Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"People live with all manner of holes in their lives", February 5, 2008
An eight-year-old girl tries to make sense of the unexpected death of her younger brother; a struggling artist strives to venerate the bodies of the dead in his work; an ageing wife of a well-known Danish furniture designer laments the loss of her husband; and a middle-aged woman grieves the murder of her only daughter, taken from her so suddenly and without warning.
It all starts off like any other day at the sports oval, in the shade of the Moreton Bay, the straight white goalposts, and the tall spreading gums. Perfect weather for a children's picnic, but when an angry father in a dark blue Nissan Patrol pulls into the shade at the edge of the oval and demands his twin boys, events go horribly wrong and everyone is run down.
Riley, Pearl's young brother is also killed. Their mother Lily, unable to cope is set adrift, powerless to understand what has happened even as she sees the chaos around her, the police cars and ambulances, the "people's unchoreographed movements," the bodies on stretchers under white sheets, the bodies of those children. In the end there are "six children dead and two women, and the one child, Pearl, who had escaped."
As Pearl and Lily try to heal their grief, the narrative turns to the young and handsome sculptor Adam Logan who with his with his "Bonds T-shirts and his slim hips" who has in recent months gained notoriety with his illuminated death cast of a young girl who had died of a heroin overdose three days after her sixteenth birthday.
This "portrait" of Kathy is at once controversial and also cathartic, the installation bringing Adam an unforeseen measure of success. When the authorities decide to commemorate a memorial to the dead children, Adam realizes that this will be a unique opportunity to broaden his artistic horizons. The vulnerable Lily ends up falls for Adam, swept away by his sexy charms even though Adam proves to be a rather self-interested character. The affair starts something inside him, something that will perhaps deliver him to new possibilities.
Even so, Adam tries to be here for Lily's grief, for its inspiration, all the sadness the whole bad experience, feeling its shape, its limits, its volume and texture and mass. When he offers to use Riley's ashes in his exhibition, Lily is all to willing, but Pearl is shaken, even as she confesses the idea to her Gus, her therapist whom she has been seeing for three months, ever since that terrible day at the oval.
But there are two other characters that orbit the lives of Lily, Pearl and Adam. The middle-aged Anna visits Lily to try to help her through her grief even as she shows Lily photos of the Memorial for the Unrecovered, for her daughter who was murdered and dumped at sea. Anna can't seem to rise about her anguish and sorrow as she frantically tries to talk to her dead child.
Meanwhile, the aging Sonia befriends Adam who works in the workshop at the back of her stylish house. A native of Denmark, who came to Australia with her husband Pieter in the early seventies, Sonia, the innocent bereaved wife, imagines her life over the years with Pieter, until he had a deadly heart attack. Now she spends her days in a type of willing seclusion, wondering the isles of Ikea while pondering the influence of her husband's life work.
Willing to face the truth, these characters face their grief head-on, Lily hides behind her affair with the egotistical Adam, all to willing to hand over Riley's ashes to him. Pearl, continues to focus on the memories of Riley and he persists as a powerful force in her life, just as much as when he was alive. Anna's hurt heaves, pronged and bulky inside her. She cannot live her life exacting penance from others for her own grief, yet there's a place inside her that remains black and barren.
As these people continue to connect with each other, often in surprising ways, author Deborah Robertson writes with a sort of delicate and detached irony, even as she tries to give heart to what truly makes a person grieve. Contrasting the different ways we assemble our personalities from the fragments we perceive about others, the author also explores the nauture of memorials and how they influence how we mourn and how we ultimately cope with death. Mike Leonard February 08.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
"Stories about children did not always have a happy end.", October 11, 2008
Robertson explores the cratered terrain of loss in this thoughtful Australian novel, penetrating beneath the surface gestures of those who have endured death and must go on, day by day, reclaiming the fragments of their lives. The novel begins with outrage: a distraught father mows down helpless children at play, even his twin sons annihilated by the looming menace of his speeding automobile. Only eight-year-old Pearl survives the massacre, obscured from the man's vision as she crouches in the cab of a vehicle. An old soul at eight, Pearl has been five-year-old Riley's caretaker until his brutal and untimely death, the children regularly escaping their mother's chronic dissatisfaction and fits of temper, leaving the flat until it is safe to return. Lily is distracted without a man to define her, barely able to endure the two children who carefully monitor their mother's moods and adjust their behavior accordingly. Now Riley is gone, swept neatly out of Pearl's life; she has not yet found a way to cope with the long days without him.
Then there is Adam Logan, a sculptor newly inspired by the overdose of a young woman near his studio. His cast piece of the girl has brought Adam some success and cache in a competitive art world- and a taste for the intimacy of the experience with death as inspiration. Attending a meeting for a memorial for the dead children, Adam's eye falls on Lily, Pearl hunched quietly at her side. Attuned to the susceptibility of such females, Adam senses opportunity, moving slowly into Lily's orbit as the author explores the attraction of mourning to those touched only peripherally, but drawn into that emotional vortex. And it is Adam who serves as a bridge to another character, newly-widowed Sonia. The Danish woman has not acclimated to Australia as had her craftsman husband, Pieter. Pieter embraced Australia's indigenous beauty, using natural woods to create exotic and original pieces of furniture that literally works of art to collectors. Yearning for the lost center of her world, Sonia flounders between grief and the years that stretch ahead, only recently agreeing to a retrospective of Pieter's work.
Sonia also reluctantly gives permission for Adam to use Pieter's studio, disturbed at first, but later comforted by the sound of another nearby. At the heart of all these stories, death is a hard, immovable presence, a truth that cannot be avoided, only assuaged. In its aftermath, Robertson's characters dance around the edges of one another's lives with the inclusion of a few others, another mother who has lost a child reaching out to Lily and the smart young woman spearheading Pieter's retrospective. Robertson's melding of individual and loss is nuanced, muted by the immensity of their experiences, Australia's vast beauty looming as though another character in the drama, a place either loved or left. Surprisingly, it is Sonia's sons who define place and bereavement from the perspective of the survivor, the memory-keepers who sort through death, searching for seeds to plant for the living. Luan Gaines/2008.
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