fiction

CLOISTERED COMMUNITY

Peter Pierce

Jane Sullivan
The White Star
Penguin $19.50pb, 310pp
0 14 029202 6

JANE SULLIVAN'S The White Star is her first novel, but one would not have suspected it, such is the assurance with which a tense story is told. To give little of it away, this involves the reunion in Sydney -- after more than twenty years -- of two women who went to school together in England. They were `best friends'; they played at being witches and believed in their magic; each is still damaged by the disappearance of her father. Alison Cullen is now the journalist Alison Baxter, who has put her career on ice to come to Australia with her husband and daughter. Jessie Cullen (no relation, whatever she pretends) is now the perfumes magnate Belle Cullen. Spookily clad all in white, Belle eventually lets Alison into her Sydney tower block and then invites her for a rural weekend to observe the cloistered community that she calls The White Star.
      Those who remember The Family run by Mrs Hamilton-Byrne on the shores of Lake Eildon will respond to the resonances of Cullen's project. She is the 'mother' of a group of obedient girls whom she has adopted and who are now in thrall, and in training, for purposes that are obscure to all save one -- the exercise of power. Carmel Bird's recent novel Red Shoes (1998) told of the fate of children who, after being up for adoption, were taken over by the sinister Hill House Brethren. Each of the novels is a story -- one of the most disturbing that Australia has to tell itself -- of lost children, of the innocent victims of adult desire and cruelty. Belle Cullen's silky manipulation of them is the more alarming because her force of will appears to be irresistible, her plans for the children so reasonable.
      The core of Sullivan's book -- and this is in no sense to belittle its achievement -- is the classic situation of the novella, as the American poet Howard Nemerov wrote of it. This involves the intense, dependent relationship of two people, which is ultimately fatal for or destructive of one of them. There can be ebb and flow in the balance of power within the relationship. There are periods when contact between the two is sporadic, but an inevitable climax is reached. So it is with Allie and Jessie/Belle.
      The outline of the novel promises something more familiar than we receive. Sullivan, who was born in England of Australian parents, came to this country as a journalist and has worked principally for The Age. One might suspect a diffused autobiography in The White Star, a much more typical first novel than in fact she gives us. For some of the obvious points of interest in such a story of deracination are not to be found. There is no yearning for England. It is as if that country had been erased even as a memory trace. The process of translation seems eerily simple.
      This is to speak of Alison. The thoughts of her husband Ghordon are rarely communicated. Making money by means of a computer is his absorption. It is one of the subtleties of The White Star that we learn how he, also, has the sense of having been closed out of the possible intimacies of married life, and at last finds the words to say so. Their daughter, Lisa, discovers Australia to be the most accommodating of foreign places. especially when the girls of St Hilda's see what she can do in the swimming pool. The various threats for this family, whether they are potential or no more than intimated, are dexterously suggested. Sullivan instinctively and skilfully prefers our capacity for inference to the temptation of over-emphasis.

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CLOISTERED COMMUNITY

Peter Pierce

Peter Pierce is Professor of Australian Literature at James Cook University.