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A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.
They met by the smashed call box at the intersection of Homan and 16th, as proposed in her perfectly spelt text message earlier that night.
What we read at difficult times in our lives – plague, insurrection, divorce, major root canal work, etc. – is always telling. Carlyle, miserable and unwell at Kirkcaldy, read the whole of Gibbon straight through – twelve volumes in twelve days – with a kind of horrified fascination. I recall one friend who, at a time of ineffable tension, calmly read Les Misérables, one thousand pages long, in a single week. (I would have been incapable of reading a tabloid.) Another time, lovelorn in Siena, I stayed in my ghastly hotel room and read The Aunt’s Story right through while the handsome Sienese sunned themselves in the companionable Campo.
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Archie Fusillo
The following books manage to avoid patronising their intended audience by eschewing proven ‘age-appropriate’ characters and/or sanitised versions of contemporary issues inserted into formulaic plots. Finding Grace (Allen & Unwin), by Alyssa Brugman, balances pathos and drama in telling the story of a young woman, Rachel, who discovers the real meaning of heroism and personal strength when she leaves university to care for car accident victim Grace. Wildlight (Penguin), by David Metzenthen, weaves historical detail, an ear for dialogue, and a keen sense of adventure into a clever story of self-discovery by his illiterate protagonist Dirk Wildlight. Ian Bone’s The Song of an Innocent Bystander (Penguin) grips the reader with the force of its moral and ethical dilemma, while never straying from being a probable story set in a world that is becoming less and less predictable.
Anyone who hasn’t caught up with the thriving diversity of recent Australian poetry should get hold of this second annual anthology from Black Inc. edited by Robert Adamson. It’s a richly impressive selection from all corners of the Australian poetic field and across the generations, from Bruce Dawe and Frank Kellaway to younger poets yet to publish a first book. For more specialist readers, with a comparative eye on contemporary poetry in English, Adamson’s soundings demonstrate amply how mature and vital Australian poetry is.
