An Elegant Thriller

...Classic vernacular, like a model from the old textbooks...

...But Scully is so madly in love, so busy whitewashing walls and digging septic fields, that he doesn't see trouble ahead?until it lands on him at an arrivals gate in Shannon airport...

...The book's one dicey departure from logic and plausibility, however, occurs when Winton asks his readers to watch Billie survive and staunchly transcend all manner of terrifying near-catastrophes—and yet remain too traumatized by her mother's abrupt decampment to recall any of the circumstances surrounding the solitary flight to Shannon...

...Gay colored clothes, an ancient comic book, toiletries, a folder full of documents, for Godsake, and some photographs...

...It was a small house, simple as a child's drawing and older than his nation...

...It is no easy task to make all these plot twists seem plausible and convincing, and to keep the narratives from suggesting a labyrinth through which the writer is running his hero, like a lab rat in a maze...

...Winton's novel is about something, about many things: the confusing cultural contrasts between Europe and Australia, between the Old World and the New...

...Indeed, such fictions inspire us to see the twisting and turning narrative line as a metaphor for the mysteries of a higher order...

...Serviceable, plain, often eloquent without calling attention to itself, his language is free of those stereotypes and cliches ("He strode across the room") that can slow down John Grisham and Michael Crichton thrillers...

...She is an odd little wise child, with an interesting and engaging sensibility...

...From this point on, the eventful novel contains very few events a responsible critic could reveal without willfully ruining the suspense that propels us through the book, or spoiling the many small shocks that may cause us to skip a breath...

...The moderately discerning reader will sense in the early descriptions something sinister wafting in on the mists that gather round the Leap and the castle...

...But in the end that hardly matters...

...Such books provide the simple pleasures of what is commonly called a "page-tamer" without the drawback of bad writing and thin characterization, and with none of the guilty suspicion that one might be wasting one's time...

...Scully's one friend, the postman, speaks darkly of family tragedy and informs Scully that the man he had worked for in London was a much-feared soldier in the IRA...

...Reviewed by Francine Prose Author, "Hunters and Gatherers," to be published in August THE AUSTRALIAN WRITER Tim Win-ton's new novel is one of those clean, elegant, metaphysical thrillers we most often associate with Brian Moore, Graham Greene or Robert Stone...

...Scully's daughter, Bil-lie, gets off the plane alone, too numb and shell-shocked to explain why her mother is not with her...

...The Riders is a novel that makes us keep wanting to find out what happens next—while constantly reminding us that there is more at stake than the answer to that question...

...They were headed home when he and Jennifer, his wife, decided on a whim to buy the abandoned Binchy's Bothy and start new lives in the Irish outback...

...A working-class Australian, he can't quite believe the good fortune that has awarded him a beautiful wife, a smart seven-year-old daughter and enough physical strength, survival instinctand manual skills to support his fam-ily during two years of wandering through Europe...

...Scully's slide into his own private hell has many sharp bumps along the way: a suspicious death, an attack by a vicious dog, a perilous water-taxi ride, several near-disasters, a mysterious woman who may be even more of "a bad dream from hell" than Scully initially thinks...

...We learn that "all the valley people are chary of the place...

...They were hallowed, frightening places to Scully...

...Toys, more clothes...

...It stood alone on the bare scalp of the hill called the Leap...

...Queues of smooth, confident men in pinstripes...

...Winton is extremely skillful at capturing the details and flavors of a regional landscape, the pace and mood of a city...

...It is character as much as plot, though, that draws us forward...

...The Riders is full of false leads and blind alleys, of jealousy and paranoia...

...the frightening ease with which the most settled life can take a sudden turn toward disorder...

...Behind glass and wood and carpet, so much power...

...Winton constructs Scully's point of view with deft, comprehensible accuracy, acknowledging the contradictions in this proudly independent and deeply uxorious fellow...

...For what stays with us is the fact that The Riders is an immensely entertaining book and takes on important issues...

...The well-oiled clack of briefcases...

...Two hundred yards below...

...he went through it with unmistakable desperation...

...Billie, Scully's daughter, is a slightly less successful character...

...Perhaps most alarmingly, the telegrams Scully receives from his wife—who has gone on to Australia with his daughter to tidy up a few business and family matters, and will be joining him as soon as she sells their house in Fremantle—are chillingly businesslike...

...The instantaneous nature of things...

...A neighbor, Jimmy Brereton, tries not to brood on "the things he's seen here over the years...

...Right there on the floorhe unzippedher little tartan case, and to the great amusement of the next shift of meeters and greeters...

...the equally confusing changes in our ideas of family, men and women, gender roles...

...The Riders has a high-speed roller coaster of a plot, but there is an unhurried, deceptively calming approach to that first drastic plunge into confusion and chaos...

...was the remains of a gothic castle, a tower house and fallen wings that stood monolithic above the valley with its farms and soaklands...

...Partly Winton succeeds so well because his writing is lovely...

...With the mute Billie in tow, Scully more or less retraces the route of his family's recent peregrinations through Europe, traveling to Greece, Italy, France, and the Netherlands...

...The casual shifting of currencies and information...

...And yet readers may feel like Scully, unable to focus on the sights and seductions of travel, searching along with our hero for any clue, the faintest trace of his wife...

...Things that make the hairs on your arms stand up, like every poor bastard mortared into the walls and fed to the pigs and tilled into the cellars of that place is stirring...

...and the utter impossibility of ever knowing the truth about those we think we know best...

...Wrappers, a packet of raspberry gum, a plastic Darth Vader, 10 English pounds, but no note from Jennifer...

...As the book opens, the big-hearted, optimistic Scully is fixing up an 18th-century cottage on the West Coast of Ireland...

...Like a pagan temple...

...He is a brave man who, despite being able to hold all sorts of demanding and dangerous jobs, still retains inside himself the working-class kid suddenly intimidated by the brassy shine of the American Express office in Florence: "Down by the Pitti Palace, the Amex office smelt of flowers and paper and damp coats...

...He stooped and went through the many pockets of Billie's denim jacket...

...Two rooms upstairs, two down...