21st century literature

HC Gildfind, The worry front (#BookReview)

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HC Gildfind, The worry frontThe first thing to note about HC Gildfind’s short story collection, The worry front, is its striking, inspired cover. Designed by Susan Miller, it features a weather map which captures the central motif of the title story, but it also suggests the unsettled lives which characterise the book. Gildfind, however, writing a post on the publisher’s blog ascribes another meaning too, noting the link between maps and stories. She says that both “guide us: they locate us in the present by showing us where we have been and where we might go in the future.” Both can also represent the abstract and concrete domains in which we live and operate – and where they might intersect.

But now, the book. It contains ten short stories and a novella, titled “Quarry”. All but one of the stories have been published before – in respected literary journals like Meanjin, Griffith Review, Westerly and Southerly. “Quarry” in fact appeared in the Griffith Review’s novella edition back in 2015. Gildfind then is an accomplished writer, and yet I hadn’t been aware of her. I am now, though, and I’m impressed.

I wasn’t completely sure that I would be, however, when I started the collection. “Ferryman” is a grim, gritty story about an angry man. I wasn’t sure that I was ready for such anger, albeit understandable in the circumstances – but the writing, particularly the rhythm and poetry of it, appealed, so I kept on reading. I’m glad I did, because the next story, the title story – “The worry front” – got me in completely. While the first story is told third person through a man’s eyes, this one is first person in the voice of an eighty-year-old woman. Like “Ferryman”, it’s a powerful story – but this time about a widowed woman who, all her life, has been dogged by “the worry front” but who, when confronted with the realisation that she has cancer, takes matters into her own hand with a breathtakingly original plan. It’s one of those stories where, at the start, you think, “is what I think is happening, what is really happening?” Well yes, it is.

And so the stories continue – varied in gender and voice, but often about something a little out of the ordinary or from a slightly offbeat point of view. The third story, “Gently, gently” is, for example, told second person. It’s a woman speaking about herself, but the second person voice engages us intimately in her life and feelings, drawing us in. It’s about a couple and the three hens they acquire. A chook goes missing – and the couple’s reactions highlight the tension in their relationship. Violence ensues. Like other stories in the book, it treads familiar ground but then turns a corner that forces us to see it from different angles. The relationship dynamic is not as simple as it might have first seemed. The next story, “Eat. Shit. Die” is told in two alternating voices – Leo’s in first person, and Nina’s in second. Both are lonely, and both have – hmm – gut troubles. Nina can’t stop eating, and Leo is having trouble with his s******g, but these are, as you might expect, also symptomatic of something else.

The birds and other animals, and food and eating, that appear in these two stories, recur in many of the book’s stories. Sometimes they reflect emotional states and other times they provide conduits for resolution. In the novella, “Quarry”, a stray black dog kickstarts our damaged protagonist Luke’s return from his agonising loneliness.

These recurring motifs underpin, as you’d expect, recurring themes. One is the interrogation, sometimes explicit, sometimes not, of what is normal. And another is that universal human one of longing for meaningful connection. Some characters eschew it because it hasn’t proven positive (“The wished for”), some are resigned to not having it because they feel unloved or unlovable (“Quarry”), and some actively seek ways of achieving it (“Solomon Jeremy Rupert Jones”). In most cases, this meaningful connection means a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, which, not surprisingly, raises the spectre of gender differences – which issue does run through many of the stories. There’s violence, direct or indirect, in several – but there’s nuance here rather than reliance on standard tropes or simple explanations.

Margaret River Press has produced Book Club Notes for the book. I’m not usually interested in such notes, because they don’t usually address my reading interests, but these are good. There are thoughtful questions for each story, ones that ask for the meaning or significance of events, symbols, actions, and/or characters, rather than the more simple “what would you do” sort of question that you often see.

There are also some general questions for the overall collection. One of these is: “Do you think it is important to ‘like’ a character when reading fiction?” This is a good question because it confronts this problematic issue head on. The worry front does not have many immediately likeable characters – but most characters ring true, and that’s the critical thing for me. We may not, for example, decide to do what the woman in “The worry front” does, but her feelings of dismay, and her resignation to and acceptance of things she can’t change, are true.

Another general question asks “which stories – or characters – provoked the strongest thoughts and feelings in you?” What a good question! I love that it doesn’t ask which one/s you like the best. For me, three stories in particular stand out – “Ferryman” because its anger was so viscerally shocking, “The worry front” because its protagonist’s plan is so surprising while her feelings are so comprehensible, and “The quarry” because Luke’s predicament engaged my heart from the start.

Not all stories grabbed me equally, but there are other memorable ones, including “What there is”. I related to its narrator’s searching for “the body-jolt of recognition” in books. Ironically, a significant jolt that she receives comes from another character, not a book:

You can never change the past. But you can always change how you feel about it.

However, it did come from a book, for me!

It’s hard to do a collection like this justice, but I liked it. I liked its surprising situations. I liked having my expectations unsettled. I also liked its design, and its careful order. It starts and ends with angry men, both of whose anger is caused by the actions of others, by, as Luke sees it, “f*****g men and f*****g women f*****g everything up for everyone forever” (“The quarry”). While it’s uncertain whether our first man will recover, Gildfind does leave us with a sense of hope at the end. I like that too.

AWW Badge 2018HC Gildfind
The worry front
Margaret River Press, 2018
288pp.
ISBN: 9780648027577

(Review copy courtesy Margaret River Press)

Robyn Cadwallader, Book of colours (#BookReview)

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Robyn Cadwallader, The book of coloursWhat makes historical fiction worth reading for me is the exploration of universal ”truths”. Fortunately, Robyn Cadwallader’s second novel, Book of colours, does this, albeit I wish that some of the universals – gender inequity, class (meaning social and economic inequity), and fear of foreigners – were no longer universal! The book explores other more general universals, too, such as love, friendship, loyalty, courage, suspicion, fear. However, historical fiction needs something more of course. It needs to authentically evoke an historical time and place, preferably through engaging characters. Cadwallader does this too.

Book of colours is set in mediaeval England, specifically between 1320 and 1322, and concerns an illuminated book of hours. The narrative is structured into two main chronological threads – the story of the book’s creation and the people creating it, from late 1320 to 1322, and that of the noblewoman who commissioned it, Lady Mathilda Fitzjohn, after she has it in her hands, from May to September 1322. She lives in Hertfordshire, while the limners’ atelier is located in London, so we also see city and country life during this period. As the limner Gemma writes:

…let all of life be there in the book, from high to low, animal and monster, story and joke, devotion and dance … (from The art of illumination)

Now, I particularly like it when historical fiction writers provide some historical context to their story, preferably in an afterword, along with some references or sources. This Cadwallader does, with a four-page Author’s Note and two-plus pages of Further Reading. She explains the historical background, including that the period she chose encompasses the Great Famine and the Dispenser War, and she discusses where the facts are less well documented. The meaning of those bawdy or confronting marginal images in books of hours, for example, is little understood. Also, says Cadwallader, no women limners are listed in this period, but there is evidence that women did, in fact, undertake illumination. These notes support the novel’s political, socioeconomic and sociocultural context.

