Customer Reviews

The Great Inland Sea

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Past and present inevitably collide in The Great Inland Sea, where life consists of shattered memories, the anguish of not belonging, and the vignettes of a life once lived. Magically lyrical and stylistically fluid, David Francis' accomplished first novel takes place on two continents - Australia and the United States, where the dusty desolation and expanse of the Outback meets the green, verdant fields of Maryland.

This considered, measured, and beautifully written story centers on Day, a troubled and disturbed boy who comes of age on a cattle station in Northern New South Wales in the 1950's. Haunted by the ghost of his dead mother, Day escapes the clutches of Darwin, his indifferent father on a pony. At age twelve, he travels to Victoria and works in a stable where he learns to train horses, eventually gaining some skills as a jockey.

When Day gets an offer to escort Unusual, a five-year-old thoroughbred prize-winning horse to America, he jumps at the chance. Now eighteen, it is in America, the greenwoods of Maryland, where an uncertain destiny awaits him. Here he meets the feisty and spirited Callie and tastes the illicit fruits of first love.

Haunted by thoughts of the Australian father he has run away from and the dead mother he has never come to grips with, Day is frequently pulled away from his American life of horse farming by memories of the sparse, lonely landscape of his upbringing. The voice of his father and the ghost of his mother constantly calls to him, so Day, accompanied by Callie, returns to the land of the "emus and the gum trees, the red desert, and the orange dusk" where he re-lives his mother's death and tries to reconcile with his father's aloofness.

While growing up, Day knew little about either of his families' histories, but now his past begins to steadily unfold. He learns that his mother was Jewish and that Darwin married and moved her from Vienna to rural Australia, where she spent most of the War in exile. But their marriage turned out to be one of abuse and hardship, and she spent most of her time wishing to return to Austria with her son, while Darwin resented her Jewish heritage and her pregnancy. Day learns the truth about his mother's relationship with an enigmatic Argentinean named Dickie Del Mar, who paid an extended visit to the family when Day was young.

Francis effortlessly weaves Day's past life of fatherly neglect and dysfunction with his present life of worldly, knowing experience. The author obviously knows his character so well, and writes with such empathy, legitimacy and dexterity, that we can practically feel Day's achingly slow evolution, as he falls in love, experiences more loss and rejection, and finally makes his way back home to care for his dying father.

When Day returns, Darwin accuses him of "sniffing around the past." But Day wonders if little bits of truth will eventually fall from his father; in one instance he recognizes that he's carried his father around with him "like a stone in my shoe."

Francis also paints a startlingly accurate and realistic portrait of life on an Australian cattle station: "the far off men on rough, brumby horses, a few slat-ribbed cattle per square mile, the marginal spread of spinifex and sand." And even the town of Maude is beautifully presented with "its few dusty cars and dogs, the weatherboard store, and the Maude Hotel with its bull-nosed veranda."

The Great Inland Sea is so well crafted that the reader is almost allowed to "be" with Day and understand his pain. Francis takes us on a journey through the vast inland sea of Day's disparate life, and we emphasize with him as he comes to terms with the spirit of his mother: "I think about her all the time, as if she lives in a room inside my chest, a place I get my breath from."

Poetic, unhurried and graceful, The Great Inland Sea is a truly rewarding novel, and is a most gratifying, emotional, and pleasing literary read; it is where a young man's haunted soul is laid bare and is irretrievably connected to the landscape of a grand and vast country. Mike Leonard May 05.

The plot of this wonderful book has been written about may times, so I just wanted to add my two cents worth about its effect. The Great inland Sea is one of those books that tattoos you. The scene where Day watches his mother die is just one extraordinary example. Strange , fascinating , wrenching, uncanny. The author of this book time and again depicts scenes where the reader at once meets the strange and yet recognises the familiar. It's a dark book, as any writing that captures life is, but it is not without hope. Not without the possibility of change through truth. The writing is spare and elegant. As taut as the bridled horses' heads in the story. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

David Francis' stark, beautifully crafted debut novel, "The Great Inland Sea," takes its title from a vast desert-like area in Australia's New South Wales. This harsh, dry land was once, (hundreds of millions of years ago), a Great Inland Sea, where shells and fossilized sea creatures can still be found. Over the course of the narrative the reader discovers what our protagonist eventually learns in this unusual coming of age story, that people and things change. Neither the individuals who play a part in our lives, nor the events, are as predictable or as apparent as they seem. Day, a young man, is our narrator, and this is his story.

