fiction
James Bradley
Georgia Blain
Candelo
Penguin $17.95hb, 249pp
0 14 027206 2
THE STILL SURFACES of Georgia Blain's writing are deceptive. Like
the scene of a drowning, their seeming calm obscures darkness,
pain, and most powerfully, the mute absence of loss.
In Blain's first novel, Closed for Winter, this absence was
physical as well as emotional, the novel turning on a abducted
child, and the emotional paralysis that surrounded the family
that was left behind. In Candelo the absence is not dissimilar:
once again it is a young child, Evie, killed during a family
holiday, although this time it is the circumstances of her death which remain unclear until the novel's closing chapters.
The mystery that shrouds Evie's death is one that her family has
chosen to bury. Yet as time has passed she has refused to be
forgotten, and although the events surrounding her death remain
undiscussed, the illness of her mother has caused Evie's presence
to intrude once more into the lives of the survivors. But it is
another event that triggers the process of revelation that the
book depicts: the unexplained suicide of the young State ward who accompanied the family on the holiday almost two decades before.
Superficially it might seem that the stage is set for a fairly
conventional - and fairly lurid - thriller: a mysterious death, a
young man with a troubled past, a remote setting and sexual
danger in the guise of two teenage siblings, one male, one
female, both of whom are drawn to their troubled guest. But there
is nothing lurid about Candelo. Questions of responsibility -- to children, to friends, to lovers, but most importantly, to
the truth of what has gone before -- swirl about the characters,
unresolved, perhaps unresolvable. And although it has the same
tautness and narrative drive that made Closed for Winter such an
intense experience, Blain is interested in probing her
characters' individual pathologies in order to provoke sympathy (or at least recognition) rather than exploiting them for effect.
This restraint is most evident in Blain's prose. Crystal clear,
unaffectedly simple and beautifully crafted throughout, its
clarity allows a level of intimacy with the characters that is
quite remarkable. Similarly, Blain has an uncanny ability to
evoke the mood of a place, or more precisely, the experience of a
place and a time by her characters. In Closed for Winter she evoked the Adelaide beachfront with a pungency that was
remarkable. In Candelo it is a country town, and to a lesser
extent - and with less success, it must be conceded -
contemporary Sydney.
But it is the past that seems most alive in Candelo, the days
leading up to Evie's death enveloping the reader, wholly and
immediately real. And not just the physical setting: Blain also
demonstrates a keen eye for the social milieu in which her
characters move. She captures the experience of growing up amidst the world of seventies radicalism and its aftermath
exquisitely. Not just its strident mingling of the personal and
the political, and the hypocrisies that combination tended to
generate, but the rituals of house meetings and childhood
freedoms, the seemingly endless parade of causes and the labour
that went into them. And, perhaps even more keenly, the slow dying of that world, choked on the very contradictions and
virtues that once gave it strength.