I hadn’t meant to start reading I for Isobel just yet. I’d begun Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance but that’s a hardback first edition and I don’t like reading those in bed in case I fall asleep with the book over my nose or under the doona and damage the pages. Paperbacks are best for reading in bed, but if I’d known how brutal Mrs Callaghan was going to be I might not have started reading I for Isobel at midnight. It was with great reluctance that I finally turned out the light some hours later, and I just had to finish reading it over breakfast this morning…
The story opens just before Isobel Callaghan’s ninth birthday, when she anticipates correctly that there will be no presents for her this year, just like all her other birthdays. Her mother is a monster: cold, hard, spiteful and jealous. Poor little Isobel grows up forever wanting to please but unable to work out how.
She takes solace in books, and too bad if the reader isn’t herself widely read – because there are countless perfectly apt allusions to works of literature great and small throughout the story. For those of us who grew up bookish in a bookish age, this is part of the joy of Witting’s writing, but I can see from the clumsy markings on the second-hand copy I foolishly bought without inspecting its innards that its previous owner, Kade M- took no such pleasure in reading it for school. He has laboriously highlighted the bits his teacher said were significant, and noted key themes (‘social confusion’; ‘miss use of language’ (sic); ‘discovering her lost self’; ‘can’t stop thinking’ and ‘the special group’. Poor Kade is all-at-sea amid the sparkling wit of Isobel’s new friends at the coffee shop on Glebe Road.
‘If you were a part of speech, what part of speech would you be?’ He added, blowing on his fingernails in self-congratulation, ‘I speak as a verb, a transitive verb. And Janet there is a conjunction, a co-ordinating conjunction.’ He turned to Vinnie. ‘And you, my pet, are an adjective, naturally’. Seeing the necessity, he added, ‘You adorn. You decorate’.
….
Isobel laughed too.
He looked at her kindly.
‘And what are you?’
She said in a small racked whisper, ‘I think I’m a preposition’.
‘Oh, do you govern?’
‘Only small common objects.’ (p83)
Kade, for whom grammar appears to be arcane, had to highlight that ‘Diana is a past participle’ and note beside it that she is a ‘has been’ . How sad to be denied the delight of these witty exchanges because grammar and Shakespeare and Auden are now deemed redundant!
Isobel flounders around at school, at work, and with fledgling friendships. She’s always in a panic about being wrong, being unwanted, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place. As a child she has a brief religious conversion to a ‘state of grace’ that enables her to withstand her mother’s bullying, only to find that forbearance infuriates her mother even more.
Over the tea table on Wednesday night, her mother said resolutely, ‘I’m not going to put up with any more of this, Isobel. I want to know what you are sulking about.’
‘I’m not sulking.’ Astonishment brought out the words clear and strong, but she felt anxious. There was trouble coming.
‘Don’t give me any of your lies. What are you sulking about?’
‘But I’m not. I’m not sulking about anything.’
Think of the inward light and hold on.
‘Not sulking not sulking not sulking. You answer me, what are you sulking about?’
Oh, where was it, the tone of voice that made people believed (even when they were telling lies)? Isobel could never command it. She shook her head.
‘Walking about looking down your nose too good to speak to anyone you nasty little beast. Miss Superior I can read you like a book. Telling me you’re not sulking you brazen little liar. What are you sulking about?’….
Then she saw that her mother’s anger was a live animal tormenting her, that she Isobel was an outlet that gave some relief and she was torturing her by withholding it. (p28-29)
But Isobel’s not as meek as she seems at first and her habit of self-awareness is what finally frees her to be herself. After what has gone before, it seems facile to describe this moment as ‘coming-of-age’.
Amy Witting, A.M. (1918-2001) began writing late in life, and had her first novel, The Visit, published in 1977 when she was almost sixty. However in 1980 I for Isobel was initially accepted and then rejected by Thomas Nelson which triggered a retreat from writing fiction for ten years. When the novel was finally published in 1989 by the more perspicacious Penguin it was immediately successful, and won the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) Barbara Ramsden Award and was short-listed for the 1990 Miles Franklin Award (which went to Tom Flood’s Oceana Fine). In 1993 Witting received further recognition with the Patrick White Award, and in 1994 published her third novel A Change in the Lighting. Maria’s War came out in 1998, and the long-awaited sequel to I for Isobel was published in 2000, the year before Witting died. Isobel on her way to the Corner Shop’ was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award 2000, and won The Age Book of the Year Award in 2000. She did not live to see the publication of After Cynthia in 2001.
Belated recognition of her importance as an Australian author came shortly before she died when she was awarded the Australian Literary Board’s Emeritus Fellowship. In 2002 she was also posthumously made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her ‘service to literature as novelist, poet, short story writer, and mentor to young writers’.
I am indebted to the Amy Witting website for some of the biographical details of Witting’s life.
I am one of the many who discovered Witting with delight: I read Maria’s War in 1998, Isobel on her Way to the Corner Shop in 2002 and After Cynthia in 2003, but for reasons I can’t remember I didn’t read I for Isobel when ANZ LitLovers scheduled it for March 2002. It’s nice to know that I still have The Visit and A Change in the Lighting to track down, as well as substantial body of work in the form of short story collections. I hope that there are readers out there who appreciate her still, as I do.
Author: Amy Witting
Title: I for Isobel
Publisher: Penguin, 1989
ISBN: 9780141004136
Source: Personal copy, second-hand, $3.00
Recent Comments