Victoria Hannan, Marshmallow

 

- This new novel by Victoria Hannan is quite an extraordinary achievement. It's a sensitive and exquisite portrayal of grief, intimacy and love.

-  Ali, Claire, Ev, Nathan and Annie are the five young friends at the centre of the story. They are now in their late thirties and early forties and are old uni friends. Ali and Claire have been in a relationship for a number of years, and Nathan and Annie have been married for longer. Ev is still single. 

- Tragedy and its associated grief have deeply unsettled them all. Nathan and Annie's young toddler died suddenly one year ago. He was celebrating his second birthday. And Ali still feels deep guilt for the death of a young woman on New Year’s Eve 1999. She was only seventeen. She fell from a roof at a party, to which Ali had brought ecstasy. 

- As in her previous novel, Kokomo, Hannan explores family relationships and their tensions with particular skill. Mothers are a special target. Nathan's mother in this book is an unlikeable Toorak snob, married to Bob, a well connected and unfaithful member of the corporate/political elite. The contrast with their sensitive and caring son Nathan could not be sharper. The family gatherings are suffocating. 

- Ev is now a very popular high school teacher, having ditched law because of its meaningless boredom. She’s still single, but a lovely, highly likeable person. ‘She was a wonder, Ev. A strong, funny, beautiful wonder of a woman’. She feels immense guilt and grief because of what she deems to be her part in the toddler's death. What precisely happened at the party becomes clear later in the novel. 

- Claire, also a frustrated lawyer, has been offered a new and exciting opportunity with a law firm in Sydney. However it would mean leaving her Melbourne friends and possibly spitting with Ali. 

- One particular narrative device Hannan indulges in in this novel becomes quite frustrating at times. She refuses to disclose details when, as readers, we're crying out for them. It's a very slow pace of revelation despite being central to empathising with the profound grief the characters feel. While on page 33 we learn that Nathan and Annie had ‘a kid’ who died, we don’t know how, or even the kid's sex. We are forced to wait for those intimate details till page 202, and we finally learn the name on page 226. From then on all the characters refer to the kid by name. As is natural. 

- Hannan wraps up the story nicely however. It's deeply satisfying and will stay with you for a long time.