The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner

I bought The Children’s Bach (1984) by Helen Garner in Oxford’s newest bookshop, Caper, a while ago. I might have mentioned the shop before. From the outside, it looks like a children’s bookshop – all joyful colours and suchlike – and it is, indeed, a children’s specialist. But there is a sizeable section at the back for adult books, all arranged together under headings like ‘the mundane everyday’ and ‘incredible journeys’. It’s a fun idea that invites serendipitous finds. When I came across the W&N Essentials reprint of The Children’s Bach, I couldn’t resist. This cover is so beautiful – one of my favourites of recent years.

The Children's Bach by Helen Garner | W&N - Ground-breaking, award-winning,  thought-provoking books since 1949

I’ve been listening to a lot of Garner’s non-fiction in the past couple of years, but I did start my reading journey with her about 15 years ago with The Spare Room. My return to her fiction – only my second novel by her – reminds me of how taughtly she tells stories of disrupted domesticity.

In The Children’s Bach, Dexter and Elizabeth meet after years apart. They were at university together but drifted apart – yet, when they reunite, they almost unquestioningly bring their attendant worlds together. Dexter and his wife have two young children, Arthur and Billy (whose unspecific disability is dealt with in a way that felt quite shocking, and probably wouldn’t be done now). Elizabeth is dating an untamed musician, Philip, and he has a daughter, Poppy. Elizabeth’s closest relationship is with her much younger sister, Vicki, who is still on the cusp of adulthood while Elizabeth is heading into middle-age. The coming together of these families ultimately brings about a crisis.

A synopsis of Garner’s book is one thing. The reading experience is quite another. Garner has cut away at the plot until what is left is really an impression of a plot. There is an excellent scene where each line of dialogue and narrative is clearly a moment from an extended evening – it is the most filmic scene I’ve ever read; the most clearly like a film montage. It’s extremely effective. Writ on a larger scale, that is what the whole of The Children’s Bach does. You won’t find lengthy examinations of motivations and emotions – rather, Garner gives us stark glimpses into these people’s lives. That means that the choices people make play out almost before you realise they’ve made them.

And then, on the other hand, Garner gives some scenes unexpected breathing room. As David Nicholls highlights in his enjoyable introduction: ‘Major confrontations are overheard but never described, while smaller incidental scenes – a cello lesson, a conversation in a playground with a strange scabby boy, the experience of getting locked in a cemetery – expand.’

But the main star of The Children’s Bach is Garner’s writing. The unwavering, merciless observation she brings to her non-fiction is less intimidating in fiction, but no less present. She is exceptionally good on small domestic moments – and, much harder, equally good on the occasional abstract or nebulous moments. Here’s something which combines most – the recognisable ‘braced for more sobbing’ leading into a lovely dream scene.

Dexter lay rigid as a board, braced for more sobbing, but Athena slept, and dreamed that she was in a garden, on a large, flat, well-kept lawn, where yellow leaves off poplars lay about in drifts. As she watched they began to rise off the grass and play in the air in orderly streams as if being squirted from a hose: they rose and fell and rose again, in a variety of patterns, and everything was beautiful and enchanting and as it should be.

Threaded throughout the novel is music. The soundtrack – of Bach, of Philip’s grungier music – is never used heavy-handedly, but at the same time gives us insight and a rhythm to the story.

Athena understood why people gave up playing an instrument. She knew she did not play well, that her playing, even when correct, was like someone reciting a lesson in an obedient voice, without inflection or emotion, without understanding: a betrayal of music. She took her hands off the keyboard. There was dust on all the keys except those an octave either side of middle C. She closed the lid.

The only drawback I found with The Children’s Bach is how unknowable the characters are. Or is that a drawback, or simply a choice? Garner’s impressionistic writing is stunning to read, and every paragraph has the weight and confidence of a poem. I often stopped and reread sentences simply because they were so beautiful with such well-judged balance to them. But I don’t think I could describe the characters. Philip and Vicki are the exceptions to that rule, but the others felt like ciphers – or perhaps like containers for Garner’s beautiful observations and discrete moments. Is it deliberate, or a casualty of the novel’s sparseness?

