Over the past few weeks, the writer has been deep into a couple of more serious books, including a written version of a television series about the history of Ireland – ‘Story of Ireland: In search of a new national memory’ by Neil Hegarty. Needing a bit of a break from the likes of that, I chose a couple of recently released novels by two Australian authors – Craig Silvey, and Jane Harper – both novels are briefly commented upon with the aid of a couple of professional reviews written after publication.
We begin with ‘Honeybee’ by Craig Silvey: published 2020; 424 pages – a very emotional and eye-opening novel about, what for me, was generally, the more seedy sides of life [at least, on the surface anyway] – the book’s message ‘Find out who you are, and live that life’.
In many ways, a ‘heart-breaking story taking myself as the reader, into a world I was not familiar or particularly comfortable with – of family violence; extortion plots, botched bank robberies, drag shows, and so on. There are also stories of redemption, perseverance, mercy and hope in this scenario – of two lives changed forever by a chance encounter, and of the friendship offered from unexpected sources along the way – as one reviewer put it – “At the heart of Honeybee is Sam: a solitary, resilient young person battling to navigate the world as their true self; ensnared by loyalty to a troubled mother, scarred by the volatility of a domineering stepfather, and confounded by the kindness of new alliances”.
From the book cover and subsequent comments.
Late in the night, fourteen-year-old Sam Watson steps onto a quiet overpass, climbs over the rail and looks down at the road far below. At the other end of the same bridge, an old man, Vic, smokes his last cigarette. The two see each other across the void. A fateful connection is made, and an unlikely friendship blooms. Slowly, we learn what led Sam and Vic to the bridge that night. Bonded by their suffering, each privately commits to the impossible task of saving the other.
Guardian Australia writes:
Sam Watson, the narrator and protagonist of Silvey’s much-anticipated new novel, Honeybee, is another such adolescent. The reader is first introduced to Sam on the railing of an overpass, where, filled with despair and unendurable hurt, Sam has come to die.
It’s a dramatic beginning, and much of the first act of the novel is structured around unfolding the actions and history that have brought Sam to this point. Sam’s particular context, that is, is treated as something of a mystery, the discovery of which is the main narrative impetus of the first part of the book.
[As the Guardian writes] :There’s no way to write about this without a spoiler. Reader, you have been warned.
Honeybee’s opening mystery, the reason why Sam is different from Silvey’s other characters – and the reason why Sam’s particularly gentle nature is a problem in her family and life (and, arguably, in the novel) – is the fact that Sam is transgender. Sam is 14 years old, at the point where the body she was born in is beginning to develop the adult characteristics that are so different from those that match her gender; at the point, that is, that dysphoria so often becomes intolerable for trans people. For Sam, too, this is also the point where her family’s desire for her to act “like a man” has intensified, and she can see no way out of her discomfort and her shame.
None of this is inaccurate, as far as portrayals go – and it’s clear, especially from the book’s acknowledgements, that Silvey has done a great deal of research in writing Honeybee, and spoken to many people with lived experience of gender dysphoria and transition. Even still, there’s something about the way that Sam’s gender identity is treated as a reveal, as something startling or surprising, that sits uncomfortably with me. It feels othering, or almost exploitative, even as Sam is always portrayed with great compassion.
I’m not trans. I am queer – which means that transfolk are a part of my community – and the woman who I love just happens to be transgender, too. She’s an activist, and a mentor to young transfolk, and one of the reasons why she does such things is because, as a child and adolescent, she was never able to tell her own story, and because, as an adult, so many of the stories that exist about people like her centre on their pain and trauma and their struggle – and this is, she sometimes says, exhausting.
There’s a whole article that could be written about the rights and responsibilities of representation, the importance of “own voices” telling their own stories. There are smarter and better-placed people to do that. But even after Sam’s gender identity was revealed in Honeybee, I kept thinking there’s so much else to her, and to the novel, that her transness sometimes feels like just one more trauma without which the book would have worked equally well.