He left the family farm located near Maude, New South Wales, when he was twelve years-old. His father, Darwin, and his deceased mother, Emily, provided an emotional environment too dysfunctional for any child to thrive. Combined with the harsh physical climate, it's a wonder Day survived. He took-off after his mother's mysterious death, with just a pony to his name. Selling the animal in the nearest town, he made his way toward Melbourne, and found a job as a jockey along the way. He worked for the Delauney's at Sutton Grange for six years, breaking, exercising and caring for young thoroughbreds. Then, in 1953, he escorted a horse named Unusual to America.

On Maryland's eastern shore, Day meets Callie, a determined young woman, with a hard shell around her heart. She is set on becoming the first woman jockey...and a successful one at that! Day pours all his stored-up loneliness and intense yearning for love into his feelings for her. Emotionally scarred by a brutal childhood, Callie is not capable of reciprocating his love with much more than occasional affection, rejection and abuse. When thwarted, Day's feelings become obsessive. Again, his most critical needs, his overwhelming thirst for love, are met with a harsh, barren landscape. Haunted by his past in Australia, he returns to his father's farm and his mother's grave, to face his ghosts.

There he learns of his mother's girlhood in Vienna where she was an opera singer, and of a mysterious Argentinean man, Dickie Del Mar, who came to the farm once for an extended stay. Other than his mother, Del Mar was the only person Day remembers as showing him affection and paying him attention. Callie and Day remain in touch - usually by letter or telephone, the contact always instigated by him. Then she writes with an invitation. She asks him to travel to Mexico, to a horse show in Puebla. And so he leaves Australia for a second time, and initiates a scenario which puts the past and present on collision course.

The troubling story of Day's childhood, and the lives of his mother and father are darkly gothic in nature. A constant air of suspense permeates the narrative and Mr. Francis is unusually good at building tension and sustaining it. The prose is sparse but lyrical and the descriptions, especially of the Australian Outback, excite the senses and bring the landscape to life in the mind's eye. I am fascinated by the author's imagery of the sea, swimming and potential death by drowning - especially in the context of a desert environment.

"The Great Inland Sea" is a compelling, thought-provoking novel, and also a tautly written mystery. I eagerly await the author's next book and highly recommend this one.
JANA

Two women dominate this poignant novel: one is a ghost, a young boy's mother as she lives in his childhood memories, the second a wild young girl determined to be the first woman jockey. Day loves them both to distraction, Emily, the woman who slowly loses her wits in the barren landscape of Australia and the other, Callie, his constant companion in America. Both are unattainable, the mother because she now exists only in his thoughts and the other, who will not be tied down, following her dreams and determined wanderlust.

Day's Australia is as palpable as his yearning for connection, as isolated as his loneliness, "the views, the shapes of the trees and the angular cattle, the smell of the clothes dried hard in the sun." Day's father, Darwin, is a man of few words and cold comfort, a man who eventually ties his wife to her bed at night to keep her from wandering in her mental confusion. When Emily dies, Darwin wraps her in a rough sack, digs a grave and tosses her body in without a coffin, inscribing only her first name on the stone, "Emily-1947".

Throughout his wandering from Australia to America and back, Day searches for bits of the past, the smells and colors of his youth, images of his mother sewing, digging in her garden, heavy with pregnancy. He remembers the man who came to visit the young bride and new mother. Dickie DelMar, an Argentinean horseman, takes the place of Darwin in Emily's affections. Questions weigh upon Day, no matter where he is, all that he wants to ask Darwin about Emily, so little kindness between father and son that they barely speak, "I've carried him with me like a stone in my shoe."

