Review - The Sky So Heavy

The Sky So Heavy by Claire Zorn. UQP. 2013

‘You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.’

This is the story of seventeen-year-old Fin and his twelve-year-old brother Max, a nuclear ‘accident’ and the events that follow. Written by an Australian author, set in an Australian landscape – The Blue Mountains – this is a dystopian survival story that piqued my interest from the start.

Zorn is quick to establish her characters ‘normal’ world – school, friends, crushes, and home life – before dropping them into a survival situation. Nuclear winter. These boys must quickly learn to fend for themselves without the aid of adults. Their parents are absent and it is soon apparent that the adults remaining cannot be relied on to behave in the usual way. Even the police can’t be trusted.

Tragedy and disaster have a way of bringing out the best and the worst in people. There are two ways people commonly react, they can become selfish, fearing only for themselves and their own situation, or they can become selfless, banding together to help those in need.

‘The true measure of a man is how he behaves when no one is watching.’

Take Starvos, the local shop owner, for instance. At first he is only concerned with how much money he can make. He makes a show of caring about everyone in the community by limiting the number of items people can buy at any time, yet he immediately doubles his prices. Later, with no idea how long the current situation will continue and concerned only for himself, he closes his shop, hides the food out of sight and is prepared to kill to protect it.

The tension builds steadily as the food runs out and people become desperate, but after reading more than 100 pages I began to wish something new would happen. There wasn’t enough action and the same goals and obstacles were repeating themselves. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before the story shifted. Along with Lucy, Fin’s crush, and a boy from their school, Fin and Max finally leave the mountains and head for Sydney in search of their mother, who incidentally works for the government.

Survival of the fittest.

Dog eat dog.

Every man for himself.

Us and them.

These are the clichés and themes that filled my mind while reading The Sky So Heavy. The idea that some people are more deserving of life than others, more worthy of being saved and protected, is the refugee situation at its core. I’d be blind not to see the parallels between this fictional story and the plight of those seeking Asylum on our own shores. Zorn shines a light on Australia’s Asylum Seeker situation and the way fear and greed and misinformation can be used to support the ‘us and them’ mentality. Inhumanity.

This is our Country.

These are our resources.

You don’t deserve them.

You are not one of us.

Segregation is not a new concept in society, but the divide between the haves and the have-nots has never been more obvious. The outsider, the old, the sick, the young, the disabled, the injured – who is useful, and therefore worth saving, worth spending money (resources) on, and who is not, is reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

Zorn undertakes an unflinching dissection of human behavior under extreme conditions. People either keep their humanity in the face of incredible challenges, or they lose it, and in doing so lose themselves. It’s these near-future potentially possible scenarios that frighten us most I believe, simply because they are believable. The likelihood of them happening within our lifetimes is real. And that is terrifying.

In a world, fictional or otherwise, where money no longer has power, it is those who control the giving or withholding of our basic human needs, such as food, water, shelter and safety, who hold the balance of power. How willingly they reject those in need reveals all.

It’s a harsh world, cruel at times.

It’s been said that ‘truth is stranger than fiction’, but it’s also been said that ‘fiction shines a light on the truth’. Zorn has positioned her spotlight well.

Review - The Midnight Dress

This book broke my heart.

The Midnight Dress is a story about many things – friendship, loss, secrets, betrayal – but most of all, love. The writing is emotive, evocative, atmospheric. I couldn’t read Rose’s story with half my attention on what I would say later in this review. I couldn’t help but become fully immersed in the world of the story.

This is the story of a motherless girl (Rose Lovell) and a fatherless girl (Pearl Kelly) who meet when Rose’s drifter father Patrick decides to stop in a small Northern Queensland town. Rose is, at first, reluctant to attend school. She is also reluctant to become friends with Pearl – a friendship that begins pessimistically, based on a snap decision Rose makes on the first day she attends Lenora High.

“Geography or French?” asks Pearl. “French,” says Rose. Pearl even asks Rose later in the book – “What if you had chosen Geography?”

It’s sugarcane country, and the annual Harvest Parade (something else Rose would much rather avoid) is the celebration that the story builds towards. However, as the reader, you know in advance that this won’t be all celebration, as right from the beginning you are privy to pieces of the later parts of this story. The tragedy that unfolds alongside the more hopeful story of Rose and Pearl’s growing friendship has your mind already searching the text for the clues that will solve the crime.

I was amazed by how well the unusual structure of this story worked. At first I found it a little odd that so much of what’s to come is divulged to the reader at the beginning of each chapter. Half to a few pages of italicized text that clearly begins somewhere near the end and outcome of the story, creating tension, building backwards chapter by chapter, until it meets up with the forward story and propels you towards an ending that has become inevitable.

           

The first sentence of the first chapter is “Will you forgive me if I tell you the ending?”

These chapter prologues (for want of a better description) are told from the POV of the all-seeing, all-knowing omnipotent narrator – in this case the author herself. Author intrusion doesn’t usually work, but for this story, even though – or more likely because – the structure is so unique, it works. Even so, at one point early on I wondered if I should skip them and just read the story through to the end. I wondered if that was a choice the author intended by structuring the novel in this way. I wondered if it would make a difference to the reading experience.

The other star of this story is Edie. The girls all need dresses for the Harvest Parade. Most girls travel into the city to get their gowns, in the hope of being chosen to be one of seven Harvest Princesses, but Rose has neither the money nor the inclination. She is told of a local dressmaker who may be able to help her with her dress. This is Edie, an elderly woman living a lonely life as an outcast – someone to be whispered about in the streets by the locals. Edie is different and we all know that society is intolerant and suspicious of difference, and these feelings are even more pronounced in a small town setting.

Edie’s history – a love story of sorts – is woven through the narrative during Rose’s visits. The making, by hand, of the Midnight Dress becomes a kind of meditative therapy. Edie becomes ‘mentor’, and Rose changes – becomes smoother, less sharp-edged – as the dress takes shape. Edie lives in squalor, yet seems happy surrounded by her ‘things’. She feels safe with the mountains and rainforest at her back. This is her home – however dysfunctional. She has grown roots here.

Edie’s house became, for me, a character in its own right. It was a living, breathing thing that I could picture in my mind as though I was right there looking at it, walking through it – which would be difficult with all of Edie’s things cluttering it up. The quality of the description of this relic of a house only proves how fully the author imagined it – with all of her senses. Edie tells Rose of the ‘spell’ the rainforest cast over herself and her mother; the same spell that Rose inevitably falls under. The same type of spell is cast by this author.

Foxlee masterfully gathers the threads of her story together to give the reader an ending that may not be unexpected yet is still extremely satisfying. Rose loved words – collected them in her green notebook. Foxlee loves words and has a knack for using the perfect one. I gave The Midnight Dress 5 stars on ‘Goodreads’ and I believe it deserves every one of those stars. I highly recommend this book.