The saint arrives in a horse trailer, packed in a box made from tamanu wood. She has no name, her age is uncertain, and there is no sign of death or decay. Orrin Bird is reluctant to take her. A half-broken man living in the remote north-west of Australia in the 1950s, he has no notion how to care for her. “Still. Catholic or not. You don’t turn away a saint.”
Josephine Rowe’s Little World is a strange little novella about protection and grace. Set in three stories, it follows the retired engineer Orrin, the traveller Matti, who later stumbles on Orrin’s dilapidated house, and the self-deprecating Syb, sifting through Matti’s own home decades later. The saint herself is semi-conscious, with an imprecise awareness of her surroundings. Hers is the little world of the title, contained inside a box. There’s a sense of nesting dolls, stories inside stories.
The child-saint has been used as a kind of giant lucky rabbit’s foot. She died violently (most saints do) and was shipped to the island of Nauru as a kind of charm, protecting the colony of sufferers of leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease, who were quarantined there. World War II pushes her to Australia where she offers a tenuous benediction to her custodians. Orrin’s home survives cyclones. Decades on, Matti’s home also remains unscathed after several bushfires. But if this is the saint’s protection, it’s not willingly bestowed. Instead it’s purposeless, as shapeless as luck. In Rowe’s world, the child-saint is furious, with no real idea why she had to die or why she endures. “What is she supposed to do, out here?” Her thoughts drift over her life and death, and occasionally the world around her, but she can’t reach far.
She’s not so different from the rest of them. Orrin, Matti, and Syb are all struggling with the unknowable. The main story centers on Matti, who has been forced to give up her baby—or given over, as the nuns around her insist on calling it, to a wonderful life, to every opportunity. “She had been given a few days’ rest (Grace) to collect herself, and then been sent back into the world, delivered of moral danger and violently heartsick. Her confused body too empty and too full at once, heavy with needless milk, a chasmal hollowing at her centre.” Matti is haunted by both her lost son and her hungers. She doesn’t know what to do with them. She is powerless to even understand the extent of her own need. In the final story Syb, too, is floundering after the departure of a girlfriend and an elderly neighbor. “There are people in the world who’ve never thrown a plate at a wall,” she says. “Think of that.”
It’s hard to know what to make of Rowe’s child-saint at the center of it all, or how to frame the religious references that thread through Little World. Leper colonies, relics, reverence, faith, mercy. But God? Even when the framework of religion is offered to them, in the bewildering shape of the saint’s body, Orrin and Matti approach it with suspicion. They don’t look to the church for answers, or even to other people. They are instinctively secretive. Orrin, at least, sees the saint more like a sister. He dreams of her, barefoot and spitting profanities. Apart from her incorruptible body, he suspects “that she is not miraculous, that she is of no greater faith or sanctity than he. He does not say so.”
Rowe might be writing around the church rather than towards it, but the religious subject matter means that comparisons to Charlotte Wood’s Booker-shortlisted Stone Yard Devotional are inevitable. These days, Christianity is an unusual subject matter for contemporary literature, and it’s curious to see two Australian luminaries exploring its traditions and textures. Wood’s novel is set in a convent, and follows a woman who gives up her career and marriage to retreat from the world. It’s an investigation of ethical choices, purpose and the nature of work. For Wood, it was also a return to her Catholic upbringing and the hours spent at church. “Catholicism had got into my bones,” she writes in her essay On Gods and Ghosts. “The mark Catholicism left on me was bodily, instinctual and spooky; not so much godly as ghostly.”
Rowe’s interest is harder to pin down, or perhaps has less to do with religion than how confusing and out of control the world is right now. There’s a familiar fatalism to Orrin, Matti, and Syb as they face their smallness and how little they can know. The deeper questions feel timely. What is grace? Who can offer us relief? There are also harder provocations about the power of protectors over their wards. When World War II arrives and the saint is taken off Nauru, the colony is loaded into small boats, “towed out to sea, shelled and sunk.”
For Australian readers, the outback setting and religious language in Little World will also raise the specter of the church’s history here, and the ongoing impact of missions on Indigenous peoples and cultures. It’s not the only Christian crime to go unmentioned, and arguably Rowe is experimenting with just that, separating the spiritual from the catastrophes humans have made of it. But the silence is not entirely successful, especially when the nuns in the home where Matti delivers her baby are so sharply drawn.
Little World is ambitious, reaching over decades from Panama to Nauru and the West Australian coast. This epic sweep is a lot to ask a little novella to hold, but Rowe moves with wily lyricism and speed. The first chapter, “Tamanu,” originally appeared as a short story in Zoetrope and the last, “Bunker,” in Australian Book Review. Rowe’s connecting story about Matti is spread over two chapters. It has emotional heft but the pieces feel out of balance. The novella is somehow both too big and too small, though perhaps that is just right for the constrained worlds Rowe wants to explore.
Little World won’t be an easy sell. A child-saint stuck in a box? A title easily confused with A Little Life? Rowe has a dedicated following and the interlinked story structure is not new for her, yet it’s hard to see Little World gathering the same word-of-mouth momentum as her phenomenal A Loving, Faithful Animal. Partly that’s due to its ambiguity. For many audiences, Little World will be too experimental and the answers too elusive.
For others, however, that won’t matter in the least because the pleasure of Rowe’s writing is in the sentences and the flow. Her passages run close to prose poetry, dreamlike, almost like a deck of impressions on index cards, and her rhythm and cadence never falter. In the last chapter, Syb’s voice is wry and full of longing. “Alone in Tilde’s home I lay my palms flat upon the plastic gingham tablecloth. Feel them stick. Wanting something to call Holy, call Hallowed, but without all the rest of the bullshit, if you please.”
