This book has been around for a while, but the recent release of the film starring Jessica Buckley and Paul Mescal has brought it to attention again. There was some surprise that O’Farrell’s book was not longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020, but it did win The Women’s Prize for Literature, as well as other awards in 2020 and 2021. I’ve read several books by Maggie O’Farrell e.g. This Must Be the Place (my review here), Instructions for a Heatwave (review here) and The Marriage Portrait (review here). On looking back at my own reviews, I seem to have a rather ambivalent response to her writing.
One of the epigraphs to the book quotes Shakespeare scholar Steven Greenblatt’s assertion that in the late 16th/early 17th centuries the names ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Hamlet’ were interchangeable. Just as the book title ‘Hamnet’ is a manipulation of the ‘Hamlet’ we know as Shakespeare’s play, so too this book is a manipulation of a detail from Shakespeare’s life. Not once is Shakespeare named in the book, and although we know that the play referenced at the end of the book is ‘Hamlet’, it is not definitively stated anywhere. But right from the start of the book, where 11 year old Hamnet is roaming his house seeking a family member to help his sick twin sister Judith, echoing the opening graveyard scenes of ‘Hamlet’, we as readers know what O’Farrell is doing.
Ann Hathaway is not Ann who ended up with the second-best bed, but Agnes, a skilled healer and herbalist (in fact, the bed is mentioned). There is little known about her, but O’Farrell is not the first writer to try to flesh her out in more details – Germaine Greer has done so, too- but owing to the dearth of information, this needs to be a work of conjecture and assumption. O’Farrell’s Agnes comes from a wealthier family than her husband does, and they meet when her future husband takes up a Latin tutoring job in order to pay a debt sustained by his violent and feckless father. They intentionally fall pregnant, to force a marriage opposed by both families (although I seem to remember research from my undergraduate days that suggested that pre-marital pregnancy was not unusual, or a source of great shame). Her father-in-law continues to exert his power over his son, who lives in a smaller building adjoining the family home, and it is only when Agnes and her husband contrive to sell the family business’ gloves in London that her husband can embark on his career of writing, producing and acting in the plays that will make him famous.
But this book is not really about Shakespeare, who is absent for most of it, but about grief for a lost child. Both parents keen the death of 11 year old Hamnet, and Agnes is completely undone by her sorrow and her impotence to stop this plague-borne death. Hamnet’s twin, Judith, who looks so similar to him (plausible?) wants to know whether there’s a word for a child who has lost their sibling, as she walks the streets at night, hoping to glimpse him or sense his presence. O’Farrell writes this grief so well, with truth and experience at its core.
The book starts with two interwoven narratives, both voiced in the present tense: the first narrative introducing us to the members of the family, focussing on Hamnet as he searches for someone to help his sister Judith as she collapses with plague, and the second narrative a flashback to the meeting of Hamnet’s parents and their marriage.
The second part of the book is one long chapter following Hamnet’s death. It gradually moves towards the father’s career as playwright and suggests that the writing of ‘Hamlet’ is his way of working through his grief. Although the first 2/3 of this chapter was excellent, I wasn’t particular convinced by this end section, mainly because the play Hamlet has such a tenuous link with the death of a child. I found the argument put forward in the recent BBC three-part series Shakespeare:Rise of a Genius on ABC i-view more convincing where they suggest that it was the death of his father, and his questioning of his own responsibility as an adult son, compounded by the loss of his own son in Hamnet, that prompted his writing of ‘Hamlet’.
However, for me this didn’t particularly matter. There are 21st century infelicities right throughout this book, and although O’Farrell has clearly done her homework about Elizabethan family life, it’s not in the league of a Hilary Mantel. I didn’t read it to learn about William Shakespeare, or his wife Anne for that matter; but as an exploration of grief, it’s excellent.
My rating: 7.5/10
Sourced from: purchased e-book
Read because: I can’t decide whether to see the movie, and I wanted to read the book first if I do.
Well, it only took five years between hearing a podcast about this book and being inspired to purchase it, and actually reading it. And even then, I was spurred to read it because I’d like to read Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, set in the winter of 1962-3, which was short-listed for last year’s Booker Prize. Interestingly, Miller’s book also won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, with the events of sixty years ago now considered history.
