Perving – the act of looking lustfully; lust – an over-powering or inordinate desire for something. Spying, wishful thinking, stirring the imagination: this is what writers do. In the process – or the narration of the process – some writers hide themselves; others reveal themselves. Garner doesn’t hide. She sets out to navigate difficult factual or literary terrain. She asks big questions, gets into trouble, overreacts, weakens, bounces back. She figures things out. Like all her work, Garner’s new book, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, is a survival text. Its subject is a recent murder trial.

Joe Cinque grew up in Newcastle, in New South Wales. He was a civil engineer. The writer’s first impressions of him, from indistinct copies of newspaper photographs, were ‘of a cheerful young man with his peaked cap on backwards’, who struck her as warm and frank. He died in Canberra on Sunday, 26 October 1997. Within a couple of days, two women had been taken into custody and charged with murder. One was Joe’s girlfriend, Anu Singh, also from Newcastle; the other was Anu’s friend Madhavi Rao. Both were final-year law students.

Why did Garner choose to write this book? She explains how a journalist had drawn her attention to the story in the newspaper, sensing perhaps that in some ways it was like the subject of The First Stone, which is about two young women, also law students, who accuse a college master of sexual misconduct. Two against one. Women against men. Courtroom drama. Background sleuthing. But Garner also inferred from this that she was meant to have an interest in ‘women at the end of their tether’, and goes on to confess: ‘I had recently been forced to acknowledge that I myself was a woman at the end of her tether … My third marriage had just collapsed in a welter of desolation … I knew I had to get out of my own head, to find some work to do.’ So she found ‘some work to do’. And her biographers, no doubt, will have a field day scrutinising the circumstances in which Joe Cinque’s Consolation was produced.

While Garner does not attempt to equate her own anguish over the breakup of her marriage with death, or with the death of Joe Cinque, the reader readily understands that both factors – the end of a marriage, the end of a life – are presented as experiences of deeply felt personal loss. The title alerts us to this, and the epigraphs set a tone that calls upon the right balance of reason and emotion: ‘to place, consider, deplore and mourn’ (Gitta Sereny) and ‘suffering is not enough’ (Thich Nhat Hanh). In this respect, the book can be read as a work of and about mourning – a Trauerarbeit.

Literature is a mode of consolation, in all senses: as substitution, as condolence, as alleviation. When Charlotte Brontë published Shirley in 1849, she had just lost her sister Anne. Her brother Branwell and sister Emily had both died the previous year. When urged by her publishers to include this information in the book’s preface, she rejected the idea: ‘I can shed no tears before the public, nor utter any groan in the public ear.’ All too familiar with death and her own sorrow, she had come to understand that the process of writing the novel ‘took me out of the dark and desolate reality’, that it ‘lifted me when I was sinking’ – the act of writing as a way of dealing with loss.

Other parallels between Garner and Brontë spring to mind. ‘Are you then addressing explicitly “moral” issues in your writing?’ When Garner was asked this early in her career, she answered in the affirmative, as I imagine Brontë would have done. Perhaps growing up in a family of sisters – each had four, and one brother – enhances the feminine art of judgement. Both these writers enter into the discourse of power, questioning false authority, social constraints and individual choices. They are connoisseurs of crumbling edifices. Both are lively reporters, impelled to colour their prose with authorial discernment and directive. Their manoeuvres stimulate the reader’s participation. In this reciprocal domain, the writers then find themselves vulnerable to criticism. Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847) shocked many of its first readers, in particular a group of evangelists who thought the book was immoral. Garner’s The First Stone also provoked protest from a new breed of pulpiteer, who believed the author was writing against women. As Brontë and Garner invested much of themselves in their works, they were both scarred from the battering. But it must also be said that those books attracted so much attention that they became great publishing successes.

