BR: Wake in Fright (Kenneth Cook)

Amazon Link: Wake in Fright

The back cover reads:

“In one magnificent rough-and-tumble of a first novel, the gargantuan flavour of the Australian outback, its sick heat and its people. Like quicksand their animal customs, their animal women, their perverts and their stupendous, overpowering hospitality drag innocent, city-bred John Grant down to his ruin – and beyond.”

John is a school teacher in a remote outback town. The story starts on the last day before summer break, as the students file out of the dusty classroom, John considers the summer ahead of him – a long idyllic break in Sydney, his hometown and a place he pines to return to full-time. To get there he must catch a train to the nearest town then catch a bus across the desert to Sydney. He has enough money for both journeys, and a pay cheque he can cash once he reaches Sydney.

When he reaches the next town he is parched and frustrated. The bus doesn’t leave until the next morning. With a night to kill, he books into a hotel and goes to the bar for a drink. He’s not interested in socializing, just quenching his thirst and passing time before he can escape the barrenness. After one drink he is offered more, encouraged to share a beer with the locals. It would not be good manners to decline, in fact, it would be downright offensive. John doesn’t want trouble, and he is thirsty, so he agrees.

Soon, he’s had too many, he’s hungry and isn’t thinking straight. The local policeman offers to take him to a place that serves great steak – a dusty back-end of a hotel where a game of Two-up is in progress. The steak is bad, the policeman abandons him and John is drawn, moth-like, into the game. It’s a serious affair, almost ethereal in its intensity. He drinks more, bets and wins. He now has enough money to live it up in Sydney. He bets again, and again, drunk on money and out of his head on alcohol. Soon enough, he loses and staggers from the venue. Back at his hotel he considers what just happened. He takes out his pay cheque, thinks about it, goes back to the venue and cashes it in.

The story, written in sombre tones, an almost hallucinogenic quality to John’s experiences, goes into dark territory from here on out. John loses all his money, and with no way to leave the town he’s trapped in a hell-hole of his own creation. A local man takes pity on him, takes him in, gives him a bed and more alcohol. John readily imbibes, fragmenting his already hazy intuition and leaving himself even more vulnerable.

He is pushed into joining a hunting party, a group of older men who take him out, shove a rifle in his hands and teach him to shoot kangaroos. It’s not hunting though, it is carnal slaughter – horrific, bloody, a deranged, alcohol driven orgy of unimaginable violence. John is both sickened and thrilled. Despite dreadful unease about the acts and his companions, he participates then relies on alcohol to numb the horror of what he’s done.

Eventually, after a black-out whereupon he wakes with a hollow sense of something being amiss, he abandons the house and attempts to hitch a ride to Sydney. It does not go to plan. Before the book ends John will hit the depths of despair. It will take more than the kindness of strangers to save him.

This book shows a darker side to the outback, beyond the glossy postcard pictures and cutesy tales of small town hospitality. Country living sets aside the gentility of suburbia, favouring a rawer, animalistic nature to its inhabitants. The book is well written, a fast read but well worth it. The writing is powerful and polished, and no other book has managed to turn my stomach with scenes of graphic horror than the frenzied killing sprees that John is drawn into.

There’s a nice blend of introspection and a well formed logic that sees this story through. John spends most of the book in a drunken daze, yet instinctually he recognises he’s in trouble. The reader, from the very first page, is drawn forward by that same recognition, and left with a sense that something more disturbing may have occurred, something that eroded the very fabric of who John was.

BR: Whitecap (James Woodford)

Link: Whitecap

I sought out this book, lured by the premise of an albatross researcher: an isolated scientist devoted to enhancing seabird knowledge. I hoped to be bewitched by imagery, offered insight into an ornithologist’s life, the inherent isolation and conflict with those who oppose protective measures. I expected heart-felt dedication, conflict, tragedy, redemption. I expected a character I could feel empathy for, could cheer for, could cry for, and who exhibited a ferocious love of albatrosses, an arguably blinker-visioned determination to protect them at all costs. Or, something like that.

Digby (Dig) lives in a fishing town, a narrow economically biased society where his work would surely set him off-side with at least some of the locals. Yet, somehow, he manages to remain below the radar, in fact, if not for one scene where he goes out to tag and release birds, the reader may be forgiven for forgetting why he even lives there. This scene gave me a taste of what might have been:

One of the most captivating features of the wanderer is its eyes – so brown they are almost black, the colour of tannin-stained water. Only after staring into many birds’ eyes was Dig able to detect their almost-invisible pupils. Seeing himself in her eyes now was like looking through a fish-eye lens, with everything reflected in a brown mirror. The bill was an impressive pink, with a tube-shaped nostril on either side, like submarine torpedo launchers. The bill’s edges were knife-sharp and, as a scavenger, engineered to sever both bone and flesh in a single slash.

