Books
Madeleine Ryan
The Knowing
The kind of knowledge, the knowing, at the heart of Madeleine Ryan’s second novel is bodily, almost instinctual. It is knowledge that is deeply held and felt, but difficult to pin down or explain or even, at times, to identify. For Camille, the novel’s protagonist, it is very much in conflict with the stories she tells herself and those that circulate within the world, as she contends with her life and her desires. Camille knows, on this deeper or more primal level, that something is not right in her life, but she is usually able either to distract herself from this knowing or to think her way through to reasons and scenarios that counter it – to push it aside and continue.
Camille is a florist, currently working as an assistant in a high-profile, glamorous operation called “Florals by Holly”. It’s a position that had seemed like a dream job, except that the eponymous Holly is a horrible boss – chaotic, self-centred and miserly. Holly shows little interest in, and devotes none of her energy to, the actual running of her business. Instead, she delegates to her underlings, blames them for her mistakes and constantly doles out small indignities and aggressions, while maintaining a veneer of friendliness and charm – her constant emails all begin with “Hi Hun!!!” Camille tolerates this, mostly, in part because of her own ambition and desire to learn, but also because she can’t quite believe Holly might not have a kinder or more constructive ulterior motive that will one day become apparent.
The Knowing unfolds over a single day spent largely in this workplace. It is Valentine’s Day – the busiest calendar day for a floristry business – and it is also a day in which Camille is forced to be more sensitive to her body and its kinds of knowing. She accidentally forgets her phone in her rush to the train station and so undertakes her long commute from regional Victoria into her city workplace without distraction or diversion and is forced to sit with her discomfort and let her thoughts spool out wherever they will. She also gets her period that morning and the inescapable physicality of that experience – the pain, the sensitivity, the blood – serves as a continual reminder of the body and its power.
It’s rare to see menstruation given such importance or depicted with the depth and detail it is given in The Knowing. There’s no sense of the provocative in Ryan’s treatment of this, either – a period is a regular fact of Camille’s material existence and Ryan handles it as such. There’s something delightful and surprisingly affirming in the novel’s descriptions of the use of menstrual cups, negotiating their emptying and cleaning in public toilets and dealing with their occasional broken stems.
Much of the novel’s tension is built from moments where Camille’s deft observations of the people around her – strangers on the train as well as colleagues and acquaintances – clash with her inability to intuitively understand or blend in with their interactions and behaviour. These almost always exacerbate her questioning of how she might locate herself within these social worlds, how she should be and live.
They are also markers, never overt, of her neurodivergence, a trait she shares with the protagonist of Ryan’s previous novel, A Room Called Earth, and with Ryan herself. One of the real pleasures of the book, especially for readers who are – in the literal sense – like-minded, is Camille’s characterisation. Her play-by-play imagining of the shape of a possible interaction of asking a stranger for the time, her dislike of the way sunscreen feels on her skin, her self-chastisement when she has difficulty doing things that “plenty of people” manage “every day”, are all depicted with honesty, nuance and deep compassion.
Camille’s struggles are, of course, broader than this, and more widely applicable. At their heart, they are a search for meaning within her life and work, in a situation where Camille feels increasingly trapped by capitalism’s demands and frightened by the sense that her choices are hardening into something inescapable. It is this that the knowledge latent in her body is pushing against: Camille is trying to distinguish what she wants from what she thinks or is told that she should be striving for.
Despite the abstraction of these concerns and Camille’s often intense focus on details and their possible interpretations, The Knowing is a pacy novel. Ryan has great control over the rhythm and momentum of the short chapters through which it progresses, which makes the ever-increasing pressure on Camille all the more palpable. There is a sense that the resolution Camille finds over this one, heightened day is a little too complete, especially in terms of practicality – but Ryan’s concern is with the physical and even spiritual dimensions of Camille’s quandary and the ways in which they might win out over more mundane or worldly matters.
Above all else, The Knowing is a visceral and sensual novel that is very much concerned with what it means to be a body in the world, and the ways in which we might attend to its pleasures and demands. It is deliciously funny – mostly because of Camille’s sharp, wry wit, which is always tempered by her slight awkwardness – and deeply empathetic. A distinctive, assured work.
Scribe, 256pp, $29.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 8, 2025 as "The Knowing".
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