Marion Halligan (1940–2024)

(7.5) Cassandra Travers, book editor, single mid-thirties believes she is reasonably content with her life. During a trip returning from visiting a new client, she suffers a tyre puncture. Alone on a stretch of road, a man in a Monaro, eventually stops to help her. She is grateful but uneasy when he infers repayment is required. She purposely gives him another female client's card, intent on getting away from him. When a week or two later she learns that this young woman has been murdered she begins to feel frightened. Her new client, Colonel Al Marriott invites her to stay while she is editing his book on the Gulf War. She accepts. She confides in him, her concerns about the driver of the Monaro. A friend of her back in Canberra sets her up on a date with a colleague. Cassandra's life is full, but who can she trust.
This is a lighter read but this writers skill with language makes it enjoyable, particularly her comments on the art of book editing.… (más)

It’s two or three days since I finished reading Valley of Grace, and I’m still savouring the reading of it. It’s always such a pleasure to read Marion Halligan’s novels … I save them up when a new one comes along and wait to read them in the same way that I save a box of expensive chocolates for just the right moment.

Valley of Grace is not the first of Halligan’s novels to be set in Paris. The Golden Dress (1998) was too, but I hadn’t been there when I read it and though I loved the novel, its Parisian textures just added to the constant temptation to swap the mortgage for a suitcase. Now, (having vanquished the mortgage) I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Paris three times, and Halligan’s lyrical descriptions make me want to sell up my dear little house that I took so long to buy – so that I might rent an apartment somewhere in that gorgeous city. Halligan is a seductress with her pen…

Fanny is married to Gérard Tisserand who is a restorer of old buildings. Halligan makes even this grubby renovation process seem romantic. Fanny’s father – a developer of modern buildings – had spoken disparagingly of Gérard but for Fanny it is love at first sight:

The building is not in some crooked street but in the rue St Jacques. Fanny walks through the small oval place in front of the Val de Grâce and just past it is the building, eighteenth-century, five-storey, classical. It is a wreck, in the process of being gutted. A segmented orange worm descends from the top floor, a set of elongated bottomless buckets chained together, through which rubble is poured into a hopper in the street. It rattles and crunches all the way until the final clanging arrival in the hopper, and quantities of dust arrive. Gérard Tisserand Builder, says a banner hung from the balcony.

Against the façade is a ladder and she sees a man she supposes to be Gérard though not so swarthy, not so nuggety, run up it, balance on a windowsill, sway, lean out and look up, climb in. Fanny pauses to read unseeing a plaque on the wall of the building next door. Gérard appears again, walks along a windowsill, teeters. Fanny’s heart teeters too. (p. 10)

Theirs is a loving marriage. They make love a lot, but they haven’t yet made a baby, and Halligan captures Fanny’s anxiety without morbidly lingering over it. Fanny is not the only one to want a baby: there are two same-sex couples in this novel, and Claude and Agnès want Luc and Julien to help them be parents too. Then there is elegant Sabine, graciously complicit in her husband the Professor’s routine seduction of his female students: she submits to this in much the same way as she has submitted to all his other rules including that over the course of their long marriage there may never be any children to interfere with the Great Man’s Thinking. But accidents happen and Sabine behaves in a way that startles her friend Cathérine, Fanny’s mother. I was enchanted by this rebellion…

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2014/02/08/valley-of-grace-by-marion-halligan/… (más)

Pretty good, I reckon. As for her other books I've read, the quality is not uniform, with some sections leaving me wondering why I'm reading it at all. However, overall it comes our rather well. I guess I'm a forgiving reader, perhaps more so for Australian literature such as this, where I can relate to the place issues (and I suspect author Elizabeth Hay is expressing a deep truth when she says "place is everything"). How well do we know our (marriage) partner? How do we evaluate the 'worth' of a relationship which has clear flaws . . . when all relationships have flaws? How do we say goodbye to those we've known moderately well, and loved? How do we relate to members of our extended family, in-laws, ex-partners and their children - especially those that are really different sorts of people? These are the kinds of questions that Halligan attempts to address in this book, and makes a decent go of it.… (más)