A generation living in peacetime is inclined to devalue the identity and place of soldiers. In Australia, active soldiers have been maligned as meddlesome interlopers in foreign affairs (if they are our soldiers) or combatant terrorists (if they are not). In his book Secret Men’s Business (1998), John Marsden wrote that going to war used to be seen as a marker of adulthood. We forget that war was once how individual personality and collective character was formed. We forget that many of our compatriots came here because of war, that there are former child soldiers living in Australia, and that literature and the armed forces didn’t always occupy such opposing worlds.

The Divine Wind is a war story and an adventure story, but it is told by a protagonist who stays put, right at the centre of a metaphorical and literal cyclone. With his bad leg, all Hart Penrose can do is rotate in circles towards the action, striving for but never quite effecting any of the grandiose deeds he believes will make him a man. His dad is a pearler, his sister a nurse, his friend a soldier. Not only is he stationary in a world swirling with purposeful human activity; but he is also in love with the ‘enemy’ of the time, a woman named Mitsy Sennosuke.

Before readers dismiss our narrator as a swooning Keats relocated to the sweltering antipodes, they need to know he is also a reluctant writer. Such characters make the best literary narrators. They do not have an arsenal of words or know how to be clever with them. They linger over facts and descriptions of places, clutching at emotions, while unintentionally revealing raw truths. Hart’s disability has made him a circumstantial philosopher: he watches and waits, thinks and writes.

Geographically, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, white people felt profoundly isolated and vulnerable in Broome. Their high status was scant consolation when they were vastly outnumbered by coloured people: the Japanese, ‘Malays, Manilamen and Koepangers’, all simmering in a cultural melting pot of increasingly hot days and imminent war. In the 1920s, Broome had around 5,000 inhabitants, only 900 of them white. Broome had segregated cinemas, a Register of Aliens, and a clear but unofficial racial hierarchy. Yet it was also a mythologised place in the literature of the time, which Hart reads with wry scepticism:

According to these stories, no-one knew the sacrifices we made, as we hung on up there, in Unknown Australia, in the Never Never, in the Great Unfenced, before the age of hurry-up. We were the true Australians, in a country going begging, ruled by governments, cities and absentee landlords who knew nothing and cared less about resource development, soil erosion and the teeming threat of Asia, which sat right on our back doorstep, waiting, waiting ...

The Divine Wind by Garry Disher (1998, Hodder Headline)

Buy this bookThe characters in The Divine Wind are first and foremost real frontiersmen: from Zeke the pearl diver, with his ascetic face and tough, scarred body, to Derby Boxer, the black stockman; from Mike Penrose with his pearling fleet to Alice Penrose and Mitsy, two young women who venture into cyclones and war zones. Arnold Zable uses the term ‘feral vitality’ to describe survivors of horrors beyond their control, and the reader gets the sense that this hotchpotch of races and cultures was united by their battle against the enemy and the elements. In Broome, the land, sea, and sky can suddenly become sites of death and destruction, especially during wartime.

However, the one group that is treated as if they have no sense of self-agency is the indigenous Australians. Disher spares no sensitivities in recounting the indignities of the past and the cruelty of station owners towards the local indigenous population: ‘Carl didn’t force his recalcitrant black stockmen to dress in women’s clothes and do women’s work. If the blacks got “cheeky” he might dock their wages but never chain them down on a corrugated iron roof ... He didn’t lay on black velvet in the visitor’s quarters, something that some managers did for company men visiting from London.’ But Carl Venning is just as awful in his neglect of the black stockmen.

In 1930s Broome, certain races cooperated to achieve livelihood goals – pearling and farming – in clearly-defined employer–employee relationships. Sometimes, these relationships caused tension when power imbalances were openly acknowledged instead of remaining hidden in servile gratitude. When Alice tells Mitsy to go back to Japan, Mitsy retorts: ‘I would if your father paid my father more.’ Hart observes: ‘That’s what happens between friends, you rub too closely sometimes and the friction ignites the hidden grievances.’ On the whole, the friends remain a close trio; that is, until the Japanese bomb Broome.

