Fanning
the flames
First
of all a declaration - I know Liz personally having worked with
her. Since that time she’s gone on to write 4 novels and
one memoir and probably countless non-fiction works.
Trip of a Lifetime is Liz’s latest
novel and is set in Newcastle in New South Wales (where according
to the acknowledgements, her son lives). Heather Delaney is the
local member and one night after work she is shot in the shoulder.
This sets up the tension in the story which compares and contrasts
the lives of several “older” women.
There’s Heather - successful, single mid 50s
politician. Jill, successful working mother of two tweens, mid
50s. Diane, bitter divorcee, also in her 50s with a grown-up daughter
on drugs and Barbara, in her 70s, single, successful now retired,
with a “male friend of significance” shall we say.
All of Liz’s books feature women of a certain
age and that certain age is the one that no one else is writing
about! Perhaps that is why her books have found their niche. These
women are still having sex (well… most of them), and still
have many of the problems - insecurity, body-image, jealousy etc
- that their younger peers have. We just don’t hear about
them.
Once your hair turns grey remember - you turn invisible
- or at least, that’s how it seems.
In the story Heather gets contacted by an old flame
- an old flame who it must be said treated her rather shabbily
in the past. Perhaps she is vulnerable after the shooting but
she latches onto this new-old love and appears to be falling into
the old relationship.
Now, I don’t know if you remember Liz’s
story - she wrote about it in her memoir Remember Me
but I wondered if she used her rekindled love story as the basis
for this relationship between Heather and Ellis.
I’m not saying that her Karl is anything like
Ellis - that would probably be slander - but I wonder if the emotional
roller-coaster that Heather goes on are like the ones she must
have felt when Liz reunited with Karl? The whole weird transposition
of bodies… you remember the young person you were in love
with - your body remembers their body - but the reality is the
older version. Very different from growing older together I think.
And then (and I don’t know whether this is
Liz’s personal experience or not) mentally you’re
in a different place. You’ve added decades of experience
to your decision making processes… emotional as well as
practical… but you expect your old lover to respond in the
same way they would have back then. A very interesting dilemma.
I wonder if any relationship could survive that?
Anyway I digress, back to the book.
It’s a fast, holiday read. A bit Maeve Binchy.
Interesting but not challenging - but it’s not claiming
to be Booker Prize fiction.
Cellobella
To read more of Cellobella's book reviews, check
out her blog at Red
Sultana.
