Chris’s Pick
July 2016
The Broken Shore
Peter Temple, published 2005
This is a first for me. The Broken Shore is a “crime novel” so I read it as such for the story, got to the end, said (to myself) “What?”, turned back to page one and read it completely through a second time. This time, though, I paid attention to the way this masterful book is written, realizing I had just discovered an exciting author (though he has long been recognized in Australia as one of the its nations finest).
The first sentence should have alerted me:
Cashin walked around the hill, into the wind from the sea. It was cold, late autumn, last glowing leaves clinging to the liquidambars and maples his great-grandfather’s brother had planted, their surrender close. He loved this time, the morning stillness, loved it more than spring.
Set on the rural coast of Victoria, Australia, much of the novel seems dedicated to giving the reader a sense of this place. The vast space, the silence, the economic destitution of the town, the hopelessness of the inhabitants, the political corruption, are so skillfully drawn they are etched indelibly in the reader’s mind.
Cashin is a cop, sent from a big city Homicide division to his boyhood home to recover from serious injuries inflicted by a madman. Although we know that Cashin lives in chronic pain, whatever else we learn about him is through intimation, surmise, off the cuff conversation. Peter Temple does not lay out a background for the reader. The whole book is a detective story for the us to determine who, why, when, and what is going on—certainly if you miss a detail, Temple does not go back to explain it to you again. To further the care and patience one must have to enjoy this writer, it is written in an Australian dialect—so much so that there is a glossary of terms at the end of the book to help discern what is being said.
The plot and story line are almost secondary to Temple’s depiction of Australia as a violent, bitterly divided nation. A wealthy elderly citizen is beaten to death in his home, and three teenage “Abos”—Aborigines—are charged with the crime; deep-seated prejudice against Aborigines is central to the novel. Cashin becomes unconvinced of their guilt, and the story takes off from there.
The characterization of Cashin develops throughout the book. We know immediately that he loves opera and Joseph Conrad, and takes enormous pleasure in his two large unclipped black poodles. The two dogs are delightful characters in their own right:
The dogs arrived from a mission in the valley, greeted Cashin with noses and tongues, then left, summoned to some emergency — a rabbit rescue perhaps, the poor creature trapped in a thicket.
We learn there are endless personal problems that Cashin deals with: a difficult history with his mother, a suicidal brother, an ex-girlfriend who will not let him see his son. There are endless subplots and characters in the book. We meet at least a dozen people important to the story, from a swagman, helping Cashin try to restore his grandfather’s ruin of an estate, to Cashin’s boss, Villani, to his aboriginal partner, Dove, to his mentor, Singo, at the end of his life in a nursing home.
In the end, though, it is the writing, at once emotive and eloquent, then crude and stark, that stays with you. There is a fair amount of blood and gore and expletives, so beware if this offends. But Temple combines this with poeticism even within the brutality. It is one of the most interesting books I have (twice) read this year.