Tag: Helen Garner

‘Recording Angel’ by Helen Garner

There is an epigraph, which is a quote from Rilke: “Every angel is terrible.” This short story, set in Sydney/Melbourne in the late 20th Century is the first in a sequence of linked fiction contained within a single volume – Cosmo Cosmolino. Another short story, ‘The Vigil’, and a novella – ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’ follow on. ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’ translates into ‘small world, big world’. It seems a metaphor for Garner’s work here, she incorporates the small human details and the process of living (and dying) into the of the world at large into her often poetic accounts. What I love about Garner’s fiction is her ability to incorporate the inner lives of her characters, sometimes idiosyncratic and bizarre, into her narratives. Strange things appear to happen.

‘Recording Angel’ is an unsettling and uncanny story of a woman and her memories. Told in the first person, it has a resonance with Burns’s ‘The Junction’. What is memory, and what matters about a memory of one’s life? In this story a woman engages with an old friend, Patrick, who has known her all her life. Patrick “had mapped out the story of my life, and the lives of everyone we knew, into a grid-like framework and nailed it down; and everything done, witnessed, dreamed, heard of or read he had lined up under cast iron headings, those terrifyingly simple categories of his.” She is disturbed by the notion that her history will transcend her life via Patrick’s memory. But Patrick is shortly to have an operation to remove a brain tumour and the implications for his legacy of her life are disturbing.

First published in Cosmo Cosmolino, McPhee Gribble/Bloomsbury, 1993

‘Civilization and its Discontents’ by Helen Garner

A man and a woman; a hotel room in a foreign city; an affair maybe at an end, certainly winding down; a flight home; a reunion with an adult child. In some ways nothing much happens in this story, but in the neat witticisms the lovers exchange – because it’s too late for the big conversations – and the touching banter between mother and son, as well as the careful shapelessness with which Helen Garner allows it to unspool, one thing after another, it flows like life. I vividly remember reading this story over breakfast in St Kilda, Melbourne, putting the book down on the table and having that rare thought that arrives as a complete sentence: “That’s how you do it.” Garner’s stories are close and intimate: they are a friend who sits down beside you, slightly overfills a wine glass for each of you and says, “You won’t believe what he did next.” But it might be the self-ironising smirk of its title that makes this story so great.

Collected in Postcards from Surfers, McPhee-Gribble/Penguin, 1985