A review by waywardfancy
A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists by Jane Rawson

4.0

I loved this book which was a big relief because I met the author and she rocked and it would have been very awkward if I didn’t like the book. I read it in March and should have reviewed it then, straight away. Rawson’s novel is so unique it has remained fresh in my mind. (And I tend to rave about it and recommend it to everyone so I have been talking about it for months!) This book manages to be original without being pretentious, moving without being sentimental, speculative without being clichéd, environmental without being preachy and futuristic in a very gritty and believable way. What Jane Rawson has achieved with this book is an incredibly skilful writing feat which delights at every – wrong or right – turn.

Melbourne in the near future – a future affected by climate change – is the main setting for the book. With Caddie’s home destroyed by fire, a fire which took the life of her husband Harry, she joins the thousands of displaced people that populate the city. The evocation of a future Melbourne seething with heat and thronging with homeless people was so believable I can still see the images in my head and I was afraid to catch the train to North Melbourne station in case I found large groups of people living there. Being from Melbourne the sense of place touched a raw nerve.

Caddie is a terrifically tough character trying to survive the disastrous times with a broken heart, turning a few tricks for money; doing whatever she can to get by. She is resourceful in both practical and mental ways. She is grieving deeply for Harry. Rawson describes their relationship so honestly, that the sense of grief is palpable.
“Harry was Caddy’s settling down. She settled into him like a pillow on the couch, a blanket pulled over her, and footy on the TV, falling asleep by three-quarter time on a Friday night. He was knowing that everything would be OK; he was kissing goodbye for a little too long before heading out to work; he was waking up on Sunday morning with plans for each day-by-day, for the little things that build a wall around two people and keep them safe.”

Her grief for Harry underpins the narrative but never overwhelms it.

“So that's how it was. And now it's gone. I don't even know why I'm still here. It won't come back....statistically, there won't be something else for me like I had with Harry, I don't even want it. There was me and him and it wasn't magical or like anything you'd see on TV, it was just love. Kind and real and every single day. Every fucking single day, and I never had to doubt it, ever."

Caddie’s dry humour, self-deprecating manner and street smarts cover most of her emotions. Her friend Ray, a Koori with a talent for black market racketeering has discovered something strange. It’s a map that when you stand in certain places (like Hanging Rock - a lovely reference to Joan Lindsay’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock”) and fold the map you can slip through space the location on the other side of the crease. Ray is naturally trying to think of a way to monetise it. Caddie and Ray explore the powers of the map and discover another place, “the gap” – a nether world –where there is a cloakroom for the shadows of the dead, the place for lost lids and pens and an office for unmade lists and most amazingly, the suspended imaginarium – a place for all things imagined and abandoned. It is in the Suspended Imaginarium that Caddie’s unfinished and abandoned novel exists – it’s setting is 1997 San Francisco - and it’s the story of Simon and Sarah who are on a quest to see America in a very specific way. They must stand in every 25 foot square of the country. It was something begun with their parents and a legacy they have continued.

Got all that? Yes it’s whacky but bloody marvellous in how it’s written. The story plays out with the real world hot and disintegrating in contrast to another world limited by the boundaries of imagination, existing bubble like in the ideas already thought. What can pass between these worlds and where would Caddie rather exist? What will she find in the gap?

The tensions between reality and imagination and the limitations of both play out in the novel with heart breaking poignancy and dry humour. The novel is utterly original in its premise and told with such expert tone and language. The passage which described how this map that is a portal to a nether world came into existence is so thoroughly amazing and well written that I stopped and re-read it several times.

In “Wrong Turn and the Office of Unmade Lists” Rawson tenderly explores a raw grief, but is never awash with sentimentality. The internal logic of this universe is so wonderfully detailed and consistent that the reader is firmly planted in this future Melbourne. The speculative tangents that spring from Rawson’s mind have a solidity to them – a testament to the honesty of her language and characters. Somehow Rawson can straddle worlds at once Python-esque and absurd but touchingly and devastatingly real and within it display the fragility of the human experience when faced with loss, change and environmental disaster.

Rawson manages to move you without any sense of emotional manipulation, manages to be absurd yet always true to the universe of the book, manages to be dryly witty but never dismissively so. There is tenderness shown to all characters and an interplay of worlds that in their un-reality only serve to heighten the reality of Caddie’s situation. Rawson taps into our connection with place and how it affects our happiness, the power of the imagination and escapism and the importance of storytelling for resilience and the fragility of human nature when faced with loss. Have I told you how I loved this book?