Title: The Australian
Author: Lesley Young
Publisher: LAY Books (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!
Not to be confused with The Australian by Diana Palmer (BN has 494 pages of books with 'Australian' in the title!), this is one of a series titled "The ". Another one is "The Frenchman" and appears to feature the same guy in the cover! It's a romance novel and I need to warn you right up front that I was hoping for more than merely a romance novel because romance novels to me are unappealing. They really have nothing to do with romance and everything to do with some wiltingly weak female with little self control (or self respect for that matter) being overpowered by Mr Macho. To me, that's not a story, it's author wish-fulfillment and/or pure fantasy. I can neither like nor respect any novel which depicts women as nothing more than men's toys.
I thought and hoped that this one would be different because of the undercover (and not under those covers!) aspects of it, but in the end it turned out to be precisely what I feared it would be. In the story, Charlie Sykes is a young American woman who flees Florida in the wake of her mother's death from drugs, and heads to Australia on a whim. She seems to have had an inexplicably easy time in moving there and finding herself eligible for work. In the European Union you can jump from one country to another job-hunting as though you never left your home nation, but moving from one nation to another where there are no such international ties is not usually as easy as it's depicted here!
Charlie is looking for work and unexpectedly finds a $50,000 (Australian dollars = approximately $37,000 US) job dropped into her lap. She accepts this job despite being ogled and inappropriately treated by the boss, a international hotelier who is grossly misnamed as Mr Knight. His behavior is far from chivalrous, which makes me question Charlie's mentality when she accepts. Yes, she's desperate for a job, but seriously? She does lay down the law, but the very fact that she has to, ought to tell any self-respecting woman who has any integrity at all that this is not the place she needs to be working. It certainly isn't a romantic first meeting. But I was willing, for the sake of a good story, to let that one slide.
I love reading novels set in Australia. I've read some bad ones, but mostly my experience with Australian writers/stories has been positive. Unfortunately I was also a bit dissuaded from this novel by the fact that it was first person PoV, which is the worst voice for a novel, and by the trope romantic male depicted in Jace Knight. Yes, Jace. He was tall, manly, chiseled, etc, etc. Yawn. At least he didn't have blue eyes with gold flecks in them, but that was about the only trope button which wasn't pressed here.
I found myself asking, once again, why romance writers seem so utterly and irremediably incapable of breaking away from the herd and coming up with something new, and out of the ordinary? Do they really think so little of their female readership that they believe those readers are sheep, incapable of traversing new terrain, unable to follow that road less traveled? I hope the readers aren't like that. I hope the writers do not view their readers with such disdain.
What initially kept me reading was that I was intrigued by Charlie. She's not your usual romantic female in one regard at least. She's slightly dysfunctional and socially inept - borderline Asperger’s or something, so I warmed to her quickly, but my empathy for her which had been built-up in the first chapter began to wane significantly when Charlie started in on the wilting violet routine as soon as she was in Jace's presence. This did not augur well for a really good story. It did augur well if you like uninventive clichéd romances.
I had been hoping for something better this time. I had dared to hope for a real story. Would I get one? Only reading-on would tell. I don't have a problem with romance, but when the entire story consists of nothing more than blushing, and attacks of the wilts and the vapors, there is no story. There is only one more limp female character and they are of no interest whatsoever to me. I like strong female characters: women who are smart, self-motivated, independent, and who can take men or leave them. Such women rarely appear in romance novels. It amazes me that they're still of interest to anyone in 2015. This isn't an historical romance, which would make antiquated 'rules' a little bit more acceptable; it's a modern story in a modern country, and my feeling is that we deserve better.
I don't have a problem with attraction between people, with a heart-beat speeding up, and bit of fluster here, and a blush there once in a while, with a few furtive glances. What I do have a problem with is when women are consistently represented as being the ones to whom this happens while the male characters are all macho and studly, and apparently feel nothing like that in return. I have a problem with women being depicted as inferior, lesser, and weaker.
I have a problem with stories which indicate that it's fine for women to be attracted to men who clearly have no respect for them, or who neglect, abuse or otherwise ill-treat them. I have a problem with novels depicting men as consistently strong and alpha, and women as weak and slavish. We all of us - men and women - deserve a whole hell of a lot better than that in 2015 and I hoped, by the time chapter three began, that this wouldn't be a novel like that. I wanted to like it, not despise it.
That said, there were also other issues. For instance, I don't get Charlie's obsession with how hot it was. She's from New York state which has a comparable temperature range with Sydney in the summer. Obviously they are in the opposite end of the year from we in the northern hemisphere, so if the transition took place in a New York winter it would be noticeable, but unless Sydney was suffering a major heat wave, it wouldn't be anything dramatically outside of the range Charlie was used to.
