The first two thirds of this truly interesting Australian novel are solid gold. Eleanor is a breast cancer survivor who’s not afraid to tell it like it is, and mostly it’s utterly crap. She is a woman after my own heart, combining a tendency to look on the darker side of life with an abililty to fully convey the suckiness of her position by some truly incisive swearing. She is thirty one, unemployed and living with her mother when she gets the opportunity to move to the tiny Snowy Mountains town of Talbingo to teach at a school with eleven students (fun fact: Talbingo is an actual town, population 239).
And then things get seriously weird, with Eleanor plagued at every turn by comparisons with the previous teacher, the oh-so-perfect Miss Barker, who mysteriously disappeared. There are also some sincerely strange town residents, which made me never want to go to Talbingo. Eleanor’s love interest stalks kangaroos and tells her she smells like a damp cupboard and deserved to get cancer. If there’s a list of actions calculated to make you scream “RUN” at an unattached girl when she’s contemplating a new love interest, those three things have got to be pretty high up on that list. And then there’s Ryan, the love interest’s even odder brother….
The last one third of the novel is in turns confusing and disturbing: as readers we are at the mercy of Eleanor, who becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator as her grip on reality slips. It reminded me very much of Darren Aronofsky’s movie Mother! For the first two thirds you’re totally getting it and loving it, then at the end you walk away not entirely sure what happened, and just feeling deeply and quietly disturbed.
But wow, what a ride. This is the most original novel I’ve read in a long time. It’s worth being deeply and quietly disturbed.
