Yumna Cassab’s Australiana

Yumna Cassab, Australiana: A Novel (Ultimo Press 2022)

I came to this book with inappropriate expectations. I had just read Dean Ashenden’s Telling Tennant’s Story and Julianne Schultz’s The Idea of Australia, and the title Australiana seemed to suggest a similar attempt to speak to the state of Australian culture – possibly, given the author’s name, from a non-Anglo perspective. If those other books hadn’t been in my mind I might have expected an ironic treatment of clichés of national identity, like kangaroos, slouch hats, or Big Things.

But neither of those expectations was met. As far as I can tell there is no attempt at a grand unifying statement about Australia, and there’s no cute wildlife or cultural kitsch. Nor is the book a novel, as proclaimed in small print on the cover (but not on the title page, which makes one suspect that it was the cover designer who added the descriptor). It’s a number of short fictions.

There are five stories, all more or less presenting grim sketches of life in rural New South Wales, up Tamworth way. The first and longest, ‘The Town’, is the most interesting. It consists of roughly 30 short pieces – ranging from half a dozen lines to seven pages in length. Most pieces pick up a detail of the previous one – a character, an action, a piece of furniture – and place it in a different story, as if the writer’s attention is caught by a detail in one story and lets it lead her (and us) where it will. What emerges is not so much a mosaic of country town life as a meander through parts of it: there’s flood, fire, and drought, so maybe a hint of a grand national panorama in the background.

In the first piece, an unnamed character has his house broken into a number of times, and on the fourth time he has a weirdly amicable chat with the intruders. Subsequent pieces introduce us to the intruders, and then to other people in their lives. The pattern repeats: asomething happens, then we see it from another perspective, and what had seemed arbitrary, weird or perhaps insane, becomes comprehensible – or vice versa. The writing is spare, and trusts the reader to make the connections – even sometimes to make them up.

If you picked the book up in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop and turned to page 76 to check it out, you would be in the midst of the section ‘The Knife and the Axe’, featuring a man consumed with anxiety when his nine-year-old daughter invites a friend home from school. The friend, we know from the previous story, has set fire to his father’s fields in reaction to something his father did that enraged him:

Would you believe it? No, he did not believe it. His own daughter was nine years old and he tried to imagine her burning their home or even the fence and he couldn’t. She would never do it. She had pigtails and ribbons and went around in a dress and polished shoes. His little Mia would never do that.

He truly believed that until she brought Jayden around after school. She told her dad that Jayden was in her class and he was afraid to go home, could he stay a while, please.

That’s all we hear about the aftermath of the boy’s arson in his own home. This story stays resolutely with the point of view of the girl’s father, and becomes a tale of parental paranoia:

He hid the matches and the lighter before they entered the house and he worried about the fireplace giving Jayden ideas. So he seated then at the dining table with their backs to where the fire could have been.

Not to spoil the episode for you, but his anxiety cranks up when the children go to Mia’s bedroom and Mia asks for a candle. ‘The Knife and the Axe’ ends with a classic horror-movie cliffhanger (I should mention that the fragments in this and the other stories move in and out of a range of genres, including fairy tale and prose poem and micro fiction), as the children, armed with a knife and an axe, come towards him demanding that he give them candles:

He turned and ran for the door but he didn’t make it that far. As he fell to the ground he thought: I never imagined my life would end like this.

(Page 79)

And the next section, ‘Lost’, picks up the story from his wife’s point of view. I won’t disclose why he failed to reach the door beyond saying that the story isn’t lacking in sardonic humour.

As befits such a set of linked episodes, the final one returns to an object that was stolen in the first.

Each of the other four stories is similarly made up of short, sometimes very short sections. Three of them are grim contemporary tales, and the fourth, ‘Captain Thunderbolt’, is a mix of narrative, verse, and reflective essays inspired by the lingering presence of the titular bushranger in the New Englandregion.

I still don’t understand the book’s title. I suppose ‘Tamworthiana’ or ‘New Englandiana’ don’t have much of a ring to them.