Picking the Morning Colour

Blair Thompson was Adult Collections Co-ordinator at the North Vancouver District Library.

Australian writer Kevin Roberts, now a Vancouver Island resident, gives us an uneven collection of twelve stories set, not surprisingly, in either Australia or British Columbia.

The stories are very accessible, except for two stabs at experimental prose. Several of his tales traffic in well-worked-over material — the mysterious ways of the Indian (“Hunting Trip), or the sure-fire racetrack wager that never made it to the pari-mutuel wicket (“The Punter”). “The Junkman” is a scapegoat story that owes an obvious debt to Shirley Jackson, whereas in “North Heads” Roberts rails (probably autobiographically) against Australian bureaucracy when his protagonist, upon arriving in-country, is quarantined for two weeks.

There is a harrowing story worthy of Stephen King in which a fisherman, badly wounded in a shark attack and obsessed with vengeance, breaks into an aquarium to redress the balance. The title story, a mini-lesson in the economics of agriculture, describes the hard life of migratory fruit pickers in Australia. The “morning colour” refers to a colour grading system followed by pickers to ensure that only “special quality” peaches of the right size and hue (for canning) are selected.

The best of the lot, however, is “Enlightenment A La Mode,” a gentle, hilarious satire about an unmotivated but likeable beach bum. Somehow, in one story, Kevin Roberts manages to shoot down in flames both the hippie ethic and the British Columbia Resources Investment Corporation (BCRIC).