Georgia White

Is it tautological to describe a work of fiction as ‘family Gothic’? After all, there’s nothing more inherently Gothic than the family politic: a hierarchical structure ruled by a patriarch, as intolerant of transgression as it is fascinated by it, sustaining itself through a clear us/them divide, all the while proclaiming, ‘The blood is the life.’ Yet three new Australian novels Gothicise the family politic by exaggerating, each to the point of melodrama, just how dangerous a family can become when its constituents turn against one another.

In Erina Reddan’s The Serpent’s Skin (Pantera Press, $29.99 pb, 364 pp), it is the father and his godlike authority from whom the fracture emanates. The novel begins in 1968, when ten-year-old Elizabeth Jane ‘JJ’ MacBride is living on her parents’ farm in a rural Catholic community. JJ is a perverse child, we’re told; at times, she is possessed by a destructive impulse she calls ‘the red’, which pushes her to call her mother names, defy her older siblings, and lash out at the Mother Superior at her school.

When the novel opens, JJ’s mother has vanished. She has gone to stay with her sister in Melbourne, JJ’s father claims, but her children cannot contact her and he refuses to say when she’ll be back. Days pass with no word of her return, and JJ starts to sense cracks in her father’s story: why, for instance, would her mother leave behind her wedding ring, or the scarf she wears to Mass each Sunday? But the intricacies of marital relations are beyond JJ’s comprehension, and Reddan is to be commended here for how well she captures the scruffy edges of the juvenile consciousness. JJ may smell the ‘spit of guilt’ on her father, but she’s at a loss as to what it might mean, and her upbringing has taught her that his word, however corrupt, is law.

We then jump forward fourteen years, when a funeral brings JJ together with her family once more and dredges up some long-suppressed memories of her mother’s disappearance. Sadly, this second half of the novel is weaker than the first: we’re told that the adult JJ has become an academic over-achiever and a rising legal star, but there’s little evidence of this in her narration, where her vocabulary and emotional intelligence seem only marginally more sophisticated than when she was a child. Her rebellious spirit makes a welcome resurgence, as she sets out on a second attempt to expose her family’s skeletons, but the plot suffers from an over-specificity of detail. Scenes that should feel tight and suspenseful are forced to a crawl as JJ mechanically informs us every time anyone opens a door, pulls up a chair, or turns on an appliance. This literal-mindedness makes sense in a child’s narration; less so in that of a whip-smart twenty-fouryear-old. JJ’s sleuthing pays off eventually, but it’s just a pity the pacing does her characterisation such an injustice.

Whereas Reddan’s novel capitalises on the kinds of horrors that eventuate when patriarchy and religion collide, Kelli Hawkins’s Other People’s Houses (HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 330 pp) takes us into the uncanny valley that is upper-middle-class suburbia. Her protagonist, Kate Webb, is a woman suffering from the resilience of grief, a condition that can linger long after the wells of sympathy have dried up. Seeking a sense of intimacy that demands nothing of her in return, Kate spends her time wandering through the manicured interiors of houses that are up for auction, suspending herself in the lives of others as she tries to forget her own.

Houses of unreason

A triptych of Gothic novels

Georgia White

Three new Australian novels Gothicise the family politic by exaggerating just how dangerous a family can become when its constituents turn against one another

One house in particular arrests her imagination for reasons that have nothing to do with its pristine façade: the child in the family’s photographs is a doppelgänger for the son she lost ten years prior. When Kate stumbles across signs of dysfunction in the house’s outwardly perfect ménage, her behaviour accelerates from hobbyist prying to outright stalking. As she resolves to protect the child (now a teenager) from a family she believes to be on the point of disintegration, others try to caution her that she is playing with fire. But the alienated and depressed Kate is unreceptive to their warnings, realising, all too late, that the danger is not where she thinks it is.

At first, Kate is a delightfully spiteful narrator: to her vindictive eye, a flag on a windless day is ‘flaccid’; a child wearing a puffy coat looks like ‘a colourful little sausage’. Here, she describes a sycophantic realtor sucking up to a wealthy Sydneysider: ‘She made London sound like heaven. Or an orgasm.’ Other People’s Houses may best be classified as a domestic thriller, but there’s a redemption arc here. We learn through a series of flashbacks that Kate has good reason to be mistrustful of others, and the novel proves to be just as much about her learning to live productively with her grief, and to uncover what kind of person she is when freed of her rage and self-loathing.

As it turns out, that person is a little bland. It’s true what Tolstoy says about happy families; by the novel’s end, all of the well-adjusted characters seem rather alike. Still, the plotting is sound, the twist is solid, and it’s an excellent premise that speaks to the voyeur in all of us. For what other reason does anyone read fiction if not to peer into other people’s houses?

If in Reddan’s novel the tension crystallises around the father, and in Hawkins’s novel, around the lost child, Kathy George’s Sargasso (HQ Fiction, $29.99 pb, 392 pp) completes our