The Broken Shore by Peter Temple

Courtesy of: Becky from Page Turners


The Broken Shore is the precursor to Truth, the first crime novel to win the Miles Franklin Award, and so I was excited to be finally reading it. This is, however, the second Peter Temple book that I have read (An Iron Rose being the first), and whilst I very much enjoyed The Broken Shore, it was very reminiscent of An Iron Rose in terms of the characters, the setting and the plot.

The main character of this book is Joe Cashin, an ex-homicide detective who becomes involved in the investigation of the death of Charles Burgoyne, a local man of large wealth. His death is blamed on some young Aboriginals from the town, but Joe soon discovers that there is something more sinister behind the killing of Charles Burgoyne and the killings that follow.

The same comments that I made about An Iron Rose equally apply to this book. Temple's writing is very spare and gritty. He writes in the hardboiled style made famous by Hammett and Chandler. In fact, the main character in The Broken Shore, Joe Cashin, was very Marlow-esque. He was a complicated character. He had the hardness of an ex-homicide police officer, but was clearly enjoying being in a role where he could exercise his discretion and common sense without all the action.

Temple is skilled at capturing detail despite his spare writing style, and is able to effectively use dialogue to give the story and setting a distinctly Australian setting.

The good thing about The Broken Shore is that not only was he able to capture detail so well but he also covered many important political issues such as crime and justice, police corruption, Aboriginal politics, environmental protection and institutionalised sexual abuse.

I enjoyed The Broken Shore, although it moved very slowly and was worryingly similar to An Iron Rose, from my perspective anyway. I am now looking forward to reading Truth and seeing how it is distinct from these novels.

Gunshot Road by Adrian Hyland

Courtesy of: Bernadette from Reactions to Reading

Emily Tempest has become the world's most unlikely cop, an Aboriginal Community Police Officer no less. On her first day on the job in Bluebush in the Northern Territory she is one of the officers called to the scene of a stabbing out at Green Swamp Well. On the surface it looks like an open and shut case: two old drunks got into a fight and one stabbed the other in the neck. But to Emily, who knows both the victim (Doc) and the suspect (Wireless), something doesn't feel right and she can't let the investigation slide.

Gunshot Road has it all. Literally. Everything I could possibly want from a work of fiction all in one gorgeous package.

First there are fantastic characters. Emily Tempest is brave and stubborn and smart and funny and, as was the case with the first book in which she features, I'm still not entirely sure how a bloke can create such a credible female character but I'm delighted he has. In this book she is more mature than in her first outing though she still struggles when she knows what she should do is not what she wants to do and usually her heart wins out over her head. For better or worse.

There are plenty of other beautifully depicted characters to look out for too. Like the teenage Aboriginal boy called Danny who is deeply troubled by something and unable to communicate his fears to Emily. And the town's new top cop, taciturn and uncomprehending of all the things he doesn't know, but trying to do the right thing in his way. And of course the setting, the harsh land in the country's centre, is just as much a character as any person in the book.

The desert isolation, the unrelenting heat, the laconic humour, the often awkward relationships between blacks and whites all combine to form an unmistakably Australian story. It's not always a pretty one though and no one could accuse Hyland of trying to make it so because he tackles touch subjects such as the rampant domestic abuse of women in Aboriginal communities, endemic poverty and racism. However he somehow manages to do it without once lecturing from a self-proclaimed moral high ground. That's a much rarer trait than it ought to be in modern literature.

Next there is writing that made me simultaneously jealous at someone else’s ability to string words together in a way that I will never be able to and grateful that he didn’t keep his gift to himself. This is from the opening chapter about an initiation


I could go on but I’d end up quoting the whole book. In short, Hyland's writing is a thing of beauty and the entire book is, in part, one long ode to its country.

Finally there is a great story and Gunshot Road is a more solid piece of crime fiction than its predecessor. For the first half of the novel there's a fairly slow, humorous approach to the investigation as we're introduced to all the players and people tease Emily about her new obsession. Then at a certain point the novel switches gears and speeds up as it becomes more serious and foreboding. Together these halves make up a perfectly paced story with a genuine nail-biting finish.

Heck the book even incorporates, glorifies actually, geology, my favourite science. What more could I possibly ask for? Gunshot Road is a funny, beautiful, sad and thoughtful book that everyone should read. Immediately.

