Wedding Bush Road

by David Francis

A young lawyer in Los Angeles is called back to his family's farm in rural Australia and plunged into a complex struggle between past and present, town and country, and the secrets that haunt them all.

When he learns of his mother’s ailing health, Daniel Rawson must leave Los Angeles and travel half a world away to the family’s horse farm on Wedding Bush Road, one hundred miles outside of Melbourne. Estranged from his parents, Daniel is hesitant to revisit their long divorced, his mother still maintains the farm having put out her cheating, rakish husband, and even in these later years her anger burns brightly.

Daniel arrives at the farm in the heat of his parents’ conflict with Sharen, an alluring tenant and ex-lover of his father now perched on family land. Sharen and her unstable son Reggie complicate an already difficult family dynamic while Daniel has to tend to his mother’s condition, his father’s contentious behavior, and the swell of memory that strikes whenever he visits the farm. As Daniel is increasingly drawn to Sharen, the various tensions across the farm will spark events that cannot help but change them all.

Genres: Fiction

300 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2016

About the author

David Francis, based in Los Angeles where he works for the Norton Rose Fulbright law firm, spends part of each year back on his family’s farm in Australia. He is the author of The Great Inland Sea, published to acclaim in seven countries, and Stray Dog Winter, Book of the Year in The Advocate, winner of the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Prize for Literature, and a LAMBDA Literary Award Finalist. He has taught creative writing at UCLA, Occidental College, and in the Masters of Professional Writing program at USC. His short fiction and articles have appeared in publications including Harvard Review, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Southern California Review, Best Australian Stories, Australian Love Stories, and The Rattling Wall. He is Vice President of PEN Center USA.

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Faulknerian tale centering on the decline of the patrician Rawson family in rural Australia. Daniel Rawson, living the expat life in California, returns to his family's horse farm to spend time with his declining mother--and is plunged back into a world of the eccentric landed gentry he'd left Australia to avoid. Such wonderful characters--the fragile but indominatable mother, the elderly philandering father whose jilted mistress lives on the property and is out for revenge, her son who has developed a mystical tie to the eccentric, dying mother and seems to be bent on replacing Daniel as heir to the farm. Add to that the volatile attraction between Daniel and the scrappy mistress Sharen, his uncertain future with his elegant girlfriend in LA, and the various forces arrayed against the Rawsons—the ambitious Genoni family, the sullen estranged husband of the tenant/mistress-- and you have an unstable constellation which bursts into flames of class, sex and land.

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Thoughtful article on Wedding Bush Road this week in the LA Review of Books, by Jean Heyes on the novel and the expat condition. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...

"A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, I returned to my homeland, South Africa, for a three-week visit. I had been away for several years, and I was hungry to see again the wide horizons and to hear the lilt and clicks of Zulu. Only to my spouse did I confess that I had to go back, because I was there. My body stopped living in Africa 30 years ago, but part of me still exists in that humid town many thousands of miles away, a place where no tourists bother to go...."

I liked this description:
"After only a few pages, Francis plunges the reader into the Australia of searing sun and windswept grass, of birds big as folded tents crouching in trees, of cypresses that creak like ships in the night. It is a place of simmering anger, where men slug one another in seedy bars and where fires rage, their instigators unapologetic...."
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And Library Journal agreed with my assessment
"Los Angeles–based Francis (The Great Island Sea) spends part of his time in his native Australia, and his latest work sends protagonist Daniel Rawson there to great effect. When his mother calls to say that she is dying, Daniel scurries to join her, leaving behind a disgruntled girlfriend with whom he’s struggling to connect. You can see why; it’s evident from the moment he arrives that Daniel comes from a classically dysfunctional family, with his tough-old-bird mother having long ago run his philandering father off the horse farm that belonged to him. Now, the mother insists on giving notice to Sharen, a glamorous if slightly worn tenant with whom the father is involved, and she retaliates by setting a fire that eats up some family valuables. Hapless Daniel stumbles through this dislocated world as best he can, while Sharen’s son, Reggie, emerges as the book’s most intriguing character. VERDICT In prose as severely beautiful as the land depicted, Francis takes us into the bleeding heart of family. Well recommended for many readers.

