I think a capitalist patriarchy that relies on monogamous heterosexuality and gender essentialism is the worst system to ensure the survival of our species. Just watch an episode of MAFS Australia. I don’t think there’s anything natural or normal about this system, instead I think it’s a construct kept in place by those who have come to power under it to maintain their power. The discrimination and privilege this flawed system creates, as part of an interlocking matrix of oppression, is causing crises in every part of our lives. This is the belief system I bring to Louise Wallace’s novel Ash which I think does incredible and urgent work problematising the construct of ‘mothering’ and exposes how the systems of oppression charged with keeping these constructs in place have effects that bleed well outside the family home.
Ostensibly a novel about an individual woman’s rage, Ash shows the systematic shit-show that makes it impossible for Thea, a veterinarian, mother of two and wife to a man, to live with any degree of comfort or fulfilment. To carry out her work as a vet, Thea is reliant on her mother-in-law and paid childcare, demonstrating the impossibility of the nuclear family at the late stages of the capitalism that created it. The lion’s share of the childcare is left to these two women while Thea’s husband takes up the role of breadwinner despite his work being far more precarious and, one imagines, less financially lucrative than hers. These outdated ideas seem set into every area of Thea’s life and the novel really takes off when it widens its focus to reveal that Thea’s is not an isolated case. At the vet practice Thea works in, there is a decision to be made whether Kim, a vet and a woman without children, should be brought in as a shareholder. Kim’s parental aspirations are debated openly, and someone is ‘checking with a lawyer’ to see if it’s legal to include and enforce a clause in her contract that if she takes extended leave of any sort, she has to relinquish her shareholder status. While her life is debated Kim waits, and waits, and waits.
What I love about the narrative of this book is that all this pressure to try to make an impossible system work seems to cause an actual volcanic explosion which results in the ash of the book’s title. The huge amounts of ash – in the air, on the ground – are the perfect metaphor for our current societal, political and environmental state and offer a way of thinking about these that is immediate and inescapable. The descriptions of the effects of the ash Wallace writes create a visceral, suffocating experience. In the book, people are forced to socially isolate. There are definite parallels between the ash crisis of the book and the Covid-19 pandemic and there’s something so emotionally intelligent about creating a cause for social isolation that is sensually overloading in response to the one we experienced in real-life which was microscopic and largely invisible until it infected.
The ash interrupts the capitalist project completely. But in the world of this novel capitalism doesn’t notice and keeps pushing and pushing on resulting in sickness and ruin. This is a world devoid of another approach. Despite being deeply rooted in the land, the land remains unnamed and therefore unacknowledged to any iwi or hapū, which means there’s no possibility of a Te Ao Māori view of the geological crisis. There are no obviously queer characters or anyone whose lived experience might offer an alternate solution. I think this lack of a different approach in Wallace’s novel feels chillingly familiar to our responses to the multiple crises we experience in our current lives. The narratorial decision to offer no new way means the book can apply a laser-focus on the failures of the capitalist patriarchy and the futility of the individual struggle within it.
And this laser-focus deftly reveals the complex web of oppression that patriarchy and misogyny are part of. The exploitation of the land and the animals on the land comes to a head when Thea responds to an emergency call. In less skilful hands this interaction would have left the animal as mere symbol for Thea’s struggle, but Wallace is able to make this incredible scene mean more as both living creatures’ situations echo and rebound between them. I don’t think fiction can do much in itself but I think this book has the potential to present issues we have become numb to in a way that is incredibly affecting. I felt exercised by it, angry, motivated to work for change. I’m making it sound like this book offers no hope and, I feel uncomfortable suggesting it should, but I think what it offers is the challenge to create our own hope. The bright spots of the novel for me were the interactions between Thea and her friends and I couldn’t help wondering about alternative stories to the primacy of one intimate, sexual relationship. I loved how this book left me feeling like there is hope in a range of relationships which create communities of support and love.
I think Ash is able to offer this kind of response largely because of its formal innovation. There is a reading experience on offer here which is deeper than the slim spine of the novel suggests. The short fragments of plot-driven prose are broken up in three ways. First by ‘Figures’ framed sections of less conventional storytelling. I think Wallace’s past work as a poet will tempt people to read the ‘Figures’ as poetry, but I want to argue for them being prose which progress the plot of the novel. This is a powerful narrative choice because it interrupts the conventional prose in a way that imagines the role of ‘mother’ in a new way. These sections on the whole run words together which gives the effect of the demands placed on a lead caregiver. In this attempt to break the linear nature of prose they act very much like images – everything all at once – but also, they create a picture of words on the page an offering which engages another part of the brain. I felt stopped in my tracks by these sections, and I needed to read them far more slowly because of the formatting. This interruption reminded me of the interruptions of parenting – disrupted sleep, immediate needs, the accidents that need prompt response. This allowed a deeper reading of the story Wallace presents, affecting body, emotions, and mind.
The second element that breaks into the more conventional prose is, as Wallace calls it in the Notes section, an ‘invented footer fable’. I found the section this footer appears in incredibly satisfying. The fable, in my reading, set in a colonial past, felt like a different time punching through into the present of the novel. I loved how this creates a shimmer between Thea’s situation and a broader context. The Notes section explains that this section, and others in the book, were created from other texts. I am in love with the way this effect of a broader context might come from these borrowed texts retaining some of their original ‘place’ as they are brought into this work. There’s something incredibly affirming about this reach to other communities in one of the most claustrophobic sections of the book. Almost like a window under ash – to riff off the title of Damien Wilkins’ novel which is one of the found texts.
The final element of this incredibly compelling whole is a series of sequences each titled ‘Memory’. These perhaps resemble poetry the most but I can’t help reading them as erasures of a prose block. This seems like the perfect form to include in a book about ash and concerned with a re-presentation of systems that have become invisible to us.
I think, in the end, this is the thing that is most impressive about this book. Wallace’s ability to weave four narrative approaches in a way that produces something greater than the sum of its parts. I have offered a largely political reading of this novel, largely because of who I am but I think there is equally an incredibly satisfying aesthetic one available. I also think the plot alone makes for a very satisfying read. Wallace has achieved something particular and exciting in Ash and I highly recommend it.
Ash by Louise Wallace (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30) is available in bookstores nationwide.
