Old growth by John Kinsella
Transit Lounge, 2017. ISBN 9780994395788
(Age: 15+) Highly recommended. Evocative, intense, and shocking at
times, John Kinsella, in this collection of short stories, takes
this medium into its absolute best. His constructed worlds seem
utterly real, reflecting life as it is today, in the big city, in
small towns and in the Australian countryside. Within the style of
this medium, he plunges us, seemingly, directly into the real lives
of the characters in his little vignettes of the modern world.
In this world, peopled by Indigenous Australians, people who have
lived here for generations, and people who are newer arrivals, we
are immediately aware of the struggle to survive, to make good
lives, or to repair their lives. For some this is not simple, and
for many the relationships are damaged, seemingly beyond repair. We
hear, in the language that is always apt, the language of children
and of adults, the vernacular, the formal communication and the
country accent, each reflecting the small worlds that he creates.
Kinsella does not let us off lightly in this collection. Depicting
sometimes raw, painful, hurtful, shattering, unsettling
relationships and events, Kinsella plunges us into the worlds that
he creates to reflect the issues that face us all today and to
depict just how difficult it is to make sense of the challenges that
this world places before us. We read about the boy who digs a
tunnel, living mostly in his own small world and seemingly
unobserved. Kinsella challenges us to spend time in his sometimes
brutal worlds, or the worlds of slow speech, 'Okay darl' says Beth
while a robber is asking her to open the till in the hotel! We slow
down with this character, who is unfazed by the situation. Kinsella
evokes memories, joy, humour and some element of the tough reality
of modern life in his imaginative reconstruction of today's
Australia.
Despite the darkness of his world at times, he evokes joy and
delight in the reader, and this is at the heart of his
storytelling, that quality of shared history, of connectedness, and
it is in his human reaction to relationships that he presents a
salve for the bruised souls whose lives he has placed, raw, blunt
and sometimes horrifying, before us. Kinsella's vivid worlds, his
characterization, and his absolutely delightful, lucid prose are a
gift to modern readers.
Liz Bondar