Book review / Shift, by Irma Gold. Reviewed by CON BOEKEL.

The main character, Arlie, in Shift, the newest novel by longtime former Canberra editor and writer Irma Gold, is a fine art photographer.

Arlie’s aim is to make the invisible truth visible by way of portrait photography.

The two main locations are Brunswick, Victoria, where he and his family live, and Kliptown, the Soweto township that he visits.

Moral hazard, moral injury and moral healing in the context of gross injustice are the novel’s themes.

The characters in the novel work at two levels. The first level is that of human relationships. The second level is how the characters represent structural political, social and economic truths. The issues are race, gender, power, poverty and wealth.

The novel moved me with a mix of dread and hope, becoming progressively more and more difficult to put down. It touched me as someone who took an active part in the violent anti-Springbok Tour protests in the 1960s.

It touched me as a photographer. It touched me as someone who lived in remote indigenous communities – including in Yarralin in the mid-1970s. Yarralin then was even more poverty-stricken than Kliptown is now. It is disconcerting how often the callow Arlie replicates my callow self, including our responses to a stray bullet skittering past.

Photographic processes, both technical and in the mind’s eye of the photographer, are a major element in the novel’s construction. Light, shade and colour are constant companions. They are often described in beautiful, painterly language. The novel’s natural and built environments are convincing. The insights into the process of portrait photography are exceptional. They are critical elements in plot development.

Gold is an acute and sensitive observer. She captures the intensity of life in Kliptown. The human spirit in the face of grinding poverty, the pain and the love are all there. The canny insights just keep coming.

Afrikaans, Kazi, Xhosa and Zulu words are interpolated effectively. Mostly the sense is contextual but at times Dr Google comes in handy. However, English orthography cannot capture Xhosa clicks or do justice to the Afrikaans ‘ag’. The voices, dialogues and speech patterns of the entire cast of characters seem to me to be authentic.

One reason the novel reverberates so strongly for me is that most of the issues affecting Soweto’s inhabitants are valid for non-indigenous and indigenous people in Australia.

It is not too long a bow to draw attention to the exploration of personal and political legitimacy in the novel and to link this to the consequences of the failure of the Voice referendum. The often self-destructive casual contempt for the law arising from a sense of injustice is as alive on the streets of Alice Springs as it is on those of Kliptown.

Shift raises the possibility of, but leaves unresolved, the instrumental power of photography to affect the sweeping structural changes required to address the gross poverty of Kliptown. Is it enough simply to make the truth visible?

Shift is written with a masterful blend of compassion and dispassion.