Book Club - Alice Robinson’s If You Go

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Alice Robinson is the author of Anchor Point, which was longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards and The Glad Shout, winner of the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.

Her new novel is If You Go.

Esther awakens in a strange room.

Strapped to a table, hooked up to machines and with a breathing tube down her throat, Esther has no memory of what this place is and how she got here.

As the days pass Esther is attended by a single woman. Grace is attentive but Esther is in no mood for mystery and in her disoriented state she struggles to understand her situation.

Where are her children and how did she get here?

As her strength returns Esther searches her memory and latches onto a singular mission; that she must get out and find her kids.

Alice Robinson’s If You Go is a gripping, heart wrenching novel.

I’m really only setting up the beginning of the book there with my intro, and I’m going to be very careful how I proceed because If You Go packs one hell of a surprise for the reader.

The narrative follows Esther as she slowly orients herself to her strange surroundings and her mysterious carer Grace. Most difficult of all for Esther is that she cannot recall how she came to be in the strange place and struggles to recall the last moments of her life before awakening.

Esther is driven by an overwhelming urge to remember herself and return to her children. While she does not know her fate she is certain it cannot be good and she knows her kids will need her. This leads to her treating Grace with hostility, certain that there is something she is holding back; a secret to the strange building and Esther’s fate.

If You Go is concerned with the relationship between mothers and their children.

Esther wakes with an overwhelming urge to find and protect her children, even as she finds herself reduced to the state of a child. She is completely at Grace’s mercy, not only for physical support but for a sense of orientation to her world.

Esther's vulnerability compels her to look back on her own jet-setting mother. Vivienne was formidable both in her presence and in her absence. This relationship in turn sets the stage for what Esther believes she might achieve with her own children.

As Esther pours over her past searching for a clue to her current fate she also looks for clues about how these relationships shaped her. Nagging at the back of her mind is the complete absence of family. No one has come to visit her and she wonders at how she became the person who could be abandoned.

I’m going to wind up the thematic discussion here and go back to referring obliquely to the incredible progress of the novel (that I just can't spoil here). Robinson deftly weaves Esther’s past and future into a rich evocation of families in all their messy glory.

Such is our immersion in Esther’s life you’ll forgive yourself if you are completely blindsided when revelation after revelation shows you this is not the world you thought it was.

If You Go is a powerful look at motherhood and family that shows us how a sense of belonging can carry us through so much and it’s absence is utterly devastating.

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