The Long Prospect

 

 

 

 

 

 

ELIZABETH HARROWER
was born in Sydney in 1928 but her family soon relocated to Newcastle, where she lived until she was eleven.

In 1951 Harrower moved to London. She travelled extensively and began to write fiction. Her first novel,
Down in the City
, was published in 1957 and was followed by
The Long Prospect
a year later. In 1959 she returned to Sydney, where she began working for the ABC and as a book reviewer for the
Sydney Morning Herald
. In 1960 she published
The Catherine Wheel
, the story of an Australian law student in London, her only novel not set in Sydney.
The Watch Tower
appeared in 1966. Between 1961 and 1967 she worked in publishing, for Macmillan.

Harrower published no more novels, though she continued to write short fiction. Her work is austere, intelligent, ruthless in its perceptions about men and women. She was admired by many of her contemporaries, including Patrick White and Christina Stead, and is without doubt among the most important writers of the postwar period in Australia.

Elizabeth Harrower lives in Sydney.

FIONA McGREGOR
is the author of five books, her most recent novel
Indelible Ink
winning the
Age
Book of the Year award. She writes essays and reviews, and is working on another novel. She is internationally known as a performance artist, completing the epic
Water Series
at Artspace, Sydney, in 2011.
fionamcgregor.com

ALSO BY ELIZABETH HARROWER

Down in the City

The Catherine Wheel

The Watch Tower

 

textclassics.com.au

textpublishing.com.au

The Text Publishing Company

Swann House

22 William Street

Melbourne Victoria 3000

Australia

Copyright © Elizabeth Harrower 1958

Introduction copyright © Fiona McGregor 2012

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published by Cassell & Company, London 1958

This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

Cover design by WH Chong

Page design by Text

eBook production by
Midland Typesetters
, Australia

Primary print ISBN: 9781922079480

Ebook ISBN: 9781921961762

Author: Harrower, Elizabeth, 1928–

Title: The long prospect / by Elizabeth Harrower ;

introduction by Fiona McGregor.

Series: Text classics

Dewey Number: A823.3

 

CONTENTS

 

INTRODUCTION

Aces from Hell

by Fiona McGregor

 

The Long Prospect

 

‘THE front door of Thea's flat was ajar so Lilian gave it a push and went in, her eyes on swivels.' So begins Elizabeth Harrower's second novel,
The Long Prospect
, first published in 1958. It is an auspicious invitation, hinting at malice and incursion, morbid curiosity and humour. Lilian, little despot of a little world, barges through the lives of all the characters, setting traps and settling scores. Counterpointing her destruction is the coming-to-life of her granddaughter Emily, neglected by all but Thea and later Max, at different times Lilian's boarders. The industrial seaside town of Ballowra, a fictionalised Newcastle, is the setting.

Harrower's writing is devastating. The prose is exact, spiky, a chiaroscuro of dread pace and bright voice. You laugh and cringe at the same time. The psychological precision is relentless. It's like watching keyhole surgery: Harrower's gaze is so penetrating you can feel her looking through the pages, down the years, at us. And she is.

Snooping into the novel with Lilian in the first pages, we learn that Thea has a lover, Max, but he is married. Thea boarded with Lilian for eleven years before moving into her own flat, that interwar symbol of scarily independent youth, particularly for women. ‘I thought I'd come and have a look at your
flat
,' Lilian announces weightily when Thea catches her eavesdropping, as though it is an equal transgression. Vexed by the loss of control of Thea and without a man of her own (‘if you had any spirit you had to battle with them, belittle them, and learn to enjoy it'), Lilian delights in Max being Catholic and unable to leave his wife for Thea.

Years later, when Lilian gets the opportunity to offer Max a room on his return to work at the steelworks, the stage is set for her to weave another of her wicked webs. Others around her, like Rosen, her hapless lover-cum-boarder acquired after Thea's departure, are bent on their own petty revenges. Cameos like Billie, drawn as savagely as a German expressionist portrait, complete the gallery. Chance delivers Lilian some aces from Hell, and she plays them like the devil.

