The past is true crime

Writing stories about the past you act as detective. What, who, when, where, how and why are your preoccupations; they drive the story (in different orders according to the type of story you want to tell).

Drewe’s story is autobiography, focusing on his childhood and adolescence. Autobiography has a bit of a routine: gather memories, historical records etc., and try to place them in some type of order so that they have coherence and meaning. This meaning is missing from the past because of the immediacy of experience: you are rarely aware of the broader implications and connections between events as they happen, especially as a child; it’s in hindsight, with more information and reflection, that we begin to craft these autobiographical stories.

But Drewe strikes out this writer – detective idea. You could argue that it’s because he was a participant: unlike the detective, he can’t be objective; he isn’t re-examining events he wasn’t part of.

But I think it’s more because he sets up the past as true crime.

The past as crime. This is what fascinates me in reading his book. The past isn’t depicted as a sun-lit idyllic time before the dark knowledge of terrible things. Instead, the past always involves the play of both light and dark. Just as when you’re a child you are naïve, and often naively happy, so too you are aware of tensions and wrongs. You’re not “innocent”, and that’s Drewe’s argument: your past is implicated in offences, illegal acts, shameful things. You’re not unaware that these things are going on.

In The Shark Net there are always whispers, things lurking. Undercurrents pull you along with only half your knowledge. When something happens you realise you kind of already knew it (as the protagonist starts to feel himself). It’s masterfully crafted.

And in Drewe’s case his past does involve capital-Crime. There are killers; there are bodies.

These bodies seem to haunt him. One of his friends dies when bodysurfing near a reef; his body is trapped in seaweed. (In a passage I find really affective,) Drewe writes: ‘It had not been disturbed by fish. This surprised me. I’d always believed there were these tiny sea-lice that could reduce a body to a skeleton in twenty-four hours.’

The body’s actuality seems to catch him unawares. It stubbornly remains, reminding him that people aren’t just stories, that it’s not as easy as that.