The retributive works that followed – Brontë’s Shirley, Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation – benefit from their authors’ heightened sense of the reception of their earlier books, heightened because, while they were affected by negative responses, they were not intimidated. ‘If I ever do write another book,’ Brontë teased one of her critics, ‘I think I will have nothing of what you call “melodrama”; I think so, but I am not sure.’ Writers sharpen their swords. In fact, Garner followed The First Stone with a poignant prose collection titled The Feel of Steel (2001), where the act and metaphor of fencing served her well: ‘I was beaten. I won a bout. I was beaten again. I faced the big guy from the Dandenongs … I forgot about “Retreat! Retire!” and brandished my feeble blade in his face … The longer we fenced in the awful heat, the cooler my head became.’ The hot and cold of writing – and of reading, of herself, of others – has always been at the core of Garner’s work. In this respect, Joe Cinque’s Consolation is a burning response to a chilling set of facts.

From the start, the book moves rapidly to the edge of the abyss by citing the transcript of the emergency call that Anu Singh made to the paramedics while Joe Cinque lay dying. ‘The shrill blast of this dialogue broke through my indifference and galvanised me,’ Garner writes, ‘the killer’s voice pleading, dodging, feinting; the dispatcher’s desperate striving for command; and the jolting visual flashes of Joe Cinque’s death throes – the close presence, behind the screaming, of a young man’s body in extremis – his limbs, his mouth, his teeth, his heart.’ This is the essence of the deed: a moment in time when the killer’s play of indecision concurs with, and can be seen to contribute to, the victim’s terrible end. The deadly attenuation stands in stark contrast to the paramedics’ urgent instructions on how to resuscitate someone who has been overdosed on heroin.

Beyond that moment, facts flourish and appear in a variety of configurations, as hearsay, evidence, judgment or interpretation. Details bring about changes of emphasis, a tone of voice shifts the listener’s allegiance. Questions and contradictions multiply. We learn, for example, ‘that Singh had talked … obsessively about killing herself and yet had ended up killing someone else’, that the two women had researched suicide methods, that one had tried to get hold of a gun, that fellow students had purposefully taught the women how to use heroin, and, in one of the story’s many bizarre twists, that payment for this drug-instruction was in Danish pastries. An eerie mood-mix of hysteria and nonchalance seems to have prevailed. There were preparations, failed attempts and phone calls, two dinner parties (on the Monday and on the Friday) and, eventually, on the third evening, Joe’s coffee was laced with sedatives. He became unconscious. Then Singh injected him with a lethal dose of heroin. ‘But the young man did not die the neat and quiet death that she had been advised would follow such a dose. He lingered. For hours. Right through the night and into the following morning.’ In other words, there was plenty of time for the killer to reconsider her act, if she had wanted to.

Like Joe’s death, the narrative is not neat or calm. It is as crowded – with characters and significance – as Brueghel’s Proverbs. Occasionally, humour rises to the surface, but, largely, it is torn with the sadness of incomprehensibility, stained with the sordidness of drugs, laden with the gravity of crime and the social responsibility of deciphering it. The book follows a diary-based, open-faceted structure that we have come to associate with Garner’s work, with several starting points and possible conclusions. The plot, to see this reportage from a literary perspective, is thick with sub-plots. Their complexities spill way past the rim of the book. Readers are required to be tough interpreters, strong swimmers, ethically, logically and emotionally. They need to cut through matters that are a far cry from the acqua profonda – of love, drugs and the Fitzroy baths – in which Garner set her first book, Monkey Grip (1977). Both that book and this latest are stories of kinds of addiction. In the first, danger lurks around the heels of innocence. ‘I wished to trust,’ says the heroine, as if she had stepped from a gothic romance, ‘and so I trusted. When events did not please me, my dreams reworked them.’ As easy as that? Not quite, but almost. In the latest, it’s not so much danger that stalks, as sheer wickedness that has killed off innocence. Joe Cinque is dead. That’s the refrain. It runs bleakly, like an asystolic flat-line, through the monitor of the text.

The work as a register of the verbal or physical articulation – and exhaustion – of emotions of loss shows the dead man’s family wearing a crushing weight of bereavement. Joe’s mother’s voice is described as ‘heavy with the authority of suffering’. In court, she utters an unsettling range of sounds, including wordless contempt. Joe’s father says, ‘I feel like a boat in the sea. I don’t know which direction to go in. I can’t see land.’ He doesn’t like anyone to sit in his dead son’s chair at the dining table. Joe’s brother is ‘a desperately thin young man in his early twenties … seldom speaking’. When he was first told what had happened, he ‘put his fist through the door. He starts screaming, “That bitch has killed my brother”.’ The fact that Anu Singh was found guilty of manslaughter – not of murder – further intensifies the family’s pain and feelings of injustice and disorientation. On hearing the judgement, ‘the dead man’s mother burst into wild sobs’.

And the narrative shoulders another kind of tension: if the Cinques feel cheated that their statements are not read out in court, and if in their view the sentence does not fit the crime, at least there might be some consolation when the writer completes the task she has set herself. It recalls the moment in The First Stone when the author wanted ‘to put the whole thing down and walk away’. But Garner stays the distance: ‘I walked out and sat on the bench under the elm tree … I felt sick, miserable, morally at sea. I wished I could stay out there forever, and heal myself by breathing the summer air. But I was in this story now, and I would have to stay in it till the end.’

In court, she listens as others ‘strain the elastic of language till it snapped’. Spurred by this atmosphere of linguistic display and competition, but primarily inspired to deliver the nuances and magnitude of the story as she perceived them, in her own work she establishes a verbal economy that does not dare to underestimate, and pays close attention to, the idea that ‘court watchers seek drama. It is easier to understand than the law’s intricacies.’ In contrast with the flow of her textual structures, which scan and hover like a Robert Altman movie, her language is mostly stripped and to the point. For this reason, in the past, critics have picked her as a realist and a stylist. She applies what she has called the ‘moral imagination’ even to the smallest units of writing. Like a judge, she understands what’s relevant to the case, makes a note of this, but then allows herself to mistrust and investigate questions of relevance. Garner often goes off the beaten track, and that’s where the excitement begins. She keeps rolling up to giants – birth, death, love, beauty, spirituality, the law – forgets about retreating, retiring, and tests their mettle – hers too – with the point of her pen. She strives for language that will communicate effectively. Hardness, distance, shallowness and complacency – in herself, in others, in systems and institutions – are the enemy.

In Joe Cinque’s Consolation, Garner builds on the expressionism established in her previous writing, particularly The Children’s Bach (1984) and Cosmo Cosmolino (1992). Her writing fits generically with the generous fictional imagination of Janet Frame or Margaret Atwood, as well as the quizzing prose of writers such as Janet Malcolm. Screams, wild sobs, the tearing noise when a psychologist zips up his bag, Freudian slips, men who dance to the tune of a woman’s tantrum, the author shivering or howling into her hanky: Garner’s text strikes gestures of primal intensity. In relation to her personal unhappiness at the time of writing, she adopts a brutal honesty, admitting that she was interested in ‘the wildness that one keeps in one’s cage’ and that she wanted to write the book in order ‘to look at women who were accused of murder’. She persuades us that murder, certain kinds of murder, belong to ‘the realm of archetypal drama’, where the suffering, the chain of painful consequences – Garner calls it ‘the long dark brooding’ – invites portentous connotations and uncanny correspondences. Love meets death, innocence falls for experience, mistakes cancel out the order of things. The past is too big for the present. The future shrinks. Objects pack a punch as symbols. In a video in which Joe features as an MC at a family wedding, Garner sees that ‘right across the top of the stairs, someone had parked a large, empty pram’ and then ‘somebody wheeled the pram out of the way’.

