The sky stays blue for '70s suburban ennui
The Age
Saturday March 12, 2011
BLUE SKIESBy Helen HodgmanText, $29.95HELEN Hodgman's Blue Skies was first published in 1976. It was lauded as a highly original novella telling a gothic tale of suburban boredom. This new edition is sure to elicit a similar response.The unnamed protagonist is a young wife and mother living in Tasmania. For her, time does not pass at "an acceptable speed". Other people's workmen and lawn mowing give her something to look at through her venetian blinds and there are "numberless days when the clock always said three in the afternoon, no matter what you did to it".Her baby, Angelica, is someone she tries to abandon more often than not; her husband, James, only comes home at night if it suits him. But on Tuesdays she goes to visit Jonathan and on Thursdays she visits Ben. They're vile lovers, but it's hard to find men who have free time on weekdays.The need for distractions is clear. The neighbourhood is filled with women learning from magazines how to fill their time in "decorative and reassuring ways".When someone scrawls a quote from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell on the walls of the school, the authorities look for a student named Blake to blame. When the protagonist begins to crack up, her neighbour ushers in the Avon lady to try to mend a fundamental break in her psyche with cucumber-scented creams.Hodgman's rather tragic heroine, despite her internal contrariness, goes along with things. She rarely says no, leading to sex with a bus driver who has dirt caked under his nails and tea with an old man who lovingly catches what he coughs up in a clear container ready for hospital analysis.Hers is a wonderfully wry and strange voice to see the world through. Something mortifying happens on a bus so she smiles and waves to the other passengers "in a feeble parody of the Queen". When she and her husband muster an evening of pleasant sex, supermarket shopping and dinner, her appreciation is qualified: "We managed rather well in our role of happy young marrieds and sustained it through Saturday and into Sunday."Blue Skies was Hodgman's first novel. She went on to publish five more, collecting the Somerset Maugham Award and Christina Stead Prize along the way, but at some point her unique voice stopped attracting the kudos it still deserves. Blue Skies has a witty, intriguing tone best hinted at by her use of a line from Noel Coward's Private Lives to introduce her tale: "I once had an aunt who went to Tasmania."
© 2011 The Age