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chramies's review
4.0
Not to be confused with "Steel Beach" by John Varley where the title refers to having passed a no-turning-back point in human development where the natural world can no longer sustain us:
Steel bitching
or fun with dead historical characters. In the 1920s DH Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen went to Australia, the result being a novel, Kangaroo. In Steel Beach by Margaret Barbalet a middle-class Australian academic, specialising in Lawrence, comes to a small coastal town which to him seems idyllic but which is struck by rising unemployment and the risk of the local steelworks being closed down, putting more or less the remaining population out of work. The tension between his attempt to find a utopia and the needs of the local populace provides the spring for this novel; and the militant young man who reminds the narrator insistently of Lawrence, turns out, and aren’t we less than surprised, to be Lawrence’s unacknowledged grandson. However, his reaction to being told this hunts up yet another dynamic: the narrator insists that the grandson gets his fiery attitudes and political intensity from his grandfather; but this is cast aside as pure speculation, and the militant replies that he got his attitude from the circumstances around him, nothing more. The book doesn’t deny its own thesis, only that of one of its characters.
Steel bitching
or fun with dead historical characters. In the 1920s DH Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen went to Australia, the result being a novel, Kangaroo. In Steel Beach by Margaret Barbalet a middle-class Australian academic, specialising in Lawrence, comes to a small coastal town which to him seems idyllic but which is struck by rising unemployment and the risk of the local steelworks being closed down, putting more or less the remaining population out of work. The tension between his attempt to find a utopia and the needs of the local populace provides the spring for this novel; and the militant young man who reminds the narrator insistently of Lawrence, turns out, and aren’t we less than surprised, to be Lawrence’s unacknowledged grandson. However, his reaction to being told this hunts up yet another dynamic: the narrator insists that the grandson gets his fiery attitudes and political intensity from his grandfather; but this is cast aside as pure speculation, and the militant replies that he got his attitude from the circumstances around him, nothing more. The book doesn’t deny its own thesis, only that of one of its characters.
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