KYLIE MASON REVIEWS FAMILY SKELETON
IN NEWTOWN REVIEW OF BOOKS
In Family Skeleton one of Australia’s most prolific and original
authors delivers a tale of life-changing family secrets.
Margaret
O’Day has always lived an ordered and beautiful life. She’s a beloved mother
and grandmother and, as an enthusiastic volunteer and fundraiser, a true pillar
of the community. She wouldn’t say her marriage to her husband, Edmund – now
sadly deceased – was perfect, but Margaret believes living a good life requires
the ability to be accommodating and forgiving, two virtues she has often had
occasion to practise. And any unhappiness Edmund caused Margaret wasn’t entirely
his fault; how could he live up to the great and glorious man who was her
father, Killian O’Day? Edmund nevertheless made sure she had everything she
wanted, like the butterfly screen that had stood for years in the foyer of the
family business, O’Day Funerals:
"A
few feet behind her in the tapestry room stands a tall folding screen, known as
the Zephyr screen, framing her mothly presence with its own eerie beauty … It
is in five folding sections, eight feet high, made from a deep golden wood
voluptuously carved, framing great panels of glass. Between the two pieces of
glass are trapped the bodies of dozens of iridescent blue Zephritis butterflies
from Peru, their giant wings spread and stilled. Each specimen is matched,
underside to underside, with another, so that both sides of the screen are
virtually identical … The patterns formed by the wings on the screen are
mesmerising, the shimmer and unearthly glow of the colours, the sense of
arrested flight. But the truth is that the insects are the stiff little bodies
of dead things, creatures captured at the height of their beauty and bloom,
trapped now between glass for the pleasure of their killers and admirers …
Margaret sometimes formulates these thoughts as her gaze settles on the screen
each day, but still she is drawn to the beauty. She delights in it, loves it,
her eyes following the designs and patterns made by the insects under the
glass."
Into
Margaret’s steady and charming world rushes Doria Fogelsong, a distant cousin
who is determined to write a comprehensive O’Day family history. And since
Margaret and Edmund were themselves cousins, many times removed, who better
than Margaret to help Doria flesh out the history? But Margaret isn’t so sure
she wants this stranger digging into the family’s past. Not that she has
anything to hide, it just feels so unseemly and unnecessary:
"Doria
comes to this story as a given, as a presence, and then as an absence. Margaret
is the force up against which she is matched, and it’s Margaret, and who she
was, that really matters here. It’s the cumulation of the events in Margaret’s
life that are really going to converge and swallow Doria up … was Doria a
nemesis? Was this how a nemesis worked? But Margaret had done no harm. Nothing
for which she should be pursued and punished. She was only trying to do that
thing people talk about, trying to ‘come to terms’ with the past."
***
Unfailingly
imaginative, Bird lets a skeleton in a wardrobe – ‘I still have my own teeth’ –
in Margaret’s house, narrate the novel. Interspersed with the skeleton’s wry and
often scalding narration are snippets from Margaret’s journal, in which she
reveals herself as human after all, often just as lost and lonely – and as
given to gossip – as anyone. It’s the skeleton who divulges the intricacies of the
O’Day family, its joys, controversies and rivalries; Doria would probably kill
to have a conversation with it. Margaret touches on a number of these things in
her journal, too, though she is far less honest than the skeleton, even as she
tells herself she’s being candid: ‘I sometimes astonish myself as I record all
these things in my book, but the recording has, in the past few days, become a
kind of comfort to me.’
As
ever, Bird’s writing is lyrical and transporting. She vividly paints the
privileged world Margaret inhabits and the past she has idealised, as well as
gracefully exploring the nature of family, loyalty, spirituality and truth:
"She
lay down on her back under the trees, gazing up, trying to see as far as she
could into the sky. For an instant, an instant that seemed to last for a very
long time, Margaret realised she understood something very grand, something
inexpressible. She seemed to know, for that fleeting moment, and yet forever,
the meaning and the reason of things. She was unable to put this into words,
unable even to form the thought, but for the rest of her life she carried the
knowledge – or was it just a feeling – of the gift she received there
above the river on the afternoon of the picnic."
Perhaps
it’s this knowledge, bestowed upon eight-year-old Margaret, that enabled her to
get on with life, to withstand the disappointments and betrayals growing up
would bring. But Doria sits outside this fundamental understanding of
Margaret’s, disrupting the peace she has dwelt in for years, and Bird has great
fun exploring Doria’s meaning in the context of Margaret’s world. Family
Skeleton is an enchanting examination of what happens when an inconceivable
revelation makes the solid earth of a woman’s world crumble beneath her.
