BR: Autumn (Noel Beddoe)

Any book that opens with:

‘You fell in love with your balls,’ she said. ‘You fell in love! With your
balls! When you were ten years old!’

is guaranteed to grab my attention. The recipient of this vitriolic rant is Charlie McFarlane, a man on the brink of divorce, helpless to prevent it and weary of trying to hold the relationship together. When his wife leaves him, taking his daughter with him, Charlie offers no resistance, no emotion beyond the tremors in his hands and uncertainty in his gut. Emotionally, he is unresistant, detached, unable to reach into himself to interrogate the physiological response to his wife's departure.

He goes to work, steps through the motions, observes his colleagues and the empty career paths they are on and realises he has to get away. He quits his job, gives a large proportion of his resignation pay to his wife and daughter then heads back to the town he grew up in. What he’s looking for is unclear, and what he hopes to find even less certain, but he ends up staying with an aunt and uncle who force him to take a vacant position at a local school.

In getting to know the children, their parents, the school headmistress and her husband, Charlie thaws. A relationship blooms with the mother of one of his pupils, and soon they are more than friends. As he spends time with this woman and her child, he learns how to connect with a woman, how to care for another and he thinks about his own child and the time he should be spending with her, the gifts he should be buying her, the responsibilities he has as a father to the child he sired.

When the end of his contract as fill-in school teacher comes, Charlie has no reason to stay on and the relationship with the woman ends when she decides to return to her husband, the girl’s father. Charlie goes back to the city, to his wife and daughter, and the book ends with him making a tentative step to woo her, just as he did with the woman in his home town. In being away, Charlie has grown up.

I found it difficult to link the experiences he has (duck hunting, fishing, accompanying a suicidal elderly man to a remote hilltop then watching him die of heart failure) with his emotional growth. Charlie introspects very little, and by the end of the book I felt I didn’t know him any better than I did at the start. Though I prefer books that don’t spell it all out, this one lacked that special something that would connect me to the protagonist. I felt as though I were a detached witness rather than experiencing and living the story with the characters.

In summary, this book was readable, entertaining and had potential, but far less than I had hoped it would be given the recommendation by Tim Winton on the front cover.

This review by Warrick Wynne eloquently illustrates some of the strengths and failings of the novel. The points he makes are useful for any first time novelist to take on board, myself included.

Rating: ** out of five