Sorry (2007)

In the life of every child there are times in which the symbolic gains more weight and magnitude, when childish things, and their comforts, are put away, and there form the intuitions and understandings that ground the later adult. These are known only in retrospect, just as the gist of any tragedy is apparent only at its conclusion.

Sorry is a book that evokes expressions of bleakness, neglect, dysfunctionality and missed opportunities. This is the story of a young life tainted by an experienced tragedy and the search for answers and understanding. Set in a remote outback in Western Australia during World War II, we experience through young Perdita's thoughts and feelings a journey of awareness, self discovery, friendship, and resilience. Perdita's childhood is an unstructured one. There is a wildness and natural affinity in her in tune with her surroundings. There is an intelligence that belies her preteen youth. Beautifully told, this is a story that will kick you in the gut with a strength that belies the beautiful prose the story is written in.

Not exactly a page turner - I had to take this one in small doses over time given it's depressing nature - but a well written story of what it means to wish you can turn back the clock to make amends or do things differently. While written with the Australian Aboriginals in mind, this story has something to say to every nation that has a history of mistreatment and prejudice of its Aboriginal population. ( )

Sorry is a beautifully written novel about horrific events that take place within a totally dysfunctional family in the 1930s Australian outback. Perdita, our protagonist, is a young girl whose father is distant and seemingly uncaring with a streak of cruelty. Her mother, Stella, seems unable to relate on any emotional level and suffers also from a mental disability. During those bleak times when Stella is drawn inside herself she lives within the world of Shakespeare's works, from which she continuously quotes complete passages, entire sonnets, and even names their daughter after one of his characters.
Perdita's father is killed during the very first part of the book. Throughout the remainder, we watch Stella, Perdita, Mary, (the Aboriginal help girl), & Billy (the deaf mute neighboring boy who has befriended Perdita and Mary), as they cope with what is left of a sad and dreary life. However dreary life in the household is, the three children, Mary, Billy & Perdita are content & even happy while playing outdoors and spending time together.
Mary confesses to the killing of Perdita's father and is sent away to a reformatory until she is twenty when she will be moved to a women's prison. Perdita is so lonely without her friend whom she has slept side by side with since Mary came to be with them. She and Billy must learn to be a friendship of two rather than of three.
Then comes the deep depression of Stella where she cannot perform the most menial tasks, keep herself clean or speak other than to quote from the Bard. She is taken to hospital and Perdita must go and live at the convent for a time and attend school. Perdita has developed a deep stutter and rarely speaks because of the way people react to her when she attempts to talk.

"In the life of every child there are times in which the symbolic gains more weight and magnitude, when childish things, and their comforts, are put away, and there form the intuitions and understandings that ground the later adult. These are known only in retrospect, just as the gist of any tragedy is apparent only at its conclusion. The meaning of one's parents-the remote father, the unstable mother-is likewise discovered when they cease to have authority over us, in death, or in the mind's demented retreat, or in the distances we manage to create as adults. But at seven, or eight, or nine years old, we may nevertheless glimpse them, sense in a hunch what will later unfold, know in the briefest presentiment their true specificity, and the claims they will have on us. When I saw my mother searching for the cards, disregarding me, and the busted house, and the storm-wrack all around, when I guessed she was acting out Lear, tormented, believing herself infirm, weak and despised, I realised in a wave of pity that I was stronger than she and would be called upon some day to act my part and protect her. Her wet hair hung in rats' tails beside her face, her thin cotton dress was spattered with red mud, she was bedraggled and lost. And she was searching in desperation, as if she had misplaced her own heart."

"There are forms of loneliness children endure that adults have no inkling of: stern seclusions, lives of quiet desperation. Now that her childhood was a spoiled thing, compounded by an inefficient tongue and garbled speech, Perdita entered the dreary territory of the truly alone."

"What remains is broken as my speech once was. But I see now what my tongue-tied misery could not: the shape that affections make, the patterns that love upholds in the face of any shattering. It is not sentimentality that drives me to claim this, but the need-more explicitly self-serving, perhaps--to imagine something venerable and illustrious beneath such waste."

Such beauty here. There is so much within the covers of this book. So much to take in and to assimilate. Although I know that those readers who had an upbringing similar to mine probably related to parts of this story much better that they would have liked.
I loved this book, thought it beautifully written and though many of the characters had just little bits in the book, I found myself drawn to them as well as to Perdita, Mary & Billy. I understood Perdita's parents only too well but was unsympathetic to either of them. I am sorry that I have completed this book, for I would like to begin it again with fresh eyes and I envy those who will come to it for the first time. I very highly recommend it and rated it 5+ stars. ( )

Secrets are not always bad things, except perhaps when you keep them from yourself. Someone is murdered on the first page of this book. It is only through the slow release of the story that we find out the reasons why.

Set against the background of WWII and her mother's frequent recitation of Shakespeare's words, Perdita is growing up in a lonely part of the world. Her parents didn't want children and do their best to ignore her. Her father works as an anthropologist in a remote area of Australia and her mother is in and out of mental institutions. Perdita relies on her two friends: Billy, a deaf mute neighbor and Mary, a teenage Aboriginal servant to be her family.

This is not a happy story, but the eloquent writing makes up for the bleakness. Perdita became aware of the unfairness of life at the age of ten: "Between the four of them they spent many hours at cards, and for a brief period at the beginning of 1941, it was a rational system surrounding them all, an inconsequential orderliness, reassuring and trite. Newspaper cuttings had begun reappearing on the walls. Once Perdita glanced sideways during a game and began to read what was before her. The Germans and Italians had engaged in conflict with the Greeks, and British, Australian and New Zealand forces had been dispatched from Egypt. Perdita imagined armies in the night, marching orders, columns of uniformed look-alike men. At once she knew with startling clarity, like a punch in the ribs, one of the terrible unassimilable anomalies of this world: that there is always war somewhere and peace somewhere else, that there are people dying and at the same time there are people playing cards..." (94) Perdita's life lessons get crueler and closer to home as the story unfolds.

