The Awkward Age

In a memorable sketch about enrolling a child in an English public school, Peter Sellers had the Headmaster of Cretinbury refer to the child as being at ‘the awkward age – too old for Mother Goose and too young for Lolita’. The Angus & Robertson imprint series, Bluegum, aims to provide quality fiction for thirteen-to fifteen-year-olds – an awkward age indeed. Two of the most recent publications in this series are books which have much in common: both deal with the experience of young women who migrate to Australia; both are told in the first person. ‘The past,’ wrote L.P. Hartley at the beginning of The Go-Between, ‘is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’ But as Hartley demonstrates, it is a country which is ever-present, its influence reaching forward into our lives – a theme which both A Kind of Dreaming and Next Stop the Moon take up – though in quite different ways. A Kind of Dreaming is an ambitious novel, one which promises much. The story is told by Christie. The tale begins well enough. Christie’s father has just dropped the bombshell that the family will shortly migrate from England to Australia. Christie is rebellious in the face of this massive dislocation. She wants to stay in England with her friends and to further her study of music. She tries to enlist the help of her Aunt Jessie, thinking that she might even remain with Aunt Jessie while the rest of the family migrates. At this point the novel is bubbling along; the characters are believable; there is drama and tension. But Christie suddenly, and without strong reason, changes her mind and decides that she will go to Australia. She learns from Aunt Jessie that more than a century before, a relative, Charlotte, also travelled to Adelaide. Aunt Jessie gives Christie some old letters, dating back to the 1850s, written home by Charlotte to her sister Sophie. Throughout the book we learn more of Charlotte. Her letters have an authentic feel to them, and Christie becomes almost obsessed with finding the truth of what happened to her. In scenes reminiscent of the film The Innocents (1961), Christie has a series of paranormal experiences – she hears (presumably the ghost of) Charlotte playing a haunting tune on the piano; she sees apparitions; and she has dreams in which she ‘sees’ what happened to Charlotte. The plot moves forward through a series of increasingly improbable coincidences which left this reader unable to suspend disbelief any longer. The novel has many strong points. It holds your interest, despite the clunky plot devices. It is a blend of adventure and detective story. The sub plot, the story of Charlotte’s journey to the new colony and her life there, is powerful on many levels. In the end, however, the novel is a little disappointing. In the opening paragraphs of Suzanne Gervay’s Next Stop the Moon, Rosie, the central character of the novel, says ‘I don’t sit much in Dad’s chair. He is the head of the table, so it’s his chair. We’re traditional.’ Rosie is the daughter of Hungarian migrants. Along with her older brother, Thomas, and her younger sister, Lisa, Rosie must learn how to cope with having parents who are ‘wogs’. In much current adolescent fiction, there is a tendency to marginalise the adults; the adult world is seen through angst-ridden and alienated eyes, and parents are either dismissed for their hypocrisy or treated as irrelevancies (The Pigman and The Catcher in the Rye, though hardly current, spring to mind; in Julie Ireland’s A Kind of Dreaming the parents are largely irrelevant). In Next Stop the Moon the complexities of family life are central, and are dealt with authentically and without sentimentality. There are constant tensions in the relationship between the parents, tensions which Rosie battles to understand. In The Orchard, Drusilla Modjeska writes: here are passages that each of us must traverse in our entry into life. It is the journey of the soul that marks us ... and for that journey the past has as much meaning as the present. Rosie struggles to understand the mixture of anger and fear and hope which drives and dominates her parents; she must learn, painfully, why her parents’ past is ever-present, how it is the source of their strengths and their weaknesses. There is much that puzzles Rosie as she struggles to make sense of her life. Early in the book, when she is twelve or thirteen, she observes: I look in the mirror and feel depressed. As well as being fat, I’m developing breasts. I can see I’ll look like my mother and she wears D cups... It’s obvious that Lisa is very immature. She’s a year younger and hasn’t got any breasts yet, so she doesn’t realise the enormity of my problem. Her relationship with her older brother, Thomas, is also problematic. But there is much more to Next Stop the Moon. The novel deals with five years of Rosie’s life, from 1964 to 1968. Suzanne Gervay skilfully recreates this era. It is refreshing to read a novel about growing up which is not totally preoccupied with the inner turmoil of the central character. Instead, we see Rosie’s life against a backdrop of world affairs and of social and cultural change, and these add a further element to the richness of the story. Next Stop the Moon is not a trendy book. But it is a book full of warmth and honesty and, above all, hope. As the novel ends, Rosie observes: ‘I read that next year there’s going to be a man on the moon. Just imagine that.’

Barry Carozzi

From the New Issue

Advances - May 2024

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

The Other Side of Daylight: New and selected poems by David Brooks

Selected Stories by Franz Kafka, translated and edited by Mark Harman

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