The Idea of Perfection
by Kate Grenville
Summary
Karakarook, New South Wales, population a few hundred, has one claim on the future: heritage tourism, if it can decide what its heritage is. The shire has sent Douglas Cheeseman, a divorced, jug eared engineer terrified of most human interaction, to demolish the town's crooked old timber bridge and replace it with concrete. The heritage committee has imported Harley Savage, a big, abrupt textile expert from a Sydney museum, three marriages behind her and a guard dog's temperament, to set up a pioneer museum, which puts saving the bridge squarely in her brief.
They are, in other words, professionally obliged to be enemies, and personally almost incapable of speech. Grenville's comedy is built on the gap between what these two middle aged people feel and what they can manage to say, rendered in excruciating, tender close up: conversations that die in the middle, gestures rehearsed and abandoned, the phrase thought of an hour too late. Around them she gives the town itself equal time, the pub, the butcher, the bank manager's wife applying her idea of perfection to her own face with increasingly desperate precision, a subplot that turns the title over and shows its cost.
The bridge does what bridges do in novels this well made, but not in the way the setup promises, and the romance, when it finally clears its throat, is one of the least glamorous and most earned in contemporary fiction.
Around four hundred pages, unhurried and very funny.
Best for readers who want a love story about awkward, unbeautiful, competent people, and small town comedy without a gram of contempt in it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize in 2001, an Australian win in a prize the British press still treated as a domestic event, and the reviews found the right comparison in the book's own imagery: a romance with, as one critic put it, the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of fine structural engineering. Kirkus called it wonderful entertainment and a cockeyed romance, which undersells how carefully it is built.
Kate Grenville was already a substantial figure in Australian fiction, Lilian's Story and Dark Places behind her, and her next book made her a controversial one: The Secret River, her 2005 novel of first contact violence on the Hawkesbury, became the centre of a national argument between novelists and historians about who owns the colonial past, was shortlisted for the Booker, and is now standard reading in Australian schools. Between the two books sits this one, her gentlest, and readers who meet her through the later controversies are regularly surprised to find the same writer capable of this much warmth.