****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This book is a delight, especially for fans of the movie. I doubt that it's been readily available for a long time, especially in the U.S., so we owe NYRB a big thank you for bringing it back in print, and at a reasonable price, as well. The book contains an excellent forward, which summarizes both the similarities and differences between it and Roeg's film, and I don't want to recap all that here. I would recommend reading the forward after reading the book, though. It's a book for innocent eyes, being basically a coming-of-age fable (amazing how many great COA stories come out of Oz). It's short; you can read it at a sitting. In these days of obese novels, it's nice to be reminded of how much you can do with 10% as many words. Probably 5% in this case.There are a couple of differences between film and book that I would like to mention, though. One of Roeg's major changes was in ascribing the Aborigine boy's death to his disheartening discovery of how White civilization impacted the environment (his universe). This fit the concerns that were becoming prominent when the film was made (and are still relevant, of course), whereas, in the book, it results essentially from a racial culture clash (the book was written in 1959). Indeed, the two white children are from the American South (although they frequently use disconcertingly inappropriate Pommie/Aussie colloquialisms), which may have stemmed from the notoriety of the Civil Rights movement, but also served to distance English/Australian readers from the racism expressed by the white kids. Putting the cause of the black boy's death within the misunderstandings of the three children makes it even more heartbreaking. And the Aborigine's decision to save the whites, although he 'knows' they have killed him, is the moral heart of the book. That's a lot to lose in the movie.Both the book and film capture, in a rather romanticized way, the unique beauty of the Australian outback. The book, however, makes geographic sense. People who know the country are sometimes taken aback by the almost psychotic pilgrimage in the movie (imagine someone in the Grand Canyon discovering the Space Needle and you know the feeling). It never bothered me, watching the movie (which has its own logic), but it adds some realism to the book.There is a critical point about Jenny Agutter's final reverie in the film (of the three kids swimming together) which I had always interpreted as her memory of something we hadn't been shown in the rest of the film. That could not possibly be the case, and I want to thank the author of the forward, Lee Siegel, for whacking me across the head with it so that I finally understood what was really happening. No, I won't spoil it, in case, like me, you need the illumination. Read the book. You won't regret it.
