Season of the Briar by H.F. Brinsmead ~ 1965. This edition: Oxford University Press, 1965. Illustrated by William Papas. Hardcover. 202 pages.
My rating: 3.5/10
Brutal rating, isn’t it?
I put it this low because I truly believe that even with full allowances given for Season of the Briar being aimed at a teenage audience, this highly capable author could do exponentially better. (Anyone else know and admire Pastures of the Blue Crane, written a mere year before this one?)
I had such high hopes for this novel, and there are bits and pieces which are wonderful, but the plot imploded early on and what might have been a fantastic “finding oneself” story got all improbable boy’s-own-adventure, with a highly manufactured dramatic fantasia about a young hiker lost in the Tasmanian wilderness, and her supernaturally tinged rescue.
Quickie overview:
Four young men find summer work on an Australian weed-spraying crew which is sent to Tasmania. They encounter and re-encounter a group of hikers heading for the alpine area surrounding as-yet-undammed Lake Pedder, and, when one of the hikers gets lost during a sudden change in the mountain weather, several of the weed sprayers decide to assist in her rescue, with mixed results.
Before the hiker goes astray, the spray crew has reached a hidden valley peopled by eccentric Euro-Tasmanian old-timers who are so desperately caricatured as to irretrievably shake this particular reader’s faith in the probability of the tale, even before the rescue mission episode. Even the beautifully written descriptions of the glories of the Tasmanian wilderness (Stunning Lake Pedder! An endless pink granite sand beach! ) weren’t enough to woo me back.
Laboriously comical pen and ink illustrations by William Papas detract rather than add to the overall effect.
To be fair, there are a number of good things going on with this book. Such as a certain amount of bildungsroman-style character development, and a believable depiction of the evolution of the relationship of a group of people thrust into close companionship 24/7 and subjected to some truly challenging work and living conditions. One of Brinsmead’s sons worked on a similar spray crew, and the versimilitude of this aspect of the tale has obviously come from some personal familiarity with the enterprise.
Brinsmead was an articulate and passionate naturalist and conservationist, and this comes through loud and clear in her written appreciation of the southern hemisphere wild country as depicted here. At first I found her approving view of the liberal application of herbicides to portions of this wilderness quite troubling, but it soon clicked that she was all about getting rid of exotic flora in order to preserve the native stuff, and, along with that, to improve the state of agriculture in the region.
It’s a very 1960s’ sort of teen/young adult-market story, and I should probably modify that rating to reflect its period, but, as I have said already, Season of the Briar disappointed me in how it so closely missed being something more than what it turned out to be.
P.S. – I still think highly of Hesba Fay Brinsmead! A fascinating, deeply earnest personality as well as a more than decent writer. I have a growing collection of her novels and memoirs; Season of the Briar is something of an anomaly compared to the others I’ve read.
Leaves & Pages 