By Declan Fry
Helen Garner observes her grandson and his football teammates in The Season.
MEMOIR
The Season
Helen Garner
Text, $34.99
Does Helen Garner profess expertise in the lore and arcana of Australian rules football? No. Does playing the sociologist interest her? Again, no. During football season in Melbourne, Garner watches her grandson Amby’s under-16s team. Her passion? The eros of sport.
Garner is half-enraptured by her grandson’s delicate, youthful universe. To be young is to be beatified, fleet, evanescent. Age has yet to arrive. Look at the players fly! Look at them leap! The athletic, at once Homeric and Miltonic, are sylvan angels. They are “supplicants in a Blake print”. The Season is Death in Venice with Sherrin balls.
A memoir-diary and document of “psychologically and spiritually meaningful incidents” witnessed during the footy, the eroticism makes sense: when a Swans player, ashamed of his performance, is kissed on the cheek by a teammate, Garner calls it a “commiseration”. The word speaks not only to compassion and pity but, etymologically, to intense erotic love.
Watching two older blokes on the field, Garner says, simply, “I envy them.” Her observations of the body ache. They’re funny, too. Her grandson’s torso is “flat and smooth and muscled as a goddamn model’s”. Youth is regenerative. It encapsulates something of Garner’s desire to be present during a time in one’s life when it is still possible to believe that the present is all there is.
And yet, amid the book’s intimations of mortality, Garner can still enjoy a teenage moment with the best of them. At home, detained by a cold, she listens to Radiohead, texting Amby emojis, a black star of self-pity (“Here I lie, forgotten, wallowing in my bitterness”). It’s a droll rejoinder to binary conceptions of age – or perhaps simply the idea that the joys of teenage angst are not reserved exclusively for teenagers.
Helen Garner at the suburban ground where she watched her grandson play football.Credit: Darren James
Garner admits a furtive longing to join the players on the field. She ministers to the boys, offers sliced orange sacraments at half-time, delivers benedictions (“Glory – glory to you”). She questions whether she is worthy of the players’ “tremendous life force” (“I draw on it. I’m even living off it”). Her accustomed mode of observation is leavened here by age – and the surveillance native to age, when almost everything ceases simply to be a matter of participation or non-participation. In its place, we have participation through observance: observance of the past, of the lives around her, the changing of the seasons, the games people wage.
Some of the book’s most poignant details are portraits of people at play, and not merely on ovals: in one understated moment, Amby’s older brother, punk-band guitarist and former team member, practises waltzes at the piano. Age makes room for innocence, just as experience can maintain – like the little rituals of penance and self-sacrifice Garner witnesses on the football field – its share of purity. In a way, it is what everything Garner has ever written is about.
In Australian writing, a combination of Catholicism and patriarchy offer a lodestone for many authors (Birch, Winton, Tsiolkas, Flanagan). A detailed itinerary of The Season’s focus on masculinity and the spiritual, its arcades of religious reference, would require more words than I can offer. A cursory itemisation: rubbish collectors working the football field, the hailing of deities, acts of attention and faith despite ignorance, an umpire’s “hieratic gestures”.
Throughout the book, Garner chastises those who appear not to be mindful (businessmen on scooters, callous dog-walkers, over-enthusiastic eaters). The observation from another parent, “Don’t turn your back on the play”, serves as both epigraph and analogy – for attention, and perhaps a sense of community, too, the link connecting observers and participants. Observation’s disappearing act is easy; who cares to notice an “old duck” patiently keeping vigil, especially when it’s your grandmother? Of course, The Season’s arrival speaks to the possibility that every observer must accept they are also a participant: to help ensure her grandson and his friends would not become too distracted by the book’s arrival during the exam period, Garner delayed publication.
The Season offers a signal idea: there is purity in observance and danger in participation. Writing combines aspects of both. “[O]ffering my presence and my attention and my service,” Garner says, devoting not just quasi-religious observance but a writer’s devotion to self-obliteration and asceticism. Writing requires patience, the slow attempt to reach toward something like understanding, even the understanding of not knowing. It is, in a way, what all creation is: an act of faith – and an absorption, too, in communities, in gestures of physical and mental attention.
At the end of the game, as Amby shouts, “Again! Again! Again!” Garner realises there are only so many rounds you can play. “I don’t want it to end”, she writes. “I want it to go on forever, to be near it forever.”
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