Narrelle M. Harris's Blog, page 34

Review: The Accident by Kate Hendrick

As I mentioned in my AWW 2013 roundup, my reading plan this year is not about the AWW challenge but about the full shelf of books I’ve acquired over the last few years and not yet read. I’m making good progress, and I’ve already read four of the 24 books that were in my book stash at the beginning of the month.

The Accident by Kate Hendrick had been sitting there since June, when Text Publishing so kindly sent it to me for review. I wish I’d got to it sooner. It’s a terrific book, and so smoothly and confidently written in a first novel. If I’d read it back then, I could have told you all about it sooner, and so spurred you on to read it yourselves six months ago. Still, I can tell you now, and maybe incite a new rush.

Because The Accident is superb. It’s elegant. It’s complex. It seems to be going one way and then goes another.

The story is told through the eyes of three different people – Sarah, Will and Eliat – but also through three different points in time – Before, After and Later. The narrative explores the ripple effect of a car accident.

First we meet Sarah, Later – starting at a new school, repeating year 12, recovering from the leg injury she got in the accident and working through the loss she and her family experienced as well. She and they are both struggling with what has happened. Throughout the chapters we see Sarah’s emotional struggle through her art. She loves photography, but has taken to constructing technically perfect but emotionally distanced pictures of buildings.

Next, we meet Will, After. The accident is not mentioned, but we learn that one of Will’s sisters was deeply affected by the events surrounding the crash, which occurred during a drought-breaking storm. Will’s family already faces challenges, including the emotional absence of their writer mother and the sudden reappearance of the father who abandoned them. Will’s relationship with Lauren changes, though, because Lauren has changed. His other sister, Morgan – who is a Later friend of Sarah’s – is creative and angry. Will’s neighbour, Kayla, is bringing changes into his life as well. Everything is changing everything else, and Will is poised at the cusp, afraid to change with it, but maybe afraid not to, as well.

Eliat we meet in the time Before. A teen mum staying with foster parents, she’s trying to deal with school, her daughter, her foster parents and her discontent and pain about her past. She drinks, she lies, she is caught between the responsibilities of parenthood, the need to be a child and the gaping absence of memory that set her on this path. She needs change too, if only she can see it.

Characters meet and circle each other, part of the network of cause and effect. The teens and their families are beautifully written: believable and fragile in their grief and difficulties. It’s brilliant how the night of the accident is approached from all these time points, so that when it comes near the end of the novel, you know what’s led to it, what spins out from it, but the actual facts of the accident are not known until that last moment. That it’s not what you thought (or feared) is an elegant bit of plotting and writing.

One of the aspects of this book I loved so well was the relationship of various characters to creativity. Will’s mother’s creativity has become a wall erected between her and her family, a destructive force rather than one of release and connection. Sarah’s photography has become sterile, because she cannot let herself feel. Morgan’s passion for theatre and art are her only release when her family connections have failed her. Kayla’s final, very practical work of craft has an enormous emotional impact, while Eliat’s focus on neural mapping and memory technique are a way to creatively capture the gaps in her life, to try to make sense of them. The act of creation is, like the fact of being human, laden with meaning about change, growth and connection.

The Accident‘s subject matter is loss and grief, but its themes are healing, connection and change. Those are subject and themes we all know too well in our lives, and Kate Hendrick offers a thoughtful, compassionate study on them all.

Buy The Accident from Text Publishing
Buy The Accident from Amazon

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, smartphone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013 Roundup

At the beginning of 2013, I signed up once more for the AWW Challenge, at the Franklin level  - which was to read at least 10 and review at least 6 books by Australian women. I usually sign up as reading a mix, rather than a single genre, though of course usually I get into fantasy and horror.

Looking at my Goodreads stats, I read 37 books in 2013. As usual, that included a number of PG Wodehouse books, some classic Christie, a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories written people other than Conan Doyle, and a number of non-fiction titles. I read quite a few autobiographies by British comedians, including Miranda Hart’s Is It Just Me? and Jack Dee’s Thanks for Nothing.

