Unbroken Blue By Jan Borrie, Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005, 176 pages, paperback, $29.95. Reviewed by Sylvia Alston in the June 2005 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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This book left me struggling to find words to describe it; the writing style is more than prose, it is lyrical, it is metaphysical -- put simply, it's pure magic. The language flows around, over and inside the reader, stirring the imagination, teasing the emotions; it is tender and sweet one moment, poignant and painful the next.
Ms Borrie has drawn her characters lightly and lovingly -- even the unlovely ones are compellingly real. Despite feeling a certain empathy towards some of the nicer characters, the reader is fully aware of their blind spots and waits for them to come face to face with reality.
Unbroken Blue is essentially a story about a family with all its faults and foibles exposed. Like most families, some of its members are warm and caring, but others are downright nasty. Ms Borrie handles the sensitive subject matter skilfully and sensitively, the foreshadowing is nicely timed so the reader is forewarned before one particular confronting episode.
Told in the third person, the story unfolds through the eyes of the young protagonist, Annabella. Her mother, Eva Angelica, the youngest of eight daughters, is devastated by the death of Annabella's father in a bushfire. One day she disappears, leaving her young daughter to be cared for by a succession of aunts, exposing Annabella to some, well, less than positive experiences. During this confusing time, Annabella struggles to make sense of her world, refusing to abandon hope that her mother will someday reclaim her. As time passes, and Annabella gets passed like a parcel around her aunts, her optimism about finding her mother starts to fade: I felt I was drawing closer to you -- so close I would arrive to find you standing, open-armed, ready to embrace me. My journey would be over for ever. But you are not here and you have not been here for years. I can feel it, I can tell just by looking. I would be lying if I said I didn't feel like crying now, if I said I didn't feel like giving up. Eva Angelica, where are you? Annabella is an overly obedient and compliant child, and although physically small, she tries to make herself even smaller, invisible. Afraid to be noticed, in case she gets hurt or rejected again. She renames the people who are supposed to be looking after her, for example: 'the woman with silver hair', 'the woman with the silky voice', and 'the man with the blue eyes'. Perhaps she feels that using their real names would give the relationship more permanency than she would like. Or perhaps it's merely a strategy to deny kinship to some of her less able carers.
The narrative swings effortlessly between the past and the present, teasing the reader as, like turning over pieces in a puzzle, more of the story is revealed. Later in the piece, Annabella sees some family photos, and letters her mother wrote to her sister Madeline, the second youngest, including the last one she wrote before she disappeared. However, it's not enough: 'There is nothing in the letters to explain how Eva could have loved Annabella one minute but not the next.'
The author also intersperses the narrative with a series of letters that Annabella writes to her mother. This device adds another layer of poignancy to the piece as the reader is aware that the letters will never be delivered; how can they be when the poor child doesn't know where her mother is? The letters, however, do not appear to be the work of a young child, they are mature and perceptive but through them the reader gets an insight into what must have been going on in the child's mind at the time.
Ms Borrie uses names as a metaphor for identity, a means of creating and maintaining a sense of self. She has given the three generations of female characters beautiful names, names that flow like poetry. From grandmother Angeline, her eight daughters, Elizabeth Rhiannon, Jade Angeline, Alexandra Grace, Rosemary Josephine, Suzannah Emeline, Jacqueline Isabella, Madeline Roseanna, Eva Angelica, down to little Annabella Joy. Annabella resists her aunts' attempts to chip away at her name, to shorten it to its diminutive form, Anna, fighting to retain her whole self, her whole name. In one of her letters to her mother, she writes: 'My name is Annabella. Two names joined together. A verse from the poem of your sisters' names. A sigh and a kiss. Like saying goodbye when you don't want to leave, when you don't want to be left.'
Unbroken Blue is a small book, although not quite as small as Ms Borrie's first book. But like Verge, this latest work explores the disturbing issue of unresolved childhood trauma. Perhaps in her next book she will choose a different topic with which to demonstrate her considerable literary skills. Citation - Sylvia Alston. 'Review: Unbroken Blue by Jan Borrie' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 10 September 2010].
Back Cover Blurb - When Annabella's father is killed in a bushfire, her mother, Eva, disappears without explanation. Left in the care of Eva's seven sisters, not all of whom are as sweet as their names suggest, Annabella fights to hold on to her own name and identity. The memory of her mother is constant and she clings to its details so that she can recognise her when Eva returns. Passing through the hands of a succession of carers, whose concern for their ward varies from indifference to cruelty, Annabella knows that her salvation lies in being reunited with her mother. While she waits, she watches as parts of her name — and parts of herself — begin to be chipped away.
Have You Also Read? Between the Battles: A Novel
 Helen Nolan, Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005, 224 Pages, Paperback, $29.95Reviewed by Tony Smith in the June 2005 issue.When narrator of Between the Battles, Holly Gow lands in Saigon on New Year's Eve, 1967, she immediately has misgivings. Recruited by the US Post Exchange (PX) in Sydney, Holly approaches Vietnam with a sense of adventure, but disembarking at Saigon airport she feels a sense of panic, realising she is one girl among hundreds of soldiers -- 'men, wall-to-wall'. (p 4) While Siobhan McHugh's Minefields and Mini-Skirts: Australian Women and the Vietnam War (1993) notes that some one thousand Australian women worked in Vietnam during the war and three died there, they were not afforded a presence in the popular imagination then or since. It is the relative rarity of 'round eye' women in Vietnam ... read more.
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Popular Music: Practices, Formations and Change - Australian Perspectives
