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Chapter 2
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
While he’s at his room above a local Kiewarra pub, Falk gets a phone call from Gerry. Gerry invites him Falk come to his house to speak with him and Barb but asks Falk not to mention the letter Gerry sent him. Falk agrees and comes over. He and Barb talk while Barb cradles Charlotte. Barb mentions seeing Falk on the news for the Pemberley case, a financial scandal that he investigated.
Falk and Gerry have been exchanging secret communications that they hide when Barb is in the room with them. This shows how some small-town secrets hide in plain sight. Charlotte’s survival in the murder remains a mystery, raising questions of the murderer’s motivations, including why, if Luke was the murderer, he would kill Billy but not Charlotte.
Themes
Barb finally says that she believes Luke obviously wasn’t the one who killed himself and his family. She says he sounded completely normal when she spoke to him a few days earlier. Barb wants Falk’s help to clear Luke’s name. Falk protests that he’s not the right type of police officer for the job, but Gerry says Barb believes that some type of financial problems were involved. Barb gets offended, thinking Gerry doesn’t believe her.
Barb and Gerry each deal with their grief over their son’s death in different ways. Barb tries to find the positive, holding on the idea that Luke is innocent, even though most people in town seem to believe otherwise. Gerry, on the other hand, becomes more of a pessimist, perhaps believing that if he expects the worst about his son, he can’t be disappointed if his suspicions turn out to be true.
Themes
Barb feels guilty about selling her and Gerry’s farm to Luke, believing that instead of helping him, they may have just saddled him with debt. Gerry trusts that the police already considered all the possibilities. Falk learns that because Sergeant Raco is new, the police sent some officers from the larger nearby town of Clyde.
Gerry lies to Barb’s face—though he claims to trust the police, he has asked Falk to look into the case specifically because he doesn’t trust the officers who have been investigating the case so far. This hints that there might be a darker side to their seemingly innocuous relationship, adding to the broader notion that the town of Kiewarra holds many secrets.
Themes
Gerry walks Falk out to his car alone. He thinks Barb is delusional to believe that someone killed Luke over a debt. Gerry thinks Luke did exactly what it looks like, murdering Karen and Billy, then shooting himself, motivated primarily by depression from the failing farm. And Gerry wants to know if he himself shares any blame for what happened, for not coming forward earlier with his suspicions that Luke might have been lying about his alibi 20 years ago during the death of Ellie. This answer unnerves Falk, and he asks how long Gerry has known. Gerry replies that he’s known the whole time that Luke lied 20 years ago to give Falk an alibi on the night of Ellie’s death.
Although it seemed earlier as if Gerry might be accusing Falk of having killed Ellie 20 years ago, here Gerry confirms that his real fear is that Luke might have killed Ellie. Gerry asks what guilt he shares for keeping Luke’s secret about his fake alibi. This question reverberates throughout the novel, which asks not just who literally killed the Hadlers and Ellie, but also which characters contributed to their deaths by staying silent.
Themes
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Falk protests that he didn’t kill Ellie, but Gerry wasn’t trying to imply this. Gerry never wanted to go public about Luke’s lie, which just would’ve gotten both Luke and Falk in trouble. Gerry believed at the time that Ellie might have even killed herself. But now he isn’t so sure, especially since Luke’s fingerprints are on the shotgun that killed Karen and Billy.
Falk’s false assumption that Gerry was accusing him of killing Ellie perhaps reflects his own guilty conscience. If Gerry feels responsible for Ellie’s death due to keeping a secret for Luke, then it makes sense that Falk himself might be guilty of the exact same thing, due to his pact with Luke about their alibis 20 years ago.
Themes
Falk says no one ever suspected Luke of killing Ellie. Gerry says that’s only because Falk and Luke gave alibis for each other. Gerry wonders if his silence caused Karen and Billy to die, then he implies that if Falk just goes back to Melbourne, he would also be guilty of their deaths in a way.
On the one hand, Gerry uses the idea of indirect guilt to try to pressure Falk to cooperate. At the same time, however, Gerry’s words hint at how the larger culture in Kiewarra, where people are afraid to speak up about the truth out of fear of becoming a target or causing trouble, may have contributed to the deaths.
Themes
On his drive back to his room above the pub, Falk accidentally runs over a rabbit. It reminds him of a memory when he was eight years old with Luke in Kiewarra. The two of them found a rabbit in the grass and took it back to put in a carboard box in Luke’s house. Falk went out to get a blanket for the rabbit, but he came back, Luke told him it had died, without explaining why. Falk wonders if Ellie’s eyes looked like the rabbit’s eyes as she was drowning.
Although Falk doesn’t witness the rabbit’s death, his memory strongly implies that Luke killed the rabbit by pressing on it too hard—and that if Luke killed that rabbit, then he could also be capable of killing Ellie by drowning her. The flashback leaves it ambiguous whether Luke intended to kill the rabbit, but even the possibility that he accidentally killed it could mean that he was capable of murdering Ellie.
Themes
