The Last Tiger by Tony Black

The premise at least is intriguing: a family relocates from Lithuania to Tasmania in 1910. The father is a shepherd, but he’s adept at hunting Tasmanian tigers and is exalted for it. His son, Myko (to which the first-person narrative belongs), is captivated by these semi-mythical beasts and feels compelled to save them from extinction. The tension between father and son is thus pulled taut: the old man trying to make a new life work, the sensitive boy desperate to stop him. The mother, caught between the two, cries a lot.

The prose, though, is overcooked, sludgy and over-seasoned with simile: ‘My mother held me, tight as a saddle belt, where I stood. “My Myko… you have come back to me,” she said. I saw her spirits rise, as surely as cream rises to the surface of a milk-pail, but then, suddenly her voice changed.’ In between things ‘suddenly’ happening, the characters shuffle around and talk the plot to each other. For instance, Mother sees Father with his pocketwatch and says, ‘It was your father’s.’ One might assume he already knew that. It’s all symptomatic of a writer who doesn’t trust the reader’s imagination – and without that subtlety, the thing groans beneath its dead weight, descending into melodrama. [Galen O'Hanlon]