Johan Gabrielsen

What about you, Stu?

Does that ring true of the surfing crowds, a certain element of the surfing crowd that you've encountered?

Well, I actually don't think he loves Bluebird Beach, really.

And I don't think he actually wants to be there.

I think he's bound by a sense of duty and of keeping the old times alive.

And I think that this is the central drama, if we call it that, of the book.

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.