Book review: One Hundred Years of Dirt, Rick Morton (2018)

This memoir by Murdoch journalist Rick Morton is slippery and filled with drama but in the end the allusive, tangential method used shattered my patience and I only got to 25 percent of the way through the book before putting it down.

Morton tries to elicit meaning through the deployment of elaborate rhetorical devices but in so doing he often misses the opportunity to use the correct noun to name the thing he wants to talk about. Instead, he relies on a sort of privileging of the negative, where you create the outline of the object you want to talk about by carefully filling in the background and leaving a blank space in the middle. He does this to create dramatic tension but it just rubbed me up the wrong way. It was often like a join-the-dots puzzle where a significant number of dots were missing, so that you just couldn’t make out the subject of the sentence. I kept on feeling the urge to say to him, “Just tell me what it is!”

The story of his grandfather, a sadist who ruled his family home on the remote border of Queensland and South Australia, is probably the best part of the book. Where I stopped is where Morton's brother got burned. Another one of those cases where the author avoids telling you what happened for as long as possible, all the while your blood pressure is building up and building up. Some might find this kind of storytelling gripping, I just found it irritating.