Stephanie Jones: Book Review - The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop

The talent of Stephanie Bishop was immediately clocked by those on the Australian fiction scene: Bishop’s first novel, The Singing, earned her notice as one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists, along with commendation for the biannual Kathleen Mitchell Award for young writers. Her follow-up, The Other Side of the World, a lucid portrait of a young mother losing her sense of self inside a marriage, offers further proof of her prowess.

Bishop’s own story likely provided some grist for Charlotte, who moves with her husband Henry from Cambridge to Perth, Australia in the mid-1960s to support his career in academia. They have a toddler and a newborn; though England, to Indian-born Henry, “has always been a land of fairytales . . . a story come alive”, he arranges their emigration, and Charlotte’s hope that something will happen to prevent it goes unvoiced and unrealized. At this and many other turns, Bishop conveys the malignant effect on a marriage of silence within it.

Henry, rapt in his work, is oblivious to his wife, who is unable to convey to him her Australian life’s fresh contradictions: her days are switch-backs of banality and bliss, frustration muddled with an animalistic adoration of her daughters. There is no lack of love, but the family comes to verify the cliché that love isn’t enough.

Claustrophobia pervades the text and surrounds and consumes Charlotte. A reason for departure from England is the closeness of their cottage, a small, ancient structure unsuited to a burgeoning family; somehow, the feeling of confinement and oppression persists across hemispheres, and in Australia, the shock of the new (“Everything is wild and hot. Dry and wild. Hot and dry”) gives way to submission. Ants dominate the kitchen’s sugar and honey provisions; Henry chokes on a drink, in the dark of night, from a bedside glass of water into which a cockroach has crawled and drowned.

Bishop’s way with setting is magnificent, and Charlotte’s loss of control, her rising desperation, seem almost unavoidable in an environment so unfamiliar and subjugated to the forces of nature. The appearance of an interloper and challenger to Henry might be predictable at first blush but is merely a symptom of Charlotte’s withdrawal. She tells new acquaintances that she used to paint, and realizes what that means. Flight becomes inevitable.

Henry’s own arc is not as smooth as expected, his Indian heritage setting him apart. In England he had learned to disregard his otherness, but he appears different to those in his new surroundings, who are unconvinced of his Britishness. Big themes – identity and nationhood, love and loyalty – are examined with modesty and understatement in a story filled with couples who test their limits with each other: Henry and his mother, who he visits in India, Henry and Charlotte, Charlotte and her lover, Nicholas.

Many interactions, like the novel as a whole, have an elegiac, nostalgic quality. Bishop is a supremely sensitive and compassionate writer, and her imaginative dive into the mind of a woman consumed by motherhood and marriage is almost unbearably intimate, and deeply affecting.