Caravan Story

So here I am, I'm going : it happens to us all. There is no rhyme nor reason. Even when you..ve sucked the fingers of the hand that feeds you it can still turn around and grab you by the throat. One morning, without warning, our narrator wakes into a nightmare. He and his female companion are put in a caravan and driven to a football oval in a faraway country town. There they join scores of other caravan-dwellers in a seemingly closed community. They are divided into groups, given their tasks. Then our narrator escapes, to an abandoned school in a big country town. Wayne Macauley has a gift for storytelling. He can, and cannot but help, spin a yarn. It is this continual shifting on of our attention through the description of the particulars of a scene that gives his writing such a weird intensity. Examining the darker side of our manufacture and manipulation of culture, Caravan Story is a deeply unsettling and at times hilarious read. With Macauley's inexorable narrative logic we are held in its thrall until the sparkling, if muted, transfiguration of its ending.