For
my latest classic Australian text I picked up a copy of Eleanor Dark’s 1936
release ‘Return to Coolami’, re-released as part of Allen and Unwin’s House of Books collection. It was on the
‘recommended reads’ shelf at Berkelouw and I was pleased to have it bought to
my attention: my mother, with her maiden name of Dark, has been telling me for
years that we are related to Eleanor, and she would point out Dark’s plaque on
the boardwalk of Circular Key when we walked over it. Alas, last year I looked
up Dark’s biography, and of course Eleanor had married into a Dark family and
they were from America I believe, not from Germany as was our family. I had
hoped to leverage off my literary celebrity there, but it’s not to be: instead
I have read my first novel from her body of work just for pleasure, and am
pleased that I did.
This
very much reminded me of my reading of Harrower’s ‘In Certain Circles’ in that so
much of our literature from the first half of the twentieth century was consumed
with analyzing the impact of the wars on those who returned and those who had
waited at home. This novel focuses on three marriages of varying stages: Brett
and Susan who have been married for a year, Susan’s parents Tom and Millicent
who have been married for decades, and Susan’s brother Colin and his wife
Margeryy who have little children and live out in the country. The novel opens
with Brett and Susan arguing about the direction of their marriage before
joining Tom and Millicent, who are to drive the younger couple from Sydney back
to Brett’s farm Coolami. On the way they will stop overnight at Colin’s farm,
before driving a second day to their destination. This is the full scope of the
plot, but Dark drip feeds us information as the narrative develops: Susan has
lost a baby not long after the birth and we are soon to find out that it was
not Brett’s child.
The
long car trip allows Dark’s characters time to reflect on their relationships
and Susan has a particularly complicated recent past to contemplate. She had
been in a relationship with Brett’s brother but had not been able to get past a
fondness to actual love:
‘Because
love still hadn’t come, but it was harder than she’d expected to retreat in
good order. The tormented misery of the young man she wasn’t in love with had
become in the end as strong a tyranny as love itself. She was confused by it,
vaguely frightened, desperately sorry for him. But not contrite, not
remorseful. Never that. She hadn’t pretended. She hadn’t promised. She had
denied and still denied responsibility’.
Brett
similarly has his mind on the relationship, with the spectre of his brother Jim
always clouding his frank interactions with Susan:
‘He
put his pipe in his pocket and stood up. “It’s no good Susan”. He looked down
blackly at her impassive face and lowered lashes. “We always end up with a row –
bickering, hurting each other accidentally or deliberately, insults – other things”.
He paused for a moment. Each of them in the rough, pebbly ground beneath their
eyes, saw a long procession of unlovely incidents – of words forged by their
speaker’s pain into instruments of torture, of actions twisted with the
inspired ingenuity of mental suffering, into veritable nightmares, of kisses
like blows and caresses rotten with a taint of cruelty’.
Tom
and Millicent worry for their children, but more notably feel a shift in their
relationship as they see their youngest off to married life. They are in their
late fifties and wonder what role they now play in society, no longer parents
but too used to being responsible to start afresh with adventure in retirement.
The fourth relationship in the novel is that of city to country, as Millicent
looks back on her move from her childhood home Wondabyne to live in Sydney with
city boy Tom with some regret, and envies her children who have returned to
large properties in the country out of some ancestral yearning. Landscape is
dramatically imagined during the travelling party’s stops from the Blue
Mountains into the wider New South Wales countryside: ‘High cliffs and tangled
gullies dwarfed into deceptive flatness by the great expanses round them. Savage
country, all but unknown, drowned in its mysterious and ineffable blue’.
Margery
and Colin’s relationship is given the least focus of the partnerships but Colin’s
mental state, affected by his return from the war, provides the catalyst for
the shift in dynamics at the close of the novel. Like Harrower, there is a confidence
with Dark’s writing, and an intelligent understanding of the inner workings of
both women and men. I thought this a very modern feeling novel, which is high
praise given its 1930s release. Some of the issues raised in the portrayal of Susan
are strongly feminist although of course, this period was a time of monumental
change for women. In the early chapters of this novel I was concerned that I would
find it hard to keep caring for the characters to finish reading, but I think
the novel becomes much more engaging after the midway point, and the resolution
was quite charmingly romantic. After reading this very fine novel I feel even
more disappointed that I’m not descended from Eleanor’s line. It would be a
very impressive lineage.
*This review is part of the Australian Womens Writers Challenge 2014
*This review is part of the Australian Womens Writers Challenge 2014
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