REVIEW #12: ONE SUNDAY BY JOY DETTMAN

One Sunday

By Joy Dettman

Macmillan 2005

While the plot of the novel revolves around uncovering the murderer  ─ and likely suspects are in plentiful supply ─ Dettman’s real interest lies in challenging our notions of what constitutes a crime. Rachel’s murder is intentionally juxtaposed against the deaths, maiming and dysfunction of families ─ one in particular ─ as a result of the horrific suffering of men in WWI and the on-going trauma experienced by them and their families on their return to Australia.

Sometimes there is a direct challenge aimed at the reader. When Tige can no longer face his post-war demons, the intrusive narrator notes that ‘Mike learned that Father Ryan and God might praise a man for blowing a German’s brains out, but it was a mortal sin to blow his own brains out’. Later, faced with the local cop’s own  helpless inability to cope with his wife’s mental illness after their two sons were killed in the war, one of the local German lads observes ‘We all create cushions of pretence to shield the mind.’ All of our social institutions are in Dettman’s sights: government, marriage, families, the church, the law, mental health treatment, the vulnerability of women and even gossip gets some attention, though it seems so harmless in the age of cyber bullying and cancel culture. Being privy to the thoughts of Thommo, the aging country constable, drags the reader through a morally ambiguous mire, unlikely to instill confidence in that social institution early last century. The family fares just as badly, demonstrating only extreme dysfunction where men are maddened by old wounds and the burden of life on the land, or the debilitating mental and physical health of their wives and sons in the face of death and the deformities of war. Women and young men bear the brutality of this bitterness and withdraw into a dull obedience and resigned silence, as they wait to make their escape from a resentment that gnaws constantly at the bones of their discontent.

Dettman portrays her characters flaws, but the mud and blood that inhabits the days and nights of the period reveal that all have been stained by the war and wounded by life’s circumstances, enabling us to sympathize with their decisions and to temper our exasperation and harsh judgement with the acknowledgement that life is much easier in the observing that in the living.

On many occasions, the reader is faced with the discrimination suffered by Australian-born children whose German ancestry marked them as deliberately and hostilely as Hitler would later brand Jews. We are confronted by a grocer spitting on a boy’s joy in the knowledge that the war had ended and his optimistic belief that his old life of being included in a game of cricket would soon resume. Instead, he realised ‘he would always be a German bastard’ and he would spend his life ‘[walking’ on eggshells around many in [his] town.’ Dettman draws attention to the anglicizing of names to overcome prejudice and the freezing out of those of German descent. Constable Thompson had worked through his hatred, though it had taken many years. ‘Like bushfires,’ he observed, those fires of hatred in your belly burned themselves out after a  time, unless you kept giving them new fuel.’  But not everyone was willing to let the past die. There were those ‘who kept those flames leaping high.’ Dettman ends on a hopeful note. A belief that life and love can reassert themselves after the tragedy of war and its lingering hurts and hatreds. I stayed up most of the night to read this book in one day and I have continued to mull over the many confronting attitudes and issues of the day and compare that with today’s society. I like a book that stirs me to think about my humanity and my society. You may like it, too, if you like a story that takes you outside your comfort zone.