When you have something good going on, change can be a very hard thing to deal with.
That applies even when the change that comes along is eventually good, the product of life bestowing all kinds of happy eventualities on people who face great adversity and come out the other side, bolstered by their familial closeness but also way overdue for finding a sense of individual purpose.
That is the central beating heart of The Knighton Women’s Compendium by Denise Picton, a delightful story that lives out the truth deep in its narrative bones that while we draw strength from the connective tissue of family, we also need to very much stand on our two feet if we are to truly live the life destined for us.
But 12-year-old Holly Knighton is going to need some convincing on that point.
Living just outside of Adelaide in 1982 Australia, Holly loves the big chaotic multi-generational household that defines her world, made up of great-grandmother Dorothy aka Greaty, grandmother Gran (Flora) and her mum Lucy, who struggles with at-that-point undiagnosed fibromyalgia but who loves her daughter with the kind of protective fierceness you need and want from a parent even if you’re too young to really appreciate that at the time.
Sure, Holly doesn’t like Weasel Features aka Si, the handsome but controlling man who’s supposedly won Lucy’s heart and who is determined to push her into a tightly-controlled box of his own making, a prison of sorts that is spun from fake smiles and manufactured concern, and a lack of Holly anywhere in the vicinity who will likely be packed off to boarding school as soon as Si gets his way.
So that, and the chance to begin my journey as a famous dancer, was why I jumped at the chance to enter the dance marathon at the Celestial Ballroom.
Which, as Greaty said, led to a family kerfuffle of epic proportions.
IF, of course, Si gets his way.
Because while he might have charming and caring down to a snake-oiled smeared artform, everyone but Lucy sees right through him, with outspoken Gran, who’s a gloriously militant feminist with the fiercely passionate heart of a protestor, and even more measured Greaty, taking him on times, their vocal dissident to his plan to ensnare Lucy leaving nothing to the imagination.
Being a 12-year-old on the cusp of teenagerdom, Holly wastes no time making it clear that she knows Si hates her and that she loathes him right back; thankfully, while Si is a constant thorn in her side, the lovely Zac, separated from his wife and clearly in love with Lucy, is a delight, supportive, genuinely caring and practically helpful, and thankfully for the always-inclusive Knighton women, a constant presence at their dinner table along with Gran’s friend Wilma, Holly’s bestie Barry who has a mangled way with well-worn phrases, and sundry other townspeople.
The home of the Knighton clan, the remnants of a once-great land holding diminished in size but not spirit by time, is a largely happy one, and while Gran and Greaty, as daughter and mother often argue, they always have each other’s backs, even when they’re stepping on each other’s feet.
Such as when a big dance marathon drops on their radar courtesy of Holly who sees it as her chance to forge a reputation as a stellar dancer and to attract the attention of Olivia Newton-John who will take her on a tour of the world and reshape her life in the vividly imagined way that only nascent teenagers possess.
Holly wants fame and fortune but Gran, ever sniffing out the chance to MAKE A POINT, takes it over as her latest cause, a move which starts sending cracks through the until-then unified edifice of the Knighton family who, though drawing strength from each other, begin to discover that fulfilling individual hopes and dreams may not be a bad thing either.
Rich with happy whimsy and emotional thoughtfulness, The Knighton Women’s Compendium is a joy to dive into because it celebrates the comfort and support that comes from being part of a big and loving family while understanding that much of what grants that collective its innate lovability and richness are the lives of each person in it.
Lives that each person in the family, the adult ones at least, have been effectively placed on hold for far too long and which could do with some revitalising and reimagining.
That is in many ways what drives Picton’s beautifully written novel, that sense that the whole is only made better and stronger and more vital by lives that have purpose and meaning and a real individual zest.
‘Well, let’s hope that’s the end of our weasel troubles,’ I said to Barry.
‘I don’t know, Holly. A tiger never changes its spots.’
The hall was almost full, with just minutes to go before the marathon was due to start. One of the judges stood and walked to the microphone to ask all the dancers to please take their places. The time had finally come.
Reading The Knighton Women’s Compendium fills you with a delicious sense that life can be a thousand wonderful things if you can just see it.
At the start of the story, none of the people in the large, sprawling Knighton ancestral pile can see just how wonderful things can be; they are in a rut, a good and loving one with all kinds of pluses but a rut nonetheless, and it’s only as the dance marathon and the various plots, plans, hopes and dreams that percolate through and around it find their form that the true possibility of what the family can be, separately, and thus more strongly together, becomes apparent.
Suffused with a belief that no woman should ever be defined or constrained by a man, The Knighton Women’s Compendium celebrates the power of women in particular to forge their own lives; having men in them is a good thing, it admits, but only when the women are free to be themselves, to live out their own imagined beginnings, middles and far-in-the-distance ends, and to truly define their worlds on their terms.
Rich with exquisitely well-realised characters, fervent belief softened by life’s realities and a sage emotionalism, and a buoyant mix of action and intimacy and witty dialogue, The Knighton Women’s Compendium is a love letter to family, to individual hopes and dreams and to find strength in who you are together but only after you have stood and triumphed and lived out your heart all by your gloriously possible self.