On the night I finished reading Marion Halligan’s Goodbye Sweetheart a quote from the TV series Broadchurch grabbed my attention. A mother whose child has been murdered says, ‘I used to assume that grief was something inside that you could fight and vanquish, but it’s not. It’s an external thing, like a shadow. You can’t escape it. You just have to live with it. And it doesn’t grow any smaller.’
Goodbye Sweetheart explores many different kinds of grief. The sudden death of a loving partner, the grief of never really getting to know a parent and the shock of sexual betrayal, to name a few.
It starts with a heart attack in a public swimming pool in Canberra. The death of William Cecil allows Halligan to rove through the minds of those who loved him and to see how they deal with the loss. We also learn more about who he was.
We meet William’s first wife Nerys (a new-ager who recalls little about him), his second wife Helen (who still smarts that she left him for Lynette), his third wife Lynette (who finds out more than she bargained for about his predilections after his death) and his lover Barbara (who loved him and misses him).
Of William’s three children (one from each marriage), we get to know his son Ferdie best. He is a PhD student in the UK who fears that, like Casaubon from Middlemarch, his ambition might be greater than his intelligence and that this will turn his lifework to ‘ashes and dung’.
We also meet the marvelous grande dame, Pepita, age 90, a strong-willed character, who believes you can train yourself out of the ‘withering, self-poisoning sin’ of envy—‘the sin of Casaubon’.
‘A walk with love and death’
Goodbye Sweetheart is Halligan’s 11th novel and 22nd book.
As she says in Home Truth (edited by Carmel Bird), she writes about the same subjects as the Greeks and Shakespeare — the things that matter — ‘About life that is a walk with love and death’.
This is borne out in Goodbye Sweetheart. The dead linger in their words and phrases (uttered posthumously by those who mourn them) and through ‘embodiment’ (for example, ‘the Cecil girl’—Lynette and William’s daughter Erin—seems somehow to embody Barbara’s dead daughter Chloe).
Love, while present in the other relationships depicted, is most sympathetically drawn in William’s brother Jack’s relationship with his wife Rosamund and through Barbara’s memories of Chloe. I found both to be moving portraits of loss.
Halligan is no stranger to grief, having lost her husband of 35 years, Graham Halligan, in 1998 and her daughter Lucy at age 38 in 2004.
In Goodbye Sweetheart, she writes elegantly and convincingly about grief’s shadows. She also shows how objects, in their solidity, will often outlive us—their nicks and scratches originating from the lives and narratives of people long gone.
The lost bloom of youth
Halligan, who is now 74, has taken the opportunity in this novel to touch on the losses sustained through growing older. As Pepita gets her nails done by the fresh-faced Vivienne, she observes, ‘It is youth that looks like that. When she [Vivienne] gets older she will be a woman with skin still lovely, but it will not have that bloom of youth, that downy smoothness, that luminous freshness. Each of these phrases had a melancholy absence. She sighed faintly to herself. It was a long time since she’d possessed any such things, and when she had she’d not known it.’
Goodbye Sweetheart is set in Canberra, Sydney, Eden and the UK and I really enjoyed the way Halligan conjured these locations with such deft strokes. I also loved the descriptions of Janice and Lynette’s kitchenware shop Batterie de Cuisine with ‘all the intricate, erudite, abstruse objects, for which there was such an enthusiastic market’.
The leaven of humour is welcome in a novel that explores grief’s contours so comprehensively. In fact, to me the novel’s lightness of touch and loose plotting (both characteristics that seemed to trip up some other reviewers) were two of the its strengths.
As I write this post, I’ve been reading Julian Barnes’ essay ‘On Loss of Depth’ from Levels of Life—an essay that examines his grief after the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh. Barnes’ essay and Goodbye Sweetheart remind me that each of us tends to mourn in character; grief does not dissipate just because we decide not to look at it; and the ash of grief we feel for those we’ve loved deeply then lost, never really blows away.
Recent Comments