From this point on, the novel could have descended into a didactic tale of learning to tolerate difference, of not betraying your friends, of remembering past good deeds – Mitsy’s father once saved Hart’s life after all. But what elevates The Divine Wind from a good yarn to a masterpiece of character development is that Disher doesn’t do this. The poet Robert Cording wrote this about poetry, which could easily be transposed to fiction:

The poem has to feel ... as if there is a real person struggling with real experiences that will not yield some handy lesson, but nevertheless are not entirely without meaning. The voice that convinces will always be the voice of the individual, not as a spokesperson for this or that idea.

Many Young Adult writers get it wrong because of the tyranny of good intentions. In representing refugees or war, they err on the side of righteousness, portraying people of colour as admirable victims, investing them, grudgingly, with as few flaws as possible. With bolder authors like Disher, Marsden, Libby Hathorn, Robin Klein, and James Maloney – and more recently, Clare Atkins – the character comes first. As a prerequisite they have done their extensive research; they are not bumbling around with stereotypes. They also trust their adolescent readers to have a more nuanced understanding of character development than the ‘heroes and villains’ mentality that informs much Young Adult literature. I remember reading Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993) and recognising the character Lee – not because he was Asian, but because he did not ‘do’ Asian-ness. He did survival, as did all of his friends.

Mitsy’s feelings are a mystery to Hart. He doesn’t even know why he loves her. She is not physically beautiful, and she can be bull-headed and unforgiving, a young Asian nurse without the endearing bedside manner usually associated with such caricatures. While washing Hart, she even laughs at his manhood. Yet he still loves her. For long periods she sequesters herself away from Hart, as well as from her best friend, Hart’s sister Alice. When she tells Hart that she must give up nursing because her mother needs her, you get the strong sense that she exists as a separate character outside his own pinings and imaginings.

The Divine Wind by Garry Disher (2002, Hachette Childrens Books)

Buy this bookDisher writes that teenage girls initially hate Mitsy because she is ‘cold’ and stony towards the protagonist. He asks them to ‘step outside of [their] skin and into hers, and consider the pressure she’s under’. This important self-interrogation does not happen if minority characters are two-dimensionally easy to love. Mitsy’s Japanese-ness does not define her, but nor does her Australian-ness: ‘Mitsy represented a new generation. Born and educated in Broome.’ Mitsy is described as ‘sly’, but a few pages later Hart also describes his sister Alice as ‘sly.’ Slyness in this case is not synonymous with Orientalism but with commendable survival skills, the formation of the frontier character. Mitsy suffers but is never pitiable. She is defensive, never cruel.

Hart realises that in his powerlessness against circumstance he can be both self-pitying and mean-spirited. Yet his redeeming quality is his acute awareness of his fallibilities: his lack of action, his faltering ways, even his petty resentment of his able-bodied friend, Jamie Kilian: ‘I envied him, I was jealous, I pitied myself. Perhaps that’s why I decided not to go out to the aerodrome with Alice to say goodbye. I didn’t want to witness the bounce in his step.’

It is Jamie, who represents the continuity of the Anzac legend, goes to war, courts Mitsy, and becomes the object of Hart’s envy. When drafting The Divine Wind, Disher came across an account of an Australian army surgeon whose best friend was looking for a way to get them both to safety, but in the end left without telling him. The surgeon ended up as a Japanese prisoner of war. ‘I’d never been impressed by Australians’ fond notions of the national character,’ Disher states, ‘We like to think we’re brave, resourceful, loyal to our mates, democratic, egalitarian ... and here was a betrayal of mateship ... It was a powerful betrayal.’

As racial tensions escalate in Broome, so do Hart’s feelings towards Mitsy:

How can you love and hate someone at the same time? How can you continue to want them, and yet despise them? It has happened to all of us, yet when it first happens there is nothing more hurtful and confusing ... we are ... the worst of ourselves, the side we’re scarcely aware of.

With deceptively simple sentences replete with feeling, Hart reflects that even when Derby Boxer tells Hart and his father that they were good people, ‘I didn’t feel that there was much goodness in me.’ This is the mark of a character who understands morality beyond the simple accumulation of good or bad deeds, a young man with a deep understanding of how powerless the individual can be against circumstance.

