Glenda Guest

Well, A Week in the Life of Cassandra Aberline is a road trip with a difference!
Cassandra Aberline has been estranged from her family for almost half a century, but faced with that diagnosis that we all fear as we get older, she takes the train back to the west. In her 'platinum' cabin she has all the luxuries that the iconic transcontinental Indian Pacific can offer, but it's not a relaxing trip because she is tormented by memories of a Faustian pact, and she wants to sort it out while she still has time. For the reader, burdened with insight that Cassie does not always quite share, there is also a sense of time running out, which tempers the rush to turn the pages to find out what those betrayals were.
It's been eight years since Guest's debut novel Siddon Rock and until I revisited my review of that novel, I had forgotten that Siddon Rock features a Faustian bargain too, and there's also a tantalising similarity between Cassie's surname and the quirky character of Henry Alberdine who ventures out into the bush and comes back with something he did not expect. But A Week in the Life of Cassandra Aberline is a very different novel, contemplative and wise, and peopled with everyday characters rather than the oddballs who featured in Siddon Rock.
For those who've never done the trip from east to west, the chapter headings give some hint of the scale of the journey, as in 'Adelaide to Cook, 6.40 PM to 10.30 AM'. I remember writing to my uncle in England after I had 'done the Nullarbor' by bus in the 1980s. (With only two weeks of school holidays, I couldn't take the train because it would have taken ten days there and back, whereas the bus with a team of two drivers gets there in 48 hours, and we flew back in four). I found it impossible to convey to someone on that small island just how vast that desert is. It seems empty and barren too, though it's not, as an alert passenger will see with the differences in plant life as the wheels roll on. But there is an overmastering sense of riding into oblivion, and that - as the neurologist predicted - is what is happening to Cassie.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/03/11/a-week-in-the-life-of-cassandra-aberline-by-...… (meer)