Hard to read but interesting Blue Bay Airbnb ( )

Ever since I discovered the novels of Philip Salom when the Miles Franklin Award shortlisted Waiting in 2017, I've been on the lookout for more of his work. I loved The Returns which was shortlisted in 2020, and just last week I was excited to track down his early novels Playback (1981) and Toccata and Rain (2004), both published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
I haven't read these early novels yet, but because I edited their entries in the Goodreads database, I recognised elements of Toccata and Rain in Salom's new novel, The Fifth Season, published by Transit Lounge. This is from the blurb of Toccata and Rain:

Like a contemporary Rip Van Winkle, Simon awakes only to find he has been inventing another life. He lives where he has no memory of living. There are astonishing towers he has built of steel and broken ceramic in Sarah's Melbourne backyard. He is a man caught between two very different versions of himself.

Simon and Sarah are also characters in The Fifth Season, and those astonishing towers of steel and broken ceramic feature as well. But whereas Waiting and The Returns were memorably set in inner Melbourne, The Fifth Season is set in the small coastal town of Blue Bay, and Sarah's backyard is in her airbnb, rented out to Jack who's come to Blue Bay to write.

If you've ever stayed in one of those over-decorated 'homely' B&Bs, you will warm to Jack from the first page:

The cottage sits above footpath level, with wooden steps up to a front verandah too short for anything besides a table and a wicker armchair. He can see himself there with a glass of wine, watching the ocean as the sea breeze arrives. But not too many or a step forward and he'd plunge into the yard. His writing went downhill, they'd say. At the front door he clicks the numbers into the lock safe and removes the keys. An old-fashioned wooden door, the heft of which is pleasing, then a short corridor of small bedrooms before the space widens out and up, into open plan and vaulted ceilings. The interior is hot and airless. Up, down, across, his laser over-fussy senses have scanned the place in seconds. He knows straight off the space is right but the décor probably needs destroying. (p.3-4)

And that's exactly what he does. He prefers the feng shui of bare floors and walls. Out it all goes until all that remains is a single chair, a table to write at, and a cocktail of medicines on the shelf.

I would have got rid of it too if I planned to live somewhere like this for three months:

...the floral lounge suite, the shrieky porcelain flowers (seriously, why?) on the sideboard, and [...] a starey-faced painting hung on the main wall like a stricken portal into some hell of ever-present eyes. [...]

He hopes that Sarah isn't as fussy and old-fashioned as her decorations; perhaps some idiot rental manager said her customers would be middle-aged women more accustomed to the ... ornamental. Who thought Andrew Lloyd Webber was a genius. (p.4)

Well, fussy and old-fashioned she certainly isn't, but she turns up she's snarky. She hopes he's taken a photo so that he can put it all back exactly where it was, but they become friends notwithstanding.

Jack's project is a book about 'found people': the Somerton Man, the Gippsland Man, the Isdal Woman, the Piano Man, Cornelia Rau. All people who are found dead or amnesiac — their identities unknown by accident or design. But in one of a series of eerie correspondences, Sarah is an activist in search of missing people, and her life is consumed by the absence of her sister. She paints massive portraits of Alice in public spaces, along with portraits of other people who are missing, in order to raise awareness of the Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN). Not everyone likes her doing this, because some people who disappear don't want to be found, (and Jack turns out to be surprisingly brave).

Salom's gift for characterisation is as sharp in a coastal town as it was on the streets of Melbourne in Waiting and The Returns.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/09/29/the-fifth-season-by-philip-salom/ ( )