Showing posts with label Chris Womersley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chris Womersley. Show all posts

17 August 2011

Review: BEREFT, Chris Womersley

  • Published by Scribe 2010
  • ISBN 978-1-921640-60-5
  • 264 pages
  • Source: my local library
Publisher's Blurb

It is 1919. The Great War has ended, but the Spanish flu epidemic is raging through Australia. Schools are closed, state borders are guarded by armed men, and train travel is severely restricted. There are rumours it is the end of the world.

In the NSW town of Flint, Quinn Walker returns to the home he fled ten years earlier when he was accused of an unspeakable crime. Aware that his father and uncle would surely hang him, Quinn hides in the hills surrounding Flint. There, he meets a mysterious young girl called Sadie Fox, who encourages him to seek justice — and seems to know more about the crime than she should.

A searing gothic novel of love, longing, and revenge, BEREFT is about the suffering endured by those who go to war and those who are forever left behind.

My Take

Returning to his home town after the Great War Quinn Walker is determined to clear his name of the murder/rape of his younger sister 10 years before. He finds that the man he knows was guilty is now the local policeman, that his father has vowed to kill him if he returns, and his mother is dying from bubonic plague. In fact his mother believes that he is dead, having been killed in the war.

BEREFT draws a harsh landscape and I found it difficult reading. Despite the original murder and the fact that two more take place within the novel's time frame, I found it difficult to accept the novel as crime fiction, mainly because I think Womersley was trying to write something else. My reservations are shared by Bernadette but not by the glowing reviews that Womersley quotes on his site.

Womersley's style is carefully crafted, demanding the reader's full attention, and providing some arresting imagery.
    On the day twelve-year-old Sarah Walker was murdered in 1909, a storm bullied its way across the western plains of New South Wales and unleashed itself on the fly-speck town of Flint. Sarah's murder became the warm, still heart of several days of of frantic activity in which almost every one of the town's two hundred or so residents had a tale of chaos or loss. Trees cowered and snapped in the winds; horses bolted ..... Dead cows, swollen tight, bobbled about in the floodwater for days. And old Mrs Mabel Crink lost her sight, which partly accounted for the name by which the maelstrom became known: the Blinder.
In the novel Womersley describes the impact that losing its men folk to the Great War had on the small town of Flint, as well as the impact of the war on those who returned. In many ways, although avenging his sister's death is what keeps Quinn going and cold blooded murder does happen, crime and justice take a back seat.

My rating: 4.4

Awards and listings:
Winner ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year
Winner of Indie Award for Best Novel
Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year
Shortlisted for 2011 Miles Franklin Award
Shortlisted for ASL Gold Medal for Literature
Shortlisted for Ned Kelly Award for Fiction

Chris Womersley won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First novel in 2008 with THE LOW ROAD
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28 February 2009

REVIEW: THE LOW ROAD, Chris Womersley

Scribe Publications 2007, 280 pages, ISBN 978-1-921215-47-6

Wild, a doctor de-registered because of his morphine addiction, cast out by his wife, and on the run from the law, checks into a dingy motel on the fringe of the city. He is rather obviously a doctor, carrying a medical bag with him, and so it is to him that Sylvia, the motel manager, turns when a young man with a gunshot wound is dumped on her doorstep.

The wounded man Lee is also on the run. He was shot during what should have been a simple money retrieval job, complicated by the fact that he has decided to keep the rather paltry sum of money for himself. Now Josef, the man who sent Lee to get the money, wants it back. Or rather his boss wants it back.

Wild was a GP and has never dealt with gunshot wounds and he decides to take Lee into the country to the house of doctor he knows. Their subsequent journey with Josef in pursuit is quest-like, with critical consequences for all concerned.

THE LOW ROAD was shortlisted for the 2006 Victorian Premier's Award for an unpublished manuscript. In 2008 it won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First novel. But to be quite honest, this book could be set almost anywhere, with very rare references to its Australian setting. Neither the setting nor the characters exude particularly Australian characteristics. My guess is that this will give the book a wider audience. There will be readers who won't recognise anything Australian about it.

Although there are elements of mystery in the strands of the story, and Lee and Wild's individual back-stories are cleverly unpacked as the main action progresses, for me THE LOW ROAD seems to have a lot in common with Westerns, while still being unmistakeably crime fiction. In style, particularly in the author's economy with words, it has a lot in common with Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD, which also works on the idea of a journey taking place in a harsh and unforgiving landscape, which I read a couple of years back.

THE LOW ROAD has one stylistic feature I feel I must comment on. Womersley has presented it without punctuation marks in dialogue. It is something that I have noticed recently in at least a couple of other novels. While contributing to the book's style, it has the effect of requiring the reader to focus closely on who is saying what.

Here is an example: A conversation between Josef and his boss Marcel.

Josef?
Yes Marcel.
We've got a problem.
Josef lowered himself into an overstuffed armchair that was here when he moved in. It was an enormous thing, almost capable of swallowing him whole. He stifled a sigh. What is it?
You heard from Lee? You seen him?
Josef sucked at his gold tooth. No.
Nothing?
No. Why?
Because. Neither have I.

As I read on through the novel, the lack of quotation marks, which struck me as odd at first, no longer seemed to matter. There were times when I had to re-read a passage to make sure I knew who had said what, but it does make me wonder if we are going to see more books written in this way, and whether this is an impact of word processed writing.

I thought I would make a comment on the cover design, which seems to me to be unusually good too. I've spent a long time looking at it. it appears to be a view of a harsh landscape, perhaps the road through shards of glass. It works really well with the fractured view of life the flawed characters in this novel have. Why "THE LOW ROAD"? Well, I'm going to let you puzzle over that one for yourselves. It reminded me of the words of Loch Lomond:
    Oh ye'll tak' the high road
    and I'll tak' the low road,
Chris Womersley was born in 1968 and that makes him a relatively young author. He currently lives in Sydney and has contributed stories and reviews to a variety of journals and newspapers.

My rating: 4.7
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6 March 2008

Australian Crime Fiction Snapshots - # 4

The 4th batch of these interviews, the result of a collaboration between Karen Chisholm (of the Aust Crime Fiction weblog), Damien Gay (of Crime DownUnder) and Perry Middlemiss (of Matilda).

Previously listed

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