"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”.

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 dra…