Frostquake, on the other hand, positions itself very clearly as ‘history’, telegraphed with the subtitle ‘The frozen winter of 1962 and how Britain emerged a different country’. In it, Nicolson argues that the winter of 62-63, the coldest since 1814, crystallised a tension between the old and the new. The old: Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, the continuations of the poverty of the Industrial Revolution, with 15 million people still lacking a plumbed-in bathroom. The new: JFK, Harold Wilson, the Beatles, consumer goods like televisions and refrigerators, glass office-blocks.
There are moments when society, however embedded, shifts on its axis. The long and lingering hardships of the paralysing winter of 1962-3 encouraged, even enabled, change: the very effect of shutting down empowered a thawing. Forces of social change that had been building over many years now found their moment of release as they broke through the icy surface. As the country froze it melted. (not sure about the page number because I read this as an e-book)
So what is a frostquake? One of the epigraphs to her book is a definition from an unnamed source:
Frostquake (n) A seismic event caused by a sudden cracking action in frozen soil. As water drains into the ground, it may freeze and expand, putting stress on its surroundings. This stress builds up until relieved explosively in the form of a frostquake (p. vii)
However, this book is not about weather or geology, although the snow and ice that started falling and forming for 10 weeks from Boxing Day 1962 through until to spring give the book its narrative parameters. Instead, this book is far more about people and their overlap with events on a national and world stage, drawn from conversations, memoirs and interviews. Some of these people are unknown: 19 year old Pauline Stone, driving through the mustard-like fog in her Mini Minor; Terri Quaye a 22-year old black jazz singer, Corporal Dennis Osbourne, travelling with his family on the Liverpool-to-Birmingham Express, which collided with the Glasgow-London express because of poor visibility. They each have a small story, of which the weather is just background.
But many of the people that Nicolson writes about are well known: Joanna Lumley talks about the cold at her boarding school; the Beatles are being transformed from scruffy, rather smelly hack musicians playing the clubs and careering from gig to gig into suited songsters who appear on the television; Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones are London fixtures- Mick and Brian Jones sharing an Edith Grove flat, and with Mick taking on board the advice of Andrew Oldham, 19 year old window dresser at Mary Quant’s shop and music promoter “If you pretend to be wicked, you’ll get rich”. There’s the eruption of satire on the television, with comedians Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Barry Humphries and Alan Bennett thriving into the 1970s and later. Author Antonia Fraser floats in and out, as does fellow author Penelope Fitzgerald. There’s a lengthy section on Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in February 1963, in the depth of this cold winter.
Not only do other people, both famous and unknown, appear, so too does Nicolson’s own family. When she talks about spending Christmas of 1962 at her grandfather’s house at Sissinghurst, the penny dropped- Ah! She’s the daughter of Nigel Nicolson, who wrote Portrait of a Marriage, and the ‘Nicolson’ in the publishing company Weidenfeld & Nicolson. And so, she’s the granddaughter of Harold Nicolson, many-partied politician, who supported the decriminalization of homosexuality and the abolition of hanging, opposed the Munich Agreement with Hitler, published Lolita and disagreed with Anthony Eden’s Suez policy. And the granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West, who had died the previous summer.
Her upbringing in a political milieu is reflected in her attention to the Profumo Affair in particular, and the entanglement of the various characters who appear throughout the book. Nicolson herself received a pinch on the bottom from John Profumo, a one-time parliamentary colleague of her father, when he came to see the garden at Sissinghurst some thirty-years later. The glamour of JFK is here too, a contrast to the dowdiness of the Edwardian-figure of conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan whose career was derailed by the Profumo Affair. The anxiety of the Cuban Missile Crisis pervades the book, and Britain is being rebuffed from the European Economic Community by Charles de Gaulle.
