How well can you really ever know anyone? The Wife and The Widow

The Wife and the Widow by Christian White

Affirm Press

Pp. 326

In this novel Kate is the widow (husband; John) and Abby is the wife (husband; Ray), and, although this occasionally gets confusing, it is well-written and with enough suspense and intrigue to keep the reader engaged. It has a contemporary feel in that the characters frequently refer to true crime podcasts or “suburban procedural TV shows”, indicating that we have all become familiar with these, and that there is a communal enjoyment. It also explores a common theme of these novels in how secret lives are discovered after the death of a loved one (and sometimes even when they are alive), causing one character to reflect, “We all have things that ought to stay buried, things a person should keep to themselves. Things that, if they were ever dragged into the light, would change the way people saw us. I suppose my point is, how well can you really ever know anyone?”

 

With a wry aside to the power of fiction on susceptible minds, Kate first learns something may be amiss when she discovers her husband was skipping work and “reading horror novels by this mad American – Lovecroft? Something like that.” White examines the consequences of hiding feelings and burying emotions, suggesting that suppressed memory will never remain that way, even when counselled, “Put it someplace out of the way, in a room behind a locked door. Then all you have to do is not go in that room.” Kate remembers that John told their daughter they had to confront their fears; after all, “If they didn’t talk about the monsters in this world, then they wouldn’t be ready for them when they jumped out from under the bed.”

 

When Abby asks her husband why he hadn’t previously spoken to her of his fears, and dreams, he replies, “Come on Abby, I’m not one of your girlfriends. Men aren’t like that.” Later he relates his reading matter, “I started reading Tolstoy but couldn’t get into it. Vonnegut and Salinger were both pretty good. Didn’t mind Jane Austen either – bet you’re surprised to hear that one?” It’s difficult to tell whether this gender-reductive viewpoint is that of the character or the author, or both.

 

While appealing to the common denominator – we all consult Dr Google, right? “Her left foot ached with what the internet had diagnosed as either gout, a corn, or foot cancer.” – there are some aspects of the novel which are unoriginal or overexplained. We all know what TMI is and don’t need it spelled out. Similarly, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is used to indicate the consequences of broken trust and looking back. This must be one of the most overworked myths in recent literature, and the fact that it needs to be explained suggests a level of disrespect for the reader.

 

On the other hand, the author deals well with the subject of grief. “Since John’s disappearance, such simple things had become near impossible. Preparing meals, for example, now seemed like a bizarre foreign custom, needlessly complicated.” Kate cannot easily see a way forward. “She baulked at people who said things like life’s too short and time passes in a blur and Jee-zus, is it Christmas already? Life was long, time moved too slow, and anyway fuck Christmas.” Her friend advises her how to cope with the aftermath. “You keep moving. You eat, you take a bath, you shave your legs and you keep looking forward. Guilt, fear, grief, they’re all like moss. If you slow down long enough, it’ll start to grow and it won’t stop until you’re covered.” Apart from the bit about shaving your legs – another male writing about women trope – this is an interesting metaphor.

 

At other times, the similes are so original as to almost be jarring. “She was quiet, like a duck slipping through a pond.” A false person speaks “words like a backdrop in a Hollywood studio, held together by balsawood and coated in cheap paint.” While waiting for news, a character smokes with attitude. “He sucked on the cigarette hard and fast, as if he was hoping to develop lung cancer before dinnertime.” The colloquial is ever-present as the ferry doors opened and “spat the Lexus out like a dislodged chunk of meat” or fact is sifted from fiction. “Around here, rumours are like holey buckets. They don’t hold water.”

 

The characters and setting are distinctly Australian. Abby practices taxidermy on roadkill her friends bring her, and the tools of her trade, pelts and glassy eyes are all fabulously macabre. It is set on a fictional Victorian (Australian) island out of season where, “The island represented a cold exclamation mark at the end of a sentence.” The atmosphere is frigid and grim, or as Abby puts it, “It’s colder than a fairy penguin’s pocket.”

 

Overall, this is an intense and compelling thriller which is hugely readable and atmospheric. It is only White’s second novel and already he is being described by The Age as a master of the art of misdirection.

Frozen: Let It Go

Ice by Louis Nowra

(Allen & Unwin) Pp. 322

In the 1880s British entrepreneurs Malcolm McEachern and Andrew McIlwraith tow an iceberg to Sydney and introduce locals to ice. It goes down a treat, but as the iceberg melts, the frozen body of a young sailor is found within it. Malcolm is lost in grief for the death of his wife, Ann, and he attempts to preserve her memory. A parallel story is narrated by a young man who takes over his partner’s research work (she was writing a biography of Malcolm McEachern) after she is frozen in a coma. Images and metaphors of arresting time resound throughout the novel.

Early Sydney comes alive through the impressions of the young men as they first arrive. It is a character in itself, defying description and confounding assumptions; full of possibilities as people flee the Old World and try to reinvent themselves in a land of opportunities. Malcolm is always chasing the latest business venture: he brings refrigerated meat from Australia to London, electricity to Melbourne and order to the Tokyo electric tram system. He is attracted to what he calls Australia’s “dirty prism of classless democratic optimism” which allowed him to succeed in business.

Malcolm is clearly a man’s man, dismissing women as inferior and the representation of women within the novel is astoundingly weak. Malcolm’s mother remarries and excludes him from her life, and his second wife, Mary, is unkindly portrayed as some sort of harpy, despite the fact that his treatment of her is appalling. He mourns his first wife, Ann, building her a mausoleum – a weird subterranean world of bottled embryos – and Mary disappears into the background to lead a separate life.

The telling of Malcolm’s story is full of things that biographers could not have known but must have imagined; as the tale proceeds the narrator becomes increasingly unreliable. Ann dies, which is convenient, because live women are so messy, and Malcolm is distraught, but is the narrator talking about himself or about Malcolm? “Until he’d married her he had been unloved and she had awoken love in him, as surely as if it were a delicious, sweet emerging from melting ice. She had given him a purpose, a sense that he was human and loving, but a callous God had snatched her away from him, scooped his insides out and rendered him hollow.”

The references to being frozen in form and time are both literal and metaphoric as the lines between subject and biographer blur. The frigid purity of ice is contrasted with the warm sensuality of the body. Malcolm makes a wax effigy of Ann and keeps it in his catacombs where he builds a room for her and visits her for necrophiliac purposes. “It was as if she was frozen, like the perfectly preserved American sailor excavated from the iceberg.” The similarities with the drug – “the drug that ruined your life and mine” – are not accidental.

Malcolm’s time is one of great change and discovery and he himself is a man of science and technology. The scientific developments of the age – X-rays; atoms; telephones; electricity – become confused with spiritualism and mesmerism because “The boundaries between the possible and impossible were quickly narrowing at an astonishing pace.” Mary believes that, “Scientists belong in the darkness of their laboratories, not in the bright light of society.” Darkness and secrecy, however, lead to obsession and madness, which will always be revealed when exposed to the light.