Australian literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Australian Novel, 1945 style

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Joseph Furphy (Tom Collins)

Joseph Furphy (Presumed Public Domain, from the State Library of New South Wales, via Wikipedia)

Every now and then I like to delve into the newspapers digitised by the National Library of Australia and made available via its website. Last week, I was pottering around researching another topic for Monday Musings (for which you’ll now have to wait) when I came across an article written in 1945 about a series of books,”arranged” by Colin Roderick, being published about Australian prose. The series aimed “at introducing to students the work of Australian writers of prose fiction” but another article suggested that it would be of value to adult readers interested in the subject.

The first volume is titled The Australian novel and was published in 1945. It’s an anthology containing précis and excerpts from the selected works, and some critical analysis, and has a foreword by Miles Franklin. She wrote that:

People settling in new lands need novels and dramas closely concerned with their own time, place and community to support and lighten the great classics and world masterpieces in literature. Certain stories relate us to our own soil, and when such works find universal acceptance, they still retain greater significance for the people of their origin than for other readers by imparting a comforting glow which springs from the intimacy of home … writings, redolent of our own land and our life in it, thus fulfilled one of the functions of imaginative literature by heightening and illuminating everyday life in familiar surroundings.

I love her description of “writings redolent of our own land and our life in it” and their importance to “illuminating everyday life”.

The 19 (strange number, eh?) works were presented in order of their age:

It’s an intriguing list for me. Some of these works and authors I’ve read, and some have been on my list to read for a long time. But there are some here that I have never heard of – such as Brian Penton and Leonard Mann. It makes me wonder which writers from our last half century or so will be no longer well-known in 60 or 70 years. Longevity in the arts is such a fickle thing really, isn’t it?

Next week, I’ll write on the second volume in which Roderick presented 20 significant novelists.

Peter Carey, The chemistry of tears (Review)

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Peter Carey Chemistry of tears bookcover

Gorgeous bookcover (Courtesy: Penguin Group, Australia)

It may sound strange, but when I think of Peter Carey, I also often think of Margaret Atwood. Their works and concerns are very different, I know, but the thing is that both produce highly varied oeuvre. They take risks; they try new forms, voices and genres. This is not to say that I only like writers who do this – after all, I love Jane Austen – but I am always intrigued to pick up a Carey or an Atwood. Consequently, I was keen to read Carey’s latest, The chemistry of tears.

As a librarian-archivist who also worked with museum materials, I was engaged from the first chapter which introduces 40-something Catherine, one of the two protagonists. She’s an horologist and senior conservator in a museum, and the novel opens with her discovery that her (secret) married lover of 13 years, another museum employee, has died. She’s devastated. She also thinks their relationship has been a secret, but soon discovers that her boss, Eric Croft, knows about it. Aware of her grief, he allocates her to a project away from the main museum building. And, he provides her with an assistant, Courtauld graduate Amanda. Catherine has been a calm, rational creature but warns us that she is now “a whirring mad machine”. Hang onto that image. The date is April 2010. Hang onto that date.

The second protagonist is Henry Brandling, who is the author of the exercise books Catherine finds in the tea chests containing her project. This project is to reconstruct a Vaucanson style Digesting Duck which Henry commissioned for his consumptive son. Henry’s part of the story takes place in 1854.

The novel is narrated pretty much alternately in first and third person voices. The first person is Catherine relating her progress with her project, and with her pervasive grief, while Henry’s story is told in third person, based on Catherine’s reading of his exercise books. Henry’s is a pretty wild story that sees him travel from England to Karlsruhe, Germany, to find someone able to make the automaton and then on to Furtwangen to oversee its construction by watchmaker Sumper. Henry’s faith in himself and the somewhat enigmatic Sumper are sorely tested as the manufacture proceeds in a rather secretive and chaotic manner within a household that also includes the moody Frau Helga, her odd but clever son, Carl the Genius, and the silversmith-cum-fairytale-collector Arnaud.  Meanwhile, in 2010, Catherine’s progress is no less erratic, due partly to her own self-centred grief-stricken behaviour and partly to the not completely transparent actions of assistant Amanda.

There were times, I must say, when I wondered if Carey were pushing his plot too hard – when Catherine’s behaviour got just a little too irrational or paranoid, or when Sumper (if not Henry) became a little too obsessive – but these times were fleeting because he always managed to pull it back just as I thought he was going over the edge.

