Category: Gillian Mears

Allen & Unwin, Australia, Author, AWW2016, Book review, Fiction, Gillian Mears, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Australia 2016, Setting

‘The Mint Lawn’ by Gillian Mears

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The Mint Lawn by Gillian Mears

Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 2011; 420 pages.

What is it that propels us to read an author’s work as soon as we hear of their deaths?

Not long after I discovered the sad news that Gillian Mears had died (she was just 51 years old and had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 17 years earlier), I extracted her debut novel, The Mint Lawn, from my pile of Australian books, where it had been languishing since 2011.

I remember the date because I acquired the book not long after I finished reading Mears’ award-winning Foal’s Bread, which was newly published at the time. That book was astonishing – written in beautiful, sometimes difficult, language, littered with intriguing leitmotifs, and filled with such emotion that it has lived on in my memory ever since.

I rather suspect that The Mint Lawn, first published in 1991, will also live on in my memory. It earned Mears the Australian/Vogel Literary Award, a prize given to an unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of 35.

It’s quite an extraordinary debut novel — on all kinds of levels. It’s ambitious, creative, powerful, authentic. And it has the feel of having been written by someone who is mature beyond their years (Mears was just 26 when she wrote it). But it’s the story-telling, multi-generational and quintessentially rural Australian, that makes it such a rewarding read.

A marriage gone wrong

The Mint Lawn is essentially one woman’s tale — of her disappointing marriage to an older man, and her complicated but loving relationship with her mother, killed before her time in a car accident, over whom she is continuing to grieve.

Clementine is 25 and has never left the town on the northern NSW coast where she was born, raised and educated. She’s trapped in a marriage with quirky old Hugh, the man who was once her music teacher, and is desperate to escape — to live a more adventurous and passionate life — but something is holding her back, and she’s not quite sure what.

The story flits between Clementine’s increasingly desperate current situation (told in the first person) and her happy but complicated childhood growing up with her auctioneer father, social-climbing, party-loving mother and two horse-crazy sisters (told in the third person).

The latter storyline helps inform the former so that the reader comes to understand Clementine’s place in the family and the ways in which her outlook and attitudes have been shaped by her mother, a woman who tried to make small-town life much more exciting and glamorous than it really was.

It’s only when Clementine comes to terms with her past (and her reasons for staying in the town) that she finds the courage to follow a different path.

A truly immersive read

Admittedly, it took me quite a long time to read this book, not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because I had a lot of other stuff going on. However, whenever I picked it up I was immediately transported into the topsy-turvy, sometimes funny, sometimes sad story of Clementine and her crazy but loving family.

It’s a truly immersive read, perhaps because it’s so richly detailed and multi-layered — nothing feels tacked on. You simply get thrown into the maelstrom of Clementine’s life, and because it’s mainly told from her perspective in a frank, forthright and sometimes crude manner (there’s quite a lot of graphic observations about sex and sexuality in this book, it has to be said) you get to share a rare intimacy with all the characters in this rather remarkable story.

In many ways it’s like a literary soap opera — there’s drama at every turn, but it’s not overdone, and even the landscape and the wide cast of subsidiary characters lend an authenticity that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever endured small-town life.

Unfortunately, The Mint Lawn has only been published in Australia. If you live elsewhere, do check bookfinder.com for second-hand copies, as it’s definitely worth tracking down — but be warned, it’s probably cheaper to buy a brand new edition directly from Oz.

This is my 31st book for #ReadingAustralia2016 and my 22nd for #AWW2016.

Allen & Unwin, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Gillian Mears, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Foal’s Bread’ by Gillian Mears

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Foal's-Bread

Fiction – Kindle edition; Allen & Unwin; 368 pages; 2011.

A book about horses would not normally be my cup of tea, but Gillian Mears’ Foal’s Bread — her first novel in 16 years — is more than just a story about equines.

It’s a story about love, sex, joy, sadness, jealousy and ambition. It’s about complicated families and the ways in which history often repeats itself within those families. It’s about the hardship of living on the land in the years between the wars, of milking cows and breeding horses, despite floods, drought and raging bush fires. But above all, it’s about aspiring to better things — and chasing dreams.

