Outback Noir

"You wouldn't want to be lost out there for too long.  It's the panic that gets you.  Everything starts to look the same After a few days, makes it hard to trust what you are seeing."  He glanced outside.  "Drives 'em wild."

I actually prefer Jane Harper's second novel Force of Nature to her highly acclaimed debut The Dry.  I just love the concept of five ill-matched female colleagues forced to spend a long weekend on a team-building hike in the remote Giralang Ranges in East Australia.  Brilliant opening chapter with the corresponding male team completing the hike and making it back to camp in plenty of time, drinking coffee, checking their phones and making jokes about the tardiness of the women's team.  As time moves on they become concerned.  The search team come in, confident of swiftly locating the women and bringing them out.  They return stone-faced as the light begins to fade.

Jane Harper's low-key, likeable detective Aaron Falk receives a disturbing voice mail from one of the women on the hike and also heads out to the Giralang Ranges recalling that the area was the scene of a notorious serial killer in his youth.  The five women are ill-equipped for hiking in the outback with hiking boots that don't fit and rucksacks with straps that chafe the skin. Not enough water, not enough food.  Courtesy and camaraderie breaks down under adversity and the five colleagues - all at different levels of seniority within their organisation - are reduced to scuffling over their only phone with a faint signal.

Jane Harper is good at the slow-burn plot and setting up red herrings among her characters.  What does the guy at the petrol station know? Who exactly is the man running the corporate events?  Is the woman known to have a drink and drugs problem too obvious a suspect?  As in The Dry the landscape itself adds a sense of foreboding -  a 'green sprawling mass of bushland' where you only have to walk a little way in any direction and it all starts to look the same.

While we're on the subject of outback noir let's not forget that other great novel by Colleen McCullough who was writing a love story set on a remote sheep shearing station in Drogheda, New South Wales back in 1977.   I've just reread The Thorn Birds and for me the most interesting part of the story is not the affair between Meggie and the priest but the gradual unfolding of the character of Fee, Meggie's strange silent mother.

Amidst the ghost gums, wilga trees, cockatoos and the silver grass of Drogheda, McCullogh brilliantly portrays how the climate controls life and work.

Any recommendations for further reading would be welcome!

The Thorn Birds

I started and abandoned a couple of books this month. Neither The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett or Gillespie and I by Jane Harris held my attention beyond the first fifty pages or so. Perfectly good books but they didn't speak to me. I wanted a big novel with a strong sense of landscape and a compelling story. I wanted something like The Poisonwood Bible with its female focus and exotic setting. The Virago logo on the spine of The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough caught my eye in Waterstones and I thought it might fit the bill.

Well it's certainly unfamiliar terrain! The novel is set in the early part of the twentieth century on the fictional homestead of Drogheda, a vast sheep station in Northwest New South Wales, Australia. Summer begins in December and winter in June. The land is populated by kangaroos, emus, parakeets and kookaburras, fearsome lizards with blue tongues, snakes, spiders and grasshoppers. Dust storms leave finely grained brown powder on all surfaces in the houses, even getting into sealed containers and 'dulling newly washed hair.'

Amidst the dust storms, floods and droughts the male-dominated Cleary family work as stockmen on the land. Meghann Cleary the only daughter reaches the age of fifteen wholly innocent of the facts of life while her strange, silent mother keeps her working in the family home. Mary Carson the elderly landowner seems to be obsessed with the local priest - the handsome, ambitious Father Ralph de Bricassart who smokes, swears and helps drive the sheep. Father Ralph seems to be very fond of young Meggie. I never did watch the TV series but I think I can see where this is going!

The dialogue in this novel is a little far-fetched at times but the sense of landscape is breathtaking. I can't put it down.