[Tony Parsons · Rating 4 out of 5]

LA, CA. Daniel Rawson (lawyer) is headed back home to Melbourne, Australia (Wedding Bush Rd.) to sort out his family’s issues.
They own a horse farm on Wedding Bush Road.
Sharen Wells (divorced mother) has been a fixture of the household for a while.
Ruthie Rawson Daniel’s mother is not in the best of health.

Earley Derrick Rawson (aka Gates) his dad is stubborn & hard to get along with.
Fast forward; what did the headlines state in the Pakenham Gazette about Walker Dumbalk?

I did not receive any type of compensation for reading & reviewing this book. While I receive free books from publishers & authors, I am under no obligation to write a positive review. Only an honest one.

A very awesome book cover, great font & writing style. A very well written family matters book. It was very easy for me to read/follow from start/finish & never a dull moment. There were no grammar/typo errors, nor any repetitive or out of line sequence sentences. Lots of exciting scenarios, with several twists/turns & a great set of unique characters to keep track of. This could also make another great family matters movie, or better yet a mini TV series. It was just OK for me so I will rate it at 4/5 stars.

Thank you for the free Goodreads; MakingConnections; Counterpoint Press (Publishers group west); hardcover book
Tony Parsons MSW (Washburn)

[Mary Rakow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in a rural landscape as physically expansive as it is emotionally claustrophobic, Daniel sees that his father, can't understand "how love could manifest as so much fury." And by the second short chapter we feel the same thing. In a web of shifting alliances, overlapping jealousies, legacies of betrayal and loss, everything, including the land in WEDDING BUSH ROAD feels flammable.

Late at night a dog barks, Daniel springs from his bed, pushes a chair against the door-knob, waits "for the footsteps in the side hall, the scratch of the fly-wire out onto the bluestone, and the sound of his boots stepping off the verandah into the dew." The suspense never stops. We are held this way too. Always vigilant, not knowing what others seem to know, violence happening almost always off stage.

Stones ricochet off the veranda, Reggie's bloody leg is wrapped in a skirt, someone's let the horses loose, "its gone wild out there." The cypress trees catch fire, Daniel's 83 year old mother stands "in a nightgown and gumboots on the lawn brandishing the hose." But when the Fire Brigade has come, "suited up and meaty", their hoses unspooling, it's her canister of kerosene there by the laundry room door.

"I hate who I am when I'm here," Daniel says near the end, speaking words that could come from the mouth of every character in WEDDING BUSH ROAD. After the fire, rain sizzles in the trees.

But the miracle of this tale is that each deeply flawed character is also right. In the end we come to feel that beneath so much fury, that the troubled and idiosyncratic life of each character is driven by a logic that is emotional and likely also moral. That this is the human condition.. Compelling and honest, this is the novel's greatest gift. This is the masterful feat achieved here in these pages.

We close the book, catch our breath and find ourselves saying, of each character, Yes. I am each of these. "I'm back to basics here," Daniel admits. And so are we.

[Jillwilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is set around Tooradin (“Toovareen”) in Victoria’s South Gippsland. I include this detail because I know Tooradin well and the novel uses the physicality of the place and the history to good effect. It’s the kind of place that is driven through. Much tourist traffic passes by en route to Phillip Island or Wilson’s Prom. In my childhood, it was known for its fish and chips – and maybe still is – the inlet from Westernport Bay provides seagulls and something to look at while you eat. An online article provides me with the fun fact that “The town's name is an Aboriginal term for a monster which the local Aborigines reputedly believed resided in a waterhole at this location.” (http://www.traveller.com.au/tooradin-...) It’s not a grand landscape – Tooradin is flat, surrounded by mudflats and a depressed vista.