The story is told third person through three main perspectives: Mathilda’s and those of two of the atelier workers, journeyman-near-master Will Asshe and master-in-work-if-not-in-name Gemma Dancaster. The atelier is owned by Gemma and her husband John – well, actually, given the times, it is “owned” by her husband, but he inherited it from her father. Prefacing the atelier-based chapters are sections from the book The art of illumination which Gemma secretly writes for her apprentice son Nick.

“both beauty and chaos”

Towards the end of the novel, the widowed Mathilda – her rebel Marcher husband having been killed while fighting the Dispensers – realises that life is not “ordered” as she had thought but is, like the “delicate, bawdy and capering creatures” in her book, “both beauty and chaos.” It is this “beauty and chaos” that Cadwallader captures through her vivid characters. The atelier thread starts with the arrival in London of Will, a limner who is escaping something that happened in Cambridge where he had lived and done his training. As the story progresses we discover, of course, what that was, but all I’ll say here is that he’d been associating with a student named Simon who had filled his head with ideas about equality. These ideas make Will angry about “the rich and their ambitions” and resentful about “the marks of privilege” requested for the book of hours. He’s a bit fiery, our Will, and gets himself into several scrapes, all the while watched over by an animated gargoyle who represents, I’d say, Will’s conscience.

Meanwhile, Gemma, the would-be master limner, is frustrated about the inequalities she faces as a woman – particularly a woman having to cover for her husband who is, we soon discover, no longer able to draw and paint. Gemma, too, is aware of economic inequities. Southflete, the stationer and middleman who handles the commission, tells them that

the calendar pages must be beautiful scenes of life on the demesne, you understand … Chubby infants, well-fed peasants, colour, beauty …

Gemma is not impressed:

Beautiful. How, in a village farmer’s wife, would January be beautiful? Snow if the weather was kind, ice if it was not. And this past year, colder than ever. Frost that rarely lifted, and then only to snow or rain. London had clenched its teeth, frozen to the marrow, too cold to move. At least the cramped lanes and houses blocked some of the wind; what it was like in the country, she couldn’t bear to think.

She, like Will, makes her assumptions about their patron Mathilda’s life and values, but as is often the case, assumptions aren’t always completely right – and these too Cadwallader teases out as the book progresses.

There are other characters – including Gemma’s gentle husband, their quietly wise apprentice Benedict, and their son and beginning apprentice Nick. These, plus other residents of London’s book trade area, Paternoster Row, flesh out the story, adding depth to the narrative and to the history of this fledgling industry struggling to establish itself as a guild.

So, there’s beauty and chaos in life, but it is through their drawings that the limners convey their feelings and ideas. As the world changes around them – for reasons I can’t fully divulge – the limners draw and paint their reflections and reactions, their messages even, into the book. Both Gemma and Will remind Mathilda of who she is and of her responsibilities to herself and others, responsibilities that become more nuanced and more personal than their original simplistic view of the world at the start of the novel. The interplay between the artists’ ideas as they paint and Mathilda’s reflections as she considers their paintings is one of the joys of the book. It is as much through these, dare I say, “virtual communications” as anything, that our three main characters grow in understanding. It is through them, for example, that Gemma shares her feelings – feelings Mathilda doesn’t recognise as coming from any sermon she knows – about women’s need to stand strong in the face of men’s power.

Book of colours, in other words, is a delicious read, imbued with the life of a long-ago time but filled with people whose emotions, hopes and frustrations are very much our own. Latish in the novel, Mathilda realises that Will’s friend “Simon’s simple borders of right and wrong won’t hold. They leave no space to breathe.” This is the book’s message: to grow and change we need to expand beyond simple conceptions of right and wrong. We need to let each other breathe and be. Only then can true selves, true relationships and, hopefully, a true understanding of equity develop.

Note: Lisa (ANZLitLovers) loved this book, and Angharad Lodwick (one of last year’s Litbloggers) was also impressed. I also reported, back in April, on a Conversation with Robyn Cadwallader about this book.

AWW Badge 2018Robyn Cadwallader
Book of colours
Sydney: Fourth Estate, 2018
360pp.
ISBN: 9781460752210

(Review copy courtesy HarperCollins)

Laurie Steed, You belong here (#BookReview)

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Laurie Steed, You belong hereMy first reaction as I started reading Laurie Steed’s debut novel, You belong here, was, “oh dear, another novel about a dysfunctional family”, but I was quickly disabused of that prejudice because while that is indeed the book’s “genre”, Steed writes it in such a fresh and engaging way, albeit seriously so, that I was soon engrossed in his Slater Family.

You belong here is an ambitious novel, spanning over four decades from 1972, when Jen and Steven are 16 years old, to 2015 when their grandchild turns 13. This is the span you’d normally find in a family saga of 400 pages or so, but Steed does it in under 250 pages. How does he do it?

First, though, the basic plot. It concerns the marriage and its subsequent breakdown, of the above-named Jen and Steven, and the impact on their three children, Alex, Emily and Jay. Australian author Melanie Cheng, whom I’m yet to read, says on the back cover that the family has “all the dysfunction of an Anne Tyler novel, but with a distinctly Australian feel.” Having read and loved Tyler’s novels (before my blogging days), I’d say this is a good call. Steed, like Tyler, deals with a very particular family – its idiosyncrasies, and shifting individual relationships – while also speaking to universals like love and loyalty, betrayal and breakdown, closeness and distance.

Now, back to the time span. The book is organised by chronological parts: 1972-1984; 1985-1995; 1996-1999; 2000-2002; and, 2015. To cover this ground it is, necessarily, episodic*. Each part comprises short, evocatively titled chapters, which contain scenes from a life, switching the point-of-view between the five main characters. These time-shifts (which aren’t all clearly signposted within the parts) and changing perspectives demand a level of concentration from us readers, but I didn’t find they slowed me down significantly. On the contrary, they kept me engaged and focused on the matter at hand – that is, on whose story I was reading now, what was happening to them and why.

A hairline crack. Small, but spreading.

So, the early parts of the book focus on Jen and Steven’s relationship, their falling in love and the subsequent stresses – three children in quick succession for Jen, and failure at work for Steven – which drive a wedge between them. Steed’s writing is evocative and tight – it has to be really – and I enjoyed it immensely. Take this description of Steven’s commute to his job at the airport:

Steven had lost track of time. Moments, hours, left scattered along the Great Eastern Highway while driving to and from work. Seconds entered in the till by an underpaid, overworked cashier. A day maybe two, left hanging in the change room at the airport. (Before a fall)

Or this of Jen, in the bedroom with Steven, after we discover she’s been having an affair:

She stared past him at the wall, beneath the windowsill. She’d seen it before, maybe weeks, months earlier. A hairline crack. Small, but spreading. (Wallpaper)

The staccato rhythm here is perfect. And Jen’s sadness is palpable.

