On Father’s Day in 2005, a car driven by Robert Farquharson, carrying his three young sons, veered off the highway outside of Winchelsea and plunged into a dam. Farquharson swam to shore, but his children drowned. In This House of Grief, Garner follows the subsequent murder trial, a case that stretched over eight years, and seeks to answer the incomprehensible: was Farquharson’s a deliberate act? Winner of a 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction.
Again, Garner shows us her facility for recording speech and, even more remarkably, the 'waves of emotion and private mental activity' of group listening, now honed to almost hallucinogenic clarity ... Here, too, are Garner’s characteristic sympathies: with working people, immigrants, mothers ... And here, in every scene, is Garner herself, thirsty for coffee, wisecracking, observant: her very own USP ... This is a communal, painful effort: the lawyers and jury are engaged in the difficult understanding that a man murdered his children, and so is Garner ... This careful record of the mind and its workings, of the strange dance we take toward truth, makes the narrative compelling and the story fresh through all the trials and retrials. It also insists that Farquharson and his children belong to all of us ... It’s an elegiac farewell, and indeed the whole book feels final, elegiac – perhaps because for all the horror, it is so elegantly and calmly written; perhaps because This House of Grief completes so many arcs begun in Garner’s previous works; perhaps because it is impossible to imagine it being done better.
Much of the book revolves around the disputatious inquiry that constitutes a courtroom trial, the back-and-forth between the prosecutor and the defense lawyers, the questioning and cross-examination of witnesses for both sides. This part is gripping ... There is also a certain amount of tedium that is part of any trial, especially when it involves granular details ... Garner is good at capturing it all, the longueurs as well as the suspense ... Helen Garner is a prodigiously gifted writer, one with many quivers in her bow. This House of Grief is the sort of book Joan Didion might have written if she’d had more of a heart.
Helen Garner’s This House of Grief....is as involving, heart-rending and unsettling a read as you could possibly find, a true-life account of three deaths and a trial that leaves you with a profound sense of unease as its drama unfolds, and disturbing questions about how we judge guilt and innocence ... Garner is an immensely sympathetic narrator, open, honest, swayed first one way and then the other by the competing claims of the barristers ... She is our unsteady moral compass in this storm of provisional truths, testing the opinions of onlookers, trying to be rational, watching the tears stream down the faces of accusers and accused alike ... Garner writes simply about the proceedings, but with immense control and many taut, haunting asides. Under her scrutiny, the plain, unglamorous cast in the courtroom begins to take on the heft of Homeric figures ... Some may come away from This House of Grief...unsatisfied by a book that ends, almost too abruptly, as soon as the final verdict is handed down. But the deep unease with which one is left, and the feelings of guilt and shame one shares with Garner about taking pleasure from such private grief, are the real legacies of this remarkable book.
