‘THE SEARCH…’

Two works of fiction by Antonia Hildebrand

To Breathe

And other stories

Ginninderra Press, 2016

ISBN 978 1 76041 160 2

The Darkened Room

Ginninderra Press, 2022

ginninderrapress.com.au

ISBN 978 1 76109 268 8

Reviewed by Ian Keast in 'Studio'

Take the opening sentence, ‘I’ll kill him, I will! I will!’ she said and began crying’: from Everything is Prologue, in The Darkened Room. Here begins Antonia Hildebrand’s (a Studio contributor, poet, essayist, novelist): first rate, gripping, murder mystery-courtroom drama. It also offers much more woven through its fabric. The prologue introduces the characters- Leonora and Sam Davidson, with a concentration on appearance : initially, they are ‘The Golden Couple’. Now the younger woman, Susan Ross, is Sam’s wife, also introduced with concentration on her appearance. What has occurred is described as Leonora’s tragedy, ‘and she would make it his; for once Leonora loved, it was for keeps’. Sam, by contrast, discards people ‘when he had no further use for them, he simply let them go’. Herein, the novel’s threads -appearance opposed to reality: the complexity, and cost, of love: masculinity and power; amidst a physical world, the search for ‘something more’.

In varying degrees, the threads are visible in Antonia’s previous collection of short stories, To Breathe, an undercurrent of violence is in many of the stories. The beginning of ‘Bone-Cold Day’- ‘The chicken ran round and round the yard, blood spurting. It had no head’ and is most evident in ‘Extremis’. Here masculinity manifests in violence: ‘A laughing woman might even be laughing at him. Which was, of course, intolerable…the fact that she had been loved showed on her face. It was there in her smile, her laugh. The unloved often hate the loved..’ On the surface, the quieter appearance of, ‘Every Deed a Shining Star’ belies a throbbing reality, seen also in ‘The Sewing Circle’ and its conclusion of lustful violence- ‘Lisa soon lost interest…she drifted off into another story altogether: Carey. Why did she think of him?’ Below the appearance, of what ‘seems’ to the murk of reality, is in many of the stories, echoes of Hamlet’s reply to his mother, ‘Seems, Madam? Nay it is: I know not seems.’

And this is developed in greater, often graphic, detail, as appearance is probed in The Darkened Room. We witness the downward spiral into the reality of a post-Genesis 3 disfigured world of (much) infidelity, drugs, deception, disharmony, greed, physical and sexual abuse; as Sam Davidson discards things, ‘when he has no further use for them’. It is raw and visceral, its physicality conveyed by appropriate, and (at times) explicit language.

At its core, The Darkened Room explores the complex essence of love. From ‘Everything is Prologue’- ‘When Leonora loved it was for keeps. Later, Leonora was never prepared for the cold flipside of love. Her entire life had been Sam and the children..’ With a nod to C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves, it is ‘agape’ against ‘Eros’. For Sam his love was purely physical, seen in sexual activity; for Leonora, hers is covenant love expressed in marriage. Such love is costly and paradoxical: ‘His needs trumped hers and she had never been prepared as a girl for anything other than being a wife and mother…the way he treated her when he decided to throw her away, destroyed her. In her mind, she had no choice but to destroy him so that she could survive…’ and it remains the case at the end of the novel, even as Ben has entered her life…’Sam was always there. A ghost at every feast…he would always be her husband, forever and forever. As she told him on their wedding night. And that was the vow she kept.’

In both books ‘maleness’ is primarily depicted in terms of power, misogyny, violence, emotionally stunted and linguistically bankrupt. There is little ‘inner self’ revealed. Several examples from ‘To Breathe’ have already been mentioned. It is a contrasting portrayal of the victims. In The Darkened Room, for example, when Leonora is trapped physically in jail awaiting the outcome of her re-trial, she talks with her fellow inmate, Kay Tait, about their deep need, to feel safe, in relationship. Her search for this ‘is an illusion. I convinced myself I was safe with my beautiful children, my handsome husband and all that money. But you know, I never was…I was living a lie and the money and all that stuff made no difference because one day it was like an angel with a sword flew down from heaven and cut my wealthy life, my fake heaven, to ribbons. And it could never be repaired.’

Leonora’s imagery of ‘angel’, ‘heaven’, ‘fake heaven’ is telling- the ‘appearance’ has crumbled before the reality; she is reaching for something transcendent. All is not a grim read in these books: there are the voices of ‘something more’ speaking. In To Breathe in ‘Roads and Cliffs’, the young character Danny waiting to see one of ‘the Seven Wonders of the World’, is quietly told by his mother that ‘love is the eighth. He didn’t sneer and he didn’t look embarrassed, he just nodded. All children know that this is true. I had forgotten it until that moment.’ In the title story it becomes more explicit in the vision of the character, William Blake: ‘When one thought about his life, it was easy to understand. Here was a man who craved the beautiful and the sacred and how did he live?....Dissatisfied with the world he lived in, he had created another world of angels, sacred deeds, great sin and a hope of redemption…’

The last chapter of The Darkened Room, ‘Some Light at Last’, has Leonora’s painting of her ‘life sentence’ – ‘Brilliant oranges flowed from her brush and some gold and creams. She painted huge clouds tinged with gold and orange and slashed some blood red below them. She had to stop for a while…red affected her that way.’ Significantly she speaks to Ben on the search for ‘something more’- ‘See the way she’s put that light there on the floor?’ (She and Ben are looking at one of Margaret Olley’s paintings.) ‘I’m still working on being able to do something like that.’