'Fearless' by Fiona Higgins

From the BLURB:

What happens when six pampered Westerners on a spiritual retreat in Bali end up fighting for their lives?

Six strangers from across the world meet on the tropical island of Bali to attend a course designed to help them face their fears. Their backgrounds are as diverse as their fears - which range from flying, public speaking and heights, through to intimacy, failure and death.

Friendships and even romance blossom as the participants are put through a series of challenges which are unusual, confronting and sometimes hilarious. A week of fun in the sun suddenly turns into something far more serious, however, when the unthinkable happens - a tragic disaster that puts the group in deadly danger, testing the individual courage of every member.

‘Fearless’ is a new fiction novel from Australian author, Fiona Higgins.

I was really excited to read this novel, as I’d thoroughly enjoyed Higgins’ ‘Wife on the Run’ back in 2014, and everything about ‘Fearless’ was broadcasting being a “great summer read” to me. But what really pushed me into reading this one was my catching the 2012 movie ‘The Impossible’ on TV one night. It’s a great movie based on a true story, about a British family on holiday in Thailand, who are separated by the destruction and chaotic aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The blurb of ‘Fearless’ alludes to ‘an unspeakable act’ happening in Bali, that throws six strangers’ lives into mayhem – and of course that’s alluding to an event similar to the 2002 Bali Bombings – but ‘The Impossible’ reminded me of the power in such stories where an unfathomable disaster happens in the middle of “paradise” … so I delved into ‘Fearless’, and hated it. Absolutely hated it.

The premise of ‘Fearless’ is these six strangers from all corners of the globe come to Bali to attend a Fearless retreat where they intend to combat everything from a snake phobia, to fear of heights and flying, to general dissatisfaction with life. We get a chapter that follows each of the six strangers, to understand the deeper meanings behind their wish to combat fear. And straight away from meeting these characters, the story started to fall down for me because there’s so much cliché … there’s Annie, an older mid-Westerner who is (of course) an outspoken devout Christian and overweight American. Remy is a Frenchman who falls for Australian Janelle while she’s wearing a rash-vest and zinc on her nose (because of course he does – Frenchmen are so very romantic). Henry is a paunchy, British bird-watcher and quintessential geek (because he’s British?). Cara is a broken mother … and even her, who has one of the more compelling and believable backstories, I wish there’d be a decision to make a subversive gender-flip and have her be a father grieving the loss of his child, just so that not every character was so darn predictable. And then there’s Lorenzo – an Italian photographer who has experienced some Bill Henson-esque backlash in his home country, amid accusations that his artistic photographs of ingénue girls are inappropriate …  his introspective story takes a bizarrely sharp turn towards the end, and I couldn’t help but feel he got lugged with this exploration on the cliché that Italian men are sleazy and pervy or something?

It wasn’t just that these characters all felt built on the most typical of tourism clichés, it’s also that they’re all kind of unbearable. At one point, the Australian Janelle puts on a saccharine “presentation” to be filmed for her bulimic teenage niece, wherein she quotes bumper-sticker philosophy while stripping down to her underwear and Taylor Swift’s ‘Fifteen’ plays from her iPod in the background. I just … my eyes were so busy rolling, I could barely focus on the page during that scene (which is also when Frenchman Remy really falls in love with her, because … of course.)

‘Of course,’ said Remy, impressed by how much Janelle seemed to care. About the orangutans of Borneo, the world’s rainforests, the gamelan orchestras of Bali, teenagers with eating disorders and, naturally, her own family. He considered what he cared about. The last time he’d cried was after the defeat of Paris Saint-Germain to archrivals Montpellier in round 32 of the Ligue 1 football season. Janelle’s compassion is more than refreshing, he thought. It’s intoxicating.

But the book was also off-putting to me for the presentation of Bali, as seen through the eyes of these Westerners … it reminded me of a Kirkus book review I read once, of Heidi R. Kling’s YA book ‘Sea’ in which the reviewer accused the story of being; “Disaster tourism masquerading as romance…” and the last line of the review was also apt for Higgins’ ‘Fearless’; “Well-meaning, but ultimately about slumming in disaster zones for a summer’s recuperative fun.” Because Higgins does present Bali as a “disaster zone”, essentially. Everything from Annie’s observations of their abuse of street dogs, to Remy watching a woman defecate in the street and all six hearing locals bad-mouth the Javanese … none of this sat well with me.

So, nothing in this book was really working for me – why did I keep reading? Well, I wanted to get to the “unspeakable act” tagline on the cover … I thought everything at the Fearless retreat and getting to know these strangers was boring or infuriating, but maybe they’d rise to the occasion in the midst of a disaster? But this plot-turn doesn’t happen until around page 220 (of a 391-page book) and it did feel utterly disjointed from the rest of the story … it felt cheap, actually – as did the whole book for me, unfortunately and ultimately.

-->

1/5

'Wife on the Run' by Fiona Higgins

Receive from the Publisher

From the BLURB:

A mother's greatest fear... A wife's worst nightmare... What would you do?

