Parallax by Robin Morgan, Spinifex Press, 2019

Robin Morgan is a renowned author, political activist, women’s rights advocate and academic. Active in women’s issues since the 1960s, Morgan is a major presence in the international Women’s Movement and has been so for well over three decades. In 2005, she co-founded the Women’s Media Centre with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem.

Morgan’s literary novel, the dystopian Parallax, is a collection of stories about storytelling, framed by the narrative motif of The Yarner, an older woman who lives in the “old part of The City”. The City is the stone-walled, bustling capital of a society administered by the enigmatic, all male ‘Trust.’ Individual and collective roles of The City’s social hierarchy are pre-determined by The Trust.

The term parallax describes the perceived shifting of an object when viewed from differing locations. A standard metal letterbox, for example, when looking face-on, might resemble a small house. Shift to the side, however, and the metal is rusted, a screw is missing and spiderwebs accumulate, manifesting the letterbox’s layered narrative.

The Yarner meets The Stranger when he comes to her home seeking clarity. As a citizen of The City and an old woman, The Yarner performs two pre-ordained roles, that of knitting fine garments to sell to The Traders, and that of telling stories to strangers who come to stay. The stories read like folk tales, the characters are likeable, and bring to life the complexities of negotiating cultural identity in an ever-shifting world. The Yarner relates stories including those of The List Keeper, The Child Who Could Read Rivers and The Handmaiden of The Holy Man. Through the motif of The Yarner, whose unravelling ball of yarn reveals the many strands and entanglements of a single story, with requisite needles and hooks to assist, Morgan deftly unpacks and rejects the idea of a single perspective as truth.

Parallax interrogates the interconnectedness of human consciousness to the past, present and future. Each character in The City has their unique role to play, with men becoming Fathermen, Sonmen, Followers, Fathomers and Traders. There is, however, little mention made throughout the novel of young women’s roles and place in society. Old women are relegated to List Keepers and Yarners, as their advanced age diminishes their societal worth to The Trust. The List Keeper, conversely, sees her designated role as vital to society’s success. Writing her lists link the past to the present to the future and keep memories of the old world alive, despite The Trust’s totalitarian determination to erase them.

The List Keeper writes: “Women keep lists. A lot. If women didn’t keep lists, everything would never get started, let alone done. Young men should keep more lists. It would be better for everyone if they did”.

In the world of The Trust, men are never assigned to such womanly tasks.

Parallax is not an easy read, and demands re-reading, which is perhaps its intention. Morgan explores and upends common dichotomies which, to the reader, are inherently familiar: chaos/order, sanity/insanity, religion/science and freedom/captivity. She eloquently unpacks the paradoxes that lie within each. Inverting such narratives shows the vagaries of the hive mind and redefines notions of collective intelligence, which, for this reviewer, raises more questions than answers. At what point exactly, for example, does chaos become order, order become chaos, fact become fiction, and so on?

There are common themes between Parallax and other well-known dystopian novels. Like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, we see in Parallax the patriarchal dominance of women whose intransigence often relegates them to hard labour in the salt mines, in a similar vein to the colonies of Handmaid’s. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 bans and burns books and outlaws intelligent thought, much as Morgan’s novel does through the state-sanctioned Unifier language, concocted by Word Workers and Grammarians. The Yarner’s role is perhaps rendered most significant because it is she who subverts The City’s status quo in her telling of stories that lie outside of The Trust’s desired narrative.

Parallax uses elegant, inclusive language that articulates a vision for co-existence in our shared humanity of competing ideologies, diversity and difference. Given the world’s current geopolitical movement toward authoritarianism and a potential resetting of the world order, Parallax is an important and relevant addition to contemporary conversation.

 – Leonie Bingham 

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Leonie Bingham lives in Katoomba on Darug and Gundungurra Country. She works as a corporate scriptwriter for 1 Minute Media. In her spare time she writes poetry, short stories and reviews. Leonie holds an Associate Degree in Arts (Creative Writing) from Southern Cross University. She lives a mostly self-sufficient lifestyle among the trees and birds in her beloved Katoomba.  

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Parallax by Robin Morgan is available from https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/ shop/p/9781925581959