Book review: Esther wakes up terribly ill with a breathing tube down her throat and no idea what has happened. She is nursed by Grace, a mysterious woman who is reluctant to explain the situation. Why is Esther imprisoned with her in an abandoned building? Suspense builds. The reader, too, yearns to know what’s going on. Each time Grace seems about to enlighten us, she withdraws.
As Esther struggles to understand, she begins to recall her past. In flashbacks, we learn about her childhood with her feminist mother, Vivienne. We meet her as a mother herself, divorced and bringing up two young children. The flashbacks provide relief from the close and horrifying present, but claustrophobia starts to pervade them, too, so intensely do they partake of the experience of motherhood.
Everything reminds Esther of pregnancy, or birth, or parenting. These experiences are undeniably intense, yet they’re also universal, and some skill is required in translating the individual sense of wonder and significance into art.
Robinson, a prizewinning Australian author, has Esther, a poet, reflect on this difficulty. Whereas Vivienne “had publicly railed against domesticity from a distance, my own work perfectly described the intimacy of its entrapment. Perhaps that was why it was so unpopular, I thought. As women writers across history have long known, no one wants to read about the experience of the animals while they’re still inside the zoo.”
For a novelist, the problem is one of emphasis. Having children is the most extraordinary, overwhelming thing you’ve ever done. And it’s also mundane. Once you get outside the zoo, you understand the disconnect: the individual experience doesn’t necessarily translate. More is required than simply detailing the confined conditions.
The juxtaposition of domesticity and horror is strange, and adds to the reader’s discomfort. If you’re paying close attention to the prose, things quickly get convoluted.
On one single, busy page we get all this: “The tears burbled up from a place beyond my control … This idea bloomed up fresh from beneath the fog of drugs … The idea of the mountain house broke through the murk the way a plane breaks through cloud cover as it ascends to high altitude. As with my comprehension of Claire and Wolfie, three components converged … a reflexive concept that seemed to burble up from a place deep within me, subconscious, beyond the scope of my cerebral cortex …” And so it goes.
“Burbling up” twice in one page – along with “bloomed up”, “broke through” and “breaks through” – could be called a copy-editing problem (as could the various incorrect placings of apostrophes). But surely the author should have imposed an organising sensibility over all this creative writing.
The control seems equally loose in sentences like this: “‘I know what it’s like when bad things happen,’ Vivienne used to say to me gravely when I flapped hard to get free of her, gripping me so tightly as we crossed the street that I felt the bones in my hand crunching together like twigs underfoot.”
While the prose meanders, the structure is intricate and clever, with numerous twists and some genuine shocks. The tension is maintained, and there is grim satisfaction in the final working out of the mystery; a resolution that’s unexpected – and ambiguous. The scenario is horrifying, and yet there’s the odd straw to clutch, a few cracks against which you can press your eye, looking for light.
This is a novel to relish if dystopian bleakness doesn’t depress you, if you don’t mind an overwhelming tone of grimness, if cleverness without joy is acceptable. If you don’t want your art to be life-affirming or hopeful, or infused with comedy, then this will be your thing.
If You Go is the kind of novel that confidently bustles the reader into hell, because hell is on the writer’s mind. Motherhood is, too – pregnancy, labour, birth, childcare – along with various kinds of dysfunction. The flashbacks portray an interesting set of characters, generations of a blended family, but they are rendered indistinct by the distancing structure of the plot.
It is perhaps difficult to evoke original, richly observed human detail when the character who’s recalling it is desperately ill, confused and imprisoned in a concrete labyrinth. Family life viewed from a bunker far, far away: it is a tricky exercise to pull off.
If You Go by Alice Robinson (Affirm Press, $38) is out now.