Then there is the enigmatic, unreachable Callie, who has stolen Day's heart without uttering a word, his soul mate, he thinks, although her cruel distance remains implacable, if finally explicable. On the wet sand of the Delaware shore, Callie rides her horse hard, out into the ocean, as Day watches through fog-shrouded binoculars. The horse won't turn back, keeps swimming out to sea, but Callie returns to shore. Later, when the dead horse washes up on the beach, Callie says, "He wasn't going to be an important horse." Then walks away.

From the first page the reader is assaulted with stunning images, the language perfectly phrased, forming pictures in the mind's eye: "her sun-scorched arms like long gloves pulled up to her shoulders." There is a reckoning to be had in this sullen land of hard men and a woman too fragile to exist in their world, and a son who has known so little of love, that he chooses a partner as broken as himself, hoping the pieces will fit together. Until he unravels his conflicted feelings, Day is a prisoner of memory. But in the land of his childhood there are more answers than he ever dreamed. Luan Gaines/2005.

I enjoyed this spare, quiet impressionistic novel, about a boy who runs away from the backwaters of Australia to the horse country of Maryland, haunted by the death of his mother. I liked that Day, a boy more comfortable with animals than with normal human life, comes into collision with a fiery unpredictable girl like Callie--in the middle of the highly predictable 1950's--an encounter to which he has no framework of comparison and from which he has no defenses. His reactions are always quiet and understated, even in big scenes, he's very internal and the pressure builds up. I look forward to Francis' future works.

David Francis has written a stark, beautifully textured novel reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy. His understated and minimilist prose masterfully conveys his characters emotions with grace and humanity. A simple, haunting story of loss, love, and family.

The Great Inland Sea has a strong story in it--a slow coming of age and awareness, a stark childhood setting, a fiery (literally) dream girl, a dead mother who haunts the main characters thoughts and a living father who does the same, a return "home" to see if it can indeed become that. But the novel never met its promise I thought, especially after its strong beginning when 12-yr-old Darwin observes his mother, trussed and gagged to her bed, just before her death.
Darwin ends up running all the way from his home in the Australian desert to America, escorting a horse named Unusual to a Maryland farm where he ends up taking a job breaking horses. There he meets Callie whose outsized personality and ambition (she's known to start fires, she wants to be the first female jockey, she tours the near country running betting horseshows) immediately sucks him in, for good and bad. Their rocky relationship continues for a while then seemingly ends, at which point Darwin heads back home and begins to explore both a new relationship with his father and his own past, especially with regards to his mother--her youth, her strange marriage to his father, her relationship with their single farmhand (long gone), and her mysterious death. Soon though Callie invites him to a horse show in Mexico and when he returns home it will be with Callie and the long-gone farmhand as past and present collide and answers start to fall.
As mentioned, the book starts strongly but its flat-voiced narration and tempo, which I granted him early on as in accord with Darwin's shock and grief, never altered and eventually grew wearisome, dragging the energy of the book down. The sparseness of language has its poetic moments, there are some beautiful lines here, but the unvarying style, like the voice and tempo, also grew wearisome. The same was true of the characters themselves, who all fit into the same type and voicing. These stylistic decisions led to too great a distancing between the characters and myself and I found myself caring less and less what happened to them. Though I finished the book, by the end I was hoping for someone to show up in person on the farm or as part of the many flashbacks, that would break the patterns of behavior, voice, and mood. Someone to add a dash of color or a bit of loquaciousness or visible passion not marred as Callie's was with self-destructiveness or dark childhood secrets.
It isn't that the book was too quiet, it was too monotone in its silence. I'd try a second book by Francis as the prose was often quite strong, but this one I can't quite recommend.

I met this author in LAX, Los Angeles. I gave him a book which he graciously accepted and promptly began to read. In exchange, he gave me his card and explained that he had written this book. I misplaced the card, but never forgot the young man who had given it to me.
Once I located it again, I ordered this book from Amazon and it came quickly. I found it to be a good read. The author brings every page to life. It is a simple story with complicated characters. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys lessons taught by living.