"He was hurling words at his shrinking wife like clods or bricks and she was not dodging but receiving them like a willing saint, enduring abuse like a terrible balm."

Ezra getting some local advice on the best bombing technique, Mossman George, Daintree National Park, Far North Queensland. April 2021.

Drylands by Thea Astley

Thea Astley's last novel Drylands is a queer old thing. Presented as a series of loosely connected fragments, it begins with a decidedly clichéd post-modern flourish more Calvino than Miles Franklin. To my horror, I thought for a moment that I was getting a meta-exploration on the nature of writing and literature. Early on, it appears that we are to follow the process of a writer going through a painful attempt to birth an idea.

For whatever reason, Astley gives up on this conceit - although she half-heartedly returns to it every now and again - and instead, we drift into the series of vignettes that eventually build the book. Admittedly, it is an awkward and stuttering start, but perhaps this was the author's aim. After all, novels are born out of such stutters and stumbles.

From such a beginning is born a cast of exhausted and alienated characters sleepwalking through a failed and resentful town in the grip of drought and entropy. They flail against the tide before each seemingly submitting to inevitable failure and defeat. You will struggle to find a bleaker metaphor for rural Australia than this.

The usual Astley themes are here: the nature of words and meaning; the impoverishment of the spirit; misogyny; racism; violence; and the denial of our history and true national character. Again, there are flashes of brilliance here, but this is a tired book by a tired author. I largely enjoy her work, but both the narrative framing device and underdeveloped characters who appear and disappear seem unconvincing and insubstantial.

I have no problem with a novel that ends on a bitter tone, but it saddens me that this is the note one of the greatest Australian novelists ended her career with.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2

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Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

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This will hurt me...

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