Carey uses a whole grab-bag of devices to tell this tale. I liked the obvious but not slavish parallels between grieving Catherine and her clever but a-little-too-independent assistant Amanda, and between worried father Henry and his rather independent watchmaker Sumper. These parallels encourage us to think more deeply about what is really going on in the two domains, to consider who is rational and who isn’t, or whether no-one is. Carey also uses humour and satire, some light foreshadowing, and effective imagery, in addition to the structure and voice I’ve already described. Looked at individually, none of these is particularly innovative, but in concert they result in something rather fresh and, more than that, something that is entertaining while also challenging the intellect.

If you know Carey, though, you will know that this novel is about more than two people resolving their respective griefs. Remember my instructions in the second paragraph to hang onto an image and a date? They are clues to the bigger themes of the novel. The date, April 2010, is the date of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This is a serious and distressing issue for Amanda. And what caused the oil spill? Why, a big machine of course. Carey’s theme, however, is a little more complex than simply demonstrating the negative effects of industrialisation, that triumph of the 19th century, on our lives today. Enter the automaton story-line …

Automata, you’ll be aware, represent scientists’ attempts to imitate life but, as Henry recognises early in his quest, they are “clever” but “soul-less” creatures. Catherine also reflects on automata in her first chapter:

But really, truly, anyone who has ever observed a successful automaton, seen its uncanny lifelike movements, confronted its mechanical eyes, any human animal remembers that particular fear, that confusion about what is alive and what cannot be born.

The plot – well, the theme – thickens, because Henry and Catherine’s automata, the duck, isn’t quite what it appears to be. And here, Carey cheekily introduces and twists the ugly duckling story because, as we learn early in the novel, the duck is in fact a swan – and a swan, in reality and myth if not in fairytale, is something both “beautiful and pitiless”. Carey uses it to suggest that science may be taken too far … and to represent …

The other big theme of science versus belief, the paradox of scientific and industrial endeavour towards perfection versus the chaos of humanity. As Eric says to Catherine late in the novel:

Do you know, I find the notion that mysteries must be solved to be very problematic. […] Why do we always wish to remove ambiguity?

Is this Carey confronting us head on with our own paradoxes? With the fact that we are happy with, want even, our modern culture’s tendency to produce open endings, to recognise that not all can be neatly explained, while at the same time expecting science to push and push and push for answers. Accepting mysterium tremendum, suggests Carey, is the stuff of life.

Lisa of ANZLitLovers also liked this novel.

Peter Carey
The chemistry of tears
Camberwell: Hamish Hamilton, 2012
268pp
ISBN: 9781926428154

(Review copy courtesy Penguin Group, Australia)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writers from New South Wales

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I’ve almost finished my Monday musings round-up of writers from the different states and territories of Australia, but have been putting off doing New South Wales because it’s a bit scary to confront. New South Wales is Australia’s most populous state. It is also, in terms of white settlement in Australia, our oldest state. And, more importantly in terms of literature, it’s where Australia’s only Nobel Laureate for Literature, Patrick White, came from. So, given all this, where to start?

With a little bit of background perhaps. It was here that Captain James Cook made his first landfall in Australia in 1770 … and it is where, 18 years later, Captain Arthur Phillip established Britain’s colony in Australia. In fact, originally, New South Wales encompassed the whole east coast of Australia but gradually, during the 19th century, Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria and Queensland were hived off to form separate colonies (and later states). It is a state that encompasses great variety of landscape, from desert outback to Australia’s highest mountain, from a temperate  southern coast to the subtropical northern one. The phrases commonly used by Australians to indicate remoteness, “back o’ Bourke” and “beyond the black stump”*, originate from the state.

For today’s post, I’m going to draw a selection of writers from those currently living. There’s time in the future, after all, for some retrospective region-based posts.

Kate Grenville, Australian author.

Kate Grenville, 2011. (Photo by Kathleen Smith via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

Kate Grenville

While I have referred to Grenville (b. 1950) many times on this blog, I haven’t reviewed her here as I haven’t read a novel by her in the last three years. I have however read and loved many of her novels. She is best known for her historical novel about the early days of the colony, The secret river, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the Man Booker Prize. Two of her books, Lilian’s story and Dreamhouse, have been adapted for film. My favourite, though, is her Orange Prize winning novel, The idea of perfection. Most of her novels are historical in subject, but this one is a contemporary story set in a country town struggling to survive the urban drift. Her picture of country town life is drawn with both affection and gentle satire.

