Little White Secrets by Catherine Jinks

Catherine Jinks’ new novel reminds us that humans are great pigeonholers: we like to know where everything (everyone) fits, to be able to pop them in the right slot, slap the right label on the front and relax, secure in the knowledge that our future reactions are safely prescribed by the parameters of the pigeonhole to which we have consigned them. In this the reviewers of Australia are little different to the housewives and fishermen of Sable Cove, Nova Scotia, and it is nearly as interesting to watch them (us) fumbling furiously around to find a recognisable niche for Jinks on the evidence of her first adult novel, An Evening with the Messiah, as it is to read of the consternation of Bonnie-next-door when the Australian exchange teacher insists on bursting out of the box she has put him in, thus rendering all her original responses to him embarrassingly inappropriate in her eyes. David French is gay, and passionately, miserably committed to a relationship with a married man. The Canadian exchange with its year of enforced separation is intended to jolt some answering commitment from his would-be partner. So David swaps the steamy heat of Sydney and his mother’s coterie of exotic, outspoken, incestuously gossipy friends (‘Everyone in Clara’s crowd slept with everyone else, and no one ever kept anything a secret...’) for a frozen Canadian fishing village where gossip seems rather designed to maintain the status quo, to preserve as many secrets as it purports to reveal. In a prologue which comes to seem, as the book progresses, a bit of a contrived and creaky diversion, the reader gets a sneak preview of the people who will be most important to David in Sable Cove: laconic Oakey Marshall, handyman, snowplough driver, and brother of David’s exchange partner, now sweltering primly in Sydney, and Oakey’s next-door neighbour, local newspaper editor Alice McDonald. The third&shy;person narrative alternates between David and Alice, building up a jigsaw picture of life in the county from the contrasting viewpoints of one to whom everything is new and entertaining and one to whom it is all part of a regular and deliberately hectic routine. David takes a little time to get used to the characteristics of snow, particularly its propensity to freeze things like locks and pipes, and is at enough of a loose end to be fair game for any activity, from hosting the committee meetings of the annual Blueberry Carnival to helping at charity bake sales and undertaking poorly planned and usually disastrous solo expeditions to view local natural phenomena. Meanwhile Alice does the rounds for her newspaper, reporting a myriad of social and political events – wrongful dismissal at the ice-rink, financial problems at the school, escalating opposition to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ decision to cut fishing quotas. As a focus on county activity and vehicle, via the letter page, for public opinion – most of it hand-delivered in high dudgeon – the newspaper is a hive of gossip and rumour, much of which soon centres on David. Meanwhile, the high level of interest in the effervescent and personable newcomer has tended to mask the fact that something serious is going on with Oakey. It is only when the man disappears that his colleagues become retrospectively concerned – although from the red-herring prologue on, the reader has been given hints that the characters have been too busy to pursue – and the book moves into detective mode, with Alice searching her obsessively detailed diary for clues that might explain not only Oakey’s disappearance but his sister’s enigmatic responses from Sydney. The solution to the mystery, when it comes, is both painful and topical, and raises disturbing but eventually cathartic (as well as structurally satisfying) echoes in a past that Alice has been determinedly suppressing throughout the novel. Jinks approaches fictional life with a resilience which only occasionally borders on the reductive: devastating things happen; grief and guilt remain; but life goes on and can in time be lived with pleasure – joy comes again in the morning. The mix of mystery, thriller, and saga of finely&shy;observed village life – portrayed with understanding as well as with a tart edge of satire – seems to lead to a lot of loose ends which the reader would rather like to have had dealt with more satisfyingly: Oakey’s invention, a putative neighbourhood drug trade, the fate of the fishing fleet and of various personal relationships are all left somewhat up in the air (art may mimic life, but one always feels that it ought to do it better). The prose also succumbs at times to the pathetic fallacy: conveying the suffocating banality of life it can itself become yawningly banal; ‘She drove all the way to the lighthouse and got out of the car; the breeze soon revived her, for although it was cold, it was not too cold.’ However, the reader finds at the end of the book that Sable Cove and its environs have been added willy-nilly to the places they have visited, and David, Alice, Oakey to their list of friends, not deeply known, but real, familiar, cared about – like the Woods family and the daffy young girls from An Evening with the Messiah. Which brings us back to pigeonholes: so far reviewers have suggested that Jinks cuddles in cosily with Anne Tyler, Anita Brookner, Joanna Trollope, Mary Wesley, and a young Kingsley Amis (and those are only the ones quoted on the book); after Little White Secrets someone will no doubt suggest Annie Proulx, though Jinks’ prose isn’t up to that one yet, any more than her dignity matches Brookner’s, her passion Trollope’s, or her life-experience Wesley’s. Perhaps we could just let her be herself: observant, romantic, resilient, ironic, and refreshingly committed to joy rather than misery.

Katherine England

From the New Issue

Troubled Minds: Understanding and treating mental illness by Sidney Bloch and Nick Haslam

On Kim Scott: Writers on writers by Tony Birch

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

The Shortest History of Italy by Ross King

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