KRISTINA OLSSON Shell. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

The struggle over the building of  the Opera House is part of Australia’s ongoing quest for a national identity and the country’s truncated sense of itself at this time resonates through Shell.

Shell is set in Australia in the months before the sacking of Danish architect Jørn Utzon in 1965. This is a time when the familiar is being replaced with new ideas, new people, and new fears. Olssen shows us Australia’s cultural cringe through Axel Lindquist, a glassmaker from Sweden who has arrived to work on the grand project.  Axel brings a European — Scandinavian — perspective to the events, which may also be Utzon’s, though Olssen does not presume to speak for the architect, who remains in the shadows.

This is also the time of the Vietnam War and Australia is in the grip of the conscription ballot. Demonstrations, sometimes violent, are frequent and protest leaders are in ASIO’s sights.

Pearl Keogh is a journalist and activist, and well aware of the dangers. She has been taken off News, to work on the Women’s Pages of the Telegraph. Her frustration with writing about the new season’s fashions and household hints is compounded by having to pass leaks from her sources to male journalists who publish the stories under their own bylines.

Through Pearl and Axel, Olsson brings the reader to mid-1960s Sydney. The visionary awarding of the design to Utzon —  the result of an international competition — is accompanied by a stultifying timidity from a culture still making undrinkable coffee. The social changes brought by the waves of European immigration are yet to take hold:

He picked at the slices of bread in his hand, the odd contents of his sandwich. There was something yellow and viscous on the cheese that didn’t look or smell right. Jago leaned towards him. Corn relish, he said quietly. It makes me cry also.

Pearl’s series of articles on neglected women writers, started in earnest to counter editor ‘Judith’s more vacuous story ideas’, leaves her despondent. She mourns the sadness of women’s lost stories and the near-impossibility of them surmounting domesticity to write. She remembers watching her mother and fears the loss of her own separate identity through motherhood: ‘a love that could relinquish volition and accept servitude, daily. The dailiness of it.’

Pearl’s own freedom has come at a cost. She has lost contact with her brothers since they were taken by ‘the welfare’ when her family broke apart and they are at conscription age. Her search for them, her need to see them before they are perhaps called up, yields a poignant and unexpected turn of events.

The struggle over the Opera House is part of Australia’s ongoing quest for a national identity, an open sore since the invasion and occupation of this vast southern continent. The relationship with Britain was being replaced not by independence but a turning towards the United States — never more clearly articulated than by Harold Holt’s ‘All the way with LBJ’ statement. Australia’s truncated sense of itself at this time resonates through Shell. Axel sees:

… a kind of huddling around sameness, a retreat from risk and  —  despite the openness of air and sky  —  from exposure. He saw it plainly in the derision of Utzon in the papers, the growing clamour of voices mocking his vision. As if they were ashamed of a building that might reveal them, the soaring shapes of their dreams, the true interior of their hearts. As if they were afraid of grandeur.

Linquist wants to know the older civilisation, the culture that he sees as being ‘annihilated’ by modern Australia. ‘How could anyone represent this place in art without reference to its beginnings?’

The senses are fully evoked in Shell  —  the view of the sails on turning a street corner, Paul Robeson’s impromptu concert at the site, and Axel’s parents smoking together:

… another smell, sweet, acrid … He would roll the papers with exactitude, pass his tongue along the edges, tucking, tapering … If it was summer they would go outside in the sun and crouch together like thieves. His mother tipping her head back and exhaling, his father twisting his lips to send the smoke sideways. Axel would kick a ball half-heartedly around the garden, pretend not to watch. But the intimacy of this ritual would stay with him, the casual arrangement of their bodies, the unison of breath, inhale, exhale, cigarette between thumb and forefinger, elbows on knees.

My only reservation is that Olsson brings too much to the reader: Sweden’s role in World War II, a love affair in Pearl’s past, a betrayal and a final drama, are distracting.  But Shell’s power is in drawing us into this period —  the lives of men and women, the clashes, the powerlessness ‘before the old men of Australia, their cynicism and lies’ and in bringing us fresh insight into the final betrayal of Utzon by other old men.

Kristina Olsson Shell Simon & Schuster Australia 2018 HB $26.00

Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor who, long ago, wrote an Honours thesis on the Australian identity. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.

You can buy Shell from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

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Tags: Australian women writers, Jorn | Utzon, Kristina | Olsson, Paul | Robeson, the Opera House