Kate Grenville site - review article by Peter Craven in Scripsi magazine

Peter Craven

The Gothic Grenville, or
Kate Makes Rhetoric

First published in Scripsi magazine
volume 6, number 3, November 1990

This piece is about 20 printed pages long

THE OPENING SENTENCES of Lilian's Story, those juicy, rhetorical words that take us back to a traditional Australian writing older than the Garners and the Wintons, signalled the appearance of one of the heftier talents to appear in a while. Here was a writer who was not afraid of the older vices and glories of Australian writing: a high tone, a penchant for rhetoric and a passion for rubbing the reader's nose in whatever sensual or sensuous stuff the novelist was enamoured of or appalled by - beltings and fatness and incestuous assault, the world from the top of a tree and the view from the heart's rag and bone shop.
Kate Grenville (in Lilian and elsewhere) is a practitioner of the art of Australian Gothic which is the chosen ground, (as it is the high ground) of Patrick White, of Christina Stead and of the early Thomas Keneally. If we reduce a mimetic disposition to an approximate technique the practitioners of Australian Gothic hurl words onto the canvas by a principle of rapture, simulated or assumed. It is close cousin to the neo-Yeatsian style of much mid-century Australian verse, Judith Wright, say, or A.D.Hope with his hieratic rants which parody a neoclassicism they hug to themselves out of romantic yearning.
'Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare' might be the motto of this verbal triumphalism because the Australian Gothic is also the dialect of the Antipodean Bard, and the preferred diction of the species (a net of high glossiness that extends from Les Murray's amplification of rural epiphanies to Robert Hughes' imagining of the convict past) is that of the High Post-Colonial, beyond any disparagement. (After all, native dress always looks like fancy dress if looked at from outside and the Australian way with words when it is confidently anti-metropolitan always tends to take refuge in the vesture of traditionalism, while resisting any realism of the surface.)
All of which makes us sound like a nation of hanged outlaws pretending to be icons in tin helmets: a romance of the self which transcends the human, that has to be part of it.

It was a wild night in the year of Federation that the birth took place. Horses kicked down their stables. Pigs flew, figs grew thorns. The infant mewled and stared and the doctor assured the mother that a caul was a lucky sign. A girl? the father exclaimed, outside in the waiting room, tiled as if for horrible emergencies. This was a contingency he was not prepared for, but he rallied within a day and announced, Lilian. She will be called Lilian Una.

Kate Grenville hit the Australian literary scene with a greater portent of literary genius than any writer in our recent history. In part this was because Lilian's Story (1986), her first published novel, delivered her complete, like an act of God. A few years later Lilian still looks like the sacred predestined volume, though the light it casts has been extended and modified by the other books, especially Joan Makes History which looks at some of the same things from a different angle and uses something of the same rhetoric with a diminished effect. At any rate, if Kate Grenville is as good as she looks she's worth a long hard look.
With Lilian's Story she produced a warty and blemished saga of such power that it confounds the criteria that find it flawed. In Joan and in the forthcoming book about Lilian's father she is employing different angles of vision to look at a complex tract of ground, and there is every sign that she is intent on producing an extended Family Romance, a multi-volume history of the Singers and their intimates which might rival Martin Boyd's Langton story and its relations.
The perception of all this tends to be confounded by Grenville's cluttered publishing history. Lilian appeared in the same year as Bearded Ladies, the collection of short stories, and Dreamhouse (1986) is actually the first novel (it was submitted for the Vogel award which Lilian subsequently won but narrowly missed out because of the structural problems which are discernible just below its smooth, hair-raising surface). In fact with Lilian and Joan and the 'Father' book Grenville continues to dig up the same burial ground. I don't think there's much point in denying that as a writer she exhibits the kind of radical unevenness (with accompanying falls from soaring to stammering) that has traditionally been thrown at Americans from Melville to Faulkner and which has its place in any accurate appraisal of Patrick White or Christina Stead.
I want to take her books in something like their order of composition and see what makes them tick.

Small Mercury

Bearded Ladies, the volume of short stories, was necessarily overshadowed by the publication of Lilian's Story in the same year. In some ways it shows the range of her capabilities and evinces what she is like in relatively conventional mode, sustaining that one mood which can be the characteristic of the short story.
It is a striking collection which stands above the ruck of fiction in this country while adhering to the general penchant for love, sex and identity variations. Grenville has an arresting personal voice and a command of the mechanics of realism that remains supple through most of the stories. Often, she gains or nearly gains a transparency of effect, which allows her to adhere to the more or less stormy, more or less commonplace emotions of an attractive female persona who doesn't much enjoy the fact of her attractiveness and who is often right or put upon. In several of the stories she is referred to as Sandy, and in none of them does the narrative tone vary enough to compel the reader to a different form of visualization. So the characterization is sympathetic and fairly simple. These are stories with a dominant 'I' or a point of view minimally deflected from first to third person narration. Apart from one lapse into street poetry that could have been dispensed with, these stories are about initiations or extrications on the part of a series of girls or young women, who are conjured up by the same sort of language and who insinuate their identity, through all discontinuity, with the parameters of this book and with a poised nearly stable self that seems to be doing the talking.
The title is a multiple if obvious pun. It suggests not only the bearded lady of the raree-show and the fact that any self-possessed woman is made to look a freak in a man's world but, only a level lower, the fatuous words from Macbeth, 'You should be women but that your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so.' Of course those Witches gave him his come-uppance.
The image of women tolerating men with an undercurrent of sensuality and a stronger one of anger is dominant in several of these stories:

