Alone

Melbourne, 1959. Eighteen-year-old would-be poet/novelist Shirley Nunn is waiting in the dingy room of a Carlton boarding house for her former roommate and lover - Catherine - to come home. Catherine moved out weeks ago but, in a final effort to win her back, Shirley has threatened to kill herself tonight and now waits for Catherine to come and rescue her... This short, intense novel is a masterpiece of oppressive mood. You can feel the grime of the Carlton slum, smell the cat's urine and the sizzling fish in Mrs O'Toole's kitchen, taste the beer on the breath of passers-by. Farmer has a perfect ear, too, for mid-century Australian dialect, treating the reader to some extended dialogue scenes. The novel starts out almost playfully, with Shirley drafting six epitaphs for herself, six newspaper reports of her death by various means. But as the novel progresses we realize that Shirley's suicide isn't some predictable teeange fantasy, nor some idle threat she's made to get Catherine's attention. She means to take her life, and as the clock ticks down the story get darker, grimmer, more compelling. The most successful sections are those where the interior monlogue has some pace, e.g. Chapter 8, where Shirley's movements around Melbourne are interleaved with memories of her childhood, of Catherine, of her own attempts at writing and some neatly deployed lines from T. S. Eliot. Here Farmer captures perfectly that swirling inner nightmare of yearning, anger, jealousy, love and hate that we all know as a broken heart. This shouldn't really be seen as lesbian novel, even though the love in question is between two women. It's actually a novel about loneliness, as the title suggests. While there are sex scenes - both homosexual and heterosexual - the novel is erotic only in the sense that all eroticism consists of a slow unveiling, a consummation almost endlessly deferred. Here, what's slowly revealed is a dark and pitiless truth. We know Catherine's never coming back. And the climax, when it comes, is shattering.