Book review: Edenhope author Louise Le Nay has a background as an actor, working in film, television and theatre. After her first novel, Hero, was published in 1996, she began writing for the screen, working on Neighbours, Blue Heelers and the medico-legal series MDA. It is tempting to imagine that these areas of expertise assist Le Nay in one crucial element: how to hold the audience’s attention. If Edenhope was a film, it would be edge-of-the-seat stuff, a two-tissue tale with all the feels.
Central character Marnie is 63, a classic Aussie battler with a big heart and strong moral compass. The story opens in rural Victoria, in January 2022, as the state is recovering from the devastation of the Covid pandemic. Marnie is doing all right, though, with a new job and accommodation in a small town. Backstory is woven in from recent and distant past. She thinks of her mother and how she “always conveyed dignity. She looked like someone who could only know desolation in the abstract.”
Marnie’s knowledge of desolation is not at all abstract. Her only child, Lenny, has given her endless grief for many years, being in and out of jail, and mostly responsible for her mother’s poverty. It’s not long before the daughter shows up with her deadbeat boyfriend and neglected children.
Frankie is 3 and Koa nearly 1, but Lenny is more interested in appeasing current partner Braydon and laying hands on heroin and oxycodone. It is cold comfort to Marnie that she hasn’t succumbed to ice, or meth, which ravages Australia as it does Aotearoa. Lenny and Braydon take over the little flat, fleecing Marnie of her money, drinking and getting high and further mistreating the kids.
At Easter, while they’re sleeping off yet another binge, Marnie packs the kids into the car and departs. She has no real plan – except for, at one point, thinking she might go to a farm in New South Wales where Lenny’s oldest child is being raised by his father, TJ, who managed to go straight. But there is the danger she could be arrested for kidnapping if she crosses the border, so she drives around Victoria.
Edenhope becomes a road novel. For much of the time, grandmother and grandchildren live in the car, dependent on social welfare, but locals extend kindness and safe havens. Le Nay’s understanding of character enriches not only the major players but also the many and varied country people who come to the little family’s aid.
Throughout the struggle, Marnie recalls her own early life, how lucky she was to have come into contact with a man, Harvey, who helped her. It was his wife who introduced Marnie to reading: Willa Cather, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Graham Greene. No matter what curveball life throws at her, reading is always a great comfort.
Lenny and Braydon are not so concerned about Marnie taking the children. They depart for Byron Bay, succinctly and amusingly described as a “fake old-hippy, wealthy-retiree playground … a kind of Nirvana. Sunshine and clean needles and everyone on a high.”
Le Nay’s scene setting is winning. Of Nhill, Victoria, she writes: “The town was quiet. Full of empty shops, pretty buildings and elaborate leadlight windows in storefronts … that sense of history, struggle, decline … There were always closed-up hotels.” Of a country scene with lambs and ewes: “Further along, among the wattle, newborn twins butted at their mother’s belly in a soft hail of blossom.”
Edenhope is about mothers and grandmothers, particularly the deep devotion of the latter. Le Nay explores also how a grandmother may unwittingly enable a daughter to lead a life of useless indulgence by taking over the children’s care.
There are heartbreaking small revelations of Frankie and Koa’s lives with their mother and abusive stepfather, but it’s never laid on thickly enough to turn the audience towards the exit signs. Readers will cheer for Marnie and want her to take several curtain calls.
Edenhope by Louise Le Nay (Text, $40) is out now.
