Picked up in Mürren—and wow—this had me gripped from the first page; the sort of novel one wants to read in one session. I recalled enjoying Knox's Adult Book a long time ago, and so it was a delight to discover Summerland, his first novel. There are obvious antecedents with Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The latter immediately springs to mind as Summerland charts the disintegration of gilded lives, transported away from the roaring 20s in the US to 1980s Australia. However, Maddox Ford's book is the more interesting to consider, given not only that a quote from it opens Knox's novel, but also since there are deliberate and uncanny parallels between the two. Nasty people do nasty things to each other, yet the nastiness is magnified by the complications on one hand and convenient untruths on the other. All this is compounded by the ostensible unreliability of the written/narrated account. We “have to” believe Richard's (the narrator's) testimony, since it is the only available, with two of the remaining three protagonists dead and the other estranged. Sure, there is perhaps excess digression (or, less generously, red herrings) and an element of repetition, but I continued to be at turns shocked and surprised right through to the end. 9/10.
By Malcolm Knox