An Enthralling Read – Due August 2021

Complicity City is the story of one woman’s pursuit for justice. Klara has died from an overdose of drugs and alcohol, and her best friend, Lesley, believes she’s been murdered rather than taking her own life.

Lesley wants revenge as she sets out on a quest to find out who has been complicit in the committing of this crime. Her days are spent determined to uncover the reason for Klara’s death. Lesley devotes her time to pursuing Patrick a guy she has had a brief relationship with and who has spurned her for Klara. She vehemently believes that he is responsible for her demise. Early in the narrative, his reputation precedes him as a sleazy, rich, misogynistic Irishman.

Through quick, page-turning chapters, we discover that Lesley, Patrick and Klara, before her death, all work in the same company, yet when a meeting is called, Patrick is nowhere in sight. Searching for the man at his home address, Lesley meets Maria, Patrick’s Filipina housekeeper. In the following scenes, Lesley learns from Maria about the debauchery going on under Patrick’s roof. The latest is a consensual ménage à trois of sexual activities between Klara (last known sighting), Patrick and a so-called Tony. She becomes suspicious and more aware of the possible dangers that Klara faced, especially involving herself as a dominatrix in this illicit underworld of a corrupt, male-pimping culture. It is basically a man’s club where the most depraved of sexual acts, BDSM and sado-masochism are enacted. The club is called the Knights of Apollo, a boy’s club where many scurrilous acts occur ‘after a few too many sherbets of an evening.’ However, further in, more detail emerges about these characters that inhabit this underworld. It is a world of crime, company fraud, embezzlement, sex trafficking and rape.

Without revealing too much for the reader, one main character remains a constant focus, Klara’s brother, Frank. When Lesley visits Klara’s home in Piara Waters, she meets Frank, a man on the edge of drugs, booze and trying to get sober. He is also like-minded about his sister’s death, both agreeing it’s not suicide. He remains her sidekick until the very end.

There are parallels of China Miéville’s The City & The City with themes of a hidden or unseen city where the two exist in the same physical space, including a murder and an uncovering of the mystery. Salvidge’s Complicity City of Perth juxtaposes a picturesque river town of pelicans, white swans and cranes with a menacing, degenerative social world of sex, albeit power and control, and also a dead girl. The story reveals that Klara works as a dominatrix to supplement her income, but being involved in this sleazy, working environment in order to save for her own home, ultimately has its consequences.

Other characters are involved in Patrick’s life of crime, his henchman Sando, Royce who works for the company he embezzles, and his accountant Bill Darko. In her search, Lesley meets Bill Darko’s wife, Anna, and both try to find the missing housekeeper, Maria. In her attempts for the truth, without the aid of the police, Lesley’s travels begin at the heart of her concern, become all time consuming, then circular. We are led on a road map from one environment to another, from suburbs to freeways, from houses to a character’s business or workplace. In final scenes we move to a disused railway tunnel and a killing.

Salvidge’s writing bursts with energy and suspense and his chosen words exemplify the seedy underworld that is on display. His descriptions of the city are pictorial and his action scenes are both authentic and cinematic, which makes the reader imagine this book as a TV series or movie.

Guy Salvidge is one of Western Australia’s young and up-coming writers. He’s published widely, and is active in the Susannah Prichard Writers Centre where he gives his time in helping others. His first novel is The Kingdom of Four Rivers, 2009. His second novel Yellowcake Springs won the 2011 IP Picks Best Fiction Award, and in 2012 it was short-listed for the Norma K. Hemming Award for speculative fiction in Australia. Yellowcake Summer followed closely behind and was a Winner (Best Fiction) in the IP Rolling Picks 2013.  I look forward to his next enjoyable work which I understand is an historical novel set in Tasmania.

Helen Hagemann

I’m going to include the review, verbatim. One thing I have noticed is that no 2 reviews of my novel are alike. Somehow, readers have viewed the story on many and different levels. I like Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s review and will need to take her advice about predicability. I didn’t see that coming!