I didn’t know that there was a historic homestead in the area and it’s not referenced in this novel but I imagined something like Harewood when I was reading the book (https://vhd.heritagecouncil.vic.gov.a...). Maybe not so much the hose but the cyprusses and the slightly unloved feel. I don’t think that Harewood is where the writer David Francis grew up – I think it was close by – but it gives a sense of place.

Main character Daniel Rawson is now living in Los Angeles after growing up on a farm out of Toovareen. The contrast in lifestyle is significant. He is working and a lawyer and on the brink of proposing to his Venezuelan girlfriend who “flew across the country to study reflexology”. But Daniel’s elderly mother Ruth is unwell and he is called home.

Despite Ruth’s frailty, she has a kickass personality. I think I instantly cast Judy Davis in the role and that image prevailed. Daniel’s return is marked by the dysfunctionality of the family. His philandering but ageing father Earley no longer lives with his mother. (Daniel says of himself: “I come from a line of men for whom fucking around is a form of mourning, a way to forget the dead.”) Earley’s girlfriend lives in a house on the same property as his ex-wife. The property is subject to the comings and goings of Walker Dumbalk, an Aboriginal man whose mother once worked on the property, and Reggie, a young boy.

It’s a confronting journey for Daniel and I think that it’s evoked very well. His mother’s house is crumbling – like her body. “I get my bag and roll it along the bluestone path to the big house. The long veranda striped by the shadows of the cypress trunks in the late afternoon, the lawn all but dead save for capeweed, the garden thirsty but overgrown.” Set over the course of a week at Christmas, Daniel is increasingly paralysed by the complexity he faces in Australia and increasingly disconnected from his American context.

The novel explores guilt and disconnection. There’s a couple of great scenes in the town as the outsider returns to the small arena of an Australian country town; the faces and memories of kids that Daniel went to school with, the old rivalries and misunderstandings. It’s hard to leave home and it’s hard to go back. Ruth offers this reproach to her son: “You want us to be here … But you don’t want to be.”

There’s a kind of porousness explored in the novel – characters ignore the boundaries of doors and fences and materialise within the private spaces of other characters. This adds tension to the narrative; no one is safe where they live. The Aboriginal connections in the novel are a reminder of the recent incursion of white people onto the landscape of the novel and the injustices that have occurred as a result. This is a difficult topic for Francis to manage – he said in an interview: “In Australia it’s tricky writing about that Aboriginal presence because the misappropriation of indigenous stories is a complex and insidious issue.“ Online research about Harewood indicates that two members of the Boonwurrung tribe lived from time to time at Harewood (but of course this whole area would have been home to a much larger group of Aboriginal people for many thousands of years prior to Western settlement. They were/are the Yallock Balug 'river people', located around Bass River and Tooradin).

The novel circles around what is valued – it is clear that Daniel’s family was once a family of greater wealth but that wealth has been pissed away by Daniels father. There are antiques that are vandalised and cattle rustled. Frances creates a feeling of the transitory nature of material things. It’s a novel about decline.

I liked this excerpt from a review: “The land of this particular corner of Australia serves not just as scenery but as a brooding presence. Despite its expanse, it seems claustrophobic. It is a place full of creaks and sighs, where shadows mutate, where an incinerated car looms on a hillside like “the carcass of a gutted beast,” where death and hardship are integral, passed off “like so many handkerchiefs, laughed away with a weary acceptance.” As Daniel notes, “In L.A. risks are everywhere but somehow I feel safer there. Here there are no witnesses, just the mute regard of the trees, and the dull acceptance of the animals.”” (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...)

I liked reading some of the interviews with Francis about this book.
In one interview he responded to a question about how Australian and American audiences have responded to the novel: “Australians are a little hurt by the way their country is depicted, but country life in Australia is hard. Wedding Bush Road explores that harshness and lack of sophistication by contrasting it to Los Angeles life. I think of Los Angeles as softer. Australia somehow hardens me – I even looked older at my book launch in Aus.“ (http://www.socalmag.com/wedding-bush-...)

And, SPOILERS AHEAD.

