Well, it’s not a murder mystery. Though there is a mystery at the heart of the book and that mystery may – or may not – be the result of a murder.
It’s not a romance novel. Though there is romance woven through the story, not just of the kind between humans but the romance of natural things; the romance that’s around us everywhere, every day, if we only learn to look for it.
It’s not a crime novel. Most of us go through our lives, thank the Powers, without being directly affected by crime, though we know it is out there and that we must try to avoid it. A crime may have been committed in Lyrebird Mountain – a terrible crime. And if it was, who dunnit?
It’s not a historical novel although the history of Queensland, Australia and the wider world is recorded through events that affect the characters in the book – over more than a century.
It’s not a family saga – in the usual sense of the word. It is essentially the story of one woman’s life but her story carries the reader through six generations of women with whom her life is linked, from mother to daughter.
It’s not women’s fiction even though the main character is a woman and the story looks at life through a woman’s eyes. I don’t pretend to know the hearts of men; I can only experience them from the outside. But there is other stuff in Lyrebird Mountain besides the affairs of women…war gets a mention and politics and historical events and…yes…even cricket.
An author is by trade and inclination an observer of life and my observation is that novels rarely tell about life as it is. Of course they don’t; the job of the novelist is to shock, excite, thrill, entrance, intrigue, move you to laughter or tears. It’s entertainment, baby, not real life.
And yet, I have learned more in my life from novels than I ever learned from a non-fiction book.
So Lyrebird Mountain is not a genre novel. I did not want my characters to be larger than life, I wanted them to be the kind of people we encounter in our own lives. Life is not well-organised like fiction and people do not always have clear motives. Nor behave logically. Situations go unresolved, mysteries remain unsolved. It’s not neat, it’s not tidy, it’s LIFE.
So when people ask me what Lyrebird Mountain is about, I find it hard to answer. I say it is about love and loss, strength and resilience in the face of misfortune, the power of passion and the even greater power of place. It’s about the relationship between grandmothers and granddaughters and the cruel impact of war. And it’s all set against the historical evolution of a still-young nation finding its place in a sometimes terrifying world. (Yes, yes, I knew it’s an old continent with an older set of inhabitants but I’m talking about nationhood.)
I have often relied on allusion to tell my tale, rather than spelling it all out. As much as possible I have tried to treat cliches like potholes in the road – to be avoided. I don’t insult my readers by telling them the bleedingly bloody obvious! I prefer to let them work it out for themselves. Those who can’t are welcome to discuss it here on my blog.
There is, for example, a constant allusion to the mystery of the rainforest, especially higher-altitude forest like that of Lyrebird Mountain, where mist throws a gauze over the trees and clouds of vapour float up the gullies. I have always found rainforests of any kind – from the mighty Tongass of Alaska to the jungles of Africa – to be mysterious places. Spirits lurk there, ancient as the trees, though spirits of what I am never sure. Like Anna, I sense them, I feel them around me. Whispering. The life of the rainforest, whether in the canopy or on the littered floor, is secretive. If you listen, there is always a scuffling or a rustling or the cries of birds that often have a wailing eeriness to them. As if song or cackle belongs only to sunlight.
Such mystery, such hints of a magic powerful but unseen, can affect people in strange ways. Men have gone mad in rainforests; especially those who have gone there to cut timber and found themselves alone among the tree shadows, their axes suddenly falling from their hands. Women, in my experience, have a better understanding that keeps them safer; visiting as they do mostly to seek and examine plants and birds, doing no harm.
In many ways Lyrebird Mountain is an old-fashioned book. Deliberately so. I’ve gone against the contemporary trend to recast history through modern eyes and ears, in film, in television in books. Where characters speak and act as they do today and not as they did then. For I have lived through much of the timespan of Lyrebird Mountain and know, too, how my parents and grandparents spoke and behaved. And those of earlier generations. And there are, quite simply, things they didn’t do or say because of the prevailing standards of behaviour. Some bold few might have said and done things that broke the code. But most people didn’t. And those are the people I’m writing about. People who set a high price on reticence, restraint, fortitude, good manners and self-control. And who understood the difference between compassion and sentimentality. This is how they coped with the tough stuff. Looking back, it seems amazing to me that they could be happy in a world where even the rich did not have the comforts, conveniences, services, safety measures, medical treatments, social support and readily-accessible entertainment that we take for granted.
But, by and large, they were. Like Anna and her family, they bore it all and carried on.
This is not, I know, the stuff of great drama. But I wanted to write something real. For the kind of readers who like it that way.
I hope I succeeded.
Lyrebird Mountain 