An Isolated Incident

I've been meaning to read An Isolated Incident for at least three years. I saw Emily Maguire speak at Newcastle Writers Festival back in 2017. Remember when Writers Festivals were a thing? It makes me all nostalgic. I had a copy somewhere I bought back in 2017, but fear it has disappeared somewhere. Recently I found the audiobook on my  BorrowBox. A few days ago, I started listening, and then, four days later I was done. 

An Isolated Incident kicks off grabbing our attention from the very start. A young policeman is knocking on a door to tell a woman that the body of her sister has been found. 

It was the new cop who came to the door, the young fella who'd only been on the job a couple of months. I thought that was a bit rough, sending a boy like him to do a job like that. Later I found out that he was sent because he'd gone to pieces at the scene. That's what we all call it now: the scene. 

Chris is a local barmaid, working at one of the four pubs in Strathdee, a small town in South West New South Wales. She is perhaps a bit rough around the edges, but she loved her younger sister very much. They had a difficult mother, and a difficult childhood for various reasons, and they've been very close as adults. Bella's murder hits Chris and the small town hard. Much of the book is told in first person narration by Chris.

The other narrative voice is May, a journalist who has come to town to cover "the story". To me An Isolated Incident was then somehow like a female version of Chris Hammer's Scrublands- which was also an audiobook for me, and another NWF connection! (see my review) Female author, female journalist. Female victim. An Isolated Incident is of course the earlier of the two books, but a similar story with a damaged journalist coming to a small town. Of course this perspective from the outside fills out the story a lot, and gives a broader perspective on the town and it's inhabitants. The articles that May writes for her online newspaper are included too. 

I always enjoy a multiple point of view but the dual narrative was sometimes confusing, as changes in narrator are unannounced on the audiobook, which is an ongoing audio problem. Just a short pause between sections is all we ask. Too much? Seems to be. The print book has obvious spaces, give us pauses on the audio. 

An Isolated Incident asks us not to see Bella's murder as an Isolated Incident, but to see how it sits within the history and context of violence against women. 

This had nothing to do with what happened to Bella and what happened to Bella had nothing to do with Tegan Miller and none of it had to do with the rich Sydney housewife left out to rot in the street which had nothing to do with the Nigerian girls stolen as sex slaves or the Indian woman eviscerated on a bus or the man grabbing women off the streets in Brunswick. 

It also explores family, female friendship, marriage, infinidelity, our culture of alcohol. It is sexy and provocative in a way that is rather unusual for a murder mystery. 

I've been listening to quite a bit of crime fiction over the past year since I listened to Scrublands really. I'm just about  half way through Nicci French's Frieda Klein series, and loving it. 

The narration by Katherine Littrell (what a surname!) is masterful. She is astonishing actually. She is a trained actor- which really shines through, and does work in multiple accents  and dialects- Australian, New Zealand, American and British! Wow. Sadly most of the titles she narrates are not my cup of tea, but I'll be searching out more of her work. 

An Isolated Incident was Shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize

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The Weekend

Holiday reading is always fun to think about. So much expectation, of the holiday itself of course, and what you'll read while on holiday - always massively over calculated. I'm coming to the growing realisation that I rarely get more than one book read while I'm away, no matter the length of the holiday. I tend to do more holidaying than reading. Even so I always pack at least four books, knowing that I will buy many more while away. For quite some time I was planning that I would read Trent Dalton's Boy Swallows Universe while I was in Tasmania in January (ah, interstate travel in a group, so last year). He's got a new book coming out in a few months, and I haven't read his first one yet. I hate that.

Somewhat out of the blue Trent got pipped at the post by a more recent book Charlotte Wood's The Weekend. No particular reason. I did consider some Tasmanian books - Heather Rose's Bruny, Robbie Arnott's Flames, and also some themed books, notably Alice Bishop's A Constant Hum as Australia continued to burn, and I knew I would see bushfires from my plane seat.