Perhaps Hart’s feelings are conflicted because he is also struggling with an underlying and unacknowledged resentment of Mitsy’s defiance in the face of adversity. When the police and soldiers come, she refuses to let them look in her house, even though she has nothing to hide. When the Japanese bomb Broome, she declares: ‘We need to get down to the harbour. There’ll be people in the water, people dying.’ She ventures onto the beach to put her nursing training to good use, despite racist hostility and impending internment. Like her friend Alice, she does what is right, not what is easy.

The Divine Wind by Garry Disher (2004, Scholastic Paperbacks)

Buy this bookYet Hart’s admiration of Mitsy is clear, as he joins her in the search and rescue in the most powerful chapter of the book, ‘The Divine Wind’. Hart comes to a reckoning of all that he is and what he will become. He defines Mitsy for all of us, once and for all, when he grabs and yells at the harbour master who is denying her the medical kit to save lives: ‘Don’t be so stupid. She’s a nurse. She’s lived here all her life, you useless bastard.’

Nonetheless, our narrator is not a straightforward hero. He may have saved lives, but in a pivotal scene he briefly reveals a decision he might have made that would have had no consequences for anyone other than the victim, himself, and his own conscience. For once, Hart does not do what comes easily. He does what is right. In the end, Hart learns to abandon his self-absorption and to accept patience. He thinks about his mother and realises that ‘she understood what it is to wait for something to change, just as I’m waiting now, waiting for Mitsy to come back to me’.

Garry Disher writes that he is proud of the powerful opening lines of his book, but for me the ending remains more resonant, almost two decades later. It is not a neat conclusion; some publishers today might ask him to change such a final sentence, to make it less depressing. Yet the reality is that war is depressing, self-abnegating, and destructive. People don’t just turn into their better selves because of adversity. It is a choice, and sometimes suffering does not make a person stronger. The concluding paragraph was a culmination of Hart’s character and resilience; and I feel vindicated by Disher’s own explanation of his ending:

He’s not going to back away. It’s not a dramatic or heroic reversal, but quietly hopeful. He says, ‘We may not make it,’ meaning he knows the terrible pressures he faces now, in post-war Australia, but is willing to give it a go.

Referenced works:

Secret Men's Business, Manhood: The big gig (1998) by John Marsden, Pan Macmillan

Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993) by John Marsden, Pan Macmillan

The underlying theme in Marcus Zusak’s novels is ordinariness. Whether he is writing from the perspective of two working class-brothers struggling to get noticed for their boxing abilities in Fighting Ruben Wolfe (2000), or from that of Ed in The Messenger (2002) – ‘the epitome of ordinariness’ – the theme looms in complex ways over his writings. Even a character such as Death in his best-known work, The Book Thief (2005), is depicted as facing the same mundane issues as most human beings: he is easily distracted, he can’t make up his mind, he feels overwhelmed by his demanding work.

This focus is also what makes Zusak’s work so fundamentally Australian, even when set overseas. Ordinariness encompasses so many prominent cultural tropes in Australian art and literature: the underdog, the loser, the anti-hero, the working-class hero, the woman maligned and forgotten in a harsh landscape. All of these figures function in a multiplicity of ways in The Messenger, against a suburban backdrop, which comes with its own cultural connotations of inertia, entrapment, and conformity. From here the reader is taken on a journey with Ed, who discovers that the smallest things are the most significant and that the most ordinary people are the most extraordinary.

At the beginning of The Messenger, Ed declares himself to be a failure at most things, including sex, friendship, and being a dutiful son: ‘I’d been taking stock of my life ... No real career. No respect in the community. Nothing.’ Being average, for Ed, does not seem to lie in comparison with others so much as in a refusal to participate in elaborate interpretations of his own life. To pass as average is to avoid the need for abstract explanations of what one is or does. Ed’s representation of himself as typical, average, and boring typifies the way his life is not to be taken as representative of large social structures or processes, but to be understood at a more immediate level, simply for what it is. The way Ed narrates his story as the reader gets to know him helps Zusak to establish him as an uncomplicated character. For example, this is how Ed describes himself:

I cook.

I eat.
I wash but I rarely iron.
I live in the past and believe that Cindy Crawford is by far the best supermodel.
That’s my life.

The prose consists of simple sentences, largely unadorned by adverbs or adjectives. The repetition of the personal pronoun ‘I’ with no reference to how that ‘I’ interacts with the objects or people in its life reinforces an image of a simple, unintrospective life. This is reinforced by Zusak’s lineation, primarily composed of one sentence per line. This creates a border of blank space on each page, reinforcing what Ed’s life is about – not much.

