One bullet, untold suffering
Author: James Woodford.
James Woodford's latest book is The Dog Fence.
Date: 01/11/2003
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Section: Spectrum
Page: 14

It has taken Gail Bell 35 years to find the courage to write about the night she was shot, and how such an event reshapes a life.

Shot:A Personal Response to Guns and Trauma By Gail Bell Picador, 252 pp, $28

One thing is fortunate about the terrible violence perpetrated against Gail Bell on the night of April 30, 1968. It is that she has gone on to become both a scientist and a wonderful author so she can write about it. True crime is one of the world's most popular literary genres, yet rarely do such tales tunnel deeply into the mind of a victim. Rarer still are the stories by the victim where the crime is held at arm's length and meticulously deconstructed. "When the bullet struck I travelled forward an extra half step, as if someone wielding a broom handle had given me a rude shove from behind," she writes. "One minute I had been walking with intent (I was late), the next I was off balance, faltering towards a full stop." What makes Bell's book, Shot, so extraordinary and engrossing is her determination to scientifically, forensically, physiologically and psychologically tackle exactly what happens when a person is hit by a bullet.

From the first, her story is an easy read, an impressive encore from an author who won the NSW Premier's Prize, for her book The Poison Principle, last year. Her opening sentence in Shot would be a dream beginning to any work of crime writing: "While walking home one dry, moonless night in 1968, I was shot in the back." It takes nearly 80 pages, however, for Bell to confess how hard her elegant first sentence was to put down with her new fountain pen on a clean sheet of paper. "I stared down at the sentence and saw half a lifetime of suppressed emotion stalking the bold forward march of my words. My heart picked up pace, my chest felt tight, my ears turned pink. OK, I said to my quailing nervous system, it's time to get a few things straight. It's time to speak, and to hear others speak. Prepare yourself."

Whoever shot Bell as she walked home from Toongabbie train station has never been caught and this story is as much a search for the gunman as a quest for meaning. As a sidelight Shot is also a book about Sydney and its western suburbs, with some fine moments of description showing how well Bell knows her city: "[In Toongabbie], there were White Russians, Poles, Dutch, English, Greeks, Italians, Maltese the acceptable face of migration in White Australia scattered about in the 1950s. You had to get very close to the ground, follow the creek and read the land to recognise the footprints of the original owners. My sister and her friends knew a lip of sandstone that curled up like a small wave where there was primitive art etched into the rock."

So often in such stories we are served up a great slice of cliche pie and that is what often defines the victim's experience. Yet it is exactly society's expectation of victimhood that Bell spends nearly 250 pages trying to shake off. "Communalisation of my particular trauma was almost instant, thanks to the media. Seeing your story in print with photographs has a way of validating any doubts about what happened. In bold type, my story was being retold in a way that maximised sympathy for me and condemnation of the shooter, with no shades of grey, no equivocation about who was innocent and who was guilty."

Some of the most fascinating material in Shot deals with the body's response to the trauma of fear and pain. It is in these sections of the book that Bell really hits her straps and is most confident as a writer. Although she is on a mission to understand the landscape in which a shooting incident walks, her subject is a universal one how human beings cope with an extreme shock. "The amygdala deals with the raw emotional content of shock. Hooked up to the visual cortex it sees the spider, the raised knife, the rapist, the aimed gun, and in milliseconds sends urgent messages to the adrenal glands to pump out adrenaline, the vital fuel for a frightened human."

She spends considerable time dealing with the problems that can result when this hormonal carburettor is opened full throttle. Most importantly, she dissects the condition that so many of our families' men returned with after war post-traumatic stress disorder. "Normal people who have undergone deep trauma," she writes, "may end up with damage in the limbic system. The amygdala holds on to and replays the feeling that accompanied the original trauma without signalling that this is remembered fear from another time."

After detailing her own experiences, Bell heads off on a journey to understand the common threads that bind shooting victims together. She resists the more horrendous and high-profile shooting incidents that have occurred in the past decade. Instead, she concentrates on Chittaway, April 2002 an industrial complex where a biker slaughtered two people because he was angry that a neighbour left a stereo on too loud.

"Chittaway was another freakish tragedy, another case of a perpetrator a man who was an otherwise tolerable social misfit suddenly grabbing a gun and mowing down people he didn't know or hold any grudge against." Her response to reading the evidence in that case is, to me, perhaps the most important paragraph in the book, the single most powerful enunciation of the horror of guns that I have ever read: "At that moment, I was in a small, barely known town north of Sydney picking my way through one chamber of horrors, when all over the country I could, if I chose, take as many paths as the maze would allow, all of them leading to blood and pain and the many faces of loss. And even then, I'd still be in Australia and have the whole world, and its history, to engage."

This book is not perfect and there are things that readers may criticise about Bell's style, her choice of case studies and other minor details. But her courage in writing such a deeply personal story means that any faults must be forgiven. I will never again see a victim on television without feeling immense pity for the length of time they will take to recover. Nor will I again underestimate the lonely pain and confusion they will experience once the media and the doctors depart.