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Loading... Irisby Fiona Kelly McGregor
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"Who is Iris Webber? A thief, a fighter, a wife, a lover. A scammer, a schemer, a friend. A musician, a worker, a big-hearted fool. A woman who has prevailed against the toughest gangsters of the day, defying police time and again, yet is now trapped in a prison cell. Guilty or innocent? Rollicking through the underbelly of 1930s sly-grog Sydney, Iris is a dazzling literary achievement from one of Australia's finest writers. Based on actual events and set in an era of cataclysmic change, here is a fierce, fascinating tale of a woman who couldn't be held back."--Publisher's website. No library descriptions found. |
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Mcgregor's website tells me that this new novel Iris, is the first in a duet of novels based on the life of real-life Iris Webber:
So the 448 pages that I've just read is but the first instalment of prodigious research for McGregor's doctoral thesis!
(Mercifully) the novel doesn't read like a thesis. Written in a profusion of short vivid sentences, peppered with (a-hem) lively language and authentic slang of the era, it tells the story of a woman who was a survivor, but whose survival was always only tentative. And while Iris comes across as a woman determined to be in charge of her life, I came to the end of the novel feeling melancholy because her life was so compromised by crime as a solution to extreme poverty. She and her friends were constantly in and out of gaol for both petty crime and on remand for more serious crimes, and the 'Refty' was a brutal place. A very brutal place, where Iris was often cold, hungry, and recovering without medical attention for the beatings that had been dished out to her.
In a life characterised by insecurity in all the things that matter (shelter, income, safety, dignity) it was the insecurity of her friendships that seemed most tragic to me.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/12/21/iris-2022-by-fiona-kelly-mcgregor/ ( )