*The Last Asbestos Town* is the first novel by poet Helen Hagemann. A young couple, May and Isaac leave the city for the South-West. They buy a house in a country town only to discover that it is haunted and potentially made of asbestos. Their biggest external challenge is with asbestos-removal bureaucrats who want to evict them and tear down their house. The biggest challenge in their marriage is Isaac’s “Kelp” habit. Then there is the small problem of the ghost, Cheryl, who alternates between being helpful and being menacing.

What this novel does really well is place. If you read to appreciate landscape you will enjoy this evocation of South-Western Australian towns:
The park had three miniature gazebos, barbeques, swings and a large stretch of grass that ran down to the river. The tended park with all its shelters, basketball courts and soccer field held no
excitement for her. Rather, the river fascinated May … There was something mysterious about its
quiet repose. In the early morning, the bright sun highlighted the dark inky colors of the purple
swamp hens, and demarcated the dark to light brown tones on the wood ducks. (p. 11)

I enjoyed trying to guess which South-West town this might be based on … Nannup? Bridgetown? Collie? It could be any of them. The horror element of this book is also grounded in place and I will probably never look at a country town’s large drainage pipes in the same way again.

Hagemann also does a good job of creating recognisable contemporary Anglo-Australian characters. May and Isaac are like so many white hetero couples who move to picturesque country towns thinking it will save their marriage. Hagemann’s decision to alternate between May’s and Isaac’s points-of-view in each chapter is ambitious for a first novel but it does give a pleasing complexity to their dilemmas as the reader is positioned to see them from alternating perpectives. Isaac fits the irresponsible-but-charming male archetype and May matches him with the female opposite of responsible-but-controlling.

Plot is the area where this budding novelist probably has the most room for future growth. I like to be surprised by what happens next and I want the conflict, crisis and resolution of stories to be intertwined with character growth in a way that feels (to echo Harold Bloom on good poetry) inevitable without being predictable. There was a little too much foreshadowing in this novel for there to be genuine surprise and while things happened, I’m not convinced the characters grew that much as a result. What I did enjoy in the story, though, was the indigenous characters, particularly Steve and Buzz, and the role they played in bringing the story to its climax.

Western Australia needs as many stories as it can get and I have enormous respect for older women who try new things. I hope to see more fiction from Helen Hagemann that builds on the achievements of this book. I am grateful for this opportunity to swap book reviews with her. By paying critical attention to one another’s work, we create possibilities for the future growth and transformation of one another’s writing.

Miriam Wei Wei Lo is the author of a 2nd Edition collection titled “Against Certain Capture” – re-released in February 2021 by an imprint called the Apothecary Archive, formerly 5 Islands Press.

The Farm by Tom Rob Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have had a copy of The Farm sitting on my bookshelf, bought in 2015 at a Perth Writers Festival, and that was before Covid-19, when we had the privilege of talented, international guests. I sailed through this book, a good page turner, not knowing what the outcome or who was telling the truth in this family, Tilde or her husband Chris. I’m so grateful to the author for publishing this book, I haven’t read any of his others, but I think it’s a very delicate, suspenseful story, another #MeToo narrative about hidden abuse. The author slowly unravels the story of Tilde as a mother, wife and stoic, expat from Sweden. I won’t reveal a spoiler as the novel is what’s known as “open ended.” The reader has to guess or make up their mind about what happens next to a woman who is mentally unstable. In hindsight looking back from 2021 we realise it’s because of trauma. If I had read this book back in 2015, I might have reviewed it differently, ie spruking unreliable narrator, little action, and basically a one-sided, one character point-of-view. However, since we have now come to realise that mental and physical abuse, inflicted by many perpetrators, has been rife in our society, we can no longer look at a woman and call her ‘mad, insane, off the raiis, or living a different reality’. We know in our society there has been a terrible injustice to victims of abuse, we know there has been little inaction in relation to mental health as a medical priority. When we get to the end of The Farm , we know why this story was written.