The writing is quite beautiful. Here she is waking up on the day after Boxing Day 1962 as the snow begins to fall, the most snow they had ever seen in their lives:
The following morning we woke to the peculiar blue-bright light of reflected now filtering through the closed curtains. Instead of disappearing during the night as we had feared it would, the snow was still there, turning the landmarks of the garden- the walls, lawns, statues, urns- into something unrecognizable but unified. The sight was beautiful, its very transience on this familiar landscape making it even more precious. Snow muffled all sound and the silence felt dream-deep. Outside freezing snowballs melted the second they hit the napes of our necks and we tipped backwards on to the lawn, arms outstretched like acrobats, trusting that the mattress of snow would break our fall. Unlike a sandcastle on a beach, absorbed so soon by the waves, our imprints remained, hollows into which we could flop again and again. (Ch 7)
She returns to the silence of the snow-bound world at the end of the book, writing in the midst of COVID which brought its own silence to us. Writing in the winter of 2019-20, the daffodils and forsythia had just begun to blossom, and suddenly the earth felt lit up by yellow flowers.
Sixty years before the winter of 1962-3 the century had just turned and with it the old Victorian regime was dying. Sixty years after the winter of 1962-3 the world turned again, a little more sharply than it should have, unbalancing the stability we take for granted and throwing everyone into a state of profound shock….In December 2019, on a world map shown on every single news channel, a tiny red dot indicated a town in the heart of China, a million, million miles away from England, as the place where a brand new strain of a deadly virus had emerged, one that targeted the lungs, the enabler of breath, of oxygen and of life itself. Eight weeks later the dots had spread, and much of the world map was coloured red. In the autumn of 1962 many felt we were teetering of the edge of absolute destruction with nuclear weapons capable of wiping out mankind. And now, in the spring of 2020, the coronavirus, constantly visualized on screens as a spiky globe, an exotic species of underwater coral, a logo of frightening change, made us feel we were once again staring into the abyss, looking over the rim…. The country lanes were silent not this time because of the muffling of snow but by the absence of traffic. The world was in lockdown. The skies were blue, blue, blue, devoid of aeroplanes, not through mankind’s choice but for its survival. And the birds were going crazy in the sunshine. Nature seemed to have forgiven us not for doubting but for threatening its resilience and had returned once again with an astonishing beauty….Perhaps every half-century or so we need an intervention that is outside our control, an uninvited pause in order for resurrection to take place.
I enjoyed this book. I’m old enough to recognize the things she is writing about- indeed, the author and I are nearly contemporaries, and I do wonder if someone younger would enjoy it as much. It was not at all what I expected, which was a far more journalistic, meteorologically based account, but enjoyed the political and personal approach much more.
Especially in the wake of the centenary of WWI, there has been no shortage of books about men’s experience in war. They’re usually big fat books, often named for a battleground in large letters, with the (male) author’s name is letters much the same size. Women’s experience- especially the experience of women who didn’t go to war but instead stayed home waiting- is less often documented. And the Women Watch and Wait is based in suburban Coburg in Melbourne, and it captures well the dissonance between suburban life and battlefields far away, the agony of curtailed and delayed communication, and the emotional peril of allowing yourself to fall in love.
Kate is a young country girl who has been sent down to Coburg as company for her Aunt Mary, whose two sons have volunteered and been sent overseas as part of the first contingent of soldiers to be deployed. As well as the excitement of staying in Melbourne, Kate is excited that her boyfriend from Gippsland, Jack, has been sent to the nearby Broadmeadows Training Camp, and there are more opportunities for them to meet up before he leaves than there would have been had she still been in Gippsland. Time is rushing on, as the rumours of the trainees’ departure mount, and she is excited when Jack proposes to her. At this stage, there is still hope that ‘the boys’ will be back by Christmas, and there seems such pressure of time to commit, to get married and start up a married life. Jack leaves with his detachment, and Kate is left with her aunt, working in her aunt’s grocer shop, teetering between excitement to receive mail, and yet fearing what news the mail might bring. News does arrive, and she, along with the women among whom she is living, has to readjust her hopes for the future.
I’m probably a particularly critical audience for this book, because as it happens I’ve been writing a column for the newsletter of my local historical society for the past ten years or so that looks at events at the local Heidelberg level one hundred years previously. Just as Catherine Meyrick would have done in researching this book, I’ve followed the local newspapers closely, consciously looking for women’s experiences, reading every page and even the advertisements and classifieds. This has given me a close-up knowledge of one suburb, (albeit a few suburbs away from Coburg) and how the world-wide events of WWI impacted the social and political life of a community. I must say that she has nailed the local aspects, and I found myself nodding away to parallels that arose in her book which also occurred in Heidelberg.
