Three women in their seventies meet at the coastal holiday house of their friend, Sylvie, who has died. Wood’s novel moves slowly from one character to another, drawing back and forth like the tide, patiently accumulating expository details. The women’s collective narrative is shell-like: its weathered surface curls protectively around secrets and tenderness. In some parts this surface has worn translucent; in others, callouses and scars have formed over injuries.

As if on holiday, each woman is severed from her ordinary life, becalmed for a few days between the past with its detritus and treasure, and a future lit by flares of hope and fear. Unlike a holiday, their occupation is the work of mourning, including the emotionally freighted business of preparing Sylvie’s disorganised house for sale. It is hot, almost Christmas. Sylvie’s absence limns the places where the women’s friendship has become brittle, or holds together provisionally or by habit. Their bond is frangible, their irritation with one another so manifest that the continuance of their friendship seems unlikely.

A shell is itself a house emptied by death – the exoskeletal form of an organism that has died. It is beautiful in some lights, when considered apart from the mortality it evidences. Looking back at the early days of the women’s friendship is, to Adele, a once-acclaimed, out-of-work actor, like ‘looking through water; some things were magnified, their colours more intense’. She remembers its beginnings, being ‘drawn into the current of each other’. This current has subsided; the friendship ‘left drifting’.

As a shell forms around an animal, so the non-human animals in the novel occupy its centre: fish washed onto the shore, cicadas, a chicken ready to be roasted, and Wendy’s dog, Finn. The women’s belated identification with these creatures is foreshadowed when Jude, formerly a celebrated restaurateur, finds herself facing a dish of lambs’ brains with disgust, ‘revolted’ by the ‘colour and taste of moths or death’. She eats them, because ‘it was part of her code: you did not refuse what was offered’. Yet she is assailed by the image of the three lambs: ‘each one its own conscious self, with its own senses, its intimate pleasures and pains’.

The experience makes her want to say to Daniel, her lover of many years, ‘I don’t want to die.’ But, ‘of course’, she does not say this. Throughout the novel, the unsaid thrums beneath the women’s exchanges. Jude, especially, observes the unspeakable rising. She rages internally when Daniel tells her that his cousin has died; she holds her hand to her mouth to stop her urge to spit, or to spit out the words: ‘Of course Andrew died… what did Daniel expect? Everybody died. But not Sylvie.’ But, again, Jude lies ‘in all the expected ways’. She tells herself: ‘Don’t be so hard on people, Jude,’ but grief has ‘opened up great oceans of anger’ in her, and the lid she places on her feelings is insecure, buckled by bitterness.

Wendy, a writer and public intellectual, feels a similar tide rising. When people express sympathy for Sylvie’s partner, Gail, wondering how she can bear the loss of her life’s beloved, Wendy looks away, concentrating on not shouting: ‘But I did, I lost the love of my life.’ She remembers the death of her adored husband, Lance, as akin to watching someone being born: ‘the primal instinct, the exhaustion of it, the panting animal labour’. Now it returns to her, with Sylvie’s death, the two twined and knotted. This entwinement – the enlacing of lives and experiences – is central to the novel, as is Wood’s clear-eyed, compassionate focus on the unbeautiful.

Decades’ accretion of the unspoken both sustains and weighs on the friendship. Sylvie’s death leaves the women ‘suddenly mystified by how to be with one another’. The ‘spectre hanging over them’ is the vulnerability they anticipate as they age. Finn, Sylvie’s gift to Wendy after Lance’s death, symbolises this. At seventeen, he is enormous but frail, his unclipped claws scrabbling and clacking as he circles, anxious and trembling, ‘all failure and collapse, all decay’. Finn, ‘moth-eaten, crippled, dirty’, makes up the quartet of ‘failing, struggling, creatures’.

Moth-eaten animals or eating animals that taste like moths: Erasmus Darwin’s maxim ‘eat or be eaten’ hovers. Though Jude dismisses Finn as ‘a poor animal kept alive for too long’, with ‘nothing mysterious or ghostly about his pathetic aged body’, she glimpses in him some lustre, turning at one stage to meet not his eyes, but Sylvie’s. For Adele, Finn’s frail tenacity says ‘Here I am’. In an ecstatic moment late in the novel, she imagines something larger, ‘the ailing dog was teaching her, showing her’ – her own ‘animal self’ might be the way to embrace the future: ‘all creaturely receptivity’.

Mostly, though, he exemplifies decay. He is ‘the ghost creature’ who circles the invisible, facing and outpacing what the women deny. He is deaf, incontinent, lost. Yet his restless click and skitter becomes, steadily, scritch and balm, and each woman finds in him some consolation. Finn, ultimately, is an emblem of ‘the great gathering, the loosening of all things’ the novel moves towards. He brings into the women’s sphere the natural world of which they seem largely unaware.

‘Dreams and beasts,’ suggests Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our own nature.’ From this epigraph ‒ as the novel’s compelling tide and whorl bring the women closer to their secrets – dreams and visions quiver at the edges of their confrontation of the bare animal realities of ageing, desire, and death.

For Jude, an aching longing, an ‘insistence’ wakes her with a ‘quiet but urgent desire to go to church’. This flares like the arthritis in her thumb – she imagines this longing as decadent, symptomatic. Cognitive decline, Jude thinks, slapping it down: ‘frontal lobe shrinkage, doubtless’. She places this call ‘from the world of sleep, from her dreaming self’ in the realm of decrepitude, a sign of weakness.