Sam’s life is difficult and it is traumatic – she is the only child of a mother who fell pregnant when she was still a child herself, and who has raised Sam without support, dealing with her frustration and sadness by turning to alcohol and then to much harder drugs. Sam has grown up in a series of dilapidated flats, often leaving suddenly when the rental arrears grow too high, and being continually bullied at school for her differences.
Most recently, Sam’s stepfather has joined in on this terrorising, because Sam’s sensitivity is anathematic to the rough and violent kind of masculinity by which he lives his life – and which manifests frequently in his treatment of Sam’s mother. Sam’s stepfather is also a con artist who ends up working as a debt collector and enforcer for a dangerous drug dealer, and storing fentanyl and guns in the family home. There’s a lot going on for Sam already, a lot of reasons why she might feel damaged and “wrong” (the term she uses often across the book) – plenty that could have brought her to that overpass, even before her gender is added to the mix.
At its core, though, Honeybeeis a novel about unconventional kinds of love: standing on that overpass, Sam meets an old man, Vic, who has come to the same place with the same intention, but for each of them, the presence of the other person makes this act suddenly impossible.
Thrown together by these extreme circumstances, Sam and Vic become friends, and then a kind of family. Sam moves into Vic’s house, living in the bedroom that he used to share with his late wife, and the pair learn to support, accept and enliven each other. Here, Sam also befriends one of Vic’s neighbours, the ballsy and vivacious Aggie, a teenage girl who is so fully herself that Sam can’t help but be drawn in.
What Sam finds in Honeybeeis a different kind of family, and a different kind of love – one that is based on choice, rather than just on chance – and it is with this support and encouragement that she is also able to start to find herself. This is a book as much about these kinds of relationships as it is about self-discovery, self-acceptance and coming-of-age, themes that are common in Silvey’s work, and that he always handles with tenderness and compassion. Honeybee is no exception – but it’s still difficult to reconcile this with the discomfort that is caused by Silvey treating Sam’s gender as a dramatic reveal, or as just one other trauma in her already-difficult life.
[Craig Silvey is an author and screenwriter from Fremantle, Western Australia. His critically acclaimed debut novel, Rhubarb, was published in 2004. His bestselling second novel, Jasper Jones, was released in 2009 and is considered a modern Australian classic. Published in over a dozen territories, Jasper Jones has won plaudits in three continents, including an International Dublin Literary Award shortlisting, a Michael J. Printz Award Honor, and a Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlisting. Jasper Jones was the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year for 2010. Honeybee is his third novel].
Our second novel is ‘The Survivors’ by Jane Harper [published 2020; 378 pages] – a relatively quick read, as good as ‘The Dry’ ]her previous novel I’d read], although I felt the story could have continued a little further – it left a few outcomes either assumed, to be guessed at, or just neglected in the writing [I doubt the latter, obviously intended as it was] – I guess my problem is, that I like a clean ending, but it was an intriguing little mystery, the solution to which kept you reading. I’m currently ‘ploughing’ through a history of Ireland, so this was a bit of welcome piece of light reading for a couple of days!!! Among many other aspects of the story, there is the tragic but realistic portrayal of a dementia sufferer, a little close to home these days!!
From the jacket cover:
Jane Harper’s highly anticipated fourth novel The Survivors has been released in Australia and New Zealand. ‘The Survivors’, a standalone mystery, is set on the Tasmanian coast. Released in Australia on September 22, The Survivors went straight to No.1 on the Australian bestseller list (Nielsen BookScan) after a massive debut week.
Kieran Elliott’s life changed forever on a single day when a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences. The guilt that still haunts him resurfaces during a visit with his young family to the small coastal community he once called home. Kieran’s parents are struggling in a town where fortunes are forged by the sea. Between them all is his absent brother, Finn. When a body is discovered on the beach, long-held secrets threaten to emerge. A sunken wreck, a missing girl, and questions that have never washed away…
“I’ve really enjoyed writing this one,” Jane said. “It’s been a lot of fun researching and writing about such a fantastic part of the country.”
