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Nicholas Shakespeare
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Publisher | Vintage | ||
ISBN | 978-009950777 | ||
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Reviewer
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Ann
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Synopsis
Following the death of his parents in a car crash, eleven-year-old Alex Dove is torn from his life on a remote farm in Tasmania and sent to school in England. When he returns to Australia twelve years later, the timeless beauty of the land and his encounter with a young woman whose own life has been marked by tragedy, persuade him to stay. They marry, and he finds himself drawn into the eccentric, often hilarious dynamics of island life. Longing for children, the couple open their home to a disquieting guest, a teenage castaway, whose presence in their home begins to unravel their tenuously forged happiness.
Review
Started quite well, even if a little stereotypical - small rural settlement on the edge of the sea, on this occasion in Tasmania, man returns as on outsider after spending formative years abroad following the tragic death of parents, decides to stay and marries local girl also returning from the city to help look after her dying father.
Evocative writing of land and seascape, mildly interesting but with sense of impending disaster as her reasons for marrying someone she doesn't love are not clear and will obviously cause problems. Things go along quite well, despite their childlessness, then a storm at sea deposits a teenage tearaway on their doorstep whom they decide to keep for a while.
At this point one could be reading a different novel altogether, breakdown of relationships, trauma, adultery, visitations, and finally a very unsatisfying ending concluding an unsatisfying story.
Not up to the author's usual standard.
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