Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Angela Savage, Transit Lounge, $29.99.
An award-winning Melbourne writer, Savage explores the complex and contentious topic of overseas commercial surrogacy. It is a bold, though luminous story, about the expectations and reveries we all have about our lives and relationships, and the often tense and unanticipated ways in which they may be fulfilled.
This is a story of family and motherhood, and also a narrative of ethos and manipulation that asks us to think through the costs of our voracious craving to have everything.
Mother of Pearl is the story of three women. Anna is an aid worker, trying to settle back into life in Melbourne after more than a decade in southeast Asia. Meg, Anna’s sister, holds out hope for a child, despite seven fruitless years of IVF. Mukda is a single mother in provincial Thailand, struggling to make ends meet. The three women’s lives become intimately intertwined in the unsettling and extraordinary process of bringing a child into the world across borders of class, culture and nationality.
Angela draws us masterfully into the lives of Anna and the other characters. Reflecting on the political, ethical, cultural and emotional aspects of overseas surrogacy between Australia and Thailand, the appeal for this topic was self-evident.
It’s rich in portrayals and emotion and looks at social issues that are opportune including a curiosity about surrogacy and Australia’s long-standing interesting relationship with Asia, particularly Thailand.
Savage’s curiosity is what delivered this story since the idea was sparked by a 2013 newspaper article noting a ‘sharp rise’ in citizenship requests for Australian children born in Thailand, and attributing this to Australians flocking overseas ‘to find birth mothers for their children’.
The title springs from a memory of something a friend told the author years ago about a “pearl being the perfect metaphor for a baby: an irritant when inside of you that emerges as a thing of beauty”. Then there was also this quote from Marilynne Paspaley: “the pearl is the only gem that is made by a living creature … it represents life, as every other gem is made by the passing of time and decay.” Pearls, both literal and metaphorical, ended up permeating the novel.
Mother of Pearl is set in two cities loved by Angela; Melbourne and Bangkok. Thailand has been a popular location for her previous novels, but “Bangkok features as a significant setting for the first time in Mother of Pearl, and I strived to portray this richly complex city in nuanced ways. Bangkok as seen through the eyes of Anna, who is besotted by the city, is endlessly fascinating, friendly and playful. For Meg, who is well outside her comfort zone in every sense, Bangkok is suffocating, its streets rife with potential hazards and humiliations”.
