True Stories by Helen Garner

Author:Helen Garner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: ISBN9781921776434
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2010-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

Elizabeth Jolley’s War

‘IN THE MIDDLE of the journey of our life’, when we start to feel the weight of the crimes we are hauling behind us, we might turn to literature for wisdom. It is not readily available, but I have always found it in Elizabeth Jolley, even before I knew what I was looking for. The Old Testament, in one of its great hymns to wisdom, calls it (among other things) ‘manifold, subtil, lively, clear, undefiled, plain…’ and adds that its ‘conversation hath no bitterness’. All these things apply.

I picked up My Father’s Moon with eagerness.*; I had noticed over the preceding year or so the appearance in magazines and anthologies of new stories by Jolley which entered territory her work had hinted at before but not yet fully broached: in particular, the world of nursing, and not the shonky little rip-off nursing home of Mr Scobie’s Riddle, but a big British training institution, a military hospital in wartime.

Now here is the novel and it richly rewards the wait. All the elements of Jolley’s previous work, its familiar (even obsessive) moods, motifs and subject matters, are swung into balance with each other. It becomes clear that it was this early experience of training as a nurse in wartime England which, though she held back so many years from tackling it directly, was all the while sending waves of subdued power through everything she wrote, imbuing it with a personal and particularly female authority of tone—the authority of someone who has bitten the bullet, learnt to bear things and to be useful—an authority sometimes missed, or misread as whimsical headmistressliness, by those unmoved by her simple statements of pain and stoicism, or untickled by her crooked, skidding humour.

It is sad when senses of humour fail to meet, for nothing can be done about this, and how tedious the straight-faced must find it to be told of the spasms of enfeebling hilarity her work can provoke—something like the wild laughter of nurses, or nuns. But when one reviewer disobligingly remarked that the book reminded him of Rachmaninov, I was astonished. If there’s any composer Jolley brings to mind, it’s not a grandiose tear-jerker of a Russian but someone more like Satie—always resolutely human in scale, modest, thoughtful, quirkily melodic, with flashes of oblique humour and a light touch.

The plot, if it were wrenched against its weave into a rough chronological form, would go like this: Vera, a plain, naive girl with a German-speaking mother (social and patriotic embarrassment) and an English father, is sent away to a Quaker boarding school then on to train as a nurse during World War II; at the hospital she does well at work and study but is socially a flop, resorting to dobbing, sucking-up and petty sabotage, until she is taken up by a reputedly promiscuous doctor and his gushy wife; she falls in love with him, gets pregnant, is abandoned (the doctor vanishes as the war ends: ‘dead or believed missing’) and, rejecting her

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