Sunday Salon: conveying characters

I'm currently reading Black Tide by Peter Temple, the second of his Jack Irish series. (See here for my short review of the first, Bad Debts.)

Here are two paragraphs from page 126, character sketches of a married couple whom Jack has just met as part of his investigation:

"We sat in the huge fenestrated space, the house expensive beyond dreams, servants waiting somewhere, a beautiful woman, dresser of hair, a hardness to her mouth, fibro house in Broadmeadows floating out there in her past, sweet, sad memories of a patch of dying lawn, a father and a mother and a little girl. Arms around each other.
Below us, a rich man, thin, all body fat dissolved, was pushing himself: against water, against age, against the inability to sleep unless exhausted."

I don't know if these people will appear again in the book, but I love the way Peter Temple instantly fixes them and their lives in the reader's mind with such economy and poetry.

Comments

[Debra Hamel]

"Fibro house"?

[Maxine]

One of the many joys of Peter Temple is learning the Australian vernacular for things. In this case he means "house built of fiberglass" which from the sense must be their equivalent of your trailer park and the UK's prefabs.

[Maxine]

Well, I didn't mean *your* trailer park, Debra! I meant "the US" trailer park.

[Clare D]

Mmmm, that's wonderful description - just as you say - economcial and poetic. Love it.

[Ann Darnton]

Peter Temple is a new name to me, but given that extract it looks as if the TBR pile is going to grow even further!

[Debra Hamel]

Are there trailer parks in the UK?

[Maxine]

No, there isn't a trailer park culture as there is in the US sense - there are caravan parks near the sea where some people kind of live permanently even though they are supposed to be holiday lets. But in the country as a whole we have plenty of other similar sites to trailer parks, eg prefab "huts" put up to house people temporarily after they were bombed out in WWII, still there with many people living in them, etc.