THE SLOW NATIVES

The work of this Australian writer (Vanishing Points, 1992, etc.)—in a diction studded with some breathtaking images and conceits—continues to strengthen in depth and focus, and Astley again penetrates the shrouding canopies of loneliness to find the hope of rescue. Among those existing miserably amid ``excitability and want'' (a keystone indictment from Hunting the Wild Pineapple, 1991): a mild music teacher and his fearful/angry teenaged son; a priest and a bewildered nun; a desiccated aging single woman and a battered teenager. The four days during which Keith, 15-year-old son of piano- teacher Bernard Leverson, is unaccountably absent will seem in retrospect to have been years—of nonloving. Where is the love between father and son? To Keith, angry, bruised, and nasty, his father offers no ``rules,'' no safety; and mother Iris is having an affair with a family friend—actually a comically unlustful and boring friend. Bernard will speak and write of his worries to Fr. Doug Lingard, a Catholic priest, himself a tired victim of ``spiritual weightlessness.'' But Bernard finds everywhere ``this rolling dullness in human relationships.'' At a convent, where he gives exams in music, he witnesses the emotional aridity of a nun struggling with an empty heart, then escapes the screaming need of an achingly sad teacher. Meanwhile, on the lam, are Keith—as well as teenaged ``Chookie,'' forever unloved, a muddled Calaban, fleeing from a crime of rape. By the catastrophic close, a family is restored to love and the priest will know the brush of blessing in the act of ``restoring hope in another.'' Astley's style is occasionally choked perhaps, but also choked often with brilliants (on arriving patrons in a gloomy lounge: ``The room filled up with crustaceans—varnished hard-jawed mums and small-bit farmers all coated with the same malty staleness''). With humor and bite, then, some deep discoveries about shallow lives.