- Australian publishing industry stalwart Sophie Cunningham has written an immensely satisfying and invigorating novel. It's intriguing on every level. I was absolutely blown away by it.
- On one level it could be described as a novel about writing a novel, and the extraordinary amount of anxiety and stress involved. Alice is the author and Sarah her agent. It's taken Alice years to do her research and write her novel, and she's exhausted. Cunningham has given us a graphic dissection of the authorial experience. Every aspect of the process is interrogated.
- Alice is fascinated by Leonard Woolf, his wife Virginia, their families and friends in England, and the times they lived in. They were an integral part of the highly influential and somewhat radical Bloomsbury group of artists and writers in the early 20th century. The social and moral strictures of the Victorian age were ending and profound changes about to be unleashed. It was the beginning of modernism. A time of freedom and hope.
- Unfortunately the extreme ugliness of the First World War was just around the corner.
- By focussing on the long life of Leonard Woolf, a career diplomat, writer, essayist, gardener, and a passionate environmentalist, Alice restores him to the grand status in the history of the 20th century he deserves.
- Her novel is a delightful mash-up of genres, offering us a seamless mixing of times, fiction and facts. Alice is writing today but being visited by and talking to characters alive 100 years ago. 'Imaginary Leonard' and 'Ghost Virginia' frequently appear and enlighten her.
- Sexual trauma. War. Political upheaval. Environmental destruction. Radical gender politics. All happened then. All happening now.
- Leonard becomes enamoured of Virginia, ‘a woman with whom he could share his soul’. They marry, despite her doubts. She adamantly refuses to engage in sexual intercourse with him, and frequently attempts suicide. She's descending into ‘madness’, but Leonard maintains his loyalty, love and commitment to her. Alice recalls a psychiatrist telling her that Virginia’s choice of suicide towards the end of her life supported her insistence that she had been sexually assaulted when young. Alice is also inflicted by memories of sexual abuse as a teenager, and the constant abuse since. Will it never stop? That was the question she kept asking herself. Will it ever stop’
- Leonard became a passionate gardener, growing fruits and vegetables of all types year round. He was also relentlessly anti Fascism and Nazism, was sympathetic to Palestine, and urged the government to embrace the need for rearmament. He hated Neville Chamberlain and his preference for treaties and the naive belief that Hitler would negotiate peace.
- Meanwhile Alice brings us back to contemporary Australia and its own horrors - the severe 2019 bushfires, Covid, mandated isolation, Zoom meetings, Melbourne’s strict lockdowns, floods, the mouse plague. With her wife Edith she moves to the country. Like Leonard she is a lover of nature. They build a garden, planting vegetables and an orchard.
- But she can't escape the horror: new strains, dying forests, dying oceans, catastrophic floods, heat bubbles, disappearing glaciers, collapsing ice sheets, talk of war, actual war. Would it ever stop? It would never stop. Not in her lifetime. Not in the lifetime of the children she hadn’t had, but knew and loved nonetheless.
- Themes of dying and killing are strong in this book - whether humans, animals, nature, the planet as a whole. Deaths and suicides. Millions and millions over the last 100 years.
- So by the end of the novel I also was devastated by This Devastating Fever. It is, quite simply, an extraordinary achievement. A novel for our times, and an award winner in 2023 for sure. Hopefully The Stella Prize which Cunningham co-founded.
No comments:
Post a Comment