Different people, similar situations The necessity of finding empathy
The chance of something better
It is the late 1970s. Maggie Cottonwood, pharmacy assistant, and Leo Braker, bookshop owner, live in Williams, a wheatbelt town in Western Australia, 20 minutes south of Narrogin, where they form a hesitant friendship. On making piecemeal revelations-all they can bear to tell-it's plain their histories have similar shapes and patterns.
Both born close to WWII, they suffered privations and losses in childhood, Maggie travelling from Darwin with her only remaining relative after the bombing, and Leo taking trains westward after his mother's sudden death.
Significant episodes reveal teenage mistakes from inadequate life education and misguided advice.
Chance plays a big role, but so does
necessity. What went before-in the world, Australia, each of their families, to their previous spouses-forms an essential part of their personalities. Friends steer them when conflict divides. Flip Keenan, shoe shop owner, cagey about his past, becomes a vital part of Leo's life and career. Rita Marotta, flighty dress shop assistant, is drawn to Maggie because of a shared wariness of men.
With wheatbelt ambient and isolation affecting decisions, with river, hills, agricultural plains, tiny communities giving them an outlet for emotion, Maggie and Leo draw closer, and possibilities for some kind of future emerge.
In the style of Elizabeth Strout's
Olive Kitteridge, and
Olive Again,
Chance and Necessity focuses on the ordinary quotidian happenings of small-town Australians.
