Iris is a novel of the dark side of Depression-era Sydney. Many of the characters in the story, including Iris herself, Kate Leigh, Tilly Devine and policewoman Lillian Armfield, were real people living in Sydney in the 1930s but this is a fictional account based on fact. There was an episode of the television series, Underbelly, a while back which featured some of these legendary figures and I found it helpful to picture them as they had been shown in that episode.
Fiona Kelly McGregor has written in the vernacular of the time and for an old reviewer like me this was fun and easily interpreted, although there were a few expressions I hadn’t heard before. The men, pretty much without exception, are brutal and the women don’t expect them to be any different. The women who work as prostitutes see this as a sure way to make the cash they need to exist. Iris and her pals look at thieving (tea leafing) in the same way as they plan and strategise their expeditions into the department stores in their area. For most of them their living conditions are deplorable but in the times in which they lived their needs were condensed to enough food to stave off hunger, a drink or two to relieve the harshness of their lives and a warm bed.
Iris is intelligent and musically gifted; she plays the piano and the accordion and she sings. She learned to shoot rabbits in Glen Innes where she grew up and, in a culture where even the stupidest and meanest of men are considered superior to all women, it is her readiness to defend herself which has landed her in the trouble she is in as the book starts.
Iris is a long book with a lot of characters and it requires the reader’s full concentration. The language is very Australian but scenes from the underbelly of 1930s Sydney were not, I am sure, exclusive to our country.
This is an excellent story, and that is ridgy didge.
Published in Picador by Pan Macmillan
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