For decades now, Helen Garner has established herself as one of Australia’s most tenacious literary observers of men and boys. They fascinate her. And now she’s 80, and her youngest grandson, Amby, is playing footy.
The Season is written from the sidelines as the Colts U16s train and play their way through one drizzly Melbourne winter. It is, Garner writes, ‘‘a record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die”, a reckoning with the elements and cycles of life.
For Garner’s readers, it’s been a long wait for a new book. Her diaries have been published to much acclaim, as have several volumes of collected stories, essays, reviews and reportage – not to mention Bernadette Brennan’s award-winning 2017 biography A Writing Life. And she’s finally found an appreciative global audience. Several of her books have been reissued in the United States and the United Kingdom, packaged up with new introductions by Lauren Groff, Rumaan Alam and Leslie Jamison.
But The Season is the first new book-length work by Garner to appear since This House of Grief, her 2014 account of the trial of Robert Farquharson, a man accused and eventually convicted of murdering his three young sons.
A book about football juniors might seem like a change of direction for Garner, and perhaps like a narrowing of scope. It certainly is not. She is working in epic mode in The Season as she examines familiar themes and preoccupations: masculinity and its codes, the pleasures and contradictions of social groups, what it means to bear witness. Watching football allows Garner to “glimpse what is grand and noble, and admirable and graceful about men” – a thread that connects her fiction and nonfiction all the way back to Monkey Grip in 1977.
As a spectator of the exertions of her grandson and his teammates, and her beloved Western Bulldogs, Garner casts herself as witness to a timeless beauty. On her invigorated enthusiasm for Australian rules football during the pandemic, she writes: “I saw that it’s a kind of poetry, an ancient common language between strangers, a set of shared hopes and rules and images, of arcane rites played out at regular intervals before the citizenry.”
Garner is not alone in making extravagant claims about the grandeur of football but it is her language that ennobles the game and the players. Garner has always been an extraordinary stylist and in The Season her prose, athletic, soars and dances, just like those young footballers. How does she do it, you wonder, as she transforms yet another grey training drill into a lesson on endurance and camaraderie.
As ever, the simplicity and precision of her diction anchors her supple syntax. The metrical poise of her sentences is evidence of her immersion in the classics. Her grandsons may crack jokes about her hearing aid but her ear remains absolutely sure. Listen to the Homeric rhythm of this sketch of Tommy, one of Amby’s teammates: “He is fleet-footed, his wiry body weightless, he’s always out in front.” Who could doubt these young athletes, and who cares what they do off the field? For Garner, just being near them is thrilling.
She discerns the continuity between this project and her earlier work. “Am I bored?” she asks at one point. “It’s like sitting in a court watching a trial. There are long passages without drama, but because you’re in love with the story and its characters, even the boring parts are interesting.”
This is a significant reflection; across her career, Garner has always been in love with the story and its characters. Positioned on the sidelines she may be but she’s always had a stake in what she’s writing about – and this partisanship has split her audience. In The Season she’s barracking for the Colts and for the Bulldogs, and most of all for Amby, her eye constantly seeking to distinguish his body from the other limbs out on the field.
Her friends, especially the men, especially the lifelong footy fans, dish up advice about the book they’d write in her position. A lawyer asks whether she wants to know about boys being sexually abused in football clubs; “No, no, no, no, no. I don’t. What a fool I am, I think, stumping home from pilates, to idealise the game, depicting it as a Homeric struggle full of noble manly customs and ethical training for teenage boys.”
This is a typically shrewd example of Garner anticipating criticism, assimilating it into her book, and then moving on. Another, after a riff on the transcendence of the game: “I keep quiet about this, because I don’t want people to think I’m romanticising it, or to reproach me for not writing about women’s footy”.
Of course, she doesn’t keep quiet about the glory of it all, nor does she write about women’s footy.
The Season is a “nanna’s book about footy”, Garner insists, written from the tender, loving perspective of a grandmother. This designation appears self-deprecating but it’s a clear signal that she is in control. It’s the work of a mature artist who is writing exactly the book that she wants to write.
Garner strives, she writes, to “find a way to efface myself, to become a silent witness”. In this she does not quite succeed; as the season progresses, a revelation: “I’m not just an observer any more. I’m realising that I care about the team.”
Helen Garner is always present in The Season, as she always has been, never silent, turning her frank, curious attention where she pleases.
The Season by Helen Garner is out now through Text Publishing, $34.99
