The Drowner by Robert Drewe essay

The structure of a novel enables it to embody, integrate and communicate its content by revealing its role in the creation and perception of it. A complex structure such as that of Robert Drewe’s work The Drowner, published in 1996, refers to the interrelation or arrangement of parts in a complex entity1. Drewe’s novel is a multi-faceted epic love story presenting a fable of European ambitions in an alien landscape, and a magnificently sustained metaphor of water as the life and death force2. The main concerns of the novel include concerns about love, life, death and human frailty. These concerns are explored through the complex structure of the novel. That is, through its symbolic title, prologues, and division into sections. The complexity of the novel is here, in its inter-twining of the different aspects of structure and they way in which they all ‘communicate’ to further the underlying concerns. These concerns are in turn explored by the attainment of an in-depth analysis and understanding of them.
The title The Drowner explores the main concerns of the novel through the different representations of ‘drowning’. As a result the title itself is a complex structure of the novel. According to Robert Drewe ‘as an occupation, drowning was somewhere between a trade and an art’3. However drowning is more than just an occupation, it is to Will a way of life and tradition. However Will is not a drowner but an engineer, and here it becomes symbolic of Will’s life. Although through his rationality he left behind drowning, he speculates that engineering is “in its hydraulic potential maybe just an extension of drowning”4That is, although through Angelica he enters a new world and life, drowning is symbolic of his past and continues to influence his present. Here the past is presented as an inherent part of life and an aspect of human frailty in the way that we succumb to it.
In the same way it is through his discussion of drowning that he courts Angelica, also