The storyline of Stephanie Bishop’s first novel is deceptively simple. A woman returns to Sydney on business and bumps into a man she once loved, and, perhaps, still does. It is an unexpected meeting and one that leaves her musing on the nature of memory and pain. In those few minutes you were absolutely present and yet became an absolute memory. For you were, up until then, an apparition pertaining to my future, someone I knew I would one day again meet and yet by meeting I found you transfigured into the strange shape that I consider to be the fleet of my history.
Unable
to forget this brief meeting and half wanting to see him again, the woman begins
to relive their relationship and the mysterious illness that she had suffered.
What follows is a sparse contemporary story that anchors her extended
reflections on the past. Sometimes talking about him, sometimes to him as if he
were there, the woman’s memories, though not always chronological, build a
vivid and tragic picture of their time together.
The Singing is
a love story, but not a romance. It explores the underbelly of love. The
individual journey that each person takes, as well as their deep need for each
other. The fault lines that are there from the beginning, the lost
opportunities, peace offerings which were not accepted, words that remain
unspoken. The subtle transition as love becomes a habit, when a relationship
becomes safe, when inertia is all that keeps it going. Then the spiralling of a
relationship into something destructive. And finally, the desperate point where
two people who are in love must part in order to survive. We never know, do we,
what it is that we’ve got. And while we are losing something we
don’t know what that means either. And then it is gone. And then we know.
In
The Singing much is left unnamed: the lovers are simply a man and a woman;
illness is a nebulous invidious thing that forces its way between them, No one
said what the sickness was. Nothing can be proven and a name lasts. A word for
something comes to live in you, you own each other, your name, the name of the
thing you’re sharing. Even the nature of their relationship remains
unspecified. He never wanted to name the thing between them, believing it would
be impossible to argue about something which had no name. And yet, the woman
tells the reader. It remained as the foundation of their lives, even without a
name, and how, she wanted to know, can a foundation be earthed if its very
substance remains vacant?
Throughout
the story the point of view shifts disconcertingly between first, third and
sometimes second person, as if the reader is seeing the story through a lens,
sometimes zooming in, sometimes out, intimate and yet detached. There’s a
slow dreamlike quality to the narrative voice, as if the woman, in her illness,
had stepped outside of time. Yet this calm detached style belies a gripping
emotional tension that compels the reader to keep turning pages.
Although this
is Stephanie Bishop’s first novel, her writings have been published widely
in Australia, and she has received a number of writer’s fellowships,
including a Varuna Mentorship Fellowship. Indeed the novel comes with a glowing
introduction by Peter Bishop, the Creative Director of Varuna: ‘The
Singing is not a work of circuses and cocktails. It is a work of spring water,
solitude and quietness, breathing. Within that breathing, within the singing,
there is intense drama. Listen to it.’
Stephanie Bishop’s writing is mesmerising and quite original. I kept discovering passages that took my breath away, both through their sheer beauty and the wonderfully fresh way in which the author explores ideas. Although in the end this novel did not stay with me, I did enjoy the journey and have no doubt that The Singing is a highly accomplished first novel that introduces a talented new voice to Australian literary fiction.
ROSIE
WAITT’s fiction and travel writing have been widely published in anthologies, major newspapers, travel guides and magazines, in Australia and the UK.