Australian literature

Julian Davies, Crow mellow (Review)

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Julian Davies, Crow mellow Book cover

Courtesy: Finlay Lloyd

Julian Davies, author of Crow mellow and publisher at Finlay Lloyd, has written six novels, some of them short-listed for significant literary awards, but, embarrassingly, I only became properly aware of him through his inclusion in the two Canberra centenary volumes that I reviewed in 2013, The invisible thread and Meanjin’s The Canberra Issue. It’s the Meanjin piece that immediately came to mind when Crow mellow landed unexpectedly in my letterbox last year, probably because I was fascinated by Davies’ description of building himself a place in the mountains south of Canberra near Braidwood. (In fact, I mentioned him in a Monday Musings post about the region). He wrote about people’s fear of the bush, about country versus city living, and about the challenges and paradoxes involved in trying to live a self-sufficient life. It’s not something I can imagine doing myself, but I love reading about people who have the passion to do so. Anyhow, this and the short excerpt from his novel The boy in The invisible thread were my introduction to Davies.

I was therefore intrigued when the odd-looking Crow mellow appeared. It is an unusual shape (longer and narrower than most paperback novels), has a dramatic orange and black cover, has no pagination, and is full of black and white drawings, so full in fact that it was a challenge for me to find space to pencil in my marginalia. I managed however! There are no blurbs on the back cover, just these two sentences:

This book is a novel. It has drawings on every page.

I love this sort of cheekiness, so was looking forward to reading the novel produced by the mind behind it. The cheekiness begins with the title, which might ring a bell with some of you? It is a play, as Davies writes in his Introduction, on Aldous Huxley’s first novel Crome yellow (1921). Indeed, if you read the plot summary in the Wikipedia article on Huxley’s novel, you will have a decent summary of Crow mellow – just ignore the names – because, as the Press Release explains, Davies’ novel is “a contemporary social satire closely based on” Crome yellow.

Now, unlike Lisa (ANZLitLovers) who decided to re-read Crome yellow before reading Davies’ “riff”, I decided to read Davies’ book cold. While I cannot speak for how I might have reacted had I read Huxley first, I am happy to report that the novel holds its own as an independent read. Harking back to the tradition of the 19th century “English country house novel” (Wikipedia), it does have a whiff of the “old world” about it, despite its references to modern technology and financial crises. In fact, it’s a rather odd beast. Its set up – a group of artists staying in a country house/bush retreat with their patrons and admirers – suggests historical fiction, but it is firmly set in contemporary times. This past-present tension adds to the fun of it. The tension is compounded by other factors, one being Phil Day’s drawings which provide whimsical and sometimes very pointed satirical commentary on the text, and another being the fact that the novel’s main character, a poet/novelist who observes more than he acts, is named Phil Day! Games must surely be being played with us!

As you would expect from a “country house novel”, whether or not you’ve read one, the novel takes place over several days, and mostly comprises conversation, over meals, and in different parts of the house and gardens as the inhabitants while away their days. Davies writes in his Introduction that he was attracted to Huxley’s novel for two reasons – the idea of having a go himself at “a playful novel of ideas” and the fact that these ideas, in Huxley’s novel, have to do with “the value, purpose and pretensions of art”. He recognised the challenges in taking this on – novels of ideas are often criticised for being didactic, and “art about art risks disappearing up its own fundament” – but these challenges are of course what appealed to him.

Fortunately, I rather like novels of ideas. Ideas – plus character and language – intrigue me more than plots, so this novel with its flawed characters discussing the “important” things in life – art, love and money – was right up my alley. And of course, art-with-a-capital-A is the idea that interested me most. In an interview last year with journalist Sally Pryor, Davies described how, long ago, he’d become frustrated with the pretensions of the art world and, also, with how “venal” publishing had become, which is why he, with three others initially, had established Finlay Lloyd. He questioned publishing’s definition of “success”, saying:

We have a notion that you have to be a bestseller to be successful, but maybe it’s more interesting to do something a little bit weird and different and have a smaller audience who appreciates it.

Finlay Lloyd has succeeded with Crow mellow, achieving that difficult double of producing something different that is also accessible and fun to read.

And now, I believe I’ve done something different too. I’ve written a long so-called review without many specific references to the book itself. Do I need to I wonder, given the book, by its creator’s admission, closely follows Crome yellow’s story? Well, yes, perhaps I should say something. As I was reading, I made many marks in the book, noting ideas that interested me. Here, in Chapter 3, is cynic Scogum (also called, with appropriate Aussie adolescent humour, Scrotum) speaking to Phil Day about novels:

How many million novels would you say have been written in the last century and a half? Before that people seem to have got along well enough without the blasted things, but now every man and his word processor is blathering away putting words on paper, recounting some lame aspect of their own personal lives, celebrating their petty creativity, as though any other human being on earth could really give a damn. And what possible insight could you have to contribute that Tolstoy or Dickens or Proust or Joyce and so on hasn’t put on paper already? Seventy years ago Scott Fitzgerald had already despaired that the novel was obsolete. What original thought could you have, my dear Phil, what formal invention?

Of course, Scogum is not intended to be the last word on the matter. His is just one of the many views put forward about art in the novel. In another scene, Melissa, on the hunt for a love affair, expresses concern that artist Paul’s drawing is too “literal … where were the ideas in this picture, where the irony?” She asks him about his fine, but literal, charcoal marks:

… but don’t you intend to do something with them? I mean, pull them apart and put them in some sort of context that makes an ironic comment on art as a commodity?

