Reality and fantasy combine in Immaculate, Anna McGahan's award-winning debut novel
- Written by Jessica Gildersleeve, Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland
I read Andrew McGahan’s Praise (1992) in my first year of university. I was blown away. It was unlike anything else I had ever read: raw, gritty, real.
One of the most prominent writers of Australia’s short-lived literary “grunge” movement, McGahan – along with his peers Christos Tsiolkas, Justine Ettler, Luke Davies, John Birmingham and Linda Jaivin, among others – represented a cohort of young writers interested in a literature that was both political and personal: confessional in terms of their own lives, but also as an expression of a generational experience.
Coinciding with the popular grunge music of the early 1990s, grunge literature was jaded, anti-authoritarian and rage-filled, but retained an element of humour. It described a world of dead-end jobs, empty sex and mind-numbing drugs.
Review: Immaculate – Anna McGahan (Allen & Unwin)
Immaculate is the first novel by McGahan’s niece, Anna McGahan, and this year’s winner of the Vogel Award for writers under 35. The reader looking for the legacy of Andrew McGahan and his grunge roots will find its traces here in the unhoused characters hovering at the margins of the city, frequenting the soup vans where Immaculate’s protagonist, Frances, once worked. They return to the cheap boarding houses dotted throughout Brisbane’s inner-city suburb of New Farm, where much of Praise took place.
Anna McGahan.
Eva Rinaldi/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
A dreamlike fantasy world
These narrative strategies work alongside the first-person accounts to ground the otherwise unstable or fantastical elements of the novel. This is the other side of Immaculate’s emphasis on the real: a dreamlike, fantasy world, which somehow exists within a shared consciousness of several of the characters.
The magical-realist space offers the characters a way of healing their real-life traumas through a deeper understanding of their individual fears and desires.
Traces of this dream world remain in the real world, making it impossible to write off this part of the story as illusion or hallucination. Like Frances, the reader must accept both experiences as equally real, without succumbing to a spiritual explanation that would negate Frances’ break with the church. Like Frances, the reader must accept the possibility of a miracle, even if it does not look the way she had expected in her former faith.
Some fairy tales, Frances realises, “tell the brutal truth”, while others “give you false hope of happy endings”. Ultimately, the fairy-tale world is a way for Frances, Mary, Glenda, Jasper and others to accept the “brutal truth”. That in itself could constitute a “happy ending” – at least, as happy as an ending can be when it involves the loss of a child.
Frances’s fantastic experiences allow her to see the truth, but as a lesson about the duality of pleasure and suffering in life. Now, she understands, “the miracle is what He has already given me, not what I am waiting on. And there is great healing in that.”
If grunge had one theme at its core, it was to question what was known or accepted, to record and sometimes resist the social expectations that make us numb to our own selves. That theme remains in Immaculate, but McGahan finds a way beyond grunge’s nihilism, even in the depths of the most profound tragedy.
Authors: Jessica Gildersleeve, Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland 
