Captivity Captive

by Rodney Hall

Book Overview

This novel is built on a fragment of historical information - an unsolved triple murder committed in Australia in 1868. The author uses the real names of the victims and local details to develop the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374118892
• ISBN13: 9780374118891
• Release Date: February 1988
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Rodney Hall knows how to hold the readers captive!

Part 1 of the Yandilli trilogy, (which is about to have part 4 released!) Captivity Captive is a fictional solution to a true story: the unsolved Gatton murders that occurred in Queensland, Australia, in 1898. Using facts from the case, relocating the events a little further south, Hall uses the real names of victims and family to tell the tale of two sisters and a brother who were found shot and bludgeoned to death in a paddock in 1898. The novel opens at the death bed of Barney Barnett, a man who was engaged to the youngest victim, Ellen, who attempts a fictitious confession more than 58 years after the murders, in order to gain notoriety. His lies are seen through by the Inspector who has come to hear him, and by the remaining survivors of the Malone family - Patrick, our narrator, and the now paralysed Jeremiah, and mentally handicapped Willie. From there we are drawn back into the depths of Patrick's memory, and he tells a history of his family -- here Hall veers away from murder-mystery genre territory here by sketching unique, distinctive characters -- in all its violence, ignorance and brutality, before inevitably leading us back to where we want to be -- what really happened on Boxing Day, 1898 that led to the gruesome deaths of Michael Malone - aged 29, Norah Malone, aged 27, and Ellen Malone, aged 18. The truth is shocking, the violence disturbing, and the sexual tensions of the novel gripping and unsavoury. My only beef with Captivity Captive is that too often, Rodney Hall leaves the reader guessing about exact events. He seems to like us to guess about exactly what the victims and the perpetrator(s) of the crime got up to on Christmas Day, and then on that fateful next day. A very captivating and harrowing novel about the dark sides of the lives, memories and personalities of the people who carved farms out of the ancient Australian forest, and a superlative psychological examination.