Swinn review

Nice people like you

Louise Swinn

Emily Maguire
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE
Brandl & Schlesinger, $26.95 pb, 298 pp, 1876040785

Danielle Wood
ROSIE LITTLE’S CAUTIONARY TALES FOR GIRLS
Allen & Unwin, $22.95 pb, 260 pp, 1741149304

Love, family, hope, death and grief have always been among fiction’s chief concerns. The Gospel According to Luke and Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, both second books from their authors, share many of these themes. The Gospel According to Luke adds faith, belief, religion and prayer; and Emily Maguire adroitly pulls off what would, in lesser hands, be a farce.
Luke Butler, in The Gospel, is the senior pastor at the Northwestern Christian Youth Centre (NCYC), which keeps adolescents entertained while also giving them a spiritual and religious education. Across the street is the Sexual Health Advisory Service, run by Aggie Grey and her boss. Central to The Gospel According to Luke is the relationship between Aggie and Luke. The first time they meet, when Aggie marches to the NCYC to admonish Luke for distributing leaflets that make defamatory proclamations about the Sexual Health Advisory Service (‘encouraging illegal activities such as drug injection and under-age intercourse … promoting homosexuality and promiscuity’), the reader can’t be sure that Luke is being sincere when he says: ‘I just wanted to understand how such a nice person could be in the business you’re in.’ It becomes clear that he is.

As demonstrated in her previous novel, Taming the Beast (2004), Maguire is interested in complicated love – love that has a tendency to damage. It would be preferable for Luke if he just loathed Aggie, and desirable for Aggie if she wasn’t remotely interested in Luke, but the pair is not going to be let off so easily. At the heart of this tale is a love story. Central, too, are absolute faith and conviction; these characters live by their beliefs.

Spliced with the story of Luke and Aggie is that of Honey, the pregnant sixteen-year-old who is in a meeting with Aggie and about to go to an abortion clinic when a brick is hurled through the window. Aggie has become the target of a personal hate campaign involving e-mails, websites and death threats. Luke, concerned for Aggie’s wellbeing, rushes over from the NCYC and ends up looking after Honey. Luke is the kind of man who takes the beggar shopping rather than trusting him with his change. He believes he has been called to save Aggie from eternal damnation. It is not long before his elders start to suspect his feelings for this highly inappropriate woman; but Luke burns through life, and his flammability – his vulnerability – are powerfully portrayed as the NCYC community starts to doubt him.

The characters could have walked straight out of a Douglas Coupland novel. There is the beaming, ebullient Belinda and the other leaders at the NCYC, busy preparing presentations such as ‘Christian Dating? There’s no such thing!’ There is Aggie’s boss, Mal, who goes on holiday to sort things out with his partner, Will, just when the clinic is beginning to experience the worst of its threats. There’s Aggie’s pin-up lesbian-rights advocate mother, who left Aggie’s father when Aggie was eighteen. Not to mention Aggie herself: incredibly tall, with large hands and solid calves, whose personal life reads like a series of car crashes. Luke, in contrast, is smaller, neat, good-looking, impossibly sincere, genuinely innocent, an orphan. It is a credit to Maguire that these characters, painted so vividly, remain believable throughout.
Vitally, The Gospel According to Luke is comical – not in a way that makes you laugh out loud, but in a way that makes you shudder in recognition. Luke, putting together a PowerPoint presentation about alcohol consumption, ‘was busy formatting the word DRUNK so the text flashed like a warning, when he suddenly found himself wondering if those super-tight curls of hers were natural’. Aggie had ‘learnt to smile and not scream when people said How’s the weather up there? or You must be great at basketball’. Aggie and Luke argue because they are fundamentally at odds, but they are obsessed with each other and their desire is palpable. Maguire manages to write sex scenes that don’t make you squirm.

Very occasionally, there is an unnecessarily explanatory tone to the writing. This is a minor quibble; it happens rarely. Maguire is a master of her craft; her prose is sharp and full of imagery and her dialogue rings true. Ultimately, she sets a pace slow enough for us to get lost in the characters, and fast enough for us to get caught up in the plot.

Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, from the Vogel-winning author of The Alphabet of Light and Dark (2003), Danielle Wood, is a neatly packaged collection of twelve stories. Each story has, as well as a title, its own theme (virginity, truth, travel, beauty, longing, destiny and so on). A contemporary Little Red Riding Hood, Rosie Little recounts stories of herself and of others – tales of falling in love with married men, jobs at newspapers and on cruise ships, domestic violence, pregnancy, breast cancer, stillborn births, and partnerships, relationships, friendships. While there are occasional jolts of fantasy, it is the realist stories and their characters that work the best. Lorna, the newspaper’s chief sub-editor who mutters about her colleagues’ incompetence and has been ‘leaving in six months’ time for close to twenty years, is my favourite.

Rosie, who even as an adult appears caught in adolescence, is the central character of the book, but she is not the focal point of every story. The book is also littered with Rosie’s friends and people she has met. The best stories hardly feature Rosie at all and, because of this, seem at odds with the general tone of the book. In ‘The Depthlessness of Soup’, while trying to secure her future with Will, Paula tragically and unknowingly endangers it. Throughout this story, Wood’s authorial hand is deft; she manages to lead the reader on, even though we can see that a tragedy is unfolding.

Occasionally, cheerfully, but sometimes gratingly, Rosie interrupts the text with advice segments: ‘A Word from Rosie Little on: Nominative Determinism’, ‘A Word from Rosie Little on: Writing About Noses’. There is an enchanting polka-dot-clad fairy godmother looking after Rosie along the way, albeit in different guises. Comparisons to fables do not end there. In some stories, the prose is reminiscent of children’s fairy tales, in others it is less whimsical, but taken as a whole, there is a callow feel to this book.

Like Maguire, Wood can be funny, although in a different way – her humour reads like a joke with a punchline. On being an arts reporter at a metropolitan newspaper: ‘“Our style is really, um, eclectic. We don’t like to categorise ourselves,” they said. They ALL said, five minutes before they lay down on the ground and were photographed from above with their heads in daisy formation.’ Also like Maguire, Wood is delving into some of the most complicated aspects of what it is to be human. But Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls left me with a feeling of exhaustion similar to that felt after a day spent with a precocious teenager. The stories themselves are far from flaky, sometimes the characters have to be formidably tough, and the lives being portrayed are interesting; but they are layered under a voice that is too often glib, unnecessarily conspiratorial, sometimes smug. Perhaps because of this, my favourite story, ‘The True Daughter’, a vividly rendered tale of a dying woman and her nurse, is not about Rosie at all.

These two books are concerned with overlapping themes in markedly different ways. While Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls is for readers who don’t take their entertainment too seriously, The Gospel According to Luke is for those who demand that their serious leisure time be spent in funny, but achingly compelling, company.