The Orange Prize: Odd romance blooms in an out-of-kilter land
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Your support makes all the difference.Strangely enough, for an award founded to celebrate the achievements of women, the Orange Prize seems to have a soft spot for nerdy, pedantic but big-hearted men.
The Idea of Perfection, the Sydney-born writer Kate Grenville's sixth novel, neatly fits the subtitle that Woody Allen gave to Annie Hall: "a nervous romance". And one half of its odd Australian couple, the pernickety bridge engineer Douglas Cheeseman, would get on well with the self-doubting hero of the book that won the Orange in 1998 Larry's Party by Carol Shields.
Kate Grenville, born in 1950 and married with two children, has garnered plenty of national prizes, critical acclaim and film-rights deals in Australia. But she joined this year's Orange shortlist as a rank outsider. However, once British readers discovered The Idea of Perfection, they warmed to it fast. As the critic Jenny Turner wrote: "The book swells and glows with love for the plain, the down-home and the flawed."
Set in the backwater of Karakarook, New South Wales, the book sports a sharp humour and wry sympathy that bring to mind the off-centre world of Alan Bennett. Grenville has a wonderful eye (and ear) for the oddness of small-town life in a place where the hotel's set dinner consists of "Corned Beef with White Sauce & Three Veg, and Jam Roll and Custard".
In this forlorn setting, bruised fiftysomethings Douglas Cheeseman and Harley Savage, the equally gauche "heritage" expert sent to develop a local museum, blunder into a (sort of) relationship.
Harley, a big and clumsy woman ironically devoted to the dainty knick-knackery of a bygone age, stands up for preservation and the past. Douglas, the stolid, practical engineer commissioned to demolish the town's rickety "Bent Bridge", prefers sensible modern ways ("All his life he had wanted to convince people to give concrete a chance"). Of course, they clash; and of course, they eventually converge.
Grenville boasts one comic talent in particular that makes The Idea of Perfection so piquant and memorable. She has an unerring gift for dramatising the gap between the polite language of conversation, or the official language of the public world, and the far messier fears and desires that it conceals. Harley, for instance, has a "dicky ticker", and has suffered an "infarction". But neither everyday euphemism nor medical jargon can match the "gigantic pain" of the real thing: "The tremendous grip of it had almost squeezed her to death".
In one respect, at least, this quirky and spirited novel does endorse an idea of perfection: not of life, but of language.
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