Kate Jennings

The other Kate (b. 1948) is a couple of years older than her namesake and, while born in New South Wales, has lived much of her life in New York. I have reviewed two of her books here – her semi-autobiographical novel Snake and her “fragmented” autobiography Trouble. She is a poet, novelist and essayist. She has been nominated for several awards, and won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for her novel Moral hazard. She’s a “pull-no-punches” intellectual who is prepared to confront difficult or unpopular issues and is concerned about what she sees the “moral poverty” of our times.

Thomas Keneally

Thomas Keneally (b. 1935) could, I think, be called our current grand old man of literature – though there are some other contenders, such as Frank Moorhouse (also in this list). He has won the Man Booker Prize with Schindler’s list and the Miles Franklin Award twice with Bring larks and heroes and Three cheers for the paraclete. In 1972, he wrote a confronting novel, The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, about a young Aboriginal man who runs amok after years of discrimination. Keneally has since said that he wouldn’t, as a white man, dare to write a novel now in the voice of an Aboriginal person. He has taught fiction at University of California Irvine and while there wrote one of my favourite travel books, The place where souls are born: A journey to the Southwest. He is active in the Australian Republican movement. He trained to be a Catholic priest, but was not ordained. However, his writing is informed by his commitment to social justice and he is often heard on Australian TV and radio speaking about injustice, here and internationally. He’s truly and literally an Australian Living Treasure.

Gillian Mears

I reviewed Mears’ (b. 1964) most recent novel, Foal’s bread, a couple of months ago. It has since been nominated for this year’s Miles Franklin Award. Her first novel, The mint lawn, won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for unpublished manuscripts. She has also written short stories and essays. Her three novels are all set in the hinterland of the northwest of the state, and explore loneliness, loss and longing.  There is, I think, a lush poetic sensibility to her writing that seems appropriate to the subtropical north.

Frank Moorhouse

And, finally, I come to Frank Moorhouse (b. 1938). I have to admit that I’ve only read one of his books but it was a great one, Grand days, the first of his League of Nations or Edith trilogy. The second in the trilogy, Dark Palace, won the Miles Franklin Award, and the last, Cold light, is, with Mears’ Foal’s bread, one of the five novels shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin. Moorhouse is another of our outspoken writers. He has been arrested for campaigning against censorship but, for me as a librarian, his main claim on my memory comes from his copyright infringement case against the University of New South Wales library. In 1973, the library authorised the making of photocopies of pages from his book, The Americans, baby. The court found that the university had infringed his copyright, setting in motion changes both to the Copyright Act and to the management of photocopiers. As much as I loved Grand Days, it is Moorhouse’s impact on copyright practice in Australia that I’ll never forget.

And that’s it from New South Wales, this time around. Have you read these authors? Do you have a favourite author from New South Wales – either one of the above or one I didn’t include?

* There are some counter claims for this one, as the Wikipedia article I’ve linked to explains.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The other David Campbell and the sin of misattribution

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Much to my chagrin, the “other” poet named David Campbell drew to my attention recently to the fact that I had twice, in my blog, (mis)attributed a poem he’d written to the wrong David Campbell. The poem is “The Last Red Gum” and I first wrote about it in my post on The magnificent River Red Gums and then again, because it seemed relevant, in my post on Richard Allen and Kimbal Baker’s book Australia’s remarkable trees.

The David Campbell to whom I thought I was referring is the one who lived much of his life in my neck of the woods, that is, in the Australian Capital Territory and neighbouring areas of New South Wales. He did write a lot about nature and the landscape. In fact, his Wikipedia article (to which I’ve linked his name at the beginning of this paragraph) includes quotes from two poems about trees – “In summer’s tree” and “Snow gums”. It’s not surprising really that, at first glance, I thought I knew who I was quoting. This David Campbell wrote many volumes of poetry, edited anthologies and won some of our top poetry awards. He died in 1979.

