Into the commune
Award-winning WA author Joan London returns with a fairytale-inspired novel about a runaway
The author came to terms with her own commune experience and decided she was a 'city' person
Fremantle writer Joan London made her name with her pointed short stories, collected in volumes like Sister Ships and Letter to Constantine, and her first novel, Gilgamesh, was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award. Now, almost seven years after Gilgamesh she returns with The Good Parents, a taut, thoughtful novel about two parents searching Melbourne for their missing daughter. She speaks to Time Out’s Richard Cooke.
Part of The Good Parents is about living in a commune, and you had experiences living in a commune yourself. What drove you to write about them? I’m of the baby boomer generation, and there was a lot of political action after Vietnam, and it went to the extremes of violence really, with the Weathermen and everything in America, and then it started to be a new kind of movement, to just drop out altogether from society. It was back to the land, and I was involved in probably for a period of five years. My partner and I tried to live in the country; we were involved in a couple of attempts of starting a commune… neither of them worked out. Finally we had to face the fact that we were very glad to live on our own in the city, and that we were city people. I came to the conclusion that people who actually could make a success of living on the land, they needed to have lots of skills, they needed to be practical, and to love it, and to love growing things and mending things, and have a lot of initiative – but we didn’t have any of them… I’ve actually always wondered: what would have happened if we had managed to stay living like that for a while? And if we would have, in the end, moved to a country town and got what work we could? How after a while if you’d stayed, your children would grow up there, and even financially, it would be hard to move back to the city. So in some ways my thoughts about the way the family in this novel came from a “what if” scenario.
All of the people I know who’ve grown up in communes have left at the first available opportunity… Well, within the novel, there’s two or three generations really, and it seems like every generation has to remake itself. And the generation that Jacob and Tony belong to, and that I belong to, really emerged from parents who had gone through a Depression and World War…. particularly with a past history of living on a commune, the next generation completely wants to get out of that experience and remake itself in another mode, as the children do in this novel.
How did you get interested in runaways, which feature in the novel? Perhaps in a way it’s a dramatisation of what you do to get away from your parents. And this generation, my generation, their parents were from the old school, and had very strict rules, and that could be what Toni runs away from. It’s quite different from what Maya, her daughter, runs away from. But as I was writing it, I suddenly started to feel there was an element of the fairytale about it, and I started to read books about the fairytale.
You have a very meticulous writing process. Is it right that you set the mood with props, that you have to set a stage to create an atmosphere about a particular time before you write about it? It is right – often, to get it going, I have an item I’m going to associate with a particular project: photographs, postcards of people’s faces or of people, and often I shuffle through them and find some element in these photographs that I associate with a particular character.
So you find inspiration sometimes in human faces? Well it’s not that too much; sometimes I have a sense of what a character is like, and sometimes I’m trying to match a photograph to that face. It’s just a little help, really. Some of the origins of the novel come from different stories that I’ve heard over the years, or things that happen, or people I’ve met. One issue within the novel really is beauty. The mother, Toni, is very beautiful; that kind of interested me, how much beauty can actually influence a life. Her appearance dictated what happened to her. In a way, she had to get past being extremely beautiful to get towards being who she was, and the issue of beauty was a big one for her daughter who wouldn’t have been as beautiful and that was one of the things she had to come to terms to and that interested me.
Joan Collins said being beautiful was like being born rich and becoming poorer. There are some people who find losing their looks is a relief, they don’t have those kind of concerns. I think it happens in the novel, when Toni looks into the mirror after she’s cut her hair off and sees a different person, and she’s ready to become the person that she’s meant to be actually, which is rather mystical and a bit of a loner. But life intervened, and she’s become swept up in social situations and relationships.