The Season

 

Our Christmas was kiboshed by Covid. Half our presents still sit under the tree, waiting until we're all clear to see family members -- my sister, my daughter, my dad. Thank heavens that Helen Garner's new book, The Season, was being given to me by my other daughter, who also tested positive, because I couldn't have waited any longer. Once I cracked it open, I tried to spin it out as long as I could, but I finished it within a day.

It's so kind when your favourite living author writes a book especially for you: in this instance, a Melbourne book, about footy and families and getting older, about masculinity and violence and war, about stories and heroes and, like Tabitha Carvan's book, about being into something, whether or not you understand it 'properly,' but just because it gives you joy. Extra points because Garner's team is the same as mine, the Western Bulldogs, and little vignettes about players I know and love pepper these pages.

Garner's style looks effortless, but oh, the craft, the blood, that has gone into creating these apparently simple snatches of dialogue, these glimpses of scenes. A news report, a memory, little shards artfully arranged to resonate and glitter off each other, but made to look as if they've just been scattered carelessly and fallen haphazard. Forgive me, I'm not coherent, I'm blaming Covid, but I absolutely relished this book. The writing is so beautiful, and Garner loves footy the way I do (I feel vindicated), she tells people this is 'a nana's book about football.' She's in it for the stories, for the moments of ecstasy and despair, for the sweep of the narrative, the heroic battles and the noble characters, just like I am.

That Bont. His quiet, faithful brilliance. Where does such a man come from? Cody Weightman kicks six goals and executes a magnificent screamer: he romps up the back of North's Griffin Logue in great strides, like a man bounding up a staircase.

But really the book is not about football as much as it's about Garner and her grandson, Amby, fifteeen and growing into a man before her eyes, and her finding a way to accompany him for a little way on the journey, to find a language they can speak together.