Migrants retrace their steps. Joe’s father remembers his choice, as a young man, of a free passage either to Canada or Australia, suggesting with a desperate logic that, had he chosen Canada, his son might still be alive. An earlier girlfriend of Joe’s, whom he was too young to marry at the time and who then married someone else, ‘in some people’s retrospective fantasies’ represents ‘an emblem of Joe Cinque’s alternative fate – a figure from a parallel universe’. Her story, in turn, creates further parallels: ‘I’m half Spanish, but there was no Spanish community in Newcastle, so I loved the Italian community. I wanted that multicultural thing. I went to Italian weddings and parties with Joe.’

In one of her stories, ‘Sad Grove by the Ocean’, which appears in True Stories (1996), Garner writes of growing up without having ever ‘heard of garlic, let alone smelt it’, and of feeling ashamed, years later, at having mispronounced the names of her migrant schoolmates. If the reader mispronounces Cinque, it almost sounds like Singh, although one is an Italian surname and the other is Indian. Garner notes that after the judgment was announced in court, the mirror-family, ‘the Singhs – father, mother, teenage brother – moved past me slow and swimmingly, like people in a dream. The boy looked devastated and puffy-eyed. The mother, shell-shocked, somehow maintained her dignity, eyes down, dark-faced, inward. Dr Singh caught my eye and made a formal nod to me, almost a bow.’ At that moment, they move with the knowledge that their life will never be the same. Like leaving one’s country, and like death, these shifts of destiny are also a kind of migration. Our sympathy towards the victim’s family does not weaken, but our bias against the Singhs softens. While we remain uneasy about the father, who is much too pushy – he insists that in this story ‘the main character is my daughter’ – we cannot help but empathise with the mother and brother. Will we be allowed to hang on to this fellow feeling, or will it be disqualified by more disclosures? Will we learn that her family was somehow to blame for Anu’s character malformation? To the end, these questions remain, providing a strong chord of intellectual suspense.

And the perpetrator? Slim and attractive, she has long, dark hair, often ‘clumped on the nape of her neck’, and she wears fashionable clothes and high heels. A journalist describes her as ‘head-turningly beautiful, the daughter of a wealthy family, spoilt rotten’. How should she be read? Through Garner’s eyes? The girl enters the court ‘fast and silently’: in other words, like a hunter or killer. She puts up her hair in ‘an almost indecently intimate and histrionic display, a series of age-old, deeply feminine gestures’: in other words, like a seductress. We wonder if there is room for further interpretation.

Mainly, though, we want to know if Anu Singh is sorry for what she has done. Does she grieve? The reader joins the wide-ranging representation of interests associated with the court case, including the legal and psychiatric experts, and, not least, the supernumerary observer – the author – who all look closely for signs of Anu Singh’s conscience. When it proves hard to find, or hard to guarantee, someone suggests that for a person not to express remorse does not necessarily signify a lack of feeling. Fair enough. In our culture, this is a view with which we are only too familiar. It demonstrates the claim made by Philippe Ariès in The Hour of Our Death (1981) that excessive displays of grief are no longer a part of the Western social norm. Nonetheless, we scrape and dig for the criminal’s signs of remorse. It is a primitive impulse. Garner calls it the gut level, and in this book, as throughout her work, she defends the gut against its loftier cousins, intellect and reason.

In the necessary search for the discovery of Anu Singh’s moral centre, some sightings are reported: ‘She says … that she will still need to grieve for Mr Cinque … She misses the victim and says that if this hadn’t happened she would be married to him … She wants to write to Joe’s parents.’ But then there are also doubts about the sincerity of these sentiments. The soul and psyche of the woman who manslaughtered her boyfriend is a mystery, as her real motive also remains a mystery. It is proposed that she suffers from borderline personality disorder – manifest in a number of symptoms, including repetitive self-destructive behaviour and poor control of impulse – and that this contributed to her committing the crime. What counts against her, in all respects, is the proof of her terrible persistence, her protracted carrying-out of the murder. Garner writes, ‘it began to dawn on me that though Joe Cinque died at lunchtime on a Sunday, it took practically the whole weekend to kill him’. Need anyone say more?

