When you win the Miles Franklin Award, expectation for your next novel is going to be fairly high. Despite its terrible cover, When Colts Ran lives up to this expectation, as it’s the words inside that count and such fine words they are. Opening in the middle years of WWII, we find Major Dunc Buckler travelling the outback cataloguing station supplies for requisition in case of Japanese invasion. His ward Colts, freshly expelled from school, is searching for Buckler in the company of the latter’s wife Veronica, recently made aware of her husband’s infidelity. The descriptive passages are quite superb and written with such a distinctive voice: this book cries out for audio recording. As fresh characters are added and the post-war years roll by, the story opens up and deftly deals with all manner of relationships—between husband and wife, father and son, between men and importantly between man and the Australian landscape. This story is also about history and how we deal with it—whether it is the history of our own making or the legacy left by our parents. If you’re a fan of Australian literature then I’m sure you will find this book, as I did, a deeply satisfying read.
Paul Landymore is a bookseller at Brisbane’s Avid Reader. This review first appeared in the October 2010 issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.
| Tweet |
Tags: Australian book review, book review, fiction, Miles Franklin Literary Award, Random House Australia, Roger McDonald, Vintage, When Colts Ran
