Helen Garner has published a new book, and an excerpt featured in a recent edition of The Weekend Australian magazine.
The subject matter is chilling - she follows the trial of a father who drove his sons into a dam on Father's Day in 2005, killing them. There are multiple trials, appeals and Garner spent 8 years following their developments.
In many ways this excerpt reminded me very much of her book, Joe Cinque's Consolation that followed another eerie crime, in which a university student is accused of injecting a lethal dose of heroin into her boyfriend as he slept.
I trust her as a narrator and observer, having read The First Stone and Joe Cinque's Consolation and being a keen admirer of her writing. She lets you know when she's confused and mad about what she is witnessing both in and outside court, and includes what she's doing in between the court dates, sketches of places, as well as insights into her personal life.
Despite this, I still felt uncomfortable reading parts of this excerpt when I could feel myself really feeling for the father, despite his terrible actions as she sketches out the breakdown of his marriage some 10 months prior. It could be what makes her books so captivating to me, you get confused along with her, you have strong opinions about the crime and the accused and try to wrestle with an idea of justice, and how muddied it can be when it's dealing with human lives and relationships.
There's a six photo slideshow that sits above the excerpt that I found so sad but couldn't help feeling that it really added something extra to the text story.
Why did Robert Farquharson take an evil turn on that country road? By Helen Garner
A new Helen Garner! I ran down to Dymocks Wollongong at lunchtime to grab a copy, but it seems it's not out to next week. I always find Garner's non fiction investigative books gripping. If somewhat ambiguous in their intent. Helen always seems to deliberately blur the line between objective study, and completely subjective identification with the main "characters", regardless of the crime. It's interesting that Garner made her name with fiction (albeit closely based on her own experiences), and yet seems to now completely abandoned fiction. Interesting career trajectory. She's a great writer and I look forward to reading this. She's also giving the opening speech at this year's Melbourne Writers Festival.
ReplyDeleteI managed to get a copy yesterday! My bookshop had it waiting out the back and I wasn't the first asking about it.
DeleteI have only read her non-fiction work, with the exception of 'A Spare Room', which is meant to be a mix of fiction and non-fiction. This really confused me because I didn't realise as I read the book, and was quite moved by it as an exploration of life with cancer, for the sufferer and the friend. I worried about the fiction/non-fiction divide like it mattered, and like there was an objective truth/story!
I'm a Helen Garner fan too. She reminds me a little of the French writer Marguerite Duras, whose work I also love. Like Garner, Duras wrote fiction that drew heavily from her own experiences, and also wrote non-fiction essays and sketches of people she encountered in Paris. They both have an incredible eye for small, telling details, and write simply and poetically. The events covered in this new story are completely heartbreaking, and from the extract the lack of clear moral/sympathetic allegiances reflects the twisted, tortured complexity of the murder of children by their own parents. I read recently that the most common victim of homicide committed by a woman is her own child. This is something that touches our rawest nerve as human beings.
ReplyDeleteI read Joe Cinque's Consolation last year, a copy on loan from one of my local ABC Open contributors, Tonia Liosatos, who was one of the young court reporters regularly mentioned in Garner's book. I haven't read The Spare Room yet, but I spent quite a bit of time in that house, which is now owned by a documentary director I worked with a few years ago, Tom Murray. I'm with you Sonya when it comes to the question of mixing fiction and non-fiction elements in a story. I find it very unsettling, and end up wishing I was reading non-fiction, even if it is by necessity less dramatic or patchy. I felt this when I read "All That I Am" by Anna Funder. I was riveted, but ultimately frustrated and preoccupied by wondering which elements were true and which were poetic license.