Informazioni generali

Nome legale: Palmer, Edward Vance
Data di nascita: 1885-08-28
Data di morte: 1959-07-15
Sesso: male
Nazionalità: Australia
Luogo di nascita: Bundaberg, Queensland, Australia
Luogo di morte: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Attività lavorative: novelist
short-story writer
playwright

Utenti

Recensioni

Cyclone di Vance Palmer

Cyclone‘s blurb begins with the statement that it’s a story of conflict and tension accentuated by a brooding cyclone, and that's exactly what the book delivers.

It's a story of flawed relationships and mutual insecurities set somewhere along the Far North Queensland coast. The early chapters are mainly low-level (and rather tedious) domestic drama, rather quaint in style because women of the type portrayed seem today like museum pieces. Fay Donolly lives vicariously through her husband and children, and the only other woman sketched in any detail is a vacuous young status-seeker called Con. Fay and her husband Brian interact with other couples: Bee and Ross Halliday, on whose boat he works, and Elsie and Clive Randall, who's having an affair with Bee, much to Elsie's distress.

Unfortunately the dialogue between the characters is pedestrian, and some of it is incomprehensible. Perhaps these terms were familiar in Queensland in 1947, and perhaps some of them can be inferred from context, but some of them defied a Google search and all the dictionaries in the house:

we've been kidding ourselves that everything was segarney (p.126)

take such a scunner against me (p.127)

so much bunce (p.127)

you've cut the painter (p.129)

don't crab (at me) (p.140

burked a fight (p.1717)

Palmer's writing is at his best when describing the way the weather generates tension:

So many ghosts could be set walking by the threats of the wind. All night it had been nagging at whatever was loose about the house, coming in little gusts, now from the north, now from a few points to the east, and it was this continual change of direction that fretted the nerves. At one time it would be the spouting by the tank that was beating a devil's tattoo, then there would come a rat-tat by the tank again as a sheet of iron worked free from the lead-topped nails. It seemed as if the ramshackle house was being worried to pieces. And the fitful currents of air had no coolness; they brought the restless heat of late summer with them. (p.2)

Taking his turn at the wheel, as the dawn broke over a dirty, troubled sea that ran counter to the wind, he looked ahead at the cloud-smeared forelands and thought with a nostalgic twinge of his first trip up the reef with Halliday in the old Eagle. No chance of recapturing the freshness of those winter days: they were part of a vanished dream! It had been magical weather. Over seas so clear you could see the coral sand ten fathoms down, the boat had moved as placidly as a resting gull, and little islands took shape on the skyline as bunches of foliage or banks of snow. (p.125)

This is a pilot searching for survivors:

Now he was in the area where the full force of the storm had struck and, looking down, he felt a dark shadow pass across his heart. Not a leaf anywhere, hardly a standing tree. It was as if a giant scythe had swept over the timber and undergrowth that came to the water's edge, mowing a twenty-mile swathe to the hills inland. It brought back to him the look, the very smell of war. Great trees had been smashed down or torn up and thrown across one another. Even the grass had been uprooted, and high above the waterline, where tidal waves had borne it, was a mass of wrack, pumice, and lumps of coral wreathed with growths of weed. The whole sea-bed seemed to have vomited up its refuse in a violent convulsion. (p.181-2)

It's the relationship between Halliday and the other men which offers most interest. Halliday is not a successful businessman, but Donolly has uprooted his family from the farm where Fay felt secure, to invest what little they have in Halliday's unprofitable business venture, ferrying cargo along the coast. Halliday's charisma derives mainly from his service in the war, and there's a general feeling amongst his mates that they owe him their loyalty.

This compulsion to admire Halliday even affects Fay's brother Tod Kellaher, even though he's a of different generation. So amongst his other dilemmas he feels an element of guilt in his decision to stop working for Halliday, not least because his reason is spurious. His girlfriend Con is infatuated with Halliday, and although there's no sign that he has any intention of leaving his wife and children for her, Tod is so jealous that he joins the other unemployed men sleeping rough at the showground rather than continue living with Fay and Brian when he can't pay his way.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/11/08/cyclone-by-vance-palmer/… (altro)

Segnalato

anzlitlovers | Nov 8, 2020 |