Kate Grenville's The Idea of Perfection

Orange Prize Winner is a Lovely and Quirky Page Turner

Jun 9, 2009

Like Harley Savage's artfully done quilts, Kate Grenville's novel is filled with delicious details and sharp contrasts.

Harley Savage and Douglas Cheeseman, two quirky characters in Kate Grenville’s lovely novel, The Idea of Perfection, meet by chance one hot summer in a small Australian town called Karakarook.

Meet Harley Savage

Harley, a part-time museum curator, seems at first to be an unlikely candidate for the big-city representative who has come out to help the citizens of Karakarook with their Heritage project. Big and gangly, her plain and awkward appearance ganders for something less than romantic, but Douglas seems to see something in Harley that the others don’t. Maybe it’s her dangerous streak, a streak that was supposedly the cataylst for her late husband’s attempt to take his life.

But Harley, feeling responsible for her husband’s unexpected death does not want anything to do with love or feelings at all. Rather than welcome the blossoming romance she tries to deter it with her strong personality. Like the mismatched patterns to the unique quilts that she makes, Harley is an unusual woman filled with lights and darks.

With just the right match, another pattern could emphasize her light or darkness.

A Less Than Perfect Character

Douglas is drawn to Harley. Shy and gawky himself, Harley and Douglas make an odd pair. Self-conscious from the beginning of his jug-handle ears and cowardly personality, Douglas didn’t have it in himself to approach Harley. A close encounter solves this, and slowly Douglas finds himself more and more drawn to Harley, a woman who seems just beyond his grasp somehow.

Douglas, a big-city engineer himself, has arrived in Karakarook to demolish the old Bent Bridge, the very artifice that Harley has come out to save. With two different ideologies and two different sides, Harley and Douglas are bound for a collision course. But what can save them: something that matters or something that is only the idea of perfection?

The Idea of Perfection?

Complimenting Harley and Douglas throughout the novel is Felicity Porcelline and her grotesque obsession with perfection. Deeply vain and filled with a damaging kind of conceit, Felicity’s face is a mask of perfection. But already forty years old, she is taking all kinds of pains to keep her face undiminished by wrinkles and frown lines. Lined with face creams, her vanity and bathroom stall is filled with all types of products to keep her from aging. Inhumanly perfect, she keeps her home spotless. Not even her child escapes this regime.

Any time now this perfect façade is ready to crack. And it does, tearing down everything that Felicity knows is familiar. But already disengaged from herself and her life for the ideal of perfection, Felicity has no idea the type of damage she has havocked on herself and her family. Without any kind of remorse, Felicity continues to aspire to her idea of perfection.

A Superb Storyteller: Kate Grenville

Winner of the Orange Prize, The Idea of Perfection is a moving story about an unlikely kind of love. Kate Grenville is a master storyteller interweaving the most precise details like the artful quilts Harley makes. Told with the steadiest hand, Grenville knows how to get across to the reader what is valid and true. The contrasts and comparisons told in this story are dealt in the subtlest manner. Kate Grenville is a superb storyteller for the perfect way she is able to portray her characters’ quirkiness and idiosyncrasies.

The copyright of the article Kate Grenville's The Idea of Perfection in Australian Literature is owned by My Nguyen. Permission to republish Kate Grenville's The Idea of Perfection in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.