And so the discussions go on throughout the book, sometimes pompous, sometimes sincere, but never reaching resolution because in our post-postmodern world, there is no resolution. And that, too, is part of the underlying, albeit tongue-in-cheek, tension in the book.

Meanwhile, Phil hankers for Anna, the daughter of his wealthy host, while she flirts with artist Paul, and Melissa searches for a love affair elsewhere. The set piece of the story is the annual masked ball to which the neighbourhood and wealthy friends are invited and for which the drawings are particularly exquisite. It’s flirty, and fun, but a little creepy too, in a Nero-fiddled kind of way!

Life, Oscar Wilde said, imitates art, more than vice versa. For Davies and Day, I suspect, life and art are so deeply entwined we couldn’t possibly say – but then that’s probably just what we would say in our highly-conceptualised world. Crow mellow is yet another good read coming out of a small publishing house. Do pick it up if it comes to a bookshop (or library) near you, and let me know what you think.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) has reviewed the book (including a good description of the art), and author Dorothy Johnston’s review was published just last weekend.

Julian Davies
Crow mellow
Illustrated by Phil Day
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd Publishers, 2014
No numbered pages (but 384pp, says the Press Release)
ISBN: 9780987592941

(Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd Publishers)

Anna Funder, Everything precious (Review)

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Anna Funder, Everything preciousI must thank John aka Musings of a Literary Dilettante for introducing me to this intriguing little e-work by Miles Franklin award-winner, Anna Funder. When John read it, back in October, it was in daily instalments, but when I clicked the link in his post I was offered several e-book versions, including for the Kindle and iPad, or for an audiobook which I believe is read by Funder. It’s free.

So, what is it? Here’s the description at the start of the story:

This story is a unique collaboration between Paspaley, acclaimed author Anna Funder, photographer Derek Henderson and award-winning actress Teresa Palmer. It’s an original story of love, self and all things precious, featuring the most beautiful pearls in the world.

Paspaley, for those who don’t know, is an Australian-based company founded in the pearling industry of northwestern Australia. Although it has now diversified into other businesses, it is probably still best known for its pearling arm. As you might assume from the title of Funder’s story, “Everything precious”, it is the pearling arm that sponsored Funder. John wrote his post before he finished reading the story, and said he feared finding some product placement at the end. However, in a postscript added later, he advised there was no such thing. He’s right – in a sense – as there’s no reference to pearls or Paspaley in the text. But, in my e-book version, between chapters 4 and 5, there is a series of five photographs taken presumably by Derek Henderson and featuring, again presumably, actor Teresa Palmer. They are tasteful in that high-class-magazine way … no text, just beautiful images of a lovely woman wearing gorgeous pearls.

I researched a little more, and discovered that the story is part of a “multi-channel campaign” to launch Paspaley’s new Touchstone collection. The “campaign uses storytelling to engage a new, younger, more fashion conscious audience and make pearls relevant and appealing to them”. Intriguing eh! I wonder how successful it’s been?

What, besides presumably money, did it all mean for Anna Funder? Here’s what she says:

Working with Paspaley has been one of the most exciting writing experiences I’ve had. To have total creative freedom, a time limit and an audience turn out to be the perfect conditions for writing a short story. And the idea that a company, which makes things of great beauty and value from nature, values literature, which (on a good day) is also something of beauty and value that reflects the world around us, was inspiring. Writing this story has been a joy and a privilege, and was some of the most fun I’ve ever had writing.

Now, let’s talk about the story, which the promoter’s website I’ve linked to above describes as “a short story of desire, need, love and all that is precious”. The plot is pretty simple. It’s about Tess, who works in online legal publishing, and would be in her mid thirties. She has a husband, Dan, head of epidemiology in the State Health Department and a lovely SNAG if ever there was one, and three children, Charlotte who is 13, and the twins, Tom and Lorna, who are 6. She also has a father, Howard, a retired judge who is in Assisted Living because he has dementia. This is, then, an upper middle class, professional family. Tess and Dan have been together for 17 years and she’s feeling a little trapped and restless. A bit of a midlife crisis, in other words, or, as Funder writes in the story, Tess is:

at a hinge moment: between youth and age, between the life you thought you wanted and the one you feel might, now, suit you better.

So, Tess decides to consider that other life she might have had, but … well, I won’t give the ending away because it’s easy for you to access at Paspaley.

It’s interesting to look at this story in terms of the campaign because I’m presuming that although Funder had “total creative freedom” there must have been a brief – one that at the very least identified a target market, oops audience, for the story. This audience would, I’m sure, identify pretty easily with the character and set up, with the restlessness attended by guilt that she should be so restless. The brief must surely have identified a tone too. You wouldn’t sell pearls with a grim story – or did they assume Funder would have the nous to make the story appropriately positive? Regardless, the story would clearly suit what I assume was Paspaley’s target market – upwardly mobile or already there professional thirty-to-forty-something women who have the disposable income but who may see pearls as the province of their Baby Boomer mothers.

This all sounds pretty cynical, and to some degree it surely must be. I would describe the story as “chicklit” for the well-to-do married woman. It’s not challenging reading. The resolution is easy to comprehend and reassuring. However, it is written by Funder. This means that the writing is good, there’s intelligence at play (including an allusion to Chekhov!), and the insights into the pressures of early 21st century professional family life are authentic even if not explored in any depth.

awwchallenge2015Overall, then, it’s an enjoyable read and an interesting concept to ponder. I certainly wouldn’t criticise Funder for taking up the opportunity offered to her. Writers, like all of us, have to live – and if a company like Paspaley is prepared to pay, and offer “complete freedom”, why would you say no?

