MANDY BEAUMONT The Furies and AMY REMEIKIS On Reckoning. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
Mandy Beaumont’s novel and Amy Remeikis’s essay share powerful themes.
Two books released in this nascent year recount women’s trauma and silencing by men, and their rage.
In On Reckoning, an essay in Hachette’s ‘On’ series, Guardian journalist Amy Remeikis documents the rising tide of women’s anger that led to thousands marching in last year’s March4Justice. In The Furies, novelist Mandy Beaumont carries that anger in a compelling story of trauma, both inherited and present.
The Furies opens with Cynthia, just 16 and abandoned. Her home had been a rural property in south-west Queensland, but something terrible has happened. Cynthia’s young sister Mallory is dead, and the last time she sees her mother she is peering out at her daughter from the back of a police car. Her father leaves soon afterwards.
This is Australian pastoral noir. The romantic myth that the bush was the real Australia encouraged scores of small farmers throughout the last century but it was rarely sustainable. Cynthia’s parents started out with hope – the land would provide – but prolonged drought slowly strangled their dreams. Throughout, Beaumont weaves images of a happy childhood – Cynthia remembers her father’s tenderness, helping him on the property, reading the encyclopedia together; her mother’s cooking and songs; but this is gradually replaced by screaming, desperation, and madness.
Some chapters are from her mother’s point of view and we see her plans and young love whittled away by poverty, fear and stasis. Cynthia’s mother’s lack of choices, and of any agency, is reminiscent of April in Revolutionary Road. In Richard Yates’ 1961 novel, April and Frank are seduced by a daring resolve to strike out and leave their suburban banality for a new life in Paris; they spend evenings aglow, in love with possibility, as they plan their future. When Frank is ultimately dragged back down by fear and the burden of conformity, it is April who pays the terrible price.
Likewise, Cynthia’s mother wants to leave the farm, seeing only pain in remaining, but she and Cynthia are stuck because of her husband’s inability to act, by his neglect, his abdication of responsibility. Cynthia says, ‘I remember my father coming and going in those final years, standing and watching, bewildered as to what this had all become.’
When her mother becomes pregnant with Mallory, her depression and displacement is cemented. Mallory cries constantly, and it is Cynthia who cares for her, feeds her, bathes her, teaches her, through her short life. Her father leaves them alone for longer and longer periods. He roams their property, spending weeks out on the land, and he has work in town, where he sees other women. Her mother, starved of company, isolated, hears voices as she descends into madness.
How many times have you heard a woman be called hysterical, crazy, impractical, a lunatic – her madness thought to be caused by the moon? How many times have you heard a man tell a woman to settle down, to chill, to not get her knickers in a knot, heard him ask if she is on her period? How many of these women are actually mad, do you think? How many of these women are just responding to being ignored or spoken for, are misplaced without hope of movement? No wonder they/we/you/I am.
With both parents gone, Cynthia takes a job at the local abattoir where her father had worked intermittently when the farm yielded nothing.
Beaumont writes long, long paragraphs, her sentences ending abruptly. The next starting where it left off. Pausing at unexpected junctures, or running on bang bang bang. They discomfort. Disjointed, as are the carcasses of the slaughtered beasts.
I slice a beast through the centre of its backbone, holding the knife in my fist. One slice down. I feel my heels lift from the floor. Push the ribs down with my large bulk. (That breaking bone sound.) I take a smaller knife and slice through the ribs.
She daydreams of her mother coming to look for her; she searches in belongings, in clothes, in the dirt, for any reminder of Mallory. She is constantly aware of the men surrounding her, men whose power allows them to take what they want. Men who move into a circle, gathering in numbers, who grab their crotches when she walks past, who call out ‘slut’. And the other men who apologise for them, who enable them. When Cynthia is thrown into a huge bucket of blood, her boyfriend comes after her ‘with a grin on his face. Oh Cyn, love, it was all just a bit of fun.’
The mirror to On Reckoning is stark. Remeikis writes:
It’s the men who tell you to smile as you walk down the street, like they own and deserve your pleasant countenance. The men who sit too close on public transport, who spread their limbs like conquering forces into your space. It’s the men who follow too closely as you walk down the street, hurling abuse because you looked at them wrong, were wearing something wrong, responded to them wrong.
As Grace Tame is told to smile, to make nice, women have been told forever to ignore their pain, shelve their fury, told they were mad. The enablers are in our highest offices. Remeikis says of the Prime Minister’s (non) response to historical rape allegations against the Attorney General, ‘He said he didn’t do it, so what can we do?’ She notes the weasel words, ’Respect, protect and reflect’ were trotted out regularly in responding to Brittany Higgins, but to do anything concrete? ‘[O]nly when convenient, seemed to be the message.’
Remeikis herself is a survivor. With trauma, she writes:
… your body keeps remembering. Remembering what kept you alive. It catalogues the pain, the stimuli and your environment and it weaves it through your DNA.
A recounting of trauma is anything but cathartic, something the Prime Minister seems to have made no attempt to understand.
On Reckoning is a call for change and what we need to do to effect that change: active over passive. Recognise it is men who assault. Turn the language around to indicate how many men will assault rather than how many women will be assaulted.
Understand that to only see women through the prism of being someone else’s daughter or mother or sister robs them of their own story, ‘wearing another’s face as you tell it’.
Rise up.
You make waves by burning these institutions to the ground and working to create something new from the scorched earth.
Beaumont’s writing is at its most beautiful when describing the bush:
…looming soft wattle trees growing thick, the weight of their fragrant yellow blooms bending their branches towards the ground as if each part of the bushland is tending to the next.
Cynthia senses her lost family here, and is welcomed by another presence.
It is in the bush that she hears the Furies, ‘the vengeful female divinities … who ascended from the underworld to pursue and punish the wicked on Earth.’ She hears the voices of women who have died, all the women who have suffered violence by men.
They are a reckoning. For. Your hand on the back of her throat. For. You ignoring the woman crying on the street corner. For. You telling your daughter she is unlovable. You. Laughing at the fat woman at the gym whose stomach is escaping her leggings as she runs on the treadmill. The ‘hilarious’ rape joke you tell your mates. It’s. You telling a woman to be quiet. It’s. Touching her lightly on her breasts to confuse her into thinking that it didn’t really happen. It’s. Walking too close to her at night when she is nearly home.
Remeikis asks:
Who knows where rage lives while it’s dormant? Rage, once sparked, doesn’t dissipate. It transforms, it leaks, it transcends and it builds. But it doesn’t disappear.
Beaumont answers:
I want you to know, I really want you to know, that we are ready to start this.
Mandy Beaumont The Furies Hachette 2022 PB 272pp $32.99
Amy Remeikis On Reckoning Hachette 2022 PB 112pp $16.99
Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.
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Terrific review/s. Will be seeking out both books.