As the novel progresses, the children grow up and we shift to their lives, with Jen and Steven receding somewhat from the narrative focus. Each child struggles in his or her own way to navigate the family and their place in the world. We are frequently devastated for them, while also applauding their will to survive. There are some lovely vignettes, such as a cricket innings played by Alex and his friend Walker. The whole is underpinned by pop-culture references to music and video games that were only vaguely familiar to me as a baby-boomer parent of late Gen-X early Gen-Y children. Knowing these better might have added to my appreciation of the novel, but I didn’t feel my lack greatly. That is, the novel seemed to work well for me anyhow.

The jerky, episodic structure may have grown out of the original short story concept, and for some it could result in frustration at not “knowing” the characters as fully as they’d like. But I thought it effectively mirrored both the family’s fractured relationships and the way they stick together despite it all. Over time, allegiances switch as particular stresses develop for one person or another, but the love between them, while it falters at times, comes through.

But then, Alex couldn’t make head or tail of any of it. He felt sad and sorry for his sister, his brother, and the fraught, familiar way that the family closed ranks when one began to sink. It felt tender if he touched upon it, like he’d picked up a peach and felt the bruise. (Skin I’m in)

Lest this sound a bit corny, let me say that this is a serious book. The impact on the children of their parents’ separation is unflinchingly exposed, particularly through mental health issues and the difficulties they face in forming long-lasting relationships. It isn’t a pretty picture, but the end, without giving too much away, suggests that with love, perseverance and loyalty, families can and do muddle through.

And so, a book that I thought at the beginning was just another novel about a dysfunctional family surprised me with its insights, warmth, relevance to us all, and above all, its writing pizzazz. Well-worth reading.

* WA writer-blogger Nathan Hobby’s review tells me that the book started as a short story collection, which makes sense. Lisa (ANZLitlovers) featured Laurie Steed in her occasional series on Debut authors.

Laurie Steed
You belong here
Margaret River Press, 2018
250pp.
ISBN: 9780648203902

(Review copy courtesy Margaret River Press)

Raphaël Jerusalmy, Evacuation (#BookReview)

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Raphael Jerusalmy, EvacuationRaphaël Jerusalmy, for those who, like me, hadn’t heard of him, is a French-born and educated writer living in Tel Aviv. He had a career in the Israeli military intelligence services, worked in humanitarian and educational fields, and is now an antiquarian book dealer in Tel Aviv, where his novella, Evacuation, is set. In some ways, the book is a love letter to Tel Aviv – but it is more than that, too …

Evacuation is a short, quick, but powerful read. The narrative is structured around a road trip, in which twenty-something Naor is driving his mother from her kibbutz home to Tel Aviv. As they drive he tells her what happened in Tel Aviv, after he, his girlfriend Yaël, and his grandfather Saba, had jumped off the bus that was taking them out of the city, as part of a mandatory evacuation process.

The thing about this book is that although we realise the war is part of the ongoing Middle-eastern conflict, no specifics are given. No dates, no enemy, just, later on in the story, that peace negotiations were taking place in Geneva. By the time the novel starts, that peace had been achieved (for the moment anyhow) and Naor is dealing with the aftermath. The lack of specificity universalises the story, focusing us on the characters’ experience more than on the whys and wherefores, rights and wrongs, of the war.

So, their experience. Firstly, I should explain that it was Saba and Yaël who had decided not to evacuate, with Naor feeling obliged to stay with them. They are all artists – Naor a filmmaker, Yaël a visual artist, and Saba a writer – so there is also an underlying thread about art and resistance. They go to friend Yoni’s house in the already evacuated part of the city, and from there they learn how to survive – how to find food, water, clothes – and how to occupy their time. They roam further and further, taking risks to enjoy a dip in the sea; they enjoy strolling down Tel Aviv’s beautiful Rothschild Boulevard; and, they decide to make a film, titled Evacuation, to Naor’s script and with Saba and Yaël acting.

It’s while filming a critical scene in a synagogue that a long-range missile attack occurs, forcing them to take cover. After this attack, Yaël decrees that they are not going to let air-raid sirens disturb their peace again – “From now on, we were going to behave as if there was no war” – setting us up for the tragedy that we have been sensing through Naor’s narration.

Now, I said that the novel focuses more on the characters and their experience, than the war. However, there are occasional references to Zionism and the ongoing political situation, including this on Saba’s opinion:

Deep down Saba wasn’t unhappy about what was happening to Tel Aviv … He said it did no one any harm to get a kick up the arse from time to time. And that we Israelis badly needed it. Because we had got stuck in a stalemate. Not only with the Palestinians, which was of course unfortunate. But also and especially with ourselves, which was much worse.

So the evacuation was timely. It gave us an undreamt-of chance to wipe the slate clean. To start again. In his mind, Zionism as an idea was not a failure. But it was stagnant. It had come unstuck in its application. Because of this and that. Those were his exact words. This and that. He spoke about restarting our attempts at Jewish socialism. About the importance of education. ‘Everything stems from that.’ And about being kinder in general. To poor people, and to Arabs.

There’s also Yaël’s stronger statement that Tel Aviv was the only place she “felt safe. From those at war with us. From those who have morality and justice on their side.” [my stress]

All this is narrated by Naor to his mother as they continue their trip – and as he does, certain things become clear. One is that there’s been some falling out between his mother and Saba, her father, and that this trip is partly a peace-making one (subtly paralleling the political war-and-peace background to the story.)

Now, I daren’t say any more for fear of giving the whole lot away. While it’s written nicely (albeit I read it in translation), its main appeal, besides the story, is its engaging narrative structure and gentle tone. I loved the way Naor’s story is interrupted regularly by comments from his mother (not to mention road signposts). These interactions, while hinting at some of the tensions needing to be resolved, also imbue the book with a lovely normal intimacy, unexpected perhaps in a book with such subject matter.

Evacuation is an open-ended book, one the reader can consider from various perspectives, including the choices we make, love and family, art and resistance, war and peace. I found it a surprisingly enchanting read, which I hope doesn’t make me sound insensitive to its seriousness, because I felt that too.

Raphaël Jerusalmy
Evacuation
(Trans. by Penny Hueston)
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2018 (Eng. ed.)
150pp.
ISBN: 9781925603378

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

WG Sebald, Austerlitz (#BookReview)

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WG Sebald, Austerlitz

For the first time in my reading group’s 30-year history, we read a book recommended by a fictional character. It happened like this: after reading and discussing Rabih Alameddine’s An unnecessary woman (my review) in January, we thought it would be interesting if we all nominated which book mentioned by the “unnecessary woman”, Aaliya Saleh, that we’d most like to read. The book that got the most votes was Austerlitz. I was thrilled, because I bought my copy back in 2010 to read with one of my online reading groups, but never did, and because I had already read and been bowled over by his The emigrants.

But now where to start? A bit left field I think – which is probably not inappropriate given Sebald’s approach to literature. The “left field” happens to be one of my (few) never-forgotten book quotes. It’s from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and is Sethe talking about “the day’s serious work of beating back the past.” Sethe is, as most of you probably know, an American ex-slave who is living with the trauma of her past life. Austerlitz, in Sebald’s book, is a man who, as a four-year-old, had been sent from Prague to England on a Kindertransporte in 1939, never to see his parents again. Indeed, he suppresses all memory of his past life – realising later

how little practice I had in using my memory, and conversely how hard I must always have tried to recollect as little as possible, avoiding everything which related to my unknown past.

