FICTION All the Words We Know Bruce Nash Allen & Unwin, $32.99 Dementia is particularly cruel to the intelligent, and especially to lovers of words: think of Terry Pratchett, Iris Murdoch, Robin Williams . Wordsmiths who are also detectives are interesting of themselves: think of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, Dorothy L.
Sayers’ literate sleuths. Indeed, any decent and clever author of detective fiction must have a bloodhound nose and a large, polyglot vocabulary to track the labyrinthine workings of devious criminal brains. But what happens when the polyglot vocabulary transmogrifies into glossolalia? Bruce Nash’s astonishing and beguiling novel All the Words We Know offers more than a detective story of gaslighting, fraud and murder – it takes the reader on a dizzy ride through the mind of a fiercely intelligent woman who, though confined physically in a nursing home and mentally in a mind whose maps and signposts are vanishing, is hunting for truth.
Nash’s Rose is an 80-something retired teacher whose son and daughter have little time for her, and whose teenage grandchildren are now distant memories of little pink toes and open-hearted trust. She winds through the corridors of the aged-care facility and notices that things are not as they should be. The immediacy of her perceptions offers an enjoyable Joycean babble of descriptive attempts at naming reality: the Care Manager becomes the Scare Manager, a uniform becomes a unicorn, facilities become facsimiles.
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