Australian literature

Shaun Tan, Eric

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Shaun Tan, Eric cover

Eric bookcover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

When I bought Eric on a whim the other day (as you do!), I didn’t realise that it had been excerpted from Shaun Tan’s Tales from outer suburbia which I haven’t yet read, but have given to others. That’s okay though, because it means  that I’ve finally read a little of Shaun Tan, something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

Shaun Tan is an Australian multi-award-winning artist-writer (or is it writer-artist?) who has published books, worked in theatre and film, and had his work adapted by such luminaries as the Australian Chamber Orchestra. He is one versatile man! His best known works include The arrival (a wordless graphic novel about migrants) and Tales from outer suburbia (an anthology of 15 short illustrated stories about all sorts of strange things that happen in suburbia).

Eric picks up on what I believe is one of Tan’s common themes, that of being different or strange, an outsider. It is about a foreign exchange student who comes to stay with a family in – yes – suburbia, and how they all get along.

Tan’s is not a negative presentation – at least, not here. The mostly monochromatic drawings are whimsical and all focus on Eric, the visiting student, while the text is in the voice of a child of the house. The story is about tolerance and acceptance of what you don’t understand. It’s also about expectations that aren’t met – but accepting the things that happen instead. As Mum says in the book, “It must be a cultural thing”. Overall, it’s about the fact that other can reside with other – and yet it also allows discomfort and incomprehension to be an acceptable feeling.

This sounds like a simple book, and in some ways it is, but it’s not simplistic. Producing it as a gift-edition like this is a lovely idea. It will, I hope, introduce more people to Shaun Tan and his rather unique view on the world. It has certainly whetted my appetite.

Shaun Tan
Eric
Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010
[48pp.]
ISBN: 9781742372921

Alex Miller, Lovesong

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Alex Miller, Lovesong

Lovesong bookcover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Lovesong is my first Alex Miller novel, which is a bit embarrassing, really, given that he has won the Miles Franklin Award twice.

John was the quiet type … Except when he was telling me his story. Even then there was something quiet and private in the way he spoke about himself and Sabiha; as if he was telling himself the story; going over it to find its meaning for himself. Looking for something he’d missed when it was happening to him.

As you can probably tell from this quote, Lovesong is one of those story-within-a-story novels. Its basic plot is fairly simple. John, an Australian, tells the story of his life in Paris with his Tunisian wife, Sabiha, to Ken, a retired novelist. Retired? Well, so he says, but can he resist a good story when he hears one?

John and Sabiha’s love story is not exactly straightforward, which is foreshadowed early in the novel when Ken first meets Sabiha and notes “a sadness in the depths of her dark brown eyes”. He begins to wonder about “her story”. Adding a little complexity to this is a loose parallel in Ken’s life. He lives with his 38-year-old daughter, Clare, who during the novel starts a love affair of her own. Sabiha is, coincidentally, about 38 when the “crisis” in her life occurs. There are other parallels in the novel, such as Sabiha’s aunt Houria and her marriage to Dom, and Ken’s marriage to his wife Marie. Again, these are loose. They provide depth and perspective rather than the direct commentary that parallels often seem to do.

This is a surely structured novel. Miller manages to be simultaneously subtle and obvious so that you are conscious of being led along, but you are not always sure where to or what it might mean. Early in the novel, Clare tells her father that “Love is never simple”. A little later, Sabiha’s father reflects on his daughter and wonders, rather more prophetically than he realises, what “makes some people so different from others that they cannot share a common fortune with them”.  Alongside these early thematic hints is a whole slew of comments about story-telling and writing, about story-telling as “confession”, as “craving for absolution”, as, in fact, catharsis. In other words, the novel is also self-consciously metafictional, which is not surprising given that the first person narrator, Ken, is a novelist.

Meanwhile, there is John and Sabiha’s actual story – and again, the plotting is sure. We learn early that Sabiha wants just one child, “her child. There was only one”. And we learn of her closeness to her maternal grandmother. These two things, dropped lightly in the book, play a significant role in the development of the plot.

