We always give books as gifts for pretty much every celebration. This was one of my Christmas presents from my husband, and I completely see why he chose this book for me. The blurb for The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner says:

Athena and Dexter Fox are happy. They love each other. They are friends.

They live with their young sons in a sparsely furnished house near the Merri Creek: its walls cracking, its floors sloping and its doors hanging loosely in their frames. There is a piano in their kitchen.

But then, one day – years after their lives have taken different directions – Dexter runs into Elizabeth, an old friend from his university days. She brings into his world her loose-living musician boyfriend, Philip, and her seventeen-year-old sister, Vicki. 

And all at once, the bonds that hold the Fox family together begin to fray.

Helen Garner’s perfectly formed novels embody Melbourne’s tumultuous 1970s and 1980s. Drawn on a small canvas and with a subtle musical backdrop, The Children’s Bach is a beloved work that weighs the burdens of commitment against the costs of liberation.

This is a book about a family living in rural Australia, set in the 1980s. Well, there are two families here really that are very much linked to each other. One family, Elizabeth and her younger sister Vicki, who are thrown together reluctantly after their mother dies and Vicki needs to live with somebody. The other family is Athena and Dexter with their young children. Dexter and Elizabeth were friends at University, and Elizabeth runs into him with Vicki one day. Vicki is drawn more and more into Dexter’s family life with all their complications. She ends up pretty much living with them for a while as Elizabeth is not at all prepared for living with her sister. But while Dexter’s family has something that Vicki craves in terms of family life, it has its own difficulties. In terms of their life with one of their sons who has various difficulties which are not explicitly described, and Athena’s dissatisfaction with her role in this family, or her desire to explore beyond the walls in which she has made their home. The family love music, and references to the music they enjoy is peppered throughout the book every now and then.

The Children’s Bach is a novella really, at just 158 pages long, so it is a short read. I was not overly keen on this book to be honest, and I don’t know if the fact that it was a novella, and so very short, was part of the reason for this. It is written in short sections, and then the narrative moves on very fast. Many people will like the sparseness of the writing, the fast pace, the snippets. For me I found them rather confusing. There were quite a few occasions where by the time I realised who that particular passage was about, and that we had met this character before, we had moved on to another day, or another person or situation.

I also found the characters very difficult to empathise with, and didn’t feel that any of them had much that was sympathetic about them. It is a rather unflinching exploration of motherhood, and there are some very confronting, difficult passages in the book where it talks about life with a child with significant mental health and/or physical disabilities in it as well, so consider this something of a trigger warning in that respect. I found those passages talking about the disabled son very difficult to read.

This is a very well written book and I think I will remember it for a while, but it just wasn’t for me. I personally would give the book 2.5 out of 5 stars, but I also know that for the right person, this would be a great book.