This realisation comes some 50 years later, in the early 1990s, when, one day, having become “increasingly morbid and intractable” after the death of his only true friend, he is in the Ladies Waiting Room of the Liverpool Street Station – and a memory comes back of his arrival in England. At this point, his “self-censorship”, his “constant suppression of … memories” brings about a nervous breakdown. Upon his recovery, he begins researching his past life, resulting in trips to Prague to look for his mother, and to Paris to do the same for his father. Much of this is couched in discussions of architecture – because Austerlitz is an architectural historian – forcing us to consider the role architecture plays in human history and psychology. It’s compelling, but more than that, mesmerising …

However, this book has been written about with great insight and sensitivity by reviewers at, for example, the New York Times and The Guardian, so I’m going to do something a little different, and respond to that fictional woman, Aaliya, who recommended the book to my group!

“His style, drawn-out and elongated sentences that wrap around the page and their reader …”

And I will start with the seemingly mundane, the style, because it is this that confronts us most strongly with we start the book. If you’ve never read Sebald before it could be a shock. There are almost no paragraphs – well you could say there are 5 including the beginning of the book – which means there are no real chapters. The story just continues on and on, often through very long sentences containing multiple clauses and lists. We do have a narrator, the person to whom Austerlitz is telling his story and who relates it on to us.

Strangely though, I found the writing page-turning. There is something mesmerising about the almost flat, rather melancholic, tone suffusing the narration, that you want to keep reading. At least I did – and so did most of my reading group once they’d “got into it”. The style, in other words, wraps around you.

There are motifs and images which recur through the novel, making the whole cohere, creating the tone and developing the themes. There are shadows, there’s darkness more than light, and colours are muted, mostly grey. There are star-shapes, railway stations and other monumental buildings. There are references to ghosts. Places are more often empty or deserted, than heavily populated. And there’s the mysterious operation of time and memory. All these support the narrative’s mesmerising quality.

The book also includes black-and-white photographs, encouraging us to see it as non-fiction but no, this is fiction. Austerlitz is a made-up character – but, says The New Yorker, Sebald sometimes called his work “documentary fiction”. In other words, this is a very different sort of read.

“All I am is lonely. Before I go to bed, I must put away Sebald …

… both The Emigrants and Austerlitz. I can’t read him now, not in this state. He’s much too honest. I will read something else.” 

Our “unnecessary woman”, Aaliya, who lives in Beirut, has experienced war herself, been affected by its ravages. I won’t say more here, because I think what I have said about the story and it’s tone already makes clear why she feels this. Sebald is not a writer to be read at times of distress or melancholy, but his insights into what we call “the human condition” are … well, let me put it this way: this is not a book you explain, really, but one you feel. What you feel is something that affects the way you think about human history, about where we’ve been and where, unfortunately, it looks like we’re going.

“I am proud that I finished the Austerlitz project. I consider it one of the best Holocaust novels.”

Aaliya goes on to say that “I find that when a subject has been heavily tilled, particularly something as horrifying as the Holocaust, anything new should force me to look with fresh eyes, to experience previously unexperienced feelings, to explore the hitherto unexplored.” And this is why Austerlitz is powerful. Austerlitz was a young boy in a little Welsh town while the war was on so he did not experience the Holocaust directly. But, his experience of being displaced comes back to haunt him later. So this is not about a person who directly experienced the Holocaust, nor is it, though, about the second generation. It is about someone who lived at the time, but had not experienced it first-hand because his parents, who did, had removed him. He is in a sort of limbo generation – and “limbo” is probably a good description for how he feels through much of the novel.

He writes, describing his experience of another mental/physical collapse:

It was obviously of little use that I had discovered the source of my distress and, looking back over all the past years, could now see myself with the utmost clarity as that child suddenly cast out of his familiar surroundings: reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed and was now breaking through the walls of its confinement.

This statement struck me powerfully, because not only does it reflect another experience of the Holocaust – another way of looking at its impact – but it articulates the experience of our stolen generations, and, beyond that, of any children removed, for good or bad reasons, from their homes. “Reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation”. What more is there to say?

There is so much to talk about this book, so much I haven’t touched upon, but I’m going to finish with a brief reference to his discussion of time, the past and memory which underpins the novel. Here is Austerlitz late in the novel:

It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not also be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

I love this organic way of looking at time, this suggestion of how we might experience, approach or understand the events, particularly traumas, that happen to us.

Our unnecessary woman, Aaliyah, calls Austerlitz a great Holocaust novel, but I’d go one step further and simply say it is a great novel. Full stop.

WG Sebald
Austerlitz
(Trans. by Anthea Bell)
London: Penguin, 2002
415pp.
ISBN: 9780140297997

Jenny Ackland, Little gods (#BookReview)

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Jenny Ackland, Little godsThe universe is telling me something. Jenny Ackland’s Little gods is the second novel I’ve read in a few months that is set in the Mallee region of northwestern Victoria, the other being Charlie Archbold’s Mallee boys (my review). Interestingly, both are coming-of-age novels, both involve farms, and both have a death at the centre. However, this is where the similarity ends, because Ackland’s protagonist, Olive, is female – and younger than Archbold’s – and Ackland’s death is a mystery to Olive, whereas in Archbold’s novel it’s the mother’s death which precipitates the narrative.

There’s another difference too, and it’s that Mallee boys slots into YA fiction*, albeit also a good read for adults, whereas Ackland’s book, while seen primarily through Olive’s point of view, is adult fiction. This is because although it’s about Olive’s journey, the main focus is on the way children see adults and the way adults completely miss what is going on in children’s minds, on the decisions adults make about what to tell children and how children respond to what they sense isn’t being told.

So, the story. Set in the 1980s, it’s about Olive and her extended family in which two of the sisters, Audra and Rue, had married two brothers, Bruce and William, with a third sister and brother on each side left over. Thistle, the oldest (and left-over sister), lives with Rue and William and their three children, Sebastian, Archie and Mandy, on the sisters’ family farm. Audra and Bruce, with Olive, live close by in town. The action is split between the farm, which Olive’s family visits regularly, and Olive’s home in the neighbouring town.

The novel starts with a little un-named “prologue” which tells us that the book is about the year Olive turned 12, when she was “trapped in the savage act of growing up”. It’s about a time when, uncertain about what was going on, she reached back into her memory, only to find that memory can be deceptive. It all could have ended up far worse than it did. (We know it didn’t because here she is at the beginning, alive, apparently well, but contemplative!)

