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

https://australianwomenwriters.com

Wasted

Elspeth Muir's Wasted was long listed for the Stella Award 2017. For some reason it really called to me to read it. I really like the double entendre title, although not the cover particularly, and didn't really know much more about the book than the subtitle: A story of alcohol, grief and a death in Brisbane.  I almost got to see Elspeth talk at Newcastle Writer's Festival this year, but sadly didn't manage it.

Wasted is part-memoir, part-nonfiction and grew from Elspeth's grief, despair and anger at the death of her youngest brother, Alexander. 

My brother died because he was drunk, and because the drink made him stupid. 

Alexander had quite the proclivity for drinking, he started sneaking out of home to drink from the age of 13. A year before he was to drown in the Brisbane River at 21, Alexander woke up one morning passed out under the mangroves of the river bank. 

I thought this was hilarious. 

Elspeth documents her own hazardous drinking in much the same way. 

I drank more than ever. On rare nights I could remember getting home but usually I had no idea what had happened past midnight. I shed personal objects- cards, wallets and phones. I spent Saturdays and Sundays vomiting bile into a saucepan. I started to feel darkness when I drank: a grasping, anxious slide from euphoria into deep nervous anger. It started with small tendrils of anxiety, then my breath became shallow and I started kicking as hard as I could to stay afloat. I drank more to stave off the fall but it was inevitable, and drinking more just made me black out. 

Alexander drank heavily, he had frequent blackouts and would often disappear for days at a time. He was arrested for the first time at just fifteen, and had some minor skirmishes with the police. Of course many young Australians drink this way, most will survive it, some don't, and her brother was one of the unlucky ones.  Each week one young Australian between 16 and 25 will die, and more than 60 will be hospitalised from alcohol related incidents. 

Drugs were expensive, and tricky to get because their procurement needed to be planned in advance, but alcohol was cheap- five dollars for a cleanskin, ten for a cask- and there were bottle shops all around us, including a twenty-four-hour one a fifteen minute walk away.

The second half of the book is more nonfiction than memoir, where Elspeth looks at the role of alcohol in our culture. There are interesting discussions about white versus Aboriginal drinking, and Elspeth spends an eyeopening night with Red Frogs volunteers at Schoolies on the Gold Coast. 

Yet there is something unsettling and unsettled about the place of alcohol in Australian society. At its best the drinking culture is characterised by egalitarianism, a laid-back attitude and a spirit of creativity. Australians invented the goon bag and the stubby, while the first tubs of Vegemite were by-products of discarded Carlton and United Brewery yeast. At its worst the nation's drinking can be characterised by violent and recklessness, exclusion and a pattern of boozing to extremes. 

Overall I enjoyed Wasted, especially the memoir sections, at times it was like Elspeth and I lived in the same share households... Wasted casts an interesting light on Australian drinking culture, a culture that I both participate in from time to time (although no longer as enthusiastically as in the past), and see as an observer.

http://australianwomenwriters.com

Stella Prize 2017 Longlist and Shortlist

The Stella Prize has done such a great job of highlighting the superb writing by Australian Women writers since it's inception in 2013. The official site of the Stella Prize gives a great account of its foundation in 2011. It's interesting that it was founded at the same time as the Australia Women Writers Challenge, which started in 2012.

This years list is naturally another Stella list. I have been keen to read many of these titles, and have bought a number of them already.

The Longlist was announced on February 7.

Victoria: The Queen - Julia Baird
Between A Wolf And A Dog - Georgia Blain
The Hate Race - Maxine Beneba Clark
Poum and Alexandre - Catherine de Sainte Phalle
Offshore - Madeline Gleeson
Avalanche - Julia Leigh
An Isolated Incident - Emily Maguire
The High Places - Fiona McFarlane
Wasted - Elspeth Muir (see my review)
The Museum of Modern Love - Heather Rose
Dying: A Memoir - Cory Taylor
The Media and the Massacre - Sonya Voumard



The Shortlist was announced this past week.


Between A Wolf And A Dog - Georgia Blain

The Hate Race - Maxine Beneba Clark

Poum and Alexandre - Catherine de Sainte Phalle

An Isolated Incident - Emily Maguire

The Museum of Modern Love - Heather Rose WINNER

Dying: A Memoir - Cory Taylor

The winner will be announced on April 18.

UPDATE April 18 Heather Rose's The Museum of Modern Love has just been announced as the winner. 

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The Natural Way of Things

The Natural Way of Things was all over the best of 2015 lists a few months ago, and I suspect it will pop up on many award lists this year, it has already made the Fiction Shortlist for the Indie Book Awards and the 2016 Stella Prize Longlist (Update- The Natural Way of Things won the Stella Prize). I was sorely tempted. And I really loved the cover. I became even more tempted. I bought a copy for a friend, and then I had to buy a copy for me too.  I'm glad I did, although it's certainly not my usual fare, rather far from it actually. 

It's a mystery of sorts. Two young women wake up in an unknown place in unknown clothes. It's obvious fairly quickly that things are not right. 

She got out of bed and felt gritty boards beneath her feet. There was the coarse unfamiliar fabric of a nightgown on her skin. Who had put this on her?

But it's not just these two young women, Yolanda and Verla, in this remote place in outback Australia, there are other women. It's hard to say more than that about the plot really, without giving too much away. 

It's a sparse, unappealing story in some ways- profane, violent, mean, it makes for very uncomfortable reading at times. And yet I didn't stop reading, I couldn't. I had been warned that some "old ladies" didn't like it at all, and didn't finish it. I can see how it isn't a book for everyone. Still it's a powerful story and well written. 

Clouds collect and steepen, build then collapse, silver empires rising and falling in the vast blue skies. 

Even within this most Australian of novels there are mentions of Paris that made my heart swoon. Verla has stood before The Lady and The Unicorn at Musée Cluny. I tried to do that in 2013, but it was visiting Japan at the time. As you read the cover design becomes even more intriguing. I think it's one of the most perfect book cover designs ever. Big call I know. 

This has been my first taste of Charlotte Wood, although I've been meaning to read her for several years. I saw her talk at a Melbourne Writer's Festival quite a few years ago now.  I'm glad I've finally had the opportunity to read her writing, and of course look forward to checking out her other books. 

Hear a fascinating RN interview with Charlotte Wood talking about The Natural Way of Things (there are however some specific discussion of plot points). And another RN podcast of Charlotte Wood talking about 5 works of art that helped inspire The Natural Way of Things, it's very fascinating, and explains the yellow bus. 

http://australianwomenwriters.com