This is a wonderful book that is entirely unsuitable for teenagers – it needs a reader with more life experience. The prose has a starchiness about it which mostly suits the elderly narrator but doesn’t feel quite right in the more emotional moments. Despite Anderson’s skill in rendering complete characters in few words, I’m left wanting more about Ida Mayo, Lewie, Hilda and the rest. Nora laments the ‘vile wastage’ of her marriage and examines her life in all its shabbiness with an unflinching eye.Īt around 150 pages it is very short. The novel’s focus is avidly personal its first-person POV, wry observation and regretful – but never nostalgic – tone make it feel extremely contemporary. Major world events are skimmed over or elided completely (Nora lives in London and loses friends during the Blitz, yet WWII barely rates a mention). Nora Porteous’s life takes her from Brisbane to Sydney to London and back again, living through both World Wars and the Great Depression, but this never feels like a work of historical fiction. Instead I found a wise, poignant and incisive novel, a worthy forerunner to Moon Tiger (1987) and Cat’s Eye (1988), and inventive in its approach to the shifting sands of memory.
Being from the 1970s I was prepared for it to be fusty, dated, parochial, or all three. I knew it was frequently assigned to high school English classes, which is not exactly a distinction, considering the truly awful Australian books I was made to read at school. I’d vaguely heard of Tirra Lirra because it pops up on those lists of Best Australian Novels and had won the Miles Franklin award. Published in 1978, Tirra Lirra is the earliest of the three, which each examine the life of a singular woman through the lens of personal recollection. Tirra Lirra by the River brought to mind for me Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, and Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood.
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