Christopher Bevan
Christopher Bevan is an Australian writer of literary fiction. He writes stories about Australia - its people, landscape, culture, racial issues and values. He is a senior lawyer by day and novelist by night. Bevan has been writing fiction for 12 years after 20 years devoted to writing legal texts.
His first novel, A Kinchela Boy, is a story about one of the darkest chapters in Australian history, its infamous "Stolen Generations". From 1924 until 1970 almost all Aboriginal children of mixed parentage (half-castes) were "stolen" from their families and raised either in children's homes or foster homes. A Kinchela Boy is the story of one of those children, told from his perspective and in his distinctive voice,with his dialogue and that of his friends rendered in their unique brand of pidgin English. The novel is based on Bevan's first decade of practice as a young lawyer in northern New South Wales in the 1980s, so that he speaks with the authority of someone who has lived and worked with the disadvantaged indigenous people who are the subject of his first novel. One reviewer described the novel as "difficult to read," because of the pidgin English dialogue and the simple-minded voices of its principal characters, but equally "impossible to put down:, because of the tension and suspense that is built up over the course of its 275 pages.
His second novel, Parable of the Two Sons, is a story about grief, truth and empathy between a father and his two sons over a 25 year period after the wife and mother is killed in a car accident, as the surviving family members try to come to terms with her death and their own sexuality in the case of the father and the younger son, both of whom discover that they are gay, a realization that creates disharmony with the older son, who is as straight as a toolmaker's die. The story is told with the aid of Greek mythology, with the principal character, the father, dead a year before the action starts. The story is a study in three intersecting character arcs over a 25 year period rendered by flashback in the minds of two principal characters overlaid by another intersecting of two characters arcs in scenic format over the five days of real court time that the action - a court case - takes place.
His novels have been critically well received worldwide by leading literary reviewers, because his brand of fiction is a spare writing style, focusing on strong verbs and nouns with few descriptive words. Readers are left to do much of the spade-work for themselves immersed in his stories. He has been described by The US Review of Books as a clever director of films which unfold in the reader's mind, with strong characters - men and women alike - acting out roles in locations having a strong sense of place, all unmistakably Australian, each having a distinctive and memorable voice.
Bevan's third novel, Ash Wednesday, based on the theme of global warming, is a story about the worst bush fires (wild fires) in Australian history, which ravaged southern Australia three years ago, and is due for publication in 2014. His fourth novel, The Blue Note, the theme of which is the power of music to both create and destroy the lives of the people who write and perform it, is a story about the life of an Australian jazz musician, and is due for publication in 2015.
