Brothers & Sisters ed by Charlotte Wood
Allen & Unwin, $37.99
Theme-based anthologies serve several purposes. They explore and represent particular subjects from a thousand vantage points and they assemble diverse voices, both familiar and unfamiliar.
Sue Orr once compared a short story anthology (as opposed to one person's collection) to a box of chocolates where you are sure to come across something you like. You may not like everything, but you can admire the sweet intensity of flavour and the delectable containment.
Charlotte Wood, Australian novelist and short story writer, has brought together a gourmet "chocolate box" on the subject of brothers and sisters. She once met a woman who complimented her on her novel The Children before announcing, "my brother hates me". This - coupled with the intensity of responses to the sibling relationships in The Children - suggested to Wood that her writing had "touched a raw nerve in contemporary life - the deeply complicated bonds between adult siblings".
Less observed in literature perhaps than mother-daughter or father-son relations, the theme struck me as a gold mine for writing. Many of us have siblings, have raised siblings, or have half-siblings, step-siblings or surrogate siblings.
Wood commissioned established and emerging Australian writers to explore the subject in any way they wished and to a longer rather than a shorter length. The 12 resulting stories are deliciously different in execution and impact.
Virginia Peters' About The Others features a loathsome, self-centred sibling who sets herself apart and reveals her dysfunctional family from a tainted perspective. I wanted to step into the scene and hear the colliding versions of the other family members.
Sometimes out-of-the-ordinary circumstances that alter the comfort and routine of home and everyday living breathe different life into sibling relations. Cate Kennedy's Beads And Shells And Teeth presents a heartfelt recollection of two sisters divided by the absence of their father in Vietnam.
The gifts he sends, virtually untouchable in their preciousness, stand in for his scouring absence. The marks they make on each passing day on the calendar become deeper and darker, underlining an unspoken but competitive need to be more loved and more rewarded.
There is a different but equally penetrating ache in Tony Birch's One Good Thing. The half-brother and sister learn not to call Gwen "mother", to make themselves scarce when she is with a good-for-nothing man and to wait patiently for her unreliable return. This is a story of exquisite tenderness and strength. Often there is a seemingly unbridgeable gulf or, at best, disconcerting distances.
In Wood's The Cricket Palace, two sisters in their 70s travel to Ruth's daughter's wedding in Greece. Wendy covets her sister's children but is disdainful of her sister's life. I don't want to reveal the ending but this is beautifully paced in its revelations of character.
Christos Tsiolkas plants the question to what extent is the gap ever bridged between the lines of the different lives of two brothers in The Disco At The End Of Communism.
When Saverio goes to the funeral of his younger, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll brother, he recoils at the thought of delivering a eulogy.
This is a terrific collection with a tasty assortment of flavours that demonstrate how good a short story anthology can be.
Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.
