13 hours ago
2
FICTION
The Thornbacks
Chloe Wilson
Hamish Hamilton, $34.99
In The Thornbacks, Melbourne writer Chloe Wilson introduces us to two young women who live together, work together and speak with one voice. OK, two voices, but together, simultaneously, which takes a few pages to get used to but before long you aren’t exactly reading their stories; it feels more like you’re listening to them.
And Gertie and Tabatha are worth hearing out. Wilson’s clever merging of these women is a stereo monologue, with two audio channels splicing across each other, interrupting, not always agreeing, yet seamlessly telling the same stories from two viewpoints at once.
And what wild and wacky stories they are. Gertie and Tabatha are morticians, working for Emmet, a cut-price undertaker paid on a corpse-by-corpse basis to make the dear departed presentable for viewing by distraught families, and often with not a lot to work with.
But these women take their jobs seriously. They have high standards, and being utterly obsessed with make-up and beauty products gives them a head start, and lots of options.
Of course, some mortal remains present serious challenges, and there are those for whom the only option is a closed casket. But they don’t give up easily. Not even when Emmet announces that he has “a swimmer” awaiting their ministrations. “This didn’t mean the man had literally been swimming,” the girls explain. “That’s what we call a decedent who had been submerged in water for any length of time.”
The description that follows, of a preposterous bathtub accident involving a portable TV and its ghastly aftermath, is as hilarious as it is revolting; Wilson doesn’t pull any punches when she describes how these wizards of mortuary make-up set about saving the aesthetic day.
I have no idea where the author did her research, and I’m not sure I want to know, but the ghoulish realism is tempered by matter-of-fact, just-another-day-at-the-office descriptions of the various cadavers they are paid to beautify.
Things get delightfully out of hand as their obsession with blush, eyeliner and perfumes, so useful in the workplace, plays itself out in their online dating adventures.
It’s not giving too much away to reveal that there are three women involved in this caper: Gertie, Tabatha and their dating persona, Poppy. Poppy doesn’t exist, except in the form of an attractive, carefully crafted online image and irresistible biography. Our morticians are on a mission to set up dates for her with horny blokes, then turn up in Poppy’s stead to surreptitiously spike the fellows’ drinks.
But that’s as bad as it gets for the delirious, would-be Poppy dates. They are helped into cabs, taken home and tucked into bed. Once their flats have been examined, and worthless souvenirs that will never be missed are squirrelled away for the girls’ trophy cabinet, they walk away.
They have a code of ethics, and lines they will not cross. There are delightful insights here that verge on the creepy but ring with a forensic precision born of voyeuristic research.
Indeed, these peculiar characters may offer hints to crime-scene investigators. “Women wear down their lipsticks in such idiosyncratic ways,” the women assert. “Some are blunt and flat, some taper to a point, some look like a cliff being eroded. It’s like a fingerprint.”
As I read the above, I imagined readers running to their cosmetic stash and wondering what their lipstick says about them – not only as a mirror but what mortifications their lippy might reveal post-mortem. For centuries girls have been told to make sure they had clean undies on so that they wouldn’t be ashamed by dirty knickers when their bodies were pulled from under a wayward omnibus.
The Thornbacks (a backhanded compliment to Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, perhaps?) is a wonderful if delightfully surreal satire on the eternal cult of female vanity and desperation to impress.
But the men don’t get off lightly, either. Poppy’s pharmaceutical sucker punches, delivered by proxy in singles bars, do not show men at their best. There is a wonderful moment of horrified embarrassment when the women discover they have duped and drugged a bloke who is honest, self-effacing and, in short, the complete gentleman. The bafflement that ensues, and their desperate attempts to put things to rights, is simply hilarious.
Thornbacks turn out to be a species of bottom-feeder stingrays. And if Chloe Wilson is using them as a metaphor for her women’s obsession with setting self-satisfied, predatory blokes to rights, it fits as tight as a coroner’s nitrile glove.
But who are the predators here? Our demented morticians, the men they set up with Poppy assignations in pubs, Emmet the money-grubbing funeral spiv, or all of the above? Put it this way – once you get past page five, and have the hang of Wilson’s adventurous prose, this is a wild ride well worth the price of a ticket.
Chloe Wilson is a published short-story writer and poet. In The Thornbacks, her first novel, she has written probably the funniest, and most perceptive, satirical work of the year.
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