Honi Soit
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Trending
    • CAPA Board Passes Motion Removing SUPRA Voting Rights 
    • The momentary victory of mass politics: reflections on Kissinger and Australia
    • “We are freedom fighters”: pro-Palestinian protestors march amidst end to seven-day ceasefire
    • An invitation in: SCA’s ‘New Contemporaries’
    • NTEU to delay new fixed-term contract limits that fail to cover higher-education workers
    • Mohammed Shami: The Muslim cricketer who carried an Islamophobic nation to the Men’s Cricket World Cup Final
    • Moving beyond the theoretical: Privacy law reform in Australia
    • Digital privacy, missing voices, and cookies: IAPP Summit 2023
    • About
    • Print Edition
    • Advertise
    • Locations
    • Contact
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok
    Honi SoitHoni Soit
    Thursday, December 7
    • News
    • Analysis
    • Culture
    • Opinion
    • University
    • Features
    • Perspective
    • Investigation
    • Reviews
    Honi Soit
    Home»Culture»Books

    Review: Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light

    Bodies of Light is a beautifully controlled account of a life devastated by systemic failure.
    By Grace RoodenrysAugust 22, 2022 Books 4 Mins Read
    Share
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

    Winning the Miles Franklin Prize is about as good as it gets for Australian novelists. Not only is it our richest literary award, it’s also the most likely to open the door on a meaningful international readership. You’re joining a list of alumni that includes some of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary writers, after all: the acclaimed Indigenous novelist Alexis Wright, the Nobel Prize-picked Peter Carey, the somehow four-time winner Tim Winton (if anyone else just doesn’t get it, you’re not alone). Perhaps taking out the prize also turns up the critical heat on an author, since anything deemed an Important Australian Novel is going to be charged with some heavy cultural lifting. But Jennifer Down meets this standard again and again in her recently Miles Franklin-winning novel Bodies of Light (Text Publishing, 2021), a beautifully controlled account of a life devastated by systemic failure.

    Bodies of Light follows Maggie, a survivor of Australia’s out-of-home care system who has spent most of her life trying to flee a childhood marked by sustained sexual abuse and an almost unfathomable degree of institutional negligence. We meet Maggie in media res: Vermont, 2018, where she is living as Holly after changing her identity under vague circumstances some years prior.  A Facebook message from a man noting her resemblance to a Maggie Sullivan who went missing from Victoria in 1998 is the set-up for Maggie’s retelling of her horrific childhood, whose cost she later keeps on paying, no matter how earnestly she tries to build a normal life. 

    Stylistically, Bodies of Light reminds me of Emily Bitto’s Stella Prize-winning The Strays, another recent Australian novel in which an adult narrator reflects on the traumas that shaped her. Like Bitto’s, Down’s narrative is layered and sweeping, moving between present and past and unfolding across a number of locations within and outside Australia. In the first part of the novel this movement between places largely reflects the realities of a childhood spent in institutional care: Maggie goes from group home to foster family to emergency accommodation with a stoicism that is one of the more heartbreaking features of the novel, since it shows just how little she expects from the system designed to protect her, and how unsurprised she is when it lets her down again. But the adult Maggie moves equally fast through homes, cities and attachments, as if bound to repeat the patterns of her early life. She finishes school and makes it to uni, but leaves for reasons she can’t explain: “in the end it was easy to give up,” she recalls, since “none of this had ever been mine to want.” She forms some close relationships, including with a foster carer, Judith, with whom she lived in the only briefly stable years of her childhood, but every one of them crumbles. Maggie watches this all with more relief than disappointment, since each thing that falls apart in her life is “just another part of a sequence already in motion, the next scene in a play.” When she’s hospitalised for catatonia at 20 after reading her state records, there’s “something sickening but reassuring about it,” she explains, “as if I could have only ever ended up here.” 

    This idea – that Maggie could “only ever have ended up” where she is – makes Bodies of Light difficult reading. Time is a closed loop for Maggie: she buys a car, goes to uni, starts a family, twice relocates and changes her name. But none of it matters; each attempt at escape only returns her to her past harder than before. Some readers might find the novel relentless in this way, even repetitive, since all narrative progression in its nearly 500 pages leads us back to where we started. There is also a kind of suddenness to Down’s temporality at times, as the terrible things that happen to Maggie are narrated with neither build-up nor any sense of surprise (this is particularly the case in the book’s last 100 pages, when Maggie falls hard and all of a sudden into addiction yet we suspect, given the echoes of her biological father’s history of addiction, that things might never have ended up any other way). But Down’s refusal to tell this story otherwise is exactly what makes this novel so incisive a critique of a broken system, and so truthful a portrait of how those it fails are left to suffer the costs more times over than we can count. 

    Australia has always been big on the liberal fiction that we alone determine the course of our lives. Bodies of Light is a quiet, sad reminder of the many people for whom this isn’t and has never been true, and a call to recognise that we are only as good as our collective systems. 

    Australian literature jennifer down miles franklin prize systemic failures

    Keep Reading

    Stories behind Disability Pride Sydney Festival

    It’s coded in the stars

    White Bay Power Station: Why local histories matter

    Hopping on The Milk Lorry: my family’s story in verse

    Hardcore, Hardcare? Lessons from the Fiddlehead moshpit

    The man with nine lives, an interview with Nathen Mazri

    Just In

    CAPA Board Passes Motion Removing SUPRA Voting Rights 

    December 7, 2023

    The momentary victory of mass politics: reflections on Kissinger and Australia

    December 6, 2023

    “We are freedom fighters”: pro-Palestinian protestors march amidst end to seven-day ceasefire

    December 4, 2023

    An invitation in: SCA’s ‘New Contemporaries’

    December 4, 2023
    Editor's Picks

    Puff, puff, pass: What does cannabis legalisation mean for student communities?

    November 1, 2023

    Privacy is not dead, yet

    October 26, 2023

    ‘A patchwork quilt of repression’: The disappearing right to protest in NSW

    October 17, 2023

    The lights are on, but no one’s home: inside USyd’s International House

    October 10, 2023
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok

    From the mines

    • News
    • Analysis
    • Higher Education
    • Culture
    • Features
    • Investigation
    • Comedy
    • Editorials
    • Letters
    • Misc

     

    • Opinion
    • Perspective
    • Profiles
    • Reviews
    • Science
    • Social
    • Sport
    • SRC Reports
    • Tech

    Admin

    • About
    • Editors
    • Send an Anonymous Tip
    • Write/Produce/Create For Us
    • Print Edition
    • Locations
    • Archive
    • Advertise in Honi Soit
    • Contact Us

    We acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The University of Sydney – where we write, publish and distribute Honi Soit – is on the sovereign land of these people. As students and journalists, we recognise our complicity in the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous land. In recognition of our privilege, we vow to not only include, but to prioritise and centre the experiences of Indigenous people, and to be reflective when we fail to be a counterpoint to the racism that plagues the mainstream media.

    © 2023 Honi Soit
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms
    • Accessibility

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.