‘There is a hole in the English language’ – Bereft by Chris Womersley

Bereft is set in 1919 Australia, a country in the grip of Spanish ‘flu following the end of the first World War.  Quinn Walker returns home having fought in France to a past he has been running from since he was accused of killing his twelve year old sister, Sarah, ten years earlier.  He is much changed:  his hearing is ruined , his lungs collapsing from a gas attack, but most importantly he is visibly changed and so is not easily recognisable.  Quinn hides in the hills above his former home, Flint, always aware that he will be hanged for his supposed crime if he is found.  In the hills he meets Sadie Fox, a mysterious orphan who seems to know impossible things about Quinn’s past and present, and together they face the man that threatens them both.

Chris Womersley is an Australian journalist and literary critic.  His debut novel The Low Road won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Book.  Bereft won the ABIA and Indie Awards and was shortlisted for the 2011 Miles Franklin Award, the ASL Gold Medal for Literature, the Age Book of the Year and the Ned Kelly Award for Fiction and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award 2012.

This is the story of a broken man finding the strength to face his demons and it is a good story.  It is also a murder mystery where surprisingly, the mystery is not who did it, but whether Quinn can find the strength to seek retribution for his sister.  In a world where death is the norm and the landscape is littered with bodies, the fact that Womersley has made one death matter is testament to his skill.  The books real strength lies in its careful construction.   Womersley keeps a constant forward momentum in the present day action whilst at the same time flashing backwards, each time revealing a little more of the experiences that have shaped Quinn.  There is very little information given to the reader that doesn’t become vital later on in the story and because of this the reader is pulled through the narrative and is always eager to read on.

The title of the book comes from Quinn’s mother, who Quinn visits secretly and discovers is dying of the ‘flu.

“Do you know, Quinn, there isn’t even a word for a parent who has lost a child?  Strange, isn’t it?  You would think, after all these centuries of war and disease and trouble, but no, there is a hole in the English language.  It is unspeakable.  Bereft.”

But it isn’t Quinn’s mother who feels the searing loss in this story.  It is Quinn who really suffers.  Quinn goes on to say:

“There was no word, either, for a brother who has lost his only sister.”

It is this unbearable loss that dominates the story and that Quinn must somehow come to terms with.

Womersley has the skill of being able to see from a child’s point of view.  Early on in the narrative we see the young Quinn and Sarah out collecting ‘treasure’ which they ‘planned to sell when they are older so they might travel to strange countries and purchase exotic animals and jewels’.  The ‘treasure’ consists of buttons, feathers and stamps.  This imagery of childhood is repeated later on when Quinn meets Sadie as she too collects mundane objects and infuses them with spiritual meaning.  Sadie is mysterious and seemingly possessed of magical powers and spends her life arranging animal bones and other detritus into magical tokens tied with cotton thread and string.  She insists on giving Quinn a series of tattoos to protect him and the relationship between these two unlikely companions gives the book a tenderness that counteracts the horror around them.  Sadie is perhaps the most interesting character in the book, fully realised but still unknowable and ephemeral.  Because of this she stays in the mind long after the story has ended.

It is Quinn’s dying mother that didn’t really work for me.  She has believed for years that Quinn murdered and raped her daughter and yet she welcomes him back readily.  She lies in her bed desperately ill, but somehow manages to speak in long sentences and whole clear paragraphs.  As a whole dialogue is something that Womersley seems to find more difficult.  He didn’t capture the cadences in the characters’ speech and it was often the case that where the speaker was unidentified it was almost impossible through the voice to determine which character was speaking.  No character had a distinctive voice and to my mind they all sounded a little too modern for the time period of the story.

Womersley’s prose has moments of real magic.  For example ‘The opiate tide of heat’ captures exactly Quinn’s experience of the harsh heat in the hills above the town.  Similarly ‘darkness silted around him, gathering in drifts along the window sill, in the folds of his clothes and in his hair.’  My particular favourite  is the description of Quinn’s throat following the gas attack as a ‘violin with a frayed string that fluttered useless and annoying, tangling in those strings still tuned tight and in working order’.

Religion and belief in the afterlife pulses through the story, understandably given the amount of death Quinn faces during the war, the ‘plague’ afterwards and of course the untimely death of Sarah.  The story ends with the sound of hymns floating over the town.  A séance that Quinn attended in England is referred to throughout the story and adds a mysterious otherness, bringing the dead back to life.  Unusually, Womersley didn’t capitalise on one scene where Quinn is shown the decaying body of a saint during his time in France.  This was such a startling incident I would have liked him to have made more of it.

Quinn’s hometown, Flint, as well as Australia and the world has been hit by war and disease and I just didn’t feel enough of the loss, fear and suspicion that would have been prevalent at this time.  Womersley does, however, give us a sense that the bereaved resent the survivors for their life when others have not returned home.  The press release states ‘The Great War has ended, but the Spanish ‘flu epidemic is raging across Australia.  Schools are closed, state borders are guarded by armed men and train travel is severely restricted.  There are rumours that it is the end of the world.’  This sense of fear and change and desperation although referred to is, for me, lacking in the actual story and I really wanted it to be there.  It felt as though having set his story in this world he somehow backed away from exploring it fully.  Although I enjoyed this book and thought it was a good story, for me there was something lacking in the telling of it.  I didn’t get the sense of a real passion for it, a sense that he simply had to tell this story, set in this place at this time and that he was there with Quinn struggling against his demons.  There was a reticence to the emotion that I wanted him to just let go of.

Any Cop?:  Yes, this is a good book, well written, with many layers that reveal themselves to you as you consider it more.  I think there is more to come from this writer and he’s worth looking out for in the future.

Julie Fisher