The book is arranged chronologically by year, starting in 1914 and going through to 1919 with an epilogue. It has over sixty short chapters- too many, I feel- and the frequent changes of location made it feel a little like a screenplay. She integrates political events of the day, like the conscription debates, into her narrative and, again, she captures this big event playing out in small halls and conversations so well. I particularly liked that she explored the WWI experience from the Catholic viewpoint, something that is not represented well in the local newspapers that I have read.
It’s a difficult thing to undertake huge amounts of research, then to let it go in case it smothers the narrative (an advantage that historians have over novelists). At times I felt that small local details were made too explicit, but I’m also conscious that I may have read this book differently to the way that other people might read it. At an emotional level, the book rang true with love, fear, vulnerability and strength being lived out not in trenches but in suburban houses and streetscapes.
It’s appropriate that I should be writing this review on January 26, Australia Day. Here’s a recommendation: if you’re going to read a survey history of Australia, then read this one.
There’s lots of survey or short histories written by eminent historians to choose from, many of which appear in several editions as they were updated to encompass later events: Keith Hancock’s Australia first written in 1930; Gordon Greenwood’sAustralia A Social and Political History (1955) Manning Clark’s A Short History of Australia (1963) ; John Rickard’s Australia: A Cultural History (1988); Creating a Nation (1994) by Pat Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly; David Day’s Claiming a Continent (1997) and Stuart Macintyre’s A Concise History of Australia (2000). There’s even Alex McDermott’s Australian History for Dummies (2011). One could quite justifiably ask “Does the world need another short history of Australia?” And I would answer: yes, and it should be this one.
In 1968 New Zealand historian Keith Sinclair wrote an article for Historical Studies called ‘On Writing Shist’ (that second ‘s’ is very important!) He pointed out that shist (i.e. short history) is not a summary of what is known in order to be memorized, but a summary interpretation of a topic, intended to make it understandable. It should be aimed at the educated non-specialist, and the author cannot assume more than the most vague background knowledge. Facts are illustrative and form a “very thin, hard skeleton”, and the overwhelming problem is what to leave out, rather than put in. The heart of the task is to shape the overall pattern of ideas, facts and prose, interwoven into a pattern of thought and story. It is meant to be read, rather than consulted, utilizing the novelists’ tools of suspense and pace, driven by the author’s sense of commitment to his subject.
McKenna addresses the issue of the need for “new ways of thinking about the nation’s history” right in his first chapter. He writes:
Most national histories are ‘rise and rise’ narratives. They narrate the nation’s formation and walk chronologically through familiar milestones. In Australia’s case, there’s a chapter on Indigenous Australia before 1788, before moving onto the main story: penal colony to gold rushes and responsible government, then to Federation, the First World War and the Anzac legend, the Depression, the Second World War, postwar reconstruction and the Cold War; before waves of non-British migration, the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the end of White Australia usher in the emergence of a more open, global economy and culturally diverse society. Or words to that effect. The history of the nation-state- from one formative event to the next. (p. 7)
So how is he proposing to avoid this straightjacket? His fundamental strategy is to see Australia as a continent rather than a nation, to turn both Edward Barton’s declaration “a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation” on its head. He foregrounds place, both the climate, ecologies and histories of different regions of Australia, and the Indigenous understanding of history which can never be divorced from place. And rather than that awkward, dangling introductory chapter of “The Aborigines”, he integrates Indigenous perspectives and actions throughout the whole book, from start to finish. Nor does he follow a well-ploughed chronological trench: indeed, Captain Cook and Botany Bay don’t appear in detail until Chapter 9, more than half-way through the book, in a chapter titled ‘Facing North’.
