Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead: a fine book with a bleak heart

Miranda Darling – poet, writer and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures – describes Thunderhead, her fifth book, as a dark comedy’.

Author and former model Miranda Darling at her home in Bellevue Hill, Sydney.

Miranda Darling – poet, writer and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures – describes Thunderhead, her fifth book, as a “dark comedy”. A first-person riff on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the novel captures, with the same precisely articulated detachment, a day in the life of Australian upper-middle class “motherwifeperson” Winona Dalloway.

“Some animals,” Darling explains, “cannot be successfully domesticated. Just as all happy families are apparently alike, so are all animals that take to being tamed.

 

“A deficiency in even one of the six qualities identified as necessary is enough to render a species ungovernable, impossible to live with; impossible to tame, break, discipline, cultivate, or reclaim. In other words, a single deficiency is enough to keep them wild.”

Dalloway, a romantic novelist, sees herself as a zebra, “walking down New South Head Road during rush hour, parting traffic, hardy and independent”. But Dalloway isn’t a zebra or, ideologically speaking, even a bit wild. Her interest in adventure is limited to the status it affords her; she loves the trappings of the bohemian haute bourgeoisie.

Like Darling, who read English and Modern Languages at Oxford before taking a Masters in Strategic Studies and Defence from ANU, Dalloway has an intriguing academic past (“a carefully considered Masters degree in All Things Military and Strategic”). Also like Darling, she treasures her ability to write, seeing it as an escape route. Dreaming on paper, she revisits Azerbaijan, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Namibia, Norway, Russia, Scotland, Sweden and other territories, walking “the cobbled streets, or the snowy paths, to smell the woodsmoke and trail my fingers in that blood-warm sea” in between the usual series of domestic chores, increasingly aware of “the sheer distance between me and everything else I ever knew”.

Burdened by a sense of disconnection – from life, from love, from meaning – Dalloway relates to others as objects. Her husband is a “large, sleeping mound under the duvet beside me. It snores.” Her children are a “tiny tornado of little hands and feet”.

In keeping with this patrician detachment, the heroine of Dalloway’s most recent novel is Nora – named, perhaps, for James Joyce’s wife – who is “in a relationship with a man for whom maintaining appearances is paramount. He is dedicated to this maintenance in the way that people dedicate their lives to religion or revolution. Surface is all.”

Miranda Darling’s memoirs 'B Model' expose anorexia, drugs and rape in the world of fashion.

Dalloway’s marriage is, however, hollow, a fact she masks in public. “The conversation starts as I wait for my coffee,” Darling writes, “it’s one-sided, as most of my conversations lately have been. Another voice quickly joins in, and it becomes an argument – although there have been plenty enough of those at home, thank you very much, and I’m not going to be drawn in. I have learnt How to Handle Arguments.”

At another juncture, the discord grows violent: “There are also Other Complaints. Those build faster than the clouds and reach a tipping point. Dodge, weave, hide. The shouting is louder than the parrots. A chair is toppled, and the crash scatters the birds to the wind.”

Tellingly, Nora’s white nightdress makes her look like a ghost in the moonlight. Darling writes, “She is a ghost in her own life – or she will be if she marries him!”

While Darling has little to offer in terms of wisdom, she is a gorgeous stylist. “I swing long legs from the quilt in a bold, decisive movement that mimics purposefulness – oh cold, rose-scented air!” As Fitzgerald wrote of Daisy Buchanan, her voice is “full of money”.

Darling’s eye for detail, too, is beautiful. Her depiction of the privileged Dalloway and her graceful, fundamentally irrelevant existence is powerful. “No one has time for anything anymore, just micro photo shoots of things they don’t actually have the time to be doing: ‘Here are my amazing kids!’ (who I don’t have time to play with because I have to check work emails on my phone and people keep texting me and there’s yoga to get to and can you believe ...) And so we are drawn away from ourselves and unmoored.”

Love, for Dalloway, is insufficiently engaging. She just doesn’t know what to do with it. Where are the rock bands, medieval libraries, and fencing bouts with the Polish aristocrats of her youth? The adjectives she conjures for Nora are telling: ungrateful, unfocused, greedy, selfish, ambitious, disengaged, irrelevant, and invisible.

Miranda Darling exposes the spiritual emptiness at the heart of consumerism. Picture by Rene Vaile

“I stop at age twelve,” Darling writes. “I am getting off the bus, heading home from school. My brown leather T-bar school shoe hits the pavement and there it is. In the moment between the launch of the foot off the lower step and it hitting the concrete, something falls away. Suddenly I am stepping into the great void, dropping into nothing … I only know with certainty now that I never felt the same after that moment.” Forevermore, Dalloway would be caught “lilting between observing life from the outside and the desire to be fully present in it”.

As Dalloway’s husband notes, she is simply not made for the real world.

Exquisitely wrought, Thunderhead exposes the deadness at the heart of the Australian dream. There is no comedy in the book, dark or otherwise – rather, it is a document of uniquely feminine distortion. Darling may lack the philosophical rigour of Woolf, but in its place, a compellingly resonant – and, to those in such circles, familiar – spiritual emptiness.

Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s new book is Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine.