Lilian's Story

Lilian's Story (1985), Kate Grenville's first novel, threatens at the beginning to be a historical novel in the vein of Pat Barker's Liza's England or Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries--a narrative in which the heroine's life registers, directly or indirectly, the aftershocks of modernization.  Grenville begins this first-person novel in 1901, "the year of Federation" (3), and ends it in what is obviously the early 1960s.  Moreover, and more heavy-handedly, almost half of the novel is devoted to the collapse of a decadent post-Victorianism: Lilian's increasingly enervated mother is a faded, neurasthenic Victorian lady, all careful propriety ("A lady does not hurtle, Lilian dear" [16]); her mentally ill and abusive father, obsessively working away at his book, is monomaniacally obsessed with facts.  (He is also the subject of this novel's sequel, Albion's Story.)  Lilian fights back against her father by overeating, swaddling herself in fat, while her puny brother desperately yearns to go deaf.  It's no great surprise when Albion sexually assaults Lilian (unsuccessfully?); this is, after all, a novel in which "Victorianism" stands in for a culture of punishing sexual repression, one that explodes outward in unpredictably violent ways. 

Once both we and Lil leave the last dregs of Victorian culture behind, however, the novel almost entirely ceases to notice "history" altogether.  There are quick glimpses of WWI and WWII, of new technologies and new fashions, but Lil's more and more eccentric subjectivity manages to register change in only sidelong fashion.  In part, Lil's eccentricity--or insanity--develops after her long stay in an insane asylum, where her father immures her after his incestuous attack; in part, it derives from her impatience with traditional forms of knowledge and learning.  Remembering one afternoon in a lecture hall, Lil muses, "I was in no state of mind for wisdom and heard nothing that I wanted to write into my own crisp new notebook.  I watched Professor Noble, but his upturned pale face, with its dark mouth hole opening and closing, was as unimportant as a scrap of paper under a desk" (82).  "Wisdom," in this novel, soon becomes as empty as the "ideas" in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," a placeholder to cover up the sheer meaningless of pigeonholed academic subjects.  Despite his name, Professor Noble comes to resemble nothing so much as a gaping fish, his mouth empty of both sound (conspicuously absent from Lil's description) and sense. 

Lil's own ungoverned speech--she makes a habit of reciting Shakespeare or singing at odd moments in public, in taxi cabs, and on buses--may be a public nuisance, but it stands in stark contrast to her father Albion's inflexible facts.  So, too, does Lil's deliberately excessive body.  Early on, Lil tells a friend that "Books should have toilets in them" (43), and the novel often returns to those aspects of the body normally kept out of "polite" company: the hair in a woman's armpit, urine, vomit, spit, sweat.  Lil's own obese body is frequently cause for consternation and distaste, but it also becomes the sign of her unrepentant thereness, in direct contrast to the carefully coiffed and shy ladies of her childhood.  At times, the novel appears to be aiming for a Whitmanesque attitude to both life and the body:

I fill myself now, and look with pity on those hollow men in their suits, those hollow women in their classic navy and white.  They have not made themselves up from their presents and their pasts, but have let others do it for them--while I, large and plain, frightening to them and sometimes to myself, have taken the past and present into myself. (227)

The novel's title, that is, is not simply descriptive.  By the end, Lilian's Story has become emphatically Lilian's act of storytelling--her proud assertion of the right to self-creation, outside of the conventions that mark the Victorian world of her childhood or even the laxer times of the 1960s. The echo of T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" is, I suspect, deliberate.  Unlike those with "quiet and meaningless" voices, as Eliot puts it, Lil speaks herself into being by simply ignoring all the rules that govern social behavior (the rules later embodied in the sometimes ominous, sometimes comical policemen who try to regulate Lil's more aggravating habits).  This, for Lil, is history: shaping her own story while integrating herself into the stories of others.  As she imagines of one child, "I knew that little Dianne would grow up listening to the telling and retelling of the story of the day she was dandled by Lil Singer, and might tell it herself at last" (214).

And yet, I found it hard to resist the suspicion that I was being sold a bill of goods.  On the one hand, Grenville effectively suggests how Lil processes the world by absorbing it; even dialogue is rendered in italics, rather than marked off by quotation marks, suggesting that it too belongs as much to Lil's inner world as to the outer.  On the other hand, the novel's reach for the Whitmanesque--or, for that matter, Falstaffian--mode considerably exceeds its grasp.  One character delightedly exclaims that "you are Lil Singer, of course, larger than life" (198), but Lil isn't larger than life.  A little irritated voice kept whispering in my ear that Lil was, if anything, frequently pathetic.  There's ultimately something too pat about the novel's identification of the nonconformist (not to mention diseased and impoverished) social fringe with "authenticity"; if anything, one cannot help wondering on occasion if Lil is truly more liberated than her twisted father.  Nevertheless, despite this rather sloppy romanticism, the book's fragmentary narrative structure is often compelling, especially in the novel's first half.