21st century literature

Stephen Orr, Incredible floridas (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Stephen Orr, Incredible floridasThe good thing about reviewing Stephen Orr’s latest book Incredible floridas is that you know the end at the beginning, so there’s no need to worry about spoilers. The end, the one that you read at the beginning that is, is that Hal, the 22-year-old son of artist Roland and his wife Ena, commits suicide. By the end, the real end that is, you have some understanding of why he does, but you are also left to think about the drive to create art and its impact on family, about parental love and father-son relationships, and about that notion that it takes a village to raise a child.

To make this work, Orr uses a flashback-style chronology. The novel starts in 1962, just after Hal’s death, and then flashes back to 1944, when Hal is 4. From there it moves forward in irregular bunches of years -1948, 1950, and 1956 – until we arrive again at 1962 where it takes us through the events leading up to the death. This, then, is not the book for those who seek excitement and plot. Rather, it’s for those who love character, are intrigued by families and neighbourhood relationships, and like historical fiction.

There’s more to it than this, however – and it relates to the artist-father Roland. He is clearly modelled on the Australian artist Russell Drysdale (1912-1981) about whom I wrote a couple of years ago. Roland’s work and career as described by Orr – his angular lonely figures in stark landscapes, and the decline in his reputation – is similar to Drysdale’s. And Drysdale’s biography – his having a son and daughter, his being rejected for war service because of a detached retina, and his son committing suicide at the age of 21 in 1961 – is similar to our fictional Roland’s.

And then there’s the title. “Incredible floridas” rang a bell with me, and a little research brought it back. Peter Weir made a short film called Incredible Floridas in 1972. (It’s available on YouTube.) It portrays Australian composer Richard Meale (1932-2009) creating his work, Incredible Floridas, which was inspired by the 19th century French poet, Rimbaud. Curiouser and curiouser.

But, how much of this is relevant to Orr’s novel? Well, Meale’s work is an homage to Rimbaud, just as Orr’s is to Drysdale. And Weir’s award-winning short film has been described as “a wonderful tribute to artistic inspiration” which we can see in Orr’s book. Then there’s Rimbaud’s poem, “Le bateau ive” (“The drunken boat), which includes the words “incredible floridas”. It’s about inspiration and ecstasy, and their downsides, disappointment and disillusion. There are, in fact, several references to boats in the novel, paper ones and a painting Roland does of a child in a boat with panthers, another reference to Rimbaud’s poem, in the background.

And, while I’m at it, there are also allusions to Shakespeare’s Henry IV Pt I. Hal is nick-named Prince Hal, and the allusion is underlined by one character telling him to watch out for Hotspur. The irony, of course, is that our Prince Hal does not win out in the end.

I hope all this hasn’t been boring – or worse, off-putting. The book can be read very comfortably without knowing any of this, but I love the layers they contribute. Now, the novel.

“casualty of art”?

Set in mid-twentieth century suburban Adelaide – mostly – the novel tells of Hal’s growing up within a small community comprising, primarily, his family (father, mother and older sister Sonia) and neighbours Mary, her brother Sam, and her lupus-afflicted daughter Shirley who is ostracised and bullied by the neighbourhood kids. Other characters, who appear more sporadically, include Roland’s art school friend James, Mary’s cousin Trevor, and Hal’s grandmother Nan who works for Dr Bailey. These make up “the village” which raises, or tries to, Hal.

From 1944, when Hal is 4, it’s clear that he’s not an easy child. And it’s also clear that Roland is driven by his art – “art was an all-or-nothing proposition”. How these two are related is central to the book. Hal regularly feels he comes second, but Roland is not the stereotypical dark, inward-looking artist. Sure, he thinks about his work most of the time, and sure, he had his “periods … months on end when they barely saw him”, but he is also seen engaging with the family and making time for Hal. Finding the art-life balance is a challenge for creators, particularly when they work from home. Always being there doesn’t mean they are always available. Is Hal a “casualty of art” or are his problems something else?

When Hal is around 16 years old, directionless and acting erratically, sometimes violently so, Roland takes him on the first of several road trips because “he knew that Hal could only be made better under the stars” (albeit Ena thinks Hal “needs a proper doctor”). To a degree it works, but Roland can never quite get it right. Of course he thinks about art and makes sketches – creating a visual diary of the trip – while they travel, but he’s also there communicating with his son, talking about options, and not pushing him to be anything in particular. Unfortunately, Hal doesn’t see the love, the sacrifice, the wish for him to be “happy”. He just sees it as Roland “trying to improve his character”.

Stepping into some of the gaps left by Roland’s busy-ness is next door neighbour Sam. He becomes a second father to Hal, taking him to the racecourse, providing his own thoughtful counsel when Hal comes calling, and making significant sacrifices to help Hal. Nan’s employer, Dr Bailey, is also generous. But Hal just keeps on getting into scrapes – at school and in the neighbourhood. He has few friends because, as he himself realises, he doesn’t know how to be one. As Ena says in the opening section, “Hal was Hal, and his wires were crossed”.

While art and the artist’s life is an overall theme, this is primarily a book about men, about fathers and sons. And Orr portrays them so authentically. There are women here too, but this is the mid-twentieth century and it’s essentially a man’s world in which women’s agency is limited. All they can do, Ena sees, is to follow the men, and try “to make the unworkable work.” Similarly, poor Shirley sees the sacrifices Sam makes for Hal, who has treated her poorly, and wonders where she fits.

So what more is there to say? The writing is clear, evocative and, what I especially love about Orr, includes wonderfully natural dialogue. I’ll just share one excerpt (but it’s so hard to choose!). It comes from 1944 when four-year-old Hal and Roland visit an airforce base with Trevor Grant:

Uniform or not, things were looking up. Hal studied the plane’s wings and asked his dad, “D’yer reckon it’s got guns?”
“No.”
“D’yer reckon I could look inside?”
“Prob’ly not.”
Grant and the other man approached them. The man messed his hair. “This is top secret,” he said. “Has Corporal Grant administered the oath?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, he will, later. And once you’ve taken it you can’t say nothing about this to no one, or else the government will come lookin’ for you. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Roland noticed the same look on his son’s face, as Hal studied the two men. Like he’d just seen a comet for the first time. Something marvellous, new; a boy in a boat in a jungle full of panthers.

