Krishna
Janet Turner Hospital was born in Australia and she spent most of her adult life in . Canada and the US. She writes about both places in her stories.
Having read and partially enjoyed Oyster earlier, I was eager to read this book. My hope was the good parts of the earlier book would be magnified here. But unfortunately again I failed to much appreciate this.
The borderline here refers to the Canadian US border.
Felicity Seymour was the wife of the artist Seymour ‘The Old Volcano’. The father was a painter who modeled Felicity and there seems to be a Jean, a child by another marriage to the artist.
She has a lot of issues, our Felicity does. She rescues a Colombian trying to smuggle herself into Canada from between hanging meat in a freezing van from US. Why is she trying to go to Canada from US? Because she has been served deportation orders in US to go back to her country. There she meets Gus and makes him a co-conspirator. Gus or Augustus is a good for nothing man, vapid, womanizing and helpless.
Then comes the complicated flashback of Felicity’s life. How his maverick father Seymour suddenly abandoned her, her affairs with the much older painter, everything. She is quite a character, vapid but charming.
The story wanders back and forth, with apparently no purpose. A far cry from her famous novel Oyster. When Felicity goes back into childhood where she saves Hector, a girl with polio only to be caught with her later one day and raped, the story takes off. But goes wandering again. There is also this confusing bits where Jean-Marc is writing this whole story and some parts where he features in it.
This spotlights the plot of immigrants: how they are desperate to get a better life and how everyone – really everyone – is against them and with two very floaty characters running through it, it all sounds vague and idealistic and not even tethered to reality. Fairly boring.
The title Borderline refers to the border line between Canada and the US. Interesting! Generally a random thing where Felicity wanders about clueless, going back to her painter lover and walking out and going back again and what not.
Gus is even more of a layabout and lazy aimless and shifty person. Wanders around having affairs and proud of himself when he does not that one time. He has no aims, and wants to live like a bum even when he has money because his wife, after interminable number of affairs decides to leave him. You feel like saying bye to the whole useless lot. Sympathy? That is the last thing you feel.
There is an interesting relationship struggle with ambiguous relationship between pairs of people: Felicity and “the Old Volcano” painter Seymour; between Felicity and Jean-Marc, the son of Old Volcano by a previous marriage; between Gus and his obsession the immigrant lady; between Kathleen, Gus’s daughter and Jean Marc. As if all this is not enough, there are unexplained disappearances of Gus, the la Magdalena, and even Felicity with a lot of speculation on what may have happened.
Well, on the whole confusing and sometimes surreal. Difficult to keep your mind in the story. Some interesting points but you cannot invest so much time to read the full story for the sake of a few items.
So, I guess 3/ 10
– – Krishna (Oct 2018)