He gestures and grins and watches me under cover of rubbing his head with his towel. I see him looking at my baggy pants and shirt, and my face half-hidden under the hat. When he stands up to dry himself, the muscles of his chest flex as he rubs his back, and twinkling water is caught in the hairs of his curved thighs. He bulges heavily, thickly, unabashed, into the taut weight of stretched red nylon between his legs.
. . .
He doesn't quite close his mouth after the word, so I can see blood-pink inner lip.
- Why'd a good-looking chick like you want to get around on your own?
He stares at me, waiting for an answer, but although I wet my lips with my tongue, I can't find one.
- You must have a bit of, you know, from the fellas.
He glances again at the shapeless pants and I wonder if he's thinking, on the other hand maybe she doesn't.

Grenville has a surer touch than anyone else around (surer even than Helen Garner) at presenting men as big babies. Grenville's short stories have no lean towards selfconscious intelligence, and the tomboyism which they flaunt as a denial of sexual stereotype (though an almost stereotypical one) is carnal but unimpressed.
The men in Kate Grenville's fiction are there almost as desirable or oppressive children. They storm into delicate female situations (between old housemates, for instance) and say, 'You gave me the wrong fucking address.' They storm out and honk their horns. They lure back the woman who wants to leave with a wistful word and sleep through her second departure which is inevitably more assured.
On the other hand, because the men in this world tend to be boys or perverts they have the freshness of sex objects, observed as types and more than types. You can sense the extravagance that will surface in Kate Grenville's work a little later but the flicks of realism hit home.

You're getting a bit burnt, Jeffrey says, smoothing my shoulder. You want to take this off and put my shirt on? Spiky grey bushes conceal us from the beach and in this little clearing the sand is hot underfoot and full of twigs. The breeze doesn't reach us here and the steady roar of the breakers is muted. Jeffrey undoes the bikini top and smears suntan oil across my shoulders. How's that, he says. Better? I close my eyes against the dazzle and feel his hands smoothing the oil further and further around towards my front. These aren't burnt, he whispers into my ear from behind, but I don't see why they should miss out.

That is from one of Kate Grenville's witch stories, 'A Summer Aunt', which is about a cultivated older woman with a slightly more than auntly affection for her niece and a deft line in repression. Grenville balances the adolescent girl's desire to get stuck into her boyfriend with the older woman's battiness and the banter with which she protects herself from any knowledge of it. It's an ambivalent story with a hint of Schadenfreude round the corner.
The older woman (whether sinister or not) is the figure in Grenville who gets it in the neck - generally from the young boygirl who is forced to repudiate the virago by the conformism she defines herself against. Such epiphanies of bad faith are most eloquent in 'The Test Is, If They Drown', in which an eccentric old woman is put through the pains of a trial by ordeal where the young girl discovers her capacity for betrayal. The theme of this particular rite of passage (betray the odd woman that you may not become one) seems to have an obsessive status for Kate Grenville because she returns to it in Lilian's Story: tomboy Lil meets the neighbourhood witch and is filled with a secret attraction to the old woman but is forced to call her dirty names by her group of friends. She works herself into a self-destructive orgy of abuse which saddens the victim and shames the eggers-on, leaving her with nothing but the loneliness of her own treachery.
The Bearded Ladies version is closely observed, free in execution, with a dramatic economy that cuts deeper than cant. At her best Kate Grenville evades the emotional obviousness of much Australian writing though she does so by confronting whatever archetypes lurk behind the clichéd demolition of cliché.

