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Literary Review
Death in the bush
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Angel Rock is an affecting work and has strengths which lie not in the tale itself but in the telling and points towards something greater, says ROYCE MAHAWATTE.
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IN the final part of the Australian author Darren Williams's long-awaited second novel (his first, the award-winning Swimming in Silk, was published in 1995), the noir-ish detective Gibson is shot. As life leaks out of him, we are told: "he finally knew. Life was to see, to touch, to smell, to taste, to hear — and to know — and even though knowing was painful it was also like diving into a wave on a hot summer's day, then surfacing, floating, letting your body be lifted by the sparkling blue water." As simple, and as received, as the epiphany is, it enables us to understand Williams's intentions as a writer. Angel Rock is a novel of lost boys and lost men trying to recover themselves in an environment that is relentlessly harsh, yet where, after all the pain, there is some satisfaction in the experience.
The novel takes its name from a township in northern New South Wales in 1969, where the rural community balances its Christian past with the prospects and temptations offered by nearby Sydney. Williams takes great care in rendering this community of timber-getters, cattle farmers, drinkers, broken women and local lunatics, when he tells the story of two boys who get lost in the bush. Thirteen-year-old Tom returns shaken and with memory loss; his younger half-brother Flynn, however, is nowhere to be found. Added to this is the story of a local girl, Darcy Steele, who is found dead, having committed suicide, in the Surry Hills region of the city. A detective, Gibson, a man hanging on to his own griefs and grievances, is assigned to the case and finds himself trying to connect the two mysteries while simultaneously unravelling them.
When summarised, this sounds like a conventional thriller plot. And in a way it is predictable — Gibson has a personal investment in finding the reason for Darcy's suicide. On finding her diary entries written in her copy of the Bible, he is reminded of a past loss, and the missing Flynn is a metaphor for his own lost memories. Angel Rock is a town populated with stock characters — the local imbecile Sonny; the abusive Henry, Tom's father; and the fanatical and seemingly indestructible culprit. Angel Rock, however, is written with a tenderness which takes it far away from the thriller/melodrama genre in which it appears to be located. The opening sequences evoke the feeling of summer holidays; the lost Tom and hysterical Flynn in the bush are touching and convincing, and the desperate life of the drinking Gibson is pathetic, but oddly humorous. There is a real attempt to uncover the motives and feelings of men — rural and unpoliticised men who destroy the lives of women, yet who seem to want to understand what happens around them. Jealousies, revenge and the consequences of a lack of self-reflection are brought together in a striking climax. Williams captures the clanks and cranks of farm life, the textures of the outback, death and the merciless killing of lizards, cockroaches and dogs. There is a rich and mucky sensuality here that is an approximation of an "outdoors" life and which points towards something greater.
This richness links biblical exegesis to the past, death and fanaticism. The novel presents a kind of pantheism that operates through observation. It is an affecting work with some fantastical and supernatural moments. An examination of male sentiments through the harshness of the bush or rural experience, Angel Rock has strengths which lie not in the tale itself but in the telling.
Angel Rock, Darren Williams, HarperCollins, p.311, £12.99. 0 00 713715 X The Times Literary Supplement
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