In the personalised spirit of Everywhere I Look, I should say that when I was 19 years old I went by ship to Australia and when I was 22 I came back overland on a non-air-conditioned bus, well before the time of bottled water, which is why my memory of the thirst is up there with the Taj Mahal and trying on a burka in Kabul.
While I was in Australia, in a time that preceded the modern influx of Irish people, I worked at everything, from barmaid in a mining town to writing for a geography encyclopedia and many things in between. I have an ongoing affair with the place, and if reading hundreds of books, talking to its citizens and travelling thousands upon thousands of its miles can do it, then I am partially intimate with its history, its cities and its outback, enough to know what I don’t know, and enough to be upset by simplified cliches. Which is why Helen Garner’s bouquet of essays is doing my heart such good.
Garner is a novelist, journalist, and reviewer; she has gone, in her previous nonfiction, where many of us would fear to even contemplate, including the shocking, harrowing House of Grief, based on the father who killed his loved children for revenge. I wish I had known her work before I went on to Death Row in the US – the acerbity of it would have helped, the moments that suddenly rattle with wisdom.
She has a unique way of looking at the unbearable pain of some crime, and she invites us to view with her, to try to make sense of it, and to walk away if we can. In Ireland, her piece about Jill Meagher may make us hold our breaths in fear for a moment. We will not want to be made even sadder than we are, particularly if we are Irish women who have trusted Australian streets.
Symphonic grief
There are essays on friendship, put together with sentences that begin on the low ground but rise into expressions of joy, marvellous pictures as clear as a well-dusted photo album. I would warn the reader that we are not spared the symphonic grief of some lives, such as that of Raimond Gaita (author of the memoir Romulus, My Father), and it might be best to finish with the healthy optimism of Tim Winton with his arms around his wife.
Everywhere I Look is a thematic selection from 15 years of work, the pieces ranging from review length to essays to snapshots from Garner's diaries, these latter surprisingly complete in their observations. Much of her work pulls from her personal life, though not in an embarrassing way or with emotional incontinence, but rather with a wry surprise that she has learned as much as she has.
There's a directness, sometimes echoing such as Sybille Bedford, who brought us the terrifying immediacy of the Auschwitz trials in As It Was. There are deeply personal reflections on how a new table, acquired after the third divorce, turns out to be a dud, surely not.
The diary pieces include heartwarming glimpses of people doing healthy things: two women standing in the way of a man who is forcing an off-conversation on a young Asian woman; two women roaring laughing at a baking innuendo they’ve just fallen over; Garner’s son-in-law holding his baby out in the spring garden as she grapples inside with all the roaring violence of Russell Crowe in order to understand his art. You just know which side of the house you want to be. And then there’s kissing the wrong John Wishart.
Taking on the guff
The entire experience of reading Helen Garner, the puzzled “ah but . . ” of her proposition, opens up the sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious discord of our lives. She may have begun acting here as an emotionally engrossing memoirist, but the reader comes away with much more than may have been intended.
The direct actions of the 70-year-old woman, who has suddenly been patronised quite enough thank you, will light up your day. You’re not sure where this woman will stop now that she’s decided to take on some of the guff. The book is worth reading for this piece alone. What we see here, in intimate coherent detail, is a true and important writer at work.
The trouble about bringing it to your attention is that I cannot stop – I want to read it to you. Garner sighs about the ways of work, understood only, she says, by other practitioners, “the heaving about of great boulders into a stable arrangement so that you can bound up them and plant your little flag at the very top”. And although we sympathise with her, we’re very glad that she has brought us to the ceremony.
Evelyn Conlon's latest novel is Not the Same Sky.
