Maria Lewis, "The Wailing Woman" (2019)

The fourth in a series, this: ancient societies of werewolves, witches, vampires, demons etc cohabit secretly with regular humans in contemporary Australia, a sort of What We Do In The Shad-Oz, though, obviously, not as funny. I haven't read the first three, and so cannot comment on their quality (they might be Tolstoy for all I know); but I have read the fourth, which concerns banshees. The screaming of these folk causes destruction and death, and so they were all transported from Ireland to Oz long ago: ‘they came on six prison ships, fifteen hundred women … they were brought out thin, pale, smelling like piss and shit. Some of them were wearing a Scold’s bridle’ [53]—the latter detail to prevent them doing their terrifying and fatal scream, you see. The descendants of these women now constitute a kind of Untouchable caste in modern Oz, working with the dead in funeral homes and cleaning-up blood-soaked crime scenes and so on, since it is with the dead they have their magical affinity.

There's a precipitously steep hierarchy in magical society, and banshees are low down, though not so low as vampires (‘loathed, nasty cat-like creatures ... they were considered below ghouls, which were part of a lower tier of supernatural creature that didn't have any kind of cognitive behaviour or quantifiable intelligence’). Anyway, our heroine Sadie has her throat mangled as a girl to stifle her banshee shriek; but when she is grown-up she falls in love with the sexy son of the man who undertook that mangling, a geezer called, with some improbability, ‘Texas Contos’. Their true-love-not-running-smooth narrative involves much running around, secret-uncovering, some gore and ick, and a quantity of jovial, sweary, matey bantz. This latter is the novel's default, really.

As fable, this novel is saying something about the subaltern voice: about the many Celts pitilessly banished by Anglo imperial power centuries back who have now made their own antipodean realm in Sydney and like cities (‘fuck you, England!’). It's also, clearly about gender, and is amongst other things a story about the patriarchal desire to silence women, to impose procrustean standards of behaviour upon them, and accordingly of the elation channelled by women refusing to collaborate with that mode of oppression (‘fuck you, men!’). As Lewis announces in her afterword, utilising here as throughout the book her rather haphazard vernacular: ‘thank you to all the IRL wailing women out there, the otherworld sisters and what not. This book is supposed to be about finding your voice and using it, so hopefully that's what you take away from it.’ Fair enough, and what not. Commendable, even. But my hesitant male voice burbles on nonetheless, in a manner that inescapably indexes patriarchy, of course, and can accordingly be discounted.

The truth is my cliché-geiger-counter continually sputtered and fizzed as I read this novel, as eyes ‘lit up’, as events ‘took her breath away’, as they saw one another ‘in the flesh’ and were ‘proud as punch’, as ‘her blood ran cold’ and so on. Indeed so much was this a case of and so on that my cliché-geiger-counter blew its fuse somewhere around page 100 (‘Sadie hated silence: she loathed it with every fibre of her being’ [107] may have been the final straw).

My problem is presumably mine alone: but cliché means stereotype, and stereotyping is precisely the problem with sexism, as with racism and other such prejudices in which human specificity is overwritten and human individual potential shut-down in favour of a caricature and generalised stock-image, a collective negative cartoonification. This is a novel with its heart in the right place, no question. The thing is: novels are not made out of heart. Novels are not made out of feelings, or vibes, or righteousness, or bantz, or even out of stories or characters or imagined worlds. Novels are made out of words. If we wish to challenge the bigotry of stereotype in such a medium, surely we need to work as hard as is necessary to avoid stereotype when we put those words together? Make war on cliché on the level of style and form, as well as on the level of content? No?

No? Well alright then.

The consensus does run the other way nowadays, I suppose. Not only do readers (who, as you can see on Goodreads, adore this novel) not mind cliché, they actively embrace it. Much of the appeal of this book, I'd guess, is its vibe: of having fun with your mates, danger and love and excitement: Sadie's sisters and friends, and of course the adoring Tex, whose physiological reaction to arousal is almost as improbable as his name (‘he gripped the fabric of her dress, his pulse racing so fast he worried his Adam's apple would burst out of his throat’ [209]). The gang are here to ground the protagonist's adventures (which is to say the p.o.v. character's—which is to say, our—adventures) in a mileu of supportive camaraderie, and the thing with friends is that they are familiar, that we're comfortable with them, they are the relationship correlative of cliché.

Perhaps readers don't want a style that ‘gets in the way of’ the things they hope to extract from their book-reading experience. Maybe there's an Oz aspect to this too (though I run the risk here myself of stereotyping, I know) that prefers straight-talking, even if it errs on the side of the stale, to fancy-pants up-yourself pretentiousness. That values a common touch over fine writing. Either way we're talking about an attitude that sees the actual stuff of novels, words cast into sentences, sentences assembled into blocks of text, as impediments to the story and the character and the Feels, rather than seeing the story (and the feels) as radically shaped by the particularities of the words the author chooses. I daresay I'm the one out of kilter on this. I should lighten up. I wouldn't want to get so worked up that my adam's-apple bursts out of my throat, certainly.