The town mob: fractured and deracinated they might have been, torn apart by
idleness and violence, by Hollywood and booze. But moments like these, when people come together, when they try to recover the core, they gave you hope.


It was the songs that did it: the women didn’t so much sing them as pick them up like radio receivers. You could imagine those great song cycles rolling across country, taking their shape from what they encountered: scraps of language, minerals and dreams, a hawk’s flight, a feather’s fall, the flash of a meteorite.


The resonance of that music is everywhere, even here, on the outskirts of the whitefeller town, out among the rubbish dumps and truck yards. It sings along the wires, it rings off bitumen and steel.

Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey

Courtesy of: Becky from Page Turners

Reading Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey has introduced me to a great new Australian writer that I am looking forward to reading more of.

Jasper Jones is set in the fictional rural Western Australia town of Corrigan, amidst a political backdrop of the Vietnam War and significant legislative change in Australia. One night, 13 year old Charlie Bucktin is awoken by a knock on the window from the town's local "thief, liar, thug and truant" - Jasper Jones. Jasper Jones is in fact a local indigenous boy, raised in appalling circumstances and treated as the local scapegoat whenever anything go wrong. Jasper entrusts Charlie with a secret so dark that it eventually leads to a mystery that envelopes the entire town of Corrigan.

I greatly enjoyed Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey. It was a page turner in the true sense of the phrase - I couldn't put it down. My biggest problem with it though, was that I couldn't figure out what genre it was supposed to be. The entire time I was reading the book I was asking myself "is this adult or young adult fiction?" I found myself so bothered by the fact that I couldn't figure it out that it became quite distracting. I know that it shouldn't make a difference what the genre is, so long as the reader enjoys the book (which I did). And yet, I couldn't shake off this overall feeling of confusion whilst I was reading the book that slightly hampered by enjoyment of it.

I think ultimately, this would have to be characterised as a book for young adults.

I appreciated that the book dealt with very real and important issues such as racial discrimination, prejudice, war and sexual assault. The opening scene were shockingly graphic (for a young adult book) and the final explanation of Jasper's shocking discovery is extremely confronting to say the least.

Silvey has written the book as a first person narrative from 13 year old Charlie Bucktin's perspective and for the most part his dialogue and inner monologue were authentic. I enjoyed the childish male banter between Charlie and his Vietnamese best friend Jeffrey Lu. It was short and sharp and funny and probably very much like what I imagine 13 year old boys would talk about.

At times though, I thought that the authenticity was lost a little. Silvey sometimes forces the childishness upon you, particularly the way in which Charlie and Jeffrey call each other names. Authenticity was also sometimes compromised when Charlie began to analyse the world and people around him; 13 year olds do not have the vocabulary and critical analysis skills that Charlie sometimes displays.

As far as a book for young readers goes, it dealt very effectively with the themes that it raises. Silvey deals with the daily reality of racism in the way that he writes about Jasper's beatings at the hands of the police, the destruction of the Lu family's garden in response to the Vietnamese War and the way in which Jeffrey courageously  deals with the racial taunts he suffers at the hands of his teammates.

Issues of physical and sexual abuse and alcoholism are also honestly but sensitively raised.

I would almost be tempted to say that it is almost like an Australian young adult version of To Kill A Mockingbird. Those big issues such as a racism and prejudice are examined through the eyes of a child experiencing a microcosm of these issues in their own daily lives.

It was heartwarming to watch Charlie come to terms with his own personal reality - in this way Jasper Jones is certainly a coming of age story. As the book progresses we see Charlie struggle to understand his parents and their relationship and come to terms with the existence of prejudice and racism but also make friends and get some "sassytime" as Jeffrey so comically phrases it.

Despite the inconsistencies in the authenticity of Charlie's narrative voice, I greatly admired this book for its honest and funny portrayal of serious issues.

Although I found my personal confusion regarding the book's genre somewhat distracting, I would recommend this book as a great Australian read, especially for young adults.

POSTSCRIPT: After writing the following sentence in my review "I would almost be tempted to say that it is almost like an Australian young adult version of To Kill A Mockingbird" I realised that something very similar was printed on the front cover of the book. I would just like to say that I am not copying the reviewer who is responsible for the comment on the front cover. I did actually think that to myself before reading it on the book.