Yet this urge rises, the novel splicing epiphanic slivers with the stubborn corporeal, transcendence with decay. Although she holds fast to hope, Adele’s dreams are elusive, ‘the thread of a dream’s edge’ slipping from her grasp. The body’s upkeep obsesses her, as does her image. With the neediness and uncertainty imagined as the province of adolescence, she checks her Instagram and posts flattering selfies, basks in emojis and flattery, then experiences savage disappointment about an insufficiently worshipful response. On the train, she is horrified by another passenger, with her flesh-coloured stocking socks, transistor radio, and undyed hair.

Wendy, as lacking in vanity as Adele is defined by it, starts to sense that there are ‘energies – wrong word, a crude approximation, but it would do for now – surging all around her’. These are in the curving gestures of angophora trunks, or in the shady light, and she knows they will somehow help her shape and frame her new novel. The ‘fizzle of important discovery’ lights the way for Wendy; her new book will be ‘not linear, yet not without order.’

Charlotte Wood (photograph by Chris Chen)

The Weekend, Wood’s sixth novel, follows The Natural Way of Things (2015), which won the 2016 Stella Prize and was joint winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. (It was recently voted the eighth most popular novel of the twenty-first century by ABR readers.)

While The Weekend returns to the realism of Wood’s earlier fiction, in some ways it is a corollary to The Natural Way of Things. Where The Weekend is about older women, The Natural Way of Things studies a group of young women imprisoned and demonised in the wake of various sexual experiences, including brutal sexual assault. Its allegorical vision takes the stigmatisation of women to an extreme, imagining the humiliation of what one woman thinks of not as herself, but her ‘ fleecy, punishable flesh’. Misogyny and women’s sexuality are explored from another angle in The Weekend. Older women’s intimate and erotic lives – conventionally ignored or derided – are part of Wood’s terrain. Collectivity, the female homosocial, and the body return as motifs, along with imprisonment, this time in figurative terms.

The body is another kind of shell, and the characters in The Weekend are divided in their attitudes to this. Adele maintains her exercise routine, imagines herself seen and admired and tries out her charms, ‘bestowing her warmth’ upon a taxi driver, who has no idea who she is, and later – in the novel’s climax – in a pitch courting triumph or humiliation. When she wonders why Wendy does ‘nothing about her appearance’, fear falls across her like a shadow: ‘Adele was afraid for her, the way she exposed herself.’ Preparing to be looked at is a defence, and she knows ‘that in some ways this frivolity had damaged her life’.

Yet admiration surfaces, as the friends swing between fear and fearlessness. Adele, Wendy thinks, could ‘reach inside herself and strike a match, light the lamp of herself, and turn it up. Then the suitors came, moths to flame.’ And Wendy, Adele remembers, was formidable. She could ‘transfix you’; her insouciance ‘made her sexy’. She was described by others – ‘interviewers, filmmakers’ – as ‘having a powerful blazing allure’. Adele thinks of her efforts to be admired as taking ‘part in the world gently, with civility and attractiveness’, a way to enhance the world, ‘to create even the smallest pocket of beauty’. She imagines everything as a stage – the rickety inclinator that lifts visitors to Sylvie’s house, the deck, the rooms.

Wood creates a sense of a staged drama. As with The Natural Way of Things, this is an assay – a meticulous weighing of ideas. The holiday house and grief function as catalyst and test tube. If the characters exemplify types, the drama centres on the chemical reactions their equation produces. As a storm builds, the natural world becomes a deus ex machina. As large and decisive an event as King Lear’s storm scene, Wood’s tempest emphasises human smallness: that ‘unaccommodated’ man, as Lear says, is a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’.

The Weekend is a novel of experience – of the ‘rich, tawdry, unjust, destroyed and beautiful world’. This recalls the vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, of ‘the vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty’. Sylvie, like Gatsby, is an elusive conductor.

Wood’s characters are all tethered by ghosts, not just Sylvie’s. One loss echoes another, the latest renewing the older. Wood keeps her insightful focus on the women, with other characters – Daniel, Lance, Adele’s lovers, and Wendy’s adult children – fleeting figments, stories. The house heats up, and, despite hard work, the stuff in the cupboards seems never to end. Too much has been stored and stashed; too much unspoken and ‘insolent inadequacies of the body’ promise to let all this loose.

Wood’s cast – restaurateur, public intellectual, and actor – is not diverse, so there is no opportunity to consider the intersections of more various facets of identity affecting ageing. Its assay is particular, and the women form a composite portrait of women from this specific demographic. ‘Unaccommodated’ woman – where and how each woman will live – is part of the work’s focus, but is not inflected by questions of class or ethnicity. That none of the women has anything but hostile connections with older or younger people suggests Wood’s interest in engineering isolated circumstances to focus her drama.

Ignoring the natural world – or projecting onto Finn a sometimes-sentimental anthropomorphic or hagiographical haze – prefaces nature’s fury. The enclosure of the house and friendship, and a degree of solipsism in each woman, heightens the narrative’s intensity.

The past in The Weekend is ‘through you, through your body, leaching into the present and the future’ – its striations ‘streaky layers of memory, of experience’. In Gwen Harwood’s ‘At Mornington’, her poem about a different kind of long friendship, harmonious instead of fractious, her speaker examines memories ‘Iridescent, fugitive / As light in a sea-wet shell’. She imagines being:

seized at last
and rolled in one grinding race
of dreams, pain and memories, love and grief,
from which no hand will save me,
the peace of this day will shine
like light on the face of the waters

The curl and whorl of this absorbing novel – its tidal draw and rush; its ‘continual work of wave and tide’ – is, like that of Wendy’s novel, neither linear nor shapeless. It moves steadily inwards towards that moment of ‘dreams, pain and memories, love and grief’, secrets and the unspoken finally erupting amid the storm’s ferocity.