The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 19 December 2007
by Thea Astley
Aging is rarely a pretty process. In Astley's small disturbing novel, she depicts the decay one elderly lady experiences as her life wanes. Kathleen is a charming character. She has had a long life in northern Australia and on an island off the coast. Her husband died many years before, her kids are grown, and she speaks to the ghost of her dead friend Daisy. She is a little addlebrained. The sense of time for her, and in the book, is somewhat disjointed and ethereal. Her children, Shamrock and Brain, are distant and reluctant to take on the care that she needs and deserves. Much of the book is given over to the petty and chaotic lives that Shamrock and Brain lead, she with a manipulative minister in the government, he with his extramarital affairs and bizarre art project. We come to see the inconvenience that their mother's aging presents to them and we won't see them live up to the responsibility. The world becomes increasingly indifferent to Kathleen in her dotage. She is at the mercy of events in the control of society, the government, and, more particularly, of her children. The process of her decay is not a pretty thing to behold. Astley goes so far as to punctuate the story with several newspaper accounts of elderly people lost and abandoned by their families. The picture she paints, while compassionate, is bleak. Her writing is oblique, with moments of confusion, either in Kathleen's character, or in the narrative. It is a short book, though, with a sizable punch.