Book Review: The First Stone by Helen Garner
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Helen Garner could write a book about painting one wall of her living room and it would still be fascinating, that’s how good a writer she is. But having now read three of her books, I’m seeing a theme: she is baffled at why everybody doesn’t think like her and more baffled when people won’t take the time to try to convince her to think otherwise, then give her the opportunity to do the same.
The First Stone is creative non-fiction, meshing tales from Garner’s own personal life, particularly emphasising her and her friends’ experiences with feminism and unwanted male attention, with the story of two accusations of sexual harassment at the University of Melbourne by two students against the head of Ormond College, one of the residences. It comes to her attention when she reads about it on the front page of The Age newspaper, as the students have taken their complaint to the police after being unsatisfied with the university’s handling of the matter.
Incensed that it wasn’t kept in-house, that it detracts from “real” issues of violence and inequality women face, and that it appears to have cost a man who is guilty at most of an “inept social blunder” his reputation, Helen dashes off a sympathetic letter to the alleged perpetrator. She thinks this will be the extent of her involvement but when the verdict in the case of the second instance is delivered in court, she is there in the crowd of people watching.
After earlier being found guilty on the first charge, the second charge is dismissed. On appeal, the first conviction is also overturned. Mostly, these results are because even though the accusers are highly credible witnesses, it’s a case of “he said, she said” and there’s still reasonable doubt. By now, Garner is determined to get to the bottom of it all. But she’s shot herself in the foot. The letter she penned to the alleged perpetrator has been copied and distributed widely, even to the alleged victims and their supporters. So when Garner asks to interview them for the book, they emphatically decline. You can hardly blame them.
Instead, she talks to anyone else she can find. She interviews the alleged perpetrator extensively, his wife, members of the college, former students, and winds it all into a narrative of her own experiences and the testimony of her many feminist friends. There seems to be a clear divide between the young feminists and the older feminists. The young feminists think that they shouldn’t have to tolerate being groped by men in positions of authority. The older feminists think because they haven’t been raped that they are making mountains out of molehills.
It’s interesting in the context of the #MeToo movement in 2017 and 2018 that this argument between feminists (or at least between women) is still happening nearly twenty-five years after the Ormond incident. Catherine Deneuve and a hundred other French women have defended men’s “right” to pester persistently, including non-consensual touching, as a means of opening a dialogue about a hoped-for romantic or sexual relationship. Rose McGowan (and about a million, possibly a billion other woman from what I can tell on social media) have defended their right to never be touched again without explicit agreement, especially in an employment setting. It seems like we haven’t come very far.
I read this book in six hours and, as with all of Garner’s books, it is exquisitely well written. The approach she takes is very similar to Joe Cinque’s Consolation – she comes into the story after a lot of it has already played out in court and attempts to retry the cases without access to the main players because they won’t speak to her. There’s no satisfying conclusion, no poetic justice, no real change in Garner herself as a result of her involvement in the events.
I can understand why this book was controversial. Many people boiled it down to this proposition: why didn’t the victims simply slap the face of the man who apparently said inappropriate things in the first incident and repeatedly groped a breast in the second? That would have been a proper comeuppance, they argue, but surely he didn’t deserve to have his reputation destroyed and to lose his job. I’m one of those younger feminists; I was still in high school at the time this was all playing out. As someone who was punished for responding to a bully in a position of power at work in not exactly but something like this suggestion in the mid-2000s, I can tell you it backfires spectacularly. We can’t win when we follow the rules and we can’t win when we don’t.
Still, it’s a credit to Garner’s talent that she can take a position I inherently disagree with and write about it in such a way that I still admire her. I read somewhere recently that we should all read more books written about and by people with views opposite to our own. If they were all such a pleasure to read as The First Stone, I don’t think we’d mind so much but those kinds of books – respectful, stylish, amiably exploring multiple sides and then agreeing to disagree – are few and far between.
This is an important contribution to the debate on feminism but I also feel like I need to read a book about the Ormond incidents with a perspective from the other side. I understand there are a couple of books that fall into that category so I’ll be searching them out, too. But I doubt they’ll have the readability of The First Stone, even if I agree wholeheartedly with their messages. I guess you can’t have it all.
4 stars
*First published on Goodreads 12 January 2018