Anna Funder
Everything precious
Sydney: Paspaley, 2014
Smashwords Edition
Available: Gratis at Paspaley

Monday musings on Australian literature: Coming in 2015

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Although my readerly eyes are always too big for my readerly brain, I do like to know about coming attractions – book-wise – and assume you’re interested too. If you’re not, apologies, but I know I’ll find this post useful to refer to as the year progresses. As I did last year, I’m basing this post on an article in The Australian by literary editor, Stephen Romei, followed by a little research of my own.

Here, according to Romei, are some of the fiction (and poetry) treats we can expect:

  • Les Murray: Given I opened my recent Reading Highlights post with Murray, I like that Romei starts off with him too. Apparently, Black Inc will be publishing two books from Murray this year. The first, Waiting for the past, is apparently his first volume of new poems in five years. I think we heard some poems from this volume at the Poetry at the Gods event I attended last year. The second, Bunyah, is a collection of poems he has written about his home town. It apparently will have an introduction by Murray. And, Romei asks, “Might this be the year the Bard of Bunyah finally collects Australia’s second Nobel Prize in Literature. I wouldn’t mind having an early wager on him doing so”.
  • Steven Carroll: Forever young (Fourth Estate, June), the next in his Glenroy series. Carroll jointly won the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction last year with Richard Flanagan.
  • Stephen Daisley: Coming rain (Text Publishing, May). I was just wondering the other day what had happened to Daisley who won the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize in 2010 with his novel Traitor. Well, now I know!
  • Marion Halligan: Goodbye sweetheart (Allen & Unwin, May). I’m a Halligan fan and reviewed her gorgeous Valley of grace early in this blog.
  • Krissy Kneen: The adventures of Holly Whit and the Incredible Sex Machine (Text Publishing, May). Text describes it as “an amazing literary sci-fi superhero sex romp from Australia’s genre-bending queen of erotica”! Sounds intriguing, eh? I reviewed her Steeplechase a couple of years ago.
  • Malcolm Knox: Wonder lover (Allen & Unwin, May), his fifth novel. He also has two non-fiction books coming out.  Knox is probably most famously known for exposing the Norma Khouri hoax in 2004.
  • Amanda Lohrey: A short history of Richard Kline (Black Inc, March). Lohrey is an acclaimed novelist and essayist, and can be relied upon to produce something thoughtful and, very likely, different.
  • Frank Moorhouse: The book of Ambrose (Random House, November), about the second (and cross-dressing) husband of Edith Campbell Berry, heroine of Moorhouse’s Edith trilogy. I’ve reviewed Cold light, the last of this trilogy.
  • Steve Toltz: Quicksand (Penguin Books, May). Toltz is another author I’ve been wondering about lately. I loved his “out there” A fraction of the whole, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize way back in 2008.

Romei’s article runs to 6 pages and includes Australian non-fiction, as well as fiction and non-fiction from overseas writers. I couldn’t possibly list them all, but I will note that some interesting sounding memoirs are coming out from Kate Grenville, Gerald Murnane, and Ramona Koval, among others. Caribbean-background author Maxine Beneba Clarke, whose Foreign soil was highly recommended in a comment on this blog by author Julie Twohig, has The hate race, a book about her experience of discrimination, coming out. It’s a real reader’s feast that awaits us.

While Romei mentions several debut novels in his article, I’d like to introduce two of my own gleaned from women I’ve come across via blogging and the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge:

  • Robyn Cadwallader: The anchoress (Fourth Estate, early 2015. It’s historical fiction set in the 13th century, about a woman who commits herself to a life of prayer, rather than marry a wealthy lord. Cadwallader is an expert in mediaeval literature.
  • Lizzy Chandler (pen-name of Elizabeth Lhuede, instigator and convener of the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge): Snowy River man (Escape Publishing, February 2015). This is in the romance genre, so not my preferred fare as Elizabeth knows, but in the spirit of the challenge’s commitment to diversifying our reading I’d like to give her a shout out here.

Finally, I wish good luck – because we all know that talent is only part of the equation in the “getting-published” game – to those out there working hard to get their first or next novel published.

Do any coming releases – either listed here or that you know about from elsewhere – appear on your must-read list for 2015?

(PS I’ll be getting back to reviewing soon!)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian Women Writers’ Challenge 2014

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awwchallenge2014As I’ve done over the last two years, I’m devoting my last Monday Musings for the year to the Australian Women Writers Challenge. This challenge, which most of you probably know by now, was instigated by Elizabeth Lhuede in response to concerns in Australian literary circles about the lack of recognition for women writers. I am one of Elizabeth’s band of volunteers – responsible for the Literary and Classics area – and, of course, am also a challenge participant.

The challenge has had another successful year with continued commitment by a wide range of reviewers. In 2015, we will be moving to a self-hosted site and plan to produce a single searchable database of all reviews logged since the challenge started in 2012. This will provide an excellent entree to a wide variety of Australian women’s writing across all forms and genres that has not been easy to access to date.