Small Mercury

If the witch stories look toward the rhetorical waywardness of Lilian's Story, the skeletal elegance of 'Country Pleasures', the last story in the selection, is a literal first draft for the sexual shadowplay of Dreamhouse.
It is the story of a young couple. He is a budding academic (of the variety which never blooms) and she is his slim, good looking wife: a self-conscious but not quite awakened woman who would like to murder the self-regarding chap she's married to with his campy manners and boys' school habits. They meet a couple of beautiful young Italians, a brother and sister dubiously linked, and experience various epiphanies, that suggest a sexual apocalypse for her and a rude comeuppance for him are just around the corner. The story is told in a close seamless third person narrative; the perspective is the wife's to the point of distortion but the fact that the narration is not shaped by a presence we have to define as her voice gives the characterization a latency which makes her drift towards cutting off the balls her husband scarcely has (at any rate he doesn't do much bouncing for her benefit) a touch less obvious. 'Country Pleasures' is to be understood in the Shakespearean sense. The countryside of Tuscany is the region where Louise discovers that she has a cunt. That it is a no man's land and she can use it to pleasure herself. Hamlet's famous snub to Ophelia 'Did you think I meant country matters' is one of the coldest jokes in Shakespeare because he suggests, without thinking about it, that sex from a woman's point of view is the merest vulgarity, like rustic humour. It can be touched on by a male intelligence (and Hamlet is a male intelligence with bells on) only in the form of a humour which defines itself as obscene. Shakespeare in his proverbial aspect is Grenville's hunting ground because she is attracted to stock rhetoric as a terrorist is attracted to aeroplanes.
Dreamhouse is a feminist reversal of Hamlet-like cocksureness. It costs Rennie a groaning to take off Louise's edge, but the process of his undoing is a complex reversal. Dreamhouse is the story of how a passive young woman comes to stick it up her husband - to brand him as an inadequate mate and an unconfessed homosexual and to contemplate with the fullest sensual anticipation his annihilation - to hurl him from the roof of the Duomo in Milan: what better way to chop off this screeching peacock?
I'm making Dreamhouse sound a lot nastier than it is and maybe a touch more powerful. It was published in the wake of Lilian's Story and is not a work of the same order, nor from the same level of Grenville's imagination. Dreamhouse is in no way a masterpiece, partial or otherwise, but a work of altogether more modest ambitions. In Lilian's Story sex is never allowed its place in the scheme of things, at least not normatively: it has to be displaced as a moment of choked incestuous assault, as the excitement behind the beatings, as the enforced taboo that makes Lil Singer's cosmic wisdom worth the candle. Part of Grenville's genius in Lilian seems to have been to see that she could preserve the patina of childhood (her own or that of her imagining) and fuse it with the latterday image of a Bea Miles figure only by dispensing with what is most deeply conventional in her own outlook and that of her audience, namely the belief that sexual fulfilment is the key to happiness, and that a woman's mastery of her body and its mysteries is the precondition of any liberty of spirit.
Dreamhouse pays homage to this ultimately sentimental myth with a sleekness and suavity that compels the attention and drives the reader on, while ultimately offering the satisfactions of something closer to genre fiction than novelistic complexity.
The book is limited by the Wildean paradox it seems happy to exploit so that it ends up proving that sentimentality and cynicism are versions of the same thing but fails to find a language that can create a world real enough to contain the heroine's misgivings.
The difficulty but also the charm of Dreamhouse comes from its lack of balance. The first part of the book (which recapitulates the plot line of 'Country Pleasures') has a new access of narrative assurance. For a start the narrator is now first person, high gloss, poised for some happening:

My husband was a vain man with a thick orange moustache who loved to look at his beautiful wife, slim like a model and striking on the streets. Look, people nudged each other. Look at her! He liked to see them nudge each other, and liked to watch me across tables or from the far side of a room, pleased with his thick orange moustache and his striking wife. As for myself, I was a woman full of greed: my husband, whose name was Reynold, was soon to be a professor with an income and a position, while I could never be anything wealthier than a striking secretary with lovely legs and little future.

This is a narrator who says 'come hither' to the reader and who has barely a hair out of place, verbally, through all the elegantly shot dynamics of this sexual thriller as it flirts with homicide and homosexuality.
Dreamhouse is not only filmic in its allure and accessibility but limited by the analogy because it recalls examples of the other medium like Polanski's Knife in the Water, or parts of Hitchcock, or even, at a lower level, the bare body in the garden school of French cinema - in much the way that a postcard might recall a streetscape or a painting.
The opening section is masterly in its cool suggestion of immanent disaster, so sensuous in its rendition of physical tension and exploitation.

He gave me a fleeting dry kiss on the neck before turning away and throwing back the covers as if letting light into a dark room. Once safely out of bed, the heavy nightshirt falling as far as his ankles, he bent down to kiss my mouth, but when I tried to pull him closer, he straightened up out of the embrace. His smile as he pulled on his shorts and running shoes was one of satisfaction. I pulled my nightgown up to my armpits and ran my hands down my body.
- Too much good living darling? Am I getting fat and ugly?
With one foot up on a box tying a lace he looked at me.
- I can still count your ribs.
He pushed at my body until I had rolled over onto my stomach, and one hand cupped each buttock as he said:
- You know I like something to hang on to.
I did know that, and could still feel the bruises from the last time he had rolled me over onto my stomach and thrust into me, violently and briefly, crushing my flesh under his hands. It did not happen often, and it was not much fun. Each time, I wondered who it was he was thrusting into, behind his tightly-squeezed closed eyes. But today was not one of those days. He gave my buttocks a final painful squeeze and turned away, putting on the clothes for the morning run that he never missed.

The writing is beautifully 'edited'. Its combination of pace and leisure intimates Rennie's boys'-own sexuality without quite ramming it down the reader's throat. A little later Louise's vision of Rennie 'lined up with the other boys in some huge green gym, panting, guffawing, wrestling later, falling against the lockers' works with the assurance of a leitmotiv.
Grenville can see all too surely where this is headed but here, as elsewhere, she is oddly uncertain in her plotting - in the elementary ability to structure her material. This matters more in Dreamhouse than it does elsewhere, because the logic of the book, with its neat bland prose and ominous mini-dramas (the wonderful episode of the imagined snake in the room, for instance), is towards perfect plotting - towards the assurance that, at any given point, the narrative knows where its going.
All of this reaches its peak and also its reductio ad absurdum in the devilish siblings Hugo and Elena. Hugo is a very cool dude indeed who collects dead birds, fixing them in a frozen ballet of sadism which is like a parodic image of art's timelessness.

