 Andrea Goldsmith’s latest novel has a deceptively simple theme, but it’s rich in complexity, says Andrew Shaw.For anyone about to read Andrea Goldsmith’s latest novel, Reunion, the spectre of her late partner, the poet Dorothy Porter, must loom large. Porter died in December last year, and Goldsmith’s story of friends reuniting includes illness and death, as well as the affairs and artistic ups and downs of a Melbourne writer. Clearly aware of readers taking an autobiographical slant on Reunion, Goldsmith includes an afterword to say that throughout its production Porter was healthy and undiagnosed with the illness that claimed her. It was written, then, in happier times. Reunion is about friendship, and presents in complex detail the motivations and actions of a group of old friends and the changed landscapes of their relationships after two decades apart. Jack is a scholar of Islam, Ava a successful novelist; Helen is a molecular biologist and Connie a TV philosopher – an Australian Alain de Botton. All four met at university and live in Melbourne, but their main bond now is that they are inaugural fellows of the Network of Global Australians (NOGA), an increasingly powerful group of scientists, researchers and scholars founded and tightly controlled by Ava’s husband, Harry Guerin. A late-comer to the group (he meets them doing post-grad at Oxford), Harry used to be treated with derision, mocked. But in the interim his power over them has grown through NOGA. This is despite his inherent unlikeability: Harry’s a cold pragmatist, married into a circle of idealists and dreamers. The reunion has its complications – past crushes and flings, including a passionate lesbian affair, threaten to flare again. Friendship, Goldsmith seems to be saying, is in constant flux: Jack’s unrequited love for Ava, Helen’s suspicion that Harry, through NOGA, is steering her work on shigella and other deadly bugs towards some darker purpose, Connie’s dissatisfaction with Australian life – these strands are interwoven to show the effect that ambition, ethics and ultimately death can have on the lives of friends. Although a peripheral character, Harry Guerin is Goldsmith’s most complex creation – a moral cipher. His undisclosed ambitions for NOGA’s vast repository of influence, his drive for power, his need to control the careers of his wife’s friends, makes him a grey man, a loner, someone outside friendship’s realm. Goldsmith never explicitly states that Harry is channelling NOGA’s power into corporate and/or military hands. But if global networks like NOGA attempt in some way to imitate true friendship groups, artificially created to serve specific ends, they contrast with the genuine friendships between Goldsmith’s characters, with all their messiness and pain. In this way, Reunion’s theme, on the face of it a simple one, becomes charged with complexity and depth. Reunion, 4th Estate (HarperCollins) 2009. Trade paperback, rrp $32.99.
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Friendship and loss
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