Maurilia Meehan evokes something disquieting and oppressive in the fog that enshrouds her fictional town, Wombat, in The Bad Seed. The mist, like the wild brambles that feature so strongly in the author‘s homage to the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, cloaks old secrets and damning prophesies. Meehan however, in her exploration of loss and human desire ruthlessly subverts the soothing dénouements that characterise the fairy tale, those that fulfil the reader’s desire in narratives of loss or estrangement. While the tropes of fairy tales in the stolen child, the impenetrable forest, the witch, and the changeling leave evidence of their passing through the course of Meehan’s narrative, the effect of the author’s systematic subversion of any expectations of soothing emotional recoveries and gentle homecomings creates a compelling tension.

The anxieties that loom throughout the novel, largely in response to Meehan’s unheimlich touches, respond to the tensely wrought narrative, in the author’s conversion of mundane Australian landscapes into more exotic, threatening spaces and, more confrontingly, in the plot’s deliberate misdirections. The first of these concerns the character of the town’s reviled hermit, her life reconstructed by the townspeople who judge her. The life of Wombat’s witch is mysterious, and bestowed on her by the community are three tenuous identities; the first constructed by the local children, cruel and fearful; the second a reflection of the ire of the community’s affronted housewives, their offerings scorned by the object of their charity who is jaded by endless donations of dismal soups; and the final accounting of her life, more compassionately bestowed by medical professionals, those lacking both the townspeoples’ ignorance and their vindictive persecution of difference.

The misdirections, strewn by Meehan throughout The Bad Seed , are redolent of Gothic suspenses, where the reader is kept by the author in a state of disequilibrium, never entirely sure of the literary ground beneath them. Whether the ancient woman, twisted and misshapen is a witch, menacing and hostile, or simply a diseased, maligned old woman remains, for most of the novel, impossibly opaque. The narrator’s description of her, ‘like some ancient half-wrapped mummy,’ (15) casts her as something simultaneously venerable and repulsive and, being only half-wrapped, something cruelly open both to her neighbours’ hostile gaze and the reader’s morbid curiosity.

The pivotal point about which turn Meehan’s various characters is that of imposture. Meehan’s protagonist, Agatha Hock, writes her deceptive magazine articles celebrating a lush, entirely fictional garden, the star of which is her wholly imagined little girl, Mary-Mary. The child, wholesome and adorable, is merely a charming, nursery rhyme whimsy. The English couple, Magdala and Giles Dewbank, who are moved to make the long journey to Australia, are, like Agatha, more complicated than they seem. The couple’s relationship is symbiotic, each taking advantage of the frailty or abnormality of the other and, while these fetishes seem complementary, the couple have quite disparate sexual peccadillos and intellectual prejudices. Magdala is crippled by arthritis and this draws Giles to her for he has a self-confessed penchant for ‘invalid women’ (45). She, in turn, is convinced of the evolution of humans from aquatic mammals, and finds Giles infinitely more appealing because of the scars left by the surgical removal of his webbed toes and gills. These she finds irresistibly erotic and the pair find it all but impossible to enjoy each other sexually beyond the watery limits of their spa-bath.

The need looming on Agatha’s horizon to exhibit her alarmingly fictitious Eden, provides the impetus for her quest into the country, one that parallels a number of pilgrimages to the spa town of Wombat and the tiny, rundown hotel called ‘Agatha’s Springs’. The prophetic name of Meehan’s witch’s house draws Agatha to it, but the area’s natural springs become the conduit for restive, vengeful spirits and Agatha becomes just one of a number of impostors to be caught up in an older, quite poisonous mystery. The move promises at first to be therapeutic, Agatha’s flat is suffused with memories of her missing child, Daphne, who disappeared years earlier. Agatha still grieves for her and cannot separate herself from the pain caused by that loss. The earliest days after her arrival in Wombat do seem, at times, cathartic. When Agatha attempts to destroy, utterly, the towering blackberry brambles protecting the house, she becomes deeply thoughtful, even musing that, perhaps, for all their grief, she and her husband, Frank, might have conjured their child Daphne, that ‘Frank and she were both mad. Their daughter had perhaps never existed, she was a case of folie à deux brought on by five years of trying and failing to get pregnant’ (67).

