The Vintage And The Gleaning by Jeremy Chambers
Text, $39
Judge not a book by its title. The Vintage And The Gleaning may sound like a swollen Jeffrey Archer (yes, a tautology), but it's actually an affecting Australian first novel - by an author who has won distinction as an amateur boxer, I must tell you.
In a north-east Victorian wine-making town lives Smithy. He's an ex-shearer, ex-husband, ex-alcoholic. Years of booze have "stuffed up his stomach and insides", left him with ulcers in his mouth and the knowledge that once he could have been someone. Now forced to stop drinking or stop breathing, he looks with a new perspective at everything and everybody.
He heads a cast of drifters, druggies, drop-outs, dogged plodders, many of them vineyard workers who spend a lot of time inspecting their shovels or nudging dogs affectionately with their boots. Chambers describes them compassionately, unflinchingly, just as he describes the sweat, ache and drudgery of their work.
Things happen in and around a small town of corrugated iron verandas, silos, disused railway lines, and rippling, distorting heat. And pubs.
These are lives drenched in drink. Boozing is manliness. Smithy's enforced teetotal habits bring only derision. Scene after scene is set in bars of spilt beer, cigarette butts and vomit, where "the silences are long and the talk is between closed lips", and where meaty violence may split open at any moment.
For most of his working life, Smithy has been an unthinking member of this world. But now he's altered. Memories flood him: shearing all day in his youth, fights in shanty pubs, his wife going into hospital "and I didn't know she wouldn't be coming out", a naked, bleeding woman stumbling out of the bush in front of him.
That woman, much younger, the partner of a psychopathic drug dealer about to get out of jail, mauled by her own dreams of depravity and death, also changes Smithy. He makes a commitment to her; his first to any other human for a very long time.
Jeremy Chambers tells it in pages of blokespeak, jumping with laconic, loaded cadences. He knows how to say what isn't spoken out loud, knows also how to be lyrical when it's called for. "The sun has come up behind the trees on the hill and they are fiercely gilded." (Admire that "fiercely".)
You do get pages and scenes that read like a post-graduate exercise. You also get long periods where nothing much happens. But one of this novel's several strengths is the way you always feel that something appalling is about to. Does it? Read your way to an ending of bruised heroism.
David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