But I'd been intrigued by The Weekend since I'd first heard about it. A tale of three close friends, now in their 70s, coming together to clear out the holiday house of their fourth friend who had died earlier in the year. Increasingly I love stories about older adults. 

I really enjoyed getting to know Jude, Wendy, Adele and their absent friend Sylvie. I've recently taken to travelling with three friends, there was the shock of recognition at times, and prophecy. Hopefully decades away for us though. 

Adele and Wendy and Jude did not fit properly anymore, without Sylvie. They had been four, it was symmetrical. When they went on holidays they shared two hotel rooms, two beds in each. There were four places at the table, two on each side. Now there was an awful, unnatural gap. 

I enjoyed the stories of how the four of them met, their friendship over time, and the various hurdles that life throws our way. 

This was something nobody talked about: how death could make you petty. And how you had to find a new arrangement among your friends, shuffling around the gap of the lost one, all of you suddenly mystified by how to be with one another. 

I've read two  Charlotte Wood novels now. I read The Natural Way of Things (see my review) back in 2016. The Weekend was certainly a less discomforting read, more suburban. But Charlotte Wood still has her eyes keenly focused on our culture and societal changes.

Everybody hated old people now; it was acceptable, encouraged even, because of your paid-off mortgage and your free education and your ruination of the plant. And Wendy agreed. She loathed nostalgia, the past bored her. More than anything, she despised self-pity. And they had been lucky, and wasteful. They had failed to protect the future. But, on the other hand, she and Lance had had nothing when they were young. Nothing! The Claires of the world seemed to forget that, with all their trips to Europe, their coffee machines and air conditioners and three bathrooms in every house. And anyway, lots of people, lots of women - Wendy felt a satisfying feminist righteousness rising - didn't have paid-off mortgages, had no super. 

Young people, Australians, now spoke with American accents, pronouncing their r's at the end of words and saying afterr, the a like in apple. Why was this? The Western world had blurred itself into one jellied cultural mass. Her students last time she had lectured - years ago, when they still wanted her - knew the names of suburbs in San Francisco or Seattle better than the names of towns of Western Victoria. It was strange. For almost all of Wendy's life the only things Australians knew about America were the words 'New York' or 'LA' or 'Niagara Falls', but now her friends' grandchildren were buying brownstones and running businesses in Brooklyn as if this was the most normal thing in the world. Neighbourhood, they said. Bed-Study. Prospect Heights. 

I really loved the first two thirds or so, but didn't enjoy it as much after two new, and not particularly likeable, characters were introduced later on in the book. I do wonder about the title of The Weekend, as it isn't set over a weekend. It's set at Christmas. 

Christmas was supposed to mean renewal. It meant the beginning of things not the end. 

Which I found a nice accident for my January holiday read. It was also set somewhere north of Sydney, which is where I grew up, it's all a bit vague in the book, a fictional location, but I was perpetually looking for clues as to where it was "really" set. As always reading this book has only increased my TBR, as I'm keen to read more Charlotte Wood. I've read two of her six novels now, four to go!

Charlotte Wood interviewed on RN The Book Show, where she refers to The Weekend as a "cautionary self portrait", and that the creative impulse of curiosity about the ageing process.

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The Household Guide to Dying

It wasn't my intention to start this book a few months ago. I didn't think it would be a good idea given that my week was going to include the funeral of an old friend. But then I hopped in my car for a road trip to discover that I had forgotten to download the other audiobook that I was actually planning to listen to. What to do? What to do? I had to listen to something... so I started this one, albeit somewhat cautiously. Planning to bail and just listen to music if I had to. 

Only to have the first chapter be all about dying in spring. Oh dear. This was flying rather close to reality. 

It didn't get more cruel than this: the season of expectation, of hope, of growth; the season of the future, when there was none at all. 

But there were enough difference to let me continue. Our first person narrator of The Household Guide to Dying is Delia Bennet. A woman in her late thirties, with a husband and two young children, Delia is dying of metastatic breast cancer. Depressing enough when you're feeling a bit fragile. 

