Like so many good Gothic stories, The Shark
Net begins with Drewe's move (at the age of six) from the
city to the country, from "ordered" Melbourne with
its "frosty lawns and trimmed hedges" to Perth, a sand-swept
town on the Western Australian coast, two thousand miles away.
(Perth is often dubbed the most isolated city in the world.)
Drewe knows right off--from the moment the view from the airplane
window changes to a "gold and gray desert below"--that
his world is about to change profoundly, and even before he reaches
Perth, he begins to see a shift toward Gothic horrors:
When we left the plane at Kalgoorlie to stretch
our legs there was a one-legged man balancing unsteadily in the
red desert where the tarmac ended, trying to hit a little fox
terrier with his crutch. Where the dog's fur was supposed to
be white it was pink with desert dust. The man was three novel
humans in one: the first real-life drunk, the first cruel person,
and the first one-legged man I'd ever seen.
Perth itself, Drewe writes, is a place where
standard rules are subverted (teachers insist that students come
to class barefoot, for example), and danger seems to lurk in
a variety of forms: undertow, snakes and--his mother's favorite
fear--'boiling brain' brought on by the sun and heat. While 'boiling
brain' doesn't appear to be a realistic concern, the sun and
heat do their part to make Perth seem like the set of a horror
film to the young Drewe, who calls his neighbors in the dunes
Sand People:
Sun and sand had rearranged the appearance
of the Sand People, too: tanned, freckled, scabbed, and bleached
them. With their darker skins, red eyes, raw noses, and permanent
deep cracks in their bottom lips, they looked nothing like Melbourne
people. Some were as eroded as the cliffs, their noses and ears
worn and peeled away, so that grown men had the snubbed features
of boys. Around their edges--noses, ear tips, cheeks, shoulders--they
were pink and fraying. Shreds of skin poked up from their general
outline and fluttered in the sea breeze. Boys bled if they smiled
too fast.
From a distance most of the adults seemed
stained a smooth reddish-brown--my paintbox burnt sienna--but
close up at the beach, walking behind them down the wooden ramp
to the sand, you saw they were stippled like people in newspaper
photographs, spotted with hundreds of jammed-together freckles
and moles--brown and black on a pink background. There were women
with chests and backs like leopards.
The leopard-backed women are nothing compared
to the Walrus Man who rode the same bus as Drewe and "inevitably"
sat next to him:
With a whistling snort, he'd plonk down beside
me. Where his nose should have been was a gaping hole, like the
nose cavity on a skull. He'd grown a walrus moustache to hide
it, but to no avail; of course the moustache grew downward instead
of upward, accentuating both his noselessness and his walrusness.
He made many long, noseless trips into town
sitting beside me, and every time I felt sorry for him. But as
he breathed his snorting whistle, and his fat thighs took over
the seat, and his fingers worried away at the edges of his nosehole
until his eyes watered, I inched so far away from him that I
was barely sitting. I was teetering on one buttock and I was
half out the bus window. I had a crick in the neck from twisting
and leaning away and desperately trying to avoid a view of the
inside of his head.
Once Drewe's family acclimates to Perth's
rhythms, though, the neighborhood's suburban elements become
more obvious. Indeed, for all the Gothic horrors Drewe finds
awaiting him in Perth, the book's memoir sections often have
the quality of an anthropological study of a quaintly remote
era--of tradesmen who used the back door when selling household
items or offering to sharpen the housewives' knives, for instance.
This nostalgic sense of innocence is central to what Drewe is
slowly building to on the sly: that in the middle of this innocence,
profound disturbances were beginning to surface, and they took
the form of Eric Cooke, a serial killer without a consistent
pattern (he variously shot, stabbed and ran over his victims).
Drewe does wonderful work with Cooke's character. A small man
with a profound speech impediment caused by a hare lip, Cooke
could have rung hollow in the wrong hands, but Drewe manages
to make us first feel his shortcomings and his status as an outsider
in a strong chapter (in which Cook swims across a river in a
fruitless effort to gain respect) before he shifts the focus
from Cooke as a social victim to Cooke as a neighborhood Peeping
Tom and, ultimately, a vengeful murderer.
