Reading Matters

'Monkey Grip' by Helen Garner

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Australia; 246 pages; 2009.

I seem to have accidentally developed a track record in choosing books for my book group that are universally disliked. Last year I chose Dermot Bolger's The Journey Home, which scored 5.5 out of 10, and this year's choice, Helen Garner's debut novel, Monkey Grip, achieved the far worse score of 4 out of 10.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised: Garner has a reputation in Australia for polarising readers, more notably for her journalistic work — The First Stone, an account of a 1992 sexual harassment scandal at the University of Melbourne, generated an avalanche of controversy. And her fiction also seems to attract equal amounts of bile and love. But of the books I have read — including Garner's most recent novel The Spare Room and her true crime book Joe Cinque's Consolation — I have thoroughly enjoyed.

I can't say the same for Monkey Grip, which did not live up to my expectations.

Bohemians living in 1970s Melbourne

The story, which is set in Melbourne in the mid-1970s, is about a group of men, women and children living a Bohemian lifestyle in a series of share houses. It is narrated by Nora, a 30-something divorced woman with a school-aged daughter, who develops a sexual relationship with a junkie called Javo.

The diary-style narrative charts this on-off affair, which gradually morphs into an inter-dependent relationship that neither party is willing to break. Nora, who seems intent on sleeping with anyone simply to stave off the loneliness, turns a blind eye to Javo's continued dependence on drugs — "Smack habit, love habit, what's the difference?" — and his dishonest tendencies.

It is, at times, a fascinating, albeit frustrating, portrait of two people caught up in a destructive relationship. But for the most part I found it a somewhat tedious read, not helped by the all-too frequent descriptions of Nora's dreams and her sexual activities.

A journey of self-discovery

There's no real plot; the story is essentially one person's journey of self-discovery.

The book's strengths lie in Garner's evocative prose — her descriptions of Melbourne baking in the summer sun are particularly eloquent — and the snapshot she provides of a specific time, place and group of people living an alternative lifestyle.

Nora's voice, while slightly self-obsessed and vain, is refreshing in its frankness and its honesty. No surprise then, that Garner later claimed she adapted it directly from her personal diaries.

Monkey Grip, now regarded as an Australian classic, won the National Book Council Award in 1978 and was turned into a film in 1982 starring Noni Hazlehurst, Colin Friels and the author's daughter, Alice Garner.

---------------------------

This book was chosen by me for our Riverside Readers book group. Despite the fact no one seemed to particularly like the book we had an incredibly lively discussion about it.

'Joe Cinque's Consolation' by Helen Garner

Non-fiction - paperback; Picador; 328 pages; 2010.

On Sunday, October 26, 1997, Joe Cinque, a young engineer living in Canberra, died in his own bed of a massive overdose of Rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend, Anu Singh, and her best friend, Madhavi Rao, were charged with his murder.

In this book, first published in 2004, Australian journalist and novelist Helen Garner follows the twists and turns of Singh's and then Rao's criminal trials as they unfold. Later, when she realises that the memory of the victim has been superseded by the infamy of his killer, she befriends Joe Cinque's family in order to tell his side of the story.

Her account is unflinching and deeply moving. At times it is profoundly shocking, and no more so than the opening chapter which transcribes the emergency call made to the Canberra Ambulance Service by Singh on the night of her boyfriend's death. She is so hysterical she cannot even get the address of their home correct. Meanwhile Joe Cinque, lying diagonally across a double bed, stops breathing and chokes on his own vomit.

The book is told in narrative style, almost as if you are reading Garner's personal diary -- she records everything from the hotels she's staying in to the people she befriends in the court room -- but undercuts this with information gathered by interview, research and legal hearings. This makes it imminently readable, because she has a great gift for storytelling -- and, in turn, of making you care about the people she writes about.

But from the outset Garner admits that her reasons for writing the book were an ethical minefield -- and that many people, including close friends, warned her against doing so. She knows that there are people -- the victim's family, the accused's family -- who will be hurt by what she writes. "If your daughter was mixed up in a thing like this, would you want a book to be written about it?" an acquaintance warns her. He goes on:

"You think that book about sexual harassment* got you into trouble? This would be much, much worse. The person who's murdered stays the same, or even gets better -- becomes a martyr. But the person who's killed somebody goes on and on being speculated about."

But while Garner might have had her doubts about the project, she wasn't going to be easily persuaded.

But wait. Hang on a minute. [...] At the end of every argument, every doubt, stood the fundamental fact of the matter. Joe Cinque was dead.

What further hurt might I inflict? What right did I have? Yet surely if you kill someone -- if you are intimately involved in a situation that ends in a death -- you forfeit your right to a polite turning away. You have blazed your way into the collective awareness. The rest of us have to think about you. We need to work out what you mean, what should be done about you.

Interestingly, Garner had only been informed about the case mid-way through Anu Singh's second trial in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Supreme Court, but she couldn't resist attending.

It was a confused drive that had been firing me, so far -- first, curiosity, then a repelled fascination -- even an identification -- with Anu Singh; then, as I came to know the Cinques, a contagion of horrified grief.

That quote pretty much sums up the emotional change I went through as I read this book. Once I got a handle on the basic (surreal) facts of the crime, my intrigue gave way to shock. What motivated such a bright law student, with her whole life ahead of her, to commit such a violent act against the man she presumably loved?