The novel is full of irony, starting with the title and its romantic connotations being undercut by other sorts of songs. And there is this from Sabiha’s aunt Houria:

Don’t try sorting out the rest of your life tonight, darling. You’ll see, it’ll all work out in the most unexpected ways.

This is doubly ironic because, eventually, Sabiha does attempt to sort out her life, rather than let it work out, and the result, while giving her what she wants, is also not what she expected. What’s that adage? Be careful what you wish for? And yet, that’s not what the novel is about. It’s not a cautionary tale. Rather, without being coy, it’s a meditation on the mystery and power of love – and, I would say, on innocence and experience in its many guises.

But it’s about other things too, such as the importance of home and place. Both Sabiha and John spend much of their lives living away from their respective homes. Ken, at the novel’s start, has just returned from spending time in Venice and is trying to decide whether to return. It’s also about Life – and the inevitability of change: “Change being forced on them, even as they stood still”. John feels it, Ken feels it.

But again and again, we come back to stories and storytelling. Partway through the novel Ken thinks:

There were things I could have added to his story, but I didn’t want to make it up this time. The truth is … I have never really liked making it up. My imagination, such as it is, needs the facts to feed off. I could see the directions I might go in with John and Sabiha’s story, but I resisted. I wanted to hear the truth from John.

And yet, it is not so simple as it sounds. At the end, he wonders:

I had her story now, but it is one thing to have a story and another to write it. How was I to articulate the delicate complexities that must give weight and depth and beauty to her story, those things that most easily elude us?

I found Lovesong an engrossing read. Its writing engaged me, it’s accessible, and it tells a great story, while also exploring the art and meaning of storytelling. I am left though with one question: Whose story is it to tell?

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also liked this book. You can read her review here.

Alex Miller
Lovesong
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009
368pp.
ISBN: 9781742371290

Thea Astley, The multiple effects of rain shadow (Review)

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There are two main reasons why I like – actually love – to read Thea Astley. One is her language, her wonderful way with words that may, at times, be over-the-top but that is never clichéd. The other is her passion for the underdog, and thus for social justice in a world where it is often conspicuously absent.

Island, Palm and Sun

Island with palm, because Penguin will not answer emails regarding bookcover use (Courtesy: OCAL, via clker.com)

The multiple effects of rainshadow is Astley’s second last novel. Its overall subject matter is, as one character says late in the book, “the unmoored behaviour of humans”, an effective image given the book’s central motif is an island. It has a very loose plot which is based on an actual event that occurred on Palm Island in 1930. Palm Island was, at that time, essentially a dumping ground for Indigenous Australians deemed to be “problems”, but the event in question concerned the white superintendent, mad with grief at the recent death of his wife, running amok and setting fire to buildings (including his own home in which his children were sleeping). He was eventually shot (and killed) by an Indigenous man under the (cowardly) order of the white deputy superintendent. The novel explores, through multiple points of view and over a period of around 30 years, the impact of this event on six white people who were present on the island at the time – but interspersed between these voices is the voice of Manny, the man who shot the super. This is, I think, a pretty risky thing to do but Astley is not one to shy away from risks in her writing.

The voices are, in chapter order:

  • Manny Cooktown, first person, the indigenous “shooter” and main narrator who commences the story and appears between each voice, but does not conclude the novel
  • Mrs Curthoys, first person, landlady on Palm Island at the time of the incident
  • Gerald Morrow, third person, writer/editor who had gone to the Island to work as a foreman, for which he had no skill or experience, and who was in fact escaping the Island in a boat at the time of the incident
  • Captain Brodie, third person, the Superintendant who ran amok and was shot by Manny
  • Mr Vine, third person, a school teacher on the Island at the time of the incident
  • Father Donellan, third person, priest who visits regularly from the mainland and is responsible for the Island’s religious “needs”
  • Leonie née Curthoys, first person, daughter of Mrs Curthoys and so on the Island at the time of the incident
  • Omniscient author who carries the last chapter

Looks complex eh? But in fact it’s pretty straightforward in terms of knowing who is who, as each voice “manages” its own chapter. The chronology is a little trickier as many of the characters (let’s call them that from now on) flip between their present (some are writing from many years after the event) and the past. Did you notice that the first person voices belong to the two groups most recognised by Astley as disadvantaged: women and indigenous Australians? A subtle but clever use of her narrative structure to give them a voice!

