When life delivers you gifts you don’t want.
Dave Martin is down on his luck: his wife has left him; his farm is a failure; his house is a mess; he has withdrawn from his community and friends; and tragedy has stolen his capacity to care. He passes the time drinking too much and buying cheap tools online, treating the delivered parcels as gifts from people who care about him.
And then boxes begin to arrive in the mail: boxes that he didn’t order, but ones that everyone around him seems to want desperately. As he tries to find out the secret of the boxes, Dave is drawn into a crazy world of red herrings and wrong turns, good guys and bad, false friends and true, violence, lust, fear, revenge, and a lot, lot more. It’s not a world he understands, but is it the only one Dave can live in?
Boxed, Richard Anderson
I know that summer is supposed to be finished, but no one told the sun and its mate, the wind that blisters off the plain, making me feel like a dry frog stranded between water points. But I see the plains grass is still green, the dust is holding low, and the kurrajong tree leaves are shaking their shiny vigour, so perhaps the last few months haven't been that hot. Can't say I've been paying attention.
Richard Anderson's latest novel BOXED opens with a series of tableau paragraphs, almost photographic in their capture of place, and a man. Right from that start you know this is a man with problems.
I don't want to be Dave Martin, loser, parked at his mailbox under the river gum: two beers' drive from Stony Creek Pub, half a state from Sarah, and at least eighteen months past useful.
But Dave's not as useless as he thinks he is. Definitely struggling, grieving for a dead son, and a past life, Dave's paralysed by overwhelming loss, distracting himself with online shopping, waiting for the parcels delivered to his mailbox. Those parcels providing (he fully admits) a small moment of joy in what's otherwise a difficult, downtrodden life. Caught on the farm that's failing in part because of him, trapped by depression and an inability to pull himself out out of it, his interactions with the world are driven by those that come to him, but most especially his parcels.
Until the day something very unexpected is delivered to Dave's mailbox and things get weird. Packages of something white and large amounts of cash, a neighbour behaving oddly, a mailman who is unforthcoming, a neighbourhood suddenly infested with strange men with violence on their agenda, Dave's world quickly gets a lot more "interesting" than he wants, but it could just be the thing that he needs.
As with Richard Anderson's earlier book RETRIBUTION, BOXED is rural crime fiction of the highest calibre. It's not all blood soaked violence (although there is some of that), nor is it necessarily crime and punishment based. It's a character study through the prism of threat, and people outside their comfort zones. Particularly, in this case, a man for whom the problems of his life are pretty overwhelming. Dave Martin is beautifully evoked and whilst he will ring bells with city people, rural dwellers will know him in particular. A man whose life is tied to a place through generations past, the expectation would always be the same of generations future. Until the unbelievable happens and a moment wipes away that future. Then it's a marriage that doesn't survive the loss, but a friendship that remains. It's about somebody who can't bring themselves to step away from the source of so much pain, and yet simultaneously can't bring themselves to thrive in that place. It's about depression ultimately, the scourge of so many rural people where livelihoods depend so much on physical ability, often impaired by mental challenges.
BOXED is slower paced than some crime fiction, but there is an intriguing mystery at the heart of this novel, providing the catalyst that could change Dave Martin's life, wrecking it further, or possibly improving it. You won't know until the end of the novel, but I bet you by that time you will find yourself experiencing a connection with Dave and all his challenges.
Boxed, Richard Anderson
Bush crime, or rural noir if you prefer, is having quite the moment as we all know. The challenges of such extreme geographic isolation in the hostile environment of outback Australia lends itself well to works of crime and dramatic fiction. It’s possible there is going to be no one around to witness the occurrence of a terrible event. No one nearby to help, and perhaps no friends or family about either to observe what a person might be up to.
Dave Martin, newly separated, newly bereaved, but not so newly impoverished, is watching his life decline by degrees. There are few routines left to cling to as the family farm decays around Dave and the community who once embraced Dave as part of a family of three are now not sure how to speak to him. There are no labels for parents who have lost their children; it being a suffering so deep that it has never been given a one word descriptive.
Hauling himself away from his largely liquid diet and out to his roadside mailbox is something Dave is still managing to muster up the energy for. The constant arrival of boxes full of random items all bought online is an event to which Dave has now, likely unhealthily, become rather attached to. The day Dave receives an empty box full of cash though is something of a gamechanger. The box may have been addressed to Dave, but he is certain there isn’t a money fairy out there thinking of him and his dying farm. Soon it seems everyone in the vicinity wants to see if there was a box delivered in error to Dave’s farm. A decision needs to be soon made about how far Dave is prepared to go to mask the origin of his newly found wealth. New boxes are arriving all the time, not full of cash, but instead containing puzzling little clues to someone else’s life.
Australian author Richard Anderson knows his rural settings well, being a northern NSW cattle farmer himself. Dave Martin’s small rural community is easily identifiable to anyone who has ever lived or worked in such towns, with there being a sameness to the manner in which they are constructed, regardless of the landscape of bush or sea. There is always the landed gentry, the newly landed, and fringe dwellers seeking a quieter life for fair reasons or foul.
Anderson shows respect and offers dignity to the smallest of rituals observed by the bereaved in an isolated location beautifully yet economically illustrated. As Dave Martin’s life goes from meandering to murderous, we’re right there in the passenger seat with him, hurtling around dusty roads and living day to day with what might come next, be it in the form of yet another mysterious box or an unexpected visitor. Dave’s life incrementally picks up the pace as he adapts to each new dilemma, moving beyond the ennui in which we find him wading through at the beginning of the novel, to thinking speedily on the run as he second guesses the motivations of everyone around him.
BOXED is a carefully and cleverly plotted crime novel centred around the deeper theme of what it is to endure paralysing loss. This is not to say this is a novel saturated in melancholic regret by any means; BOXED has a self-deprecating character in Dave Martin and he is an interesting work in progress from start to finish of this absorbing book. The setting is almost that of a post-apocalyptic community – everyone is waiting for something to happen, yet quite shocked when it actually does.
BOXED is Richard Anderson’s second novel. The first, RETRIBUTION, also deserves your immediate attention. Both novels are standalones and feature realistic characters that are desperate to move on beyond their current circumstances, yet are unsure of exactly how to do so.