Wedding Bush Road by David Francis

There’s got to be a lemon in any book list and for many of our members the latest book, Wedding Bush Road, by David Francis, has been it.

It’s always a clue when people put a book back in the library or back on the shelf after two or three chapters. Or when people finish a book and can’t see the point as to why they read it.

It should have been a good book. It is written by an Australian author who works in Los Angeles as a lawyer, just like the protagonist, and regularly visits the family horse farm, at Tooradin, near the Mornington Peninsula in rural Victoria, which seems remarkably like the farm in the book. In fact, when he was interviewed on radio about the book recently, he admitted it was partly autobiographical.

David Francis's mother was Judith Francis, a talented Victorian equestrian who was famous for developing the riding skills of a number of Australians who went on to become show champions and Olympic competitors. She apparently did more than anyone before her to establish pony clubs throughout Victoria and was also on the first Australian women’s polo team.

The author told the radio interviewer that frankly he had had to wait until his mother died (of a stroke, in 2008) before he could write the book. He spent a long time writing many drafts over several years before publishing it in 2016. However, book club members may well say he needed to write a few more.

The problem we found with the book is that none of the characters is very likeable, particularly the main character, Daniel, who returns to his family's South Gippsland horse farm near the township of "Toovareen" because his mother calls him in LA to say that she’ll be “Dead as Dickens before the end of the year”.

He has to leave his lovely Venezuelan girlfriend and the elegant Christmas they had planned together to go back to the farm and re- enter a somewhat bogan lifestyle in the the heat and dust of the Australian bush. He finds out that while his mother has had a pretty bad “turn” she’s far from dying and is still quite prepared to give him more than one guilt trip about leaving her alone on the farm.

“Alone” is not strictly true since Ruthie’s ex-husband and Daniel's father is still limping around the property, which he considers still his, while his ex-girlfriend, Sharen, has torched his car and is generally destroying the family’s cottage which she rents under sufferance next door.

Meanwhile, Sharen’s former lover, Walker, hovers around in the shadows stealing horses and harassing her - he also has it in for Daniel and his family as events unfold. Ruthie also has the company of Reggie, Walker and Sharen’s 14 year old son who from time to time either lives in her ceiling or in a nearby tree to escape from Walker. Oh yes, and she has for company a faithful dog, Pip, a pony, which likes to live indoors, and three strange black Clydesdales who seem to be a menacing leitmotif, but who aren’t anything like it, really.

The next problem we had with the book was that the author has included the voices of several of these characters to give their views on the narrative. This is signalled to us by the pages being set in italics - but it is quite confusing to work out who is speaking.

The main problem with the book, however, seems to be a lack of heart. It is not clear that the author really knew where he was going with the story and consequently the ending is ambiguous and lacks both conviction and realism. He seems to be a fence-sitter when it comes to his characters, too, and it is not clear what we should feel about them. In one moment a character is violent to Daniel, the next, they are helping him to put out a fire. The menace is suggested but doesn’t really amount to much. Daniel's dubious hang-ups about his genes after apparently following his father's sexual misadventures seem unconvincing. And the tangled dark history of the family is resolved quite easily - particularly when Daniel decides to ignore family ties and his mother's supposed frailty, and head back to LA, after "burying" the problem.

Having said that, there are some great descriptions of the run down farm and the bush, together with details of the unsophisticated life of a regional town, centred around the pub. It is also clear that David has keenly observed what old age looks like close up and is prepared to tell us about it in detail.

Who is David Francis?

David Francis was born in Mornington Victoria in 1958 and is novelist, lawyer and academic. He studied arts and law at Monash University and then worked as a solicitor in Melbourne for two years. In 1985, he represented Australia in an equestrian team competing in Europe. He subsequently travelled to the US to be a show jumper. He currently works as a lawyer in Los Angeles and has taught creative writing at the University of California and the University of Southern California. He spends part of each year in Australia and Paris. Wedding Bush Road is his third book. His second book, Stray Dog Winter, was named as a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2009.