« Sean Williams Interview | Main | The Tin Wreath »
August 21, 2008
Review: Things Without a Name by Joanne Fedler
|
Joanne Fedler THINGS WITHOUT A NAME Allen & Unwin, 400 pp. Source: review copy Review by Tineke Hazel |
This seems a curious title for a book, until you hear Nonna speaking to her little granddaughter Faith. "Things without a name don't exist" she says, "they are lost".
Faith Roberts (no relation to Julia Roberts she hastens to add) is a legal counselor with an organization called SISTAA which stands for "Sisters In Struggle Together To Alleviate Abuse". Faith says this is a hell of a mouthful for someone with a broken jaw or split lip.
Faith listens each day to the most horrendous stories of domestic violence. She organizes restraint orders and gives legal advice which mostly isn't taken on board by the abused women. The novel starts with Faith listening to Priscilla, a Somali woman whose sister made the mistake of going home to collect her things after she had been told not to go back without police in attendance. She is stabbed to death with a pair of scissors. Faith feels she will never look at scissors in the same way again.
Faith's life is full of broken women who want to cling to her because Faith listens and observes more than she speaks. Everyone loves to tell their story to someone who will listen and Faith is a good listener.
The domestic violence she has to listen to, and give advice about each day, slowly threatens to swamp Faith's own life. She works on regardless, observing and also mulling over situations she remembers in her own life, as a child, as an adolescent and now as an adult: 34 years of age and still single.
Incidents in her childhood suddenly become clearer to her now she looks back. The fact that her mother was always busy organizing meetings at home for grieving people after Faith's baby brother drowns in the bath. Her mother writes books to advise people how to cope with their grief, books with titles like Mourning After. Faith now realizes her mother wrote them for herself, to escape the guilt she felt about her baby drowning in the bath while she went out to smoke a cigarette.
Fortunately Nonna is a down-to-earth woman, full of wisdom which helps to carry Faith through everyone else's disasters with a modicum of steadiness, though she does seem to rely rather heavily on her asthma pump.
Carol, her friend from work, is totally focused on sex and thinks that a good fuck is all that she and Faith need to bring them happiness and relief from all the terrifying abuse cases they have to deal with. But, good men are hard to find it seems and when Carol phones Faith in a suicidal mood, Faith confesses to some indisgressions with a man Carol remembers as short and fat, which manages to switch Carol from suicidal to hilarity. Nonna thinks Carol is not a good friend for Faith.
One evening after a few drinks with Carol at the pub, Faith hits and kills a cat with her car. She rushes the cat to a vet's clinic where the cat is declared dead by the vet who is on duty. Faith dissolves into tears no longer able to cope with all the stress in her life and now a dead cat as well. She wants to give it a decent burial rather than have it incinerated by the clinic. The vet promises to bury it for her at his sister's place in the hills.
The next day Faith manages to find out the vet's name and rings the clinic to leave a message for Caleb, the vet who attended the cat. He responds and some time later takes her to show the little grave on his sister's property. While they are driving, in the safety of the car, Faith finds herself explaining about the work she is in. Dealing with battered and hurt women, while Caleb deals with battered and hurt animals. Unlike Caleb, Faith has started to hate her job. Faith leaves her job with SISTAA and takes on walking dogs for other people. She has found a job she likes and a man she can love and be loved by in return.
"Amore", sighs Nonna.
Things Without a Name was interesting from the start, but it became irritating when the timeline became confusing. We read about Faith as an adult, then suddenly we are in her childhood or her adolescence and until we become really aware of what the author is doing it can be somewhat disconcerting. The characters are numerous, and again, until we can sort them out, it makes for irritating reading. However, once we do get them straight, the book becomes intriguing. Although superficially a love story, it deals with that shadow-side of domestic bliss, domestic violence. It also draws attention to the sterilization of mentally retarded people, workplace ethics and how to cope when this isn't backing up a valid complaint, rape and the reasons why women won't very often report it, self harm, stress in the workplace, and the attitude of young women to men these days.
The author uses many quirky observations on people and their attitudes which are a delight to read. For example, Barbara, the receptionist is described as "a radiant human frangipani", and poverty is depicted "hanging around like a teenager with nothing better to do".
There is a lot to recommend this novel, and I'll be looking forward to Joanne Fedler's next book.
Posted by larrikin at August 21, 2008 02:52 PM