Sex and death — the two key subjects of fiction — are entwined and plentiful in esteemed Australian novelist Marion Halligan’s twenty-second book, Goodbye Sweetheart, said Carmel Bird, who launched the novel in Canberra on April 14.

Bird, whose new short story collection My Hearts Are Your Hearts will be released by Spineless Wonders later this year, is good friends with Halligan (pictured on the right with Bird in Canberra) and they phone each other twice a week to discuss their writing and other shared interests.

Bird said Allen & Unwin’s publicity for Halligan’s Goodbye Sweetheart reveals that the main character, William, drowns early on, and that the novel will explore the mourning of his family.

‘Margaret Atwood says she thinks that all narrative writing is motivated by a fear and fascination with mortality. I agree with her.

‘Goodbye Sweetheart’s narrator [also] suggests that there are enough births, deaths and marriages — enough anguish here — for half a dozen nineteenth century novels.’

Bird said that, while fiction may be motivated by death, its aim is usually to seek out meaning.

‘Marion takes a pretty big cast of characters and weaves them — I am inclined to say she stitches them up — into a pattern, and the meaning — the true thing — emerges and stays in the reader’s mind.’

Bird explained how Halligan’s narrative ‘unfolds in present-day Australia, in the domestic lives of an extended and muddled family’.

While grounded in the everyday, she said, the narrative frequently spins the focus around to writers like Milton or Browning or George Eliot in particular — for William’s son, Ferdie, is a great admirer of Eliot’s novel Middlemarch.

Bird praised the rhythms of Halligan’s sentences, the precision of her words and the melody of the novel. She also said there was a delightful coincidence at the end which would put a smile on readers’ faces because, ‘Not only is there love, there is hope.’

Bird said Goodbye Sweetheart offered ‘a rich vein of fascinating short narratives’, including one about a boat that came into the bay at Eden after it had picked up smallpox in India from an infected cargo of silk. The silk was buried in Eden with the dead bodies but dug up again and made into dresses.

‘The complex everyday lives of the main characters are threaded with mysterious narratives such as that one,’ Bird said. ‘And these narratives form a subtle, dark undertow to the everyday problems of the characters.

‘So, while the surfaces of lives are followed in meticulous detail, from the clothes people wear to the food they eat, the wines they drink, the glasses they drink from, the landscapes they contemplate — a darker undertow works away in the depths.’

Goodbye Sweetheart
Marion Halligan
Allen & Unwin, $29.99

PS: Keep an eye out for my interview with Marion Halligan coming soon to A Bigger Brighter World and read my recent Q&A with Carmel Bird about My Hearts Are Your Hearts: Twenty New Stories and Their Origins.