the coming of the whirlpool andrew mcgahan

''But even in suburbia it hits you occasionally, as we've seen all too well the last few years in Australia, with all the floods and cyclones. ''I'm such an urban dweller these days that the natural world can seem very far off, at least in the sense of the natural world as wilderness,'' he says. He started with an unnamed boy and built the storyline and physical landscape of New Island page by page, as a navigator who charts new territories finds surprise in every new twist of coastline. McGahan began Ship Kings not as a story for young adults. I wanted to write a fantasy about the wonder and the novelty of the world we live in and, in terms of our recognisable physical world, the ocean was the realm where anything could happen.'' ''I wasn't trying to create a new language like Tolkien - that's beyond me. ''I set out not so much to create a world of magic,'' McGahan says.

There are, as yet, no faithful sidekicks and no landmark portals to magical and secret worlds, even if in this strange land of New Island the seas fall with ''different waves''. Dow's innocence dissolves as he confronts increasingly complex challenges but he has no special powers and, like the author, is more shaped by events than a shaper of his destiny. But that's the end of similarities to the pop fiction of J.K. There's something olde English and gothic in the mood McGahan conjures via the archaic language of the sea and mountain folk, the stone fortifications and tall ships. Unburdened by first-hand familiarity with the sea, the 45-year-old McGahan has remained faithful to the genre with his narrative of the boy of yeoman spirit marked special by his ancestral links to a legendary sea captain and facing impossible odds, and of a foreign oppressor who rules by cannon over an impoverished people. Out of these boyhood fantasies of courage and quest has come The Coming of the Whirlpool: Ship Kings 1, the first in a four-book franchise featuring the seafaring exploits of Dow Amber, a woodcutter's son who was destined to become the greatest mariner of his time. It was this macabre and cracking story and the way Poe portrays the fear and shrieking of the whirlpool, there is none better.'' Edgar Allan Poe's A Descent into the Maelstrom I read as a boy and I was obsessed with the story.

All the great sea stories have a grimness, a greyness and a sadness to them. ''My real love is for sea tales and sea lore for the myths and legends and the wonders of the sea. ''I don't know the sea, I've probably been on a ferry to Tasmania once and I remember a trip to the Barrier Reef with friends,'' McGahan says.

The coming of the whirlpool andrew mcgahan