She is fierce

Anyhow, from this point, the novel proper starts with Olive knowing that the local community thinks her family – the whole family, I mean – “odd”, which entrenches her sense of outsiderness but also fires her sense of agency. The novel starts slowly, with the plot not picking up until we are well in. Before that, Olivia’s character and the family’s complicated relationships, particularly between the sisters, are carefully developed. Olive, we soon learn, is independent and, outwardly at least, sure of herself. She’s “fierce”, as the epigraph from Shakespeare warns us, and bosses her best friend, Peter, and her cousins around. But she is needy too. And for this there is Grace, a wild raven who provides her with the affection that she doesn’t get from her stylish but withdrawn mother. For all her faults, we like her.

And so, here’s Olive, on the cusp of adulthood, wanting to understand the world. She knows which adults in her life will nurture her, mainly Rue, and which are likely to answer her questions, and that’s mostly Thistle. However, Thistle has her own issues and sees life through a particular prism which is not always useful to Olive. It all starts to unravel when Olive finds pictures of her parents and Thistle all holding a baby which is not her. Through insistent questioning, she discovers that the baby had been her sister and had drowned. But, with no more details forthcoming, she decides the baby had been murdered and that she knows who is responsible. She determines on revenge, but needs help. Meanwhile, Thistle is working through her own lost baby problem … You could see this novel as a modern take on the Aussie “lost child” motif.

At times, as the narrative plays out, we are called on to suspend disbelief, but never quite beyond the point of no return. Some shocking things happen but others are diverted, so that by the end Olive has found some answers and also learnt some valuable lessons.

There are several joys in reading this book, one of which is the writing. Ackland’s descriptions of the Mallee, though brief, are evocative:

Sunday morning and the sun rose on the bleached Mallee landscape and lit the distressed greens and greys.

Even lovelier are the ways she captures people, their thoughts and relationships, particularly Olive’s of course:

Olive crept back to the bathroom. It was a startling thing to know that Cleg could be tender with Thistle the sister he seemed to like the least. Standing in front of the mirror it was as if there was an opening inside her mind. A plant, a tall one, with a green stem that was thick all the way around. At the top of it, a tightly bunched bloom, an enormous head of closed, wrapped petals. She didn’t know the colour of the flower yet but it was bright as if illuminated by special lights, and inside the heard of the flower was a quavering, shimmering sensation of coming movement and understanding.

Perfect.

Water also features throughout the novel, which is appropriate given the drowning, but it is also presented as a positive thing. For Olive, water provides respite. At the pool, “her body feels real in the water”, and, submerging herself in the dam she stays “under just to be in that cool distant place for a while longer.” The novel, in fact, opens and closes with references to Olive jumping off the high board – an effective image for the gutsy way she approached life, though the suggestion in the prologue is that having grown up she “was no longer a girl bombing off the high board.”

So, the book is about the challenges of growing up. Olive, the child, sees the world simplistically. People are “little gods” who “have power to do things, like make baddies pay”. She is shocked when lawyer Cleg sees it a little differently, is not so categorical about “bad people”. Ackland explores the clash between child and adult world views by teasing out responses to a family tragedy. As the secret comes out, as the truth is told, some family wounds heal and some lessons are learnt – but at what cost? I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Oh, and as for what the universe is telling me … it’s that I need to make good my plan of some years’ standing to visit the Mallee!

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed this book.

AWW Badge 2018Jenny Ackland
Little gods
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2018
345pp.
ISBN: 9781760297114

(Review copy courtesy Allen & Unwin)

* Mallee boys has just been commended as an Honour Book in the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers Award

Michelle de Kretser, The life to come (#BookReview)

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Michelle de Kretser, The life to comeMichelle de Kretser’s Miles Franklin shortlisted novel, The life to come, makes for great reading but difficult blogging because, like her Miles Franklin Award winner, Questions of travel (my review), it is big, and covers a lot of ground. Where to start is the problem. However, I’ll give it my best shot, starting with its form.

The novel comprises five distinct, almost standalone, parts, except that one character, the Australian novelist Pippa, appears in each one, providing a continuing narrative thread for the whole. She is introduced as a rather naive student in the Part 1 (“The Fictive Self”). We then move through Part 2 (“The Ashfield Tamil”) about Ash and Cassie, Part 3 (“The museum of romantic life”) about Céleste in Paris, and Part 4 (“Pippa Passes”) about Pippa and her in-laws, to end with Part 5 (“Olly Faithful”) about Christabel and Bunty. These characters are Australian, French, British and Sri Lankan.

But something intrigued me. The title of Part 4, “Pippa Passes”, rang a bell, of Robert Browning’s poem “Pippa Passes”. I don’t recollect much about the poem, but its form, interestingly, is similar to de Kretser’s novel. “Pippa Passes” is also the origin of the famous lines “God’s in his heaven/All’s right in the world”. However, while Pippa in the poem acts as a positive force, our Pippa does not. She thinks she’s a “good person”. As Céleste says, “Pippa would always need to demonstrate her solidarity with the oppressed – Indigenous people or battery hens, it scarcely mattered.” In fact, though, she regularly tramples on others, not necessarily intentionally, causing them pain. Presumably de Kretser intended this ironic allusion to Browning’s Pippa. I also wonder whether Christabel alludes to Coleridge’s poem Christabel, which explores the relationship between two women. Hmmm … I may be drawing long bows here as I don’t think Bunty is anything like Coleridge’s Geraldine. Still …

Anyhow, moving right along, I’m going to divide my remaining comments into two main strands – the personal and the, for want of a better word, sociocultural.

The personal

The novel’s title, The life to come, comes from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, as quoted in the epigraph. It provides a clue to the novel’s main theme. It’s the theme that most touches our hearts, because it’s about the hope for or belief in “the life to come”. It’s about the search for meaning, for transformation, for a full life.

Cassie, for example, realises that her relationship with Ash is about trying to work out “How was she to live?”. She thinks, self-centredly, that “the two Sri Lankans”, Ash and the Spice Market man, “had entered her life to change its course”. Paris-based Céleste, who is fifty-something, single, and having an affair with thirty-something Sabine, is confronting ageing. “Is this all there is?” she wonders, as she sees her future shrinking “to a single point of solitary, penny-pinching old-age.” Pippa, our ongoing character, imagines a glorious future for herself as a writer: “her future was as vast as the light beating its wings in clifftop parks.” Céleste, though, sees something quite different in Pippa; she sees “Excess so far in excess of achievement.” Finally, single, Sri Lankan immigrant Christabel, looks, from the beginning, for that moment of transformation when her real life will begin. At 34, “she had believed, briefly, that her life could be joyful.” She keeps on hoping, however, and even when she accepts, “humbly, that it might never exist for her (“I am ordinary”) … she needed to know it was there“.

De Kretser provides her characters with life’s reality check, that gap between what you imagine and what you achieve. Best to learn it sooner rather than later!

The sociocultural

While that personal strand touches our hearts, the other one provides more of the laughs, albeit rueful ones, because many of them are turned on us. The life to come, in other words, contains a healthy dose of satire, skewering our assumptions and pretentious. When I say our, I’m particularly referring to us left-oriented middle-class earnest do-gooders. Like all good satire, it makes you think …

Eva, Pippa’s mother-in-law, is a good example. She “likes rescuing things”. For example, she employs refugees from a “not-for-profit catering group” to serve food at her parties, while wearing “garments stiffened with embroidery and beads. At throat and wrists she wore silver set with gems, some the colour of butter, others the colour of blood. These tribal ornaments lit Eva’s face, and proclaimed her solidarity with the wretched of the earth.”

