Past the Shallows is the first novel of the Australian author Favel Parrett. After a brief stay on the island of Tasmania, just south of Australia, Parrett used its uniquely bleak geography and unpredictable ocean as the setting for her novel about the relationship between two young boys and their violent and abusive father. Past the Shallows was published in 2011 and received measured praise for the author’s evident promise – it is a finely drawn study of the inner lives of the boys, but fails to ground most of its other characters in a satisfying way. When the novel opens, we meet Joe, Miles, and Harry, three brothers growing up in a small Tasmanian fishing village. Their mother died in a car accident a long time ago. Their father, known only as “Dad,” is a vicious, cruel alcoholic, an unremittingly evil man who mistreats all of them as much as possible. There is a sense that Dad is being tormented by a terrible secret. Dad makes his living as an abalone fisherman, a job that requires him to face the often changing and dangerous ocean on a daily basis. Joe is much older than his brothers, and after Dad broke his arm when he was 13 years old, Joe moved out of Dad’s brown house and went to live with the boys’ grandfather, who has recently died. Miles and Harry, meanwhile, are forced to try to be as invisible as possible in order to avoid at least some of Dad’s anger and fury. The novel focuses on Miles and Harry, who are approximately 10 and 7, alternating between their voices and perspectives to tell the story. Dad keeps Joe and Miles out of school so that they can help him fish for abalone on the boat. Harry is too small to go, and spends his days finding things on the beach – shells, driftwood, and other “treasures.” Miles loves the ocean, and spends as much as of his free time surfing with Joe as he can. Harry, on the other hand, is terrified of the water. The boys have an incredibly strong bond, and Miles feels responsible for taking care of Harry as much as he can – especially since their father spends whatever money he earns on drink. We know less about their feelings about Joe, who is old enough to have moved out to escape their father, but not old enough to take them with him. Miles and Harry try to reconstruct their memories of the car accident that killed their mother, since they were also in the car. We meet the other people in the boys’ lives. There is Jeff, Dad’s fishing partner, another violent and terrible man. When we first see him, he viciously hacks apart a shark that attacked their boat – and then, finding out that the shark was pregnant, also hacks apart the fetuses. Later, he holds Harry down and forces him to drink whiskey while Dad looks on. On the other hand, there is the friendly and kind George. One day, Harry finds a friendly dog on the road and follows him to the home of George, an older man who has been terribly disfigured by an accident. His house is cozy and inviting and he tells Harry stories about his mother. And then there is Auntie Jean, their mother’s sister, who is sometimes kind and sometimes mean, but is generally not a helpful or protective presence. In general, even though everyone in the small village seems to know what’s happening to Miles and Harry at their Dad’s hand, no one cares to intervene in any way. Slowly, we learn details about the past, the accident, and the relationship between Dad and the boys’ mother. It becomes clear that Harry isn’t Dad’s biological son, and Joe may also be from their mother’s relationship with another man. We also learn that before the car accident that killed her, their mother had left Dad, filling him with even more rage than he originally had. There is a clear implication that Dad is directly responsible for their mother’s death – and this is the secret that is eating away at him. Joe tells Miles and Harry that he has built himself a boat and is planning to sail away from Tasmania to the South Pacific islands, in essence abandoning his brothers to his father’s whims. Furious that Joe will no longer be around to help on the boat, Dad forces the frightened and seasick Harry to start going fishing along with Miles. When something goes wrong during the fishing, an enraged Dad starts holding Miles’s head underwater for longer and longer periods of time, screaming that this will teach him the correct way to do things. He then picks up Harry, who has never learned to swim, and throws him overboard. Miles dives in after Harry but the sea is too rough for him to be able to hold on to his brother and keep himself afloat. Harry drowns with visions of George’s house. Miles stops swimming and also prepares to drown, but is rescued and wakes up in the hospital. Dad is nowhere to be found – he has run off to escape any possible prosecution for his murder of Harry. The novel ends with Joe and Miles about to sail away to somewhere new on Joe’s boat. Critics praise the novel’s spare and beautiful descriptions of the ocean, and some of the discreet moments that characterize the boys’ relationship to the water. But the novel is universally criticized for failing to create a three-dimensional portrait of Dad, who is drawn as so unremittingly evil that his behavior fails to make a lot of sense. The relentless terribleness of the boys’ lives also comes in for disapproval, with some wondering whether the novel is just an exercise in miserabilism.

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Favel Parrett

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