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Against Certain Capture by Miriam Wei Wei Lo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I once had the privilege of hearing Miriam Wei Wei Lo read her poetry at the State Library of Western Australia and also on the ABC’s Poetica. That seemed so long ago, in fact it was 2004 when her first edition of Against Certain Capture was published by Five Islands Press, in the New Poets 10. The good news is that her book has resurfaced, it’s an identical second edition published by an imprint called the Apothecary Archive. In the meantime, it seems, Lo has been raising children, holds a Phd from the University of Queensland, has published a chapbook No Pretty Words with Picaro Press (2010) and currently teaches creative writing at the Sheridan Institute, Perth. I managed to get a copy from the author in an exchange for my debut novel, however, I drew the shorter straw and read through Lo’s poetry in no time, with much interest.
Against Certain Capture opens as a generous homage to family and the various struggles of two women, namely Lo’s grandmothers. Liang Yue-Xian and Eva Sounness make up Lo’s heritage: her father being Chinese-Malaysian and her mother Anglo-Australian.
Approaching this poetry, I must admit that I have only ever read some of Li Po’s work, but that doesn’t exclude me liking the serious reverence in this collection, especially the biographical nature of the text that highlights a time when higher education was rare in China, when women had little agency over their bodies & minds in a patriarchal dominance. Yue-Xian loses a sweetheart, enters into a loveless marriage or in Eva’s case, she is tethered to dependency and years of multiple pregnancies.

Part 1 opens with the young Yue-Xian trapped/ in the machinations/ of family and wealth/she loses the man she loves/to her cousin. The poem ends with a deep longing.

she will write
to deliver herself
from the snares of her feminine body,
from all forms of dependence,
she will write
until she can walk
through the gates of Canton University,
crack the egg
and sign
her name on the pavement
in glistening yolken gold. p.7

In the poem No Pretty Words we encounter the deprivation of food and living at the onset of World War 11. Much has changed in Yue-Xian’s life now married to a gambler.

There are no pretty words for hunger
Only what thuds from the mouth,
flat and ugly,
like rice, fish,
sweet potato –
words to roll around in her stomach
or burn in her throat
when her husband comes home
with nothing. p.11

In Part 2, we continue with the dramatic narrative. Eva Sounness is the poet’s Australian grandmother. Born in Boulder WA, she also has an ambition for university, but this is thwarted by her father’s heart condition and no funds.

Eva has seen the results
all fifteen letters of her name
stamped in black type on the bursary list.
….
she has seen her father
white from exertion
stumble up steps
….
the word that hangs
in the air
‘angina’
and knows
that hope
is a thing to be swallowed,
to hold in the belly
until it turns sour. p.20

And as with Yue-Xian’s life, “Here, the war is a headache that lasts six years.”  p.24

When the war begins
Eva is feeding her first daughter, Robin, oat porridge
boiled soft for her infant mouth which drops to an O
at the sight of the spoon, the small pink tongue expectant.
Kim, her son, is running around in the yard
rounding up chooks and shouting at sleepy dogs,
pretending to be a farmer.

Somewhere faraway
a place called Austria is annexed, Poland collapses,
Jews are garrotted and pinioned in ghettos.
With the usual burst of wattle and birdsong
spring arrives in the South-West corner
of Western Australia, which is, Robert Menzies declares,
also at war. p.23

While there is evidence of a repressed society for women in the early twentieth century, disrupted by the onset of war, with all its deprivations, one wonders which grandmother may have lived life the hardest. The parallels of these two women’s lives are connected pre-feminist liberation. This was a generation that had little say over their bodies, tertiary education was rare, and conformity was dependency to a man, and/or childbearing.
I have not touched on many poems in this collection. The poetry is dense, lyrical and poetic lines such as “starlight touching the first dew of morning” are peppered throughout. The stories are a little bleak at times, and forms such as the pantoum and headline poems do not give an accessible narrative in a biographical sense. I would have liked some lighter moments, perhaps from Eva’s life, being Australian, but this is only a minor criticism. One poem that does touch on her character is revealed in Don’t call me Grandma p.30, but this is a fleeting image of her in later years. Perhaps in the future, Lo has plans for more lightweight incidents about family.
Helen Hagemann

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