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The bodysurfers Robert Drewe 9780949493026 Books

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The bodysurfers Robert Drewe 9780949493026 Books

one of my all time favourite short story collections. I am not usually someone who re-reads stuff but this is an exception.


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The bodysurfers Robert Drewe 9780949493026 Books Reviews

I'm a bit dismayed to find that no one has reviewed this little gem yet. Let me say up front, if you enjoy literary short fiction or love Australia, you ought to go ahead and buy it now. You won't be sorry, and there's no need to finish reading this meager little review.

My job takes me to Queensland every couple of years, and I always look for Australian writers when I'm in the bookstores there. This is a book I came away with on my last trip, and it was the kind of lucky find every reader hopes for. The Bodysurfers is Australia in miniature, a collection of short stories following different members of a single family across several generations, mostly in the suburbs and beach towns around Sydney. The writing can remind you of both Ellen Gilchrist and Raymond Carver, but it's pure Aussie, with a surf-scented wind and the morning cries of currawongs rising from the page. Most of the twelve stories are less than twenty pages long, and it's an ideal book for reading in quick snatches over a few days. The subjects include finely drawn portraits of families at play and in turmoil, the spectacular downfalls of small-town heroes, the rambling candor of a sex criminal who's spent much of his life in prison, the role of fish venom in budding romance and a snapshot of the last days of a once-celebrated explorer who helped open the continent's interior from the back of a camel.

Really a wonderful book, and the back blurb of my edition says it's well loved in Australia, with adaptions for film, television, radio and theater. It definitely deserves a readership beyond Australia.
This is a book of short stories, but unlike most such collections it shares two qualities with novels. The first is the device of recurring characters; most, although not all, of the stories have as their main character one of the members of the Lang family, especially the patriarch Rex Lang, his two sons Max and David, and David’s son Paul. Several other members, including Rex’s two wives Joan and Janice and his daughter Anne, also appear or are mentioned. The second is that the stories are arranged, approximately at least, in chronological order. The earliest ones take place in the 1950s when Max, David and Anne are still children or teenagers, the latter ones in the eighties when they are adults with children of their own, so one gets a strong sense of character development, something more frequently associated with the novel than with the short story.

“The Bodysurfers” is the title of one of the individual stories, but Robert Drewe doubtless also used it as the title of the whole collection because many of the stories concern either surfing or, more widely, what has been called “Australian Beach Culture”. Australia is one of the most urbanised, or at least suburbanised, countries in the world, with nearly half its inhabitants living either in Greater Sydney or Greater Melbourne, and most of the rest in Greater Brisbane, Greater Adelaide or Greater Perth. All of those cities are situated on or near the coast, and given the country’s warm climate it is not surprising that Australians spend so much time on the beach.

My edition contains a quote from the “Sydney Morning Herald” describing the stories as “taut yet teeming with life” and “shot through with gritty phrases that catch at one’s throat”, and that is certainly a judgement with which I would agree. Drewe has a gift for an arresting phrase, particularly the openings of his stories, such as “My father wasn’t in his element in party hats” or “It was possibly lucky my mother didn’t marry her first fiancé because he ended up in Fremantle Prison”.

Despite the concentration on leisure activities, the overall tone of the collection is not particularly lighthearted, although there are variations as far as individual stories are concerned. Some are markedly serious in tone, although this seriousness is sometimes accompanied by a rather grim humour. “The Manageress and the Mirage” deals with a sad occasion, the Lang family’s first Christmas together after the death of their mother Joan, yet there is something rather funny, in a pathetic way, about Rex’s attempts to keep up a mood of forced jollity. Christmas in Australia, of course, occurs in the summer, but this is a very bleak midsummer. “The Silver Medallist” also deals with a serious topic- the downfall of a former Olympic athlete from national sporting hero, to beach bum, to convicted felon- yet there is also a certain humour in the description of Kevin’s encounter with the swan. “Baby Oil” is one of the lighter stories with its rather farcical account of how Max tries to spy on his mistress Anthea and Brian, his rival for her affections, by surreptitiously marking the bottle of baby oil they use in their sex games. (His logic is that, if the level of oil goes down, then Anthea and Brian must still be making love regularly). The linked story “After Noumea”, however, set after Anthea has finally abandoned Brian for Max, is much darker, a tale of heartbreak and obsessive jealousy.

As I said, the tone of the individual stories tends to vary, and one reason for this is the variety of narrative voices used. Some are told in the third person, others in the first, and the first-person narrators are a very varied bunch. “Sweetlip” is written in the style of an official report, in this case an investigation carried out by a company into the sudden and unexpected death of a senior employee. Although the author of the report expresses sympathy for the dead man and his family, it becomes quite clear that, behind all the stilted management-speak, his main concern, and that of the company for which he works, is to ensure that they cannot be blamed for the death. “The View from the Sandhills” is the confession of a middle-aged Peeping Tom and sex pervert. The man is quite obviously a scoundrel- as the story progresses it becomes clear that he has spent time in jail- yet his very shamelessness and brazenness makes his story curiously entertaining.

It is sometimes said that “less is more”. Although this would appear to be a breach of the normal semantic principle by which a word does not mean exactly the same as its precise opposite, in the arts less can indeed occasionally be more. It is however, a difficult trick to bring off; we can probably all think of writers for whom less is definitely less. Drewe, however, struck me as one of the few who can successfully manage it. (In this he reminded me of his older American contemporary Raymond Carver). A good example of what I mean is “Shark Logic”, one of the finest stories in the collection and one of the few not to feature any member of the Lang family. The story is written as an entry in a diary kept by its central character, who goes by the name of “Joe Forster”, although we learn that this is an alias. “Joe” is working as an unskilled labourer in a seaside resort, although it becomes clear that he is an educated man who has abandoned his family and a comfortable middle-class existence by faking his own death. (Drewe may have been inspired by John Stonehouse, a British politician who had done precisely that several years before the collection was published by disappearing from an Australian beach). We do learn something of “Joe’s” previous life, but only a few details, and, crucially, never learn why he took the decision to turn his back on it. Yet the story is all the more affecting precisely because we do not know; the mystery itself is more intriguing than any possible solution could be.

Not all the stories are as good as the ones I have highlighted above, but there is enough here to show me why the collection has achieved classic status during its author’s lifetime, at least in his native country; it is significantly published under Penguin Australia’s “Modern Classics” imprint. As a short story writer Drewe might not be as internationally famous as Carver, but he struck me as an author of a similar stamp.
one of my all time favourite short story collections. I am not usually someone who re-reads stuff but this is an exception.