Randall's characters, three Englishmen and one Irish, may be united by their criminal pasts and desire to escape, but the four are far from thick as thieves. Once on the island, there are power struggles and differences of opinion as some seek to provide order and others to break away from the shackles of their former lives. Jibes and taunts are the common trade, rough alliances are formed and tested, ''rules'' made and broken.
Each man is assigned, or finds, tasks necessary for the group's survival but copes with the ''long years of our loneliness'' in vastly different ways. Self-appointed leader and bully-boy ''Slangam'' believes hard work is their only salvation, Irishman ''Toper'' has religion, food-obsessed and learned ''Gargantua'' falls back on art and literature, and ''Bloodworth'', the omniscient-like narrator to the end, finds comfort in solitude - soaking up what he learns from Gargantua, philosophising and watching and anthropomorphising a colony of penguins.
As their stories unravel, we learn of their histories and opinions on a range of subjects, through a vernacular both historically and personally convincing yet often touchingly eloquent.
Of the autumn weather, Bloodworth proclaims: ''There aint no reds or golds, no pretty withering leafs that inspire poetry, jes a fearsome marble cold that come down upon us and a mean sun that slash like a blade.''
Of love, Gargantua contends: ''Loving make a witch beautiful and not loving turn a oil painting into Medusa.''
Of melancholia, or ''the dark allure of the think poison'', Bloodworth explains how ''every good thing can lose its point rubbed against the file of gloom''. And he tells the reader how Slangam and Toper have no time for such intellectual talk that ''go too far into the deeps''.
Through her characters, Randall explores sweeping issues - evolution and creation, spirituality and philosophy, fate and free will. As the men's physical strength and emotional resilience are tested, she delves into what it means to be human.
There are obvious nods to Daniel Defoe (the title is taken from Robinson Crusoe) and William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and it brought to mind her earlier novel The Curative and Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish, but the book is a tour de force in its own right, an imaginative, profound analysis of the human condition, full of humour, grit, grace and unease in equal measure.
- Helen Speirs is ODT books editor.
Win a copy
The ODT has five copies of The Bright Side of My Condition, by Charlotte Randall (RRP$30), to give away courtesy of publisher Penguin. For your chance to win a copy, email playtime@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email, and ''Randall Book Competition'' in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, February 11.