I’m pleased that I did indeed meet my Franklin level goal, and in fact reviewed 11 of the books by Australian women. I covered a range of genres, too: fantasy, horror, crime, romance and biography.

My first book of the challenge was Leonie Norrington’s The Barrumbi Kids, and the review still gets a lot of hits and sometimes comments – mostly from kids who are hoping I’ll answer their essay questions for them. Sorry. Nope. Read the book, little humans, and find out for yourself.

Judith Lucy’s Drink, Smoke, Pass Out was the first of many biographies by comedians I read in 2013, but the only Australian in that crowd. She and the Brits I read are all on the self-deprecating, wry end of the scale, but Lucy had a kind of embarrassed optimism to it that really liked.

I got in two books by Mary Borsellino this year – YA fantasy Ruby, Coral Carnelian and erotic romance A Brighter Spark. She’s had more erotic romance published with Clan Destine last year too, and I’m chuffed as anything that we now share a publisher!

I’m a bit behind in some series, so I only got to Tansy Rayner Roberts’ The Shattered City (second of the Power and Majesty books) in 2013, and the third book in the series is in my Kindle for this year. The first two were brilliant, so I’m looking forward to finishing the trilogy! I did get onto Paula Weston’s Haze, sequel to Shadows, in good time thanks to the publisher sending me a review copy. The series is shaping up well, and it’s nice to see a broad-sweeping fantasy set in Australia.

A particular joy and surprise was Julie Bozza’s The Fine Point of His Soul, a subtle horror story featuring the poets Shelley, Keats and Byron and cleverly written in a 19th century Gothic horror voice that rings true and not of pastiche.

Carolyn Morwood’s Cyanide and Poppies had murder and mystery in the midst of the 1923 Melbourne police strike, and taught me quite a bit about my city’s history that I hadn’t known before, just like the first in the series, Death and the Spanish Lady. I’m looking forward to a third story with Eleanor Jones, former nurse and now journalist and, sometimes, detective.

In horror, both Felicity Dowker’s Bread and Circuses and Kirstyn McDermott’s Caution: Contains Small Parts were superb. Australian horror writers are doing some amazing work right now, and these two writers are among our very best.

It was also a great pleasure to get hold of classic Australian author Helen Garner in her short story collection, Postcards from Surfers. I might not have thought to read it, but my husband bought me the Penguin edition as a ‘thinking of you gift’ – and I’m so glad he did. It’s good to use this challenge as a prompt to find older books to expand one’s reading.

I read other books by Australian women that I didn’t review. I read books by Australian men that were terrific (especially Jason Franks’ Bloody Waters, which I keep recommending to people, but also Jason Nahrung’s Salvage and a few more of John Marsden’s Tomorrow series). I read biographies and crime and a Bill Bryson travel diary, and a collection of class short stories that my father gave me and at long last Gail Carriger’s Soulless (and I’m looking forward to more in that series too.)

As much as I love the AWW Challenge, I’ve decided not to sign up this year. Not because I don’t intend to continue reading a diverse range of books, including those by Australian women, but because my only reading challenge this year is to finally read all the books in my shelf of paperbacks/hardcovers, some of which have been in that ‘to read’ pile for two or three years. I have When We Were Kittens down as the first to start on, but there’s quite an array there, including fiction and non-fiction. The books by Australian women sitting there include Behind the Shock Machine by Gina Perry, Lost & Found by Robyn Annear, Jay Ford’s Beyond Fear and three SF short story collections from Fablecroft that are edited by women.

There are 24 books all up on that shelf, and I will be trying very hard not to buy any more paperbacks (well, except those coming out with the Twelve Planets series!).

It’s going to be a good year!

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, smartphone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Lost and Found 7: Peaceful

In late December, while the world carried on in its usual mad dance, peace came to Altona.