As last year, the Challenge ran some special events during the year, including a focus on indigenous writers, writers from diverse backgrounds, and writers with a disability. These events have included interviews and guest posts, and I thought I’d share some with you here, because they are worth reading and because they demonstrate the depth of diversity the Challenge reaches for:

  • Honey Brown (Women writers with a disability): on living with paraplegia and the surprising links between creativity and coping with adversity.
  • Eleanor Jackson (Queer women writers): on how being a “bisexual, biracial female writer” affects her art.
  • Ambelin Kwaymullin (Indigenous women writers): containing reviews of 5 works by Aboriginal women (including one by an Aboriginal community) which “offer insights into Aboriginal culture and existence”.
  • Donna McDonald (Women writers with a disability): on the struggle for rights for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, and how exhausting it is.
  • Yvette Walker (Queer women writers): on two queer writers – Elizabeth Bishop and EM Forster – who have inspired her.
  • Jessica White (Women writers with a disability): on her deafness which brought isolation and dislocation but some consolations too!

If you are interested in the challenge, you can check it out here. I don’t believe the sign up form is ready for 2015, but keep an eye on the site. We’d love you – whether you are female or male – to join us next year. The challenge can also be found on Facebook, Twitter (@auswomenwriters), GoodReads and Google+.

As regular readers know by now, the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge is my only challenge. This year I posted 30 reviews for the challenge, three more than last year. My breadth is similar to last year, except interestingly, I reviewed no poetry this year, whereas last year I contributed three poetry reviews. What happened? However, I am pleased that I managed to read four books from my TBR pile for the challenge. Now that is something worth crowing about! Anyhow, here’s my list (with links to the reviews):

FICTION

SHORT STORIES

NON-FICTION

ESSAYS

JUVENILIA

Again, I have enjoyed taking part in the challenge – and plan to take part again next year, both as volunteer and participant. I particularly want to thank Elizabeth and the rest of the team for making it all such a cooperative, and enjoyable experience. I look forward to 2015.

Thea Astley, Drylands (Review, of sorts)

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I read Thea Astley’s Drylands many, many years ago now, so what I’m going to share here – inspired by my post earlier this year on confronting Australian novels – are the notes I made when I read it. They are not particularly well-formed, because I wasn’t planning a review at the time, though I must admit that I did spend some time skimming it as I tried to massage my notes into some shape. Too hard not to! It’s her last novel, and it earned Astley her fourth Miles Franklin Award (shared with Kim Scott’s Benang).

Drylands is subtitled “a book for the world’s last reader”. It’s one of those tricky books that looks like a collection of short stories but is, albeit perhaps loosely defined, a novel. Its structure comprises sections titled “Meanwhile” by the so-called writer of the stories, Janet, alternated with stories about inhabitants of, or visitors to, a dying town called Drylands:

a God-forgotten tree-stump of a town halfway to nowhere whose population (two hundred and seventy-four) was tucked for leisure either in the bar of the Legless Lizard or in front of television screens, videos, Internet adult movies or PlayStation games for the kiddies.

[…]

No one was reading anymore.

It’s a town “being outmanoeuvred by the weather. As simple as that. Drought. Dying stock.”

The main subject of these stories are three men (Franzi Massig, farmer Jim Randler and the indigenous Benny Shoforth) and three women (Evie the writing teacher, Lannie Cunneen, and Joss the publican’s wife). This is all quite neat, except that we are thrown somewhat by the fact that the “Janet” character may be a conceit dreamed up by Evie, who says she will “write a story … about a woman in an upstairs room above a main street in a country town, writing a story about a woman writing a story”. Since Janet is an inhabitant of Drylands while Evie is not, it makes sense that this might be Evie’s work, not Janet’s, making Evie both character and observer*. Another spanner in the narrative-voice-works is that two of the stories – those of Franzi Massig and Joss – are told first person. I might be reading too much into it, but I wonder if Astley is using this uncertainty to mirror the disorder she sees in society, if that makes sense.

Drylands explores many of the issues important to Astley. The two overriding ones are words and their importance/power, and the impoverishment of the spirit (often related to our inhumanity). Subsumed in the latter are some of Astley’s recurrent issues – gender and race, dispossession and power imbalances. She rails against the shallowness and small-mindedness that lead to poor treatment of “other” (indigenous people, women, less educated people, the ageing, etc), to “the powerlessness”, as Benny calls it, “of poverty and colour”. Here is a husband coming to drag his wife out of her writing class to get him his lunch:

He was hurling words at his shrinking wife like clods or bricks and she was not dodging but receiving them like a willing saint, enduring abuse like a terrible balm.

I wonder what Astley would have written about our treatment of asylum-seekers had she still been around, but unfortunately she died in 2004.

Thea Astley is, as you’ve probably gathered, an unsettling writer – and one with some very strong viewpoints. Besides being unimpressed by how women, indigenous people, and ‘oddballs’ (or outsiders) are treated, she’s also not too fussed about computers, television, and our sports-mad society. For these reasons I’m inclined to agree with Kerryn Goldsworthy that there’s a dystopian element to her vision. I didn’t pick it at first because I tend to see dystopian novels as being speculative or fable or allegorical, as being, in other words, about what “might be” rather than what “is”. The handmaid’s tale is a dystopian novel that is not specifically set in the future but neither is it set in a recognisable “real” world. Lord of the flies and Animal farm are dystopian views of the world that are not set in the future but, arguably, neither do they present a realistic community/society/place. Drylands, though, is recognisably our world, but a pretty grim version of it, which suggests dystopia. It’s probably worth noting here that Drylands was published in 1999, that is, at the end of the millennium.

Regardless of formal definition, though, Drylands, like dystopian novels, is pervaded by a sense of hopelessness. There are likable people – many – but life isn’t easy or happy for them. There are, however, some positive or redemptive hints, particularly for Clem and Joss. Janet, the linking character, on the other hand, can only glimmer the fact that there might be something out there:

There was something out there, but she doubted she would ever discover. The idiocy of her wasted years made her laugh even more.

