The Toucher is woven around Esther La Farge, a sixty-seven-year-old novelist who is widowed and confined to a wheel-chair. It describes her efforts to pattern the past and to reconcile herself to loneliness and physical dependency. Living on ‘the edge of the known world’, the south coast of Western Australia, she rebuffs her children’s pleas to settle with them in the Blue Mountains, where her son and his wife live, or Oxford, where her daughter lives, claiming instead freedom to live in her own house, aided by her housekeeper and friend, Clarrie.

As the novel opens in autumn 1990, Clarrie is called away, leaving Esther to the less tender ministrations of Clarrie’s niece, young Iris Reece. It is Iris’s boyfriend, Billy Crowe, who details Esther’s search for solitude and ‘a kind of ghostly extinction’.

Such a withdrawal is not, however, possible, given the potency of the natural world which envelops Esther. Here is elemental life in all its vigour: forests and birds, ferny gullies and dark scrub thick with germinating wild flowers, fish and silvery rivers, gales and bushfires, caves, crumbling sandstone cliffs, and always the wash of the great Southern Ocean, deadly yet teeming with life. Esther might wish to stand aside, but she, too, is part of this chain of being, dissolving into sea, rocks and sky.

In this country of the spirit and physicality, there is no external ordering god or hope of post-death reward. Here, the perfect and the divine are found in the middle of life, in company with violence and decay.

Esther La Farge is touched back to life by twenty-six-year-old boy/man Billy Crowe. Self-indulgent, erratic and dangerous, an uneducated drifter and petty criminal, he eases himself into Esther’s favour as handyman, cook, nurse, typist, fisherman and, soon enough, lover. Immoral, perverse, disgusting, say the local townspeople, a young man and an old woman together, he’s only after her money.

But Billy is also tender, considerate and funny, thirsting for poetry and love, full of life. With him Esther spends the most perfect summer, never to be repeated, everything enfolded in a tranquil sensual haze.

Esther’s money isn’t important to Billy, but her body is. And so is the body of Iris, his girlfriend become wife. Billy loves Esther and Iris. Esther, with difficulty, accommodates the sounds of Billy and Iris fucking in her own house. Iris wants Billy just for herself. There can be no peaceful solution, as Iris finds to her cost.

As a child, Esther ingested the time bomb that is Wuthering Heights. In her seventh decade, ‘all fat and false teeth and hair, like a lioness’, she lives out a similar passionate and destructive affair against a wild landscape. And she repeats the pattern of her life, which is measured out in broken love affairs. One of Billy’s attractions is his resemblance to Sam Winter, an earlier lover about whom she is writing a novel – a novel which Billy is typing.

In literature it is possible to make the banal heroic and this is what Esther does in her writing. Perhaps she is also turning herself into the stuff of myth as she commemorates the power of love. The complications of her life may have been sordid, miserable and funny, as she reflects, but the orchestral accompaniment which she alone heard ennobled them:

It was the music, so passionate and prophetic, that transcended the second-rate plots and scoundrelly lovers. It suggested something elemental and immortal, as if life really had a meaning after all. 

The question that troubles Esther is not the morality of her life, but how to live calmly knowing that death, arbitrary death, awaits. In her search for an answer, should she withdraw from the world or should she live to the full? Should she transcend mortality by casting aside her body, or should she lose herself in the pleasures of the flesh?

Over the twelve months or so that The Toucher spans, these contrapositions blur as reality and reflections become confused, fact and fiction intermingle, and the living and the dead flow together. The extent of change can be gauged by the way in which the deaths at the opening and closing of the book are treated. The first, accidental, Esther envisages as violent, horrifying, but the second, chosen, is a maternal thing, a gentle voyage into ‘an unknown light and an ultimate darkness’. There is a sense of reconciliation here which, while owing little to Christian belief, does express an acceptance of the mystery of life in death, and a trust that, in the end, there is nothing to fear.

This review engages only the surface of Dorothy Hewett’s novel. The Toucher can also be read in conjunction with Wild Card, the first volume of Hewett’s autobiography, as a study of the fictional nature of reality or vice versa. Hewett worked on the books concurrently and it’s tantalising to speculate how much of the seepage from one book to the other was subconscious and how much was put there purposely to tease. There are many other readings possible too, but one element which remains constant is Hewett’s liquid prose with passages of translucent beauty and crude dialect jostling together. I could have done with less of the fish/sex/male and bird/love/female imagery, and perhaps the past does come together a little too neatly, but then ...

The Toucher is a rich, engaging and challenging contribution to the body of literature that charts the ways in which women experience life and find consolation in art, love and passion.