Review: Locust Summer, David Allan-Petale

The manuscript for Locust Summer was in 2017 shortlisted for the Vogel’s, one of Australia’s most prestigious literary prizes.

Not every talented writer can sustain the effort over the (usually required) years to transform a story from promising manuscript to published novel with watertight plot, pace and characterisation.

But Dave, my former colleague and now friend, could – and did, and at last we have the final work, just published by Fremantle Press.

It tells the story of Perth newspaper crime reporter Rowan, whose gnarled, demanding boss Holt continuously threatens to send underperforming journos to the scrapheap. Rowan's run a bit dry on juicy stories lately, so it's terrible timing when his mum rings and begs him to come home for a few weeks, to help on their Wheatbelt farm. Rowan’s dad is very ill, and they’re selling up – but there’s one final harvest to get through first. A month of exactly the kind of backbreaking, thankless labour that made Rowan escape to Perth. But this time, he has run out of excuses.

Rowan drives north to a family destroyed by grief and thwarted hope, and a team of farm workers who know he doesn’t belong.

Locust Summer is about how farming has transformed a landscape, the beauty and brutality of small towns, and what happens when loss blurs love into obligation and resentment. It’s also about how words can do more than just convey facts: how they can heal.

The rendering of a Wheatbelt harvest operation is somehow both hyper-realistic and page-turning. The settings, from a strangely magnetic rock monolith too big to blast, to a shimmering but potentially deadly salt lake, are a beautiful blend of symbolic and realistic, reminding me of Tim Winton's latest novel, The Shepherd's Hut.

It’s not the only echo of Winton. Allan-Petale has in spades that ability to combine poetic precision –describing simple things in a magically creative way, instantly recognisable, right and true – with lovable ocker plainness. Strongly straightforward, bang on everyday speech, stopping things getting too flowery. And when Allan-Petale hits the balance just right, his writing soars.

Locust Summer marks the launch of a writer I believe could be one of our nation's next most popular novelists.