Book Club - Susannah Begbie’s The Deed Final Draft - Great Conversations

Susannah Begbie grew up in rural New South Wales on a sheep farm and is now a GP who has worked all over Australia. She is the winner of Hachette's Richell Prize for 2022.  The Deed is her first novel.
Tom Edwards has spent most of his life running the farm by himself. He’s not well pleased that his kids never came back to take their place on the land as he wanted.
Tom’s also dying and so he’s come up with a plan.
His kids will return to the farm and build him a coffin, in four days no less. They build him a coffin and they’ll do it right, or he’ll disinherit the lot of them.  
Jenny is the first back to Ellersly. She never really left the area and is the one to find Tom’s body. Christine is reliably prompt, Dave hurries because as the only son he thinks he’s getting it all and Sophie gets there, as she always does in her own time.
The conditions on Tom’s will at first puzzle then infuriate the siblings. Worse, the local lawyer stands to benefit from their disorganization and works to sow confusion in the ranks.
The Deed is a tremendous family drama that variously shocks, delights and intrigues the reader with the machinations of the town of Coorong.
The novel is told from the varying and contradictory points of view of the four Edwards siblings and their father Tom. Tom’s view is hard bitten and uncompromising. He feels he never got any favours and so he’s not about to start handing them out himself. 
As we flit between each of the children we see what this has meant through their lives. Jenny as eldest feels almost invisible and just wants someone who can see her for herself. Dave’s role as the only son ultimately drove him away from the pressure. Christine feels noone ever appreciated her work keeping everything together, a role she’s continued in her own family. And Sophie as youngest always tried to keep Tom smiling and perhaps never learned that she could be serious.
The interplay of the siblings and the obvious tension arising from the reading of the will lights the fuse that plays out in a kind of battle between allies. As readers we are poised to choose sides but ultimately root for the four to come together and overcome. It’s an interesting tension and hard to escape that for many people managing wealth transfer following the death of a parent is a macabre journey into bitterness and avarice.
The conceit of building the coffin is brilliantly set to allow us to discover something of the landscape around Ellersly. For mine I had no idea about how this might be achieved and still imagine a rough hewn box not unlike the pencil boxes we all made at school writ large. The journey itself is set up to trouble the power dynamics and drive forward the characters.
The Deed is a strange journey that is carried by the strength of its characters. I thoroughly enjoyed the pacing and energy of the narrative opening up parts of greater Australian life outside of my day to day. 
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