Belinda Castles is an editor and writer whose first novel, Falling Woman, received much praise when it was published in 2000. Her second novel, The River Baptists, has won her the 2006 Vogel Literary Award.

    Castles lived for a time on an island in the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales and it is this landscape that
informs the setting for The River Baptists. The river plays a major part in the novel, serving as a conduit for all the action; people come and go, up and down the river, carrying with them their stories and their secrets.
    Castles’ approach to her setting is in itself appealing. On the one hand life here is depicted as a rather
monotonous one, revolving around trade on the river, weekend or holiday tourist traffic and evenings in one of two watering holes on the mainland; and there seems to be a malaise that affects the town and its residents.

    But it quickly becomes apparent that Castles is more interested in what lies below the surface, in the inner lives
of her characters, and she excels at bringing us into their world. There is Danny Raine who, after falling overboard while fishing with his father on another part of the river, has decided to pretend to be dead; Tom Shepherd, the tortured old-timer who lives in seclusion (and likes it), only surfacing in town to drown his sorrows, and often sinking his boat on the journey; and Rose, a writer of romance novels, who has come to live on Tom’s island, pregnant and reluctant to name the father.

    Castles is extremely talented at making us care about these characters and has created a supporting cast that only
serves to heighten the tension in the life of this town. Over a long, hot summer, with an arsonist on the loose and a rough newcomer, Kane, creating trouble, this community is about to realise the effects of their multitude of grievances and sorrows.

    As they start to learn about one another’s pasts and the consequences of their own actions and decisions, the
reader is embroiled in a small-town saga that is completely engrossing and extremely well-pitched. Castles’ masterful control of her characters ensures that, while the reader is completely hooked, there is no distracting hysteria to mar the climax. And so the river flows unstoppably on, cleansing these characters of their pasts, and sweeping in fragile new futures.

Kabita Dhara is a Melbourne-based editor, reviewer and former bookseller

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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