(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Finding somewhere to belong, to truly, absolutely and irrefutably to belong, is something we all crave.
We want our people, need our people, whoever they may be, but traumatised by past events and blinded by the scars they leave behind, we often lack the means to find out who they might be, or if we did once have them and are returning to them, how you reintegrate a world you once called home but which suddenly feels half full of strangers.
In Welcome to Glorious Tuga, one of the standout novels of the year by Francesca Segal, belonging to a person or a place or a sensibility is the key driver of a narrative that spins a fairytale-like story of community found, either for the first time or all over again, but one that is wholly and affectingly grounded in what it’s like to know if you’ve found your tribe or not.
Tuga de Oro is one of those islands that exists thousands of kilometres from anywhere, populated by a hardy and diverse group of people who are descended by escaped slaves and sailors, those running from something or to something, and who while independent, owe allegiance, at least as far as their political structure goes, to England.
Theirs is a world ruled by Island Close and Island Open, two roughly six-month periods each during which ships, upon the island depends for supplies and people like doctors and vets, can either not get near because of tumultuous storms or are able to get in without issue.
‘Nothing on this,’ he [Dan] said and smiled at his mother, whose love and pride filled the small room, and who was aglow with the pleasure of feeding him. ‘Nothing like this. Not like home.’
Into this closed and quirky community, which may seem goofy and atypical on the surface but which harbours some very dark issues and secrets down below well out of societal sight – or at least the sight of the FFAs or From Far Aways aka outsiders – comes zoologist and trained vet Charlotte Walker who, thanks to a controlling if loving mother and an entirely absent father, keeps her life and emotions as tightly locked down as its possible to get them.
She is there to research an endemic species of tortoise, the gold coin, in a biological environment which, like all islands, is prone to invasion by outside species and degradation on a scale that become readily apparent due its small size and which needs the sort of investigation Charlotte wants to carry out to make sure the island can continue to function well into the future.
For Charlotte, it’s just a work assignment, albeit a highly unusual one, but on the ship to Tuga she is consistently and violently ill for weeks at a time, and it’s only thanks to a kind and attentive fellow passenger, Dr Dan Zekri, a Tugan returning to his home island after many years away in England, that she survives the whole experience and makes a connection into the bargain.
While she’s loathe to open her heart to anyone, Dan has the inside running thanks his sweet and kind nature but upon arrival on Tuga, she discovers there’s a lot more going with Dan and the tight knit community he’s stepping back into than she even expected.
(courtesy official author site)
While Charlotte isn’t remotely looking for friends or community, as Welcome to Glorious Tuga progresses, she become increasingly enmeshed in island life, tending to people’s livestock and pets, finding connection with a host of people she never expected to get close to (or really wanted to until of course she did) and finding that maybe it’s not just Dan that could win her heart, assuming she wants to hand it over to anyone in the first place.
Charlotte is also looking to solve a personal mystery, and while she indeed finds a solution, it’s a long way from what she expected and its unveiling radically changes how she sees and interacts with her new home, not so much because of the discovery itself but the people she encounters and gets to know along the way.
Wonderfully quirky, very funny and alive with epic ideas and intimate humanity and emotionality, Welcome to Glorious Tuga is one of those spectacularly well-written novels which manages to be both idiosyncratically warm and witty and big hug-like while taking a moving deep dive into how knowing your place or not knowing it, can really profoundly affect you.
There’s a gloriously grounding thread of brokenness and flawed humanity through Welcome to Glorious Tuga which might offer up the possibility of some very happy-ever-afters indeed, there’s a lot of work to get them and a lot of internal hurdles and struggles to overcome, something the novel weaves into its quirkiness in beautifully engaging and meaning ways.
Garrick looked at her shrewdly. ‘You don’t need to sit at the bar drinking fizzycan every evening.’
‘It’s to get a sense of the island,’ said Charlotte, somewhat hotly. She was most surprised Garrick noticed anything she did. ‘And in any case I don’t do that anymore.’
‘Indeed. That is probably wise. Shall we press on?’
What makes Welcome to Glorious Tuga such a joy to read is that it never uses it setting as some sort of “aren’t they strange” running gag.
The islanders are oddball and offkilter in their own way but then much the same can be said for the denizens of any major city; what makes this community so wonderful, despite its darker elements, is that its people do love and care for one another, perhaps not perfectly but in a way that suggests people matter more than things.
Throughout the narrative, which both goes and doesn’t go where you expect it to, which is a joy in any book you read, Charlotte and Dan have to grapple in their own ways with what community and belonging mean to them and whether Tuga offers that to him after lives which has diverged heavily, in different ways, from the societal worldview in which they now find themselves.
Maybe the good people of Tuga are a little too suffocatingly attentive to others and their demands sometimes onerous but they are a rich and inclusively warm and supportive community overall, and as Charlotte especially lets down her barriers and accepts that maybe belonging somewhere, wholeheartedly and completely, is not such a bad thing after all, we are taken in Welcome to Glorious Tuga on a richly warm, funny and intensely emotional ride from isolation to connection and into the bonds of community which have the power to bring powerful and personal lasting change.