One thing which became annoying was Charlie's inability to employ contractions. For example, she would say "I hope you are right" Instead of saying, "I hope you're right". This seemed odd at first and became annoying quite quickly. She reminded me of Commander Data from the Star Trek: Next Generation TV series, and it made her seem far more robotic than ever it did human-but-dysfunctional. I would have liked her better without that.
At the point right before Charlie learns of the true identity of the improbably-named Sullivan Blaise, she panics over his behavior, thinking he's a psycho killer or something, and tries to flee her apartment, but he manhandles her to the bed, and the way this is described isn't done horrifically, which is how it would have been, but rather sexually. I didn't think that this was appropriate at all and I didn't appreciate the way it was described. I am not a fan of sanitizing violence in this way, much less of trying to make it titillating.
Obviously, I can't speak for women (I don't even play one on TV!), but my best guess is that most of them would not at all appreciate being grabbed, their mouth covered, and thrown face down on the bed under the weight of an attacker who towers a foot over their head. Even if they'd been role-playing it would be scary, but that's not what was going on here. It was at this point I really started to wonder if this author would win me back over to enjoying this novel and how, exactly, she planned on doing it.
Charlie requests more than once that Blaise leave, but he refuses. When she threatens to call the police he claims he owns the police. When she stands up he orders her to sit down. This guy is a complete jerk. Then he asks this woman (who has worked for Jace for a day or so) what she knows about him! You know, if he wanted her to spy, all he had to do was to meet with her professionally. This business of lying to her to get into her apartment and then physically restraining her is hardly the best way to go about recruiting someone who is inexplicably, but evidently vital to your operation, so he's not only a jerk, he's also an idiot!
She does have the presence of mind to demand he prove his identity to her, but all he does is show her a business card. That's hardly proof given that anyone can have a business card printed up showing anything they want on it. This jerk tells her: "Here's the thing, Charlie. I don't need your buy-in. And I don't give a shit about Interpol. You just need to do what I ask, when I ask. This is my show." Seriously? From the minute he man-handled Charlie I took a dislike to this guy. He then proceeds to blackmail her, threatening to throw her out of the country if she refuses to help.
The Charlie that I met in chapter one would have gone right ahead and said, "Go ahead and throw me out, and see if I care!", but this one cowers under the threat and gives in. I don't know this Charlie, and I don't like her either. Obviously she has to give in, in order for the story to proceed, but it seems to me the author might have gone about this in a better way - one which doesn't leave her main character looking weak and easily manipulated.
So without checking-up on Blaise to independently verify his story, Charlie takes him completely at face value, and agrees to do this spying job. She concludes, "It was fairly evident that Sullivan was who he said he was...." That's not a smart conclusion and again it seemed out of character given what we'd been told of Charlie so far.
The inevitable trope of getting any two of our three main characters undressed occurs when Jace offers Charlie an opportunity to learn how to swim. Apparently her school never taught this activity, but it does require a state of semi undress and physical proximity, so it will do. I figured that this was also where the requisite trope 'accidental' falling of female into male's arms would take place. And it did, exactly as I predicted.
Charlie gives us a detailed description of Jace's penis, ensconced as it was inside his swim trunks. She also describes herself. Again. Not only does she have an hourglass figure, she also has unusually smooth skin, lean legs, a flat stomach, and above average sized breasts. At this point I realized that Charlie really ought to have been named Mary Sue and asked myself yet again why it appears not even remotely possible to get a good story about regular people? Must they all be outstandingly beautiful, or studly, or curvaceous, or chiseled? Seriously? This is when despair set in.
Er no, Virginia - sorry, Charlie - hot water doesn't freeze more quickly than cold (not in that bald and simply-stated fashion at least). This is called the Mpemba effect. Water that has been boiled may well freeze quicker than un-boiled water (which has more air in it), but consider this: in order to reach freezing point, the hot water has to first cool down to the same temperature as the cooler water before it can then further cool down to freeze. How is it going to freeze more quickly when it first has to catch up? In some circumstances, it can, but there's a lot of issues and disagreements here so the bald claim is wrong. And no, water has neither memory nor consciousness. Now I not only dislike Charlie, I have zero respect for her intellect. I guess that just leaves the body, which is fine isn't it, because the body on the cover will match that perfectly? I mean, who needs a head (with a mind) when you can have any body?
The swimming lesson puts Charlie in her place finally - the subservient, submissive woman. Which man wouldn't want one of these toys in the closet, so they can pull it (not her) out, and play with it whenever they choose? It's said that men do not play with dolls, but they do. Those dolls are women like Charlie. Chapter six ends with the telling phrase, "...and his word was my command." It was at this point that I quit reading this novel. I cannot stand to read another novel which turns women into slaves and toys and dolls. I expected better from this and it was not delivering. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel. The liberation of women evidently still has a heck of a long way to go, I'm sorry to report.
