Where pain resides

Robert Farquharson had been separated from his wife for about a year; she had been granted custody of their three children. The setting is Australia in 2005. After spending Father’s Day with his children, Farquharson was taking them back to his wife’s house, but just near the dam close to Winchelsea, he lost control of the car and ended up in an artificial lake. He survived, but the three children drowned. This was the backdrop to one of the most closely followed Australian trials of the early 2000s; among the spectators was the journalist and writer Helen Garner, who would later publish, in 2014, "Where the Pain Lives" (Italian translation by Milena Sanfilippo) – a book considered one of her finest and a masterpiece of contemporary literature in the tradition of authors such as Truman Capote, Nick Tosches and Gay Talese. Garner spent long days at the trial, taking notes and attempting to sketch a profile of the alleged murderer; her work is an immersion in the most excruciating pain experienced by a mother and a father accused of having murdered their children—a pain that affects the entire community, transforming the trial into a media spectacle, a public forum in which false truths, frustrations and the deepest anxieties intermingle. Garner records everything, sifting through every detail until she reaches the essence of one of literature’s most classic and ancient themes. What is most striking about Helen Garner’s text, however, is a sort of neutral detachment, an apparent emotional absence, as if every element had been so thoroughly sifted through the sieve of language by the author that it emerges not so much as harmless, but reduced to its bare essentials, like a simple legal fact. In reality, the strength of "Where the Heart Lives" lies precisely in the author’s ability to maintain a precarious balance and to convey that effort and that fragility to the reader. In doing so, she avoids any facile emotional outburst, any sentimental lapse that does not belong to her—not only as an author, but even less so in her role as a listener. Robert Farquharson was convicted of murder on 5 October 2007, but the verdict was quashed following an appeal by the defendant. A retrial concluded with Farquharson’s final sentencing to life imprisonment on 15 October 2010, bringing a painful, atrocious and insane story to a definitive close. This brought an end to all the inconsistencies and nuances, the subtleties and errors of the investigation; yet these remain in Garner’s novel, in which she does not set out to exonerate, let alone impose a different truth, but rather to reveal human nature, human arrogance and just how endless the descent into the abyss can be. A powerful and radical book, written by an author who remains largely undiscovered in Italy.

    

Helen Garner
, "Where Pain
Lives at Night", 312 pp., 20 euros