When two technology-related disasters hit within days of each other, Paula knows her comfortable suburban life has been irrevocably blown apart. One involves the public shaming of her teenage daughter, the other is a discovery about her husband that shocks her to her core. With her world unravelling around her, Paula does the only thing that makes any sense to her: she runs away from it all.

She pulls her children out of school and takes off on a trip across Australia with her elderly father and his caravan. The only rule is No Technology - no phones, no Facebook, no Instagram, no tablets, games or computers. It's time to get back to basics and learn how to be a family again. It all sounds so simple - and for a while, it is. But along the way Paula will meet new, exciting complications, and realise that running away is only a temporary solution. The past has to be faced before the future can begin.

Fiona Higgins is the author of the critically-acclaimed, bestselling 2012 novel ‘The Mothers' Group’ which I, regrettably, have not got round to reading yet. ‘Wife on the Run’ is her latest novel, and has ensured that I’ll be going back to read her breakout hit.

‘Wife on the Run’ is set in modern-day Melbourne, and follows the increasingly tangled and crumbling lives of the McInnes family. Wife and mother, Paula, has been called to her daughter’s school after a pornographic image is uploaded to Facebook and attributed to her and a friend. Teenager Caitlin is gently told to take a few weeks off school while the scandal dies down, the school scrambles to get the image removed from Facebook and some much-needed cyber-bullying education can be organised for the community.

Paula’s husband, meanwhile, is feeling unloved at home and finds temptation everywhere but with his disinterested wife. Hamish thinks their marriage was sidetracked by their children – Caitlin and Lachlan – and it’s never quite righted itself. So Hamish seeks sexual gratification elsewhere and as close to not-really-infidelity as he can get – cyberspace.

When the virtual world intrudes on the McInnes family, everything is turned on its head. Paula decides to take the kids and her recently widowed father, Sid, on a caravan trip from Melbourne to the top-end of Australia. She needs some time away from Hamish after discovering his online secret, and she also wants to fulfil a life-long road trip dream.

His curvy, intelligent, committed wife.The only girl with a university degree who’d ever agreed to go out with him; all the other chicks had been too stuck-up. Watching them across the room every Thursday night at the trendy pub near the university, Doggo and Hamish had called them the ‘Fig Jam’ girls. An acronym for their attitude – Fuck I’m Good, Just Ask Me. Skinny girls with chambray shirts and plums in their mouths, studying law, science medicine. But Paula had been a standout; her big, open smile, her infectious laughter, a not-so-serious degree. And no tickets on herself, either. She hadn’t thought twice about going out with him.
They’d got together, got married, had two great kids. He’d made the money and she’d run the home.Except now she wasn’t there, for the first time in seventeen years.

‘Wife on the Run’ is an interesting novel – there’s a bit of ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back’ to it, but the plot trigger is a look into what happens when the virtual world intrudes upon the real, and our false identities are revealed to the world … in fact, the whole novel is an exploration into ripping off the masks we wear, and exposing our true (sometimes ugly) selves. 

I can see a bit of Liane Moriarty in Higgin’s writing – both women have a keen eye for observing the insidious suburban underbelly, and exploring ‘suburban-paradise lost’ through outlandish but oddly believable storylines. I would highly-recommend Fiona Higgins in fact, for anybody who loves Liane Moriarty’s books.

Higgins touches on cyber-sex and cyber-cheating in this book, as well as cyber-bullying and online identity – and all of these grubby online liaisons are being tapped out on the keyboards inside family homes, behind picket fences, along tree-lined streets. Investigations into the virtual contrast beautifully with Paula’s road-trip with the kids and her dad that sees them navigating the far-reaches of Australia: along the Nullarbor Plain and through country townships where fast-friends are made and sausages sizzled.

We actually get two sides to the story in ‘Wife on the Run’, which is told in third person but offers both Paula and Hamish’s version of events. From Hamish we get to read his slippery-slope into a seriously questionable online hook-up, and then we also get to read Paula navigate her hurt and distrust in equally destructive, morally-questionable ways.

It’s odd, but I wouldn’t say Hamish or Paula were terribly nice characters … but I did enjoy spending time with them. Even Hamish whose moral slip-up is truly contentious, I liked seeing things from his perspective. They’re both so flawed, and the stresses they’re under do not bring out the grace in either of them – but I understood how, once they’d started digging holes for themselves, they found it nearly impossible to find their way out. Maybe for that reason I found the ending quite abrupt, because it swings back to following Paula for the climax but I was rather hoping to get Hamish’s final take on things too… he’d been with readers for as much of the book’s journey as Paula, and I really felt the book needed one more chapter following his fall-out to feel properly concluded.

I really loved ‘Wife on the Run’. It’s a rather outlandish book at times, particularly towards the end, but I found Higgins’ investigations into our online moral compass fascinating and revolting, and very appropriate for the times. Paula and Hamish were both fantastically flawed – but I enjoyed reading their unravelling (of both lies and lives) and found myself rooting for both of them, even though neither comes out as hero or villain by book’s end.

4.5/5