Incredible floridas is the third Orr book I’ve read, the others being The hands (my review) and Datsunland (my review). What keeps me coming back is his ability to capture ordinary, day-to-day human interactions, human hopes and fears, with such realism and warmth. There’s no judgement from Orr. He leaves that for the reader to consider.

Lisa (ANZlitLovers) is also a Stephen Orr fan and enjoyed this book.

Stephen Orr
Incredible floridas
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2017
335pp.
ISBN: 9781743055076

(Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press)

Sofie Laguna, The choke (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 29 Comments

Sofie Laguna, The chokeThere are many reasons why I wanted to read Sofie Laguna’s latest book The choke. Firstly, I was inspired by a very engaging author conversation I attended late last year. Secondly, she won the Miles Franklin with her previous book The eye of the sheep (which I still haven’t read). Thirdly, its setting, the Murray River, is one of my favourite parts of Australia. For these and other reasons, I finally slotted it in this month, despite my growing backlog of review copies, and I’m glad I did. It’s an engrossing, moving read.

The novel is divided into two parts, the first set in 1971 when its first person protagonist Justine is 10 years old, and the second set three years later when she is thirteen years old and starting high school. It’s an effective structure. The first part sets up Justine and her physically and emotionally impoverished situation. She lives with her war-traumatised grandfather Pop on a struggling farm on the banks of the Murray. Her mother is long gone, and her father returns erratically. She has regular contact with her two older half-brothers who live nearby with her father’s first wife. Pop loves Justine, but he does not have the wisdom or emotional resources to guide – or even provide for – her as she needs. She is undernourished and poorly groomed. We are therefore unsurprised when Part 2 unfolds the way it does.

Now, I am a little cautious about first person narratives. It’s not that I don’t like them. In fact they can be highly engaging, but it did seem, for a while at least, that first person was becoming the voice du jour. However, Laguna’s choice here is inspired. She’s known for her ability to write young people and it’s well demonstrated here. Telling the story in Justine’s voice enables her to show Justine’s situation, without resorting to telling, which can so easily turn to moralising. Justine is the perfect naive narrator. She can only describe and explain the world as she knows it, so we readers must read between the lines to work out what is really going on. We work out, for example, that she is dyslexic by the way she describes her inability to read. We learn about the quality (often poor) of the relationships that surround her through her observations.

When I looked at [half-brother] Steve it was as if there was a ditch all around him too wide to jump. If you shone a torch into it, you’d never see the bottom. Steve couldn’t get across by himself; it was only Dad who could help him.

She might not understand the world – and it is this, along with her loneliness, which drives the crisis when it comes – but she’s attuned to the feelings between people.

One of the reasons this book so engaged me, in fact, is that it’s all about character. In the conversation we attended, Laguna said a couple of things about this. She said that it’s the characters and the tensions between and within them that drive the narrative and that character IS the plot.

“I got it wrong from the start”

So, who are these characters who drive the narrative? Justine is the main one, of course. She tells us that she was a breech birth – “I thought that was the right way to come out.” She understands by this that she “wrong from the start”, and she blames herself for her mother’s departure three years later. Her sense of being wrong – and feeling somehow responsible – is a recurring refrain in the novel. The other characters – her Pop, her sometimes-present father Ray, her mostly absent but significant aunt Rita, her friend Michael, her half-brothers, and the similarly dysfunctional neighbouring Worlleys – are all seen through her eyes. It is the tensions, stated and unstated, between them and their impact on her, that drive the narrative and the decisions she makes.

As well as a coming-of-age story, The choke is also a classic outsider story. Part one sets up Justine’s outsiderness, and chronicles, among other things, the friendship that develops between her and another outsider at school, Michael, who is taunted, bullied, because of his physical disability. Justine doesn’t have the words, but his disability appears to be cerebral palsy. The end of this friendship with Michael’s departure for the city ends Part One. This friendship plays multiple roles in the narrative. It helps develop Justine’s character. Her decision to stand up for Michael, having earlier wanted nothing to do with him, not only brings her a friend and marks her outsiderness from the cohort, but also shows her own sense of social justice. However, this friendship also exposes her low self-expectations and further reveals her neglect, because Michael’s family is a “normal” middle-class family. There’s a mum and dad, two kids, a proper house, regular meals and proper care. Justine is intitially embarrassed by the gap between their lives and hers, but when Michael eventually visits her home, she discovers he loves visiting it. He loves, for example, the chooks, Cockyboy and the Isa Browns.

By the time Part Two starts, her father Ray is in jail and Justine is starting high school. With Michael gone, she’s isolated at school and, while loved at home, continues to be neglected. The crisis is revenge-driven for something her father had done, but Justine, as the vulnerable female, is, of course, the target. It’s a gut-wrenching story of damage, neglect, abuse and, yes, also just simple misguidedness. Her Pop means well but is ill-equipped for the caring role thrust upon him. In the end, the story is also one of a failure of people and systems – including education – to identify Justine’s real situation.

And then there’s “the choke” of the title. I don’t always discuss a book’s title, particularly given that the author doesn’t always have last say on this, but for this book it’s highly relevant:

Down at The Choke the river pushed its way between the banks. The water knew the way it wanted to go. Past our hideouts, past our ring of stones, past the red gums leaning close enough to touch – it flowed forward all the way to the sea.

The “choke”, then, is a bottleneck in the river, a place, Justine says elsewhere, “where it would push through and keep going”. It is a physical place (based on the actual Barmah Choke) and a metaphorical one. Physically, it is a place of tranquility, of respite, for Justine. However, it also symbolises the things that threaten to “choke” her life, while at the same time hinting at hope, at the possibility of pushing through.

The choke is a book written by someone who knows exactly what she is doing. As I flipped through it to write this post, I noticed again and again the crumbs laid for us, the signs, in other words, that prepare the groundwork for what comes later. There is nothing wasted here. It is a grim story, but it is enlivened by its resilient young protagonist who finds the resources within herself to “push through” when life threatens to overwhelm. It may not have been shortlisted for the Stella Prize but I’m glad I decided to read it.

