SALLIE MUIRDEN Wedding Puzzle. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

Sallie Muirden’s fourth novel explores love and life choices.

How does anyone ever manage to choose a partner for life? Given the imperfections of every choice, given that we are all complicated individuals with our own distinct bundles of neuroses, Muirden asks how anybody ever manages it at all.

Beth Shaw, who has spent her life so far trying to avoid decisions in love, preferring to be passively chosen than to choose herself, must answer this in Wedding Puzzle. The book opens with her driving to her childhood home in a pretty seaside town, on her way to her own wedding. The town’s mock Tudor hotel is where she and Jordan, her fiancé, had impulsively decided to marry a few months earlier. But the night before the wedding, she has received an anonymous letter telling her something shocking about the man she is about to marry.

Beth muses:

We humans, it would seem, are preordained to be loved too much or not enough. Given the unique make-up of each person, it’s impossible for an equal degree of emotion to flow between two individuals simultaneously.

Choosing one over every other is a momentous decision yet it is shrouded in the unspoken and at the mercy of our all too fickle perceptions. How quickly we can discard what we believe in if we are shown it in a light that plays to our prejudices.

Beth has been in love with Jordan since school, where he was a star athlete. To Beth, he was in another league and she kept her adoration to herself, instead being content with tagging along behind the luminous ‘baton-change girls’, champions of the 4×100-metre relay.

Muirden has drawn a picture many of us will recognise. We carry into adulthood the memories of those days when being recognised, winning and hanging with the popular kids were all-important. Beth can’t let go of the desire to show everybody that she has snared Jordan — scar tissue from high school’s myriad hurts and insecurities. Jordan asks if this matters. ‘We’re adults making adult choices now, Beths,’ he says to her.

Muirden’s writing is deceptive; its light tone can suddenly darken. As Beth and Jordan are looking over wedding photos in the hotel’s promotional album, ‘a drop of blood, splinter-small, slid off his chin. I swiped the page clean …’ This, in the opening pages, seems to hint at our vulnerability —pricked, we bleed. Pain is close to the surface.

Over the course of that one day, some time in the late 1980s — an era of payphones — Beth, as if on autopilot, goes on with the wedding plans with a few half-hearted efforts to contact her fiancé:

At 5.30, our meeting with destiny would arrive and tick past, and either the ceremony would happen or it wouldn’t happen, but I’d not be in harmony with what came to pass. That was the tragedy of this day. Whichever decision I chose, I was not going to make the right one.

In dealing with that poisonous letter, Beth is hurtling towards a decision that she feels wholly ill-equipped to make. She knows she has to grow up:

… I wanted to go back to being who I was yesterday … Grieving would only start the process of changing, possibly into a new person, so I resisted it for now.

There were times I wearied of Beth’s dilemma and felt that Jordan’s behaviour was outright callous, but finding out which way Beth will fall is to twist first one way then the next, like the baton-change girls dancing with the maypole ribbons.  Muirden’s deft handling of her characters returns in an unpredictable and original ending as Beth becomes aware, finally, that she is deserving of the baton being handed to her.

Sallie Muirden Wedding Puzzle Transit Lounge 2019 304pp $29.99

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 Wedding Puzzle from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

Tags: Australian fiction, Australian women writers, Sallie | Muirden, Wedding Puzzle