FAMILY FORTUNES UNFOLD
The quiet complexities of surrogacy contrast with the explosiveness of a family split
Melbourne-based Angela Savage already has three well-received, Thaibased detective novels to her credit, all shortlisted for Ned Kelly Awards and all starring Australian PI Jane Keeney, an English teacher whose move into gumshoe territory has been inspired by her passion for detective fiction.
Her latest novel, written as part of her PhD in Creative Writing at Monash University, is far deeper and more nuanced, although also set partly in Thailand, and hardly less gripping than any of those cliffhanger whodunnits as it negotiates the ultra-sensitive minefield of intercultural surrogacy.
Hoping to force the hand of a stalled Bangkok romance, Anna has returned to Australia after more than a decade working on aid issues in South-East Asia; her sister Meg, approaching 40 and miserably childless after seven years of failed IVF, has just learnt of the possibility of surrogacy arrangements with Thailand; while 26-year-old Mukda Boonpranee has used up all her meagre resources nursing her son and mother through fever, and decided to follow a friend’s apparently successful example and at least research the possibility of bearing some welloff foreigner’s child.
Savage skilfully intertwines these three at first distinctly separate, almost antipathetical characters to the point where each is altered and softened by their interaction. Anna is desperate to show her sister the Thailand she sees in all its beauty, poverty and difference; Meg is undermined by its heat and strangeness, and her terrible all-consuming fixation on taking home her own child; Mukda, or Mod, wilts under the spotlit attention of so many foreigners and desperately misses her own little son.
Like Anna, the reader does not always find it easy to sympathise with humourless Meg, who is both self-obsessed and self-righteous, but also, like Anna, perhaps has to wonder why the benefit of the doubt so often goes more generously to strangers than to intimates. In the same context, Savage raises interesting questions about Australia’s pervasively insular attitude to, for example, natural disasters, that sees our own as both worse and more worthy than anybody else’s.
The response to Black Saturday, which occurs in the course of the novel, prompts her to regret a lost opportunity to acknowledge how those experiences of loss and grief, courage and compassion connect human beings to one another rather than separating them. Intriguingly insightful on a number of unexpected issues, fascinatingly informative on both surrogacy and Thai/Australian cultural interaction, and with a nice little subplot around pearls and their significance, Mother of Pearl is a new, more complex departure for Angela Savage and a shapely pleasure for her many fans.
Life Before, Carmel Reilly’s first adult novel, moves back and forth in time between two generations of the same Victorian family in 1993 and 2016.
It opens with a mystery: police call on Lori Spyker to tell her that her brother Scott has been injured in an accident. But Lori hasn’t seen Scott for 20-plus years, not since Scott’s last year at school, the summer they were both teenagers, when the unimaginable repercussions of an alcohol-fuelled catastrophe blew their family apart. Indeed, her husband and two young children have no idea that she still has a brother.
Reilly works her way between past and present, between Lori’s story in contemporary suburban Melbourne and her mother Pam’s in country town Northam, where the family is securely part of the local establishment. The juxtaposition of the two time-frames enhances the elements of suspense without giving anything away, so that the reader comes to one horrifying climax without realising that another is on the way.
Even minor characters are well fleshed out, there’s a thoroughly unexpected but quite believable twist just before the end, and some minute but important details that are only very casually revealed at the very last minute.
Most effective is the bookending of the novel by two short, seminal 1993 sections, one pre-disaster, the other post, their respective placement most heart-stoppingly critical to the whole structure of the book.
KATHARINE ENGLAND