For 10 years, Gin Boyle and Agrippas Toad, the central characters of Goldie Goldbloom's stunningly good debut novel, "The Paperbark Shoe," have managed to survive an unlikely, hardscrabble marriage on an isolated Western Australian farm.
How unlikely? Gin is a classically trained pianist whose albinism has pushed her to the periphery of society. Toad is a tiny, red-faced farmer who proposed to her after hearing her play the piano in a mental hospital. (He was visiting an aunt; Gin was involuntarily confined there after she failed to secure classical-music studies in Europe.)
Farm life is tough and unrewarding for Gin, but the marriage has found a workable rhythm. Then, as World War II rages around them, the Italians arrive.
"Men were rationed, like everything else, and so when the government offered prisoners of war as farm labour, the control centres were mobbed from the first day by farmers in search of workers," says Gin, who narrates the novel.
The Toads manage to acquire two prisoners. Antonio is a 40-year-old shoemaker with five kids back in Italy. "John claimed to be twenty-two (he must have lied when he joined up; he never needed to shave), unmarried, a farm labourer who'd enlisted in the cavalry and brought his own horse with him," Gin says.
The two Italian prisoners build a hut to live in, but they interact with Gin daily. And that's when the Toads' marriage hits a bumpy stretch of road.
Perhaps inevitably, Gin finds herself attracted to one of the POWs — but the object of her affection is the married, middle-aged Antonio. He is gentler and more responsive than the taciturn Toad, and he defends Gin against the neighbors who attack her for what they call her "defect." (Besides, Toad's predilections lean toward "deviant" activities, as Gin describes them.)
But what can Antonio offer Gin, once the war ends and he's free to return to Italy and his family?
This isn't the first appearance of "The Paperback Shoe" in print. In 2008, Goldbloom's unpublished manuscript won the AWP Award for the Novel, and it appeared in a small print run last year under the slightly misleading title, "Toads' Museum of Freaks and Wonders."
It now appears under its original title, and one can only hope its wider distribution will bring critical and popular attention to Goldbloom. She has written a deeply affecting, beautifully modulated debut novel.
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