Because the hash brown, NCIS and cat-obsessed sharehouse I live in doesn't have internet yet, I was actually in the uni library when I came across the AWWC. So for once in my life I thought, 'There's no time like the present!', looked up the Miles Franklin shortlist, read a few synopses, chucked The Beloved into the library search engine, walked up a few flights of stairs, and took it home with me that same night.
I did not intend to finish it that same night, I had half a season of Sabrina the Teenage Witch to lie catatonically in front of, but this book grabbed me from the first page.
The Beloved is a story about mothers and daughters, about the individuality that women can lose when they have children, and about how they and their children navigate this loss. It perfectly captures the prickliness of tense mother-daughter relationships in a way that doesn't simply write off adolescent desires as a phase or portray mothers as always knowing best in the end. Its first-person narration by the child in the relationship, Roberta, means that the main story, hers, has a clear and ongoing progression throughout the years over which it is set. This is particularly striking given the number of subplots and the extent of the secondary characters' development, which combine to give a strong sense of the richness of the world around Roberta, escaping the trap of the entirely private sphere which often affects books centred on family relationships.
This novel is beautiful on a number of levels - its vivid descriptions of Papua New Guinea, which reminded me strongly of Peter Goldsworthy's impressions of Darwin in Maestro, its harsh and often, in reality, unspeakable truths, and its ability to draw a shocked laugh from me every so often, just as events and people in my own life do. And it is beautiful for the way it made me cry over a throwaway sentence about the mere humanity of parents. I've already called my mum to tell her to read it.
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