The Messenger by Markus Zusak (2002, Pan MacMillan Australia)

Buy this bookAs the story unfolds, Ed accidentally foils a bank robbery and the local newspapers exaggerate his heroism. Shortly after, he begins to receive playing cards from an unknown source. On them are cryptic messages which lead him to the people he has been sent to help. The Ace of Diamonds appears first in his mailbox. On the card someone has written three times and addresses. When Ed visits each of them he finds someone in need: a woman who is raped nightly by her husband; a lonely, senile woman; and a young girl who needs to be reminded of the joy she takes in running. Thus begins Ed’s reluctant journey into an elevated consciousness in which he is forced to consider what others require to live more meaningful and fulfilled lives and thus to consider how he can do the same.

The Messenger is a deeply moral work which provokes the reader to consider the judgments they make about strangers, and to contemplate the small acts of kindness that can have profound effects on their lives. Zusak seems to suggest that we must learn to observe the ‘small things that are big’, a phrase Ed uses towards the end of the book. Whenever Ed is sent out to help someone new, he spends time watching people. He is learning to observe, and this makes him a better human being. He realises that Angie Carusso, a single mother with three children, needs an ice cream of her own to remind herself of life’s small pleasures, and that a struggling family that has recently moved into town needs someone like Ed to remind them that they are not alone.

This message is enforced by the language of the text which, in its stripped-back simplicity, paradoxically forces the reader to consider the complexity of the images being presented. When Ed visits Father Riley’s battered church, he sits in a pew trying to determine why the latest playing card he received has directed him there. The scene is described through a simple accumulation of images, all of which represent silence and inaction:

When ten o’clock strikes, the bells of the church take possession of the congregation, and now, everyone – the kids, the powdered ladies with handbags, the drunks, the teenagers and the same people who are there week-in week-out – all fall down in silence.

The father.
Walks out.
He walks out and everyone waits, for the words
[...]
There are no other words yet.
No prayers.

The Messenger by Markus Zusak (2005, Knopf books for young readers)

Buy this bookA space with ‘no words’ is a reoccurring motif in the book. Here, Zusak draws our attention to the things that are often overlooked because of the human tendency to seek meaning in speech and action. These frequent pauses create an intense atmosphere in the scene. It opens with a long sentence which employs the dash to force us to concentrate on the images of the type of people we often fail to observe (‘drunks’, ‘powdered ladies’, etc.). The longer pauses created through the one-sentence paragraphs (‘The Father.’ ‘Walks out’) places the reader in the position of Father Riley’s motley crew of parishioners, whose strong ties to their priest are evident in the way they allow him to inhabit the space of his church by paying him more attention than they devote to their own neglected lives. Ed’s burgeoning awareness of his surroundings is also represented through his narration, which, over the course of the novel, increases in its level of detail and its complex layering of multiple images.

The rhythm and pace echo the reality of the quiet suburban lives depicted in this book. The Messenger bears many of the hallmarks of the crime and thriller genre; there is the mystery of who is leaving the playing cards for Ed and why they want him to intervene in so many lives, as well as the constant threat of criminal thugs who show up uninvited at his house to make sure he is carrying out his job, as well as the many false climaxes and clues which lead the reader towards false conclusions. But the text also works against these conventions. The criminals aren’t so threatening; they bring him meat pies and sit on his couch cracking jokes. When Ed takes a gun to shoot the abusive husband, he ends up firing into the air instead; he is no hard-boiled criminal either. Unlike traditional thrillers, which gain pace towards the end, The Messenger slows down, becomes more contemplative and joyful in tone, so that when Ed and Marv daub graffiti in order to advertise the fact that there will be free beer at Father Riley’s next service, their escape from the scene of the crime reads:

Our footsteps run and I don’t want them to end. I want to run and laugh and feel like this forever. I want to avoid any awkward moment when the realness of reality sticks its fork into our flesh, leaving us standing there together. I want to stay here in this moment and never go other places, where we don’t know what to say or do.

