CLASSIC BOOKS FOR MODERN READERS

PRAISE FOR THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF

‘Attracted and repelled, Garner circles around the unspeakable abysmal horror. Can any story “explain” why a man might murder his children? … Garner’s narrative is lit by lightning’

JAMES WOODS, NEW YORKER

‘This impeccable account of the trial of a father who murdered his children has gathered a following to become one of the most highly rated of recent non-fiction works … it is impossible to imagine it being done better’

GUARDIAN

‘Like a latter-day Truman Capote, Garner sketches an ordinary small-town family with a terrible mystery at its heart. This House of Grief is as much about divorce, Bob the Builder and chips for tea as it is about criminal justice. It is one of the best books about inexplicable behaviour I have ever read’

BEE WILSON

‘Devastating and extraordinary’

JENNY COLGAN

‘Helen Garner describes with wonderful subtlety and honesty the trial of a man accused of drowning his three sons; she is fascinated by what we’re capable of and how fiercely we hide it from ourselves’

HELEN SIMPSON

‘A gripping account of a murder trial. An examination not just of what happened, but also of what we prefer to believe and what we cannot face believing’

JULIAN BARNES

‘If you’re a non-fiction reader, Helen Garner’s This House of Grief should be high on your list of greats. (Think In Cold Blood.)’

JENNY LANDRETH

‘One of Garner’s most acclaimed and beloved works of non-fiction. What makes it such a triumph is how Garner takes the act of bearing witness to newfound levels. She doesn’t merely observe and record what happens, but invests herself fully in the process and the outcome. In doing so, she implicates herself and, by extension, the reader’

SARAH WEINMAN

‘A rich canvas of heartbreaking drama. Her words, and the boys’ fate, will haunt us long after we’ve turned the last page’

GUARDIAN

‘Garner uses the case – and her reactions to it – to think about wounded masculinity, collapsing families, the theatricality of courtrooms and the unknowable mystery of human behaviour. Tinged with mourning, the book leaves us wondering what justice might mean in a tragedy where everyone winds up a victim’

NPR

‘A gut-wrenching courtroom drama. A book I would recommend to anyone’

SUNDAY TIMES

PRAISE FOR HELEN GARNER

‘There are very few writers that I admire more than Helen Garner’

DAVID NICHOLLS

‘A voice of great honesty and energy’

ANNE ENRIGHT

‘Helen Garner is a great writer’

PETER CAREY

‘Garner writes with the humour and precision of Joy Williams, the warmth and ferocity of Elena Ferrante and the investigative rigour of Janet Malcolm’

LITHUB

‘The greatest novelist you’ve never heard of’

NPR

‘One of those wonderful writers whose voice one hears and whose eyes one sees through. It is impossible not to follow her’

DIANA ATHILL

‘She is unafraid of showing pettiness, darkness, anger, ugliness. More daringly, she’s also a great writer of joy’

LAUREN GROFF

‘You always remember where you were when you read your first Helen Garner and you always regret it has taken you so much time to get to her’

FATIMA BHUTTO

‘Helen Garner writes the best sentences in Australia’

BULLETIN

‘The literary queen of Australia … the mother of autofiction’

KIRKUS

To the Victorian Supreme Court:
‘this treasury of pain, this house of power and grief’
DEZSÖ KOSZTOLÁNYI: KORNÉL ESTI

INTRODUCTION

Loneliness brought me Helen Garner’s This House of Grief. One late summer evening in 2014, the year of its first publication, I happened to be at a party in a London bookshop: a launch for a writer, none of whose friends, it turned out, I knew even slightly. In search of something to do with myself in the long half-hour before I could respectably leave, I moved towards a table marked true crime – oh, the jaunty little sign – and there it was, rather pale and unassuming next to so much screaming scarlet. I read its jacket, tersely inviting, and then its opening section, in which Garner’s well-made sentences move from the quotidian (‘once there was a hard-working bloke who lived in a small Victorian country town with his wife and their three young sons’) to the utterly horrifying (‘the car sank to the bottom and all the children were drowned’) with the speed and dexterity of a nursery rhyme (those poor blind mice, I thought, picturing black water). Two minutes later, the book was in my bag, and I was on my way to the train.

I expected to read this paperback quickly, with the same dazed compulsion with which I’d devoured Garner’s novel The Spare Room (2008), a novel about a woman who looks after a friend as she undergoes alternative treatments for cancer (the friend’s delusions – she believes she’s to be cured – stir a rage in its narrator that shames and exhausts her). But, in fact, I read it slowly, tiptoeing along carefully, like a person taking their first walk after serious illness. It was brilliant and relentless, fascinating and terrible, exciting and claustrophobic; to inhale too much of it in one sitting was, well, too much. When I wasn’t reading it, the book ticked away, like a bomb, waiting for my return. When I was, I turned its pages with infinite dread. This House of Grief is an eye-witness account of the trial of a man for the murder of his sons – and, like a good juror, I’d resisted the temptation to google the story. I didn’t know any of the details, including the verdict, and thanks to this, as well as to its author’s skill with pace and tension, I was permanently braced: ever fearful. Questions of innocence and guilt were almost irrelevant. The children were dead. Their father, who had been driving the car in which they died, was alive. What else but horror could possibly lie ahead?

