The Shark Net: Memories and Murder
Robert Drewe Hamish Hamilton, £9.99, 358pp
Buy it at BOL

Oddly, given its title, sharks do not dominate Robert Drewe's memoir of his west Australian boyhood. There is a relatively harmless carpet shark that the 16-year-old narrator pierces through the brain and then drags, as it leaks foul-smelling blood and distintegrating guts all over him, to the front doorstep of the girl he fancies. Her father alerts her thus: "Mr High Society's here wearing a fish." (She, as one might expect, is faintly repelled by this peculiar trophy, and makes her excuses.)

Then there are the requiem sharks that, during his stint as a cadet reporter, Drewe attempts to drum up into a reputation-building feature, only to be thwarted by the bathetic pronouncements of a sanguine ichthyologist. Alas: you've several hundred thousand times more chance of dying in a car crash on the way to the beach than in the jaws of a shark.

Despite this lack of real-life piscine danger, the book is suffused with a wonderfully achieved sense of menace. Events are quietly encircled by a mysterious malice, most obviously suggested by the "murder" of the subtitle, which refers to a serial killer who terrorises suburban Perth during the 1950s, chopping up women as they lie sleeping, shooting teenage boys through the head, peering in through steamed-up car windows to catch couples necking and mowing down young women who are innocently crossing the road.

Drewe was closer to the murderer, Eric Cooke, than many (although he points out that once he was apprehended, everyone rushed to claim some sort of link with him: in gossipy small-town society, there is little division between celebrity and notoriety). The hare-lipped, speech-impaired Cooke had delivered dining-room chairs to the Drewe family house (delivering in the process a gnomic utterance about bicycle pumps giving you warts), and had killed one of Robert's chums. And then, in his cub reporting days, Drewe found himself on the receiving end of a chilling wink from Cooke in the dock - an unwanted gesture of complicity that he automatically returned.

Cooke's misdeeds feature sporadically in the book, alongside separate sections attempting to imagine what was going on in his head. It's no surprise to find out that he was an ugly, resentful man, knocked about as a kid by his drunken father, not much of a dad to his own seven children, and obsessed with women. There is a powerful moment towards the end when Drewe interviews Cooke's widow and asks her how she felt during the final moments before her husband's execution. She had been getting the children ready for school, and hadn't noticed the appointed hour come and go. Her next-door neighbour came over and asked her if she felt like crying. "No, no," she replied, "maybe later."

This macabre drama frames the book but, despite its headline-grabbing horror, it is not its life and breath. Far more sustaining is the other half of the subtitle - the memories, largely concerned with childhood. Drewe had been transplanted from Melbourne to Perth at the age of six, tracking his father's trajectory as a rising star in the mighty Dunlop corporation. Rubber products dominated his youth, from the unfashionable Bumper leisure shoes that made an appearance under every Christmas tree to tyres, hoses and novelty ashtrays. Drewe Sr was fond of reminding his wife that when he proposed to her, he warned her that she was marrying the company as well as him. Ever the perfect consort, she took her somewhat acid comfort in teaching the budgerigar to say "Today You'll Use a Dunlop Product."

Drewe captures perfectly the way businessmen like his father colonised the alien landscape of west Australia, braving the shifting sand dunes and treacherous coastline to educate the suburbs in the ways of company cocktail parties, tennis tournaments and factory visits. Their children, of course, marvelled at the freedom of the wild, and much amusing, poignant tension derives from the older generation's nervous attempts to inhibit the excesses of juvenile enthusiasm. The Drewe children were continually being lectured on the perils of the undertow and of sun-broiled brains, all the while marvelling at the bravado of the native kids, who were known to peel strips of desiccated skin from shoulder to shoulder and eat them.

In this sensitive and delicately realised memoir, these local details accumulate to give a much wider picture, not only of 1950s Australia, but of the fragile ecology of a family. On the surface young Robert's relationship with his parents is fairly straightforward, a recognisable mixture of affection, embarrassment and covert rebellion. Yet Drewe himself is a master of the undertow, and his subtle, suggestive recollections transform boyish tales into a far more original, affecting meditation on the nature of childhood itself.

There is a tremendous tenderness in his depiction of the comedies of family life, but those comedies exist alongside a welter of unreconciled differences and outbreaks of ungovernable tragedy. The apprehension of the murderer and the revelation of his proximity to the Drewe family is a beautifully turned counterpoint to domestic events: the frisson of excitement and the accompanying shame, the sense of random, irrevocable actions, propel Robert into adulthood as surely and as fast as his shotgun wedding to his girlfriend.

Drewe grew up to become a writer of novels, short stories and plays, and this book is as much about the development of a writer's sensibility, the ability to make connections and to become alive to mood and atmosphere, as it is about sharks and murders and Dunlop tyres - although I'll never attempt to ride a bicycle with a dead shark strapped to my back.