Review: The Diamond Anchor by Jennifer Mills

Review copy provided.
The foreword to the peripatetic Australian   
writer Jennifer Mills' first novel, like the opening lines of a tale from Hans Christian Anderson, sets up the framework for the whole book, though we do not realise it until we are about two-thirds through.

May McCabe and Grace Harper have wrestled in their adult lives to forget their early passion for each other, and the book is framed as a tale told by one of them in her old age, the one who stayed behind and seems to have melted into the cliffs of Coal, a fictional mining town somewhere in New South Wales.

    May, the proprietor of her family’s hotel, the Diamond Anchor, tells most of the story, as she did in childhood. She is responding to a letter from Grace, long gone from Coal, writing to May that she wishes to open up the past once more, to find out:

“who broke whom, who pushed whom away, who cast the first stone, who can say what split our path into two distinct forks like the tongue of a snake?”

Although the retelling is at length and as detailed as a tapestry, I believe the space taken is warranted, unlike some reviewers who feel this book has overstayed its length. When you pull back at the end and start to reconsider the imagery, the frame, and the movement of the story back on itself like a swallowing snake, the length is justifiable, and signalled clearly at the beginning when seventy-year old May says she is trying ‘to find the thread of the story, to place the lines. To pick up the end of the rope that will pull you home.’ 

Mills allows space for the kind of detail familiar to readers of that great ethnic storyteller of Nova Scotia, Alistair McLeod. Even though she may not be writing of her own people, as he does (is she? I don’t know), the world she creates has a texture that reminds me of his work – toughly lyrical, clean cut but able to incite smoke, mist and seascape to deliver colour and sensuality at an instant. The effects are quietly intoxicating, if slow to build at times - but then, so is McLeod's best work.

I  have been watching Ms Mills for a little while and asked for a review copy of this book because I knew it would be worth investigating, and I am not disappointed. It is important to be patient with the slow building towards the final moments of the book, and with the elusiveness of Grace throughout. Mills has set herself an exacting exercise in allowing one protagonist to both deliver what is essentially a two-hander and to build a place and its people, and the way she carries it out is impressive. Her writing of country is quietly, sombrely magnificent, and her intelligent braiding together of politics of several kinds with their histories and her characters is impressive. This is somebody to keep watching.

Update - this fine interview with Mills at the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Diamond Anchor, by Jennifer Mills. UQP Press, 2009.

Comments

[LiteraryMinded]

Thanks for this review Genevieve. I've also been keeping an eye on the author. :-) Angela

[lisa]

Fantastic review Genevieve. I can't wait to read this one. I love Jen's writing.

[genevieve]

I'm sure you will enjoy it, guys. There's a good narrative challenge in there that Jen sets up from the beginning, and it's satisfying to watch her carry it off so well. A quiet book in lots of ways, but a deep one nonetheless, hence the comparisons with McLeod.