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Entitlement

Jessica White

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Aug 03, 2012 Bree T rated it liked it

Shelves: arc, australian, contemporary, literary, aww2012, cultural

Cate McConville has not returned to her childhood home in eight years. After the disappearance of her brother, she could not set foot back on the family farm, preferring to stay in Sydney where she works as a doctor and devote her spare time to haunting message boards for missing persons, making and posting fliers seeking information on her brother and searching for him.

Now she has been called back to the farm because the syndicate of family members who own it wish to sell it. Cate knows she can Cate McConville has not returned to her childhood home in eight years. After the disappearance of her brother, she could not set foot back on the family farm, preferring to stay in Sydney where she works as a doctor and devote her spare time to haunting message boards for missing persons, making and posting fliers seeking information on her brother and searching for him.

Now she has been called back to the farm because the syndicate of family members who own it wish to sell it. Cate knows she can never let that happen – the farm is Eliot’s home, it should be his. It needs to be there so that he has something to come back to. The only signatures missing from the contract are hers and Eliot’s and Cate will never, ever sign. And she makes sure that her parents, her aunt and her uncle and his wife know this in no uncertain terms.

Everywhere she goes back in her hometown and on the farm, Cate is haunted by memories of her brother – the times they shared, the moments, the milestones. Her parents seem to have given up hope – her father can’t wait to get off the land and retire somewhere else and her mother has buried herself in denial by cleaning obsessively. Cate doesn’t see how they can even consider selling the property and clashes with both of them, in particular her father. On her ‘side’ is her aunt who has lived for many years in the city, who Cate has always felt more connected to and Finchley, a man who has followed her from Sydney all the way to her hometown on nothing more than a whim. Cate is also enlisting the help of Mellor, an Aboriginal man who has worked on the farm for many years.

Entitlement was a book that was quite deceiving – originally when it popped up on the doorstep, I thought it was going to be another of the vastly popular rural romances that I’ve read plenty of this year. But it’s not – instead this is a story of loss, family, the land and indigenous issues. So if you look at the cover and think oh, this looks like a nice story about a city girl returning to her farm and finding love, that’s not exactly what you’re going to get. Our protagonist Cate is about 30 – she grew up on a farm in a remote area, running wild about the property with her brother Eliot. The two were ridiculously close – they were each other’s best friend as well as sibling and it seems like they were rarely, if ever, apart.

When Cate was a teenager, she began to clash with her father and that led her to seek a life in Sydney at University, studying to be a doctor. She would return to the farm on her breaks until she was about 21 or 22 when Eliot disappeared without a trace not long after he came to visit her in Sydney. Since then she has not set foot back on her family property, nor has she even spoken to her father. She lashed out at him and blamed him for Eliot’s disappearance, citing the pressure placed on Eliot by their father to take over the family farm when the time came. Cate suspected Eliot’s dream lay in other directions but he would sacrifice it for duty and when he disappeared she assumed that was the reason why, if it wasn’t foul play. Cate cannot bare to think that Eliot might never come home to them – something that it seems everyone else in the family has long accepted. Even though Eliot didn’t particularly desire to take over the farm, it was still his home and Cate is determined he should have that home to come back to.

Cate was a very hard character to connect to. We’re the same age and although I can understand what it’s like to be at odds with a parent (I too clash with my father, particularly when we spend too much time under the same roof!) I have to say that I think a lot of her actions were the actions of a much younger, or immature woman. She was fond of starting fights, yelling and then storming off to run out her frustrations. It’s clear that she’s angry, frustrated and very unsatisfied. She has no friends in Sydney, she has no partner, she barely speaks to her family. Her whole life revolves around attempting to find Eliot alive, which, after all these years, seems to be a hopeless task to everyone except Cate. There were times I found her so frustrating, although I did try to be sympathetic to her, given the close relationship the author carefully built up of her and her brother. The farm was worth quite a bit of money, enough for all of the parties involved to take a nice slice and make a life somewhere else for themselves, off the land and the work that came with it. It was Cate’s father that did pretty much the lion’s share of work on the farm – his sister, Cate’s aunt lived in Melbourne, Cate lived in Sydney, Eliot was missing and his brother, Cate’s uncle, did live on the property with his wife, but contributed very little work wise. I felt he was quite right in his desire to sell and enjoy what was left of his life, given his health was not great. The fact that Cate did not even attempt to see this sale as an attempt by other people to try and better their lives, was a bit blind.