Because Singh seems normal to most people most of the time, it is difficult to accept a purely psychiatric explanation of her act. Garner once said she was interested in ‘how people draw a line between responsibility and freedom, and also what happens to people who don’t’. Singh is someone, in Garner’s view, who either couldn’t or didn’t draw the line. Despite the abundance of evidence and explanation, something about Singh remains worryingly out of range – deranged and undecidable – and in court, with the author, we watch ‘as a whole section of the floor reared up on hinges, revealing, at an acute angle, the bare timber planks of a staircase. The guards guided Anu Singh towards the trapdoor. She stepped into the hole. Down she went, with her head bowed. The last thing to disappear was her hair, bound in its thick club.’ Mrs Cinque shouts curses, but ‘the girl was already too deep to be seen. The floor closed over her and became once more only a rectangle of carpet.’ She had it all – love, youth, intelligence, beauty, wealth – and ‘for whatever reason, she had thrown it all away’. She had ripped the social fabric. She had disappeared into a hole of her own making.

Throughout her work, Garner establishes metaphoric equations between sex, language and domesticity, and then envisages situations of despair and repair, emptiness and replenishment. The heroine of Monkey Grip is always darning clothes, just as she stitches herself across the rifts of friendship and fragments of community. In The Children’s Bach, a woman’s stupefyingly pointless talk is also ‘as voluptuous as the murmuring of a dressmaker’. Kerryn Goldsworthy has pointed out that in ‘Postcards from Surfers’ ‘the knitting metaphor with its complex patterning and endless thread is invoked to characterise the older women’s “endless, looping discourses”‘. In Cosmo Cosmolino, someone weaves a cradle, steals a fortune and conceives a child. And The First Stone exemplifies this break-and-fix paradigm in its very title. In Joe Cinque’s Consolation, the breakage is at once a young man’s death and a young woman’s crime, a terrible confusion of love and death, and the repair – the consolation – is a complex patchwork of interpretation and mourning.

Although Garner admits early on that ‘Anu Singh raised my girl-hackles in a sharp bristle’, and later refers to her bluntly as a witch and as ‘that irritating classic type, the sex bomb’, through taking up different perspectives and harnessing images like that of the trapdoor and the carpet patch, she almost allows the reader to feel for someone who, perhaps tragically, appears to have a severely impaired capacity for compassion. When the sentence is handed down and the judge tells Singh that she has caused immense pain, ‘the young woman wiped her eyes, but she kept her face up and continued to return his gaze, like a schoolgirl being hauled over the coals’. Is it all an act? Then the judge suggests that the girl should ‘find the moral courage … to rebuild the wreckage, to repay the trust people have put in you’. And Garner reacts sharply: ‘Trust? Who had put trust in her?’ Again and again, the author’s judgment zooms in on the frustrations and misregistrations that occur between words and meanings. She watches and listens, trusts and mistrusts, mediates and measures. ‘Ten years with a non-parole period of four years … I did the sum in the margin. She could be out by … 2001.’

Anu Singh was not alone in her preparation for the crime. There were two: the actor and her understudy. This collusion, this excess of ill-will makes it all much worse. There is elaboration and confusion in their different versions of the story and in the court’s unfolding of events about what Anu Singh’s friend Madhavi Rao knew and to what extent she was actively involved in the build-up to the crime. The question of her double-sidedness is turned over and over. The author has her own ideas: ‘it struck me that the world is full of these female doublings … symbiotic power arrangements that are called friendships … The well-meaning “supportive” one trails along in the wake of her narcissistic friend … But she also feeds off the wrecker’s high-voltage energy.’ For Garner, this is familiar territory. Similar issues come to the fore in her portrait of Cheryl Butcher, the mother of Daniel Valerio, in ‘Killing Daniel’ in True Stories. About this woman the writer asks, ‘How could she not have known what was being done to Daniel? What deal did she make with herself to allow her child to suffer the brutality of her boyfriend … in exchange for his company?’ Similarly, it seems that Rao might have saved the dying man if she had had her full count of ethical marbles. ‘When Madhavi Rao saw Joe Cinque on the bed, did she know, ought she to have known that he was in peril of his life?’ People were shocked when it was argued that ‘whatever moral duty might have been on a person in her circumstances to act, no legal duty was created by those circumstances’. And Garner notes wryly that this is the point of separation, when ethics is peeled away from the law.