However, the “other” David Campbell is very much alive – and just as well, because he was able to ensure I righted my wrong. He lives in Victoria and is a member of the Federation of Australian Writers. He too has won several poetry awards and has published volumes of poetry. While he also writes in free verse, his first love he says is bush poetry. As a lover of Banjo Paterson, I can relate to that. This Campbell is keen, he writes on his website, “to promote traditional poetry, particularly in terms of the assistance that a mastery of rhythm and rhyme gives to any form of writing”. He argues that this form of poetry “is accessible to all”. Like the first David Campbell, he has also written short stories (and appeared in Black Inc’s Best Australian stories, 2005).

In 2011, Campbell won the Bronze Swagman award for his poem about dementia, called Wasteland. You can read it on the ABC’s Western Queensland website. It’s a simple, accessible and moving poem.

And so, I apologise to this later David Campbell and hope he doesn’t mind if I quote another verse from “The Last Red Gum”, because I do like this poem and its environmental message:

Dead gums in Lake Mulwala

Dead gums in Lake Mulwala, on a late autumn afternoon

At Mulwala and Chowilla there are remnants of our kind
in a place where verdant floodplains used to be.
Now a ghostly red gum graveyard is the only thing you’ll find
and a desert is the only sight you’ll see
(from “The Last Red Gum”)

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned “another” Australian David Campbell, the singer and son of rocker Jimmy Barnes! It clearly pays to be careful in your research – something I with my librarian-archivist background should have been well aware of!

Have you ever been guilty of misattribution – and how did you handle it?

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Willa Cather’s landscape

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In my review earlier this week I mentioned that Willa Cather‘s description of pioneer life in My Ántonia could apply pretty closely to Australia, but I didn’t say that her description of the landscape could too. Again, the details are different, but the sense is the same. The expansive blue skies and the preponderance of yellows and reds in a vast landscape are all very familiar to Australians. The book is full of gorgeous descriptions featuring the sun and sky, and with the colours of red, rosy, and yellow dominating.

Here is Jim in Book 1 describing a landscape that is still new to him:

I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.

Outback Australia, near Burra, SA

Outback Australia, near Burra, SA

And here he is in the 5th and final book some 30 or so years later:

Out there I felt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of autumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could see the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all about stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold colour, I remembered so well. Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against the wire fences like barricades. Along the cattle-paths the plumes of goldenrod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, grey with gold threads in it.

If I think wheat instead of corn, and spinifex and wattles instead of Russian thistles and goldenrod, I could be reading about Australia. Not that I need to apply my reading to Australia, of course, but in this particular book it struck me again what similarities there are between the two New Worlds of Australia and America. For both our countries, Jim’s description that “there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made” rings true.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Noongar/Nyungar, and the importance of place

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Conceptions of home and understanding of place are the central issues in Noongar author Kim Scott‘s Miles Franklin award winning novel, That deadman dance, which I reviewed last year. From the opening pages of the novel Scott explores notions of home, as the white settlers confront the indigenous inhabitants of the land they are trying to colonise.

Here is the main indigenous character, Bobby:

And then Bobby found a sheet of granite, and a small rock hole covered with a thin stone slab and filled with water.  He crouched to it, touched the stone, and sensed home. Something in the wind, in plants and land he’d at least heard of, and increasing signs of home. There were paths, and he knew where there’d be food […] Bobby closed his eyes, felt the wind tugging at his hair and rushing in the whorls of his ears. Breathed this particular air. Ngayn Wabalanginy moort, nitjak ngan kaarlak … Home (pp. 235, 238)

And here is the main would-be pastoralist settler, Chaine:

With no boat Chaine felt his loneliness … It was land he’d hoped for – pastoral country, with good water and close to a sheltered anchorage. But he had tried and been disappointed. It deflated him. (p. 239)

These occur during a long trek which Chaine and Bobby make when Chaine’s boat hits a reef and founders. Chaine thinks Flinders’ journal will provide the guidance he needs while Bobby, in country unfamiliar to him, relies on his understanding of the land’s clues. “This way, we go this way, follow the creek away from this spring and this estuary”, says Bobby, while Chaine insists “they keep to the coast … so he could catch sight of the sea every now and then”.

noongar1

Courtesy John D Croft, English Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

All this is to introduce a fascinating seminar I attended today, at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. It was given by Associate Professor Len Collard, a Nyungar* scholar researching Nyungar place names, using an ARC research grant. The English title of his talk was “I am creating the knowledge of Country place names: from the past to now and into the future”.  His aim is to document Nyungar place names in Western Australia’s southwest on the basis that naming place confirms or establishes “ownership”. The project aims at

  • supporting reconciliation,
  • encouraging environmental understanding,
  • helping tourism ventures, and
  • “closing the gap of Australianness” by creating a common understanding of local indigenous geography.

