He's a custodian of his people's long history, and the convenient but arguably misleading categories of past, present and future have little meaning for him. Norm's casual slippage between barely differentiated worlds must be understood in temporal as well as spatial terms. It's as though the partition between thought and reality - whatever 'reality' might mean in this context - has thinned to nothing. But no sooner has Norm recognised the resemblance than the yinbirras are there with him, gliding alongside him, calling out mockingly, crowding into his boat as he hauls it through the bush. As he advances, the wind whirls objects around him, objects which, we are told at first, 'resembled the yinbirras' - beings who have half-absented themselves from the material world and live invisibly alongside humankind.

Later on, Norm finds himself on a storm-battered coast, dragging his boat inland. When Wright describes the waves as mourning widows, rising above Norm 'to wail in majestic heights, showering him with teary froth', this is something more than literary metaphor: for Norm, the universe is thronged with spirits as actual, if not quite as solid, as his fellow humans, and it's through his visionary animism that a major part of the novel's action is mediated. It's a voyage of epic proportions and mythic significance, undertaken in a leaky rowing boat in the company of capricious spirits whose existence is made manifest in the winds and waters of the gulf. Norm Phantom, ageing Aboriginal mystic and leader of his community, has taken the desiccated body of his friend Elias Smith far out to sea for burial. If you want to sample the writing at its best, look at the novel's eighth chapter, an astonishing tour de force in its own right. This, together with a defiantly individual literary style, can prove challenging at times, but the persistent reader will be amply rewarded. It's the home of her people, the Waanyi, and she draws not only on the dramatic topography of the region, but on an essentially non-European vision of humankind's place in the world. Alexis Wright has set her award-winning second novel in the area around the Gulf of Carpentaria in northwest Queensland.

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