He starts right up front in Chapter 1 ‘The Founding Lie’, with a reflection on the Sydney Opera House, its design and construction, then considers its site – Bennelong Point. In Chapter 2 ‘From Ubirr’ he joins hundreds of visitors at Ubirr, in the Kakadu National Park looking north to the Arafura Sea at dawn- again, starting at a place- to emphasize the great migration from Asia into northern Australia, and the influence of trade with the north. Chapter 3 ‘The Island Dilemma’ looks at the sense of geography and the ‘island’ perspective that encouraged isolation as both a negative and positive force. He takes us to Christmas Island, both its now-deserted CI Club for administrators and Europeans, then its use as a detention centre for asylum seekers. Ch.4 ‘Taking the Land’ (and there, again is that ‘place’ emphasis) starts with John Howard at the Longreach Stockman’s Hall of Fame in 1997, promising that government legislation would ensure pastoralists’ rights after the Wik decision. He traverses land policy from Cook’s act of possession to the spread of ‘settlement’ and Aboriginal resistance, especially in Queensland. He notes that Australia has silenced not only the evidence of frontier warfare, but also the many efforts at reconciliation that were made between British settlers and First Nations Australians (p. 75).
Chapter 5 ‘War and Memory’ takes us to Australia’s “most storied beach”, 15,000 kms away. In a desperate craving to be connected to European history through blood sacrifice:
Over time, the birthplace of their nation was conveniently displaced 15,000 kilometres offshore to Anzac Cove. Australia thus became the only modern nation-state to create an origin myth not located on its own soil p.90
He points out that, two decades before the outbreak of the Great War, and for at least a decade after the war ended, in areas like Wave Hill and Victoria River of the Northern Territory and the Pilbara and Kimblerley regions of Western Australia, frontier violence was still occurring. War memorials to the First World War stand in villages, towns and cities throughout Australia, but the Australian War Memorial resists calls to recognize the loss of life in frontier wars.
Chapter 6 ‘Fire and Water’ takes us to Red Bluff, Kalbarri in Western Australia way back on 25 January 1697, and the desperate search for water by the men and officers from the Dutch East India Company who anchored three ships in Gantheaume Bay and rowed towards the coast. Drought, fire and flood are “a cycle as ancient as the country itself”, and while non-Indigenous Australians have long been familiar with bushfires and floods, the memory of one is swiftly erased by the arrival of the other, as if we’re fighting the same battles with the country (p. 111). Here are the plans for irrigation using the Murray-Darling, the Snowy River scheme and the fires at Mallacoota in December 2019. In Chapter 7 ‘Fault Lines’ we go to Waverley cemetery in Sydney, and the grave of Louisa and Henry Lawson, before embarking on a really good analysis of Catholic/Protestant sectarianism, touching on Ned Kelly, Billy Hughes and conscription. Chapter 8 ‘Fault Lines’ starts with Dorothy Napangardi, one of Australia’s most acclaimed artists, and the gradual recognition and appreciation of Indigenous ways of belonging to Country in the late twentieth century. For many non-Indigenous Australians, works of First Nation artists are a reminder that, as recently arrived migrants in a country, we do not have the same keys to Country. Modern Australia has always been a migrant society, and McKenna returns 19th century migration, especially from Ireland, and the Chinese migrants lured by the prospect of wealth on the goldfields. He goes through the conversion from a white, British enclave to a diverse multicultural nation, while noting that it was driven by self-interest and economic necessity. He reminds us of the memories of discrimination and prejudice through the story of William Yang, born in 1943 on a tobacco farm on the Atherton Tablelands. In Chapter 9 ‘Facing North’ (there’s that sense of place and geography again) we finally meet Captain Cook face to face. To illustrate the short-term economic mentality of resource extraction he turns not to gold, but to pearls, and the pearling industry not just for its importation of divers from Asia, but its mix of voluntary and forced Aboriginal labour (I didn’t know about this). He then moves on to New Guinea, and Australia’s WW2 in the Pacific.
