Global Comment

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Review: Sofie Laguna’s The Eye of the Sheep

Australian author Sofie Laguna’s second novel for adults, The Eye of the Sheep, won the Miles Franklin Award on 23 June. It was a well-deserved win of Australia’s richest literary prize by a book that manages to be both compelling and heart-breaking within a potentially unprepossessing frame.

It was, it must be said, an unusual year for the Miles Franklin, a prize so well known for its preference for oldish white male authors writing about nationhood, war and philosophy that it spawned the establishment of a counter-prize open only to women authors (the Stella Prize, which was won this year by Emily Bitto’s The Strays).

Things were different in 2015, though. The Eye of the Sheep took the Miles Franklin in a contest with three other novels by women and only one by a male author. Itself an intimate family story, it was competing with three other domestic-world novels, all told from the perspective of children, and only one (Christine Piper’s After Darkness) which even touched on the favourite theme of all Australian novelists seeking gravitas – war.

The Eye of the Sheep is told from the perspective of Jimmy Flick, who is six years old when the novel opens and twelve at its close. Jimmy is not a typical kid; although the text avoids labels, the writing makes it clear that he’s somewhere on the ASD spectrum, although the exact diagnosis is never explicated.

Jimmy’s life is not free of difficulties unconnected with his neurodivergence, either. He’s the younger son of refinery worker Gavin and nursing home cook Paula, a painfully familiar (to me) working class Australian couple struggling in the western suburbs of Melbourne.

The book’s action opens in the 1980s in Altona, a then-working class suburb nestled in the western bay of Melbourne, most of whose residents were then employed by the three biggest industries in the region: oil / petroleum (refineries and depots), car manufacturing, and food processing. I myself live in Melbourne’s west, which has gentrified to some extent over the past 40 years, but still remains an area of profound socioeconomic disadvantage relative to the rest of the city. Jimmy’s family are people I know, at an everyday, visceral level; the precarity of the working class is a story I see being written in the lives of my neighbours on a daily basis.

There is always something both exciting and disorienting in reading fiction set somewhere deeply known. The landscape Jimmy describes – Pier Street, the wetlands, Maidstone Street, the refineries and the parks – are all places I have been many hundreds of times. Very little has physically changed in these landscapes since the 1980s; as property has risen in value, houses have been prettied up and repaired, but Altona remains largely untouched by the drive to knock down older-style homes and replace them with modern apartments or units.

I think Laguna, like me, must know Altona very well. I think she must have spent time in the wetlands where Jimmy and Robby go to play; I think she, like me, has ridden the bus down Pier Street and watched the flat expanse of the bay opening out before her. I think she’s driven past the huge fuel depots, dominating the landscape; she’s probably seen the now-defunct refinery wasteland down towards the freeway, as well as the still-operating one further up. Sharing the landscape and its resonances undoubtedly deepened my engagement with this text, and I salute Laguna for her spare, poignant capture of all that makes Altona both so lovely and so potentially alienating, for a child at odds with his world.

The story is, of course, not simply the story of Altona; it’s about a family in pain. Gavin gets drunk on Saturday nights and hits Paula, who takes the blows herself in protection of both her sons, especially the more vulnerable Jimmy. Paula herself suffers from severe and unmanaged asthma, which Jimmy conceptualises with piercing accuracy as dust and moths choking up her tubes. Jimmy’s older brother, Robby, is wracked with anger at his father and a desire to separate from the family dysfunction, but it also fiercely protective of both his mother and his little brother.

Jimmy’s ability to process the emotions and needs of those around him is both limited and also more profound that he’s credited with. Because we see events from Jimmy’s perspective, his peculiar kind of clarity pierces the text and soaks the whole tale in the kind of sadness that is hard to shake off.

It’s Jimmy who sees that his mother yearns for tenderness, for connection, from his father, and that it’s longing, rather than fear, that renders her unable to disconnect from him, even as his abuse goes on and on. It’s Jimmy who understands that his mother’s closeness to him, and protectiveness of him, acts as a barrier to both the relationship between Jimmy and Gavin, but the relationship between Gavin and Paula – he understands, with uncluttered simplicity, that Gavin is jealous of him, as well as baffled by him, and that this sourness pervades their whole lives. It’s Jimmy who sees Robby’s ferocious need to get away at war with his essential love for his mother and brother – and, ultimately, it’s Jimmy who gives Robby permission to go.

It’s also Jimmy who provides the nuance in both Gavin and Paula. On the bare facts, it would be easy to see Gavin as the monster of the piece – indeed, his behaviour is monstrous, and Laguna never shies away from that – but Jimmy’s voice doesn’t allow for a straightforward anathemising of his father. Instead, Laguna gives us a Gavin who is frustrated, violent, and alcoholic, but is also baffled by a world in which a working man cannot guarantee provision for his family; a man who doesn’t understand how to be the father and husband he wants to be, and whose every failing sends him deeper into self-disgust.

Leaving Altona, when Gavin takes Jimmy on a brief holiday to see his uncle (Gavin’s brother) on Broken Island, provides the backstory to Gavin’s journey, and also allows Gavin to be seen through a different lens, where he is happy, relaxed and able to show some self-awareness. As Gavin and his brother talk, with Jimmy all ears, the picture of their own violent, abusive father emerges; these two of four brothers, it emerges, are the ones carrying their own damage most lightly, with one younger sibling in jail for rape, and another dead after wrapping his car around a tree while drunk.

Paula is one of the most heartbreaking of all the characters – even more, in fact, than Jimmy himself; Jimmy has a resilience that is denied to Paula, who reads as utterly defeated by life. Her chronic asthma is both cause and symbol of how life has beaten her down, and the loose grip that she holds on continuing it. She’s made even more poignant by the brief moments of happiness than Laguna affords her, and they are such small ones – an amicable night in front of the TV news, an afternoon on the kitchen couch reading one of her Agathas (Christie). Paula cut me to the heart, because I know her. I see her in women I interact with every day, women of the precariat, women in poor health and with violent partners and no sense that things can ever be better in any sustained way.

Jimmy’s story is a tragic one, and often a brutal one – the profound dysfunction of his family leads to severe catastrophe, and Jimmy carries the brunt of it more than anyone else. But, ultimately, this isn’t a hopeless or nihilistic book either. It is painful, but at the end, there’s Jimmy, sand between his toes, rationalising the fast-spinning world with the sun on his head. And, ultimately, the painfulness is a price worth paying to share his world for the space of a book.