Feast opens with Alison – a once-famous actor living a reclusive life with her partner in the wilds of Scotland – discovering a rabbit caught in a trap.
She doesn’t soothe it or speak to it as she pushes down on its neck until it snaps. She stands, feeling “the illogical ache of homesickness, of feeling far from where she is safe”, and carries its corpse back to their dilapidated manor house.
This opening sequence – lush, harsh and visceral – grounds the novel in the luxurious gothic that defines it; its author, we immediately learn, is unafraid of cruelty, of peeling back the layers of flesh to expose the darkness of her characters. O’Grady’s debut, The Yellow House, won the 2018 Vogel’s literary award and her follow-up, Feast, is a triumph: bloody, haunting and pulsing with the lives of the expertly rendered ensemble at its core. It is, as the title suggests, a feast for the senses, and one that deeply examines the frustrations and unmet needs that leave women hungry for more.
Alison and Patrick, a former rock star, are an eccentric couple: artists who made enough money in their prime to afford a life of indolent indulgence now they’re past it. They live together in the manor home that Alison’s mother, Frances, died in. In a recent development, they’ve been joined by Patrick’s teenage daughter, Neve, who moved to Scotland from Australia on a whim before her 18th birthday. Patrick wants to throw her a party – the book’s titular feast – and invites Neve’s mother, Shannon, but the newcomers disrupt the delicate status quo of the house, and dredge up hurts old and new.
Feast deals in liminal spaces more than the absolute, capturing the complex tensions between life and death, good and bad. Like Christos Tsiolkas in The Slap, O’Grady exposes the innate capacity for violence, cruelty and neglect which all her characters share, but she refuses to make them only this, showing also their capacity to create life and joy, to nurture and to love. O’Grady explores this using the physical realities of the body – Alison has just discovered, at 48, that she is pregnant. The intrusion of the foetus on her body mirrors the intrusion of Neve on her house – both are mostly unwanted by Alison, who would prefer not to be confronted with the reality of other people. “The outside world has become scary and unfamiliar,” thinks Alison early on. “If she were never to leave the house again, she’d be a very happy woman.”
The reason for her self-imposed isolation isn’t revealed until the novel’s end: an ugly but satisfying denouement to her narrative, and one that gives weight to the refrain “they deserve each other”, which Alison thinks more and more often as she reflects on Patrick’s character – “oblivious to all things, unshakable, and as slippery as oil” – and her own.
Satisfyingly, Patrick isn’t given any say in how he is perceived, revealed instead via the alternating points of view of the three women. His presence is affable and somewhat bovine at first, but becomes bullish and controlling as his ex Shannon asks him to face up to the early years of their relationship. “Radiant”, Alison calls Shannon (awkwardly, to her face).
Shannon’s presence disturbs the tension that has settled between the taciturn Neve and Alison, and her voice is a breath of freshness that stops the novel from becoming unbearably heavy. In a refreshing alternative to the stereotypical narrative of female jealousy and possessiveness, Alison and Shannon develop a kind of wary curiosity about each other, if not outright friendship. Many aspects of their own lives are reflected in the other, even if they’re not overtly aware of it – their relationship with Patrick; with their own mothers; with their unborn children (Shannon’s stillborn daughter, Anya, was the catalyst for her separation with Patrick).
O’Grady layers these themes with perfection, planting images at the beginning of the novel that bear fruit upon their repetition towards the end. These echoes have the filmic, haunted quality of a double exposure, as impressions of the past left on the present. In one scene, for instance, Alison finally takes on the task of cleaning Frances’ old room, which has, until this weekend, been off limits:
Is she here? Not a ghost of her physical self, but an imprint, perhaps, or some sort of afterglow. Alison pays attention to the air and how it feels on her skin. She waits for it to grow colder, or maybe warmer, for a prickle of something, a hand in the small of her back.
O’Grady is a clever writer and her ability to craft a tense and compelling story within the confines of this house, over a single weekend, is admirable. Feast is meaty and provocative in its exploration of power, desire and the hunger for something more.
Feast by Emily O’Grady is out now through Allen & Unwin
