Australian literature

Ruth Park, Swords and crowns and rings

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Note to self: never again “read” an audiobook over a long period, such as, say, 5 months! This is how I read Ruth Park‘s engrossing 1977 Miles Franklin award-winning novel, Swords and crowns and rings. It was not hard to keep up with the plot as it’s pretty straightforward – and powerful. It is hard, though, over such a time to keep up with and remember all the nuances in her writing and expression and the way they affect character development and thematic strands. For a thoughtful review of the book by someone who read it more sensibly, please see my friend Lisa’s, of ANZLitLovers, here.

I am not an experienced “reader” of audiobooks and I have to say that I found what seemed to me to be the over-dramatisation of the story rather trying in the first few CDs. I gradually got used to it, however, and by the end I was happy with Rubinstein’s reading, but it did take me a while to settle into it.

New-Zealand born Ruth Park is a wonderful chronicler of Australian life. Her novel, The harp in the south, set in working class Sydney in the 1940s is, to my mind at least, an Australian classic – but it is just one of her extensive and well-regarded body of work. Her autobiographies are also well-worth reading, not only for the light they throw on her life and on that of her husband, author D’Arcy Niland, but also on that of the Australian literary establishment of the mid-twentieth century.

Anyhow, back to the novel. Swords and crowns and rings tells the story of two young people born in an Australian country town before World War 1 – pretty Cushie Moy (born to a comfortable family with the stereotypical socially ambitious mother who has married down) and the dwarf, Jackie Hanna (whose background is well and truly working class). Not surprisingly, Cushie’s parents frown on the friendship which develops between the two. This is not an innovative story but, rather, good historical fiction with evocative writing and sensitive character development. Consequently, as you would expect, the two are separated just as they realise their love for each other and the book then chronicles their respective lives – Cushie with various relations in Sydney and Jackie in a number of country locations before he too reaches Sydney. Much of the book takes place during the early 1930s Depression. Park gorgeously evokes the hardships – physical, economic and emotional – experienced by people like Jackie and his step-dad “the Nun” as they struggle to support themselves. All this is underpinned by Park’s thorough knowledge of the social and political history of the time: we learn about labour organisations and the rise of socialism, of that irascible politician “Big Fella” Jack Lang, and of the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The resolution is predictable – it is, after all, a book of its genre – but it is not over-sentimentalised and is not achieved before the characters, Jackie in particular, have matured to the point that we can trust that he not only deserves what will come but that he will continue to work and mature for the betterment of himself and those he loves. It is truly a powerful book about human nature, as well as about the place and time in which it is set.

Ruth Park
Swords and crowns and rings (Audio CD)
Read by Deidre Rubenstein
Bolinda Audio, 2007
18 hours on 15 compact discs
ISBN: 9781741636628

Martin Boyd, A difficult young man

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Martin Boyd's A difficult young man
Difficult but handsome (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn’t expecting the delightful sly wit I found in Martin Boyd’s A difficult young man, which, I understand, is the second book in the “Langton Quartet”. This novel though can clearly stand on its own – otherwise, why would Sydney University Press publish it alone as part of its Australian Classics Library? Is it the best written of the four? The most readable? The one most commonly studied (which goes back to the original question anyhow)? Or was it simple a case of eeny-meeny-miny-moe? (Even “eeny meeny miny moe” has a Wikipedia article – how great is that?) Whatever  the reason, my appetite has been whetted, and the first book, A cardboard crown, will now be promoted in my TBR pile.

Anyhow, back to the serious stuff. I know it was written in a completely different place and oh, nearly a sesquicentenary later, but there’s more than a whisper of Jane Austen about Boyd’s book. Superficially, this book and Austen’s works are very different: this is not a romance – but then neither is that Jane Austen’s focus either; its main characters are male rather than female; it has an autobiographical thread which none of Austen’s novels do; and it uses first person rather than Austen’s omniscient third person narrator. The similarities are, rather, in language (their wit and irony) and form (both write what can be described as social satire). I may be the first person to have put these two authors in the same sentence, but, well, that’s the fun of being a blogger: you can say it as you see it! And what I see is that both writers make me chuckle with their observations on human nature.

