Robert Drewe is an Australian author, and his novel «The Bodysurfers» was first published in the 1980. It is hard to say what the novel is about, but the very memorable opening scene seems to set the whole novel as if located on the beaches of Australia and the American east coast. Retrospectively, the novel does seem to be very typical of the 80s but as it is difficult to say what the novel is about, so it is difficult to explain what gives you this feeling. Unremarkable. ( )

I'm a little bit on the fence about this collection.

I remember how descriptive it was - how easily the author was able to render the Australian beach. It's the beach from my childhood, every weekend, every afternoon, every cool morning before it got too hot -- all those memories played vividly in my mind when I read this book.

But I can't actually remember what any of the stories were about? So, I don't know how I feel about it! I love how Drewe uses beautiful writing to describe an environment or a scene. The characters, on the other hand, I do not remember.

So, on one hand, this was really readable. I read it in about a day (I was trying to read 100 pages in a day at the time, and read 100 books in a year.)

But it wasn't very memorable. A bit of a shame for an Australian classic. So, if the characters were more significant in my memory, perhaps this would've been 4 stars. For now, it'll be 3 stars. ( )

Disappointing.

'His characters repeatedly hurl themselves at life and lovers. There is something very powerful and poignant in these stories.' …..so says one reviewer.

For me though - overall I found something ambiguous and essential lacking in the stories. They let me down severely with too few satisfactory resolutions. Maybe that is what short stories are supposed to be about - to leave you wondering?. I don’t know. I like a good twist at the end but this selection left me floundering like a fish washed up and gasping on the shore. Mostly it wasn’t a good place I was left in.

Drewe does blend character development with absorbing scenarios. Whilst each tale is different, they all leave you pondering, with deliberately loose ends to be considered. The Bodysurfers vividly evokes the beach, with the scent of the suntan oil, the sting of the sun and a lazy sensuality, but actually suggest a deep undercurrent of a sickly suburban malaise. I start to like each story but by the end I’m left with a bitter after taste that I can’t quite put my finger on...

The Bodysurfers in locating stories at the coast, the depiction of beach scenes in story after story soon suggests a preoccupation;
In ‘Looking for Malibu’, Peter Boyle expounds his theory on the beach:
‘You know something? When Australians run away they always run to the coast. They can’t help it. An American vanishes, he could be living in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, the mountains, the desert, anywhere. Not an Australian – he goes up the coast or down the coast and thinks he’s vanished without a trace’.

In ‘Shark Logic’, for instance, the protagonist, who has fled his family, has wound up on Australia’s Pacific coast where he dreams of escape to New Zealand: “I was thinking about New Zealand when I left the shop this afternoon and set off for my usual walk along the beach”
Drewe’s collection opens with ‘The Manageress and the Mirage’, set on the West Australian coast, from where “the Indian Ocean stretched flat and slick to Mauritius and beyond before curving into the sky”.Despite the fact that Mauritius is thousands of miles across the ocean, for Drewe, the beaches of Western Australia suggest it.

The Bodysurfers, mentions far-off islands and continents hinting at Australia’s and New Zealand’s geographical isolation, and the intensity with which escape is longed for. The beach as escape is not only signalled by its relative proximity to other places. However, Drewe marks the beach as the place at which illicit sexual activity occurs, and in so doing contribute to a convention that has its origins at least two hundred years before them in the writing spawned by European exploration of the Pacific. Commentators on Australian and New Zealand writing of the twentieth century also see the beach as the site of carnal pleasure.

Drewe exploits the sexual aspect of beach culture. Nude bathers crowd his beaches. ‘The Manageress and the Mirage’ finishes with a widower’s encounter with a new lover. ‘The Silver Medallist’ closes with the revelation of the incestuous character of the relationship between a lifesaver and his daughter. ‘The View from the Sandhills’ is the account of a pervert and ex-prisoner who spies on nude bathers.
The preoccupation with what is often very casual sexual activity is a steady stream of foundering marriages. The one married couple to survive an entire story together in the collection – Angela and David in ‘Looking for Malibu’ . It’s kind of a sad statistic I think.

Against this backdrop of marital discord, the sex at the beach promises freedom from the constraints and disappointments of the domestic life without ever quite delivering it. The beach, screaming of escape, is no mere playground, but essentially ambiguous in its significance.

I was drawn to the cover illustration first. A painting by Charles Meere (Australia 1890–1961), ”Australian beach pattern” (aka “Beach Pattern” which won the 1940 Sulman Prize exhibition. It was Meeres’ painting that prompted me to pick up the book. Meere was one of a group of Sydney artists whose work modernised classical artistic traditions as a means of imaging national life during the inter-war period. The epitome of his vision by the late 1930s is 'Australian beach pattern'; a tableau of beach dwellers whose athletic perfections take on monumental heroic proportions. Meere created a crowded and complex composition through a pattern of bodies which appear as a still life of suspended strength. Perennially popular, the painting has contributed more than any other in Australian art towards the myth of the healthy young nation as told through the metaphor of the tanned god-like body of the sunbather.

I wanted to really love this book, here was an Australian writer who had won the Walkley and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. The problem for me with “The BodySurfers” is that the characters in the stories are not godlike and only superficially depict that myth of the healthy young nation and I don’t mean physical but morally.

There is a good article/interview with Drewe here http://users.tpg.com.au/waldrenm/drewe.html

Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1943. He grew up and was educated in Western Australia where he took up journalism with the West Australian in 1961. He was the literary editor for the Australian from 1971 to 1974. He won the Walkley Award (Australia's highest such award) twice for journalism in 1976 and 1981. Drewe's novel, The Drowner was shortlisted for the 1997 Miles Franklin Award. Fortune won the National Book Council fiction prize in Australia. One of his anthologies, The Bay of Contented Men, won a Commonwealth Writers' Prize, while another, the best-seller The Bodysurfers, has been adapted for film, television, radio and stage. Robert Drewe is also a film critic, playwright and the author of several screenplays. His stage drama, South American Barbecue, was first performed in 1991.
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beautifully crafted short stories, very evocative ( )