Initially Careless strikes the reader as a collection of short stories: there are four protagonists - Pearl, an eight-year-old responsible for the happiness of her mother and the care of her beloved younger brother; Anna, who has lost an adult daughter to murder and was never able to recover her body; Sonia, a Danish immigrant mourning the loss of her furniture-making husband; and Adam, a controversial, egotistical artist on the cusp of fame. Their stories share a sense of disconnectedness and loneliness but appear to have little relation to each other; familiar territory for Deborah Robertson whose first book, Proudflesh, won the Steele Rudd Award for the best Australian short story collection in 1998. Yet as their stories unfold and their lives become entwined, brought together and then driven forward by a tragic event which causes them all to examine what is lost and what can be recovered, it becomes clear that Robertson is just as adroit in the unfamiliar landscape of the novel.
Lost children people Careless: in lived experience; in the news; in fairy tales and myths; reminding the reader and the characters of the many lost children throughout history and the immeasurable emptiness they leave behind. Sonia often ponders the Irish fable of The Children of Lir which tells of three abandoned children who are turned into swans for nine hundred years, left to wander in sorrow until they have outlived all who knew them, finding human form for one last brief moment before dying (39-42). Sonia realises: ‘Stories about children did not always have a happy end. And the years might pass and the world might move on, but the loss would never be recovered’ (42).
Death and grief are central to this novel, and in particular the concept of public versus private grief and the questions around how art can deal with a subject of such magnitude. A great deal of attention is given to the idea of public memorials and the commemoration of an individual or individuals. With so much of life lived in the full glare of the public eye - reality shows abound and personal privacy has become a rare and precious thing in a post-September 11 world - it is perhaps unsurprising that death and the ways in which grief appears should become less of a personal and more of a community experience, as evidenced by the vast public demonstration of feeling at the death, funeral and subsequent memorial of Diana, Princess of Wales. Indeed it is a city council meeting to discuss plans for a memorial for lost children that first brings the main protagonists together, and the novel is punctuated by the symbols of personal loss and public grief: there is a posthumous exhibition in honour of a furniture designer; flowers are left at the scenes of road traffic accidents; a waterwheel cast in bronze turns continually to represent the never-ending nature of love; and a drug addict’s death by overdose in a run-down apartment is turned into art so that we all might feel the beauty in loss. Yet despite this coming together in grief, the characters live in a world depicted as lacking in empathy and filled with broken ties, eschewed responsibilities and careless love. It seems only fitting that Robertson writes with restraint; the novel has a sense of requiring in the reader, as the artist Adam develops in himself, the ‘cultivat[ion] [of] a small, cold place in his heart in order to experience something that interested him’.
But there is a suggestion of hope too. Pearl’s passion for Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic house ‘Fallingwater’ leads her to the discovery that the architect also suffered great loss when a male servant set fire to the living quarters of Wright’s home ‘Taliesin’ and murdered seven people with an axe (including Wright’s partner Mamah and her two children) while the fire burned. Pearl is astounded that the beautiful ‘Fallingwater’ was created sometime after this atrocity and she comes to realise that great beauty and happiness is possible after great loss: it is at this point in the story that the reader senses that recovery may be possible for Pearl. Yet Robertson avoids any suggestion of complete reclamation - of the self, or of things and loved ones lost - closing the novel with an epilogue called ‘The Children’s Memorial’ where three new characters, a mother and daughter, accompanied by a distressed female friend, pass by the site of the soon-to-be constructed memorial.
“It just looks like a huge, big seesaw,” says Ava.
They read that the mechanism will slowly oscillate the bronze plank upon its copper pivot through the minutes of every hour, through every hour of every day …
“It looks like one of those memorials you can take your own grief to,” says Serena.
The women fall silent. Ava looks at them.
“But what if you don’t have any grief?” she says …
There are questions her daughter asks for which there are really no answers. (293)
They have not personally experienced the griefs which inhabit the novel but they respond to the memorial with an ambiguity which might be a general response in the shadow of such monuments. Careless offers an intimate yet shared portrayal of grief in all its complexities and reminds us that our promises of care can never really be kept.
Rachel Slater is a freelance reviewer and is currently working on a PhD in contemporary women's literature in the School of EMSAH at The University of Queensland.