The Lost Child review – 'brutal and touching detail'

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/20/the-lost-child-review-brutal-and-touching-detail

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In his scholarly work The Country of Lost Children, Peter Pierce presents a detailed analysis of the haunting presence of lost children in the history, art and literature of Australia. Suzanne McCourt’s first novel, the Lost Child, adds another disturbing narrative to the genre.

The setting of this novel is all-important – the wild and windswept coast of South Australia where, from 1866 to the 1960s attempts have been made to discover oil. This landscape south of the Coorong provides a rough, tough, yet lyrical fabric on which McCourt examines the bleak, sad lives of her characters. The fishing village of Burley Point is opened up to the reader in all its brutal and touching detail. Just the names of the characters breathe the weird ethos of the town – Mrs Winkie, Uncle Ticker, Mrs Bullfrog, Mrs Bloomers.

The life of the first person narrator, Sylvie, from the age of five to 15, is strung on and woven through the historical events and key brand names of the period. Wunderwax, Turf cigarettes, Phantom comics, Thalidomide – there are many kinds of nostalgia here. From the coronation in 1952 to the mid-60s – the assassination of Kennedy, Vietnam, the Beatles – the reader sees the world unfold through Sylvie’s sharp and knowing mind. It is clear that the clever, imaginative, poetic Sylvie will ultimately move on from Burley Point, but every stage of her life is scarred by the misery of poverty and a dysfunctional family.

The narrative is regularly marked with images of disappearance and drowning, a kind of warning that the title of the novel will turn out to be as sinister and ominous as it seems. A woman called Wanda the Witch has a well where she “drowns children”; Mr Smythe “walked off the end of the jetty and drowned”. The “lost child” of the title is Sylvie’s beloved older brother Duncan who disappears mysteriously, and whose drowned remains are not discovered for many years (during a search for oil). Sylvie, who is not responsible for the death of her brother, is nevertheless burdened with guilt as well as sorrow.

She is a philosophical girl, wondering: “Does anyone get what they want?” and “What if there are no answers to anything?” But in the face of her mother’s mental instability, her father’s brutality, fecklessness and faithlessness, her brother’s disappearance, the cruelty of her peers, she perseveres and prevails.

Sophisticated in her imagery, she is able always to find analogies and similes which help her through. When her mother throws jam at the wall it reminds her of snail trails, which remind her of a boy jumping on snails, “and the way their green stomachs ooze out”. Her father scoops up her kitten as if it is a ball of “soft black knitting wool” and smashes it against the wall where it “cracks like a chopped mallee root”.

This is a cruel and terrible world in which a little child finds herself, yet her strengths are such that she survives, and in the end breaks free.