Smokehouse opens with a drive from Bellerive to Kettering, where the landmarks of the characters’ world (Mount Wellington, Tasman Bridge, Hobart Regatta grounds, Salamanca Market) are registered. Nora is dissatisfied with her life and irritated by her husband’s attempts at tenderness. Their decision to purchase land in Kettering, where they plan to build a house for themselves and their two daughters, offers her hope: she wonders ‘who she might become, whether this place, these people, might change things. Might render this life enough.’

Other stories, including ‘Boy’, ‘Bruny’, and ‘Stone’, feature similarly dissatisfied women, whether as central characters or as the offstage cause of pain in the men they leave behind. They often view their men as unreliable, forever promising to finish projects; the men, for their part, are angry at the unreliable women for leaving. In this, the stories act as riffs on the same set of circumstances, so much so that at times the echoes are uncanny. While Nora ‘longs to feel the margins of herself’ in ‘Smokehouse’, in ‘Bruny’ a burnt house is remembered by Arlene as ‘the one place on the island where she felt seamless’, whereas the big city was where she could ‘let her margins blur’.

Being good with one’s hands and with practical tasks is prized. Nora’s feelings of inadequacy when it comes to building the house contribute to her resentment and imperil her self-esteem. According to the set of values quickly established in the book, we understand that Ollie, for whom she leaves her husband, is a good man because he sets craypots and bakes bread. He gently initiates Nora’s hostile daughters into these activities, eventually winning them over. Rob, in ‘Chainsaw’, teaches his daughter Hannah to fish, kayak, and whittle things from driftwood. These instances are not only markers of the moral order that governs the world of Smokehouse; they are offered as examples for how to lead a good life, how to be awake to the beauty of the ordinary, of its capacity to ground and centre us.

Melissa Manning (photograph via UQP)

The fulcrum on which all these stories balance is personal devastation. We encounter characters still in the thick of grief after losing someone, whether to death, illness, or drugs. Often this loss serves as a moment and a perspective from which to survey the rest of life, a way to apprehend time. The nonsequential structures of ‘Nao’, ‘Bruny’, and ‘Chainsaw’ subtly foreground the power of memory, the way grief can mean the past lives on in the present. Always, the focus is on family, so much so that the friends of Nora whom we learn about in Part Two of the novella come as a surprise. It is not that these friendships are unconvincing, more that the expectations set up by the concerns of the other stories make them feel inconsequential.

Throughout Smokehouse and particularly ‘Faal’, it becomes increasingly easy to predict the ruptures that will puncture happiness. Admittedly, this is always a challenge when bringing sole-authored stories together in one volume: while repetition means that certain concerns get a chance to resonate, at the same time it can highlight any author tics. In Smokehouse, the fact that focus is so trained on the personal, on family relationships, is a limitation, especially when viewed in light of characters’ interactions with the setting. People are at liberty to choose where they live ‘for the view’, or they decide to move from interstate ‘on a whim’. While making such decisions is ostensibly reflective of the tree-change settler experience, these characters are also remarkably uncurious about the history of the land they are living on. Kettering, for example, is so close to putalina (Oyster Cove), where Aboriginal Tasmanians who had survived the forced removal to Flinders Island lived after the island settlement was closed, yet Oyster Cove is absent from the collection’s otherwise detailed imagining of this part of southern Tasmania.

This is why the focus on grief feels blinkered. There is no exploration of grief at the level of community, society, or environment; no sense that it can be brought about by causes beyond personal tragedies. It starts to feel like a burying of the head in the proverbial sand. Tellingly, I was most engaged by the final third of Part One of the novella, where the narrative explores the complex dance carried out by various members in the reconfiguration of a family. They subverted my expectations by reaching a fragile happiness. Disappointingly, Part Two did not pick up where Part One left off, instead jumping forward some fifteen years to another moment of high drama.

Yet it would be remiss of me not to emphasise that the personal grief and family breakdown is narrated with emotional maturity. The unfussy prose is an apt vehicle, and there are no false notes. It creates thematic harmony across the collection, making it a meditation on how we cope, or fail to cope, in the face of personal loss; on the complexities of relationships that lead to loss, or of those nurtured in its wake.