What Book to Read?

Janette Turner Hospital is an Australian-born writer who has spent much of her life overseas, and this perhaps explains why she doesn’t get the recognition in Australia I think she deserves. Orpheus Lost (2007) is a wonderful book.

Not surprisingly, the myth of Orpheus, who descends to the Underworld to try and rescue his beloved Eurydice, is central to the story, and appears in several different guises throughout. I think it’s worth reminding yourself of the details of the myth before you start the book, though others disagree. I also listened several times to the aria referred to several times: Gluck’s Che Faro Senza Euridice. I like this version, and it has the words.

Leela, a brilliant mathematician who is studying the maths of music at MIT, meets Mishka who is studying composition at Harvard and playing his violin in the Underground in Boston because he likes the acoustics. They fall in love. ‘And how … could Leela have thought the ending would be other than what it was?’ Mishka is an Australian who was brought up in the Daintree rainforest of north Queensland by his mother and Holocaust surviving grandparents. He believes his Lebanese father to be dead, but feels incomplete without knowing more about him. Leela comes from the small South Carolina town of Promised Land – a real town, though not quite where Turner Hospital has placed it – where her father and sister still live. Her main memories of the town involve Cobb Slaughter, who was almost as good at maths as she was. (The Americans, and the author, say ‘math’ – I think ‘maths’ may be an Australian thing.) By ‘a coincidence so huge it was eerie’ – ‘the sheer symmetry of chance’ – Cobb comes into her life again, setting disaster in train. The story is divided into nine sections and an epilogue, shared between Leela, Mishka and Cobb. Within these sections there are flashbacks to events from the characters’ childhoods.

I love the way Turner Hospital writes, though as always, it’s a challenge to say quite why. Her writing is full of metaphor, and I don’t always like this. So maybe she’s just better at it than most writers. Here Mishka as a child is thinking about the feeling of safety he associates with home: ‘He did not have a name for the feeling, but he could see it and hear it, and it was a river that rose and rose in its banks like the Daintree in the Wet season until it washed his body with warmth and rushed all over him, foaming and splashing him with Gluck and Mendelssohn and Uncle Otto’s violin and bird cries and fragrant night-blooming flowers.’ Music is central to the story, and suffuses the writing. Leave out a word, and the rhythm is spoiled. Try reading the passage without the word ‘fragrant’, and you will see what I mean.

I can’t outline the way the myth is used in the plot, and the references made to it, without giving away what happens, but almost every strand of the story can be seen through its prism; the myth is woven throughout with a brilliantly assured hand. It is a springboard for exploring the themes of grief and loss. ‘How can I live without my love,’ sings Orpheus in Gluck’s opera, and that is a question a number of the characters ask themselves – or have asked themselves over the years. They respond in various ways, some more damaging than others. So the book also deals with the way children are damaged by their parents, and how their parents were damaged in their turn. Personal tragedy is a microcosm of national tragedy, for though the book is a love story, it is also about contemporary America’s obsession with Islamic terrorism, and some of the unintended but perhaps inevitable consequences that go with this.

However important the myth, the characters in this story are people, not figures determined by myth; Turner Hospital has given them choices. ‘I insist on believing in hope and redemption,’ she says, ‘and I am drawn to characters and stories to find it. To give up believing in hope would be, well, just not a viable way to live. Not for me anyway.’ And not for me, either.

After I had finished the book, it occurred to me that there are some plot elements – in addition to the remarkable coincidence at the beginning – that don’t jell perfectly. But Turner Hospital is such an enchantress that she completely dazzled me while I was reading.
You can read more about her here.

PS My copy of the book says on the front cover that it ‘recalls Graham Greene at his best’. Maybe I haven’t read enough Greene – a writer I admire – but I can’t see anything about this book that vaguely resembles his work.