Books
Sofie Laguna
The Underworld
Finding a way out of one’s own mind can be a long and solitary journey for an only child of emotionally distant parents. From disappearance into the outer reaches of book-learnt mythology to the tangible reality of lying on grass in a beautifully kept garden, staring up at the blue and listening to birds, thoughts are the way forward into the world.
No one can describe the tentative, exploratory nature of thought as well as Sydney-born, Melbourne-based writer Sofie Laguna. Her new novel, The Underworld, is a fresh mastery of her strange balance of abstraction and the everyday.
We meet Martha Mullins when she is a shy 14-year-old boarding-school student. Home is where her glamorous, highly critical housewife mother, her nice but increasingly absent executive father and eccentric maternal grandmother live, an upper-middle-class place she is relieved to leave at the end of every home visit. She has a tiny gang of friends at school who accept her quirks, anchor her and give her space to be herself.
A teacher has encouraged her fascination with ancient mythology, particularly Roman mythology and its antecedents in ancient Greece, and especially their imagining of the underworld and the intersections between life and death. Martha finds sanctuary there, as well as somewhere to learn about existence in all its gore and glory. Her absorption deepens from year to year, as she tackles everything from her first period and her burgeoning sexuality to the internalised critique her mother has planted in her – that she is not pretty enough, not loveable enough, not present enough.
It is the 1970s. The second wave of feminism has women questioning their position in society, whether fighting for equality or protecting the status they are already comfortable with. By the last chapters of the book, Martha is at university, an award-winning scholar heading for a postgraduate career, having lost her little gang to an awful but common adolescent denouement, and learning to go it alone. The book has a happy ending.
Is it a book for women? No more than Laguna’s haunting 2020 novel Infinite Splendours – about a boy’s dreadful betrayal and the suffering he carries into manhood – is a book particularly for men. Femininity is a strength to be respected here and not a minority condition. Meanwhile, the language is hypnotising. The frequent use of Latin, some translated, some not, is incantatory, and Laguna’s rare ability to describe emotion without cliché can be revelatory.
Penguin, 384pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 25, 2025 as "The Underworld".
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