Cate Kennedy on ‘The World Beneath’
- Nick Terrell
The World Beneath – Cate Kennedy
Scribe. 352 pages. $Au 32.95
Sandy, Rich and Sophie have been living in the world beneath for the past 15 years.
For Sandy and Rich it’s been a time of self-involvement and stasis. After meeting during the Franklin River blockade, the pair returned to the mainland and for nearly ten years shared a carefree life in the small country town of Ayersville. Then Sophie was born, and while Sandy had seemed to be putting down roots, Rich had begun to feel himself “seething with restlessness.”
Spooked by a vision of himself as a middle-aged buffoon, marooned in Ayersville, Rich gathers up his passport and abandons his family. Sandy is left to raise Sophie alone while Rich travels the globe as a freelance photographer.
Growing up in the long wake of Rich’s absence, and guided by a teenager’s eye for her mother’s every weakness, Sophie has developed a general disappointment with her parents’ world - “so horrible, and so messed up, you couldn’t stand it.” Behind her dark eye make-up and her blunt, dyed black fringe, she strives to be “self-contained, self-sustaining.”
Perhaps regrets are beginning to tell – for Sophie’s fifteenth Birthday, Rich is no longer content with a phone-call and card. To give himself an opportunity to get to know his only child, he proposes a six day hike through the Tasmanian wilderness.
The World Beneath begins in a comic and satirical vein then gradually moves into deeper emotional waters. Over the years, Sandy and Rich have been bent out of shape by the weight of insecurities they can’t face up to and apprehensions they can’t quell. “Like a bound foot forced into a constricting shoe,” suggests Kennedy, “these characters are unable to take a free, unanalysed step into their future.” It is at times amusing, rewarding and provoking – Cate Kennedy kindly answered my questions about the novel.
NT - You mentioned somewhere else that The World Beneath started as a short story but you found you weren’t finished with the characters, or they weren’t finished with you, and let the story play out. What was the starting point – was it a particular character?
CK - Actually what I said was that this story was never a short story, although sometimes characters in short stories seem to stay with me after the story’s finished. My starting point for this one was the dynamic of the relationship between the three – such a dysfunctional triangle, and all so caught in the stasis which is preventing them from moving on – particularly Rich and Sandy. It wasn’t exactly that they were asking to be filled out, more that I saw the potential for having them collide with something which was going to shift them whether they liked it or not. It does seem to me that people don’t ‘change’ voluntarily, any more than they reveal what is really at stake for them. I wanted to find something which they were holding onto, like a precious, burnished memory, and force the circumstances which would demand a reassessment.
NT - The possibility of righting oneself - of waking up, growing up, or shedding a skin - is a great source of hope in The World Beneath. In the context of the novel, the prospect of this hopeful and positive outcome seems to balance out the satirical treatment you give the characters to begin with. Do you see satire, or the critical attitude that underlies it, as necessarily having a positive, corrective role?
CK - I was concerned with portraying this possibility of hope seriously. My intention was to present the kinds of characters it was easy at first for the reader to dismiss as two-dimensional, then slowly chip away at what’s driving them until we begin to see more dimension, until we begin, in fact, to feel a little chastened that we have dismissed them so readily as stereotypes. Because that’s what I find happens with real people in real life – it’s easy to make quick assumptions but harder to find them forgivable, fallible, worthy of compassion. So I don’t see satire per se as having a corrective role, no. I’m more interested in creating that push and pull in a reader’s mind which mirrors the flux of the characters’ minds as they veer between self-loathing and self-awareness.
NT - Do you think satire has to come from some moral starting point or can it come from a pure critical instinct for wrong-headedness and pretense? Where does your satirical intent come from?
CK - I guess testing the boundary of how ‘likeable’ a character has to be for a reader to identify with him or her. I have a theory that you don’t have to like them, you just have to understand what’s at stake for them so that you can see clearly why they are doing what they’re doing. It’s more a test of the reader’s empathy than an obligation of the writer to create someone so neutral and anodyne that they won’t offend anybody. I suppose I’m interested, too, in why a reader is so discomforted by a character who is clearly unpleasant, hapless or wilfully deluded. To me their limitations make me more engaged as a reader, because I want to see those limitations come up hard against what’s waiting for them down the track.
