I bought this book and Golden Boys (previous review) after seeing them shortlisted for the Australian Independent Book Sellers awards (The Indies).
This was a new genre for me. It's the story of the court proceedings in a true crime. On Father's Day 2005 Robert Farquharson drove his car, with his 3 young sons in, off the road and into a dam. Farquharson survived while his sons died. He had recently separated from his wife and she had started seeing someone else. He claimed that he had a coughing fit, blacked out, and found himself in the car under water.
Helen Garner is an author and journalist. She attended Farquharson's Melbourne trial and got to know some of his ex-wife's family. She provides an excellent portrayal of the trial including the hounding of the police witnesses by the defence lawyer and attempts to confuse and misdirect the jury. The book left me in awe of lawyers, both prosecution and defence. They have to make sense of technical details about tyre marks and the camber of the road that leave both the jury and Garner herself struggling to stay awake, let alone make sense of them.
The book helps the reader understand the husband and wife. Could a man hate his wife so much that he would drown the children he loved just to spite her? Does the wife really know her husband or has she convinced herself that it was all an accident because the idea that it wasn't is just too much to bare?
At the end of the book Garner is convinced that the jury has the right verdict. I still wasn't sure that it couldn't have been a coughing fit, and that the older child tried to steer and ended up in the dam. If Farquharson did do it on purpose, I have no idea how he would know that he could get out of the car, so suicide followed by a change of mind was still an option for me.
