"Angel Rock" by Darren Williams

 This novel is set in a small town in the Australian outback. Tom, a young boy, may be poor and bare-footed but he is nice and polite and honest and clever. But he gets lost in the bush while looking after his little step-brother and when he is found, he's alone. Whatever happened seems to be linked to the running away to Sydney and the suicide of Darcy, the brother of Sonny, a boy who hates and bullies Tom. Pop, the town's policeman, and Sydney detective Gibson, have to explore deep into the past to find out what has happened.

It's a lovely story, well-told, that pulls no punches. It's real beauty is the lyrical descriptions of Australia. It sounds like a dreadful place, a harsh landscape which can easily kill a man, and the Australians that inhabit it have been toughened and coarsened to survive. 

As a thriller it didn't quite work for me because there were a lot of characters and I lost track of who was who. But the principal characters of Tom and Grace and Pop and Gibson were incredibly real and alive and their stories were told with sensitivity and understanding. There was young love and there was revenge, there was redemption and there was betrayal, there was loss and there was heartbreak and there was madness. But the main character was the landscape and here the author's descriptions made the book into literature.

Selected Quotes:

• "The first real heat of summer had just steamed into Angel Rock in a welter of frayed tempers and sunburnt noses." (first lines)
• "A butcherbird on the fence watched a dragonfly jig and jag its way over the lawn. Bees hummed in the orange blossoms. Soft nbw leaves fluttered in the trees like tassels and ribbons, like echoes of other celebrations, other occasions. Births, deaths, marriages." (Ch 4)
• "He wondered what the odds were now on finding the boys alive. If he could find God's bookie he would certainly ask him. What are the odds?" (Ch 6)
• "There was a deafening crack as a great electric key reached down and tried to unlock the earth." (Ch 19)

July 2022; 311 pages

More Australian novels reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God