The Riders [Hardcover]

Tim Winton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 12, 1995

After traveling through Europe for two years, Scully and his wife Jennifer wind up

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Elements of a psychological suspense thriller and a gut-wrenching love story blend into this irresistible narrative, Winston's 13th novel, written in supple, lyrically charged prose. Australian expatriate Scully is a working-class bloke with a "wonky eye... Brillopad hair" and a "severely used face." All the more wonder that beautiful, upper-middle-class Jennifer married him eight years ago. The adoring Scully has since followed her every whim, trailing along with her and their seven-year-old daughter, Billie, across Europe. Jennifer decided they must buy the tiny, dilapidated cottage in rural Ireland that Scully now cleans and rebuilds with the demon energy of his love while awaiting his wife and child to return from Australia, where Jennifer has gone to sell their possessions. On the night before their arrival, Scully sees a troupe of ghost horsemen, their torches burning, arrayed before the ancient castle keep on his neighbor's land. The next day, a traumatized, mute Billie deplanes without her mother, who has somehow disappeared at Heathrow airport. To find her, Scully and Billie begin an odyssey to all the places they lived while Jennifer was aspiring to fulfill what she considered her artistic potential. Gradually, Scully realizes that there are things about Jennifer he could never admit to himself; tormented by fear, desperation and heartache, he almost loses his sanity. Precocious Billie, who knows things her father will never understand, uses the power of her love to redeem them both. Perhaps Billie is a little too wise and resilient and Scully not credibly protective of her welfare, dragging her into perilous situations. But Winton propels the narrative so quickly that one accepts Scully's obsession and Billie's compliance. Winton is particularly deft in creating the supporting characters in this powerful drama, all of whom assume vividly dimensional form. He also conjures up settings with a magician's hand: the frigid, barren Irish countryside; Australia drowsing in summer heat; a Greek island shorn of tourists in winter; Paris, Florence, Amsterdam. His terse, lyrical descriptions, the throbbing energy of his prose, can illuminate a scene like a lightning bolt, cut like a knife or wring the heart. Readers who met this stunning Australian writer in Cloudstreet or That Eye, the Sky, will find his talent fiercely honed. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The destructive and redemptive powers of love are the focus of this new novel by Winton (That Eye, That Sky, 1987). Fred Scully has gone to Ireland, where he is restoring a dilapidated cottage and waiting for Jennifer, his wife, and their seven-year-old daughter, Billie, to arrive from Australia. But on the appointed day, Billie arrives without her mother, too traumatized to explain what happened during their last stop at Heathrow. Thus begins a mad search through Greece, Italy, France, and Holland, always just missing the elusive Jennifer. Though action-filled, this is primarily a study of the psychic price paid by an open-hearted man who loves deeply, if not wisely. The novel's strengths lie in its richly detailed settings and in the archetypal fury of its portrait of psychic dissolution. Recommended for most public libraries.?Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1st edition (June 12, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684802961
• ISBN-13: 978-0684802961
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,432,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Contrived and Implausible Stuff., October 23, 2002

By 

Michael Leone (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Riders (Paperback)

I wanted to like this book, I really did. It's an interesting premise but the book sets the reader up for something and then totally fails to deliver on it. You learn nothing that you didn't already know at the start, which is nothing.

You spend the first eighty pages or so with Scully fixing up his house in Ireland for his seven-year-old daughter and wife who are supposedly coming to meet him. Eighty pages of him scrubbing, grouting, plastering, shoveling, painting, broken by some chatty interludes with a minor character Peter Keneally. Unless you're Joyce or Nabokov or Proust there is no way to make these mundane activities compelling for eighty pages. I would have forgiven Winton at forty pages, but at eighty it's just too dull and the attempt at plot build-up totally off kilter.

Finally, the first climax comes: Scully goes to pick up his wife and child at the airport and only the child emerges from the plane. Where is his wife? We all want to know, of course, as we've spent eighty pages waiting for her and listening to Winton tell us how much Scully is looking forward to it, but his daughter won't tell him, despite the fact that Winton gives us a brief scene with the child on the airplane (which airplane is just another one of the unsolved mysteries in this book) with her mother, so we KNOW at some point the child was with her. Billie, his daughter, will never tell him, and after a while, for no reason that I can possibly discern, other than Winton's attempt to keep up the novelty of "suspense", Scully stops asking her about it. Would you do this as a parent? Wouldn't you find some way to coax this vital info out of your seven-year-old child? But I guess the info isn't so important to Winton.

Scully then decides, as though he's a private detective -- why he doesn't spend his money on a professional we'll never know, but then Winton wouldn't have a novel -- to go look for her. And he takes his daughter with him! Imagine that! A guy dragging his seven-year-old all around Europe. (Nobody in the novel even questions how abusive and unfair this is -- even after the girl suffers a vicious dog attack.) Scully flocks to Greece where he meets a variety of extremely frustrating drunks and bohemians who REFUSE to answer a question directly or provide him (or us) with any tangible information. The story at this point becomes Monty Pythonish, it's so absurd. Here is a desperate man looking for his wife and a cynical friend just toys with him: "Where is she?" "She? She?" "Come on Arthur. [...]." "Oh dear."

Winton deliberately tantalizes us with the bare bones of a thriller without giving us any of the meat such a genre requires. Why? Is he being postmodern? That could be his defense, but then why does he try so hard at being "realistic"?

