Book Club - Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Miranda is a writer, poet, and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures. Her latest novel is Thunderhead.

Across a single day we are thrown into the life of Winona Dalloway. From the moment she wakes, stealing a few precious moments before her time is not her own, to the dinner party that looms over her calendar, the reader follows Winona as she tries simply to be herself…

Stepping out into the streets of Sydney, Winona has her lists and her responsibilities, all punctuated by the incessant buzzing of texts and reminders from her husband lest she stray from the day’s purpose.

Winona wonders, perhaps suspects that she is looking at the world differently to everyone else. That might explain how they seem to navigate it so effortlessly while she only manages to muddle through.

The Thunderhead of the title looms large over the narrative, threatening to burst, drenching the fragile balance of Winona’s life.

Winona Dalloway is a wonderfully original character for the sharpness of her insights and the myriad of voices she offers on the minutiae of her day to day.

Throughout the novel the reader is confronted, as is Winona, by the specter of mental health. Within the novel it is both the reality of Winona’s experience of the world and a cudgel used to beat her into some semblance of the everyday. As we travel alongside Winona it becomes apparent that the way she looks at the world is not the problem so much as the voices that tell her she needs to be other or more than they perceive her to be.

Within the world of Thunderhead Winona is in fact a guiding light and even as we shift back and forth between her contradictory views of the world, we are certain that her fresh take on the everyday must be more wonderful than simply blindly living it.

There is a lyricism to Darling’s rendering of the inner world of Winona. Images float in and out of view as she encounters her world both as its surface and its potential.

We are introduced to the Transcendence Project; Winona’s search, perhaps striving to make an authentic connection with another person. Something that could lift them both out of the humdrum and confirm that there is a point to this existence.

As the day passes and Winona moves toward the inevitable, we learn that she is not simply one person struggling with the pressures of her world. Winona is subject to something more sinister, something threatening to strip her of her very essence.

But… I’ve said too much.

Thunderhead is a tremendous evocation of life lived on the edge of a threatened if perhaps not enacted violence. A study in control and escape that offers the reader a glimpse into a world of expectation imposed and shattered.