Night Street
by Kristel Thornell
Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2012
239 pp. $19:95
Night Street by Australian Kristel Thornell has already won a clutch of prizes including The Australian/Vogel Literary Award from its 2010 publication. Goose Lane Editions now makes it available in a Canadian edition. The novel is a fictional account of the life of Clarice Beckett (1887-1935), a Melbourne artist.
Thornell was captivated by Beckett’s work when she saw it in the Art Gallery of South Australia. Beckett is known for her landscapes, and Thornell takes the work to help her fashion a life for Beckett, one that is invented. As Thornell says in the Author’s Note, “I attempted to ‘look’ at Beckett as she might have looked at a landscape, squinting to soften edges and reach beyond detail in the search for patterns of light and shade.”
Beckett’s work was unseen for a long time, but she is now revered as one of the great Australian modernists, and Thornell uses the experimentation expressed in the paintings and spills it over into the imagined life of the artist. To that end Thornell makes Clarice Beckett and utterly driven woman who eschewed a conventional life of marriage and children and devoted herself to art. She did not, however, reject love and sex, and her love affairs are supposed to show her individuality and independence as both men were married.
The romances are the least interesting aspects of the novel and tend to lead to self-reflexive melodramatic dialogue, such as “I love you so much I hate you.” When Thornell sticks to art or description of landscape, she is on firm ground. When she switches to emotions other than the love of art, things get a bit sticky. For example, when a girl Clarice barely knows is murdered, Clarice ponders her death and connects it to her brother’s suicide: “She saw that Jean’s death and Paul’s were connected. They were the same, because one death is really all deaths—is Death.” Clarice is given to pronouncements about a variety of subjects, and her attitudes are not endearing.
But making her endearing is clearly not Thornell’s purpose. The author is trying to lay bare what makes this fictional artist tick at a time when women were supposed to follow a prescribed path. The most arresting parts of the novel have to do with Clarice’s insistence on developing her own artistic way, to the extent of building a portable painting box to wheel her materials outside and paint away from the disapproving glare of her father. Thornell also excels at showing how diminishing family fortunes affect Clarice’s life.
Night Street does a luminous job of showing how important the ocean is to Clarice, and how much her life is shaped by her commitment to painting even to the extent of jeopardizing her health. The cover of the book features a detail from Wet Evening by the historical Claris Beckett, and it is a tempting tease, prompting a desire to see more of Clarice Beckett’s work.
Congratulations Alecia, job well done!!
Keep writing…. you just never know….your next novel could very well turn into a movie!! You can do it so continue writing!
Take care,
Grace
Alpharetta, Georgia, USA