Hugo drew me away from the window to the dark side of the room. After the bright landscape and sky outside, the corner seemed black and I squeezed my eyes tight, seeing darkness shot with rainbows. When I opened them I saw a bench with a kind of museum exhibit of stuffed birds, all with vicious beaks and threateningly fanned wings. One bird the size of a hawk gripped a mouse in its sharp claws. Where the talons were embedded in the preserved flesh, the pale belly of the mouse was slit with a shining red gash.

A moment later Louise says of the preserved snakes whose 'forked tongues seem to flicker ponderously' that they are 'very life-like' but the effect is more silly than shocking. When we first read this stuff we imagine it will all add up to a satisfactory bit of grand guignol but it doesn't. The trouble is that this still life theatre of cruelty makes little sense as a piece of realism and is never given enough potency to work as a symbol, so that it hangs in the air like the smell of an unproved theory. Of course the snakes have their little phallic charge, the iconography of nature preying on itself associates with Rennie's terror of snakes (his terror of heterosexuality), just as it prepares the way for the revelation, sickening to him, of his homosexuality. But the indeterminacy of these trappings is really the multivalency of nothing much at all. We are in the domain of the expensively dressed-up cheap thrill.
In much the same way, Hugo and Elena, though vivid in a few words, are ultimately erotic nonentities, justified by their eroticism and not much else. They drip sex. Louise is kindled. Curtain. The logic is that of sleek pornography in which lighting adds a patina of cultivation to an exercise which is titivating before it is human. Not that there is anything wrong with that in itself - Grenville obviously wants to juxtapose married forbearance with sexual attraction - but she never allows herself to be interested in anything but the superficies of Louise's rite of passage. She is an obvious character in the sense that her actions gain their frisson as external rather than inevitable actions.
And here - as the action goes chasing its own tail - the shift from third to first person narration is less efficacious because Louise is forced to dramatize herself and to announce as revelations things which as narrator she has known all along. This is particularly striking in the epiphany in the monastery:

My husband looked at me across the space between us and I saw that he did not, for the moment, know who I was. His face was blank: I was just another stranger, a woman he did not know, leaning against a stall holding a glass of blood-red wine. I saw a stranger, too: the stranger was the man I had lain beside, all those nights, and tried to touch, who had not wanted to touch me except with closed eyes. This man, coming out of the bushes arm-in-arm with his friend: this was a man I could recognise, although it had taken me this long to recognize my husband as a man who belonged to men, not to women.

People may have epiphanies like this but they don't kick along a plot that cries out for sleaze and shock. The potential homosexuality of a husband needs more structural amplification than this. Something has to happen - something more than the chap waltzing round arm in arm with an old man. It's possible to defend Kate Grenville's strategy here and to say that the unreality of all this comes from the fact that it is simply Louise's projection, but I think the argument is a desperate one.
The trouble with Dreamhouse is that the middle of the book (with its sexual revelations) is flabby and unfocussed. Nor is the shock of Rennie's thing about men helped by Louise's crush on Viola.

The curtain of blanket came down again and she squirmed, trying to burrow into the mattress. I pulled the blanket and sheet from my own bed and spread them over her, and was careful this time to measure the distance from the floor to the bed before I switched off the light. Viola stiffened as I slid into the bed with her but then she sighed and folded herself around me until we were lying front to back like two spoons in a drawer.
- Better?
I imagined someone pressed up against the edge of the window frame, watching the dark hump on the bed heave and stir.
- Mmmmmmmm.
The palms of Viola's hands were as smooth as unstamped coins on my flesh.

'Mmmmmmmm' is not a sound one would make about this prose - at least not with the intonation we are to imagine here. Taken in a context that does nothing to give it reality this is just Girl's Own writing writ liberated. Dreamhouse is devoid of any intelligent representation of female homosexuality; and while it plays on stereotypes of the male variety (slim-hipped women, coming from behind, etc.) its lesbian eroticism never rises to a comparable level.
It's a pity because the last movement of the book in which Louise comes to the end of her tether with Rennie has a fierce and jubilant energy, a nerve-cracking pace and intensity of detail which shows what versatility and virtuosity Grenville can command. Again, and with the monotony of a pornography that has attained moral stature, Louise gets hers:

I groaned and buried my face further into the pillow so that even when I felt the bedclothes being pulled down to the foot of the bed I did not have to face the day. When I felt his hand on my buttocks I assumed that it lay there casually while he rubbed his eye or scratched his chin, and by the time I realized that the scratching sound was the jar of vaseline being unscrewed, it seemed too late to resist. Ah, Rennie exclaimed in triumph as he thrust further and further into me. Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! I lay and bit deeply into the pillow, whispering into the feathers: Our last day, the last day. I became the pillow, the mattress, my husband's engorged organ, anything rather than be myself lying in pain under him, wishing to be elsewhere. Today, I promised myself. Do not be afraid, because today is the day you will leave.

