Little World by Josephine Rowe review – a beautiful novella that lacks heft

The Guardian

01-05-2025

The road to sainthood is littered with the bodies of dead girls. Saint Maria Goretti was stabbed more than a dozen times while resisting a rape. Saint Dymphna of Ireland refused to share her father's bed and was beheaded for her filial disobedience. Saint Agnes of Rome, the patron saint of Girl Scouts, was set alight after rejecting an offer of marriage. When the flames did not claim her – she was too pure-hearted to burn – Agnes's throat was cut. Her sister was stoned to death for good measure – punished for her grief.
These are inspirational stories, we are told. Tales of triumphant innocence. They are also acts of obliteration. Snuffed lights. Maria was 11 years old when she was murdered. Dymphna was 15; Agnes 12. What would happen if these brutalised children were mourned? What if their lives were worth more than their miracles? How might we dare to tell those stories? What kind of prayers might we offer to the dark?
These are the questions Josephine Rowe asks in her new book. Or seems to ask. Little World is the tale of a fledgling saint – 'a kid in a box' – whose corpse is dispatched to a remote mining outpost in Western Australia as part of a cryptic bequest. The saint was once a daughter, a sister. She once had a name. Now she is a good luck charm – 'a child-sized rabbit's foot' – trussed-up in frills. And she knows it. The saint's mind has retained a hazy kind of consciousness like 'a lamp swung in the dark'. There are memories too, which rattle around in her incorruptible skull. She's unfairly dead, oceans away from home, and trapped in a box. And she's bloody annoyed.
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What will Rowe do with all this stifled fury? Not much. The saint fumes away in her canoe-wood reliquary waiting for something nameless and unattainable; answers to questions she will never know how to ask. The years tick on. One custodian replaces another.
The people who care for the saint are exactly the kind of folk who drift in and out of bush towns in lyrical Aussie novels. Reticent, resilient and heartsore. Beloved by stray dogs. They are bound to the dead child by solidarity, not faith – a kindred loneliness. Rowe traces this misfit bond for the better part of a century: from the postwar boom to the pandemic. But Little World is not a sweeping sociocultural epic; history seeps into this book like music from a distant radio.
Little World is true to its title: it's intricate, intimate and short (132 generously spaced pages). Arguably, a long short story. But that's a tiresome argument to have. We all know that short fiction can pack a wallop, who cares what we call it. (In releasing Little World as a stand-alone volume, Rowe is being positioned as Australia's answer to Claire Keegan.) The problem here isn't size, it's heft. This book feels hollow, as though the desert termites have been at it.
There's no question that Little World is beautiful. Rowe's fiction has always been uncommonly gorgeous – the kind of gentle, contemplative prose-work that feels akin to prayer (see her 2021 short story collection, Here Until August). Here she writes of the 'alluvial silt' of half-forgotten dreams; the 'animal sentience' of warm rain; the 'red earth acropolis' of termite mounds. And the 'inner reliquary' of the soul, a description that holds for the book itself. Little World is a tiny treasure box.
But if you're going to stuff a kid into a box – even a treasure box – that kid deserves to be more than a gauzy metaphor. More than beatific cosplay. More than a cultural shorthand for male rage. More than a weary inevitability – a girl who's hurt to prove that girls are hurt. Sadly, that's precisely who Rowe's saint becomes. Rowe only needs to hint at what has happened to the girl for us to fill in the rest. 'Every woman who dies like that,' she writes, 'has already dreamt her death.' How I long for a novel that dreams new dreams.
I am also tired – so very tired – of tales of lost girls in the bush. Dreamy, beautiful ruin. There's so much more to regional Australia than white lace and red dirt (not that you would know it from outback noir). The miracles in Little World are moments of grace in a savage world. Another cultural shorthand.
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There's a churchy streak in fiction at the moment, in Ozlit and beyond. Consider the papal machinations of Emily Maguire's Rapture (2024); the rural nunnery in Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional (2023); the cloistered powerbroking of Lauren Groff's Matrix (2021); the volatile congregation in Catherine Lacey's Pew (2020). What are our authors searching for in these sanctified spaces? What are they finding?
I have plenty of theories: the power of ritual in a time of fracture; a patriarchal petri dish; a language equipped for awe and cataclysm; miracle hunger. The renewed resonance of old ideas: solace, forgiveness, mercy. But I can't work out what has brought Rowe here. Which is another way of saying that I don't know why she has brought us here. As her little saint grumbles: 'Death has brought very little in the way of answers.'
Little World by Josephine Rowe is out through Black Inc (RRP A$27.99)