Cooke's presence in Drewe's memoir certainly
isn't gratuitous: he killed one of Drewe's friends and was a
Dunlop employee who sometimes made deliveries to the Drewe house.
Indeed, one marvels at first that Drewe doesn't give Cooke more
space in his text. But Drewe is up to something far more subtle
with the Cooke material. The true-crime sections certainly aren't
extended enough to call the book a true-crime narrative, but
they are strong enough to give the text a dangerous, Gothic aura.
And--perhaps most importantly--it helps form a bridge to one
of The Shark Net's most intriguing elements: Drewe's own
sense of being drawn into the Gothic underworld as an adolescent.
When he was a child, Drewe's parents had to
protect him from Perth's natural dangers. When he becomes a teenager,
the roles reverse, and he finds he has to protect his parents
from his knowledge of a new set of dangers and excitements, most
of them dealing with that most Gothic device, the adolescent
discovery of sex. He is shocked speechless, for instance, when
he and his mother step into a milk bar and discover a "clumsy
lout" is sauntering around the room "repeating in a
falsetto voice, 'Rape! Rape!'" And, when his thoughts turn
to Rottnest Island ("where West Australians lost their virginity")
and the local dances where Drewe could dance close "up against
the bolstered breasts and panty-girdled pelvis of a fifteen-year-old
normally spotted at the bus stop in a tartan uniform," the
sexual world he tries to keep from his parents becomes his own,
guilt-ridden secret preoccupation. Attending a Billy Graham crusade
with his mother, Drewe writes that Graham seemed to seek him
out in the crowd and let his eyes bore "right into my evil
teenage soul." (Drewe does eventually make it to Rottnest,
but--in one of the book's funniest scenes--his first kiss goes
horribly awry when his date actually vomits on him, mid-kiss.)
Pointedly, Drewe is thirteen and on the cusp
of adolescence and "cultivating a rebellious teenage image"
when he first meets Cooke, whose own sexual explorations have
already begun to turn horribly criminal. Drewe's slipping so
subtly from memories of a quaint boyhood to a story of transgressions
that ultimately consume him at the same time murder victims begin
appearing is a cunning piece of narrative work. On a psychological
level, Cooke is the perpetually rejected, misunderstood adolescent,
wanting acceptance (both sexual and social) and finding himself
drawn into his own secret world of transgressions when his gestures
are repulsed. (This interpretation ignores the possibility that
Cooke was simply insane-after all, his sexual urges were truly
deviant, while Drewe's were simply guilt-ridden but healthy discoveries--and
that Cooke in fact had a wife and several children, which Drewe
doesn't explore at length until the book's end.)
The subtle linkage between Drewe and Cooke
culminates, some years later, in Drewe's covering Cooke's murder
trial as an apprentice reporter. Sitting in the courtroom, Drewe
writes, he suddenly felt Cooke staring at him.
I'd been avoiding his eyes, hoping he wouldn't
recognize me, but a moment later he winked. I winked back, then
I felt a hot wave of embarrassment that quickly turned into anger
at myself. I hoped that no one, not the magistrate or the other
reporters, and especially not the victim's family, had seen me.
I told myself I should have ignored his wink
and looked away. But in the split second when I'd weighed up
my response, I decided he was in such deep shit that it would
be uncharitable and somehow treacherous not to wink back.
That word 'treacherous' is a wonderful example
of Drewe's subtlety: psychologically, Drewe the reporter now
stands on the side of normalcy, of suburban values, and Cooke
represents the Gothic world (i.e., sexually deviant--though in
suburban terms, the phrase may be redundant) that Drewe (now
happily married) has 'relinquished.' (After all, marriage has
sanctified his own sexual urges.) Drewe's ability to suggest
these connections only indirectly is an amazing accomplishment,
and the fact that this court scene appears in the book's first
chapter (rather than at the end of a chronologically arranged
account) is a testament to Drewe's skills at developing sinuous
narrative structures.
For readers looking for subtle complexities
(both structural and psychological) as well as a healthy dose
of Gothic explorations, The Shark Net is not to be missed.
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