I read Cloudstreet, a modern Australian classic by Tim Winton about two down-on-their-luck families who end up living in the same big ramshackle, haunted home, beginning in Brisbane (someone had misinformed me and told me it was set there) and then throughout the long plane ride home. Now, I liked a lot about it. I liked the surrealist touches, the premonitions and warnings and dreams. I liked the flinty Oriel, a mother and a hard worker, and her soft husband Lester; I liked the journey of young Quick. It's a family epic about two families shaped by tragedies. It's compelling even when sometimes long-winded.
But ultimately, I really struggled with the core character: Fish. The Lamb family's world changes when a tragic accident leaves the favorite son, Fish, mentally disabled. Other characters' stories and journeys are built upon this tragedy. But he also has seemingly magical abilities. He "knows" things, he can talk to the family pig and to the ghosts of the house, he appears to characters in dreams and some version of him is narrating our novel. He is described too often in a very dehumanizing way (was a scene of his brother sobbing as he cleans Fish up after he shit himself necessary to the plot?) and Rose's crush on him becomes a ridiculous childhood fantasy transferred onto his brother instead.
Most upsettingly (spoilers), the ending of the two families, the two mothers, seeming to heal and come together in the house, seems to hinge on his suicide. It's been hinted at throughout the book—when Fish almost drowned, but was resurrected, he felt disappointed to be taken from the water, as if there was something wrong in his rebirth, and he's craved the water ever since. His purposeful drowning is written almost as a correction, a completion of what had been hanging over the Lamb family all this time. It is a release for him and his family—which is extremely troubling.
We can add to that a mysterious black man/spirit/ghost who shows up at random times solely to hand out sage advice or warning. One of the ghosts of the house is an indigenous girl who was killed in the midst of a colonizing, imperialist re-education project. These brown presences haunt the families of Cloudstreet, perhaps a metaphor for colonization's legacies, but mostly an uncomfortable magical-negro style presence instead. The women are...ok, Oriel being the best written of them. The male characters are interesting and complex but they too have their holes.
Ultimately, if it had had a different ending for Fish, I might have been able to better balance the flaws of this book with its successes, but it's impossible in the end. A shame, because a lot in this book was really promising.
Intense content warnings for ableism, suicide. Warnings also for violence, disordered eating, child death, substance abuse/addiction.