Some critic apparently said The Children’s Bach was one of only four perfect short novels in the English language, which is the sort of silly thing that critics say when they want to get noticed. I can think of many short novels that I think are probably better, though perhaps not many that are as delicately and deftly done. With stronger depths to her characters, it would be a masterpiece. And perhaps those depths would come with rereading – my main takeaway from the experience is that I’m keen to reread, and perhaps find still more than I did this time. While googling for reviews, I discovered that Whispering Gums did exactly that.

So, how to conclude? I think there’s a strong chance that this is a brilliant novel, and it’s certainly a brilliant piece of writing. And perhaps it couldn’t have been such a beautiful reading experience if it had been more grounded. Or perhaps it would feel more grounded the second time around? Well, why not find out for yourself?

Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner #ABookADayInMay Day 5

Helen Garner Joe Cinque's Consolation Audio Book mp3 on CD | eBay

Today I had an action-packed day in London, and I did get through quite a lot of a book on the train to and from, but not a whole book. Luckily I only had 40 minutes left on an audiobook of Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) by Helen Garner, and I finished it as I was driving into the railway station.

I’m making my way through everything available by Garner on audiobooks – well, everything non-fiction – and Joe Cinque’s Consolation has a lot in common with This House of Grief, published ten years later. It is about a tragic death and the impact it has on those in horrendous mourning, and it closely follows the trial of somebody accused of murder. In this case, though, it’s pretty unambiguous that they committed the killing: one of the central questions is whether or not they have diminished responsibility.

Joe Cinque was in his 20s when Anu Singh, his girlfriend, drugged him with rohypnol and injected large quantities of heroin into him while he slept. During the night, he dramatically died. I’ll spare you some of the more graphic details (which Garner does not spare the reader). Anu Singh had told various friends that she planned to kill him and then kill herself – various motives flew around, from her fear that he would leave her, to her own hypochondriacal (and incorrect) obsession that she had a muscle-wasting disease. None of the friends reported what Anu had said until it was too late, and one of the friends (who had been involved in getting the heroin) is also tried for murder.

Garner got involved in the story after a previous joint trial of both murder-accused broke down, and the decision was made to do separate cases. The book is very Garner: she is interested in the minutaie of the trial, down to the expressions and foibles of each witness. She is as compelled by the way in which people on the stand might make a half-hearted joke as she is with the finer points of law.

Beyond the courtroom, she interviews various people, including Joe Cinque’s distraught parents. (Anu Singh refused to be interviewed.) The scene where she first meets them is fascinating – not only for what she learns from them, but for how she frames it and reflects on it. “Her voice was heavy with the authority of suffering” is a brilliant and concise observation of Mrs Cinque. And afterwards she goes over the mistakes she made as an interviewer – and for sitting, unawares, in the chair that had usually been Joe. Garner takes us so far behind the scenes of reporting that the reporting becomes almost the heart of the book – without retracting from the seriousness of the crime.

A mix of criminology, psychology, elegy and character study, almost nobody else could have written a book like this – Janet Malcolm is the only other name who comes to mind (someone Garner is often compared to, and she does mention The Silent Woman, Malcolm’s brilliant book about the aftermath of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes). I think I’ve almost run out of Garner’s full-length non-fiction, but it’s been a fascinating journey.

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial: Amazon.co.uk: Garner, Helen, Weinman, Sarah: 9780553387438: Books

I hadn’t heard of Robert Farquharson or Cindy Gambino, or their children Jai, Tyler, and Bailey, before I started Helen Garner’s This House of Grief (2014). I suspect the same wouldn’t be true of most Australians. They were at the centre of a tragedy that led to a trial, and a retrial, for murder. This much was clear from the outset: Robert Farquharson drove his three young children into a farm dam and all three drowned. He managed to get out of the car. But was it murder or was it a tragic accident, caused by Farquharson blacking out during a coughing fit?