I’d like to look at Chapter 10 ‘The Big Picture’ in more detail as an example of the diffuse way in which McKenna writes, his integration of stories of individual people into broader historical events, and the sweep of a theme across time. He starts with Charles Doudiet’s sketches of Eureka, which were only discovered in 1996 through a Canadian family which found them in their attic. These sketches verified for the first time the location of the Eureka Rebellion and the use of the Eureka flag, and they are the springboard for McKenna to discuss Australian democracy and its evolution from Eureka and the anti-transportation movement, through to self-government of the colonies in the mid 19th century. Then he moves to a second picture, Tom Roberts’ ‘Opening of the First Parliament of the Australian Commonwealth 9 May 1901′ and federation as a political compromise that combined elements of the US federal constitution and the Westminster system. The opening of Parliament House in Canberra in 1927 had many guests, but two uninvited guests were Jimmy Clements and John Noble, two Wiradjuri elders who walked 150 kilometres from Brungle Aboriginal station near Tumut in NSW to attend the opening. Here McKenna turns to Indigenous agitation for their rights in the 1920s and 1930s, set against Queen Elizabeth’s tour of 1954, the first reigning British monarch to set foot on Australian soil. He returns to Indigenous activism and the 1967 referendum, and the myths that surround it, before moving on to Whitlam and his deliberate cultivation of what Whitlam called “a vigorous national spirit” and ending the era of assimilation in favour of land rights and self-determination. This was encapsulated by the photograph of Whitlam pouring a handful of red earth into the hands of land rights leader Vincent Lingiari in 1975. However, the most seismic shift was the High Court Decision in the Mabo case, and he returns to Eddie Mabo’s sketch of his ancestral land on Mer which hangs not far from Tom Roberts’ ‘Big Picture’ in Parliament House. McKenna finishes the chapter with another painting of the people on Mer executed by Tom Roberts on his way to London in 1903. Twenty years after his arrival in London, Roberts presented the painting to the British Museum, and there it stayed undiscovered until found in 2009 by a curator from the National Museum of Australia.
He closes his book with an Epilogue titled ‘Modernity and Antiquity’ which starts with suburbia and the humble Sydney houses of both John Howard and Paul Keating. He notes that in the half-century since the dismissal of the Keating government, the old verities have vanished: Australia is now one of the world’s most diverse, multicultural and liberal democracies. The Indigenous cultures that White Australia tried to eradicate are now fundamental to the nation’s identity. From a protectionist economic policy, we are now an open, free-trade economy; the alliance with the US remains the linch-pin of its defence; the population has doubled since the mid 1970s and there is a distinctive rise of environmental consciousness, with the Tasmanian Greens the first Green party in the world. He notes that the closer we come to the present, the harder it is to discern which reforms will be of lasting significance. He returns to the “Big Lie” with which he started his book, and the question that continues to gnaw at Australia’s soul is how to tell the truth about the nation’s history and what Noel Pearson called “a rightful place” for First Nations Australians. Here are the apologies, the Uluru statement and the referendum campaign. He closes as he started with a place: this time Lake Mungo National Park (the most spiritual, life-changing place that I have visited in Australia) and the potential for Mungo to be “for all Australians, black and white. It can embrace us all in its spirituality, and draw us closer to the land.” (p. 266)
This is a beautifully written, really carefully crafted and highly original book. Although part of the ‘Shortest History’ series that ranges across the whole world, I feel that it is far more directed at an Australian audience than an international one, but both readers could take much from the book. Indeed, the word ‘shortest’ obscures the deep-time and Indigenous emphasis of the book. By eschewing completely the chronological approach, he prioritizes understanding of a theme illustrated through many kaleidoscopic prisms. In the author’s note at the end of the book, he says that he decided to “say more about some things rather than a little about many things”. He has certainly succeeded in this. His prose is beautiful, drawing your interest from vignettes based on people, with a pace that doesn’t get bogged down in details. It’s excellent. Read it.
My rating: 10/10
Sourced from: Review copy from Black Inc. but that hasn’t influenced my rating!
I often find that there is a sort of brittle formality about books written in early-mid twentieth-century Australia, echoing the slightly-British, self-conscious tone of newsreaders and documentary narrators that you hear in black-and-white footage from the 50s and 60s.This book, first published in 1966, and reissued by Text in 2012 starts off in a similar way. The scenario of two sisters, Laura and Clare, being brought into the headmistress’s office to hear of their father’s death and their removal from school evoked children’s books of the past (Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, anyone?) The focus at first is on sixteen-year old Laura, who had had aspirations to be a doctor like her father, and she is more conscious of the economic and social fall in their circumstances when their fey and selfish mother turns to Laura to be the breadwinner of the family. At this stage, neither Clare nor her mother are particularly well-rounded characters, Clare (seven years younger than Laura) being merely childish and her mother Stella a languorous, demanding presence who decides to sail back ‘home’ to England, leaving the girls to fend for themselves.
