Dust jacket blurbs are usually misleading, but at least one point made by the back cover of Blanche d’Alpuget’s new novel, Turtle Beach, is authentic. It refers to the ‘Graham Greene sense of inevitability’ of the events of the work. As an admirer of Greene, especially in his Third World novels, I can confidently recommend Turtle Beach as a worthy successor to such socially important novels as The Quiet American and The Comedians. D’Alpuget has the same keen sense of the inadequacies, irrelevance and wrongheadedness of Western involvement in the East, the same wryly ironic depiction of the frailty of human nature regardless of class, colour, creed or sex.
...
(read more)
