From Melbourne to Baghdad, South Dakota to Uluru, four disparate lives intertwine across time and place as each confront the past and its conflicts and contradictions in determining a sense of self.
Deeply traumatised by three tours, Toohey is an Iraq War veteran (literally) scarred from surviving a suicide bomber. Prone to intense mood swings and violence, Toohey’s home life in Melbourne unravels, with his son Gerry looking to find his own identity amidst the unstable aggression with the constant tension and conflict.
Robbie is a young indigenous woman who’s failing to deal with her much-loved father’s early-onset dementia. A Stolen Generation foster child, Danny had little connection with his own culture but his past and Robbie’s future become interlinked as distant family members, unknown before the illness, come to the fore. Danny’s hospitalisation causes a rift in the immediate family, it felt like they’d all turned into islands, no longer joined as Robbie’s (white) mother looks to a sense of normalcy within the reality of a living death, perceived by Robbie as a sense of betrayal.
From a privileged background, as a child Nasim benefited directly from the attentions bestowed upon her by Saddam Hussein (much to the horror and fear of her artistic, academic parents). But the rise of the dictator’s sadistic son, Uday, changed all that and as the regime fell, so Nasim found herself working as a prostitute and madam for those with connections. Act of grace: a payment made to the mother of a baby killed by an Australian soldier in Iraq. Nasim is the beneficiary of the payment – but she is not the mother. But, with the talent for surviving, the purchase of a dead woman’s papers allows her to escape.
We travel with these characters over a number of years with each connected in some way – tenuous or otherwise. Each is looking for greater understanding of themselves, their own conflicts as well as those within the world around them.
With both parents tortured and murdered, it is only as an adult that Nasim recognises their terrible fear for her and themselves as a result of those indulgent favours bestowed upon her as a child. Through art and time in Uluru with the First Nation local community, Robbie can deal with some of the conflicts within her family and her own sense of indigenous self-identity. And whilst Gerry and Toohey will struggle to connect, a discord that runs deep, their own personal reconciliations within themselves carry immense weight and value.
As a journalist, Anna Krien is not afraid to take on the bigger issues. In this, her first novel of fiction, she has expertly created empathic and sympathetic characters that enable her to explore those wider issues of social and environmental concerns – the invasion of Iraq, colonialism, racism, sexism, self-identity, family. It’s beautifully written with a straightforward prose that is refreshing in its telling, wholly propulsive, deeply thoughtful yet readily accessible.
It’s certainly up there in one of the best Australian novels I have read. Somewhat surprised, therefore, that it only made the longlist of the 2020 Miles Franklin Award.
An Opinion or Two 