Emily Lawrence observes all with the raw clarity of a child. Her mother, Paula, a petit-bourgeois remittance woman, was packed off to Sydney by Lilian due to marital discord. At different times from their different abodes Paula and her husband, Harry, drift into Ballowra to perform parental duty in a less-than-cursory fashion. Society is not impervious to the unconventional arrangement; Emily even loses a friend over it. She is ambivalent when her father visits. ‘Just the same, it was immensely embarrassing to have a stranger as an intimate relation,' is the tart observation. Emily is as thin-skinned as her parents and grandmother are thick-skinned, but is intent on survival, too fierce for self-pity. Her isolation is terrible; she can be arch, manipulative, utterly self-absorbed in the way of a child. But she learns.

 

There are moments of reprieve. In one hysterical scene, Lilian takes Emily out of school for the day so they can go to the pictures and have an afternoon tea party. Lilian entertains her with song. ‘And Emily pressed her to tell again how, if she had not had her tonsils removed at the age of eighteen, she might have been another Melba...“You owe your life to my tonsils,” she said, and then she sang some more.'

Lilian makes the sort of remarks that today's psychotherapists spend years addressing. When Emily is bereft at Thea's departure, Lilian goads, ‘her interest sharpening as...Emily began to cry...“That's right! Cry, cry cry! Your bladder's too near your eyes, that's what's wrong with you, Emily Lawrence. No wonder she wouldn't stay to say goodbye. I don't know who would.”' The cruelty is dreadful, and incessant.

It is no surprise that Emily falls for Max when he comes to board. By now she has survived twelve years of bullying and humiliation at the hands of her sadistic grandmother. Love-starved, she has already had crushes on a teacher, Miss Bates, and Thea, and when Max treats her with respect, including her in discussions about literature and science, it is enough to send Emily to the moon.

Emily and Max had taken up a dialogue that had no end, leaning across the table like antagonists—Max speaking slowly, listening, watching her, smiling and sending up clouds of smoke, Emily, serious, blotting up facts, ideas, and more than anything, a manner of thinking.

Leaning back in his chair when Emily had carried one of the ideas he had thrown forward to a triumphant conclusion, he would say, ‘Perhaps. But look at it from this angle, Em...'

And she would be, at the same time, dashed and fascinated to see the many, many angles to the problem, the ifs and buts and qualifications without which no answer was possible.

For his part, Max endures a trial by mob. Hounded by Lilian's sanctimonious cabal, subjected to moral opprobrium for his friendship with Emily, he is proof that mere gossip wreaks ample damage.

Harrower moves through the terrain of prepubescent love unencumbered by prurience and sentimentality. Her formal studies in psychology are evident; she is an expert in human behaviour, and her analysis of it underpins everything. Yet the writing is aflame with emotion arising from the characters' quests and ordeals. And we are always aware of the author's service to her craft. Harrower is, as the cliché has it, a writer's writer.

 

The Long Prospect
survives the decades also for its evocation of place and time. The ACIL steelworks, where Thea and Max work, belches black smoke across the pages, its ‘shuddering machinery' punctuating Lilian and Thea's conversation in the fateful opening scene. Always beyond is the glittering ocean. This is the Australian coast in summer: ‘The vast sky of a vast unmisted land shone bright and hard in the light of the afternoon sun.'

I've read critiques of Harrower's work as an exposé of misogyny, but that is reductive, if not defensive. Her women can be as sadistic as her men, her men as dignified as her women. What she exposes is the will to power. Its politics, its battles, its terrible atrocities rage within the domestic realm—and the world remains indifferent. People get up and keep going, scarred and flayed, their comrades pretending nothing has happened. ‘People simply existed and things happened to them for no reason,' Paula thinks, with more profundity than perhaps even she recognises.

Here is another myth to be scotched: that we revisit books as often as restaurants. Rubbish. We don't have the time. But I have reread
The Long Prospect
a couple of times, and I keep finding new insights, finely faceted as jewels, packed into its sentences. I keep laughing and cringing. I notice another masterly fold in the structure. Its conclusion is both tragic and a merciful escape—it is an ending of ashes, like that of Harrower's later novel
The Watch Tower,
from which a phoenix may arise.