Book Club - Andrea Goldsmith’s The Buried Life

Andrea Goldsmith is the award winning author of novels including the Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlisted The Prosperous Thief and the 2015 Melbourne Prize for Literature, The Memory Trap. Her new novel is The Buried Life. Adrian’s colleagues affectionately call him Doctor Death. As a renowned scholar of death in the modern age he has surprisingly little insight into the impacts death has wrought in his own life. Kezi is a young artist torn between the freedom of her life and the tug of the fundamentalist christian life she escaped to lead it. Laura is a brilliant town planner anchored by her marriage to an underappreciated scholar. Each of these characters orbits the other, leading lives of quiet expectation.  Adrian seeks to find a way forward after the breakdown of his relationship to Irene. Kezi hangs on to the possibility of forging a life outside of the church that rejected her for her sexuality. That she can reconcile and occupy the space carved out when she was so young. Laura is animated by a growing realisation that there is more to her cloistered world and she has been ignorant to what has been holding her back. The Buried Life takes place across Melbourne and into the lives of Adrian, Kezi and Laura. Here the city is a village inhabited by relationships near and far, and into which we are invited. There we discover how life can give us glimpses of possibility but stubbornly refuse to help us unless we first help ourselves. The novel is animated by the music and poetry that come to be central to the characters' existence.  Adrian so long a rationalist has always enjoyed music but failed to appreciate how others can be in its thrall. Returning from a conference, he chances on a recording of Mahler in a coastal cafe and discovers a kind of transcendence that drives him forward.  When he meets Laura he is similarly enthralled and comes to question the certainties of his life and come to favour living with passion and emotion. Each of these characters is shadowed by their buried life.  Imagine, if you will, a sense of incompleteness. A gnawing worry that there is something more to do. That you are living in sepia but aware that brilliant technicolour is waiting if you could just see it. The Buried Life chronicles the journey into discovering that life and the journeys; both physical and spiritual we must take to get there. I found this novel both moving and challenging. Searching and yearning are such human traits but we all walk a tightrope of wishing ourselves and trying to live in our world.  Within the novel we are confronted with pain and uncertainty and must consider if we can ever undo some of the damage we’ve lived through.  I’m reluctant to suggest whether there’s a destination because so often it's the journey, cliched as that might sound. So to the novel as I found myself transfixed by the growing dynamic between Adrian, Laura and Kezi. As they become each other’s family I found myself increasingly concerned with where this might take then and less so if they got to go together.