Eye of a Rook by Josephine Taylor

Fremantle Press, $32.99 pb, 232 pp

Prioritising an agenda in favour of a story is a risky approach to writing a novel, and of these novels, Eye of a Rook, Josephine Taylor’s first novel, takes the most risks. It is unapologetically committed to exposing a story with which few readers would be familiar.

The novel starts in contemporary Perth with Alice Tennant, lecturer and researcher, being struck by a mysterious gynaecological pain that becomes so severe and chronic it consumes her entire life. As in so many stories concerning little-known, forgotten, or marginalised people or topics, what is fundamentally lacking is the language; the story often remains untold because the words are inadequate, or do not exist. When we meet Alice on the first page, she is searching for the right words to describe the shocking, persistent pain that will affect everything in her life – work, marriage, and friendships. By the novel’s end, after trying every possible remedy, Alice has not so much controlled this pain but found a way to control the language around it, and thus its fundamental narrative. This language involves terminology that will be new to most readers – vulvodynia, vulvovaginal disease – though the pseudo-medical diagnosis of conditions like ‘hysteria’ will be familiar.

While Alice’s body increasingly betrays and confines her, her imagination becomes more vibrant and responsive, and searching for language leads her to ideas for a story. It is not giving away anything to explain that the alternative narrative of the novel is being written by Alice, because that is clear in advance. This part of the story is set in London in the 1860s, where a new husband, Arthur Rochdale, is trying to comprehend and find a cure for his wife Emily’s similarly mysterious and excruciating pain. Ignorance and desperation lead Arthur and Emily to agree to a brutal ‘cure’ at the hands of a sadistic celebrity male doctor. This character might seem straight out of the pages of a horror story, but Isaac Baker Brown was indeed a prominent gynaecologist and obstetrician who performed clitoridectomies to treat a range of illnesses from epilepsy to ‘hysteria’. It would be unfair to reveal what happens to Emily, but suffice to say it is not what we expect, and nor is the resolution of the novel overall.

If this novel is somewhat clunky in stitching together the two halves of the narrative (the conversations between Alice and a friend on how her historical novel will be structured are pretty expedient and implausible), and if the overall approach is designed to educate us, they are mitigated by the novel’s unflinching representation of women’s bodies, women’s voices, and specifically women’s pain, in a novel that is compelling, well-paced, and engaging from start to finish.

Everyday Madness by Susan Midalia

Fremantle Press, $29.99 pb, 280 pp

The characters in Susan Midalia’s Everyday Madness are also searching for the right words. So elusive are they that one of them switches from incessant chattering to clamming up. Gloria’s refusal or inability to speak is the external symptom of the breakdown that sends her to hospital and forces her husband, Bernie, ultimately to rethink his own silence and emotional atrophy. In this novel about middle-aged, middle-class, suburban people, the ordinary is peeled back to show that the everyday madness of the title is the sort that can afflict anyone and cannot be dismissed as trivial.

There are two main narrative strands. The other focuses on Gloria and Bernie’s ex-daughter-in-law, Meg (whom they value more than their indifferent and materialistic son), and her daughter Elle. Meg struggles with the right words when trying to help Gloria. Ironically, she is a speech pathologist in training, and she is also prone to saying the wrong thing when she meets a man who seems to be an attractive proposition. The reason for the missteps and misunderstandings in their relationship is subtly seeded, and ultimately explains why he is silent and how that silence has provoked her tongue to mischief.

The pace briskly moves us through the different storylines and points of view of each character, but allows us to reflect on the suffering in even the most anodyne suburban context (in this case Perth, again). Interestingly, the acknowledgments at the end explain that ‘madness’ in the novel is not meant to be ‘the severe mental illnesses’ that people suffer from, but rather more generalised or ‘normalised’ things like anxiety and suspicion, and even users of leaf-blowers and fake fingernails. In that case, we must all be a little mad.

Aptly, it is the imaginative and talkative child Ella who provokes the real crisis of the novel, and at the end her chattering indicates a reassuring sort of resolution; but the story, while deftly structured, is not too neat, and the overall effect is satisfying. This novel is designed to nudge us into seeing the hidden anguish in people’s lives, rather than confronting us with suffering, which, if not the intention of Taylor’s Eye of the Rook, is certainly its effect.

 A Room Called Earth by Madeleine Ryan

Scribe, $29.99 pb, 304 pp

Unlike Alice, Gloria, and Meg, the unnamed young narrator of Madeleine Ryan’s A Room Called Earth has a great deal to say. Her affliction is to be hypersensitive and emotionally trapped, and this is reflected in the amount of time it takes her to get dressed and out to a party. In this novel, voice is prioritised over story, and this voice reflects the self-absorption, contradictions, and vernacular of someone both immature and vulnerable (the filler word ‘like’ gets a big outing), yet world-weary and overconfident. She notices everything, but what does she really see? Cynical faux-wisdom is offered in flat prose, as if language itself has been administered some kind of sedative. Numerous lengthy conversations, often comprising monosyllables delivered tag-free like a game of ping-pong, along with the narrator’s random diatribes on any number of topics, combine to deliver a surreal effect that is not entirely successful.

With little context or backstory, trapped in the present tense, the story has no means of exploring what might be fuelling the narrator’s fears or insecurities. Numerous nameless boyfriends are referenced, rarely favourably, while everything she knows she seems to have ‘once read in a book somewhere’. But while contextual details are rare, the narrator is attentive to details of her appearance and surroundings, and there are some intimate descriptions of things like clothes, the house where the party is held, and the streets where she seeks to escape. And butterflies. When this overlong, claustrophobic story came to its most unexpected ending, I was almost cheering for its maddening yet strangely appealing narrator.