Courts are alive. ‘The court let out its breath, and drew another’ – like a powerful beast, half bureaucracy, half humane justice. In The First Stone, Garner had already noted that, according to the rules of evidence in court, much material is rejected as irrelevant, including ‘the complexities of co-text’. But far from being repelled or daunted by this fact, it’s as if Garner can’t get enough of its claustrophobic connotations, its walled-in heart. ‘I got to the court early so I could watch the lawyers,’ she writes, and notes the pecking order at the bar table. ‘Everything social at this table seemed to revolve around Anu Singh’s counsel, Jack Pappas … You could have drawn a diagram of the lines of attention that centred on him.’ As an observer, Garner has the privilege to reflect on other kinds of insights, such as power play and body language. She can write, for example, that ‘the transcript of the Singh/Rao committal is a document of rare human richness, clanging with voices, shot through with colour and marked by a sort of fabulous crudity’, and recount the fact that ‘the proceedings are slowed down by Mr Pappas’s need to keep taking notes – “Your Worship, I am not a writing machine!” – but they are also a showcase for his old-fashioned glorying in the performance of it all’.

She can also show the effects of the law, and describes one witness who had attended the second of the inauspicious last suppers in the week before the murder took place, and who had shown more moral fibre in the course of events than the other guests and acquaintances. ‘Eager to cooperate and to get things right’, this girl is shown being treated mercilessly by the defence counsel. Confused and humiliated, she is asked repeatedly ‘whether she was – that word so insulting in a legal context – “emotional”‘. Garner says: ‘it was awful … to read the transcript of the three days of mauling cross-examination she had to face: to see the erosion of her certainty about herself and her memory … outmanoeuvred by heads cooler and wills tougher than hers.’

Garner’s literary expression of feeling is synonymous with the moral thread that runs through her work. It’s a kind of defiance, and a kind of excess, like fronting up to ‘the big guy from the Dandenongs’ in her fencing class, catching sight of Eros in The First Stone, or inhabiting the shed, picking the jonquils and conceiving the angels of Cosmo Cosmolino. In an interview in the mid-1980s, Garner was asked if it was important for her to have women publishers. She answered, ‘Oh God, it’s been crucial. If I’d had to take Monkey Grip to a male publishing company, either it would have been thrown out immediately as being too emotional … or I would have had to hack at it and change it in lots of ways.’ And in ‘Sighs Too Deep for Words’, which appears in The Feel of Steel, she calls upon Kafka to define abundance as ‘something greater than all that is fearful’. Kafka must have had those thoughts towards the very end of his life, when, for a short while, the great love of Dora Dymant deflected the nearness of illness and death.

In her latest work, Garner shines her torch on many faces, but on one in particular. ‘The first time I saw Joe Cinque among his friends and family, the first time I ever heard his voice, was in the living room of his parents’ house in Newcastle, in the winter of 1999 … By then, of course, he had already been dead for nearly two years … This is the story of how I got to know him.’ These are her opening lines. And after a harrowing examination of his death, she closes the book as respectfully and lovingly as it had begun. She finds that: ‘His face was fine and sensitive, still faintly blurred with youth, not yet set in the hard lines of manhood. He looked like a man who was lightly poised on the very rim of the world he came from.’ Around death, she cites the priorities of life: ‘to place, consider, deplore and mourn.’ It’s a kind of embrace.