The Trout Opera 'is a stunning epic novel that encompasses twentieth-century Australia. Opening with a Christmas pageant on the banks of the Snowy River in 1906 and ending with the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, it is the story of simple rabbiter and farmhand Wilfred Lampe who, at the end of his long life, is unwittingly swept up into an international spectacle. On the way he discovers a great-niece, the wild and troubled young Aurora, whom he never knew existed, and together they take an unlikely road trip that changes their lives. Wilfred, who has only ever left Dalgety once in almost a hundred years, comes face to face with contemporary Australia, and Aurora, enmeshed in the complex social problems of a modern nation, is taught how to repair her damaged life.
'This dazzling story - marvellously broad in its telling and superbly crafted - is about the changing nature of the Australian character, finding the source of human decency in a mad world, history, war, romance, murder, bushfires, drugs, the fragile and resilient nature of the environment and the art of fly fishing. It's the story of a man who has experienced the tumultuous reverberations of Australian history while never moving from his birthplace on the Snowy, and it asks, what constitutes a meaningful life?' (Publisher's blurb)
'Since the 1980s, Australian critical and creative writers have employed family history as an adaptive metaphor for challenging hegemonic representations of national descent. Literary and cultural critics, in particular, describe a strong connection between complex literary representations of family in self-reflective and generically hybrid novels and an increasingly inclusive national cultural imaginary. In this article, I investigate how genealogy functions as a trope for reimagining dominant models of cultural representation in Matthew Condon’s The Trout Opera (2007). Condon’s novel exhibits both a degree of self-reflexivity and generic hybridity. However, it provides a counterpoint to what critics have described as the productive potential of filial allegories of nation. In both theme and structure, Condon’s novel dramatises a transition to a multicultural order that reproduces the cultural authority of the white patriarchal order it replaces. Genealogy, in this instance, serves as a quasi-biological metanarrative to naturalise the assimilation of multiple cultural identities and experiences in a settler colonial myth of origin. I employ Edward Said’s (1983) model of filiation and affiliation to examine the thematic and generic affiliations underpinning this dialectical manoeuvre and to illuminate how the discursive effects of genealogy are mediated by the author’s subject position and the genre(s) they employ.' (Publication abstract)
