Review: A Language Of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle

What would happen if the evolutionary tree on Earth started growing again. What rhymes would emerge among its branches, and what are the happenstance occurrences that might truly be unique? In their fervid novel, Dylin Hardcastle gives this sliding doors experiment a queer Australian twist. What would happen to a Newcastrian teenager in the early 1970s if they ran away after their violently homophobic parents found them hooking up with the neighbour in the family garden shed? And what would happen if they stayed, their queerness internalised and neutered?

Such branches — titled “limb one” and “limb two” in alternating chapters — intertwine and move apart in A Language Of Limbs over the course of 30 years or more. Limb one flees to Sydney with truck driver Dave, where they are taken into Uranian House, a ragtag bunch of intellectuals, activists and performers. There they make their way through half the women in the Cross before falling in love with Welshwoman artist Caragh, and experience such formative queer incidents such as the first Mardi Gras and its accompanying police brutality, and later the AIDS pandemic. Meanwhile limb two, after their queerness is brutally rejected, moves to Sydney to complete their studies and falls in love with Welshman writer Thomas. They are touched by the pandemic in different ways. There are pleasing coincidences, as if some events are so momentous they draw in lives across space and time, and a hint of the metaphysical idea that knowledge and experience can pass between lives. The action, the history, the characters are all drawn fairly broadly, but even so you can absolutely count on a deathbed wedding to ruin your day.

What’s fascinating about this premise is how it relates to the narrator’s identity. They are queer in both, but express it differently. Limb one’s queerness, nurtured by Uranian House, is fluid and defiant. Limb two’s is deeply internalised, but it would be a mistake to see them as miserable — their relationship with Thomas is beautifully drawn, even as it is shaped by the forces of heteronormativity. Both have their blindspots and prejudices that evolve over the course of the novel. In other words, A Language Of Limbs explores in depth that identity is social, built through our relationships with those around us.

In A Language Of Limbs, these relationships are always mediated by bodies, and the white-hot viscerality of Hardcastle’s writing. Bodies keep experience and memory, they store grief, grace, hatred and love. As the protagonist and Caragh flirt through stolen glances, the narrator describes:

I feel birds in my stomach, thick-winged and thrashing … I feel l might explode through my skin. This is our game, of subtle gestures, a language of limbs written like words in sand. We toe the shoreline between rock and ocean, between what you see and what we are underneath

and then as they fuck the language explodes into poetry. A Language Of Limbs soars when it lives in the agony and ecstasy of the body.

Gay rating: 5/5 for queer characters, sex, themes, history and relationships.