The setting is, after all, very much a white patriarchal world, and marriage is seen in that light. Vine, for example, is told to get a wife  for

‘The boring bits. You know. Meals. Washing. Shopping. Kids. All that sort of thing. A man hasn’t time for that sort of thing.’

‘Why not a housekeeper, then?’

‘You are green. Cost too much …’

Not surprisingly Mrs Curthoys and Leonie do not find marriage much to their liking. The main underdogs in this novel though are the indigenous people, many of whom are brought to the Island – and therefore separated from their country – as problems, and are treated with disdain at best and real cruelty at worst by most of the white residents (from 1918 when the settlement begins to 1957 when the book closes). Astley offers, I’m afraid, little hope. She is not a cheery writer: her goal is to shock us into attention – and that she does. However, I can imagine some critics accusing her of putting contemporary views about feminism and indigenous relations in characters’ mouths. I would argue though that contemporary ideas do not spring from a vacuum, and that therefore the occasional more sensitive/egalitarian views expressed in the novel are historically valid.

I said at the beginning of this review that one of the main reasons I like Thea Astley is her language, so here are some examples of her imagery:

…whistlestop hamlets scattered along briefly tarred roads that led to further sprawls moated by loneliness …  [from school-teacher Vine, heading to a country school]

And I am weary of  a Celtic charm that is shaken like spice over any dish within gulping reach. We bore each other rancid. [Leonie on marriage and her philandering husband]

At least I’ll have tried. At least I’ll be learning to decline the gumleaf, conjugate the seasons. [Vine’s “do-gooder” son Matthew]

She also effectively mixes up the rhythm to make points or convey feeling, using short snappy sentences, repetition of phrases (such as Morrow’s “swing dip drag” as he sails across the sea), and punctuation-free streams of consciousness:

There was an unalterable plane geometry to his movements: the clock the tea/toast the clock the bell the classroom the toted piles of exercise books the bell the repeated texts the stale jokes the texts the bell the common-room bitchings the clock the bell … the … the … [schoolteacher Vine]

Astley is often quite self-conscious about the act and role of writing, and this is certainly the case in this novel. I’ll give just one example, the bitter rant of failed writer Gerald Morrow, who is jealous of the success of another, to him, lesser writer:

There must be a million readers out there who crave boredom! Who love the dangling participle! Who wallow in truisms and fatuous theorisings! … Slap in your popular aphorisms, buddy, but don’t make ’em think!

You could never accuse Astley of not making you think, but there has to be some irony here, some little sense of self-deprecation even, in the fact that she put these words in the mouth of a failed writer, as if she knew that for all her passion there’s only so much you can achieve with words. That may be so, but Astley has given it a darned good try!

Thea Astley
The multiple effects of rainshadow
Camberwell: Penguin, 1996
296pp.
ISBN:  9780143180265

Miles Franklin shortlist for 2010

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It seems vaguely silly for all we bloggers to be announcing the same thing – except that perhaps each of us has a slightly different readership so maybe it’s not completely redundant for me to announce here what has already been announced elsewhere – at Musings of a Literary Dilettante.

The Dilettante has provided links to the Judges’ comments, so please check out his link (here) if you’d like to see them. The shortlist though is:

  • Alex Miller’s Lovesong
  • Brian Castro’s The bath fugues
  • Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones
  • Deborah Forster’s The book of Emmett
  • Peter Temple’s Truth
  • Sonya Hartnett’s Butterfly

To date, I’ve still only read Jasper Jones, though Lovesong is creeping up the pile!

Now the fun – and the wait – really begin.

On the literary road, in north-east Victoria

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Last year I wrote a couple of posts about places of literary interest that we passed through on a road trip. Here is another such post, again using The Oxford literary guide to Australia as my main source.

