tl;dr

A bold experiment that fails to hit the mark.

opening remarks

Peach, Emma Glass’ debut novel (for the pedants in the house it’s novella length), has been compared to the work of Eimear McBride and Max Porter (aren’t we due another book by him?).  That’s a pretty high bar so no pressure.

knee-jerk observations

Something awful has happened to Peach.  She has been attacked by a man, possibly sexually abused.  Now home, hiding what has happened from her parents, she checks out the extent of the damage.

If this conversation is actually taking place between Peach and her parents – and it’s not a fever dream, a hallucination following her attack – then it’s all sorts of wrong:

In a previous chapter, Peach described her baby brother as being formed from jelly.  I thought it was a weird figure of speech or a metaphor for the squishiness of babies.  But with the introduction of Mr Custard, Peach’s biology teacher, I’m now convinced that Emma Glass has a thing for desserts:

Peach reads like a twisted children’s book.  Her assailant is all sausages and grease; her teacher is made from custard; her boyfriend may be a tree, and yet there’s nothing twee or humorous about any of it.  Take this disturbing moment when her rapist harrases her at a cafe:

Not Enid Blyton, it’s Dr Seuss!

Not only does Peach take revenge on Lincoln, her attacker and stalker, not only does she cut him into smaller pieces and shove him into six garbage bags, but she also delivers the remains of sausage-man home to be consumed by Ma and Pa:

The Gist Of It

In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald Emma Glass explained that with Peach she wanted to provide an ‘entire sensory experience’ by focusing on language rather than a conventional plot.  In this sense, she succeeds admirably.  The language of Peach, staccato sentences, alliterations and repetition, does affect a harsh, raw rhythm, reflecting Peach’s mental state, the horror of being abused, the disgust at her body, the inability to speak her pain out loud to friends and family.

What’s less successful is the absurdist bent of the novel.  It’s not that I have an issue with experimental fiction or authors prepared to challenge notions of coherence and sense.  But it is a narrative decision that comes with enormous risk, and, in this instance, Emma Glass doesn’t pull it off.  By populating her world with people whose titles describe what they are – Sandy is made from sand; Green is a tree; Lincoln is a Lincolnshire sausage – Glass steps over that fine line between the absurd and the ridiculous.  It reaches its melodramatic peak when Peach kills Lincoln, slices him up and presents the sausage-corpse to her parents who promptly organise a BBQ.  To some Peach’s decision to kill and eat Lincoln will be a profound statement on victims of sexual abuse confronting their attackers, to me, it reads like a Peter Greenway film (or a Monty Python sketch, though not one played for laughs).

I found that there was ample innovation and variety in Glass’ prose without the need to have talking custards and babies made of jelly.  So while I applaud Glass taking this unconventional approach to a thorny, upsetting subject her askew perspective provided little insight on the topic.