Delia is a copyeditor, proofreader and writer and  has had an "accidental" career as an author to various Household Guides. The Household Guide to Home Maintenance. The Household Guide to the Kitchen. The Household Guide to the Laundry. A veritable modern day Mrs Beeton (who is reference multiple times in the book). Now Delia wants to write The Household Guide to Dying.

Always a devoted reader, I found myself surprisingly ahead when I commenced the arts degree. I finished under time to discover I was brilliantly unqualified for anything. 

The Household Guide to Dying is filled with literary references, whether discussing dying mothers

How cruel, how unfair, how totally unsporting, how unlike the stout mothers of public life, the mothers of fiction. You could never imagine Mrs Gandhi or Mrs Micawber or Mrs Thatcher or Mrs Weasley dying before their time and leaving their children unmothered. The prime minister's wife - any prime ministers wife - Nicole Kidman's mother, Mrs Jellyby, Angelina Jolie, the Queen, Lady Jane Franklin, Mrs George Bush Senior and Junior .... they would never have died young and left motherless children. They might have been doubtful, dominating or dysfunctional - all Dickens's mothers were- but they stayed around. Even Lady Dedlock hung in there. Jane Austen's Mrs Bennet would never have left five young daughters weeping over a coffin. 

or dying readers. There is a whole chapter on what to read when you're actually, actively dying. 

Even before I realised I'd be leaving this world prematurely, I had fantasised over what I would be reading at the point of death. 

How practicalities interfered.

Middlemarch was far too heavy. Witty, yes. Ardent, doubtless. But just too damn heavy.... Lolita was too clever. Pride and Prejudice was suddenly all so brittle... Madame Bovary far too sly... Then I realised, when I started rejecting books that I knew were perfect works of literature, that it was not them, and not the authors. It was me, the reader. The reader in me was unwinding, spooling backwards. The reader who was me was now no longer. 

But it's more than a book about illness and dying, it's also mediation on the lives of modern women and mothers.

Thirty years later, it was different. We women of the early twenty-first century knew we were poised somewhere between domestic freedom and servitude. The home was ripe for reinvention. Event he theorists were claiming it. Angels were out, they'd been expelled years back. Now you could be a goddess, a beautiful producer of lavish meals in magnificent kitchen temples. Or a domestic whore, audaciously serving store-bought risottos and oversized oysters and leaving the cleaning to others. Goddess or whore, both were acceptable. 

The burden of choice, one of the late twentieth century's most insidious was lifted. 

One of the literary references really spoke to me. The Metaphysical Poets was not a book I knew. Despite the fact that this was published in 1965 and I could well have been tortured with it in high school.  I've never recovered from my lifelong loathing of poetry caused by misadventures in high school English.  Of course a few days later on a spontaneous visit to the Newcastle Lifeline Book Fair the universe threw up a copy of this classic into my path. I couldn't help but buy it... among a few other things. 

It was if one person in the world had decided that school-kids should eternally read Hamlet, To Kill a Mockingbird, Herodotus's Histories, The Catcher in the Rye, and something called The Metaphysical Poets.

Of those I only had to suffer through Histories. 

There was a lot of beautiful writing about the mundane, the every day.  About back yards, lawns and chook sheds. 

I entered the shed. Despite the dust, the earthy pungency of the chicken manure, the remains of bones and shell and everything else they unearthed in their endless, resales scratching for vermicular treats, the shed and the run was a pleasant place. It offered tender moments that couldn't be found anywhere else. The angled poles of light capturing swirls of golden dust. The feathers rising and settling on the ground. The clucking that sounded equally contented and distressed. The air of expectancy that emanated from every hen, no matter how silly. The pure optimism that kept her laying an egg day after day, when day after day that egg was taken away. 

My day job often interferes with my enjoyment of medical scenes or procedures. There is a rather preposterous medical situation later in the book, and it was so egregious that for me it was like the rest of the book was suddenly a bit out of focus ( even though I was listening to it). Although when Delia goes to observe an autopsy it was clear that Debra Adelaide had been in Glebe Coroner's Court, and I had more than a tingle of recognition. 