It didn’t look much. Mistaken for a pendant, peace manifested itself as a small brass symbol, tiny and easily overlooked. A glint on the concrete, a shape made of lines and spaces.

A modest peace, its effect was localised and felt in tiny ways along the beachfront and in the park, along the streets and among the trees.

This little peace made the sound of gulls less of a strident, frustrated demand and more a cry of endless, beckoning horizons. The cry of a gull, for a time, was a response from the great blue sky that answered isolation and made the world less lonely.

It made the cold, rough waters invigorating rather than daunting; it made the child gaping wide-eyed at the never-ending sea wonder at adventures on other shores instead of fearing the waves, and she body-surfed back to the beach with the feeling that she could fling herself at the motion of the world and never be afraid.

The people who stepped over this unseen symbol on the footpath felt for a moment that all was well or, if not currently well, that it soon would be, or could be. Some of those whose feet hovered above it for that moment felt the urge to forgive a wrong, to take a kindlier view, to judge less harshly.

Some of them forgave not others but their own selves for frailty and perceived failure, and saw that it was in the striving to improve rather than in failing at perfection that their better selves could be brought to light.

In the park, a grandfather, ill-tempered with aches and disappointments, halted an impatient snarl and instead looked at the leaf presented by a small grandchild, and recognised the leaf as an offering and a request, even if the child didn’t know it. The world is huge and fascinating, Grandpa, and it’s so so new to me, show me, show me, show me how to grow in it, oh please.

This modest peace was not a place of stillness. All the world is ceaseless change, much of it unconsidered and reactive, at the whim of chance and resistance, violence and cacophony. But some change happens in the quiet, in the momentary peace, in the pause between breaths.

The change of peace is gentle, a flow that is soft and yet profound, like rain on stone, like roots in the soil. It is a way to tilt the world, to see old things anew; it is the contemplative moment in which the familiar is rearranged and new patterns bloom with potential.

Nobody knows how many little peaces exist in the world. Nobody knows if they bring the peace with them or manifest spontaneously in hushed moments. This tiny symbol is no longer in Altona. Perhaps it was seized upon by a child, or a magpie, or a street sweeper. Perhaps it dissolved on the sea air.

Perhaps in a warm and silent moment, someone will manifest it out of their own brain, and like rain on stone, like roots in soil, a small but significant change will bloom.

Wishing you all a Happy New Year, and that something good will bloom for you in 2014.

Lost and Found is an irregular series of posts about random items I find abandoned on the streets and the stories I make of them.

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, smartphone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Gifts for the Writer in Your Life

Christmas is 12 days away, which ought to prompt me to some kind of ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ doggerel, but honestly. I like you all too much to subject you to such dire yuletide whims. (I did once rewrite The Night Before Christmas, with our cat Petra in the leading role, and if my doggerel amnesty fails, I’ll subject you to that at a later date.)

The organised amongst you will have completed your Christmas shopping, while the rest of us are in the process of staring, aghast, at the calendar and wailing OH MY GOD, NO, I’M NOT READY, I’M NOT READY, I WILL NEVER BE READY!

I can’t do much to help you with that, I’m afraid, except offer a few suggestions of what you might get for the writer in your life. It breaks down into two categories: time and stuff.

Time

If the writer in your life is anything like me, the thing they need most of is time. Time to write. Time to plan. Time to just sit and think and think and think in an attempt to sort out that plot point that simply will not resolve itself in five minute snatches of contemplation over a cup of tea. If the writer in your life is a parent, and has a lot of household responsibilities as well, a little alone time for thinking is especially precious.

Some years ago, my dear friend Jehni and I arranged to take our mutual dear friend, Yvon, away for a weekend for her birthday. We went to a farm stay, a long way away from shops, cinemas or any other distractions. Meals were included, and we could look at the cows until they came home, if that was our desire. I think we puzzled the host family a little by essentially just bedding down in the guest section of the house and writing for three days. Yvon, who normally supported her husband’s business in the office as well as taking care of the home and feeding the family, had three clear days in which she didn’t even have to do the dishes. She wrote up a storm. Jehni and I weren’t too slack either.

