A Fine Excess: An Australian Odyssey

About the Book

He’s caught in a rip tide off Kuta Beach in Bali: no one’s on shore to help; every time he cries out, the waters rush over him.

Tony Speed is in free-fall.  Near 30, a victim of the budget ax, he’s lost his first real job as an Instructor at a southern university. Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and John Lennon—the gods of his idolatry--all tell him to get out, just go.  So he takes his life’s savings and chases his Japanese girlfriend to Tokyo.  But Yoshiko dances to a different drummer, and before he knows it, Speed’s in Southeast Asia, knocked silly by a rip tide. That rip is the book’s central metaphor, as Speed travels through Asia and the “Lucky Country” of Australia, watching the fragmented pieces of his life play out like a kaleidoscope.

Set in Bali and Australia, with flashbacks to Japan and the States, A Fine Excess is a novel that reads fast and goes deep—an On the Road for the new millennium--with a foot in this floating world, and a wing in the spiritual realms of East and West.  It's a book about the adventure of discovery, integrating our whirling selves with the mirroring chaos and beauty of the world.

What’s Speed searching for, what does he want?  An affirming vision… wholeness…someone and some place to hold onto.  It’s the mid-70s, after all.  Vietnam, Watergate, a worldwide recession form the crazy quilt he’s woven into.  He joins Aussie friends Peter and Kay in hurricane-ravaged Darwin where he’s harassed by the local bar fauna—“Ockers.”  With fellow wayfarer Dacy, he hitches a ride through the outback in a Holden station wagon piggybacking a lorry, the red dust of the Simpson Desert clogging every pore.  In Coober Pedy, the mole-like denizens burrow into caves to escape the heat while ferreting night and day for fire-lit opals.  It’s all Dante-esque—and exhilarating!

Speed finds work in Adelaide, picking grapes for a winery.  He settles in for a month of love-making with Colleen, a funny, pretty Canadian scientist who despises Aussie men.  Tempted to linger, Speed finds he can’t shake the memory of Jeri, the American woman he met in Indonesia who is now in Sydney.  On his way to her, he stops off in Melbourne, where he re-joins Peter and Kay.  They’re in the process of breaking up, and Speed gets caught in the inevitable rip.

A couple of weeks later, he’s keeling into Jeri’s orbit.  But she’s involved with two other men.  Only when he can recognize the quiet charm of Carol, Jeri’s reticent roommate, does Speed find peace and love.  He finally gets his revelation, his “Zen slap,” through Dennie, Carol’s quadriplegic cousin.  In the sad and luminous figure of Dennie, the suffering, acceptance, gratitude and grace at the core of the religious traditions of the East and West finally converge.

All journeys are beginnings.  This is a book about beginning.

About the Author