KATHERINE COLLETTE The Helpline. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Katherine Collette’s Germaine may not be ‘good with people’ but The Helpline charms and delights.
The plot of The Helpline sounds a bit dull: late-thirties mathematician Germaine Johnson is made redundant from her role at an insurance company and, out of desperation, takes another office job, this one answering calls to the senior citizens’ helpline at her local council. All Germaine wants in life is to be a team leader and receive recognition for her hard work. She thinks it’s finally happening when the mayor – the local council mayor! – asks for her help on a special project. But when Germaine discovers the project’s goal is to shut down the local senior citizens’ centre, she needs to decide how committed she is to helping the seniors whose calls she’s been answering.
It’s Germaine’s quirkiness, experienced through her first-person narration, that makes this debut novel from Australian author Katherine Collette so delightful. The Helpline is part of an emerging subgenre of women’s fiction that features singular characters navigating an everyday world while learning to overcome personal challenges: it’s Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project combined with Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. What makes these books so compelling is the dissonance between how each of their main characters understands the world and how readers know the world to work. It’s not so much chick lit as personality lit.
Sudoku-obsessed, spreadsheet-loving, rule-following Germaine is, in her mother’s words, ‘not great with people’ and ‘a bit of a self-promoter’. We get a sense of Germaine’s distinct take on the world as she heads to work on her first day at the council:
It was raining in the morning, which I anticipated. I brought with me an umbrella that was very large, and very waterproof. When I got out of the car and walked towards the front doors of the town hall, it covered me, my disposable hooded poncho, the matching pants and my wheeling briefcase.
Unfortunately, my timely arrival had not taken into account the opening hours of reception and, as it was 8:57 am, the sliding glass doors remained stubbornly inert.
Lucky I had a sudoku in the inner pocket of my jacket. I wiggled one arm from the sleeve of the poncho and manoeuvred inside the plastic sheath to get it out. Then I stood and filled it in.
Trying to distance herself from her emotional, animal-rights-activist mother, Germaine sees the world through pie charts, graphs and equations. This makes all her decisions simple – she only has to check the figures. ‘Importance is made up of four things,’ she tells Celia, the deposed president of the senior citizens’ centre committee, ‘status, career, money and personal connections.’ When Celia replies that life is about more than money, Germaine feels frustrated:
It was as though she wasn’t listening at all. Hadn’t I just said there was status and career and personal connections? I started to go over it again but she interrupted to list a range of things she thought were important, ignoring the fact that none of them were measurable.
‘Fairness? Happiness?’ I said. ‘I can’t calculate those.’
Like Eleanor Oliphant, Gail Honeyman’s breakout hit, The Helpline isn’t a love story, though there’s a strand of romance. Germaine has long had a fangirl crush on Alan Cosgrove, the 2006 national sudoku champion. Cosgrove disappeared from the competitive sudoku scene after being accused of cheating, and Germaine always felt he was treated unfairly. When she has the surprise chance to meet Cosgrove, now the owner of the local golf club adjacent to the seniors’ centre, and close friend of the mayor’s, Germaine is certain everything is about to work out for her. Her awkward pursuit of Alan, her determination to automate the seniors’ helpline, and her efforts to avoid her overly friendly neighbour Jin-Jin, all emphasise Germaine’s aloneness.
Reflecting on a conversation with the mayor, Germaine notes that it was difficult ‘because it involved feelings. These were not only unpredictable; they could be very unpleasant.’
The ending might be too predictable for some readers, and although Collette adds a surprise twist in the final pages, it comes a bit too rushed to quite work. But if one were, like Germaine, inclined to express things in graphs, this would only represent a small dip at the conclusion of an endearing page-turner.
The Helpline is a charming exploration of what’s really important in life and the challenges of dealing with the people around us who cause so many unpredictable and sometimes unpleasant feelings.
Katherine Collette The Helpline Text 2019 PB 400pp $29.99
Ashley Kalagian Blunt is the author of My Name is Revenge, a finalist in the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. Her writing appears in Griffith Review, Sydney Review of Books, the Australian, the Big Issue, and Kill Your Darlings. Find her at ashleykalagianblunt.com
You can buy The Helpline from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
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HA! What a cracking review, I love that graph! Thank you for sharing, really looking forward to picking this one up.
Glad you enjoyed the graph!