The wonderful penultimate moment in the book when she contemplates her husband falling from the top of the Duomo and asserts it in her imagination has a breathless exhilaration. The command of suspense is superb:

Rennie laid both hands as if to anchor himself along the parapet before looking over the edge, and he stared down for so long that I wondered if I would have to come and prise him off like a limpet. In one abrupt movement he swung his legs over and sat on the edge peering down between his knees at the drop beneath. I squeezed my lips together so hard I could feel them go numb. He just went berserk, I heard myself telling Mrs Dufrey, twisting her pearls and choking herself while tears ran down the powdered furrows in her cheeks. Nothing I could do, not a thing. Rennie's head seemed very large on his shoulders from this angle. His arms would shoot straight up into the air as he jerked himself forward over the edge but since he had his back to me I would not have to see the expression on his face as gravity snatched him down. When he twisted around and waved me over with vigorous arm-movements, I held my breath, moving towards him heavily like someone drugged.

One problem for Kate Grenville is that she runs the characteristic Australian risk of being victimized by her popularity, of never quite knowing at the level of imaginative conception whether she is trying to compete with Patrick White or rival the successors of Women's Weekly. This is the instability that a national literature is inclined to suffer when it is going through a heroic but pre-sophisticated phase. Hence the unevenness I mentioned at the outset of American writing in the days of Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. (None of them ever quite knew when he was writing for God rather than The Saturday Evening Post.)

Small Mercury

In Lilian's Story, as God-given a book as we are likely to see, Kate Grenville is way beyond any vulgarity her imagination may be heir to. Lilian's Story appeared in the field of Australian fiction as something that should always have been there, an immanence and an instant classic.
The Kate Grenville it disclosed was a born novelist, a writer who had not only mastered a distinctive idiom which would always be recognized as her voice but a writer who could descend into the thicket of what might almost be the typical Australia of childhood reminiscence and historical nostalgia, and come up with a vision (inseparable from the words which shaped it) that really did have beauty and terror and the stamp of uniqueness.
Lilian's Story presents itself as the autobiography, or at any rate the personal recital, of a woman who is born in 1901, in the year of Federation. She grows up as a fat and awkward tomboy who from an early age enjoys a fraught and ambivalent relationship with her father, a Victorian ramrod of obvious and overweening repression, who collects facts but never manages to write the book that is in him. He belts her regularly for nothing much and as she takes her pants down she reflects that there is too much flesh for him now, listening to the resonance of the strap on bare skin. She plays with the roughest and strongest of the boys, vying with him for supremacy, wanting his love and rising to his dares. There is a telling moment which recapitulates part of the short story 'The Test Is If They Drown' in which Lilian shouts abuse at the neighbourhood eccentric, this time called Miss Gash. If the name is more Freudian the terms of abuse have a greater childishness and hence a greater realism, which tends to suggest that Grenville discovered history by circumventing platitude. She looks after her brother John who is bespectacled and who aspires to be deaf. He hates his father and collects images of feet because no one else will want them. There is a terrible scene, half glimpsed, in which the neighbourhood boys break his arm. John is brave. Lilian's mother is vague: a woman of mists and ruefulness who has her happiest moment counting the seconds as they trudge or fly. The father, shriller than any of the creatures he dominates, has a breakdown. Lilian becomes a plump young lady who can't abide the tennis courts and garden parties. She climbs trees with Duncan, a lanky squatter boy who mutters dirty words in her ear in a friendly way as they look down on the world from their perch. He is to end up in the arms of Joan, the perky Jewish girl, all angles and green hair, who will dominate another book and who uncovers Lilian's nakedness when they go rowing together and declares that with her clothes off she is a mountain of beauty. There is F.J. Stroud, the scholarship boy from the slums, with his pride and malnutrition. And through all this there is the outraged figure of Father, who thinks she is rutting like a hog and who lusts to rut with her, as we slowly come to understand. He takes her complete Shakespeare, the volume which she started learning by heart as her prototype Bea Miles had and as the girlish Christina Stead was to learn Paradise Lost. He takes it and buries it in the sea. And deeper than did ever plummet sound. Yes, he drowns her book. He confronts her in what could be a re-enactment of one of the beatings and ends up, to use the euphemism, assaulting her instead.
She goes bush. She goes native. She goes troppo. The father remains the heartbreak son of a bitch he almost always is. He has her committed, coldly and without concern. His sister, Lilian's aunt, blackmails him into leaving her alone. She wanders and the narrative wanders with her through derelict housing, in the company of derelict creatures. One of them we are told is F.J. Stroud, called Frank now, who never wanted anything but the boy he never quite had. Though if he is Stroud then he had once wanted Lilian, most bitterly. They comfort each other in the rain and cold, flesh of each other's flesh beyond consummation. There is the mad girl who thinks she will bear God's only boy and there are the taxi drivers who take Lil Singer for a block or two round the city and a woman who meets her on the tram. She is a mad person, Lilian, and a character of great charisma in the last part of a novel which has become as random and picaresque as her sense of herself. Late in the piece she sees her father laid out, dead, and feels whatever sorrow is left in the world for the man whose face shows no forgiveness even now when it need not strain. Father dies. Frank dies. She cracks jokes in a ward of down and outs run by Sisters of some charity, those kindly nuns. A saint comes to visit and Lilian is sent out into the sun, in one of her beloved taxis. And death shines bright upon her.
Lilian's Story, which is not a perfect novel, looks at this short distance as bright and burning a piece of fiction as our generation will see in this country. If anything will live from the seventies and eighties, this period of prefab Australiana with its thousand books of women's fiction like so many housing estate homes, this book will live. People will rejoice at it, years from now, when they want to know, as through a bioscope, what an early twentieth-century childhood was like, what virginity and madness were like in the emphatic imagination of a woman who was born in Sydney in 1950. Kate Grenville has every right to say but I wasn't fat and she certainly isn't mad but at a deeper level Lilian c'est moi is as manifest as the driven style, at once lyrical and rank, in which this catastrophic bildungsroman is written:

Where a row of snowdrops indicated a border that implied a path, I was a beauty in velvet with a hat like a cake. It had been necessary to use Chinese burns and pinches on John to get him to leave the hands and feet. Don't wanna, Lil, he whined, but as Marco Polo or Captain Cook it was important for me to have an expedition to lead. We'll get into strife, he warned and whined, but I remained four years older than he would ever be. Only three and a bit, he claimed after he had learned about months, but in any case I was much bigger than John and would stop at nothing. Father will give you a hiding, John said, and lagged behind as I led the way into Miss Gash's jungle. I would not want to be you.
Along that path towards the swing, John pretended not to know me, but pointed out how Mother's velvet was brushing the ground. She will tell Father, he said, and breathed on his glasses. And Father will give you a hiding. Now that he was seven, he knew how things worked.
Snails crunched under my sandal while John sat on the cracked seat of the swing and I pushed further into the wilderness. Mother's velvet impeded my progress through the grove of bamboo, and I could no longer hear the creaking ropes of the swing. The knuckles of the bamboo seemed about to erupt out of the cool green skin and the leaves shivered against each other in a foreign way. It was easy to imagine snakes coiled in there, and I made haste. When I crept up the stone stairs on all fours I felt John down below watching my velvet back. It seemed a long way down when I looked back, and John on the motionless swing looked like an invention.

It is a novel that develops nowhere though it has some of the most powerful descriptions of childhood and adolescent experience in our literature. At its sustained best it is a novel to mention in the same breath as The Getting of Wisdom and The Man Who Loved Children. Lilian's Story works as an associative whole though it cannot really work organically or architecturally. The latter part of the book with its Blakean overturning of logic is also an overturning of form. There could be more or less of this onion-skin homage to Bea Miles - almost to no end term. Thus when her American editor saw the need for another chapter - showing Lilian in prison - Kate Grenville could provide it. There is nothing wrong with this because Grenville clearly has a Balzacian and indwelling imagination which allows her to stay in one fictional plot, turning the earth over and over, from book to book - though it does underline the fact that the fragments-shored-against-ruins principle of literary composition can't embody a world as the first two sections of Lilian seem to.

Small Mercury

Joan Makes History tries to have the world while turning the juxtaposition of fragments into a structural principle. It is obviously the work of a significant literary talent while exemplifying like a museum exhibit the weakness of Grenville's rhetoric when it is used programmatically, when it is allowed to become a principle of style which is separable from a psychology that might make sense of its afflatus. The beginning is impressive but overworked. It is full of portent but it leads to very little:

In the beginning was nothing much. Vague things swirled and whirled, impulses grouped and dissolved, light came and went. It was a fluke, or a leap of faith: but there it was all at once, the first atom, and everything else was just a matter of time.

What it leads to is the maddening choric repetition of this kind of thing:

I, Joan, have been all of these things. I am known to my unimaginative friends simply as Joan, born when this century was new, and now a wife, a mother, and a grandmother: Joan who has cooked dinners, washed socks and swept floors while history happened elsewhere. What my friends do not know is that I am also every woman who has ever drawn breath: there has been a Joan cooking, washing and sweeping through every event of history, although she has not been mentioned in the books until now.

A couple of hundred pages later, at the novel's conclusion, Grenville (or one part of her endeavour) is still stuck in the same rhetorical groove, a sweetness and light of the everyday, approvable as motherhood. Let's hear it for Everywoman.

Around me in the mauve dusk, I can hear a child screeching at the idea of bedtime, a woman singing over the dishes clattering in the sink, and someone somewhere is having a good sneeze. Long after I am dirt, there will still be such people screeching, singing and sneezing away, and I will always be part of them. Stars blazed, protozoa coupled, apes levered themselves upright, generations of women and men lived and died, and like them all I, Joan have made history.

