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The
Lovemakers: Book One: Saying All the Great Sexy Things
by Alan Wearne. Penguin Australia, 2001. |
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In
a somewhat rare gesture these days, Alan Wearne has written
a verse-novel, apparently pitched by publisher Penguin
to a general readership. Taking on the formidable task
of tracking the relationships of a number of youngsters
from "The Shire", a small Victorian country town in the
1970s, through their adolescence and finally to the realities
of adulthood, Wearne takes great pains to map out the
tone of each encounter between this group of people who
will become each others' lovers, friends, nemeses and
ghosts.
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Kim
Spacey is the resident bad boy whose attitude is reminiscent
of the character Marlon Brando played in On the Waterfront.
Brando's line was "Wanna hear my philosophy of life?
Get to him before he gets to you", whereas Spacey's sentiments
are a little less personally confrontational:
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Kim
enjoyed giving as much as he liked taking:
wasn't it who you took things from
and who you gave things to
that
really mattered: who felt bad and who felt good?
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The
cover states this is "Book One" of a series yet to be
expanded on, and many narrative and character threads
are shamelessly left dangling, not just at the close of
the book, but all the way through. It is as if Wearne
is saying to the reader, "this is post-modern, it's real;
it's realer than real and in real life circular themes
are for babies". We see Wearne's characters grow up, and
there are lots of them; so many it is sometimes
difficult to keep track of each of them. As a whole, however,
this is an absorbing work that while it is sometimes hard-going
is, at the same time, masterly in conveying a very earthy,
no-nonsense portrait of these (sometimes endearingly)
faulty people.
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