Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career could be considered the historic template for Zoë Morrison’s debut novel Music and Freedom, but that’s only partly true.
Morrison’s achievement in this tremendously powerful novel is to reach beyond the surface energy and grit-ingrained bravado of the ‘tough woman of the bush’ archetype. She delves instead, into the nether depths of very real physical and psychological suffering of unseen or acknowledged women who endured from early bush days into modern suburbia of post WWI, WWII and current day.
In Alice Murray, Morrison offers a powerful character infused with great musical talent. She has a depth of practical spirit in the face of family violence and her crushing marriage to Edward, an English economics professor she meets at Oxford as a young Australian girl from the bush of the 1930s, seeking her career as great concert pianist. Once the heightened romance of her relationship with Edward gives way to the reality of a harsh, brutally suppressed lifestyle, all things strong and passionate within Alice begin to wither. Her music, the essence of her being, is slowly taken from her.
Moving from the present to the past, Alice offers up a soul on the verge of giving it all up. Her daily rituals are those of one slowly dying. As she does so, she travels to the past and back. Morrison skilfully renders parallel worlds in time, conjuring up a rich, radiant blend of sturdy outback freshness, velvet-cushioned English sophistication hiding darker realities, and washed-out present day suburban living.
The steady, flowing rhythm of Morrison’s writing allows Alice’s inner life of struggle and torment to create a vivid, at times terrifyingly searing, desperate debate about what real inner freedom is. What love is. What that greatest human expression of spirit, music, actually is.
Morrison’s introduction of classical piano being played through the walls from a neighbour’s home, ushers in Emily. She is the first life force to successfully crack Alice’s resolve to die slowly. Alice’s relationship,with Emily is simultaneously a force of resurrection and a threat to whatever inner emotional balance Alice has left once her son Richard becomes entangled in their relationship.
Music and Freedom is raw as it poetic. Full-blooded and searing with white hot, unforgiving honesty in prose and living power of Alice Murray’s voice and being.
Reviewed by David O’Brien
Twitter: @DavidOBupstART
Rating out of 10: 10
Distributed by: Penguin Random House Australia
Released: June 2016
RRP: $32.99 trade paperback, $22.99 paperback
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