I encounter a good book with unnecessary elements of magical realism

The Riders ****
By Tim Winton

Fred Scully is good-hearted but not-very-bright Aussie. He's busy fixing a hovel in Ireland on a whim of wife Jennifer, who up and leaves him and daughter Billie, though it takes Scully some time to process this info. (Like I said, he's not very bright.)

**SPOILERS** We never really know what happens to Jennifer, though it is gradually revealed that she has the kind of magnificent and bloodless selfishness that puts her in the pantheon of truly heartless women of literature like DuMaurier's Rebecca and Lillian Hellman's Regina. But the story isn't really about Jennifer. It's about Scully searching for her across Europe, often often finding mutual acquaintances who seem to know where she is, or at least seem to know her far better than Scully ever did, but who refuse to give him more than innuendos and hints. In tow with Scully is Billie, 7, who has been traumatized nearly to the point of speechlessness by Jennifer's abandonment, and to whom horrendous things happen that mirror Scully's damaged emotional state.

Winton has a beautiful prose style. Three weeks after reading this book, I still remember some of his phrases--for example, the "sunsilvered" patina of wood left to weather--little jewels of words that, like a whiff of savory sauce from the kitchen, remind you how hungry you are for prose that rises above the prosaic.

Punctuating the story are the riders of the title, who first appear to Scully as as a ghostly-but-corporeal army seemingly searching for something in a ruined castle keep near the cottage in Ireland. Like Scully, the riders seem to be on a quest for someone or something. Like Scully, they show up too late, in empty places.

The riders represent what has been lost. That they don't disappear suggests the lasting scars of Jennifer's leaving that Scully and Billie must live with. Nevertheless, Billie and Scully do not join the riders nor succumb to the restlessness of a futile and neverending quest.

At least, that's what I think the riders are about.

Frankly, as elements of magical realism, the riders are clunky and self-conscious, dream wraiths wholly out of place in a novel about a man who is generally without much imagination and firmly rooted in his five senses. They mar an otherwise beautifully written book.