A Second Life is a pleasurably baffling book. Winner of the 2017 Viva La Novella Prize, it seems to be many things: a meditation on death and memory; a cry of anguish about misogyny and male violence towards women; and a quest for justice when there isn't any to be had. But it's not a book with an easy plot or even an obvious cast of characters, and there's a warning early in the book that lets the reader know that confusion lies ahead:

...language is a sleight of hand that both reveals and hides the existence of the unspeakable; that reminds us there are things about ourselves we can never know, that knowing is endless and uncageable, and to understand each other is an approximation of a dream. (p.23)

I've read it twice, and there are still aspects of it that I don't understand.

Wright plays with the conventions of the detective story. Acker seems to be some kind of private investigator, with a seedy office tacked onto the read of the Emporium in the village street. She's not Australian, she only visited it once, but is now stuck here, and she thinks that's because of the light and because of the history of murder and the addiction to brutality and exploitation. Women who have suffered at the hands of men come to her with their choking griefs.

In crime fiction it is often the villages and small towns that hide a sinister sub-structure of violence and transgression, ringing the cities like refugee camps and harbouring an endless proliferation of terrorists, serial killers, cults, sexual predators and people smugglers. Those who fictionally murder often have no motive except to rejoice in their demonic cleverness. But this is the common daily crime: a man kills a woman, or a man kills her children, or a man kills a woman and her children. Or a man kills a woman and her children and then himself.

The dark and bloody tales of crime fiction, Acker thinks, are just descriptions of the ways we prefer to hide the truth or leave cryptic stupid clues about violence. (p.11)

An unnamed woman comes to Acker, and she listens, and hears the bones of the too-familiar story...

...all the repetitive tropes of misogynist violence: that to be is to own, that punishment is justice, and if punishment is justice, murder is transcendent justice, the sacrifice of martyrs.

The stalking. The threats. The ongoing terror. How the cops did nothing. And the courts said, The Father. The final text message. Her panicked rush through the suburbs with a yawning chasm tearing open her heart. Flinging open the screen door. Blind in the gloom after the summer street. Then the children's bodies, broken, blood like a plant's shadow. How she noticed everything and can't forget. Every detail. (p.13)

She tells the woman to come back in the morning. And then the novella morphs into something unexpected.

From the description of Acker's dingy office, we learn that she dismembers and then reconstructs books revealing their bizarre and occasionally subversive natures. We learn that she is a writer herself, and that her books were on restricted access in university libraries. And (easy to miss, as I did the first time I read this strange book) we also learn that she must be dead because she came through the Round Window just as Death once came through it in an episode of Play School that coincided with her cancer diagnosis. She is a ghost who sees other ghosts, the multiple selves that we present to the world, the unknowable others that we are or might have been.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/02/03/a-second-life-by-stephen-wright/ ( )