To be honest, when I got to the end of this novella I felt a surge of relief that I don’t have to live inside this woman’s head any more. Fireweather is a follow-up to Miranda Darling’s earlier novella Thunderhead, and it deals with the same characters, some months further down the track. By now, our main protagonist Winona Dalloway has left Him (her husband). She has found a new place to live, and is now battling over custody rights with her ex-husband who is trying to use Winona’s mental health as grounds to deny access to their sons. It’s high stakes for Winona.
This time the weather is real, rather than emotional. Bushfires and a heat wave have enclosed the city in a hot, smoky envelope, reminiscent of the 2020 summer before COVID. As with Thunderhead, all the action takes place within the one day. Winona undergoes a medical test for her seizures, then waits for her children to be dropped off by Him later that afternoon. She has rented an apartment near the school, walking around the suburbs and retrieving old neglected pot plants, like a poinsettia she finds in an abandoned house. She goes to have blood tests at the pathologist, she watches a surf rescue at the beach, she has lunch at a Sushi Train and goes to watch a movie before buying the ingredients for a picnic to have with the children when they arrive.
She is alone, but her head is noisy. She has taken to devising strings of rhyming words in an internal monologue. She talks with Bruce, a neighbourhood dog. New voices have taken up in her head: The Child, The snide Archer, The bossy Nanny and the florid Poet. They bicker amongst themselves like the Greek Gods. Meanwhile, she goes off into thought trains of her own, interesting enough but didactic and distracting for both Winona and the reader.
Is this book really necessary? I wonder. I don’t know what sense you would make of it if you hadn’t read Thunderhead. I see that it has been short-listed for the Stella Prize, and I wonder if it’s an (unsuccessful) attempt at a ‘second bite of the cherry’? I think that its sequel nature would make it difficult to win, and I think that Thunderhead was the better, and more clever book. The issue of coercive control is important, but it becomes lost and almost pathologized in the noise in Winona’s head.
My rating: 6.5/10
Sourced from e-book borrowed from Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I knew it was the followup to Thunderhead and I was looking for a short book between two longer ones.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 