David Francis (1)

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy. In Wedding Bush Road, David Francis vividly captures the complexities of families, of being an expat, of coping with aging parents, and of identity.

Daniel is planning a romantic Christmas getaway with his potential fiance when his mother rings.

"My mother told me she thought she was dying. 'Dead as Dickens by the end of the year' , she forecast, pretending not to be scared."
“I’ll be back by New Year’s,” I say. Eight thousand miles and two days lost to the blazing Australian summer, when I’d promised myself I’d ask her to marry me before year’s end. A promise eclipsed by last week’s telephone call. “Family’s first,” said Isabel. But why is that? Why not this?

Why indeed. Daniel is torn right from the beginning, stay or go, take Isabel or go alone. After ten years he thought he had escaped his family, become a different person in the US.

"If it was just me on my own so I could see life clearly, maybe even be someone new. But how do you shed the skin of a family, really? These arms already peeling from this angry sun. The gay Beverly Hills dermatologist told me, as he froze off eleven moles, that most of the damage was already done, growing up here as a boy on a farm. No hat, no screen, no nothing."

I loved the spare, clean prose Francis uses. Nothing flowery or unnecessary, similar in some aspects to another Australian author, Rodney Hall.

"This time my mother said she dialed the CFA even though she doesn’t approve of involving outsiders. “A fire at the cottage on Wedding Bush Road.” I imagine her moving through the paddocks in the dark, the way she knows the land by heart, the shapes of the concrete water troughs, the shadows of the rabbit warrens, the cattle as they balk.

The distant flicker and a hint of smoke, a far-off siren wailing. I imagined it from above, the fire truck already on the highway and my mother breathless down by the windmill. I asked if she’d been okay before the fire but she ignored me, wanted me to hear the story. She didn’t seem to know her speech was strange.

“It wasn’t the cottage but a car in the back paddock up in flames.” She talked about the shadows of the heavy horses circling, arched up with fear."

Francis uses several different POV to help explain the why and the how of Daniel's predicament. Daniel is both an outsider, the one who got away, and a lynch pin to the lives and destinies of those he has come back to. Every decision he makes seems to make things more complicated. His relationship with Isabel is further complicated by the tenuous phone connection to the States. Some of Daniels actions and decisions seem to me to be so out of character, they jar and jolt, your never sure where the narrative will go. That is where I had trouble with the book. I couldn't grasp why he would behave in this way, so soon after arriving. How coming home seemed to have stripped all sensibilities from him, reducing him to a cliche. It did follow a story arc of "like father , like son' but I could not bridge the gap and just go with it it, hence the three star rating.… (meer)

DNF @ 17%

I was drawn to Stray Dog Winter because of the following blurb:

"Darcy Bright, a restless young artist, receives a surprising birthday present from his elusive half-sister Fin: a ticket to the Soviet Union housed in a leather money belt. Together only briefly during their youth, Darcy and Fin are both estranged by the distance between them, and yet inextricably bound by the secrets of their childhood. So when Fin -- ostensibly in Moscow on a fellowship to paint industrial landscapes -- invites Darcy to join her there, her wary brother doesn't resist.
Soon after his arrival in the bleak Soviet winter, Darcy, already engulfed in Fin's mysterious new life there, becomes entangled in an extortion plot designed to change the course of Cold War history. And as the intricacies of their bond as brother and sister are revealed, Darcy uncovers Fin's involvement in an unexpected cause of her own, leading to a confrontation with profound and deadly consequences.
Atmospheric and suspenseful, "Stray Dog Winter" is a remarkable novel about love, passion, politics, and identity."

The problem is, that, while the blurb promises all the elements of a Greene novel, the writing just does not live up to it.

There we go again, my reading experience has been spoilt by my encounter with Graham Greene's work. The man has a lot to answer for!

In all seriousness, tho, the writing tries very hard to emulate the great Cold War thrillers, but falls flat. Where Greene, Le Carre, and Fleming all create an atmosphere of suspense and manage to do this with authority (some of which may have stemmed from them all having had first hand experience of what they were writing about), Francis' book reads like he tried very hard to copy the imagery from the films based on the great Cold War thrillers without capturing the sentiments of the underlying books.
In other words, although I have not read much of Stray Dog Winter, the onslaught of cliches and stereotypes, made me twitch.

It may well work for a James Bond to make reference to the brand names of the things he enjoys, but Fleming does so without attributing these products with any particular significance, nor would he expect the reader to gain any insight into the plot or a character by making these references. When our main character in Stray Dog Winter, Darcy, puts on his Ray Bans on arriving in Moscow, I got the feeling that the author tried to use some symbolism that just ended up having no meaning in the context of the story or character at all. And the sunglasses were not the only instance. Within the first three pages we already have....:

- "Darcy pulled up his Pentax and snapped a quick shot, feeling foreign, unaccountable."
- "....and flicked his half-done Popularne onto the tracks."
- "Fodor’s Moscow & Leningrad just said don’t take photos of anything strategic."
- "He pulled his faux-fur Kenzo coat about himself..."

I truly hate it when writers try to convey sentiments with brand names. It's so stupid. It is counter-productive to the art of writing, art of using words to describe and express.

And then there is Darcy, the main character, a young Australian art student from a broken home, who is travelling to visit his half-sister, who moved to Moscow. Darcy is naive and judgmental, which does not make him an endearing character, but what really irked me is that he jacks himself off to sleep to the idea of a border patrol soldier he watched from the train in one moment, and only a couple of pages on, he fantasizes about his half-sister?

To me that's an indication that there is not enough in the Cold War aspects of the story to make up the book and the author needed to clutch on some other straws to create a "thrilling" read.

I might be wrong. There may be more to the book than the indications I have picked up from the small part I have read, but I have the strong feeling that there will be a lot of eye-rolling and head-scratching ahead and that any hopes for a noir mystery thriller will be disappointed in favour of some contextless capers.… (meer)