Johnston's Hope; an Australian story - E-book - ePub

At six, despite being isolated on a farm in Southwest Australia, Johnston believed he was a boy soprano meant for great things. With inspiration from the Bronte sisters and spurred on by literary "pearls of wisdom" introduced around the kitchen table by his dad, he conscripts little sister Hope into his phantasmagorical world of Gondal, to mother creative exploits which he records his diary for posterity.
Hope's cello prowess eclipses Johnston's self-proclaimed favored child prodigy status, causing him to undertake ludicrous tests for family attention. When his father dies, Johnston's made-up world ends abruptly and along with it, an age of innocence. He hides himself in Asia, sidestepping responsibility for his fantasies which have impacted the people he holds dearest - in ways he couldn't have imagined as a child.
But he cannot make sense of a universe that does him no favors and drives him towards depression. As he searches for an alternative moral compass to the one instilled in him by his erudite father and his religious mother, he becomes obsessed by the suicide of the Japanese icon, Yukio Mishima. He resolves to challenge Mishima's view of the world but he fails to confront his guilt about a brother-sister relationship that has verged on mutual obsession.