"This House of Grief": True Crime On Trial
"This House of Grief": True Crime On Trial
On Helen Garner's poignant exploration of the “excruciating realms of human behaviour, where reason fights to gain a purchase, and everyone feels entitled to an opinion”.
This House of Grief, Helen Garner (2014)
A good essay should start “without bullshit preamble”. A writing tutor once gave Helen Garner this advice, and it shapes the opening of This House of Grief. Garner starts with a true story about a hard-working Australian man with a wife and three sons. By the end of the first paragraph, his wife has left him and taken everything but the shittier of their two cars. By the end of the first page, that car is at the bottom of a dam, and his three children have drowned.
Garner starts as she means to go on — or, as James Wood puts it, she avoids bullshit preamble and bullshit amble. We have the facts in a few pages: Father’s Day, evening, 2005. Robert Farquharson, driving with his three young sons. For reasons that will be argued over in the court case on which the rest of the book is built, the car leaves the road and ends up at the bottom of a dam. The father swims to shore; the children drown. Garner’s first glance at the crime scene (a term that will be contested in the ensuing legal drama) cuts to the core:
“I saw it on the TV news. Night. Low foliage. Water, misty and black. Blurred lights, a chopper. Men in hi-vis and helmets. Something very bad here. Something frightful.”
And then she offers up a simple prayer: “Oh Lord, let this be an accident.”
The question of a moral dimension to this tragedy is what the court case rests on. Did Farquharson faint, as he claims, and run off the road in a terrible accident, or did he intentionally steer them into that cold, black water? Our conviction about which way the coin of criminal conviction ought to land vacillates before various arguments performed for the jury and, through Garner’s book, for us — the collective thirteenth juror. Beneath this protean allegiance to a particular outcome is the hope that things will eventually land one way or another. As the genre of true crime is always revealing, we’re more comfortable with a certainty we have to make peace with than making peace with uncertainty.
The question of what ethically grounds or condemns true crime is inescapable while reading This House of Grief. A potential answer comes in one of Garner’s most significant departures from the genre — she has no interest in the morbid or prurient. While true crime typically centres the tragic in human tragedy, This House of Grief prioritises the humane. When an investigator describes the corpses of the three dead children after the car was pulled from the dam, Garner doesn’t provide that description. Instead, we’re told that “the only sound, apart from his voice, was a terrible sob, almost a muffled scream,” from their mother. Garner finds humanity, not in explicit depictions of death, but in the suffering hearts of people who live.
Garner writes at one point of the “excruciating realms of human behaviour, where reason fights to gain a purchase, and everyone feels entitled to an opinion”. This could stand as an apt description of true crime. The shows, books, and podcasts that populate the genre actively invite their audiences to seed and nurture their own pet theories, knowing that we struggle to “live in such a cloud of unknowing” — Garner’s own phrase for why she, along with everyone else covering the case, insisted on forming strong convictions about what had happened.
In true crime, stories about the depths of human depravity are often presented as an accumulation of data. We’re given more pieces of evidence, more arguments and counter-arguments, a surplus of information that promises if we just get enough of this stuff, we’ll eventually come to a definite conclusion. However, more often than not, this excess only muddies the mental waters, rather than purifying them for clear thought. Garner writes (in one of the beautiful sentences that unobtrusively pepper her writing), “Hour after hour, while cop and counsel danced like medieval angels upon the head of a pin, I grew stupider and stupider.”
Why should we give any credence to the various theories our overwhelmed minds come up with? Why don’t we recognise them instead as stubborn acts of will rather than logic, attempts to close down the cognitive byways through which the overflow of evidence floods our cluttered minds? Garner worries about her own diminishing reason, but she consoles herself with the knowledge that she’s not on the jury:
“I had made no vows. I was only an observer. Nothing life-altering would be required of me.”
Perhaps it’s this sense of being an innocuous bystander that frees us to pursue the most incredible theories — theories that would be reckless if we had any sway over the case. Conspiracy thinking and dogmatism don’t seem so dangerous when it seems that nothing of importance is affected by them.
Yet this indifference, or impotence, runs only one way. We readers of Garner’s book and observers of the Farquharson case might be unable to affect the outcome, but the outcome can deeply affect us. At the quietly profound close of This House of Grief, Garner imagines “the possessive rage” of the children’s family and their scolding her for talking about her own “grief”. She is understanding but defiant, because “no other word will do”:
“Every stranger grieves for them. Every stranger’s heart is broken. The children’s fate is our legitimate concern. They are ours to mourn. They belong to all of us now.”
Garner, to her credit and to the reader’s benefit, is lucid on the topic of her own biases. She admits that magical thinking has convinced her that “if only Farquharson could be found not guilty, then the boys would not be dead”. She goes further, revealing this isn’t really altruism; it’s death resentment coupled with concern for the children in her own life. Garner goes from thinking of the drowned boys to her own grandchildren, and the deep questions that tragedy forces us to confront:
“Young boys! How can such wild, vital creatures die? How can this hilarious sweetness be snuffed out forever?”
We look for categorical imperatives among the debris of a crime scene, eager (perhaps compelled) to extrapolate from the particulars of a murder, rape, or theft to the generalities of our own lives. If we want Farquharson to be found not guilty, it’s because of how we believe that ruling impacts the world we inhabit. Garner admits late in the book that she “would have given anything to be convinced that he was innocent” because “it was completely unendurable to me that a man would murder his own children”.
For parts of the court case, Garner is accompanied by a teenaged girl, Louise, whose friends keep asking her, “Well? Did he do it?” This is, Louise knows, “the least interesting question anyone could possibly ask”. What matters most, to those of us not immediately involved in the awful affair, is not whether he did it — it’s why he did it. This House of Grief knows that the meaning of a thing often reaches further into the world than the thing itself. In the end, the question we’re asking is not what happened? but what does it mean?
Marginalia, plur. noun:
“In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin … for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe