Abstract
Remembering Babylon pits characters' interactions with the natural world in diverse ways and the culminating impression is far from idealistic or apolitical. Ultimately, the novel's complex rendering of human relationships with place and the non-human animal offers a specific challenge to romanticised, pastoral visions of place. This argument is counter to some criticism of the novel as idealisation of the natural world at the expense of historically salient political considerations. In a recent research project, this work was reconsidered by regional book clubs with the question: is this a work of environmental significance? The responses very much focused on the pastoral connection via the meaning of authorial choices in the epigraph, the significance of the title and reader reflections on the parallels between their own transformative experiences with nature and non-human animals and those represented in the novel. This paper takes these reader responses as a starting point to further scrutinise the relationship the novel Remembering Babylon has with the pastoral tradition. In so doing it finds the novel revises an idealising vision of nature and gently parodies the notion that nature is separate from or a tool of human, cultural concerns, particularly through its figurative and literal foregrounding of the nonhuman animal. The epigraph provides a deliberate and significant signal of Malouf's challenge to pastoral understandings of nature, because the poets cited within it, William Blake and John Clare, arguably offer in their wider body of work what might be termed a post-pastoral ethos that evokes, challenges and thus adapts pastoral idealism of nature. The paper suggests that Remembering Babylon expresses such a post-pastoral ethos, if in a very different context and form from Blake and Clare.