AustLit

Fiona McFarlane’s novel The Night Guest(2010) tells the story of Ruth Field, an older woman living alone in an isolated house by the sea who believes that a mysterious tiger is visiting her home at night. Although the novel takes place in contemporary Australia, Ruth spent her childhood in colonial Fiji as the daughter of white missionaries, and her memories of this time begin increasingly to infiltrate her daily life. Ruth starts to become unwell and confused as the novel unfolds, and although the text never names dementia specifically, it is evident that she is experiencing many of the symptoms commonly associated with this cognitive disorder, for example, difficulties with memory and recall, losing her way in familiar places and becoming easily distracted.1By keeping this condition latent in the text, however, McFarlane’s novel asks us to reflect on the ways that as readers we might bring certain kinds of assumptions to bear on older bodies when we encounter them in texts. This incentive to reflect on our own biases is made compelling by the novel’s depiction of two key relation-ships: the one between Ruth and the visiting tiger of the title, and also Ruth’s connection to her live-in carer, Frida, whose presence is alternately comforting and abusive' (Introduction)