At a recent books gathering, Jonnie Comet posed the question: ‘How do you kill off a first-person narrator?’ The disturbing events at the end of Deirdre, the Voyager, themselves an outcome of the end of Deirdre, the Adventurer before it, are resolved, for better or for worse, in Deirdre, the Renegade: Never-Never (Surf City Source Media Group), volume five of the Deirdre saga.
Having awakened in an alien land, Deirdre must face the ultimate example of karma when she returns to the scene of an accident. Consequences transpire, conducting her across half of Australia in a desperate dash for freedom. Along the way, scarred and scared, she will realise that, more than saving her own skin, what she needs most is to save her own soul.
Though she has clearly matured over the last year, the Deirdre of this instalment recalls the Deirdre of Wanderer, the first volume. In attempting to make a fresh start, she forges new friendships, learns vital life skills, eludes untenable situations and charms all she meets. She even revisits two of her very first careers, if only tentatively, finding both more lucrative now than before. Through immersing herself in a series of four isolated, insular societies– and on her way towards a fifth– she takes on a myriad of assumed names and identities. But by now she has the confidence of knowing who she is and what she wants: a very capable young woman seeking a way of life on her own terms. For any chance at that, she will forsake anything that might inhibit her, even a respectable chance at romantic love.
Fetching up in a veritable oasis she is quickly adopted by the hardworking Collins family and dives into routine, not entirely out of mere gratitude. As on the container ship in Voyager, she is excited to recognise a situation in which she might carry on almost indefinitely. But in spite of spiritual happiness– and more than a little intimate gratification– her past will rear up, most unwelcome. And, as at Grand Bahama with the Clark family, she must decline and move on.
Part of her recognisable maturity can be seen by her attention from the Morgan family on whose yacht she will crew. Her identity swings between the impression of Caleb and Jesse, the two younger teenaged boys, that must be older and more socially experienced, if only down to their unfamiliarity with keeping close quarters with a pretty girl in a bikini, and their bachelor Uncle Daniel’s hope that she might not be too young after all, if only down to the content of his own daydreams. For her part Deirdre delves into the role of a sensible yet fun-loving teenaged girl, favourably impressing David and Josie, the boys’ parents, till her character is finally defined, definitively, by her response to the most dire circumstances imaginable.
Ultimately her friends come to love her too much to do anything but what they believe the very best for her, at any cost to themselves. Deirdre’s plan for how to arrive in a new land confuses them all; for they cannot know of the circumstances under which she believes herself to be one step from an insupportable outcome. As such her decision here, as with the end of Wanderer, represents her boundless and indefatigable sense of noblesse oblige, which may be the maturest thing she has yet done.
Jonnie Comet has intimated that Renegade may be one of his favourite instalments of the series. Defying strict rules of formulaic fiction, the novel is rife with a cocktail of exotic locations, illicit travel arrangements, sensual interludes, and life-or-death dangers. ‘To read of Deirdre is to dive into her world,’ asserts the Author. ‘You’ve got to join her in that head space to appreciate just where she’s coming from.’
As it turns out for the heroine, who may be one of the most loveable literary heroines ever, that may not be such a terrible place to be.
Deirdre, the Voyager: Karma is now available through Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
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Surf City Source Media Group. Original text ©Jonnie Comet Productions; used by permission.