In another example, her osteopath Rashida, who also happens to be a Muslim Indian immigrant, dines with Eva and her family. They quiz her about her background:

‘My parents thought that India wasn’t the best place for Muslims,’ said Rashida. ‘I love these potato pancakes, Eva. Could I have the recipe?’

‘Were you persecuted for your faith?’ Eva asked, hushed and hopeful.

‘Not really.’

Keith [Eva’s husband] said, ‘So you were privileged migrants.’

Rashida said nothing. She seemed to be turning the sentence over in her mind, trying to work out its shape.

De Kretser skewers Australians’ naiveté and blindness again and again, particularly regarding the horrors experienced by others, offsetting actual history against the idea of stories. Cassie, who is “postmodernly tutored”, thinks history is “just a set of competing stories” but Ash, born of a Scottish mother and Sir Lankan father, knows the difference between history and story, and understands exactly “the historical sequence that … brought a Tamil civil servant to the counter of a shop in the west of Sydney.” Cassie, Ash sees, “clung to an idea of Australia as a place where kindness prevailed over expediency”, her face denying “the existence of evil, the possibility of despair”. Ash, however, gobsmacked by her lack of awareness, wonders

What is wrong with you Australians? You eat curries without rice, a barbarism. You fear being attacked by people you’ve killed. You stole their land for animals that you slaughter in their millions, when you don’t leave them to die by the side of the road.

Pippa is no better than Cassie. She “saw Europe, momentous and world-historical, magnifying eventless Australia”, oblivious, clearly, to the barbarism enacted on our own shores. After all, as Ash is told when taken to his friend’s country home, “there’s no actual historical [my emphasis] record of a massacre.”

There are lighter, though no less satiric touches, such as Pippa’s telling Christabel about dining out with her literary agent:

We went to this amazing new Asian place at Darling Harbour. It’s been quite controversial because they do live sashimi. But Gloria and I talked about it, the cruelty aspect, and we decided it was Japanese cultural tradition so it was OK.

Where do we draw a line on cultural relativism?

The life to come is an uncomfortable book, particularly for Australians, because it suggests we are generally naive, and blundering, in our assumptions about and behaviour towards others, no matter how hard we try to be “good”. It’s also uncomfortable for us all as humans, because it exposes the gaps between our dreams and hopes for large lives and the reality that more often than not confronts us. The result is something that’s touching but also a bit pitiful.

Is this a Miles Franklin winner? I’m not sure. It may in fact try to do too much. But, is it a great read? Absolutely. I’d recommend it to anyone.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed the book. And, for a non-Australian blogger, check out Guy’s post at His futile preoccupations.

PS I read this with my reading group.

AWW Badge 2018Michelle de Kretser
The life to come
North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2017
375pp.
ISBN: 9781760296568

Marie Munkara, Of ashes and rivers that run to the sea (#BookReview)

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Marie Munkara, Of ashes and rivers than run to the sea

The stories keep on coming, the stories, I mean, of indigenous children stolen from their families and what happened to them afterwards. I’ve posted on Carmel Bird’s compilation of stories from the Bringing them home report, The stolen children: Their stories, and also on Ali Cobby Eckermann’s memoir Too afraid to cry. Now it’s Marie Munkara’s turn with her excruciatingly honest, but also frequently laugh-out-loud-funny memoir, Of ashes and rivers that run to the sea.

Late in her memoir, Munkara learns that she was born “under a tree on the banks of the Mainoru River in Western Arnhem Land.” But, what she writes next is shocking

‘Too white,’ my Nanna Clara said as they checked me out by the camp-fire light, and everyone knew what that meant. Back in those days any coloured babies in my family were given to the crocs because dealing with these things right away saved a lot of suffering later on. It was better that we die in our own piece of country than be taken by the authorities and lost to our families forever.

Does that remind you of anything? It did me – of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, and the slave mother’s decision there. Anyhow, knowing what we know now about the lives of many stolen children, we can surely understand her indigenous family’s actions. Luckily, though, for Munkara – and us – Nanna Clara saw something “special” in her, and she was kept. That was in 1960. Three years later, now living on the Tiwi Islands, the inevitable happened and she was taken from home one day when her mother was at work at the mission laundry. Her mother begged for her to be returned, to no avail.

All this, however, we learn near the end of the book. Munkara starts the book when, at the age of 28 and quite by accident, she came across her baptismal card tucked in a book in her parents’ library. It told her that she was born in Mainoru in Arnhem Land. “In the space of an instant,” she writes, “excitement was replaced with mortification as old geography lessons began to resurface” about a “wild and untamed place where Aborigines hunted kangaroos and walked around butt-naked.” However, she decides to find out more, and soon discovers that her mother was still alive and still living in the Tiwi Islands. She decides to go meet her, with no advance notice.

To say that she was shocked by what she found is an understatement. “This is not the tropical island I had imagined,” she writes, “with luscious vegetation and cute little palm-frond houses. It is a dump.” She tries hard to enjoy her time there, but hates it and three days later returns home. However, it’s not long before she realises that she has to return. This ends Part 1 of the four-part book. In Part 2, she goes back in time and tells of her life as the foster child of two unhappy but highly religious people. Her mother was strict, and cruel, but her father was worse. He molested her for many years. A sad, sad upbringing but Munkara, as she admits herself, is a survivor:

But aren’t human beings amazing creatures and even at an early age we can choose to let the bad things in life devour us and we sink or we can make the most of the good bits and swim. … I chose to swim.

Part 2, then, makes for hard reading, but Munkara’s sense of humour, her ability to believe that things will work out, and her independent mind bring her, and us, through. She’s a great story-teller, which makes this section more manageable than you might expect – but it still leaves you angry!

And then we come to Part 3 in which she tells of her return to Bathurst Island. This is where the real interest of the book lies because it is here that Munkara takes us on her journey into another culture. She is us – to a degree. She has been brought up white – albeit “a dusky maiden” version – and her expectations and initial reactions are very much as ours would be. She describes how she tries to apply her whitefella ways to her new life with her Aboriginal family. She expects privacy, cleanliness, order and, most of all, respect for her possessions. None of these sit well with traditional Indigenous values as she found them on Tiwi, but she’s determined nonetheless. We can feel her horror and frustration – but she’s telling this story long after the events, and imbues them with a light touch of self-deprecation and a warmth for her family which encourages acceptance rather than judgement (in herself and us).

Some examples:

I spend the day scrubbing the kitchen and neatly place all my things by themselves on a shelf so everyone can see they belong to me, and then I have a well-earnt nap. I sleep soundly and wake up to the smells of cooking. Stretching and yawning I make my way to the kitchen to put on the billy for tea only to stop at the doorway in horror, my mouth still open from the yawn. The room in an absolute shithole of a mess. My stuff is strewn everywhere […] Everyone tiptoes around me now they know I’m in a bad mood and I’m fine with that, maybe they’ll learn not to touch things that they shouldn’t.

and

They are instantly awake when they see that I’m only dressed in my bra and underpants. Thankfully my underwear is matching…

Haha, as if they’d care! And,

… after going to the footy on the weekend with my family for protection I’ve gotten over my fear of big crowds of black people. I now feel quite foolish for thinking they could be harmful to me and reckon I must have gotten this irrational fear from my white parents.

