ANDREA GOLDSMITH The Buried Life. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Each of Andrea Goldsmith’s three protagonists faces a reckoning with the past in this novel of life and death and friendship.

The Buried Life begins with characters whose fates seem predictable, but Andrea Goldsmith is too good a writer to rely on clichés.

Adrian Moore (alias ‘Doctor Death’ because of his academic field of study) is 43, successful, healthy and focused on his work. His wife, Irene, has recently walked out on him, although he doesn’t really know why and he still expects her to return. But he is clearly a methodical creature of habit and is certain that

he wasn’t passive, he’d made something of his life, and he’d done his fair share of the work with Irene. So perhaps the failure of the relationship wasn’t entirely his fault.

He is, in effect, a nice man but a rather boring stick-in-the-mud, and ripe for change as the novel progresses, although, typically, he ‘gave little credence to the human capacity for change’.

In his academic Doctor Death mode:

 It occurred to him that change was rather like death: both of them happen to everyone, and everyone knows they will happen, yet people live in a cloud of denial. Death and Changes: it might make an interesting paper.

That was before ‘the lightning struck him’. This lightning, however, was not love, but music – Mahler’s ‘The Song of the Earth’. And that was just the beginning.

Laura Benady, a smart, capable woman in her late fifties, is a social scientist working for the State Department of Planning. She is an expert, involved in the planning of urban development in a growth area of Melbourne, and she is valued by her colleagues. As the chief planning officer said at a recent committee meeting:

We could have done this without you, Laura, but the final result wouldn’t have been as comprehensive.

Laura’s marriage to Tony is seemingly perfect:

First life-changing impressions, first all-consuming love, first intimations of fabulous possibilities: any of these firsts could capture a person for life. But imagine if all of them occurred simultaneously and slotted into one person. That was how Tony Sheldrick entered Laura Benady’s life.

Laura loves him fiercely, ‘Tony was and would always be, essential’, but as the novel progresses the reader can see, even if Laura cannot, that Tony is not the doting husband he pretends to be. The first hint is that Laura’s ambition, before they married, had been to stay on at university, do a PhD, and pursue an academic career.

It’s what her family expected, too; but as Tony pointed out, two academics in the family was, by any calculation, one too many.

Since Tony was to be the academic, Laura gave up her plan, but things happen that make her begin to see her life differently and she, like Adrian, is clearly heading for a change.

The third major character in The Buried Life is Kezi, a vibrant young artist who specialises in creating beautiful handmade paper but works in a call-centre in order to survive. Kezi had grown up in a strict religious community called Crossroads.

Life was smooth and happy until the questions started – such bad questions because they revealed holes in her faith, and a faith with holes is no faith at all.

Kezi is imaginative – but that is interpreted by her parents as lies, and she is fat:

Unfortunately, her slim mother conflated being fat with religious laxity, so throughout the meal she policed every one of Kezi’s mouthfuls. Know you not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit? [She] would quote from Corinthians with distressing regularity, while assuring her overweight daughter she had her best interests at heart. As a child in the church, Kezi had wondered what sins she had committed for God to punish her with being fat.

As she matured, Kezi also realised that she was lesbian, which, of course, was completely unacceptable. Her parents issued her with an ultimatum: ‘unless she changed her ways she was to be out of the house by Christmas’. They were unrelenting, so at the age of 16, Kezi, with the help of her lesbian friends, left, but she has never stopped hoping that her parents will soften and accept their ‘unconventional’ daughter.

When her brother Luke calls her to tell her that she is invited to a special ceremony to honour her parents and the important work they have done for Crossroads, ‘the past, and all the longings it engendered, had flooded into her’:

Kezi had walked away from this years ago, but it would seem she hadn’t walked far enough. A few phone calls from her brother and she wanted to smuggle God back into her life. Though what she really wanted was her parents’ love. And she wanted them to love her as she was, not as they wanted her to be.

Kezi’s ‘carefully constructed life’ is thrown into turmoil as she struggles day by day to decide whether or not to attend the ceremony.

She was the sum of her past: to lop off the past now causing her grief would be crippling, she knew this all too well, yet to hold onto it was crippling too.

Kezi and Adrian are neighbours and friends; and fate (of course) brings Adrian and Laura together. But it is not as simple as that: all three have been shaped by their pasts and all three struggle to adjust to the changes that happen in their lives.

Andrea Goldsmith juggles their thoughts, emotions and actions realistically. Adrian, Laura and Kezi become lively, likeable and understandable characters, and as each of them tries to deal with the complexities of reconciling their long-held beliefs with vastly altered circumstances, there are no easy answers, just life and death and the human need to try and make sense of it all and to accept what can or cannot be altered.

So, The Buried Life is not as predictable as it initially seems and there are no contrived romantic endings. Andrea Goldsmith writes compellingly and creates an intricate, absorbing, thoughtful and enjoyable novel.

Andrea Goldsmith The Buried Life Transit Lounge 2025 PB 328pp $34.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Andrea | Goldsmith, Australian fiction, Australian women writers, Mahler, relationships