Lifting off: A Review of Helen Garner's The Feel of Steel

It is these short observations on daily life which are the most powerful, but Garner can take any subject and turn it so that it becomes a mirror reflected against the human heart, as her piece on Antarctica, “Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice” , in which she takes a painful trip to the South Pole, and while watching and documenting the people and images, she avoids the usual cliches and fights hard against the human need to categorise, classify, define, and thereby limit experience, bringing Wittgenstein’s maxim back to mind: “Why can’t we let experiences lay themselves down in us like compost, or fall into us like seeds which may put forth a shoot one day, spontaneously, as childhood memories do, in answer to the stimulus of ordinary life?” and “One plumbs the word-well. The bucket comes up empty.” And yet, throughout the essay, which is one of the longest in the book, Garner manages, without recourse to tired adjectives, or “helpless cliches” to convey the pristine beauty of the ice with its green core, and her own fear, and helplessness, and joy, mingling funny observations of the other passengers with her own linguistic bravado: “The forms are inhuman, but to name them we need the vocabulary of the body, or carpentry, dressmaking masonry – all the beautiful crafts of people’s hands. Pocked. Dimpled. Chiselled. Chamfered. Bevelled. Ruched. Frilled. Saw-toothed. Cloven. Striated, stripped, puckered, fringed, trimmed, carved, scrolled.”

The mingling of humour and deep seated pain (pun intended) come together perfectly in the funniest piece in the book, “A Spy in the House of Excrement”, in which the author visits the Spa Resort on Koh Sumui in the Gulf of Thailand, to subject herself to its famous Cleanse and Fast regime. Some of the passages in this piece are funny enough to elicit a loud chuckle, rare enough in a book with such deep subject matter, although high colonics have always provided good funnybone fodder: “I was ready to pack my bags, even before she added that one young woman had passed a small plastic doll, which her mother told her she’d swallowed in early childhood.” Or “If you are squeamish, bail out now. Read a cook book instead. No hard feelings. But before you go, consider this piece of fraffiti, written above the toilet in a Paris restaurant: C’est ici que tombent en ruines/Les grands chef-d’oeuvre de la cuisine.” The humour is

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