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A Verse Novel
By Maree Dawes
109 pages
Thank you to Bronwyn Mehan at Spineless Wonders for this e-book copy.
Brb is a first person verse novel that remembers the days when chatting on the internet was new, when chatters revelled in immediate, words-only, communication. Remember ICQ?
I hadn’t read any verse novels before, I know, shame on me, but I’ve had a quick look around and I’m glad this is my first foray. Brb captures that immediacy and quick-fire fast-fingers-chat with a luscious blend of prose and poetry. It uses online language like email and chat talk to take the reader, with ‘Bodicea’ our protagonist, as she stumbles and learns how to use chat rooms and falls so deeply into that world of other chatters and painful trysts where she is forced to question her actions, and her identity: what is adultery? Who is she really as she straddles both her worlds?
Her friend and husband take measures to draw her out again back into her lonely life as wife and mother where she almost has to relearn how to live and love and communicate in a life not governed by the fantasy created by words. (Funny, in this instance, how easily it is to turn ‘word’ into ‘sword’.)
Think again
She says
You’ll never feel that in chat
Never see my eyes fill
Never taste our tears
In the ocean
This is what she believes
Chat is fantasy
How many times
Would she need to slap my face
Before I believed it too
She won’t be able to I know
One slap
All she can do
The nowords space
Between the slap
And wishing
You never had.
pg 97
Brb is a fascinating, fun, and sad portrayal of a lonely housewife trek into nineties chat-rooms. I love the use of chat-room language, the phrases, short-hand and email, and yes, I do remember chat-rooms. What a wonderful portrayal of the era that was the dawning of the complex use of our lovely internet!
The Spineless Wonders Book club will be chatting about this book on March 13 on their face book page.