NT - Are the character flaws of Sandy and Rich broadly relevant to a particular generation, or are they common human flaws which you are depicting via the trappings of their time?
CK - Well, they’re precisely my own generation, and by that I mean people who were children in the sixties, teenagers in the seventies, in their twenties in the eighties, etc. We’ve reached the new millennium in our forties, and a lot of us seem adrift, trying to tackle midlife with our particular set of experiences and trappings. The character flaws you mention stem from my reluctant awareness of two tendencies that seem to loom large for my generation: denial and narcissism. These probably are common human flaws, and possibly a third flaw is blaming other agencies for our failings, like relentless advertising (“because you’re worth it”, etc) conspicuous consumption, etc., (it seems almost instinctive to find elaborate, watertight excuses for these behaviours) but basically while we’re preoccupied with making ourselves the centre of the universe while strenuously denying it, it does seem to me we’re mired in the same bog as these characters.
NT - As a kind of representative, dysfunctional family unit in an affluent, developed middle-class society, Sandy, Sophie and Rich are clearly on the wrong track in their lives for most of the novel. Did you have in mind what the right track might be like?
CK - I don’t have the answer for what the right track is, but I hope the novel suggests that cynicism isn’t the answer any more than unquestioning credulity is. The track out of there, I hope, belongs to Sophie – finding compassion despite your disappointment, seeing fallibility but also seeing it’s forgivable and human, finding a balance to address reality rather than your preferred version of it. I guess there’s something there, too, about people seeing each other more clearly when they’re authentically put to the test, rather than just theorising about it. We don’t really know what someone’s made of until things go wrong, and in an affluent, commodified, emotionally timid world it’s possible to go a long time without experiencing this.
NT - The involvement of Ian Millard, Sandy’s Search and Rescue contact, opens up quite a different mental space - was it a risk to introduce a new vantage towards the end of the novel, or was that new vantage necessary through these climactic stages?
CK - The problem with staying inside the heads of the three major characters was their limited understanding of what was going on, obviously. They’re all driven by some fairly major agendas and self-involved expectations. The introduction of Ian – someone whose point of view is unfettered by the limitations of the main characters - is a chance for the reader to ‘pull back’ and have a clear-eyed break from the constrictions of the others. Ian, importantly, is not caught up in dysfunction and the interpersonal action/reaction of damaged people. His motives are uncomplicated – as a writer this came as a relief. I also wanted the final scene in the Labyrinth to be related through the eyes of someone without the insider knowledge of what was going on implicitly between the characters – this knowledge belongs only to Rich and Sophie and the reader. I kind of like that dynamic, of the reader being privy to something the current narrator doesn’t fully comprehend.
NT - The elemental scale, the wilderness, the storm, and the extreme circumstances that so thoroughly challenge the characters’ ideas about their own capabilities set off a lot of epic and mythic resonances. Were you drawing on that tradition deliberately?
CK - These resonances are all intentional, so that the story becomes a sort of contemporary reimagining of classical myth. There’s lots there if you’re interested in that kind of thing (I didn’t want the reader’s enjoyment of the book to be diminished, though, if they weren’t familiar with these myths). There’s echoes of Persephone, Euridice, Narcissus, Achilles, Hades – you name it. I tried to be pretty playful with this to avoid portentousness – the goth stuff, the trickster crows, the descent into the Labyrinth, etc – but it’s there if you want to see it, and of course the place names in that part of Tasmania are all about Greek myth as well.
My main reason was to draw on the notion of the Underworld, because of course the Greek concept of ‘hell’ wasn’t about eternal torture and torment, but rather drifting around in a semi-conscious haze, never connecting, never remembering, living a kind of half-life…here was the great contemporary analogy, to me, of the cost of denial and narcissism.
