Rainforest Narratives: The Work of Janette Turner Hospital (review)

This, the first single-authored book on the work of the novelist and short-story writer Janette Turner Hospital, offers a thorough, chronologically ordered account of the eight novels and three short-story collections Hospital has published since her first book, The Ivory Swing, appeared in 1982. As David Callahan shows us, Hospital's writing has taken identity, location and dislocation, and difference, especially gender difference, as central themes, which become more complex, both in conceptualization and treatment, as the works progress. Early on, Callahan suggests, Hospital "perceived identity and its problems as principally gendered and cultural" (p. 20), but it was not long before these were complicated and expanded so that power and authority in their many, often insidious, forms became both backdrop and foreground in the increasingly complex, usually globalizing world of her texts, which discuss themes like terrorism and hijacking, lost mothers and fathers, and cults and sects.

Callahan analyses and argues for Hospital's increasingly complex world-view as it develops in her writing. His meticulously researched, well-written book offers much to contemplate in its consistently partisan account of Hospital's work: partisan in the sense of wishing to provide for readers an account of the writing that is sympathetic to its aims so as to assist in the interpretation of these ambitious, very literary texts. He is motivated by a belief in the significance of her work, which he also believes deserves fuller critical attention than it has thus far received. Hospital's "multiple locations"—Australia, Canada, and the U. S., in particular—and the multiple settings of her books mean that she cannot be "assign[ed] to national or other categories" (pp. 5-6). National literatures, by definition, assume a preferred location, which may have contributed to the relative neglect of her work in, for example, discussions of Australian or Canadian literature. Hospital's writing, which displays a "persistent questioning of identity and the narrative conventions of the subject position," is not just at a distance from but also critiques these very preoccupations (p. 72). Her "everpresent attention to margins, borders and liminal states" means that she "makes the experience of dislocation" and not belonging "central to contemporary experience in general, whether or not we are spatially or internationally dislocated" (pp. 6, 100). I would add to this that Hospital's position as a woman, writing in the way that she does on these particular themes, may also mean that the critical absences Callahan identifies are gendered. Hospital's writing addresses large historical and political questions as well as emotional and personal themes. Her writing is at some distance from what may be expected of or recognized as women's writing, even in these times when feminism has succeeded in unsettling these boundaries to some extent.

While Callahan offers a thorough, critically precise overview of the novels and short-story collections, his explanation of Hospital's writing as writing is what I like best about his work. Adopting motifs both from Hospital's fiction and from her own discussions of her writing, life, and background, Callahan suggests that the rainforest, particularly the subtropical rainforest in and around Hospital's home town of Brisbane, Australia, provides not only a topic or theme in her work but a metaphor for the writing itself, hence the title, Rainforest Narratives (and an attractively subversive, green-purple-and-white book cover design, as suggested by these themes). In Callahan's and Hospital's rainforest narrative metaphor, Hospital's literary thinking and methods are structured like a rainforest: "The rainforest is as complex a metaphoric site as it is a complex biological site, so that Hospital's work both invites symbolic exploration and confounds it, just as the rainforest's exuberance can invite physical exploration and confound it" (p. 3). Hospital's work draws readers in, rather as a rainforest does. That there are meanings to be found is evident, but what the meanings are, how they are made, and...