Jaclyn's Reviews > The Performance

Three women attend a performance of Beckett’s Happy Days in Melbourne and while the demise (or are they already dead? That play has always confused me) of Winnie and Willie plays out on stage we follow their tangential thoughts and learn their inner secrets and fears. Australian fiction has a rich tradition of incorporating the visual arts into narrative and I’m thinking here of Miles Allinson’s Fever of Animals, Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love and Emily Bitto’s The Strays just to name a few. Structuring this book around a play cleverly allows Thomas to explore these women while giving her a deliciously compressed and restricted timeframe to do so. I read it in a single sitting and was drawn in completely. The women were very well rendered but I would have liked more distinct voices for the three – Margot, Ivy and Summer are each 20 years apart after all. This is an impressive work of fiction that uses art to reveal our humanity, something so many readers will love.