Love at the Railway Hotel
By: Sue Hurley
Reviewed by: Anna Johnson
A light touch.
That is something we rarely find in books that involve family sagas, betrayals, loss of virginity, suicide by poison or
indeed lesbian hairdressers. Sue Hurley's tone for her new novel, "Love at The Railway Hotel" (Ginninderra Press) would best be described as dramedy. And the story un-spools a bit like a very funny but oddly bittersweet Australian movie from the mid nineties, with loads of vernacular detail, lovable characters and a narrator who's ego is as stripped back as the prose that describes her life. The story begins in the somewhat grandly misnamed country town of Celestial Creek, a place whose spiritual heart is it's pub and whose inhabitants eat food that has
not budged in style or substance since the 1940s. Hurley has an eye for country town ways but especially the food. Ritual offerings such as cold chicken and brandy sauce at Christmas or miniature sausage rolls at a funeral. But the tenderness of her descriptions rarely comes across as patronizing. From page one the reader has a good sense of whose side her storyteller's voice is on. Lisa Macleod lives at the back of a pub, idolizes her parents and has an affectionate view of the world around her that is shrinking much faster than she is growing. She has stringy hair, skinny legs and is not the "pretty one" in her family but because of her unremarkable vantage point she is the watchful one. Set in the early seventies, her childhood is underscored by a mounting restlessness within her small family. Feminism is percolating at a low boil in Celestial Creek and Lisa's mum finds its call in the most unconventional context: an affair with a lesbian hairdresser called Loretta (love the alliteration) that culminates in
her exodus and the keystone of the novel's plot. Lisa learns to live in the shadow of small town scandal and has to manage her passage from child to woman without her mother. But because the tone of the story is so upbeat we rarely feel shredded by sorrow or even loneliness. Lisa is rarely alone. If she is not having perfunctory teenage sex with her first lover or observing her brother's crush on his first cousin, then she is painting her bedroom ceiling sky blue or eating more bad country food with an artless and faintly whimsical relish with her Aunty Marg. It is within this sunlit, simple, parochial world that Hurley seems most comfortable. Part One of the novel is set in the country, in girlhood. A girlhood marked by bemused boredom "The girls I read about usually lived in great cities and went to ballet schools, chalet schools, pantomimes and ice-skating lessons. On a Sunday in Celestial Creek my choice of entertainment was to go out yabbying or stay home and play pool in the front bar."
Part two is set in Melbourne. where Lisa gets a job, studies, lives
in a boarding house and has highly comic (if stilted) contact with a haute middle class family who play tennis, discuss Diane Arbus and have a private box at the races
The Porter family, for all their urbane affectations come across as the most cardboard characters in this book, it's as if the author (and Lisa the narrator) never quite acquires a taste for them. Like lost extras from a David Williamson play they drift through the plot making the crowd back at the Railway Hotel look more and more attractive.It doesn't take a wild guess to predict where Lisa will end up, and unlike a Jane Austen novel, even the prospect of a rich young suitor and a posh terrace house does little to loosen her roots from arid country soil. The threads in this novel sometimes ramble but rarely knot. Lisa's mother is at the end of one thread, distant and faintly glamorous on the Gold Coast. Lisa's future is at the end of another, unpainted and untold. The strongest ties though prove to be family who give Lisa her anchor on the longest possible rope to shore. The word saga indicates a tale told over time, yet this novel does not sprawl like a saga. Where the book might have indulged in more danger or drama, say a delinquent brother or an abortion or two, the tale continues to come clean. Lisa does not get stuck in a cycle of blame, a marsh of depression or even her own flirtation with lesbian love. Instead she remains an old head on young shoulders, perhaps paying the price for the narcissism of her elders or simply paying homage to the very simple town where she was raised. I won't provide a spoiler for our heroine's final choice between Europe and running the pub, foppish James or gritty Rex. If this were a Jilly Cooper novel she might have indulged both. But Sue Hurley is nothing if not consistent. She loves her plainest creations and she tenderly paints the domestic details that help us all forge our own tenuous identities. Lost in the social minutae of old money Melbourne Lisa has an epiphany while looking at the dishes owned by a rich but very stealth family ..."Although they could afford whatever they wanted nothing at the porters place was new or modern..we'd eaten off dull green plates much plainer than aunty Marg's set of floral trimmed nor take....just one lunch and I'd already begun to sense that there were more shades of meaning to most topics than I'd known possible." Lisa's naiveté can sometimes come across as cloying but her common sense is lovely. It is possibly this more than any other quality in the book that roused my own nostalgia, for Shepard's Pie and meat and potatoes morality. If this novel was a cookbook it would be by Margaret Fulton and life: riven with disappointment, strength and joy, would be dealt out in dollops like like a pub lunch, fair square, satisfying and nothing too fancy.