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A haunting story of regret leads our list of the must-reads this month.
Extinctions
Josephine Wilson, UWA Publishing
"What is the point of pain?" asks widower Frederick Lothian, the protagonist in Wilson's second novel, Extinctions. The question resounds through a novel brimming with tragedy. Extinctions flew a little under the radar until it won the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award, guaranteeing it the wide audience it deserves. It is the story of Frederick's painful journey from ignorance and moral cowardice to self-knowledge and courage.
The novel opens with Frederick, a former professor of structural engineering, in his retirement village in Perth, reading the obituaries, signalling a recurring theme – death. He loathes being there, regarding it as a "bridge between his real life, which had ended, and death". He is estranged from his adult children, Caroline and Callum, and has managed to keep to himself until circumstances connect him to his neighbour, Jan, a friendly, no-nonsense woman who makes her way into his life.
As Jan gets to know Frederick, he reveals himself to be a difficult man: selfish, thoughtless and, at times, misogynistic. Through persistent questioning, she learns that he had a brutal father and that he suffered a childhood tragedy. As an adult, in a grim echo of his father's cruelty, he was responsible for an equally devastating event, to which he has responded with a combination of denial, shame and remorse. Jan's probing causes him for the first time to confront his past and to contemplate atoning for it.
Extinctions is an ambitious novel, with a number of significant concerns. One is family. Frederick's daughter Caroline is adopted, and Indigenous, and she has always struggled to find her own identity in a family to which she bears no physical resemblance. Now a curator, she is planning an exhibition on extinction, which, in a novel rich in imagery, becomes a metaphor for adoption. Wilson explores the complex issues surrounding adoption, in particular of an Indigenous child by a white family, with great sensitivity, suggesting that the concept of extinction is equally relevant to the Aboriginal people.
Another theme is the impact of the past on the present – Frederick is tormented by the past, yet can't let it go, hanging on desperately to his dead wife's belongings in a vain attempt to hold onto her. Wilson's portrayal of the loneliness and fears of old age is particularly poignant. A haunting story of grief, shame, regret and loneliness.
The World Broke in Two
Bill Goldstein, Bloomsbury Circus
Who knew that 1922 was a seminal year for four of the great writers of the 20th century: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster? In this deeply researched book, American literary historian Goldstein describes a year that began for all of them with a crisis of confidence but ended with them producing some of their best writing, signalling the beginning of a new era of modernist literature.
Woolf began the year bedridden with serious influenza, Eliot was recovering from a nervous breakdown, Lawrence struggled with influenza and domestic woes and Forster had not published a book for 12 years.
By the end of 1922 Woolf had started Mrs Dalloway, Eliot had published The Waste Land, Lawrence had written Kangaroo and Forster had returned to the abandoned manuscript of A Passage to India.
Goldstein's description of how each conquered their personal demons provides a deep insight into the highs and lows of a writer's life – from the perennial struggle with poverty and writers' block to the euphoria of critical acclaim.
The Cage
Lloyd Jones, Text
Jones' latest book is a thinly disguised allegory of how easily ordinary, civilised people can lose their humanity, which reminded me of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Jones is a New Zealand writer who wrote the award-winning Mister Pip, published in 2007.
This book is set in a guesthouse in New Zealand, where two unnamed men are being held against their will in a cage in the backyard. They are refugees who have survived a catastrophe which they will not talk about. A group of locals decides to imprison them until they say where they are from and what has happened to them. The treatment of the men goes from bad to worse, with requests for release denied, and gradually even small privileges withdrawn.
In a triumph of doublethink, the captors justify their cruelty by telling themselves that it is the men's own fault because they refuse to talk. The prisoners lament that, "whatever we say is not heard, or is taken for a lie". The novel reads like a fable; and it isn't difficult to see the point Jones is making about the treatment today of asylum seekers.
The February issue of AFR Magazine is out on Friday, February 2 inside The Australian Financial Review.