So much of this section resonated with me because it reflected many of the things Mr Gums and I were learning and experiencing as I was reading it. I’ve already posted on the cars, but there’s also the mess, the confusing kinship (including her having to call various dogs her brother, her son, her uncle and so on), the trust in spirits, the lack of concern for possessions, all of which can result in decisions and behaviours mystifying to us whitefellas.

But Munkara also learnt more seriously confronting things, such as that her mother’s damaged leg was caused by leprosy, something she’d thought only happened in the Bible and poor countries:

I slide my ill-informed thoughts into the rubbish bin and slam the lid down tight, angry that our First World country can live in ignorant bliss of our Third World problems. … I bet there wouldn’t be too many white people afflicted with leprosy in Australia because if there were it would be front-page news.

However, while the memoir is, for us, an eye-opening, necessary journey into another culture, it is, ultimately for Munkara, a journey to her self. By the end of Part 3, she has come to a better understanding of who she is:

But they don’t realise that there is no stolen and there is no lost, there is no black and there is no white. There is just me. And I am perfect the way I am. And I know now that I have to leave this place because I’ve learnt all I can for the time being and this lesson is over now.

She only leaves as far as Darwin, however, so she can remain in contact with her family. And so it is that, late in the book, Munkara writes about her (biological) mother’s dying:

When I asked her if she had any regrets she said there were no words in any of our family languages for regret. To regret something was a waste of time so why make a word for something that you didn’t need.

Munkara’s mother’s comment that her language doesn’t have a word for “regret” encapsulates for me the value of reading this book, which is its chronicling of the meeting of two opposing cultures. I thoroughly recommend the book, because understanding what divides us is critical to reconciliation – and because it is a darned good read. She can tell a story, that one!

ANZLitLovers ILW 2018

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) has reviewed this book, as has French blogger Emma (Book around the corner) and the Resident Judge. Read for Lisa’s (ANZLitLovers) Indigenous Literature Week.

AWW Badge 2018

Marie Munkara
Of ashes and rivers that run to the sea
North Sydney: Penguin Random House, 2016
179pp. (print version)
ISBN: 9780857987280 (eBook)

Michelle Scott Tucker, Elizabeth Macarthur: A life at the edge of the world (#BookReview)

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Michelle Scott Tucker, Elizabeth MacarthurThere’s something special about reading a good, engaging history – and this is how I’d describe debut author Michelle Scott Tucker’s biography Elizabeth Macarthur: A life at the edge of the world. There are, in fact, three prongs to my statement, namely, it is history, it is good history, and it is engaging history. I plan to tease out each of these in my post.

First though, a bit about Elizabeth Macarthur, particularly for non-Australians who may never have heard of her. She arrived in Australia on the Second Fleet in 1790, at the age of 23, with her husband John Macarthur who had an army commission with the New South Wales Corps. Their aim was for John to gain a promotion, and then return to England. However, they soon started making their mark in the new colony as farmers – including pioneering the Australian wool industry – and Elizabeth never did return to England, though John did twice. The first time (1801 to 1805) was to stand trial over a duel with Colonel Paterson, and the second (1809 to 1817) to stand trial again, this time for his role in the rebellion against Governor Bligh. Now, have you noticed those dates? Four years away and then eight years. So, who ran the famous pioneer farming enterprise? Yes, Elizabeth of course. It was partly to correct the longstanding image of Elizabeth as helpmeet to her husband that inspired Tucker to write this biography.

Now, my three prongs, starting with that it is history. This is easy to explain. In form this is a biography, but like most biographies of historical figures it also operates as history, because the reason it has been written, the reason we are interested, is the subject’s role in an historical period. This is somewhat different from literary biographies which don’t necessarily engage with wider historical issues relating to the subject, though you could argue, I suppose, that all biographies are history. I’m good, you’ve probably learnt by now, at this on-the-one-hand-but-then-again-on-the-other sort of argument! Still, the story of Elizabeth Macarthur is ingrained in the history of the early British settlement of Australia.

Next, that it is good history. Now, I readily admit that I’m not a trained historian. I did a little history at university – in fact just one subject on historiography – but I’m interested in history and like to read it when I can. So, what do I mean by “good history”? I mean that the history is, or at least appears to my lay eye, to be trustworthy. For it to appear this way, it needs to be well-researched, well-documented and well-presented. And this, Elizabeth Macarthur is. That it is well-researched is evidenced by the extensive bibliography containing significant primary and secondary sources, many of which I am aware and know to be authoritative. That it is well-documented is evidenced not only by this bibliography, but by the comprehensive, but unobtrusive end-noting. Very few facts that I wanted to check were not supported by a source. I read this book with a bookmark at the end-notes so I could easily check sources (or additional explanatory notes), which I did fairly frequently, not because I didn’t trust Tucker but because I was interested to know where she’d got her information. As for the presentation, this is also excellent with evocatively titled chapters, each headed with a quote, usually from Elizabeth or John’s own writings; the detailed index and the use of end-notes rather than foot-notes; and the sensibly selected and ordered pics.

These aren’t all that make it good history, though, because of course the “story” needs to be well-argued, and it is. Tucker marshalls the facts together clearly and logically to prove Elizabeth’s significant role in the family’s farming, but what I particularly liked was the way she handles her sources, and, in particular, the gaps, because of course there are gaps. There are, for example, letters not kept, information not documented in private journals, personal conversations not, of course, recorded. Tucker is careful to flag these, with words like “probably” and “maybe”, making it clear when she is presenting her own assessment of the situation. On one occasion when the frequently disputatious John Macarthur sends off a messenger with an inflammatory letter, that messenger is waylaid by his son Edward. Who sent the son, Tucker asks before exploring the possibilities, deciding in the end:

No. The most likely source is Elizabeth Macarthur, once more trying to mitigate her husband’s wilder misjudgements. But we have to imagine it: a hushed yet heated conversation with Edward to send him flying out after Oakes and then a vain attempt to placate and soothe John …

And finally, the last prong – that it is engaging history. It’s engaging partly because of the subject. Elizabeth Macarthur is an interesting woman, who lived long, achieved much, and left enough documentation for a story about her to be told. She was a woman of her times, as Tucker makes clear. She was aware of her social status, and wasn’t much into “good works” like some of the other leading women of the colony, but she and John were known to treat employees well. She was well-respected in the colony, and many times played conciliatory roles, but she and John were always driven, in the end, by money. And, of course, she was an excellent farm manager.