The irony here is that this is the first time in the book when Ed knows precisely what to say and do. He says nothing and does not try to make sense of the moment, but rather revels in the joy of the incredible here and now. His ‘footsteps run’; they are not a part of his awkward physical self which he dislikes so much. He doesn’t need to ‘go to other places’, like his siblings and friends who have sought social and economic advancement by leaving a dying suburb on the edges of town. The reality of leading a life so painful that it is represented through the metaphor of sticking ‘a fork into flesh’ dissolves into a blissful moment.

Towards the end of the book, the playing cards lead Ed away from intersections with the lives of people he does not know, towards the lives of his friends and family, and ultimately himself. When he takes the time to observe and question the lives of his friends Marv, Richie, and Audrey, he discovers that each of them is emotionally vulnerable, with a complex interior life he has failed to notice before, as they all appeared so tough, confident, and incapable of self-introspection. This realisation that the people he thought himself closest to have been presenting false exteriors paves the way for his growing understanding of the fact that his family, who have done so much to determine his negative ideas, have entrapped him in a false image of himself and his potential.

The Messenger by Markus Zusak (2013, PanMacMillan)

Buy this bookOne of the final playing cards leads Ed to a restaurant where he observes his mother on a date with a man with whom she may or may not have been having an affair before his alcoholic, loving father died. ‘There’s my ma, fifty-odd years old, high-tailing around town with some guy- while I sit here, in the prime of my youth, completely and utterly alone. I shake my head. At myself.’ Ed’s observations of his mother here are typical of his reactions to her constant demeaning of him throughout the book. His judgements of her poor behaviour are directly reflected back at himself. The fact that she is self-obsessed and living a fulfilled life is juxtaposed to his own isolation. Her actions highlight his own inaction. Shortly after, on Christmas Day, his mother berates him beyond endurance. ‘I want so much to verbally abuse this woman standing there in the kitchen, sucking in smoke, and pouring it out from her lungs. Instead, I look right at her ... “The smoking makes you ugly,” I say, and walk out, leaving her stranded among the haze.’ This is when Ed decides to stop seeing himself through the distorted lens of others; to regard himself in a new light. His use of impersonal and generic terms to describe his own mother (‘this woman’, ‘you’) emphasise the internal distance he has travelled towards defining his sense of self in his own terms.

The final pages of The Messenger lead the reader through a series of images and people we have already met before but are now being asked to regard with greater significance. The bank robber from the start of the text gets into Ed’s cab and asks him to drive to all the houses of the people he has helped and then finally back to his own home. It is both a literal and metaphorical journey for Ed. He realises that he was never the one delivering the messages – he was the message. In helping others he has ultimately helped himself. The robber hands him a lesson he has already learned, ‘If a guy like you can stand up and do what you did for all those people, well, maybe everyone can. Maybe everyone can live beyond what they’re capable of.’

The ultimate message is that even the most ordinary people can be remarkable too.

Referenced works

Zusak, Markus (2002) The Messenger, Pan Macmillan

In the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s there was a flurry of what were called ‘single issue’ or ‘problem’ novels for teenagers. The books focused on problems or issues that frequently confronted teenagers, such as bullying, anorexia, child abuse, depression, suicide, unplanned pregnancies, struggles over friendships, puberty, divorce, and more. These were indeed matters faced by young people, and the rationale was that by reading about others in similar situations, teenagers would feel less alone and might also find ways of coping. ‘Reading novels dealing with social and personal problems is a safe way to bring these issues into focus and give adolescents a chance to talk about their own experiences or relate their own lives to what others have gone through’ (Diana Hodge, The Conversation, 13 June 2014). There is a whiff of bibliotherapy (books and reading as therapy) in this view which seems to undermine the notion of reading and evaluating books for their literary merit.

This subgenre was most widespread in the United States, with Judy Blume probably the most prolific and popular proponent. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) features a young girl asking for help from a higher being about pressing issues such as buying her first bra and having her first period. Like many of Blume’s books, it was criticised for tackling taboo topics and for being too frank. Her most frequently banned book, for somewhat older readers, was Forever (1975), a mildly explicit exploration of a first sexual encounter and, most contentiously, of the use of contraception by the girl.

