Book review: ‘Memory’s a slippery bastard,” observes Lachy, the complicated and flawed central character of The Last Trace. Memory here is at times outright malevolent. It conceals itself in the dark corners of the mind and then unexpectedly leaps out – boo! – to scare the hell out of you. Even scarier is not being able to remember.
Lachy finds himself in the pub, in the small town of Dalgety in rural Australia. Dalgety is like all small towns in rural Australia, blink and you’ll miss it, mate. He is there with his teenage son, Kai, who he is spending an extended period of time with for the first time in both of their lives.
They are holed up in their remote family cabin, Mimosa. Lachy is an aid worker and has spent almost all of his adult life doing good things in stricken parts of the world. This sounds admirable but it is also an avoidance technique. Either he is a good person who wants to save the planet or he is a person who wants to save the planet but is not a good person. We don’t know because neither does he.
He has no idea how he ended up in the small-town boozer with his son. He has no memory of having driven them here and no idea why he has a bad cut on his arm. He has no memory of the old bloke with a face as battered as an old ute, or why he insists he owes Lachy a round or two. He has been having blackouts for some time.
Ronnie, who Lachy’s sister Sheridan calls “the mad, old bat”, is Mimosa’s nearest neighbour. She’s pretty much a recluse and an enigma. Nobody knows what her past is. She’s a prepper. She is given to mysterious utterances predicting ill winds to come. Lachy can only smell Ronnie: “a combination of deodorant, sweat, horse and dog. The tang of the country.” You can just about smell her yourself. This is good plain writing. The good Australian thriller writers excel at this. This is very Strine. The writing reflects the environment and the characters.
Lachy and Kai are awaiting the arrival of Sheridan, her husband and their two young daughters for an Easter weekend get-together. Sheridan is a life coach, which means that she is controlling in a do-goody way. There is a near-catastrophic incident involving the girls, for which Lachy is blamed. It’s not actually his fault but the one person who knows what really happened is too afraid to own up. Lachy and Sheridan’s mother has dementia. She does jigsaws and is destined to remember her past – which is twisty and tricky and about which her children have no knowledge.
There is a plot within the plot involving an American woman Lachy met once who is now demanding, for an unspecified reason, that he provide her with his DNA. There is more unresolved business involving Lachy being a whistleblower. The company that employs him would really like him to go away, quietly.
All of this results in something of a plot pile-up. And this sometimes detracts from a closer examination of the characters and of the central theme, which is the slipperiness of memory and how jigsaws are resolved.