Each of the characters in Meehan’s novel is likewise damaged, or physically flawed; the arthritic Magdala, seeking a magical spring; her husband with his vestigial gills, their fishiness his wife’s obsession; Agatha herself, drawn to the impenetrable, spiky fortifications encircling the witch’s house, each in turn, compelled to make their own pilgrimages to Wombat. Even Agatha’s husband, Frank, unable to sustain the grief that has consumed his wife since their daughter’s disappearance, is driven to undertake a quest of his own. Having endured his daughter’s abduction, seeing her reduced to the banner in the newspapers, ‘The Milk Bar Girl’, he plans his trek into the anonymity of the Great Dividing Trail. Ostensibly Frank leaves to find his daughter’s body somewhere in the Australian wilderness. His efforts though, to lose himself in forbidding terrain, are thwarted by the search instigated by his wife, alarmed that his regular emails had slowly diminished before falling, inexplicably, into silence. Frank, thin and dishevelled is rediscovered by a search helicopter, and returns to a wife who has found, in his absence, a new profession, home, and lover and, most amazingly of all, their prodigal daughter, a baffling restitution.

The pilgrimages and quests seem inevitably to culminate at Agatha’s Springs, where the house and its garden constitute the novel’s most alarming counterfeit. The dream Shakespearean garden imagined by Agatha, designed to stand in for the paradise described in her magazine column with its flowers and medicinal herbs, honeysuckles, lavender, and woodbine, is savaged by the realities of the poisonous belladonna, hemlock, and daphne that regenerate, exclusively but unbidden, around Agatha’s tiny hotel. The plants bring to the narrative something menacing and portentous. The presence that gestates in the dark spring beneath the house also seems destined to restate a claim to it, urging the lethal plants to extraordinary vigour. The novel’s protagonists, drawn by their various needs and desires to take up residence, move inexorably forward toward a confrontation with its power.

The connections between the lovers, parents, and the mothers and daughters in the novel are created by the author with compelling sensitivity; each relationship characterised by its own passion or yearning. The restoration of the missing daughter, like that in Toni Morrison’s Beloved , is a cause for both celebration and agitated foreboding. It seems, at times, that Meehan, like Morrison, has disinterred a malevolent and vindictive offspring, returning it to a grateful, but nevertheless guilt-ridden parent. Daphne’s return, however providential, is likewise complicated in its inexplicable, phantasmic immediacy. She seems, with her colourless skin, and her tattered black clothes, to be scarcely human, even ‘her voice was still a barely heard whisper’ (117). Daphne seems at times to have coalesced from fragments of Agatha and Frank’s memories and forebodings.

The sudden return of the mysterious Daphne, however longed for, affects Agatha and Frank in different ways, but the weight of her presence robs them of the possibility of any passionate reunion, even infantilising them, ‘in bed, they hugged like Hansel and Gretel in the woods’ (129). The authority exercised by the young woman, by virtue of her parents’ gratitude at the return of their child, five years after her disappearance, is absolute, the narrator holding that ‘a child snatched away then given back is a child with enormous power’ (116). Meehan’s narrative, contemplating the possibility of the fantastic against the mundane, of witches, dark with knowledge, and other lurking, vengeful creatures, her thickets of thorns, poisons, and old secrets, builds to a series of small revelations.

Meehan’s suspenseful confrontations between the characters that people her novel take place at ever-greater distances from the reality of the nameless, urban poseurs that inundate Wombat each weekend. The author, who began by juxtaposing the frivolous, malignant atmosphere of the city with the bucolic wonder of bush tracks and bubbling springs reshapes them in a shift toward a more malevolent view of nature. This change condenses the events of the story until the power of the narrative is concentrated almost exclusively in Agatha’s Springs. The effect of this increasingly insular field of engagement is tantalising. The histories and compulsions of the protagonists in Meehan’s story are governed by a narrator who jealously guards the motivating forces at work in the construction of each of the characters, fully revealing the power of revenge, love, and self-preservation only when the narrative is complete. That confidence constitutes the author’s final, extremely effective assertion of literary power. Of all her literary references, that which refers to Titania’s speech from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream , resonates best at the end of the novel, ‘Sleep then and I will wind you in my arms/ Fairies begone and be all ways away’ (57).

Majella Stewart is working on a PhD at The University of Queensland on representations of femininity and madness in recent Australian women’s fiction.