Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Stephen Orr, Wakefield Press, $32.95.
Smartly composed, the premise for this novel has you wondering about its origins. Where did Orr get the inspiration for his seventh novel?
The synopsis goes something like this. As Hitler’s war looms, famous Australian artist Roland Griffin returns home from London with his family to live a simple life of shared plums and low-cut lawns in the suburbs.
In the yard: a daughter, and a son, Hal, growing up with a preoccupied father who is always out in his shed stretching canvases and painting outback pubs. Everything is a picture, a symbol … even Hal, the boy in the boat, drifting through a strange world of Incredible Floridas. An isolated man obsessed with other people and places.
Over time, Roland learns Hal is unable to control his own thoughts, impulses, behaviour. The boy becomes the destroyer of family. The neighbourhood is enlisted to help Hal find a way forward.
Incredible Floridas describes Hal’s attempts at adulthood, love, religion and the hardest thing of all: gaining his father’s approval. It’s a disconcerting novel of subtle power, with impressive dialogue that ensnares.
Bereft of judgement, Orr has the ability to instill cordiality and level-headedness. It also bravely encapsulates ordinary, daily connections, expectations, qualms and disquiet. The title is taken from Rimbaud’s famous poem Le Bateau Ivre (The Drunken Boat).
Being immersed in the slow-moving nature of a 1950s Australian town allows us to look into the world of a well-known Australian painter and ‘his troubled son, both rocked by devastating currents of life and art’.
