"On the Beach" by Nevil Shute

 1963. There has been a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. Everyone seems to be dead. A radioactive cloud is drifting south. Melbourne is the furthest south big city. The inhabitants are waiting to die. 

The story revolves around Australian Navy officer Peter Holmes, his wife and baby; US Submarine commander Dwight Towers, missing his presumably dead wife and children, consoled by wannabe girlfriend Moira; and scientific officer John Osborne. Each of them try to continue as if nothing is happening. Peter and his wife worry about the baby's health and make plans for their garden; Moira's father puts in fencing for his farm; Dwight buys presents for his (probably dead) wife and kids; John wants to win the very last grand prix race. Some people keep working, others get drunk.

A stunning, beautifully written study of human behaviour, and the quest for meaning in life, when faced with inevitability.

Of course, it is of its time. The women are fundamentally passive, seeking a life of housewifery and motherhood. Patriarchal attitudes are everywhere: "These bloody women, sheltered from realities, living in a sentimental dreamworld of their own. If they'd face up to things, they could help a man,help him enormously. While they clung to the dreamworld they were just a bloody millstone round his neck." (Ch 5). But the husband uses the excuse of work to leave her and go into town.

Selected quotes:

• "It's not the end of the world at all ... It's only the end of us. The world will gone on just the same, only we won't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us." (Ch 3)
• "You get scared stiff. Then directly it's over you want to go on and do it again." (Ch 7)

September 2022; 296 pages 

Shute also wrote, among many other books, A Town Like Alice

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

"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

"The Dickens Boy" by Thomas Keneally

 The fictionalised biography of Edward 'Plorn' Dickens, son of the famous novelist. Plorn, an academically challenged sixteen-year-old who has never read his father's books, is sent to Australia to become a sheep-rancher. We learn a great deal about the frontier Australia of the day, about sheep-farming and the newly-dispossessed aborigines, and the logistical and social contexts of farming a remote homestead. Plorn's experiences of love and loss, of kindness and hatred and danger, and his gradual understanding of sex and its relation to the scandalous divisions between his mother and father, help him to grow up.

This is a slow-paced book, gently told. The essential themes are 'coming of age' and the difficulties of being a normal son of a famous father. But the problem with 'true' stories is that some events happen and then other ones do, without the unification imposed by a nove's structure. For example, what promises to be a major character dies quite early in the narrative and another fades out. Then other characters have to arrive to carry the story. And some situations, as in real life, never get fully resolved. While this adds verisimilitude, it makes the book less of a  page-turner. Certainly I was less motivated to read it than by Keneally's most famous book 'Schindler's Ark', the bionovel on which 'Schindler's List' was based (the book is better because it really explores the shadowy fringes of heroism). 

Selected quotes:

• "How far did the reverberations of my famous father reach? Colonies of birds in the desert oaks were engaging in the last clamorous parliament of their day, but Dickens was in the hut at the heart of Ullollie!" (Ch 7)
• "I'd felt inexpressibly strange and even repelled by the idea of my father and mother being one flesh and sharing somehow the stew and the sanctity of that." (Ch 9)
• "The priest uttered his benediction in Latin and very exactly quartered the air to make a cross above the company's heads." (Ch 26)
• "This performer strove for relevance by means of volume." (Ch 33) The context suggests that the performer was loud but it could be read as a snide comment of writers such as Dickens who, at least in Plorn's view, achieve their effects by the quantity of their text.

April 2022; 390 pages

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

"English Passengers" by Matthew Kneale

Manxman Captain Kewley has built himself a sailing ship with a secret hold for contraband goods. But his first attempt at smuggling goes badly awry: to save himself he must carry three Enmglishmen: a Reverend, a Doctor and a Botanist, to Tasmania where the reverend believes they will discover the Garden of Eden. The voyage is marked by the Captain and his crew repeatedly getting into scrapes and escaping by the skin of their teeth.

When they reach Tasmania they hire as native guide an old man who was born as a result of a rape: his father was an escaped convict and his mother was an aboriginal woman. From his life story we discover the chilling true story of how the Tasmanian aborigines were exterminated; from his father's story we learn about the treatment of the convicts. The book is a compendium of human inhumanity.

The story is told through the testimonies of each of the witnesses, including but not limited to the main characters.Each character has a distinguishable voice and, although this technique fragments the narrative, the plot remains clear. In the end, though, the author seems to have rejected a conventional structure for the book in favour of a picaresque. Although, in the end, each character receives a resolution and often one involving poetic justice, the path to that resolution twists and turns, defying expectations.

This book has superb characterisations and drops you right into the scene and confronts you with the horror and the pity of colonialism at its rawest.

There are some delightful moments:

• "As the wise man says, Choose you lies like you choose your wife, with care." (C 1)
• "London dimly glinting in the distance through its own dust." (C 1)
• "Smash a man to pieces and he will look much the same, regardless of his skin or manner of speech." (C 2)
• "As any fool will tell you, there's near and there's near, and the two are different as pigs and parakeets." (C 3)
• "That had seemed clear enough at the time, but then directions usually do when you're still months and miles off from needing them." (C 3)
• "It's a fact that what seems light as daisies for a minute becomes heavy as rocks when you're hauling it mile after mile." (C 6)
• "Sheppard who was doing the cherubs ... wasn't much skilled at them ... and they never looked like flying babies so much as fat boys with something nasty flapping on their backs." (C 8)
• "It is hard, though, to get lovings in a dying place." (C 10)
• "It is hard to choose dying. Dying chooses you." (C 10)
• "My surprise would be fresh as last month's herring." (C 14)

Nominated for the 2000 Booker Prize; winner of the 2009 Whitbread Novel award.