It’s also engaging history because of the writing. This story has a large cast. Elizabeth had seven children, for a start, but also, she lived in the colony for 60 years, so knew a large number of the often-revolving movers and shakers of colonial society. Tucker manages to keep the story moving despite all this, using some of the techniques more often found in fiction, including foreshadowing, clear character development, and succinct but evocative turns of phrase:

Yet for all their emphasis on the rewards of heaven, the gentlefolk of Georgian England maintained a steely gaze on the rewards of this earthly life.

AND

When the court sat at 10am the scene was more circus than circumspect.

Why, though, should we read this now? Well, there are several reasons, the main one being to re-balance the historical record to properly recognise women’s roles. There’s also the discussion about indigenous relationships in the colony, with Tucker chronicling the Macarthurs’ early good relations with local people followed by their changing attitudes as “their” land and livelihood began to be threatened. There’s John Macarthur’s mental health and the role it played in his behaviour (and thus history.) Did he suffer, for example, from bipolar disorder as Tucker and others suggest? And then, there’s the insight Tucker provides into the daily life of the early colony – the relationships in such a close community, the economic ups and downs, the communication challenges caused by distance from England, and so on. If you like social history, there’s much here for you.

I did laugh at Tucker’s concluding comments that Elizabeth Macarthur, born 9 years before Jane Austen, is “a real-life Elizabeth Bennet who married a Wickham, instead of a Darcy – albeit one who loved her as much as he was able.” I’m not sure I agree, but I applaud her for taking on the Austen fans of the world this way!

Meanwhile, for other bloggers’ reviews of this book, do check out Lisa’s (ANZLitLovers) and Bill’s (The Australian Legend).

AWW Badge 2018Michelle Scott Tucker
Elizabeth Macarthur: A life at the edge of the world
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2018
xxxpp.
ISBN:

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Jan Wallace Dickinson, The sweet hills of Florence (#BookReview)

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Jan Wallace Dickinson, The sweet hills of FlorenceThere are several reasons why I enjoyed Jan Wallace Dickinson’s historical novel The sweet hills of Florence, the first being Florence itself. I fell in love with Italy in Florence. Brunelleschi’s dome, Giotto’s belltower, the Uffizi and all the other gorgeous places of art and architecture, not to mention the food, combined to capture my heart. It was the first foreign place to do so, and so remains today a special memory. Dickinson, who has apparently lived and worked in Italy for many years, clearly loves Florence too, because it is described in this book with such love.

However, that’s not the only reason for liking this book. Another is the history. I’ve read many, many novels set during the second world war, but not many set in Italy, let alone in Florence. When I visited Florence way back in 1980, it was the art that drew me. I knew very little of its war history, and I don’t recollect its being much on display. Dickinson, though, tells a fascinating story, one that captures both the horror and chaos, the brutality and bravery of war, and particularly of Italy’s war, well.

In some ways, the book could be described as historical romance, except that it doesn’t fit the bodice-ripper formula that I, of admittedly limited experience, see as the definition of this historical fiction sub-genre. What I’m saying in other words, is that in this book, although the love story underpins the plot, it doesn’t drive it in a suspenseful way. This enables Dickinson to explore the main relationship in a more subtle, dare I say, more nuanced way – and to focus on other themes as well.

The story, then, concerns two cousins, Enrico and Annabelle, who are in their late teens to early twenties, during the period of war – 1941 to 1945 – covered by the book. It’s clear from the beginning that Annabelle loves Enrico, and it doesn’t take long before we realise her love is reciprocated. The story follows their lives as partisans, with the Giustizia e Libertà movement within the Italian resistance movement. It’s a story of love, loyalty and camaraderie, but also of courage, deprivation, brutality, and chaos. Dickinson writes this convincingly, though I must say that all the names and places sometimes made my head spin! Here are a couple of examples of her descriptions, describing the German occupation of Florence:

There was no shortage of good citizens ready to settle a score by denouncing someone to Major Charity. The war lifted a rock and from under it, unimaginable creatures emerged, creatures who could not survive in the sunlight, who could thrive only in the dank shady corners of a civil war.

AND

This was the real Florence, the Florence of sobbing and wailing and tearing of hair, not the painted and decorated Florence put on show by the authorities to distract the popular, like the dance of a painted harlot before an audience of terminally ill patients in a madhouse.

Another aspect of the book which made it interesting reading is its structure. The novel is divided into 6 parts, and flips between war-time and the 2000s (up to 2008). The main war action is told chronologically through the middle parts of the novel, while at the beginning and end, we alternate somewhat between past and present. Again, this structure forces us to focus on the characters and their development, on the ideas and themes, rather than the plot.

There’s also paralleling of Annabelle’s love for Enrico, with Clara Petacci’s love for Benito Mussolini. I enjoyed this too. Dickinson spends some time describing Clara and Ben’s relationship. In her Acknowledgements she describes them as “fictionalised characters constructed from my interpretation of diaries, reports and histories.” Clara and Ben’s story serves a few purposes in the novel besides being a focus for Annabelle’s thinking about love. It humanises the two characters, for a start; it encourages us to consider the complexities of their relationship; and it makes the manner of their deaths all the more shocking.

We have no choice, do we?

In the end though, the ideas and themes were what I most enjoyed about the book, particularly those regarding the brutality of war and the lessons learnt or, to be more precise, not learnt. Dickinson makes very clear several times through the novel that there are no saints in war – and that Enrico and Annabelle themselves were capable not only of “justifiable” killing but of more brutal acts:

We cross a line. We decide killing os justified. We have no choice, do we? After that, nothing is taboo. Nothing is unthinkable. We are Freedom Fighters. We are heroes. We have rights on our side. Then wars end. We sleep and try to forget. But beneath it all we are still killers. We stand on the other side of the line. (from Annabelle’s diary)

Dickinson’s main theme, though, concerns the lessons of war. Annabelle’s reaction on the brutal death of Mussolini and Clara, and the subsequent way the bodies were treated, was

I wept for what we have become. Have we learned nothing?

Then, late in the novel, she makes a similar comment, quoting a partisan colleague who’d said:

“Italians … do not learn from the past. They live in the continuous present.”

There were times when I wondered about the reason for the epic nature of this novel, for its spanning so many decades and for, something I haven’t mentioned before, also spanning two countries, Italy and Australia to which Enrico went after the war. Dickinson, through Annabelle and her beloved niece Delia, consider the differences between Italy and Australia, seeing, for example, the former as kinder and the latter as more free. I’m not sure I agreed with all their conclusions, and I’m not sure what these discussions added to the novel, but …

… what did add to the novel were the references to the leering Berlusconi’s re-election in 2008 despite his increasingly fascist tendencies. Seen by a horrified Delia and Annabelle as “a leap back into the past”, it leaves us with, indeed, the question, “have we learned nothing?” The sweet hills of Florence, then, is an engrossing read if you like a strong story about “real” characters, that asks the important questions.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed this book – I promise I hadn’t read her review when I wrote my introduction, which is suspiciously similar!! I decided not to change it.

AWW Badge 2018Jan Wallace Dickinson
The sweet hills of Florence
Melbourne: Hybrid Publishers, 2018
401pp.
ISBN: 9781925272840

Review copy courtesy Hybrid Publishers.