MIREILLE JUCHAU The World Without Us. Reviewed by Annette Marfording
This is a story of loss and grief, motherlessness and environmental destruction – but also of survival, renewal and the importance of community.
Mireille Juchau’s third novel is set in an alternative community in northern New South Wales. Run-off from mines leaches into the waterways, forests are logged bare, and life-sustaining bees are disappearing from their hives. But environmental degradation is not at the forefront of Juchau’s interest. Rather, it is like the title of one of her short stories, ‘The Weather Inside’ — in this case, inside the home of the Müller family and inside each of the characters.
Stefan Müller is a beekeeper of German origin who met his wife Evangeline at the Hive commune in the Ghost Mountains. It is now more than a decade later, and they live in a large timber house in the valley below with their two daughters, Tess, about 13, and Meg, a few years younger. Their neighbour is Jim Parker, a new arrival in town and Tess’s English teacher. Minor characters include Tom Tucker, who hands out fliers about how to survive the impending environmental catastrophe, and Nora Roberts, both also former members of the Hive.
From the first chapter, in which Jim comes across Evangeline while ‘on his wilderness vipassana … his silent walking attempt to come out of suffering’, Juchau enthrals with the beauty and poetry of her language, her wit, and the sense of mystery shrouding her characters:
Evangeline stood naked, arms out and teetering. Even sunk in river mud she was imperial. He knew the rumours, which Ms Bond had glossed between each staple crunch. How she was seen very rarely in town, and always below that umbrella … How she’d been spied walking back roads with an empty pram, intent on something, but never, he got the sense from the staffroom chorus, doing what she ought.
Because Juchau excels at providing suspense, only very slowly disclosing each character’s secrets and suffering, while never slowing the pace of the narrative, it would be doing a disservice to her readers to reveal any more of the plot.
In her previous novels, as well as in The World Without Us, Juchau has demonstrated great psychological insight into the inner lives of her characters. One of her prime interests lies in exploring the aftermath of traumatic events, especially loss and grief, and in doing so, she illuminates the human condition. Loss and grief are central to The World Without Us and her earlier novel Burning In. In both, characters experience an overwhelming loss. In Burning In, the resulting grief is wild and full of relentless guilt, conveyed primarily through internal monologue. In The World Without Us the anguish of loss is conveyed through the different points of view of the main characters, who observe the actions of those suffering in a powerful example of the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule.
As in Gregory Day’s recent novel Archipelago of Souls and Mette Jacobsen’s The Vanishing Act, the effect of being motherless is also a strong theme in Juchau’s work. Motherlessness can result not only from a mother’s death, but also from her physical or emotional absence, and Juchau imparts the impact of that on her characters, both children and adults, beautifully.
All this may sound as if The World Without Us is a misery novel. It is and yet it isn’t. It is a story not only of loss and grief, motherlessness and environmental destruction, but also of survival, renewal and the importance of community. Juchau’s subtle exploration of her themes, her use of the traditional three-act structure, her complex characters, her mastery in creating suspense, her use of bees as central metaphor and symbol, her poetic use of rhythm in her sentences, the vivid and original descriptions she gives everyday objects and the landscape all contribute to making Juchau a master of the literary novel.
If you want to be mesmerised by beauty on the page, there are many such moments:
Tess looks at the dry earth almost reaching the foothills of the mountains now. It has not rained, it has not rained. The bees have nearly all gone. Fifty hives in the bee yard stolid and empty. José’s entire colony – stolen. Everything, waiting. The dirt on her father’s shoes fine as talc and holding to nothing, not even the roots of trees, not even to itself. On the mountain, when they fell the ancient eucalypts, there’s a second when the trees hover, suspended by a final splinter of trunk. Dust whirls up from the weekend tourists’ four-wheel drives, from the semis that rattle through town in the morning.
The manuscript for Juchau’s first novel Machines for Falling (2001) was shortlisted for the 1999 Vogel/Australian Literary Award. Her 2002 award-winning play White Gifts distilled the essence of her haunting second novel Burning In (2007), which was shortlisted for several awards in 2008: the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Nita B Kibble Award. The World Without Us is also likely to be shortlisted for most upcoming literary awards in Australia and to win several.
In her acknowledgements Juchau says that ‘[t]his book could not have been written without generous support from the Australia Council for the Arts’. What a loss to the body of Australian literature that would have been. The World Without Us should be compulsory reading for George Brandis.
Mireille Juchau The World Without Us Bloomsbury 2015 PB 320pp $29.99.
Annette Marfording broadcasts about Australian authors and their work on community radio and has been Program Director of the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival. Her book Celebrating Australian Writing: Conversations with Australian authors (profits to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation) is available at lulu.com and in selected bookshops.
You can buy this book 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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