What Book to Read?

I recently reviewed Grenville’s The Lieutenant (2008), a moving but rather grim story about the first contact between white arrivals in Australia and the Indigenous inhabitants. A friend lent me The Idea of Perfection (1999) with the assurance that it was just as well written and much happier, and she was right.

The two main characters both consider themselves and their lives to be far from perfect. Douglas Cheeseman is an engineer, good at his work, but self-conscious and awkward with people. He has been sent to Karakarook, a small town in outback Australia, to demolish and replace a damaged bridge. Waiting to be served in the local pub, ‘he felt the urge to apologise simply for existing, much less wanting breakfast’. Harley Savage is equally gauche, and carries with her the belief that she is somehow likely to damage people she becomes close to; she feels she has ‘a dangerous streak’. She is an expert in fabrics who has come to Karakarook to help a local committee establish a pioneer museum. Karaakarook (Gateway to the Foothills), like so many outback towns, is dying, and the committee hopes to give it a fillip by encouraging tourism. The first meeting of Douglas and Harley, where they literally bump into each other, in inauspicious: ‘a moment extending itself into awkwardness … two bodies hitting together, two people standing apologising’. To make matters worse, they seem destined to be on opposing sides on an issue that is dividing the town: should the bridge, which is a piece of pioneer history, be replaced, or repaired? But seasoned readers are likely to guess that obstacles will be overcome, and that the two will find friendship, and probably something more. Their story is counterpointed by that of Felicity, the bank manager’s wife, who thinks the local butcher is in love with her, though it very soon appears to be the other way round. She wants to be perfect, but it is obvious that her idea of perfection is completely dysfunctional, and constrains her.

The craft of quilting runs through the story, and is one of the themes that offers contrasting views of perfection. Reflecting on the tradition of deliberately placing an asymmetrical piece in an otherwise symmetrical hand-made quilt, Felicity thinks ‘it was just another part of the perfection, really, not being perfect. But it only counted if you were not being perfect on purpose.’ She gave up quilting for fear it might damage her physical perfection (yes she is a bit crazy). But all of Hayley’s quilts are purposely asymmetrical; she thinks that ‘to anyone else [they] would probably look like something gone wrong’. Yet her quilts are highly sought after works of art, reflecting her passions and insights; any ‘perfection’ they have is unspoken.

One of the things that makes the book such a pleasure to read is that Grenville is ultimately kind to all her characters. This is despite the fact – or maybe because of it – that she writes about them with a certain dry humour, often conveyed by the italicising of certain words, as in: ‘The trouble was, even as woman looked at dog and dog looked back at woman, still life turned into life’.  Both Douglas and Hayley initially find the small town atmosphere somewhat hostile and intimidating – but this is a perception partly born of their self-consciousness. On better acquaintance, they find that the townspeople, despite, or even because of their eccentricities and inquisitiveness, can be kind and approachable. They both learn from their experience there. For Douglas, ‘the thing he would like to learn was not something you could ask anyone, although it was so simple. How do people get on?’  He realises that ‘crankiness could be a kind of intimacy’. Hayley comes to realise that ‘out here, people went by different rules … You forgave people for being who they were, and you hoped they would be able to forgive you.’ Coralie, the driving force behind the idea of a museum, and her husband Chook, foreman of Douglas’s work gang, seem initially hostile to Haley and Douglas respectively. They are furthermore on opposite sides in the bridge controversy which might be expected to make them antagonistic to each other. Yet by the end of the story, Grenville grants them ‘a second of simple love’, and Hayley realises that the love she has thus far pushed away, however complicated, could be ‘the simplest thing in the world’. And just as they learn from the town, the town learns from them.

Another nice thing about this book is its cover, which shows a wooden bridge which has bowed in just such a way as the bridge that has brought Douglas to the town. The cover is a photo – meaning that the story is inspired by a real life bridge. No wonder Grenville’s descriptions of it are so detailed and evocative.

You can read more about Kate Grenville here. The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize for 2000.