NT - When Sophie realises how exploitative Rich’s attitude to the wilderness really is, her soft laughter reveals a “wise and terrible sadness.” Is Rich here judging himself through Sophie’s eyes? Or is Sophie’s “wise and terrible sadness” a narrated fact that Rich has just come to recognise? Is Sophie’s generation - growing up with cynicism about ideology and causes, blessed and cursed with justifiably low-expectations of human behaviour – simply right, in a way that Rich and Sandy never have been?
CK - Hmm – I guess it’s just Rich’s recognition of the fact that she’s seen through him, and can see his fervent justifications for what they are. And yes, on a deeper level, perhaps each generation can see that everything they most rail against in their children has in some way been something that they themselves have caused and created. (I always find it strange when parents, for example, criticise their children’s values, or lack of direction, or acquisitiveness, or whatever, when they have been directly responsible for nurturing those values.) When I wrote it I wanted to show that Rich has really reached rock-bottom, in losing any respect Sophie might have had for him, and hearing this clearly in her response. He’s just feeling, finally, what he’s been lacking – shame.
NT - Being right in this way is a sad thing for a 14 year old. Does Sophie’s anorexia, aside from reflecting an assertion of control, carry the broader implication of a lack or refusal of appetite, in reaction to the expansive selfish indulgences of her parents?
CK - Not really, although that’s an interesting response. Maybe as an analogy for enthusiasm and passion, both of which seem uncool now for many teenagers to dare to exhibit. I did intend this to portray a desire for control, but now I come to think of it, I like the way she sort of rediscovers a ‘hunger’ for staying alive in the story.
NT - The way technology nurtures a consumer mindset and encourages people to mediate or ‘capture’ their experiences is a recurring theme in the novel. For me this was epitomised, perhaps, by Rich’s recollection of struggling, in the midst of genuine awe at a sky-burial, with an urge to capture the moment in a picture. Do you think it’s possible to separate the fascination with extremes and the exotic (be it macabre, animal realities or inspiring scenic beauty) from the industry that feeds off this desire?
CK -What interests me is not whether it’s justifiable or exotic or thrilling, but why we do it, and a million things like it, in the first place. Why do we need to travel to remote places at all? What’s driving us to push into unexplored territory, demand novelty all the time, pay an industry to pander to our whim to ‘experience’ Antarctica or remote rainforests? I don’t think it is possible to separate the fascination with the industry, at present. They’re there because of our demand. I tend to think it’s part of our compulsive need for confirmation of our specialness, for seeking something exterior to ourselves to fill the vacuum of our own jaded doubt and boredom. To me the epitome of this idea is not Rich’s visit to the sky burial, but his inability to walk through the wilderness without framing each new vista as a potential photograph. His experience of it has become so circumscribed that he can’t separate what’s actually there, now, with what it will look like as a recorded image.
NT - Some reviewers have picked out the descriptive sequences in the Tasmanian wilderness as a highlight and the highpoint of your writing – what is it that makes the distinction between your use of wild landscapes and the kind of wilderness-porn Rich aspires to sell to travel magazines and camping companies?
CK - If my rendering of a landscape feels powerful enough for reviewers to mention it, that’s great – I find it a bit hard to believe that’s akin to producing “wilderness porn”. My rationale for ‘using’ a wild landscape in this story is to make characters unable to commodify it or shape it to their own ends, as they can in their usual comfort zones. The landscape is implacable, it won’t bend itself to their expectations or desires. Any natural landscape can teach you this – you won’t win. In fact, you’ll even start querying why you set out to ‘win’ in the first place. So all your assumptions, vanities, illusions and grandiosities are thrown into relief once you ‘pit yourself’ against the natural world. This seemed a logical place for Rich to get to, given his arrogance – take him somewhere where his arrogance is worthless. I didn’t want to humanise wilderness either – just bring humans down to their real ‘unenhanced’ scale when they find themselves lost in it.
Tourism, necessarily, mediates this experience for us, so we miss out on this awareness, and see the wilderness as manageable and controllable and something human enterprise has tamed for our comfort and convenience. But it seems to me this stands in the way of understanding the humbling fact that we’re fundamentally powerless, tiny and inconsequential in the greater scheme of things. We’re all losing that lesson, and the insight that comes with it. Give us an unmediated experience, and we’re floundering. That’s no way to face the future.
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