It is a great honour to launch Merlinda Bobbis’s book .

Some books are very easy to describe – they fall into well-known categories or genres, they carry with them a kind of commercial promise of familiarity, a kind of complacency, if you will, that reassures the reader of a certain comfort and ease. Then there are those books, like Merlinda’s, like Fish Hair Woman, that are utterly singular, books that challenge and excite us because they are like no other, books that transport and transform us, that require us to imagine larger, richer, more profoundly and more audaciously...

So my job this afternoon is to give you a sense of the qualities of this remarkable book without reducing or summarizing it, without spoiling the plot…

Fish Hair Woman is a kind of magical history, set in the Philippines, mostly in 1987, but with an investigation, a sort of detective narrative, set much closer to the present. To say it is magical is not to suggest it is escapist fantasy; but that it is magical in the sense of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Gunter Grass or Angela Carter, writers who – paradoxically – employ the marvelous in order to suggest the irrepressible richness of real life, its folded and intricate dimensions, its weird interiorities and inexplicable goings on. And like those writers, Merlinda has a political purpose; to challenge the social order of received and simple explanations. This is a kind of magic, then, that speaks truth to power, but it is a literary truth, conceived in an ambitious register which figures calamity, grievance, brutality, depredation, but also – and crucially – its radical counter: intimacy, eroticism, the wonderfully implausible persistence of individual heroism and love.

1987 was the year of a war on terrorism in the Philippines, a time in which the military tried to extinguish the New Peoples Army, insurgents calling for social renewal and justice for the poor. It was a time of atrocity, disappearances and irreparable social damage. Within this terrible context, within the dark spaces of history, Merlinda has chosen to focus on particular individuals in order to remind us that those who disappear in any catastrophe have faces and names and personal stories and families; they have loved and experienced tenderness in the context of their suffering; they can be recovered within story in their all-too-human complication. The fish hair woman is a woman who has 12 metres of hair; she is condemned to retrieve the bodies of slaughtered villagers from the river, to fish them out, dragging the awful corpses with the net of her own making, trawling the depths to bring the truth of violence to the surface.

 Desaparecidos. Our disappeared, ay, so many of them. And the lovers left behind became obsessed with doors – one day my son, daughter, husband, wife, will be framed at the doorway. Behind my beloved will be so much light.

It’s a metaphor for the writer’s task, of course, to return what is hidden or unacknowledged to the light, and to loving attention and appreciation; but its also an extraordinarily bold conceit, that a woman might perform so grotesque and necessary a task, that she might carry the hope and the mourning of everyone in her village. So this is a painful magic, and this novel is sorrowful and serious; it requires us to imagine mutilated bodies and the savagery that produced them.  Most writers would be daunted by so very large a theme, and so difficult a history, but Merlinda is courageous, and committed to her moral storytelling. She has cleverly structured her book through intertwined stories, so that we learn slowly of the characters and become enmeshed in a different kind of net, if you like, in which threads of story stretch and contract, open and knot, and gradually begin to form a discernable pattern.  There’s a wonderful sense, reading this book, of continuing revelation, of coming to know the plot through this careful net-like structure. And as you can tell from the tiny piece I’ve just read, the prose has an elegiac beauty to it, a compelling lyricism and loveliness, so that the reader is also emotionally involved. It’s always a mystery to me how beauty and atrocity can co-exist in writing, but this too is central to the work of art: I’m reminded of the French philosopher, Maurice Blanchot, who believes that in a sense we write to acknowledge the dead, that the corpse is the reason that we have art, and that the decent of Orpheus to rescue Eurydice, for example, is paradigmatic of the metaphysical function of writing. In this sense the bravery of Merlinda’s vision is to lead us all to the point of witness, then allow us to sense the precious, if frail, affirmation of so terrible a journey.

Fish Hair Woman is social history, lamentation, magic, cultural investigation, but it is also a romance, working indirectly, with a poetic logic. Throughout the book, Estrella, the fish hair woman, is writing a kind of love letter to an Australian adventurer, Tony – though this is a clumsy way of describing a subtle device (there’s a mystery to the status of the love letter). Par-da-ba, the word for beloved, echoes within the book, and reminds us that weeping is possibly like singing, that there are forms of desire and mourning that are both implicitly musical. The metaphor of the heart is central too; the fish hair woman has a “tricky heart”: there is left ventricle and right ventricle love; and there are broken hearts aplenty and a deep reverence of the body and its capacity to be hurt and to find pleasure. The poetic logic – a wholly distinctive feature of this book – is no less important than the plot; and it means that we are enjoined in dense imagining of the community of the suffering, that there is a solidarity – if you will – required of us, that we are addressed through the animation of our necessary fellow-feeling.

In the investigative thread of the novel a young man, Luke, is searching for his father Tony, who is one of the disappeared. In inserting a white Australian man into the Filipino situation Merlinda raises some of the most vexatious political questions in the book: is the body of a white man more important than the body of a Filipino woman? Why might we ask this question or even dare to contemplate it? What relations of power and colonialism give more weight and prestige to the disappearance of a white man? We share a bodily vulnerability – an existential vulnerability – and in representing so sincerely, with such pertinent care, the grief of indigenous Filipinos, Fish Hair Woman is above all an ethical novel and one that requires us to be circumspect about the politics of which it speaks, and the magnitude of forms of loss we might find it easier not to consider.

I want in closing to offer my gratitude to Merlinda. We all read a great deal, and what matters finally are those books that come to rest within us, that have taught us something – not with a message, but in the process of encountering a richly imagined other-world. So I commend this book to you for its ethics, its complication, its wonderful writing, but also, finally, for reminding us that the dark human shape in the doorway, the shape surrounded by light, is what we need to recall and attend to, to vouch safe and to treasure.

Gail Jones March 2012