Devotion

By Ffion Murphy, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2006, 268 pages, paperback, $27.95. Reviewed by Marion May Campbell in the July 2006 issue.

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For this elegantly constructed and potent first novel Ffion Murphy chooses cyberspace and the hospital corridor for the literally haunting narrative front, off-setting the potential claustrophobia of these spaces by broadly brushed estuary and beach vistas around Perth, Western Australia. The suburban gothic opens in elegiac mode with a backlit idyll underscored by dread -- the family picnic at Mt Eliza is disrupted by a visitation and a portent of loss. The pregnant body of the young mother, Veronica Peterson, is the site of contestation: the baby son will be reluctant to be born; the husband impatient to reclaim his own sexual intimacy, while the small daughter, Katie, is drawn to the apparition of Sharny, disturber of the family idyll.

The young mother, Veronica Peterson, is hospitalised for postnatal depression, triggered by the delivery of her son via caesarian section. 'While I slept they took him. Sliced me open, stole him.' The language later suggests that Veronica has not only been alienated from Benny, but that this 'bug-eyed' baby glimpsed through the placenta by the 'omniscient' MRI might have been from conception, if not an alien, certainly alienated from her. Veronica Peterson is dumbstruck and suffering from hysterical partial paralysis. Her psychiatrist, Andrew Moore, encourages her to channel her thoughts into a laptop, which he plans to tap. The assurance of daily deletion enables Veronica to tease out strands from the tangle of associations immobilising her. But this 'screen breeds demons'. What has pre-occupied the maternal body?

Murphy sustains this question throughout, looping with impressive skill from Veronica's narrative present, in which she types her way through visits by medical staff and increasingly frustrated family members, back to her childhood captivation by the Lepage family. Here she enters a space radically different from her own home, which is more than anything a loveless device for projecting good middle-class appearances. These scenes of captivation are interspliced with the third person narratives of characters constellated around the hospitalised Veronica. 'The past visits us in many guises. It has no chief and is no one's child; it lives in truth and in lies,' says Dr Andrew Moore. Like his charge, harrowed by guilt and by unaddressed grief, he retreats into porn and philandering, ruinously neglecting his wife and his children, even after the near-death of his junkie daughter. However, he is buoyed by hopes of redemption through his devotion to the laptop cure of Veronica, as if her restoration to her family romance might make up for the ravages of his own. It must be said that even here, Ffion Murphy lets ambiguity play: Dr Andrew Moore might be equally motivated by proving colleagues of the pharmaceutical persuasion wrong.

The turbulent Lepage family is attractive for its strange amorality, its bohemian disregard for what others think, and especially for its embrace of Veronica as Sharny's 'twin'. While Sharny is friend to Veronica though childhood into early adulthood, she is capricious, in turn cajoling and bullying, magnetic and dangerous, and is left, like Veronica, in the shadows of her mother's affection. Veronica provides for Sharny a distraction from her dutiful and, at times, resentful devotion to her younger brother, Stevie, who is afflicted with an unspecified degenerative motor neuron disorder, which might or might not be hereditary. Increasingly he is depicted as absorbing like a black hole most of the devotion of his otherwise distracted mother, Emila.

Veronica herself has been overshadowed by a sibling, Sarah, who is said to be flawlessly beautiful and accomplished. Beyond this, little focus is on Veronica's family: they are sketched as heartless and competitive, trying to shame Veronica out of her illness or shock her by appeals to her sexual insecurity into re-embracing her suburban idyll. 'Men will ruin us' has been Sharny's prediction and increasingly, as the girls traverse adolescence, their identification is expressed by competition, perhaps to the point of wishing the murderous displacement of the other. It becomes clear that unless Veronica untangles the deep ambiguity of her identifications, she will stay possessed and bound to their repetition.

The mythomania of Sharny's mother, Emila, spinning romances about her own orphaned-cum-gypsy identity, the 'incestuous' basis of her marriage to an older man, has a giddy kind of allure, setting the pattern for melodrama and betrayal. The gradual unveiling of the underside of these eccentricities and extravagances provides some of the more poignant aspects of the novel.

Occasionally it is possible to be chilled by the lack of affective resonance here -- as if, with the mere hint of passionate vibrancy, the strings are stopped and resentment or remorse steal into the silence. It is the locations associated with an ardour realised later that carry the closest thing to love in this novel: the sun-drenched beaches, the intoxicating beauty of light on the Swan river, the balmy nights of Rottnest Island or the almond trees recalling Sharny in the gardens of Veronica's marriage home, despite the demonic connotations of its street number, 66.

The main characters circuit around a centre, which is easier for them to see as monstrous than their own unloving hearts: Stevie (or Benny, fantasised as his repetition) is perhaps a figure for their inability to contemplate their own imperfection, and to forgive each other's flawed humanity. The question that powers the plot is whether, through Benny, Veronica will pay for her betrayal of Sharny and perhaps for a moment of pre-nubile dalliance with Stevie -- phantasmagorical or not. Or is this maternal rejection symptomatic of a culture bent on deletion of its own troubling past to ensure the perpetuation of glossy appearances? Deletion of all affective connection is a fantasy entertained by Veronica: 'Speak, record, erase -- that simple progression undoes voice and time, brings a self into the world then out of it -- swift and clean and precise.'

This taut psychological thriller eschews anything approaching sentimentality or the compensatory epiphany but breeds haunting questions about the perversions of love enacted in privileged suburbia. It is a very impressive debut.

Citation

• Marion May Campbell. 'Review: Devotion by Ffion Murphy' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• 'A brave new novel exploring the intensity of connection and betrayal among women friends' - Brenda Walker.
  
  Who is Veronica? What is she so afraid of? Following the birth of her second child, a successful and beautiful woman inexplicably stops speaking and refuses to see her baby. With her psychiatrist suggesting writing as therapy, Veronica begins to pour her ghosts and memories into a laptop believing that only she is reading them...
  
  A compelling fresh voice in Australian literary fiction.
  
  Ffion Murphy teaches writing at Edith Cowen University in WA. Her publications include The Gates of Dreams, Writing Australia and Storytelling, and she was the inaugural editor of the API Review of Books.

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