There were no endings no endings no

awwchallenge2014The writing in Drylands, though sometimes colourful, is sparer, more restrained than we are used to from Astley – and just right for a bitter tale about lack of literacy, loss of reading skills, and the implications thereof. Janet’s mother tells her that “being unable to read is being crippled for life”. Janet, writing her story, worries whether she’s getting her narrative right, but decides it’s “better for readers to frolic with their own assumptions from the words spoken, the deeds done” – which is, perhaps, the ultimate irony if everyone has lost the ability to read! If you only ever read one Astley, you couldn’t go wrong with this one.

Thea Astley
Drylands
Ringwood: Viking, 1999
294pp
ISBN: 9780670884704

* There is a scene in “Stranger in town”, where Evie briefly meets the eyes of the woman (whom we know is Janet) living above the newsagency.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The challenge of literacy

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Today’s topic may be a bit serious for Christmas week, but I’ve decided to go with it anyhow. I was inspired to write it by an article in the online journal, The Conversation. The article, by Deakin University academic Lyn McCredden, was itself inspired by the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards at which one of the winners, Richard Flanagan, donated his $40,000 prize to the Indigenous Literacy Fund. A good thing, nest-ce pas? McCredden goes on to mention the creation by Prime Minister Tony Abbott that night of the Australian Book Council, and quotes publisher Louise Adler as stating that this Council “declares that Australian writing matters and that building future generations of writers and readers is vital to a civilised and free society”. So far so good, but …

Then she quotes American literary critic Michael Bérubé who wrote in 1996 that:

… it has been some decades now since George Steiner and Thomas Pynchon reflected, in their different ways, on the phenomenon of Nazi officers with a fine appreciation of aesthetic excellence. (Bérubé)

In other words, the importance of literacy is a given but

what is so often occluded or skimmed over in many of the prize-giving activities of the book industry is that literacy on its own [my emphasis] is not necessarily a good. (McCredden)

Are you getting the picture? Sure, she says, not being able to read is a bad thing – it usually implies or leads to powerlessness and lack of privilege – but being able to read per se is not automatically good in itself, as Bérubé implies.  (Though, of course, what is “good” is a judgement isn’t it?). Anyhow, McCredden goes on to refer to Flanagan’s winning novel, The narrow road to the deep north, and the fact that “the figure of the vicious and violent prison guard is also notable for the way he quotes the exquisite poetry of Basho, even as he inflicts maniacal harm on prisoners”. If I understand her correctly, she suggests that for reasons like this, she doesn’t find Flanagan’s book (see my review), “satisfying or cohesive”. However, my reading is that Flanagan addresses the ambiguity contained in the Japanese officers’ love of poetry when he says:

They recited to each other more of their favourite haiku, and they were deeply moved not so much by the poetry as by their sensitivity to poetry; not so much by the genius of the poem as by their wisdom in understanding the poem; not in knowing the poem but in knowing the poem demonstrated the higher side of themselves and of the Japanese spirit … (Flanagan, The narrow road to the deep north)

This, to me, clearly expresses Flanagan’s awareness of the questionable or complicated nature of our relationship to literature. McCredden and I could argue this specific point, but it’s not the essence of her article, so let’s continue.

Books, she argues, do not always “unite” us. In fact, the controversies they sometimes generate show that culture is “always contested, and always ideological”. The best kinds of books she therefore suggests might be those that challenge our assumptions about ourselves – like Christos Tsiolkas’ Barracuda (see my review) – rather than those that “please us with myths about ourselves”. She argues that:

if we are, like Dorrigo, privileged enough to be able to read, we are opening ourselves to a world of pain, as much as entertainment. (McCredden)

Literacy, in other words, carries responsibilities as well as rights. As citizens we have a right to be able to read and to therefore conduct the business of our lives, but, there’s more to it than that, and therefore

Learning how to read – that is, how to think, analyse and challenge prevailing ideas (including those appearing in many works of literature, many histories) needs to be considered more coherently alongside the mechanics of book distribution, book marketing, learning the alphabet. (McCredden)

A very good point – and much needed methinks in our rush-to-judgement world. Do you agree? And if so, how do we teach this sort of reading without turning people off?

Morris Lurie, Hergesheimer in the present tense (Review)

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Morris Lurie, Hergesheimer in the present tense Book cover

Courtesy: Hybrid Publishers

Well, well, well, I got to the end of Morris Lurie’s quirky last novel (if that’s what it is), Hergesheimer in the present tense, and laughed. The final paragraph, which seemed to come out of left field, concerns Dostoyevsky’s contract with a “scurrilous publisher” to deliver a novel – The gambler – on an impossible schedule. It resulted in his hiring the stenographer Anna Snitkina, whom he later married. I laughed because my reading group’s next book is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and punishment (the book published immediately prior to The gambler) and because this little anecdote about Dostoevsky manages to bring together in one paragraph the main themes of the book – the writer’s life, relationships with publishers, and finding love.

Where to start? Perhaps with my little aside in that first sentence regarding the form of this “novel”. This book has a very plain cover. In fact, it simply comprises some text on plain white, as you can see from the book cover image. And this text is right: I don’t think I have ever read anything quite like this before. But, I did enjoy it, because this sort of challenge to my reading brain appeals to me, particularly when the challenge involves a writer writing about the writer’s life. Delicious. When I say, though, that the book is about “the writer’s life”, I mean that in its broadest sense. It’s about life lived by the writer – his growing up, his women, his children, as well as the specific challenges of being a writer. This brings me back to the main challenge, its form: 30 little vignettes that criss-cross time within and between each other. There is probably an over-riding chronological arc to the narrative, though this is not particularly obvious, partly due to flashbacks within the chapters and partly because there’s not really a plot. The voice is third person, with the occasional lapse (is it a lapse?) into first or even second person.