So what is the plot? The story is narrated by Guy Langton (a veiled Martin), who is the fourth son of Steven and Laura Langton. He focuses on the late adolescence-early adulthood of the eldest living son, Dominic (inspired by – but not – Merric), the “difficult young man” of the title, who, as the story progresses, manages to fail in, or otherwise mess up, pretty well everything he does. Through the course of the book the family moves from Australia (Melbourne and environs) to the family seat in England and back to Australia again. The book chronicles a number of domestic crises, at the root of which is usually Dominic who somehow undermines “the various attempts to fit him into some place in the world”.  In many ways though, the book is just as much about Guy who, through the process of narration, works to find a balance between “the unaltered impression” of “my childish mind” and “the glaze of adult knowledge”. This is a clever book which reads like, but is not, an autobiography.

It’s an engaging story – not so much for its rather episodic plot as for its array of wonderful and mostly eccentric characters, from the social-climbing arriviste Aunt Baba (who thinks anyone who does “a kindness from which they received no benefit” is silly) to the gentle, wise but somewhat ingenuous father, Steven. My favourite aspect of the book though is its style. I usually enjoy self-conscious narrators, and Guy is definitely that. He regularly addresses the reader directly, reminding us that he can use “the mask of a character in the story” and advising us of which “glaze” he is applying at the time. In this way he lets us know which parts might be more suspect than others in terms of the “facts”, which he recognises as being different from the “truth”:

..but the reader must take certain wild statements as intended for fun, though they contain an element of truth too subtle to be confined within the limits of accurate definition. One can make exact statements of fact, but not of truth, which is why the scientist is forever inferior to the artist.

And this brings us to another concern of the novel – the importance of the imagination. In many ways the book is a hymn to the creative life, a statement of the Boyds’ belief that a life lived without imagination is probably a life not worth living. It also makes a plea for humane values, for peace not war, for gentle not brutal discipline of children, for education that is not conformist. The book is set in the years leading up to World War 1 and the point is made that life before the war – the “secure civilisation” – was to change irrevocably after.

In addition to irony, Boyd uses a wide range of literary techniques rather effectively, such as foreshadowing (which teases us while at the same time directing our understanding), analogies, contradiction, and allusions (particularly to art and literature). All of these imbue the book with a reflectiveness that undermines a focus on plot.

There are so many strands to this novel – its style, diverse subject matter, and characterisation – that would be fun to explore, but that would leave nothing for the rest of you to talk about, so I will finish with a statement made by the narrator towards the end of the novel:

This is really what I am seeking for throughout this novel, the Memlinc in the cellar, the beautiful portrait of the human face, lost in the dissolution of our family and our religion.

I am doubtless romanticising the Bynghams [maternal ancestors], but there is an element of truth in what I write, which is all I ever claim. Also everyone romanticises what interests him.

As he does so often in the novel, he says one thing here and then undermines it immediately after. But it works, and it works because life is messy and contradictory and yet out of this mess and contradiction comes a vision of something that is real and enduring – and that is the transcendence of family, and the importance of imagination.

Martin Boyd
A difficult young man
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009 (orig. pub. 1955)
223pp.
ISBN: 9781920898960

(Review copy supplied by Sydney University Press. This is the last of 12 books that my friend Lisa (aka ANZLitLovers) and I received to review. We believe more will be published in this series: if these 12 are anything to go by we are in for a real treat – and the cause of Australian literature can only profit from that.)

ABR’s Favourite Australian Novel poll

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Back in October I wrote about the Australian Book Review’s poll to find our favourite Australian novel (not Australia’s favourite novel!). Well, the result has just lobbed into my email inbox: it’s an interesting list. No great surprises, and it’s certainly pretty acceptable even though one can always find something to argue about when the opportunity arises.

