(courtesy UQP)
After watching far too many books sit trapped in my To Be Read (TBR) pile for years and years, I decided it was high time a month was devoted to rescuing them from the reading void and diving into their promising stories. So, for October, each book review will be a novel long neglected but never forgotten, finally read as the author and published intended …
It doesn’t us long to realise that life can scar you deeply.
You set out with verdant hope and the very best of intentions, with every expectation that is going to be every bit as wondrous as the lofty, idealistic, best-case scenario promises.
But then something traumatising happens and suddenly all the starry-eyed hopes and dreams and that dreamy certainty that only good things will come your way, goes flying roughly and terrifyingly out the window and you are left wondering just what the hell happened and how on earth you could ever recover from such a cataclysmic existential betrayal.
In Sally Piper’s compelling novel, The Geography of Friendship, three onetime close friends, Lisa, Nicole and Samantha, regroup twenty years after an horrific incident in the bush not only shook their fate in the innate wonder and goodness of life, but in their capacity and that of their friendship to weather this most brutalising of storms.
Barely out of high school at the time of the five-day bush hike gone terribly wrong, they are subjected to an ordeal which tests who they are and what they value most about life and their friendship, and the decisions they make then haunt them some twenty years or so later when Lisa suggests out of nowhere that the three estranged friends recreate the hike as a way of healing their wounds.
And it’s when Lisa has thoughts like these that she wonders why she thinks she can make anything better by bringing them back here. What gives her the authority to even try? And what if in trying, she only ends up making everything worse.
It’s an almost desperate plea by Lisa, who was, the last time Nicole and Samantha had any meaningful contact with her anyway, was angry and demanding and not short of a confidently held and articulated opinion.
But the Lisa of the current day is not the woman of two decades prior, and her request for Nicole and Samantha to come back together in an attempt to remake their troubling memories into something less invidious and corrosive is met with reluctant acceptance by the two women who, along with Lisa, realise that the events of that terrible time have shut them down emotionally in many ways, affecting romantic relationships, adult friendships and even relationships with their children.
Written a moving, near poetic, lyricism, The Geography of Friendship, does an immersively beautifully and arrestingly affecting job of exploring what happens to even the best of friendships when they are subject to events no one should ever have to endure.
What’s happened with Lisa, Nicole and Samantha is that they just shut down almost immediately after they left the bush, battening the hatches on their traumatic memories, and hoping that hiding them away might heal them in some fashion.
But that, of course, doesn’t happen; as many of us know, traumatic memories that are simply tossed in a room and sealed behind a psychological locked door, simply fester and worsen and rob us of any joy or capacity to truly be ourselves because so much of who we are is devoted to keeping the door shut and the memories far from the present day.
(courtesy UQP)
But as we all know too, the more you try to pretend something is there, the more it makes its robustly disruptive presence felt, and you finding yourself diminished and robbed by the locked-down pain of the past.
The three women come face-to-face with these truths in ways they simply can’t avoid during their recreated five-day hike, and while it’s clear there’s still a close bond lost in the destructive debris of all that trauma, there’s a lot of pain to be excavated before any renewal of friendship, if that is even possible after all this time, can occur.
Rich with the potentially restorative truths of past regret and present pain, The Geography of Friendship is starkly emotional but surprisingly beautiful book that might have trauma and its messy consequences as its core, but which holds onto the hope that maybe, just maybe, some kind of healing can occur.
No one is buying that for a minute, possibly not even Lisa, the instigator of this hike to renewed life and friendship, but as the three navigate the present-day hike, which is far tidier and more codified than it was in their day, and the rocky landscape of past pain and trauma, The Geography of Friendship never quite surrenders the kernel of an idea that some kind of healing is possible.
Still, that nascent, almost dead-on-arrival hope born of one’s person no-longer-bearable desperation, is always present even as they past and the present, mixed together often within the one chapter, and it imbues this most nuanced and remarkable of novels with a truthfulness and hope that is surprising given the emotional terrain it traverses.
She wonders what the others see when they look around. Maybe the terrain represents something altogether different to each one of them. Courage. Loss. Fragility. Can any of them see just its beauty without also feeling their pain?
What The Geography of Friendship is almost unbearably honest about it is that you can’t simply flick a switch and make everything better.
Shoving trauma into the nether regions of your psyche almost never works, but then as the moving story makes clear, neither necessarily does returning to it or airing it, and while hope may reign ascendant, that doesn’t guarantee a Hollywood-level happy resolution.
Life simply isn’t that straightforward, and while Lisa accepts that in many areas of her life, as do Nicole and Samantha, all of them emotionally hobbled by the events of twenty years earlier, The Geography of Friendship concerns itself with what happens when hope, desperately birthed true but there nonetheless, is thrown into the mix and all those assumptions about what is or isn’t possible in the aftermath of trauma come into play.
Piper writes with real insight and heart-rending empathy, and doesn’t spare the truth to make something what it can never be, but then neither does she surrender to the idea that we are forever the products of our trauma; she makes it clear, the road, or in the case of The Geography of Friendship, the hiking trail, that while getting to a place of healing will not even be remotely easy, and indeed may not be possible at all given the scarring and loss, it should not be foregone and that maybe the future can be a whole new unexplored landscape of closeness and belonging, one not held hostage to the estranging trauma of the past.