“My editor at Counterpoint, Dan Smetanka, had minor changes and one big one. He put it out there tentatively wondering if I’d freak out. Basically he wanted me to change the last 3rd of the novel. It used to be that the girlfriend, Isabelle, arrives in Australia and hijacks the novel. Dan wanted the focus to remain on the main character, Daniel. In hindsight, it seems right. I wrote 8-9 hours a day dealing with that change, for 3 weeks, and it worked. Dan was delighted.”
Good suggestion Dan. It worked well for me.

[Joan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Confusing at times until I realized that the portions in italics were not all the same character. Earthy with touches of magical realism. Felt as if there was symbolism here that didn't work for me-a boy who sleeps on the roof and enters the house through the ceiling, three huge black horses, a pony inside the house, dresses hanging from trees.
The language is powerful. The sense of place done well. Unfortunately I didn't find any of the characters likable, although all were distinct and well drawn.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daniel returns home to take care of his dying mother, only to be drawn back into the dysfunctional family he swore he'd never be part of again.

The family dynamics of Daniel and his mother and father are extraordinarily crisp, three dimensional and fascinating. Unfortunately, this makes the other relationships rather muddled and unclear to the reader. Daniel's relationships with two women are flat and feel unexplored. Interesting, but I didn't feel much affinity for any of the characters.

[Theresa Putkey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Halfway thru the book and I wasn't sure where the book was going. Lots of background story telling that doesn't move the plot forward. For me, didn't find the descriptive prose easy to read. Not what I was in the mood for...

[Kt]

Did not finish.

I was really looking forward to reading this; but I just could not get into this. Too all over the shop for me and the writing was not strong enough to hold me interest.

[Robert Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy. In Wedding Bush Road, David Francis vividly captures the complexities of families, of being an expat, of coping with aging parents, and of identity.

Daniel is planning a romantic Christmas getaway with his potential fiance when his mother rings.

"My mother told me she thought she was dying. 'Dead as Dickens by the end of the year' , she forecast, pretending not to be scared."
“I’ll be back by New Year’s,” I say. Eight thousand miles and two days lost to the blazing Australian summer, when I’d promised myself I’d ask her to marry me before year’s end. A promise eclipsed by last week’s telephone call. “Family’s first,” said Isabel. But why is that? Why not this?

Why indeed. Daniel is torn right from the beginning, stay or go, take Isabel or go alone. After ten years he thought he had escaped his family, become a different person in the US.

"If it was just me on my own so I could see life clearly, maybe even be someone new. But how do you shed the skin of a family, really? These arms already peeling from this angry sun. The gay Beverly Hills dermatologist told me, as he froze off eleven moles, that most of the damage was already done, growing up here as a boy on a farm. No hat, no screen, no nothing."

I loved the spare, clean prose Francis uses. Nothing flowery or unnecessary, similar in some aspects to another Australian author, Rodney Hall.

"This time my mother said she dialed the CFA even though she doesn’t approve of involving outsiders. “A fire at the cottage on Wedding Bush Road.” I imagine her moving through the paddocks in the dark, the way she knows the land by heart, the shapes of the concrete water troughs, the shadows of the rabbit warrens, the cattle as they balk.

The distant flicker and a hint of smoke, a far-off siren wailing. I imagined it from above, the fire truck already on the highway and my mother breathless down by the windmill. I asked if she’d been okay before the fire but she ignored me, wanted me to hear the story. She didn’t seem to know her speech was strange.

“It wasn’t the cottage but a car in the back paddock up in flames.” She talked about the shadows of the heavy horses circling, arched up with fear."

