Sonia Orchard

Almost a decade ago, I read Sonia Orchard’s debut novel The Virtuoso (2008) which won the Indie Award for Best Debut Fiction. I was impressed, but it’s been a long time between novels, so I refreshed my memory of the theme from my review, to find that in this new novel — though the plot is entirely different — once again it’s a case of a friendship that sours…
Lara is a thirty-something high-achiever about to become a mother for the first time when she visits the surviving family of her best friend Alice, a year after Alice died in a house fire. Lara is devastated by this loss, even though their long-term friendship was as good as over.
That friendship originated in a shared view of the world, nourished by the feminist ideals they aspired to after completing Women’s Studies at the University of Melbourne in the 1990s. But plans to travel the world together and ‘have it all’ fell apart when Alice opted to keep an unplanned baby and in her early twenties took up an ‘earth mother’ lifestyle in the bush. With the charismatic musician Crow she has two more children, and the gulf between her life and Lara’s widens as Lara takes off around the world and builds her career.
It was nostalgia for the shared good times that sustained continued contact — and Orchard writes brilliantly about the hectic lifestyle they had, following Crow’s band and partying hard.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/03/05/into-the-fire-by-sonia-orchard/… (mais)

True confessions time: I have had Sonia Orchard’s The Virtuoso on my TBR for a while, but I had forgotten about that when I borrowed it as an audio book last term…And then to make matters worse, I forgot to blog it or journal it, until this week when I saw it mentioned as a possible contender for the Miles Franklin Award. Oh the guilt!

It is a very good first novel indeed. It’s yet another story of obsessive love (I’ve seem to have read a few of these lately!), based very loosely on the life of the Australian concert pianist Noel Mewton-Wood (1922-1953), and an (entirely fictional) nameless young music student who adores him. They meet in London in 1945, when concerts go on in defiance of the Blitz and, war notwithstanding, there is still a bohemian scene which encompasses a sophisticated homosexual milieu (even though homosexuality was illegal and risky). Before long Mewton-Wood and the student are lovers, but the passion of the affair is not entirely mutual; the student doesn’t understand that Mewton-Wood has other lovers and that his overwhelming passion is for his music. The student is not a reliable narrator; he thinks he’s much more important to Mewton-Wood than he really is and his devotion makes him completely blind to Mewton-Wood’s occasional cruel mockery. This is partly because he’s naive, but his account is also coloured by the fact that he drinks too much, and that his fantasy about the significance of the affair is influenced by his own desire to be part of Mewton-Wood’s circle.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2010/05/02/virtuoso-by-sonia-orchard-read-by-humphrey-b...… (mais)