Book Review : New Thriller Gives a Vivid Picture of the Outback

Alice to Nowhere by Evan Green (St. Martin’s Press: $16.95; 285 pages)

Once, while making a long train journey across Australia, I awoke to find we weren’t moving. The train had broken down and stood silent on the tracks. Out the window of my compartment lay a barren and forbidding landscape. Hours passed and nothing moved except the heat waves, apparitions rippling the gum trees and a straight horizon of red clay.

By noon, help arrived from Port Pirie, and we were once again on our way. But in those few hours, while the train stood crippled and isolated in the outback, I got a sense of something about that land. Crossing it is one thing. Breaking down in it is another--an almost unthinkable proposition.

No one I know of has written more vividly about this extraordinary landscape than Evan Green does in “Alice to Nowhere,” fiction that aptly falls into the category of thriller. It’s all there, the heart of Australia, with its components of loneliness and flies, intense heat, dirt and isolation--the feeling of elements posing a continuous threat to life.

The story opens with the murder of an elderly woman, a hotel keeper in Alice Springs, and the theft of opals from a safe. The two men who have committed these crimes--Johnny and Frog--escape and make their way north to the small town of Marree, and eventually hide in the back of a truck belonging to postman Fred Crawford.

Once every two weeks, Crawford makes a 300-mile trip into the outback, stopping to deliver mail and supplies to remote and isolated homesteads before reaching the tiny outpost of Birdsville, his destination. The trip is an immensely difficult one. There is no road; winds and rain can easily alter the tire tracks from his previous journey. And what if his truck should break down?

“Fred Crawford took perverse pride in the fact that the truck looked bad but ran well. . . . It had a rough life, churning its way slowly over the sand hills, rumbling across wide stretches of gibber plain, following the grooved wheel tracks that its own tires had carved in the desert. There were salt pans to avoid, basins of bull dust to drag at the wheels and, on some occasions, flooded rivers to cross.”

On this trip, he has a passenger, a nurse from Sydney, Barbara Dean, who is traveling to Birdsville to take up her post in a clinic there. Without knowing the two murderers are hidden in the truck, Crawford, Dean and Fred’s assistant, Ivan, set off on the lonely track in the battered truck. When their passengers are discovered, the trip turns into a nightmare.

Several things make this thriller a satisfying book--not the usual elements of plot, character or motivation--all of which are fine but not outstanding. What really emerges as powerful and interesting is the Australian outback--the land itself--and the fact that people actually choose such a remote and harsh life.

Dean and Crawford and their nascent romance, their admirable decency and courage, the crazy killers and the outcome of the journey, it’s all engaging. You wait eagerly for the next thing to happen, as you should with a thriller. But it’s when the author turns to what I sense he knows very well, which is the minutiae of the journey--things that really enliven the main-stay plot, such as the terrific descriptions of driving a truck so temperamental and jerry-rigged that it’s like a horse that can only be ridden by one man, or the otherworldly look of the land, the faces of the outlanders, the feeling of being unwashed and beyond caring and detached from civilization--it’s in the successful realization of these details that something unique turns up in the writing.