Leaping into the footsteps of an Aussie classic

The Leap by Sydney-based journalist Paul Daley tells the story of an Englishman dealing with a tough outback society

Detail from the cover of The Leap by Paul Daley

One of the challenges of fiction, for the writer and the reader is the believability of the characters: whether a made-up character is authentic is unknowable, yet the thought, the suspicion, sticks in the mind.

This idea percolated as I read The Leap, the page-turning new novel from Sydney-based journalist and author Paul Daley, which is an unapologetic homage to Kenneth Cook’s 1961 outback masterpiece Wake in Fright, which was filmed by the Canadian director Ted Kotcheff a decade later.

I wondered if the inhabitants of The Leap, an Australian town “three-fifths of the way to f..k-all-nowhere-ville”, all “weirdos, racists, drunks, misogynists, druggos, religious freaks and gun nuts”, were realistic.

The Leap by Paul Daley

I have not met a group of hard-drinking, crudely-tattooed pig shooters with names such as Ferret, so I don’t know.

I had similar thoughts about the main character, British diplomat Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill, who suffers post-traumatic stress disorder from postings in South-East-Asia (the 2004 tsunami) and a resultant drinking problem.

Ben, as he’s known, has been posted from London to Canberra, which is seen as a cushy “cultural” position. Be nice to visiting English rock stars and cricket teams and so on. His wife and three children, aged 10, 14 and 16, are soon to join him. The cushion becomes a bed-of-nails.

A 38-year-old Australian flight steward and wannabe actor, Charlene Sloper, falls to her death from an apartment in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, where she was partying.

She was born and bred in The Leap, a name that has multiple nuances, especially from an Indigenous perspective.

The town lawyer advises that the “contemporaneous Aborigine problem’’ continues.

Two women, British citizens, are charged with murder. If guilty, the sentence is death by beheading or stoning.

It is Ben’s job to save them, which is what brings him to The Leap, face-to-face with Charlene’s father, Cecil Sloper, who quotes from Deuteronomy and insists on an eye for an eye.

What follows is a well-written and humorous – there’s a LOL joke about Foster’s Lager – game of cat and mouse in which reputations, and ultimately lives, are at stake. The author snuggles close to Wake In Fright, particularly in the pig hunting scene, but it’s hard to blame him for that. It’s an Australian literary classic that deserves to be remembered.

Stephen Romei is an adjunct
research fellow at La Trobe University