My review of Missus, by Ruth Park

Missus

by Ruth Park

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Like all exceptional novelists, Ruth Park employs a simplistic yet captivating insight of the human condition. This sets her work apart from the workaday potboiler that simply churns out juicy formulaic plotlines. Her work is purely character driven, their storylines organic by-products of characters' endearing quirks and peculiar choices. 

This is what makes her a literary writer, rather than a fast fiction or romance machine of the Barbara Cartland ilk. Her characters are blessed and burdened with the virtues, shortcomings and consequent dilemmas of ourselves and our loved ones, universal qualities and quandaries that resonate with our inner philosopher. 

Her settings, whether city slum or outback dustbowl, are vivid, poignant and glorious. Her understated period detail is delicious in the many flashbacks. So completely does she transport us to other times and places, we feel that gratifying sense of escape that we read for. This raw literary talent shines across all three novels in the series.

This third and final instalment in Park's prestigious trilogy, the prequel, Missus, begins in the 1920s. Our beloved established characters become less central presences, absentee players for much of the novel, contemplated and discussed by others. 

I would have liked more focus on our familiar people, less on their multitudinous forebears and offsiders. I was interested in the trajectory of Hughie and Margaret's pairing, prior to their Sydney transfer and offspring that form the next two novels. 

I appreciated this necessity of new protagonists. What I had not envisaged was their persistent dominance and high numbers, many being arguably quite extraneous. Though some were absorbing, this matrix of 'others' pushes aside our special people. 

Whilst feeling compensated with certain of Park's other characters, I skimmed many of their scenes, picking out my own characters' episodes, tying in their histories. Though this perhaps typifies prequels, it was also as if Park became uneasy staying with these characters from previous instalments, or just too bored with them to give them the space I wanted for them.

Or maybe we're meant to approach this as a standalone piece. If so, then the publisher's pitching becomes questionable.   

None of the above issues affect the quality of prose, as rich, even richer in parts, than in the other two The Harp in the South books, perhaps because by this book she was nearly forty years more practised than with the first two. 

Missus, like its sibling novels, transcends family saga into a wider social critique, an intimate study of human emotion. Its stylistic supremacy is evident from the opening lines, hence my four stars despite my other misgivings covered here. 

This is interwar regional Australia, its ethos, its people, its places, told by one of the finest.