This Water by Beverley Farmer (2017)

What joy. Firstly, to read fiction from Farmer again after a twenty-two year wait. She was always good, but this is different in many senses, in ways which inspire and threaten. Those firings to the brain are a second joy. One of the least regarded of modern classic Australian writers, I assume she is seen as a 'writer's writer', which is code for a kind of connoisseurship of the delicacies of wordsmithing, a snifting of the salty airs of delved places not often revealed which, if "we" educated people more broadly, could cease to be some sort of torrid zone of perceived limited access. This comprises three novellas, interspersed with two long stories. The first novella, A Ring of Gold, occupies the most traditional Farmer territory, and has a woman walking the beaches of a country town in Victoria, musing over textures and colours of nature and the life it symbolises, identifying herself with not only people but creatures, and her ways with those of the rhythms that surround her. She is everyday and peculiar in a trove of ways, where those aspects form a contrapuntal sway that delineates clearly and then undercuts itself with fascinating strangeness. The first story, which gives the book its title, is the first indication of the new territory to be encountered here. We accompany a young woman, daughter of an unnamed king (never called a princess presumably because of the bedraggled state of that word in its current Disneyfication) who is promised to an old man for whom she doesn't care. She notices one of his young kinsmen when he arrives at the castle for the betrothal, and intrigues to run away with him. They find, after covering a lot of miles and many revelations of self, sex, nature and symbolism, a place of safety in his foster father's castle. But her lover dies, and she discovers maturity and bitter poetry in a return to her former betrothed. This one's repleteness with the fabular, and the rich symbolism of female approaches which it shares with its predecessor, give it the quality of bridging the two territories of this book. The second novella, The Blood Red of Her Silks, is an astoundingly brilliant tale of four children, changed through the jealousy of a rival/stepmother into swans. They exist over an unspecified but extensive period of time, becoming a strange inspiration to a lonely monk on a distant island, and a semi-mythical emanation to be both feared and coveted over centuries; their world is full of the soft coastal imagery of reedbed and estuary, wind and sand. The second story, Tongue of Blood, is the most formally experimental of these pieces. In short poetic bursts, Farmer builds up a mythic picture of the resentment of a young woman whose daughter was sacrificed in a rite, probably raped and done away with, with the rite almost as excuse. The woman becomes the sworn enemy and attempted revenger on her daughter's assailants in a powerful tale, dripping with bile and gore. The last novella, The Ice Bride, takes the effort at image-making to yet another level. Set in a kind of labyrinthine ice-dome, mainly at night, with glimmerings of light, passages to unknown regions and places of the mind, its main character is a questioning woman, starting to find out about the world, but trapped in this snowy, stripped down, enchanted building in a restricted, dark landscape. She knows she is a bride, but her "Lord" visits only occasionally, giving her titbits of information about her world, allowing her to discover things only under his say-so. Also visiting is a "Fool", who is a servant to her betrothed, who also lets out information in a very controlled way. She discovers meaning and colour in brief bursts, through light from the stars and, at the end, the sun. She finds rooms in the labyrinth of the dome that weren't there before, with fossils on their shelves, for example, and not really knowing what these things are, questions her Lord and the Fool, on their occasional visits, about wings, or shells. Things turn more threatening toward the end as, in another level of the dome which has not been there before, she sees beneath the ice floor what appear to be the half-skeletal, red-fanged remains of previous brides locked in the freeze. The novella ends with her disposed of, and her Lord arriving in a largely melted landscape with a new bride at his feet in his skiff, and the waters just beginning to freeze again. The looming, disturbing otherworldliness of this piece is phenomenal. Recounting plot is not marginal to these works, but it does result in a very partial picture. The berserker, or setter-alight, of these pieces is Farmer's capacity in describing not only events, but also blazoning the way into worlds they inhabit, textures and exhalations of meaning that are inherent in small symbols and things that can be touched. Her career's prior worldliness and descriptive succulence, though, cannot quite prepare the reader for the delicacy of imagination in the last four of these five. Though it did not feel at all impossible then, to now discover the extraordinary stretch of these tales is to know that the author's mind is at its most powerful in this emanation; she reaches for the stars here, and grasps them. Exhilarating.