Australian novelist Sonya Hartnett has long suffered from a lack of due recognition because the majority of her novels are either aimed at the young, or span the gap between young adult and adult fiction. Critic Peter Craven has been one of her long-time champions, naming her ‘a novelist of genius’.
It’s wonderful that such a sterling writer is able to bring to such glittering life the complex, deeply felt experiences of young people. But just as youth is wasted on the young, it would be a sin if Hartnett’s audience was confined to the under-16s.
Hartnett’s work has won a swag of awards since she published her first novel at the astonishing age of 15. Now, fresh from winning the 2008 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, worth a cool $A880,000, Hartnett has published Butterfly, aimed once more at a hybrid market.
It’s an apt title. The novel has the delicacy and complex patterning of a butterfly’s wings. But given its sometimes grim subject matter, the title presages a kind of optimism.
We’re in a sleepy Melbourne suburb somewhere in the late 1970s. Abba, shag pile and Holden cars reign. Plum Coyle is 13 going on 14, emerging from the safety of childhood into the ‘anguished infancy of teenagerhood’, with its social horrors and crippling narcissism. She sometimes feels herself evil and inhuman, hates her face and body, adores her two much older brothers, Justin and Cydar, and tolerates her mild, eccentric parents.
Lowest on the pecking order in her group of friends and feeling misunderstood by her family, Plum is drawn into the world of her glamorous next door neighbour, Maureen. Perhaps Maureen will be able to help Plum in her attempts to gain some status in her friendship group, attempts which appear only to lead further into humiliation?
Hartnett’s many skills are in full play in this beautifully crafted novel. There are secrets in this quiet suburban world, secrets the characters keep from each other for fear of losing everything they value most. These secrets fuel the momentum of the narrative that Hartnett so carefully builds, keeping the surprises coming.
Indeed, there’s almost a thriller element to the novel: until the very end we don’t know exactly what will happen. At one point towards the close Hartnett plays with this mounting sense of dread, keeping us guessing as to whether she’ll choose a conventional melodramatic device or a more nuanced resolution.
Hartnett’s writing shows us the inner worlds of her main characters in close-up, as if we’re lurking somewhere behind their eyes. These worlds are full of both sensual immediacy and psychological nuance; there is much to see, hear, feel, touch and taste:
… the sky beyond is purple, as if it’s suffered a horizon’s-worth of blows. … there are midges bouncing on the air, and underground a cricket is tuning its saws and pins. She looks back to Maureen and asks, ‘Will you come to my party? Even for a little while?’
As is also evident in the above quote, Hartnett has a talent for casually placing apt, highly economical metaphors in the text that conjure up vivid images: ‘Her friends stare in post-nuclear silence’; ‘he has bumped through life like a brightly coloured ball’; ‘Maureen stands out against the lawn like an orchid, all lankiness and waxen beauty’.
Hartnett has set herself a challenge by placing this vividly imagined world in the seemingly far-off 1970s. Yet the material details are rendered as casually and faithfully as if the novel was set in 2009.
There is no sense of a period piece; we are parachuted back into the everydayness of the past, never merely gazing at it through some soft-focus lens. And this is what memory is like, too: when we recall the past, however bizarre the clothes or daggy the furnishings, such details stubbornly continue to make sense in the context.
Indeed, there’s a sense in which this foreign but, to older readers, familiar world is every bit as materialistic as our own. Objects in the novel have a huge and sometimes negative force, often standing in for everything that is emotionally absent or awry.
Plum hates her parents’ love for daggy antiques, yearning for a renovated house that will impress her friends. Meanwhile, Maureen is trapped within a suburban nightmare that is reflected in the furnishings: ‘her gaze moves over the sideboard, the drinks cabinet, the archway, returns to him’.
The exotic fish that Cydar rears in tanks and sells for profit are living creatures objectified, parts of himself that he cannot fully own and one reason why he sleeps and studies in a bungalow in the backyard, to some extent physically separate from his family. And Plum finds hope and an almost spiritual sustenance in the small precious objects she collects and keeps hidden in a case under her bed.
The predominance of objects is intimately bound up with the distance from which Plum surveys her loved family, particularly her parents. This doesn’t mean that they don’t love Plum, and when a crisis erupts in her life, the whole family mourns with her. However, they seem afflicted with a total inability to help. Hartnett is keen to demonstrate that family life, however benign, can never fully insulate us from the world – and that the internet age alone cannot be blamed for this inability. Perhaps she’s also suggesting that this distance is at least no worse than the suffocating parenting that is criticised so often today.
Hartnett’s masterly portrayal of the darker side of adolescence is both frank and humorous. She sympathetically depicts the hapless role of parents from an adolescent’s viewpoint. Mums and Fa are never fully fledged characters and they’re not supposed to be. Plum’s often appalling behaviour towards her mother in particular, as well as Mums’s tolerance of it, is amusing, touching and irritating at the same time:
She slams downstairs to take her frustrations out on her mother … Blissfully, a scandal: ‘I told you chicken vol-au-vents! No one in the world likes tuna!’
Clearly, Mums can’t win, and we feel for her. Both parents hover around the edges of this novel, their inability to change their lives for the better a point of sadness and a kind of warning. They seem to maintain an uneasy emotional balance, neither totally fulfilled nor devastatingly unhappy.
Hartnett’s view of adolescence is often bleak, no more so than in the excruciating descriptions of Plum’s desperate attempts to impress her friends. Hartnett forces into our gaze the psychological sophistication of the scapegoating that adolescents engage in, their ability to back each other into semantic corners with a couple of well-chosen words.
This is a forensic cruelty that relies totally on the insecurity of its recipients. Hartnett is almost fatalistic, perhaps too much so, in her seeming insistence that this kind of behaviour is inevitable and possibly unchangeable in the young.
You’ll have to read this intricately imagined novel to find out whether Plum’s attempts to negotiate the long and difficult process of individuation are ultimately successful. But the process of finding out is rich in writerly rewards.
Verdict: a novel to savour
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