Review: The River Mouth, Karen Herbert
Background image: Marcelo Palacios
Love crime, smart contemporary general fiction or the dark beauty of Australian Gothic? This cinematic 2021 debut from Geraldton-born, Perth-based Karen Herbert, published by Fremantle Press, is a crowd-pleaser.
Middle-aged nurse Sandra is living quietly and alone after the shock shooting of her teenage son Darren – a tragedy that also eventually ended her marriage. Ten years later, police are knocking again. Her best friend Barbara has been found dead and a forensics have made a discovery: hers was the then-unknown DNA found under her son's fingernails. Sandra knows her best friend, a social worker and mother to Darren's best friend, could not have done it. But the police insist on dragging it all back up, determined to this time solve the case.
Herbert evokes her fictional regional coastal town with precision. Whether landscape, home or business, each scene's setting is detailed swiftly, sparingly yet so richly it unfurls before your mind's eye in an instant. I am not surprised it's been optioned the screen.
Herbert's rendering of 15-year-old Darren and his two best friends in the weeks and days approaching the shooting are pitch-perfect. Her recreation of the 1990s as a time of outdoorsy innocence, yet underlaid with all the simering division and violence a country town can harbour, is superb.
I did at times feel emotionally cut off from Sandra, a woman numbed and hanging onto her hard-won equilibrium to the point of apparently not even really wanting the case solved. This is at points hard to swallow – after all, the reader is invested! – but potentially also contains its own meanings. While Sandra's domestic service in the family unit was cut shockingly short, her community service has continued in her work at the hospital, privy to generations of the locals' sometimes terrible secrets. The result of these decades bearing the loads of love, caring, trauma and and grief is a woman with a tiredness that has gone beyond the physical to something existential.
A slow but steady burn; hard to put down in the second half and the fiendishly clever, multi-layered plot kept me guessing until the end. A truly impressive debut from a writer to watch, and you won’t have to wait long; her second novel The Cast Aways of Harewood Hall is due out later this year.