Yarrawonga, Vic

Lake Mulwala at dusk

Lake Mulwala at dusk

Yarrawonga was where, on this trip, we hit Victoria first. It is a twin town with Mulwala which is on the New South Wales side of the border. The border, here, is formed by Lake Mulwala which was created by a dam built on the Murray River in 1939. This lake is rather eerie due to the dead tree trunks protruding from its waters. This however is not its literary connection, which is, really, a bit of a far fetch. The town features in the poem, “Night vision, Yarrawonga” by Christine Churches who, from what I can see, never really lived there.  Oh well, it gets the town in the book – and these lines are rather evocative of the slow flowing Murray and its eucalyptus lined banks:

At sunset we came to the river
slow water feeding through the trees

Chiltern, Vic

Lake View House, Chiltern (built 1870)

Lake View House, Chiltern (built 1870)

This pretty little town’s literary credential is far less arguable as the significant Australian writer Henry Handel Richardson spent part of her childhood here, and the house, Lake View, in which she lived, still stands. In her autobiography, Richardson says this is where she first smelt wattles in bloom. (For more on Henry Handel Richardson in Victoria, check out ANZLitLovers here).

Beechworth, Vic

Beechworth Courthouse

Beechworth Courthouse, est. 1858, where Ned Kelly was committed to stand trial for murder

Beechworth’s big claim to fame is that the Australian outlaw, Ned Kelly, was first jailed here! However, it also has “real” literary connections as several novelists lived or visited here, including Henry Kingsley (brother of the English novelist Charles Kingsley), Mary Gaunt, Ada Cambridge, Ronald McKie and David Martin.

I’ve only read one of these, Ada Cambridge. She was a prolific writer but, like many of our early (turn of the century) women writers, receives far less attention than she deserves. She was a strong woman who often tackled issues that were close to women’s hearts but not deemed proper for the clergyman’s wife that she was. I was surprised and delighted when I first read her in the 1980s – and horrified that I had not known of her before.

Here ends the formal literary highlights of this most recent trip! Informal “literary” highlights had more to do with signs and town names. I will leave you with just one that tickled our fancy:

Road sign for Burrumbuttock

Road sign for Burrumbuttock (Photo: Courtesy Carolyn I)

Burrumbuttock, NSW, is, apparently, affectionately known as “Burrum”. Seems sensible to me!

Peter Pierce (ed)
The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 (rev ed)
501pp.
ISBN: 0195536223

The other Jane

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Lady Jane Franklin

Lady Jane Franklin (Presumed public domain, via Wikipedia)

Those of you who have read a bit of my blog will know that I am a big Jane Austen fan, and so when you see the name Jane in a post’s title you would not be wrong to assume that it’s about her. However, over the last decade another Jane has been coming to my attention. She’s not a writer, unless a lifetime of journal-writing counts, but she was born during Jane Austen’s time, and is a fascinating woman. Her name is Lady Jane Franklin (1791-1875), and these are the ways I’ve been meeting her:

  • Andrea Barrett’s The voyage of the Narwhal, dealing with one of the expeditions which set out to find Lady Jane’s missing explorer husband, Sir John Franklin, was the first thing I read that brought her truly to my consciousness;
  • Matthew Kneale’s English passengers in which as I recollect she is portrayed as the rather strange wife of the Governor;
  • Richard Flanagan’s Wanting which partly explores the Franklins’ time in Van Dieman’s Land and, in particular, their disastrous adoption of the little indigenous girl, Mathinna;
  • Resident Judge’s reviews of  Lady Franklin’s revenge by Ken McGoogan and This errant lady by Penny Russell;
  • Adrienne Eberhard’s Jane, Lady Franklin, a poetry collection written in the persona of Lady Jane (and given to me this year by my Tasmanian-based historian brother); and
  • Silkweed’s Lady Jane Franklin: an examined life, a musical-theatrical-visual presentation of her life, which I saw this weekend at the National Folk Festival.

Silkweed’s website describes her thus:

a woman ahead of her time; she was an explorer and adventurer, a prolific diarist and wife of Sir John Franklin, Arctic explorer and one-time Governor of Tasmania. John Franklin died searching for the North-West passage and his widow spent her later years ensuring his place in the history books.

