A surreal romp
Eleanor is having a bad time; a really, really bad time. She's just split from her boyfriend, found out she has breast cancer, has had a mastectomy, had to quit her teaching job while undergoing chemo, and is now broke, angry, depressed and back home living with her mum.
Her supposed support group is of no support, neither is her BFF, who is busy getting happily married and pregnant; Eleanor's surgeon may look like George
Clooney but he has no bedside manner, she's been witnessed throwing herself at her elderly, balding and married GP in a moment of despair and desperation and, when she does finally venture out on a first date (with cleft-palated “Harry the Harelip”), she is spurned in the throes of passion, when the ravages of her post-surgery self are awkwardly revealed.
Feeling battered in body, mind and soul, she tries to escape reality by taking a job at a small school in a tiny, isolated Australian community. However, the much-loved previous teacher has gone missing in mysterious circumstances, the school secretary thinks Eleanor is a poor substitute and can't stop giving her the evil eye, the freakish local priest has a penchant for the carillon (The Chimes, anyone?) and exorcism, one of her pupils won't stop ogling her, there's a strange man creeping about her house — and what is it with the smelly, noisy, rundown, old bus that keeps eerily appearing out of nowhere?
If you think it all sounds a bit like a Helen Fielding-penned episode of The Twilight Zone, you'd be right. The book is billed by the publisher as “Bridget Jones meets The Exorcist in Twin Peaks”.
Throw in the author's mentions of The Shining near the beginning and you know the ride is going to get pretty surreal.
The problem is, if you're going to set the bar that high, you've got to deliver and, for me, this book didn't justify the hype. I know it's supposed to be black humour but I found Eleanor's character, language and actions OTT (although Barrett does make some poignant observations about shock, grief and rage), the cultural referencing relentless and the gothic horror romp overcooked.
The malevolent force haunting Eleanor is most likely a metaphor for the invisible monster that is cancer and it is a clever analogy about facing — or running from — your personal demons in circumstances out of your control.
The problem is, it's been done before — and to my mind much better — by homegrown author Elizabeth Knox in Wake, written in response to nursing her mother who died from a form of motor neurone disease. The Bus on Thursday lacks Wake's genuine creepiness, subtlety and originality, which was disappointing as I loved Barrett's delightful and engaging first novel, Rush Oh!, about a whaling family in New South Wales in the early 1900s.
The book has a strong visual presence and I can see the film rights being snapped up
— if the author (also a screenwriter and director) doesn't have her own such plans already.