![]() ![]() It reminded me of Sonia Hartnett’s disquieting work with which it shares an adolescent narrator, quivering tension and long silences. Threaded through the book is a sense of menace, but there is no plot or climax as such. The longest part of the book is taken up with a rather pointless road trip taken across the country where they drive, drive, drive and sleep in the car at night. Father man is violent and abusive, and her impotent mother turns a blind eye. The narrator avoids naming the trauma, but she tells it in “the air between” the parts. If you make yourself look for what’s not there the empty spaces become parts themselves. The air in between isn’t nothing it isn’t blank. If you had never touched an engine, if it were only a matter of looking in the manual, you would think it was a miracle, that it couldn’t have been made by a man…In the manual you can choose to look at the parts, or the air in between them. She does not speak and she reads the Holden workshop manual, not for what it says but for its depiction of what she cannot say. Instead, she sabotages his work, taking the cars out at night and damaging their motors. Her stepfather (‘father man’) repairs cars in an unlicensed repair shop at the back of the block, but she is not his willing assistant. ![]()
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