Smart Aussie oddity

Press, 21 October 1989, Page 27

Smart Aussie oddity

Water from the Moon. By Rory Barnes and James Caldwell. Penguin, 1989. 174 pp. $14.95. (Reviewed by Reginald Berry)

This novel would appear to prove that men can still write novels for an intended audience which is largely male without sinking to Wilbur Smithlike depths. There is no violence, no sex, and no rock n’ roll here — just a careful investigation into the nature of human corruption. The scene is not the Congo of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but Bengkulu, Sumatra, in Indonesia. It is here, while he is working under contract for the Indonesian Government, that John Cooper discovers the universality of that human corruption.

Cooper sees it in the Indonesian Government practice of transmigration, where hundreds of thousands of Javanese are to be settled in supposedly unoccupied territories, sites which his surveying firm is supposed to be approving. Into the black hole of the survey is disappearing a fortune in World Bank money. But the corruption, as if we didn’t know, is also in Australia too,

and it is at the highest levels of Government. The expected references to Queensland appear throughout as a form of comparison to the Asian

variety. The novel feaures a cast of beerswilling, tough-talking ockers who love to skite about their inability to be beaten by other beer-swilling, toughtalking ockers — that is, when they are not slandering women as dykes or bitches. Next to these is Cooper, the contractor with a heart of gold, who loses everything but wins it all by surviving, by standing by the women, by pulling out with dignity, and by finally throwing beer in the face of another chap whose middle name is "Bloody.” Energetic enough, but predictable.

The real oddity here is how two blokes can write one novel. Charles Spear and Lawrence Baigent did it here in the 1930 s in “Rearguard Action,” and Taylor Caldwell (man and wife) did it together many times in the United States. It would be interesting to know how these two Aussies do it, because together they have made quite a smart piece of popular fiction.