(courtesy Ultimo Press)
Diving into any book comes with certain expectations – there will be a beginning and an end, a middle that connects them both in ways that are emotionally fulfilling and intellectually satisfying, and there will be characters you come to care deeply about, people (and not; this is the world of imagination put to page after all, so anything is possible) who do and feel things in places and times to which you will likely never journey.
It’s a glorious cocktail of humanity, escapism and truth, a ticking of storytelling boxes that delivers on our innate need to feel a part of something bigger, deeper, more alive and beyond what we know.
It’s rare that reading is never not deeply and viscerally satisfying because all the expected pieces, used imaginatively, wisely and well, are in place; but sometimes it goes up a notch, or quite a fact when an author dares to push the boundaries, to mix poetry and raw emotion in a story that is partly a nod to business as usual and partly, and this is where things get exciting, wholly and gloriously not.
Sharlene Allsopp is one such writer who has taken some core, expected ingredients – a protagonist divorced from the place she truly belongs, an apocalyptic future and a race for survival against some quite chaotic and bloodily messy odds – and come up with a tale, in the future-set The Great Undoing, which happily and blissfully subverts any and all your expectations while delivering up those very things you need to walk away from a story changed and satisfied.
He flew out one October morning, hoping that I would join him for some of his tour dates. I never got to make that decision. It was all decided for me.
Part of The Great Undoing‘s points of difference stems from the fact that the story recorded in it by the protagonist, Scarlet Friday, in written in and around an older book of history, A Short History of Australia by Ernest Scott, an actual early twentieth century book, the genre of which is key to what lies within Allsopp’s nuanced and beautifully written novel.
At its heart, The Great Undoing is a story of identity and belonging, of what happens to a people, any people really but in the case the dispossessed First Nations people of Australia, who 236 years ago, had their land stolen off them by invading colonisers in the form of the British Empire, and who in turn lost language, culture, and also ownership of their own stories, the ability to craft how they are represented and understood.
A First Nations woman with a keen and intrinsically necessary need for truth telling – in a future digital Australia, a reckoning has happened that has seen the falsities of part history laid bare and the truth of colonisation writ large upon the social consciousness – Friday is in London researching further into the way that history, and thus identity can be distorted and manipulated.
While she does have an abiding interest in the topic, both because of her racial identity and academic focus, it also goes far deeper for Scarlet as she wrestles with a revelation that she is not who she though she was and that the people who matter to her are strangers and not kin at all.
(courtesy Ultimo Press)
Scarlet’s only personal struggles suddenly become even more graphically important when the BloodTalk system, which omnipresently tracks a person by their blood and lays bare who they are and where they are allowed to be and go, crashes and in days, civilisation in most of the world falls to its knees.
Borders are closed, trade ceases and society devolves into a Lord of the Flies mess, with people like Scarlet who are in the country of their birth, locked away, or even sometimes killed, while the citizens of the country are given preferential access to what remains of scant and diminishing resources.
In one hijacked moment, the interconnectedness of global society vanishes and Scarlet and a new Australian friend, decide the only way they’ll survive is to get home, however impossible that seems, a place where, if nothing else, they belong, even if, in this new fallen world, they are not as welcome as once were.
As they dash across a world newly inimical to such attempts, Scarlet dashes down her ideas in Scott’s book, some highly relevant and stingingly, richly observant passages of which sneak into the recounting of a journey which is burnished by sage quotes from a range of authors, all of whom speak to the prevailing themes of identity and belonging.
In words lyrical and brutally honest, sparing nothing for the sensibilities of those who cling to a fiction about themselves and the world they live in because they can’t face a truth that dispossessed people like Scarlet have no choice but to embrace, even if painfully, The Great Undoing delves deep into what it means to sweep into an uncertain future when your own sense of self and grasp of the past has been called into question.
I wanted to laugh at the irony. At how absurd it was to imagine the state of border queues. But there was no laughter inside of me. Not as an Australian who would never be welcome in the queue. Who would ever share their boundless plains with us.
The brilliance of Allsopp’s cleverly and thoughtfully imagined novel is that it manages to both tell a fairly conventional story of apocalyptic dispossession, loss and a desperate quest for restored belonging, while delving deeply and with great empathy and insight into what it means to have your identity and sense of place blurred and lost, all at a time when clinging to who you are and where you belong might be all you have lost.
The Great Undoing is feat of wondrously envelope-pushing storytelling because it melds a thrilling tale of escape and a rush to hoped-for safety with messaging that is intense in one sense but necessarily so because Scarlet’s entire world is about being both sure and unsure of who she is and how this impels her to find out who she is and where she belongs, not just physically but at the very heart of her being.
That something so personal and truthful takes place amidst the end of the world – it is partial (some parts of the world simply didn’t sign up to BloodTalk and are relatively unaffected) and possibly temporary but who honestly knows? It certain feels like all the touchstones of civilisation have been lost forever – is fantastically audacious.
And yet it works, and works brilliantly, because with real empathy, heart, truth and honesty, all told with words groundedly human and heartstoppingly poetic, The Great Undoing cuts to the very core of why we must know who we are and where we belong, of how history is construct of facts and fabrication, and how untangling it all and arriving at the truth, whatever that may be, is an urgent and deeply necessary that must take place no matter how crazily chaotic the world in which it happens might be.