The Sooterkin

On July 14, 1821, on a small island off the coast of Australia, Sarah Dyer gives birth to a ""thing the size of a weasel, wet and slippery and covered in fur."" Rumor spreads that the creature is a sooterkin--""a monstrous animal, with a hooked snout, fiery, sparkling eyes, a long neck and the stump of a tail""--but closer inspection reveals the newborn as none other than a seal pup, whom Sarah names Arthur. In Australian journalist Gilling's droll and engaging first novel, a bestseller Down Under, the seal pup's appearance--while cause for wonder--is not quite cause for alarm. The town's minister, Mr. Kidney, writes about the event: ""we are a colony, so inured to the Unnatural that the Natural itself seems wondrous and terrible."" This imaginative story doesn't confine itself to a single narrator or hero; rather, the entire population of the island acts as the true protagonist. Included in the community of convicts, debtors, itinerants and rebels are the drunken Mr. Kidney, nursing hopes that his service will cancel his debts, and the midwife Mrs. Jakes, who was expelled from England for performing illegal abortions. Sarah Dyer is a convict, and her older son, Ned, is a talented pickpocket and petty thief. But when someone captures Arthur, the long-dormant moral outrage of the island is at last incited, and a search team is sent out to recover the pup before he's killed for his pelt or sold to the circus. Gilling's island is a Dickensian, scatological, violent world in which people are as likely to steal as to pay, to cheat as to pray. Shifting points of view and the plot's decentered trajectory make for a sometimes disjointed read, but this unlikely setting acts like a hothouse for the miraculous, showcasing people's unusual and even heartwarming ability to embrace the strange. (June)