The Choke, Sofie Laguna, Allen & Unwin, $37
To see the world through a child’s eyes has become one of those desirable ideas of mystical awareness for adults, completely forgetting how much tangled confusion can mingle with the unfiltered wonder.
Sofie Laguna’s novel, The Choke, with its 10-year-old protagonist, Justine Lee, is a subtle but explosive exploration of the life of a young girl living amid her extended family on the banks of the Murray River in Australia. It is a tough, unsentimental and perhaps necessarily remedial view of childhood.
Set in 1971, Justine’s world is a lush and even magical landscape where the green eucalypts cluster close to the slow brown river and threaten to throttle its flow. It is also a place of very real family history. Justine – or Jussie – lives in a neglected house with her grandfather, Pop, who still carries the burden of psychic damage from imprisonment by the Japanese on the Burma Railway in World War II.
Justine’s father is a charismatic and violent criminal, seldom at home. Her mother has long left. There is Aunt Rita, but Pop has disowned her because she is a lesbian. Justine has two halfbrothers, who live in a make-shift caravan park down the road with their own mother.
Justine can’t read but her dyslexia hasn’t been picked up by the school. Her grandfather is frequently doubled-up by pain. Eggs from their chickens are a mainstay of meals, except when Pop is drinking or not feeling well, then Justine doesn’t eat.
The Choke remorselessly strips back the layers from an apparently idyllic childhood to reveal darker things. It is a class-act, a skilled dissection, where sudden realisations strike the reader with particularly potent force.
Laguna won the 2015 Miles Franklin Prize for her first novel,
The Eye of the Sheep, which focused on a young boy with Asperger’s syndrome, an alcoholic father, and a binge-eating mother.
The Choke explores a similar territory. It is a country of damage where the personal victories are not those a reader expects.
The Choke is a well-written book, conveying in nuanced prose Justine’s world with all its sights and sounds. Laguna’s disclosures often change the narrative-frame and they are perfectly paced to have the biggest impact. The final section is both harrowing and stubbornly triumphant.
Despite initial appearances, it is not a comfortable novel. Laguna offers up a loss of innocence in the underside of the Australian dream. Being drawn into Justine’s world is to be lured by sympathies and complicity, but also to be ambushed by ignorance and sexual violence. The result is often tense.