Word: outerness
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...made a career of fanning hatred in the North of Ireland and who refused to participate in the talks. Paisley's recalcitrance left him with no role other than leading a pathetic midnight protest outside the gates of the final negotiations and, with luck, a permanent position on the outer fringes of Northern Ireland politics...
They would have the name of a town, Outer Maroo, but not its location, scrawled months ago on a postcard as a possible next stop. With cruelly bad luck they might find the place. The author describes an outpost of paranoia and fear festering with something more virulent than countrymen's traditional loathing for outsiders and government bureaucrats. Rumored large discoveries of opals in the surrounding geologic strata don't really explain matters because opal mining has scuffled along here for decades. Except for tankerloads of beer and gasoline, contact with the rest of Australia is largely cut off. Mail...
Most of the story is told by a bright, troubled girl named Mercy, daughter of a preacher whose church has been taken over by religious zealots. "If rain had come, things might have turned out differently," she says. "That is what I think now. But there were children in Outer Maroo who had never seen rain." Into this withered rangeland came a drifter who dressed in white and called himself Oyster, a random alias he had adopted while working with an aquaculture firm. In his new manifestation he was a religious con man, a charismatic spellbinder who had learned...
Mercy knows only part of what then happened, and most of her memories are too terrible for her to face directly. So the reader, like the parents who have found their way to Outer Maroo, is disoriented for much of the novel, menaced by half-understood threats, never sure what ground is solid. The horror here is peeked at slantwise, through a girl's splayed fingers. What appears to be true is that Oyster bound dozens of young believers into a cult whose elements included an underground life of opal mining, ecstatic prayer and patriarchal sex. And that...
Sunday, March 15: Today, I began to feel a strange tingling, tickling sensation in both my outer forearms...