From the Archive

Dementia, in all its forms and intensities, is a modern curse. It featured in many entries in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize. Dementia was the subject of The Night Guest, the first novel published by Fiona McFarlane, whose second novel, The Sun Walks Down, is many people’s favourite for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award. Gillian Dooley, in her review of The Night Guest (ABR, December 2013–14), described it as ‘utterly charming’. She noted that its compulsive readability ‘arises less from the floaty plot … and more from the seductive rhythms and cadences of McFarlane’s prose’.

The depredations of time on the ageing human is an unusual topic for a young writer to confront, especially in a first novel, but why not, if the negative capability is not wanting? After all, it’s common enough for an older writer to inhabit young characters. The difference is, of course, that a young writer hasn’t yet been old.

In Fiona McFarlane’s first novel, The Night Guest, the main centre of consciousness, through whom the whole narrative is perceived, is more than twice the author’s age. In an interview in The Sydney Morning Herald, McFarlane revealed that both her grandmothers suffered from dementia and that writing about Ruth, a seventy-five-year-old widow who is clearly becoming increasingly confused (the D-word is never used), is an act of homage and remembrance.

Despite the seriousness of the theme, and the potential for gloom and despair, The Night Guest is an utterly charming book. Ruth is mischievous, adventurous, and unconventional, and she seems to experience her advancing age as a process of shedding inhibitions. The tiger she hears (but never sees) in her house in a coastal town of New South Wales is both frightening and exciting. McFarlane’s great insight is that, however much the body and mind might fail, people tend not to feel as old as others expect them to. Like Clive James, Ruth gives the impression that she always feels that she is the youngest person in the room.

Coincidentally, I have recently seen John Doyle’s play Vere (Faith), another exploration of the onset of dementia, in this case inspired by Doyle’s experience of having cared for his father through his last years. It presents an altogether darker picture. Vere knows exactly what will happen to him – it is explained to him (and the audience) at the beginning of the play – and it proceeds remorselessly: incontinence (both verbal and otherwise), social embarrassment, rapid intellectual decline. Ruth’s voyage into dementia is, by contrast, mildly exciting and only slightly disturbing, and she seems unaware that it is happening. This makes her vulnerable and encourages some risky behaviour, rather like other transitional states – adolescence, falling in love, midlife crisis. If old age and senility must come, I would rather live through McFarlane’s version than Doyle’s. I fear, however, that Doyle’s may be more accurate.

The Night Guest is basically a two-hander. The other main character is Frida, a woman who appears unheralded in Ruth’s garden one morning and announces that she is a carer provided by the government. The sense in which Frida intends to ‘take care of’ Ruth is only gradually revealed. Ruth, in her ingenuous way, is not particularly surprised, though she wonders whether she really needs looking after. Everything about Frida is large and exaggerated; she insinuates herself into the household until Ruth regards her as indispensable. Frida advances in surges: she encroaches, is questioned, and usually prevails. She is a ferocious cleaner. Ruth thinks, in one particularly bleak moment, that ‘after Frida, everything would be clean, white and extinct’. Ruth is plainly right to be cautious, but the gracefulness of her inevitable compliance is irresistible.

There is a blitheness about Ruth which is only occasionally clouded. In one instance, the more responsible of her two sons, Jeffrey, rings to check up on her and speaks ‘with such warmth that for the first time Ruth worried properly for herself … Ruth was a little afraid of her sons. She was afraid of being unmasked by their youthful authority.’ It is particularly disquieting when Jeffrey tells her how ‘wonderfully’ she is doing. How utterly the patronage and reassurance of the young betray their distrust of their elders’ capabilities, and their misunderstanding of their intentions. With gentle irony, she ponders Jeffrey’s reaction to the news that she has invited Richard, an old flame from her youth in Fiji, to visit her after a separation of fifty years. ‘He didn’t seem at all scandalised that his mother was planning to entertain a male guest, which was a relief and also, thought Ruth, something of a shame. Not that she set out to scandalise her sons. She’d never liked that obvious kind of woman.’

The night guest of the title is not Richard, however. Neither is it Frida. The nocturnal visitor is the tiger that comes in the night and disturbs the sleep of her more domestic cats, who ‘stiffen and stare’. He is a sound of ‘nosing and breathing’ outside her bedroom, and ‘a sharp whine, as if he were hungry’. Is this magic realism or hallucination? Whichever way, the tiger has a significance of which Ruth is only dimly aware.

McFarlane’s style is fresh and full of surprising delights. Ruth, as a young woman, ‘was sensitive to criticism of her father, in that tenuous and personal way in which children are anxious for the dignity of their parents’. On arriving in Sydney, she ‘went home with her relatives to a street lined with heavy mauve jacarandas, to a borrowed bedroom warming in the mild sun, and cried into a pillow that smelled of someone else’s hair’.

The compulsive readability of this novel arises less from the floaty plot – although it is intriguing to attempt to sort illusion from fact – and more from the seductive rhythms and cadences of McFarlane’s prose, which echo perfectly the mental landscape of the fey and endearing old-young Ruth. g