BR: The Riders (Tim Winton)

Amazon Link: The Riders

The back cover reads (in part):

“Fred Scully eagerly waits in an Irish airport for the arrival of his wife and seven-year-old daughter. He envisions a new life ahead of them, a fresh start in an old farmhouse that he’s been renovating during the weeks they have spent apart. But something goes catastrophically wrong. His daughter emerges inexplicably alone through the airplane terminal’s glass doors, and Scully’s life goes down in flames.

Thus begins The Riders, a dark and powerful journey into the obsessive psyche of a man in search of a woman vanished. It is a tale of the ghosts that plague relationships; of revelation sought in places and people; and of redemption found in the determined will to carry on. Epic in its sweep yet gripping in its details. The Riders is storytelling at its most haunting.”

This story can be summed up in a few words: a man searches for his missing wife, daughter in tow. The book is more, so much more.

I can recount the plot for it is simple, the settings I can list off for there are many, I can even outline the progression that this character takes from loving, hopeful, thankful (a touch disbelieving at his fortune to have such a beautiful wife) to desolate emptiness. What I cannot do is justice to Tim Winton’s writing. To capture that, you must read this book yourself.

Here is an excerpt, quoted at length so readers may see the beauty in the detail.

In sleep Scully felt like a flying fish, a pelagic leaper diving and rising through temperatures, gliding on air as in water. He heard the greater oceanic static. He felt seamless. Weightless, free.

He woke suddenly with Billie’s face close to his, her eyes studying him, her breath yeasty with antibiotic. She ran the heel of her palm across the stubble of his cheek. Her skin was cool, her eyes clear. The surf of traffic surged below.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘I feel ordinary again.’

He lay there, muscles fluttering, like a fish on a deck, feeling the dry weight of gravity, the hard surprise of everything he already knew.

Mist lay across the soupy swirl of the Seine. It hung in the skeleton trees and billowed against the weping stonework of the quais. The river ran fat with whorls and boils, lumpy with the hocks of sawn trees and spats of cardboard. He felt it sucking at him, waiting, rolling opaque along the iced and slimy embankment. It made him shudder. He held Billie’s hand too firmly.

‘This isn’t the way to Dominique’s,’ she murmured.

‘Yes it is. More or less.’

In every piss-stinking cavity the mad and lost cowered in sodden cardboard and blotched sleeping bags. Out of the rain and out of sight of the cops they lay beneath bridges and monuments, their eyes bloodshot, their faces creased with dirt and fatigue. Was it some consolation to imagine that Jennifer might be here among them? Did the idea let him off, somehow, take the shame and rage away? These faces, they were generic. Could you recognise a person reduced to this state? Maybe he’d walk past her and see some poor dazed creature whose features had disappeared into hopeless fright. Would she recognise him, for that matter? Was his face like that already?

Beneath the Pont Neuf he stepped among these people and whispered her name. The stoned and sore and crazy rolled away from him. Billie tugged at his hand but he stared into their eyes, ignoring their growls of outrage until a big gap-toothed woman reared and spat in his face. Billie dragged him out into the faint light of day. She sat him down in the square at the tip of the island, and pressed the gob away from his face with his own soiled hanky. He let out a bitter laugh. She hated to see the way he trembled. She hated all of this.

Scully looked back toward the bridge. Something in the water caught his eye. Something, someone out in the churning current. He shrugged off the child and went to the embankment to peer upstream. Dear God. He saw plump, pink limbs, tiny feet, a bobbing head. He wrenched his coat off. Please God, no.

‘Sit down, Billie, don’t move! You hear me? Don’t move from this spot!’

He edged down the slick embankment, grabbing at weeds and holes in the cobbles. The current was solid. He looked about for a stick, a pole, but there was only dogshit and crushed Kronenberg cans. Close to the water he found a ringbolt and he hung out precariously from it, titled over the water, reaching with one arm as the tiny pink feet came bounding his way. The steel was cold in his anchored hand. His face stung. His heart shrank in his chest. He saw ten perfect toes. Creases of baby fat. Dimpled knees. He poised himself, seeing his chance, and in one sweeping arc he reached out – and missed. Oh God! His fingers sculled hopelessly on the water. And then he saw it clearly as it floated gamely by – cherry mouth pert and cheeky, plastic lashes flapping as it pitched, cupped hands steering it through the soupy convergence at the end of the island.

‘I’m not really into dolls,’ called Billie, standing precariously close to the edge. ‘But I’m glad you tried.’

Scully hung there panting, the sweat cold on him already. He hated this town.

Some readers have found this story to be incomplete. Too much is left unresolved, they say, there is too much mystery for it to be a fulfilling story and yes, I can see why might they feel this way, however I don’t agree.

This book is about experience, about living, dreaming and doing, giving our all (every tiny fragment of our being, and more – so much more) in the hope of winning that which we seek. Scully’s emotional erosion is difficult to witness, even worse is the effect on Billie, his daughter. Anyone with half a heart wishes for a happy ending, or at least an explanation, something to fill the gnawing questions that slice the insides of these characters and eats like acid into their souls. But, they don’t get their happy ending, they don’t get answers and neither do we, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.

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