You’ve probably noticed the alternative spellings I’ve been using to name the people of this area. Alternative spellings are a significant challenge for both indigenous and non-indigenous people studying indigenous culture.  Collard made an interesting point regarding variant spellings. He says that a common reason given is that  the Nyungar (like many indigenous people) encompass several language groups and that the different spellings could therefore have come from different pronunciations, putting, in a sense, the onus of problematic spelling at the feet of the indigenous people. However, he suggests there is another possibility. His project is based on post-colonial historical records produced throughout the 19th and 20th centuries by settlers from a wider variety of countries – England, Ireland, Holland, France, and so on. The different spellings, he suggests, could be due to the way these recorders transcribed, using their own linguistic knowledge, the word/s they heard.

Early in his talk he talked of the “history of constructing the negative” in which indigenous people have been reduced to the role of sidekick in post-colonial Australia. The reason for variant spellings could be read as an example of this. Another is the attitude to indigenous trackers. Their knowledge, Collard said, was critical to the survival of the colony and yet, as Scott shows in his novel, this knowledge was either used ungraciously or, at worst, ignored.

I thoroughly enjoyed the talk, not only for its specific content but also for the way his scholarship intersects with contemporary indigenous literature. Home, land, place … they are important to all of us … recognising and respecting that is a good place to start. I’ll conclude with Bobby near the end of the novel:

On time we share kangaroo wallaby tammar quokka yongar wetj woylie boodi wetj koording kamak kaip … Too many. But now not like that, and sheep and bullock everywhere and too many strangers wanna take things for themselves and leave nothing […] And now we strangers in our special places.

Monday musings on Australian literature: World Book and Copyright Day, Australian-style

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World Book Day!

World Book Day! (Photo credit: Nimages DR, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)

World Book Day 2012 was more than half over before I realised it existed. That could be my fault of course. I may have had my head so deep in my last blog post and my current book that I missed all the publicity …

Are you aware of World Book Day?  April 23 was established by UNESCO as World Book Day in 1995 to promote reading, publishing and copyright. Why April 23rd*? Because in 1616, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died. April 23rd is also the date of birth or death of other authors such as Maurice Druon, Halldor Laxness, Vladimir Nabokov, Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo. And, while she may not be in the same class as these luminaries, the Australian creator of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers died on April 23 (in 1996).

Anyhow, upon discovering that today is World Book Day, I hit Google to see what I was missing. Not much it seems. I discovered, for example, that the Department of Education in Western Australia thought that March 1* was World Book Day. Hmm … yes it was, but in the United Kingdom. Several others thought the same. The English, it seems, are doing such a great job of promoting their celebration of World Book Day that they have confused we Antipodeans!

So what is World Book Day all about? Here is a description from UNESCO:

It is observed by millions of people in over 100 countries, in hundreds of voluntary organizations, schools, public bodies, professional groups and private businesses.  … World Book and Copyright Day has won over a considerable number of people from every continent and all cultural backgrounds to the cause of books and copyright. It has enabled them to discover, make the most of and explore in greater depth a multitude of aspects of the publishing world: books as vectors of values and knowledge, and depositories of the intangible heritage; books as windows onto the diversity of cultures and as tools for dialogue; books as sources of material wealth and copyright-protected works of creative artists. All of these aspects have been the subject of numerous awareness-raising and promotional initiatives that have had a genuine impact. There must nevertheless be no let-up in these efforts.

Oh dear … Australia could perhaps lift its game a little.  After some careful searching of the National Year of Reading 2012 website, I finally found a link to the World Book Night (which says that it will be celebrated in the UK, Ireland, Germany and the USA). I found no press releases or reports on World Book Day activities involving our first Children’s Laureates. And Google didn’t turn up anything from booksellers or publishers.

