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In the opening pages of Disquiet, a young woman named Olivia comes home to her native France for the first time in twelve years, bringing her two children to see a grandmother whom they have never met. On the same day, Olivia’s brother Marcus also comes home, bringing back from the hospital his wife Sophie and a little pink-swathed bundle they have named Alice. In a kinder world, the ensuing reunion would be a cause for celebration, very much in keeping with the gay helium balloons that the servants have used to decorate the family château. However, the world as described by author Julia Leigh stands at a far remove from kindness; Olivia has been battered and abused by her “pig” husband, and the bundle named Alice is not at all a bundle of joy. Rather, it is the stillborn corpse of the couple’s long-hoped-for child, strangled by its umbilical cord during the delivery. Marcus and Sophie have brought the child’s body home with the intent “to get to know her before the funeral.” However, parting with the child proves far more difficult for Sophie than anyone has imagined. In this follow-up to her award-winning debut novel The Hunter, Julia Leigh is again at work with explosive materials. As she weaves her obsessively dark tale of infant death, spousal abuse, domestic violence, and adultery, tensions abound. And yet, thanks to the author’s remarkable restraint of emotion and tautness of language, these tensions seldom flare forth into full-blown conflagration. Instead, with architectural precision, the tensions build slowly upon one another, combining and recombining in a haunting drama of menace and obsession. As Olivia, most often referred to as “the woman,” strives to leave behind the oppression of her past, Marcus and Sophie struggle quietly against the unsupportable burdens of the present. As for Olivia’s affection-deprived children, known to readers mostly as “the boy” and “the girl,” life in the massive yet oddly claustrophobic château gradually resolves into a clandestine battle to escape the madness of their shattered family and to forge some kind of bearable future. Seen from one perspective, Leigh’s novella is a fearsome reflection on the pitfalls of maternity and the misery that can emerge when mothers love either too much or too little. From another viewpoint, the story explores the strange distortions that result when material wealth combines with emotional poverty. Seen yet again, Disquiet tells of an elemental struggle between the urge to live and the heart-stopping dread of what lies beyond and beneath our normal existence. In Leigh’s unforgettable, sparsely written tale, death is at once the most inescapable reality and the most impossible one to embrace.
A CONVERSATION WITH JULIA LEIGH Q. Disquiet is as remarkable for what it chooses not to say as what it does say; we learn very little, for instance, about Olivia’s marriage or about the earlier phases of the relationship between Marcus and Sophie. How did you decide which portions of your tale to elaborate and which to leave relatively blank? These kind of choices are largely made by instinct. I suppose I wanted to avoid any neat psychological explanation along the lines of “this happened therefore X.” We carry our past with us, inevitably, but in very subtle ways. Q. Your story has an atmosphere highly reminiscent of the mid-nineteenth century. One thinks, perhaps, of Poe or the Brontës. Yet details like electronic keypads and cell phones insistently remind us that Disquiet is a contemporary tale. Why did you choose to situate Disquiet in the present day instead of in some more distant period? I envisioned it as a contemporary tale, that’s how it came to me. I don’t have a particular interest in the Gothic tradition. That said, there’s an otherworldliness to the château. A strange sense of time or timelessness. The waking and sleeping rhythms of Olivia and the children have been thrown out by jet-lag. Olivia herself is in a liminal space, between life and death, outside of regular time. And grief destroys time—as Sophie comes to know. Still, there’s an urgent time-related question propelling the story, the time of bodily decay: when on earth will they bury the corpse? Q. Although you give names to Olivia’s family, you most often identify them more generically: “the woman”; “the boy”; “the girl.” Why do you use these identities instead of their names? There is a formality to terms like “the woman,” “the boy.” This lends a sense of authorial observation, distance, remove. It is well-suited to the château and its surrounding formal gardens, and to the formal social milieu. Q. When you created the château in which your story is set, did you have any particular place in mind? I did live in France for a few years, but I didn’t have a particular château in mind. I bought a book on an estate called Courances, outside of Paris, which served as a loose reference. I never actually visited the location. I also looked at images of gardens designed by André Le Nôtre. And yet, my choice of setting is crucial to the story. The unashamed artifice of the gardens, their cultivated perfection and mannerism, is mirrored in the masks of politesse worn by the members of the household. To maintain these gardens, to control the uncontrollable—that is, nature—is a demanding near-impossible task. In the garden the members of the household, each dealing with great loss (their “burnt hands” to paraphrase the epigraph), hold themselves together as they bear toward breaking. Even the language of the story is