'"Sometimes the only way to manage the daily percolating drip of fear, the corrosive dread of debt and humiliation, is to embrace another sort of terror, to put oneself in danger."
'Alice and Louise are sisters united by a distant tragedy - the house fire their brother burnt to death in fourteen years ago. Alice teaches dirt-poor students at a state high school that the government wants to close while she pursues a tumultuouse relationship with a married man. Louse, a habitual liar and recovering heroin addict, has been playing "the danger game" since she was a child, and she can't stop. But when Louise decides to unravel the truth about her twin brother's death, and seeks out the mother that abandoned them, everything changes.' (From the publisher's website.)
'In this paper [the author] will consider the intersection between family tragedy, trauma, and affective uses of narration in two Australian novels: Surrender (Hartnett, 2005) and The Danger Game (Ashton, 2009). In both of these novels, narratological techniques are utilised to represent a grief beyond words—the tragic loss of a close family member, specifically, a sibling. Both novels use disruptions in narrative forms—particularly in the inherent expectations readers bring to the forms of first, second and third person narration. These narrative disruptions mirror the disruptions of identity experienced by the characters in these texts. Moreover, as we engage with the traumatic content through a fractured subjectivity presented by these texts, our identities as readers, too, become fractured and disrupted. These disruptions of identity echo that which is experienced by the characters themselves through their loss. By analysing the link between these disruptions and the content of these novels, we get a better understanding of the ways in which fictive worlds can represent psychological issues. The narration of these novels and their engagement with childhood sibling loss enable us to begin to create and understand a broader aesthetic of representational trauma.'
Source: Abstract.