Interwoven within the story are tales of the local Aboriginal population and that of the generations preceding this one – the ‘Stolen Generation’ and incidents of Aboriginals losing their land and being forced out of communities. I can’t say too much about this particular line of plot without ruining the book but I did have a bit of an issue with the way in which everything was resolved. The horror that was inflicted upon Aboriginal families up until probably around the 1970′s in terms of taking children away from their parents is undeniable and unquestionable. However, I do not particularly like this as a device for pretty much blackmailing Cate – dangling something in front of her that she could not refuse in return for something that was amazingly huge. I think that in this situation, it seems to have worked out for almost everyone – Cate got the answer she so desperately needed and the others also got what they wanted but I did have questions left at the end that I felt didn’t get answered. What happened to Cate next? Where did she go? How was she going to handle the huge financial responsibility she took on? What would become of the farm? How would the Aboriginals who had worked there gain an income?

This book had some strengths and some weaknesses. It wasn’t very long, under 300p so I feel that there could have been a little more definite closure and also some fleshing out of the budding romance which barely even qualifies as a romance. But I did enjoy that this book did go in a totally different direction to what I thought it would and also embraced and highlighted a very significant issue in Australian history as well as attempting to offer a resolution. I’m just not sure that I find that resolution entirely believable. ...more

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Jul 26, 2012 Shelleyrae at Book'd Out rated it really liked it

Shelves: provided-by-publisher, aussie-author, arc-are

Entitlement explores the grief, bitterness and anger of loss and estrangement. Eight years ago Eliot went missing and now his sister, Cate McConville, refuses to allow her parents to sell the family property while a chance remains that her brother may one day come home.

Cate's obsession with her brother's disappearance has had a detrimental affect on every facet of her life. While I was sympathetic to her overwhelming sense of loss, I found her largely selfish, cold and bitter. Her lack of empat Entitlement explores the grief, bitterness and anger of loss and estrangement. Eight years ago Eliot went missing and now his sister, Cate McConville, refuses to allow her parents to sell the family property while a chance remains that her brother may one day come home.

Cate's obsession with her brother's disappearance has had a detrimental affect on every facet of her life. While I was sympathetic to her overwhelming sense of loss, I found her largely selfish, cold and bitter. Her lack of empathy for others, particularly her mother, is disturbing, though perhaps is more understandable in terms of her relationship with her father. Only the glimpses of Cate as a child and teen showing her close bond with her brother offer some sense of redemption, yet even then, there is a subtle current of self centeredness in their relationship. I found I grew increasingly frustrated by Cate failure to acknowledge her own contribution to the dysfunctional family dynamics.

The relationships within this family are central to this story. Cate's father, Blake, is almost wholly unlikeable. Though I did feel some pity for him because of his current physical pain, I was appalled by his racism and his attitude towards his daughter. Nora, Cate's mother, seems weak in the face of the behaviour of her husband and daughter. Elliot largely remains an enigma through out the novel with only Cate's memories giving him life. He has been missing eight years when the novel begins, simply walking away one morning with no further trace. What specifically kept me reading Entitlement was my desire to know Eliot's fate and I found I developed several theories as to why Eliot would disappear as the novel progressed.

Loss is the major theme of Entitlement explored not only within the McConville family, but also within the indigenous mob that lives on the fringes of the family property. Mellor, the McConville family's longtime farmhand, has a family history defined by loss, from the loss of his tribe's native land and culture to the forcible removal of aboriginal children from their parents. This element is a significant aspect of the story.

Told in the third person, at times I found the way the narrative segues from the present to memory with little warning disconcerting. The pace of the novel is measured yet White skillfully sustains the suspense throughout the story, despite the lack of urgency in the plot. I thought the tone stylish with evocative descriptions of the Australian landscape and it's people.

Though there is closure for the McConvilles's, and Mellor's mob, there is no happy ending. Entitlement is a profound, sober novel that I found thought provoking and interesting. ...more

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Nov 15, 2012 Michael Livingston rated it really liked it

Mar 16, 2018 Stuart Barnes is currently reading it

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