Amanda Lohrey’s Vertigo

Amanda Lohrey, Vertigo (Black Inc 2009)

Gertloveday recommended this book in a comment on my blog post about Amanda Lohrey’s more recent book The Labyrinth. They were worth reading together, she said, ‘as fire plays a part in each book’. She could have added that both books have a major narrative strand dealing with a lost son. They’re both set in the town of Garra Nalla, and each of them describes itself on the title page as ‘A Pastoral’.

Gertloveday was right. The books make a good double feature. They have no characters in common, unless you count Garra Nalla itself as a character, but each of them entails a retreat from the city to live in a small seaside community with the aim of healing, and in each of them the dangerous rip at Garra Nalla is a symbolic warning to the reader that this is no Eden. And they are both relatively short. Vertigo has just 140 pages.

In Vertigo, thirty-somethings Luke and Anna leave the city partly because of her asthma, partly because of his generalised discontent. They are accompanied by ‘the boy’, who acts like a normal four or five year old child, but is somehow insubstantial. The details of the couple’s new life are fleshed out: the relationships with various neighbours, the discovery of bird life, the threats to the environment posed by corporate take-over of a nearby property. Though Lohrey’s writing is fresh and clear, the first two thirds of the book offer little more than a blow-by-blow account of an uneventful move to a new place. Anna watches news about the invasion of Iraq on CNN, and Luke reads (with us reading over his shoulder) excerpts from The Land that is Desolate by Sir Frederick Treves, a real 1913 travel diary about Palestine left by the house’s previous owner. It’s not dull, but only the mild mystery of the boy’s silent, intermittent presence creates a forward impetus. Anna ruminates near the end of the second of the book’s three parts:

So what is this pointless dance that they are engaged in, this dance where they whirl together in an endless circle, locked in the illusion that they are going somewhere, that what they do has meaning beyond their own day-to-day survival? At any moment they could disappear from this place and nothing would change, nothing of consequence, so vast is the land and so small are they. And the thought of this brings on a rush of vertigo, a dizzying sense of disorientation, as if she is about to fall, but that when she falls she will be weightless. She has lost her roots, her anchorage to the earth; she might float away into the blue of the sky and never be heard from again.

(Page 85)

Then in the third part all hell breaks loose in the form of natural disaster, vividly described. An acknowledgement of Henry Lawson in an end note acknowledges that the description is part of an Australian tradition; and the apocalyptic quality of the writing gives it astonishing relevance to events that were to take place more than a decade after the book was written. The peril facing all the characters is real, and as with the book’s less dramatic moments it feels as if it was taken from life. It also precipitates a resolution to issues that have been more or less unstated, and we realise that, like The Labyrinth, this is a book about grief.

One more point of comparison between the two books. I complained that The Labyrinth lacked illustrations. Tiny photographs by Lorraine Biggs are scattered through Vertigo. They appear to be images of the coastal landscape – sadly, in the trade paperback edition I read they a bit smudgy.

So, many thanks to gertloveday. The next time I visit the south coast, Amanda Lohrey’s imagining of it will be with me.