Asturias

The novel, Asturias written by Brian Caswell holds its reputation with its relevance and effectiveness to the given audience. It captures the audienceÐŽ¦s attention with a modern story set in contemporary times. It addresses issues that concern todayÐŽ¦s youth with l„Zve, hate, friendship, abuse, gay rights and betrayal. With the parallel story involved with the civil war; it gives the audience an understanding of AustraliaÐŽ¦s history and how it changed and affected today.

Asturias concerns a group of adolescent youths, who are in search for fame and fortune. They create a band where the actions of friends and family affect the outcome of the band. Individual wants and needs, builds up tension, suspense, and dramatic moments to create a climax at the conclusion of the novel.

Asturias revolves around 8 central characters; Alex, Chrissie, Tash, Marco, Tim, Claire, Max and Symonds. Each character has different opinions and beliefs. They have all been brought up differently. Alex was brought up under strong male influence, where family bonds were strong. This is such a contrast to Marcos upbringing. Marco watched his fathersÐŽ¦ abusive actions and had a mother who never believed in him. Although each character is so diverse, they all held one common aspect; their l„Zve for music. This is what held the band so strongly together.

The structure of this novel has great effectiveness on how each character is perceived and how others perceive them. The uses of first person narrating gives us a subjective point of view, if it was narrated in third person you would get generalised opinions in objective manner. The book is set out so that each character converses in the situation they are in. This gives each character their individuality. Through Chrissies dialogue she seems assertive by the dynamics of Brian CaswellÐŽ¦s writing. The individual responses create different perceptions with individual opinions. This enables us to interpret each character individually.

Each character is perceived differently by others but each have a certain character trait the fits in with the story. For example; Alex is seen as the ÐŽ§backbone of the bandЎЁ; he is the one who holds it all together. He can seek through situations without stressing too much. Whereas Chrissie is seen as the introverted shy character that would rather keep her feelings