Joe Cinque died on Sunday, 26 October 1997 after being administered a massive dose of Rohypnol and heroin by his girlfriend, Anu Singh, on Saturday. It took him all weekend to die. Others, including Singh’s friend Madhavi Rao, who was also initially charged with murder, knew of a murder-suicide plan. They provided Singh with money, heroin, injecting lessons and dosage advice and, quite possibly, the nerve to proceed with at least the murder part of the plan. Only one person confronted Singh prior to Joe Cinque’s death but was reassured that Singh no longer intended to harm him. In Joe Cinque’s Consolation, Helen Garner guides us through a Chronicle of a Death Foretold set in a Canberra depicted as a nihilistic wasteland.
Garner confronts any similarities between this case and The First Stone head on. She has again written about a man and two female law students caught up in the legal process. Garner documents the beginning of her emotional involvement in the story and her developing commitment to writing about it. In a disturbing opening, Garner has again used a transcript presented as evidence to the court, this time of an emergency call made by Anu Singh on the day of Joe Cinque’s death. Singh was eventually convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter and Rao acquitted. The court had heard evidence from various psychiatric experts to the effect that Singh had been suffering from a major depressive illness or borderline personality disorder with narcissistic features. Eerily, Joe Cinque’s voice was inadvertently recorded on an answering machine tape at about 10:30pm on the night before he died. The tape was tendered in evidence during proceedings. Only Joe Cinque’s blurred and disembodied voice remained, like Narcissus’s original Echo: ‘... Anu’s worried for nothing!’
It appears Garner has anticipated a backlash comparable to that which followed publication of The First Stone. She has captured a groundswell of public feeling against lenient sentencing and the rights of victims and their families. This is uncomfortable territory for many of us, shared as it is by ‘unseemly’ public displays of grief and anger, together with reactionary elements. Reading Joe Cinque’s Consolation itself is a discomfiting experience. The facts swirl elusively, derived from one aborted trial and two further trials, imperfect memory, witnesses keen to forget whatever role they played and others bludgeoned by the legal process.
Garner has further honed her technique since The First