However, my favourite radio station, ABC Radio National, knew it was today … and posted so on Facebook! To commemorate it, they asked their Facebook fans what they were reading and got 12 responses (by early evening, anyhow). And BookTown Australia has a web page on World Book Day. They suggest “that the enthusiastic focus on Book Week later in the year and … the proximity to ANZAC Day (April 25)” are reasons for minimal observance in Australia. They would like this to change:

One aim of BookTown Australia is to give World Book Day a context to be celebrated in Australia and link it to the international community of booktowns. Using World Book Day as the commencement of the One Town – One Book community reading programs is seen as viable means of doing so, especially as the reading program can then culminate in August to coincide with Children’s Book Week. On World Book Day (April 23) in Australia in years to come, any community – village, town suburb or city – can be a “booktown” on that day, simply by declaring its participation in the reading program with the announcement of their chosen book.

This was probably written in 2002 and there’s nothing on the site to suggest that anything significant has eventuated. And yet, the day does seem like a great opportunity to make a bit of a splash – to promote our writers, to encourage reading, to stimulate discussion about copyright and books in the new digital environment.

The theme for the 2012 World Book Day is Books and Translation. At first glance this is not, really, a comfortable fit for we Australian readers who live in an anglo-centric island nation. And yet, it could be an opportunity to draw attention to the diversity in our population and how reading translated literature can help us learn about and understand our non-English speaking compatriots.

I’m afraid I’ve rambled a bit today (more than usual, anyhow!) because I’m a little flummoxed. Does anyone have any experience of World Book Day – in Australia or elsewhere? Are we so over-run with UN-designated World Days and International Years that they’ve just become too much noise?

* Apparently, while most countries keep to the April 23 date, there are some that don’t, including the United Kingdom. This year they celebrated it on March 1. I was intrigued to discover that the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford dedicated their celebration of World Book Day this year to Jane Austen. They had a display, a reception, and two talks, one of which was on a sequel (not PD James’s though)!

Chris Flynn, A tiger in Eden (Review)

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Flynn Tiger in Eden
Courtesy: Text Publishing

Are all people redeemable, regardless of what they’ve done? This is the question that confronts us in Chris Flynn’s debut novel, A tiger in Eden. I wondered, as I was reading this book, what inspired Flynn to write – in first person – about a man who was a violent thug during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and how he managed to achieve such an authentic voice. I don’t read reviews before I read books, and I didn’t read the press release which came with the book until I’d finished it, but when I did I discovered that Flynn was born in Belfast during the period he writes about. “I was born into the war and knew nothing else growing up”, he says.

He has seen horror, he says. He has had guns pointed at him, and he has heard “stories of torture and cruelty so nightmarish I would not recount them to someone who had grown up outside of Northern Ireland. You don’t want that in your head”. This, however, is the world of Flynn’s protagonist, the thug-on-the-run, Billy Montgomery, whose head is full of violent memories and whose hands are stained with blood. “Sometimes”, he says, “I reckon the worst thing that can happen to a person is surviving”.

I don’t want to say too much about the story because it’s a slim book with a small cast of characters and a pretty straightforward plot. To say too much would give it away. It’s set in Thailand in the mid 1990s. The aforesaid thug Billy, who is not short of a penny due to his criminal past, is hiding out. But, here’s the interesting thing. Billy is a sympathetic character, despite the violence we know he’s done (though we don’t know the full extent until near the end) and even despite the violence we see him enact in the first half of the novel. He’s sympathetic because we realise early on that he’s trying to work through something, that he’s carrying some terrible baggage he wants to shake off.

It’s the mark of a good writer to be able to make an unappealing character sympathetic. And Billy is pretty unappealing. Not only is there his violent past, but his attitude to women is (or, at least has been) appalling, as has been his attitude to Catholics and various other “lesser”, to him, members of society. But, this book is really about the education of young Billy and so, through the love of a couple of good women (which is, yes, a little corny) and some other meaningful encounters, a Buddhist retreat, and reading, Billy starts to think about his life and, consequently, starts to confront his demons.

One of the things that makes Billy work is his voice. The novel is told first person in the vernacular of his ilk. This means there’s liberal use of swear words*, minimal punctuation, and the grammar is, shall we say, idiosyncratic. The result is a voice that sounds authentic – and, in this case, reliable. The only thing stopping Billy from telling the truth at times is the pain it would release.

