Trauma and loss define Mandy Beaumont's unapologetically feminist debut novel
- Written by Natalie Kon-yu, Senior Lecturer, Literature and Gender Studies, Victoria University
After it happened, I’d walk in slow circles outside the house looking for her, my feet hardening and my skin turning a deep red.
So begins The Furies, the work of debut novelist Mandy Beaumont.
We are propelled forward, desperate to know what “it” might have been. What is this event that leaves Cynthia, a 16-year-old in rural Queensland, to fend for herself in deeply unyielding worlds?
As we plunge further into the novel, we are moved between the past and the present, between what Cynthia knows for sure and what she struggles to remember. Her home is surrounded by the event, surrounded by the hostile bushland. Her missing sister Mallory beckons to her wherever she goes.
Review: The Furies - Mandy Beaumont (Hachette)
Mandy Beaumont.
Hachette
Violence and ambivalence
The particulars of the family’s pain are folded into a larger narrative about women and the things that mute them in contemporary society.
Trapped in the house, ever more estranged from her increasingly absent husband, Cynthia’s mother recedes into herself and the voices of all the women in pain barge in, indistinguishable from the noise of her small daughter. She tries to shut out the noise as she descends into madness.
That she is left to deal with her children alone is the part of the book that made me most angry. Cynthia’s father is not responsible for Mallory’s violent fate. His hands are clean. Yet, his absences in the book are undoubtedly a catalyst. It is Cynthia’s father, more than her mother, more than the men at the abattoir or the perpetrators of the heinous crimes, who emboldens the Furies and sets everything in motion.
While men’s violence is easy to acknowledge, their ambivalence and lack of care is more insidious. The violence and ambivalence feel inseparable to me, part of a larger societal consciousness that allows men to dismiss women, their anxieties, and eventually their pain and humanity.
The Furies is unapologetically feminist in its preoccupations. It addresses some of the structural inequalities that women still face in contemporary society. The further Cynthia moves from the tragedy of her family, the more clearly she is able to see this.
The realisation allows Cynthia to stop directing her anger at herself. It allows her to start directing the anger outwards at a culture that enables, if not encourages disregard and violence towards women.
The Furies asks a lot of its readers. Cynthia’s voice is that of a traumatised person, who flails in pain and seethes in anger. The stream-of-consciousness narration has a dizzying effect, drawing us in so that we see what Cynthia sees and feel what she feels. The Furies is a devastating book, but one which hints at the possibility of redemption and reckoning.
