The Comfort of Figs

The Story Bridge nearing completion, October 1939
From the State Library of Queensland Collection

Simon Cleary, The Comfort of Figs, 2008

Reading this book is a joy.

It is a joy because it conjures up the feeling of Brisbane, where I once lived, “a city of hills and the trees which cover them.” Cleary uses sensory prose and striking images to bring the city, and its fig trees, to life.

We take pleasure in the characters, liking them despite their flaws. Robbie, the protagonist, is a good man, passionate about trees, but unable to respond to his partner, Freya, or understand what is happening for her, just as his father was unable to respond to him. We care for these people, and become engrossed in following the evolving relationships between them.

The structure is elegant. We are hooked by a short prologue which sets up a mystery we want to solve. The rest of the book is in three parts: Figs is set in 1999-2000 and tells of Robbie and Freya. Bridge is about Robbie’s father and the other men constructing the Story Bridge sixty years earlier. And the final part, Story, links the bridge and the figs into one story.

Learning about building the bridge is an unexpected joy. Novel readers often skip technical sections, but Cleary writes with a light touch, keeping us interested by integrating engineering details into the story and using the bridge’s potential for metaphor.

And finally, we are swept along by the story itself, propelled by two terrible events, one that comes out of nowhere, the other a tragedy that builds slowly as the bridge workers are swayed by a theory about how the world works, and act on it in a way that causes the thing they most fear.

I was prompted to read Simon Cleary’s first novel by a recent thought-provoking talk he gave about his second book at the University of Queensland Library. That novel, Closer to Stone, is a joy that awaits me.