The toucher

... the role of the woman writer is always doubly subversive in a predominantly male ethos. She thinks subversively by nature and experience, and she writes from that other country of spirit and physicality, which still remains, for us, largely uncharted.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Dorothy Hewett, ‘The Garden and the City’, in Westerly 4, 1982

The publicity for Dorothy Hewett’s first novel in thirty-four years bills The Toucher as ‘a story of sexual intrigue, memory and death’. Maybe, but there’s also a lot more going on, as Hewett subverts conventional ideas of romance, ageing, morality, fiction and autobiography, and the end to which we come.