Melina Marchetta: Jellicoe Road

Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

(Major spoilers for a novel that relies upon what we know and when we know it! Please read the novel before you read this—I don’t want to ruin one of my favorite books ever for you.)

            This is the most complicated “who knew what when” book I’ve ever run across, so I wanted to give it a thorough analysis in the hope that I can use these tools one day. There are really two stories, one in the present, when our characters are 16-18, and one in the past, when their parents were the same age. Several of our main characters don’t know that their parents knew each other, or even in most cases who their parents were. Some of them have family in the present, some have family but don’t know that they’re family, and some just have connections to other adults.

            The main character is Taylor, a girl who was sent away to boarding school because her mother is a junkie and a hooker—though we later find out it’s her mother who sends her away, once she realizes she can’t keep her daughter safe. Taylor doesn’t even know her mother’s real name since they were on the run most of her life. She knows nothing about her father. She’s living with her aunt as the story begins, but does not even know that her aunt (her father’s sister) is her aunt. This is a major theme of the book: nobody talks about anything, certainly not to Taylor.

            There were two tremendous traumas in the past. One was an accident on the Jellicoe Road, where two cars, each full of parents and their children, collided head-on. The parents from both cars were killed. Two children survived from one car, but only one from the other car, and then a local boy stopped by on a stolen bike to help the children, and a teenage cadet from the military camp joined him. This formed the original group of five. But of course Taylor knows nothing about any of this and has to piece together the history from fragments—sometimes literally scraps of paper and photos—she gathers over the course of the novel. Those five became the best of friends. Two of them were Taylor’s parents and one was her aunt.

            The second trauma is the accidental death of Taylor’s father before she was even born, at the hands of one of the five, his best friend, the boy on the bike. The second trauma blasts the group apart and leads to Taylor’s isolated, wandering existence, and ultimately her arrival at the same boarding school where her parents were sent.

            There were five in the past, but there are four in the present: Taylor, Jessa, a local boy, and another cadet. Almost everyone from the past has two names, or goes by a nickname or a middle name or a title, so untangling what went on in order to untangle the present and find her mother and her aunt takes Taylor and the others the entire book. What we know is only half the story, because what we know changes as more is revealed. Relationships, events, connections: everything completely changes as we discover what is hidden in the past.

            What is hidden? We only get to know things as Taylor figures them out. Upon rereading, there are clues there, but they’re subtle. The clues are the type of things that go right over the heads of younger people, signals from adults about their relationships, for example, that the younger ones don’t pick up. Equally, the young people are successfully keeping their relationships and activities and an entire town/school/cadet war game secret from the adults. There are curfews and rules, but there are also ways to sneak around them.

            What I found most interesting on a craft level, which turns out to be part of my stated subject of what we know and when we know it, was that all of the emotional currents were subtextual, not spelled out or even discussed sidelong. Taylor in particular seems completely unaware of her own tremendous emotional need to find her mother and figure out the family mystery. She does things without ever articulating why she’s doing them, until the end, when she comes out and says what she wants to say, to the people she wants to say it to. It reminds me of the thing therapists always say when presented with a situation: “Well, did you tell them that?” Uh, no, that’s why I’m in therapy. All of the unsaid history and trauma and loss informs the lives of all of these young people, so bringing it into the light means resolution. But Taylor basically does not know that she knows these things. Like Melinda in Speak, Taylor is unable to articulate even to herself the emotions and needs that drive her. She can’t name her problems or loss.

            Taylor and the cadet begin as enemies, in spite of (or because of) an odd incident from years ago. Taylor was running away from school and going back to the city on a train to try to find her mother, but met the cadet at the train station. They traveled together until the cadet made a phone call and the Brigadier, his supervisor, came to catch them and bring them back home. Even this shared experience has hidden layers, as Taylor finds out later the cadet was actually at the train station to throw himself under the train and kill himself over his own family trauma, but went along with her instead to keep her safe—and because he couldn’t traumatize Taylor by doing that in front of her. Imagine hating someone for getting you caught by the authorities, only later to find out they were saving you and you were saving them at the same time.

            In the present, the two embark upon the same journey, a terrifying and extremely illegal trip in a borrowed car back to the city, to find Taylor’s mother. The vividness of this trip to formerly familiar ground that is now alien knocked me sideways, not just because of how viscerally powerful it was, but because everything throughout the book feels like this, the familiar turned unfamiliar, and vice versa. This is how Taylor’s entire family history is. Anything she thinks she knows is wrong. She thought her mother didn’t want her, but later found out her mother was protecting her from a predatory pedophile. She thought the Brigadier came to get the cadet from the train, but it turns out the Brigadier came to save her. And the Brigadier was the cadet in the story from the past, who pulled her parents and her aunt out of burning cars and covered the bodies of all four of her grandparents. He came to get her.

            There are so many more intricate complexities to this novel, so much more wrapped up in every event, more than just a type of double vision when rereading, more like a Shakespearean tragic sense that unresolved history must play itself out. Its inevitability comes from lack of resolution, from running away from the past. The past catches up with all of the characters eventually. Taylor’s aunt (though Taylor doesn’t know she’s her aunt) disappears right at the beginning of the book, which leads Taylor to search the aunt’s house and find the writing her aunt did about the five from eighteen years ago, scraps about the car accident, the friendships, and the relationships. Since every name is different, between nicknames and aliases, Taylor only gradually figures out this manuscript isn’t fiction at all, but her own family history. It makes for wonderful multi-layered storytelling and unraveling that finally leads to that car trip back to the city, where Taylor finds the trail that leads to her mother, and finally reunites the family and friends.

            I really enjoy a mystery that isn’t set up as a mystery, where no one actually knows that there’s something to figure out until they’re hip deep in it, and sometimes not even then. I love how nobody talks about heartbreaking trauma, which rings very true to me. I love how Taylor has nearly all the pieces to the puzzle, but has to figure out what the picture is before she can begin to assemble them, or even knows that they are puzzle pieces at all. This is incredibly complicated storytelling, but also incredibly rewarding. I adore the idea that we’re all working through narratives that we don’t even know we’re in, much less how to resolve them.