The answer is not clear cut. Singh's motivations are muddled -- and her excuse, that she killed Joe so that he would not have to witness her own suicide, seems ludicrous. Any wonder then that witness testimony and Garner's own investigations demonstrated that Singh had a narcissistic personality and was prone to dramatics?

But where does Joe Cinque stand in this? Family and friends suggest that he was besotted with Singh even though most of them were unimpressed by her. Garner makes a good attempt to shift the focus towards him, to show that he did not deserve to die in this manner.

My over-riding impression of Joe Cinque's Consolation is that this somewhat bizarre murder, a case that was truly stranger than fiction, has left countless people reeling in its wake. Pain, confusion and grief resonate off the page, whether it be Garner's own personal reactions, or the reactions of Joe Cinque's (grieving) family or Singh's (bewildered) family.

The book throws a light on everything from moral culpability to the failure of an adversarial legal system to acknowledge the rights of the victim. It is a thought-provoking and unsettling read.

As an aside, if you are curious like me, you may well ask why there is an apple on the cover, because it seems like such an innocuous object to illustrate "a true story of death, grief and the law". It turns out that one of the crime scene photographs showed six Granny Smith apples sitting on the bench in the kitchen that Joe Cinque and Anu Singh once shared. Of this image, Garner writes:

It was jarring to see their intense, gleaming green, the fresh green of childhood -- as if these people, with their poisoned 'dinner parties', their horrid dramas, could never have performed an act as ordinary as cutting, peeling and eating an apple.

Please note that Joe Cinque's Consolation doesn't appear to be available outside of Australia, although you can track down secondhand copies via Amazon Marketplace and Abe Books. Alternatively you can download the eBook version direct from the Pan Macmillan Australia website or register your interest at the Book Depository.

* The First Stone, published in 1995.

'The Spare Room' by Helen Garner

Fiction - hardcover; Canongate; 180 pages; 2008.

Even before I started reading Helen Garner's The Spare Room I knew I was going to like it. It was the design of the book that convinced me, because surely a publisher wouldn't go to all this trouble to make it look so beautiful if the content was rubbish? The cover image grabbed me initially when I ordered it online, but once I had it in my possession I loved the whole package: the gorgeous cover image (tulips are my favourite flowers); the dust jacket with its luxurious matt sheen; the pretty endpapers (tulip petals interspersed with green leaves); and a green bound bookmark.

But putting the sheer physical beauty of the book aside, The Spare Room is also rather special because it is Garner's first novel in 16 years. Her last novel, Cosmo Comolino, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 1992, but she then took a different writing path, concentrating on short stories and journalism. The first (and only) Garner I have read was The First Stone, a non-fiction account of a sexual harassment scandal at a residential college at the University of Melbourne, which caused much controversy upon publication in 1995. I ate that book up in the course of a day and closed the last page feeling dazed, slightly dirty and not quite sure whether the author was a genius or a traitor. Having now read The Spare Room my opinion lies toward the former rather than the latter.

That other great Australian author Peter Carey endorses Garner's talent by describing her new book as a "perfect novel".  Of course this is an oft overused trite phrase but, in this specific case, it's a wholly appropriate one. In fact, I'd go so far as to describe it as a sublime novel, and one that works its way into your subconscious so that you find yourself thinking about it when you are doing other things.

Reviewing the book is difficult though, because the synopsis sounds terribly dull and depressing. A 60-something woman offers her spare room to a cancer-stricken friend of the same age and then finds their relationship tested to the core, doesn't really grab you by the throat, does it? And yet, in Garner's careful hands this story becomes a thoroughly engrossing one. The carefully measured prose, stripped of unnecessary clutter, serves to remove the claustrophobia of such a dark storyline, imbuing it with a light-hearted touch. Indeed, there were many times when I laughed out loud, not the least of when Nicola, the cancer sufferer, asks Helen, the friend caring for her, to buy some organic coffee for an enema.

When I saw her brewing the organic coffee in the kitchen after dinner, I said tentatively, 'Do you need a hand to set it up? I can...
She shook her head, too busy to listen.
'I wonder, though,' I said, as she forged off to the bathroom with the equipment. 'Is it a good idea to have a coffee enema at bedtime? You don't think the caffeine might keep you awake?'
'Why on earth would it do that, darling?' she said breezily. 'I won't be drinking it -- I'll only be putting it up my bum.'

Supposedly based on Garner's own experience of caring for a dying friend, The Spare Room has a genuine ring of authenticity about it. You can understand Helen's anger, her fear, her inability to look after her dying friend, even if it is for just three weeks, because you know to be in a similar situation you'd probably feel the same way. Why should a friend do what a family member should be doing? And what happens if this friend dies in your spare room?

This is a novel about death and friendship, about drawing lines and crossing them, about facing up to hard truths and shying away from things we'd rather not confront. But it also embraces other uncomfortable issues, including whether it is permissible to believe in alternative therapies if Western medicine does not have a solution, but all the while it never preaches, never comes across as heavy or patronising.

The Spare Room is one of those books that throws you in at the deep end and, to completely mix my metaphors, you either run with it or you don't. I'm pleased to say I ran with it... and only wished it was longer than its brief 180 pages.