Here they are:

  1. Cloudstreet, by Tim Winton (since members of the Australian Society of Authors voted this their top novel in 2003, it’s not a totally surprising win – and I’m happy enough with it!)
  2. The fortunes of Richard Mahony, by Henry Handel Richardson (the oldest in the top ten – and great to see a woman in second spot!)
  3. Voss, by Patrick White (woo hoo … this was my well-considered vote!!)
  4. Breath, by Tim Winton (another guernsey for the popular Tim – and perhaps its ranking here is largely due to its still being fresh in people’s minds? You know, along the lines of how well Harry Potter has done in recent readers’ polls. I’m not saying this is a bad choice but … currency often does come into play in these polls doesn’t it?)
  5. Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey (this would have been a serious contender for my second choice if I’d had one, because I think it is often overlooked in discussions like this)
  6. My brother Jack, by George Johnston
  7. The secret river, by Kate Grenville (a riveting read that gets to the heart of our origins as a convict settlement and so good to see here)
  8. Eucalyptus, by Murray Bail (great to see this beautiful fable-like tale appearing in the top 10)
  9. The man who loved children, by Christina Stead
  10. The tree of man, by Patrick White (another worthy choice I think … though after Voss it is hard to choose which White should come next!)

In the link I’ve provided above, you will find the next 10, and here is a link to the complete list. Apparently 290 were nominated, and thousands (nothing more specific than that) voted.

And, before I close, some basic stats. Ten novels:

  • 8 authors;
  • 3 women;
  • no indigenous author (but Alexis Wright does appear in the top 20);
  • all published after 1900 (but a couple of earlier ones appear in the top 20); and
  • I have read only 7, of which I am a little ashamed (but I have seen one of the others as a miniseries – does that count? – and the remaining two are in my TBR, one physical, one virtual).

Geoff Page, The scarring

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Geoff Page (born 1940) is a Canberra-based poet who has been active in the Australian poetry scene for many decades now. He was also, for nearly three decades, an English teacher. Page has published several volumes of poetry and at least three verse novels, of which The scarring is his first.

The scarring, which I read a few years ago but have been wanting to review here, is, I have to say, one of the most gut-wrenching works I have read. Page has set it in the landscape – rural northern New South Wales – of his childhood and says it was inspired by rumours he heard as a child (but it is not a “true” story). The story spans around seven decades from the 1910s to the 1980s, and chronicles the lives of a couple from their youth and courtship through to old age. As the blurb on the back cover says, “their separation through war sows the seeds of their eventual destruction”.

One of the things I love about the book is the way Page weaves so much of the social and political history of twentieth century Australia through the lives of this couple – war, the Great Depression, the boom of the 1950s, city versus country life and values, and of course gender inequity and the old double standard! The scene is set from the first line:

Breed em tough, the old man says.

Little do we know what lies beneath this seemingly innocuous opening – and I’m not about to give it away to you now. Let’s just say that Page deftly weaves the breeding motif through his tale of a young couple running a cattle property.

Here is an example of how history is told alongside life on the farm:

the new white stiffness of the sheets
where Sally will be his forever

…

‘Forever’ moves on two years more.
The set of skills they share between them
shoves them sideways from the news:
Sudetenland, then through to Munich,
Kristallnacht and into Prague.
It rattles in through bakelite
and once or twice on Cinesound
showing at the flicks in town,
that lifted arm and square moustache
relishing a massed salute.

And so the story moves on to its more or less inevitable – given the events that occur – conclusion. This is not flowery poetry. Page tends more to a spare style that is well suited to his setting and subject.  The poetry’s insistent rhythm draws you on, and Page’s use of repetition slowly but subtly builds up the tension. This is a novel that you’ll want to read in one sitting.

Page is, I think, a little too unsung … but then, isn’t that the case with most poets?

