Paula Xibberas
Chloe Hooper’s first name translates into meaning something like ‘young green shoot’ and identifies with fertility and Chloe’s book ‘The Engagement’ is definitely fertile with possibilities and encourages a fertile imagination by the reader! The book is like a maze where each new lead or possibility leads us further into the mire,of the confusion it generates. ‘Games’ are played between our protagonists. The games are frustrating and sometimes shocking but the book’s intrigue draws us in.
Chloe tells me one of her editors says the book is a ‘psychological box of mirrors’ where truth is reflected on one side and turning it around to another side we see truth reflected again! A different truth but one that seems equally valid.
I had the pleasure of speaking to Chloe Hooper recently about ‘The Engagement’. The book follows the story of two protagonists, a young woman architect from England who has taken on work with her uncle in Melbourne real estate. She begins a playful relationship with a man of property and after viewing some architecture she has on offer, the man, Alexander, propositions Liese to spend some time with him at his lonely mansion and this is where the serious games begin.
We ping pong between the trust we feel for the characters, perhaps leaning more to trust Liese as we are seeing things from her viewpoint. Yet even in her story her vision of Alex is constantly refocusing and we come to the realisation that trusting anyone completely is a leap of faith. We are left to make our own conclusions and because of the ambiguous nature of the relationship between the two leading characters it means the book keeps us guessing long after we have finished reading it and this Chloe agrees is a sign of a healthy book.
I ask Chloe one of my favourite questions of what she thinks of readers that misinterpret or over analyse something in her writing quoting something that came up in a conversation I had with Morris Gleitzman who calls this collaboration between the author and reader ‘the magic spaces’. Chloe loves this phrase and is in agreement that perhaps the reader’s interpretation is bringing something out that the author had felt all the time in their subconscious.
Chloe says if her book were to be made into a film Hitchcock would have been the one she would have wanted as director and readers can only imagine he would have had great fun with the book’s twists and turns. The photo image on the book’s cover has a startling similarity to the image of Vertigo’s Madeleine/Judy staring at the painting of her doppelganger Carlotta. We view her from behind with the famous bun at the back of her hair itself a symbol of twisting to and fro in our perceptions of the characters.
The book is deeply layered with the masterly weaving of the symbolism of the swan, the swan is a mythological symbol of a creature that mates for life but this nobility is dis-proven statistically with the revelation that one in six cygnet offspring are illegitimate and this comment sets the tone for this book about trust and possible deceit.
Chloe says the black swan is seen as the negative of the white swan as is the male to the female, the yin and yang and the black and white also reminds us of two chess pieces and about our two protagonists caught in a possibly deadly game.
We are often presented with Alex’s skills in midwifery on his property in bringing forth life and we are torn between the image of him as a life giver and his penchant for the culinary which seems him consume this very life and makes us wonder metaphorically, as well as literally, what he is cooking up.
I ask Chloe about the difference between writing fiction and non-fiction skills and she quotes that’ ‘fiction’ gets you out’. One can only say this book is one that keeps you in and by extension makes you search within your soul for what really is true!
Chloe will be out and about and appearing at Fullers bookshop at 5.30pm on 13 September.
