STORMY WEATHER

This lively and increasingly engrossing second novel from the Australian author of The Salt of Broken Tears (2001) reinvents Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the story of a traveling vaudeville troupe’s impact on a remote northwestern backwater.

The action occurs on a single day in 1955, when the Blind Concert (a real-life group whose performances raised funds for blind people) pulls into the “one-horse town” of Towaninnie—led by an ostentatious Pontiac carrying aging “star” Leonard Barrington and his unhappy wife, a former concert soprano now very much out of her element. The opening chapters swiftly, skillfully introduce major characters, most of them are specific counterpart-echoes of Shakespeare’s originals. For instance, English-born flautist Amanda Jones, the troupe’s saxophone soloist and a suggestible maiden in search of True Love, is ingénue Miranda; the Barringtons’ scapegrace son Freddie, fleeing his gambling debts, will become the romantic hero redeemed by love; and the elderly “compere” who directs the performance, “his nose always stuck in his stupid books” as he contemplates retirement and the completion of his memoirs, is Meehan’s Prospero. The story’s most interesting figure is its Caliban: “the rabbiter,” a muscular, malicious orphaned recluse who lives in a festering swamp with his “beastly” dog Spot, amuses himself by playing outrageous pranks on the Towaninnians who loathe and fear him, and is himself transformed and exalted by the “magic” that’s displayed in the book’s lavish extended climax: a triumphant evening performance, following a day of unceasing rain—when “for a sacred moment world and stage were bound in feeling, and against all things of darkness.” It’s all more than a bit stagey, and the Shakespearean echoes sometimes feel forced. Nevertheless, Meehan’s constructive skill and empathy with his vivid characters’ makeshift vagrant lives make it all work surprisingly well.

Another unusual and original novel from Down Under.