Book Review: Speak to Me

Reviewed by Lorraine Cormack

“Speak to Me is a fairly bleak story of an Australian family who are estranged from each other. I don’t think it was meant to be entirely bleak; the last pages of the novel appear to be trying to offer some hope for the future.  For me, however, the overall bleakness of the novel overwhelmed this final offering.

It’s not a depressing novel but I didn’t find it very hopeful either.

Michael, a psychiatrist, has gone blind as a complication of life-saving surgery on a brain tumor. This has been traumatic not only for him, but for his entire family, something they haven’t fully acknowledged and certainly haven’t addressed.  His wife Elizabeth is both thrilled to have a life beyond her children and stressed by her new responsibility as breadwinner – particularly as her family responsibilities have only increased with Michael’s illness.

Meanwhile, their children, Charlotte and Daniel, are teenagers trying to find their own way. The children are well aware of the tension between their parents and are unsure of what it means for them.

The novel follows one week in their lives.  It seems initially fairly meandering, and certainly there isn’t the clear structure of, say, a crime novel.  Rather like life, you can’t really see where it’s going until after you’ve arrived. The novel is written in a somewhat remote tone that made it a little hard for me to feel real warmth for any  character.  Michael, Charlotte and Daniel all experience significant events which have the potential to change their lives forever. Elizabeth’s direct experiences aren’t as dramatic, but her foundations are deeply shaken by the experiences and actions of the rest of her family.

None of these characters are overly sympathetic, perhaps because we are meeting them during a particularly bad week.  There isn’t a lot of laughter or lightness in any of their lives, and they mostly come across as sullen and uncommunicative.  However, Hopkins has made these characters very real.  You may not like them a lot, but you’ll probably recognise a lot about them. The way they struggle to communicate with each other is, for example, something many people will find strikes a chord. Few of us are as articulate or coherent as your average character in a novel or movie.

The point of view moves between characters until we have seen the family from the perspective of each member.  Although this made it a little more difficult to feel as though I was engaged with any one person, it does provide a very good view of a family in crisis – albeit a slow-burning and not fully recognised crisis.  None of them are saints, but it’s also pretty clear that it’s not really anyone’s fault that the family has reached this point. The question is, can they now get themselves out of the abyss they’re falling into?

Elizabeth, the wife and mother, is probably the most sympathetic of the characters. She is also the one most acted upon, the one who seems most at the mercy of other people’s actions. She is a lawyer, and at work she’s constrained by her clients’ instructions and actions, the rule of law, and the judge’s dictates. At home she is highly reactive to Charlotte’s teenage tantrums and challenges.  You get the sense that maybe she’s never been all that highly connected to her son Daniel.  Most devastatingly, Michael’s illness seems to have destroyed her life even more than Michael’s. He is starting to recover, to physically manage and to psychologically come to terms with the situation.  But Elizabeth seems to have lost her ability to talk to Michael, feeling he froze her out in the aftermath of his illness, and unable now to find their connection again.  Working full time now, she has the life outside her family that she’s longed for – but it’s brought with it stress, and huge time pressures, and increasing alienation from the family.  Elizabeth feels unseen and unappreciated, and her bad-tempered response to this only pushes her further away from her family.

This isn’t a book to read if you’re looking for a fun time or a good laugh.

However, Speak to Me will make you think about how you communicate with those you love, and how you’d deal with a life-changing trauma.  It’s also about maturing and moving on to a new stage in life, and Hopkins does a good job of drawing out some of the challenges associated with that. This is a novel to read during a thoughtful period, one to provoke you into assessing your own life and how much responsibility you take for your own happiness.  It’s not precisely an enjoyable novel, but it’s one that raises a lot of issues that are worth reflecting on.”