Their production had some rough edges and is still, I think, being developed, but it was thoroughly engaging and made me finally realise that this is one rather astonishing woman. So, what have these various “sources” told me about Lady Jane? Well, first and foremost that she was a strong, intelligent woman who was intellectually curious and adventurous, who was ambitious for her husband whom she had married in her late thirties, and who had a lot of energy much of which she channelled into all sorts of plans for improvement or “doing good”. She was, paradoxically, both ahead of her times and firmly planted in them. For example, in Wanting she is presented as a childless woman who genuinely wanted to do the right thing by Mathinna but who really had no idea. For a woman who was ahead of her times in so many things, she was not so when it came to raising children or understanding the real needs of indigenous people.

I am well and truly intrigued now … and will try to read more about her, but for now I’ll end with some lines from the first poem in Eberhard’s book. The poem describes her well-documented plans to rid Tasmania of snakes and ends with:

No. For all this work,
this hatching of plans
– catching, dispatching –
when I close my eyes
the snakes multiply.

The Franklins did not have a smooth path in Tasmania, and their plans to create a “model society” failed, due partly to the machinations of self-interested others. I cannot help thinking that it’s not coincidental that Eberhard opens her collection with the failure of Lady Jane’s snake-removal plan, as there were indeed snakes in that grass.

David Malouf, Ransom

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David Malouf reading Ransom

Malouf reading Ransom, National Library of Australia, August 2009

Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose on the world. (p. 61)

Is risk-taking only the province of the young? Do desperate times call for desperate measures? Or, more to the point, can the impossible be made possible? These are some of the questions that form the core of David Malouf’s most recent novel, Ransom.

WARNING: Spoiler if you don’t know the Iliad!

Ransom, as I wrote in my post last year, is Malouf’s re-visioning of the section of the Iliad (from Books 16-24) which chronicles Patroclus’ death at the hands of the Trojans, Achilles’ revenge killing of the Trojan prince Hector and his subsequent abuse of Hector’s body, and Priam’s visiting Achilles to ask for his son’s body back. Malouf says that he wanted to suggest a new kind of human, non-heroic consciousness, by re-visioning how Priam does this through deciding “do something extraordinary” (Malouf’s words). As Priam discusses with his wife Hecuba

I believe … that the thing that is needed to cut this knot we are all tied up in is something that has never before been done or thought of. Something impossible. Something new. (p. 58)

and

there might be another way of naming what we call fortune and attribute to the will, or the whim of the gods. Which offers a kind of opening. The opportunity to act for ourselves. To try something that might force events into a different course. (p. 61)

Ah, I thought, here is going to be Malouf’s vision (or recipe even) for our conflict ridden times. He wants to show, through Priam’s desire to do “something impossible. Something new” that  there is another way of managing conflict. But sadly, that is not what he is about. Sure, Priam does do something audacious – he enters Achilles’ compound as an ordinary man on a plain mule-driven cart driven by an even more ordinary man, the humble carter, Somax. But, I was disappointed, because after a lovely interval of humanity the story plays out as it always does with Achilles dying, and Priam being brutally killed by Achilles’ son. What I hoped Malouf was setting me up for wasn’t his goal at all. It was something both bigger and smaller. Smaller because he is not (really) making a political statement for our times, and bigger because he re-visions the story as one of humans rather than of heroes, and as one in which humans can be self-directed rather than at the whim of the gods. There is some irony here though because, as well as being accompanied by the humble Somax, he is for a while escorted by the god Hermes who facilitates their entry into Achilles’ compound. I did wonder about the meaning of this unlikely trio – common man, king, god – but it is in the original and so is not really part of a new message. That said, this is, as I am sure you are starting to realise, quite a complex book despite its small size – and I am only going to touch the surface here.

Some of the loveliest parts of the book are in fact the most human ones, such as the conversation Priam has with Hecuba when he reveals his idea, and Priam’s journey with Somax in which he learns to enjoy ordinary human (as against royal) pleasures. (“It had done him good, all that, body and spirit both”).