Repeating, this is not a happy story. But it is a memorable one and has implications much larger than Perdita's story. It was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2008. I'm pretty certain it would have garnered my vote. ( )

What does it mean to say you are sorry? That you regret what happened, whether for the distress it caused yourself or others? That you wished it had never happened? That you wish there were a way to atone? Perhaps it is said as a summation, a closing ritual, either expected or received in surprise, unaware of the silent emotions of the sorry one. Can you know the meaning of another's sorry-ness, of another's sorrow? If saying you are sorry is open to interpretation, how much more so then, the failure to say you are sorry. The expectant pause in the story, the silent internal debate, perhaps an ignorant obliviousness or a nonchalant callousness. What is gained or lost with sorry being said or left unsaid?

A whisper: sssshh. The thinnest vehicle of breath.

This is a story that can only be told in a whisper...

'Don't tell them," she said. That was all: Don't tell them.

...And when for comfort we held hands, overlapping, as girls do, in riddled ways, in secret understandings and unspoken allegiances, the sticky stuff of my father's life bound us like sisters.

So begins the first page of this devastatingly beautiful novel about Perdita, her family, and the ways in which speech and silence can each be a salve and a torment.

Perdita's parents met in England and married with the air of Well, that's done. Neither Stella or Nicholas was looking for romance, and their sterile togetherness reflects their egocentric emptiness. Stella lives in a Shakespearian world that only she can navigate, reciting long passages from the tragedies as her way of interpreting and interacting with the world around her. Nicholas, too, is lost in his own world, composed of imagined academic success as an anthropologist and later of manly posturings overlaying his deep sense of impotence at not being able to join up in WWII. Completely self-absorbed and living in isolated fantasies, the couple has a child shortly after leaving England to live in the West Australian outback, where Nicholas can make his name as the translator of the Aborigines.

Perdita is left to flourish or not in this wrack of a family. When Stella enters a deep post-natal depression, fueled by the emotional extremes of Shakespearian tragedy, Perdita is nursed by two Aborigine servants. Growing up, Perdita exists on the edges of two worlds, the one inhabited by her parents, and the one shown her by the Aborigine people who live on the fringes of that world. When she is ten, Nicholas takes Stella to the clinic in town where she rests, off and on, for much of Perdita's childhood. On the way home, he stops at a convent and takes on Mary, a sixteen year old Aborigine orphan, as a cook and tutor for his daughter. Instantly, Mary and Perdita are bound by a love based on sisterhood, shared hardship, and need. Together with Billy, the deaf-mute neighbor boy, they find and share the affection and community that each lacks.

War intensifies the ugliness of Stella and Nicholas's declines, and then something horrific happens, and the children are torn apart. Perdita is cast into silence and withdraws into herself, until she feels as hardened and dead as an ammonite. Her struggle to find herself and regain her voice is a story that tears at the heart. What secrets does her silence hold, and will she herself ever know?

Evocative of the fears and determination of the war years and eloquent on the beauty of the outback and the generous kinship of the Aborigine, [Sorry] is a novel rooted in wartime Australia. Yet the story stretches beyond the particular into the nature of introspection and the use of language to create and maintain identity. The language is beautiful, the story heartbreaking, and the ideas thought provoking. Read this novel. You won't be sorry. ( )

Sorry was not quite what I expected but none the less impressive for that. The title and references to Aboriginal characters led me to expect that the book would be focused on Aboriginals and their exploitation. Whilst this is a theme which Jones obviously wishes the reader to consider, the central storyline features the domestic situation of a British family: a little girl called Perdita, her mentally unstable mother and her weak and sadistic father who exploits the Aboriginal people who he is studying whilst attempting to become a successful anthropologist.

The book is beautifully written. We are introduced to the family’s life in late 1930s and then 1940s, rural Australia with elegant and poetic descriptions which are a joy to read. However the story is a bleak one and the power of Jones writing makes it particularly chilling. I was pulled right into Perdita’s life in the cluttered little shack with the increasingly difficult parents. The advent of WWII brings with it disturbing political events. There are occasional moments of happiness for Perdita which are made particularly moving by their rarity and come mainly through her friendships with a neighbour’s son and with Mary, an Aboriginal girl who comes to work for her family.

Each character finds refuge in books at some point. Perdita’s father hoards books, her mother quotes Shakespeare but says nothing else in times of stress and Perdita herself finds an escape in her father’s books. I liked this passage which followed the confusion of a non-reading neighbour who discovered Perdita and Mary reading, “otherworldly and somewhere else.”

“For those who do not read, for whom reading is not part of the texture of knowing, the gorgeous complication, the luxurious interiority, the thrilling extrapolation from black marks to alternative reals; for those who might not understand what it is to collaborate in making a world, or building a thought, or consolidating, line by line the salvage of something long gone; for those bereft, that is, and booklessly broke, those word-deprived, craving, caught in dull time, it will seem odd two girls with not too much to do, spend a few hours of each day hidden in the valleys of pages. Proxy lives, new imaginings, precious understandings.”

After the death of Perdita's father, the story becomes bleaker still. It concludes with a personal apology to Aboriginal Mary which Jones clearly intends to be symbolic of the wider apology owed to indigenous Australians. A powerful and haunting read, beautifully done. ( )