Book reviews: In Nikki Gemmell’s Wing and Christian White’s The Ledge, the Australian landscape looms large and ominously. It entices, but its embrace proves to be a menacing one. Watch out, it cautions.
In Wing, four girls go missing on a bush walk on a school outing. They are “The Cins”. They emerge, days later, covered in “great streaks” of mud, which “looks deliberate, like some kind of ritual rewilding”. They refuse to say what happened, just as they remain silent about the male teacher sent after them, who does not emerge.
This is the mystery. But the real mystery is the examination of the complications and evolutions of female friendship. And of feminism.
It is set, ostensibly, in Koongala, a school for the elite – for rich, entitled girls with rich, entitled parents. The parents are, almost universally, ghastly. They complain when their daughters are not favoured over other people’s daughters. A bully-boy father, Hugo, phones the head teacher to ban his daughter from going on a women’s rights march. He didn’t send his daughter to this exclusive, expensive school to be turned into “a f---ing feminist”. Too bad. Too late.
The head teacher notes that girls of her generation were: “Flattened. Muted, ignorant. This will not be your girls.” Koongala girls “are taught that women stand on the shoulders of women who have gone before them”; those “first-wave feminists who chained themselves to railings, and threw themselves under horses”.
Cin is the leader of the Cins, whose circle is wholly closed to any others. They are enigmatically unknowable and wield an undefinable power. They are interesting and yet they deflect any attempts to examine that interest simply by being, as though there is some strange sort of force field around them. They are, as all teenage girls are, a bit scary in their unknowability. And in their knowledge of the power of their emergent sexuality. They know they are desirable and they know that to desire them is taboo. They flaunt: look at me, I’m so hot. You cannot look; it is dangerous.
Cin – short for Cinnamon – is not rich. She may, though, be entitled. She is the only child of a single mother, Mig, a socialist artist who has no money, and holds desire for money and power in contempt. If Cin has a father, he has never been acknowledged; he has certainly never been required.
Mig and Cin, but particularly Cin, are the great and only loves of the head teacher’s life. She has no children, and men have been disappointing and cast aside as surplus to her requirements, which are stern. Mig was her best friend. Mig has always held her ambitious career choices – from public schools to the plum job in the private system – in utter contempt.
Yet she let her have Cin jump the entry queue – the rich apply when their child is in utero. She lets her secretly pay Cin’s hefty fees. Now she is ghosting the head teacher. She has, without any explanation, cast her lifelong friend aside.
Reading Wing is like being taken hostage and driven, fast and furiously, in a car by your abductee. You want to get out, but you can’t. And you’re not certain you would if given the chance. You are frightened, but also somehow exhilarated. I couldn’t wait to stop reading this presumably deliberately infuriating book and I couldn’t stop reading it. Why Wing? Is the wing a broken wing? Or is it a soaring wing?
The Ledge is a vertiginous read. If you have a fear of heights, of edges that stretch into voids beyond, tread carefully. A member of a tight group of young teenage boys receives a cryptic message when one of them, Aaron, goes missing. They fear he is suicidal. They follow the instructions contained in the message that involves a perilous dodge across a train line, a scramble through oppressive bush and up a cliff. They arrive at the ledge: a flat piece of stone with that vertigo-inducing drop into the bush far below.
The tension, which makes your stomach wobble and causes your breath to catch as it might after you have taken the journey to the ledge, is maintained until the very end. And there’s one hell of a terrific twist.
Wing, by Nikki Gemmell (Fourth Estate, $37.99), is out October 2 while The Ledge, by Christian White (Affirm Press, $34.99), is out now.