Francis uses several different POV to help explain the why and the how of Daniel's predicament. Daniel is both an outsider, the one who got away, and a lynch pin to the lives and destinies of those he has come back to. Every decision he makes seems to make things more complicated. His relationship with Isabel is further complicated by the tenuous phone connection to the States. Some of Daniels actions and decisions seem to me to be so out of character, they jar and jolt, your never sure where the narrative will go. That is where I had trouble with the book. I couldn't grasp why he would behave in this way, so soon after arriving. How coming home seemed to have stripped all sensibilities from him, reducing him to a cliche. It did follow a story arc of "like father , like son' but I could not bridge the gap and just go with it it, hence the three star rating.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

While in novel form, this book is based on the writer's own family and experiences (I heard him interviewed on radio, where he talked frankly about waiting for the death of his mother before he could write the book). His style is impressionistic: rich in descriptive imagery, sentences frequently incomplete, resulting in an effect akin to a painter making quick sketches with a few brush strokes. I felt that he captured very skillfully the complex relationship we urban Australians have with the land and the people who make their lives outside the regimentation and order of cities, as well as the ambiguity of our feelings when adulthood shifts our interdependence with our parents.

[Jess V · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled with this book. I found the writing style hard to get into. I loved the fact that the book was set in my local area so I knew of all the places mentioned. But I found it a chore to read and it felt unfinished and unresolved. Plus I was left feeling quite depressed by all the awful characters.

[Lisa Arnold · Rating 3 out of 5]

wow is this one weird arse story, if you think your family are strange then this one is even worse, no wonder Daniel left Australia, only to be dragged back into the family saga of hurt and betrayal where nobody is truly innocent.

[Bec · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story was ok but I found the ending just felt a bit unfinished

[Jmolentin]

Very mushy. Characters aren't well distinguished. Plot - if there is one- meanders.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel leaves a comfortable lifestyle and classy girlfriend behind in Los Angeles to return to his dying mother's side, for a couple of weeks anyway. He has never wanted to return there and it's not hard to see why; it's an absolute train-wreck! The characters and life-style is this rural area are brilliantly described; each one larger than life and each one tragic in their own way. The tensions, jealousies, sorrows and animosities combine to create a tension that is a powder-keg. Daniel gets drawn into it and becomes the spark that ignites it. He seems a very selfish character at times; his strange somewhat old-fashioned upbringing in the show-jumping circuit, his desperation to get away, his moods are indicators of the effect of his parent's love/hate relationship. It remains to be seen if his relationship back home survives.

[Alistair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel is a 35 year old lawyer with a highly paid job in L.A., living with his girlfriend who he's about to propose to. Just days before Christmas he receives a call from his mother, Ruthie, in Australia telling him she's dying. it's been 7 years since Daniel was last home to the farm, and he finds he now has to negotiate some different (and complicated) relationships.
His father now lives with Elsie, yet hankers after Sharen, mother of Reggie, a strange boy who spends a lot of time in the roof cavity of Ruthie's house.
As the days drag on, Daniel swiftly loses the veneer of L.A. "the way this town, this farm and family cave in on me". He also reluctantly acknowledges that he's like his father - "but worse", wanting "some oblique connection [with him] whom I don't respect either, yet searching nonetheless".
Daniel's descent into his 'Australian-ness' and his feelings of desolation and despair is one of the finest features of the very good novel.

[Katrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

It starts well although the author's writing style is a little idiosyncratic. The imagery of the countryside is vivid and conveys a sense of isolation although the farm is not far from anything else. This establishes a aura of impending doom, you know something bad is going to happen. Unfortunately I lost interest in the main protagonist halfway through the book - he is too much a product of his parents- he inherited the worst characteristics of both and just wasn't very likeable. I usually like flawed characters but not this time.

I believe that many readers will find the book interesting and may be more charitable that me towards the leading characters. Unfortunately not the right book for me at this time.

I am going to give the author another try and will read his sophomore book Stray Dog Winter to see if it's more to my liking.

[Darrell Bevan-ridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

picked this up in LA - sincere enough but a real part timer, attempts to hide seemingly autobiographical elephants with a pinkie finger which was lame. good gift for a mum that isn't into books

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Real and surreal at the same time!

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the voice of this book. Really liked so much about it. Can't wait to talk to David on the radio.

Read it twice and loved it more the second time.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!, beautiful book, great writer,
I've ordered Stray Dog Winter

[Azarin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raw, spell bounding, lyrical prose of David Francis. A beautiful read.