Review of Gatherers and Hunters by Thomas Shapcott

Thomas Shapcott’s long last story has the innocent title ‘Sunshine Beach’. There’s nothing innocent about it. All of his stories, in fact, have innocuous titles, but inside them are great currents of emotion and difficult truths. But the novella made me realise just how fine his storytelling is, and how much wisdom is contained within.

Charlie Branson is the main character, and I kept reading his name as Charles Bronson, the tough guy actor with the sculptured rock face, as if he keeps trying to ‘tough’ out the change in his life. Charlie is a widower, his wife Miriam having died suddenly while overseas at a conference. Shapcott shows him clearing every physical object out of his life after her death: the house is sold, the furniture disposed of, even the photograph albums thrown away. He clears out a lot of his own clothing and bins paperwork, until there is nothing left.

Ghosts. No, out with them all. Everywhere he looked, even with so much of the household furniture already sent off to children, in line with Miriam’s will, and with all those ‘might come in handy’ bits and pieces (from long pieces of timber to what seemed like every piece of electric gadgetry ever invented) at last bequeathed to the Salvos, in each room of the house Charlie still found himself looking into a mirror, not a tunnel, of remembering. And what made it worse, each memory associated with each stick of furniture or property was as if each moment of the past were still now. Everything lived still in a perpetual present tense. He had not realised that furniture had this power. (124)

And then he goes back to the holiday town of his early adolescence, Caloundra, where he had experienced ‘glorious times’ (125). He buys a unit, furnishes it with any old pieces he can pick up, and reminisces about Beatrice. She was his brother’s friend, a special girl he got to know when he was fifteen, who now seems to glow with the light of nostalgia, lost youth, longing. He has thrown away the memories that pain him, and grasped with both hands the ones he thinks will comfort.

Continued at Transnational Literature, Volume 3, Issue 2, May 2011.