Adrift, anachronistic, alienated and alone, intelligent and intransigent in equal manner, a “sexual deviationist”, Iris Webber is a woman to reckon with.
Abused housewife, Iris has fled the country town of her torment and travelled to Sydney. It is 1932. A marvel of engineering spans Sydney Harbour, but social engineering has done nothing to alleviate the slums of Surry Hills with its six o’clock swills and sly grog shops and the inequality of gender based or biased laws.
Stepping off at Central, she is recruited into prostitution, becomes adept at tea leafing and finds enjoyment in the precarious employment of the squeeze box busker.
In a seamless blend of fact and fiction, Fiona Kelly McGregor has written an impeccable, immersive narrative set in the seething underbelly of Sydney in the 1930s.
Superbly evocative, IRIS brings a city’s dark past vividly to life, plunging the reader into a world of sex, love and death, and ensuring you will never look at inner Sydney in quite the same way again.
Crafted in the vernacular of the day, McGregor’s searing and unsentimental story portrays the era in all its ugly reality, yet with insight and sensitivity.
Iris Webber is front and centre in IRIS but the cavalcade of characters that populate these fast turning pages – schemers, scammers, scumbags – provide a new palette to the hoary cliché, colourful.
Vibrant, vital and voluminous of vim, vocally and visually, this cast is varied and alive.
The richness of the characters is informed by a complex array of social, political, environmental, cultural and psychological factors, a compelling canvas that is compulsively readable.
IRIS is a work of imaginative energy and passionate honesty, fascinating in its small perfections of pace, place and tone, which are distinctly gripping.
The best thing you can do is get on and read it.
IRIS by Fiona Kelly McGregor is published by Picador.
Main photo: Author Fiona Kelly McGregor by Jamie James.