How it Feels by Brendan Cowell

Courtesy of: Danielle from The Book Nerd Club

From the back cover:
'I had no idea how free we were. That's how free I was'.
An old friend, a best friend, a first love and the dreamer Neil who connects them all...Over the next twelve hours, their lives will change forever - friendships will be broken, virginity lost, love unleashed and secrets buried. A decade later, one is dead, one is famous, two are getting married, and the truth is about to erupt. Wildly funny, brutal, tender and true, Brendan Cowell's electrifying debut novel is a devastating ode to youth, capturing the beauty of growing up by the beach, and the darkness which moves beneath its surface. Because this is how it feels.'


Review:
'How it Feels' is the perfect title for this book. There seems to be this new wave of Australian male writers (or at least it seems to be a new wave, but maybe they've always been there and I'm only just discovering them) who are willing to write about the experience of being male from a feeling point of view. There's been plenty of work done by other Australian men which describe confronting and shocking events that put a spotlight on the world we live in. Tim Winton is an example of this, an amazing writer who is willing to write about the things that people might not want to look at and see. But what these previous writers have done is describe the events, and in doing so tell a story. What Brendan Cowell has done is gone deeper. He has managed to take the events in the books and describe the feeling of them. In doing so he is writing much more than just a story, he is writing the truth.

This is a searing look at the experience of growing up as a young Australian man, the brutality of this life that takes innocent, beautiful young boys and turns them into damaged and damaging men. There is a lot in this book that is confronting. The events and the choices the characters make, but for this reader, what is really confronting is the feelings. There is this beautiful exploration of the notion that by wanting to run away from people and a place, what you are really wanting to run away from is yourself with these people in this place, and that this is actually impossible. That wherever you go, there you are. These feelings, these experiences are always with you, you can't escape them, and how unbearable that can be. The books asks 'Do you want to know what it feels like to be this kind of man, can you really bear it?' Suicide is a major theme in the book, and really, it's not hard to see why in some communities in Australia male suicide is so prevalent. Brendan Cowell uses the word 'rape' repeatedly throughout the novel, but not in its usual sense (as in sexual assault), which reinforces this idea of the suffering that men experience at the hands of other men and inflict on themselves.

Ultimately, despite the grimness of this tale, I found it to be hopeful and beautiful. I think it is part of the modern Australian psyche that men are in a time of change, where some of the elements of the older ways of being are no longer socially acceptable, and many young men have this experience of being left unguided and abandoned by older generations. I feel uplifted by this wave of men willing to write about the experience of being a man in such an honest and truthful way, to be able to show 'this is how it feels'. It seems to me to be the beginning of the way to push through the damage and dysfunction to find a path that is better. This is my favourite line in the whole book:

And then I think of Oscar. That buzzing ray of light and openness...What will he do when he gets here himself, and there is no one to tell him that it is ok not to know the way.

This is not a comfortable read, but it is an important one, and I highly recommend it.

Many thanks to Pan Macmillan Australia for providing me with a copy of the book for review.

The Book of Lost Threads by Tess Evans

Courtesy of: Becky from Page Turners

 

The Book of Lost Threads is a pleasant and enjoyable debut novel by Australian author Tess Evans.

The book is about four miss-matched friends; Finn, Moss, Mrs Pargetterand Sandy. Moss is 20-something woman born to a lesbian couple who is struggling to come to terms with her identity. Finn is the 'anonymous' sperm donor who fathered her. He lives in a small country town called Opportunity, next door to Mrs Pargetterwho is still struggling to cope with the still birth of her child 40 years previously and who has been knitting tea cosies for the UN for several decades. Sandy is Mrs Pargetter's nephew and he has his own family's history to make peace with.

Together they help each other comes to terms with whatever it is that they have each been struggling to come to terms with.; love, guilty, loss.

The characters and their stories were really endearing, especially the story involving Mrs Pargetter and her tea cosies.  It that sense, it was a sweet read, if not a literary masterpiece. The book did attempt to deal with big issues; love, death, family. I particularly admired Evan's having written about the child of a same-sex relationship. This is not a common theme amoungst many books that I have read, and I appreciated that Evans was willing to write about something different. It was refreshing to read about a family that wasn't your typical one, but at the same time you shouldn't read this book and expect any deep analysis of the issue.

