(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers)
The way the world is going at the moment, you would have to be the hardiest and perkiest of optimists to think that the way forward is strewn with anything but death, disaster and destruction.
Fascists are making their cruelly odious presence felt around the world, wars are breaking with a veracity that no one wants and few can countermand, and the climate is in an horrific freefall, with all the modelling that said terrible things would happen in decades hence coming to pass now.
Things do not look good.
And in Hurdy Gurdy by Jenny Ackland, all those predictive hellmouth moments have come to pass, leaving the world, and Australia in particular where this meditatively paced but deceptively intense novel is set, a mere shadow of its former self.
Elephants and spring are a thing of the past, food is scarce, flying is for the wealthy only and holidays are now a thing of myth and legend as people concentrate simply on staying alive.
In a country where survival is the only mode currently engaged, extremism, it will not surprise you, is on the alarming rise, with the Church reaping the benefits of a frightened populace, frightened by tangible and intangible terrors aplenty, looking for easy, clearly defined answers.
There aren’t any, of course, there never were, not even in the times of plenty, but as Hurdy Gurdy unfolds, more and more people are flocking to restrictive, legalistic ideologies like the Church’s which is back to enforcing time-old sclerotic beliefs that rail against alcohol, abortion and adultery.
The thing is not to panic not you and not her because panic is when bad things happen.
While preachers of dubious double standards who treat their women companions like acquisitions to be ordered around as they please roam the land dispending “truths” of dubious value, and white-clad cult members known as Saviours stretching in monochromatic “purity” along the roadside, some people are trying to hold to a morality that is acquainted with humanity as it is and not how legalists think it restrictively should be.
Queenie and her found family travel in a circus caravan through countryside and towns which vary between utterly blighted and declining prosperity, their days ostensibly filled with hairdressing services and circus performances.
But while these activities are very much a thing for them, they are also active in far more undercover circumstances, giving hope to women who are abused, who require abortions for a host of reasons and who are in dire need of freedom from oppressively cruel marriages for which the rule of law, in an increasingly authoritarian land, has no care or answers anymore.
In short, people are on their own, and while many flock to the paper-thin answers of religion, which is all vaguely reassuring show and no practical substance, many simply need someone to listen, act and make their blighted lives a little more palatable than they currently are.
This is where Queenie and her troop come in.
(courtesy official author site)
An ageing matriarch who mourns her deceased husband, who, rare among the male characters in Hurdy Gurdy was a good and decent man – most are not, and the men who come to the caravan for haircuts and shaves often mysteriously disappear into what seems to be thin air – Queenie is as uncompromising as the religious zealots she quietly works to oppose.
For the most part, this is a good thing, especially for 19-year-old Win, who longs for love and despairs of ever having the stomach for Queenie’s dark but necessary acts of retribution against cruel and vicious men, Russian philosophical clown Valentina who provides illuminating insight into the strange vagaries of dictatorial regimes, and Girl, a nameless child who was found on the side of the road and adopted into the clan.
Sitting under Queenie’s protection, they are as safe as they can be in this unsettlingly near-apocalyptic vision of the future, which feels like the end of the world even as civilisation somehow limps on, a mere retro-laced caricature of its own worst qualities and past historical sins.
You have to remember many times over as you read Hurdy Gurdy that civilisation hasn’t tumbled into the abyss because life is so bleak, nightmarishly authoritarian and legalistically dark that it feels very much like all things have come to an end.
There’s little about Hurdy Gurdy that feels bright and light and even rare moments of belonging and joy feel tainted and corrupted by a world that has well and truly lost its way in the decline caused by climate change, so much so that coal is still being mined and used even as its cuts the collective throats of the planet and the people who somehow linger on it.
I mean, why are you being kind to me now?
It’s not your fault, I say. It’s never the girl’s fault. We want to help.
Help, she says. I suppose.
And yet, for all this dark malaise, there is hope in the form of Queenie and the troop who may not be able to make things universally better but who can strike back as needed, changing one life at a time in ways that the law does not approve of but which in this religion-benighted near-future, are all many people have got left.
There’s a deeply haunting quality to Hurdy Gurdy which asks readers to imagine what they would do if the world turned on its head and left a weirdly insufficient partial collapse in its place – would they make a stand to change things in some way or would they seek easy answers and moral fakery and retreat into the embrace of useless but cosy untruths masquerading as a solution.
This heavily polemic novel also asks us if there is more to be found at the end of times than mere survival; can anyone find purpose and fulfilment when there’s not enough food to eat, morality is skewed and twisted back to the Dark Ages, and putting one foot in front of the other demands almost everything most people have to give?
Hurdy Gurdy seems to argue, yes, and while its answers are from definitive and its hope muted and predicated on so much going right when all signs pointed to the contrary being the default, it finishes on a hopeful note of sorts, testament to the power of the human spirit who stare into the void and find beauty and find peace and a sense that there is a way forward in a world that is “wide and wild” still.