Katherine Brabon’s fourth novel, Cure, follows a mother and daughter with a shared experience of chronic illness who travel to Italy in search of healing. The book opens in Lake Como, where clouds devour the hills and the water reflects the obscuring fog. Vera has been here before; she is now taking her 16-year-old daughter, Thea, to a small town in Lombardy, where she herself travelled with her parents as a sick teen, to seek out an obscure man who promises to heal.
The novel captures the painful intimacies between Vera and Thea, who are allied in their shared experience of chronic headaches, fatigue and stiff joints. Both have been subjected to banal health advice, but they are also estranged: Thea wants to rebel against Vera’s anxious proscriptions, while Vera favours supplements over prescribed medications. The narrative shifts between Vera’s adolescent pilgrimage and her daughter’s, and between sequences from Vera’s early adulthood and scenes of the mother and child at home in Melbourne.
Brabon is sensitive to how time dissolves in the effort of managing illness. Vera partakes in fortnightly subcutaneous injections, while Thea relies on painkillers. In this cyclical experience, Thea looks to Vera as a template of what will come. The pair turn to writing as a means of communication and escape: Thea retreats into her journal, while Vera appeals to online communities. This secret retreat into fantasy is driven by necessity, allowing them to imagine their lives with hope.
The narrative reproduces the slow, careful pace of their lives, with italicised passages told from an estranged, omniscient perspective. The pair become “mother and daughter”, “the woman” and “the girl”. In adopting this glacial formalism, Brabon seeks to capture the effects of bodily estrangement, reminiscent of Rachel Cusk’s Parade. Cure continues Brabon’s metaphoric use of doubles, mirrors and reflections to explore the social dimensions of the body in pain.
