The aftermath

Stephanie Bishop’s alluring new novel Astrid Edwards

The Anniversary

by Stephanie Bishop Hachette $32.99 pb, 421 pp

Stephanie Bishop’s The Anniversary is an example of both deft literary craft and an engrossing read – a feat rarer than it should be. Billed as a ‘novel about writing and desire’, this is more a work interrogating the nexus between art, celebrity, and commerce, while unpicking the ways in which gender informs all three.

JB, the narrator, is an accomplished novelist on the cusp of winning an international literary prize, and perhaps eclipsing her husband, Patrick. A celebrated film auteur, Patrick is two decades her senior and at the peak of his career. He is also her former teacher. Their art is intertwined, a joint project melding the personal and the professional in ways that cannot be separated – until, of course, they are. Given the key event of this novel can be no surprise to the reader – the blurb reveals that Patrick is lost at sea while they are celebrating their anniversary on a cruise –questions about their creativity, their reputations, and who advanced whose career more are what drive the narrative.

Narrative tension there is aplenty. Early on, JB leaves the reader wondering what exactly were the words Patrick ‘must have been trying not to say’. Later, when conducting a reading of her latest work, she muses about boring book-club questions that focus on causation and motive, when she herself is ‘always more interested in the aftermath’. This novel from Bishop explores that aftermath – a famous husband lost at sea and a younger wife left exposed – but events from JB’s past surface slowly.

Bishop delights in piercing the stereotype of the charismatic male artist. She reflects on how age, ambition, and talent are deemed acceptable; how men can get away with things in a way that women can’t. Despite his old charisma, Patrick is now past his peak and has ‘the body of an ageing rockstar’. Any reader who has found themselves wondering about the gatekeepers in their industry will revel in such deft barbs. Gender-based commentary is frequent. The men have ‘large, long-handled umbrellas ... a dry force field all about them’, whereas the women have the kind a person has ‘to shrink in under’. This commentary operates as a sub-theme in the first half of the novel, only to emerge forcibly near the dramatic climax.

As a novel about a fictional female novelist written by a female novelist, The Anniversary is a comment on the publishing industry itself. On the book tour, Bishop has JB critique the interview process, noting the poor questions so often asked by radio hosts (who have not read the book) and the predictability of bookish interviewers who want to know how much of a work of fiction is drawn from the writer’s life. One cannot help but feel that Bishop is playing with us here. The reader cannot ask whether Bishop is providing a commentary on her own experience, because that type of question is being critiqued. The same is true of JB’s account of conversations with other shortlisted writers at the awards ceremony – one wonders if this has happened to Bishop. The structure of the industry, especially publicity, comes in for scrutiny. While JB’s publicists offer compassion and care, they also organise publicity junkets in the days after Patrick’s death. Celebrity sells books, and so does trauma.

As a novel about a fictional female novelist written by a female novelist, The Anniversary is a comment on the publishing industry itself

The commentary on the industry is simply the most overt form of engagement with the literary world. What is of more interest to Bishop is how one can interrogate life through literature. This is made explicit throughout the work. JB muses about the literary novel, ‘the form most approximate to the unruliness of living’. There are extended discussions about literature and form; one of them includes an explanation of caesura to elucidate both trauma and gender power dynamics.

At some point, the reader becomes aware of the unreliability of the narrator. While JB’s inner voice is at first competent and assured, over time it becomes more intense and often startling. In the days after Patrick’s disappearance, she surprises police with graphic depictions of the last time she and Patrick had sex, and then flies to the other side of the world to accept a literary prize. Are her actions driven by grief or guilt or trauma – all frequently attributed to grieving widows and female artists? Or are these the actions of an artist who knows what she wants?

This is a work predominantly interested in women. The sex scenes (and there are quite a few) are a delicious evocation of a woman’s thoughts during sex, with little focus on the acts themselves. As the narrative progresses and JB retreats from the limelight, the longing for absent mothers and the presence of stepmothers begin to surface. It is only as the novel progresses and more of her family history is revealed that we learn JB is a pen name – her real name is Lucy. Lucy has a sister, a mother, and a stepmother; these relationships come to the fore after Patrick’s death.

The Anniversary interrogates how we communicate within families, through our art, even in the bedroom. This is a novel worth reading twice, for all the subtleties missed the first time around.

Bishop has previously published three novels. The most recent, Man Out of Time (2018), was longlisted for the Stella Prize and shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. It is worth noting that The Anniversary will be published internationally – not common for much new Australian fiction. g

Astrid Edwards hosts the podcast The Garret: Writers on Writing and teaches Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT University.