WG, I’m sure, would applaud Viskic for using Aboriginal characters – Zelic’s wife, Kat, his mother in law, Mick, his friend and neighbour – in important roles in the story. The next issue to get out of the way is cultural appropriation. is down the coast from Port Fairy and the ferry which plays a central part in the story is clearly based on the cable drawn ferries over the Murray River that would sink if ever put to sea. Neither has an island, though the uninhabited Lady Julia Percy Is. The town is probably based on a mix of Port Fairy and Warrnambool: the distance is right there’s a fishing fleet Port Fairy is about that size Warrnambool is bigger but the Framlingham Mission – a ‘miss.’ is mentioned – is nearby and so on. Let’s deal with the geography first (non-Victorians can skip the next para.)
One of the great improvements in crime fiction over time has been the increased emphasis on character development, and that is the case here.Ĭaleb Zelic lives in Melbourne but his Indigenous wife comes from a fictional Victorian coastal town, three and a half hours away, population 3,000, with a small, habitable island nearby. Nevertheless, except for one sequence which seemed to me was going to be all ‘action’, I listened all the way through to the end and in places even experienced mild enjoyment. I’m sure action thrillers are also an art form, but killing for art’s sake is not a concept that turns me on. What brought this to mind today was the extraordinary, “unrealistic” – for ‘real’ life, not for thrillers – number of violent deaths which deaf PI Caleb Zelic has to deal with over the course of this novel. It took me a long time to understand that musical theatre was an art form with particular rules into which the story was made to fit, and longer to realise that all modes of story telling have rules which of course skillful story tellers modify as they go along. Back in the 1950s, which sometimes still feels like yesterday, ‘people’ would complain, about Doris Day movies, that breaking into song at critical moments was ‘unrealistic’.
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