Reviewed By The Booktopia Book Guru
By the simple act of telling a story a good book can carry a light
into the dark and unexamined corners of a reader’s life. The darkest of
these unexamined corners is occupied by the single irrefutable truth of
our existence, death. Left in the shadows this stark fact can take on
all of the attributes of a nightmarish spectre. Left unexamined we may
be left entirely unprepared when death intrudes upon our own lives.
Something it will do, eventually.
Last Summer by Kylie Ladd, begins with the
sudden death of Rory Buchanan, captain of the local cricket team, a man
in the prime of his life. We immediately enter the lives of those Rory
left behind – his wife, Colleen, his sister, Kelly, her husband, Joe,
and Rory’s friends and team-mates, Nick, James and Pete, and their
wives, Laine, Anita and Trinity as they, in their various ways, cope
with Rory’s death and face up to the fact that life does, and will, go
on without him.
Last Summer is told from the points of view of these nine
characters with full chapters from one point of view only. This method
of storytelling requires strong characterisation so that each
individual point of view provides a unique perspective on the events.
By choosing suburban Melbourne as her setting, and the cricket club as
her focal point, Ladd has made things difficult for herself. There is
much that is necessarily shared by all of these nine characters. They
are all white, they are all
moderately
well off, they are all around the same age and they all have some
connection to the game of cricket. This seeming difficulty turns out to
be one of the novel’s strengths.
A writer’s tools are sharpened upon their knowledge of human nature
and as we read we discover that Ladd’s tools are very sharp indeed. A
lazy writer will accentuate minor differences between characters or
lean upon ready to hand stereotypes but Ladd shies away from these. You
will not find the ditsy blonde, the funny guy, the earnest one, the
clueless one, Dopey, Sneezy or Doc… Ladd’s characters are
differentiated by their individual wants, needs, regrets and hopes,
which are finely drawn. They are all at times funny, witty, stupid and
earnest. This technique establishes each character’s point of view with
a force which is at once memorable and engaging.
My allegiance to one character’s point of view was invariably
challenged on reading the following chapter written from another
character’s point of view. The effect was a broadening of my
perspective. I was forced to examine events from different angles.
Ladd overcame my complacency, too – I thought I knew these people
and in knowing them, secretly despised them. But as I read, her
characters revealed themselves in unexpected ways, now they met my
expectations, now they exceeded them. I was given an opportunity to
warm to characters I would ordinarily shun in life. This is no small
thing.
Last Summer is an entirely adult story.
Here we find married people dealing with the consequences of a tragedy
but having only the tools of ordinary suburban existence to aid them.
The people described in
Last Summer aren’t philosophers, they
can’t crawl off to live in a barrel and ponder the meaning of life.
After the funeral they have jobs to go to. That week the kids will have
to be picked up from school, dinner will have to be made, as will the
beds, and the laundry won’t get done all by itself. The rest of the
cricket season awaits, too. A new captain has to be appointed, the fund
raisers still have to be organised and someone has to replace Rory as
coach of the Kookaburras, the kids cricket team.
The great internal strength we appreciate when reading
Last
Summer comes from Ladd’s weaving together of what could be nine
novellas. We feel compelled to read on not only for the realisation of
one grand scheme but the conclusion of many secondary plots as well.
The wonder of it all is how seamlessly Ladd combines these sometimes
disparate threads.
I would say Ladd is more of a listener than a talker. In
Last
Summer the author recedes allowing the characters to take centre
stage. One can imagine Ladd in a room full of people finding it hard to
concentrate on the conversation she may be having with you, not because
she finds you dull but because she is simultaneously keeping track of
the needs, wants and desires of everyone else in the room. It is this
interest in people which enables her to construct scenes with large
groups, and there are many in the book, without letting the reader miss
out on a thing. Few writers understand the mentality of the group. Ladd
does.
Ladd’s life beyond the page may give some insight into her interest
in and knowledge of people. Dr Ladd has a PhD in neuropsychology, which
is to say, she has made an extreme sport of voyeurism. Not happy with
peeping through windows, she has taken to peering into the very
workings of the brain. In laymen’s terms, she is one smart cookie.
It is clear on reading
Last Summer, though, that Ladd is
an artist, first and foremost. Her ability to reproduce the phrasing of
a liar, to provide meaning with an action left half done, to describe
the slow and painful progress of someone attempting to clamber over the
ramparts of a wounded heart, these cannot be reduced to her
professional interest in human psychology. We must conclude that an
artist’s instinct and craft is at work here, too.
But having said that, Ladd does not offer us flights of fancy.
Last Summer confirms Ladd’s preference for
the true. This is fiction which clasps fact’s hand and will not let it
go. Ladd’s prose is understated, purposefully so, I feel. She knows she
must keep quiet and not interrupt with fancy phrases or authorial
interjections. She is aware how important it is to keep the line of her
narrative taught.
Last Summer is art cleansed of hyperbole,
modern realism at its most unobtrusive.
Ladd depicts her characters coming to grips with their loss and what
it means in the midst of the chaos of contemporary suburban life. Our
suburban life. Although we may feel invincible, we may feel that we
have examined our lives, that we are prepared for any eventuality, more
often than not, when tragedy strikes we find we are unprepared,
hopelessly so.
Last Summer caused me to reflect on life. On my life, too.
How well do I communicate with others? How important are my
relationships? Is this the life I want to be living? Have I made these
choices or have they been made for me?
Ladd reminds us that when death comes it is too late to ask these
questions. We can’t schedule time for a breakdown. We can’t make things
right by sheer will. By letting us into the lives of these people Ladd
offers us an opportunity to make sense of a subject we shun, simplify
or worse, mythologise.
I read
Last Summer quickly, greedily. I really
wanted to know what happened next, how these people would cope. When I
wasn’t reading it – when I was at work – I kept thinking I should text
the characters to see how they were doing. They had become such a part
of my life. It was a wonderful feeling. A great thing for a novel to
achieve.
And even though
Last Summer made me stare right into the
unremarkable face of death, when I closed the book, and leaned back to
think, I realised that the central theme of the book is not death but
life – and how to live it well.
My one complaint is that the novel moves too quickly and the end
comes too soon. I would quite happily have lingered for longer amongst
these characters. But perhaps that is Ladd’s intent. Perhaps she wants
to encourage us to get out and meet our neighbours in the flesh.
Kylie Ladd is a strong, intelligent, subtle and
wise new voice in Australian literature who is already being compared
with
Christos Tsiolkas,
Malcolm Knox and
Helen Garner.
Last Summer is a warm,
entertaining and somewhat life-changing novel which will be enjoyed,
and re-read, by readers of
Jodi Picoult,
Ian McEwan and
Colm Toibin.
And to the five or six people reading this who know of my taste in
literature and raise their eyebrows at such words of commendation I
say, I mean every word. And to those who read
Last Summer and find not what I have
found, I say, look again.
