From the Word Go

You often bring baggage to a book. Previous books. Gossip. The author’s photograph. The design or picture on the cover. Tabula rasa I am not. As a reviewer, I do endeavour to wipe the slate as clean as possible, but there’s always the odd smudge. In the case of Nette Hilton’s The Web, I found my hackles rising on sight. What was this! A rip-off comic strip version of E.B. White with loopy drawings à la Quentin Blake? Fortunately, it is a short book, and while ploughing through Anna Fienberg’s Ariel Zed and the Secret of Life (the writer who took this year’s CBC Award in the younger reader category), and feeling somewhat jaded by smart talk and deadened by lively prose, I cast a glance and gave it a go. I hope parents and young readers will too; The Web is a very special little book. It has nothing to do with talking spiders, and it claims a territory and style all of its own. Through the perfectly pitched voice of a delightfully unassuming child, Nette Hilton gives disturbing insight into the fetish adults often develop for tidying up. A fetish that, at its worst, can extend to wanting to tidy up people. Vulnerable and often powerless, classic victims of the tidying-up syndrome are the very young and the very old. But in this book, mutual vulnerability is just one of the bonds that exist between a young girl and her elderly grandmother. Lost in worlds of their own where time doesn’t figure much, they also share a preoccupation with whimsical, seemingly trivial things and an enchantment with nature – all of which Nette Hilton captures superbly. The complicity is established from the outset when the little girl is dropped off by her mother to stay with her beloved grandmother. The mother frets and worries – that her daughter won’t have enough to do, that her mother should be safely away in a nursing home. ‘Sometimes I don’t think my mother listens very well’, the child observes. And we soon see how very true this is. Grandma is perfectly happy living in her big old house, sharing her memories and life in a bit of a muddle with a pet possum and lizard, which she has to hide from her daughter. But her daughter has her own ideas about what’s best for mum. The mother despatched, the grandmother and little girl are free to play and dream. They muddle along together, make mobiles out of broken glass, drink Milo, and discover the magical web, through which the old lady is able to glimpse some of the happy memories from her past. How true it is that the things small children and old people find fascinating and important are the very things many adults want to sweep aside. But the pair’s dreaming and play is short-lived. When mother and father arrive to clean the house, the spider is threatened by insect spray and Violet-Anne is told she must leave her home, her memories, her muddle, and go to live in a nursing home. The child’s simple observation cuts through all the rationalism: ‘She doesn’t want to go.’ Being forced to move breaks the old woman’s heart and extinguishes her will to live. If this sounds melodramatic and frightening, it isn’t. Hilton’s choice to speak with the matter-of-factness and clarity of a child is exactly right. It enables her to tackle a tragic situation with humour and subtlety. At the nursing home the old lady is certainly tidied up. No shadows of the past and no room for her dreams, not even the remote possibility of something as dirty and useless as a web. She quickly fades. In an ending of remarkable beauty the little girl smuggles the spider into her grandmother’s room and through the web it spins outside her window, the old lady dreams her final dream. Nette Hilton has successfully made light, but not light of a very difficult subject. Cleverly, she has also exposed unfairness without ever seeming stern or judgemental. Through the eyes of a young girl we see the beauty and fragility of age with its cobwebs. And this fine little book, apart from being very easy to read, funny and entertaining, can also be read as a gentle plea for both old age and its cobwebs not to be swept aside. Amy Amaryllis takes the writing of Sally Odgers further into territory that her previous book, The Magician’s Box, hinted at, but did not explore as boldly. A variation on the now endemic ‘travelling through time or space’ theme, this new novel creates a completely fantastic world that is visited when a girl from the ‘real’ world finds herself swapped over with a look-alike ‘twin’ from the imaginary world. Bored with holidays at home, estranged from friends because of the intimidation of a stand-over girlfriend, Amy begins to write a fantasy about a girl called Amaryllis. By some alchemy (not sufficiently devised or perhaps just never sufficiently explored to be entirely credible) she finds herself in the world she has begun to create. On the other side of the mirror is Amaryllis who has her own problems. Through the oppression of the dictatorial Lady Jasmin, her mother, and the fact that she has been born a daughter and not a son, she is confined and defined, when she would rather throw off the prissy skirts and ride legs astride next to her father. She too has written down her fantasy – about a girl called Amy. The switching of the girls works better in the description of Amy in Amaryllis’s shoes – a fairytale kingdom has the potential to be so much more interesting than suburban Australia and Odgers is able to make much of it, providing the reader with mythical landscapes, castles, intrigue, a capture, and grand escape. Indeed there were points when Odgers’ treatment of Amaryllis in suburbia seemed comparatively cursory, which made me wonder why she didn’t create the mythical kingdom and be done with it. Amy in fantasyland is much more plausible and enticing, while Amaryllis in Australia is often a little forced and dull. The latter, however, does provide Odgers with ample opportunity to explore areas such as how to avoid peer group pressure and the way siblings tend to bicker out of habit, no longer seeing qualities in each other they would probably respect in outsiders. In the ‘other’ world Odgers makes good mileage out of the way conventions hold a girl back from achieving her full potential and confine her to empty formalities. Amy Amaryllis is the result of a bright, if not entirely polished idea, and certainly supplies the young reader with enough momentum to keep wanting to turn the pages. It is not intellectually or emotionally demanding, nor is it particularly memorable; the ideas, characters, and situations are not sufficiently developed to claim that. It is, however, accessible, topical, and diverting enough to augment Sally Odgers’ reputation for producing some of the more thought-provoking, inventive, and salubrious options written especially for young teenage readers.

Meg Sorensen

From the New Issue

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2024 Calibre Essay Prize (Winner) | ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’ by Tracey Slaughter

Until August by Gabriel García Márquez

Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein debate to the riddle of entanglement by Jim Baggott and John L. Heilbron

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