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‘Is it any good?’ asked The Spouse, when I told him I’d finished The Memory Trap this morning.  He was friends with Andrea Goldsmith at university, and loves to hear about her books when I read them.  A reader of non-fiction, he doesn’t read novels, but he’s always interested in the ones that trigger thoughtful discussion about issues and ideas, and last night, in the car en route to see a production of The King and I, we’d talked about a key theme in this book, the purpose and meaning behind public monuments and memorials…

‘It’s very good,’ I replied.  ‘It’s one of those books that you’re really sorry to finish.’

I feel bereft, now that I’ve come to the end.  The Memory Trap is a character-driven novel, and I’ve come to know and be very interested in its characters.  They’re like people you meet when you travel, and you promise each other that you’ll keep in touch but of course you never do, yet you find yourself wondering about them long afterwards.

Around the world, vast amounts of money are spent on public monuments and memorials, and as I discovered from fellow-readers when I posted a Sensational Snippet from The Memory Trap, Goldsmith has invented a marvellous job for her central character: Nina Jameson is an international consultant on memorial projects.  She is based in London where the novel begins, but her marriage has just failed, and at 40-something, she comes home to Melbourne when the TIF (Together in Freedom) memorial project comes along.   She thinks it’s a project from hell – doomed to failure because its aims are so nebulous – but she feels drawn home and so she succumbs to the offer.

In Melbourne, she visits her sister Zoe.  Zoe’s marriage to Elliot Wood is rotting beneath a thin crust of convention but as family Nina is privy to Elliot’s caustic spite that’s usually concealed beneath the public veneer.  It makes the couple’s company painful, especially so when a trip down to the family beach-house turns out to be Zoe’s intrigue to meet up with Ramsay Blake, love of Zoe’s life since childhood.  Ramsay is a virtuoso pianist with an international career, but his obsession with his music makes him narcisstic, selfish and purposefully helpless.  His stepfather George Tiller is lured into his orbit and becomes his helpmeet, pushing aside all others including Ramsay’s brother Sean.  Zoe has no hope of reciprocal love from Ramsay, but she pursues it all the same, rationalising his more-than-appalling behaviour towards her, and damaging her relationship with Elliot.

Nina, who fancies herself in a wise-adviser role, remonstrates with Zoe.  Nina knows that the toxic state of her older sister’s marriage is a no-go area, she knows that her own lost marriage was no reason to be meddling in Zoe’s but she can’t help herself.  There’s a wonderful scene where (although Nina is the same age as Sean) she tries out the wise Older Sister Routine with him as well, so much so that he flees into the loo at the café to escape her bombardment.  Professionally she’s a bit too assertive too, as the good folk from TIF find out when they have their first meeting with her.  Not fully in command of her emotions because she herself is (metaphorically speaking) memorialising her own marriage, she adjusts her plan to be forthright about her concerns when she meets these idealistic people who are proposing a project that in London she had dismissed as:

one of those vague, feel-good projects which, in the abstract, promises to fix the evils of the world: a multicultural, inter-faith committee proposing a monument to promote religious tolerance, unity in diversity, individual courage, and freedom for all.  A heap of stone with a water feature and a few well-chosen words to right the wrongs of the world – as if that was all it required.  The naivety of what this monument was to achieve was irritating rather than touching, and the camaraderie enjoyed by the organising committee in regular meetings and tours to religion’s hotspots wouldn’t survive the first stage of a project like this.  (p. 27)

Why then does Nina take the project on?  Because she thinks that it would be a weakness to come home without a job , without a legitimate reason.  She doesn’t recognise that her bruised soul needs nurturing from family. 

But the work she plans to do is to scuttle the project, so her response to the committee is merely to change strategy:

Nina encouraged them to talk, to explain their rationale for the monument.  She did not want to be seen to be diminishing their project by attacking it or injecting damp realism into their ambitions.  She hoped that if they talked long enough, guided by strategic questions from her, they would eventually come to see not the folly of this project – never folly, not with such admirable intentions – but the impossibility of it.

