Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

 

- Quite simply, this new novel from Australian author Jennifer Down is just blew me away. It's a highly emotional and heart wrenching story of Maggie, born in Melbourne in 1973, whose junkie mother dies when she is two and whose father is jailed for drug dealing when she is five, and who, for the remainder of her miserable childhood, is shuffled between cruel institutions and foster families. 

- From a very young age she suffers constant sexual abuse. 

- Down takes us on a brutally honest journey. Everything in Maggie's life is transitory, as she's switched from family to family and from institution to institution. She has no anchor. As a teenager her life is just boys, sex, drugs, and alcohol. Despite the loving care of some of the foster mothers she's wandering and lost. As an adult she suffers unbelievable pain. We are not spared any detail no matter how ugly.

- She marries Damien who ‘eclipsed everything else’. They were deeply in love, but of course she had secrets. Down has a gift for writing about intimacy. The birth of Maggie and Damien's first baby is beautifully and sensitively told and the drama of it brought intensely alive. There is enormous tragedy in their lives which unfortunately brings the marriage to an end.

- Maggie is forced to adopt a new identity as 'Josephine' and eventually finds herself in the US, where she lives for many years after marrying Jeff. While Down embellishes this period of her life with a little too much irrelevant detail, causing the novel to lose some of its power, we nevertheless feel so deeply for Josephine and Jeff as they struggle with her bruising legacy. 

- The ending is very emotionally satisfying.

- There is no doubt that this novel has set a high bar for Australian literary fiction. It's an extraordinary achievement.

(There is one editorial error in this book that is intensely annoying to a fussy reader like me. The word 'teevee' is constantly used instead of TV and it’s so wrong. Who writes that? It appears in no other book, article, magazine piece ever. Arnott’s chocolate teeVee snacks are the closest. Please, Text, do your readers a favour and fix it at the next reprint.)