CLASSIC BOOKS FOR MODERN READERS

PRAISE FOR THE CHILDREN’S BACH

‘Not long ago I read Helen Garner for the first time (The Children’s Bach, a perfect novel) and was so stunned that I wanted to run around the block; how strange, how wonderful, that a book can still make me feel that way’

RUMAAN ALAM

‘When I say The Children’s Bach is a jewel, I don’t only mean to offer a cliché of praise, although it is beautiful, lapidary, rare; I also mean that Garner captures the alternating transparency and opacity of others … A book about, among other things, families and “the rough sexual world that lies outside of families”, The Children’s Bach is an exceptionally non-judgemental work of art … The efficiency and precision of her descriptions allow her to accomplish in a sentence what for other writers would require pages of exposition’

BEN LERNER

‘Garner’s real triumph … A novel about the ways that sex and desire undo a group of interconnected families and friends. One of the best short novels ever written’

MADELEINE WATTS

‘The Children’s Bach is one of the greatest family novels ever written’

ANDREW RIDKER

‘A generational saga that unfolds like a version of The Big Chill if it had been written by Virginia Woolf … This opalescent masterpiece [catches] the essence of the characters as they chase the secret of happiness’

NPR

‘There are four perfect short novels in the English language. They are, in chronological order, Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach’

THE NATIONAL TIMES

‘Garner’s style is laconic and wayward, reminding me of other writers whose gift is the art of artlessness, like Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles and Paula Fox … The Children’s Bach seemed truer to the way we experience life than most other novels I’d read … Helen Garner is a prodigiously gifted writer’

NEW YORK TIMES

‘Garner is gesturing to entire lives with a few spare strokes, a master of incredibly fluid and intimate free indirect discourse … It’s like nothing else I’ve ever read’

VOGUE, Best Books of 2023

‘This beautifully written novel of suburbanites in heat [keeps] us as uncertain and alarmed as its mothers, daughters, sisters and university friends as they circle one another and consider, then make, certain bad decisions’

SLATE

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

For Alice and J-J,
and for some very good
friends of mine

INTRODUCTION

‘The day I realised my novel was going to be a short one, and that its domestic subject and setting were quite proper, I walked home from work and passed a print shop, in the window of which stood a copy of that Van Gogh painting of the inside of his bedroom: floorboards, a bed, two cane-bottomed chairs, a window. I thought, That’s a beautiful painting. And it’s only the inside of a room.’

Helen Garner, Yellow Notebook:
Diaries Volume 1, 1978–1987

Is there a better book, a more beautiful, complex and original novel, about domestic life than The Children’s Bach? And yet that word, ‘domestic’, carries all kinds of associations that don’t fit with our notion of ‘quite proper’ subjects for art: routine, the commonplace, what Garner frets, in her fascinating diaries, is ‘the smallness of my scope, the ordinariness of it, the bourgeois nature’.

Certainly the texture of family life is everywhere in the novel, in the bricks that hold down the dustbin lids, the stove ash melting a plastic bucket, the household objects that look like ‘cartoons of themselves … the brown piano grinning’, in the richly detailed world of homework and music lessons, photos stuck to greasy walls, conversations about the proper weight of a steam iron, the importance of sending off the guarantee slip. One of my favourite know-all observations as a kid was that no one in a book or on TV ever goes to the toilet and yet here they do, and wipe themselves afterwards, and notice the odour. Domestic life is sticky, fleshy, noisy, smelly but still appealing; the air shimmering with warmth, soup on the stove, ‘the pop of sticky tape’, ‘plates rattling dully in water’. The back door to the family home at the centre of this novel is always open, the kitchen like a burrow – fitting for the Fox family – rounded, no edges or corners.

The convention in so many novels, particularly from the United States, is to treat domestic life satirically, as a kind of banal hell, a trap, but Garner is frank about its appeal. ‘“Soup means lots”,’ proclaims Dexter, paterfamilias of the Fox family, and Vicki, a newly orphaned teenage girl who has ended up in his kitchen, is immediately smitten, rejecting her sister Elizabeth’s trendy loft, which has no walls or rooms, no demarcation between sex and eating and washing, no rules either; ‘the rough sexual world that lies outside families’. Meanwhile Philip, a musician, abandons his daughter to sleep in ‘strange beds in houses where a boiling saucepan might as easily contain a syringe as an egg’. No wonder Poppy throws herself into schoolwork, while Vicki decides to make her home with the Fox family, fortifying herself, ‘as women do, with the sight of sleeping children, the abandonment of limbs, the oblivious breathing, the throats offered to the blade’.

Because the blade is always there, and even the garden bird opens ‘its beak like a pair of scissors’. A pet rabbit won’t last long in the Fox burrow and the paradise that Vicki seeks is vulnerable, fragile, precarious. ‘The edifice trembles’, and Dexter’s seemingly perfect wife Athena, ‘goddess of war and needlecraft’, confesses to violent fantasies of murdering her most vulnerable child. For all its poetic evocation of family life, this is a twitchy, anxious, unsettling novel, primarily because of its startling, innovative narrative style. In her diaries, you can sense Garner’s excitement at this new radical economy. ‘I am trimming so close to the bone that a reader will require either good will or sensitive nerves. Naturally I would prefer the latter.’

