Book review: Moving through this world is an eccentric group of circus women: “We sew and drive and perform and reclaim.” Illicitly, on the side, they offer “reclamations” for women who do not want to be pregnant. It’s a story told from two main points of view – a 19-year-old woman called Winnstay, or Win, who performs in the circus, and a nun-like woman, known only as “The Woman”, who is travelling with the Reverend, a man harbouring a “might of righteousness”.
Queenie leads the small band. An older woman who has been in circuses most of her life, she carries around with her a fetus in a jar. The reclamations are considered a necessary service for women. Queenie wants to pass the mantle on to Win, who is becoming increasingly uneasy with what they do. “We call it returning a missed period, we don’t call it what it is, always something else as if using other words means we aren’t doing what we really are.”
Darker still, “problematic men” have been disappearing. The group has started offering a new service – “free shaves” – involving a cut-throat razor. Queenie decides which of her “special customers” should bring their boyfriend or even father for a shave. Men want women and women want safety, says Queenie, and she knows how to help: “No more softly-softly.”
And yet, despite this darkness, Win realises, “It’s important to recognise there are beautiful moments.” The Woman, too, knows that even in entrapment there can be beauty. “His fits and tempers happen on occasion but splendour is here to be noticed even in the annelids, the beetles, the spiders.”
Girl, too, who they find at the side of the road, is energised by the wind and sky. The beauty in nature acts as a balance to the bad stuff. For Valentina, the clown, this is all there is, though Win hopes there is something more, “something more for me”.
Maybe it can all be fixed with love. Valentina, in considering the nature of being a clown, seems to endorse this hope: “Be ready to love because that’s all you can do for another person, let alone yourself.”
In a world where access to abortion has increasingly been banned or severely restricted, Hurdy Gurdy makes us question when it can be considered “right” – for the woman, for the fetus. And when might it be warranted to take justice into one’s own hands. “You think to play God?” asks the Reverend.
The novel also explores, in language that is simple yet filled with powerful images, the place of “badness” in the world. It may simply be a part of nature, or something imposed from the outside, like the dust that Win thinks might be from asteroids, “brought like bad things that come to us eventually”.
At times gripping, cinematically menacing and sometimes shocking, Hurdy Gurdy explores a future that nobody would want to be part of.
Hurdy Gurdy by Jenny Ackland (Allen & Unwin, $36.99) is out on Tuesday, June 4.
