Review: Vertigo

Vertigo is a terrifying experience, but in Amanda Lohrey’s novella, the main characters are not fearful of heights. They are suffering from a loss of bearings in their world. They are classic sea-changers, who have fled Sydney for the coast. But country life isn’t a romantic escape; they find themselves spinning on another axis.

Lohrey has taken the popular sea-change story and given it depth by placing it within the framework of a time-honoured literary convention, the pastoral. In Australian terms, it’s the city or the bush (or the coast), and the pastoral form traditionally presents a picture of rural life that is in harmony with nature in contrast to the corruption and artificiality of court (or city) life.

Luke and Anna Worley leave Sydney for the fictional coastal settlement of Narra Galla because Anna has developed asthma and because they can’t afford to buy a house.

In their thirties — that all-important decade in adult life, when issues of children, mortgages and careers come to the fore — they are self-employed as legal editors and as long as they have access to broadband, they can earn their living anywhere.

They settle in to the old house they’ve been able to buy, and get to know the locals. But it’s not as simple as that.

As events unfold, Anna finds she is as breathless as she was in the city, overwhelmed by the sensation that they are but figures in the landscape; that everyone is but a figure in the landscape:

"So what is this pointless dance they are engaged in, this dance where they whirl together in an endless circle, locked in the illusion that they are going somewhere, that what they do has meaning beyond their own day-to-day survival? At any moment they could disappear from this place and nothing would change, nothing of consequence, so vast is the land and so small are they. And the thought of this brings on a rush of vertigo, a dizzying sense of disorientation, as if she is about to fall, but that when she falls she will be weightless. She has lost her roots, her anchorage to the earth; she might fly away into the blue of the sky and never be heard from again."

In turn, Luke delves into an old book he finds in a trunk, written by Sir Frederick Treves, surgeon to King Edward VII. Published in 1913, The Land that Is Desolate, subtitled An Account of a Tour in Palestine, records Sir Frederick’s travels and travails after the death of his daughter.

Winding through the novella, it’s a pastoral within the pastoral. Sir Frederick is bitterly disappointed by the Holy Land but to his astonishment, in the great Muslim city of Damascus, he finds “the shadow of great peace”.

While Vertigo is a simple tale on one level, with a plot that keeps you turning the page, there is a psychic level, as evidenced when Anna feels the rush of vertigo, when she tries to make sense of their place in the landscape.

This is enhanced by the presence of the boy; a child who materialises on occasion, who is real but not real. It’s clear that he has a bearing on their decision to move to the coast, and the reader can hazard a guess early on, but it’s not until the end of the novella, when he fades from view that we understand his place in their lives.

This is revealed after the bushfire that engulfs the inhabitants of Narra Galla. Lohrey’s description of this cataclysmic event — based on the fires that ravaged the north-east coast of Tasmania in December 2006 — makes you suck in your breath as the dramatic tension escalates.

The sense of menace, of ever-widening rings of vertigo, in the lives of the Worleys, in the landscape around them and in the world at large, is enhanced by Lorraine Biggs’ small, black-and-white photographs that are embedded in the text, while the jacket design by Thomas Deverall is eerily evocative. There is a photo by Biggs of a seagull on the front, flying across a dark landscape that is tilting on its axis, with an exploding fireball on the back.

Amanda Lohrey is the author of four previous novels: The Morality of Gentlemen, The Reading Group, Camille’s Bread and The Philosopher’s Doll. She has also written extensively for Australian journals, magazines and newspapers, often on politics, including two Quarterly Essays, Groundswell: The Rise of the Greens, and Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia.

While many Australian novelists turn to the past for inspiration, Lohrey draws on the present.

Vertigo is both timeless and contemporary. You can read it in one sitting, but when you read it for a second time, you find subtly beguiling layers of meaning, never overt, never getting in the way of the story.

Amanda is an old friend of mine, but I would not say it if I did not think it: Vertigo is word perfect.

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