Billy is, of course, the tiger in Eden, a potential threat to good people everywhere, but just to give it some added real and metaphoric punch, Flynn has our Billy confronting and staring down an actual tiger, an escapee from a zoo (just like Billy really). However, whilst I say Billy is “the” tiger in Eden, he is not the “only” tiger in Eden. Flynn shows Thailand to be a place spoilt if not corrupted by sex-tourists and cashed-up back-packers who abuse the locals one way or another. Here is Billy after realising that a genuine friends-only outing with a local Thai girl threatens her reputation:

The aul sex tourism had changed things for all these people, I could see that now ‘cos normal life no longer existed. It was kind of like how the Troubles had changed things back home, once you go down that road, sure there’s nothing going back, everything gets changed forever and not for the better. I felt ashamed so I did.

In other words, while Flynn’s main story is men like Billy, he manages to make a few other points along the way.

At the beginning of this post I said that the book confronts us with the question of redemption, and so it does, but that’s not so much what Billy is seeking. He does not specifically ask to be “saved”. He simply wants to be able – psychologically and actually – to put the past behind him and “make something” of his life. This is not a perfect book. It’s somewhat predictable and the supporting characters are not well fleshed out, but Billy is a character that will engage you and make you see the world from another angle. And isn’t that what reading is all about?

Chris Flynn
A tiger in Eden
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012
217pp.
ISBN: 9781921922039

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

* So it’s not the book for you if that offends.

Monday musings on Australian literature: What value literary awards?

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If you are an Australian reader, you have probably heard that the new Premier of Queensland, Campbell Newman, has abolished the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. This was a shock as it had not been flagged during the election. His reason? To save some $250,000, as part of the Liberal National Party’s promised cost-cutting drive!

It was a wry moment for me when I heard the news, because only a few days before the announcement, I had pondered in my post about Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature whether, with the Festival becoming an annual event, South Australia would finally have an annual literary award, like most other Australian states.

Queensland’s literary awards program has been running since 1999 and is (hmm, was) one of the most comprehensive literary awards programs in Australia. It offers (offered) prizes in fourteen or fifteen categories, which included unpublished manuscripts, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, unpublished indigenous writers and fiction. Many of our significant writers have benefited from these awards, including Helen Garner, Alexis Wright, Tim Winton, Thea Astley, Nam Le, David Malouf, Judith Beveridge, Peter Carey, and Les Murray.

Australians will know that many of these award winners are not Queenslanders and their winning books were not necessarily about Queensland. Does this matter? All (I think) of Australia’s state-based awards are not state-limited in their criteria. I think that’s a good thing, though I can see arguments for limiting them to their states just as we have awards for women, for young writers, for indigenous writers, for unpublished works. What I don’t think is a good thing is to do away with awards. Awards for creative endeavours are always fraught. There are no objective standards to judge artistic creations by. But, this doesn’t mean they don’t have value – for the winners, for the short- and longlisted authors, and for the industry as a whole.

There are supporters of the decision. One is blogger Mark Fletcher who argues that these awards are “vanity projects” for Premiers and that “there are more significant funding opportunities for the arts in Queensland than the award: the end of the award does not mean the end of arts funding in Queensland”. Opponents, on the other hand, fear that this is the thin end of the wedge and that more cuts to arts funding are coming. Time will tell …

The topic has already been discussed on Australian blogs. Here are just a very few:

  • Angela Meyer of LiteraryMinded talks of the value of the prize to writers, publishers and booksellers
  • crikey.com calls it a sad announcement
  • Jeff Sparrow in Overland argues that this may be the harbinger of more cuts as more conservative governments gain power in Australia. He suggests that “There’s an urgent need for a new defence of literature, arguments that are neither philistine populism nor patronizing elitism but instead make the case why writing should matter to ordinary people. It’s something we’ve traditionally been very bad at. We need to get much better, very quickly.”
  • Lisa Hills of ANZLitLovers advises that the awards will be made with or without prize money and provides the link for submissions.
  • skepticlawyer describes plans by authors Matthew Condon and Krissy Kneen to continue the awards, probably using the law of trusts – and provides a link to their Facebook page for the awards.

I think that’s enough. You get the drift I’m sure. But, I wonder, what do you think about Literary Awards. Are they worth defending? What do awards mean to you, as a reader?