AWW Badge 2018Sofie Laguna
The choke
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2017
369pp.
ISBN: 9781760297244

Carmel Bird, The dead aviatrix: Eight short stories (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 28 Comments

Carmel Bird, Dead aviatrix

Carmel Bird, whose latest short story collection, The dead aviatrix: Eight short stories, I’m reviewing here, has to be the consummate writer. She can turn her hand to fiction and nonfiction, to short and long form writing, to formal and more informal voices, and to both serious and witty or satiric tones. She’s also an editor/anthologist in addition to being a writer. And now she’s experimenting with a digital platform. So, when she hesitantly offered me The dead aviatrix to read and review, there was only one answer, yes.

Her hesitation related to its e-book form. She feared that we Gums’ people aren’t much interested in ebooks, but, she wrote, “they are a growing part of the literary landscape”. Then, using a very Bird-like expression, she continued, “so maybe one day you will write a bit about them, and if and when you do, The Dead Aviatrix will be idling on the tarmac.” Well, how could I resist, even if I had wanted to, an aviatrix idling on the tarmac? And anyhow, as you know, I do read and write about e-books. Annabel Smith’s The ark (my review) is a good example, but I’ve reviewed several e-books here including Dorothy Johnston’s Eight pieces on prostitution (my review).

Like Dorothy Johnston’s book, which was a digital publishing initiative of the Australian Society of Authors, The dead aviatrix is the first Capsule Collection, a new platform by digital publisher Spineless Wonders. Subsequent titles in the series will, the book’s “About” says, include works “selected from The Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award”. You clearly can’t keep a good writer down. I love that this doyenne of the Australian literary scene is still exploring and experimenting.

However, it’s all well and good to explore and experiment with form, delivery platform, and so on, but in the end you need to produce the goods, and this Bird has done with her eight stories. I should say, before discussing them, that all have been published before – in publications like Southerly, Island Magazine, and Review of Australian Fiction.

So now, at last, the stories themselves. They are a wonderful lot. Bird regularly makes me laugh, and she does so again here. It’s not empty laughter though, because her targets are serious. It’s just that she frequently presents her ideas with a cheeky, often satirical approach.

The first story is “The dead aviatrix and the Stratemeyer Syndicate”. It’s written in the sort of style Bird used in Fair game, her memoir of Tasmania (my review). By this I mean it digresses or, as she says, becomes “productively sidetracked”. However, as “The dead aviatrix” is “a publishing story”, the opening digression about the prolific Edward Stratemeyer – creator of a childhood favourite of mine The Bobbsey Twins – is relevant in a way (of course!). Actually, it’s very relevant because she finds a quote about an aviatrix in a Stratemeyer book, and uses it to springboard her story. Oh, she’s a character! The tone of the story, like several in the book, is chatty. She talks directly to us, the reader, leading us along, often lulling us into a false sense of security. In this case, it’s a little satire on the publishing industry – on proofs going astray, on distracted publishing interns – but along the way it invokes or references all sorts of ideas, including the Australian aviatrix Nancy Bird Walton who “unlike the great and mysterious Amelia … did not disappear in the skies.” Sometimes it is hard to keep up with Bird (our Bird, I mean!) but I love trying. This story is, partly, about the art of writing stories.

The second story, “The Whirligigge of time brings its revenges”, draws from a Shakespeare quote, and is also a publishing story, this one more satirical about first and second novels, the notion of “literary” novels, awards, and not using agents. Again, it has a similar, chatty story-telling tone. Here’s an example:

The history of this novel (The Heat of Summer) is the real subject of my tale. That, and the wheel of fortune and the quirks of fate. The book takes its first inspiration from Camus’ famous L’Etranger, and its content is drawn from the aforementioned history of Joseph Tice Gellibrand, the disappearing Attorney-General of Van Diemen’s Land. Well, you can see that what Frankie was doing here was risky. It was what is often described as literary fiction.

There’s more delicious satire about publishers and their slush piles, but I’ll finish with a quote about promotion:

The media hype for The Heat of Summer is huge, what with the glamour of Frankie’s Paris life, and the deep fascination with gothic Australian bush stuff and so forth. Based around the tragic life of her ancestor. Smash hit. Frankie turned out to be a publicist’s dream, having, as well as the attributes I have alluded to, long legs, a face that could sell cosmetics and airline tickets, and an engaging lisp.

Delicious isn’t it?

And so the stories continue, addressing issues like missing children (“Cold case”), dying towns and New Age shops (“Cactus”), shallow suburbanites and their prejudices (“The matter of the mosque”), surrogacy (“Surrogate”), and species extinction (“Letter to Lola” and “The tale of the last unicorn”). All the stories could be lessons in writing – in tone, in varying form, in how to make words and language work for you, in being absurd without being absurd (if you know what I mean), in addressing serious matters with a light but pointed touch. I enjoyed every one.

While several stories are written in the chatty, satirical tone of the first two. Not all are. “Dear Lola” takes the form of a love letter from a Spix’s Macaw to his lost mate. It’s sad, and pointed, but the whole idea of a bird writing to its lover gives it a whimsical touch too. “The matter of the mosque”, on the other hand, is written in little scenes, comprising mostly dialogue between two mothers in which it’s clear that whether to use hairspray or mousse is more important than opening their minds to different ways of being. Bird’s control of language and narrative here, together with her use of repetition and recurring ideas or images, makes this a little gem.

Now, I know many of you aren’t short story readers, because you want to get lost in character. These stories won’t give you that. However, what a mind, what ideas, what fun and, ultimately, what heart, you miss by ignoring a book like this. It’s only available in e-format and costs a whopping $4.99! Why not give it a go?

AWW Badge 2018Carmel Bird
The dead aviatrix: Eight short stories
Spineless Wonders, 2017
50pp.
ISBN (e-version): 9781925052343

(Review copy courtesy the author, but available from Spineless Wonders)

Diana Blackwood, Chaconne (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 28 Comments

Diana Blackwood, ChaconneDoes a book set in the early 1980s qualify as historical fiction? Does a book about a twenty-something woman’s romantic adventures, and search for direction, qualify as coming-of-age? The answer is probably yes to both. Certainly, it is within these parameters that it’s appropriate to discuss Diana Blackwood’s debut novel Chaconne.