And from the introductory paragraphs of the review in the Sydney Morning Herald [by Sue Turnbull, on the 22nd September 2020] we read:
This time we’re in one of those deserted-for-most-of-the-year beach communities in Tasmania with one main road and a restaurant called The Surf and Turf. Just in case you might miss it, there’s a giant crayfish fashioned out of sun-bleached shells glued to the wall, and a sign saying “In here for fish from there” with an “uneven arrow” pointing to the ocean.
Once again, as in all her crime novels beginning with The Dry, Australian crime writer Jane Harper creates an impressive landscape that serves to illustrate how the experience of place inevitably shapes the lives of those who live there. While Evelyn Bay might once have depended on fishing and forestry, it now limps along supported by seasonal whale-watching and deep-sea diving tours to investigate the innumerable wrecks offshore.
Evelyn Bay is the kind of small town most young people can’t wait to leave as soon as they can. Like Kieran, who now lives in Sydney but has returned home with his partner Mia and baby Audrey to help his mother pack up the family home. His father has disappeared into the “void” of early onset dementia, and his mother is only just coping with his increasingly erratic behaviour
Coming home was never going to be easy. But Kieran is also lugging a swag of grief for a tragedy 12 years earlier during a fatal storm that resulted in the death of two young men at sea. One of them was Kieran’s elder brother, Finn, the other a young father whose still-furious son now works at The Surf and Turf. This was also the night when a young women, Gabby Birch, went missing, and the mystery of her disappearance has never been solved.
Harper establishes the situation fast. Kieran’s only been home one night when another young woman, Bronte, who again works at The Surf and Turf, is found dead on the beach at the end of her shift. But then the pace slows, as Harper lets the ripples of effect wash over all the survivors of that storm in the past as they circle each other in a reunion that is now overshadowed by a death in the present.
While the police conduct their investigation in the background, the focus is always on Kieran as he comes to realise that he has been so consumed by his own guilt and grief, that he has missed the bigger picture. Like all small towns, Evelyn Bay has more than its share of intrigue now rehearsed on its social media network.
Harper deftly unravels these small-town secrets, where it’s the little things that matter. Kieran’s old friend and rival, Ash, now runs a landscaping business and is devastated by the destruction of his grandmother’s carefully tended garden by a recent blow-in, the thriller writer G.R. Barlin. This character gives Harper some playful opportunities to comment on the experience of being a writer.
Barlin writes the kinds of books that people buy at airports, stay “glued to” at the pool and then leave in their hotel room “to save on luggage weight”. Far from being dismayed by this, Barlin appears unruffled given he has made a great deal of money at his craft and approaches it in a workmanlike way. As he tells Kieran, “Writers’ block is for amateurs … I do this for a living.”
He is, however, the perceptive outsider who knows that for a community such as Evelyn Bay to survive, the people need to be “close-knit” and that “once that trust is broken, they’re stuffed”. It’s not just the loss of the traditional industries that threatens small communities, but the tensions that pull people apart.
As always in her books, Harper embraces the mythic. Visible from the whale lookout are three iron statues facing the sea, a memorial commissioned as a tribute to the 54 passengers and crew who lost their lives in a shipwreck nearly a century ago. Known as The Survivors, they are never totally submerged. For Kieran, his family, and Evelyn Bay, it is all about survival.
Despite the obvious symbolism, The Survivors is a subtle, quiet book about guilt, grief and growing up. You may find it hard to leave it behind.
[And thankfully, for my readers, this review didn’t reveal the story’s outcome – it’s not hard to read, and you are constantly wondering, despite little clues along the way, just who has been responsible for the two murders, a decade apart, and seemingly unconnected!! Enjoy!!]
[Jane Harper is the author of international bestsellers ‘The Dry’, ‘Force of Nature’, and ‘The Last Man’. Her books are published in 40 territories worldwide. Jane has won numerous top awards including the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel, the British Book Awards Crime and Thriller Book of the Year, the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year and the Australian Indie Awards Book of the Year].
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