Volume 47, Number 16 · October 19, 2000
The Fatal Shore
By Joyce Carol Oates
The Shark Net:Memories and Murder
by Robert Drewe
Viking, 288 pp., $24.95
Perth, in Western Australia, the setting of this fascinating memoir by the Australian novelist and short-story writer Robert Drewe, is said to be the most isolated city in the world. Facing the Indian Ocean, surrounded on three sides by sand and bush and cut off from the far larger, more cosmopolitan cities of the east, Sydney and Melbourne, by the vast Nullarbor Plain, Perth would appear to be, to the traveler, a place of romance: the 'City of Light' acclaimed by the astronaut John Glenn who, orbiting the earth overhead in his Mercury capsule in 1963, claimed to have seen 'the tiny glow on the south-west tip of the great black southern continent,' as its inhabitants left their lights on through the night in honor of Glenn and the United States space program. 'I can see lights on the ground,'Glenn reported. 'I can see the lights of Perth on the coast. Thanks everyone for turning on the lights.'
Review, 2264 words
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