'Painful, confronting and totally riveting': Peggy Frew's novel of dysfunctional sisters is ultimately uplifting
- Written by The Conversation
In her hybrid critical memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi poses a knotty question regarding the spell of problematic books such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
A novel of shockingly egregious thoughts and actions, in which a 12-year-old girl is sexually abused and exploited in other ways, Lolita nevertheless offered a compelling text for Nafisi and her female students, all victims of the oppressive Iranian regime in the 1980s.
Nafisi had resigned from her university teaching position, and she and her students were continuing informal literary studies in secret in her apartment. “Are you bewildered?” she asks us. “Why Lolita? Why Lolita in Tehran?”
Review: Wildflowers – Peggy Frew (Allen & Unwin)
Despite its subject matter, Lolita continued not just to fascinate the class, but to provide solace and more. Why, asked one of Nafisi’s students, are readers filled with joy upon reading such novels? Does that mean there is something wrong with the novels, or with the readers themselves?
After some thought, Nafisi formulates an answer that satisfies both her and her students. First she reminds us every great novel is a form of fairy tale, and while fairy tales typically portray violence against children, they are also full of good, powerful magic – plus, they offer freedoms denied by reality, and an affirmation of life that counters real life’s transience.
When the author takes control of reality by retelling it, a new world is created. Thus “every great work of art […] is a celebration against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life”.
Azar Nafisi on Reading Lolita in Tehran.Read more: Trauma, resilience, sex and art: your guide to the 2020 Miles Franklin shortlist
Three sisters, estranged
This could be a stretch, and certainly defenders of novels like Lolita, post #MeToo, have their work cut out for them. But it worked for Nafisi and her students, as it has for me over the years – and Peggy Frew’s fourth novel, Wildflowers, reminded me of these comments once more.
Peggy Frew is always in control of her novel.
Amber has been the golden child, the performer, the charmer, who seemed to have her future laid out in glittering success, while the lives of Meg — dependable and unimaginative — and Nina — cautious and cynical — have been bathed in shadow rather than sunlight. Nevertheless, their love for the vivacious Amber endures. As adults, they are prepared to take on the task of rescuing her.
The nature of this rescue — initiated by Meg, who determines that with their father dead and their mother incapable, enough is enough — turns upon lies and secrets. She and Nina trick their sister into going away on a holiday to north Queensland, where they intend to dry her out. Obviously things will not go to plan, and the subsequent conflict, suffering and sheer abjection presented makes this section of the novel horrifying and compelling.
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Atonement
As the fuller story of this family is revealed, so are the more recent details of Nina’s own failures and humiliations – in particular, her inability to form stable, loving relationships. Finally, those questions raised in the opening section are answered. Just as Amber is stripped down to be “cured”, so Nina needs to literally reduce her life as a way of finding the kernel of who she might be, as well as to atone for her complicity in that cure.
Frew’s dissection of family dynamics, with all its misunderstandings and failures, and her sense of the precarious line between loving care and harmful neglect, impart a threat of tragedy throughout the novel, which maintains our attention. Wildflowers is a painful, confronting and totally riveting novel, but Frew’s control of the story – evident on every page – promises not to engulf the reader in the sorrow it must expose.
The explanation that Nafisi offers as to why we cherish stories of abuse and misery concludes: “The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter.”
Frew’s great skill at the structural and other formal requirements of the novel, and her firm hold of the fictional reality she has created, are counterweights to the distressing subject matter. This makes reading Wildflowers an ultimately uplifting, rather than depressing, experience.
