Part adventure tale, part romance, part Western (but without the gunslinging), The Burial has already earned Collins comparisons with Cormac McCarthy. She brought him down with the blunt side of an axe.īut this is not just Jessie’s story - the narrative also covers the two men who are on her trail: the opium-addicted Sergeant Barlow and the aboriginal tracker Jack Brown who secretly knows (and loves) Jessie but never lets on.Īdventure and romance with a Western feel On the eve of my birth, my mother concertinaed my father while I lay inside her. You might like to think of your own mother knitting blankets expanding outwards in all colours while you were in her womb. She later marries Fitz, even though he treats her appallingly and is violent and abusive from the first day they met - any wonder she decides to do him in. We also learn how she was apprenticed to Fitzgerald “Fitz” Henry, a fiery red-headed man living in a remote valley, to help him break in horses. Through a series of flashbacks we learn about Jessie’s colourful past, which includes a stint as a circus rider and a two-year stretch in prison. Indeed, the baby has so much sympathy for her mother, that you immediately warm to Jessie despite her track record as livestock thief, convict and murderer. In a distinctive and unusual twist, it is the dead baby that narrates the story - a literary device that feels more natural and less showy or intrusive than you might initially expect.
The book opens in dramatic style: she’s just given birth to a premature baby while on the run and she’s buried it alive. The Burial tells the tale of Jessie Hickman, a female bushranger who rustles horses and duffs cattle, in the years after the Great War. But most of all I was captivated by the storytelling. From the opening line - “If the dirt could speak, whose story would it tell?” - to the closing sentence, I was held in thrall by the exquisite prose, the luscious descriptions of the bush and a cast of curious well-drawn characters.
Review copy courtesy of the publisher.Ĭourtney Collins’ The Burial is such an extraordinarily powerful book it’s hard to believe it was written by a first-time novelist. Fiction – paperback Allen & Unwin UK 310 pages 2013.
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