There is a power struggle happening here, not just between Charlie and Valente, but between progressive and outdated attitudes. The threatening presence of detective Valente seems to seep into all corners of the investigation. The town feels out of time, ripe with nostalgia and sweltering summers. The sun-bleached, asbestos-lined beach shacks of Swanage are like a metaphor for the tired attitudes of the old cops who still roam the streets. Disher leans further into this trope than most writers, turning the narrative towards the dynamics that allow toxic masculinity to fester as Charlie reflects on his relationship with masculinity and power, and his fear of becoming like his father. Although Charlie’s mother is more complex than the standard female cadaver, her death is in many ways the catalyst for her son’s narrative.
US author Alice Bolin writes in her book of essays Dead Girls: “The victim’s body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems.” In some ways this rings true in The Way it is Now: Charlie’s mum is somewhat downtrodden as a mother, ex-wife and landlady to key male characters, her position is relational to the men in the novel. The “dead girl” trope in crime fiction is the subject of much criticism and debate. When two skeletons are unearthed at a local building site and revealed to be the bodies of Charlie’s mother and Billy Saul, his old obsession takes an even firmer grip, leaving him determined to get to the truth of what happened. A particularly gritty rape case, in which privilege and entitlement seem to take precedence over truth, has left Charlie disillusioned with his job, and with a heightened awareness of the lack of justice for women.
Now a divorcee with an adult daughter, Charlie has worked his way up through the police ranks, all while investigating his mother’s disappearance on the side. Twenty years after the events of the novel’s extended prologue, Charlie is staying in Swanage while on leave for punching a superior officer. But Charlie fixates on tracking down the lodger – the man he’s convinced is responsible for his mother’s death. Charlie’s father, Rhys Deravin, is accused of murdering his ex-wife, and although there’s no proof to convict him, the accusation is enough for Liam to turn his back on his dad and for the local cops to stop investigating other leads. When, eight days later, Charlie’s mum goes missing on the same day as schoolboy Billy Saul, people assume their disappearances are unrelated – Billy’s a tragic accident, their mother a victim of domestic violence. As an adult (and now a cop himself), Charlie returns to Swanage with his brother Liam to help their mother evict a troublesome lodger and prepare her house for sale.
World-weary Charlie Deravin has grown up around cops – he was practically raised by local sergeant Mark Valente and the other alphas of the “Menlo Beach mafia”. Contemporary attitudes towards male violence are pitted against the stereotypes of a small-town old boys’ club in this complex and thought-provoking story. I n his latest novel, award-winning crime writer Garry Disher interrogates the cultural landscapes of power and misogyny within the coastal town of Swanage, a fictional locale nestled among the back beaches of Dromana in Victoria.