Give me the apes and protozoa any day. But there's little point in denying the sentimental power of this kind of thing or, indeed, of pretending that the sentiment was bound to be negligible in its expression merely because it is.
I think Kate Grenville should have been wary, however, that she should have been warned by the rhetorical glitter that gave Lilian's Story its exhilaration and its power to move us, the pity and terror that trails in the wake of its representation of an exalted and maltreated person, a Crazy Jane as wise as we could wish for.
Nature's rhetoricians never make good speechmakers because the activity lubricates their weakness and facilitates what is already coming easy. Yeats, the greatest rhetorician of the age, understood that all too well - hence his talk of poetry as a quarrel with the self not with others, of the Agincourt speech as leader writer's stuff.
So what happens in Joan Makes History? To be factual: an engrossing quotidian narrative about Joan, Lilian's friend, stretched to encompass a large part of the twentieth century, is counterpointed, chapter by chapter, with the story of 'Joan' the avatar of Australian womanhood who was there (with Cook, on the goldfields, near the Kellys) throughout Australian history. As Kate Grenville says in a give-away phrase that shouldn't make us wince, but isn't poetry either, 'to wash the socks and underpants of destiny'.
Joan Makes History was a bicentennial book and the interpolations of Joan the resurgent Nobody tend to come across as the trumpetings of the Sponsor; not, of course, on a par with Hawke's patriotism but a feminist inflection nonetheless of an unquestioning faith in much too little. It is a mistaken conception and someone should have told Grenville before she dissipated what might have been a very good book into what now looks like wholesome mush by a writer of talent.
Of course in saying the conception is wrong from the start I am only playing the critic's trick of hindsight on the evidence of faulty execution. There is no reason, on the face of it, why the collocation of an individual perspective and an historical one, each serving as a frame for the other, might not have worked. It is a brilliant if risky idea with Brechtian implications: freeze the potential sentimentality of the individual's story with the plight of the type; refuse to be sucked in by the generalities to which the type disposes you by returning to the individual. It is not hard to see how such a conception in the hands of writers of greater intellectualism and political commitment (writers like Amanda Lohrey or Stephen Sewell where an engagé political vision leads to an art of interwoven complexity and experimentation) might have been an enriching rather than a diminishing thing.
The trouble is partly that in Joan Grenville uses history as a simplification. (It doesn't help that she seems to have relied on her memories of grade five social studies.) After all, the greatest fictional representation of history, the reductio ad absurdum of all that nineteenth-century teleology, is War and Peace with its relentless dialectic between the fates of Pierre, Natasha and Co. and Tolstoy's own projective and ur-Marxist debunking of Napoleon, one in his series of assaults on the idea of the great man. The Tolstoyan dialectic is between the drama of the human faces at the corner of history and the theory, carried to the point of extremity, that no Human Face can cast so long a shadow that the world is mocked. In itself the theory is a bore (a windmill in perpetual rotation) but the interplay between it and the human panorama is dazzling because it suggests that the panorama alone is inadequate to what is being represented, which demands the fullest effort towards intellectualization if reality figured forth as history is not to be scanted.
It's a steep comparison, I know. Grenville allegorizes her historical figure (or figures) so that the avatar of the Joan who makes history is forever usurping the potential drama of the material. If she had researched the material she might have brought it alive, free standing and intricate. The alternatives that are glimpsed at but looked away from are fascinating enough. A series of narratives we could imagine as written by the twentieth-century character Joan, which contributed to our sense of her complexity and underscored the importance of the private imagination in the face of the ahistorical character of the private life surveyed. That private life, it should be said, is rendered with tact and beauty despite the lacunae which the other narrative forms. The real story of Joan is a further leaf from the book of Lilian, that marvellous recapitulation and reimagining of an earlier Australia through the inner lives and fraught banalities of the individuals who see which desire can reach fruition, what integrity can survive unshattered in an earlier incarnation of Sydney, Australia.
In all of this, Grenville remains the heir of White and Stead. She is not a dramatist as he is, or a master of interlocking structures, but she has his feeling for the sensuality of what makes the spirit tick, and she has that ability to sustain boldness of effect in the face of material which might be novelettish which was one of Stead's strengths.

Duncan loved me, and I deserved no such thing as the love of a good man. I thought it was just lust, I said aloud, surprised to hear my voice vibrating in my head, for I had not intended to speak my thought. Duncan shifted in his chair and his face blossomed into a smile. Oh yes, he said, showing his pink tongue, there has been any amount of lust, too, Joanie, my word yes. He took my hand but then thought better of it, thinking perhaps I would misunderstand and expect lust then and there, and put it back where it had been lying on the sheet. You know, Joanie, he said from the chaste distance of his chair, Your body has always been like a red rag to my bull. He sat smiling at me and at his fancy, and although the smile faded soon and left his face sad, I could see that his anguish had lifted now, and he was thinking not of the child he had lost, but the one he would soon make.
Duncan, I do not deserve you, I said, feeling my lips dry, wondering if the syllables were shaping themselves right, or if I spoke that other language of my infancy. I rubbed the back of my hand across my mouth and felt my lips move, and knew that I must have spoken, but Duncan sat watching the flowers on the bedspread, his large hand lying beside them stiffly. You are too good for me, I am soiled, I said, and took that hand, which did not look warm, but was, full of the warm loving blood of a good man. He stirred himself out of some gloomy dream then, shifted in his chair, squeezed my fingers, and gave me a look that was an attempt at a smile. Well Joanie, I do not know about that. We are none of us perfect. He thought for a while and turned my hand over, running a finger along the lines of my palm as if he knew what they meant. Or we are all perfect in parts, is that it? he said, and laughed in a sad sort of way.

