Human constellations

Paul Dalgarno’s chatty ghost

Jennifer Mills

A Country of Eternal Light

by Paul Dalgarno Fourth Estate $32.99 pb, 311 pp

When a book takes its title from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you can expect the shock of something supernatural. But although Paul Dalgarno’s A Country of Eternal Light is narrated by a dead woman, there is little here to horrify.

Margaret Bryce is a self-conscious and self-questioning narrator. We find her shuffling, or being shuffled, through scenes from her life like old photographs. Neither tragic nor spooky, Margaret is pragmatic, a self-described Episcopalian who soon lets us know her impatience with the whole arrangement, declaring: ‘I don’t believe in souls.’ If she seems uncomfortable in a story like this, that’s part of her charm. While her enthusiasm for eager explanatory digressions sometimes seem to belong more to the author than his character – I sometimes wondered if Margaret had access to some afterlife version of Wikipedia – for the most part this chatty ghost is observant company, both enjoying and perturbed by her memories, determined to puzzle out some pattern or purpose in them. She is doing her accounts, the way the dying often do, setting things right as best she can from the elevated, if slippery, perspective of an afterlife.

In his work so far, Dalgarno has proven himself to be very good at evoking life in its details, particularly the minutiae of human relationships. His previous novel, Poly (2020), was a slow suburban relationship drama, a painfully honest blow-by-blow of the insecurities that can attach to polyamorous relationships. Told with a meticulous and sometimes uncomfortable level of detail, that novel – like its characters – struggled to find a balance between honesty and oversharing, but often found quick redemption in self-effacing humour.

Dalgarno’s strong ear for dialogue and his direct style are a natural fit for domestic realism, so it is encouraging that he has set himself the challenge of writing in a slightly different register here. But even though it looks at death, A Country of Eternal Light remains more interested in the living. This novel is suffused with nostalgia for a Scottish childhood. The textures of a range of times and places – Scotland, Australia, Spain – are carefully interspersed and often beautifully drawn. The emotions are bigger, the scenes more freighted, as Dalgarno tackles heavier subject matter. This book about grief and loss, denial and faith, stays steeped in the dailiness of human existence, tethered to the real.

Dalgarno is primarily interested in families, in the feelings that are fired up or contained by their structures, in how those structures support or condemn their members. He comes across as psychologically literate, with characters informed by therapeutic models. In these models, we are who we are in constellations with each other, with narratives, and with our pasts.

As in Poly, the daily life of parenting provides the author with endless material. Dalgarno writes the anxiety and delight of raising young children beautifully, and it’s that energy that hums through this book, leading us to the puzzle’s eventual resolution. There must be a resolution, for this ghost wants to be put at rest.

All ghost stories are about justice, and A Country of Eternal Light fulfils the brief, with the narrative culminating towards a reckoning with past wrongs – nothing so dangerous as evil, but the kind of human failure that steers a life off track and can quickly spin a family out of its orbit. The lived consequences of this are tragic for Margaret’s family, with each character hurtling into his or her own variation of traumatic replay.

Like the tales Margaret’s daughter Rachel tells her own children, stories that are a form of play therapy for herself and the children, A Country of Eternal Light has a meandering structure. It can seem sprawling, like her husband’s mind: ‘no beginning or end, a story snagged in medias res’. This can slow the compact novel’s pace, and repeat clues, making the twist a little predictable.

However, the success of a first-person narration comes down to character, and Margaret’s company is a pleasure. Disarmingly direct in a late-life (well, after-life), no-fucks-left way, she’s honest with the reader, even when she’s not being honest with herself. It is always good to meet an older woman in fiction who remains complex and human and flawed, never a victim of her life and never a villain. She is fully embodied to such an extent that she sometimes forgets she doesn’t have a body at all.

There are some irritants, such as the tendency to sing-song in the language, paired words (dropsical/popsicle; nemesis/emesis; an oxcart of oxytocin, and so on) that disrupt the storytelling and add nothing to a sense of character. But when she speaks clearly, the observant, reflective Margaret has a winning combination of carelessness and meticulousness, humour and sorrow. She can be very funny.

Though many fragments from Frankenstein are peppered throughout this novel, the narrative veers away from the monstrous, homing back to the domestic scale and the more forgivable, quotidian crimes of neglect, bitterness, and failure. The idea that the stories we tell are not what they seem is not new, but it is well articulated. That ‘grief drives us out of our minds’ is true enough, even if this novel is ruled by a simpler moral logic, the nineteenth-century reference point perhaps more Charles Dickens than Mary Shelley.

Dalgarno, who works as a journalist and has two books out this year, has no shortage of energy. He has a flair for emotional nuance and much to offer in the way of feeling. A Country of Eternal Light invites the reader to suspend their cynicism and allow the heartstrings to be played. Sentiment steers the reader away from difficult waters, reaching for something very lifelike, but ultimately cleansed of real danger. Dalgarno conjures a tender and warm-hearted world, where – if you can believe it – some light remains in grief, and no one ever really disappears. g

How magical can we be?