Okay, so maybe this Christmas it’s not possible to give your writer honey three clear days without other responsibilities, but you can find other ways to gift them time. Perhaps you can offer a standing arrangement one night a week that you make dinner, do the chores and the running around, all those things, while they lock the door to their office and get five straight hours of writing done. Maybe you can take on breakfast duties and give them an extra half hour every morning. Perhaps you can come up with the cash and the time to send them off on a writer’s retreat after all.

Talk to them first, of course, to find out how best to arrange such time so that they can make the most of it. You’ll probably come up with some other useful ways to help your cherished writer find more time for their craft. It may seem intangible, but the results will be words on pages, and a happier honey.

Stuff

It’s possible, however, that the writer in your life is already managing their time well, or that it really isn’t possible to  gift them extra time in some way. Never fear – there is always fabulous writerly STUFF to be had!

The Sentence First shop sells T-shirts and cups based on wordplay, including the delicious “Inventing words is squingulously efflumberant”.

The Literary Gift Company has always been a favourite, too, with its quotable chocolate bars, word-related jewellery, and even author-themed gifts (here’s an amusing collection of items related to Agatha Christie,  Arthur Conan Doyle/Sherlock Holmes and Jane Austen. The Literary Ties are pretty neat too.

Of course, there are also the stationery standbys, like Smiggle, Kikki K and Typo. Those are good if you’re worried that an online purchase won’t reach you in time, as there are plenty of Real World™ stores to find.

So good luck with your shopping, and with your writing – and whatever the festive season brings (and however you celebrate it, or not) let your new year bring you inspiration, free WiFi and all the right words in the right order.

Merry Xmas!

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, iPhone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Peacemaker Cover Art!

The fabulous Marianne de Pierres (who also writes under Marianne Delacourt) has a new book coming out with Angry Robot books in May 2014. As a teaser, the publisher is releasing the cover art today.

Look at the pretty, created by Joey Hi Fi.

The book, first in a series, combines, SF, westerns, crime and the paranormal in an Australian setting, and is based on the graphic novel by Marianne and Brigitte Sutherland (which also inspired the cover art).

What more could an Aussie reader ask for?

Apart from it to be May 2014 already.

You can read more at Marianne’s Peacemaker site.

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, iPhone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Lessons in Language: Fine Toothcombs and Fine-toothed Combs

You know what surprised the merry hell out of me when I googled in preparation for this language rant?

There is indeed such a thing as a ‘toothcomb’.  A toothcomb refers to a dental feature in some mammals where a row of long, thin teeth mimic the teeth of a comb, and are used by the mammal in question for grooming. Lemurs have them. So do some antelopes. I know this is true because Wikipedia told me so.

Do you know what mammalian dental configurations called toothcombs are not used for? Describing how people search in detail for something. No, you do not search through records with a fine toothcomb. I don’t care how fine that dental work is, it’s not used for searching for detail.

For that, you need a fine-toothed comb.

Yeah, I know I should probably learn to breathe deeply from my diaphragm and just let things go, but this one, whenever I see it, makes my teeth hurt. My regular ol’ human teeth, which I do not use for grooming.

You see, the marvellous agility of the English language already defines ‘to comb’ as, among other things, to perform a thorough search. It has always seemed to me such a small and eminently logical step that one would search in depth with a fine-toothed comb (or fine-tooth comb, since ‘fine-tooth’ will do as well as ‘fine-toothed’ for an adjective).

Doesn’t it make sense? To, you know, search, more thoroughly, with a comb that has finer teeth than the average, to separate minutiae of data or material? Doesn’t it? Is it really just me?

So, perhaps, for the sake of my hurting teeth, if not for the eloquence and logic of language, please do away with going through evidence with a toothcomb. Your evidence does not need grooming. Employ a fine-toothed comb in your search for unassailable facts. I’ll thank you personally. Possibly with chocolate.