guided to some degree by a sense of artifice and austerity, the muted formality. There’s little attempt at strict naturalism. I wanted to heighten the realism. Q. Few genres run a greater risk than the Gothic tale of descending into a realm of predictability and cliché. What do you think enabled you to run this risk successfully in Disquiet? I like stories that grow organically and if this happens, if the movement comes from within, then there is less chance of predictability. Q. The title of your book is intriguing, not only in that it openly advertises the unsettling nature of the story, but also in that the word “disquiet” might be read as a negation of silence, both suggesting a void and rejecting it. How did you decide upon this title? It’s a strange thing—I have a document on my computer called “Jotting Things Down” where I note wonderful titles for unwritten works. . . . I guess they are turns of phrase which for some reason deeply appeal to me. But for each of my books, The Hunter and Disquiet, I’ve had a terrible time with titles. I didn’t have either title at the start of the writing process, not even at the end. I recall it was a last minute scramble to come up with Disquiet—which I do like, precisely for the reason suggested in the question, the hidden “quiet.” Instead of being guided by a title during the writing, I was guided by the epigraph, my talisman: “With my burnt hand I write about the nature of fire.” Q. For some writers of fiction, the work begins with an imagining of plot. For others, it begins with character. What foundations do you use when you start to construct a narrative? I genuinely find it impossible to recall the beginnings of the story, how it came together. It’s deeply mysterious—and I’m wary of disturbing that mystery. I feel a little like I wrote this story with my left hand. What I do know is that by the time I begin most of the key elements are already in place—characters, broad plot, setting—they are all of one piece. Q. Your text often makes use of grammatical irregularities: conjunctions are sometimes elided, and sentence fragments are not unusual. What did you seek to accomplish by your departures from strict grammatical correctness? I try to work with the sound of a sentence, with the rhythm of one sentence after another. Sometimes I sacrifice grammar for sound. Also, in this story, where the characters cannot bring themselves to discuss their circumstances, where they keep secrets, it works well to hide things in the language itself, to leave things out, to elide. If my characters were garrulous, or if the family had come together for a happy boisterous occasion, then I would have chosen a different authorial voice. Q. At first blush, Disquiet seems to be all about the communication of mood. Should the reader also be looking for a message? Sorry, I’m loathe to point out any message. The great beauty of fiction is that it is message free. It’s a medium which allows for a fullness, a complexity, a delicate exploration, an asking of questions without need of definite answers. Irreducible. Those qualities are hard to find in other mediums. Q. Just as people in a theatrical audience tend to equate actors with the roles they play, an author’s readers may assume that the voice and concerns they encounter in a story are those of the writer in her daily life. What would you like your readers to know about you that differs from what you offer to the public in Disquiet? That’s a tricky question because there is a part of me in Disquiet. Its concerns have been, at some point, my concerns. I have my own secret losses—some that were due to circumstances beyond my control and some in which I feel I was complicit. But yes, the writer-in-daily-life is not the writer-at-the-desk. As it is for many others, I find it very hard to pinpoint any fixed idea of self whatsoever. Q. It is probably fair to say that with its dark theme and disturbing descriptions, Disquiet may not appeal to every reader’s taste. What would you say to a reader who may initially be put off by certain elements in your story? Even though it may be heretical on some levels—particularly around motherhood, around “the bundle”—the work was written with respect for each character. Respect, but not overt sentimentality. There’s a truth to it, and moments of deep tenderness, intense feeling. It may not be for everyone, which is fine with me. I do hope the book will somehow find its readers, those who might recognize something in it, see they are not alone. I wonder if I’d recognize such a reader in a crowd . . . that’s an image I like, the writer crossing paths with the reader, unknown to one another, but sharing a glance of recognition . . . moving on. My own reading and writing life has been shaped by books of similar disturbing ilk and I accord the reader the same willingness to go to those places.
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Born in Australia, Julia Leigh won international acclaim with her novel The Hunter in 2000. She was named co-winner of the 2000 Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year and won the Kathleen Mitchell Award for Australian writers under the age of thirty. She has won the United Kingdom’s Betty Trask Award, and in France she received the 2001 Prix de L’Astrolabe. Leigh was an inaugural participant in the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative. The Hunter was also named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times. She currently divides her time between Australia and New York City, where she teaches at Barnard College.