Image credit: Text Publishing Company |
This week I am back to reading fiction from my own backyard with one of Australia’s most celebrated and versatile authors: Helen Garner. A writer of novels, screenplays, and non-fiction, Garner can do no wrong - or rather she does everything wrong, and it turns out to be righter than right- and the book I just closed the cover on, Monkey Grip, is a perfect example of this.
Nora lives in a world of sex, drugs, and community: communal
households, partners, and possessions. There is love, but there is also a whole
mess of sticky emotional navigation that comes with it. When she falls in love with
Javo, Nora is pulled into a web of addiction and an emotional rip that pulls
her one way and then another in the blink of an eye. As she battles to stay
strong during Javo’s unstable dance of loving and leaving, Nora discovers that
there are limits to the amount of love that one can give, but also there are so
many ways in which relationships can flourish, thrive, and endure.
Depicting young Australian culture in the late 1970s, Monkey
Grip is a raw and delightfully rough novel, the equivalent of a painful
massage that finally works out that knot in the muscle, or a really hard scrub
with loofah that erases that grass stain from your back. Garner is intimate and
painful in her writing, delving deep into the character of Nora and putting her
innermost emotional workings on display.
When it first came out, the book divided critics as to whether
its combination of grittiness and lyrical prose was a match, but nowadays Monkey
Grip is considered a masterpiece. Garner aggressively throws all textbook rules
of writing out the window and instead expels whatever is pushing the skin at
the tips of her fingers, seemingly without rhyme or reason. The book is a character
study in the shaping power of environments, subculture, and community; not so
much telling a story with an ending or punchline, rather following one woman
and her attempts to navigate the emotional minefields of her life. It’s a book
about nothing and everything. And the most brilliant thing about it is that a
great change happens that you don’t even recognise until the end. Over the
course of the book Nora goes on a journey of internal self-discovery and it’s
not until the very last pages and reading the thoughts that come into her head
regarding situations that she’s been in before that you realise how much she
has changed. This pleasant surprise is shared by the protagonist herself,
making it all the more satisfying when the cover is closed.
Image credit: Herald Sun |
Monkey Grip is one of those books that doesn’t draw you in with its blurb, rather the promise of an uncomfortable depiction of drug addictions and artistic insecurity works a little like a deterrent, but as soon as you start reading and you get completely enveloped in Nora’s brainwaves, there is no escape. It really is like being in a rip, scary at first but you just need to remember to let it carry you to shore… eventually. It’s a captivating and truly hypnotic read.
Author: Helen Garner, 1977
Published: First published by McPhee Gribble Publishers,
1977.
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