Geoff Page
The scarring
Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, 1999
111pp.
ISBN: 0868066826

Australia Post’s new set of Living Legends

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Australian Legends of the Living Word, stamps

The six on the stamps (Courtesy: Australia Post)

Does the choice of writers for Australia Post’s Australian Legends of the Written Word look a little one-sided to you? Here is the list:

The Guardian books blog – Australian writers’ stamps send the wrong message – suggests so, and has a bit of a discussion going on the topic. I’m inclined to agree. I was trying to list the 6 recipients for my co-diners at lunch yesterday and, having remembered a few, started running through other possibilites. Helen Garner? No, I’m sure she wasn’t there. Alexis Wright? No. Kate Grenville perhaps? No. And so on … you get the drift. Personally, I’d have Bryce and Colleen outta there, and would have instead some of the names I’ve mentioned – or any of the many others I could think of. But then, this is “legends” and I suppose Bryce and Colleen have earned that right if only by dint of their recognition in the popular imagination of Australians who buy their books by the droves. Who am I to argue with that?

And just for a different approach to the topic, Australian ex-pat journalist and bookblogger in London, kimbofo at Reading Matters has asked her readers who they would choose for British authorial legends. You might like to think upon that too…

Top non-fiction of 2009

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Is it cheating to do separate lists for fiction and non-fiction? Some people list their top books regardless of form or genre, while others created separate lists. I’m going to do the latter because – well, because I get to choose more books for a start. Actually, I didn’t read a lot of non-fiction this year so my top non-fiction titles will almost be all the non-fiction I read. As with my top fiction, I am listing them in the order I read them.

I didn’t nominate a top fiction for the year, but I’m going to here – and it is the one I read before I started blogging: Chloe Hooper’s The tall man and so I’ll do a little mini-review of it now.

Chloe Hooper’s The tall man

In a nutshell the book, which is best described as “true crime”,  chronicles the fallout that results from the death in custody on Palm Island of indigenous man Cameron Doomadgee, fallout which includes the autopsy report and ensuing riots, and the homicide trial of policeman Chris Hurley. Hooper explores the awful disconnect between people in the communities involved, between white and black, and within the white and black communities. She shows how women (particularly those on Palm Island) are caught in the middle. They believed the policeman killed Doomadgee but, when the riot occurred, they didn’t want the police gone because “who will protect us from the men”.

Throughout the book, Hooper manages to bring what is a very complex situation into rather clear focus…showing, not surprisingly, that in the end it’s the whites who have the power. For example, she attends a police rally organised to support Hurley and notes how they, the police, were fashioning themselves as victim. She comments that “measured against two hundred years of dispossession and abuse, the idea is fantastic, but no-one in that hall was thinking about historical relativities”! This point regarding “historical relativities” is well-made: this is not simply a case of white devil versus black angel, but we know where the real “victimhood” lies. The book also touches on the notion of power corrupting – or, questions at least how police officers are chosen and trained in the first place.

Hooper manages to walk a fine line. You know where her sympathies lie (particularly as the book progresses and she teases out the evidence) but she takes an analytical approach encouraging her readers to also do so. This begs comparison with Helen Garner who takes a far more heart-on-sleeve approach to her subjects in her books, The first stone and Joe Cinque’s consolation.

Finally, she makes an important point when she describes Hurley’s trial as “a false battleground”. Truth and justice – those universal concerns – do need to come out, but the trial is not going to solve the underlying problems. The tall man is a highly readable book about some significant concerns (for Australia at least)…and, in my mind, well deserves the awards it has won. I have only one quibble with it: I wish it had an index!

POSTSCRIPT: Thea Astley also dealt with troubles on Palm Island in her novel The multiple effects of rainshadow. It deals with the event which occurred on Palm Island in 1930 when the supervisor at the time ran amok and killed his children, something which Hooper refers to in the book when she provides a little rundown of Palm Island’s history.

Chloe Hooper
The tall man: Death and life on Palm Island
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2008
276pp.
ISBN: 9780241015377

C.J. Dennis, The moods of Ginger Mick

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Sometimes a bloke gits glimpses uv the truth
(“In Spadger’s Lane”)

I wasn’t sure, really, that I wanted to read CJ Dennis’ verse novel, The moods of Ginger Mick, which I received as a review copy from the Sydney University Press as part of their Australian Classics Library – but have surprised myself. I rather enjoyed reading it and am glad that I had this little push to do so!