Over the course of her long career, Garner, who was born in 1942, has written novels, short stories, screenplays and journalism; she has also published her diaries. But many readers – I’m one – associate her most strongly with the kind of books she has said she doesn’t ever read herself: true stories, often violent, which have a mystery at their heart (though the puzzle in question has, always, to do with motivation rather than identity). The First Stone (1995) is about a university college principal who is accused of groping two female students. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) is about the poisoning of a young man after a dinner party thrown by his girlfriend. This House of Grief, a book that swallowed many months – many years – of Garner’s life, relates the story of Robert Farquharson, a window cleaner from the small town of Winchelsea near Geelong in western Victoria, Australia, who in 2005 killed his boys by running his car off a road and into a deep dam, an atrocity committed in the wake of his separation from their mother, Cindy Gambino. Summarised like this, such books sound straightforward: mere feats of reporting. Except, they are very far from straightforward. Garner is interested in ordinary people who snap and do heinous things; whose ‘self-restraint suddenly stops working’. She knows such human beings are ‘just an exploded version’ of what many of us – most of us, probably – fantasise about in moments of intense anger or distress. Even to begin to explain such acts is difficult. ‘Unfathomable’ is the word that bobs to the surface of my mind.

How does she do it? Of course there is diligence. Garner is attentive to that critical cliché, the telling detail. She is noticing, beady, persistently curious: ‘a small grim figure with a notebook and a cold’, as she once put it. But she gives of herself, too. Instincts matter, so long as you treat them with caution. What’s her gut saying? What does she feel in her bones? ‘I’m trying to take their story into me,’ she has said of the stricken, destroyed beings who are her great subjects. ‘[I] give it my full … attention, from the depths of myself, as best I can, to give full value to the people in the story, to respect it and to respect their dignity. And to do it in the language of literature, a bloodstained language, one of violent emotion.’ There are, she believes, ways to write such things without recourse to the cloying, clichéd language that is common to pulp, to so-called true crime. People note her honesty, which often seems to wind them, but I prefer to think of it as a kind of composure, a self-possessed clarity. Her way with complicated feelings is at once entirely at odds with the present moment, which demands that everything be black and white, and an antidote to it: a cool palm that may be applied to the brow of a hot head.

For Garner, writing This House of Grief had an ‘accumulative cost’. By the time she was done, she was in ‘a very bad state’ – and no wonder. Farquharson’s car, en route to drop his children at their mother’s after one of his access visits, swerved off the highway on Father’s Day in September 2005. Garner saw the aftermath on the TV news. ‘Night. Low foliage … Something bad here. Something frightful. Oh Lord, let this be an accident.’ The following year, a magistrate committed him to stand trial on three charges of murder, by which time Garner already knew she wanted to write about the case. That August, she visited the graves of ten-year-old Jai, seven-year-old Tyler and two-year-old Bailey, little knowing that in the course of the next seven years – seven years – she would often regret she hadn’t simply ‘blessed them that day and walked away’. The trial began in August 2007 (read this later, if you also wish to be a good juror), at the end of which Farquharson was found guilty and sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment without parole. In December 2009, following an appeal, his conviction was overturned. In 2010, there was a retrial. Again, he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, for a minimum of thirty-three years. Garner was there through it all, the sadness seeping into her very pores. What did she feel as her writerly dispassion frayed at its edges? As she surveyed this moonscape of misery? It was a bit like shame, she writes, struggling (just for once) to find the right word.

The things she saw. The things she thought.

I once tried to describe Garner’s work to a radio producer who was in a great, manly rush. ‘Janet Malcolm with a cold beer in her hand,’ I said quickly, thinking on my feet, aiming straight for target. What I meant is that, like Malcolm, a non-fiction writer and journalist whom Garner admires intensely, she is interested in what lies beneath the surface. What stuff is buried in the mud of the unconscious? What forces within us may not, cannot, be quietened by convention, propriety or self-restraint? Only, she writes more freely – more outrageously – than Malcolm. For a long time, she was Australia’s great secret. This was, you gather, something that she both minded, and did not mind. But either way, it released her, I think. She wrote about, and for, the people she knows, with whom she grew up (she, too, was born in Geelong). There’s something plain-speaking in her work; she will say the unsayable, and never more often, perhaps, than in this book. She makes its cast – Farquharson’s sisters and his so-called friends; Cindy Gambino and her parents; the lawyers, the journalists and the gap-year teenager who sometimes comes to court with Garner – so vivid for us. If she doesn’t judge them, she nails everyone on whom her eye falls: their moods, their motivations, their barely concealed flaws. Politeness, discretion, what she would call bullshit, don’t interest her. She’s high-minded. Her intelligence is fierce, and her images are marvellous (on the wigs of the supreme court judges: ‘foaming and globular, as pale as raw cauliflower’). But all this is undercut with an understanding of the demotic, and a willingness to deploy it, and it’s this, in the end, that makes the book in your hand indelible.

‘There was something frantic about the way we danced attention on the silent man,’ she writes of Farquharson, up there in the dock, as if on a stage. ‘This “horrendous snorer”, this “sook”, this “good mate” and “loving dad” and “good provider”; this stump of a man with his low brow and puffy eyes, his slumped spine and man-boobs, his silent-movie grimaces and spasms of tears, his big clean ironed handkerchief.’ Here is fury, vengeance and pity, the words knotted together like rope. Once read, they cannot ever be expunged from the memory.

—RACHEL COOKE

‘Are you going to the Farquharson
hearing? I’ve got two reactions to this.
He can’t possibly have done it. But
there’s no other explanation.’
LAWYER WALKING PAST THE SUPREME
COURT OF VICTORIA, 16 NOVEMBER 2007

‘There is no explanation of the
death of children that is acceptable.’
LEON WIESELTIER: KADDISH

‘…life is lived on two levels of thought and
act: one in our awareness and the other only
inferable, from dreams, slips of the tongue,
and inexplicable behaviour.’
JANET MALCOLM: THE PURLOINED CLINIC