Instead of a medical degree at university, Laura finds herself packed off to business college and a secretarial job at a box factory, owned by Felix Shaw. Although she feels no great attraction to him, when Felix Shaw proposes to her – largely as an economic arrangement – she accepts, seeing it as a means of financial security for herself and her younger sister Clare. Felix offers to support Clare to go to university- a dream that Laura had had for herself- but this promise is soon broken once Laura and Felix are married. I can’t really decide whether Felix is a complex character or a caricature. He almost willfully makes unwise financial business decisions, selling off mildly successful companies to spivs and incompetents, while expecting Laura to pick up a heavier work burden as a result. They are not poor: they live in a large house overlooking Sydney Harbour, and he enjoys driving luxury cars dangerously while abusing everyone else on the road. He sells the house – the one thing that Laura loved- from under her to underline her financial impotence in this dependent relationship.
Harrower skillfully juxtaposes the glittering sunshine of the Harbour, with the darkness of their house. It is as if a shadow lies over this beautiful home and its extensive gardens. The book is set in the 1940’s and 50’s, and although neighbours are aware of the arguments next door, nothing is done to help them. In fact, in spite of living in the midst of other houses and working with other women, Laura and Clare are socially isolated, with Felix’s happiness their main concern.
The term ‘coercive control’ did not exist when Harrower wrote this book, but all the signs are there: the emotional blackmail over the prospect, later withdrawn, of Clare’s university education; the changeability of mood; the oscillation between extravagant generosity and meanness; the rigidity in expectations for the women in his life compared with his own recklessness. Felix is physically violent towards Laura, and the possibility of sexual violence towards her sister Clare lurks in the shadows.
Most insidious of all is Laura’s own coercion of Clare to remain in the family home as a peacemaker and mediator, and her adoption of Felix’s own sense of victimhood as a reason to make her stay. Felix has made his own wife the enforcer. At times Laura dreams of an escape, but faced with the consequences, she represses her own will and becomes an extension of Felix.
Meanwhile, as the novel progresses, Clare becomes the main focus when she resists the narrowing of her own horizons and as all of the colour leaches out of Laura. The arrival of Bernard, a young refugee, to stay in the house to convalesce breaks the spell, even though for a while it seems that he, too, is going to be lured into Felix’s orbit by the promise of academic support, similar to that offered to Clare. In fact, there is a latent thread of repressed homosexuality in most of Felix’s relationships with other men, be they fellow entrepreneurs or employees.
The threat of violence runs through this book and it is clearly felt by Laura and Clare as they scramble to meet Felix’s standards and demands. Knowing, as we do, the physical danger to women at the point where they finally decide to leave a coercive partner, as readers we feel unsafe as Laura, and increasingly, Clare contemplate an escape
The title ‘The Watch Tower’ is interesting, because it can be interpreted in many ways. It has connotations of punishment and incarceration, which the beautiful house on the Harbour becomes. But it also suggests a lookout as well, and as the book progresses Clare is increasingly looking out, to a wider world, even while Laura becomes more deeply entombed in her relationship with Felix.
So, for a book which I thought was going to be rather insipid and old-fashioned, I found a book that in many ways predates Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do (my review here). I read this as part of the Ivanhoe Reading Circle’s program, and one of the questions raised was whether we know of another Australian book of similar vintage that deals with the issue of what we now recognize and name as ‘coercive control’. I haven’t read it, but I suspect that Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera treads similar ground (The Pastor’s Wife (my review here) does too, to a lesser extent. I can see why Michael Heyward at Text Publishing re-published this book. Unfortunately, it reads just as true today – possibly even more true now – as it would have sixty years ago.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Brotherhood Books
Read because: November book selection for Ivanhoe Reading Circle.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 