Chaconne, as you can see, has a gorgeous cover. Rather than an image of a pretty young woman, promoting the idea of a “woman’s book”, it features a harpsichord – with an image of a Pershing (or similar) missile inside its open lid – sitting in a golden-lit rural landscape. This clues us into some important aspects of this novel, which are that music and war are involved. Of course, the title, Chaconne, also suggests a music theme. A chaconne, says Wikipedia, is “a type of musical composition popular in the baroque era when it was much used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a fairly short repetitive bass-line (ground bass) which offered a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and melodic invention”. By this description, the “chaconne” works as a metaphor for Eleanor who is “sort of” progressing in her life, though with a deal of repetition, particularly in her way of choosing the wrong men and of  bumbling along, without goal, from job to job. And within this main storyline are several interesting people and events which intervene along the way to add variety and decoration to the whole!

The novel starts with 24-year-old Eleanor arriving in Paris in 1981 to meet her lover, the bourgeois communist Julien whom she’d met a couple of years earlier in Sydney while he was an exchange student in Australia. Eleanor, who has “a fuzzy sense of being shut out of her proper story as if she had failed youth, been found wanting by life itself”, seems to have little direction in her life, though we know from flashbacks that she’s interested in music. One of her complaints against her mother, Mavis, and there are many, is that she’d stopped Eleanor’s piano lessons, replacing them with something she deemed more important for Eleanor’s education, maths tutoring! Escaping to Paris, though, is a bit of out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire, because Julien proves to be rather less than she thought. She finds herself spending much time alone in a tiny flat, relieved somewhat by her English teaching job at a lycée. Fortunately, her loneliness is assuaged a little by some lovely people, such as Rosa and the kind Monsieur Joubert who recognises her interest in music and starts, in a small way, her musical education.

As her relationship with Julien flounders, she meets Lawrence, an American who is flat-sitting for her next-door neighbour. It’s not long before she follows him to Germany, where he, a PhD student in deconstructive theory, is an English tutor on an American airforce base near a German village. The novel is set during the Cold War, when fear of nuclear destruction was high. Here Eleanor also obtains work teaching English. But, Lawrence – as we readers could have told her, just as we could have with Julien – doesn’t turn out to be the man she hoped.

Providing a background to Eleanor’s lacklustre romantic life is the unsettled political situation. Julien is engaged in communist politics, taking part in peace marches and the like, while Lawrence works on a military base where Eleanor keeps her Parisian life quiet and tries not to get too close to the base’s scary off-limit areas. Nonetheless she lives with “the unpalatable truth … that the nuclear umbrella was sheltering her by paying her rent.”

Not only does Lawrence draw her to this uncomfortable environment, but he is also not interested in music. What was she thinking in following him? Luckily, Eleanor finds a choir in the village, and her life gradually starts to change as she finally finds the thing that enlivens her.

And this is perhaps where the novel was a little problematical for me. While Eleanor’s journey to self-discovery was interesting, I never quite “felt” her sadness or her joy. I liked her, but I didn’t fully engage with her. This may be because she makes too many bad decisions that didn’t quite ring true for the intelligent young woman she clearly is. The coming-of-age felt a little late (particularly for the 1980s, which was before our 30-is-the-new-20 age?) But, this could just be sensible me speaking! Still, I would love to have seen more of her gutsy-but-also-life-challenged friend Ruth.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot to like about this book. I particularly enjoyed Blackwood’s obvious love of the English language. Eleanor and her Australian friend Ruth – not to mention her aforementioned mother – are grammar nazis (though that’s an unfortunate phrase given the post-war setting of this novel, a time when Germany was particularly uncertain about its past). The book delights in wordplay (including puns), alongside more serious discussions of grammar. Lawrence pegs Eleanor as “a proponent of prescriptive grammar” while she expects that “traditional grammar was another thing he would like to see tossed on the scrapheap”. The discussions Eleanor has about language are those we have here among the extended Gums’ family. We discuss language with each other, yell at the TV, argue about prescription versus description, ponder how and why language does or should or shouldn’t change. There are no answers but it’s fun exploring the issue.

Blackwood’s writing is also beautifully evocative, such as this description of Monsieur Joubert – “loneliness was close about him like a Parisian winter”. And this of the beginning of spring:

In the last few days spring has retreated. The quickening of the senses, the opening up to life and fate, had been dampened by chilling rain and the need to wear a jumper again.

This is exactly why I’m not a big fan of spring! It taunts with moments of warmth before plunging us all into cold again! Time and again Blackwood captured moments perfectly.

Chaconne, then, is an intelligent, well-written, well-structured book set in interesting times and places. I did like the cheeky metafictional reference to The catcher in the rye’s Holden Caulfield. Eleanor suggests that he needed “a firm but loving grandmother”. However, she also recognises that,

of course, the whole point of being a fictional character was to suffer misadventures and setbacks and humiliations without being bailed out by your grandmother, at least not until you’re sufficiently chastened.

Very true – and in the end our fictional character is – but no, I’ll not give it away.

Chaconne is book that should appeal to those who love Western Europe and baroque music, who remember the 1980s, and who like their romantic novels to be thoughtful and not neatly wrapped up. By the end, Eleanor has grown, but, as in life, we know she has yet more growing to do – and that’s the sort of ending I like.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) loved this novel and includes two YouTube links to music referenced in the novel.

AWW Badge 2018Diana Blackwood
Chaconne
Melbourne: Hybrid Publishers, 2017
296pp.
ISBN: 9781925272611

(Review copy courtesy Hybrid Publishers)

Lynette Washington, Plane Tree Drive (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

Lynette Washington, Plane Tree DriveLynette Washington’s debut collection of short stories, Plane Tree Drive, reminded me a little of Rebekah Clarkson’s Barking dogs (my review). Both are collections of stories revolving around a location, and in both the location is in the Adelaide region. There are differences though. Clarkson’s book is a little grittier with an overall theme of community undergoing social change, while Washington’s book is the portrait of a suburban street. There is change, of course, but the change is more broadly human – breakups, ageing and retirement, generation gaps, friendship and dementia, illness and death – although contemporary issues are also touched on.