Looking for God in the emergency room

Naama Grey-Smith

Tiny Uncertain Miracles

by Michelle Johnston Fourth Estate $32.99 hb, 327 pp

‘The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.’ Albert Einstein wrote these words, originally in German, in his book The World As I See It (1934). He went on to describe the ‘knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate’ as constituting ‘the truly religious attitude’, adding he ‘cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes’.

The first of these quotations, and Einstein’s sentiments more broadly, are proffered in Michelle Johnston’s second novel, Tiny Uncertain Miracles. The story is set in the labyrinth of a giant public hospital, where the walls of the wards ‘had deaths fossilised in them like rubble’. Here, protagonist Marick – a guilt-stricken schlemiel estranged from his ex-wife, child, and faith – takes up the role of hospital chaplain. Marick soon befriends Hugo, a hospital scientist who believes the bacteria in his covert basement lab are producing gold. The mystery sparks an unforeseen chain of events, within and without the hospital walls. Meanwhile, a twin narrative gradually unfolds to reveal Marick’s story of love and loss.

The theme of gold at the heart of the work is extended to its presentation. The book’s production is a statement of confidence: unusually for a novel, Tiny Uncertain Miracles is packaged as a sizeable hardcover, with attractive cover artwork printed entirely in gold metallic foil over white Wibalin. The eye-catching motif of tiny, organically clustered particles repeats on the cover, in the golden endpapers, and internally as a section-break glyph. The result is an elegant volume with ample shelf presence that suggests HarperCollins means business.

The intersection of theology, science, and fable – as much historical as it is literary – is apparent from the epigraph page, which quotes from the Book of Job, Isaac Newton’s Praxis, and Rumpelstiltskin by the Brothers Grimm. Each quote mentions gold, but more is suggested: Job is a central text in the theological study of suffering, while Praxis is an alchemical treatise that reminds us that modern science did not emerge whole like Athena out of Zeus’s head but rather was wrested from the jaws of superstition through the persistent application of reason (the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that ‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians’).

The question of meaningless suffering that dogs Marick is amplified tenfold in the setting of an emergency department.

Marick’s first visit as hospital chaplain is to the putrid-smelling room of a sixteen-year-old girl whose life has ended violently. His jaw hangs, ‘slack on its hinges’, as he discovers ‘a different God from the one floating among the sermons and the choirs up the hill’. Stunned, Marick wonders, ‘What sort of God presides over circumstances such as this?’

Johnston, who is a staff specialist at the Royal Perth Hospital Emergency Department and a Professor of Emergency Medicine at St John of God Murdoch Hospital, is well placed to describe the brutal reality of an inner-city trauma centre. Tiny Uncertain Miracles touches on such difficult subjects with a light hand and a gentle tone, delivered through clean, supple, accessible prose. There is a deceptive simplicity to the work, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be the elegance of a right fit. Johnston has skilfully crafted a cohesive and engaging tale.

While I felt confused by various characters’ reactions to the gold-producing bacteria (would the average modern Australian, let alone a scientist like Hugo, posit ‘alchemy’ or ‘miracle’ rather than ‘interesting scientific discovery’?), a series of subplots sweeps the reader along as Johnston explores faith, doubt, and the human hunger for the mysterious.

Years ago, a friend of mine – a scientist studying nanotechnology – described a similar sentiment to me, quoting from the song ‘Hur lyckliga kan vi bli’ (2006) by Swedish singer-songwriter Emil Jensen: ‘How happy can we be / we who know what the stars are made of / And how magical can we be / when we know what brains are made of.’

The reader’s next thought is on the risks this kind of thinking could engender in today’s world, where false news travels faster than fact. Johnston anticipates this. Marick asks Hugo: ‘But hasn’t this sort of thinking opened the door to the plague of conspiracy theories? By downgrading rigorous truths to ideas that can be trumped by opinion?’

Johnston leaves no doubt as to Marick’s views on conspiracy theories: on hearing an anti-vaxxer ‘influencer’ encourage people to ‘rise up against health officials’, Marick ‘would almost have preferred the Devil’. Marick’s own hearing loss is the result of a missed measles vaccination in infancy. By establishing the parameters of her enquiry, Johnston creates a thoughtful space in which readers are free to explore the questions of science, God, and faith as philosophical matters.

While the novel’s cast will elicit a range of responses (wifely and motherly characters get a rough trot by my reckoning), a character that sticks in the reader’s mind is the nameless emergency doctor whom Marick occasionally spots. He finds her sitting outside the hospital, ‘staring beyond the bitumen, beyond everything’, or else trying to write in a notebook, though ‘the stories in this hospital defy translation into words’. Every encounter with her offers sober insight into the reality of an emergency physician, of ‘trying to patch up all the broken things at the final stop’. She rejects suggestion of a new wellness space for staff with the assertion that ‘We don’t need wellness and yoga and chat. We need society fixed.’

It is this worn and weary doctor who impresses upon Marick that perhaps what we do is more important than what we believe. In this, Michelle Johnston leaves the reader with an empowering message of hope and meaning. g