Plenty of journos go on to write novels. Few do it as well – or as imaginatively – as Paul Daley.
With Challenge, he started by sticking to the old adage ‘write about what you know’, creating a thriller with a comedic edge based on everything he’d learned covering Australian politics. Next was the boundary-pushing Jesustown, a kind of 21st-century Heart of Darkness – relocated to far north Queensland – that dived headlong into our colonial past and its ongoing repercussions.
In The Leap, Daley revisits those themes with a new ferocity, this time taking us deep into Wake in Fright territory. Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill is a British diplomat returning from trauma-induced gardening leave to take up a post in Canberra. It’s supposed to be a cushy halfway house before a well-paid retirement, but Ben soon finds himself in circumstances that are anything but comfortable.
In a town called ‘The Leap’, Daley has created a milieu worthy of Bosch peopled by a gallery of grotesques, each more repulsive than the last. Ben’s there to try and persuade a local landowner to forgive the sins of two British nationals facing the death penalty in Riyadh, but the Old Testament-quoting racist is having none of it.
Even worse, Ben keeps getting sucked into nightmare scenarios that deliberately reference the Kenneth Cook classic (including a particularly disturbing pig-shooting expedition), pushing him to near-madness. And all this is set in the context of colonial crimes, modern-day corruption and bigotry, and against the appropriately hellish backdrop of the Black Summer bushfires.
While he does deliver us a final grace note, Daley is clearly passionate about our failure to come to terms with the brutality of British settlement and is unsparing in bringing both the past and present to life. In the process, he takes outback noir to whole new heights – or should that be depths?
