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By the Currawong’s Call
By Welton B. Marsland
Escape Publishing, 2017
Four stars

Matthew Ottenshaw is a thirty-four-year-old Anglican priest, just assigned to his first parish in a small town in rural Victoria, Australia. Jonah Parks is a year or two younger, and has been the Sergeant of Dinbratten’s two-man constabulary for nine years. Jonah is American-born, and the self-styled protector (and sometime hero) of this farming community. Somehow, it seems, Fate (or, possibly, God) put these two men in the same town at the same time.

For an American reader, one who loved the work of authors of the American west such as Willa Cather, it is wonderfully eerie to “see” the Australian bush, where kangaroos graze on cricket pitches and the call of the currawong offers musical background to everyday life. It is all alien, and yet terribly familiar. Welton Marsland has done a great job bringing his world to life.

Marsland has done something even more powerful, however, by placing the priest and the policeman in the Australia of 1891, when even suspicion of homosexuality could get you arrested, and conviction could result in three years at hard labor—which in those days, in those prisons, could be a death sentence. Knowing this, Matthew has energetically suppressed all sexuality, devoting his life to prayer and good works, doing his utmost to live out his calling as a priest. Jonah, on the other hand, has purposefully set aside his interest in good-looking men, sublimating all those impulses into the easier, and safer route of casual womanizing.

It is when Matthew and Jonah meet, that things begin to go pear-shaped. Marsland creates a classic kind of romance, within a setting that supercharges everything without necessary recourse to extremes—no horrible childhoods, no severe emotional disorders. These are just regular, good, generous-spirited men, trying their best to do what is right. The author uses their unexpected affection for each other, which only seems to grow as the danger increases, to spark conversations about morality, law, the church, and societal prejudices in general. In the end, Matthew and Jonah are men of reason, swept up in an emotion that they both thought they’d gotten under control—because they never really knew what it was.

For all its sleepy, small-town setting, there are little peaks of adventure that shine spotlights on both Jonah’s and Matthew’s natures, reminding us (and them, of course) that they are in fact good men. This is a story remarkably, and believably, free of guilt. There is fear, but that fear is not tainted by any self-doubt. It is that certainty that drives the plot to its (for me) surprising conclusion. There is a exquisitely painful little twist at the end, a reminder to the men (and to the reader) why it must happen as it does.

The author also uses the device of the epilogue in an unexpected and poignant way. It brought tears to my eyes, but also joy to my heart. This is fiction, of course, but it is an avatar for all those long-lost stories of same-sex lovers in the past who managed to survive and find happiness, against the odds.