When I started reading this book, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it. It’s set on the beaches of a tropical island, for one thing, and I tend to prefer mountains to the sea. Also, the pace was slow-moving at first, whereas the title alone, Deadman Bay, led me to expect dramatic action, probably starting early on.
I first came across the author, Patrick Wayland, when reviewing Taiwan Tales [Taipei Times, March 19, 2015]. His story about an aging baseball player who comes to Taiwan in an attempt to revive his fortunes seemed to me the best tale in the collection, marked by an ear for the American language of its narrator and its evocation of the Taiwan countryside. So I came to Deadman Bay with relatively high hopes.
This new novel concerns a young graphic arts graduate, Edward, who, reluctant to take a job with big business in New York, opts instead for one taking care of some elite properties in the British Virgin Islands. He soon finds himself the sole occupant of a caretaker’s cabin a short distance from two luxurious houses on what is in effect a private beach. Despite an early power outage, he manages to survive, trekking across the island to a small tourist town to replenish his supplies.
His eyes are soon drawn, however, to a solitary local girl, Mary, who arrives in his bay from time to time to retrieve the catch from her lobster-pots. This romantic interest proceeds more or less predictably, but is balanced by Edward’s discovery of a dead body, strangled with fishing line, next to his simple pier. But after he’s reported this to the town police, the discovery is largely forgotten while more congenial matters occupy the book’s central pages.
The elite properties’ owners, for instance, show up for a brief visit, and Edward and Mary turn the event into a success, despite having lost the steaks they’d bought in advance in the town during a nightclub brawl, by dressing up as pirates to entertain the owner’s children, and preparing a greatly appreciated crab lunch. When left to themselves, the young couple live an idyllic life, and Edward takes up painting again, thereby making his life Gauguin-like, and, in his eyes, almost perfect.
Minor characters include the island’s top drug dealer, Mr Bones, who as the story reaches its climax turns out to be a very different person from what you’d come to expect. Then there’s a local policeman with whom Edward develops a semi-confessional relationship.
So the book moves from pastoral to romance, then to whodunnit (an expression, incidentally, that originally implied via its grammatical error that only uneducated people read such books). And as it does so, it gets more and more gripping, so that by the end I was reluctant to put the book down. Things end partly happily, partly less so, in ways it would be wrong to divulge.
A good novel should have an evolving plot, or plots, varied characters ideally identifiable by the way they speak, plus a couple of themes that evolve along with the plot but are not identical with it. This modest offering has all these things, so that although it can’t be described as compulsory reading it nonetheless can fairly be called a worthy effort displaying considerable craftsmanship and judgment.
A regular narrative voice, for instance, is sustained throughout, incidents are balanced and a sense of proportion kept. Only one event seems slightly problematic — when a boat-load of tourists arrive and camp on the beach after Edward has refused them permission to sleep in one of his rooms. This does allow the author to present a bizarre but often met with character-type, a man who believes we should all live in the present and treat life as one long party, but it doesn’t advance the plot in any ways I could detect.
For the rest, the familiar ethos of a tropical paradise beneath which something far more ominous lurks is efficiently presented. The romantic element may proceed predictably, but it doesn’t end like that. And the whodunnit element certainly contains its enjoyable surprises.
It won’t detract from the pleasure to be derived from reading the book to say that drug-smuggling forms part of its plot-interest. The drug-smugglers themselves remain mere formulas, however, seen as it were at a distance and rather resembling the pirates of old that the young couple impersonate for the benefit of the elite property owners. As for the drugs themselves, Edward proves himself the soul of conventionally-perceived respectability when he disposes of a free sample of marijuana Mr Bones has given him in the trash can.
By and large, I found the character of Mary the most subtly presented. She’s outwardly very attractive, but inwardly modest and exceptionally well-disposed. She works in a small library, and this neatly symbolizes her seriousness and lack of pretension. Her arrival on the scene can only do Edward good, and when he paints what he judges to be the finest picture of his life, of Mary lying naked on a sofa, you feel the couple have together reached a pinnacle of happiness and fulfillment.
Edward himself is the vehicle for one of the novel’s deeper themes — is life on a tropical beach really preferable to one working to amass a fortune in, say, New York? Edward initially prefers the beach, but retains the option of returning one day to the Big Apple, a notion that upsets Mary who was born in the islands and hopes to remain there. The two have, in other words, slightly different perspectives, but this only adds to the charm of their evolving relationship.
Deadman Bay, then, is an efficient work, modest in its aims but successful in achieving them. It’s published by Lone Wolf Press, one of Taiwan’s small handful of independent English-language publishers.
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