The Winds of Heaven (review)

Clementine and Fan, short for Francesca, are cousins in 1950s Australia, but their lives are very different: mousy, anxious Clementine, cherished by her parents, attends a good school in Sydney, while bold, beautiful Fan, the abused daughter of a single mother, would rather roam the hills around her small rural town than suffer through any more failure at school. As the girls turn teenagers and head toward adulthood, Fan grabs blindly at the only option she sees—ready male attention, which leads to a shotgun marriage at fifteen and another baby not long afterward; meanwhile, Clementine makes her way toward university and a good future, while still holding on to her deep connection to her cousin in spite of the distance and lack of communication between them. A contemporary scene at the start makes it clear that Fan's headed toward a tragic fate, but that final end, when it comes, is merely the playing out of the slow, inexorable demise of Fan as a person, a crushing at the hands of family, school, circumstances, and her own self-doubt that's all the more heartbreaking for the occasional flashes of spirit she still musters. Clarke, a gifted writer, makes Clementine's story full in its own right, but she also plausibly depicts the way Fan's life interweaves with her cousin's, with Fan ultimately, unknowingly conferring on Clementine the ability to break free of expectations and question her own options. Post-war Australia and its bigotries and parochialism are vividly portrayed, and the picture of what that milieu meant for young women is chilling and compelling (interested readers may want to move on to Jill Ker Conway's memoir The Road from Coorain). Ultimately, however, it's a story of the personal even more than the historical, and teens won't need to know the history or the place to understand the tragedy of blocked exits and to weep for Fan.