Helen Garner (This House of Grief; Monkey Grip) has long been celebrated as one of Australia's greatest authors, and U.S. readers will get to savor the brilliance of her work with several releases, including The Children's Bach. Written in 1984, this short novel is the portrait of, as Rumaan Alam puts it in his introduction, "the collision of several lives" in 1980s Melbourne. Garner has structured this work as an ensemble piece that shifts among perspectives, sometimes within a single scene, with no one character dominating. The result is a unique depiction of familial confusion in 20th-century Australia.
Among the characters in this mesmerizing work are Athena and Dexter Fox, a seemingly happy married couple with a piano in the kitchen; their sons, Arthur and Billy, the latter of whom has a developmental issue and screams when provoked ("There's nobody in there," Athena complains); Dexter's college friend Elizabeth, with whom he "lived almost as sister and brother for five years as students" and is now reacquainted after 20 years; Elizabeth's much younger sister, Vicki; and Elizabeth's married musician boyfriend, Philip, with whom she introduces the Foxes to a side of society that upends their lives. The book is filled with jewels of prose, such as: "All the objects in the room looked like cartoons of themselves: the flap-handled fridge, the brown piano grinning, the dresser where plates leaned and cups hung." Garner doesn't make her themes apparent, but, for patient readers, The Children's Bach offers a trove of riches. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer