The Drowner - Softcover

As carefully composed as a period photograph, Australian writer Drewe (author of six previous novels, none issued here) frames the love story at the heart of this generally well-rendered tale with evocations of water and its arid opposites--drought and desert. When Will Dance meets Angelica Lloyd in Bath, taking the waters, the two begin an odyssey that starts in the late 1800s and takes them to the western Australian desert, where they are finally free to love fully. This contrast between water (cool, life-giving, but also death-dealing) and the desert (sapping and murderous) sometimes distracts from the understated and too delicately evoked story. Will, the son of a ``drowner'' in a long line of ``drowners'' who understand the ``secrets of irrigation'' in rural England, falls in love with Angelica, an actress traveling with her father's company. Her mother is in an asylum where water is frequently used in treatments. Will, a civil engineer, takes a job that involves laying a pipeline to carry water from Perth on the coast to the desert interior of Australia, where gold is being mined under extreme conditions--water is short and typhoid endemic. The couple set off for Australia, their travels described in alternating sections with a portrait of life in the horrific desert mining camp. Among the outsized characters are a German photographer, an American undertaker, a stubbornly dedicated Australian nurse, and a French doctor. The epidemic rages, some of the figures fall in love, others are weakened by drink or the struggle to survive. Meanwhile, Will and Angelica, their life riven by haunting undercurrents (her father abused her and other young girls), have to face their demons by bringing water to the desert- -perhaps a too cute touch--before they can truly be together. Clever, informative, exquisite in sensibility but cool in sentiment. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In Drewe's (Savage Crows, Salem House, 1989) historical novel of Australia, Will Dance is an engineer in the 1880s, descended from a line of "drowners"?men who irrigate dry lands. While at the public baths, Will swims into the love of his life, actress Angelica Lloyd, and together they travel to dusty western Australia, where Will succeeds in conveying water uphill 35 miles from its source. While experiencing the rough-and-tumble outback, gold rush mania, and a typhoid outbreak, they meet such characters as Axel Boehm, a photographer and chronicler; Inez, a bankrupt socialite turned nurse; Felix Locke, an undertaker with a poetic soul, whose longing for companionship is thwarted by the stigma of his profession. The book is beautifully written in its disparate parts, but its ambitious epic scope fails to join them together satisfactorily. Nevertheless, recommended for fiction collections.?Sheila M. Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.