A Boat Load of Home Folk

When the tourist ship Malekula arrives at a tropic island in the the Pacific the crushing heat and the looming hurricane intensify the hostilities and frustrations of the egocentric people on board. And when the hurricane bursts on the island the havoc it brings is less perhaps than the personal storms of man and wife, of spinster friends, of man and mistress, of erring priest.Gerald Seabrook's pointless womanising achieves a finality of irritation for his suffering wife; elderly Miss Paradise drives her life-long friend, Miss Trumper, to make a fatal pilgrimage; the agent Stevenson sees the failure of his dream of love with his mistress; and the priest, Father Lake, explodes his own petty vices and his spiritual impotence. Their moments of truth are brilliantly illuminated as the story moves to its climax in the hurricane and its aftermath.A sensitive and unsentimental specialist in suffering and conflict, Thea Astley sees the user and the used, the destroyer and the victim, with an unerring eye for character and motive. In A Boat Load of Home Folk her sympathetic insight is leavened by a rich vein of comedy that underlines the absurdity and pathos of the human dilemmas she describes.