Kirsten Alexander’s new novel After the Fall is an ode to poetic justice and an object lesson in relationships. Her earlier novel Riptides was shortlisted for the PEN America/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2014 and After the Fall would be an equally worthy contender. The book introduces us to married couple Giselle and Adam. Giselle is a pottery instructor with her own teaching school. Her husband Adam is a corporate high-flyer. She is patient and loving. He is childish and insecure. Outsiders see their marriage as a fraught but stylish romance. They enjoy wealth, good looks, fine food and drink, and a dazzling array of friends. But their relationship harbours a dark secret.
The book opens in the picturesque village of Hollydale in north Yorkshire. Giselle has fled there from Melbourne for reasons not immediately clear. Bombs have recently detonated in the forest near her cottage and village local Margaret wants her help to bury a body. Village folk seem to know the culprit behind the bombings, but are staying tight-lipped. There is nothing the locals won’t do to protect its integrity. It is a place where “kindness and violence can exist in the same instant”. After the Fall reads like an Agatha Christie cosy told from the inside-out.Â
Meanwhile in Melbourne, Adam paces his empty home, at a loss as to why his wife has packed up and left. The reader wonders too. Adam is bereft, worried and confused. Isn’t Giselle capricious, selfish and cruel for leaving without warning? And here is the genius of Alexander’s writing: we make allegiances to characters we are later ashamed to admit to as we learn the truth behind Giselle’s departure. And even as we learn the truth we are tempted to hold her responsible for her own predicament.
As Giselle’s past closes in on her present, the Hollydale community rallies around her. Their devotion to Giselle is ancestral; when the village adopts her they adopt her crises too and set to deal with them.
After the Fall lampoons the rule of law and the notion of divine justice. The law is morality legislated, as dictated by God to man, but Alexander hands the keys of justice to ordinary citizens, and the secret judiciary of Hollydale metes out a punishment so satisfying and complete we understand why those in power are desperate to keep its deliverance from the hands of the meek.
When Giselle begins to doubt her complicity in Hollydale’s extrajudicial activities, Margaret reminds her that “ethics, morality and the law have little to do with one another”.
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This book is certainly not for young adults, but it should be required reading for all high school students. It imparts a relationship literacy all young people ought to know about, but are not formally taught. Men like Adam need to be studied. Hollywood is too busy propagating a romantic ideal women feel they need to buy into at any cost. After the Fall shatters this ideal and provides the blueprint for the type of person all women should avoid and no man should aspire to emulate.
After the Fall, Kirsten Alexander
Publisher: Ultimo Press
ISBN: 9781761153532
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304pp
Publication date: February 2025
RRP: $34.99
