Paul Daley, The Leap

 

- Acclaimed journalist and writer Paul Daley has written an intriguing novel about Australia - its colonial history, its people and its blokey way of life. 

- Your typical Englishman, Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill, MA Philosophy and Theology (Oxon), is posted to Canberra as a diplomat. He and his now wife, Lucy, were familiar with Australia, particularly Sydney and its beaches. They had toured as backpackers years ago. But now there are bushfires all over southeastern NSW, including Canberra, making it difficult to enjoy the old haunts.  

- The book is riddled with so many dopey Aussie cliches unfortunately - blokes, beers, pubs, fights, pig hunting, Bondi beach. It focuses on the ugly. And of course snakes and crocs are mentioned. Canberra has become unwelcoming due to the haze and ash in the hot air, prompting Ben to become a little cynical about the War Memorial, the vacant suburbs, and even ANZAC Day. 

- An Australian woman, Charlene Sloper, an air hostess, is killed by falling from a high window in Saudi Arabia. Two Northern Irish women, both known petty thieves, were arrested for having pushed her. The Saudi government will summarily execute them, as it usually does to offending women, by a beheading or a stoning. Ben is tasked with persuading Cecil Sloper, the father of the dead woman, not to continue pressing for their execution as he's been doing. The British government is anti this primitive Islamic behaviour. 

- Cecil Sloper is a successful grazier with a long family history. His forebears were granted an 'empty land' in 1818. 'There was no one here. Not a damned civilised soul…The wretched natives! They’d no rightful claim to this place.’ He's fond of quoting passages from the Old Testament, ones praising retribution and revenge. And legitimising violence. Ben quotes New Testament passages back to him, focussing on love and forgiveness. They don't wash with Sloper. 

- Ben flies to a regional town called The Leap, adjacent to Sloper's property. He meets a driver called Nelson, who's an Indigenous leader and musician. And, as it turns out, highly intelligent and influential. 

-The Leap is an ugly town full of uneducated, racist, drunk morons. The name comes from the leap that native women and their children did over a cliff to escape the murderous colonial forces in 1856. As Sloper's ancestor wrote: ‘We slayed the warriors with gunshot and blade and instilled into the stragglers the greatest terror so that they ran like so many lemmings and leapt off the highest cliffs, a pitiful procession one after another, whereupon their bodies were dashed on the stony ravine floor far, far below.’ 

- The drunk blokes in the pub decide to go pig hunting and demand Ben come too. He is utterly weak when it comes to succumbing to beers, whiskeys, smokes and pills. He is forced to kill a boar by slitting its throat. ‘He realises that these men…dwell on the edge of another civilisation’. Nelson tells him he's like 'that other poor English bookish type who drank himself to death in the hut the other side of the Babylon'. We're reminded of the classic ‘Wake in Fright’.

- There is another side to Ben however, and it emerges slowly. He's angry and articulate and holds nothing back in condemning Sloper outright. 

- The novel ends dramatically but it's a satisfying resolution.