In the end after a beautifully rendered meeting with the conflicted Achilles, Priam achieves his goal and brings Hector’s body back for burial. It is a triumph of his vision, but

It is only a provisional triumph, of course; the gods are not to be trusted when they tilt the balance momentarily in your behaviour. And what sort of triumph is it to be bringing home the body of a son? But he has done something for which he will be remembered for as long as such stories are told …

Yes, he is “a man remade” because he has done a “deed that till now was never attempted”. Achilles too has been transformed (at least for a while): he is “visited by a lightness that is both new and a return”. But, and unfortunately there is a but, the story plays out as it always has…

So, what is it all about – besides, that is, the underlying themes relating to fathers and sons, grief, will versus fate, and humanity versus the gods? Perhaps it is simply this, that you can dare to try the impossible, and you can triumph. How big that triumph is, how long it lasts, is perhaps not the right question. The right question is the original one, “Dare I dream, and dare I do it?” It is also about the power of stories. Priam’s action will now be remembered “for as long as such stories are told”, while his killer, Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, is not so lucky. The murder is a messy one and so “for him … however the story is told and elaborated, the raw shame of it will be with him now till his last breath”.

David Malouf Ransom

UK edition cover (Used by permission of the Random House Group)

In its rather ironic and paradoxical way, then, Ransom is redemptive … and is beautiful for all that. And yet, I do have this little nagging feeling that I’d have liked it to have been a little more. I did in fact want a recipe for our times, a suggestion that we can move our humanity forwards!

David Malouf
Ransom
North Sydney: Knopf, 2009
224pp.
ISBN: 9781741668377

Helen Garner, The children’s Bach

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I’ve said a few times now that I rarely reread books, and then go on to write about something I’ve re-read. I must look like a liar, but the fact is that if I’ve liked a book so much that I’ve reread it it’s likely to find its way here. The funny thing is, though, that my reason for rereading The children’s Bach was not so much because I loved it first time around (though I did enjoy it) but because I read a critic who described it as one of the four best short novels – ever! It’s hard to ignore a commendation like that, isn’t it? And so I read it again …

It’s set in Melbourne, and concerns a couple, Athena and Dexter, who lead a self-sufficient life with their two sons, one of whom is severely disabled. This apparently comfortable life is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, from Dexter’s past. With Elizabeth come her sister Vicki, her sometime lover Philip, and his prepubescent daughter Poppy. Through them, Athena and Dexter are drawn into a world whose ideas and values test the foundations of their relationship.*

This sounds like a pretty standard plot, but from it Garner draws something quite special, something tight and marvelously observed, and something, in the way that Garner has, that is brutally honest. This is the thing that I admire about her most – even though I don’t always agree with her: she doesn’t flinch from unpleasant “truths”. And so, in this book, she tackles the challenge of parenting a severely disabled child. While there are people who talk about the joy and meaning a disabled child brings to their lives there are others who feel quite differently. This is the shock at the centre of this book.

Garner introduces a sense of uneasiness right at the beginning with a photo of Tennyson and his family (why Tennyson, I’m not quite sure) which shows them together but not quite together and which is described simply as “the photo of a family”. The photo is old but Dexter keeps sticking it back up again. This beginning is followed by a fairly idealised image of Dexter and Athena as a loving, supportive couple – “she loved him. They loved each other” (p. 4) – and then Garner slowly reveals the cracks. Dexter’s idealisation of Athena is one cause, but the disabled child who holds Athena back, is another. The arrival of Elizabeth and her entourage – with their different and challenging ways of viewing the world – is just the catalyst.

Athena’s harsh attitude regarding Billy, her disabled son, is psychologically real, but is shocking to see in a character who is idealised as the earth-mother. Our readerly assumptions take a knock! Early in the story Athena looks at handprinted cards of places for rent:

… Athena was … scanning the window covered in handprinted cards on which people advertised rooms to let in their rented houses. Athena lived, for as long as it took to read a card, in each sunny cottage, each attractive older-style flat, spacious house, quaint old terrace, large balcony room with fireplace, collective household with thriving veggie garden. Her children dematerialised, her husband died painlessly in a fall from a mountain. What curtains she would sew, what private order she would establish and maintain, what handfuls of flowers she would stick in vegemite jars, how sweetly and deeply she would sleep, and between what fresh sheets.