For Dig, holding a wandering albatross was a moment when the world seemed to stop. A spell had been cast, and every sense narrowed to what was in his arms. Even Whiting’s chatter as swhe went about measuring and recording, seemed kilometres away. He could see tiny feather lice moving in the albatross’s down and could feel that, beneath the mass of feathers, this was a slight and elongated animal. He buried his fingers two knuckles deep into the down and felt its neck, which had the fragility and beauty of a child’s.

Instead of just focussing on Dig and the birds, the offers up a mystery (an unusual leg tag on an old bird suggests foul play years earlier). The many characters serve as suspects (and inherited victims) in the sinister wrongdoing of the past.

Subplots effectively highlight the daily woes of fishermen (and women), their dysfunctional relationships, the underbelly of crime that seeps like cancer into the town. There is also a hinted lesbian affair between a female sea-changer and one of the local women (I’m not sure which one, it got confusing by the end), and the haphazard romance between Dig and the fisheries officer, or was it the fishing trawler operator? Hmm…

One aspect makes this story painfully memorable: Billy, the ten year old grandson of an aged fisherman, and his preventable fate. Billy is misunderstood, sensitive, abused. From the moment he is introduced to the reader, there is a sense of impending tragedy. Though the boy’s fate is predictable, the reality of it comes as a sensory shock.

James Woodford succeeded in his portrayal of a child in peril – the consequences of a community turning a blind eye to wanton abuse – yet I’m left wondering what purpose it served. It was horrifically dramatic, yet the only plot effect seemed to be to be Dig’s bedding of the fisheries/fishing trawler chick. Until that point their relationship had been tentative, at times outright hostile. I guess there is nothing like a sobbing, distraught man to soften a woman’s heart!?

The story is weakened by short scenes, alternating points of view, too many characters (which are poorly defined) and an overall lack of depth. It reads as an overly long synopsis, but is lacking the heart that could have made it shine.

Overall, an enticing premise but a disappointing execution.

** (out of *****)

BR: Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living (Carrie Tiffany)

Amazon Link: Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living

The novel starts in 1934 in the Victorian Mallee, a thin-skinned dry land not so far from where I grew up. Robert, a man with scientific ideals and a knack of knowing a soil’s origin from the taste of it, and Jean, a woman with determination and skill with a sewing needle, meet aboard the Better Farming Train (a moving display, of sorts, that chugs through the Victorian farming country bringing new science to remote families). There’s a Japanese chicken-sexer on board, several men of various skill, a carriage of swaying wheat growing healthy and strong through the addition of super phosphate to the soil, and three women who coach the fairer sex on matters of domestic duty. I never knew such a thing existed, but now I do, thanks to Carrie Tiffany.

Robert and Jean’s first meeting is passionate, but near silent. Somehow, with few words, they recognise a shared dream – a future where he will grow wheat and she will bake test loaves from the flour to demonstrate his theories. Robert buys a property in the Mallee, near Wycheproof, and they start growing wheat in accordance with Robert’s rules for scientific living.

It’s a period in between wars, when the addition of chemicals to the soil is new, drought is rampant and babies die from nutritional deficiencies. These are hard times, the extent of suffering and stoicism is foreign to me and I am granted a new appreciation for these tough men and women who shaped this country – even if we can now recognise how wrong the farming practices were:

“… You can’t farm properly with paddocks full of dead wood. Your first duty as farmers is to completely clear the land. Once you’ve got nothing between yourself and the soil – that’s the time for agriculture.”

We now know better… or we think we do.

Jean and Robert do it tough in a land that betrays their dreams. Robert is a quiet, honorable man with high ideals and emotion that runs deep, but he lacks in the romantic area and fails to connect in meaningful ways. Jean loves him regardless and is dedicated to making their partnership work even if he offers her little support.

This is not a romance, nor is it a story that ends happily. It's not what I'd consider a tragedy, rather, it is a reflection of real life, of farming life in a time of minimal prosperity. There are many references to towns that I know, and I appreciate the research that had to have gone into crafting this novel. Even the dust storm that swept through the mallee reminds me of images from old newspapers, and brings the taste of dust to my lips from dust storms that swept through my home town in years past.

On the downside, I would have preferred to spend more time with these people -- more time in experiencing their lives, the events that shaped them, that drew them to the eventual conclusion. The logic, progression, characterisation is strong, but at times I hoped for a little more introspection. Overall, it's an enjoyable, enlightening read with unique, well formed characters.

Rating: *** (out of *****)