There’s a delicate and quiet power in Patrick Cullen’s stories. As the title suggests, What Came Between focuses on the ten years between the 1989 Newcastle Earthquake and the Newcastle BHP Steelwork’s closure in 1999. They’re the major events that bracket this work, providing context, setting and external pressure, but this is a novel driven by character development rather than major events. The book’s title also refers to what came between one part of Laman Street and the other – the small scale place of the novel. Small in focus maybe – these people are neighbours and their lives intersect in passing moments – but the broader scale is the range of human emotion that Cullen delves into.
The novel takes the form of a series of twelve interconnected stories, all of which could stand alone. Indeed, a number of the stories were published in the Frank Moorhouse edited The Best Australian Stories as standalone pieces, and I was pleased to revisit them here. Taken as a group, the stories work seamlessly together, creating a web of interwoven lives, where a glimpse of an incidental character in one story becomes a complete story and main protagonist in another. Cullen rarely tells the reader what the characters are feeling or even what is happening. Instead, it is subtly inferred through spare dialogue, quiet activity, or almost imperceptible action.
There are three main couples around whom the work pivots, all living on Laman Street in Newcastle, NSW. There is Sarah and her husband Paul. There is middle-aged Ray and Pam, and there is the young Cate and Lucas. The couples live near one another and have small links between them: they pass each other, take tea together, or glimpse bits of one anothers' lives from the outside. Within each unit however, there are big things happening.
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