Good Weekend ahead

It’s not out until October 14 but I read Charlotte Wood’s new novel, The Weekend, last Sunday, in one sitting.

The Weekend, by Charlotte Wood

OK, I couldn’t wait. It’s not out until October 14 but I read Charlotte Wood’s new novel, The Weekend (Allen & Unwin), last Sunday, in one sitting. Here’s my verdict: wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

This is Wood’s greatest novel yet, and that’s saying something considering its predecessors, especially the kidnap-outback incarceration-corporate and common misogyny thriller The Natural Way of Things, which won the 2016 Stella Prize.

When I finished reading The Weekend, which has a final sequence as powerful as anything in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a stage drama central to the life of one of the main characters, I had that strange feeling of realising my heart was beating too fast. Yet I hadn’t left the couch in a few hours, except to make a cup of tea. I’m not going to review the novel here. We will run a substantial review nearer to publication date. I just want to make sure it is on your radars. Get a copy as soon as you can.

The story centres on four women in their early 70s who have been friends for about 30 years. One of them, Sylvie, has died and the others travel to her rambling Sydney beach house to clear out her possessions before it is sold. It is Christmas Eve and it is hot.

There are echoes here of Graham Swift’s 1996 Booker Prize winner, Last Orders, which follows four London men, friends since the Blitz, who travel to Margate to scatter the ashes of their mate, Jack Dodds.

Like Sylvie, Jack, flawed as he was, was the glue in the friendship. Swift’s novel in turn echoes William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. All three books are different, but I like it when great writers speak to each other. The 2001 film adaptation of Last Orders was directed byAustralia’s Fred Schepisi. After reading Wood’s novel, I decided I must rewatch that superb movie.

The three women who gather at Sylvie’s house are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur, Adele, an actress, mostly on stage, who now finds it hard to find work, and Wendy, a public intellectual and author who reminds me of Germaine Greer. When The Female Eunuch is found among Sylvie's books, I laughed, I suspect along with the author.

Wendy, who was once a beauty but now looks “impossibly but surely, very much like Patrick White’’, brings with her my favourite character: Finn, an arthritic, deaf, 17-year-old labrador-poodle. Wood has always liked putting dogs in her novels and I am pleased to see the noble Finn on the cover of this one. Clearly he is in the same boat as the women: the road ahead is shorter than the one already travelled. That “clarifies the mind”, as 72-year-old Salman Rushdie put it in the interview I did with him last week.

Indeed it does. I am a generation younger than these women, who are around my mother’s age. Yet I am close enough, I think, to understand their fears, small and large, about the lives they have lived, how they have treated those closest to them, where they are right now and the (shorter) lives yet to come. Sometimes I wonder if chronologically and unfortunately eventually become synonyms. I also empathise with Wendy’s concern that she hasn’t paid enough attention to her life and remembers it only in “scraps’’ and “outlines”. This sequence, which also includes her looking through Sylvie’s old postcards, is brilliant.

I say Finn is my favourite character because I love dogs but also because I don’t like any of the women, at least at the start, and I admire Wood for that. Jude is a control freak and snob, Adele is a bit of a grifter over-interested in her own “still terrific” breasts and Wendy, the only of the three with children, is shambolic. Yet, of course, each one is so much more, as we will find out as this trio discover more about each other than they ever have before. Will their friendships survive?

There is more to Finn, too. Wood has a particular talent for turning ordinary words into extraordinary mental images. This sentence is one that I have returned to a few times. Adele, just woken, hot and groggy, looks from the balcony of the room she napped in. “Adele leaned out to see Finn, the crazed doddering creature, standing stiffly in the hottest corner of the deck.’’ That “standing stiffly” is just perfect.

I will stop now. A full review to come, by someone I know not only will do a good job, but will alert me to aspects of the book I may have missed or thought of as only “scraps or “outlines”.

It’s refreshing to see a book prize judged by its target audience. The Inky Awards, run by the State Library of Victoria, are for young adult books. The winners are voted on by readers aged 12-19, choosing from a 10-book shortlist selected by eight teenage judges. The Gold Inky, for a local book, has been won by Queensland-based Lynette Noni for her dystopian novel Whisper. “It is truly humbling to have been chosen as the winner by teenagers,’’ she said. The Sliver Inky, for an international book, went to American writer Holly Black for The Cruel Prince.