Unlike Aeneas and Odysseus, Harry’s name does not give the work its title, and, in his adolescent uncertainty, he has little in common with the elevated heroes of the traditional epic. The verse novel traces its roots back to epic poems such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s The Odyssey, each of which centres on a heroic protagonist.
He is an unlikely hero, wounded, unambitious, and boyish, stationed in the liminal space where childhood pleasures and adult possibilities converge, trapped within the confines of a town he is outgrowing. Harry’s ‘I’ is laconic and self-effacing.
Harry’s voice and perspective tie these strands of narrative and imagery together.
If, as psychologist and philosopher William James sees it, human thinking proceeds like a stream of consciousness, by the river exemplifies its dynamic flux – its mobile and shifting nature, its snags, shifts, and flow, and the ways the currents and undercurrents of memory, hope, and thinking entwine and wind. Image by image, glimpse by glimpse, by the river collects its narrative fragments and vivid impressionistic slivers as ‘the big river’ that ‘rolls past our town’ collects and influences the stories of the people it circles and observes. As a verse novel, it combines narrative bones with poetry’s compression, as well as its sonic and lyrical qualities. Through a leisurely accumulation of detail – houses on stilts, fruit bats, a blotchy carpet of mango pulp, wisteria, cricket, bags of lollies – the town comes into focus, along with the lives of its people, especially protagonist Harry Hodby and his family.īy the river is one of Steven Herrick’s many award-winning verse novels for young adults and the recipient of several prizes, including a 2005 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award (Ethel Turner Prize for Books for Young Adults). By the river evokes the textures of a small Australian town in 1962 through lean episodic poems that drift along gently until moments of intensity break their banks.
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