Telling the story

 

I just read a book by a really good author that was both fascinating and difficult.

Nothing about this book was familiar to me. Not the language, or the topography. I initially felt a bit lost, like I was reading in another language, which in a sense I was. Australian.

The slang, the names of the wild life, the geography, none of it was easy for an American, raised in America and limited by American education, but it was fascinating.

In the beginning I just kept reading, hoping that simple immersion would fill me in. Later I began looking up some of the words and especially photos of the landscape.

The story was compelling and sometimes horrifying. It is about child abuse at some of its worst and the product of that abuse as a boy enters his mid to late teens on the road to manhood.

The boy takes off, like a child might do after a terrifying incident and runs away, but he runs into a landscape that is totally unforgiving. I found this symbolic of his life up to that point. As he runs he discovers what he probably should have brought along with him and is forced to both make do and succeed by his hard won skill for surviving under the worst circumstances.

Ultimately he meets a scraggly old man living in a shepherd's hut.

The man is as reconciled to his life as the boy is in changing his own and so the two life styles begin to bump into one another.

I never discovered exactly why the old man was out there, marooned and isolated, partly by his own choice I think and partly because he felt it was his only hope of redeeming himself without seeking redemption through traditional ways.

The ending was hard to read and yet when the book was finished I felt intrigued and good. I'm glad I read it. It's given me so much for food for thought.

You might enjoy Tim Winton's, The Shepherd's Hut.