fiction
Marion Halligan
Amy Witting
Maria's War
Viking $24.95hb, 254pp
0 670 88312 3
EVER SINCE I heard Amy Witting speak at the recent Melbourne Festival I have been thinking about her name, which is a chosen not a given name and therfore may be considered for its meaning. It occurred to me that there may be conscious artistry in her name as in her work. Amy: that must mean love. And Witting will be knowledge, awareness. The two an expression of the novelist's desire. Her new book has both in good measure. Even more strongly here than in her earlier work, I have a sense of Witting's voice speaking to us. Of course her medium is her characters through whom her plot works itself out, and the wise things spoken are the words of these characters, but I had an intimate sense of their being hers as well. You could extract her bon mots, her reflections, her epigrams, and make a nice little volume of the wit and wisdom of Amy Witting. But of course you would lose a part of their power, and all the poignancy that context gives.
The story is set in an old people's home. Witting does not make things easy for herself; I can imagine some readers wanting to have as little to do with the book as with its setting. They would of course be wrong. The people in Witting's old people's home may be fat and balding with lizard-like eyes (that's Maria, one of the heroines), they may be blind and deaf and nasty-natured, they may be boring or full of anger, but they are human, all of them, and most of them have a moment of triumph.
The two heroines have a great many. And this small world is a microscosm of the larger one outside, with its own narratives of romance, and despair, and fragile happiness. 'Old age is like religion', the other of the heroines thinks, 'it makes good people better and bad people worse'.
Erica is an unmarried retired schoolteacher who moves into Leicester Gardens when her dear friend dies. She's not keen on the idea, but what else is she to do? She has understood her own invisibility. There's no threat, she thinks: 'Nobody was going to pay her any attention at all. That was the threat.' But somebody does pay her attention, Maria, the stout and weary Lithuanian woman who recognises Erica's wit and the kinship of taste, sense, intelligence that goes with it.