Bryan Brown, 'The Drowning' review Set on the New South Wales North Coast near Coffs Harbour. The story is well researched. The writing style reads liBryan Brown, 'The Drowning' review Set on the New South Wales North Coast near Coffs Harbour. The story is well researched. The writing style reads like a screenplay draft, no-frills, economic, blunt as an instructional manual. Classic crime-fiction, told in the third person in the vernacular of one of the characters. Vernacular Aussie blokey narrator. The writing is as if one of the characters is telling you the story instead of reading it oneself. Close to texting style. Would be easy to storyboard. That could be the intention. I can see the author playing the role of Sergeant Tommy Gallagher. The international popularity of crime fiction seems insatiable, not that it appeals to me. I wouldn't have read the novel but for the author being Bryan Brown. I nearly bailed on it at half-way through, gets tiring by chapter 22, at 115 pages in. "What are they telling us? Not a lot, Leila reckoned. Just a jumble of knowings crashing together looking to make sense." Pretty much like this novel at half way point. The second half tightens up and comes together nicely. This is crime fiction as showcase Australian tourism, layed on with a trowel. Realistic, naturalist, almost French Nouveau Roman 'New Novel' style. The French New Wave style in Literature and film was influenced by American crime-noir fiction and film, that sparse style influence trying to write like Hemingway. This should be a natural fit for Australian simplicity, particularly with the narrow constraints of the genre of crime fiction....more
A brand new hardback copy borrowed from the Library. I read two essays, 'Why Read?' and 'Australia and I'. I'll be buying a copy. Five stars so far.A brand new hardback copy borrowed from the Library. I read two essays, 'Why Read?' and 'Australia and I'. I'll be buying a copy. Five stars so far....more
What a History book. Always good to look through and reread the text which relates to each iconic graphic cover and images that span the twentieth cenWhat a History book. Always good to look through and reread the text which relates to each iconic graphic cover and images that span the twentieth century to early 2000s. There's the LIFE magazine cover May 1970 of the Tragedy at Kent State. The TIME cover of a multiple identical photo of Richard Nixon interspersed with images of the Vietnam War, the headline asks the question, "What if we just pull out?". There is the 1965 Sunday Times Magazine cover image of Dunkirk in 1940, the photo by German photographer Hugo Jaeger. His colour pictures lay buried for years in a tin box in Baveria, published for the first time in 1965. So, so much history in this book....more
Chapter Forty, the last, a chapter of such important message and example, puts it on its own, making the preceding three hundred and thirty pages enjoChapter Forty, the last, a chapter of such important message and example, puts it on its own, making the preceding three hundred and thirty pages enjoyable ephemera in comparison, not out of context in its easy ride to the last chapter.
Special Delux is somewhat of an inadvertent portrait of the philosophy of excess of the American Dream, exemplified in the large, heavy gas guzzlers of the 20th Century....more
