Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By A. S. Patrić, Transit Lounge, $29.99.
Miles Franklin Award-winner, Patrić has written a disconcerting book.
Katerina Klova, 17, and her mother are on an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic. When Anne suffers a psychotic breakdown, Katerina is left alone on a ship full of strangers spanning a wide-range of stations and classes. Adding to the mix of social and political behaviour, all of them are full of objectives, uncertainties and preoccupations.
This is an exciting, alarming world to navigate, especially for the daughter of an ambassador. It’s New Year’s Eve, 1939, and the story takes place over one day and night. As the RMS Aquitania steams across the waters, the world is about to explode over the horizon.
Atlantic Black is an expressively intense and touching story of unexpected familial betrayal, of a mother and daughter’s relationship, of a brother and father whose voices resonate from afar. Personal loneliness, love and loss, are tightly bound to the wider reality of a world set on a fateful course.
The legacy of violence, and of how the First World War precipitated World War II reverberates as if ‘tolling on the inside of a church bell’. Through the eyes of Katerina and her own family’s place within a fracturing world, we see the way damage, yet also hope, is passed from one generation to another.
“Death flitters through my mind and I think why not float away with it? Leave body and mind behind. It’s all just a passing thought anyway. And when those thoughts are gone, no matter. The same as when you lie down at night. Released into shades less substantial than shadows.”
These words are spoken towards the end of Atlantic Black, Patrić’s gloomy and chilly second novel. The quote neatly encapsulates how stories of the past, though sometimes disconsolate, become real today.
“It’s as easy to forget life as it is to settle yourself down to sleep. For a few hours or eternity, little difference. You can release yourself from your pain so easily, more easily than tearing pages from a book.”
Patrić’s writing is rightly described as being ‘achingly tender, the tone merciless but heartbreaking in its compassion’.