July 2020; 458 pages This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Only killers and thieves" by Paul Howarth

Fourteen year old Tommy and his elder brother Billy live with Mum and Dad and sister Mary in drought-struck Queensland on a cattle farm in 1885. When tragedy strikes the boys set out for revenge. "But three plus three makes six ... It doesn't take it back to none."

This is a book so vividly described that I could taste the grit between my teeth and feel the sun beat down upon my back, my throat was parched with Tommy's. When rain comes there's too much of it and I could feel the chafing of the sodden clothes. The scenes of killing nauseate.

The story followed almost perfectly the Three Act Structure. In the first quarter of the book the scene is set; the initiating tragedy is almost exactly at the 25% mark. The second quarter concerns their first steps towards injustice and the loss of the brothers' innocence. The third quarter rises to a crescendo with the act which ought to make redemption impossible and the final quarter contains the consequences.

The antagonist is a devil with the wonderfully ambiguous name of Noone. He tempts and leads the boys to sell their souls and then he is the instrument of punishment. This is a classic work of evil and temptation, of sin and redemption, of weakness and strength, and it is masquerading as a thriller.

This is savage and it's brilliant. It can be hard to read but it is even harder not to.

Selected quotes:

• "If they were dogs they'd have been called mongrels. Australian was a whole new breed."
• "It was the same sensation as when they'd first met: the feel of him tiptoeing down Tommy's spine."
• "Tommy spent a long time wondering what she was thinking, then he realised that he could not understand. Her thoughts were not his thoughts."

My wonderful wife bought me a subscription to Books and Beer; each month I receive a crime book and some cans of beer. The other titles I have received so far are:

• Most Wanted by Robert Craik: a fast-paced thriller set in California
• The Devil's Dice by Roz Watkins: a whodunnit set in the English Peak District
• Snap by Belinda Bauer: a brilliant story about a young lad who, having become a burglar in order to survive, discovers his mother's killer.
• Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic: a murder mystery set in Australia in which the PI is deaf
• The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernal: classic Chandleresque Mexican noir
• The Closer I get by Paul Burston

This is a superb piece of writing. March 2019; 400 pages

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

"The Light Between Oceans" by M L Stedman

Tom, veteran of the trenches in WW1 and his wife Izzy live on a lonely Australian island  where the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean meet, manning the lighthouse there. Just after Izzy has lost a baby a boat washes up on the island containing a dead man and a baby girl. Izzy, mad with grief, determines to adopt the baby. Tom has doubts.

The stunning first page has Izzy  tending a new grave and whispering "and lead us not into temptation".

The story takes a while to get going. It is careful to build up the rights and the wrongs and the tensions. But when things break down they cascade like a bloody avalanche.

There is a brilliant moment of high drama when, just after a vase is thrown at a policeman, we get this paragraph:

"He stood perfectly still. The curtain flapped with the breeze. A fat blowfly buzzed against the fly wire. A last fragment of glass gave a dull tinkle as it finally succumbed to gravity."

Perfect change of pace. Perfect suspension of the drama. Take the reader to the wire and then look out of the bloody window! Brilliant.
Other wonderful moments:

• "A single fat cloud snailed across the late-April sky" (p 13)
• "the boy you'd suckled, bathed, scolded and cried over, was - well - wasn't." (p 32)
• "thin as a yard of pump water" (p 41)
• "He must turn to something solid, because if he didn't, who knew where his mind or his soul could blow away to, like a balloon without ballast." (p 53)
• "If a wife lost her husband ... she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent lost a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or a daughter." (p 171)
• "The contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of any indiscretion of their father in his youth ... History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent." (p 214)
• "Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can't tell which is which until you've shot 'em both, and then it's too late." (p 247)

A great read. June 2017; 461 pages

"A Pirate of Exquisite Mind" by Diana and Michael Preston

This is a biography of William Dampier, the first person to circumnavigate the world three times, who landed on the coast of Australia 80 years before Captain James Cook and who became the best selling author who inspired the new genre of travel writing as well as Robinson Crusoe (being on both the expeditions which marooned Alexander Selkirk and which rescued him) by Daniel Defoe (whose biography is reviewed here) and Gulliver's Travels. He is also responsible for a host of words including avocado, barbeque, chopsticks and sub-species.

But he started off as a buccaneer. Sailing to the West Indies he began working on a sugar plantation but his wanderlust soon got the better of him. He spent time as a logger before signing on as a pirate. His career in piracy was pretty lacklustre; in his first voyage he sacked a couple of towns but kept missing the rich prizes and he returned to England (having rounded Cape Horn and crossed the Pacific) after twelve years at sea with little to show for his trouble. His second voyage, as a captain of a scientific vessel for the Royal Navy was equally unsuccessful. Only on his third voyage, demoted to navigator under the command of Woodes Rogers, did he help in capturing a Spanish Galleon which earned him some thousands of pounds, enough to pay his debts after he had died. In all, he did better as an author.

The Prestons tell his tale in great detail which sometimes slows the narrative. A great deal of time is spent on the first voyage (to be fair, it was the longest, it took twelve years). But Dampier did so much and discovered so much that it is difficult to see how any less detail would be possible. Certainly the book is action packed to the extent that I got a little lost a times. I would have liked to see some (modern) maps to show exactly where he was at which time.

This is is an interesting biography of a fascinating man and well worth reading.

August 2015; 461 pages