They embrace every challenge with strategic thinking but deliver results in a pragmatic way. 
The First Stone & Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner
The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner
For me, one of the delights of reading is the chance of encountering a writer with whose works I fall instantly in love. Whether it’s how they approach their subject matter, a way with words that has me re-reading sentences with mouth agape, or a view of the world that accords with mine, discovering a writer that makes you sit up and smile is thrilling.
Two of my happiest findings of 2009 were the Indian-American short-story writer and novelist Jhumpa Lahiri and the French crime-thriller writer Fred Vargas, but Helen Garner, an Australian writer of many talents who began publishing in the late 1970s, struck the deepest chord with me.
Garner has so far produced four novels, three screenplays (including one for Jane Campion), three short-story collections and four books of non-fiction.
The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation both fall into the latter category; published in 1995, The First Stone (subtitle: Some questions about sex and power) is Garner’s first non-fiction work, focusing on a sexual harassment scandal that emerged in 1992 at Ormond College, one of the residential colleges of the University of Melbourne, when two young female students accused the Ormond College head of indecently assaulting them at a party. The story captured wide public attention and caused a schism in the cloistered environment of the university: Garner set out to report on the ensuing court case and establish what had happened between the head, Dr Colin Shepherd, and the two complainants – a naïve objective, as it turned out.
The book begins with an intriguing preface which reveals that we are about to embark on a very different text than the one Garner intended to write. She envisaged, she says, an extended piece of reportage – but soon “encountered obstacles to my research which forced me, ultimately, to write a broader, less ‘objective’, more personal book.” Personal it is, forcing Garner to confront her own feminist notions as she questions who is telling the truth and whether, if the women’s allegations are true, this is a matter worthy of the police and the courts.
Joe Cinque’s Consolation (published in 2004 and subtitled A true story of death, grief and the law) makes for more harrowing reading, and here Garner’s talent for uncovering the pathos in ordinary lives comes into full bloom. From the back cover: “In October 1997 a clever young law student at the Australian National University made a bizarre plan to murder her boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests – most of them university students – had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of Rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with her murder.”
The book is the outcome of the several years Garner spent following the Cinque case, a period in which she spoke with nearly every key player, except the two accused women whose trials she attended. She examines the life of Joe Cinque and the nature of his relationship with the woman who took it. Her descriptions of her conversations with Joe Cinque’s Italian-immigrant parents, and of their stricken, dignified bearing through the trials, wrench the heart. It is one of the finest accounts of grief I have read (another of the best is The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, with whom Garner has much in common).
Aspects of both books reminded me of some of Dominick Dunne’s legendary journalism in Vanity Fair magazine, for which he covered some of the most high-profile American and European court cases of the past two decades, including the murder trials of OJ Simpson and the Menendez brothers.
Like Dunne (who began writing about court cases after sitting through the trial of the man who murdered Dunne’s daughter Dominique), Garner’s books throb with the author’s passion for social justice and strong sense of rightness. Also like Dunne, Garner breaches conventional journalistic boundaries by forming personal relationships When a writer cares like hell about their subject matter, and is profoundly gifted in the wrangling of words (the final line of Joe Cinque’s Consolation brought me to tears), it is a privilege to read the product of their labours.
Tags: Alexander Communications, Book Reviews, Helen Garner, Joe Cinque's Consolation, Personal Choices, Stephanie Jones, The First Stone
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