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Mangowak Trilogy #2
Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds
On the wild clifftop of the coastal town of Mangowak, Ron McCoy lives an almost marsupial existence with his elderly mother. He hunts and gathers while the town sleeps; he is acutely shy, but in the privacy of his imagination, fostered as it is by his love of music and the oceanscape of his birth, all things are possible.Liz and Craig Wilson, meanwhile, are lovers of the surf and the bush. When Craig is offered a job by Colin Batty, Mangowak's larrikin real estate agent, the dream of bringing up their kids away from the city is finally realised.
But working for Batty Real Estate is not as simple as it seems. The surrounding landscape is full of alchemic power and mystery and when Ron McCoy and his mother decide to sell half their land, the subtle generational differences between young and old Australia begin to swirl.
Written in a precise, painterly style, Gregory Day's follow-up to his award-winning debut novel, The Patron Saint of Eels , is a powerful meditation on belonging, on landscape, and on love.
But working for Batty Real Estate is not as simple as it seems. The surrounding landscape is full of alchemic power and mystery and when Ron McCoy and his mother decide to sell half their land, the subtle generational differences between young and old Australia begin to swirl.
Written in a precise, painterly style, Gregory Day's follow-up to his award-winning debut novel, The Patron Saint of Eels , is a powerful meditation on belonging, on landscape, and on love.
- GenresFiction
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
About the author
Gregory Day
18 books17 followersGregory Day is an Australian novelist, poet and musician who is best known for his Mangowak novels,
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 11, 2021
Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds is the second novel by Gregory Day, and the second set in the fictional town of Mangowak, a small seaside community set on the coastline of the state of Victoria in southeast Australia. It is a considerable improvement on his first effort, The Patron Saint of Eels, for which I did not care.
The novel itself is focused around characters familiar from the first novel, most obviously seventy-five-year-old Ron McCoy and his one-hundred-year-old mother Min, who live together on a large property at the top of a cliff overlooking the sea. Ron has lived there all his life; he was even born in this house, and his late father Len had protected the baby Ron by putting up a shield of chicken wire. The wire's diamond shapes become the lens (get it? Len/lens) through which Ron sees the world, especially the sea. Ron decides to sell a chunk of the land to a rich Lebanese businessman named Dominic Khouri, who builds a large holiday house on the site.
The Wilson family - Craig and Liz, and their children Reef and Libby - move to Mangowak. At first the focus is on Liz, who gets bitten by ants and suffers a serious allergy, but settles into the town by doing yoga and walking to the local convent. Craig gets a job working as a real estate agent for the novel's villain, Colin Batty. Colin is driven by his anger toward his father. As a young man, he fled Mangowak, traveled around the world, and returned to make his name in real estate. He is scheming to get Ron to sell the remainder of his property following the death of Min, bullying him in various ways.
The end result is that Ron commits suicide, with Craig finding the dead body. Traumatized, he quits Colin's real estate business and turns to running a cafe instead. At Ron's funeral, Dom Khouri proposes a memorial to Ron, which he will fund, and so several of the men start work on something suitable. What they come up with is a weathervane in the likeness of Ron, shaped like a totem pole, which they attach to the top of the cliff.
While this second novel is far superior to Day's first, I can't say that I enjoyed it much. Day certainly has a knack for capturing a sense of place, and his cast of characters rings true for a small Australian town. The novel also has a greater sense of plot, although Ron's suicide seemed far too easy and banal a conclusion to be satisfying.
What I ultimately don't like about it, though, is its cloying sense of Catholic spirituality. It's a recurrent problem I have with Day's work - a superficial notion that natural beauty and a sense of naïve wonder equates to something profound. The "sea of diamonds" that Ron repeatedly sees is a case in point: it may be beautiful, but Day's implicit assurance that it has some deeper, supernatural meaning just because of its lovely aesthetic is annoying and pathetic.
The novel itself is focused around characters familiar from the first novel, most obviously seventy-five-year-old Ron McCoy and his one-hundred-year-old mother Min, who live together on a large property at the top of a cliff overlooking the sea. Ron has lived there all his life; he was even born in this house, and his late father Len had protected the baby Ron by putting up a shield of chicken wire. The wire's diamond shapes become the lens (get it? Len/lens) through which Ron sees the world, especially the sea. Ron decides to sell a chunk of the land to a rich Lebanese businessman named Dominic Khouri, who builds a large holiday house on the site.
The Wilson family - Craig and Liz, and their children Reef and Libby - move to Mangowak. At first the focus is on Liz, who gets bitten by ants and suffers a serious allergy, but settles into the town by doing yoga and walking to the local convent. Craig gets a job working as a real estate agent for the novel's villain, Colin Batty. Colin is driven by his anger toward his father. As a young man, he fled Mangowak, traveled around the world, and returned to make his name in real estate. He is scheming to get Ron to sell the remainder of his property following the death of Min, bullying him in various ways.
The end result is that Ron commits suicide, with Craig finding the dead body. Traumatized, he quits Colin's real estate business and turns to running a cafe instead. At Ron's funeral, Dom Khouri proposes a memorial to Ron, which he will fund, and so several of the men start work on something suitable. What they come up with is a weathervane in the likeness of Ron, shaped like a totem pole, which they attach to the top of the cliff.
While this second novel is far superior to Day's first, I can't say that I enjoyed it much. Day certainly has a knack for capturing a sense of place, and his cast of characters rings true for a small Australian town. The novel also has a greater sense of plot, although Ron's suicide seemed far too easy and banal a conclusion to be satisfying.
What I ultimately don't like about it, though, is its cloying sense of Catholic spirituality. It's a recurrent problem I have with Day's work - a superficial notion that natural beauty and a sense of naïve wonder equates to something profound. The "sea of diamonds" that Ron repeatedly sees is a case in point: it may be beautiful, but Day's implicit assurance that it has some deeper, supernatural meaning just because of its lovely aesthetic is annoying and pathetic.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 17, 2017
I enjoyed the Australian-ness of this book.
October 27, 2022
Gorgeous sense of place but the narrative didn’t hang together
February 9, 2008
This book wis one I couldn't put down, a book in which the landscape is an integral character.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews