Mark Brandi, The Others

 

- An eleven year old unnamed boy lives with his father on a small farm in the bush. He’s home schooled and has no friends. He keeps a diary and we’re reading it. He’s a very sensitive, warm-hearted young boy, but he's wary of his often angry father.  

- Brandi's tone is one of foreboding and it's totally sustained. The boy tries hard to read his father and his moods. He keeps his distance and refers to him as ‘him’, never ‘dad’. His father constantly refers to 'the others', plague-ridden people from the 'town' and the 'commune' who they must avoid.

- The boy's fascinated by the natural world around him, the foxes, the birds, and the sheep they tend on the property. The foxes eat the young lambs, their favourites, and the crows pluck out their eyes. There are plenty of mice around. And only the boy seems to notice that there's 'a fire up the hill'. And a sound of some sort. He's afraid ‘…the others might come. Like he says they would’. 

- There’s a sinister tone to many diary entries. ‘That’s the thing about things that are good. It always seems that they never last. But bad things, they can go on forever’. ‘You can never know what’s underneath things. Like the rusty sheets and the mice. Like him and his eyes’.  

- The tension builds, very slowly. The boy ventures out of the farmhouse against his father’s orders, just to explore and try to get some answers. His father refuses to answer his questions on their circumstances and his mother’s death. His curiosity is denied. 

- After secretly following his father up the hill he finds a young woman chained to a tree and bound. He concludes his father is training her to be his servant. 

- Evil is closer than you think. Perhaps it’s not the ‘others’. Once a sound like thunder is heard. ‘He doesn’t want to talk about the sound. Or the smoke. Or the woman'.

- Like Brandi’s two earlier novels, Wimmera and The Rip, the resolution is nice and uplifting. Good people and the authorities come to the rescue. Brandi can’t seem to stay in the darkness. He believes in a Christian salvation.

- He should stay in the darkness however, because that's where his remarkable talent lies.