(disclaimer: I simply can't do a 350 word review of this book!)
I heard this book discussed on the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club, and I was not surprised to hear it passionately defended by two guests, and savagely attacked by another. I bought this book for the school library because I believe it to be an outstanding (nearly) Australian novel. I suspect it will only be read by Extension English students, but I would encourage parents with a literary bent to borrow it. What is all the fuss about?
Those who do not like it find it intricately detailed and overwhelming in size… the larger format paperback I have is over 500 pages in length. It is also distressing because the story is a painfully close look at a family that we would now call dysfunctional. The cruelty to the children is not really physical, certainly not sexual… rather they are drafted into a world of warring parents who use endless tricks to co-opt the children to their side. This is all the more difficult because the parents each believe they are on high moral ground and do what they do for the sake of right and for the children… especially Sam, the father who loves his children so much that he cannot leave them alone for a moment to have their own thoughts or feelings.
I have long wondered why I loved this book from the first time I read it over 30 years ago. I think I know now… it is the extraordinary language that Sam (the father) uses with his family. This is not a trivial rendition by Christina Stead of a family’s “in house” language… not just the application of a few nick names or a special name for a mood or event. She actually creates a totally believable stream of language for Sam, who plays with words constantly, twists and distorts words, brings in without explanation scientific names, patches of Malay, literary references and phantasms of his own imagining. The effect of reading his monologues is like being immersed in a modern stream-of-consciousness text, or perhaps slabs of Finnegan’s Wake.
Stead does not speculate on the impact this strange life of inconsistent messages, cloying love and adult fury will have on the children. Ultimately she is telling the story of the eldest, Louise, who is very bright, constantly reading, and constantly called on by her parents to be a “little mother”. Her response is to shoulder responsibility beyond her age: defending the other children and challenging her parents. It is her story that ultimately reaches a tragic climax that brings the book to a close, without any hint of what will happen next.
There is just one clue… but it is not in the book, it is in the writer. There is a reasonable ground to believe that Stead drew on some aspects of her own childhood, and if that is true, then “Louise” went on to become a political activist and writer… and someone who lived most of her life away from her homeland.
Suitable for older students, the difficulty will be the size of the book and the characters who are appealing at times but enmeshed in tragedy none of them seem able to escape. The language is wonderful and worth close study.
Andrew Lack
