Stephanie Jones: Book Review - The Road Back by Di Morrissey

A middle-aged journalist finds you can go home again in Australian writer Di Morrissey’s languorous tale of familial reconnection, The Road Back, set partly in Sydney and Indonesia and mostly in the idyllic town of Neverend, where protagonist Chris Baxter grew up. As we encounter him, Chris is returning to Sydney from a lengthy stint as a newspaper foreign correspondent, and banking (in the media job market about whose tenuousness we are repeatedly reminded) on another overseas posting.

The life of lone-wolf Chris is to his liking after a long ago “painful and expensive” divorce that left him with few scars other than instant irritation upon any contact with his ex-wife. More importantly, the union produced a daughter, 14-year-old Megan, now bristling against the blended-family conditions arising from her mother Jill’s recent remarriage and the suggestion of a move to Perth. Though they’ve spent little time together over many years, Chris has a solution: keep Megan with him and negotiate a local job. No such luck, he is told – it is Bangkok or bust.

In what appears to be his first selfless decision in some time, Chris sacrifices a steady income for his daughter and decamps to Neverend, where his mother Susan still lives in his childhood home. Morrissey does a commendable job of evoking the specifically Australian pastoral environs of the town – as Chris stops for lunch on the side of the road, a large goanna or dozy rock wallaby is apt to saunter by – and indeed, her evident passion for the rural setting produces a text that is more atmospheric than eventful, at least until the high drama of the climax.

The pacing of The Road Back fits the leisurely speed of life in Neverend, which is shaken up when Chris learns of his mother’s experiences as part of a goodwill envoy to Indonesia in the late 1960s. In flashbacks recounted from Susan’s perspective, romantic sightseeing is juxtaposed with unprosecuted crime in the seemingly lawless period following the failed coup of 1965. Those encountered then – the good, indifferent and hideous – will make a reappearance thanks to Chris’ notion that there’s a book in his mother’s story, and a plot that at times threatens to disintegrate is knitted together, however questionable the plausibility of the resolution.

Meanwhile, father and daughter mend all fences, and Megan’s loneliness in a new town and the troubles of a pot-smoking, neglected new friend are resolved with neck-snapping swiftness. In Morrissey’s world, there is no woe too intractable to be sorted with calm conversation over a cup of tea.

Much of the story, as generally pleasant as it is, suffers from insufficient momentum. Even when catastrophe threatens, it is quickly averted, and what serious damage is inflicted occurs off-screen, as it were, with the consequences reported by others. There is, however, true doom in the form of a super-villain who makes only a brief physical appearance in the story but whose titanic persona looms over the narrative and links the Australian and Indonesian storylines. In a novel that offers pure escapism, his presence is a provocative reminder that Australia is home to some very dangerous creatures.