On
atonement
Paul Bourke
Joe Cinque’s Consolation, Helen Garner. Picador, 2004. ISBN 0 330 36497 9, RRP $30
Joe Cinque died on Sunday, 26 October 1997 after being administered a
massive dose of Rohypnol and heroin by his girlfriend, Anu Singh, on Saturday.
It took him all weekend to die. Others, including Singh’s friend
Madhavi Rao, who was also initially charged with murder, knew of a murder-suicide
plan. They provided Singh with money, heroin, injecting lessons and dosage
advice and, quite possibly, the nerve to proceed with at least the murder
part of the plan. Only one person confronted Singh prior to Joe Cinque’s
death but was reassured that Singh no longer intended to harm him. In
Joe Cinque’s Consolation, Helen Garner guides us through a
Chronicle of a Death Foretold set in a Canberra depicted as a nihilistic
wasteland.
Garner confronts any similarities between this case and The First Stone head on. She has again written about a man and two female law students caught up in the legal process. Garner documents the beginning of her emotional involvement in the story and her developing commitment to writing about it. In a disturbing opening, Garner has again used a transcript presented as evidence to the court, this time of an emergency call made by Anu Singh on the day of Joe Cinque’s death. Singh was eventually convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter and Rao acquitted. The court had heard evidence from various psychiatric experts to the effect that Singh had been suffering from a major depressive illness or borderline personality disorder with narcissistic features. Eerily, Joe Cinque’s voice was inadvertently recorded on an answering machine tape at about 10:30pm on the night before he died. The tape was tendered in evidence during proceedings. Only Joe Cinque’s blurred and disembodied voice remained, like Narcissus’s original Echo: ‘... Anu’s worried for nothing!’
It appears Garner has anticipated a backlash comparable to that which followed publication of The First Stone. She has captured a groundswell of public feeling against lenient sentencing and the rights of victims and their families. This is uncomfortable territory for many of us, shared as it is by ‘unseemly’ public displays of grief and anger, together with reactionary elements. Reading Joe Cinque’s Consolation itself is a discomfiting experience. The facts swirl elusively, derived from one aborted trial and two further trials, imperfect memory, witnesses keen to forget whatever role they played and others bludgeoned by the legal process.
Garner has further honed her technique since The First Stone. The characters and incidents described mediate the story and permit different, sometimes astonishing, perspectives. Joe Cinque’s mother dominates the book through sheer force of personality, her suffering and rage. Her moral authority is in no way lessened by her desire for greater retribution. Garner seems to shrink in Mrs Cinque’s presence, on one occasion literally not knowing where to put herself. Her relationship with the Cinques manages to leaven the grim story, although their level of suffering clearly shocked her. It is a simple, devastating story for the Cinques: their son was killed. It is a hideously complex story for the Singhs and the rest of us: their daughter killed Joe Cinque.
The book has that mystery at its heart. Garner grapples with both the
mystery and her own clearly identified prejudices. She is unable to explain
why Joe Cinque was killed and why nothing was done to stop it. She can
provide no response as to what the legal outcome should have been, particularly
when confronted with the compassion of the trial judge, Justice Ken Crispin.
Garner has not simply raised issues of justice from the point of view
of Joe Cinque’s destroyed family. Neither is the book just about
restoring his reputation, threatened at one stage during court proceedings.
Garner is interested in the concept of atonement. How can a guilty person
live with a crime for which they have not properly atoned? There may be
a moral duty where there is no legal duty of care, and the legal concept
of diminished responsibility may even permit
the perpetrator to claim a share of victimhood.
Many of us would still prefer to live in a country with a judiciary capable of exercising compassion as opposed to elected judges expected to apply the death penalty or mandatory sentencing. There is room for judicial discretion in sentencing which should include empathy for the victims, as well as for the mostly unspecified need of the criminal for atonement. As Anu Singh launches her own career based on the circumstances of Joe Cinque’s death, Mrs Cinque’s question seems unanswerable: ‘How am I supposed, Your Honour, to go on?’ Garner was unable to provide Mrs Cinque with any direct consolation and is scathing at her own inadequacy in this respect. She has, however, provided us with a glimpse of Joe Cinque’s face, given him substance and reaffirmed his human dignity. He is no longer a mere echo.
Paul Bourke is a lawyer.