Like Clarkson’s book too, Washington’s has some continuing storylines – such as Jennifer who is unhappily married to Dan while pining for her first love, Alexander – that are interspersed with the stories of other people. I liked this. Not only do these ongoing storylines provide a lovely sense of cohesion for the whole, but they also reflect a typical neighbourhood street. By this I mean that in any of our neighbourhoods there are people we know well, those we know a little, and others whom we only know passingly. And so, in Plane Tree Drive, there’s Jennifer who appears regularly; there are others like Maurice, Alice, Amily and Faraj who appear more than once, sometimes as a reference in another person’s story; and there are those who only appear in their own story.

To make all this work, Washington pays careful attention to structure. The overall order is chronological, driven primarily by Jennifer’s story, but the collection starts and ends with the other main continuing story, that of musician Maurice. His final section cleverly but light-handedly brings several of the characters together, but I won’t tell you how! The book is divided into sections – I think that’s the best way to describe it – which are named for the characters they cover, but some sections comprise small chapters. For example, a section titled Faraj, Coralie and Ruby, which focuses on Afghani asylum-seeker Faraj, has two short chapters, “Housing Needs Assessment” and “The Bay”. And this brings me to form …

Many of the stories are short, in fact very short, and most are told first person, but there’s some interesting variety, some experimenting with form, too. There’s a dialogue between Maurice and his wife Jacqui (“He said/She said”), some diary entries by the teenaged Poppy (“Dear diary”), several government employee reports on Faraj’s application for housing (“Housing Needs Assessment”), some social media commentary (in the cheeky “Scarlett’s shed”), and even a flow-chart from IT expert Sarah (“Oma’s fruit cake”). This playing with form – which brings with it changes in tone – break up what could, in other hands, become a tedious and melancholic parade of first person voices.

Oh dear, I’ve spent a lot of time describing the book and how it works but not much on whether I enjoyed it – so I’ll do that now. Of course I enjoyed it! How could any reader who is interested in the lives of people not enjoy a book which pokes into the nooks and crannies of all our lives? There are stories with a political bent, albeit told from personal not political perspectives. These include the aforementioned Faraj and his search for a home, a couple (Stella and Graham) who travel overseas to access euthanasia legally, and a woman (Coralie) watching the demolition of a loved theatre. I like that Washington doesn’t proselytise, but simply shows how people are affected by and react to these situations. There are lighter stories, such as Marg who talks to animals, particularly her neighbour’s badly behaved cat (“That cat”).

And there are, dare I use that cliché, “poignant” stories, such as, to give an example, Martha and Charles (“Gaps between boxes” and “So much sand and so much water”). They are a retired couple who have been together since childhood but who, at this point in their lives, suddenly find themselves at odds. She wants to adventure – to “seek out the gaps between the boxes” they’ve been ticking all their lives – but he just wants peace. He thinks “the boxes made a darn good life”. This story is gently and warmly told. No fireworks, just hope and acceptance on both sides.

There’s exploration in the writing – in form in particular – as I’ve already said, but the stories are accessible. This is the sort of short story collection that should have wide appeal. The use of recurring characters makes it appealing to those who prefer novels, while the playing with the short story form and structure provides interest for the short story lover.

Washington, who has appeared here before as editor of Breaking beauty (my review), precedes her book with an epigraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby. The quote concludes with “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” I wouldn’t say I was repelled, albeit some characters are more appealing than others, but Plane Tree Drive does contain a wide variety of life which makes it an engaging and yes, enchanting even, read. Like many books from smaller publishers, it deserves a wider audience than it will probably get.

AWW Badge 2018Lynette Washington
Plane Tree Drive
Rundle Mall, MidnightSun Publishing, 2017
245pp.
ISBN: 9781925227345

(Review copy courtesy MidnightSun Publishing)

Rabih Alameddine, An unnecessary woman (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 17 Comments

Rabih Alameddine, An unnecessary womanLebanese-born American writer Rabih Alameddine’s novel, An unnecessary woman, is tailor-made for readers. It was fittingly, therefore, my reading group’s first book for 2018. The novel is told first person in the voice of 72-year-old childless, divorced Aaliya Saleh, who lives alone and spends her time reading and translating books. Set in an apartment in Beirut in the 2000s, it has a minimal plot, focusing more on the thoughts and ideas of this reclusive woman who describes herself as her “family’s appendix, its unnecessary appendage”.

However, before I tell you more about the subject-matter and why I so enjoyed this book, a little warning. This is the quintessential literary novel. It is packed with literary references and allusions, not to mention references to musicians and artists. One of Aaliya’s favourite authors is the also-reclusive “connoisseur of alienation”, Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and he appears regularly, but she also mentions, in no particular order, WG Sebald, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Patrick White (whom she adores), Helen Garner, Marguerite Youcenar, JM Coetzee, António Lobo Antunes, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Shakespeare, and many, many, many more. While I know the authors I’ve named here, I certainly don’t know all those she mentions – but it doesn’t matter. Well, it might, in that more knowledge might add all sorts of nuances to the book’s meaning, but all I can say is that I enjoyed it with what I do know.

But now the subject-matter. Where to start? The book covers a lot of ground. It’s about living in a war-torn city and country; it’s about relationships, gender and women’s lives in a patriarchal society in which her “half brothers, like so many men and boys, have the impatience of the entitled”; it’s about aloneness and loneliness; and, best of all, it’s about books and reading. It’s this last one I want to focus on, partly because it’s the one that gave me the most chuckles.

These chuckles aren’t of the belly-laugh variety. They’re more subtle, coming particularly from allusions and irony. Take for example this comment, a bit over halfway through the book:

Most of the books published these days consist of a series of whines followed by an epiphany. I call these memoirs and confessional novels happy tragedies. We shall overcome and all that. I find them sentimental and boring.

