In her flat above Drylands' newsagency, Janet Deakin is writing a book for the world's last reader. Little has changed in her 50 years, except for the coming of cable TV. Loneliness is almost a religion, and still everyone knows your business. But the town is being outmanoeuvred by drought and begins to empty, pouring itself out like water into sand. Small minds shrink even smaller in the vastness of the land. One man is forced out by council rates and bigotry; another sells his property, risking the lot to build his dream. And all of them are shadowed by violence of some sort these people whose only victory over the town is in leaving it.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From AudioFile
Prepare to have your heart broken. Thea Astley and Beverley Dunn bring the dying Australian town of Drylands to life--bleak as it is. Janet Deakins runs a bookstore in a town where no one reads. She's writing a book for the world's last reader about this parched settlement, and the vignettes of its inhabitants are full of racism, sexism, and inexplicable cruelty. Dunn creates multiple voices for characters who range from thoughtful, lonely Janet to abusive husbands. She also skillfully conveys the physical landscape, with its isolation and relentless beating sun. Residents abandon the town one by one, fleeing domestic violence, unaffordable taxes, drought, and dreams turned into ashes. Astley's language is breathtaking, and Dunn's narration is stunning. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"merely a hesitation in the road . . . ",
By Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Drylands (Paperback)
How many towns like Drylands dot the planet? Anywhere drought's furnace breath dries the paddocks and desiccates the stock. Any place where people hold on beyond hope, fearful of change, yet facing only further exhaustion. Such a town sits on the edge of despair, infecting its residents with a deadly torpor. What if one of the townspeople decides to chronicle this theatre of defeat? Which one will observe with purpose instead of ennui? Most importantly, who will read the story?
Astley's run of works has dealt with the small-town idiom before. This book, which capped her illustrious career, is her greatest literary achievement. It's about a remote town and its remote people. Janet Deakin resides in Drylands, struggling to retain a bookstore, which is nothing more than a newsagency. The coastal papers, some fly-specked magazines, a rack of dusty paperback "Westerns" or mysteries. Books don't sell well in Drylands, but beer does. Widowed and alone, Janet watches her town diminish and the world outside continue on, unknowing and uncaring. Deakin bemoans the dominance of the telly, the video film, the game pods that are driving people away from reading. Alone in her flat, she wants to arouse those "twenty-six black characters" that have inspired people to tears, laughter, follies and hope. She wants to write for the last reader. She has a cast of characters to draw on. One man is on the run, but not because he's a criminal. An itinerant literati arrives in town to teach people how to write. Four women attend, only to be set upon by resentful husbands. The liveliest spot in town is the pub, of course. "The Legless Lizard", run by an expat Yank from New Orleans and his Brisbane-born wife, suffuses the town with the din of sports on the telly. It struggles to survive where income is limited and drop-in trade scanty. Lannie Cunneen, burdened with six sons and a husband who knows that "women have their place" and wants to keep that fixed, fixes her nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-eighth school lunch. And makes a decision. In effect, all the townspeople are on the run, but not all of them are moving. Astley's portrayal of desperation and resentment at fate's dealings had few parallels. She had an amazing talent for description and feelings. The power of language seems to flow easily through her fingers to these pages. She knew the country of her settings - the creeks without water, the intensity of the sky overhead, the loneliness of living remote from others. Her characters are intensely human. If some of them seem extreme, consider their situation before judgement. Under her deft touch, none of them are artificial. Any of them could be your neighbour - perhaps some of them are. All these stories are tragedies. Humour might have lightened these tales, but their message would have been distorted. The best humour here becomes only cruel irony. The greatest irony in this book is the reader's final predicament - who wrote the book, Janet Deakin or Thea Astley? Be prepared for a different world in this book. It's a distant place for some, right outside the front door for others. It's an untidy narrative, with much interweaving of characters and events. There are endings that resolve nothing. Astley will introduce her people who will then keep you reading without pause. There is sorrow here, and violence. But love isn't banished and it provides amelioration to offset them. Astley captures and imparts it all, in prose and love of country that can only be described as passionate. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Contemporary classic,
By
This review is from: Drylands (Paperback)
Embittered and sharp-witted widow Janet Deakin sits in her flat above the newsagency in Drylands - an emptying, disintegrating outback town, 'pouring itself out like water into sand' - and proposes to write a book for the world's last reader. Her interconnected tales recount the real or imagined struggles of the townsfolk against the entropy of rural subsistence, the innate and inane brutality of Australian men, the powerlessness of poverty and colour, and the idiocy of wasted years. In escaping from Drylands her characters all achieve small victories, but they're equally hollowed by the question, "And then?" Having escaped, what now? Where to? With whom? As one character puts it, "Nothing's ever finished. Didn't you know? ... Nothing. It goes on and on." Only in the arms of her husband does one woman find a fullness to pit against this constant emptying, a tenderness described as beginning, middle and end. Astley is one of Australia's most prolific, versatile and socially conscious writers, and "Drylands" is one of her better works. It could be enjoyed simply as a collection of quintessentially Australian stories, or more seriously as a meditation on a decaying culture and, specifically, the loss of literacy. Reading is figured in this book as the thing that might have "saved" us if it weren't already too late; page and screen are presented as mutually exclusive and morally opposed. In the final moments, narrator Deakin is bitterly tickled by the memory of discovering a reference to a Rimbaud poem in the naming of an Australian house, "Bateau Ivre" (The Drunken Boat); she's amused by the utter implausibility of the suggestion that Australia could ever have been so civilised. But in referencing Rimbaud, Astley might also be giving us a clue to one way her novel can be read - as a livre composé that borrows the narrative pattern of Rimbaud's poem, but swaps its visionary journey over European water for an ironic tilt over Australian sand. Whatever you make of "Drylands", the prose is dazzling. As Astley herself might lament, to call it "literary" these days risks the misinterpretation that it's pretentious. What I mean is that it's sharp, evocative and above all accurate. Astley's vision has a stark and pitiless precision - the characters and settings are vividly realized and instantly recognisable as Australian without ever being cliché. You get the sense she could conjure the nation in a single phrase. As Randolph Stow noted in another context: "What enormous and desolate landscapes are opened by the voice of a lone crow."
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