ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I do like it when authors try something new.  Not for the sake of it, but to achieve something different, something that only works in the novel because the novelist has been adventurous.

I’ve been reading Kristel Thornell’s novels since she first published her Vogel Prize-winning Night Street in 2010, and each one has been different.

Night Street was a fictionalisation of the life of the Impressionist painter Clarice Beckett, but though it was Thornell’s debut novel, it was a masterclass in evoking contrasts in tone.  Where the narrative is about Beckett’s confinement to home duties because of her duty to her demanding parents the tone is claustrophobic; at night when she is free, the narrative expands and the tone is sensual.

On the Blue Train (2016) is a mystery, but it’s a whydunit, not a whodunit. The story is bookended by the framework of Agatha Christie’s unexplained brief disappearance, but within that the narration focusses on the thoughts and emotions of Teresa and her admirer Harry.  Thornell’s novels are character-driven in a social context, and I’ve always liked that.

The Sirens Sing is a step away from narratives with a real-life prompt, and its two-part framework is unusual because its patterns reverberate across generations but the novel begins with the later time frame.  It is also a social novel because it explores how disadvantage shapes personality and behaviour.  Thornell shows how a lack of social confidence impacts on people of modest means when they move into a different milieu.

Odysseus and the Sirens, eponymous vase of the Siren Painter c.475BC (Wikipedia)

The Sirens who fail to lure Odysseus away from his quest do so only because his crew restrains him.  At his command, the men blocked their own ears, and tied him to the mast so that while he could hear the Sirens’ song and feel the desire it evoked, he could not act on it.  In different ways, Thornell’s characters hear the siren song of desire and do not act on it.  But the unconsummated loss haunts them all their lives.

The first part of the novel features adolescents Heather and David in the 1990s, attracted to each other by their mutual love of learning the Italian language. For both Heather and David, ambitions are constrained by the limitations of their backgrounds as the children of single parents.  Each is hesitant in developing the relationship, not least because they are both from disadvantaged backgrounds and are wary of being judged and rejected.  Sometimes the rent isn’t paid and the pantry is bare.  Getting dressed for an outing is filled with anxiety because their wardrobes are so limited.

After agonising over his very few clothing choices, David had gone with the old Levi’s, the Doc Martens he’d bought with his first pay from the hotel and the green-and-black-checked shirt he hoped was more urban-trendy than loutish-slacker Westie.  He fussed with the shirt, tucking it in, untucking, tucking, untucking. (p.21)

Their opportunities for meeting extend beyond school when Heather invites David to join her in an Italian conversation class with Ada. Fatally, Heather also invites Robbie to join the class as well although he is only a beginner in Italian.

Ada is exotic to them not because she and her husband Filippo are Italian but because they live in a world of wealth and privilege that Heather and David have never seen before.  Ada is an art aficionado and she has paintings by Lloyd Rees and Brett Whitely on the walls. Robbie — with an unusual talent for his age — is really more interested in art than Italian and, awestruck, he recognises these paintings straight away.

His first glimpse of her garden, viewed with his artist’s eye for detail, comes as a culture shock:

The fragrance got pure and he saw that it came from pots of dainty white flowers edging the verandah like miniature foamy clouds.  A splashing drew his attention to a fountain, marbly stone, the flow from an urn balanced on the graceful shoulder of a young woman.  Past that were neat shrubs and masses of mauve rhododendrons, crepe myrtles with flowers of surprisingly deep pinks and purples, and then a dense clump of cedars that seemed part of an old forest; a glint of shiny white through the trunks, down low.  Three tall gums were so casually magnificent he felt a sort of envy, wanted to paint them, get inside them and hang out there.  Of course you knew in theory that rich people had it good, but it was a shock to actually see how picturesquely good they could have it, be confronted with the plush setting of their lives.  There was no way to compare this with the short redbrick fence, the short, scratchy lawn, the short house in Lithgow with its chilling seventies-eyeshadow-blue walls. (p.43)

Ada introduces them to a lifestyle that they have never experienced.

‘A toast,’ Ada said huskily, her glass high.  ‘To you all, to the end of school, to the past and to the future.’

To the younger people, those Italian words were intoxicating: singsong, plump, sprung.  Listening, they felt an expansion, something within them becoming more elastic, elongating. The occasion was a sort of initiation ritual, Ada and Filippo ushering them into their language and culture, into adulthood.  They had never before sat down to such a table, made of solid, glossy wood, so extravagant with candles, food and wine and laid with a level of ceremony that would have befitted a religious rite. (p.95)

But while David is hesitating over his attraction to Heather because he fears that she is attracted to the more confident Robbie, the Siren song of desire is not just exerting its influence on the young.  And, like the Sirens of The Odyssey, it is not benign.

Part 2 brings the story of David’s mother Jan.  In an unusual twist, Jan the counsellor is in therapy herself.  She is troubled by how things fell apart after November 11th, 1975.  For her, the Dismissal of the Whitlam government (1972-1975) whose reforms to university education changed lives, brought chaos in both her personal life and the wider society. She dreams of it, and wakes with a feeling of doom.

‘Sadness, some kind of regret, I think.  Well, everything came apart after that.  I mean, obviously it was all very fragile before that.  But in a way that was the start of the real chaos.’ (p.145)

The patterns of this novel reveal themselves when Jan, lacking in confidence, hesitates to act on an attraction she feels, is bullied into an unwise marriage by her mother, and is betrayed by infidelity.  And her pain is exacerbated by a know-it-all male who thinks that trauma can be displaced by adventure:

‘You’ve got to turn things that freak you out into an adventure, feed off them.  Otherwise they shut you down, they define you.’

‘Good philosophy, Jan says, finding him insistent and patronising.  (p.204)

Not all the men in this novel behave badly, but when they do, it is shocking.

The most poignant of all these characters is David’s grandmother Lorna who emerges in Part 2 of the novel. Troubled by voices, she has escaped from the confinement of an institution and is searching her old haunts in Sydney for Claude.  She’s  wonderful character, an old Communist with a lively personality, but like the others, she has difficulty expressing her inner life.  Doing a bunk with her secret five buck note hidden in her tatty old handbag, she has learned wisdom the hard way:

The next test will be the driver, who has seen her and is preparing to stop.  He’s starting to look her over.  He’s young and a redhead like herself, which could be in her favour.  It says so much about a person, maybe everything you need to know, how they treat you when they’ve got you in their power. Whether they use the power or refuse it.  What you have on your side in such a situation is that you are seeing them, aren’t you?  Who they are underneath. (p.163)

Indeed…

You can hear Kristel Thornell talk about The Sirens Sing here.

Author: Kristel Thornell
Title: The Sirens Sing
Cover design by Lisa White
Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2022
ISBN: 9781460762660, pbk., 294 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books Bentleigh

Image credit:

Odysseus and the Sirens, eponymous vase of the Siren Painter c.475BC (Wikipedia) by ArchaiOptix – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87708594