A book like nothing Helen Garner has done before

The Season is about an old woman, Nanna Garner, who is devoted to her youngest grandson, Amby, and his ­devotion to Australian rules football. It’s likely to madden you at first, but bear with it. You’ll end up enchanted.

Helen Garner’s book is about young boys on the cusp of manhood.

What a strange book Helen Garner’s The Season is, and what a zigzag from anything we have had from her in the past.

It’s a long time since we experienced the rich patterned confessionalism of Monkey Grip, and a shortish time since we had her delineate the betrayals of a marriage breakdown which left some readers aghast (some felt the revelations should have been left until the actors were dead, but Garner has always mined her privacies, whether in essayistic mode or in her books about court cases, often presenting herself unsympathetically.)

The Season by Helen Garner

The Season is not like this, not quite. To start with, it’s not a book about men or in any comprehensive sense a book about adults, it’s about boys and it’s about an old woman, Nanna Garner, who is devoted to her youngest grandson, Amby, and his ­devotion to Australian rules football.

The voice, enraptured and (as ever) self-obsessed is also startling in its candour and compelling in its nakedness:

“All my life I’ve fought men, lived under their regimes, been limited and frustrated by their power; but in the first decade of the century I became a grandmother to a girl and two boys, a hands-on nanna who by some unimaginable miracle was invited to buy the house next door, knock down the fence, and become part of family life. The girl and I understood each other at first glance. But having never raised a son, I now began to learn about boys and men from a fresh angle, to see their delicacy, their fragility, what they’re obliged to do to themselves in order to live in this world, the codes of behaviour they’ve had to develop in order to discipline and sublimate their drive to violence The pandemic came. Melbourne copped more lockdowns than any other city in the nation. That’s when footy really got a grip on me.”

She becomes fascinated by football’s “ancient common language between strangers”. This leads her to a sense of what’s “graceful about men” and this is not separate from her desire now that she’s in danger of losing her faculties to age, of making herself a silent witness.

The book explores the intensity of this grandmother’s loving kindness and writerly self-expression. She needs to testify to her love for Amby and her dedication leads her to study the codes of feeling implicit in junior football, even though she’s never mastered how the game works.

Helen Garner. Picture: Darren James

She doesn’t understand the basic terms. Amby tells her about how he plays “midfield mostly” and she says a bit dumbly, “I don’t even know what that means”.

“It means I’m always on the ball,” he replies.

Anyone who shares Garner’s relative ignorance of basic footy terms will recognise the author’s groping toward knowledge, and her desire to comprehend things a football tragic would have learnt a lifetime ago. It makes sense in this nearly tragicomic book about being a grandmother who is bound for that reason to see the boy she chastely loves as a star. And going along with this, there’s the fact that the hurrahing nanna is writing a book about the young boy’s journey into self-definition. She’s a witness, not a player and The Season is as much an exhibition of Garner’s self-exploration as anything else. It comes at times with a sense of her own precariousness even as she presents herself as the not quite exploitative doting elder.

The writing is often incomparable and unlike anything Garner has done before:

“Eight am on a school morning and no sign of Amby. I tap on his door and call out. He answers. I go in and there sprawled on his back on a boy’s single bed with its boy’s orange and white doona flung back, lies a six foot man, naked but for a pair of short cotton pyjama pants, his surfer’s legs covered in golden hair, and a torso as flat and smooth and muscled as a goddamn model, I stopped in my tracks.”

She’s also recurrently dismissed by this boy who loves her while also understanding her grandmotherly infatuation.

The Season is a richer book than it first seems. Garner will quote a modern re-take from a retelling of Homer invoking the ice-cold tones of Thetis, the sea-nymph mother of Achilles. And references to Homer and the rhetoric of the warrior code run through this book.

There are hundreds of vivid moments, such as when a dad stumbles on the poetry of Stevie Smith and is taken by “Not Waving but Drowning” when he was in fact looking for Steve Smith the cricketer. And The Season deliberately presents subordinate figures in longshot. Amby’s mother is always called just that, his father also goes unnamed and the effect is almost cognate with the initials in Garner’s Diaries.

This is Helen’s book and more crucially it is Amby’s book and we see him in a thousand lights as well as speckled with darkness. It is to Helen Garner’s great credit that we come to form an image of Amby which is as familiar as the back of our own hand. Garner’s power of inducing visualisation is stunning. He stalks The Season and baulks at it with an absolute credibility. There is a blackhaired boy known as ‘Boof’ because of his head of hair who’s vivid; the Coach Archie is vivid; all these kids with deliberate and contrived mullets are vivid but they are all subordinate to the education of young Amby and the nanna who adores him.

She screeches, barracking like the bogan she is not; she sacrifices her usual complexly lit portraiture for her hymn to her grandson but the effect retains its own magic.

The Season is a kind of memento mori and it is a marvellous paean to the glories of youth just shy of the treacheries of manhood. It’s likely to madden you at first but bear with it. You’ll end up enchanted.

Peter Craven is a culture critic