Reviews for Mastering Web Music 2000

The average rating for Mastering Web Music 2000 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-12-10 00:00:00 Eilish Fox Gee, what to say really? Winton is a natural when it comes to description. He can prattle on for miles about this rock and that tree. But when it comes to the meat of a story, he likes to blow past the most interesting and provocative bits! What is with that??? To say this is a love story is laughable to me. Where's the love? How did it happen? Did I miss it? Winton drones on for 100s of pages about landscape, wildlife and paints an exhaustively clear picture of Western Australia. But at what point do his characters actually find this love? When it comes to actual plot, the long-winded Winton just brushes past in a veil of ambiguity. I buy into his characters, but not so much their motivations. The love triangle is convoluted and confusing. I hear Winton praised for poetry and description, and that I can agree with definitely. At least in Cloudstreet (a far superior novel in my humble opinion) I was invested in the story and in the characters. Dirt Music gave me a thin plot, characters I didn't care about, and a completely unsatisfying and unrealistic ending.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-03-02 00:00:00 Joe Mama This is my last unread book from the 2002 Man Booker shortlist, which is the topic of a current discussion in The Mookse and The Gripes group. I am also planning to read several more from that year's longlist. This for me is the weakest of the six books, but it was still an interesting read. The story is largely set in the wilder parts of coastal Western Australia. It has three central characters and their relationship is something of a love triangle, but to portray the book in those terms would be a gross misrepresentation. It is much more about misfits and drifters and their attempts to find a place to survive in hostile terrain, which makes it more like an Australian western. All of the three main characters have secrets they are scarred by and hide from one another, and only at the very end is any concession made towards a happy resolution. At the heart of the book is Georgie, a drifter who has arrived in the fishing village of White Point on a boat with an ill-equipped sailor she wants to leave. She finds a place as the partner and housekeeper of Jim, a successful local fisherman and unofficial policeman of the local community who lives in the shadow of his more violent dead father's reputation. Georgie becomes intrigued by Luther, who has been poaching fish at night and has his own past as a musician whose family have all been killed in a car crash he survived. After a brief and impossible liaison with Georgie and reprisals from the White Point rednecks, Luther takes off on a trip north with a plan to attempt to live on his wits as a fisherman on a much wilder part of the coast. Georgie begins to settle for her life with Jim, but he conceives a trip north to find Luther. This book is full of colourful Australian vocabulary, some of which stuck (quolls, spinifex) and others which I didn't check. It is uncompromising and quite long, in fact too long to hold my interest throughout - for me it could have been edited down to something a lot more punchy, but it is still quite a memorable read.