Then Scully meets a woman, Irma, en route to Italy, who, based ona photo she plucks from his wallet, claims she saw his wife at a hotel in Greece with another woman. Aha, the reader says. Finally, a morsel of information -- we're halfway through the book now -- might be given. Another false lead. Scully doesn't believe her, I guess because Irma's a bit of a floozy, and so he hardly probes into the idea of his wife being with a woman, hardly probes into any idea at all and yet insists on going from city to city of his expat past with his daughter. He refuses to pack it in.

Other coincidences abound that leave you and the characters NOWHERE and with NO ANSWERS. Scully finds himself a murder suspect in Greece, but he flees before any authority has a chance to apprehend him. Why this intrigue? An attempt to keep the pages turning, I guess. A telegram is sent to an Amex office in Florence, purportedly from his wife, telling him to meet him in Paris. She doesn't show. Was it a hoax? Why doesn't she come? Don't expect answers.

I found this book to be contrived, implausible, and in the end, utterly frustrating. Scully's relationship with his wife, with his past, who he thought she was, who he thinks he is, are not remotely explored, not even superficially a la Paul Auster, and are certainly not dramatized. Scully's entire "voyage" has no point, no catharsis, no resolution. It's a big shaggy dog story.

There are strengths: some of the prose is brisk and effective, the secondary characters are quite good and memorable, especially Peter Keneally and Irma, etc. The dialogue is top-notch, and unlike the story, real.

It just fails to add up to a story.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The unknowability of the human heart, March 24, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Riders (Paperback)

Tim Winton's "The Riders", a Booker Prize nominee, is one of the most impressive novels I have read all year. It is a brilliantly crafted and expertly executed literary achievement by one of Australia's most promising modern young writers. Preparing to start a new life with his wife Jennifer and young daughter Billie in Ireland, Scully's life is blown apart when he goes to the airport to meet his family but finds only Billie and no message from his missing wife. With Billie in tow, he travels to Greece, France and the Netherlands in search of Jennifer but unbeknown to himself begins a journey of self discovery that will alter the course of his life in ways he never envisaged. The Scully you meet in the first few chapters, giddy with happiness and anticipation as he toils to make habitable a ramshackle old place he has bought to begin a new life with his family, is so "up" and vibrant a life force, you feel a palpable sense of hurt watching his slide downhill. But redemption awaits around the corner. While Jennifer, a shadowy figure, remains an enigma, her disappearance forces Scully to come to terms with feelings of betrayal and to recognise that it is perhaps impossible to truly know another human being. The unknowability of the human heart, arguably the novel's central theme, is powerfully captured in the recurring image of riders on white horses, all spendiferously dressed, but still and silent and oblivious to all as they line up for parade in the night. The gradual role reversal we witness in the adult-child relationship between Scully and Billie only deepens the sense of pathos evoked by new circumstances as they unfold. Billie, quiet and uncommunicative, but who proves ultimately to be the quicker learner of life's lessons, ends up taking charge. She quite literally controls the purse strings by the end of the story. Winton's language is colourful and he uses imagery to dazzling effect. His minor characters (eg, Irma, Alex and Pete) are also memorable. They remain sharply etched in our minds long after they have been written out of the plot. Irma, arguably Scully's saviour, may be a damaged soul but she possesses the essence of humanity absent from the sophisticated but calculating Jennifer. "The Riders" is such a rare and haunting beauty of a novel I can only recommend other readers to take their time enjoying it. Richly deserving of its Booker Prize award nomination. Go get it !

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What the Dickens?!, November 23, 2000

By 

katrina kelshall (Paris) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Riders (Paperback)

Now I would hate to rubbish Tim Wintons latest tome outright because frankly, it was a compelling read. I couldn't put it down till I had turned the last page, this is true. However this urgency was inspired more by my desperation to get the tale of doom and gloom over and done with, then out of a desire to gallop along with the protagonist to an enlightening conclusion.

Wintons novel is no less then a Victorian tale of melodrama and sentimentality. Charlie boy would have been proud! The protagonist -- Scully, is introduced as a pathetic, doting husband, all too earnest and well intentioned. We know from the start that he is a victim having been abandoned by his wife to bring up little daughter Billy (echoes of Oliver, little Dorrit and poor Joe haunt her characterisation) in a ruined Irish cottage. The novel follows his frantic scramble across Europe searching for his illusive spouse with little Billy knocking along behind with resolute maturity. Clearly she is the real victim and one might even be inspired to feel sympathy for her if it weren't for the overwhelming metaphors and allegories and several lashings of pathos.

Everything that can happen to this desperate pair, does happen, till the reader is simply overloaded and exasperated. Scully is quite the anti hero -- with his disfigured face, wounded eye and scarred builders hands. Co incidentally Billies favourite comic is Victor Hugos' 'Hunch Back of Notre Dame'. It is hardly surprising then that on a cold Christmas night in Paris, Scully (drunk and penniless) is persuaded to take refuge in the Cathedral by his pleading daughter? Bells tolling about their heads...

The laboured metaphors plod through the body of the book till at the last moment what better symbol to sum up failure then the proverbial sinking ship.

By this stage I was crying for mercy!

Now to be fair to Charles Dickens who is one of the great classical writers, there is a place for Victorian Melodrama -- even today. What surprises me is that The Riders was short listed for the Booker Prize in 1995. I find it astounding when you see how much intelligent, sensitive, modern literature goes unnoticed in the marketplace today, that The Riders should be singled out for such praise.

My opinion of the Booker Prize has waned somewhat I fear.