Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption (53 page)

BOOK: Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption

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My next sight of Sydney was nine years later, when I wasn’t quite fifteen. My mother hoped the living would be easier in Australia than in New Zealand (it was) and that we would be accepted once again as part of a new community (we were). It was a new world. I have a vivid recollection of passing the Town Hall when it was being used as a temporary polling booth for the 1967 referendum, the significance of which completely escaped me at the time. The city of Sydney, however, had already made its way into my novelist’s imagination. I write about the city now as a character in my novels, as uniquely Australian as Uluru, out of an outsider’s attachment which began back then.

A single woman in an unknown city (Auckland or Sydney) with two young children and little money is in a vulnerable situation. We lived in places where we seemed to see the world in X-ray, where people were undisguised and often predatory. As I grew older I haunted public libraries (they were free), read a lot and thought a lot, and as a result grew up with a particular perception of the underpinnings of everyday life. I had the sense that these underpinnings were largely like a stage set: canvas stretched over wooden frames, painted to look good, but quite different when viewed from the other side. Secondly I had the sense that the world was a dangerous place, inhabited by unpredictable people whose motives were highly questionable.

So, when I write I dig into the question of why people do what they do, and why they
want
to do what they do. As one of my characters asks in
Blood Redemption
: Why do people like to be so cruel? The question of motive is always the most important one to me. There is no better genre in which to ask this question than crime, to which investigations like this are fundamental. Crime at its best attempts to unpick the puzzle of human behaviour: all those dark places inside the human head, as in Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and
Punishment
or, at the other end of the spectrum, the real crime of James Ellroy’s
My Dark Places
. That there may not be a definitive answer to the puzzle is beside the point. We have to ask those questions, we have to study that human darkness. There is no other solution to the complexities of our human existence than to keep on asking
why.

In
Songs of Innocence and Experience
William Blake contrasts what it is to be a flawless innocent or to be stained by experience.

These are the dual (or split) capacities of humanity, evil and good, which exist in each of us and which together form a complex whole.

In
Songs of Experience
we find ‘The Sick Rose’.

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

The crime genre is as good a place as any to study the worm at the heart of the rose and this is what I have tried to do in
Blood
Redemption
. To look at how violence is generated in the human psyche and how it works in people’s thoughts and feelings. How it is supported

— like any other human activity — by technology, by the internet, by all forms of communication and technological advance; and in the end, how it affects us all. How it works through our society like a negative force constantly in conflict with the positive in each of us.

One of the aims of the novel was to ask all these questions and to raise other fundamental ones: How do we, as people, redeem ourselves for the things we do to each other. Do we even think we need to?

These are personal questions, personal enquiries, for each reader.

My novel is an attempt to paint a sequence of actions with sufficient complexity and on a broad enough scale for readers to be able to ask meaningfully these questions of its characters. The answers lie with each of us individually. I have tried to write
Blood Redemption
in a way that is open enough to allow each reader to reach their own judgment.

Alex Palmer

January 2003

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Palmer was born in London in 1952. Her father abandoned her family when she was very young and they left England when she was five to live variously in South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, arriving in Sydney in the late 1960s. Here, she studied English literature and language at Macquarie University and later sat for a postgraduate diploma in information management at the University of New South Wales.

Palmer has travelled across Australia, Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. After a working life which has ranged from occupations such as geriatric nursing to automated systems design, she now writes full time. She is married and lives in Canberra.

CREDITS

Cover photograph by Luke Causby, HarperCollins Design Studio, Australia

Cover and internal design by Darian Causby, HarperCollins Design Studio, Australia

BLOOD REDEMPTION. Copyright © 2002 by Alex Palmer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.

PERFECTBOUND SPECIAL FEATURE: CRIME WRITING AND

PerfectBound™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Adobe Acrobat E-Reader edition v. 1. January 2003

ISBN 0–7322–7781–7

Print edition first published in 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Publisher

Australia

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