Judy Blume sold some eighty-two million books, was widely translated, and was also hugely popular in Australia. Blume was clearly speaking directly to a large and receptive audience of young people aged twelve and up – perhaps even younger, as the books were very easy to read. However, while she was frequently challenged for her outspokenness and determination to explore issues, her often simplistic approach to her themes and characters, and her general lack of depth or sophistication were rarely called in to question. The focus was largely on the issue rather than on characters or character development. Should buying a first bra be a matter of such careful and painful consideration? Few of her characters were allowed to think beyond themselves and their immediate concerns. Identity and solving an apparently significant problem in a socially acceptable way were central.

During this period, several Australian, European, and US writers produced books on contentious topics. One early translation from Swedish was Gunnel Beckman’s Mia Alone (1978), about a young teenager who realises that only she can make the difficult decision about whether to have an abortion or not. Most of these books were devoured by girls, though teachers and librarians knew that boys read many of them secretly. Some confessed that the books gave them much needed insights into the mysteries of how girls thought and felt.

John Marsden surged on to the Australian scene in 1987 with his multi-award winning So Much to Tell You. He followed this with stories showing young people battling violence, authority, and loveless, isolated lives in books such as Letters from the Inside, Checkers, and Dear Miffy, the latter probably his most confronting and disturbing book. With these books Marsden was at times lumped in with the writers of problem novels. However, his books focused on society and how it viewed and treated young people and how in turn those teenagers observed their world and dealt with what they faced. The focus was not simply on the ‘issue’ or a specific problem. Furthermore, the language and scenarios were much more complex and nuanced.

Zac and Mia (2013, Text Publishing)

Buy this bookIt is into this much-changed, more open, and far more sophisticated reading environment that A.J. Betts and others have stepped. It is important to locate Betts amongst some other fine Australian writers of realistic fiction like David Metzenthen, Maureen McCarthy, Jaclyn Moriarty, J.C. Burke, Cath Crowley, Will Kostakis, Scot Gardner, Sonya Hartnett, Melina Marchetta, Lili Wilkinson, Simone Howell, Julia Lawrinson, Vikki Wakefield, Fiona Wood, and Clare Zorn. These contemporary writers create works that are varied, challenging, stimulating, and complex.

On a cursory look, Zac & Mia (2013) could be mistaken for an ‘issues’ book; one about teenagers with cancer. However, to view the book in those terms would be reductive and do a disservice to Betts and her book. Betts has written: ‘When I began to work on Zac & Mia, I hadn’t chosen to write about cancer ... I was toying with two separate ideas: love and isolation’ (Viewpoint). Zac is in isolation following a bone marrow transplant after chemotherapy failed to cure his leukaemia. Mia has just been admitted to the room next door in the adult oncology ward, with osteosarcoma (a cancerous growth) on her ankle. The teenagers make their first tentative contact by tapping on the wall of their adjoining rooms. Betts has said the image of two hands meeting on either side of a hospital wall was what sparked this story, which took her some four years to write and refine. Betts is interested in how her two main characters view and deal with their situations; how they see themselves and their future; how they cope with adversity; how they see their place in the world and amongst their peers; how they view their bodies at different stages of treatment; how their very different families and family circumstances affect their lives; how they behave and cope – or don’t; and how from this situation an unlikely friendship and even love might develop.

How characters change and perhaps mature is an important feature of Young Adult – and adult – fiction. Betts uses a three-part structure in Zac & Mia to highlight the significant, subtle, and often unexpected shifts in her two protagonists’ situations, states of mind, attitudes, and moods. Perhaps the most notable and sophisticated achievement of the book is how deftly Betts manages these shifts. The middle part of the book gives us the alternating voices of Zac and Mia, while the third part is told from Mia’s point of view. However, as the novel is bookended by Zac’s voice he may be seen as the more important character. Betts’s ability to capture and sustain the voices of these two fragile teenagers is remarkable as is her facility with snappy, authentic, convincing dialogue.

In the first section, we get Zac’s perspective but also his view of Mia, as far as he can glean despite their minimal contact. The mother and daughter (Zac assumes it is a mother and daughter) seem at odds, angry. Zac appears calm, articulate, smart, level-headed, with a good understanding of his current state of health and prognosis for the future. His tone is often wry and self-deprecating. He copes partly by tracking through ‘the maze of blogs and forums’ on cancer and arming himself with statistics about the stages and outcomes of his and other types of cancer. He tends to do all this at around 3 a.m., when his ever-present mother is dozing, but he is unable to sleep.

