Damage and despair haunt the pages of Josephine Rowe’s first novel like the phantom panther said to have stalked the area near Puckapunyal Army Base in central Victoria.
This makes A Loving, Faithful Animal an eerie and unsettling book—and a difficult read. Persist, though, and you’ll be rewarded by Rowe’s precise and poetic use of language and her uncanny ability to dig under the skin of her characters.
You’ll find the good, the bad and the ugly picked over in dark places, in the glare of headlights and through the filter of fly-wire. It’s a tightly woven tale that charts the dimensions of a family’s suffering—the sad reverb from one man’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
The loving, faithful animal of the title (in its most literal sense) is the family’s dog, Belle, who has recently been savaged. The key suspect is a panther—but not the Puckapunyal one, nor the one depicted in a tattoo clawing its ‘sleek and wonderful’ body up a key character’s bicep. Shortly after the dog is mauled, Jack Burroughs (father of Ru and Lani and husband of Evelyn) disappears. He’s done it before but has always returned. This time it’s not looking likely. The double meaning of the phrase ‘He’s gone for good’ is made clearer as the summer of 1991 ticks on.
Jack is a Vietnam War veteran whose nerves are frayed and whose anger bubbles over into violence. His wife Evelyn takes the pain—physical and emotional—and pays it forward. Evelyn comes from a more privileged family of horse rearing, Sunday race meets and a Corvette— ‘gleaming, cicada coloured, its cream panels like wings and the soft top folded down’. Partly because of Jack, she has been estranged from her parents for many years. Understandably, given her difficult marriage and different circumstances, she ‘keeps waking to the same knowledge: This is not my life.’
That’s what war does …
After Jack scarpers, he phones his brother Tetch to retrieve a locked chest that contains the objects he has kept from the war. These objects seem insubstantial compared to the weight Jack carries around in his body and mind. In ‘Breakwall’, the chapter told from his viewpoint, we learn more about how the war and the meds have destabilised him. I flinched when Jack said to himself, ‘That right there is what war does. Takes a tyre iron to beauty. To the smallest, friendliest things.’
Ru, who is 12, knows enough to know that her father has ghosts in his head. What she doesn’t understand is his need to flee. She thinks, ‘Now he’s out there somewhere. Wasting his New Year’s Eve in a shabby, forgetful room that has bedsheets for curtains, a mattress soaked in other men’s fevers. You’ve seen those rooms. How is that better than being at home? Those sad seedy places that Mum has dragged him out of before, you and Lani waiting in the car.’
Ru is the least aggressive member of her family and when a friend intentionally hurts her and tells Ru to hurt her back she won’t do it. Her biggest act of rebellion is actually an act of pleading: she smokes the cigarettes her father’s left behind in the hope it will call him back.
Ru’s older sister, Lani, is brasher and more brittle. She’s spent too many nights chasing her father into the dark—pressed into the chase by her mother, who hopes her presence will convince him to head back home. Lani’s borne her mother’s rages for far too long to let on that she cares about anything but escape and defiance. She regularly slips into the night to meet her boyfriend; pops pills and drinks grog (she started drinking in class in Year 8); and grasps whatever freedoms she can from the misery at home and the suffocation of small town life.
Jack’s brother, Tetch (his real name is Les), carries less emotional baggage than his sibling—although he did cut off two of his fingers to avoid conscription and the Vietnam call up. Tetch, as his nickname implies, brings a slightly uneasy thrum into Ru, Lani and Ev’s life … at least at first. Ultimately, though, his calm helpfulness is welcome and it demonstrates that there might be light at the end of the tunnel for all of them. I was relieved when Evelyn said Tetch didn’t have his brother’s brains or his meanness as it signalled that some of the scars Jack left behind in his family might finally get the chance to heal.
Dark undertow
I read A Loving, Faithful Animal in the same week that I saw Stephen Sewell’s excoriating play The Blind Giant is Dancing. The double whammy left me with a strong need for respite from the gritty and raw.
It’s an older Ru who is thinking here: ‘All through the gauzy, jacaranda bore-water Christmas, whisking up purple blooms instead of pine needles, there’s your sister’s sweet voice singing between rooms …’— and by the time this fragment appeared I clung to it like a lifebuoy. A ship was in sight!
One of Rowe’s themes is genetic memory: can the damage from trauma be passed on? Lani is making a different life for herself when she confesses to Ru her fear that ‘there wasn’t enough good in me to make anything good’. Ru knows exactly what she means.
What we realise by the end of the novel is this: Humans may well start out as loving, faithful animals but other humans and nations can beat these gentle beings into the ground. While war and domestic violence can turn humans vicious or leave them terrified and defenceless, some people can still make, or be offered, choices that can help them snip the circuit. It may not be easy but people do crawl out from under, and refuse to perpetuate, the curse.
Australian author Josephine Rowe made a deep impression on me with her short stories and poetry and I still think her profound gifts of expression and empathy find their most comfortable home in these forms. Rowe’s first novel is a fabulous piece of work—so don’t doubt it. However, I did wonder if a longer stride might have added air to some more compact passages I initially found a little cryptic. This niggle and a few editing glitches aside, I can see why Rowe’s novel has been compared favourably with All the Bird’s, Singing by Evie Wyld as the two novels share a dark undertow and taut intensity. Will Rowe will scoop up the Miles Franklin as Wyld did in 2014?
A Loving, Faithful Animal is an insightful and engaging debut that bristles with electricity and breathes a sigh of melancholy over the pain wrought in families from war. It cements Rowe’s position as one of Australia’s finest writers. It also guarantees that I’ll be first in line when her new short story collection hits our shores later this year.
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