SHADY COSGROVE What the Ground Can’t Hold. Reviewed by Jacqui Dent
The past makes uneasy company for five avalanche survivors trapped in the Andes. Shady Cosgrove’s novel is quietly arresting to the very last page.
‘Snow falls in layers. Maybe the top one looks fine but there are more below. A warm day melts them …’ He balled his fists together, one slipping off the other to demonstrate. ‘It’s weather that tempts avalanches.’
When an avalanche blocks the only path down from a refugio (cabin) in the Andes, nine hikers are stranded and two more presumed dead in the ice. With no radio and food supplies dwindling, the survivors are faced with a choice: risk starvation in the refugio, or more avalanches on the mountain path.
Among the survivors are our five protagonists: Emma, an Australian who has discovered a secret that could send her parents to gaol; Jack, a German teenager obsessed with sex, Jack Kerouac and fighting the power; Carmen, a tango dancer whose estranged father is dying of cancer; Pedro, the refugio manager in hiding from his family and Woolfe, a late arrival to the refugio on secret business.
Cosgrove’s novel is told in five parts, beginning with Emma’s story. Raised an Australian, Emma has recently discovered she was illegally adopted. Her biological parents were political dissidents murdered by the government during Argentina’s Dirty War. If her adoption is made public, her Australian parents could be extradited. Reeling from her discovery and alone in a foreign country, Emma confides in two American tourists, John and Jeremy. However, as Emma gets to know her new travelling companions, something sinister in their nature begins to rise to the surface:
Jeremy had fallen asleep and his leg was pressing against mine. I moved away but a few minutes later his knee was back, touching my thigh. I pushed him off but as my hand touched his jeans, his eyes sprung open and he grabbed me by the wrist. ‘What’s going on, Emma?’
‘What? No, I …’
‘Hey, you can grope me anytime. Just wait until I’m awake, okay?’
As the three of them hike into the mountains Jeremy begins to insinuate that he will make Emma’s adoption public if she doesn’t sleep with him. And the two Americans become an increasingly unsettling presence as they dominate the refugio, winning Jack to their side and playing power games with Pedro.
By the time the novel begins, John and Jeremy have already hiked into an avalanche and all our information about them is delivered in the past tense through the recollections of different protagonists. Yet even so their presence remains strong, and our horror at the probability of their deaths must sit uncomfortably beside the growing evidence that they are no great loss. The slow revelation of their characters takes place beside growing insights into each of the five main narrators, and I was propelled forward on the promise of learning more about these people: their secrets, their insights and the witness each one bears to the events inside and around the refugio.
We have the chance to meet each character as narrator only once and each one gives us only part of the story. Emma’s narration ends a few days after the avalanche, when she is accused of stealing money from the refugio. Then Jack picks up the story, stepping us back in time to his life in San Francisco. He becomes our guide through his trip to Argentina with his family, his time with the Americans, the avalanche, the alleged theft and then further still. Each account overlaps the one before and snowballs into the next as tensions in the cabin continue to mount. The suspense in this story is beautifully understated but no less powerful for being so; in fact, it’s the intangible quality of it that makes it so disquieting. I was often not quite sure what was holding me in this story, I just knew I couldn’t put it away.
The avalanche lies in the immediate past for all in the cabin. But this is a story about layers, and the deeper thread running through each of the five narrations is Argentina’s Dirty War. Slowly Cosgrove identifies varying degrees of connection between each of the main protagonists and the state terrorism of the 1970s and 80s. Carmen’s father was a pilot who helped to ‘disappear’ prisoners like Emma’s biological parents. Pedro’s family were tortured by the regime. The novel doesn’t offer us a history lesson about the war, why it occurred or how it ended. Rather, the war creeps in and out, on the fringes of conversations or needling at the thoughts of a particular narrator, occasionally offering up some grim fact, like the one Pedro relates:
‘I was never taken in but my cousins were. Sometimes the guards would use an electric prod. One of them rewired kitchen appliances to shock prisoners. That way, if the prisoner were freed, they’d never forget. Every time they used a blender or a coffee grinder, they’d remember being tortured. My cousin would laugh, though: the guards were wasting their time, we didn’t have money for blenders.’
The violence of the past seeps out of the earth. It crosses national borders and is passed down through generations, lingering always in the background to haunt and accuse.
I read this book for the first time a year ago and both then and now I found myself unwilling to stop reading. However, to call it gripping would be misleading. The word ‘gripping’ puts me in mind of high-action page-turners that are devoured too quickly and forgotten the moment they end. What the Ground Can’t Hold haunted me – quietly – and I caught my thoughts returning to it weeks and even months after it had ended.
Shady Cosgrove What the Ground Can’t Hold Picador 2013 PB 304pp $29.99
Jacqui Dent has had short works published in Voiceworks, Verity La, Emerging Writer and broadcast on ABC Radio National. She was a creative writing student of Shady Cosgrove at the University of Wollongong. Visit her at www.jacquident.net or Twitter: @notjacquident.
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