By Juliette Hughes
FICTION
All the Words We Know
Bruce Nash
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Dementia is particularly cruel to the intelligent, and especially to lovers of words: think of Terry Pratchett, Iris Murdoch, Robin Williams. Wordsmiths who are also detectives are interesting of themselves: think of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, Dorothy L. Sayers’ literate sleuths. Indeed, any decent and clever author of detective fiction must have a bloodhound nose and a large, polyglot vocabulary to track the labyrinthine workings of devious criminal brains.
But what happens when the polyglot vocabulary transmogrifies into glossolalia? Bruce Nash’s astonishing and beguiling novel, All the Words We Know, offers more than a detective story of gaslighting, fraud and murder – it takes the reader on a dizzy ride through the mind of a fiercely intelligent woman who, though confined physically in a nursing home and mentally in a mind whose maps and signposts are vanishing, is hunting for truth.
Nash’s Rose is an 80-something retired teacher whose son and daughter have little time for her, and whose teenage grandchildren are now distant memories of little pink toes and open-hearted trust. She winds through the corridors of the aged care facility and notices that things are not as they should be. The immediacy of her perceptions offers an enjoyable Joycean babble of descriptive attempts at naming reality: the Care Manager becomes the Scare Manager, a uniform becomes a unicorn, facilities become facsimiles.
Many of Rose’s malapropisms reveal uncomfortable truths about the starkness of what she faces. One of the residents has died, having fallen out of a window (she mentions to her exasperated son and daughter that she has been thinking about “window sills and window silliness”), and she suspects, rightly, that it was not an accident.
She continually gets her granddaughter’s name wrong: Charity becomes Chastity and the name sticks despite irritated correction from her daughter. That mistake is a bit of a naughty dig: Rose is quite naughty. It adds to her interest and likeability, as does her befriending of a troubled youthful resident who is obviously on the autism spectrum, and whose Tourette’s insults she is able to translate with ease without taking offence.
In Rose, Nash has created an eminently credible, rounded character. It is a genuine feat of his authorship that he has used the deliberately limited filter of Rose’s hobbled mind to present a story of complex characters and a twisting crime plot. He is too wary of the danger of cliche to make her a savant, however: she is satisfyingly right about many things and refreshingly wrong about others. It is a tribute to his craft that he creates such a layered and rich world of plot, character and beguiling wordplay while deliberately limiting his tools and palette like a filmmaker in black and white, or a painter using pen or charcoal.
One of his self-imposed limits is that of his artistic and completely justifiable use of present tense. Unlike so many currently fashionable novels, Nash makes present tense’s limitations a virtue, forcing the reader to see the world from Rose’s complex point of view – which, despite the limitations and frustrations of dementia, remains discerning and attuned to a recognisable reality, highlighting her rich perceptiveness.
In other words, Nash is using objective correlatives, as identified by the poet and critic T.S. Eliot – the literary tools and methods that convey realities through external observable facts or events to evoke a response in the observer. And it works. This is literary art at the most ambitious level, yet All the Words We Know remains a lucid, enjoyable read for anyone.
There is a heart, too, in all of this plotting and technique. Art must have more than flash and pizzazz.
The book reminds us that a mind on the blink still offers unique and valuable perspectives. Rose’s universe may be one that she navigates through a fog, but she keeps us with her, often laughing, as she goes.
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