Natalie Andrews
CLARA'S WITCH
FACP, $24.95pb, 269pp, 1 92073 162 8

Gaylene Perry
MIDNIGHT WATER: A MEMOIR
Picador, $19.95pb, 183pp, 0 330 36467 7

WITH BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR, it seems that readers are buying a certain kind of truth — call it authenticity, the authority of fact. Yet all reading is escapism, even when we are escaping to what we consider true; even in non-fiction, we seek some of fiction’s satis- factions. This is the challenge: to find a theme and structure that will shape the story without sacrificing a sense of intransigent reality.

Gaylene Perry’s memoir would work just as effectively as a novel. Midnight Water describes how her family reacts to the death of her father and brother, who drowned in an irrigation channel in Wyche- proof in January 1993. It starts with a quote from Kenneth Slessor’s poem, Five Bells: ‘Where have you gone? / The tide is over you, / The turn of midnight water’s over you, / As Time is over you, and mystery, / And memory, the flood that does not flow.’

It is the story of a few days, but it is also the story of a family — its complicated allegiances, its loyalties and betrayals — told through the memories that come to Perry as she moves through those days in a haze of suffering. In that way, Midnight Water works with two senses of time: the ceaseless and irreversible momentum of events; and the drift across past, present and future that is consciousness — what you might call ‘the flood that does not flow’. As such, it is a book that reads quickly, but has a dream-like quality. These two senses of time work in counterpoint to give this story peculiar poignancy, for it demonstrates how events ignore the meanings we attach to them. In that way, it dramatises the sense of loss. It is the art, as much as the truth, in this story that makes it effective.

Natalie Andrews’s Clara’s Witch, on the other hand, repeatedly prompts a reader to wonder about the world behind the story. This is so even though it is not, conventionally speaking, a memoir, but a biography written in the first person. It has this caveat: ‘While many events and characters in Clara’s Witch are based in real life, others have been created in the interests of telling Clara’s truth. Even the “real” people are not necessarily as they actually were, but are portrayals as seen through Clara’s eyes.’

This complication of fact and fiction in biography still warrants the odd session at writers’ festivals. It has done so ever since Drusilla Modjeska published Poppy in 1990; though we could more properly date the controversy back to Martin Boyd’s loose adaptations of family history in his series The Cardboard Crown (1952). At this stage, however, it seems like a nominal controversy — the kind we could resolve by naming a new genre.

In principle, therefore, there is no problem with this biography making up events and characters ‘in the interests of telling Clara’s truth’, or presenting por- trayals ‘as seen through Clara’s eyes’; but it does create a problem with structure. Its limited point of view makes Clara’s Witch oddly episodic, for it is composed of fragments of memory: three- or four-page chapters, in the main, describing incidents in Clara’s childhood, early adulthood, and first and second marriages. These make disturbing reading: Clara’s father beats her with a strap; her mother dies young; her father abuses her. In fact, Clara is happiest when she is sent to board with a childless couple in the country during the war.

If the episodes in Clara’s Witch link together, it is through a theme of suffering and misfortune. After sixty chapters, this culminates in a violent episode in Clara’s second marriage, when she mistakes her husband for an intruder and lunges at him with a pair of scissors. The act puts Clara in a psychiatric hospital. In the final three chapters, she describes how she recalls and reconciles herself to her past. Clara’s Witch reads as part of that therapy, written not so much to share a story as to understand and explain a problem.

The episodic nature of the story also means that every character, except Clara, has a walk-on role. They exist insofar as they affect her. This is a shame because Clara’s Witch presents some extraordinary characters, living in interesting times. Every story needs its world; perhaps this biography could have marked out Clara’s perspective and situation more clearly if it had included other characters’ motivations and distractions. Instead, we have Vanity Fair as Becky Sharp might have written it: an account of injustice indeed, but injustice in isolation.

Clara’s Witch is at its best when it attends to the world. It includes intriguing recollections of wartime Glasgow:

The siren wails and somebody yells, ‘Get up! Get dressed!’
Let me sleep, my curled-up body begs.
Mother shoves my limp arms into a coat and my feet into a pair of boots. I try to keep my eyes shut and not hear the siren wailing like a banshee. We scramble down the narrow stairs … to join the others headed for the shelter. I look up as searchlights swing crazily across the sky.

And it evokes postwar Glasgow with just a few phrases:

The gas filament in the corner flickers, giving forth an eerie hiss and casting weird shadows over the floorboards. Father gets up and disappears down the hall to put a penny in the meter box. The strains of a war song issues from the crackling mantel wireless — ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’.

Clara’s Witch is full of such brilliant sketches.

In fragments, too, Clara’s Witch is a vivid evocation of childhood: its bitter rivalries and fierce desires; its earnest and equivalent interest in justice and chocolate.

My name is called. I take a deep breath and arch my hands over my head and stand on my toes. The ship rolls and I lurch sideways. I curse under my breath and recover my balance, rotating my body in frantic twirls to take me over to the judges. I dip in a low curtsey in front of them, my arms stretching behind me as Moira Shearer did in Red Shoes, and my chin almost touching the deck. I tilt my head up and look into their faces, smiling, holding the pose until I can hardly breathe.

This is an account of Clara’s performance in a fancy-dress competition on board ship en route to Australia, when she is ten years old. And this is her reaction when her sister Maggie and her friend Elizabeth win first and second prize:

‘It’s no bloody fair,’ I shriek. ‘Why does Maggie have all the bloody luck?’ Maggie is three years and one day older than me and our birthdays are in a few days’ time. I yell at my invisible audience. ‘She even gets her bloody presents before I do.’ Cabin doors are opening and I sense people staring ...

It is hard not to see all this as comical, but Clara’s Witch stays true to the perspective of a child. This is its great strength, of course; though it could have balanced that perspective with a broader view of Clara’s world.