Omar Musa’s new book, Fierceland, ranges across five distinct geographies and covers a period of some 170 years. It is told from at least ten perspectives and encompasses prose, poetry and visual art. It is, in every way, an epic endeavour.

Review: Fierceland – Omar Musa (Penguin)

There has been a welcome tendency towards scale and ambition in Australian literature of the last few years. The centrepiece of this shift to grandiosity is Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy: a book that attempts not one, but four or five separate epics in 780 pages.

This is the sort of work required by a period of polycrisis – ecological collapse, widening inequality, catastrophes of famine and genocide. It also calls for a different sort of criticism. As critic Northrop Frye said of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton’s genius was not in the execution, so much as the grandiosity of his theme.

For Wright, our multiple armageddons push and break the limits of traditional literature. Praiseworthy keels and splutters, devastates individual characters’ claims to resolution, raising the suspicion that something like a unified modern story may be impossible.

Fierceland is maybe the first Australian (or Australian-adjacent) book to take up Wright’s literary challenge. Musa seems keen to position himself in the tradition of epic writers, particularly the masters of the Global South: Gabriel García Márquez, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie.

The novel alludes to this in its meditation on the idea of the Hikayat – a Malay form of folk epic which tells of heroic acts. At the centre of the story is a properly epic project – a “Song of the Forest” that Musa has written and then translated into many of the unique local languages of the Malaysian regions of Sabah and Sarawak.

At the same time,........

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