This is not Lurie’s first book about Hergesheimer. The first was Hergesheimer hangs in, which comprises 26 chapters and was published in 2011. My curiosity sparked, I found a review of it in the Australian Book Review and discovered that there was a “real” Hergesheimer, who, Lurie writes, was

an American writer of great popularity who fell from favour, couldn’t understand it, didn’t know why, bellyached about it endlessly to his pal Mencken, refused to go gently, if you like, into that good night, is quite forgotten now. I appropriated his name to pass unnoticed, as it were, among you. (Hergesheimer hangs in)

Even Wikipedia knows about him! Him, the “real” Hergesheimer, I mean. We don’t need to know this allusion, of course, to understand the book, but it adds a playful layer to understanding our Hergesheimer, because he too is a writer who has had his successes but who is now struggling to be appreciated, to be recognised in the long-term.

As soon as I finished the book, I checked Lurie’s bibliography and discovered what I was expecting: his twenty or so books were published by around ten different publishers. No wonder Hergesheimer, the fictional one I mean, is generally unhappy with publishers*. It starts in the first story, “Hergesheimer slaps leather”, in which he and another writer discuss publishers – publishers not entering their books for prizes, publishers not promoting their books, and so on. This story, told in Lurie’s linguistically playful and rhythmic style, got me right in. Here is the opening paragraph:

Hergesheimer, found suddenly footloose in the city this sunny midmorning, hears called out from nowhere his name. To stop. To turn. To scan. To see. To spot, waving and weaving in rapid approach through the intervening traffic, McCall, an acquaintance at best, if even exactly that, certainly not bosomy, nothing buddyish, warmth to warmth, heart to heart, nevertheless, as Hergesheimer also, similarly in or of the writing trade.

‘Tom’, greets him Hergesheimer, the safety of pavement by McCall now achieved.

I love such writing – active, compelling, demanding the reader’s full attention. And I found it particularly interesting to read so soon after Eimear McBride’s A girl is a half-formed thing with her broken syntax and run-along sentences. Very different writers, very different concerns, but both subverting the “rules” to create honest, unforgettable characters.

Anyhow, the stories/chapters continue. We see Hergesheimer giving writer’s talks in schools, attending conferences, being interviewed, winning a prize, finding a new publisher, and so on. Life is never simple, and rarely are his experiences unequivocally triumphant. His dreams of great success (accompanied by wealth and acclaim) don’t come to fruition. In “Hergesheimer prompts the essential question” a schoolchild doesn’t believe he’s a real writer because “Stories are supposed to have love in them … Where’s the love in yours?” And in the title story, he discovers that prizes don’t always mean what you think they do. Some stories are laugh-out-loud funny, such as his battle to save his typewriter in an increasingly electronic world (“Hergesheimer embraces the new technology”). But mostly the levity has a self-deprecating, often sardonic edge, because, as we know, concerns about publishing, editing, prizes, promotion, plagiarism, are real. Lurie gives them flesh in the form of an experienced but now mostly defeated writer, “a lumbering dinosaur, defeated, out of step with the modern world”, a world where, for example, plagiarism can be explained away as “collage”, “montage”, or “homage”!

Hergesheimer, though, is not only a writer. He’s a son, father, failed husband, lover and friend, so we see him, for example, facing the death of his daughter (“The gift of strength”), being sick, dealing with a landlord, and trying to maintain a shaky relationship with a new woman, the indefatigable Valerie. There’s pathos here, like in his writing life, as he shambles from experience to experience.

Because of its disjointed (though not disconnected) form, you can read this book quickly or slowly. With most chapters running to around five pages, it’s a perfect book for busy times, like now, when reading opportunities have to be snatched amongst the Christmas madness. Lurie, sadly, died within weeks of its publication. Reading it now would be the perfect way to honour his memory – but reading it only for that reason would be selling it short. Far better to read it for its verbal gymnastics, self-deprecating humour and, most of all, for its awareness of the absurdity of life’s endeavours.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also read and enjoyed this book.

Morris Lurie
Hergesheimer in the present tense
Melbourne: Hybrid Publishers, 2014
190pp.
ISBN: 9781925000337

(Review copy supplied by Hybrid Publishers)

* It reminded me of poet-novelist Alan Gould, who came to my book group and spoke specifically about the difficulty of finding publishers.

Monday musings on Australian literature: RN presenters’ pick reads of the year

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I was going to write my Case for post this week, but I think now that I’ll leave it to January. Life is a bit too busy right now to put proper thought into presenting my case (though I’ve pretty much decided which book it will be!) So, instead, since various media outlets are starting to publish “best” or “favourite” books of the year, I thought I’d share those from the presenters of the radio station that I most listen to, ABC Radio National.

Many did not choose Australian books, but given the theme of this post, I’m only going to share those who did. However, you can see the whole list online at Radio National. Here goes:

  • Helen Garner, This house of grief book cover

    Courtesy: Text Publishing

    Damian Carrick – presenter of the Law Report – chose Helen Garner’s This house of grief. Not surprising, I suppose, that a presenter on law would choose this book about a murder trial. He was concerned, he said, that he might find it too bleak, but “from the opening page I was hooked. It’s a page turner, and as it should be it’s an aching lament to the loss of three lives”. I hate the use of the word “aching” in reviews but regular readers here will know that I liked it too.

