Fiona Kelly McGregor is, according to her website a cross-disciplinary author, artist and critic who writes novels, essays, articles and reviews. Some readers will know her as a performance artist, but most notably as the author of Indelible Ink (2010) which won the Age Book of the Year. (See my review.) Her previous fiction also includes Strange Museums (2008); Chemical Palace (2002); Suck My Toes (1994), short stories re-issued by Scribe as the ebook Dirt (2013) along with the novel Au Pair (1993) which I read and enjoyed before I started this blog or (alas) even a reading journal. She was named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists in 1997.

Mcgregor's website tells me that this new novel Iris, is the first in a duet of novels based on the life of real-life Iris Webber:

a petty criminal active in Sydney’s sly-grog underworld from the 1930s-1950s. Set 1932-37, Iris is an epic and picaresque ride through inner-city slums; a doomed love story peopled with scammers, gangsters and thieves. It’s an interrogation of how society criminalises its most marginalised people.

So the 448 pages that I've just read is but the first instalment of prodigious research for McGregor's doctoral thesis!

(Mercifully) the novel doesn't read like a thesis. Written in a profusion of short vivid sentences, peppered with (a-hem) lively language and authentic slang of the era, it tells the story of a woman who was a survivor, but whose survival was always only tentative. And while Iris comes across as a woman determined to be in charge of her life, I came to the end of the novel feeling melancholy because her life was so compromised by crime as a solution to extreme poverty. She and her friends were constantly in and out of gaol for both petty crime and on remand for more serious crimes, and the 'Refty' was a brutal place. A very brutal place, where Iris was often cold, hungry, and recovering without medical attention for the beatings that had been dished out to her.

In a life characterised by insecurity in all the things that matter (shelter, income, safety, dignity) it was the insecurity of her friendships that seemed most tragic to me.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/12/21/iris-2022-by-fiona-kelly-mcgregor/ ( )