booklit

Helen Garner is a new name to me, having recently discovered a number of her books were available in the Penguin Modern Classics range, albeit only in her native Australia. Reading around, it seems her work deals autobiographically with elements of her life. But after her 1992 novel, Cosmo Cosmolino, she effectively stopped writing fiction and now, sixteen years later, has returned with The Spare Room (2008), another take on her life, and, given that the narrator shares her name, lifestyle, and talents, it may just be her most personal yet.

While the novel has moments of comic relief, one can’t ignore that death underlies it. Opening with Helen preparing her spare room, plumping pillows and airing it out, it may hint at a new beginning, but she’s doing this because her friend Nicola, diagnosed with bowel cancer, is coming to Melbourne to stay for three weeks while receiving alternative treatment from the Theodore Institute, a local clinic.

Said clinic, charging two thousand dollars a week and manned by unprofessional staff, runs on the ideas of its founder, Professor Theodore, a quack with some strange ideas about medicine:

‘High dosage vitamin C will kill off lumps of cancer and boost the immune system. And our ozone sauna treatment is based on the old natural-therapy approach to cancer - sweating out the toxins. Most doctors don’t know this stuff. But it’s good science.’

Outfits like this, as Helen notes, “tended to keep people linked to them in cloudy hope, right to the end.” And linked to it Nicola most certainly is, walking around with a permanent smile on her face, worrying for others rather than herself, and flat out refusing to acknowledge the truth that she’s going to die. (”‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s the treatments causing the pain - that’s how I know they’re working. It’s just the toxins coming out.’”)

The relationship between the two women is in turns comic (on the subject of coffee enemas) and downright heart-breaking. Helen’s journey as friend and carer is punctuated by ugly thoughts, worryingly detailed, as Nicola infuriates her again and again with her embracing of dodgy treatments and her mustn’t-grumble attitude. It’s certainly a far cry from Helen’s sister, herself dead from cancer:

She accepted her death sentence quietly, without mutiny; perhaps, we thought in awe, she even welcomed it. She laid down her gun. She let us cherish her.

In further contrast, Helen’s sister was a nurse who believe in western medicine, whereas:

…in recent years, shortly before [Nicola] became ill, Buddhist terms had entered her discourse. She knew how to pronounce rinpoche and where to get a ticket when the famous ones were coming to town. She subjected herself to ten-day vipassana boot camps in the Blue Mountains: her account of these speechless ordeals were shaped to make me laugh, but she always came back to the city elated. She referred casually to weekend teachings, and to new friends with names that sounded made up; she had taken to wearing little thread bangles, or a string of knobbly, dark red wooden beads. So I imagined that somewhere in her free-wheeling nature she was quietly equipping herself, as everyone must, with whatever it is one needs to die.

In The Spare Room there’s lessons for both sides, although being told from Helen’s perspective, we never truly get inside Nicola’s mind, but this is skillfully circumvented by the right portion of dialogue or crisp description that hints at unreachable depths. In anger, there’s the need to be kind (”Dying was frightening.”) and in that no matter if you look the other way, you can’t cheat death:

To try is grandiose. it drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

While the story between the two women works extremely well, the inclusion of too much of Garner’s non-fictional life, such as her ukulele playing, feels a tad superfluous, even if it is a comfort to her fictional self. But to document one’s feelings on a heart wrenching topic, and to do it in such a warts-and-all way, creates an real empathy for the narrator and, by extensions, Garner herself, who expertly conjures up the memory of a friend to fleetingly fill the room she left spare.

Road Story by Julienne Van Loon is not a novel I would have ever picked up by free choice. I’d never even heard of it when it was given to me. And as the cover proudly proclaims, it was the 2004 winner of the Australian/Vogel Literary Award, Oz’s largest prize ($20,000) for an unpublished manuscript, previously launching the career of Orange Prize winner, Kate Grenville. So it has some pedigree, at least.

It begins, where else, but on the road as Diana Kooper abandons her best friend, Nicole, in a car crash. Without looking back she hitches a ride west of Sydney and, determined to start over, finds employment at a truckstop called Bob’s in the heart of nowhere. Serving food, stocking fridges, bantering with drivers passing through. She soon assimilates into this life but as the days go by a series of events occur (a butchered dog, an “accident”) reminds her that she has a past and it demands to be dealt with.

While I was never really convinced that Diana’s character could just leave her friend (even after the closing revelations) I was also suspicious of the time it took for the consequences of such an action to catch up on her. Perhaps that’s the way it is out in the middle of nowhere, but with people passing through all the time, surely someone had seen a news report, heard something on the radio. But it just felt like the time elapsed since car crash and closure was drawn out only to add event to Diana’s life. She does, after all, find a partner for casual sex, and develop suspicions about the depth of her new employer’s gambling habit. But other than what seems a temporal anomaly in this day and age, I couldn’t find much to grumble about.

The prose is light and pacy, perhaps too just-the-facts for my personal tastes, although it shows the occasional stylistic indulgence, and Van Loon uses this to conjure up some decent images, notably of the truckstop life:

Inside the little restaurant truckies congregate along the length of the orange laminex bar, coming and going at irregular intervals. Their conversation is scant, limited to short complaints and the occasional bad joke, which Bob immediately adds to his collection. Mouths never open all that wide. If Diana comes around the front of the bar to wipe the tables and mop the floor, she can see a whole row of boots twitching uneasily on the stool rests, knees flicking up and down, up and down, up and down. The drivers are nervous, preoccupied. This place is only ever some place on the way to somewhere else.

The dialogue is convincing, characters repeating phrases, their words short and snappy. It’s obviously a strength of Van Loon’s writing, although I did think sometimes that some characters were given vocal motifs that were used too often (Bob’s “mate”, her friend’s “you know”) but this didn’t really become noticeable until near the finish line. And the characters felt alive in their own way, whether it be Andy West, her sometimes lover, employer Bob, or, in flashbacks, Nicole. But the main focus was on Diane and while there was action in her life at Bob’s, and much musing on the nature of stories - indeed of becoming a road story herself - I found the central premise and her concern for Nicole to be the least believable aspect. Maybe I just didn’t accept her reason for running in the first place.

Road Story, however, does have much going for it. I particularly liked the notion of it, the narration feeling like someone was just sitting somewhere - at Bob’s perhaps - on the road relating it to me. It was a story of friendship, of new beginnings, both tinged with the darker worlds of drugs and addiction, and how they impact on others, but where it worked best for me was in the evocation of the truckstop life, stripping off the overalls smothered in grease and oil, and showing the lonely nature of the road and how stories connect. It was a satisfying enough read, quick like a meal you’d enjoy at Bob’s, but it was just another story on the way to somewhere else.