Maryrose Cuskelly is an award winning writer or fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel is The Cane.
The Cane transports the reader to the Northern Queensland canefields and back in time to the 1970’s.
The town of Quala is reeling from the disappearance of sixteen year old Janet McClymont. In the weeks since Janet failed to arrive at her babysitting job the canefields have been repeatedly swept by search parties and every man is the district has been grilled over his whereabouts at the time of her disappearance.
Told through a multitude of perspectives, The Cane delves into the psychology of a town on the brink. The questions of whether Janet is alive is almost secondary to the rarely spoken, ‘could have been one of us?’
This is a society that views outsiders with suspicion.
The new school teacher is too tall, too long haired and too free in his advocacy of social change. His alibi must be rechecked and still not believed.
The new publican’s daughter is old for primary school and too open in her ways with the boys. Raelene flaunts the unspoken rules that have turned the town in on itself. She freely walks alone and refuses to defer to parental authority.
The new copper brought in from Brisbane is just too much because she’s a woman and Quala’s men have their own ideas about the roles women should occupy.
With the harvest being held off in the hopes that Janet might be found before the cane burn the stage is set for tensions to run high. If the cops can’t do anything about the malignant force that seems to have invaded Quala the locals might just have to sort it out themselves.
The Cane has all the elements of a seat of your pants beach read, purpose built to give you aching arms and sunburn as you lay too long turning page after page. As it builds inexorably towards the moment the canefields are set alight the book shows us how social unrest brews in a town turned against itself.
The various narratorial perspectives glimpse at the ways this highly conservative social milieu is fighting against itself and the forces of change. Women in particular are given the spotlight as agents of change and targets of those who would maintain the status quo.
The narrative is based on a true story and it is not simply in this historical alignment that we can find resonance with The Cane’s exploration of social expectation and control.
It was interesting to read back fifty years in the wake of the current news cycle. While the sexism and misogyny of many of The Cane’s men is more bald than we might be used to today, there is undoubtedly a through line from older attitudes towards women working, reading and expressing themselves openly, and attitudes in certain sections of the media about ‘proper’ behaviour from prominent women.
By giving us perspectives from characters as diverse as children, established and recent arrivals we are privy to a world that is seeking a united front but is torn by feelings that something is not right.
As I entered the world of The Cane I fell into the trap of trying to solve the mystery alongside the characters. This is not a traditional ‘fair play’ style whodunnit although it offers a compelling psychological search. As a reader you are given enough of a glimpse into the ensemble cast of characters to wonder at who might be the perpetrator, and perhaps just as importantly, how that person may go unseen within a close knit community.
Check out The Cane. It’s an exciting read with its soul in the heart of contemporary questions about how we treat and respond to violence against women.
Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
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