The splendid W&N Essentials series is a carefully curated collection of books considered to have stood the test of time, and been adored by their first readers. The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner is one of its brightest stars, a spare and fearless novel, highly acclaimed in the author’s native Australia in 1984, but curiously, only now feeling the love in the U.K. Set in suburban Melbourne in the early 1980’s, it’s the story of Dexter and Athena Fox and some blast-from-the past visitors, whose presence causes the Fox’s cosy domesticity to unravel into fantasy, escapism, and moral dilemma.
Dexter and Athena live with their two young sons, in a home with a pot-bellied stove and a piano, the type of home that often has a vat of hearty soup simmering away in the kitchen. Dexter is exuberant and sociable, Athena self-contained and serene. They love each other, they’re friends; Garner tells us this in the opening pages, but sometimes Athena likes to fantasise of a home that’s exclusively hers, ‘her children dematerialised, her husband died painlessly in a fall from a mountain. What curtains she would sew! What private order she would establish and maintain’.
One day, while dropping his father off at the airport, Dexter bumps into Elizabeth, a friend from uni days. Once sibling-like in their closeness, the intervening decades have seen Dexter become a family man, and Elizabeth a freedom loving sophisticate. Her responsibility-free status is about to be disrupted however, as she’s at the airport to pick up her troubled 17-year-old sister, Vicki, who’s in need of a new home.
Thrilled by this serendipitous meeting, Dexter welcomes them both back into his life, along with Philip, Elizabeth’s married lover, and Philip’s teenage daughter, Poppy, an extended hand of friendship that will lead to unforeseen ructions and repercussions.
There’s not a word out of place in Garner’s distilled depiction of a family in tumult, and many passages of beautiful writing, as confidences are exchanged and indiscretions committed against a backdrop of increasing moral ambivalence. Initially, Dexter and Athena appear unworldly alongside these incomers, whose attitudes to monogamy, theft, and personal responsibility, are distinctly casual. It’s modern life, Dexter thinks, it’s what people do now.
As each character wrestles their impulses, Athena remains the lodestone of the story. In one compelling scene of subtly shifting power, she is gathering in sheets from the washing line, with the aid of Elizabeth.
‘Their fingers met formally at the high corners of the sheet. Elizabeth’s relinquished, Athena’s accepted. As they folded, as they spoke, the light left the garden.’
Garner’s cool evaluation of the compromises and suffocations of domestic life is blessed with an escape valve of classical music; the Fox’s disabled youngest son singing for comfort, Dexter prone to bursting into Mozart arias, and Athena spending solitary hours lost in piano playing. The advent of their visitors offers a different kind of escape.
Complemented by a typically perspicacious foreword from David Nicholls, it’s a great introduction to a writer considered to be one of Australia’s finest.
The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner is published by W&N, 172 pages.