  • Jonathan Green – presenter of Sunday Extra – chose Richard Flanagan’s The narrow road to the deep north. I’m glad someone did! He felt that, given it had won the Booker Prize, “anything I say isn’t much more than licking the spoon that somebody else used to put the icing on the cake. Even so, gosh this is a good book”. I agree.
  • Lynne Malcolm – presenter of All in the Mind – chose comedian Tim Ferguson’s Carry a big stick. Again, it’s not a surprising choice for the presenter of a program about the mind and the brain, as this book is a memoir focusing particularly on Ferguson’s being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Malcolm refers to Ferguson’s progress from denial to eventual admission when he could hide the condition no longer.
  • Rhianna Patrick – presenter of AWAYE – chose Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and light. This is a book I have on my TBR. Here’s what Patrick says “Van Neerven is part of what I see as the next wave of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers, who are university graduates in creative writing. What’s clear early on is van Neerven’s exploration of indigeneity and sexuality, and whether the two can coexist”. That intrigues me. Why can’t they coexist? Clearly, I’ll have to read it to find out.
  • Robyn Williams – presenter of the long-running Science Show – chose Evie Wyld’s All the birds, singing. He says that “It may be about blokes with beers and rugged times on the land, but the voice is always clear and convincing”. Hmm, blokes with beers do appear but I wouldn’t quite say that’s what it was “about”. However, I like the fact that he appreciates Wyld’s voice. (You can check out my review if you like. I expect it will feature high in my top books – when I do my list in January).

Other choices included Eleanor Catton’s The luminaries, and Eimear McBride’s A girl is a half-formed thing, both of which I’ve reviewed this year. The most interesting choice, from my point of view anyhow, was from Ann Jones, presenter of Off the Track. She chose Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole which she described as “fantastically surreal and brutally real”.

For each of the choices, there is a sound grab (at the link I provided above) that you can listen to which gives you a little more about their reasons. I don’t find them all enlightening, but I do find it interesting at this time of year to hear people’s choices and why they chose them.

Have you chosen your favourite book of the year, or are you, like me, waiting until the year is over? (Even then, I suspect, I won’t be able to choose ONE book to top all the others but I will have some favourites.)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

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I’ve written about the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards before – more than once in fact, as you will see if you click on my link. They were created in 2007 by our then new Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. What heady days they were. These were, at the time, Australia’s most lucrative literary awards, and were among the first of the major awards, when they instigated this in 2011, to provide a cash prize for shortlisted books. Awards were initially made in two categories – fiction and non-fiction – but gradually other categories have been added for poetry, children’s fiction, young adult fiction, and Australian history.

I do wonder though about the ongoing support. In 2010 the winners were announced on 8 November, then in 2011, it was 8 July, and in 2012 it was 23 July. Last year the winners were announced on 15 August, and this year they were announced tonight, 8 December. Why such inconsistency? Most major literary awards keep pretty much to a schedule, but this one is all over the place. Does this suggest a lack of commitment? I had started to think this year that they weren’t going to happen – until the shortlist was suddenly announced on 19 October.

I enjoy following these awards – and I’m primarily talking fiction here – partly because there is often something left field about them. Three winners – The zookeeper’s war by Steven Conte (2008), Eva Hornung’s Dog boy (2010) (my review) and Stephen Daisley’s Traitor* (2011) – didn’t win any other major award (as far as I’m aware). And the shortlists have included books that scarcely, if at all, popped up elsewhere, such as Sophie Laguna’s One foot wrong (2009) and Alan Gould’s The lakewoman (2010) (my review). Given that the arts is a subjective business, I like seeing different works being recognised. I can’t believe that there are only 6 or 7 books worth highlighting each year – and yet that’s what often seems to be implied when you look at the shortlists in any one year. (I suppose, though, if you are one of those 6 or 7 you hope that multiple listing will result in your winning at least once?)

Anyhow, it’s now time to announce this year’s winner of the fiction award – and it’s a joint award: Steven Carroll’s A world of other people and Richard Flanagan’s The narrow road to the deep north (my review).

And I can’t help giving a special mention to a couple of other winners:

  • Poetry award: Canberra’s gorgeous Melinda Smith with her collection Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call (published by the lovely little poetry press, Pitt Street Poetry). I haven’t read this, but I have heard Smith speak and mentioned her in my post on Capital Women Poets.
  • Non-fiction award: another joint award – Gabrielle Carey’s Moving among strangers (on my TBR) and Helen Trinca’s Madeleine: A life of Madeleine St John (my review).

The Australian history award was also made to two books. I have no idea what the authors think about all these joint awards, but as you can imagine, I like that the love was shared.

I do hope these awards continue, and hopefully on a more routine schedule.

Congratulations to all the authors, and their publishers, who won this year.

* I have been wondering about what has happened to Daisley, but I read just today in a catalogue from Text Publishing that he has a new book out in 2015, Coming rain, set in Western Australia in 1955, the year he was born! I’ll be looking out for it.

Helen Garner, This house of grief: The story of a murder trial (Review)

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Helen Garner, This house of grief book cover

Courtesy: Text Publishing

Well you might ask why you would want to read a book about the trial of a man accused of murdering his three sons by driving his car into a dam and escaping the car himself? Indeed, Helen Garner was asked why she would want to attend such a trial – and write about it. But Helen Garner is made of strong stuff, having previously written The first stone about the sexual harassment of two girls at Melbourne University’s Ormond College and Joe Cinque’s consolation about the trial of a woman accused of murdering her boyfriend via a drug overdose. I’ve read and appreciated both these books, along with novels and short stories by Garner, and so was keen to read this, her latest.

