MICHELLE DE KRETSER Springtime: A ghost story. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
The award-winning author of Questions of Travel delivers a delicious reinvention of a familiar form.
Michelle de Kretser’s new novella charts the relationship of Frances and Charlie as they embark on a new life together. They’ve moved interstate from Melbourne to Sydney, and the idiosyncrasies of their new city – the torpid weather, the veiled competition at dinner parties of the social climbing intelligentsia, the sprawling geographical chaos of a city without a grid – create a richly filled backdrop to their days:
Her sense of direction, moulded to Melbourne’s grid, functioned by the straight line and the square. In Sydney the streets ran everywhere like something spilled. The river curved, and the sun dodged about. On a stretch of the path where there were no trees, the sun bounced off the water to punch under the brim of Frances’s hat.
Pivotal to the story are the daily walking adventures Frances has with her dog, Rod ‘… a hefty, muscled bruiser from the RSPCA’. His is a fretful canine personality, quick to react in fear to any other dogs they encounter. He is the first to alert her to the presence of a white bull terrier in a back yard neighbouring their walking path. Frances’s curiosity is piqued when she glimpses the terrier’s elusive female owner in the garden behind him – a ghostly, hatted image in a trailing pink dress. Thus the seeds of the mystery that is Springtime are planted.
Reading Springtime is like peering through the lock of a closed door. Not everything is immediate or apparent. As with all good ghost stories, some things are obscured from view. Without shying away from the banalities of domestic life, the poetic nature of the writing captures small moments poignantly, imbuing them with meaning. The story explores the obscure aspects of relationships and the intangible essence of love and attachment, and is laden with nuanced encounters. It is as much about the things we don’t know about each other as the things that we do. This theme, of ignorance by omission or inattention, ties the layers of the story together. As Charlie says, ‘What people don’t pay attention to changes the story.’
The reader, too, is in danger of becoming so immersed in the narrative that crucial pieces of the ghost-story puzzle become lost in minor details: lyrical cryptic passages that float at the edges of the plot like shadows. Centre stage are the daily occurrences that affect Frances and Charlie; the compromises they have to make when Charlie’s young son, Luke, comes to stay; the deceptively casual conversations at the dinner party they attend; the hosts’ and guests’ veiled judgement of Frances’s vegetarianism. The story operates on another level, too, the dinner party guests providing a kind of commentary on the ghost-story form itself:
He looked at George. ‘Do you know this idea that electricity put an end to ghost stories? People stopped seeing ghosts when rooms were properly lit.’
George Meshaw said he didn’t think it was the change in lighting. ‘The way stories were written changed around that time. Ghost stories work up to a shock, but the modern form of the short story is different. When a loose, open kind of story came in, writing about ghosts went out.’
Essentially this is what de Kretser has attempted to achieve with Springtime: a modern form of ghost story with a loose openness. It is not necessarily a frightening tale, but it does have some disturbing elements. Its interest lies mainly in its aversion to accepted form and its relatively short length. Springtime is a beautiful elegy on a ghost story.
Michelle de Kretser Springtime: A ghost story Allen & Unwin 2014 HB 92pp $14.99
Lou Murphy is the author of the crime novel Squealer, available from https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LouMurphy
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