The Custodians, first published in 1997, was Nicholas José’s fifth novel, and it captures my generation perfectly. Tracing the lives of characters who came to adulthood in the heady 1970s, it depicts the idealism and the optimism, the delusions and pretensions, and the steady disenchantment of adult life in the real world. It’s a big, heavy book, nearly 500 pages in my first edition, and it’s big and ambitious in its preoccupations. I’m a bit surprised it wasn’t nominated for the Miles Franklin, but 1997 was a very strong year with books by David Malouf, Thea Astley, Janet Turner Hospital, John A Scott, Robert Dessaix and Robert Drewe, with the prize eventually going to David Foster’s The Glade within the Grove. So The Custodians hasn’t had as much attention as I think it deserves – despite a 2012 paperback reissue in the Allen & Unwin House of Books series – and an impressive blurb from no less than an authority than Simon Schama

A brilliantly vivid tapestry of the Australian predicament, rich in possibility, but shot through with accident and revelation. Through it all breathes the ancient reality of the land: its red earth and bright air painted with the sure hand of a master.’ – Simon Schama, A&U website, (where, bizarrely, it has been categorised as Popular Fiction. Have they read it??)

Anyway, I found it very satisfying reading over a number of days…

The main characters start life in Adelaide, and leave it for what they think is a more exciting life elsewhere. Jane is a painter in love with the light in Sydney; Wendy is an indolent thrill-seeker with a penchant for dubious company; Elspeth the heiress wants enlightenment but not if it involves parting with her money; and Josie wants to be good and thinks she can be, as a nun.

José fleshes out the characterisation of the men a bit more, especially Alex, clever and ambitious but always wanting to keep his options open. At ANU he studies economics, Australian history and law, and he won’t commit to a relationship with Jane in case something better comes along. (He keeps Josie ‘in reserve’ back in Adelaide until – to his chagrin – she joins the nunnery). Ziggy is a charismatic thespian; and René is an ideologue spouting dialectics and Chinese communism with Alex at ANU. On the fringes of their childhood group are Aboriginal boys from the Stolen Generations: Cleve, a scholarship boy at a Catholic boarding school, and Danny who stumbles from one institution to another, marginalised further by his reticence and his illiteracy.

While the relationships between these characters hold the book together, the themes of The Custodians unfold as Australia comes of age in the 1970s. With the finding of Moorna Woman (an event fictionalised from the discovery of Mungo Woman) Australian history turns out to be much older than first thought, and the emerging empowerment of Aboriginal Australians under a reforming government (based on the Whitlam Years) means that the pastoral land on which the bones are found becomes contested. Chinese investors make an appearance as Australia turns to Asia, and their Australian interpreter, a character loosely based on the communist sympathiser Wilfred Burchett, has to decide where his loyalties lie.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/04/25/the-custodians-by-nicholas-jose/ ( )