FICTION
Heartsease
Kate Kruimink, Picador, $16.99

In her latest novel, Kate Kruimink offers a heartrending tale that hinges on the relationship between two sisters, Nelly and Lot. The story takes the connection between these two women, as well as their deceased mother, to dramatic and even supernatural heights, in ghostly visitations and mind-reading that at times sits oddly with the book’s realist preoccupations but nonetheless makes it an absorbing read.

The story takes place at a silent retreat: “The desk, the sofas, the paintings and the weird carpets were all like artefacts locked behind a cordon in a well-preserved homestead museum, the kind that skates over the various atrocities of the local area in favour of bone-white dummies posed stiffly in replica period clothing and ranks of staring dolls in the old nursery … I was yet to be invigorated by this experience.”

Nelly waits for her sister to arrive and characteristically, we soon realise, drops acid to dull the unceasing depression that has plagued her since childhood and is now coupled with addiction. She wavers somewhere between the living and the dead, visited regularly by the ghost of her mother as she hallucinates. By the time her older sister Lot arrives at the retreat, late (as usual) and somehow perfect (as usual) we understand the sarcastic and depressed Nelly has always held the world at a distance and feels she cannot measure up to the example of Lot, who she believes her mother loved more. Nelly just wants to go to the pub. But settles for the bottle of whiskey she has smuggled into the retreat and the “restorative” dissolving on her tongue.

This is Kruimink’s second novel. Her first is the historical novel, A Treacherous Country (2021), which won the 2020 Vogel/Australian’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Heartsease is as far away from historical fiction as you can get. Set in present-day Hobart, it has given Kruimink the chance to experiment with structure, while still proving again the authors’ ability to write a compelling voice, though this is occasionally hampered by the crowded imagery that fights against it.

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We know Nelly’s death is coming only a few chapters in. It begins in first person, delving deeper into the interesting, insecure, and acerbic Nelly and her troubled consciousness, but switches to third person every second chapter to follow Lot as she grieves her sister, who will die before the silent retreat ends. The constant shuffle between past and present and the two perspectives obscures the strength of the story at first, which lies in the voice of Nelly, but this is resolved as the novel progresses. The complicated structure Kruimink has chosen becomes more successful once the character of Lot is established.

Kruimink describes Lot revealingly, beyond the “greige” world she inhabits as a lawyer and Nelly’s older sister/ surrogate mother: “Marriage has taken its toll on her, though. It has carved off some of the whorls and curlicues of her personality, some of the things that are nice to have but not strictly necessary. Carved off, or filed to a point.” I just wish we had been able to know her sooner. But in this way, it is the kind of book where persistence pays off. So, keep reading.

At the heart of this novel is an honest and poignant struggle between sibling love and misunderstanding, made all the more tragic by Lot’s grief and what is left unsaid and unacknowledged between the two sisters before Nelly’s untimely death.

As the novel attempts to move towards a resolution it is unable to. We are left with a somewhat hollow reference to organ donation that feels forced and out of step with the depth of feeling offered elsewhere, particularly in what is left unspoken or unspeakable, where the immutable connections of family are felt.

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