ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Carol Lefevre is a versatile writer… Murmurations (2020) — shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards — was a delicate, melancholy collection of interlinked stories — about a generation of women whose lives were constrained by the mores of the time and the isolation of urban life.  The Tower (2022) was a dazzling composite novel featuring a couple of feisty older women determined to live out their last years on their own terms.  But while Lefevre’s new novel Temperance is more conventional in form, it has a darker tone and a narrative arc that gathers tempo towards the unexpected ending.  It is a novel of a childhood blighted by the poverty of single-parenthood and the otherness that poverty brings but it is also a novel of friendship and love between two older women.  And it is an unflinching novel of parenting and the terrible, damaging mistakes people can make, from unresolved grief, from blatant selfishness, from misplaced hope and from a long-held lack of confidence in personal worth.

It is also a novel of betrayal.  Shocking, breath-taking betrayal.

The story begins in 1963, with the chance friendship of an unconventional artist called Mardi Rose and café owner Stella Madigan, who supports her three children, Tess, Fran and little Theo, who was born shortly after his father’s accident.  This accident is never spoken of, but Fran, from whose perspective the story is told, has found newspaper clippings about it among old photographs.

This morning Fran sees with a shiver that the newsprint is yellowing and brittle.  She holds each one by the edges and lays them out on the floorboards.  In her favourite picture their father is wearing shorts and a singlet, with his socks folded down over scuffed boots.  It is his cheeky lopsided grin she loves the most.  Frank Madigan squints into slanting sunlight, and Fran wonders who he was looking at — perhaps Stella took the picture.  The truck he stands beside is the one that plunged from a bridge into the flood-swollen Darling River.  (p.12)

He’d picked up a passenger, spent time with him at the pub, and failed to see the warning signs on the bridge.

Frank’s truck smashed through the barricades, and out in the middle a wheel went down, and the load jack-knifed.  One clipping says the vehicle went over the side.  Another describes how the bridge dropped the truck and its load of wool bales into the rust-coloured water. (p.12)

The hitchhiker’s body was found downstream, but though police divers scoured the river, Frank’s body was never found.  Tess and Fran are convinced that the signs were never there; Tess who was older and remembers everything says he would have seen them even if he was drunk because he wasn’t stupid…

Stella, whose visible scars on her work-roughened hands are from the hot oil in the fryer, bears her emotional scars within.  Her exhaustion gives her scant time or energy for mothering, and it is Tess to whom Theo turns when he has his frequent nightmares. Fran doesn’t have anybody.  Unlike her siblings who are attractive and charming, and who eventually find partners who love them, Fran drifts through life in a fog of unhappiness, yearning for the kind of family life that other people seem to have.  She marries, unwisely, to become a mother to a waif called Lauris, only to have that love rejected when cruel adolescence rears its head and Lauris seeks out her feckless birth-mother.

Mardi Rose is the light that shines through this melancholy tale.  She brings colour and laughter and a liberating breath of fresh air into the bleak world of this family, but when her friendship with Stella becomes something more, there’s a bit of a scandal about that in those conservative days in beachside Adelaide.  Byron Bay was then the mecca for alternative lifestyles and much to her children’s surprise Stella agrees to pack up everything and take off for a new life.  Tess, at sixteen, refuses to come along, so it is only Fran and Theo who witness the event that was to change everything.  They were asleep in a tent in the camping ground at the small town of Temperance when disaster struck and they were too young to make sense of anything.  Stella, who turns around in a panic and returns without Mardi Rose to the dreariness of the café, will never talk about it with her children.  It is an unspoken mystery that haunts them for decades afterwards.

The novel gathers momentum when Theo and Fran return to Temperance in adulthood, and it becomes unputdownable.

Highly recommended.

Author: Carol Lefevre
Title: Temperance
Publisher: Wakefield Press, 2024
Cover design by Wakefield Press
Cover art: Beach Scene  c1932, by Clarice Beckett
ISBN: 9781743058695, pbk.,326 pages
Review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press