Disquiet

I am so deeply impressed with this little book! The story and characters were riveting from page one. Very mysterious and compelling-- a book I won't soon forget.

Leigh creates an unusual setting for this small, intense drama. Olivia and her two children gain entrance to her mother's French chateau through an overgrown side gate, the iron obstacle of the driveway impossible to navigate. Her arm in a sling, Olivia leads her children, Andrew, nine, and Lucy, six, into the estate, repeatedly dropping the heavy knocker against the door until there is a response. Once they are inside, Olivia introduces the children to their grandmother, an austere greeting at best, the lack of communication between mother and daughter evident. The old woman informs them that they are soon to be joined by Olivia's brother, Malcolm and his wife, Sophie, and their newborn baby. But when Malcolm and Sophie arrive, a pall settles over the intended celebration. The infant, Alice, has not survived her birth, although Sophie clings to the bundle in her arms, an accommodation made by Sophie's doctors to aid the grieving mother in processing her loss. Embellishing on this grotesque situation, the author sets characters against the circumstances that have brought them to the chateau, each in need of shelter, life demanding more than they can endure. Olivia describes her husband as "my murderer", believing herself complicit in his violence against her. Andrew surreptitiously prepares to return to Australia, from which they have traveled, his young mind practical and focused. Lucy clings to her doll and her brother, a six-year-old adapting to circumstances out of her control. And Sophie, predictably, refuses to accept the immanent separation from her child, withdrawing into a sad fantasy. That this tale does not end tragically is due to the deft management of characters and the language of their deepest fears and flaws. In a denouement that can bring further horror or transcendence, the author cuts to the heart of these intimate dramas, clarity wrung from impending tragedy in a flash of images and intentions. The length of this story cannot obscure its focus, the power of choice in the face of profound distress. Luan Gaines/2009.

Reading a novella like this is like watching a great little movie late at night. It was a couple of hours of intense reading and mystery with characters that are immediately interesting and somehow lost in life's tougher tragedies, a terribly abusive husband (the murderer), a stillborn birth that almost destroys a distraught mother, accidents waiting to happen to young curious children on a large estate where there is a lake and leaky boats. It all happens in an old and almost abandoned and yet manicured estate in France. It reminded me of the setting for horror shows from my youth where there are boogeymen hiding in the shadows. The elderly mother is in a wheel chair and is formally caring for her middle aged children who have come to recuperate from their recent tragedies and yet she isn't really emotionally available to them, somewhat mystified by their immature and stupid lives. The main character, "the woman" seems like she is dying and trying to get her children set up with their inheritances and perhaps even to recruit her brother to become their parents since her life is basically over. The crazy and perhaps most terrifying element of the story is that the mother of the stillborn is literally hanging on to the dead baby and won't let it go to the point where the baby is going rancid and disintegrating. There is some kind of metaphor here for the state of the family, hanging on to something that has long since died. And yet, by the end, there is a plan and redemption and we pretty much have a successful future course that will work for everyone.........and yet, do we and will it really work? I love the novella. It's a great little escape into a very complex and yet believable world laid out very poetically.

I disagree very strongly with the single, negative reviewer of this book posted up on this site -- actually, it is the only non-glowing review of this marvellous little tale that i have come across online. And i looked at a dozen or more reviews. (Leigh is a widely admired author whose fans include Toni Morrison, Simon Schama, and others). Leigh's latest novella is a beautifully written and marvellously atmospheric story whose central theme, for me at least, is the loss of loved ones--the loss of a partner, the loss of a parent, and perhaps most distressingly here, the loss of a child. Everyone we meet in this book has lost something or someone. But in Leigh's deft and unsentimental authorial hands this powerful material is far more deeply psychological than sad, more alluringly gothic-strange than expository as a series of ever more bizarre events unfold during an impromptu gathering of family at an old chataeu --a dead baby is stored in a freezer; an unidentified man continuouslly calls on the phone, and a woman watches indifferently as a pair of children seem ready to drown in a pond. The prose is rich, lyrical and spare, making the subject matter even more haunting and the characters even more memorable. Leigh is smart and easily talented enough as a writer to be able to brilliantly hold everything in suspense for the reader, with the dark tension beckoning you onward. This is a clever, engaging and marvellously evocative book which makes you feel like you are there, in this place, watching her well-drawn characters interact. I cannot recall a book in recent times in which the imagery is so vivid. Ben

Julia Leigh's novella is a series of glimpses into the lives of a family haunted by secrets both past and present. It is a nouveau-gothic tale that has the tone of an old horror story but has elements of modern living (a dead baby is stored in a state-of-the-art freezer). Nothing is ever fully explained, and the author skillfully tells a story almost solely through visuals. There is little dialogue, and when it occurs it is terse and gives away nothing. What we see is a carefully chosen selection of images designed to unsettle and put the reader on alert. But this alert is never fully realized, so that the denouement comes off as a bit of a letdown. There is a sense of a parallel universe, that the characters exist on a plateau that is slightly off-kilter to ours. Nothing truly scary happens, but the little things - a still lake, a shed with old canoes, a high heel used to crush a phone jack - build into a frenzy of beautiful lyricism and will leave the reader feeling haunted for days. Indeed, every image conveyed by Leigh is designed to keep itself stored in the memories of the reader, so that this novella will never quite go away. The prose is wonderfully rich, and the characters leap off the page, fully-formed in just a mere 120 pages. Disquiet tells a simple story that has a slight plot, but it pulls its weight in highly developed atmosphere and the author clearly has a gift for story-telling.