The facts of the mother’s crime are withheld until late in the text, the narrative being constantly patterned with Cyn’s “thoughts” whereby she refers to the crime as “it”. She is monstrously damaged, yet, with hope throbbing in the operatic whispers and melodies of the Furies, she will form part of a revolution. From her abjection will come a kind of victory, a victory aligned with the rebel cries of Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison.
Cyn is more or less self-educated, a lover of reading, and she’s very interested in language. What, she asks, might be the collective noun for that audience of men in the toilet block? “A terror, a calamity, a butchery”? Perhaps there is no word. But with the hope at the heart of the bushland comes an outpouring of words for the joy of life. “Arcs of vivid light from the sun bounce between clusters of bushes and rocks.” She recalls the colours of sunlight passing through Mallory’s glass jars of food dye and old bones: “We sat in violets, in. Apple greens, among. Zinc yellows, with.”
Yes, those prepositions are a feature of the writer’s markedly individual style. The colour red whips and drips and flares its way through the narrative. Of course there is plenty of blood. Cyn’s hair is a wild blazing “copper-gold-rusted”, and at one point she says: “Red. Red. Red. Red hair. Red dress. Red lips”. Whew!
Not only is the prose distinctive, so too is the structure of the novel, which is the fractured document of a grievously wounded woman. The subject matter, a rallying cry for revolution, like a cyclone, delivered as it is in blunt, vivid, visceral, ferocious language and image, makes for very confronting reading.
“The beatings, the losses, the knives at our throats.” It is a savage howl to women to “build new meaning together”.
Mandy Beaumont’s dark and tormented novel is a rallying cry
Source: Philippines Alive
