This is the final novel I’ve read that made the 2021 Mile Franklin Shortlist, the winner to be announced in late July. It is no surprise I have enjoyed this novel the least of the six listed as it’s synopsis had made me delay reading it.
At the Edge of the solid world is Daniel Davis Woods second novel and is by my estimation a very well written and complex novel. It has obviously taken a great deal of skill and effort to write, and yet, it is unapologetic in its purpose of exploring pain and tragedy.
At one point the novel muses that regret is deeper than the sea and pain sharper than a thorn. This book demonstrates pain and regret in spades.
When an Australian couple living in the Swiss alps lose their newborn daughter their marriage steadily unravels as the narrator contemplates the myriad of sufferings in the world. There are references to a lot of tragedies both invented for the story and others painfully embedded in Australian history. Some small and personal and others large but always told in minute detail so the visceral impact is sure to disturb: a miscarriage, the death of the couples daughter, a massacre at a day care in Sydney, a plane crashed by a depressed co-pilot killing 144, the Port Arthur massacre, to name a view. The point being that life is sad, painful and filled with trauma.
The novel also demands a lot from the reader, often shifting location and time, not from chapter to chapter or paragraph to paragraph but within a sentence. It uses a stream of consciousness device that is clever but at times exhausting to read. There are also clever meta literature devices that are used to make the reader conscious the work is the narrators manuscript and account of events. About a third of the way in, the wife reads the work thus far and laments how badly the author depicted her point of view. This couldn’t be more true, given how badly she is treated in the text.
All in all, a complex, challenging and harrowing novel. Some will love this. Just not me.
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