Review of AFTER STORY by Larissa Behrendt

 3.5 Stars

Though it deals with Australia’s Indigenous peoples, this book had me thinking about Canada’s First Nations people.

Jasmine, an idealistic Indigenous lawyer, takes her mother Della on a literary tour of England.  Della, recently widowed, is no stranger to tragedy:  25 years earlier, her eldest daughter Brittany disappeared.  Jasmine thinks of the trip as an opportunity to reconnect with her mother with whom she hasn’t been close after she left for university.  

The literary tour is the framing device.  Each chapter, devoted to one day of the tour, has two sections giving alternating first person perspectives of Jasmine and Della.  Della, fairly uneducated, has never left her small town, whereas Jasmine is university-educated and worldly.   Reading their thoughts about what they think is significant about what they see is interesting. 

This structure can be somewhat repetitive but there are distinct differences in Della and Jasmine’s reactions to what they see.  Della lacks literary knowledge but is intelligent and observant.  She always compares what she sees and learns to her experiences back home, and questions the wisdom of the British when compared to the knowledge and achievements of her Indigenous ancestors.  Jasmine, on the other hand, is familiar with British writers and focuses on how the life experiences of authors influenced their writing.  This leads to considering the effect of childhood trauma and abuse on one of her clients.  Only later does she give thought to the impact of past events on her mother.

The characters are authentic and relatable.  Jasmine’s attempts to escape the small world of her childhood and to prove that she is more than the stereotypes of her people are perfectly understandable.  Likewise, Della’s observations about how her people have been misjudged and mistreated are grounded in her experiences.  She is more interested in the daily lives of people in the past, lives with which she can identify, than in the writings of literary figures. 

I enjoyed seeing the growth of a closer mother-daughter relationship.  Della comes to think about her daughter and what she experienced:  “I’d never thought much about what a big change and adjustment it must have been for her to go to such a new place like a university.”    And Jasmine learns about the trauma her mother suffered as a child.  There is also more self-reflection so Jasmine concludes, “I’d rejected too much of who I was in trying to prove others wrong.”

What bothered me is the book’s tone which often becomes didactic.  The ever-so-frequent comparisons between Indigenous and western culture seem contrived.  Here are some examples of the preachy tone intended to educate the reader:  “An old druid stone impresses people but most don’t even know about the things Aboriginal people built” and “We lasted generation after generation so we must have been doing something right.  And we’re still going – unlike the Romans who made it here, where everything now is buried ruins” and “we were the world’s oldest living culture so ours is a pretty impressive inheritance” and “It was true that Aboriginal people didn’t have pottery but is that the only thing you should judge by?  The Romans had crucifixions and watched people kill each other for sport and had slaves.  Aboriginal people didn’t have any of that and they didn’t go around invading other countries and conquering people.”

As I mentioned, the treatment of Indigenous Australians is similar to that of Canada’s First Nations.  Reference is made to “the government practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families.”  Della mentions that “Aboriginal stories across Australia record events from over seven thousand years ago when the sea levels rose, faithfully handing down the stories for over three hundred generations.”  This comment reminded me of how the Inuit have passed down stories from one generation to the next about the Franklin expedition and the resulting tragedy. These stories directed the Parks Canada team of explorers and archaeologists in their search for the wreckage, leading to the discovery of Erebus in 2014.

As a booklover, I found myself wishing to do such a literary tour.  But I learned more about intergenerational trauma and racist colonialist behaviour than I did about literature.  I don’t mind having my view of the world and history expanded and challenged, but I wish the novel had been less heavy-handed in its attempt to do so.