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, smartphone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Doctor Who, Robert Holmes and Writing Supporting Characters

Doctor Who: The Pyramids of Mars – Courtesy of BBC Worldwide

As you are probably well aware, this year is the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who. The City of Melbourne, bless it, is full of the Spirit of Geekness with this and has been running a great program of related events: one of which was a writing workshop I ran at the lovely Southbank Library called Doctor Who and Building Believable Fantasy Worlds.

We had an entertaining discussion in part about how a show that was previously notorious for its wobbly sets, sometimes bombastic performances and shonky SFX was considered engaging and even believable enough that it kept viewers coming back year after year; that it regularly attracted new viewers; that even for the period where it didn’t exist as a TV show, it had books and audio adventures that filled those gaps with great aplomb.

The responses partly cited the ideas behind Doctor Who, but mostly, the workshop attendees talked about the characters, both lead and support, that populated the regularly changing worlds.

That led me in turn to talk about one of the show’s great writers, from whom I learned so much about writing supporting characters.

I of course refer to Robert Holmes.

Holmes was a genius at writing supporting characters that were bright and engaging people in their own right. He understood that to engage people in a story, you need not only lead characters you care about, but for those characters to live in a world filled with other fully realised people. Even if the latter only got a fraction of the screentime.

His supporting characters were not only there as plot devices, to force certain things to occur or to advise the Doctor or one of his companions of key exposition. They made the worlds the Doctor visited more real by making their societies real, and by having lives that extended beyond the story we saw. So many of them demonstrably had lives before we saw them and, if they were lucky enough to survive the episodes, would clearly have lives beyond it, too.

Take Robert Holmes’s Carnival of Monsters, which is essentially a story about a customs dispute. It contains three blue-skinned government employees who could easily have been identical cyphers but instead had discussions and arguments about government policy, the possibility of a worker’s revolt and the different attitudes members of a society might have about those social and political conditions in which they lived. They added texture to a world we never really saw, showing that it was not a homogenous civilisation with only a single viewpoint on how to live – just like the world we live in.

Carnival also contains two travelling entertainers who seem quite affable and fun, but who have an illegal device that treats sentient beings as zoo animals, and treats both them and the actual animals with less respect and care than in most zoos. They are quite nice people doing quite a terrible thing, without much thought. That ambiguity (good people doing terrible things; terrible people doing good things) immediately provides an engaging story-telling concept, a dichotomy that is used so well in more recent shows like Dexter, Being Human and Breaking Bad.

Robert Holmes also wrote The Ribos Operation, the first story in the Key to Time arc with Tom Baker’s Doctor and the first Romana. It contains a scene that is wholly unnecessary to the plot but is also one of the most moving scenes in the series.

The young, fresh-faced conman Unstoffe is fleeing from a guard and is hidden by a homeless man in rags - Binro the Heretic. Binro was ridiculed and exiled for daring to believe the little lights in the sky were not ice crystals, but the lights from other suns, and that those suns might harbour other worlds and other beings. His hands are gnarled, he lived in squalor and he is treated badly by the guard and others he meets. From him, we learn about this planet’s history, but in a very personal way.

When he tells Unstoffe his theory, instead of being ridiculed, Binro is met with kindness. Unstoffe actually tells him that those worlds and people exist; that one day, people will turn to each other and say ‘Binro was right’. Binro, tears in his eyes, commits to helping Unstoffe escape. When later he puts himself between Unstoffe and harm, it’s especially moving because those two characters, in so few scenes, have a bond borne of kindness and hope. It’s absolutely unnecessary to the main story we are seeing, but it’s one of the things that makes the story matter, and work so well.

Similarly, the vile and cruel Graff Vynda-K shows his only spark of true humanity near the end, when his old friend and brother-in-arms, Sholakh, is crushed beneath falling rock. For the only time, Graff doesn’t care about the precious stone he’s spent all this time killing and scheming to get. He only cares that his friend is dying, and when Sholakh breathes his last, Graff bends to kiss the closed eyes of his only friend. For that moment, I have sympathy for an otherwise shallow and hateful man. Quite an achievement. Again, it doesn’t contribute to the plot, but it does contribute to that story being memorable and emotionally affecting.

