I’m planted on the couch, notebook on my lap, listening to the rain. The world is wet and green and exceptionally pleasant, and I will be on this here couch for the remainder of the day.
Unless the rain gives up. Then I’ll have to move, as the front room gets too hot for work purposes in Summer.
I’ve been reading Peter Temple’s Black Water in the evenings for the last few days and it’s rather glorious. I started the book years ago, then managed to pack it away into a storage box when I moved into a friend’s spare room; I spent three or four years convinced that I’d lost the book, unfinished, until my parents recent move meant that I finally had to unpack everything I’d stored at their place.
I was mildly tempted to leave it unfinished when I first unpacked it, since it’s one of the stories that got adapted into the Jack Irish TV series, but I figured that would be a mistake.
So now I’m finishing it.
It’s an extraordinarily Australian book, without being an extraordinarily Aussie book. It captures the kind of laconic mood that gets associated with the Australian voice, but its setting is decided urban Melbourne and filled with the minutia of football clubs and horse racing and cabinet making. Little windows into secret worlds that you don’t get to see or comprehend, which is one of those things that makes fiction addictive.
I’m about a third of the way through and it’s already so much better than the TV adaptation (which was very good). Possibly on the verge of challenging my favourite Temple novel, An Iron Rose, for the top spot.
