Considering Helen Garner and Charlotte Wood

In search of the Australian Voice

I devoted myself to reading the Booker Prize longlist this year - all fourteen. I’m about halfway. The prize is Very Snooty and dedicated to celebrating ‘the best original fiction in the English language’ - whatever that means.

It turns out it means non-genre-specific Literary Fiction with mostly over-burdened prose. Still, the occasional Booker Prize winner has become among my favourite novels and authors. I restrained myself until the halfway mark to read this year’s favourite: James by Percival Everett (superb, excellent, yes, read it). Then I read the longlist’s rare Australian inclusion: Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional.

Wood is destined for the Booker eventually. In a cold Sydney winter in 2016, I read The Natural Way of Things in luscious gulps (dark, addictive, beautiful). Amid lockdown, sitting on the couch surrounded by baby toys, I read The Weekend (intimate, authentic, funny). Reading Stone Yard Devotional for this Booker exercise was a reprisal of Wood’s genius, immense skill, and rightful place as one of Australia’s best writers - ever.

Stone Yard Devotional’s is the least plotty of Wood’s latest fiction trilogy. In literary fiction, I am reminded that the plot hardly matters. The longlist is riddled with quiet, reflective novels this year. In Stone Yard Devotional, a woman abandons her metropolitan life to return to her hometown, where she holes up at a modest ‘retreat’ hosted by a small religious community.

I’m obsessed with Wood's prose, especially compared to her international peers. While UK literary fiction is saturated with adverbs and syntax gymnastics, Wood chooses her words with the precision of a taxidermist. Each seam is pulled together with an invisible thread so the artist's work disappears - all that remains is the convincing illusion of life itself.

Take this, for example: a perfunctory bit of reportage from the narrator dealing with the mice plague that’s infected the retreat:

Thirteen mice today. A record. We have to do something else about the disposing of the bodies. We’ve been flinging them over the back fence, behind the pine trees into the paddock. But they’re piling up and the stench is worsening. We need to be rid of them, to bury or destroy them. Not just because of the smell, but because the simple fact of them is so horrifying.

This is another gift (perhaps unique to an Australian sensibility); Wood is obsessed with ugliness and horror. She has restrained herself from describing the bodies of the mice or what their loose corpses look like as they are ‘flung’ over the back fence. She doesn’t describe the stench. Many other writers would. A few carefully chosen verbs (flinging, piling, rid) provide enough colour for the short sketch. It seems simple, but such restraint is a point of difference in literary fiction. A UK writer, coming from the lineage of Shakespeare, would devote a few pages to what Wood achieves in the gulp of a paragraph.

It’s perhaps more impressive when Wood describes character or relational dynamics. Consider this excerpt, in which the narrator reflects on her childhood memories of Charismatic Christianity. The narrator’s parents disapproved of the movement.

In their disapproval my parents found themselves strange bedfellows with the local priest, who quietly discouraged Charismatic theatrics and urged his parishioners to stick to mass for more traditional, and more orderly, forms of prayer. Looking back, I think my parents’ disdain had as much to do with what they perceived as American chicanery as their general scepticism about physical manifestations of the Holy Spirit. I understood these meetings to be run by people who thought themselves somehow special or gifted, or who sought out drama (a great crime).

I think now my mother must also have sensed a kind of sexual undertone to descriptions of these gatherings - there was a furtiveness, a breathlessness and urgency in the reports of the wild abandon of self, the rumoured loss of all control. Perhaps she was thinking of one of the teachers at my school and her husband, who were rumoured to spend their weekends ‘wife-swapping’ with the next-door neighbours.

In two paragraphs, Wood conjures a small universe: the dynamics of a small town in the 1970s, the measured tightness of her family’s Christianity, and critical character insights about the narrator’s mother and, therefore, the narrator herself. She does so with humour (the addition of ‘a great crime’ packs a fantastic punch), and a poet’s eye for rhythm (see how she piles a trio of nouns together - furtiveness, breathlessness, urgency - to achieve an actual breathlessness in the text itself). In the scope of this novel, we don’t return to these memories again, but the mother is a central figure (and concepts of Good Christian Women more generally) - so Wood finds this fresh angle on her primary theme.

In Wood’s writing I’m reminded of Australia’s other great Women of Letters, Helen Garner. The prose is sometimes so similar in its skill and restraint that I wonder if there is something quintessentially Australian about it. Both writers are deft hands at fiction and non-fiction, but Garner’s non-fiction (her true crime reportage specifically) is what she is best known for. The publication of her diaries in her late career showcases her ability to capture the world in brief, dense snapshots:

At the health farm, fasting. I must be hallucinating: when I walk past a pile of folded towels I see them as a huge club sandwich. I present myself for a reiki treatment. The woman announces that she is going to massage my aura. I submit with a sigh. I don’t have any trouble at all believing that people have auras: you only need to have seen a dying and then a deaed body to know this. But I wanted the massage to be about my gross earthly body.

Humour (gross earthly body) undercuts Garner’s flirtation with spirituality in this paragraph (she’s far from scared of it; it haunts her writing). But this is an excellent example of a uniquely Australian impulse: getting close to something real, true, profound, and vulnerable and then dismissing it with a comedic flick. It is what makes Australian humour uniquely funny and capable of such brutal devastation.

Australian culture has an allergy to looking at things too directly - whether it be our history of genocide, misogyny, or even death and hardship generally. We are never too far away from the stoic, rugged man standing with a broad-brimmed hat in a drought-ridden paddock. ‘She’ll be right, mate,’ is his mantra and reality-bending balm.

Lingering too long on the fault lines sparks a physiological reaction from me. I am outright mad at some of the other books I’ve read from UK writers, detailing sad little English lives and prose wet with writerly effort. A few more pages of the narrator reflecting on death, a few more on returning to their chosen metaphorical motif - meanwhile, the character’s barely finished the cup of tea they started six pages ago. I am livid. I want to hurl the book across the room.

Then consider this starting sentence of a feature by Garner, barely a thousand words long:

Our mother had been living in the nursing home for several months before we noticed that stuff was going missing.

Don’t you want to read more? In an instant we see it all: the horror, the sadness, measured by the focus on mischief. That is the leverage point that Garner and Wood activate. That - God help me - love of larrikinism. Even in the first passage I shared about the mice, while absent of humour, Wood treats the horror of dead creatures with the calm precision of someone working livestock. She does this often, with human violence, too. She is marvellous at horror because of it (a genre Garner also falls adjacent to in her spectacular accounts of true crime).

If you’ve gotten this far, let me tell you: if you haven’t read any Charlotte Wood or Helen Garner, buy some immediately. Start with The Natural Way of Things for Wood, and go just about anywhere for Garner. Her short non-fiction has been collected in True Stories, published by Text. But any of her true crime books are excellent too: I started with Joe Cinque’s Consolation.

I think Wood and Garner are destined to become as important - and overtake - Tim Winton, Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson - and the long line of white male Australian writers. No offence against those blokes, I love them. Garner and Wood speak to me on a level I can’t articulate….so I’ll stop trying to articulate now.

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