(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Reading, done right, is often a seismic trip to all kinds of extreme emotions.
Often in the same book too, which is what Palm Meridian by Grace Flahive achieves with an effortless ease, reducing us to side-clutching bundles of laughter one minute before grabbing our heart, giving it a squeeze and making us sob with abject sorrow the next.
Even better, and there is so much about this novel that is better than anything you’ve read in a while, it keeps the balances between the gleefully absurd and hilarious and the gut-wrenchingly poignant beautifully and movingly taut, each a part of a whole that makes perfect, beautiful sense.
Set, in its present day at least, in a climate change ravaged 2067 – the novel alternates between this sort of dystopian future where southern Florida is sinking into the waves at speed and wi-fi and planes are things of unpredictable irregularity – Palm Meridian centres on a late-seventies woman, Hannah, who is living in a retirement community of lesbian and non-binary retirees which is somehow keeping the slow-moving apocalypse at bay.
They have lawns and egrets and a bar run by a trans man called Nate and all kinds of clubs and trysts and a gleefully rich and tight sense of community that stands as an emotional bulwark at least against a world which is stumbling towards the end of things while somehow avoiding what looks like the most final of fates.
Luke would come back to her one day, she was certain. Until then, it was time to make space for new people. And so she did.
It’s a remarkable place and a joy to be a part of, and Hannah, who made millions from a revolutionary heating-cooling system while practising a deep and abiding commitment to philanthropy, her need to give back the product of an upbringing which had more than its fair share of economic deprivation even if it was full of love, is more than happy to live there.
She had a real and material role in its creation, after all and is surrounded by old lovers and friends, except for one; her long-lost love Sophie, whom she split from some 43 years earlier and who she has missed every day since, is far away in Europe although Hannah hopes against hope that she will visit the retireme nt resort for one last, big hurrah.
Far from just idly wishing Sophie would appear, Hannah is desperately wishing she will make it because this is not just any party – it’s the last one Hannah will ever have with cancer ravaging her body and an assisted dying appointment scheduled for eight the next morning.
So time is well and truly counting down and while Hannah is surrounded by her dearest and oldest friends including childhood buddy/unofficial broker Luke and old sometime-lover and fellow uni student Esme, along with an idiosyncratic found family who may do some oddball, goofy things but whose hearts are rich and sincere and deep, she wants Sophie there, hoping the past can make its piece with the present before it disappears into an all too finite future.
(courtesy C & W Agency)
Told over 24 hours more of less, but reaching right into the past to 1990 when Hannah is born and from which her life races forward, Palm Meridian is so many extraordinary and precious things.
It is a heartbreaking meditation on how we make good and bad decisions in life, how certain circumstances can place so much pressure on us that even the most wonderful of things fracture and break, and that loss and pain are never far from us.
In that respect it’s sobering, emotionally raw and heart-tearingly sad and intense.
It’s also introspective and meditative, granting us the chance to think deeply about all the things that matter and have mattered to us in life and the value that we assign them as we look back in searing reflection.
But Palm Meridian is also giddily joyous and absurdly happy, a celebration of the power of diversity and community, of the way in which born families and found families equally create and support and change us and how they are there not simply in the good times but the bad times as well.
This extraordinary sense of wholly embracing community is everywhere in Palm Meridian, every page full of people inclusively wrapping their arms around each other and while they may not always get it right, or as right as they want to, anyway, it’s the fact that they are there, that they love and care and that those in that circle matter that really comes to the heartwarming fore.
The moon had moved in the sky again. A glass broke nearby, and a laugh went up, the fire hot and sputtering, and every person in the world, it seemed, tumbled around Hannah, except for one.
For all the grave import of the always looming final act, which no one can escape no matter how good the party is, and good lord, it’s a GOOD one with far more beginnings that outweigh the hard-to-miss weight of its inevitably final ending, Palm Meridian is above all else a huge love story.
Primarily, of course between Hannah and Sophie whose story dominates the present and the past in equally powerful measure, and the resonance of which echoes right into Hannah’s final second alive, but also between Hannah and Luke, no matter the dark secret between them, and Hannah and Celeste and Christine and Ricky and the whole gaggle of people who have made Hannah’s life the wondrously good thing it has been.
It may be ending with a mortal finality that is more defined than most, and her party may be taking place against the deafening sound of a ticking clock, but greater than her death and the impossible to avoid ending that awaits is how much love and laughter and absurdist hilarity still exists even as the pall of death hangs over it.
Palm Meridian is a magnificent, beautiful, charming, madcap, moving and searingly sad and ecstatically happy celebration of life and all its huge ups and downs, and written by a writer whose talent for mixing hilarity and sadness in perfect measure, it is one of the reads of the year, an exquisitely moving exploration of what makes it so good to be alive, and how even when that’s ending, there is power in connection, love and family still, now and forever.