The Mint Lawn

Gillian Mears (author)

Allen&Unwin, Australia: 1991; 298pp

ISBN: 1863730168

Genres: realistic fiction

Issues: abuse, family ,identity, relationships

Winner of the Australian/Vogel Literary Award, 1990.

‘The tattiness of my reassurance alarms me and the way he takes hope. Now I know I'm being like Cairo. My mother was just like this: quite absent from other people's sorrow, even that of her own three daughters. We still cry secretively, as if in deference to her more permanent absence. Our tongues curl around our sadness, the way hers once did.'

Clementine is twenty-five, living in the small country town where she grew up, married to her high-school music teacher. She is restless and discontented without really understanding why. Her husband now repulses her and she realises that her teenage passion should never have been allowed to follow the adult convention of marriage.

Her present is dominated by her past - mostly her memories of her mother, whom she loved but did not really understand. Cairo died before Clementine could get to know her as an adult and as a consequence her memories are a child's memories, dominated by a child's egocentric perceptions of the world. She remembers her mother's wild parties, thrown in an effort to bring drama, life and colour to the unchanging routine of small-town life. She remembers Cairo's string of hobbies, her determination to learn something new in a community without change. She remembers her parents fighting and her mother drinking. Is it inevitable that she should become the same? Is there some genetic inheritance from her mother that dictates Clementine's drinking, her infidelity, her restlessness? Or is she anchored here by a need to comfort her father, or a guilty sense of duty to her possessive husband, Hugh?

Very much a story about a woman's search for her identity, Gillian Mears' first novel is a beautifully crafted exploration of the mistaken beliefs and misguided loyalties that often shape our choices. In almost terse prose that creates images and emotions in the imagination by mere suggestion, Mears immerses the reader in Clementine's past and present in a way that leaves you urging her on to a more fulfilling future. You are caught between laughter at the often comical nature of Clementine's memories, and an urgent need for her to move forward, to free herself from the confines of her limited world.

Both moving and encouraging, this is well worth reading.