{"id":1638,"date":"2024-06-08T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-31T22:33:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=1638"},"modified":"2025-01-01T11:33:58","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T22:33:58","slug":"hurdy-gurdy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2024\/06\/08\/hurdy-gurdy\/","title":{"rendered":"Hurdy Gurdy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><strong>Jenny Ackland<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><em>Allen &amp; Unwin<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">Otago Daily Times, June 8th 2024<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Reminiscent of <em>Station Eleven<\/em> and <em>The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>, <em>Hurdy Gurdy<\/em> explores a future in which women are, yet again, robbed of their reproductive freedoms by an evangelising, male-dominated society. One of the novel\u2019s 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 \u2018reclaim\u2019 themselves) that drives the troop\u2019s formidable leader, Queenie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Although she understands the importance of the work they do, Win\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s use of common nouns as character names is unsettling: anonymising, stereo and archetypal, effect creating a parable-like feel.)&nbsp; He, too, travels the country, preaching against the sins of alcohol, adultery, and abortion. As the two groups&#8217; paths converge, both women face questions for which there are no easy answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Although bleak and confronting in its subject matter, <em>Hurdy Gurdy<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jenny Ackland Allen &amp; Unwin Otago Daily Times, June 8th 2024 Reminiscent of Station Eleven and The Handmaid\u2019s 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\u2019s narrators, nineteen-year-old Win, is part of an all-female circus troop that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[448,370,460,407],"class_list":["post-1638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-448","tag-fiction","tag-jenny-ackland","tag-speculative-sci-fi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1638"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1639,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1638\/revisions\/1639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}