This comment made me laugh because her story is, essentially, “a series of whines followed by an epiphany”, for all her dislike of epiphanies. “Enough”, she says, “have pity on readers who reach the end of real-life conflict in confusion and don’t experience a false sense of temporary enlightenment”. This book is, you might be seeing now, also about the intersection between reading and life. To what extent do they inform each other?

Another of her dislikes, in life and in literature, is the idea of “causality”. Alain Robbe-Grillet, she says, “wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology”, meaning, she believes, “that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character’s actions, as if that’s possible, as if life works that way”. So literature, in other words, needs to reflect life. She writes:

I’ve read so many recent novels, particularly those published in the Anglo world, that are dull and trite because I’m always supposed to infer causality. For example, the reason a protagonist can’t experience love is that she was physically abused, or the hero constantly searches for validation because his father paid little attention to him as a child. This, of course, ignores the fact that many others have experienced the same things but do not behave in the same manner, though that’s a minor point compared to the real loss in fulfilling the desire for explanation: the loss of mystery. Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader.

Interesting point, this “loss of mystery”, this sense that life cannot be so easily explained. She gives an example from “life” of a woman killed, during the civil war, while driving home from work. People proposed all sorts of reasons why it happened. She was a spy, or was a bank courier carrying a large amount of money, or was wearing a flashy diamond, whereas in fact she was just unlucky. “A stray bullet killed her”.

For Aaliyah there is something fundamentally wrong with this cause-focused approach to reading, and to living. She writes:

If you read these pages and think I’m the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can’t feel my pain. If you believe you’re not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you’re unable to empathize.

This idea that finding causes for what happens to others enables us to distance ourselves from responsibility and to feel safe, has, says Aaliya, been explored by philosophers, such as the “ponderous and portentous” Sartre! Aaliyah, you see, is not cowed by big names and reputations. Nonetheless, she admits that, while she’s trained herself “not to keep inferring or expecting causality in literature”, she constantly wants explanations in life “where none exist”. “Uncertainty”, she says later, “is unsettling”!

I enjoyed Aaliya’s cheeky, somewhat self-mocking voice, the way, for example, her commentary is peppered with allusions – particularly, pointedly, from Macbeth – that tease the reader. But it’s not all light. There’s seriousness – pathos – too. For all her enjoyment of reading and translating (which is another whole topic I could write about), Aaliya is not as happy as she seems. She’s aware of ageing – and refers to Helen Garner’s belief “that all women over sixty instinctively learn to pass by a mirror without looking”- and she is lonely in her chosen aloneness:

It is the loneliness, the abject isolation. Hannah reappears in my memories to remind me of how alone I am, how utterly inconsequential my life has become, how sad.

It is partly in regard to this theme – and to the role of the “three witches” in her building – that Aaliyah has her “damn epiphany” at the end!

Besides the discussion of books and reading, the description of life in Beirut, and the analysis of the outsider’s life, An unnecessary woman has much more to offer, including its small but colourful cast of characters and some gorgeous language. This description of a saucer, for example, is surely also a metaphor for Aaliyah:

The rim of the saucer’s depression is lightly discoloured – a dusting of rust and red and brown, remnants of teas gone by that did not wish to be washed away, refused to be forgotten, the age rings of a small plate.

By her actions, Aaliya, despite her “age rings”, shows that she does “not wish to be washed away”, that she refuses “to be forgotten”. She will not, in other words, accept being “unnecessary”.

I have barely scratched the surface of this thoughtful yet playful book that teases us with an idea and then, more often than not, turns it on its head. It is this mixing of the playful with the serious, in Aailya’s compelling voice, that makes this largely plotless novel such an involving read.

Rabih Alameddine
An unnecessary woman
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2014
291pp.
ISBN: 9781922148292 (eBook)

Tony Park, The cull (#MiniBookReview based on a Guest Read)

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

Tony Park, The cullWhen Tony Park’s The cull was sent to me for review last September, I knew it wasn’t really within my normal ambit but every now and then I try something new, so thought I might give it a go. However, as time passed and more books came, I realised that I had to let it go. But, it occurred to me that Mr Gums, whose reading preferences are a little different to mine, might like to read it during our annual Snowy Mountains getaway. He thought he might so, leaving aside his German translation of Pride and prejudice (which he was reading for the second time), he took it away with him – and enjoyed it, overall.

Some of you may know who Tony Park is, but I have to admit that I didn’t – beyond recognising his name from bookshop shelves – even though The cull is his fourteenth novel! He was born in Sydney, and has worked, according to the media release, “as a reporter, a press secretary, a PR consultant and a freelance writer”. He is a major in the Australian Army Reserve and in 2002 served as a public relations officer in Afghanistan. And, here’s the most relevant bit to this book, he and his wife split their time between Australia and southern Africa where they own a home on the edge of Kruger National Park. He is also, the Media Release says, a volunteer with Veterans for Wildlife, which “pairs military veterans with anti-poaching units and conservation programs in Africa.”

And this is where I should finally talk about the book. It concerns former mercenary Sonja Kurtz, who has apparently appeared in other books by Park. She is hired by a (female, in fact) business tycoon to head a squad whose ostensible task is to gain intelligence about poachers but she ultimately finds herself involved in a full-scale assault against the “poaching kingpins”. In other words, it’s a novel which marries his military experience with his involvement in supporting African wildlife. The Media Release says that Park describes “the job of protecting wildlife” as “a high-risk, high stakes business”. Rhino horn is now worth more than “gold, diamonds or cocaine”.

So what did Mr Gums think? “Pretty good fun”, he says. Like me, he’s not an expert in the crime-action-thriller genres, but he’s read the odd one over the years, including, last year, Tony Jones’ The twentieth man. He thought the characters were well drawn for the genre, and that the writing was engaging and kept him interested. It was full of “gadgets and guns” which entertained him, but had perhaps “unnecessarily detailed descriptions of the sex”. However, that’s part of these sorts of genre books today isn’t it? You find it in movies of these genres too.

Overall, though, it was the theme of protecting African wildlife and environment that made it particularly interesting for him – just as Jones’ exploration of Australia’s first terrorist bombing kept him engaged in that novel. This is what would have drawn me to the book too, if I’d been able to prioritise the read.