Sometimes the characters did feel a bit caricature-ish and the story a little far fetched. I particularly didn't connect to Finn's story about the events that acted as his motivation for moving to Opportunity and living as a hermit.  The time that he spends in the monastery and his subsequent return their in his apparent time of need (which I think was quite overdone) all seemed particularly artificial.

All in all though it was an endearing, easy read. I felt myself going along for the ride with the characters and I enjoyed myself.

Barbara Baynton - Australia's First Great Female Author

Courtesy of: Mel U from The Reading Life

Bush Studies Barbara Baynton (1902, 80 pages)


Barbara Baynton (1857 to 1929) has a very good claim to be called the first canon or near canon status female author from Australia. She went from the child of Irish bounty immigrants (their passage was paid for by a future employer already in Australia) to the wife of a man who declined the throne of Albania. The Australian Dictionary of Biography has a fascinating article on her life. She was born in Scone, in New South Wales. She was clearly a brilliant individual. Her life would make a great book and movie.

I recently read and posted on two early Australian writers, Henry Lawson and Andrew (Banjo) Peterson. Both of these writers were known as "Bush Authors" in that their fiction and poetry centered on life in the vast areas of Australia away from the coastal cities. Within Australia this area was called the "The Bush". It is often referred to as "The Outback" also. To digress a bit, one can almost say the Australia short story got its start when the journal, The Bulletin, began in 1886 to solicit its readers (it was circulated all over Australia) to submit stories about "real life" in Australia. The Bulletin began to be famous for publishing stories about life in the Bush, The Outback. A class of writers known as "Bush Writers" arose to fulfill the demand for these stories. The Bush Man occupies the same place in Australian culture as the cowboy does in American.

Barbara Baynton felt the stories of most of the nearly all male writers romanticized life in the bush and told nothing of the real life of women. Baynton began to contribute stories to The Bulletin that showed in real detail the often horrifying and terribly harsh life of women in the outback. She submitted a collection of six of her stories to various Australian publishers but they all said the stories were over the head of the Australian public at the time. They ended up being published in London as Bush Stories.

"The Vessel", her best known and highest regarded story, centers on a woman living with an abusive husband (men come off quite badly in these stories) in a very isolated part of the bush. Baynton lets us see right away how life is for the bush wife in a vivid scene where a cow charges the wife and she is ridiculed by her husband and given a stick to beat the cow with. In her mind the wife compares the husband unfavorably to the cow. In the early stages of her marriage she had told her husband of her fear of travelers in the outback coming to their house for food and drink while he was gone. (It was the tradition in the outback that one helped travelers). He told her not to worry she was so unattractive no one would molest her. One day a swagman (slang for a rootless traveler in the bush country seeking day labor-they were often seen as dangerous, ex convicts and such) stops by the house when she is home alone with her baby. The encounter between the wife and the swagman is conveyed to us in very terrifying fashion. I could for sure feel the fear of the woman and her sense that she was powerless to do anything and that really no one would really care what happened to her. Baynton also lets us see a man who passed by on his horse but did not stop in spite of her screams. In someways the indifference of this man who comes from a more advantaged class is as shocking as the rape of the woman by the Swagman. It is all the sadder as we know when the husband returns he will know doubt beat her and claimed she enticed the swagman to molest her. "The Vessel" should be included in any list of 100 best short stories. It is almost hard to look into the world it depicts. There is nothing romantic in her version of the outback.

"The Dreamer" is a very gothic in feel story about a woman coming home from the city to visit her mother. The tone is almost horror story and is very visual. It does rely on a twist ending but I did not see it coming. The ending is left vague and we are not 100 percent sure what happened. It does a great job of describing what it must have felt like to walk through the outback at night.

