The Singing

By Stephanie Bishop, Blackheath: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005, 206 pages, paperback, $26.95. Reviewed by Zora Simic in the September 2005 issue.

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Broken hearts and illness are universal experiences, but like dreams, they can sometimes grate in the telling. Luckily Australian writer Stephanie Bishop manages to pack these themes with proper resonance, in spite of -- or possibly because of -- her small canvas. Her debut novel The Singing has at its quiet yet turbulent centre an un-named woman with an unidentified illness. She is in love with an un-named man, possibly a few years older, with a family he's left behind and a determination to see their love endure past the frustration of her sickness. They live in the bush outside a city (Sydney) and next door to a dancer (Isabella) who forms a friendship with the protagonist that is eked out in the most elusive of sub plots. It is to Bishop's credit that the reader is fascinated with this developing bond, but not enough to begrudge the author's focus on the disintegrating love affair.

Or rather the love affair already passed. The Singing begins with the ex-lovers meeting in a city street. She's presumably healthy and has the sort of impressive corporate job that breeds a certain kind of anonymity. This seems to suit the narrator's contemplative state as she blends into crowded streets and marketplaces, before returning to her non-descriptive hotel room. This backdrop isn't as featureless as it sounds and indeed one of Bishop's skills is in evoking the paraphernalia of cityscapes and the interiors of homes with convalescing occupants without distracting from the main story. The two narratives -- the one set in the present, the other in the not too distant past -- converge to foreground a rumination on what kills love, or to put it another way, the question of whether love ever dies.

Although the narrator's illness and the end of her relationship share time and space, their connection is not automatic. The more we know about her and about him, the more we realise life is far too complicated for their demise to be ascribed to her undiagnosed condition. Her illness provokes a retreat on both sides, but there are other everyday challenges to endure and make sense of -- his children, her mother, Isabella's attentiveness and their respective ways of loving. Bishop doesn't force feed us this wider context and therein resides the novel's persuasive and poetic power.

Open almost any page of The Singing and you will find something to appreciate. Bishop's speciality seems to be accessing what is normally elusive or commonplace and making it speak (or sing). So she writes of one of love's greatest illusions: 'I think he thought that because of us he would be like a new person. Better even'. Or later on, after he has gone: 'You, who are happening to me now in your absence far more than you ever did when you were here'. We've heard or felt these transcendent moments before, though perhaps not positioned in such a way as to give them such force. This is prose that commands careful reading. Its effects are cumulative, you are rewarded for paying attention.

Occasionally contemplative writing can veer on the ponderous and Bishop doesn't entirely escape this fate. Yet if there's a sense of enduring this book, I'd like to think it's deliberate. We're sitting through an illness with her and grow to appreciate her attempts to understand the ways in which she is being transformed. Bishop is to be admired for (mostly) avoiding the use of illness as a metaphor for love. Illness as a singular experience is accorded due respect and if she uses it as a way of understanding anything, it's the limitations of speech to express what is inside. It is this respect for interiority that brings The Singing to life.

Citation

• Zora Simic. 'Review: The Singing by Stephanie Bishop' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), September 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Tracing the extremes of passion and loss, The Singing tells the story of two people haunted by a love they were forced to relinquish. It is a drama told in whispers; how is one to live with the weight of the past and impossible desire, and how does human frailty destroy the capacity to love?
  
  Unforgettably uniting voice and experience, The Singing is an exquisite articulation of the need to love and remember. Its movement and cadences create a sound that once absorbed will never wholly be lost.
  
  'A striking new voice, calm and fresh. Her story has the seductive authority, and the quietly shocking beauty, of a dream'. - Helen Garner

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• Freehold: Verse Novel
  
  Geoff Page, Blackheath: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005, 170 Pages, Paperback,
  Reviewed by Adam Atkinson in the January 2006 issue.
  
  Geoff Page's Freehold: Verse Novel attempts to negotiate the different modes in which white and Aboriginal Australians connect to land and country and to counteract the forgetting of historical wrongs perpetrated against Aboriginal communities and 'justified' by white understandings of land ownership. Despite the back cover's claim that 'nothing is black and white', Page reveals that, like the Clarence river which repeatedly cuts into the novel, a sharp divide exists between black and white cultural understandings of land use. This divide in turn, serves to make Aboriginal culture transparent and invisible to white Australia. Page's verse novel attempts to narrow the gap a little. Freehold ... read more.