All the Words We Know is Bruce Nash’s third novel, but his first with a commercial publisher. The intensely interior story follows Rose, an elderly woman with dementia who becomes convinced that the aged care facility she lives in is killing its residents. As the title suggests, the novel begins (and ends) with words, exploring the slippages in memory and meaning that make Rose an entertaining but unreliable narrator: “In the beginning is the whatitsname/what do you call them? Forget-me-nots/All in their unicorns. Uniforms.” Rose’s fixation on language is at the heart of the novel, which explores the way language can spark love, strip people of power and clarify or obfuscate meaning.
Rose’s monologuing is interrupted by her discovery of a potentially nefarious plot. Opening the book she uses to keep track of her daily activities, Rose discovers that a page is missing. This triggers a string of memories – something about injections, somebody hanging from something and somebody with a plastic bag over their head – all of them the last somethings these somebodies ever did. Her somewhat clumsy investigation into what she thinks has happened reveals secrets at an institutional level and within her own family, capturing the many ways in which elderly people, particularly those struggling with memory loss, are infantilised and stripped of their agency.
Rose is a slightly less-endearing version of Ruth Cracknell’s Maggie in the 90s sitcom Mother and Son, although she does share some of Maggie’s wilful attitude and taste for mischief. But Nash is a bit too heavy-handed on the dramatic irony and so, unlike Maggie, who often wrestles the upper hand from her two sons, Rose comes across as overly naive. All of this results in her seeming a bit stupid, which seems unlikely to be the author’s intention, given the obvious heart he’s attempted to bring to a difficult topic.
Nash captures, through Rose’s eyes, how it feels to be regarded as a nuisance, such as when she describes the palaver of going on an outing with her son: “He hates taking me out. Having to fold up my walker and put it into the what do you call it … the boot, of his car. Having to fold me up too, to get me into the passenger seat, being careful with my head, then having to fiddle with the seatbelt to make sure I’m safe, because my fingers can never manage the buckle thing.” Rose has signed power of attorney over to her son – “a good boy [who] wipes his bottom thoroughly” – which leaves her at the mercy of someone who regularly reassures her that he is a trustworthy guardian for her finances and information, and seems anything but.
Although Rose is sympathetically drawn, there are many missed opportunities to present the nuanced relationships that grown-up children have with parents with dementia. Rose’s children come across as churlish and simmer with barely contained frustration towards their mother throughout, which Rose puts down to their need to demonstrate their unhappiness. And while she feels her children’s frustration keenly – my own nanna used to try to say goodbye only moments after I’d called her because she didn’t want to “be a nuisance” – to offer no insight into the shame, helplessness or fear that Rose’s children might feel alongside their impatience flattens these characters.
Similarly, Rose’s grandchildren come across as only vapid and self-obsessed, while the staff at the nursing home – referred to as Scare Manager and Angry Nurse – are likewise reduced to a single villainous archetype.
It’s not that such archetypes are hard to believe in; it’s probably harder to find someone who doesn’t have a story about the horrifying inadequacies of a woefully under-resourced and underfunded aged care system. And there’s no doubt that many will feel a twinge of uncomfortable recognition as they reflect on their own impatience with elderly relatives. But it doesn’t feel enough to leave it simply at that, without even attempting to dig beyond the superficial.
Seeing the world through Rose’s eyes, we can only know what she knows – but often it seems as though she knows too much. Nash has tried to write an unreliable narrator whose perception is undermined by her dementia, but often she seems to be in full possession of the facts. This takes away from the satisfaction the reader might otherwise feel at unravelling the reality from Rose’s experience of it for themselves.
There are moments of poignancy. In one confrontation, Rose tells Angry Nurse, “I am somebody, you know” – a deceptively simple line with the power to knock the wind out of the reader. This, really, is where the emotion of All the Words We Know comes from: the point where anyone past a certain age is stripped of their personhood and exists primarily as a burden or an annoyance. For all the novel’s flaws, All the Words We Know is absolutely a feelings book, from the first page to the last. Although it doesn’t quite reach its full potential, it will be loved by readers wanting to have their heart strings plucked.
All the Words We Know by Bruce Nash is published by Allen & Unwin ($34.99)
