Drylands.
Ross, Robert
Thea Astley. Drylands. Melbourne. Viking. 1999- 294 pages. A$24.95.
ISBN 0-670-88619-X.
Thea Astley's fifteenth novel, Drylands, covers familiar
territory, but, as always in her fiction, does so with a prose style so
demanding, so striking, that weakness in plotting or character turns out
to be insignificant. Set in a small Queensland town whose name gives the
book its title, the novel intertwines six stories in which
Drylands's unfortunate inhabitants suffer not only from the usual
Australian drought but from a spiritual drought as well. And as the
novel ends, no aid is looming on the horizon, either for the town's
parched condition or for the people's malaise. Overall, it is a
gloomy picture that emerges from the brilliantly wrought prose. Unlike
Astley's earlier work, Drylands has no redemptive center, no matter
how slight the promise might be.
Subtitled "A Book for the World's Last Reader,"
Drylands may well be more about the art of the novel and the plight of
the novelist than about the eponymous town's hapless citizens. Well
into the novel, Astley reveals that the narrator is a woman named Janet,
a newcomer to the bush town and the operator of a down-at-the-heels news
agency where no one buys reading matter, for they are all television
addicts. She decides to record the town's stories, which are
characterized by ignorance, sexism, racism, greed, and cruelty. In this
landlocked backwater, one man dreams of building a boat and living a
life of freedom on the water. The tightly constructed narrative that
records his attempt to fulfill his fantasy, then plays out its
destruction, shows Astley at her very best. Although she has never been
widely recognized as a short-story writer, her novels often contain
stand-alone passages that work as short stories. Such is the case with
this segment.
Finally, though, the novel's most significant parts come forth
in the transitional passages, when Janet considers the art of writing.
In spite of her effort at re-creating life, she discovers that the
novelist's art is never fully appreciated. At the end, Janet
returns to her trashed apartment and finds her manuscript shuffled out
of sequence, and "On the top page of this pile, a final evaluation,
someone had scrawled in text, `GET A LIFE!'" She then picks up
the discarded pen and hopes "for the ultimate reply," which
she knows she will never find. Is this the novelist's compensation
for a lifetime of portraying reality?
Robert Ross University of Texas, Austin
