THE divine Wind

Relationships under pressure are the focus of Garry Disher's book, writes Laurie Clancy.

EARLY in Garry Disher's novel The Divine Wind, the narrator says: ``You could say that this is a story about friendship, and the betrayal of friendship, and friendships lost and regained.'' The key word is ``betrayal'', because it is a novel that is about love as well as friendship and, above all, about loyalty.

Throughout the novel we are confronted with numerous examples of loyalty - Zeke's sacrifice of his life to save Hartley, Hartley's father courageously taking Sadako and Mitsi into his house in defiance of the town, and later his defence of the Aboriginal stockman Derby Boxer. But in the end the novel seems to argue, rather dispiritedly, that if society is able to impose sufficient stress upon any relationship, then no matter how intense and no matter how wellmeaning the people involved are, it can be broken.

The novel opens in 1946, just after the war, in the northwestern Australi...