I am somewhat baffled as to why The Dry has attracted so much attention and praise. The characters are uniformly one dimensional, and the main protagonist, Aaron Falk, is so boring he is almost invisible.
What I really object to, though, is the portrayal of a country town and its people. All the people locally born and bred, with the possible exception of Gretchen, are portrayed as thick and/or menacing. The owner of the local milk bar is remembered by Falk as being “slow on the uptake and quick to anger’ as a kid. When he refuses Falk’s money, Falk initially taunts him about the town’s sorry financial state and then reflects that “[t]he guy had probably been waiting twenty years to feel superior to someone and wasn’t about to waste his chance.” The local doctor hides his homophobia for fear of judgement. An old schoolmate is now descibed as “the self appointed spokeswoman of the anxious mother’s group”, and threatens that she will “call her husband” if Falk doesn’t move away from the children playing in the park. The portrayal of almost every local, from the drinkers in the pub to the owners of Falk’s old house, is unflattering; they are mean, rough, inarticulate and quick to threaten violence. They are not people; they are walking stereotypes.
The use of language also suggests this book was written and edited by people who have spent very little time in the country. For instance, no self respecting farmer refers to a shed containing farm equipment as a ‘barn’. No country person refers to earmuffs as ‘ear defenders’. Anyone who’s lived in rural Australia in the past twenty years knows that country towns are populated by a diverse range of interesting and intelligent people, including (shock) even openly gay people. Harper’s portrayal of them is outdated and offensive, a city person’s view of country people.
The book does provide an unexpected ending, but it doesn’t thrill or provide food for thought, the way a good crime novel should. So many more worthy Australian novels were published around the time of The Dry, like Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog or The Lone Child by Anna George. Read them instead.