Google tells me there are over 742 million sites on cancer. Almost 8 million are about leukaemia; 6 million on acute myeloid leukaemia. If I google ‘cancer survival rate’ there are over 18 million sites offering me numbers, odds and percentages. I don’t need to read them: I know most of the stats by heart.

On YouTube, the word ‘cancer’ leads to 4.6 million videos. Of these, 20,000 are from bone marrow transplant patients like me, stuck in isolation ... The world is turning and thousands of people are awake, updating their posts on the bookmarked sites I trawl through. I’ve come to know these people better than my mates. I can understand their feelings better than my own ... I track their treatment, their side effects and successes. And I keep a tally of the losses ...

Then I hear the flush of the toilet next door.

The new girl and I have one thing in common at least.

This section reveals much about the ways Betts builds her characters and her narrative, but also how she packs in extensive research and information without interrupting the flow with blocks of author-imparted facts. We come to understand not only what Zac is facing but how he does this. He clearly has a supportive family. Through his obsession with statistics and with Emma Watson, a star of the Harry Potter films, Betts injects some much-needed lightness and humour. The reader lives through Zac’s day-to-day experiences with him – and those of his mother, the hospital staff and others, including Cam, an adult patient who does not survive. From the other side of the wall and later via texts, Mia’s initial ignorance and lack of understanding or empathy align us with Zac, though her honesty, irritability, and bluntness prove to be an acerbic counterpoint to Zac’s apparently unfailing equanimity. Zac appears to have a much wider knowledge of the world. We begin to get to know Mia through this contrast:

Mia: What happens to someones facebook when they die?
Zac: I don’t know
Mia: Where do the profiles of dead people go?
Zac: U’ll have to ask Zuckerberg.
Mia: Who?

Towards the end of the book, Zac wonders:

Why do I like Mia?

I like that she’s tough on me, knowing I can handle it. She doesn’t tiptoe around the bad stuff or hide what’s going on in her head. If she feels something she says so, she shows it. She says and does all the things others hold back. She’s not predictable or safe. She doesn’t talk bullshit, the way most other girls do. She’s alive, despite everything, kicking and screaming and swearing. Fighting still.

Perhaps what is most worth exploring in Zac & Mia is the nature and extent of Mia’s transformation and how, as she grows stronger physically and mentally and learns to accept her situation, she is in turn able to help Zac face his parlous future. However, does Mia change too quickly and drastically? And does her much-improved relationship with her mother happen too rapidly? Is all this a little too easy? Is it convincing?

Zac and Mia (2014, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Buy this bookAnd how does A.J. Betts know so much about cancer, various treatment regimes, and the details of life in cancer hospitals? Betts has written: ‘Since 2004, I’ve been working as an English teacher with Hospital School Services in Perth. I’ve met hundreds of amazing teenagers, particularly on the adolescent oncology ward’ (Viewpoint). To this insider knowledge Betts has added prodigious amounts of research, though this never overwhelms her story.

In the third section of the book, Mia is back in hospital. She has had a wild and gruelling time after she fled after the amputation of her lower limb. Here, Betts confronts a very difficult ethical and moral question. Should Mia have been asked to agree to the amputation?

But I didn’t get that choice. My mother signed the form while I was on the operating table, the tumour holding tight to the artery it had wrapped itself around. ‘We had to act immediately,’ surgeons told me later.’An excision and bone graft were no longer practicable.’ Consent was needed. They didn’t wake me up; they handed my mother a pen. She signed her name and ruined my life.

Melodramatic? Perhaps. But she is understandably furious and distraught, and her sense of self has taken a battering. She was (still is) a pretty girl who relied on her looks for attention from boys and girls. Her deb dress is hanging at home ready. ‘Without my looks, what’s left? I’m not smart, or kind, or talented, or creative, or funny, or brave. I’m nothing.’ Betts leaves it to the reader (and to Zac and his family, and eventually to Mia’s mother) to test these assumptions. Now neither her mother nor her boyfriend nor her best friend seem able to understand, accept, or cope. Her mother had said: ‘Sort it out or leave.’ Mia needs more treatment; her wound becomes infected, but all she wants to do is escape. With her blonde wig, temporary ill-fitting prosthetic, crutches, and fragile physical and mental states, she steals, lies, and acts increasingly irrationally until she runs out of money and options and inevitably ends up at Zac’s home, The Good Olive! Olive Oil and Petting Farm. This is a country haven and the home of a loving, extended family. The contrast with Mia’s circumstances is stark. Zac tries to help, but he is out of his depth and it his older, very pregnant sister, Bec, who takes Mia in to her home next door and provides her with the space and time to come to her senses, regain some equilibrium, and eventually accept the treatment she needs. Zac/Betts sum up Mia’s initial situation beautifully: ‘Whatever’s happened to Mia, it’s emptied her. It’s left behind a girl with fake hair, fake plans, and nowhere in the world she actually wants to be.’

