Hurdy Gurdy

Jenny Ackland

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, June 8th 2024

Reminiscent of Station Eleven and The Handmaid’s Tale, Hurdy Gurdy explores a future in which women are, yet again, robbed of their reproductive freedoms by an evangelising, male-dominated society. One of the novel’s narrators, nineteen-year-old Win, is part of an all-female circus troop that travels across Australia, providing entertainment and hairdressing to the climate-ravaged towns they pass through. The first offering is genuine and gives Win joy and purpose, but it is the second (a front for services that allow women who cannot face the prospect of bringing another child into the world to ‘reclaim’ themselves) that drives the troop’s formidable leader, Queenie.

Although she understands the importance of the work they do, Win’s true dream is to empower people by invoking the sense of collective identity, appreciation of the absurd, and anagnorisis (the passage from no-knowing to knowing), which is the ethos of clowning. Her voice, beautifully and subtly captured through language and grammar that reads as oral rather than written testimony, has the passion and truth of an idealistic adolescent who still believes in her own power to change the world. The novel’s other narrator, the Woman, is a former nurse who, attempting to erase the pain of her past, has subsumed herself to the service of the Reverend (Ackland’s use of common nouns as character names is unsettling: anonymising, stereo and archetypal, effect creating a parable-like feel.)  He, too, travels the country, preaching against the sins of alcohol, adultery, and abortion. As the two groups’ paths converge, both women face questions for which there are no easy answers.

Although bleak and confronting in its subject matter, Hurdy Gurdy is ultimately a story of hope and shared humanity. It is also a fascinating insight into the philosophy of clowning, an art whose humour I have always considered founded in cruelty and schadenfreude. It has not changed my dislike of the medium, but it has challenged me to think more deeply about ways in which art can connect and strengthen the shared connections that bring out the best in society.