This could be typical daydreaming but it’s pretty specific in detail (children dematerialised, husband dead): it’s Garner telling us that Athena feels trapped and is ready for change. Then Philip comes along and she is attracted to him; she’s not morally repulsed the way Dexter is by his behaviour: “Dexter lay rigid as a board … but Athena slept, and dreamed that she was in a garden….”.

And so, Garner writes, “The edifice crumbles”. The cracks have been there, in the edifice, but Dexter is (has been) oblivious to them. He’s a kind man but he’s pretty unaware of how other people feel; he expects them all to see life as simply, as happily as he does. But this is not the case – as he finds out …

All this is told in tight, expressive language.  Here is a delicious description of Dexter’s mother:

Like many women of her age whose opinions, when they were freshly thought and expressed, had never received the attention they deserved, Mrs Fox had slid away into a habit of monologue, a stream of mild words which concealed the bulk of thought and knowledge as babbling water hides submerged boulders. (p. 101)

Garner focuses on the gap between appearance and reality, particularly regarding the problems of idealisation (of self and/or of other). Athena is idealised but is shown to have feet of clay; Dexter is also idealised and idealises himself – until his own fall from grace: “he was in its moral universe now, and he could never go back”.

We can read this book in two – not totally exclusive – ways. One is psychological and relates to the realisation of self, particularly for Athena. The other is social and relates to role definitions, again particularly for Athena in terms of the expectations of her as wife and mother. One of the things that Garner tends to do well, in fact, is explore the point where social expectations of how we should feel meet and often clash with our real emotional selves. We see this clearly in The spare room where the character Helen shocks us with her anger at her dying friend.

I have really only touched the surface of this book – there is the music motif to consider, and the conflict of values represented by the intrusion of Elizabeth and her entourage into Dexter and Athena’s world – but I have talked about some of the issues that grabbed my attention and that, I think, will do!

* This is, essentially, the plot summary I wrote a couple of years ago for the Wikipedia article on the book.

Helen Garner
The children’s Bach
Penguin Modern Classics, 2008 (first published 1984)
180pp.
ISBN: 0869140299

Longlist for 2010 Miles Franklin Award announced

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Book cover for Jasper Jones, by Craig Silvey

Jasper Jones cover (Courtesy Allen & Unwin)

Without further ado, here are the twelve who’ve made it to the 2010 Miles Franklin Award longlist:

  • Allington, Patrick Figurehead
  • Carey, Peter Parrot and Olivier in America
  • Castro, Brian The bath fugues
  • Doust, Jon Boy on a wire
  • Foster, David Sons of the rumour
  • Foster, Deborah The book of Emmett
  • Guest, Glenda Siddon Rock
  • Hartnett, Sonia Butterfly
  • Keneally, Thomas The people’s train
  • Miller, Alex Lovesong
  • Silvey, Craig Jasper Jones
  • Temple, Peter Truth

Well, shock! horror!, as you can see from my lonely link, I’ve only read one of these to date. While I like to give some focus in my reading to Australian writers, my reading, it seems, is driven by things other than catching the latest books out!  I do, however, have Lovesong and Truth in my TBR pile … so I will try, now, to get to them sooner rather than later … and then, well, time will tell how many of the others I manage to get to …

It is good to see a mix of new authors and established authors. That is a healthy sign, isn’t it. Still, there are some interesting omissions here, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of comments on those. Cate Kennedy’s The world beneath (another on my TBR pile) is one that garnered some positive critical attention but is not here. Marion Halligan’s Valley of Grace and David Malouf’s Ransom, on the other hand, would have missed out because they do not meet the award’s conditions: that is, the work “must present Australian Life in any of its phases”!

All this, however, is now water under the bridge. The shortlist will be announced in April, and the winner on June 22.

If you’d like to research any of these titles further, a good start is this link to Readings Bookshop in Melbourne: it contains links to their interviews with several of the nominated authors.

