I say ‘ book’ because 108 pages of small print can rarely be called a novel. (Henry James referred to works of his own, longer than this, as short stories.) ‘Novella’ might seem safe enough, but Love Child hasn’t got that ‘universe in a grain of sand’ appeal of the successful novella, although it is trying. ‘Novelette’ might suffice, not that it matters, except that the rash of skinny novels we’ve seen from Australian fiction writers in recent years is beginning to bore and I’m wondering why – and just what it is they’re after (apart from notches on their guns to impress the Lit. Board).

I should add that I was amazed to see on the acknowledgements page that Bedford is thanking the Literature Board the 1982/83 Stanford Australian Writers Fellowship, and the 1983 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Grant for their assistance in the writing of this book. We can only hope this wasn’t the only literary event Bedford was working on at that time with all that support.

I don’t actually mind short works. When a fair proportion of your output involves the reviewing of books, it’s a beaut to be asked to produce a few words on just the one, very slender book. Hell yeah. That’s not what’s bothering me. But slender is as slender does, and that’s what’s the matter with Love Child.

There are times when comparisons are odious and it’s probably not fair to Bedford, but when I think of short novels to compare this with, I come up with comparisons like Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, some of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, John Cheever, and, closer to home, David Malouf and Helen Garner, where the pleasure for the reader derives from the richness of suggestion or allusion, the intricacy, the fact that every image, every word on the page has a job to do, sometimes several.

I’ve got a lot of time for Bedford’s work. If her collection of stories, Country Girl Again, had first appeared at a more auspicious moment, and perhaps (as those more cynical than myself might say) if she’d been slightly more ‘gorgeous-looking’, it would have done much better. If you care to look beyond the Greekness of Beverley Farmer’s Greek stories, for instance, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that these two writers are covering a lot of similar ground with similar tools and attitudes to the craft of fiction. And there’s not that much to choose between them at their respective ‘bests’, but Bedford has yet to charm the critics as Farmer has.

If Love Child doesn’t quite make it as a book, which I don’t think it does, it’s because Bedford is taking big risks, and on the principle that it’s better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all, she deserves critical support.

The clue to it all, as Bedford intends us to note, is in the quote from Janis Ian at the beginning of the book:

There’s never much to choose between the lines of what we need
And what we’ll take.
… Between the lines of photographs
I’ve seen the past,
It isn’t pleasing.

But it’s also the clue to why this book falls short. As a writer, what Bedford is after, like Garner and Farmer, is what lies between the lines.

You can’t take the ham-fisted approach if that’s what you’re about, and Bedford doesn’t – usually. She’s trying to be delicate and suggestive. Hers is what would have been called ‘the woman’s touch’ in the ‘olden’ days before feminism and before the current debate set in over the worthiness or otherwise of our women writers.

Basically, Love Child is about the way an inability to love transmits itself from one generation to another, just as surely as brown eyes or curly hair. It’s a fact we have all noticed at one time or another, seeing harassed mothers harass their children in supermarkets, hearing the shouts of bullying fathers drifting across suburban backyards and fences. Really, what Bedford has tried to do is too obvious. She’s telling us something we already know. And she’s left herself no elbow room for asking how or why.

It’s the story of an Australian woman, Anne, and how she ends up in the ‘bin’ because she can’t cope with love – can’t give it, can’t take it. She’s also having trouble thinking about herself in the first person. (I think there’s a name for that.) Bedford traces the tale back to Anne’s parents’ respective childhoods and youth. How rotten her grandfather was to her grandmother and her mother and her aunts. How, after losing her children and much allied misery, Anne’s English mother Grace married an Australian father Bill and moved to Australia. Then we follow Anne from babyhood through a busted marriage, and a child who ends up with his father and his father’s new wife.

Already that seems rather a lot for a small book to deal with, and it is. If there is any room for the whys and the wherefores, it’s stuff like this, when her mother is dying:

Why couldn’t she say ‘You are my mother, I love you, It is my privilege to look after you’? Why wouldn’t Grace say ‘I am old and lonely and frightened, you are all I have’? Was she afraid to have put in words that she wasn’t wanted? That Anne felt her, constant presence almost intolerable? There was nothing in Anne’s rigid politeness to suggest otherwise.

But a paragraph (once in a very rare while) full of meaningful questions doesn’t constitute a searching book. Bedford is aware of this as a: possible criticism, and on the second last page. her third person narrator hedges the bet: ‘She has tried to tell you the truth, but you want reasons, and there is only what happened, what it was like … ‘. Maybe; but the question is, does it work?

Apart from all that there were things that positively annoyed me. For instance, at one stage when Anne is thinking about going to university, she tells us that her parents are against it: ‘they thought universities were unsafe places, no one in either of their families had been to one’. But only forty-six pages earlier we are told that Bill (Anne’s father) had a brother, Morris: ‘When war broke out in 1914, Morris was already at the university with a brilliant future predicted for him.’ In a 108-page book, that kind of thing won’t do.

This won’t go down as one of Bedford’s Greatest Works. She hasn’t allowed herself the leisure to create her characters at any more than the level of what they did and what happened to them: That very light touch she was after, to bring out the nuances, has slipped into the glissando mode, with the odd dollop of ham-fist. What she’s ended up with is family tree and a central character we don’t know whether to feel sorry for or annoyed with. I’m not talking about ambivalence, which I’m all for, but about the sort of ambiguity you get when authors are less than crystal clear in their own minds about just what exactly it is that they’re after.

A nice try, some great moments, but probably not the book we’ve all been waiting for from Bedford.