It’s 1998, and Roz and her brother Harun are waiting for the release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. They’ll be the first kids in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, to play it, and they’re certain it will be the best video game of all time. The game turns on and Roz and Harun are “lost in a magical forest … [that] hums with danger and enchantment”.
Fierceland, the second novel from Australian-Malaysian poet, rapper, writer and artist Omar Musa, opens and closes in the forest, among its “mud-gravy & gizzard stones” and “carnal green … the sprawl, rot & fern-tickle of time”. The forest becomes the thread that binds the sprawling narrative together, as Musa draws his readers into a world where technology, myth, childhood fantasy and ecological reality intersect.
Roz and Harun live in a high-rise apartment overlooking the bay of Kota Kinabalu, attending the best schools and moving through the world cushioned by the wealth and reputation of their father, Yusuf, a palm-oil baron. But their happy childhood is set against a vanishing world. In Sabah, the forest – once pristine, violent, impenetrable – is being felled to make way for vast palm plantations. While the children lose themselves in fantasy worlds, the real one around them is being dismantled.
After a traumatic trip with their father, the children take divergent paths. Roz drifts into rebellion, shoplifting and self-sabotaging, and eventually moves to Sydney as a struggling artist. Harun, searching for clarity, turns toward religion and technology, forging a path as a tech entrepreneur in Los Angeles.
Though the book is told largely through the eyes of Roz and Harun, Fierceland is in many ways Yusuf’s story. Childhood poverty shapes him, honing a fierce determination: “When I have a family,” he vows, “I’ll do anything to make their lives better than the one I had.” By the time he has children, he has become both patriarch and destroyer. “When I was your age,” he tells his daughter, “we didn’t have the leisure to paint pretty pictures. We had money to make. And a nation to build”.
Musa reveals Yusuf in shifting perspectives through the eyes of his children, his brother, his employees and his victims. Ambitious, tender and ruthless. As a young man, he thinks “of the British, of the violence and hypocrisy bequeathed to the world … about life … and how he would hunt it, tame it, and die a great man.” Does he die great? Perhaps. It depends who you ask and from which angle you look.
After Yusuf’s death, Roz and Harun return to Borneo to pay their respects and grapple with the ghosts of the past as well as their ambiguous inheritances. “There’s nobody I love more than my Abah,” thinks Roz as a child, “the world and every possibility shaped by his dexterous hands.” But, by the time she is an adult, that love is entangled with resentment, grief and the knowledge that those hands cleared forest and riverbanks. Roz and Harun must decide how to live with a legacy that is both destructive and generative.
“I want you to see [the world]. To see that anything is possible,” Yusuf tells his daughter. “Leave the past where it is, work hard, and we can make whatever future we want.” That hope is the counterpoint to the darkness of Musa’s vision.
Musa has long experimented with form and rhythm in poetry and rap, and he brings that sensibility to fiction. Fierceland is formally restless, weaving voices, poems, myths and histories into a tapestry of a family and a landscape in flux. Musa is at his best when he’s playing with language, slipping from narrative prose into cadence and chant, conjuring the “extravagant and violent lushness” of the forest. These passages pulse with life and I longed for more of them. Instead, much of the novel is delivered in pared-back prose, which sometimes feels flat by comparison.
Musa fractures style as he fractures the story, forcing the reader to move between lush evocations of forest, and the starker, stripped-down language of dislocation. But the threads don’t always come together; at times, the balance between myth and reality feels uneven. As with even the most celebrated video games, some episodes feel like superfluous digressions.
Yet at its best, Fierceland glows with energy, and its mosaic of time and place, myth, game and imagination is reminiscent of the expansive work of Richard Powers.
Fierceland is a novel of inheritances: ecological, historical, familial. Some cannot be undone. The challenge is to imagine futures within them. The forest may be disappearing, but in Musa’s words it still grows: fierce, alive, untameable.