Book review: The Life To Come by Michelle de Kretser
Steve WalkerThe Life To Come
by Michelle de Kretser
Allen & Unwin, $37
I have always been an admirer of Australian award-winning novelist Michelle de Kretser. Her beautifully poetic prose explores the notions of travel and identity, the nature and bounds of fiction and what it means to be Australian.
Her The Lost Dog and The Hamilton Case were rich, multilevel and exquisitely lyric. Her Questions of Travel was an engrossing and profound exploration of the interconnection between travel and isolation. All three spun their narrative threads through complex, layered characters.
So it was with some anticipation that I approached her latest novel, The Life to Come. In many ways, I was not disappointed. Many of de Kretser's characteristic features are there: beautifully wrought prose with the odd metaphorical gem; characters with deep dimensionality; plots that span continents, looping back to Australia, often via her own native Sri Lanka.
Take de Kretser's prose style. It abounds with imagery and wit. The humidity of Sydney in summer is a "swampy afternoon"; a jacaranda is "exactly poised between fullness and decay" on the cusp of summer, when "light fell in yellow sheets". The moon is "riding high, as white as a life cut back to the bone". Each image arrests, skewering the essence of a character or situation.
Likewise, her characters grow out of the accretion of details. Here, there are essentially four, whose lives intersect briefly or over a lifetime. Pippa is an aspiring writer, living with her mentor, George, a noted Australian novelist. She craves success, eager to learn from his technique. She travels to Paris to research her latest.
In Sydney, Pippa meets Ash, a Sri Lankan political scientist who is lecturing in Sydney. He represses the memory of an atrocity he witnessed in the Tamil insurgency.
In Paris, a translator, Celeste, meets Pippa at an embassy party. She is in love with a florist and agonises over whether her lover, Sabine, reciprocates her feelings, She is also worried over her nephew's psychological problems as a dysfunctional teenager back in Perth.
Pippa, back in Sydney, married and pregnant, cares for her ageing friend, Christabel, who lives with a childhood crush from Sri Lanka. Christabel objects when she appears as a "closet lesbian with a mannish face" in Pippa's novel.
The trouble is, this is all a bit incestuous. These people exist in a tiny bubble, of Australian writers and their circle. The characters may intersect, but they are not interwoven. The Ash narrative peters out and Celeste's story is just a brief encounter for Pippa.
My main concern was with what de Kretser labels the "internal rhythm" of the novel. Characters meet, join and disappear, without appearing to lead anywhere. The central thread, Pippa, merely touches their lives. Narrative interest is fitful. It does not add up to an organic whole.
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