The moods of Ginger Mick
The moods of Ginger Mick cover (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

The moods of Ginger Mick was published in 1916 just weeks before the big Conscription Referendum, according to Philip Butters who wrote the new introduction to this edition. It does not however buy into that debate. The book comprises 15 poems “written” by Dennis’ other character, The Sentimental Bloke, at whose wedding Mick was best man. The poems introduce us to Mick and his larrikin life before the Great War and then go on to chronicle his life as a soldier.

Dennis writes his poems in broad Australian slang (but there is a glossary at the end). Most are 6-line stanzas with an ababcc rhyme (the same as Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”!) but every now and then there is a different rhyme scheme which mixes it up a little. The sweet poem “The singing soldiers”, for example, has a sing-song aab(with an internal rhyme)acc, while the poignant “Sari Bair” about the eponymous battle has 4-line stanzas with a simple aabb rhyme.

I enjoyed reading the poems, not only for their evocative language but also for their subject matter. While their setting and language make them very much of a particular time and place, their concerns have some universality. They are about egalitarianism vs class difference, and about what it means to be a man (a “bloke” as it were). Mick starts off as a bit of a larrikin – one who cares not for the “toffs” and for whom the “toffs” care not! As he says in an early poem:

But I’m not keen to fight so toffs kin dine
On pickled olives …
(“War”)

What sends him to war in the end is “The call uv stoush” but, when he gets there, he starts to discover that in uniform all men are equal, that

… snobbery is down an’ out fer keeps,
It’s grit an’ reel good fellership that gits yeh friends in ‘eaps.
(“The push”)

This poem, “The push”, provides a wonderfully colourful roll call of the sorts of men who enlisted. Other poems cover the support of women at home, hopes for work when they return home now they’ve proved themselves (after all the “‘earty cheerin’ … per’aps  we might be arstin’ fer a job”) and the sense that Australia has grown up as a nation (“But we ‘av seen it’s up to us to lay our toys aside”). There is ironic humour (as in “Rabbits”) and pathos (as in “To the boys who took the count” and “The game” in which Ginger Mick finally realises that he’s found his metier). There’s also some racism that was, unfortunately, typical of the time. And of course there is patriotism, with some rather lovely descriptions of the Australian landscape. I just have to mention here some references to gums:

An’ they’re singin’, still they’re singin’, to the sound uv guns an’ drums.
As they sung one golden Springtime underneath the wavin’ gums.
(“The singing soldiers”)

An’ we’re ‘opin’ as we ‘ear ’em, that, when the next Springtime comes,
You’ll be wiv us ‘ere to listen to that bird tork in the gums
(“A letter to the front”)

As a group, the poems offer an interesting insight into Australia’s experience of the First World War, particularly given their mix of realism and romanticism that belies perhaps the recent glorification that’s developed around our ANZAC heritage. If you are interested in Australia’s cultural and literary heritage, it is well worth giving this short little book a look.

C.J. Dennis
The moods of Ginger Mick
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009 (orig. pub. 1916)
87pp.
ISBN: 9781920898984

(Review copy supplied by the Sydney University Press)

Best unread books of the decade

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One of my favourite internet bookgroup friends – the one who gave me the Jane Austen diary – has just posted, on a listserv we belong to, a link to The Guardian’s list of books that got away over the last decade. Now, that’s a new take on lists isn’t it?

Spare Room

The spare room cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

They asked people like publishers, literary agents and translators to nominate books that didn’t make, but they think should have, “best of best” lists. I’ve only read one of the books nominated, Helen Garner’s The spare room. It was nominated by Jamie Byng, the Managing Director of Canongate which published it! Fair enough. I’m sure they published many other books that didn’t make the “best of the best” lists either so his selection has some credibility. I think he hits the nail on the head when he says  it is “deceptively slight”. It does seem pretty simple but Garner is a great writer, and an unflinchingly honest one too. Put these together and the result is a compelling book, even though Lisa at ANZLitlovers doesn’t quite agree. Actually, both of us disagree with much of the way Garner views her world but I admire her nonetheless. Read this:

The one thing I was sure of, as I lay pole-axed on my bed that afternoon … was that if I did not get Nicola out of my house tomorrow I would slide into a lime-pit of rage that would scorch the flesh off me, leaving nothing but a strew of pale bones on a landscape of sand.

