Dog Rock by David Foster (1985)

Given the welter of irritations in his last two novels, I have no idea why this one leaves me so peaceful. What's the crucial difference? I can't think of an overt one, other than that Moonlite and Plumbum both had very specific extending mechanics in mind, whereas somehow this one is closer to Foster-home. It's set in a small mountain town not far from Sydney, in the contemporary period. But it does cover, in the usual elusive Fosterian manner, all sorts of ins and outs. The centre of it is a series of murders, focused on Dog Rock, the town, by a strange parcel, which may contain the killing implement, being discovered there. The main character is one of the two local postmen, who double as overnight telephone exchange operators. But the town is chock full of red herrings and misleads, secretively and politically revealed by D'Arcy D'Oliveres, that main character. I may be peaceful, relatively, about this book, but I do still have a criticism - D'Arcy's the centre of it. Foster establishes him as an Englishman, and then fills out the portrait explaining him as a Westcountryman from the Cotswolds. Now, if there's any British voice I can hear in D'Arcy's words and thoughts, it's Alan Bennett. I think he would provide an inspired reading of this character, in company with some Australians to provide the beefy local voices which would be beyond him. I wonder if he'd relish the opportunity to show how he could get a whole slice darker and more difficult with this material. I would go so far as to say that I think imagining Bennett's velvet-spiked vocals while reading this made it for me. I think Foster had perhaps a fairly rudimentary ('typically Australian') view of the English and wrote a character really very effectively of which he maybe didn't quite consciously sense the pitch. The West Country dialect is more about ordinary speech, where the inflection is the whole thing. Bennett's Leeds Yorkshire dialect is much closer to what Foster writes here, where odd proper nouns and pushing edginess are closer to the home territory. Anyway, I've astonished myself by quite enjoying it; not minding the comic-book in it, or the blatheriness of the satire. Somehow he's let me just enjoy his sparking mind in this one, and I'm grateful.