Overall my sad week in September was actually a good week to listen to The Household Guide to Dying. Some of it resonated very strongly, and much of it has stayed with me months later. I have more Debra Adelaide on my TBR, I'm looking forward to getting to it. 

I loved Heather Bolton's narration of the audiobook. She had me in from the start. 


Read in 2019, blogged in 2020.

http://australianwomenwriters.com

http://australianwomenwriters.com

The Yellow House

I haven't had a big reading year it must be said. And I haven't been blogging about those few books that I have read. Although most of what I've actually read has been audiobooks I do believe. I will have to tally up the proportion when I do my end of the year post. 

The Yellow House was another audiobook for me. Despite it winning The Vogel Award last year I first heard of The Yellow House when I saw Emily O'Grady speak at a panel at Newcastle Writers Festival earlier this year. I was intrigued by this book so came home with an autographed copy, which I then didn't actually read. Opening up my copy now I see that my lovely friend ANZLitlovers is blurbed! How fabulous. 

Newcastle Writers Festival was way back in April, so when I approached The Yellow House in December I had pretty much forgotten what it was about. The Yellow House has a child narrator, not something that every one likes. I usually do, but I was a bit frustrated by our 10 year old narrator here at times. 

Ten year old Cub (Coralie) is a twin. She lives with her twin brother Wally, who sounds as obnoxious as a ten year old boy can be, her older brother Cassie (Cassius) and her parents on a property some way out of town.

Our house sat at the edge of the paddock, down a dirt road off the side of the highway. There were no other houses close by, except for the yellow house over the fence. A weatherboard, almost identical to ours except for the colour: the same rickety verandah that looked out over the hilly paddock and the inky mountains on the other side of the highway, the dirt crawl space that rustled like tinsel if you gave the nesting cockies a fright.

Cub's family are on the outskirts of town in more ways than one. Her maternal grandfather Les committed a series of terrible crimes before she was born, and her family is still paying the price for his actions more than a decade after he died. They are shunned socially, her father and brother find it hard to get work. The twins have never really been able to make any friends at school. 

Then Cub's aunt Helena and cousin Tilly come to live in the yellow house next door, her brother Cassie makes a new friend Ian, and things begin to change. Cub's parents have taken great pains to keep her and Wally in the dark about their grandfather's crimes. That bit took quite a bit of suspension of belief for me. I really don't think that you could survive five or six years at school and have not one kid (or teacher) say something about the nationally famous crimes of your grandfather. Or that some kid would find that really the twins were just kids despite the warnings of their parents and befriend them, at least in the school yard. 

Cub was not the overly precocious child narrator, indeed she was quite in the dark about most things, she was a pestery questioning kid though. But she couldn't know some things I really wanted to know. Why did her aunt Helena move to the yellow house? It's suggested along the way, actually I think Helena's perspective would have been really interesting. 

Most of the action of the story takes place on the family property or at the local public school were the twins attend school. Cub's world is quite small so the story is quite small really. The twins spend most of their time at home, especially over the long summer holiday when a lot of the book is set. Like all country kids they roam about the paddock and the dam, but they have always steered clear of the knackery that was involved in their grandfathers crimes. 

While reading I didn't get a good feeling for when the book was set. Perhaps I missed obvious statements, but sometimes it felt like it could have been set anytime from the 1950s onwards. No-one had laptops or internet, but there were cars, microwaves and it became more obviously recent past. 

I didn't particularly like the very end of the book. I wanted something else, more perhaps. 

I know I'll be gravely disappointed (pun almost intended) but whenever I come across a ghost drop (Cub's favourite lolly) I'm going to have to have one. I'd never heard of them before. Perhaps they're a Queensland thing?

Read in 2019, blogged in 2020. Yes I'm trying to catch up a bit, clear the backlog.

http://australianwomenwriters.com

http://australianwomenwriters.com