The Death of John Lacey is a dark and grimy historical saga set in gold rush era regional Victoria. It charts the rise and fall of a ruthless man, the way that the sins of the fathers are perpetuated by desperate sons and the difficulty of finding the right way when everyone and everything is wrong.
John Lacey is a cruel man who cares only for gold and power. To get his start Lacey kidnaps a young Aboriginal boy and forces him to work in an illegal mine before killing him.
Many years later John Lacey presides over a town he has named and built. The Montague brothers, two young thieves are caught and set fire to the hotel and kill several men attempting to escape. Ernst makes it out of town but his half-brother Joe is badly injured in the fire and takes refuge in the local church. The town’s new minister Gilbert Delaney is torn between the desire to protect Joe from John Lacey’s personal vengeance and his personal belief that the young man must pay for his crimes according to the law.
The Death of John Lacey is filled with despicable characters, but even the most accessible of these characters, the minister, is a frustrating mix of self-doubt and OCD type twitches. The narrative itself never really reaches a satisfying conclusion with a final showdown that felt like more of an anti-climax.
The most interesting element of the novel is the way that both John Lacey and the Montague brothers are products of violent and destructive environments created by their fathers, but none of them seem able to escape their own darker sides. Grim, gritty, violent, emotionally uninvolving, it could be read as a tragedy, a story of broken families and toxic masculinity. But I found it hard to care about the characters or their ultimate, brutal fates.
Reviewed by Tessa Chudy
Read. a book review of Snake Island by Ben Hobson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Hobson is a teacher, and an author, based in Brisbane. To Become a Whale, his debut novel, was released in 2017. It was longlisted for the ABIA Debut Fiction award and shortlisted for the Courier-Mail’s People’s Choice Award. His second novel, Snake Island, a literary thriller, was released in 2019.
0 Comments