Cate Kennedy Launch Speech for The Curlew’s Eye
21 Sept 2021, online from Castlemaine, Victoria
It was a wise person who once said “There are only really two stories. Someone goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town.” Of course, when you think about it, even these are the same story, just told from different perspectives, and different times.
Both these things literally and figuratively happen in Karen Manton’s book The Curlew’s Eye, except that here it is not a town the strangers come to, but a return to an abandoned property, a landscape of buried secrets, memories and griefs these characters will need to excavate and acknowledge, no matter how concealed or unsayable those secrets. That’s the journey, of course. Spoiler alert.
I first got to know Karen Manton when I was tasked with editing the volume Best Australian Stories in 2011. I’d also edited and compiled the anthology the year before, so I knew I was in for a heavy slog of reading hundreds of short stories. When there’s a large volume of stories to read like that, it takes a lot to stop you in your tracks. But Karen’s story “The Gills of Fish” about an expectant mother feeling weary and doubtful the day before her caesarean, full of unsettling dreams and turbulent emotions, made me do a double take and think “Who is THIS?” When I saw Karen’s biog notes later, I realised she had been already published in Best Australian Stories in 2005, and had won the Arafura short story award three times. Like many of us, she writes around a busy life, finding time at the edges to keep writing fiction, work which has culminated in this full-length novel, The Curlew’s Eye.
These are difficult times to publish a book, far less try to launch one, and I commend Allen & Unwin for helping get this particular baby to term and into the world. But the person I would most like to commend, of course, is Karen.
Of all her skills on display in this book, there is one I particularly want to mention, just so you know what you’re in for, and that is the rendering of two simultaneous landscapes - the physical exterior landscape, the natural world this book is steeped in, and the interior landscape of these characters. There’s slippage between the two, as there is in any good work of fiction, but here it is particularly mesmerising and important to the story, because it shows what a fraught relationship this is.
Karen Manton knows just how to evoke and summon up place in her work.
She has said that she wants the story to have a dreamlike, uncanny feel, “as if a dirt road appears on the side of the highway and if you take it, the ‘real’ world will open up in a gap, a time and place warp,” and all the elements of the story world will be in there – the town of Lightstone, the character’s childhood property and memories, the landmarks and memorials of the imagined places themselves.
And like all liminal spaces – like the portal in a sci-fi novel, like the strange doorway which suddenly appears in the back of the wardrobe, like our imaginary worlds or dreams themselves – this gap might easily just close itself over, and nobody would know what had been there. Joan Lindsay tapped into this fear and desire with her novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, of course, and Australian mythology – both indigenous and settler stories, fables and occasionally so-called urban myths – are full of tales of people disappearing into landscapes, lost children, and apparitions, and crazed explorers, and wayward adventurers.
We open ourselves to the natural world, and it overwhelms us somehow – we are absorbed into something far larger and more mysterious than ourselves. We disappear too into our own internal wildnernesses, into those unquiet and unsettling terrains we carry within us.
In this way, our relationship with the natural environment reminds me of our relationship with stories, and with our own dreams, and our own hauntings. Photographs and the art of photography are used a lot in this book, and they too emerge out of a kind of chemical ether, shadows and possibilities, tricks of the light. They literally ‘develop’ into something comprehensible. But most of all, to me, this losing of yourself in an imaginary world which turns out to engulf you and change you in ways that just show you your own puny position in the universe, is most beautifully realised in this book because it is set in the Top End, in the tropics.
Nothing like a tropical climate to press home the message that nature bats last. Nature, that grows up and over and through everything humans try to impose upon it, that covers our structures and attempts at taming it with roots, vines, rot and mould, which eats away at impositions on its dominance with insects and fungi, fire, flood, sand, salt, and just plain old time. Nature which warps both our dwellings and our perceptions, which in the end makes everything vertical horizontal. Which slowly, patiently, relentlessly, cuts us all down to our actual size.
The characters in this book find themselves immersed in an experience like this, and while it’s tempting to use a bit of a literary cliché here and say ‘the landscape becomes a character in its own right’, I don’t think a well-drawn imaginary landscape actually does do that, so much as expose to the human characters their own vanities and limitations.
The landscape doesn’t HAVE to be a character, with human traits and desires, it just IS. Implacable, magnificent, kind of pitiless. It reveals us to ourselves. Shows us how we are the stranger.
Karen has been at pains to point out that this is a work of fiction. She says:
“We’re very steeped in memoir, and in what people call ‘real life’ – on TV, magazines, social media. People look for real people and places in a story if they know you or know where you have lived. We’ve almost forgotten how to read fiction. It’s a conglomeration of images, some might seem familiar, but as in a nightmare or dream, they’ve shifted, changed shape, colour, being. They’ve become something else. I like it because it removes judgment and expectation – people can’t measure it and say, ‘that building is the wrong distance from where it should be on the map.’ There are no coordinates, no exact representations. There is just a frenzy of imagination with perhaps a few glimpses of what people thought was the real world in a moment once upon a time.”
This, too, really resonates with me as a writer. When you’re a writer you get to make stuff up, and it is therefore built out of your own preoccupations, your own hauntings, the things you circle and can’t stop thinking about. There’s a slippage of time and space, isn’t there, when you lie in bed at 3 am and circle around something you did fourteen or forty years ago, that nobody is carrying except you. If time heals all wounds, then why does the wound seem so fresh sometimes, why is the pain still there, unresolved, like a broken bone that’s never been set? How can I stop being haunted by this? How can I put down this hot coal I seem to be carrying around?
Maybe they’re just writers’ questions, because writers are hungry for pattern, to see how everything fits, and how things might be used to make something else. There’s a lot of that feeling of stepping outside under a massive sky and just sitting with your own smallness. There are no coordinates, as Karen says, no exact representations. None of us have got a map. Or maybe I’m speaking for readers as well – maybe we read looking for the same relief of coherence. We don’t care if it’s an invented one – we’ll take it.
The reason I love this book is because it looks at that surrender squarely in the eye, and lets character be their flawed and complex and sometimes self-sabotaging selves, brought to painful light by a landscape that is both majestic and harsh. It’s a natural environment that really puts them through the wringer to bring a painful past and unresolved set of secrets out into the open, hot, unrelenting air, into the world in which they are now lost and vulnerable.
We’re living in a time where stories, it seems, are increasingly serving only as delivery devices for moral and political messaging, where recreating the complexities and ambiguities and frailties of real-seeming characters seems suddenly like a kind of heresy.
To me it’s a beautiful form of resistance to engage in making fiction for its own glorious power of making up an imaginary world peopled with made-up characters who stuff up and carry the cost of that, like we all do in real life. It helps me just reflect on how complex, ambiguous and resistant to simplification human beings actually are.
It also helps me dwell for a little while in the natural environment of the Northern Territory, and imagine myself there instead of here. That’s the only travelling any of us are able to do at the moment, and I’m positive you will also find that world conjured here so viscerally you can almost smell it. With a book you’ve always got somewhere else to be, some other world you’d pay to spend time in. That’s what I suggest you do with this book. It’s my great pleasure to help Karen and all of you there celebrate The Curlew’s Eye.