*This review contains spoilers!
What is the most important meeting of your life? And to what degree did this meeting seem to come by lucky chance? And to what degree did this meeting seem to come by necessity?
Newcastle, 1972. It’s a still summer night, and you are a 15-year-old girl in love with another girl. Do you decide to act on your desires, or stamp them down?
This is the question that author Dylin Hardcastle asks in their fourth novel A Language of Limbs, written as part of their PhD in Creative Writing at UNSW. The novel is told from the perspectives of two unnamed characters, referred to only as ‘Limb One’ and ‘Limb Two’. At the moment their story begins, both are 15 years old, living in Newcastle, and hopelessly queer. A Language of Limbs follow both women’s lives concurrently over the next two decades, highlighting the parallels and contrasts of their experiences living in Sydney in the 70’s and 80’s. As the two women live (and suffer, in their own personal ways) through the AIDs epidemic, Australia’s first Mardi Gras, queer protests and a homophobic society and culture, they slowly make their way towards each other.
Up until about the 200th page, I steadfastly believed that this story was told from the perspectives of alternate life paths of the same person, one who had embraced their queerness and one who had rejected it. Both ‘limbs’ find inspiration in Virginia Woolf and Claude Cahun, both experience the death of a loved one on the same night, both find solace from their pain in the cold but encompassing embrace of the ocean. How could two strangers live such similar lives?
It wasn’t until the characters almost crossed paths that it became clearer, they were two different people. It was a shocking revelation as a reader, but not an unpleasant one. Limb One and Limb Two went from being the same person to being kindred spirits, destined to meet; their souls still intricately knitted together, but in a different way.
The idea that our lives might be connected cosmically to the ones we love was an idea that had me hooked as a reader. There were so many overlaps between two stories, and their experiences so similar, that it was beyond coincidence. Their personal battles and life experiences often reflected and contradicted each other. At one point in the story, Limb One is concerned her girlfriend might leave her for a man, meanwhile Limb Two is married to a man but still thinking about the girl she loved as a teenager.
Hardcastle masterfully crafts these two women’s stories in a way that will leave you wondering if soulmates might actually exist. They also subvert language in order to more accurately portray the queer experience, by weaving poetry and moments of stillness and reflection throughout the women’s internal monologues.
By the story’s end, our two limbs are finally introduced by name when their lives finally intersect. Lucy and Suzanne have both loved hard and suffered debilitating loss, unsure if they are capable of loving again. But much like life, when one chapter ends, another begins. In the empty space in both women’s lives, new love can bloom.
‘A Language of Limbs’ has been optioned for television and is in development with Curio (Sony Pictures).
