Cassie McCullough

He's trying to save the lodge, which is this, as we said, crumbling old place.

He may or may not inherit a chunk of it.

It belongs to Kelly's father's wife.

So his stepmother-in-law is the one who's pulling the strings, Leonie.

But we also find out pretty quickly that something bad has happened in the past.

Like many characters, he has a dark secret from his childhood.

This relates to his brother, Owen, who was slightly older than him, older by four years, in fact.

And Owen died when he was 12 and Gordon was eight.

Now, the circumstances were pretty simple on the face of it.

Owen fell from a cliff on Bluebird Beach.

fell into the sea and the rocks below and died.

But exactly the nature of the fall is something that comes and goes throughout the novel and people have different understandings of it.

And it's Gordon's realisations about that that I suppose are the main business of the novel.

There's also a big insider culture that's going on in this de facto surf club, The Lodge.

They all know each other's business.

I mean, while they're not talking about their feelings, Johan, they're talking about everybody else's business like nobody knows.

Everyone knows everything that's going on.

But they're very resistant to outsiders and there's this real vein running through it about these outsiders that are coming to take Bluebird away and they're all going to be Asians or they're all going to be

And there's this stream of racism that runs right through the characters, many of them, not all of them, who are just like sort of, well, maybe it's accurate.

Maybe it's a really accurate reflection of that kind of coastal culture.