- Free Article: No
- Contents Category: Fiction
- Review Article: Yes
- Online Only: No
- Custom Highlight Text:
Steven Lang has a fine sense of the Australian vernacular and creates believable characters. This novel forges a new genre (maybe it’s just new to me): the environmental thriller. Protagonist Kelvin was a street kid and rent-boy in Kings Cross. Now twenty-one and beautiful, he fetches up, after years of aimless drifting and casual work in remote locations, in his home town of Eden, which he fled eight years before. He joins the labourers setting up a commercial pine plantation after the area has been clear-felled, but then becomes involved with a group of hippies who live on a commune – ‘the farm’. Here he falls easily into a sexual relationship with Jessica, an environmental activist and writer. She is older, educated and politically sophisticated, in a way that engages Kelvin’s imagination but compels him to hide his past.
- Book 1 Title: An Accidental Terrorist
- Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $22.95 pb, 330 pp
- Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Passive and unformed, Kelvin expresses no opinions as he observes the hippies talking endlessly about taking action to preserve the native forests. They argue, smoke a lot of dope, but achieve nothing. One of them is a federal policeman working undercover. One night, some of the group destroy the loggers’ equipment, and their protest goes horribly wrong. The betrayals and double-crossing within the group make for a complicated plot. Add a fugitive American who is running from a violent past as an international terrorist in the Vietnam era, and a group of red-neck vigilante loggers determined to wreak revenge upon the hippies, and the mixture becomes volatile.
Lang’s sense of the beauty and fragility of the land, and of politics and ideology at work in a claustrophobic space, lends conviction to his writing. This is an accomplished and entertaining novel.
Comments powered by CComment