Bereft by Chris Womersley
My rating: 3/5 cats
oh, i don’t know…
if i had to judge this book based on “the author’s ability to manipulate language in a way that pleases the reader and creates a haunting, atmospheric tale,” it would get high marks.
but if i had to judge it on “the author’s ability to tell a freaking story with compelling and believable characters,” it would fall down hard.
australian gothic. it should be awesome, right? postwar, flu-ridden australia, where men carry guns and hanging is still an accepted practice, with justice being meted out the old-fashioned, biblical way…and yet…
these characters made no sense to me.
our hero quinn is wrongly believed to have raped and murdered his sister when she was twelve. until her death, they were crazy-inseparable, with her leading him around by the nose, encouraging him to engage in pranks and other childhood mischief because she was just so irrepressible and creative and charismatic and he was the kind of older brother who loved hanging out with a little girl. and upon finding her body, and going to her and getting all covered with her blood and grabbing the knife and going into some temporary catatonic state, he does look quite guilty when his father and uncle appear on the scene. but his response to all this, even though he knows who is really to blame is to just…flee. for TEN YEARS! which, fine, he is, again, the kind of person who lets a twelve-year-old girl boss him around—he is pretty weak-willed and afraid of a lot of things. but what kind of a person doesn’t stand up at that point and say, “nahhh, this is my sister and i loved her and i want to see the guilty person punished for this.”
and (true spoiler): View Spoiler »
so ten years pass, and quinn has been through the war and seen some shit and he decides to go back home, to finally give his sister the justice he so pathetically failed to give before. why does he decide to do this? because a maybe-ghost might have told him to. sure.
so i could excuse all of that if, once he returned to his hometown, he became a true angel of death and went nuts on everyone who was to blame. but he doesn’t, not for ages. what he does instead is to hide out with some teen orphan who, oddly enough, has a lot of the same characteristics of his dear departed sister. who seems to know things, in a very spooky way. who sacrifices animals and wraps their bones in human hair and behaves very witchily and seems to know everything about everybody….
spooooky.
View Spoiler »but it doesn’t. so you can’t.
but i also can’t completely hate a book that opens with:
On the day twelve-year-old Sarah Walker was murdered in 1909, a storm bullied its way across the western plains of New South Wales and unleashed itself on the fly-speck town of Flint. Sarah’s murder became the warm, still heart of several days of frantic activity in which almost every one of the town’s two hundred or so residents had a tale of chaos or loss. Trees cowered and snapped in the winds; horses bolted. Desperate to escape the river’s rising waters, snakes invaded the Porteous house, forcing Mrs. Porteous and her two infant daughters to spend several hours perched atop the kitchen table with dresses hoisted about their knees until husband Reginald returned from work to save them. Jack Sully the blacksmith broke his arm trying to secure his roof, although there were well-founded rumors he was actually drunk at the time. Dead cows, swollen tight, bobbled about in the floodwaters for days. And old Mrs. Mabel Crink lost her sight, which partly accounted for the name by which the maelstrom became known: the Blinder.
so, yes, a disappointment, but a frequently beautiful one.
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