AustLit

'Not much has been written about Tim Winton's recently published novel The Riders (1994 ), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1995. Referred to as his first "adult" novel since Cloudstreet (1991), it traces the lives of the main character Scully and his seven-year-old daughter Billie, who travel throughout Europe in search of Jennifer, their wife and mother, respectively, only to realize at last that she will never come back to them again. The Celtic "riders" Scully catches a glimpse of at the Leap castle in Ireland at the beginning of the novel, and which both himself and his daughter Billie see again at the end, known from some of the poems written by W.B. Yeats and, more recently, from Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot, apocalyptically (like the Riders of the Apocalypse) anticipate the dissolution of his marriage. This is indeed reconfirmed during his second sighting of the riders towards the end of the novel, when he returns to Ireland with Billie only to start his life all over again with a different set of priorities. One of the most qualified attempts trying to define the two visions of the riders described in the novel, in terms of the post-Saussurean concept of the sign, is a recent article by Andrew Taylor "What can be read, and what can only be seen in Tim Winton's fiction" (Taylor 1996).' (Publication abstract)