Kiranjeet Kaur Gill
posted 13 July 2007

With the publication of the Orange Prize longlist, Muriel Gray criticised female authors for failing to write imaginatively enough and instead allowing themselves to be pigeonholed into focusing on ‘small-scale domestic themes’ – ordinary stories about ordinary people. And Deborah Robertson’s first novel, Careless may well fall into the same trap that haunts many, or if Muriel Gray is right in what she says, most of her contemporaries.

Set in the author’s native Australia, Careless follows three intersecting life stories, that of a young girl whose brother has been killed, a woman who has recently lost her husband, and a rather selfish artist who fails to find inspiration after the one controversial piece that threw him into the limelight.

Throughout the book, the author shows a fascination with the commemoration of death, from an exhibition in remembrance of a furniture designer to a memorial for lost children, and it is, in fact, a meeting about the design of this memorial that brings the characters together in the first place. Eight-year-old Pearl, wise beyond her years, supports her often feckless mother, Lily, as they try to return to ‘normality’ following the brutal killing of Riley, Pearl’s younger brother, by a car driver who is himself a grief-stricken father. The young artist, Adam Logan, longs to be commissioned for the memorial, but his own selfish nature makes it difficult for him to come up with any design that will suitably encompass both other people’s sadness and also their hope for the future. Adam works in the old workshop of yet another character who has loved and lost, Sonia, who finds her life empty after the death of her husband Pieter, the aforementioned furniture designer.

Predictably, Lily falls for Adam, but she finds herself used and then tossed to one side, as it seems, does every other young woman unfortunate enough to come into contact with the self-absorbed artist. Nina, a young journalist, ‘cannot calculate in exactly how many ways she has been insulted’ after she loses her virginity to him. But his disregard for anyone other than himself is most evident when he persuades Lily, still grieving, to give him the ashes of her young son for his own potential, and of course selfish, gain. From here, the characters in the story become inextricably linked as they unite to reclaim Pearl’s brother’s ashes, and we are shown compassion that Robertson seems to suggest can only come from having suffered hardships or losses. Adam, always the one with only his own interests at heart, is incapable of feeling anything for anyone.

Muriel Gray says that books by female authors are far too often about ‘motherhood, boyfriend troubles and tiny family dramas’. So far, so Careless. However, Deborah Robertson’s book is far removed from most of the trashy chick-lit cluttering up bookshelves today. Whilst these ‘tiny family dramas’ existing as three separate stories would most likely be exactly what Gray laments over in women’s literature, what Robertson has done, via the memorial, is turned them into a neat storyline that impacts more than those directly involved with the main plots. In the epilogue, when plans for the memorial have been finalised, one character says that ‘It looks like one of those memorials you can take your own grief to’, and this is, I think, what Robertson wants the reader to remember. Whilst an individual death rarely affects more than a handful of people, the feeling of grief is universal. This is what links not only the characters in the story, but anybody who at some point in their life has experienced the same emptiness the characters feel after losing their loved ones.

One particular talent that Robertson seems to have is being able to portray feelings – I often found myself startled by how well she puts into words emotions that many us will have felt, and the way in which the story slips between the past and the present shows just how raw and how real these emotions, and the characters’ grief, still are. Robertson also achieves a great deal in terms of characterisation. She makes it impossible for the reader not to feel moved by Pearl, for example, who is written about in very simplistic, child-like terms, but whose thoughts and feelings are probably more complex than those of most people twice her age. And it’s natural to feel it shouldn’t be like this, that so much shouldn’t happen to someone who is so young and innocent, that she should be such a sharp contrast to her childish mother, who Robertson suggests we shouldn’t really blame, and even more of a contrast to the narcissistic Adam, who even the most cold-hearted of readers would take an instant disliking to.

The book has been criticised as being too heavy on dialogue and really leading nowhere, and there is perhaps an element of truth in both of these claims. There certainly is a lot of dialogue at times, and at the end it is hard to see what has changed since the initial events of the story. There is no doubt a purpose to this however. Firstly, the dialogue can really help the readers to understand and empathise with the characters better, from the simplicity and beauty in Sonia and her husband’s short exchanges, to the tension and awkwardness often present in conversations between Pearl and her mother Lily. Secondly, in terms of where the story leads, the reader may well be left wondering whether there really has been any kind of redemption; this is, after all, what is being sought throughout the book. What Robertson seems to be pushing at is that sometimes there is no justification, no reason for what happens, or maybe this is just what we’ve come to expect with our postmodern and cynical view of the world.

Nevertheless, the most positive part of the story is found towards the end, with some of the characters beginning to accept and come to terms with their grief. But at the same time, Robertson reminds us, never forgetting what they have lost.