Sunday book pick: Sexual escapism and familial expectations lock horns in ‘The Children’s Bach’

“The soup was thick. The bread was fresh. The stove’s dry heat reddened their cheeks. The walls curved in around them. Outside the house, which was at the bottom of a neglected street, no cars passed.”

Australian writer Helen Garner’s novel The Children’s Bach opens with no preamble. You walk into a crowded room, barging into a family going about their day. Like most homes, there’s confusion and excitement, a slight nervousness about hurt sentiments and sensitive trespasses. We immediately meet Dexter and his wife Athena, friends, lovers, and content with their married life; their sons Arthur and Billy – Billy has a developmental disorder; the grown-up sisters Elizabeth and Vicki; Elizabeth’s boyfriend Philip and his daughter, Poppy. A sprawling cast of characters that talk over, to, and at one another as their words and thoughts clash to create a cacophony of human communication (and miscommunication).

Garner throws the dialogues and details of this setting at the reader and invites them to make of it what they will. It is certainly a strange “family” and we aren’t told how they’ve come to belong to the same unit, or what they’re even doing in this house. Nothing particularly dramatic has happened nor has there been any emotional...

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