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Chapter 26
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Dry, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Human Cost of Climate Change
Justice
Urban vs. Rural
Friendship
Summary
Analysis
Falk goes to the station and finds Dr. Leigh there with Sergeant Raco. Raco asks Dr. Leigh where he was on February 22 (the day of the murder) before he came to the house to inspect the bodies. Dr. Leigh says he was seeing patients in the morning, then he went to rest in his flat for a couple hours. He asks if he should have a lawyer present, and Raco says it might be a good idea. Raco finally gets Dr. Leigh to admit that he wasn’t alone that afternoon—he was with Sullivan.
Falk and Raco pay careful attention to when they reveal new information during an interrogation to try to get the witness to say something helpful. The interrogation tactic of delaying the release of information is a bit like the structure of the novel as a whole. Dr. Leigh has until this point seemed like a minor character whose only role was showing up on the scene to examine the bodies, but Raco’s suggestion that Dr. Leigh needs a lawyer means that he might have an important link to the case after all.
Themes
A flashback that follows Sullivan’s perspective tells the story behind how Sullivan ends on the surveillance footage. Sullivan is feeling anxious about being seen when he parked near the pharmacy. He goes to a door at the surgeries supply entrance and finds Dr. Leigh there. Then they went inside and kissed.
The story presents Sullivan and Dr. Leigh’s romantic relationship as a twist, suggesting that even in modern times, homosexuality still has a stigma around it in a rural community like Kiewarra. Given how quickly men like Dow resort to violence, it makes sense that Sullivan and Dr. Leigh might want to hide aspects of their life that they thought might upset others in town.
Themes
Sullivan and Dr. Leigh have been in a romantic relationship for 18 months, but neither wanted it to be public knowledge. At last, Sullivan confessed after his recent pub fight. Sullivan was with Dr. Leigh when news of the murders broke. Soon after that, Sullivan went back to find firefighters responding to his Gran’s fire in the kitchen.
Eighteen months is a fairly long time to have to keep a secret, so if Sullivan and Dr. Leigh are still sneaking around to see each other after that long, they must really fear the consequences of how some people in Kiewarra would react, perhaps shedding more light on rural attitudes about sexuality.
Themes
Before letting Dr. Leigh go, Sergeant Raco asks him if he can comment on how advanced Deacon’s dementia is. Dr. Leigh can’t break confidentiality, but he talks generally about how dementia can make the distant past seem nearer to some people. Falk puts in a call to Melbourne to get a list of all the white utes in Kiewarra, but it turns out that hundreds of people own them, including Deacon, Gerry, Gretchen’s parents, and Erik Falk.
While conflating the past with the present is a symptom of Deacon’s dementia, it’s also something that just about every resident of Kiewarra deals with to varying degrees. Falk himself keeps thinking about the past in flashbacks as he investigates the current case, and many of his actions in the present, like his budding relationship with Gretchen, contain echoes of the past.
Themes
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