'The Three Of Us' by Kim Lock, Pan Macmillan, 2018

January 29, 2018 Sarah Ridout

An absorbing love story is juxtaposed with its conservative, racist and repressed 1950s rural Australia setting. The secret, parallel world created by the main characters shows how the personal can provide solace and escape from a conformist social space.

As with ‘Like I Can Love’, Lock shows her strength in depicting personal relationships, especially between women through the stresses and experiences of life.

Be like the woman in the painting and get reading in 2018! Start with 'The Three Of Us'!

With her evocative and descriptive prose Lock infuses the book with the ambiance of a languid summers day. The atmosphere and joyful, earthy domesticity depicts strong female alliance – as powerfully employed in ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock’ and the ‘Virgin Suicides’ – that challenges and defies the times.

Lock has an uncanny ability to pick themes that gel with the zeitgeist: ‘Like I Can Love’ coincided with the public demand for action on the domestic violence epidemic and ‘The Three of Us’ comes after voters declared ‘Love Is Love' and dragged the government to Marriage Equality. ‘The Three Of Us’ is a welcome tonic of love in a world awash with hate, division and ignorance. ‘The Three Of Us’ celebrates tolerance, acceptance and love, in all its forms.

'Ache' by Eliza Henry-Jones

October 6, 2017 Sarah Ridout

Ache by Eliza Henry-Jones
Fourth Estate, Harper Collins
2017

‘Ache’ is a brave and perfectly constructed story for our new times: showing how disasters impact on families and communities and how people adapt and survive in different ways.

Much like Henry-Jones’ first novel ‘In the Quiet’, ‘Ache’ features layered and finely drawn characters. These characters have all been damaged by a terrible bush fire that tore through their town and mountain the year before – some have stayed put, shell-shocked – others have fled to the city only to remain scared and haunted by the events.

The central characters are the heroine, Annie, and her daughter Pip. All the other characters radiate and span Annie’s life from her youth on the mountain to her adult life as a partner and mother.

Discussions on motherhood, mistakes and assumptions made from love, fear and survival can carry through generations are well handled and layered.

'Ache' was a juxtapositional piece to read on a beach holiday surrounded by so much water. But Stradbroke itself had been ravaged by one of the largest bush-fires in Australian history.

Henry-Jones experience and study in the field of trauma shines through the novel in the ways characters react and cope with the terrifying bush-fire event.

Cleverly, ‘Ache’ opens many months after the fire when the characters are living their altered and devastated lives. Annie is living in Melbourne away from the mountain where she grew up but her thoughts and dreams are increasingly drawn there.

The language, word pictures of place and the detail and evocative depiction of rural life were perfectly rendered and like ‘tree-change voyeurism’ for this city-dweller. Descriptions and rendering as part of the fabric of the place include chickens, bees, lyre birds, and of course, horses. They are all much more than background and are intrinsic to the novel in terms of the life, place and what’s at stake.

This reader hopes that ‘Ache’ is compulsory reading for every politician who likes donning the Rural Fire Fighters Uniform for camera ready volunteering. They may even donate a relatively small amount of money on the one hand compared to the donations they take from the Fossil Fuel lobby (while denying the existence of Climate Change) on the other. Their obsequiousness to this industry is fueling these ‘Super-Fire’ bush-fires (the sort ‘Ache’ describes) that are coming earlier, lasting longer and destroying more. Perhaps books like ‘Ache’ which depict the harrowing, devastating and murderous impact of these events will help them realise the voters have joined the dots and there can see the consequences of their behaviour. I read 'Ache' while on holiday on beautiful Stradbroke Island itself the victim of increasingly savage bushfires, the worst being the most recent in 2014.

‘Ache’ has laconic, wry Australian humour which allows the reader moments of relief in the trauma and devastation. The character of Nigel in particular was well done and a star of the book for me. Annie’s ‘made family’ was a reflection of contemporary Australia and the changing face of parenthood.

The subplot of the TV series was a clever addition providing a common enemy, unwanted outsiders and triggers for hostility and remembering. The crew and producer were used at key moments for different reasons and results. It also showed the increasingly desensitised world of the 24 hour news cycle and social media as distraction and isolator. The use of an individual to act as a figurehead and easy visual summary for everything about a tragedy: in this case Annie escaping on horseback through the flames clutching Pip.

The healing of the mountain – along with the characters that can be healed – was finely judged and paced taking the reader along seamlessly.

'Ache’ is an evocative, compassionate and cathartic depiction of loss in an Australian landscape being reshaped by devastating, as yet unchecked human impacts. Congratulations Eliza Henry-Jones for this fine and nuanced depiction of modern Australian life.

Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic #AWW17

April 1, 2017 Sarah Ridout

The New Edition cover with it's lovely gold hardware

Caleb Zelic, profoundly deaf since early childhood, has always lived on the outside – watching, picking up tell-tale signs people hide in a smile, a cough, a kiss. When a childhood friend is murdered, a sense of guilt and a determination to prove his own innocence sends Caleb on a hunt for the killer. But he can’t do it alone. Caleb and his troubled friend Frankie, an ex-cop, start with one clue: Scott, the last word the murder victim texted to Caleb. But Scott is always one step ahead.

This gripping, original and fast-paced crime thriller is set between a big city and a small coastal town, Resurrection Bay, where Caleb is forced to confront painful memories. Caleb is a memorable protagonist who refuses to let his deafness limit his opportunities, or his participation in the investigation. But does his persistence border on stubbornness? And at what cost? As he delves deeper into the investigation Caleb uncovers unwelcome truths about his murdered friend – and himself.

‘Resurrection Bay’ won the Ned Kelly Best Debut and a trifecta of Davitt Awards in 2016. When you read it you can understand why.

It is a fast moving tale that gives Peter Temple a run for his money. The hero, Caleb Zelic, is a powerful addition to the genre. He was profoundly deaf since early childhood, but rather than that being the focus of his being it is used as another attribute and textually as a professional strength allowing him to watch and pick up the multiple signs people hide in a smile, a cough, or a kiss. It is a celebration of difference as strength not weakness important in today's Australia of the great homogeneity and the oppression of difference whether it be denying Marriage Equality for as long as humanly possible, vilifying refugees, or the strange desire to increase racism and discrimination through getting rid of 18C. In relation the narrative thread concerning Caleb's partner and her indigenous family is groundbreaking and to be celebrated. In Australia in 2017 we need much more diversity and many more different voices, not less.

Like J.M Peace’s ‘A Time To Run’, Emma Viskic's Caleb Zelic gives Australian crime writing a distinctive and strong central character readers can root for. Other great additions to this genre in 2016 are ‘Ghost Girls’ by Cath Ferla and ‘Bad Blood’ by Gary Kemble.