With true love showers
Kirsty Sangster
Ophelia’s Fan: A story about dreams, Shakespeare and love, Christine Balint. Allen & Unwin, 2004.ISBN 1 741 14444 2, RRP $22.95 Allen & Unwin, 2004. ISBN 1 741 14382 9, RRP $24.95.
Ophelia’s Fan is the second novel by the young, prize-winning
Australian author Christine Balint. In it, she explores the life of 
Harriet
Smithson, the Shakespearean actress and wife of the romantic composer
Hector Berlioz. Berlioz was inspired to write his most famous symphony,
the Symphonie Fantastique after seeing Smithson performing the roles of
Ophelia and Juliet on stage at the Theatre Odeon in Paris.
Beautifully written, Balint’s novel has captured well the life of the Irish actress Harriet Smithson and in particular gives the reader a vivid sense of what it must have been like to be a woman of the stage in 19th-century England and France. We see the whole precarious nature of the theatre, its fickleness and cruelty, and how rapidly the fortunes of the actors can rise and then fall. As working women, female actors were associated in the public mind as being almost dangerous and akin to prostitutes. Men often treated them as such, and Harriet Smithson had to fight hard to preserve her ‘honour’. She must deal with a series of suitors, who want her not for a wife but as a mistress.
The choice of a non-linear narrative style, has allowed Balint to move seamlessly in and out of Harriet’s life as a child and as an adult. We see her growing up in the green sodden landscape of County Clare and enter into her dream life as a solitary and creative child who was born already play-acting Shakespearean drama. We see her as a young woman who is forced to work in order to support her family and we follow her through the drudgery of line learning and performance—night after night after night. Her own life-story is interspersed with the stories of those women whose lives she performed: Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona. Juliet comes to life when she speaks, ‘When I look back upon this night I like to pause here, for this was the last hour of my contentment. My life was a straight line, the past still visible and the future an unwavering road into the distance, uncluttered, uncomplicated and whole …’. The past and the present merge and what is dream, reality, fact or fiction in Harriet Smithson’s difficult life becomes hard to discern.
Balint’s lyrical and sensitive prose also awakens us to the near hysteria of the burgeoning Romantic movement in 19th-century Paris. As an artistic community, the Romantics were not known for their restraint. The French Romantics—Berlioz, Victor Hugo, the artist Delacroix—could certainly not be described as tame. In direct reaction to the cool-headedness and clarity of the Enlightenment, these men went all out to live passionate lives that reflected their art. It was the time of the birth of Artist as Hero. It was almost a requirement for a ‘real’ artist to be seen falling in love, fighting duels, having affairs, climbing mountains and poisoning rival suitors. Without such experiences, it was believed that the creative spark could not really exist. The artistic dictum was: ‘not Rule but direct Reaction to Feeling’.
As one of the leaders of the movement, Hector Berlioz appears to have embodied the whole Romantic sentiment. Berlioz’s life and his art merge into one vast obsession after seeing Harriet Smithson perform her Juliet and Ophelia. Balint describes well the way in which Berlioz mistakes Harriet Smithson for Ophelia. Ophelia, who trails in and out of scenes with straw through her dishevelled hair and whose voice can be heard faintly singing: ‘larded with sweet flowers;/ Which beswept to the grave did go/With true-love showers’. Berlioz falls in love not with the woman but instead with the mad, frail and above all tragic figures that she portrays on stage.
The role of beautiful women as muse for the male artist is not a particularly appealing one. Berlioz wears down Harriet Smithson’s lack of interest in him by sheer force of will and attentiveness. Yet he very quickly loses interest in her once she has finally agreed to marry him. A muse must remain unattainable. Once attained she can be discarded like one of Ophelia’s dead flowers. Berlioz went on to marry several times over.
In this novel, Christine Balint has skilfully recreated the life and voice of Smithson, who was lauded as one of the most accomplished Shakespearean actresses of her time. With a high degree of historical accuracy, Balint has coloured in the background to Smithson’s life and exposed the poverty and degradation that lay beneath the Romantic façade. Harriet Smithson may have been the muse who inspired Berlioz’s most celebrated symphony but she herself dies in obscurity and misery. She goes the way of many women who have been courted and captured by artistic genius.
Kirsty Sangster is a poet. Her book Midden Places will be published this year by Black Pepper press.
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