Katharine England reviews Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain, opening with a man woken by rain from a recurring nightmare

KATHARINE England reviews Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain

Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain

THE title of Georgia Blain’s luminous new novel comes from a French phrase for dusk — entre chien et loup — the time at which it is hard to distinguish the dog from the wolf, the benign from the threatening. The book begins and ends in that mauve twilight but with a very different sense of its potential, opening with a man woken by rain from a recurring nightmare and closing with the same man newly resolute about a confronting responsibility he has taken up on behalf of another.

Lawrence is the catalyst in the lives of a middle class Sydney family, a bored and mischievous political pollster and failed musician initially married to steady, reserved, relationship counsellor Ester, with whom he has an impish pair of twin daughters, but who is temperamentally more closely aligned to her flamboyant sister April, another musician — a singer-songwriter whose promising early career has stalled.

The women are the daughters of the late Maurie Marcel, an ebullient and successful artist, and Hilary, a maker of esoterically evocative art films. A woman of reserve and quiet resolution like her daughter Ester, Hilary has been diagnosed in her early seventies with an inoperable brain tumour and is keeping the information to herself while she makes her own decision about her future.

All Blain’s novels, from her debut Closed for Winter, set in beachside Adelaide where she lived as a teenager, have explored and illuminated with greater and greater insight, empathy and writerly élan, the dynamics of ordinary families and, indeed, the often unrecognised benedictions of the ordinary. Restlessly looking for the extraordinary, her characters fear that they have missed what matters: like Eloise in Blain’s short story Murramarang, they look at photographs of their past happiness and wish they had recognised it at the time.

The novel alternates between the present in which Ester and April are estranged, and the events three years before which led to that estrangement, as well as harking back to a more distant past energised by the insouciance of youth and the enthusiasm of their father, Maurie. In the present, as Ester prepares with some trepidation to start dating for the first time since her divorce from Lawrence, her counselling interviews with her varied clients counterpoint other relationships in the book. In particular, a man who has lost his child and subsequently his marriage, berates his former self because “he was blessed with an ordinary life. And he didn’t even know”.

Lawrence, too, squanders his occasional happiness in a dissatisfied questioning as to why it is not his usual state; only Hilary, and to a lesser extent Ester, when she can countenance letting go of her anger and pain, recognise their contentment for what it is, acknowledging the everyday beauty of a rain-spangled grevillea, of jewelled green, velvety moss, luminous against wet stone and, in Hilary’s case, preserving and celebrating it in the images that go to create her films.

Blain creates characters so real that they colonise the mind and become part of the reader’s world well after the end of the novel; her setting — a single day suffused with rain implacable as tears — becomes our weather; her children — particularly the young twins Catherine and Lara — delight with their lively authenticity. Most memorable, however, is steadfast Hilary, with her observant, appreciative eye, her calmly constructed course of action, her urgent concern for her daughters’ reconciliation and her clear-eyed trust in the untrustworthy Lawrence, with its potential to re-enfold him in the family.

It is a painful irony that in November 2015, already well into the writing of this novel, Georgia Blain was herself diagnosed with brain cancer and given a prognosis of about five years. She is currently documenting her experience of the disease for The Saturday Paper. Readers who negotiated the course of her novel without tears may be undone by the precise grammar of her acknowledgements.

Originally published as Katharine England reviews Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain, opening with a man woken by rain from a recurring nightmare