Review of 'The Whispering Wall' by Patricia Carlon
Over at The Australian Legend, my Austlit pal Bill is hosting his annual focus on Australian women writers. He’s been progressing through the decades, and this year’s focus is on what he defines as Gen 4 - women writers from the 60s, 70s and 80s. That means trends of feminism & postmodernism.
Last year I planned to write on disability in The Harp in the South for Gen 3 and failed completely, because I was in the midst of packing to move to Adelaide. This year I got halfway through Glenda Adams’ Miles Franklin winning novel Dancing on Coral, but the characters were so painful – even though I’ve read it before – that I gave it up (admittedly I was also battling the plague) for something more engaging – Patricia Carlon’s The Whispering Wall. Ironically, Adams’ book fits the characteristics of Gen 4 better than Carlon’s, with its biting tone, satire of awful male university students pawing at women, and the naïve female protagonist’s journey to independence. Hopefully, if my fatigue (newly exacerbated by Covid! fun times) & powers of procrastination don’t get in the way, I’ll finish the thing & write up some thoughts. Adams was my creative writing teacher at UTS, and I think the tone of Dancing on Coral might be influenced by her years in America.
However, it was a happy result that I downloaded The Whispering Wall, because it was an excellent book. I came across Patricia Carlon (1927 – 2002) when putting together the Writing Disability in Australia database – Catriona Mills, now Acting Director of Austlit, pointed it out to me. Carlon wrote fourteen novels between 1961 and 1970 (often 2 in one year! I’m averaging one every 6 years), and after her death it became known that she had been profoundly deaf since age 11.
In Deaf writer Fi Murphy’s The Shape of Sound, Fi has a chapter on the weight of secrets. Until I read her book, I wasn’t aware of how much secret-keeping I did myself – keeping the secret, that is, of one’s deafness (I do try to be more assertive & open about it these days, but old habits die hard). Carlon, too, kept her deafness a secret, refusing interviews and communicating with her publishers by letter.
The protagonist of The Whispering Wall also keeps secrets because she is disabled. Sarah Oatland, a widow, has had a stroke, and although completely immobilised, she can still see and hear. This means that Sarah has to submit to the patronising comments of her nurse, including the observation to the doctor, ‘Do you think she hears? She’s laid out like a fish on a slab, with as much life to her, poor dear.’ Six weeks after Sarah’s stroke, her mercenary niece Gwenyth announces that she is letting out parts of the house to tenants to raise money for Sarah’s care. Four people subsequently move in to different parts of the house: a mother with her daughter, Rose, and Mr and Mrs Phipps, a married couple who want to stay only a few months before finding a place to live.
One of Sarah’s secrets is that, with her bed against the chimney wall, she can hear voices travelling from the sitting room below. Initially she liked to hear the voices to assuage her boredom and loneliness following her husband’s death, but once she is immobilised, the wall ‘opened a lifeline of reality in the midst of confusion, because the doctors, though sure she couldn’t hear, had nevertheless spoken in front of her guardedly, and she hadn’t had the voice to question and demand intelligent, forthright answers to her questions.’ Sarah dislikes Phipps on sight, and soon resents him even more for ‘taking from her the one link with frank knowledge about her condition, and he made her feel unreasonably afraid.’
Except it transpires that her fear isn’t unreasonable. Firstly she hears, from arguments between Phipps and his wife, that they despise one another, and are only staying together because Phipps’ inheritance depends on it. Then she hears that Phipps intends to murder his father-in-law so that he can obtain said inheritance.
Meanwhile, Rose, a clever and inquisitive girl, prompts Sarah to start communicating with her by blinking once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no’. Sarah had tried to talk to Braggs, her nurse, like this, but she was slow because of her stroke, and Braggs never waited for a blink. The conversations with Rose become another secret. Other visitors arrive, including the father-in-law. Through various communications - not only the blinking but also a Scrabble board - the secrets come tumbling out, including the fact that Sarah has overheard the Phipps’s machinations. She realises that not only is the father-in-law’s life in danger, but so is her own. This is the most traumatic part of the book: the reader is locked in with Sarah in a passive state, awaiting the direction of the author. It’s a clever way of compelling a reader to understand what it might be like to experience a stroke.
With a deft knitting of action, Carlon pulls all the characters (who are so much more engaging than those in Dancing on Coral) and their relationships together, and at the crisis danger is (just) averted. To save her life, Sarah is forced to call out, signalling that her body may yet move again.
As a deaf reader, there were various elements that I identified with in this novel, even though it’s not about deafness. When Rose, seeking to cheer Sarah up, suggests that she brings roses into the room, Sarah thinks to herself, “‘You’re the rose I want most, my dear,’ and knew again the frustration of not being able to make any real contact with anyone.” If Carlon was profoundly deaf, she would have had very little, if any, hearing, so communication would have been difficult. She would have had to come up with inventive ways of carrying out conversations – as Sarah does through the Scrabble board.
It’s amazing to me that the novel is full of sound, and that sound is what drives the plot. Even though Sarah is immobilised, her hearing and intelligence make her marvellously adept. I wonder if Carlon felt a sense of expansiveness in writing this novel, and imagining all that Sarah was capable of.
I’ve promised a colleague an essay on Carlon by April, and I’m glad that Bill’s Gen 4 has kickstarted my reading. I reckon everyone else should be reading Carlon’s under-appreciated novels too.