This is a novel that deals with life
shaped by emotional breakdown and addiction.
The encounter with the central
character, Tom Keely, is painful – he is trapped in a cycle of, in
many ways self-inflicted, failure. But I also found it somehow
hypnotic, a character that I did not wish to turn my back on.
Through the friendship that forms
between him and the boy, Kia, is a source of hope. Kia gives Tom a
reason to live – even if his struggles mean that life remains
chaotic.
Events become darker – the writer,
Tim Winton, powerfully invokes a sense of menace and of powerlessness
– and so Tom's actions, which are clearly irrational, begin to take
on a twisted logic.
The novel ends quite suddenly, in a
kind of flash of lightening. I have read the last few pages a couple
of times – and I am not exactly sure what happens – but the
immediate menace is, I think, overcome.
But for the fragile and broken, for Tom
and Kia, it seems hard to imagine and kind of straightforward “happy
ever after” - we are not given any, and I am glad, it would have
been an insult to the reader if Winton had even hinted one.
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