In the first of the novel’s many arresting visuals, a vast heron emerges from the flood beside her - emerging not as flesh and blood from water but as like from like, water from water.

Afterward, one farmer is found in a tree, half-dead. A black storm washes through a farming region, submerging it like a biblical flood. The novel opens with the titular myth: the legend of the rain heron. Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron features an impressive three eye-pluckings. From Oedipus Rex to King Lear, Bataille’s eyeballs in vaginas to Denis Johnson’s hunting knife in the eyeball, writers have plucked eyes out, reinserted them, slashed them, and infused them with infinite meaning along the way. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the eyeball would become such a prized site in mythology and literature. For those of us with the sense of sight, these little spheres are our major means of connecting with the world of determining what surrounds us - and, by extension, our own place in it. As a highly visual species, we humans have turned these balls of jelly into our primary portal between the inner and outer worlds. Structurally and biologically, these things are bonkers: retina, pupil, optic nerve, lens - what the hell?Īnd biology’s the least of it. Even Charles Darwin found it “absurd to the highest degree” that something so complex could be the product of natural selection. STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING a moment and think about eyeballs - how improbable and miraculous they are.

The rain heron robbie arnott