Books Roundup

The Eulogy
Jackie Bailey (Hardie Grant, available now)

The Eulogy is our First Book Club pick for June—Stay tuned for features on our website and podcast throughout the month!

In a disadvantaged region of Queensland in 1983, Kathy’s life changes when her older sister, nine-year-old Annie, is diagnosed with a brain tumour. The Eulogy, the debut novel by Jackie Bailey, is written in second-person, Kathy addressing her words to her dead sister. 

As the name implies, the novel is centred on Kathy crafting a eulogy to read at her sister’s funeral years later. For Kathy, it is a chance to process her sister’s death, and perhaps the cruel circumstances of both their lives. She says: ‘Annie was my big sister. To you, she was a disabled girl, a tragic story, but to me, she was real. On a deep level, I knew she was always there, a blanket of goodwill, shielding me from the sufferings of the world.’

While this is a work of fiction, author Jackie Bailey also grew up with a terminally ill sister. It’s clear that quite a bit of this novel is inspired by those life experiences: make-a-wish trips, camps for teens with cancer, family breakdown and the trauma caused by growing up in the wake of someone else’s disease.

As with any work of fiction that is based in true-life experiences, there are moments where the lines between protagonist and author become blurry. But Bailey’s life experience brings a lot to the story. Intertwined with heartfelt words, like those in the quote above, is a candid show of the ugliness of caring for someone with a degenerative illness. Kathy is, at times, frustrated with Annie, recalling how annoying she could be, or her maddening tumour-induced delusions. Part of what makes this novel work is that it is never a sugar-coated depiction of cancer, and Bailey writes brilliantly about the ways in which loving a person like Annie is simultaneously a blessing and a burden. 

Bailey writes about the mechanics of death and the death industry with such authenticity, not letting her reader go without feeling something and also learning something.

As well as exploring the legacy of terminal illness, The Eulogy depicts domestic violence. The girls’ mother, Madge, is abusive to all of her children when they are young, and to Annie until she is relinquished to an aged-care home in her thirties. The depiction of abuse is confronting, but Bailey is careful not to write a monster. As she recalls the period when her sister was first diagnosed with the tumour, Kathy reflects ‘I know that our mother didn’t invent violence in 1983. It predates us, this rage; its source is long buried in the unwritten annals of history.’ Madge’s abuse is shown in the context of a traumatic upbringing in post-war Singapore, and with the knowledge and explanation that domestic violence is a cyclical beast. 

The Eulogy is not one-note misery fiction; Bailey writes about the mechanics of death and the death industry with such authenticity, not letting her reader go without feeling something and also learning something. Much like the eulogy itself, this novel is imperfect, messy and shocking, but also gripping, insightful and deeply empathetic.

– Ellen Cregan

Homesickness
Janine Mikosza (Ultimo Press, available now)

Janine Mikosza’s memoir Homesickness unfolds as a dialogue between two versions of the author’s self. There is ‘Jin’, the narrator, who is haunted by experiences of childhood trauma—the consequences of which echo across decades. And there is the inquiring writer, who probes Jin as they visit and retrace her memories of growing up in fourteen homes.

Jin shows the writer a drawing of a giant house floor plan she saw at an art gallery. In the floor plan, rooms are connected to more rooms via doors and hallways. The artist’s intention was to generate a sense of excitement in the viewer at the unexpectedness of the design. But looking at the never-ending rooms makes Jin feel trapped; they remind her of the various rooms she dwelt in as a child and the unspeakable things that happened there. Her own drawings of floor plans for the various houses she lived in, which are interspersed throughout, are riddled with memory blanks and slip-ups.

On the subject of constantly moving homes, Jin asks the writer: ‘What would that do to your idea of yourself? How does it construct or alter the space inside you, your internal floor plan?’ Later, the writer challenges Jin, quoting Brian Castro: ‘To belong is to think only what one already knows, not knowing what else to think when a cold wind blows out the fire in one’s comfort zone.’

Mikosza’s distinctive approach to life writing shows up the constructedness of personal story. And, perhaps, the impossibility of knowing not only others but also oneself.

This back and forth between two contradictory perspectives inside Mikosza drives the memoir’s process of inquiry. Jin makes frequent attempts to evade the writer’s questions. On some days, she cannot face the writer at all. During these periods, she experiences the interrogation as an attack rather than a movement towards inward discovery. The writer knows Jin intimately and understands when to make room for her fears and doubts and when to push beyond them. Momentum builds as the writer gains Jin’s trust through proving herself as a steadfast witness. The dialogue between her two selves is emblematic then of the author’s sharpening reflexivity.

Gradually, Jin shifts from speaking in the abstract about her trauma to disclosing concrete details. She is careful to conceal and alter some details so that a degree of remove remains, and she and others are protected. In this way, Mikosza’s distinctive approach to life writing shows up the constructedness of personal story. And, perhaps, the impossibility of knowing not only others but also oneself, in full.

