Review: Catch Us the Foxes by Nicola West

Almost from the first page, I had the sense that there was something more, some kind of detail or plot twist to Catch Us the Foxes, the debut novel from Nicola West. The only difficulty was that I was not quite sure what was up. On the one hand, here was a cleverly crafted scene, opening with an author giving a talk--at a packed Sydney Opera House no less--about her best selling work of auto-fiction. The novel then becomes a story within a story, as the reader is treated to Marlow 'Lo' Robertson's bestseller about how she discovered the body of her best friend, who had been murdered at the local Showgrounds--while the local show is on, no less. Lo is also stunned to discover a collection of strange symbols on her best friend's back, symbols that her father--the local police sergeant--forbids her to talk about. Soon, it becomes apparent that the town and some of the most important people in it, may be involved in something top secret, and deeply depraved. The question is, can Lo get to the truth and find out what really happened to Lily Williams, her best friend and the town's reigning showgirl.

As I alluded to in the opening paragraph, this one had me gripped from the start. Despite the combination of a busy week and a busy workload, I found myself picking up my copy at every possible opportunity, keen to know more. Although I was able to clue into some things, others remained a mystery. And the twist at the very end was so clever, I never saw it coming--and this was in spite of the fact that I had a feeling the whole way through the novel that something wasn't quite right. 

Catch Us the Foxes is a well crafted novel that takes an unapologetic look at two aspects of small town life. The first is small town attitudes, with the locals quick to blame an innocent employee from the show for the murder. The second, and more intriguing aspect, is the sordid rumours that have a tendency to plague various towns and places in Australia. (Almost straight away, after learning what was said to be happening in West's fictionalised version of Kimba, I began to think of the stories that I have been hearing since I was in my teens that The Family Murders, which occurred in Adelaide in the late 1970s and 1980s were in fact committed by a group of high profile people in positions of authority. But that is a discussion for another time.) However, one thing that impressed me above everything else was her decision to have a main character who is not always likeable (why should characters be likeable,) and instead presented Lo as someone who was deeply flawed. It's also rare to read a novel where a character of Lo's age doesn't have a love interest or perhaps even two, desperate for her attention, and the novel works better for it. Lo is portrayed as asexual and absolutely fine with that, a rare thing in fiction. Then again, the story is so intriguing that we just don't need a romantic subplot to propel the pages forward.

West has a great deal of talent. Although the subject matter is dark and very disturbing, the author handles it well. I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next, if she chooses to continue to write.

Highly recommended.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster Australia for my copy of Catch Us the Foxes.

This book counts toward my reading goal for the Aussie Author Challenge 2021

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more