Sometimes Garner fills me with a similar rage, but when she presents me with writing and imagery as powerful and as fresh as this I can’t help but love her at the same time…and agree that Jamie Byng has a bit of a point.

(NB. The funny thing, though, is that The spare room won a few awards in Australia so I’m wondering how valid a selection it really is in this particular list.)

Helen Garner
The spare room
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2008
195pp
ISBN: 9781921351396

Andrew Croome, Document Z

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Truth, according to the dictionary, can mean several things including:

  • the state of being the case, fact or actuality; and
  • a transcendent or spiritual reality.

Document Z bookcover

Document Z cover image (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Truth in all its variety and slipperiness is, I think, the fundamental theme of Andrew Croome’s Document Z which won the 2008 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. This book, which chronicles the famous-in-Australia Petrov Affair about the defection of Vladimir (familiarly, Volodya) and Evdokia Petrov in 1954, began as a PhD Creative Writing thesis. Who needs a PhD in Creative Writing, though, when you have a publication offer instead?

At the end of the novel is a reference to an oral history that was conducted with Evdokia by the National Library:

This historian’s questions give her the space to betray Volodya, to admit his faults, to commit herself finally, to the truth. She doesn’t. The record is no all-important thing, and what exactly would be the point?

What indeed? After all, duplicity is what the book is about. Vladimir and Evdokia are MVD agents at the Soviet Embassy. This is their secret role, in addition to their formal embassy roles, and it puts them in conflict with the ambassador since, in effect, they work for two masters, the ambassador and the MVD headquarters in Moscow. Not an easy position to be in, particularly in a regime that thrived on suspicion.

Croome nicely structures the book, commencing with the dramatic attempt on 19 April 1954 by the Soviet authorities to return Evdokia to Russia. The book’s narrative form is multiple third person subjective, and this opening scene is viewed through Evdokia’s eyes: “Evdokia knew this crowd was for her. They were hunting her…”. She was wrong though. The crowd was with her and were “hunting” those who seemed to be taking her away. This opening chapter ends with the words, “Everything he had betrayed”. The scene is set to tell their story, and the book flips back to 1951 and their arrival in Canberra. From this point on the story is told through several eyes, particularly Evdokia’s, Vladimir/Volodya’s (who, Moscow thought, “could be well and truly trusted [my stress]”) and Dr Bialoguski’s (the man who worked for ASIO and who, through cultivating Petrov’s friendship, engineered the defection).

I enjoyed the book – partly because it was set in familiar territory, which is a bit of a rarity for we Canberrans, and partly because I was interested in the Petrov Affair. Croome seems, to the best of my knowledge, to have captured the era well. I loved the description of the Soviet Embassy wives going shopping…and he nicely evokes the polarisation of views between East and West/Communism and Capitalism that characterised the Cold War period. However, the book was a little unsatisfying too. I think it’s because Croome focusses a little too much on plot machinations for me – and yet the plot is not dramatic enough to support this. He does try to get “into” the characters but, for all his sound characterisation of the Petrovs, they are, at the end, pretty much as shadowy in terms of their “true” natures/desires/motivations as they were at the beginning. In the end, there’s not much drama in either the political or the personal story. It feels, almost, as though they were victims of circumstance – and perhaps they largely were.

And what were these circumstances? Well, they were largely the duplicitous – and fear-ridden – situation they lived and worked in. I had to laugh, early in the book, at the description of the embassy’s secret (MVD) section: “Somewhere, the roof leaked“. The book has many little ironies and paradoxes mostly playing on notions of secrets, lies, deception and betrayals, playing, that is, on a world in which truth is treated with rather careless abandon. By the end of the book we are, I think, no nearer the truth. We perhaps know some of the “facts” (albeit this is fiction!), but we do not “really” know the “spiritual reality” of these two people whose marriage seemed weak and who apparently lived a pretty sad life in exile.

