This is my modern/21st century choice for my 2025 Aussie Reading Challenge. It surely fits the bill, for the intriguing action (and non-action) takes place against the lockdowns, border restrictions, and social-distancing of 2020.
MY THOUGHTS:
First off, what great descriptions of the Aussie landscape we get within these pages.
'I stopped, as I sometimes do, to get out and stand looking down across the threadbare velvet-covered brown bones of this land. Stones and low yellow grasses and the delicate strings of barbed-wire fencing tracing long into the distance. Hot dry air zinging with grasshoppers. The sky a vast, white striated haze.'
The burned-out main character, who never once divulges her name, tells her story in the form of free-journaling vignettes. Still grieving her parents' deaths, and having recently split from her husband, she's in a mood to lick her wounds. She retreats to live in a small, rural community of Catholic nuns on the Monaro plains of New South Wales. There are zero expectations on her as far as the wider world is concerned, and an open invitation to attend liturgies and meals. The MC considers herself an agnostic when it comes to religion, yet can't deny a spiritual pull that keeps her there.
Even in such a pared-down lifestyle, challenges pop up, some of them quite daunting. First comes a mouse plague of almost Biblical magnitude. Although killing any living creatures isn't part of these women's creed, the sheer number of mice becomes a destructive menace. (We had an influx in the last house I lived in. The little blighters decimated the inner working of our dishwasher and cost us a new one, so I relate to these Sisters when similar wreckage happens to them.) Their live-and-let-live policy fades fast in the face of such horrific intrusion.
Next the murdered body of a former resident is discovered in Thailand. Although Sister Jenny had started to reject the validity of such a tucked-away society as theirs, her bones are on their way home for keeps. And the person bringing them is Sister Helen Parry, whose very name stirs guilt and awkwardness in our MC. As High School students, the MC had been part of a gang that mercilessly bullied Helen, who is now a super-nun, always working hard on behalf of some minority group.
The story swings back and forth between what's currently happening in the abbey and sundry reflections from the past that get triggered. It is all fascinating, yet challenges us to discern any clear conclusions. The MC herself admits that sitting with questions that are never answered is something she's grown used to. She writes, 'It always feels that I am on the edge of some comprehension but never breaking through to the other side.' Perhaps it's no wonder we readers share the same sense of elusiveness. Inability to pin down the point of this novel may actually be its point.
For someone like me, who loves clear-cut themes in stories and absolute answers in life, I would have expected to find this super frustrating. Yet somehow, it's quite freeing to read. If we can't figure everything out, it's okay.
In a way, the novel might function as a magnifying glass, highlighting for each of us something we most need to focus on.
Some readers might grapple with the conundrum of whether religious feelings are always based on a great reality outside of us, or are they sometimes simply the result of neurological activity firing within? And is choosing a life of contemplation over action a morally good fit for some of us? Impossible to find adequate, one-fit answers to satisfy everyone.
Most memorable for me is the character of Helen Parry, for I shared poor Helen's plight all through school. The flashback scene in which she's viciously attacked while the teacher ducks out of the classroom is also something that happened to me. Now, although we only ever see her through the MC's eyes, I'm left with the admirable image of Helen Parry as a survivor - a former victim of severe bullying who's learned to find strength from within herself. If my devastating, long-ago experience is ever tied to a similar breakthrough, then maybe it's okay that it happened after all.
For showing me that, I can't help but give this slippery book a high ranking.
Oh, and a group of school kids can gain the same cruel malevolence as a group of mice, even though individually they may be more innocuous. That's another thing I sadly already knew, but which this book reinforces.
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