(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Is it possible to forge a meaningful and fulfilling present from a past laced with great sadness, fear, abuse, pain and loss?
That’s a metric ton of existential hellishness to craft something currently good from and as Cool Water by Myfanway Jones opens, Frank Herbert has more than reasonable cause to wonder if he can surmount an intergenerational burden so great that it all but sank his father Joe and likely did in his volatilely abusive grandfather Victor.
On paper at least, Frank has a better shot than most at making something good and lasting from the lingering pain of the past, still in love if emotionally estranged from his wife Paula and gathered at Tinaroo Dam on the Atherton Tablelands for the wedding of his only child, Lily.
It should be a bountifully happy occasion, and it largely is, with many family members coming in from far and wide, joined together for a joyful occasion a year after they last journeyed to what passes for an ancestral Herbert home for Joe’s funeral.
While the grief lingers, and Frank feels like his father is talking to him out on the waters of the dam where father and son would enjoy rare moments of all too brief companionship, Joe’s son is on the cusp of realising a significant personal and business dream and hopefully celebrating it with Paula, though that relationship is teetering on the edge of possible oblivion.
Frank feared a reckoning, but what he feared more was that all the men in his family were cursed. And that however hard he tried to be good, he would not be able to escape his shadow.
For a graceful and softly spoken novel, Cool Water is full of roiling emotions all seeking to burst to the surface.
Split between the 1950s when the dam was being constructed and handsome, charming Victor Herbert was the town’s charismatic butcher (even as he terrorised his family which include sweet, morally strong Joe), and the present day where Victor’s descendents have returned to Tinaroo for the aforementioned wedding, Cool Water is rich with sage observations about how people strive to make something good of life and how, despite their best efforts, they don’t always make it.
Often that inability to realise their dreams is not a failure of their own making.
Take Frank’s father Joe for instance.
A sweet and thoughtful kid who love artistry and mechanics, and somehow did the right thing over and over in the face of a narcissistic father who, if he knew what the right thing was, chosen repeatedly to ignore it, Joe is in many ways the beating heart of this breathtakingly moving and nuanced story.
He develops a mother-son friendship with Evelyn Edwards, the wife of Ray, the cruelly misogynistic man in charge of the dam project (and the temporary town’s newspaper editor) and he tends to injured animals, cares about people in a way his father would never comprehend, and does the right thing even when it directly impacts or denies him what he wants most from life.
(courtesy official author site)
While Frank anchors the modern day storytelling of Cool Water, it is Joe, and Evelyn to an important though lesser extent, that gives real emotional life to the part of the novel set over a half a century earlier.
While Frank only knows Joe at a cold, shut down man of feral temper – the back blurb of the book simply says “… he could roar” – and wonders what it was that make him such a cruelly remote father figure, the Joe we come to know in the past is someone of rich humanity and real tenderness who has his ability to express love to his children (though he was by all accounts attentive to his wife Alma) and to glory happily in belonging to something good robbed him by a traumatic upbringing.
We watch as Joe is worn down in real time, and it’s a tragedy, almost a curse that seems to tower over the Herbert men, with Frank wondering, with good reason, if he will be able to escape its caustically destructive shadow.
As we meet Frank in Cool Water he is at a crossroads, and while his heart is full of a great many good things, and he longs for all the things his father denied him, whether by accident or design, it’s an even way bet if he will make it to the other side of the wedding with everything he loves and values intact.
In a novel that asks what a good man looks like and how fathers and sons play a key role in how that goodness manifests, if it makes its presence felt at all, we bear witness to the struggle of two men to escape the cursed destiny of their family line.
He is blushing like a rosy apple but it doesn’t matter. And there is no camera but he smiles.
There are many moments Joe would erase, but he will keep this forever.
What surprises and quietly delights you most about Cool Water is that is manages to say so much so quietly.
This is a story told in quiet reflection and buried pain and loss, and while there’s some explosively emotions at work here, Jones does an exemplary job of expressing them in ways that feel honest, human and grounded.
It would have been all too easy to go big, noisy and melodramatic with the various elements at play, but Jones is too good a writer to go down that messy narrative road, and so, instead, we are gifted with a measured, thoughtful and observant tale of what can happen in a family, good and bad, over three searing generations.
You get the feeling that Frank, good of heart and full of pain, may just make his way through the maze of of the overhang of his family’s blighted past, all of it anchored in the now dead town of Tinaroo, which remains a lacklustre tourist resort of sorts, but Cool Water doesn’t let you down easily, preferring to be gritty and truthful about painfully dark and violently hurtful life can be, but how, if you are open to it, it can also be healing and redemptive in ways that will last long beyond the temporality of a major family event and may undo what has come before in ways that finally out to rest the pain and loss of a great many decades.