Featured photo- novelist Emily Maguire. Pic by Steven Siewert.
The horror of Emily Maguire’s new novel, AN ISOLATED INCIDENT, is that the topic is not an isolated incident.
The horror perpetrated by men against women – murder and mutilation – are incidents seemingly on the increase.
The incidents are repulsive, repugnant and reprehensible, yet these dark deeds are like a flame to a moth, alluring and addictive, a kind of inverted fatal attraction.
“The squishy, reeking black truth of it was that reading about murder thrilled her in the exact same way, she supposed, that thrilled the masses who snapped up true crime books in the millions and watched the cheesy crime re-enactment shows and moody, gritty cable dramas. It was just so intimate.” confesses May, a city journalist sent to cover the murder of Bella Michaels, a young and attractive aged care worker in Strathdee, a truck stop town between Melbourne and Sydney.Maguire arrests the reader from the start, engaging a first person narrative from Chris Michaels, the older sister of the murder victim, Bella. Chris is a marvellous character, a buxom barmaid who has been around blokes long enough to be pragmatic about her boobs – “I wear low cut tops and bend forward more than I need to if it’s been a slow night for tips and I barely notice when men speak to my chest, women shoot death stares at it and people of both sexes treat me like I’ve got brain damage.”
Straight talking about gender and sexual equality, sexism in society, and the menace of misogyny, is a hallmark of this blistering narrative, powered by pulsating prose that explores the private grief and public scrutiny of not so isolated incidents.
“Someone dies of natural causes, everyone’s all about respecting privacy. Someone gets murdered and it’s considered ok to delve into every nook and cranny. And not just the victim either – current and ex partners, siblings, parents, kids, workmates, friends. All their nasty habits and dirty secrets laid out in the name of truth and justice. It was as terrible as it was irresistible.”
Maguire writes with a terrific irresistibility. Ordeals of memory, reinforced by resources of imagination forge this unsettling yet compulsively readable story.
It’s a story with horror and hauntings, but it is not a supernatural story. It’s not about monsters, but men, who have family, who have friends, who walk among us in society, but who have the capacity to trap and torture, capture and kill, women. Not monsters but perpetrators of monstrous acts. Unconscionable and indefensible acts.
Maguire does not get into the mire of sensationalism by describing in lurid detail the atrocity visited on the victim. She allows space for the readers’ own imagination. Her focus is on the victim and the survivors who must deal with the inconsolable incident.
AN ISOLATED INCIDENT is as much about love and memories as it is about hate and homicide, and cements Emily Maguire’s reputation as one of Australia’s leading contemporary writers. The book deserves to achieve the same best-selling success and status of Girl on a Train and Gone Girl.
AN ISOLATED INCIDENT by Emily Maguire is published by Picador.