One of the most famous opening lines in literature comes from Dante’s Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy, when halfway through the journey of his life he finds himself in a gloomy wood, having lost his way. In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.
In the face of the Covid pandemic, many of us felt a similar sense of isolation and uncertainty, confined to our homes, disconnected, and grappling with the unknown. Which led many, presumably including Melbourne writer Ronnie Scott, to the page.
As a creative writing lecturer at RMIT, Ronnie Scott knows a few tricks of the writing trade, and in his second novel, Shirley, he deploys them with undeniable flair — such as keeping his readers in suspense until nearly halfway through the book as he leads them on a journey without telling them who or what Shirley is.
On the cover blurb, Michelle de Kretser describes Scott as a ‘tremendously gifted social portraitist’. And while his gifts are on display throughout taking the whole together, how does Scott’s social portrait stack up? It’s not exactly Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, but autres temps, autres mœurs. If you’re in search of a visceral feel for what it’s like to live in a specific place at a specific time — namely Melbourne in 2020, as the first pandemic in a century casts a pall over the zest for life itself — Shirley may just be for you. Also, without giving away too much, if you happen to be a cat lover, this is a must-read.
Scott’s writing style mixes humour and a kind of literary pointillism with a heavy dollop of enigma — most of it centred on the thirty-something female narrator’s several-ways-absent mother. And much of Shirley is a meander rather than a linear jog from A to B, and long before halfway readers will be searching for a Dantesque sense of direction. At the endpoint, though, looking back, they may well conclude they’ve been on several exploratory journeys, not just one.
One of the book’s strengths is that it recaptures the sudden change of mood, both personally and collectively, that Covid wrought. With impressive granularity, the author describes that turning-point third month of 2020 as ‘the deferred end of summer — because they had come, the true Ides of March. They sounded like electric blinds opening’.
Lockdowns cast a shadow over the