The initial trial took place in 2007, and Garner was there throughout as a journalist – as she was at the second trial, in 2010. I listened to the audiobook, after hearing Garner’s non-fiction praised repeatedly on the Chat 10 Looks 3 podcast – I’d previously read her novel The Spare Room but hadn’t tried any of the non-fiction. And it is absolutely masterful.

This is the sort of case that would make a compelling newspaper article, or perhaps a podcast episode or hour-long documentary. In Garner’s hands, it becomes something much more granular. Since she is able to devote so much space to the trial, it feels like we are in the courtroom with her. The initial trial took seven weeks, so of course it isn’t in real time, but it sometimes feels that way. Periods of questioning are detailed so thoroughly – say, for instance, the doctor who is brought in to answer questions about whether or not Farquharson could black out from a coughing fit in something called ‘cough syncope’. We go back and forth, back and forth – an aggressive cross-examination, the attempts to discredit his medical credentials, the reactions from the jury. The actual evidence the doctor relates is a small part of Garner’s presentation of the scene. Her eyes are everywhere.

Garner notices things other people wouldn’t – and probably wouldn’t mention, if they did. How often a witness bites their lip, or the look on the face of a juror, or even how bored some people seem during the more technical sections of evidence – ‘the air in the court became a jelly of confusion and boredom’:

The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors’ mouths went square with the effort to control their gaping yawns.

This certainly isn’t an objective book. One of many ways in which Garner’s writing reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s is that the writer is fully present in the reading experience. Garner relates how she takes the trial home with her, how she desperately wants to believe that Farquharson is innocent but is very unsure, and the mental exhaustion of going back and forth. She writes about camardarie (and the reverse) with other journalists, including being berated by some for her supposed light-heartedness.

Her detailed observation does slip into needless cruelty at times. I was startled by one moment – she bumps into a lawyer she used to know, and he says one line. In that time, she manages to say he is looking bad for his age, has lines on his face, is wearing an ill-fitting suit and hasn’t polished his shoes. It’s all so unnecessarily unkind. Like Janet Malcolm, she doesn’t have any sense of what is kind or unkind to say. She is merciless in the way she presents any of the people she sees. Even the grieving mother is described as having put on too much weight. She censors none of her thoughts.

That’s not to say she always highlights negative things. They are just more shocking, in a context where we might expect a certain generosity of empathy. She applauds a female witness whenever she outwits the unpleasant machismo of the cross-examiner, or describes ‘that little buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie’ when Cindy Gambino’s new husband takes to the stand. Indeed, he sparks one of the asides which make Garner herself such a dominant figure in the reporting:

But, having recently watched a bunch of blokes pour a concrete slab in my own backyard, I was equipped to imagine the effect of this sight on a young woman in Cindy Farquharson’s stifling situation. A concrete pour is a dramatic process. It demands skill, speed, strength, and the confident handling of machinery; and it is so intensely, symbolically masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect.

Somehow, the tragic deaths of the three boys do not get lost in the maelstrom and minutaie of the court proceedings. Garner manages to keep the emotion of their deaths central, without being maudlin, even while we are preoccupied with the minute-by-minute trial. And it is that clash of the absurdities – and some mundanities – of the legal system with the searing emotional pain of a grieving mother that makes this book so extraordinary. To the everyman, it feels ridiculous that this tragic event can become, for instance, hours and hours of analysing photographs of wheel marks, and disputing over whether or not the police officer’s yellow lines next to them are accurate. Garner is too subtle a writer to spell out this disparity. But it is key to what makes her analytical eye work so well.

And her writing can be beautiful, without being self-conscious. Sentences like this tread the tightrope of poeticism and journalism so well: “Judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.” ([sic] to ‘men’, please!)

I didn’t think I’d find a non-fiction writer as curiously brilliant as Janet Malcolm – but I think Helen Garner is in the same league. If you’re looking for reportage or dry facts or even a kind, considerate piece about a tragedy – this isn’t the place for you. But if you’re looking for something sharp, odd, poetic and haunting – This House of Grief is a masterpiece.