Paula Xiberras
Coincidentally enough Joanne Van Os tells me that it is only two weeks ago that she made her first trip across Bass Strait. Time in Tasmania gave her a glimpse of a different existence and left an impression on her. Joanne says Tasmania is ‘incredibly beautiful’ and its beauty captured her as she travelled through Hobart, Kettering and Southport.
An ‘echo’ is defined as ‘a repetition’ and it can also be ‘a person who reflects or imitates another’ and in Joanne’s book ‘Ronan’s Echo’ we get various manifestations of repetition and imitation.
Echoes in the book stretch back to the fields of Fromelles in what was called ‘a minor action’ even though Joanne explains it was more than that and in fact a battle that saw great casualties.
The echoes continued with the effects manifest in the soldiers that returned from the battle, suffering post-traumatic stress a condition misunderstood at the time
This is a story that seeks to show how misunderstandings and not talking and having the sensitive topic of post-traumatic stress echoed in conversation, can and did create even further problems that would echo down generations.
Joanne doesn’t shy from addressing the effects of this post-traumatic stress which had devastating implications and effects on family.
On the home front is the present story of Cat,our main protagonist, a young forensic anthropologist, who is uncovering the past of her family by way of an excavation at Fromelles. Cat is known for her desire to help those seeking closure but because of such generational echoes has had trouble affecting closure it in her own life.
The anthropologist character of Cat is based on a real life female Fromelles forensic anthropologist, a young woman whom Joanne met by chance on her way to Fromelles.
The idea of an echo as a person who reflects or imitates another is also explored in the novel in the novel both in a literal sense in the past with the story or twins and in the present day in a metaphorical sense in Cat ‘s feelings for her ‘twin’ soul-mate Daniel. The twin themes of discovering family and the Fromelles link comes full circle when an accident that took her father out of her life is almost ‘twinned’ by an accident that threatens her mother too.
Perhaps Joanne says it best when she says:
“everything is connected” and “not much happens in isolation in the world”
Ronan’s Echo is out now published by Pan Macmillan.
