When Things Are Alive They Hum

 

When Things Are Alive They Hum was published last year and is the debut novel of Australian author Hannah Bent (not to be confused with Hannah Kent), though Bent, like her character Marlowe, was born and brought up in Hong Kong and studied in London. The novel centres around Marlowe and her younger sister, Harper, who has what she calls 'Up' syndrome, and whose heart is beginning to fail.

This book had a personal resonance for me. My own younger sister has an intellectual disability (though her general health, touch wood, is very good) so elements of Marlowe and Harper's relationship came very close to home. I belong to a Facebook group for siblings of people with a disability, and I know from there, as well as from my own experience, that the sib relationship can be a particularly tangled knot of love, responsibility, resentment, guilt and protectiveness.

When Things Are Alive They Hum explores this complex connection with delicacy and nuance, while also diving into the very political and horrific issue of forced organ donation. I honestly didn't know which way the story was going to swing until the very end. This is a touching and emotional novel -- not just for sibs!

The Arsonist

I was reminded about Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist when I woke up in the night and heard the author talking about the book on the radio (I hear a lot of interesting things via night radio).

The Arsonist has won multiple awards and deservedly so. Although it centres around the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, it was uncomfortably relevant during this past horrific Australian summer (which is not over yet, despite the blessed downpours). This is the story of Brendan Sokaluk, who was found guilty of deliberately lighting one of those cataclysmic Black Saturday fires, but it is also a story about the struggling rural community where he lived, a power station town in the Latrobe Valley; about the fires themselves, and the apocalypse that killed so many people. It is searing to read about the nightmare the those people endured, and you begin to think that anyone who deliberately caused that suffering and devastation must deserve the harshest possible punishment.

And yet. Things are rarely simple in a Chloe Hooper book. Sokaluk became a figure of terror because of what he'd done, yet Hooper shows that he is also deeply pathetic. Possibly autistic, definitely intellectually disabled, Brendan moves in a small world that he has trouble understanding, with people who find him irritating. His only true friend is his dog, who loves him without judgement. Like many people with ID, Brendan may have trouble grasping the complexities of social interaction, but he is expert at forming and holding onto grudges, and knowing when he's being bullied; he has been bullied his whole life.

Having said that, it's hard to feel too much sympathy for Sokaluk, and it's impossible to know if he fully understood the consequences of his behaviour when he lit that fire. Was he a cunning, manipulative criminal, or one of life's victims who got out of his depth? It's Hooper's skill that lets the reader see that both options are probably true.

Resurrection Bay

Things I loved about Resurrection Bay:

• It's written by Emma Viskic, a Melbourne author, who happens to be a friend of my friend (and piano teacher) Chris
• It's set in Melbourne, so there's lots of fun landmark- and suburb-spotting
• The protagonist Caleb is deaf, which is a fresh twist, and Viskic makes great use of his lip-reading and other abilities as well as the disadvantages of hearing impairment
• The story is fast and furious, with plenty of action, pursuit, betrayal and fighting; I can imagine teenage boys getting caught up in this engaging novel.

Really, my only reservation about Resurrection Bay was that it wasn't by Tana French... which was a problem of my timing rather than any fault of Viskic's. She's won several awards and the series has spun out to (I think) three volumes now, and she thoroughly deserves her success.

Riding the Bus With My Sister

Happy New Year to you all. I must say I'm very pleased to say farewell to 2018, which was a horrible year in many ways, but I'm hoping for a greatly improved 2019!

Riding the Bus With My Sister is Rachel Simon's account of a year she spent with her intellectually disabled sister, Beth. Beth doesn't work; she prefers to spend her days hopping the bus routes of her home town (a small, unnamed, American city). Beth gets up at 5am to catch the first bus of the day; she knows all the drivers and many of the passengers know her. At first Rachel is inclined to see Beth's obsession as a waste of time, but as she too gets to know the drivers, with their patience, wisdom, humour and philosophy, she begins to see the value in slowing down and making connections (more on that topic later...)

I was drawn to this book because I also have a younger sister with an intellectual disability, and I have also been tormented by those guilty thoughts that I'm a 'bad sister' -- not supportive enough, impatient, sometimes bored. I have wrestled with the same dilemmas that Rachel struggles with: when to allow Beth the freedom to live her life the way she chooses, and when to act in her sister's best interests, even when she resists (for example, when Beth risks her sight by refusing an eye operation).

I could see many parallels between Beth and my sister. They both hate being 'bossed'; they can both be extremely stubborn. They can develop overwhelming crushes on people. If they disagree with you, they don't argue back; instead, they just shut down, presenting a blank wall of passive resistance. This book helped me to see that these tactics are not just infuriating quirks, but a logical response to a complex, sometimes incomprehensible world where people are always trying to get you to do stuff even if you can't understand why. Beth and my sister both cling fiercely to their independence and their privacy, to that small secure space they've been able to carve out for themselves. They don't like change. They are hyper-aware of 'meanness' and any hint of bullying. They can seem self-centred, but perhaps that's a survival technique too. When you have to spend so much of your time and energy protecting yourself, there's not a lot left over for empathising with others.

As a result of reading Riding the Bus With My Sister, I've joined a Facebook group for adult siblings of people with disabilities, and already I can see that most people have to deal with far more severe problems than my sister. She has a job, she has paid off her own house, she lives independently and mostly happily. Her life is hard at times, and I have to remember that. But we have a lot to be grateful for, too.