Bonds shared by family’s grief eclipsed by hope

The body becomes an island in Peggy Frew’s third novel, one submerged beneath the weight of grief and unhappiness.

Author Peggy Frew whose novel Hope Farm was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award, has released a new novel, Islands. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

The body becomes an island in Peggy Frew’s third novel, one submerged beneath the weight of grief and unhappiness.

Islands opens with: “You were a girl, a sister and a daughter, and we knew you. At least we thought we did.” From here, Frew interrogates the labels we use to define each other, baring the bones of what it means to be a girl, sister, daughter, mother, husband, wife.

June, Helen and John share the experience of losing their sister and daughter, Anna, who disappeared without a trace as a teen.

Her disappearance fractures a family divided by unhappiness and a lack of understanding. While they, and those on the periphery of their turbulent drama, might share the experience of grief, they bear it in isolation.

It is grief compounded by individual feelings of loss: who they might have become in another life, as another self.

The key themes of the novel are laid down early on: self-reflection, loss and dissatisfaction with the prescribed identities allocated to women in particular. Helen, June, Anna and John’s mother, Lois, are remarkably similar in feeling that they have sacrificed some core ­aspect of their identity to fit the mould carved by another’s expectations.

Helen, for example, is an imperfect wife and mother, described by Lois as ‘‘the wrong sort of woman”, meaning a fast woman, who moves carelessly through the world, seemingly ­unburdened and inconsiderate of societal ­expectations.

The reality, of course, is far more complicated. Helen is just as unhappy as Lois is, as June becomes. They are isolated in an experience that might otherwise unite them, and Frew draws attention to the nuances of female identity and relationships, shaped by conflicting desires and dreams, isolated by false obligations to societal constructs that pit women against each other through language and judgment.

Frew understands the duality that comes from discovering that we can carry in us the traits that we judge in others. We feel disgust at the parts of others that disgust us in ourselves. When June, who struggles to resolve her internal conflict between the child she was and the adult she has become, stands before a diminished Helen, each unsure of how they might reach the other, she feels the tug of this duality: “she can’t stand to behold this suffering, but also she can’t bring herself to touch this creature, to give comfort”.

In this moment, June sees her mother as something beyond the maternal boundaries, but the spillages and vulnerabilities of this new “creature” are too much, as they force her to confront her own failures and the blurring of the boundaries between her various selves.

It is Frew’s skill with form and structure in this novel that allows her to not only draw awareness to this conflicting sense of one’s identity as a wife, a mother, a girl, but to do so with a deep sense of compassion, speaking to her reader’s overlapping selves and leading them to a moment of reckoning, where they will choose to either turn away, or to go deep.

The narrative knits the past together with the present, and so the reader might spend one moment in the present day with June and the next transported back to the heady days of early romance between June and Paul, or Helen’s ­unhappy childhood.

While this technique can be disconcerting — it can be difficult at times to keep track of where, when, and who the narrative is focusing on — its great success is that this uncertainty forces the reader to acknowledge the parallel experiences in the lives of each character. The dissatisfactions, how each feels obliged to perform aspects of their identity, the unhappiness at being misunderstood, left behind or finding oneself lost to the machinations of marriage and family. In playing with the overlay of memory and character, Frew aligns their unhappiness and provides moments of enlightenment for both character and reader.

Despite the various grief and losses the novel centres on, the dominant emotion isn’t sadness but hope. The landscape of the secluded beach, with its prickly shrubbery enmeshed against the softness of sand and dirt, gives perspective; the ocean and surrounds become a place of sanctuary for the cast of lost characters. There is a feeling of laying out one’s various selves against the landscape, allowing the familiar coastline to act as a fixed point against which the self can be remembered and recreated, as Helen does early on when she reflects on “all the Helens she could have been”.

Later, as June pins her identity similarly against her child and adolescent experiences of this place, she recognises it as “the coastline of her adult life. She is on the other side, booming and rough. Night and day, this side whips with its raw wind, it hectors and shouts, it does not rest, nor let go”.

The contrast of who she is on the other side of this life, familiar as it is, carries with it the exhaustion that will resonate with readers who have felt themselves a child even as a parent, or who have carried the weight of their parents’ unhappinesses even as a child.

It is both unchanged and relentlessly evolving, the novel shows life and expectations pressing against the characters, even as they resist the bonds of definition.

The reader is given an almost-resolution for Anna’s disappearance in the closing pages of the novel, but not quite. It will be up to the individual whether they decide to find peace in the explanation offered. Do we, like John, find security in the idea that she “would have been okay”. Or will we, as Frew seems to demand, recognise that life is not about neat edges and certainties, that identities are not singular but plural, and that perhaps all we can do is move forward, carrying the fragments of who we have been and who we have loved with us as we go.

Bec Kavanagh is a writer and academic.

Islands

By Peggy Frew. Allen & Unwin, 320pp, $29.99