Book Review: The Riders

Book of the month for July, I finished this yesterday - just in time for the book club meeting tomorrow. Recommended by a member who originally hails from Australia, it's written by an Australian writer - Tim Winton - who receives all the usual sycophantic gushing praise in his cover notes, but who stirs up a storm of adverse comment if you read some of the reviews of this novel, The Riders, on Amazon.

So let's accentuate the positive to start with. Winton has a unique descriptive formula. A way of selecting words that are at once slightly out of the ordinary and yet also surprisingly apt. It's a clever trick. One which, when you first start to read this book, feels a little uncomfortable and awkward, but which after a few chapters begins, almost against your will, to feel natural, clever and right. So I'd have to say that yes, I ended up enjoying his writing style, his use of language, and the meter of his prose.

But of this novel in particular, I'd have to say: No. A virtually plotless mish-mash of travelogue-style observations, a few good but half-formed characters thrown into the mix in various separate geographical locations, and a central character who verges on being a child abuser by virtue of dragging his 7-year-old daughter halfway round Europe on a hopeless quest to find a wife who he believes is just missing but, we have to conclude, never really wanted to be with him at all.

This is a book to read if you're depressed and you want proof that someone is worse off than you. Less skilled at living than you, more stupid than you, uglier than you and certainly, with the exceptions of Billie and Postman Paddy, lonelier than you. It's one of those books that you finish and your uppermost thought is how much life you wasted reading it, that you'll never get back. Does it help that the desperately tedious voyagings of Scully as he drags Billie from Ireland to Greece to France to Holland are well written? Not really.

It helps that the book is a page-turner, I guess, but only because you rattle through it looking for answers at a cracking pace. Trouble is, you find none. It's like climbing a hill and cresting it only to find there's another hill further on. And another. And another. And when you finally reach the top, there's nothing there. Not even a particularly rewarding view.