By Tracy
I read this book over the Christmas holidays (it came out in 2008, from Allen & Unwin) and have been meaning to blog a short review of it ever since.
This extraordinary novel stands apart from so much current writing for its unsentimental representation of contemporary Australian life.
Pia Ricci, a kind of antiheroine in all her real human imperfection, has built a life for herself on returning to the mining town of Port Hedland, where she grew up before her parents’ separation. A life of sorts, running smoothly and efficiently, it appears at first, if repellently detached and self-enclosed.
What Pia unearths beneath the bloodwood tree of the book’s title is both real and symbolic, linking her (outside her conscious knowledge) to the novel’s two other main characters, the dying woman Maureen Barnes, and the Dutch nurse Joachim Kalma, in Australia on a temporary working visa.
The story alternates deftly between their viewpoints in the third person, in language that begins baldly, almost too sparsely, as if in broad, bright brushstrokes, before growing more specific and complex, yet remaining always highly readable.
Understatement is what helps build the novel’s tensions. If in some ways it might seem the book is crowded with topical “issues” (ranging from domestic violence through stalking through euthanasia to immigration, mining industry etc), each of these, whether foregrounded or left as troubling backdrop, is handled with a subtlety that means the book is not overloaded.
You won’t find an overt critique of, say, the greed that drives Australia’s primary industries, but its outline or shadow is arguably there not only in the portraits — for instance, of the repulsive Dick Barnes — but in the intimations of moral decay creeping up on all the book’s cast. It’s a compelling and very disturbing read that leaves you turning over notions of morality and ethics in the way you might after reading Camus or Highsmith. Both literary and accessible in the best senses of each term.
I agree, Tracy. Having spent spent a few years in Port Hedland, I immediately related to the landscape and situation in "Under the Bloodwood Tree". A friend loaned this book to me recently and I read it cover to cover in one sitting. So much packed in between those covers! Like you, I could write heaps on it. There is some awkwardness, I agree, but I really feel more contemporary writers need to write about the north-west and its people. The Pilbara is often represented in literature in cliched terms -in some incredibly gawky works - or as completely mysterious, undiscovered territory. Nevertheless, the Pilbara is mined profitably in a completely non-symbolic sense and exported overseas. So why not by writers? Julienne van Loon has tackled a tough subject and dragged the Pilbara's reluctant door wide open. Good for her.
ReplyDeleteI've just realised I've got the title of "Beneath the Bloodwood Tree" wrong in my earlier comment. Apologies all.
ReplyDeleteHi, Barbara
ReplyDeleteYes, I couldn't put it down either.
I've never been to the Pilbara (though John has), so it's interesting to hear a reaction from someone who knows the region.
I didn't mean that the book was awkward; as I read, I came to think that the sparseness it began with was fully intended.
Re your title-typo, I occasionally think of it as "Under..." too! (I wonder if it's the slight echo of Hardy's title "Under the Greenwood Tree" -- from the Shakespeare song.)
Picking up on your comment, can you elaborate on how most Australian fiction represents contemporary Australian life sentimentally? (I don't disagree, I'm just interested.) Is it often a case of representing it with too much gloss, too much valour?
ReplyDeleteWell, I wouldn't like to name actual titles -- but for instance, I can't abide the tendency in some women's fiction to represent "women's friendships" in an idealised manner, that whole kind of "sisterhood" thing. I don't mean I'm completely cynical about that, but I think it's formulaic, "received", predictable in a certain kind of feelgood novel. An unquestioned (post-?) feminist cliche, perhaps.
ReplyDeleteLikewise there's sometimes a sentimental view (this can be in male authors too, but I am thinking of women's novels) of what women are -- still haven't moved far from the moral pedestal.
A friend of ours pointed out to me a couple of years ago that women don't tend to write antinomian heroines in the way that you get antinomian male protagonists, for example. I may have mentioned that already somewhere. There are some major exceptions to this, of course, and he wasn't talking specifically of Aust-lit.
I thought Julienne Van Loon's book was pleasingly free of sentimental illusions in the way she depicted women. I'm not saying they have to be villains ("villainesses"!), but that her portrayal of female character was sufficiently hard-nosed and not fake.
(That's as technical as I can get this late at night -- "not fake"!)
Thanks - good response. We need Australian Lionel Shrivers :).
ReplyDelete