Robert Holmes wrote some of my favourite Doctor Who stories from the Patrick Troughton to the Colin Baker eras, including the The Time Warrior, The Pyramids of Mars, The Sun Makers and The Caves of Androzani.

Doctor Who: Robots of Death – Courtesy of BBC Worldwide

Classic Doctor Who of course had many terrific writers, including Chris Boucher (The Robots of Death) and Terry Nation (Genesis of the Daleks) but Holmes was always the standout for me.

As a writer, he clearly demonstrated the power of telling memorable stories through creating strong, fully realised supporting characters.Through lively rather than merely expositionary dialogue, these characters help to build pictures and demonstrate elements of the wider world they inhabit, creating texture and emotional connection. Although they often serve to advance plot and give the lead characters interesting opportunities for interaction, these characters are not there solely to act as plot devices, obstacles or drivers of events: they are people, real and whole, with concerns, personalities, relationships and opinions that go beyond their function in the story.

These are lessons I try to remember in my own work, to make the worlds I build more real by making sure that everyone we meet in the story is a whole person, through whom the reader learns about the society as well as the protagonists –  and perhaps the reader will care for their fates, too.

Other Doctor Who posts:

What Doctor Who Means To Me (my take)
What Doctor Who Means to Me pt 1 (reader stories)
What Doctor Who Means to Me pt 2 (reader stories)

Review: Caution: Contains Small Parts by Kirstyn McDermott (AWW Challenge #11)

The 12 Planets series from Twelfth Planet Press continues to deliver brilliant stories from amazing women writers. (Yes, I know I have a book in that collection. Please excuse the hubris. The company I share in this series makes me giddy with glee!) Kirstyn McDermott’s Caution: Contains Small Parts, the ninth in the series, is another publication of excellence.

McDermott has a real skill for sneaking up on you with her horror, and then for taking you in unexpected directions. Scenarios you think will be full of gore and terror end up strangely sad and sweet; those who seem like victims might just be perpetrators of a different kind; those who seem cruel may simply have a different perspective. Human motivation is complex, so the relationship of an individual and the strange world they inhabit may not be what you think.

I want to avoid spoilers, and sometimes the shift in perspective offered in these stories is subtle, so in this respect I’ll keep my comments short and possibly cryptic. So… the title story, Caution: Contains Small Parts is possibly my favourite for becoming not at all what I expected, and moving me deeply in the process. As a writer, Horn creeped me out the most as a cautionary tale of unintended consequences. The resolution of What Amanda Wants was horrific, and I feel like maybe I’m a terrible person for finding it so satisfying as well.  The Home For Broken Dolls is sad and lonely, and the elements of what are superficially horror just feel like a personification of justifiable “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any longer” rage that ends in a wonderful sense of hope rather than destruction.

I’m not sure how useful that is to you, but honestly, the 12 Planets series is good value for money, individually or as a subscription, so I recommend you just go on over to the site and buy this one, then buy the rest, and wait for the tenth to be released.

Get the paperback from Twelfth Planet Press
Subscribe to the 12 Planets series as ebooks or paperbacks
See Kirstyn’s blog and find out about her other books
Listen to Kirstyn read from the eponymous short story Caution: Contains Small Parts at the 2012 Melbourne Writer’s Festival

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, smartphone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Review: Postcards from Surfers by Helen Garner (AWW Challenge #10)

Tim came home with a book for me the other day: the Penguin edition of Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers. I know of Garner of course, but hadn’t actually got around to reading it. Bless my feller, that’s a lack now made up.

