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Posted on 6 Apr 2023 in Fiction |

RONNIE SCOTT Shirley. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

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Ronnie Scott’s second novel explores themes of abandonment, attachment and the idea of home.

Characterised from the beginning by a sense of uncertainty, Shirley is a novel where anything can happen, and probably will. Names are ambiguous, sexuality is fluid, relationships are impermanent; the world is in flux. It opens on Melbourne New Year’s Eve, 2019, the season of the bushfires and precursor to the pandemic.

In these opening pages, we are reminded of the gradual turning-out of the lights as the world turned in on itself in early 2020: the reduced traffic, the quiet; the apprehension about bodies and breath and proximity; the ubiquity of Zoom; how we normalised the bizarre. This is all to come, however. On page 14, we are introduced to Frankie, a well-known ‘condiment maven’, who announces she is going on a cruise. Knowing what she does not, the reader’s PTSD flies off the charts.

Scott’s sentences twist, looping back on themselves.

I was not going to the music festival; I did not want to go to the music festival; it was one of the benefits of breaking up, wasn’t it, that I didn’t have to ever go to the music festival, which he must have known, not even that deep down, that I wouldn’t actually enjoy going to?

These strings of negatives can be exhausting, but so was living with the uncertainty of those years when we had no idea how any of it would end.

Narrated by a young woman, the novel jumps forwards and backwards over that time as she tries to release herself from a past that returns to her in strange, malevolent ways. Both literally and figuratively, her past is locked in a cage in her childhood home in inner-city Melbourne. Her mother is a television lifestyle personality who moves overseas after a butchering on the show goes terribly wrong, her mysterious legacy a famous photograph taken on the street outside their home, her green raincoat covered in blood. Though her daughter is only in primary school, her mother shows no desire to resume a role as ‘mother’, outsourcing her parenting to a series of personal assistants, known as the Geralds, who sign the school excursion notes that ‘even savvy, pre-teen daughters of fame believed ought not to be forged’. This disconcertingly casual parenting even extends to the long emails she sends her daughter, who realises that they have been cut and pasted from missives to other people, to men.

This house is the Shirley of the title and Ronnie Scott explores abandonment and attachment and different ideas of ‘home’: both as a physical place and as a sense of identity and purpose. Now, 20 years after the notorious photograph, her daughter is independent, respectably employed, a home-owner herself – but her trauma is rekindled when Frankie moves into the downstairs apartment.

At the novel’s core is authenticity. From intimate relationships to those at work, Scott explores what it means to invest in something genuine with all its accompanying vulnerability. To love is to be vulnerable.

I tried again to call my mother, knowing she wouldn’t pick up, just as she hadn’t two days ago, four days ago. It was an unpleasant feeling, to want and not have my mother. To be, in some way, at her mercy.

The opposite of this is expediency. Her mother’s opportunism is shown early on with a move into food broadcasting that ‘had not spoken to a particular love of cooking, nor had it spoken to a knack for the form’ but from the network’s desire to have her in a more prominent spot on the morning show. She has a ruthlessness, sniffing out people who want to attach themselves to her, and dispensing with them when they cease to be useful. Other characters who are on the up casually cast off staff, and even co-parents, when they are no longer needed.

The book’s fluid style forces the reader back into the ambiguity of childhood where we don’t have answers and, in their absence, we construct our own realities. It gets only a little easier in adulthood. However, Scott reminds us that our incessant attribution of meaning to others’ actions and words, especially of those we love, is a smokescreen. It discredits the innate drive that levels us all:

What I keep thinking of is the arrogance of the very long lengths we will go to just to tell ourselves that we’re different from the other beings with whom we share this world.

Figuring out what has happened is only one way to read Shirley. Another is to embrace its anti-linear structure and savour Scott’s sparkling observations of contemporary urban life where flatmates, neighbours, lovers, parents, children, colleagues, cats, form a myriad of unconventional attachments. A line about emails missed in the ‘empathy desert typical of my afternoons’ made me laugh out loud.

Scott’s protagonist finally understands the futility of re-prosecuting the past; if Melbourne’s eternal lockdowns proved anything, it was about making peace with the present.

Ronnie Scott Shirley Hamish Hamilton 2023 PB 304pp $32.99

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.

You can buy Shirley from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW or you can buy it from Booktopia.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

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