The story draws to its quiet and uncertain conclusion as Zac reluctantly prepares for another bone marrow transplant after lying and hiding via an ingenious ruse. Now it is Mia who drags Zac out of his depression and becomes the voice of hope and reason. Betts has written: ‘As the characters developed I became obsessed with three questions: What is courage? What is beauty? What is love?’ (Viewpoint). So we have a story of friendship and love and understanding that evolved from the plight of two initially very different young people whose lives have affected and changed others too.

Betts’s first novel, Shutterspeed (2008), a fast-paced story featuring photography and motorbikes, was aimed at teenage boys. It is about a boy who is bored, lost, and whose single father is distant. Wavelength (2010) presents Oliver, stressed about his forthcoming Year Twelve exams. When sent to stay with his father, he finds himself, much to his annoyance, in close proximity to residents in an aged care home who then, unexpectedly, offer him the gift of many new ways of seeing life. All three books derive their power and interest from innovative structures, strong characterisation, tight plotting, considerable authorial insight, and vivid settings – all in Western Australia. Zac & Mia, Betts’s third book, takes her writng to new heights. It was the winner of the Text Prize for an unpublished manuscript and this win gained her publication with Text Publishing, a major Australian independent publisher.

There have been inevitable comparisons with John Green’s best-selling The Fault in Our Stars (2012), also about two young people dealing with cancer. Zac could tell us how statistically probable two (only two?) such publications would be. Both are well worth reading. Zac & Mia has been translated into about a dozen languages and has found admiring audiences all over the world. The influential US Kirkus Reviews concluded its appraisal of Zac & Mia: ‘It’s the healing powers of friendship, love and family that make this funny-yet-philosophical tale of brutal teen illness stand out.’ It is a deeply affecting (but never sentimental), dramatic and sparklingly told story, with universal interest and appeal.

Referenced works:

Beckman, Gunnell (1973) Mia Alone, translated by Joan Tate (1978), Bantam Doubleday

Blume, Judy (1970) Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Bradbury Press

Blume, Judy (1975) Forever, Bradbury Press

'Contemporary Cool in Young Adult Fiction' by Joy Lawn, The Australian, 29 March 2014

Marsden, John (1987) So Much to Tell You, Joy Street Books

Marsden, John (1992) Letters from the Inside, Pan Macmillan

Marsden, John (1996) Checkers, Houghton Mifflin

Marsden, John (1997) Dear Miffy, Pan Macmillan

On books for young adults, Viewpoint, vol. 21, no 4, Summer 2014

'Young adult fiction’s dark themes give the hope to cope' by Diana Hodge, The Conversation, 13 June 2014

Zac and Mia by A.J. Betts, Kirkus Reviews, August 1 2014

Steven Herrick is a poet and author. He has published twenty-two books for adults, young adults, and children, and is widely considered to be a pioneer of verse novels for children and young adults.

He left school in Year 10, before returning some years later as an adult, and then going on to study poetry at the University of Queensland, where he gained his B.A. in 1982.

In 2000 he was awarded the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature for The Spangled Drongo (1999), and in 2005 he was awarded the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature for By the River at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

He lives in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales.

Reading Australia

Felicity Plunkett has written on by the river (2005) for ABR as part of the Reading Australia project. Click here to read her essay

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: by the river (2005)

Steven Herrick’s website

A biography of Steven Herrick, Poetry Foundation

Mike Shuttleworth reviews 'Slice' by Steven Herrick in the December 2010-January 2011 issue of ABR

'Another Night in Mullet Town review: Steven Herrick's verse novel for boys' by Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald 20 August 2016