"The Squeaker's Mate" is a beautiful hard breaking story that portrays the life of a wife of a logger in a logging camp. Squeaker is the nickname of her husband. She is as good at the work of the logging camp as any man if not better. Her husband lives from her work but feels a loss of masculine pride because his wife is seen as a better worker than he (or most all the men) so he tries to regain his pride by mentally and physically abusing her. Then one tragic day she is terribly injured when a tree falls on her. The doctor tells her she will never walk again. The doctor tells the husband but advises him not to take all hope from his wife and to be gentle and kind to her. When the wife asks him what the doctor said about her condition he basically says "Oh I am going out for a beer and you will never walk again so try to find someway to make yourself useful or I will put you out". It got worse from there. I will not giveaway the ending as I hope some will read this story. (I think her work maybe required reading in Australian literature classes.)

There are three other stories in the collection that I hope to read soon. Baynton should for sure be read by anyone with a serious interest in the development of Australian Literature (most probably already have). I enjoyed all three of these stories a lot. There is some slang and dialect in the stories but not enough to be annoying to me. I claim no expertise but there seems no competition in calling her Australia's best female short story writer.

Bush Stories can be read online at the web page of the library of The University of Sydney.

"The Vessel" is a very good short story. You can read it in just a few minutes.

The short stories of Steele Rudd

Courtesy of: Mel U from The Reading Life

Steele Rudd (1868 to 1935) was the pen name for a very famous writer of Australian Bush Tales, Arthur Davis.

Davis was born in the outback region of Queensland Australia to a Welsh father and an Irish mother.   He left school at age 11 and worked at various jobs on outback stations and farms.   At age 18 he got a job in the local  sheriff's office and about this time he sent in a short story to The Bulletin about some of his father's experiences working and making a life for a family of eight in the harsh bush country, the outback.   The editor of The Bulletin encouraged him to write more stories and Steele Rudd became a very popular author of simple, good natured stories about life in the outback in late 19th century Australia.   The stories poke gentle fun at the country ways people in the region but they do not show them as buffoons or fools.   The people in the three stories I enjoyed reading were super resourceful, very strong in their bodies and minds and subject to the loneliness  that other Bush Authors like Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton have shown us in their stories.   There is some slang and use of dialect in the stories but I could follow the conversations and I enjoyed learning some new slang.


"Starting the Selection" 7 pages, 1898

"Starting the Selection" is about the first few months that  the father, referred to as "Dad" spent on the farm by himself preparing the land to be farmed for the first time.  I could not but admire the tremendous hard work that this would have taken.     Everybody suffered tremendously from the isolation.

"Our First Harvest" (eight page, 1898) 

 

"Öur First Hand" gave us a poignant look at the financial difficulties faced by early farmers.   Dad and his five sons worked very hard to bring in the first harvest and get it into the local store for sell.   They were elated when the store owner told them the harvest would yield 12  pounds.  I could feel the shared heart ache of Mom and Dad when the store owner told them he was going to deduct nine pounds to pay their account with him.   Rudd does not say but we get the feeling there might be some shady bookkeeping involved.   Mom and Dad just give each other strength and go on.

"The Night We Watched for Wallabies"

In  my limited research on Rudd I did not find any stories consistently listed as his best work so I was on my own as to where to start in his work.    After completing these two stories I found one entitled, "The Night We Watched for Wallabies" and I thought OK sounds like fun and it was.   Dad tells his sons they all have to spend the night outside the house to stand guard for roving bands of Wallabies (small kangaroos) which can have devastating effects on crops like wheat and corn.   Rudd's style is straight forward while showing a keen eye for details.

There is a surprise ending that does sort of poke fun at the people in the story a bit (though not in a mean way) so I will not reveal more of  the plot.  

These stories are easy to read, straight  forward  works that the people they are written about could enjoy.   They let me see what family life was like in the Queensland Out Back in the 1890s.    You had to be tough, self reliant, and a good sense of humor was a big help also I think.   

Older Australians may recall the very long running radio program (1932 to 1952) Dave and Dad which was inspired by the stories of Rudd.   In the program the dignified intelligent people in his stories were reduced to slack jawed outback yokels.   Rudd was always very offended by this and himself had the greatest respect for the people of the outback, especially   the women.   

I liked these stories.    Maybe the are not  great art and I admit they were in part historical curiosity reads for me but I am glad I was motivated to take the time to learn about Steele Rudd.   All of these stories can be read online at Free Reading in Australia (a great resource).   My basic source of information on Rudd is the Australian National Biographical Dictionary.