BR: Bitters End (David Owen)

The back cover reads:

Shattered by the bizarre death of his fiancée, Raoul abandons civilization and drives inland. Forced by a compulsion beyond grief, he is drawn into the harsh country, an unfamiliar, sun-scorched world of vast space and very few people. He settles at Hurrah, a dilapitdated property surrounded by five hundred acres of wasted stubble and nothingness, a dead, parched hell on earth. There he retreats into loneliness, the isolation and hardship of his life cocooning him from the demands of memory and time.

Until one day out of the endless haze of the horizon walks Julia, mysterious, beautiful, escaping from her own secret torment….

Bitters End is a haunting, mesmerizing novel about love and loss.

How could I resist buying this!? The book is all that, and more. Raoul is grief stricken, compassionate, lonely. His wife died in an unimaginable (darkly comical) workplace accident and the media made jokes. To escape the torment, Raoul escaped the city and ended up on Hurrah, a property just as abandoned and desolate as his emotions.

The nearest town, on which he relies for water and supplies, fosters suspicious hostility, and his neighbour, a camel breeder and crazed recluse (the type of man he will become if he stays on Hurrah), is the closest thing he has to a friend… and that’s not very close. The only person he cares about is his younger brother, a comparative success, different in all ways from him and someone whom he cannot bear to disappoint. He worries over how to tell Emerson about Maisie’s death, how to give the impression of healthy grief, of prosperity, of all that an older brother should be. He settles on false optimism, and a letter that he knows will take months to reach its destination.

Then Julia arrives, a vision of beauty, an unlikely event that is almost surreal. She carries a mystery, a story of persecution and something more – an unimaginable horror that no sane man could accept. In her, Raoul finds peace, companionship, purpose… and ultimately insanity. When Emerson comes to the property in response to his brother’s letter, and with problems of his own, he is ill-prepared for what he finds.

This is a novel that demands a second read. The ending is abrupt, incomplete, yet satisfyingly mysterious. What actually happened? What was real, what wasn’t? It’s up to the reader to decide.

The writing is nothing short of stunning – it’s impossible not to feel the heat, the desolation, the compounding grief of this man... his pain is all around, in the words, between them, layered.

The sun had become molten and obese in its descent towards the western ridge. It threw great blood orange patterns across the sky, emphasizing the landscape’s vastness over which brief, elongated shadows crept. The farmhouse and sheds cracked loudly as they cooled. Hordes of tiny insects filled the air, as they did at the end of every day, until the atmosphere took on a vibrating quality. Patterns that were neither shadows nor life forms infected the sudden and stark tranquility of relative coolness. It had always been a strange and uplifting moment for Raoul: the soil and its inhabitants breathing a collective sigh of relief. The patterns were earth scents, dry, dusky, faintly aromatic.

I wish, one day, that I could write so well.

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