The Weekend by Charlotte Wood is a narrative centred on a weekend during which three elderly women clear out the beach house of a friend who has died. The friend is called Sylvie and she seems to have left the beach house to a person called Gail, who never appears and about whom we are told almost nothing.
The three women are called Wendy, Jude and Adele. Wendy is an academic, very slightly in the Germaine Greer mode, except she has - or had - a husband and children. Her children don’t like her because she was too absorbed in her work to pay them much attention when they were little. Her husband is dead. She has an incontinent half-blind extremely old dog, a present, as a puppy, from Sylvie at the time of Wendy’s husband’s death. Jude has made a career as a manager of very expensive restaurants and is very keen on order and keeping a tight control on everything she can. She is short-tempered and intolerant of mess. She has been mistress to a wealthy married man for decades and that relationship is the one joy of her life. Adele was once a successful actress but is no longer. She is fairly self-indulgent and has just discovered that she is being kicked out by her lover. She has no money, no prospects and nowhere to go, but she isn’t enormously troubled by any of this. These women have all been friends for a very long time, but their friendships have been thrown out of balance by the death of Sylvie, who, in a way that is never explained, made everything work smoothly.
Who Sylvie was remains a mystery throughout the book, and the reason the women feel they need to do this chore for Gael is never made clear. The house is built on a slope and has a peculiar outdoor lift arrangement on which the characters spend a lot of time travelling up and down. I suspect the author had some real place in mind as this is such an odd and unusual detail and required such a lot of explaining to help the reader imagine it. I think it would have been better left out as each time it was mentioned one was distracted by questions of why one had never seen one anywhere and whether such a thing would actually be permitted given the prevalent concerns about safety one encounters in Australia generally. So far as I could tell it didn’t serve any point or further the plot in any way.
Inasmuch as there is a plot: I got mildly excited when Wendy takes an object described as unusually heavy out of a cupboard that she is clearing. The object, we are told, is contained within a black cover. Wendy finds she cannot open the black cover and hesitates. Then, after a moment, she chucks the mysterious thing into a black bin bag, along with the rest of the rubbish. Having had my attention drawn to this object so emphatically, I assumed it might turn out to be something important that would need recovering later in the book. However, it is never mentioned again - and no other line of plot comes up to create any kind of concern on the part of the reader about what happens next.
Wood is excellent at creating a world on a page and extremely unusual in taking elderly women as her subjects. I imagine her intention in this novel is to meditate on friendship. Unfortunately, there was not one single line of it that leapt out at me and made me thing, “Oh what an insight”. It is vivid and well-written, but it is, I suspect unintentionally, very unsettling in its portrayal of three entirely self-absorbed, spiritually empty lives. Although the theme is friendship, there was little that could be called comforting or generous in these friendships - more a clinging to each other, faut de mieux, than anything involving love and care. Perhaps that is often the truth of human relationships, but it is a bleak one all the same. Perhaps this is realism and I ought not to object. Perhaps my Catholicism is getting in the way
No comments:
Post a Comment