On Greener Pastures...

I've always loathed 'Australian Literature'. Okay, maybe not loathed, but in high school, we'd be given such dreary, preachy texts like Rabbit Proof Fence (which wasn't too awful) and the horrific The Road From Coorain (and don't get me started on the telemovie adaptation of that, good God...) which made me despise the genre.

Which seems unfair, there are quite a few Australian texts I love. For instance, Tim Winton's Cloudstreet, while falling dangerously close to the preachy texts I despise, is one of my favourite books. Not to mention how I do rather enjoy Nick Earls books. Then again, that's different subject matter - they're coming of age stories in modern Australia, as opposed to dreary mid-1900s texts that spend a whole first chapter coming up with similes and metaphors for the dry outback (yep, that's The Road From Coorain. Urgh.)

Anyway, I digress. Today I sped through another book for ENGL2070 (I am on a roll), Amanda Lohrey's Vertigo. I had to fight a shudder at the subtitle: 'a pastoral'. Pastoral? Oh God, I thought. This is going to be so incredibly dull and boring.

But it really wasn't. While I wasn't exactly wowed, as I was with The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Lohrey's short novel (it's 140 pages, and the font is a fairly large size, not to mention it's a fairly simplistic way of writing) did manage to retain my interest and I would honestly have to say I found it a good read.

Even if it is 'Australian Literature'.

The basic premise is this: Luke and Anna are a married couple in their mid-30s, used to a life in the city but feeling run down and claustrophobic - particuarly Anna, who's begun to suffer from asthma, which comes as a huge disappointment for the very athletic and energetic woman. With this in mind, Luke decides that they need a seachange, and the two of them move out to a tiny rural town near the ocean, in order to start a new.

But as the old adage goes, 'the grass is always greener on the other side', and so it is that they (particuarly Anna) begin to feel disappointment with their new surroundings. And ghosts of the past continually haunt the pair of them, the very ghosts that happen to be part of the reason for their leaving...

While I feel that perhaps more could have been done with this text, I think it's the perfect size for what it is. It's an easy read and while it does touch on issues such as drought, is hardly 'preachy' (thank God).

Maybe 'Australian Literature' isn't that terrible after all...