I gave up on the book I was reading, so I’ll tell you it was The Sea Wolf, by Jack London. Life is too short to read books that I don’t enjoy, and once I put it down I really couldn’t summon up any desire to pick it up and carry on. So, I left the e-reader on the bedroom floor and moved on to:
Book 20 – The Dead Heart, by Douglas Kennedy. This book starts, fairly randomly, in a strip club. It follows an American journalist, Nick, as he travels to Australia on a whim, and meets 21-year-old Angie who is looking for a chance to explore a little of her own country. But Angie isn’t what she seems, and soon Nick is trapped in a life he doesn’t want, with no idea how or when he’ll ever be able to escape.
This book is short – I read it in an evening – but not entirely the kind of thing I’d read for pleasure. Nick, as a main character, is petty, selfish and annoying. Meanwhile Angie is a caricature and the resultant relationship between Nick and his sister-in-law is inevitable, as is its conclusion. The strip club scene was almost entirely without point, and as an opener put me off a little.
However, there were some genuinely interesting elements in the writing. The descriptions of the outback were powerful, and as a backdrop to the claustrophobia of his life with Angie the overwhelming, unpleasant and uncomfortable heat was a great metaphor for the stifling of his own character. The depictions of the townspeople in his new ‘home’ was almost feral: it reminded me not of pioneer stories but of Lord of the Flies. The savagery of the powerful was unpleasant and intense. The callousness towards animals – kangaroos and dogs, in this book – showed a genuine disconnect with the world beyond the families of the townspeople. This exacerbated the sense of removal from the world as a whole.
The blurb on the front of this book says it’s ‘hilariously funny and frightening at the same time.’ I didn’t find it funny, but I find the idea of people so disconnected from society to be disturbing, and the sense of powerlessness underpinning Nick’s experience was unpleasant. However, the pace of the book meant that was, in some respects, glossed over.
Overall, it was a quick read which stopped me getting even further behind in my reading, for which I’m grateful! I don’t know if I’d want to read it again but certain scenes were, in my opinion, very effective and I may well look at them to see what I can learn from them for my own writing.
Happy reading,
EJ
🙂
Becoming a writer 
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