JESSIE TU The Honeyeater. Reviewed by Ann Skea
The second novel from the author of A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing unpeels secrets in the life of a young Taiwanese translator.
Fay’s widowed Taiwanese mother brought her to Australia when she was still a baby. Now, Fay is a well-qualified translator, teaching at the university and keen to further her career as a specialist in translating Taiwanese literature. She likes and trusts her professor, who has been her mentor and supporter, and who has recently passed on to her the work of translating a novel by a young award-winning Taiwanese author.
The professor fought for me to have it … she told them [the publishers] that I was better suited to the work – the protagonist being young like me.
Like Fay, too, the protagonist lives with a single parent. Fay believes this to be the mother, although this is only hinted at in the novel, and the relationship has become highly unusual:
On page one, she has a violent encounter with her parent. There’s slapping, hitting, yelling and fighting. It took me a few paragraphs to realise it’s not a scene of violence, but of lovemaking. Harriet is trying to pleasure her parent.
Fay’s relationship with her own mother is loving and complicated, but certainly not sexual, and Fay has just ended an affair with an older married man, who calls her his ‘honeyeater’ and with whom she is still in contact. However, she feels empathy for the novel’s protagonist and she works hard to capture the fluidity and rhythms of each of the novelist’s sentences, choosing the exact words for her translation, trying out new ones and patterns of expression, ‘splicing, switching, replacing, eliminating’. This is ‘private, solitary creative problem-solving’ that she enjoys.
In the early chapters of The Honeyeater, we get to know Fay and her mother as they share a trip to France that Fay has organised as a birthday present for her mother. To Fay’s dismay, Paris, and other parts of France, seem not to greatly impress her mother:
‘We’re in Paris, you should be more excited. Isn’t this your dream come true?’
She opens her handbag, rummaging for an item. ‘I gave up on dreams when your father died.’ She puts on her sunglasses and sighs. ‘I am excited. But I didn’t expect it to be so warm. Or bright.’
Fay’s mother is superstitious, and very concerned about thieves. ‘Did you check your pockets?’ she asks Fay in the Louvre. ‘You shouldn’t look at your phone when you’re standing alone! Someone might sneak up on you.’ She is especially superstitious about Fay’s prospective visit to a translators’ conference in Taiwan, something Fay badly wants for career reasons, but which her professor is strangely reluctant to approve. Taiwan for Fay’s mother is ‘that ghost island’, and the conference will be taking place in the especially dangerous ‘ghost month’.
Fay fits in some of her translation work during their trip, and keeps in touch with her former lover, until on their last day in France she receives news that he has died of a cardiac arrest. From this point on The Honeyeater gets more complicated. Fay learns that many things she had kept secret are not as secret as she had believed; that there are things her lover has concealed from her; and that her professor is not totally trustworthy.
There are more shocks when she does go to the conference in Taiwan to present her paper on the novel she has been translating. There, she meets a young man who is the protégé of the renowned Taiwanese author Wet-Lin, whose works her professor has been translating. The connections between this young man, Wei-Lu, and Fay’s professor, plus the duplicities Fay becomes aware of in her professor’s words and actions, make the second half of The Honeyeater gripping.
Jessie Tu unfolds her story slowly and we get to know Fay, with her ambitions, her trust in others, her loves and her insecurities. So, we share her bemusement and her emotions as the mysteries unfold.
Altogether, this is an interesting, original and generally absorbing story of, as the cover blurb says, ‘betrayal, ambition and love’. For me, it was also an introduction to the highly competitive world of academic translating, and the difficulties of this highly skilled work.
As Margaret Atwood said in her talk ‘In Translationland’, published in her collection Burning Questions (2022):
Whether a reader in another language will grasp anything at all about an author’s work is dependent on the translator alone … I am always a bit of a nightmare for my translators. I make puns (almost impossible to translate) and jokes (difficult) and I also create neologisms, especially in the realm of genetically engineered species and imagined consumer products.
Fay would have completely understood.
Jessie Tu The Honeyeater Allen and Unwin 2024 PB 352pp $32.99
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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