Literary Ruralism (Part XIV): A thriller from down under

I read a review of The Lost Man in today's New York Times.  The new novel, by Jane Harper, is being published this week in the United States.  Harper is a novelist I'd never even heard of before today, and I'm not really into crime novels/thrillers.  That said, the review is quite positive, so I have ordered the book.  Here's the part of Charles Finch's review I want to highlight for this blog:

“The Lost Man” is set in Queensland, a ranch’s distance off from a town called Balamara, itself “a single street, really,” 1,500 kilometers west of Brisbane. (For those of you still using imperial units, 1,500 kilometers is roughly equivalent to one billion miles.) In this remote country, Nathan Bright is isolated further still by an ancient transgression whose nature Harper doesn’t immediately disclose. 

* * *

“Human relationships are vast as deserts,” Patrick White, perhaps Australia’s greatest writer, once wrote. “They demand all daring.” Harper’s books succeed in part because she conveys how even now, geography can be fate. Heat and empty space in her work defeat modernity, defeat logic, technology and even love, throwing us back upon our irreducible selves.

Ah yes, this reminds me of what I wrote here, an idea much resisted by some of the North American academics who edited the volume, that technology (or "modernity" in the lingo of the reviewer) does not in fact easily or readily (or inexpensively) tame material distance. 

As for Harper as an author and a force, the reviewer writes:

Book by book, she’s creating her own vivid and complex account of the outback, and its people who live where people don’t live.

What a powerful way of expressing that one lives in a truly remote, barely populated place.

I'm linking to two posts (here and here) about my own travelogue/journey through Queensland's interior in 2012, when I was a visiting scholar at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba, the nation's largest inland/non coastal population cluster.