At the heart of Joan Makes History there is an attempt to tell the story (like and unlike Lilian's) of a life that has encompassed happiness and failure. What unbalances the book is not this: the depiction of Joan, in and out of marital bliss with Duncan, the sandy haired country boy Lilian befriended, may not be flawless but it is sure at every step. It is more that the Family Happiness (that most treacherous of subjects) which inheres in the episodic storyline and is kept at bay keeps breaking through as the allegorical cheerfulness of the historical saga.
The break (and reconciliation) with Duncan is handled brilliantly.

I left Duncan not on a night of moon while stockmen snored and dreamed of wild exploits, but among quinces in syrup and bottled peas like pearls. Duncan and I had come to the Show to look at the cattle for professional reasons, and we had stayed for the sheepdogs, marvelling with everyone else while small men in hats clucked and whistled to their dogs and made them perform absurd feats with sheep. I found myself becoming anxious, watching so much obedience, such intelligence, packed into the parcel of a mere dog.

The novelistic rhetoric, here under expert control, echoes (and perhaps consciously) the rhapsodic opening of Lilian just as Joan's lack of marital dutifulness, the residual sadism of what she does to Duncan, recapitulates, in a lower key and a more fully humanized way, the cruelty that tinges Louise's desire to give Rennie his comeuppance.

Then I watched in astonishment at what I had already done to my mild Duncan, for he wheeled on the red-nosed man with rage, took aim at his nose, and let fly with one fist, then the other, and sent one of those brown shoes, too, into the poor shins of that red-nosed man. I saw then that, if I had been crouching on my box, watching and waiting for the possibility that I might change my mind, it was too late now: Duncan was no longer the peaceful man who had woken up beside me that morning. I saw, in the expressions of outrage and righteous sternness on the faces of the white-coated men (hired for just such an emergency, but who would ever have imagined it would take the violent efforts of three large men to remove a spectator from the excitements of the Agricultural Hall?) that Duncan was no longer a peaceful man. I had fractured his peace forever, and I sat shivering with awe at my power.

The events at the authentic core of Joan Makes History are small and the achievement of the novella which arranges these fragments is formidable. There is an imagistic sheen to the writing which encompasses the effects of poetry but doesn't stop to take a bath in them.

I did my best to loathe you, Duncan said above the clatter of the train. I filled my heart with images of you and poured hatred over them. Outside the window, the sun dazzled from small bodies of water, paddocks passed laboriously, sheep ran away in a fluster with their silly fallen-down-stockings of legs, cows stared and chewed, and a band of sunlight took turns to lie across Duncan's lap and then mine.

And there is a dramatic rhetoric of feeling, a bare notch away from what we imagine as ordinary speech, which seems to remember D.H. Lawrence on a good day and yet is all Kate Grenville's own.

Are eyes the windows of the soul? I asked one morning, staring into his. I asked that somewhat theatrical question when what I would really have liked to do would be to speak of my good fortune and the awe in which I held it. I would have liked to find the words for my gratitude and amazement that I was now exchanging love with the eyes of this man, and feeling his giant dancing within me, instead of eating the savourless bread of lonely pride.
Duncan was too wise to listen too closely to anything as sly as words, and wrapped his long arms around me, so I sighed with the bliss of being held tight by him. After some time he said, Yes, they are the windows and doorways and gravel driveways and gateposts with lions, if you want, and we lay in silence then, for it did not matter what words passed between us.

At moments like this (and her art is built out of them) Kate Grenville is a ravishing writer. She is the contemporary novelist in this country who creates the fullest sense of a normative life (though the mind loses its bearings, though fathers rape), of a life where the sun shines hard, in a perfect heaven, which is democratic in impulse, ruthless in desire, reticent in speech.
If this is Australian Gothic it is also the high ground of Australian writing. Kate Grenville is forty now and we have the extraordinary prospect, round the corner, of the Father's Story. In her urbanity and mordancy, in the ability, already attested, to enter into a sensibility which is not pretty, Kate Grenville shows herself in the extracts from this book which have already appeared to be one of our finest writers:

This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, a man with a weakness for a good fact. This is the book of my facts. My daughter Lilian, whose love for me is the story of these pages, asked me once if my book would have pirates or dragons in it: she asked me this many years ago, before she became the wild-eyed fat woman she now is. I would like to transmit the following message to her: No, Lilian, there are no pirates or dragons, no robust lies of that sort. There are no lies, no outlandish tales, nothing but facts, of which Albion your father is so fond.