If anything in this review raises issues for you,
help is available at White Ribbon Australia.
To learn to recognise the signs of coercive control and how to get help, visit Relationships Australia.



It only took a day and a half to read Robert Lukin's new novel Loveland—I couldn't put it down.

The last time I read a novel as harrowing in its depiction of coercive control was The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower. In that novel two sisters fall prey to a vile man called Felix who terrorises his wife and her sister into anticipating his every wish, for fear of punishment. The younger can do nothing but watch, entrapped herself by the other's compliance.

In Lukin's novel, May grows up in Australia as an indifferent witness to her widowed grandmother's pathological meekness without recognising that she has inherited the same vulnerability. It is not until Casey dies, and her mother Rosie inherits Casey's small property in Nebraska, that May finds the means to transcend her own submission to the vile man she refers to as 'the husband'.

As in real life where coercive control hides behind closed doors and the pretence of a satisfactory marriage, most of the violence in Loveland is off-stage.

We just become how and who we are and no-one is beyond that. He had been handsome and charming, but when she looked back it was never enough. The story could never explain itself. She came to realise that the marks on her body were not the worst of it. There is physical pain and it is unbearable in the moment but the moment is at least brief. It was the unending struggle for air. This was the worst of of it and the thing that never passed. The fear that stole her every breath. (p.43)

The intergenerational poverty is muted too as we see in May's sceptical response to the executor who explains about the inheritance...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/03/19/loveland-by-robert-lukins/ ( )