Wimmera tracks the friendship of two boys from a defining moment in their childhood, when a mysterious newcomer arrives in the small Australian country town of Wimmera, through to the discovery of a body in the river twenty years later. Mark Brandi’s debut is a simply extraordinary literary crime novel, delivered with intelligence, power and heart.
The novel opens in the midst of the 1989 summer holidays, where we’re introduced to best friends Ben and Fab. These almost-teenagers spend their days yabbying, playing backyard cricket, hypothesising revenge against school bullies, and leaving unsaid their shared discomfort over the way Fab’s father hits him, and the suicide of Ben’s next-door neighbour. When a man moves into the now-vacant neighbour’s house, Fab and Ben contemplate his presence in their hometown now; what brought him here, and where was he before? He’s a big man, obviously strong, built like a linebacker. There’s something not right about him; a meanness in his smile, a dubious glint in his eye. Unbeknownst to Ben and Fab, his arrival in Wimmera will have a major impact on their young lives — the ripples of which are still felt twenty years later, when their friendship has long since eroded, Ben now living the big city life in Melbourne, while Fab remains, stuck in a dead-end job, burdened by the weight of a decision made in his youth, soon to be crippled by it when the police discover a body in the river.
Wimmera is rural Australian noir perfected. The tone of the novel is bleak, its characters steeped in defeatism. You know from the start: nobody is going to get what they want, and everyone is going to get what’s coming to them. In his foreword of The Best American Noir of the Century, Otto Penzler described noir works as “existential pessimistic tales about people, including (or especially) protagonists, who are seriously flawed and morally questionable. The tone is generally bleak and nihilistic, with characters whose greed, lust, jealousy, and alienation lead them into a downward spiral and their plans and schemes inevitably go awry.” That’s Wimmera in a nutshell. It is unsettling and bittersweet bearing witness to two young men orbiting a black hole, but more importantly, it’s unputdownable.
Comparisons to Jane Harper’s The Dry (my 2016 book of the year) are inevitable — both Australian debuts, both set in rural Australian towns — but besides their sheer readability, these are two very different novels deserving of equal merit. Harper’s was a relentless page-turner; a race to determine the perpetrator of the crime. Brandi’s is more of a slow-burn; a character-driven, emotionally-wrenching tour-de-force.
ISBN: 9780733638459
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
Imprint: Hachette Australia
Publisher: Hachette Australia
Publish Date: 27-Jun-2017
Country of Publication: Australia
Hogarth Shakespeare seriesIn Tracy Chevalier’s New Boy, Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello is transplanted to a school in 1970s Washington DC.
Mark Greaney’s The Gray Man is as satisfying as any wide-screen Hollywood blockbuster, its superbly choreographed and adrenaline-fuelled action scenes enhancing the thriller’s thin plot. It’s heavy on familiar tropes — the assassin with a conscious, spurned by his government overseers, now targeted for elimination by, well, just about every professional killer in the business — but this first book in a series that has now reached its sixth entry is fast and furious, and a sure fix for thriller junkies.
Michael Brissenden’s debut novel, The List, has all the elements of a rollicking thriller: a diabolical threat, political intrigue, set locally in Sydney. It sits somewhere between a Harry Bosch mystery and a Tom Clancy technothriller, but unfortunately, the sum of its parts doesn’t equate to greatness. The List nails the raw pace required of a thriller, but it lacks the high-octane theatrics that elevated the best of Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum, and lacks the serpentine plot of an A-list crime novel. The novel’s characters and locales lack colour and life, and the telling details that are the hallmarks of the genre’s greats. It’s an effective page-turner, but not propulsive. It’s a little too beholden to the books that’ve come before it, not quite doing enough to stand out from the crowd.
I’m a late Murakami convert. My first sample of his work – 2014’s Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage – inspired a marathon of Murkami madness over the next eighteenth, solidifying my adoration of his imagination and his spare, unadorned prose. It lead to the devout proclamation: whatever Haruki Murakami writes, I will read. So when Men Without Women arrived in store, there was no pause for deliberation: I slapped my money down on the counter and slipped my copy of the short story collection into my bag. There was no doubt in my mind: my commute over the next couple of days would be a delight.
In Michael Robotham’s sure and practised hands, domestic noir has achieved new heights. With its perfect blend of sharp plotting, great characterisation and a powerful narrative, The Secrets She Keeps might well be the spiritual successor to Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train we’ve all been waiting for.
Meg Howrey’s The Wanderers lyrically showcases the psychological costs of humanity’s desire to explore the stars. It’s a space opera without grandiose plot theatrics — The Martian this ain’t! — which thrives on digging deep into its characters’ psyches and exposing the toll their mission takes on them.