Merlinda Bobis, Fish-hair woman (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 34 Comments

Merlinda Bobis Fish-hair woman

Courtesy: Spinifex Press

How do you classify a book like Fish-hair woman by Filipino-Australian writer, Merlinda Bobis? Darned if I know, but I’ll have a go. It’s part war story, murder mystery, political thriller, romance, and historical epic. It draws on the magical realist tradition of writers like Isabel Allende, but overarching all this, it is a book about stories – about the stories we cleave to ourselves and the stories we tell others, the stories that convey the truth and the ones that hide it, the stories that change with time and those that never change.

But enough preamble, let’s get to the action. The book is set in the Philippines, with the core story taking place in a village called Iraya in 1987. It is a time of civil unrest: government soldiers fight communist insurgents (the historical New People’s Army), with privately-controlled armies added to the mix. The villagers are caught in the middle, struggling to survive under

violence dressed as salvation. What hopeful word, the sibilants a gentle hush: salvacion. The soldiers and the rebels spoke of this same cause, even as they remained in opposite camps and our village festered in between.

The central characters are Estrella, the fish-hair woman who uses her 12-metres-long hair like a net to retrieve the dead from the river (“trawl another victim of our senseless war”); her older “sister”, Pilar, who joins the communist insurgents; and Tony, the Australian journalist whom both had loved. These relationships are complicated by the fact that Estrella, whose mother died at the birth, is the illegitimate daughter of the most powerful man in the village, Mayor Kiko Estraderos (aka Doctor Alvarado), the man who runs the private army.

While the main action occurs in 1987, the time-frame moves between 1977, 1987 and 1997, with the story being mostly told from the perspective of 1997. By this time Pilar and Tony are among the dead or disappeared and Tony’s 19-year-old son Luke has been lured to the Philippines, on the pretext that his father is alive, by Kiko who wishes to “sanitise history and facilitate his return to politics”.

It’s a multi-layered story of political unrest, complicated village loyalties, and familial and romantic love. It is told in first person and third person, with changing points of view.  Sometimes we see through Estrella’s eyes, sometimes Luke’s, sometimes an omnipotent narrator’s or another character’s, and occasionally through newspaper clippings. Woven through it are recurring images and smells – the sweet lemongrass tainted by the corpse-laden river, the fireflies that light the dead so they can be found, and Estrella’s long hair that magically grows each time she senses violence and pain.

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 Badge

Australian Women Writers Challenge (Design: Book’dout – Shelleyrae)

This is one of those books that requires you to go with the flow. Its structure mimics the way we layer stories, the way we weave history and myth, stories and memories, so that at any one time we may or may not know where we are or who we are. Estrella, the fish-hair woman, and Stella, Doctor Kiko’s daughter, for example, are different facets of the same person, each with different stories.

There are simpler characters, too. One is Pay Inyo, the village gravedigger. He reminded me a little of the grandfather in Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village. He’s the peaceful man, the wise one who urges a humane path, who says it’s about perspective, “about how and from where you look … how far … and what you will to see”. But even he is unsure about the story:

But who is the hero in this story? Pay Inyo is not sure anymore, nor is he sure about what the story is in the first place. There are too many stories weaving into each other, only to unweave themselves at each telling, so that each story can claim prominence. Stories are such jealous things. The past and the present, ay, what wayward strands.

There were times, as I read, when I thought that Bobis may have created a few too many “wayward strands”. Some stories may not have been critical to tell, but her voice is so compelling and the language so expressive that I didn’t really begrudge her these, because by then I was well and truly along for the ride.

This is a novel set during war and yet it is not really about war. It is about people, “those whom we love and hate”, about how we use and manipulate stories to “save” or ” kill”, and, as Pay Inyo would like us to see, about collective grieving, collective responsibility:

This is the wake of the world: each of us standing around a pool that we have collected for centuries. We are looking in with our little pails … We try to find only what is ours. We wring our hands. Ay, how to go home with only my undiluted pail of grief? To wash my rice with or my babies, to drink? But the water is my dead kin, an enemy, a beloved, a stranger, a friend, someone who loved me or broke my heart. How to tell them apart? How to cleave water from water?

For all the sadness and brutality in this book, it has a big heart. And its message is clear. We are all in this together. How much better if we see it sooner rather than later.

Merlinda Bobis
Fish-hair woman
North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2011
303pp
ISBN: 1876756977

(Review copy supplied by Spinifex Press)