Tomboy Noah

When the book opens we meet 14-year-old Noah, a tomboy, and her father, Cecil, as the pair are coming to the end of a two-week job — driving a mob of pigs to market via horseback. It’s 1926 and the setting is rural New South Wales.

We soon learn that Noah has a love of horses and, specifically, of jumping them over high jumps — what we now tend to call “puissance” — on the equestrian showjumping circuit. And once the pigs have been loaded onto the boat that will take them to market in Sydney, Noah will be free to compete in the ladies’ highjump at Port Lake Show; her dad will compete in the men’s equivalent.

But first, the reader is let in on a shameful and sordid secret: Noah is pregnant and her Uncle Nipper, who has just died, aged 80, is the father. While her dad is off boozing in town for the evening, Noah gives birth alone in their camp by a creek with only the “pigs watching what was coming out from between her own legs”.

Confronting scene

As an opening to a novel, this is quite a confronting — and shocking — scene. Even more so, when Noah just gets on with it, wraps the “rag doll” in a shirt, plants a kiss on its face, puts it in a butter box and sends it down river, never to be seen again.

A kind of triumphant relief was sweeping through her that it was done, the baby gone. She couldn’t realise that for the rest of her life she’d be watching Flaggy Creek spinning away from her, the fast waters making it disappear like a little bend-and-flag pony that’s forgotten to take the final turn.

All is not lost, however, because a week later Noah meets the man who becomes the love of her life: Rowley — known as Roley — Nancarrow, an Australian showjumping champion. He presents her with a foal’s bread, a bread-shaped piece of placenta that some foals have in their mouths when they are born, which is dried out as a good luck charm.

“In a high-jump foal, it’s a sure sign he’ll go to the heights’ for a galloper, fast,” explains Roley.

The charm works — for a little while, anyway. The pair marry, have children, set up a home on the Nancarrow family farm and make plans to start their own showjumping team.

Grand sweeping drama

But in the tradition of grand sweeping dramas, life does not play out the way both Noah and gentle, kind-hearted Roley plan. Curveballs come in the form of a fiercely jealous and bullying mother-in-law, who does her best to drive a wedge between her son and Noah. One of their children is born disabled. And Roley, who survives a lightning strike, develops numbness in his feet and legs which puts an end to his showjumping career.

There comes a point when Noah must run the farm unaided and this is when her emotional problems, so long repressed, manifest themselves in violent outbursts — usually directed at her horses, whom she treats cruelly — and alcoholic binges.

This probably sounds like a soap opera, but Mears refrains from emotionally manipulating the reader. Indeed, the novel is completely free of sentiment, but somehow, in giving her narrative such a strong sense of time and place, you get so caught up in the mood of Foal’s Bread that it’s hard not to care for the people she writes about. Yes, it’s a sad story (Lisa, from ANZLitLovers, says “Foal’s Bread is not a book to ‘enjoy’”) — but there’s something about it that makes it a compelling read.

No neat solutions

What I admire most about Mears’ skill as a writer is that she never offers her characters neat solutions. They are left to flounder, to muddle along; they feel flesh-and-blood real. The Nancarrow family are not great communicators. No one ever explains how they are feeling. But the way the characters talk — in a stilted, old-fashioned vernacular — seems to fit the mood of the story.

As much as I enjoyed following the trials and tribulations of this complicated, strange family, I was occasionally disoriented by the time shifts — for instance, one minute Noah is 14, the next she is 22 and happily married. And some of the prose feels slightly clunky — normally when Mears is filling in backstory for her characters or explaining some of the finer points of showjumping history.

The prose, in general, appears to be written in a deliberately old-fashioned style that takes some getting used to — for instance, “the”, as a definite article, is largely absent so that characters go to “main house” instead of “the main house”. (According to Helen Elliot’s review in The Age, “Foal’s Bread is written in the vernacular of the times”.) But once you get into the flow of it, the language works its charm.

I especially loved the way the narrative is tied to the land, and there are reoccurring motifs — the floodwaters, an always-blooming Jacaranda tree, heart-shaped items found in nature — that make it a particularly visual read.

Foal’s Bread is a powerful book and rightly garnered much critical acclaim. You can listen to a fascinating interview with the author on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.