FICTION
Alone
Beverley Farmer
Giramondo, $29.95

A reissued novel set in the 1950s reminds the reader how hard it was to be queer in Australia then, and enables us to reflect on not only how writing has changed, but how the world has changed.

Giramondo have republished Beverley Farmer’s first novel six years after her death. The award-winning writer was the author of four collections of short stories – she won the NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction for Milk. She was long listed for the Stella Prize for her last work of short fiction, This Is Water, in 2018, and received the Patrick White Award for her contribution to Australian literature.

Her kinship with modern-day writers includes the eagle-eyed poet and novelist Josephine Rowe, who has written: “Farmer’s expansive curiosity and regard for microcosmic significance sharpen a reader’s attention to all things lived, dreamed, and observed”. It is this clear attention that is a recurring character across Farmer’s books, in which she describes settings and people with piercing detail. One description of being on a Melbourne tram describes “the brick fortress of the brewery, where billows of stream hiss out through the grids of street drains. The red city baths. The doomed library, closed today, the black boards of its portico all gone to roost, squats over its dim lawns.”

Farmer’s fiction yields a strong sense of place, both geographical and emotional. The emotional context of Farmer’s 1980 novel is especially moving. The story tells of a young woman, living alone in a rented apartment, who is trying to become a writer, but is given a modern plot twist when it transpires this woman is nursing a broken heart about another young woman, who has left her, but whom she loves. The resonances with books such as Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt are unmistakable. As the young woman mourns her lost love, despondently reads the modernist classics, and tragically flirts with sex work to support herself, the oppressive idea of homosexuality as vice shadows the novel.

The poignancy of the emotional experience lets it stand as a meaningful dissent to the idea that homosexuality was criminal or an illness, interpretations that were current when Farmer wrote the novel. Instead, Alone functions as a critique of societies that would isolate queer people and pathologise selective sexual impulse.

A touching conversation between the two lovers, where they vow they would get married if it were legal, acts as a rebuke to anachronistic social conventions that oppress and occlude. The novel asks us, why is paying for sex regarded as more acceptable than being forced to hide love?

The novel’s most arresting moment comes when the protagonist carves the world “LOVE” into her chest, and its representation in the text as an illustration, along with reproductions of copperplate, stands out as ahead of its time when fiction didn’t integrate graphics along with text.