Australian readers were introduced to Diana Reid when her debut, Love and Virtue, was published in 2021, and she became that most unusual creature: a bestselling young novelist. Her third novel, Signs of Damage – like her debut and its 2022 follow-up, Seeing Other People – is concerned primarily with the way young women negotiate social norms and mores, and the way certain hidebound conventions shape the way they make sense of their lives.
In Signs of Damage, the target is trauma narratives – and the vehicle is a thriller, in which the reader is presented with not one but two mysteries to solve, and invited to reflect on how these two mysteries are related; whether the one is made inevitable by the other.
The first mystery concerns an incident that takes place in 2008, on the gorgeous grounds of a villa near Saint-Tropez in the south of France: a teenager named Cass is locked in the villa’s old “icehouse” for several hours. Cass is a guest of the wealthy Kelly family, invited to spend a languorous holiday with her school friend Anika, who is a mixed-up teen from central casting, and Anika’s glamorous older sister Skye. The mystery consists of how Cass got into the icehouse, what happened to her in there, and how the rest of her life has been affected by this frightening episode.
Our second mystery unfolds in 2024, in another European holiday location beloved by well-heeled Australians: Tuscany, where Skye is about to get married at a hilltop monastery adjacent to a charming little village. On the day of the wedding a person tumbles from a balcony and dies. Anika is a witness, and while Cass is present, she cannot be termed a witness, exactly, because the fall occurs while she is having a seizure. Again we are invited to ask, what happened here? And does this tragedy have anything to do with whatever happened in the icehouse 16 years earlier?
Signs of Damage is a meticulously plotted thriller; the tension is sustained by Reid’s withholding until the final pages the ways in which the events of 2008 and 2024 are connected. We don’t even find out who fell from the balcony until very near the end. Along the way suppressed memories surface, family secrets are revealed, hidden letters are discovered, and buried grievances and long-simmering resentments emerge. At times, it’s a bit like reading a country house farce – but the mood is often broken by earnest narratorial interjection, as if Reid can’t quite trust her reader with unalloyed satire.
Cass wants to know what happened when she blacked out on the balcony – and why she started having seizures only when she entered a relationship with Sam, the young man who rescued her from the icehouse, who went on to become a paramedic. Sam is an orphan, adopted by Harry, the best friend of Bruce, who is Anika and Skye’s father. Harry is gay, made a pass at Bruce when they were young men and is a retired literature professor, so can helpfully gloss Cass as Cassandra, the prophetess doomed never to be believed. This is how the cast of side characters operate in Signs of Damage: working double shifts to keep the plot engine ticking, sometimes but especially in the case of the male characters, at the expense of characterisation.
This busy whodunnit is a scaffold for Reid’s central thematic concern, which she flags in her author’s note: the “omnipresence of psychoanalytic concepts – not just in art, but in the stories we tell about our own lives”. In particular, she’s suspicious of trauma narratives, and at every turn in this novel, the characters who look to solve mysteries by glibly invoking traumatic backstories turn out to be wrong, foolish, dangerous, or all of the above. Skye grew up to be a doctor, and when she tells her mother, Vanessa, “your body knows things before you do”, she’s the voice of a generation weaned on The Body Keeps the Score and trauma therapy administered via Instagram.
What Cass yearns to understand, as do the Kelly family, is whether the icehouse incident set in motion a causal chain that made the tragic events of 2024 inevitable. Inevitability is an important concept in Signs of Damage, a contemporary refurbishment of fate or destiny that is set against agency. “We turn to the past,” muses the narrator, sounding a bit like Joan Didion, “and try to identify a turning point, an originating trauma, a moment after which the tragedy became neither random nor senseless, but inevitable.”
At the end of a thriller we expect the mystery to be solved. Accordingly, Cass offers the reader a story about what happened and who to blame. She has settled on the version of the story, she tells us, that she can live with. Would it hold up in court? Probably not. Does she believe it? Maybe not even that. We might tell ourselves stories in order to live – but this novel ultimately sounds a caution against reducing the “endlessly complicated human mess” to a set of neat stories about trauma.
Signs of Damage by Diana Reid is out through Ultimo Press ($34.99)
