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

is more subtle, but no less appealing in pieces such as “Moon-Gazing”, which manages to both illuminate the “firm globes” of a Western Bulldogs’ famous fund-raising ‘Male-Revue’ while making a deeper point about desire, beauty, and innocence. More poignant is “My Blue Glasses”, where a little sales attention; some deft words turn a casual shopping moment into a fragile epiphany which disappears again.

Three of the more moving pieces revolve around Garner’s new grandchild. The frightening third person narrative of an attack of Whooping Cough in “Baby Coughs” forms a parallel with the light tone of “Baby Goes to the Movies”, and the more intense first person narrative of “The Nanna-Mobile” where jealousy, possessiveness, and that terrifying love which most parents would be familiar with mingle. At one point in “The Nanna-Mobile” Garner talks about reading a piece in the Australian Book Review which lists her first novel among those selling at insultingly low prices secondhand. At first she feels forlorn, and then imagines herself walking hand in hand with her granddaughter, and “The vision was accompanied by a lightening of the heart that lifted me off my feet.” The power of maternal love, and the way in which it dwarf’s ambition, and provides a kind of warm immortality is instantly conveyed to the reader in its poetic tightness. Mastering a new sport, a musical instrument, having a grandchild, going through a divorce, or even taking a big trip, are all common scenarios in most people’s lives. These are ordinary moments, and that is why they are so wonderful. Garner takes the everyday trivial bits of our lives, and with her gifts, turns them into something spiritual, mystical, and powerful. Although The Feel of Steel is an easy read, which is much less challenging than the complex layering of The Children’s Bach, or Monkey Grip, Garner’s prose is as tight and compelling as ever, leading the reader from a series of personal musings, small dramas and achievements, into their own enlightenment.

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