And so, that’s about it – except there’s one interesting little thing to add, and it concerns naming rights. I’ll quote from the Acknowledgements at the end:

As with previous books, I’ve surrendered the difficult (for me at least), the task of thinking up names for my characters to a number of worthy charities who have sold or auctioned off rights for generous people to have their names assigned to the cast of The cull and raised money for many good causes in the process.

Those good causes are named, and they are a varied lot, including the HEAL Africa Hospital, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, the Australian Rhino Project and the Limpopo Rhino Security Group. I, and probably you, have heard about this phenomenon before, but if you haven’t, here is a 2005 article from the Guardian about authors auctioning off names. It starts by asking “Fancy having your name on a gravestone in Neil Gaiman’s next novel? Or meeting your end at the hands of a zombie in Stephen King’s latest?” Hmm, would you want to be immortalised in some of these ways? There is that thin-end-of-the-wedge issue here – as I touched on in my review of Anna Funder’s Paspaley sponsored story Everything precious – but I don’t think we should let this colour actions like Cull’s which result in money for good causes?

And here endeth this mini-review – with a big thanks to Mr Gums for his contribution.

Tony Park
The cull
Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2017
411pp.
ISBN: 9781743548455

(Review copy courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)

Jenny Ackland, The secret son (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 25 Comments

Jenny Ackland, The secret sonMelbourne-based author Jenny Ackland has tried something rather audacious in her debut novel, The Secret Son. Instead of following the autobiographical route that many first novelists do, she has leapt right in and tackled, albeit from left field, one of Australia’s most controversial legends, Ned Kelly. But, here’s the rub: it’s not exactly about Ned Kelly. It’s far more complex than that.

The secret son spans more than a century, from the 1880s to 1990 and beyond. It is set in both Turkey and Australia, and it weaves two stories. One concerns the 19th-century-born James who ends up living in Turkey, having gone to fight at Gallipoli in 1915, and the other tells of Cem, a 23-year-old Turkish-Australian man who is related to the village where James had lived and who travels there in 1990, ostensibly to learn about his heritage and identity. These two men – James/Jim and Cem/”Jem” – work subtly as foils or parallels for each other. James is intelligent, gentle and hardworking, but somewhat passive. He imagines who his father might have been, what sort of man he was. Cem, on the other hand, is young, directionless, well-meaning but rather self-centred. Turkish taxi-driver, Ibrahim, pins his uncertainty immediately, telling him:

You must know who you are and what man you want to become.

What sort of man he wants to become is something Cem struggles with, making this, partly but by no means primarily, a coming-of-age novel.

This brings me to one of the delights in reading this book, which is Ackland’s depiction of life in the Turkish village she calls Hayat (Turkish, she says, for “heart”). It reminded me of some books I read years ago, such as Beverley Farmer’s stories set in a Greek village. Farmer had married a Greek man and lived for some time in Greece, which explained her convincing insight into village life and relationships. Ackland’s depictions were similarly convincing, so I wanted to know how she’d done it. I found the answer in an ABC Books and Arts interview with her. She too had travelled to Turkey, married a Turkish man, spent time there as a bride and young mother. With this knowledge and experience, and an ability to individuate characters, Ackland creates a world that engaged me.

But now you are probably wondering how Ned Kelly fits into all this. It has to do with a historian named Harry whom Cem meets on the plane. Harry has a theory that Ned Kelly had a secret son who fought at Gallipoli and ended up staying in Turkey. His quest is to prove this theory and, in one of those coincidences that all travellers know about, the village where he believes this son went to is the same one that Cem’s family was from. So the scene is set – but the story that unfolds has less to do with Ned Kelly than with families and secrets, paying debts, and growing up.

I started this post by saying that Ackland has been audacious in this, her debut novel, and I implied that it was because of the Ned Kelly plotline. However, her audaciousness extends beyond this. It’s in the novel’s complex structure, too, in the way she weaves the two men’s stories, to-ing and fro-ing in time. It’s in the recurring motifs like bees and honey, tea and sugar, and woven rugs, that she uses to help keep us grounded. And it’s particularly in the change of voice between the more traditional third person voice used for most of the story to first person for the perspective of Berna, who is the village’s wise woman-cum-fortune-teller. Berna also happens to be Cem’s grandmother and James’ daughter, which effectively connects the two story lines. (The family relationships in this book are, I must say, complicated, and require an attentive reader to keep track!)

Anyhow, Berna provides the main link in the novel’s second plot which is about the “debt” Cem discovers he is expected to pay for something his grandfather Ahmet had done long before he’d left the village for Australia. This plotline exposes dissension in the village, and through it Ackland explores ideas about love and loyalty, truth and lies, revenge and forgiveness, not to mention the application of wisdom versus tradition. As the novel progresses, more of the “truth” about what happened comes out, and the plot thickens as we wonder what will be asked of Cem and what he will do in response. Meanwhile, the Ned Kelly storyline weaves its own path between James, Harry, and the village with the help of a woman pilot called Linda. While complex, it’s sensitively done, with, in the end, enough resolution to be satisfying without being too neat and implausible.

There are many angles from which this book can be talked about, besides those I’ve mentioned. There’s a father-son theme, a cheeky metafictional theme about a book called The secret son, Cem’s family experience in Australia as a child of immigrants, and gender. There’s also the idea of debts due by later generations, which Berna argues is not valid, but which her brother Mehmet supports. It’s relevant, I think, that Berna has the last word in the novel.

Early on Berna tells us that “truth” is not the be-all, that sometimes “life is better with surprises in the recipe”. She’s a wise woman, and this, The secret son, is a wise book. It might be a debut novel, and it might push its readers to keep up at times, but the ideas it explores, and its tolerant, generous treatment of its flawed characters, are those of a humane writer.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) was impressed by the book too.

