The publisher’s blurb compares this Aussie novel to The Hundred-Year-Old Man who Climbed Out the Window. Wrong: Bruce Nash’s story is good. In fact, good-quadruple-plus. Its narrative faces up to one of our most pervasive 21st century fears. It acknowledges, records and somehow de-demonises that fear.
Rose, the protagonist, may not comprehend the connection between an empty wheelchair by a high window and the nightgowned figure sprawled in the rest-home carpark below, or the significance of “the older fellow” whose image her children always leave the photo album open at when they visit, but we do. Rose can’t because she’s being inexorably eroded by dementia.
She lives days where understanding and illusion co-exist. “I know that my friend isn’t here … All through the dark night, I lie in my bed, facing up to things.” The anodyne invitation to join in a nice game of bingo brings her (unspoken) response, “I would sooner be pulled apart by horses.” Yet she’s perplexed by the man who now lies in that friend’s bed with his mouth open, by the significance of the nice boy – is he? – who mops the corridors. Things won’t fit together; won’t do what they should.
Words, in particular, play games with her. In one of Nash’s most astonishing achievements, they mislead, desert, yet enrich her thoughts and speech: Is her granddaughter called Charity or Chastity? Does she herself have a care manager or a scare manager? Is it parachute or parakeet, incontinence or incongruence? Can it possibly be cognitive discotheque? At the same time, she’s constantly making her own wordplays – “although I am in bed, I refuse to lie”, correcting syntax and grammar, hinting at what a fine mind was once there. Towards the book’s end, botanical names pour from her. It’s glittering, inventive, poignant. Words allude, hint, never pin down. They’re music as much as meaning.
Astronomers and optometrists know that if you want to see something clearly, you look at it slightly aslant, and so it is with Rose’s world. She builds nuanced, puzzled yet incisive portraits of her attentive, slightly hang-dog son; sighing Christian daughter; teenage twins spliced to their phones; the non-visiting daughter-in-law who once muttered that Rose was an impossible old cow. (“It almost made me like the bitch.”)
Yes, the sweet old thing has her own street-toughness. She hears and revels in every four-letter mumble from the nice corridor mopper – if he ever utters them. The hand-patting, teeth-gleaming care / scare manager doesn’t fool her. She goads her kids with word games. There’s even a mini-crime novel element she helps to resolve.
In a world of stasis, repetition and confusion, Nash keeps his plot moving and deepening. Raptures of a garden and love return more and more to Rose’s mind. There’s no silly miraculous recovery, but towards the end someone actually gets an answer correct at Quiz Night, and the lunchtime meatballs seem to taste better. Our heroine (and she is) has informed and transformed others, while she moves into her own form of serenity. “I have become Rose … I am what I am … And there is love.”
Yes, I’ve written a bit of a rave. Many plaudits, Bruce Nash. You’ve produced quite a wonder. Or do I mean winner? In fact, I mean both of those.
All the Words We Know by Bruce Nash (Allen & Unwin, $36.99) is out on February 27, 2024.