I’d certainly recommend the book … it’s well written, and is a genuinely interesting portrayal of the case. But if you are looking for insights into the affair, I’m not sure you’ll find them here.

Andrew Croome
Document Z
Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2008
350pp.
ISBN: 9781741757439

Arnold Zable, Sea of many returns

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He leaps through centuries, tears apart myths, and reassembles them in his own way.

Sea of Many Returns cover

Cover image courtesy Text Publishing

These words that are said of one of the characters in Arnold Zable’s Sea of many returns could just as easily be said of Zable himself – not only of this book, but of his earlier ones such as Cafe Sheherazade. Zable loves telling stories, stories that weave between each other in an attempt to understand the impact of dislocation and exile on the human psyche – well, on his characters’ psyches but it is not hard to universalise this.

Sea of many returns is, essentially, a dual point-of-view novel:

  • the first person narrator, Xanthe, who was born in Melbourne to an Ithacan father and who tells her story; and
  • the third person story of Mentor, her paternal (also Ithacan) grandfather whose journals she is translating.

The story roams, backwards and forwards, from 1895 to present time as Xanthe and Mentor tell of the lives of their family members in Greece and Australia…about all their leavings and returnings, for work or adventure, or more terribly for war or, simply, to find a better life:

The stories I have heard, and am yet to hear, are echoes of one refrain: Is there somewhere on earth where I can find peace and prosper? Once the question is posed, the agony begins, the eternal dilemma: to stay or leave? To retreat behind fortifications, or cast our fate to the winds? (Xanthe, p. 203)

Underpinning this dilemma is the yearning for Ithaca – which translates, really, to the yearning for place, for home. Towards the end of the novel Mentor discusses the notion of “nostalgia” or “the pain of longing for the return”. Put this together with “the Ithacan phobia, the fear that I may never return” and the result is a melancholic – but not depressing – tone, since it is mostly accompanied by, if not always strength of mind, a resilience of spirit.

Not surprisingly, it’s the men who travel, at least in the earlier times of the book. As Xanthe’s aunt says, resignedly, “Let your men roam distant lands. Let them do what they must. What choice do we have? Bend your back to the mountain. Sow and reap”. And so, while Xanthe talks to some of the women in her Greek family, it is the men whose stories she seeks as she tries to understand her father, the angry Manoli, and her grandfather, Mentor. However, the book’s final section, titled “Epilogue: The resident tiller of the soil”, focuses on 90-something year old Irini who, quite paradoxically Xanthe realises, has not left Ithaca since her arrival there 90 years before and yet “is both voyager and teller, Odysseus and Homer”. This is perhaps a little elliptical but it has a certain resonance nonetheless! And Andreas does mutter in the previous section, “To know one place is to know all places”.

While the novel takes on a mythic overtone, it is “history” which provides its backbone and puts flesh on its characters: there are, for example, the way-too-many wars (to which many men go and from which some return), the 1916 anti-Greek riots in Kalgoorlie, the 1953 earthquakes in Ithaca, and the building in Melbourne of Cafe Australia and the Capitol by the Chicago architects, Walter Burley and Marion Mahoney Griffin. This last one seems a bit odd in terms of the overall thrust of the book but is interesting to one who lives in the city they planned!

I have only touched on a little of what this novel contains – there are the references to the Homeric quest and the story of Odysseus, there is the drunk but wise Niko, there is the beauty of the language in its rhythms and descriptions, and there is music – but if I go on, I might, like its storytellers, never stop. As Andreas says to Xanthe near the end

I have told you one version of the story and tomorrow I may tell it with a different slant. Each word I utter is true and false at the same time …

Paradoxical? Yes! But that is the essence of this lyrical and mesmerising but also rather mystifying – or, is that mythifying – book!

Arnold Zable
Sea of many returns
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2008
307pp.
ISBN: 9781921351532