Hidden motives at play in Jessie Tu’s new novel

BOOK REVIEW: “Nobody grows up wanting to be a translator,” The Honeyeater’s 26-year-old narrator, Fay, says of her chosen career. “The profession is just too invisible.”

Invisibility, however, doesn’t interest acclaimed Australian novelist Jessie Tu
– nor, as it turns out, her Taiwanese-born heroine. In this bold follow-up to her 2020 debut, A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, Tu blows the whistle on the seemingly genteel worlds of literary academia and Asian Gen-Z women. For earnest and ambitious Fay, there’s plenty at stake: a stellar career, love and romance, a future without her mother always by her side. But is she smart enough to hold her own? Or simply out of her depth?

The Honeyeater opens gently enough, with Fay taking her hardworking mother on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday through France. The women are used to being in each other’s pockets: Fay earns a meagre salary specialising in Taiwanese literary translation at her Sydney university, coming home each night to the same suburban apartment of her childhood. There, her mother cooks for her, reminds her to tidy her room and prays for her good fortune at their household shrine. “Sometimes,” Fay says, “I think I am her only person in the world.”

But both mother and daughter like keeping secrets. Mum Helen has always sidestepped Fay’s questions about her absent father, as well as the circumstances of the pair’s hurried emigration from Taipei. In France, though, it’s Fay who’s being furtive, slipping away during excursions to check for phone messages from her ex-boyfriend – “he said he loved nobody else, not even his wife” – and strangely worded emails from her female professor. “We all miss you here at the department,” her boss writes. “Me especially.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that Fay’s ex-lover turns out to be her professor’s husband, James, another literary translator at the university. And when Fay’s boss emails again, this time with the disturbing news that James has been found dead in his office from an apparent heart attack, things get truly complicated. How much, if anything, does Fay’s professor know about her husband’s affair with his junior colleague? How, exactly, did James die? And what will all this mean for Fay’s big ambitions? The holiday now over, our narrator – along with her increasingly suspicious mother – must return to Sydney to face the music.

The Honeyeater is an unsettling, compelling and smartly paced tale. Tu keeps a tight hold on the plot’s twists and turns; the writing is snappy and unadorned. In many ways, it echoes her award-winning debut in which 22-year-old Jena Lin, a one-time child prodigy and classical violinist, also struggles to reconcile her competing professional and sexual desires. In that novel, the author said, she wanted to feature someone trying to pursue her ambitions on her own terms: “Someone who looked like me, and who wasn’t the stereotypical Asian woman: docile, sweet, polite and quiet.”

Like Jena Lin, The Honeyeater’s Fay learns the hard way. “Perhaps by being agreeable, I have somehow rubbed out my own identity,” she says. Just when it seems she’s cornered, her infidelities about to be exposed, she comes out fighting. Rules are broken: “Deception was easy. It merely required the omission of fact,” and betrayal is countered with betrayal. “It hurt less when I detached. And so I became very good at it.”

This discomfort makes the novel a gripping read. Our narrator is compromised and untrustworthy, but it doesn’t matter. She’s fully visible, and we can only cheer her on.

The Honeyeater by Jessie Tu (Allen & Unwin, $36.99) is out now.