For those of you who don’t know the story, here’s Wikipedia’s summary of what happened:

… as Farquharson was returning his children to their mother after a Father’s Day access visit, his white 1989 VN Commodore vehicle veered across the Princes Highway between Winchelsea and Geelong, crashed through a fence and came to rest in a farm dam where it filled with water and submerged. His three children, Jai (10), Tyler (7) and Bailey (2), were unable to free themselves and drowned. Farquharson managed to escape and alerted another driver who took him to nearby Winchelsea. Police divers recovered the boys’ bodies about 2 am the next day. They were still inside the vehicle and unrestrained by seatbelts.

Farquharson claimed that he did not intend to kill his children, that he had blacked out during a coughing fit (a condition known as cough syncope). However, he was tried and found guilty, tried again after winning an appeal and found guilty again, and was then refused leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia.

Garner sat through both trials, the first one lasting around 7 weeks, and the second one 11 weeks, and managed to condense it all into 300 pages of lucid prose. One of the reasons I was keen to read the book was to see what approach she’d take. In The first stone and Joe Cinque’s consolation, Garner’s opinion is pretty clear from the beginning – and I didn’t fully agree with her (for very different reasons in each of the books). However, in This house of grief, Garner is more measured. She doesn’t want to believe that Farquharson is guilty – “longed to be persuaded” otherwise – but is gradually swayed by the evidence to believe it must be so. She doesn’t engage emotionally with the participants in the intense way she did in Joe Cinque’s consolation, but she is emotional. How could you not be in such a case? There are two reasons I like Garner – her tight, evocative prose, and her fearless honesty. And so, in this book, she tracks her own response as she listens to the evidence – from her disbelief that a father could do such a thing, and her sentimental desire to believe Farquharson, to her horrified admission that any doubt about it is “no more substantial than a cigarette paper shivering in the wind”.

So, let’s get back to the original question. Why read such a story? There are a few reasons, but I’ll discuss my two main ones. The first is to gain insight into, and understanding of, human behaviour. Why do people do what they do? It’s so easy to judge people out-of-hand, but even horrific events have nuances, and I want to understand those. Not to excuse, because it’s impossible to excuse taking the lives of those in one’s care, but to be able to empathise in some way. Isn’t this what literature is about?

Garner achieves this by not demonising Farquharson. As she watches him in court, and listens to the evidence – professional, personal, expert – she presents a picture of a man who was “emotionally immature, bereft of intellectual equipment and concepts, lacking in sustaining friendships outside his family”. At the end of the first trial, the judge speaks kindly to Farquharson, and Garner writes:

Farquharson nodded to him, courteous and present. For the first time I saw him as he might have been in ordinary life, at work, at school. It touched me. Again I felt shocked, as if this response were somehow illegitimate.

(Interestingly, Garner did not accord such recognition to Anu Singh in Joe Cinque’s consolation. Yes, different case, very different people, but the principle still stands I think.) A little earlier in the trial, Garner quotes “a tough American prosecutor” who’d said to her:

‘If I were appearing for him, I’d try to make his family see that loving him doesn’t have to mean they believe he’s innocent’.

But, how tough that would be, eh?

My second reason is to understand the workings of courts and justice. I have never (yet anyhow) been called for jury duty. Oh my, oh my, after reading this, I’m even more desperate that I never am. Although it’s pretty obvious that the right verdict was achieved in this case, the process was not reassuring. Garner’s reporting of evidence and cross-examination reads very like those court dramas you see in film and television. There’s drama, police mistakes, twisting of the truth, character assassinations, conflicting expert opinions – and, in this case, a lot of complicated and sometimes obfuscatory technical evidence about cars and tire tracks and steering inputs, about arcs and gradients. And it goes on for weeks.

Garner keeps it interesting by focusing on the people and their reactions, reporting some dialogue, and summarising the critical (which, she makes clear, is not always the most relevant) points of evidence. Her descriptions of the defence and prosecution team are drawn with a novelist’s eye for character. Sometimes Morrissey, the defence barrister, is “as jumpy as a student undergoing an oral exam”, while at other times he’s “less flustered … more in control of the content and tone of his discourse”. His “waxen” appearance at the second trial is quite different from the beginning of the first when he’s presented as a hearty “spontaneous, likeable man” whose “stocks were high”.

She also pays a lot of attention to the jury. Of course we cannot know what they thought or discussed but Garner watches them, noting when their attention flags and when it picks up, when emotions get the better of them. She writes, for example, of one witness that “the jury liked him … he was one of the witnesses they instinctively trusted”. During her report on the second trial, she quotes American writer, Janet Malcolm who wrote that “jurors sit there presumably weighing evidence but in actuality they are studying character”.

Partway through the book, Garner comments that the question “Did he do it?” is the “least interesting question anyone could ask.” Later, between the first and second trial, she quotes a grandmother from another murky situation in which a father was suspected of killing his children via a house fire. The grandmother asks:

‘What’s worse? — living with suspicions and various possibilities and never knowing the truth, or living with the truth of something too horrible to contemplate.’

Books like Garner’s enable us – nay, force us – to contemplate such questions. They show us that trials are less about retribution, perhaps even less about justice, but more about the truth. What we are to do with the truths we so glean is another question – but that question, Garner suggests, is our “legitimate concern”, and I agree.

awwchallenge2014Helen Garner
This house of grief: The story of a murder trial
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2014
300pp.
ISBN: 9781922079206

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)