Review: The Glad Shout

Posted on 3 June, 2019

When the apocalypse comes, I’m fairly sure I’ll be one of the first to die. 

I am horribly short-sighted, incapable of navigating and lacking in just about all things practical (including street smarts and upper arm strength). The Glad Shout by Alice Robinson really drove home to me the probability of my early demise in the event of the catastrophic end of the world-as-we-know-it. So, yeah, on a personal level, it was really uplifting.

There are of course many more things that this book drove home to me: the resilience that comes with motherhood, the essential goodness of human nature and, the inextricable link between social interaction and survival. I’m not a mother but I am at my core a good person and my social skills are ok (if pushed). So maybe the future isn’t so bleak for me after all.

The Glad Shout is the story of Isobel, wife to Shaun and mother to toddler, Matilda, who is forced to find higher ground (literal and moral) after Melbourne is hit by a cataclysmic storm, one of many natural disasters that Australia has recently experienced as a result of climate change. Isobel and her family seek temporary refuge in a stadium where space, rations and common sense are at a premium.

Shaun is restless and becomes obsessed with the idea of helping people ‘worse off than them’ and embarks on a scavenging expedition: leaving Isobel frustrated, exposed, scared and alone, particularly in her parenting of Matilda. Her relative advantage is however made obvious to her when she encounters June, single mother to four children with a fifth on the way.

June is resilient and sassy, full of life, laughter and colour in the drab, homogenous and relentless environment of the stadium. (She was unquestionably my favourite character and offered the social interaction Isobel needs to survive.)

These contemporary chapters are interlaced with historical chapters, featuring Isobel’s childhood with her scoundrel brother, Josh, and her status-obsessed mother, Luna. Josh and Luna have a challenging relationship and Isobel is the somewhat impotent peacemaker, calming her mother by calling her beautiful and appeasing her brother by shoplifting on command.

Luna is rebelling against her hippie mother and Italian immigrant farmer father (now divorced from one another) by seeking out ‘properties with potential’, flipping them and making just enough money to buy Isobel and Josh their (but in effect, her) dream house.

It swiftly becomes evident that Luna is an allegory for the baby boomer generation – constantly trying to acquire money, property and respect for the benefit of (but inadvertently to the detriment of) her children. In turn, this allegory appears to be a further allegory (holy double allegory, Batman!) for the destruction humans are wreaking on the planet without care for the consequence.

Isobel in the present is seized by her memories of her past, even though it was not that halcyon, and, faced with her husband’s abandonment and the awfulness of a stadium filled with hungry, thirsty, dirty and desperate humans, she becomes determined to find her brother, Josh.

She believes Josh to have fled to Tasmania, which seems to be a nirvana of freedom, abundance and border control. Not quite the Tassie I know but I suppose if the world is ending we might as well partake in oak-barrelled whisky and soft cheeses. (I’m definitely not surviving Armageddon.)

In parts, the writing in The Glad Shout is dramatic, poetic and commanding. In other parts, it was repetitive – one particular adjective was used thrice in the space of sixty pages, and I had to express a modicum of joy when a synonym was finally found.

The need for a thesaurus and some edits aside, The Glad Shout is undoubtedly a powerful book with a strong message that we could all do to hear: the only thing certain about the future we face is that we could have done more to avert it.

Thank you to Affirm Press for providing me with a copy of The Glad Shout in exchange for my review.

I gave The Glad Shout three out of five copies of Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians.