'Your father. His head is a ghost trap. It's all he can do to open his mouth without letting them all howl out. Even so, you can still see them, sliding around the dark behind his eyes …
'It is New Year's Eve, 1990, and Ru's father has disappeared again. Haunted by the horrors of the Vietnam War, Jack has been an erratic – and at times violent – presence in his family's life. Meanwhile, Ru's sister, Lani, is constantly fighting with their mother, both suffocated by the small country town where they live. And then there's Les, Jack's brother, destined to be on the periphery, but harbouring his own desires.
'As each of the five reckons with the past, what emerges is an incandescent portrait of one family forever scarred by war. Tender, brutal, and heart-stopping in its beauty, A Loving, Faithful Animal is a hypnotic novel by one of Australia's brightest talents.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Epigraph:
Here's the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don't worry. Just call it horizon
& you'll never reach it.
Here's today. Jump.
–Ocean Vuong
'I don’t want to start with Larkin because Josephine Rowe’s debut novel, “A Loving, Faithful Animal,” makes an ocean from his aphorism. Even if Larkin’s declaration remains stubbornly true — that old, known poem of how our mum and dad mess us up — Rowe’s book, a slim beauty, does so much to complicate this idea, in such a small space, that I found myself considering those rare things only books can do, feats outside the purview of film or fine art. Imagine Rowe taking a page of blank paper — call it linear time — and crumpling the page into a ball. Nineteen-sixty-seven is flush against 1990. This crumpling, collapsing of Chronos is what it means to have a memory that’s associative and wild, or a family that might be equally uncontrollable.' (Introduction)
'I don’t want to start with Larkin because Josephine Rowe’s debut novel, “A Loving, Faithful Animal,” makes an ocean from his aphorism. Even if Larkin’s declaration remains stubbornly true — that old, known poem of how our mum and dad mess us up — Rowe’s book, a slim beauty, does so much to complicate this idea, in such a small space, that I found myself considering those rare things only books can do, feats outside the purview of film or fine art. Imagine Rowe taking a page of blank paper — call it linear time — and crumpling the page into a ball. Nineteen-sixty-seven is flush against 1990. This crumpling, collapsing of Chronos is what it means to have a memory that’s associative and wild, or a family that might be equally uncontrollable.' (Introduction)
