The place of doubt: How location creates narrative depth
Terri Seddon on This House of Grief: the story of a murder trial by Helen Garner
This House of Grief is the unsettling story of Robert Farquharson who drove his three young sons into a dam where they drowned. Farquarson survived his children when his car sank in the dam and stood trial to answer for their deaths. Garner explores the drownings through the lens of Farquharson’s marriage. Written as a parable, she offers a moral tale that is not about ‘rueful love’ but a ‘discarded husband’.
The place of the inciting incident is a spot in the universe with a certain physicality: a dam where the boys tragically drowned. But this historical event also locates relationships and social processes that become meaningful through things that humans produce: cars, divorces, courts.
Garner moves to the Victorian Supreme Court where the murder trial is the story event that drives meaningful change. The story of the murder trial is dedicated to the Victorian Supreme Court; it also made me cry.
Why did Garner’s use of location touch me in this way?
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, ‘location’ refers to a ‘place’ fixed by an event, and a ‘setting’ that is constructed like a film set. In her book, The situation and the story: the art of personal narrative, Vivian Gornick frames the ‘event’ in nonfiction as a historical moment around which the author weaves space, time, characters and plot to reveal the ‘situation’. The circumstances and context that locate ‘the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer … the thing [in this case, Garner] has come to say’.
Garner presents the Court as the place of community conflicts and public pain, where characters, routines and stories construct a theatre framed by legal reasoning. The trial unfolds through rules, defined by the principle of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. The Court whittles the doubt in this setting down by revealing events as tangible places and visible contexts, where characters have situations and motivations. The public verdict makes the father’s unthinkable act thinkable. He is ‘Three times guilty’ — beyond reasonable doubt.
The settings, both murder scene and courtroom, show place to be ‘doubly constructed’. The physical landscape, like the dam outside Winchelsea is, as TF Gieryn puts it in A space for place in sociology, ‘interpreted, narrated, perceived, felt, understood and imagined’ as a setting.
Garner reveals the setting initially through media reports and her own personal point of view.
Oh Lord, let this be an accident.
She then draws meanings from these colliding representations through a conversation with an old friend on the drive to Winchelsea, revealing the backstory: the accused’s statement and his ex-wife confirming ‘that he loved his boys’. But at the dam, ‘Talk ceased’.
Representations of this ‘ordinary’ accused as ‘just a man’ don’t add up. Garner locates her narrative in this place where doubt becomes an event because reason and emotion collide. This place of doubt, visible beyond the knowable limits of people’s objective and subjective worlds, has high stakes for the accused, families, community and court. Garner appears as an authentic narrator because her character knows this place of struggle between empathy and truth.
At the gravestone, Garner foregrounds this doubt. Three photos confirm the reality of these drownings but the father’s unthinkable act makes her ambivalent about this ‘ordinary man’. Her doubt, a ‘sort of dread’, is like ‘tiny pink flowers’ blowing off the gravestone. Garner’s imagery conveys a place of emotional pain, where her reason and emotion collide. This situation makes her unable to lay those boys to rest.
This House of Grief is more than a love story to the Supreme Court. Garner shows how public judgment offers characters release from doubt and offers possibilities for atonement. My tears fell not in empathy for characters, but because Garner exposes the Court’s compassion: a ‘house of power’ that works through the place of doubt to manage public grief.