But it doesn’t take them long to discern her hostility to the project.  ‘Did we choose the right person?’ they ask themselves as she leaves.  Indeed…

The cunning way in which Goldsmith undercuts Nina’s beliefs about herself is matched by her skill in gradually revealing the other characters to be more than they had at first seemed, all of these interactions laced together by the entrapments of memory.  Chasing up old lovers is always a bad idea, and schadenfreude is an unattractive (though sometimes irresistible) human frailty.  Making judgements about who’s at fault in someone else’s marriage isn’t a good idea either, and sometimes there’s more truth in the clear-eyed assessments of teenage children than there is in the judgements of those supposedly older and wiser.  (There’s a surprising amount of humour in this novel, given its themes!)

Bereavements come in many forms and in The Memory Trap Goldsmith explores public displays of grief as in the post-Diana spectacle; humble memorials to road-accident victims; and the ways in which public memorials can be interpreted in different ways.

Memorials speak to those wishing to listen, who have a reason to listen. … but what they say, the information they impart, the understandings they promote, tend to speak to an individual’s life and experiences as well as their needs and longings at the moment they stand before the monument.  Monuments … are like books.  A book read at a particular time can leave you untouched, and yet at another time it can strike at the heart of you.  (p. 207)

(While I knew many of the monuments and memorials to which Goldsmith refers, I confess to wanting to Google some of them.  Is there really a Diana and Dodi memorial at Harrods with her unwashed liqueur glass on display?  Is such grotesque kitsch really possible?  My goodness, yes it is.)

Alongside the abstract discussions about these public manifestations of grief, Goldsmith depicts the slow torment of loss in economical ways.  Nina naïvely believes that she can insulate herself from memory with a change of scene and the absence of memorabilia, while Beth, surrounded by reminders of her lost husband finds them little comfort all the same :

When Scotty first died I thought I couldn’t feel any worse.  And when the visitors to the house thinned out I thought I couldn’t feel any worse.  And at the four-week mark when one of his bottles of beer fell out of the fridge, and I sat in the mess not giving a toss about broken glass, I thought it couldn’t get any worse.  And bundling up his toothbrush and shaving gear and throwing them in the rubbish bin and then an hour later scrabbling to retrieve them and put them back where they belonged, I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse than that.  And the morning at Dight Falls when I first met you, I’d passed the entire night sitting on the couch, staring at nothing, thinking nothing, being nothing other than a woman who had lost her husband,  I was convinced that things were as bad as they’d ever been.  But by then I’d learned that just because I can’t imagine anything worse doesn’t mean the worst isn’t still to come.  (p. 315)

There is so much to think and talk about in The Memory Trap, I feel personally enriched by reading it.  That’s the test of a great book, isn’t it?

The only disappointment in this book is its inane cover design.  I read somewhere this week that an award for Australian book design has been dropped – and although it’s a shame, I think I can guess the reason for the decision.  Book design has, for the big publishing houses, become a shabby afterthought: choose 2-3 keywords to search for a pic from Shutterstock or Getty, fling a font on top, paste a marketing blurb on it, and that’s it.  The smaller publishing houses like Text Publishing and Transit Lounge still do captivating designs,  but of course they’re too small to sponsor a prize. It’s a pity.

What do you think about monuments and memorials?  As you’d expect, I love the traditional sort of monuments to authors that I’ve seen in the UK and Ireland, France, Italy, Spain and Russia and I wish we had more of these in Australia.  The only comparable one I can think of is Alan Marshall’s outside the Bayside Library at Sandringham – though Monuments Australia suggests that there are more than you might think, depending on how you interpret memorials.  (No sign of one to Patrick White, alas).  There are countless war memorials in cities and towns all over Australia, though none that I know of to Aboriginal resistance fighters from the frontier wars – still too contentious I suppose, just as it’s still too difficult for some places in Europe to memorialise the Holocaust.  When it comes to large scale war memorials, I found the Victory Monument in St Petersburg very moving because it acknowledges the suffering of civilians, but Nina is wary of whoppers because they can mute and crush those who stand in their shadows; huge monuments can actually make individuals disappear.   Goldsmith doesn’t tell us what Nina thinks of the War Memorial in Canberra…

Other reviews are at The Australian and The SMH.

Author: Andrea Goldsmith
Title: The Memory Trap
Publisher: Fourth Estate (Harper Collins), 2013
ISBN: 9780732296728
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Book Store, Bentleigh.

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