The Nether Regions is Sue Gough's first adult novel, but she isn't new to writing. She has written 17 books, including three novels for teenagers, a number of teaching manuals, book and theatre reviews, and short stories. She also runs writer's workshops, is part of the Queensland Arts Council, does mentoring work and still does the occasional freelance job. I asked Sue Gough whether the process of writing for adults was different, and she said that it was a huge step for her, more dangerous and requiring far greater complexity than writing her young adult novels. The risks taken by Gough, and the complexity of her work is obvious in The Nether Regions, which takes as its narrator someone who has lost all facility to communicate; a serious stroke victim looking for a way out of the prison of her body in which she feels her mind, and perhaps her soul, is buried alive. Gough told me that her writing of Beverley was based on her ultimate phobia - being entirely powerless. Beverley's mind functions perfectly, but her body is in a near vegetable state. She can blink, but cannot move, speak, or communicate in any way. Her voice guides us through the novel, set primarily at a hydrotherapy pool in a mock new age class run by the comic physiotherapist Sue Mindberry. Mindberry's aspirations to be the next Deepak Chopra are juxtaposed with the heady desires of the menopausal, overweight and mentally unstable women in her course. While the women conduct their affirmations in the pool, inside the mind of Beverley, we find a series of other worlds, short stories built around the lives of her fellow participants turned husband murderers, gourmet cooks, painters, Loden type mischief makers, visionary nuns and brain damaged sex fiends, all looking for a way to find themselves, and in the process help Beverley escape into the Buddhist death she so desperately craves.
Using the post-modern trick of a narrator creating her own narrative, Gough uses self-referential words designed to remind the reader that this is a fictional world: "her mind appeared to be freewheeling outside the parameters of their shared metanarrative"(102), at one point breaking through Beverley';s story to add in a different narrative voice: "Poor Beverley, who's here in spirit, is another story. Looking in from the outside, how can I tell her tale? It's a story lacking in high drama, all too real to be very engaging." (312). Beverley's loss comes as a series of unexpected strokes, the final blow coming while trying to commune with drunk aboriginals in the park outside her hotel. There is self-parody in Beverley's struggles with language and failure to get her work published, or in the funny writer's retreat on Norfolk island which features a 'menopausal Canadian' who does something called 'young adult fiction'; and the "sagas of self-promotion, action and plotlines".
