NAW Reading Challenge: The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane
To celebrate our our inaugural New Australian Writing (NAW) Award shortlist, we’re running a NAW Reading Challenge!
This is week one of the challenge and participants have read The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane. Here are their responses to the novel (Ed. note: may contain spoilers!).
Jill says:
As my grandmother grew older, she became increasingly convinced that someone was breaking into her house and stealing things. The boundaries of her world, her possessions, her home, even her body, became simultaneously more vulnerable and more important to her. McFarlane sets up both the tiger (that underpins the novel’s title) and self-appointed carer Frida as lurking, ambiguous intrusions into the order of widowed Ruth’s quiet retirement. The writing is sparse, confident and unadorned.
The narrative is told from Ruth’s point of view and, as it unfurls, it becomes increasingly difficult to trust her perspective. It’s a significant challenge to tell a story through a potentially fragmenting mind; McFarlane made me really care about Ruth and tapped into the universal fears we have about old age. Ruth’s gradual disintegration plays out in an excursion to the local shops that is filled with poignancy and farce. Frida is fabulously multifaceted and alarming. She is a masterful creation. Ruth is in turn grateful to Frida and resentful. As tension mounted in the book, I was increasingly scared for Ruth and found it hard to stop reading. There are elements of a powerful horror story here but Ruth’s context is frighteningly normal.
Alice says:
Human communication is fraught with fade-outs and static. This book is about communication, or more accurately the many ways we fail to communicate with each other:
‘You’re telling me there’s a what, there’s a tiger in your house?’
Ruth said nothing. She wasn’t telling him there was a tiger in her house; she was telling him she could hear one. That distinction seemed important…
Ruth’s son Jeffrey gets the wrong message. Or rather, the message he receives is not the one that Ruth wishes to send. Ruth is more successful in sending a message that receives the reception she is hoping for when informing Jeffrey that Richard is coming to visit:
He knew me when I was a girl. He knew your grandparents.
…Ruth knew that Jeffrey mistook her use of the word girl to mean child; he would be imagining this Richard as a considerably older man, avuncular…
But perhaps the greatest failures of human communication lie in our failed efforts to be true to ourselves; to us. Ruth both does and doesn’t want her sons to know that the man she fell in love with in Fiji (and lost during the boat journey to Sydney) will be coming to stay. She both trusts Frida – with her body, her hair, her kitchen – yet deeply distrusts her. She wants Frida to go, and never come back (‘I want you to go home’, said Ruth. ‘I want you to call George and get him to take you home.’) yet at the same time runs into her arms when Ellen brings her home from town, and is distressed whenever she thinks that Frida might leave.
And Frida. Frida both wants to care for Ruth, and to ruthlessly exploit her. And Frida’s final tragedy is that she both hates George, knowing what he is, yet remains desperately in love with him.
Laura says:
Fiona MacFarlane’s novel is an amazingly graphic, yet lovely, depiction of dementia, retirement, grief, love and loneliness. The novel’s main strength is the characters. Ruth and Frida are both strong female characters who complement each other perfectly which makes for a beautiful read. Despite their stark differences, the two work off each other’s energy and strengths giving the reader a raw insight into the nuances of (what Ruth believes is) true friendship.
Ruth seems to have a troubled relationship with her children who make her reliance on and trust in Frida from an early stage seem plausible. This helps move the storyline along. Without this being clear from the outset, one might question why this strong independent woman would fall so easily for Frida’s help. Ruth seems scared to speak to Jeffrey, with a suggestion that she feels as though he is now the parent. Similarly her separation from Phil seems to nurture a nostalgic sense of longing in which you get the sense that she doesn’t really know her son.
Juxtaposed to Ruth’s nostalgia, Frida lives in the moment. Her ever-changing presence, to me, seemed to be a human representation of the tiger. Deep down, I think Ruth knew that there was something going on with Frida and that the tiger represents the sense of danger she felt.
The way in which MacFarlane presents the normality of everyday life which subtly descends into confusion is absolutely beautiful. I found it striking to be put into the position of someone with memory problems. Instead of being an observer, frustrated with the ongoing forgetfulness, the reader is put in that moment, again and again with each time feeling like the first. This angle forced me to think of dementia in a new way. It almost made me think of it as an emotion as opposed to a disease.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It showcases two strong female leads and portrays everyday life beautifully.
Cherie says:
There are many factors that make Ruth vulnerable to Frida and George. At 75, Ruth is alone, isolated and hearing a tiger in her house at night. She knows it can’t be a tiger but that doesn’t stop her calling her son to inform him of the fact (is this a call for help?). She is aware that her sons are worried about her state of mind and it is into this scene that Frida appears. It feels like the perfect storm.
Ruth is ‘ prepared to accommodate the possibility that good strangers could materialise and love her for no apparent reason… ’ – just like Good Samaritan Ellen Gibson. Surely Harry would approve as well (and Ruth likes approval) and she tells Jeffrey that Frida is Fijian which reassures them both. Memories of her childhood in Fiji are recalled; where she was repeatedly told she was “part of a chosen people”. Frida is cunning & exploits Ruth’s dementia and kind nature over the course of months!
I was desperately hoping for an unannounced visit from Jeffrey, but it wasn’t to be. In the end Ruth was no match for the force of Frida.
Jacqueline says:
…a suspenseful, psychological thriller about trust, fear and loneliness. McFarlane successfully maintains the suspense at a slow, even pace just gradually ratcheting up the pressure until the climax. It is a stunning piece of writing filled with subtlety and nuance, and great characterisation. I suspect more than a few readers of this book will be dropping in to see their elderly relatives for a cup of tea.
(Ed. note: Read Jacqueline’s full review on her )
And our favourite response for this week (not to mention the winner of our $100 gift voucher) is…
Louise says:
The Night Guest is rather like a grown up version of the popular children’s classic The Tiger who came to Tea. Both have at the heart of the story a powerful stranger, the hint of post-colonial allegory and an unleashing of energy that contains elements of both desire and danger.
In The Night Guest, McFarlane cleverly juxtaposes the mundane and the exotic, bringing layers of flesh and life to a familiar, yet often thin, social narrative about elderly persons. My favourite part of the story is when 75 year old Ruth, almost in ‘tiger-made-me-do-it’ mode, trashes the room that Frida has claimed as her own – even coughing up a triumphant furball like globule to leave her mark. For me, the tiger represents a power; a protective,instinctual, discerning energy that both women are in need of, yet, are afraid of. ‘Destroying’ the tiger, removing it from their psychic house, foreshadowed misfortune for them both. If only they could have fed it instead!
I loved the book. I didn’t want to put it down, or for it to end. I have thought a lot about the characters since finishing the story and many images and metaphors have stayed in my mind. I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.
