Friends & Dark Shapes by Kavita Bedford
“I would love to see Sydney as a stranger for the first time. Be like a tourist and drive down from the city and see that magical dip of the ocean, and the frangipani trees hugging the coastline, and the surfers riding waves as smooth as oil, and think, maybe here my life could change.”
Friends & Dark Shapes (2021), the debut novel from Sydney-based Australian-Indian author Kavita Bedford, is a richly written dive into the buzz of trying to make sense of life. Told through a series of day-to-day vignettes, our unnamed narrator shares her experiences of moving into a share house a year after her father dies. While trying to make sense of her grief, she grapples with the beginning and end of formative relationships in different areas of her life.
Situated in the gentrified neighbourhood of Redfern, the narrator moves in with two other housemates, and they seek out a third, finally welcoming a musician they nickname ‘Bowerbird’. They are all just approaching thirty and second-generation Australians who bond over their shared experiences of growing up in a place that constantly views them as outsiders:
“Often, there is no vocabulary to even begin to discuss the language of race in this country, she adds. At least in the states, they are so hyper-aware of colour and race, and maybe it is out of control and politically correct, but at least you are allowed to say it out loud and be recognised. Here, we never seem to be able to say much out loud.”
Spanning one year, we follow our narrator as she remembers her father and his teachings, reminiscing about their close relationship and the many overt and covert teachings she has learned from her parents. She describes observing her parents embraced one afternoon as a teen before they are supposed to attend a social event, her father reading poetry to her mother and the dawning realising that her parents had a life that didn’t include her:
“Their lives didn’t go on pause when I wasn’t there. I felt both betrayed by this knowledge and a thrill at the thought of this vast land that existed beyond myself. They had some language that I didn’t understand and perhaps never would.”
The book is littered with similar, subtle realisations, as we feel the sense of our narrator growing and moving away from a youthful self-centred idealism and romantic view of life into the realities of making hard decisions and moving through tough experiences. At the time she moves into the house share, none of the others has experienced a significant loss like her own, and she senses it sets her apart, creating a barrier from connecting with them on a deeper level.
“Grief is invisible. It is an ice-cold sliver of dread that wakes you up every morning, which no amount of clothes can warm up. It’s like a kid’s game of catch your shadow. A flicker of something, trying to capture it and pull it back into yourself, recognition: that is me!”
This is a distinctly millennial novel, with distinctly millennial dialogue and concerns, that I couldn’t always feel connected to as they sometimes felt a bit forced, but I know many will recognise many of their own friendship groups and conversations in them. One of the standouts for me throughout the novel is how Bedford builds the rhythm of Redfern and Sydney.
Our narrator travels around interviewing different people with a photographer friend, pitching interesting stories of locals to various media outlets. Through this, Bedford plots a vibrant map of Sydney for the reader, detailing a city that grows on us, the narrator and her friendship group as it continues to transform around them.
“I think about how once you live in any place long enough, your personal history takes over, and it can be hard to re-imagine those first clean moments in a landscape that is not yet tarnished by your personal myths.”
Bedford herself has a background in journalism, media and anthropology, so it’s difficult not to immediately assign her as our anglo-Indian narrator, who constantly feels like she is recalling details and observing her experiences rather than ‘living’ them. The writing is always centred in the present and, as the blurb advises, “sketches the contours of contemporary life” – what this offers is a delicate snapshot of emerging adulthood in the suburbs of Sydney. This might leave the reader with a sense of lack if it didn’t feel so intensely deliberate in the writing, and while I finished the book wanting to know more about our narrator and her future, it was also quite freeing to leave her and the share house at the point we do.
A subtly tender read of the limbo of late-twenty-somethings trying to make it all work in one of Australia’s most vibrant cities, Friends & Dark Shapes is well worth spending a dusty weekend with.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
