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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Tyranny, and release from tyranny, occur everywhere, and in every scale.", 2 Jun 2008
Australian author Gail Jones, who has won popular recognition and prizes in Australia for every book she has written, has achieved another notable milestone with Sorry, nominated for the Miles Franklin Award for Best Novel of 2008. Set in sparsely populated Western Australia in the early 1940s, the novel recreates the life of Perdita Keene, a ten-year-old child, not wanted by her British parents, who had hoped she would die at birth. Perdita's childhood is formed by the aborigine women who nurse her in infancy, and she develops a strong friendship with Mary, an aborigine girl, and Billy, a deaf-mute white. All three children are outcasts, and their bonds with each other are total and life-affirming.
The murder of Perdita's father, described in the opening pages, is at the core of the novel, and the circumstances surrounding the case are not clear. All three children have witnessed the crime, but Perdita, the narrator for most of the novel, is so traumatized that she cannot remember any of the details except a blood-spattered blue dress, made from a fabric used to make several dresses for several different wearers.
If there is such a genre as "Australian Gothic," this novel would be one of its best-written examples. The sights, sounds, and smells of the bush, filled with storms, heat, dust, and exotic birds and animals, vibrate with life--and death--both physical and spiritual. Perdita's father has long lost his interest in researching aborigine myths and leads a mean-spirited, abusive life. Her mother seeks life lessons and values in the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare and is hospitalized periodically because she loses touch with reality.
Perdita, "the lost one," named for a character in Shakespeare's The Tempest, loves the aborigines, who value the continuum of life, not merely a set of static principles, like the whites who have driven them from their ancestral lands and forcibly removed their children. On some level, she is aware of the injustice, and she finds solace and a sense of order in aborigine, not white, culture.
Jones uses the battles of on-going World War II to parallel Perdita's troubles and illuminate the contrasts within Perdita's life, emphasizing the novel's major themes of war and peace, oppression and liberation, and order and chaos, both in society and within the individual. Entitled "Sorry" to honor the abused aborigine population, Jones notes that as recently as 1997, Prime Minister John Howard refused to acknowledge that the nation was "sorry" for its crimes, despite popular sentiment. Jones's novel is not a political screed, however. It is a story about a child who finds herself caught between two worlds--and learns the worst and the best about both. Lyrical, sensual, and full of passion, Sorry makes no apologies for its emotion or its dramatic intensity. For the author, these qualities are all part of saying "Sorry." Mary Whipple
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautifully written and highly recommended, 11 July 2009
One of the best novels I've read in recent years! Gail Jones has it all - just the wonderful prose in the telling of this story makes the book worthwhile. She has a beautiful literary style which gets you involved in the lives of the protagonists right from the very beginning, and as the story unfolds, you gain a deeper understanding of life in Australia in those years, the young girl whose life is unfolding and unfurling along with those of her parents and the young aboriginal girl who becomes her friend, and what it meant to be an aboriginal in those difficult years.
Hard to put down, and one of those novels you don't want to finish!
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Tears are not Enough, 16 May 2008
I was going to title this thread 'You will be' instead of the Sorry of the title, but that would be flippant. And Gail Jones's Orange 2008 longlisted novel - her second to be longlisted for this prize (2006 being the previous year), with another longlisted for The Booker in 2004 - is actually very beautifully written.
It's just that this novel is so unremittingly, relentlessly bleak. It is centred around a sad little family in the outback of Australia in the 1930s and '40s. Nicholas Keene is an anthropologist whose quiet exterior belies an arrogant personality and boorish bully-boy views. His wife, Stella, is a peculiar and weak person, obsessed by Shakespeare, driven to instability and eventually insanity by the stresses in her life; a life which is as arid and parched as the outback in which they live. Perdita, born in 1930, is their almost accidental child. Starved of warmth and affection by her cold father and distant, rambling mother, Perdita forms a family for herself in the form of the neighbours' deaf, mute son Billy and an aborigine girl Mary.
The novel intersperses first person narration from a grown-up Perdita looking back on her life with third person narrative.
Jones's prose is lyrical and poetic, and her descriptions of people and places are haunting in a fragile, ethereal way. Vivid colours, subtle emotions and nebulous scents drift up from her words, sensations are acutely evoked. The reader becomes involved in and sympathetic to the lives of these odd, unfortunate individuals.
The combination of writing that is often startlingly accomplished with a novel that is so thoroughly dark that it is devoid of any joy or even transient lightness of mood is one that I don't come across very often. It's easy to dislike books that are poorly, lazily written. But Jones writes like a depressed angel. At least the reader feels warmth for Perdita, Billy and Mary - unlike a book like Anne Enright's The Gathering, where occasional flashes of eloquence are bogged down by irritation with the insight-free self indulgence of the main character.
Of course serious subjects demand dark books. But this is unleavened in any way. There is a flash of hope with the appearance of kind, nurturing Flora and Ted and the wonderful Russian doctor Dr Oblov, but this ebbs away pretty quickly.
There is also an awareness that the third person narrative, usually an objective, unobtrusive relater of events, occasionally imposes his/her own opinions on the reader, as here:
'Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbour...Broome was emptying out: Japanese families were being relocated for internment; even Sis and her children, Perdita discovered, had been arrested and sent away, as if being the family of a Japanese pearl diver somehow threatened national security. Fear includes these punitive and churlish measures. It creates internal enemies, monstrous figures in newspapers. Aboriginal families were sent to outstations and missions.'
This is jarring and interrupts the flow - I became uncomfortably aware of Jones's own opinions which I didn't want to hear. I wanted to hear Perdita's story with her own opinions, sure, but in the third person parts, I wanted an impassive voice allowing me to form my own views. That's what third person narrative is all about, surely. In a broadsheet opinion piece it would be fine to surmise that 'fear includes punitive and churlish measures', but when reading a novel, I want either the point of view of the narrator or a completely objective, non-lecturing, unhectoring voice. I don't need to be talked at about injustice or prejudice. A powerful storyteller will convey the tawdry human habit of scapegoating without imposing their own voice.
All in all, I appreciate that this is a potent story which relates a dark period in Australia's history where Aborigines were treated in a shoddy, cruel way. And that Jones is an accomplished writer there is no doubt. But I didn't enjoy the novel and savour every word as I should have done with something so well written, which is why I'm only giving it three and a half stars.
***00 1/2.
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