George is haunted by these events – by the eight days he spent clinging to the remnants of the ship, and by the spectre of the woman who saved him, whom he can neither forget nor understand, and whom he feels has cursed him. Rawson’s portrayal of the effects of George’s trauma is subtle and skilful. In part, this is drawn from the contrast between the brief scenes of George drinking and joking with his shipmates before the wreck – there are some beautifully bawdy double entendres here – and the quiet, anxious, withdrawn man he is shortly afterwards, half-participating in conversations with his family and half-engrossed in his own mind. At other times, Rawson relies on more physical descriptions of George’s terror; in one passage he suddenly props, ‘breathless yet again, oh yes, that old thing once more, his back against the wall down a side alley off the esplanade, his guts choking him, his eyes spotted blind, his heart a monster in his chest that fought the ribs holding it as though it would tear itself free’. This sense of unresolved injury, the aftershocks of extreme experience, is the greatest strength of the novel. George shares this sense of grief and continuing trauma with the creature he so despises, who is lost, far from home, searching for others of her kind, and unable to communicate with the people she encounters. One of the tragedies of the book is that he is unwilling and unable to understand this.
The interest in extremity in From the Wreck is balanced by a concern for respectability, a clinging to decency that preoccupies George in his suburban Port Adelaide life. George’s concern is largely directed at his eldest son, Henry, whose birth he suspects was attended by the same uncanny creature who saved him from the wreck, and whom he regards as a decidedly odd child, interested in death and decay, deep oceans and underwater worlds, and prone to utterances such as, ‘You would have reached into the ocean and grasped them as they fled slippery by.’
Henry is, of course, a touched child – he carries the shape-shifting creature with him in the form of a birthmark on his shoulder, cold to the touch, hungry for meat, and telling Henry ‘things no one else knew’. This accounts for Henry’s precocious intelligence, and his affinity with the natural world, and all that’s sticky and visceral within it; and Rawson’s ability to capture Henry’s voice – imaginative, and simultaneously childish and wild in its logic – makes him a delightful and fascinating character.
Other voices in the novel, though, are less engaging, especially that of the unnamed creature. Her descriptions are often lyrical and fittingly alien (‘there are shards and vivid jangles; shadows smear the outlines of things’), and Rawson’s attempt to create a voice that is fundamentally unearthly in this world is admirable, and very much in keeping with her interest in animality and creatureliness. Horses become ‘the smash-footed creatures, the speed lovers, the grass croppers’, cats are ‘fleet-footed fur’, humans ‘brown uprights’. But at times this voice seems overdetermined. It quickly loses its novelty, especially when the creature’s narrative diverges from that of the human characters.
Jane Rawson (Transit Lounge)
The main weakness of From the Wreck is structural. There are a number of elements whose purpose within the novel is unclear or that feel somehow incomplete. The most striking of these is the wonderfully ballsy Bea Gallwey, who is George’s neighbour – and Henry’s friend – a widow raising her daughter’s son alone, derided as a witch by local children. Bea is a wonderful character, sharp and incisive (in her best speech, she tells George, ‘I know this is difficult for many men to fathom but not every woman will want to have sex with a man just because he fancies her ... Saying no doesn’t make them a, what did you say? A hell spirit from another plane of existence?’), and her inclusion in the novel does add a welcome female voice to the otherwise male cast of characters. But her story is not well integrated.
From the Wreck is an ambitious novel, and it is fascinating for its hybridity, its willingness to bend and blend genres – as well as perspectives and worlds. Animated by deep curiosity and wild imagination, it is a fascinating exploration of what these might bring to the stories we tell about the past.
