Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Sallie Muirden, Transit Lounge, $29.99.
How significant a decision is it for you when you choose your partner and make the decision to get married? For poet and novelist Muirden, marriage is one of the vital moments in our lives.
Sallie has framed the novel around a rite of passage, a single day of drama and change. On the morning of her wedding, 24-year-old Beth Shaw drives down the peninsula to the Portsea Hotel. However, from the outset it’s not smooth sailing. She is anxious and perplexed because she has just learnt something devastating about her fiancé, Jordan, which wholly changes her view of him.
The lead characters have interesting traits. Beth is a competent, thoughtful young woman given to unassertiveness and Jordan is a charming spontaneous man.
As Beth’s old schoolmates and her relatives arrive for the big day at the bayside idyll, Beth contemplates her childhood in suburbia. Many of Beth’s memories are from her school days at Mornington Grammar.
Painful memories of earlier unfaithfulness and perfidy resurface. Her dreams and wedding threaten to spin out of control. There was special significance to this sentiment: ‘together we will create the moments that matter’. If she hadn’t opened the letter, then she would have been none the wiser and a lot happier. Heartache had to come. This was not a practical joke.
Beth’s disordered changeover to adulthood is captured with cordiality and sagacity. Muirden adroitly conjures up the flaws of human behaviour and growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s. This is a perceptive, stimulating and often edgy humour of etiquettes.
If you correctly name Beth’s grammar school, you could be one of three lucky winners to get a free copy of Wedding Puzzle.
Entries should be sent to [email protected] by next Monday, 5 August 2019. Names of the winners will be announced in Frank Cassidy’s PS-sssst…! column on Tuesday.