And it is a wild and jagged read. Within the first few pages, we’ve met five characters and been told almost nothing about them, at least in the conventional expositional sense, and in the course of the novel we’ll slip into the consciousness of six or seven more, often just for a moment before sliding elsewhere. There are no chapters; dreams and fantasies merge with reality; characters teleport from airport to kitchen, Melbourne to Sydney, are introduced then disappear. Major confrontations are overheard but never described, while smaller incidental scenes – a cello lesson, a conversation in a playground with a strange scabby boy, the experience of getting locked in a cemetery – expand. Sometimes an object, rather than a character, will take up the frame, the effect photographic, or perhaps cinematic; those moments in a film when the camera finds a postcard on a mantelpiece, the bulb of a standard lamp. There’s a tendency for screenwriters to label novels as ‘cinematic’, claiming ownership of techniques that originated on the page, but Garner is a talented screenwriter too, someone who has worked with Gillian Armstrong and Jane Campion, and the novel is full of hard cuts, jump cuts and montage, shots held longer than expected, moments of disorientation. There’s little form-filling biography – nothing about Dexter’s working life for instance – and the writing often has the directness of a screenplay: ‘The soup was thick. The bread was fresh.’ Sometimes emotions are described in detail, sometimes they’re left blank. Many actors scribble a line through direction in screenplays, and here there’s no description of, say, Athena’s response on returning to a wrecked house. We’re outside again, observing, deprived of an inner voice or conventional response.

And of course, there’s a soundtrack too, not just Philip’s guitar but Dexter’s Purcell and Mozart and, fittingly, Athena’s Bach, traditionally the composer of order and control. The pieces are deceptively simple and repetitious – domestic perhaps – but ‘her playing, even when correct, was like someone reciting a lesson in an obedient voice without inflection or emotion, without understanding, a betrayal of music. There was dust on all the keys except those an octave either side of middle C.’ Initially ‘contained, without needs, never restless’ in her socks and sandals, Athena decides to escape those limitations and the key of C, leaving children and duty and obedience for ‘a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves cleanly from all notion of consequences … Perhaps she too might never apologise, never explain.’ She abandons her family without guilt or regret, settles in a hotel where the sleaziness and squalor are the point, sniffing coke off her key in the alley behind a topless bar. The clichés of falling in love are entirely absent, as is the conventional business of romantic jealousy. ‘Great passions are ridiculous, she thought, although it is terribly cathartic to have felt.’ It’s a quest not for love, but for feeling, the expression that’s missing from her playing, trying on a lifestyle that belongs to someone else, just as Vicki takes on family life, just as Poppy rebels against her dad’s rebellion by adopting convention at Clever Girls’ High.

And what of the men? To begin with, it seems that Dexter might almost be the hero, uxorious, old-fashioned in his tastes and morality, his dress, his love of Tennyson, classical music and hymns and his children, his rejection of slang and TV, tattoos and promiscuity. ‘He’s like a character out of a Russian novel,’ says Philip, ‘or a Wagner opera. A noble soul,’ the antithesis of Philip and Elizabeth’s studied carelessness. Without rules and responsibility and family duty, insists Dexter, ‘we’re all just dry leaves blowing down the gutter’, but his morality is Victorian in that other sense, deeply conservative and patriarchal, self-righteous, chauvinistic. When asked why she never wears make-up, Dexter answers on Athena’s behalf, a habit formed in childhood and inherited from his father. Unheard, ‘Mrs Fox had slid away into a habit of monologue, a stream of mild words which concealed the bulk of thought and knowledge as bubbling water hides submerged boulders.’ In the photograph of Tennyson with his wife and children that Dexter sticks to the kitchen wall, only the poet is happy and admired. No wonder Athena escapes.

Yet if Dexter’s moral code is self-serving, blinkered and reactionary, its antithesis, the counterculture embodied by Philip, is steeped in an aggressive misogyny that even taints the bedtime stories he tells his daughter. ‘“And men fuck girls without loving them. Girls cry in the lavatories. Work, Poppy. Use your brains.”’ It’s a warning, given out of love but also a perfect description of his own behaviour: beware of men like your own father. As Elizabeth comes to realise, ‘they do hate us’, and even the decent family man will succumb. Inevitably it’s left to Athena to clear up, responding to betrayal with the same kind of calm resignation that she brings to the mess in her home. She tidies, restores order, washes filthy sheets, puts things back the way they were. Domesticated once again.

And yet it’s not a bitter ending, not exactly. Instead, there’s a sudden, unexpected lift-off and I could rhapsodise for a long time about those final pages, which caught me unawares on a flight from Melbourne to Sydney, finishing this wonderful book and suddenly finding myself in tears. How could such a tough, frank, unsentimental novel have such a powerful effect? I think it was the line about Poppy and her father that got to me, the way the writing suddenly takes flight through space and time, leaving the ground and flashing forward, like those startling moments in Muriel Spark when we jump forward and discover the characters’ fate, except here the tone is lyrical and full of compassion, an incantation, the repeated ‘and’ leading to an exclamation mark. It’s a glorious new musical voice, deeply moving, and a fitting end to this strange, unsettling, exquisite novel.

—DAVID NICHOLLS