Postcards from Surfers is a collection of 11 short stories, first published in 1985. I read the collection in two days and feel I must certainly return to them, read again, savour the elegance of the prose and the almost tangible atmosphere each story evokes. They are less narrative structures than paintings made of words, exploring relationships, love, loss, delusion, and self realisation. There’s humour and pathos, and often at the end of a story, the sense of holding one’s breath. Some feel end on the brink of some new story, it seems.

The story from which the collection gets its title, Postcard from Surfers, reminds me in a lot of ways of childhood holidays of mine in its atmosphere, though the rest of it is far from my own life.  The prose style is gorgeous, lyrical, with a rhythm that was so irresistable that I interupted Tim’s own book so I could read the first page aloud to him. The posting of the postcards at the end is an intriguing little twist and really is what makes the story work.

The Dark, The LIght is one of my favourites, with its jumble of images and a sort of surreal collective description of someone from your life choosing to leave it (perhaps a sibling leaving through marriage; perhaps a friend just withdrawing slowly from a friendship).

I don’t want to review story-by-story, though, so I will say again – Garner’s prose is poetry and word-painting, there are stories here but there are bigger things too – atmospheres and truths (or at least some people’s truths) and perspectives that get into your head and leave you holding your breath, thinking about the implications, where your own life may fall on a Venn diagram with the scenes you’re now witnessing.

But for all their complexity and non-linear bites-of-life storytelling, each piece is so easy to read. The words slip into you so simply, and then hang around, coating your synapses. In a good way.

So, yeah. Helen Garner. I think I really like her.

Buy Postcards from Surfers in paperback or ebook from Penguin
Get the Penguin Kindle edition from Amazon.

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, iPhone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Lost and Found 6: Miracles

The smashed crutch was found in Montreal, at the seedier end of Chinatown. The number of pieces indicated a particularly vehement dislike of the thing.

The popular image of a faith-healed cripple, tossing a walking aid jubilantly in the air as they skipped chirpily from the scene of their salvation was clearly inaccurate. The image conjured by this wreckage of a crutch was more one of vindictive rage. Fuck you, crutch, the pieces said, I always hated you. Fuck off and never come back.

If it hadn’t been for Rosy the Bag Lady, the whole shards-of-crutch incident might have gone unnoticed. But she told someone about the man she’d seen, hobbling along on one crutch. About the angelic little child who had appeared out of nowhere and held hands out to the man. The man had fallen to the ground with a cry, and the child had petted his legs, lifted the crutch, snapped it in two and fled, giggling, into a mist.

To be fair, the first person she told didn’t believe a word of it, because Rosy the Bag Lady was pretty famous among her set for seeing things. Celine Dion bickering with William Shatner over a poutine, aliens singing French karaoke, Jacques Cartier in a bearskin coat, and talking patchwork cats weren’t the half of it.

But by her twentieth retelling, the story had gained some credence, partly because it was being told in loops all around the streets of Montreal. It had been overheard and retold in a dizzy spiral of rumour and breathless hope from the Parc du Mont-Royal to the coffee houses of Mile End; from the biodome of St Helen’s Island and up and down the banks of the St Lawrence River; whispered in the plain corridors of the underground city and amongst the ripest tomatoes of the Jean-Talon market.

People began to visit the grimy street where the miracle was said to have happened. Flowers were left, and notes thanking god, fate, the stars, the mysteries for kindness given, and begging, of course, for one more, just one, gesture of grace. Someone yarnbombed a nearby lamppost with a colourful offering; graffiti of joy got painted over the corrugated iron and the filthy brick.

And a man came, who limped, and stared down at the pieces of a crutch, painted now with happy acrylic daisies, woven through with plastic ivy and rain-damped wool.  Like all the other visitors to this strange holy site of hope, he brought one question and left with new ones, although his new questions were unique.

If that little shit hadn’t tried to mug me, was his question, and broken my bloody crutch, and if I hadn’t finished the job on his thieving skull, would he have staggered off and fallen off the overpass onto the freeway? And does this mean I got away with murder?

Still and all, he gave thanks, and limped away on his newly healed broken ankle, and swore to live a better life.

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, smartphone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.