ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Sophie Cunningham’s newest book This Devastating Fever (2022) — described at the SMH as a great novel of enduring significance and enormous beauty — is receiving rave reviews everywhere so I thought it was a good time to review her debut novel Geography which turned up a couple of years ago in an OpShop. Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, South East Asia (2004), Geography is nearly two decades old now, but it’s aged well and remains compelling reading.

By coincidence I see this morning that Stu from Winston’s Dad has reviewed Sandor Marai’s Conversations in Bolzano which is about Casanova, the (in)famous libertine whose name is synonymous with womaniser. Geography is about a woman Who Should Know Better who goes weak at the knees over An Unworthy Man.  Like all Catherine’s friends in the novel, the reader wants to stop this train wreck of a ‘relationship’… but does not lose patience with its vulnerable narrator…

It is a measure of Sophie Cunningham’s skill as an author that she makes an absorbing tale out of this.  Set in two time frames in transnational settings, Geography signals from the outset that the relationship has ended, but we do not know if Catherine is over it, or if she’s going to fall under Michael’s spell again. And the thing is, it’s not about the things that make a relationship great.  As her loyal friend Marion says in bafflement:

‘Just don’t wake up one morning to find five years have gone by and you’re still hooked.  He’s not real, Catherine.  You don’t know him. Nothing is more alluring than a man you make up in your head.’

‘Of course he’s real.’

‘No, he’s not. He’s drama and chaos.  He’s Los Angeles.  He’s good sex. ‘ Marion stared at me in exasperation. ‘You don’t get it, do you? With real boyfriends you do things. You hang out after you have sex.  You talk about stuff. All you’ve done with this guy is f___, get a postcard or sit by the phone in a range of exotic locations.  It is not a relationship.’ (p.98)

It’s just lust. (BTW, the language is ‘earthy’ and there’s a lot of episodes that take place in bed.  And other places, notably a bathroom sink which *chuckle* sounds rather uncomfortable to me.)

Marion’s partner Raff says (p.87)

‘You’re not still interested, are you?’ He looked at me. ‘Jesus, you are.  Women, I’ll never understand them.  It’s the nice men like me that always get passed over.’ (p.87)

This self-deprecating joke has serious intent because Raff is genuinely concerned about Catherine.  In the household they share with Catherine in inner-city Melbourne, these two are expecting a baby to add to their family, of which Catherine is a much-loved member.

With rare exceptions, there’s a bit of a dearth of nice men in contemporary fiction, but there’s a nice available man called Tony who is waiting patiently for Catherine, and Catherine’s brother Finn in New York is also a nice man like Raff.  The playful dialogue between these siblings sparkles with humour and shared understandings.  Dialogue is a real strength in this novel.

The other strength of Geography is its settings.  In the post-Michael timeframe, Catherine is finding herself again while travelling in Sri Lanka and India with Ruby.  In the futile pursuit of a relationship that’s never going to happen she goes from Melbourne to Los Angeles (with side trips to New York to see Finn), and Sydney and back again. One particularly vivid episode featuring getting snowed in by a blizzard in New York, prefigures the extreme weather events we are getting used to now.

As the novel progresses, allusions to catastrophes begin to mount, putting the whole  ‘relationship thing’ into context.  Catherine associates events in her own life with the disasters, natural and manmade, that happen to other people.  She went to see a memorable football match at the same time as seeing Timothy McVeigh in leg-irons and handcuffs after the Oklahoma bombing when 163 people died.  She notes that it was two years after the Waco siege  when 86 people died.  She worries about Michael when the Northridge earthquake shakes Los Angeles with a death toll of 57.  In a portent of the catastrophic bushfires that are now regular events, there is a vivid portrayal of Michael and Catherine in a Sydney blanketed by smoke:

As the fires got closer to Sydney the air became thicker.  We would wake up in the middle of the night, coughing in a smoky room.  There were two hundred fires burning around New South Wales; it was if everything was swimming in a sea of smoke.  Each night on the news there were fire stories, and, one night, a shot of a reporter in the centre of town gesturing to the fiery suburbs behind him with a broad sweep of the arm.  Houses were burning; the city was ringed by fires.  A man in a torn, blackened singlet was filmed in front of the wreckage of his house. He shrugged.

‘Everything is ash,’ he said.

There were stories of heroes, of fifteen thousand fire fighters from New South Wales and volunteers pouring in from around Australia.  Of people abandoning their cars on the highway.  Of a family pet exploding into a ball of flame as it tried to escape.  Of fire cutting people off so they couldn’t drive out backwards or forwards.  People in outer suburbs started to clear their gardens of dead wood, clear the land around their houses and hose everything down.  They stood on their roofs with their hoses; waving them at the flames as if they could shoot the fire, kill it dead.  Five houses in a Sydney street burnt down and the tabloids went crazy, running photos of the charred remains of a little girl’s Christmas presents on the front page.

‘It’s Christmas,’ the people who had lost everything said on the news.  ‘Things like this shouldn’t happen at Christmas.’

But things like this always happen at Christmas.  I thought of my friends whose father had walked out on Christmas Eve.  Remembered getting up to fetch the newspaper on Boxing Day when I was a little girl and seeing the photo of a city, Darwin, obliterated by a cyclone. […] Christmas, I thought, is exactly the time of year shit like this happens. (p.79-80)

Cunningham’s writing, especially the non-fiction that I’ve read, has continued to explore catastrophe.  In 2014, ten years after Geography, Cunningham went on to write Warning, The Story of Cyclone Tracy, (see my review) and City of Trees (2019, see my review) is an exploration of living with the loss of trees.  This Devastating Fever is on my TBR, and it’s about living through what feels like the end of days.

Geography, written all those years ago, reminds us not to waste any of them.

Author: Sophie Cunningham
Title: Geography
Cover design by W H Chong
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2004
ISBN: 9781920885038, pbk., 243 pages
Source: Personal library, OpShopFind, $3.00