Dorothy Porter, The bee hut

/ Whispering Gums / 13 Comments
The bee hut, by Dorothy Porter

Cover image (Courtesy: Black Inc)

The most powerful presence
is absence
(from “Egypt”)

The above lines open Australian poet Dorothy Porter‘s The bee hut, a collection of poems mostly writen in the last five years of her life. The lines are prophetic … and they appropriately open a collection which deals very much, though not exclusively, with the tension between life and death. The poems are, in turn, angry, resigned, beautiful, humorous even, and philosophical. Some draw on Christian and other mythology, some allude to other poets, and some are simply founded in the unembellished here-and-now. And, despite the fact that we and she know that death is coming sooner rather than later, they are life-affirming.

The collection is divided into eight groups:

  • Head of Astarte
  • The enchanted ass
  • Poems: January – August 2004
  • Smelling tigers
  • Jerusalem
  • Africa
  • The freak songs
  • Lucky

The title poem, “The Bee Hut”, is in the “Poems: January – August 2004” group:

But do I love the lesson
of my thralldom
to the sweet dark things
that can do me harm?

In her brief introduction to the collection, novelist Andrea Goldsmith, Porter’s partner, writes that:

The bee hut became a metaphor for these last years of her life … She marvelled at the bees, as she had always marvelled at life, but she was also aware of the danger amid the sweetness and beauty.

Danger in life, the darkness that is found alongside beauty, is the defining paradox of the collection: “In living there is always/the terror/of being stung” (from “Bluebottles”). Not all poems explore this idea but many do.

There is some sort of thematic underpinning to the poem groupings, and there is a strong autobiographical flavour. The “Africa” section, for example, clearly relates to travels in Africa; “Poems: January – August 2004” were written about her time undergoing chemotherapy for the breast cancer that was to kill her; while “The Freak Songs” are “a song cycle written for performance with the music of Jonathan Mills“. These last are older poems, and therefore predate her diagnosis, but are an apt inclusion. They are wild and defiant: “I bite the apple/I lick the fire/I kiss the sweet sweet snake” (from “The Fruits of Original Sin”). But even here there’s recognition that death, in the end, has the upper hand: “You live your life/as if there’s a secure cage/for the clipped wings/you’re planning” (from “The Bluebird of Death”).

Even more than with a short story collection, it is impossible to discuss every poem in a collection – and, to be honest, I would find it hard to do so since while  some spoke to me easily and some I could grasp with a little thought, there are others that elude me, mostly because their allusions are not familiar to me. I am not, for example, an expert on French poets like Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, so when she invokes them I can guess at their meaning but am not totally sure I “got” it. Consequently, I’m just mentioning a few of the poems which particularly appealed to me.

Her poem “Blackberries” in “The enchanted ass” deals with the imperative to write poetry and the urgency to get it down, to locate and express the idea:

and your pen slashes ahead
like a pain-hungry prince
hacking through
the bramble’s dragon teeth
to the heart’s most longed for
comatose, but ardently ready
princess.

Most of the poems are like this – strong, vivid and comprised of short active lines. There are quite a few recurrent images – blood, birds, incense. All very concrete and yet all highly evocative as well. I think that’s what I like about most of the poems – they work well on a visceral as well as a philosophical level. You feel them as well as hear them.

Also in “The enchanted ass” are “Three Sonnets”. The first refers to Byron, the second to Woolf and the third to Blake. In the Woolf one, she writes:

Life is so dangerous,
but this morning you can take
the wave
right to the sparkling shore

You can bear knowing
the street will one day dump you.
(from “What a plunge!”)

One day she finally is dumped … and yet, even then, just two-and-a-half weeks before her death she can write:

Something in me
despite everything
can’t believe my luck.
(from “View from 417”)

There are poems here that are a little obscure to me – that I will need to read again with Google at my side to check the allusions – and there are no amazingly new revelations about life and death, but their passion and vigour engaged me from the get-go! I’m glad I’ve finally been introduced to Dorothy Porter.

Dorothy Porter
The beet hut
Melbourne: Black Inc, 2009
146pp.
ISBN: 9781863954464