A Boat Load of Home Folk by Thea Astley

After Lake reached what should have been structure, he found an aching gap. There were chunks, of course, of wall and roof and immense spaces filled with thrown trees. A statue of Our Lady of Sion lay face down among the grasses. the whiteness of it was like light. It all seemed amusingly symbolic though he had not the heart to see it thus while custom nudged him past towards the presbytery, now only a flattened jumble of timber walls and passion-vine streamers torn out in the high wind. They flew steadily and crazily over the rubble, over the banana-trees that had one stood in a grove near the front door. As Lake went by he picked at a frond of these whose suave leaves lay in his hand without emotion and added to his sense of aloneness. The rain was cutting his skin like bullets, pasting his hair across his eyes. But he opened his mouth to the rain the way he used to do as a boy and felt the tearing of it across his tongue.

Thea Astley's A Boat Load of Home Folk focuses on a group of people who disembark from a ship on a Pacific island which is, I think, supposed to be Vanuatu. Among them are an unhappily married couple, the Seabrooks; Stevenson, a local official dogged by his own relationship wit his young son; a pair of elderly companions, Miss Paradise and Miss Trumper, on vacation; and a gruff priest with a mysterious errand. None of them know that, before the day is over, a terrible cyclone will rip through the island, exposing their frailties and insecurities in the same way that it rips the roofs from the buildings.

The priest, Greely, turns out to be sent from the diocese (or whatever) to discipline a local priest, Lake, who has recently been caught in flagrante delicto with a young native boy. Lake is arguably the center of the novel, and its most interesting character, an ineffectual and disillusioned priest right out of a Graham Greene novel. When the elderly Miss Trumper is stricken by a nervous attack--brought on by a rift with her companion Miss Paradise, and the psychological horror of, I guess, seeing a native Pacific Islander for the first time--Lake is pulled out of the bar where he is drinking himself stupid in order to perform the last rights. If this were Greene, perhaps, Lake would do this begrudgingly, and have to face the truth that God works his ways with human agents even despite their own inadequacies and failures. But Lake doesn't give Miss Trumper her last rights; in fact, he wakes up in the eye of the cyclone to find that she has died, unshriven. This, Lake decides, is his ultimate failure; that the inquisitor Greely cares less about this failure than he does the homosexual dalliance is the ultimate indictment of the authority that seeks to punish him. (I also really liked Lake's confession to Greely that, while drunk, he consecrated an entire truck of bread.)

I found the stories of the other characters difficult to penetrate. Like Astley's other novels, A Kindness Cup and The Acolyte, I felt as if I were missing something, as if unable to get through to some essential nature of the book that was veiled. Which is strange, because the fundamental premise of the book seems rather straightforward: the terrible cyclone, the failing relationships, etc--a natural disaster as the exposer of things that we'd prefer to hide is almost a cliche. I did find a renewed appreciation for Astley's prose, and I liked how she refuses to pull punches with the strength of the hurricane, which really does rip things up, sink the boat, destroy houses, and kill people. After all, if you want your life to be radically different, you first must destroy it.