WENDY SCARFE The Day They Shot Edward. Reviewed by Kim Kelly

A slim volume but vast in scope, The Day They Shot Edward is a novel that asks who the grownups really are.

Beautifully original historical fiction, The Day They Shot Edward is an intricately layered story of life and death and love set in Australia during the First World War, told from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy, Matthew Donohue.

It’s also a story about the power of choice: the petty kinds that exist within families and communities – more devastating to a child than any faraway world war could ever be;

and the crushing oppression of ideals at the hands of bullies fuelled by ignorance, jingoism and vanity.

The town that Matthew lives in, between river and coast, could be any town across the country, and the novel opens with our young protagonist in the midst of a very Australian childhood pastime – catching yabbies – inside a scene that’s instantly, timelessly recognisable:

It was a shiny day. The light shimmered hotly in the sky and the water in the flooded estuary reflected the tawny ragged gums.

But the archetypes end there. Matthew is a sensitive child and, having relished catching a whole bucketful of these native crayfish, finds he can’t take them home to be killed. Haunted by the squeals of yabbies being dropped into a boiling pot the last time his family ate them, he’s now compelled to let them go.

From the first, Scarfe perfectly captures the child’s experience of time, his sense of wonder and curiosity, and also his guilt and fear: catching yabbies or making a dash through the night to the outhouse are epic events. Matthew’s character is so real and well-formed he immediately hurls himself into the reader’s heart.

Inside his home, behind its Cloth of Gold rosebushes, we meet his beloved Gran, the indomitable and deeply intelligent Sarah Keogh; we meet his mother, too, Margaret Donohue, a selfish, graceless beauty who is incapable of dealing with life’s challenges; and we feel, rather than meet, the dark and angry presence of Matthew’s father, shut away in a back room dying of tuberculosis.

The everyday details of the family’s down-at-heel suburban life are crisply rendered, and underscore the novel’s themes: 

A floury warm sweet gloom pervaded the room and the grey light in which the women moved, used to rooms which like themselves were merely adjuncts, the kitchen to the house and its central living areas, they to society and its important members.

Into this close world of shadows and murky emotional eddies bursts Edward Kingsley. A strapping young man, a friend of Gran’s, Edward enters as a magical force; he is a kind of big brother, a bold heroic figure in Matthew’s eyes, and his entrance is sunshine itself:

He came on his bicycle bringing large golden oranges tucked into the spokes of the wheels and books in a hessian bag strapped onto the bar.

Theirs is the pure, all-good-fun love between an older and a younger boy.

Edward is a dock labourer, a bright-eyed radical anarchist who wholeheartedly spouts anti-conscription slogans straight out of the Industrial Workers of the World playbook, a man whose voice ‘boomed out of his chest like a wave forced through a narrow cleft’. It is clear from the outset that he is attempting the impossible – to make the world a fairer place – and, as the novel’s title suggests, he will fail, but he does so defiantly, and with his ideals unshaken.

It is Gran, however, who remains the dependable centre of Matthew’s life. While his father lives in the ‘half-light of death’, an evil spirit pervading the house, and his mother, so much a child herself, flirts with all manner of men and middle-class bigots in hopes of improving her social status, Gran is wisdom itself.

A small woman, there is ‘no sense of frailty in her slightness, only a lack of waste’; she’s the sort of gran who marches into the school principal’s office to complain that Matthew’s teacher has been unjustly persecuting him. She is Irish, republican, suspicious of all authority, but she is no cliché. Rather, like all good grandmothers, she is full of intriguing contradictions – the sweetest of which is that she communicates with her long-dead husband via a ouija board, even though she doesn’t believe in the afterlife. But best of all, she cuts through Matthew’s confusions, offering him clear and concise lessons in life:

Try not to run with the mob, Matthew. Make your own decisions, your own choices. And read. Education is power. Read history. It’s the only rehearsal we have for living.

And she offers some blade-sharp observations for the reader, too; here discussing music to be chosen for a local recital:

‘And what is the difference between German and Irish songs?’ asked Gran. ‘The British are at war with Germany now. They’ve been at war with Ireland for centuries. It’s so typical of their arrogance. Slaughter the Irish and appropriate their music to serve their own Victorian sentimentality.’

Matthew’s mother, so representative of the eternal rump of middle Australia, responds to Gran’s wisdom with a refrain all too familiar today:

‘What airy fairy notions you put in Matthew’s head. Education is power! A dreamer’s fantasy, Mother. To be free to make choices Matthew needs money and social position.’

But if Gran is the dependable centre of Matthew’s life, his school principal, Mr Werther, is its soul. Eccentric and German, he is childlike, too, but in an expansive, generous-hearted way, and as he begins to teach Matthew the violin, he offers the most powerful refrain of the story, and its highest ideal:

‘Put the edge of the bow against the strings and draw it across. Tenderly. You must love it. Music grows with love. Like people, you know. People are like music. Love makes them grow. Tenderly, Matthew, gently.’

And Matthew’s response is equally exquisite: ‘This violin felt warm in Matthew’s hand, like a tree on a hot day. It was warm, growing wood.’ ­ It is the miracle of something simply feeling right and good: ‘Everything inside Matthew softened and let go.’

Auxiliary characters are also vividly drawn and add to the moral fabric of the tale: from Matthew’s chief tormentor – his school teacher, Mrs Pilkington – a broken person whose savage patriotism represents the mindless breaking of the world to Old Pete, a proto-conservationist who protects the local reptiles on his property and teaches Matthew a thing or two about practical misanthropy.

The sense of the period, both parochial and external, is skilfully built; its snippets of war history are incorporated naturally, too, so often hitting the bass notes of Matthew’s guilt and fear that he is somehow responsible for it all. The bigotries of every day are similarly dropped in well – from casual racism against a boy with ‘touch of tar’, to the naked hatred of Germans at that time. And while some knowledge of Australia’s part in the First World War and the general socio-political goings-on at home will nourish the reading experience, it’s not essential.

The richest treasure of this novel, though, is Scarfe’s imagery, so often as deeply layered as the story; for example, this sketch of the beach:

Here everything smelt cool, the breeze salty and sharp. On still hot days a mist hung on the horizon, heavy and oysterish. Tinged with mauve, it rested on the sea but as it climbed into the sky it melted in air which glittered and glanced from the surface of the water.

And this unforgettable picture of women throwing themselves at soldiers as they depart for war: ‘Some straw hats broke away from the crowd like icing crumbling at the edge of a cake.’

Occasionally the dialogue takes on a stilted tone, as though we might have stepped into a play, but this stylisation does lend itself to the depiction of a smaller, slower and more self-conscious, child’s-eye world in which words carry all kinds of weight. As Gran tells us plainly, too, through Matthew in the prologue: ‘We are merely actors in our time and on our stage rehearsing for others a life they will not understand.’

A slim volume but vast in scope, The Day They Shot Edward is a novel that, at its heart, asks who the grownups really are. As we near the centenary of Armistice Day, we’ll be offered the same batch of mythic tropes of Anzac heroism and nation-blooding we’re served every year. Read this novel instead.

Wendy Scarfe The Day They Shot Edward Wakefield Press 2018 PB 124pp $24.95

Kim Kelly is the author of seven novels, including the acclaimed Wild Chicory and The Blue Mile. Her latest novel, Lady Bird & The Fox, will be published in April 2018. Find out more about Kim at: kimkellyauthor.com

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Tags: Australia in World War I, Australian fiction, Australian women writers, Wendy | Scarfe