– Danny Sun Baulch

This All Come Back Now
Ed. by Mykaela Saunders (UQP, available now)

Mykaela Saunders describes This All Come Back Now as a ‘mixtape of weird, black and excellent stories.’ She opens the book with an overture that provides context for the collection, questioning why First Nations spec fic isn’t being published by traditional Australian genre publications when it’s accepted into literary journals and winning major literary prizes. Worse yet, she notes that the majority of stories about First Nations characters in print with these spec-fic publications are written by non-Indigenous writers who are ‘mining our cultures and pillaging our spirituality to trade in tired themes and tropes.’ Frustrated with waiting for representation, Saunders jumped to action to create the space to publish these twenty-two stories written by Blackfellas, for Blackfellas.

Importantly, Saunders has created a space for us, by us, to speak to the past, the present and the future.

The anthology opens with Evelyn Araluen’s ‘Muyum, a Transgression’, throwing spec fic conventions straight off the cliff with a haunting story that turns the reader into the wind. The story lets us flow along with the otherworldly narrator for a poetic journey exploring lurking danger and unspoken trauma. We’re kept on this thematic walking trail as Karen Wyld and Samuel Wagan Watson explore grief through a pair of tales that abandon canonical spec fic structures as they embody a more spiritual examination of human comprehension. The next three eerie, spine-tingling stories (my favourites in the anthology) by Kalem Murray, Lisa Fuller and Jasmin McGaughey underpin the importance of family and how far we’ll push for our loved ones. These themes continue throughout the collection as each story builds off the one before it. Saunders’ editorial choices allow the stories to unfold something greater and purposeful.

From John Morrissey’s satirical look at office culture and alien annihilation to Ellen Van Neerven’s story of love and lust between a ‘plantperson’ and the woman charged with mediating their interactions with coercive government—each story houses a message to be considered. So much care and thought has gone into the curating of this collection, whisking us along through spirals of dreaming and lessons learned too late by colonial forces. Beyond the showcase of Indigenous talent and creativity, many stories also serve as a warning to listen and work with the traditional owners of these lands to resist the fast approaching climate disaster being shepherded toward us by the colonial constructs in place. As Saunders’ own post-apocalyptic story states when talking about our world: ‘Nothing was dying; it was being killed.’ But she offers hope, introducing us to country in the process of healing.

This is the best kind of anthology—one with something for everyone, be it entertainment, scares, humour, or the conversation of ideas. Saunders’ ‘love letter to kin and country, to memory and future-thinking’ provides a great argument for why Australian publishing has been remiss to not give Indigenous spec fic a wider welcoming. But importantly, Saunders has created a space for us, by us, to speak to the past, present and the future.

– Beau Windon

Basin
Scott McCulloch (Black Inc., available now)

Basin begins with a drowning. Figure, the narrator, is rescued from the water by an unhinged paramilitary named Aslan. From near death, he is heaved back into the shattered and bleak world of Scott McCulloch’s debut novel. It is Figure’s subsequent journey along the coast—through villages, outposts, and barren steppe—that forms the story’s action. War forces him from one flooded settlement to another. The survivors he meets share what little they have: their food, their liquor, their opioids, their soiled mattresses, their bodies.

The war is based on the historical conflicts suffered by countries around the Black Sea basin but McCulloch avoids details that would explicitly situate the story. Little clues (in the flora and vernacular) could as easily place it in a far-future Australia, with the continent having been split by an inland sea. More important than the setting is the feeling of doom that pervades this world: a sense of futility that has most characters succumbing to narcotic lassitude or nihilistic euphoria, embracing destruction like vandals in a condemned building.

In the face of apocalypse, language fails us. We can bear witness to the event, but we cannot clothe it in poetry. At one point, Figure is ‘struck by how long it is since I’ve canalised thoughts into anything other than the act taking place, into what’s already happening.’ This failure of language is the Beckettian fascination at the heart of Basin (there’s a reference to Molloy’s stone-sucking scene at one point). Figure hears conversations in foreign tongues, unrecognised words, song lyrics he cannot understand. Soldiers and drug dealers rhapsodise to him half-intelligibly. War creates exiles whose shared language is horror.

Basin is an uncompromising vision of war and death. As such, brief flights of lyricality, glimmers of hope, have enormous significance.

Upon hearing the night-time insects’ chittering, their ‘tremolo of heart’, Aslan asks:

—How many words would I speak a day? Hundreds? Thousands?

—What does it matter?

—Nothing, nothing. Crack, rattle. One bug sheds its skin for the next, so the music never stops, on and on and on.

As speech breaks down to animal noise, so do bodies decompose to liquid and tissue. The imagery of abjection in Basin is relentless. Bodily fluids are constantly spilled: blood, vomit, spit, viscera, semen. The natural boundaries between inside and outside are ruptured just as an invading army might cross its neighbour’s border. Figure comes to think of himself as the catfish he sees on the floor of a marketplace ‘cut lengthways…spilling out from throat to tail.’

Basin is an uncompromising vision of war and death. As such, brief flights of lyricality, glimmers of hope, have enormous significance. The book’s most jubilant scene is the birth of a donkey foal when, amidst the mucus and placenta, we see the young creature’s ‘black pupils emerge and shine.’ But moments like this one are fugitives too, and the poetry of Basin drowns in its darkness.

– Bryant Apolonio