Voices of women.(Out of the Silence)(Book Review)

Out of the Silence, by Wendy James; Random House Australia, 2005, $32.95.

THIS NOVEL (which I read at draft stage as well as in its present completeness) is the first novel of a writer who has already won prizes for her short stories. It is a work of historical fiction, but its implications carry right into our time; juxtaposing the personal and political of the women's suffrage movement in the late nineteenth century, it manages not only to avoid the pitfalls that might well have attended such a project in the hands of a less intelligent and less deft writer, but to triumphantly transcend them to create a work of art which is disturbing and yet eminently readable.

There is a quality I always seek in literature, a quality which is both warmly human and coolly limpid, something which allows a work of art to be both window into and mirror of human nature, life, the world, the strangeness of our predicament. Something which doesn't shout "Look at me! Look at me!", which knows the bell tolls for both thee and me, but which is deftly individual. Something which doesn't take sides but which presents the comedy, tragedy, irony and mystery of human life, in which we are both audience and actors. This kind of author trusts her characters and does not patronise her readers by telling them what to think, or bully them with obscurity; she does not allow a narcissistic obsession with style to dominate the story and turn the characters into shadows. Yet her pitch is perfect, her style of a limpid beauty, her reach deep and her characters real, haunting, disturbing. Such a writer is Wendy James. Such a novel is Out of the Silence--beautiful yet disturbing, deep yet accessible, full of real, human characters yet exploring wider social and moral questions, combining the pace and story of commercial fiction with the range and depth of literary fiction.

Out of the Silence is set in Victoria at the tail end of the nineteenth century, in a world which is neither relaxed nor comfortable--a time of turmoil, of huge social change, of reforming--and revolutionary-movements such as feminism and socialism and the labour movement; a time of unrest and even violent terrorism (though luckily not in Australia). Fears of change and unrest haunt people.

Yet it is also a time which is expansive and optimistic in outlook, where gentlemen and ladies discuss great intellectual and social questions and busy themselves on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable--whether they ask for it or not. The position of women, especially women's suffrage, was a hotly debated question at the time, and activists and commentators on both sides fiercely argued on this question and the broader one of just what it was exactly that made the "essence of womanhood" and whether women's suffrage would change that--for the better or the worse.

Far away from all these intellectual and ideological debates, however, spirited, ...