AWW Badge 2018Jenny Ackland
The secret son
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2015
327pp.
ISBN: 9781925266160

Bruce Beresford, The best film I never made (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

Bruce Beresford, The best film I never madeBruce Beresford, author of The best film I never made, is of special interest to me for a couple of reasons, besides the fact that I’ve enjoyed many of his films over the years. One is that after a few years of taking (or, perhaps, “dragging” is more accurate) our then young son to various classic movie “experiences”, like, say, a silent movie accompanied by live theatre organ, we finally hit pay dirt with Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant. He loved it, and I’d say his love of film was born then. The other is that I’ve known for some time that Beresford has wanted to film his old university friend Madeleine St John’s novel The women in black (my review). I want to see that film! According to the brief bio opposite the title page, it is being made now. At last!

All this is to explain why I was keen to read Bruce Beresford’s collection of stories when I saw it appear in Text Publishing’s New Releases list. But, what does “collection of stories” mean in the context of non-fiction? These are not essays or even newspaper columns that have been published before, and, disappointingly, there’s no Introduction, Author’s Note or Afterword providing context. There is, though, in that aforementioned brief bio, the address for his website, and there I found a tab called “Articles”. So this is where they are published? Yes, some anyhow, including some in an earlier form, but not all. However, from this, and from their personal, rather chatty style, I’d liken these articles to blog posts, which in his case comprise musings on things relating to his film and opera directing career and his related cultural interests.

The best film I never made, then, is a collection of these blogpost-cum-stories, organised for the book into four parts: I Family, Journeys, Memories; II Making and Not Making Movies; III Behind the Screen; IV Operas, Painters, Writers. The stories are all dated, ranging from 2004 to 2017. Some have brief updates at the end. The 2010 piece on Jeffrey Smart, “Smart lessons”, for example, has a final annotation noting that Smart died in 2013. The stories are not presented chronologically.

And now, because this is not a book with a narrative structure that can be spoiled – though there is some logic nonetheless to the order – I’m going straight to the end. You’ll guess why when I tell you that the title of the last article is “Australian literature and film”, but that literature connection is not the only reason. Other reasons are that it provides a good introduction to the style and tone of the whole, and also to the way he imparts his experience and understanding of filmmaking.

The main point of this last article is to discuss the idea, put forward he says by the press, that “Australian films would benefit if more adaptations were made from acclaimed literary works. Comparisons are inevitably made with foreign films, particularly English and American …” Commenting that he can understand why writer-directors might want to tell their own stories, he admits that probably a majority of English-language films are adaptations of novels but suggests that many of these would be from popular fiction rather than “literary successes”. He unpicks why:

Many novels are famous for their prose style, various colourful characters, their themes and so on: factors which can obscure the fact that other useful ingredients – a coherent plot for example – may be absent. In film, most of the characteristics that distinguish a literary work – such as a striking prose style – are stripped away and this can reveal the lack of a well-constructed story, or convincing dialogue, and be fatal to the effectiveness of the film.

He then provides examples of English and American adaptations, about which, of course, every reader-filmgoer will have different opinions – but I think his principle stands. He comments for example about the difficult of transferring “the satire and dry cynicism” of Waugh to film, and says Patrick White is notoriously difficult “because his novels like Conrad’s, are psychological studies, intense and profound, and not easy to transfer to a film script”. (Interestingly, though, he suggests that Happy Valley, which I’ve reviewed, could be a good candidate because of its “more conventional narrative”.) Filmmakers do better he argues “to adapt novels which rely on a few strong characters and a compelling narrative” like, for example, Kenneth Cook’s Wake in fright (albeit “won no literary prizes”).

So, this article demonstrates Beresford’s grasp of filmmaking, which, unsurprisingly, runs throughout the book, but it also exemplifies his tone and style, including his willingness to share his own prejudices. He’s not a fan of Tim Winton, for example, describing his books “as bargain-basement Patrick White: stylistically derivative, they are far more savage, full of unpleasant characters, and weakly plotted”. And Christina Stead, he says, is “a turgid writer, in my worthless opinion”. This possibly false but not pompous self-deprecation is another feature of his tone. In the same paragraph as the Stead comment, he writes that he’d filmed Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom, but that “critics did not share my admiration for the result”! (Other films of his, he agrees, aren’t the best.)

And finally, this chapter also reveals his ability to “tell-all” without being gossipy. He suggests that another reason why classic novels aren’t adapted in Australia (as they are in England) is that they are just not well-known, “certainly the word of their excellence has not reached all of those in charge of making financial decisions.” (The challenge of financing films is a theme running through the book, in fact.) Beresford wrote, he tells us, an adaptation of Henry Handel Richardson’s epic, The fortunes of Richard Mahony. He says he hadn’t expected potential investors to have read it, but he “did at least expect them to have heard of it – and her. But this was not the case.” Oh dear! He backs up this example of philistinism with another:

when I was planning a film about Mahler, a Hollywood executive said, ‘What I can’t understand is why you would want to make a film about a nonentity.’ I said  nothing, but perhaps should have told him that one of the most gifted composers of all time could not accurately be described as a ‘nonentity’ – except by someone of overwhelming stupidity.

To his credit, Beresford does not name this person of “overwhelming stupidity”.

If you’ve enjoyed my discussion of this article, then you are likely to enjoy the book. I loved his discussion of the filmic qualities of the artist Caravaggio, and of his friendship with luminaries like Barry Humphries, Clive James, and the late Jeffrey Smart. His Behind the Scenes section provides fascinating insight into the role of cinematographers, composers and designers in the filmmaking process. And so on.

However, because this is a book of collected articles written over a decade or more, there is the occasional repetition, particularly in the first section about his personal life. And, he does come across somewhat as an unreconstructed male. There are several references to his chasing, or his friends’ marrying, beautiful women, which focus I find out-of-date (but that’s just my worthless opinion!)

The best film I never made is an enjoyable book. It’s more chatty and informative than reflective, but if you have followed Bruce Beresford’s films over the years – including Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy, Tender Mercies, Black Robe, Mao’s Last Dancer – and you are interested in the practice of filmmaking and in the arts more generally, this book has a lot to offer. And makes, methinks, a good summer read.

Bruce Beresford
The best film I never made, and other stories about a life in the arts
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2017
281pp.
ISBN: 9781925603101

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Joy Eadie, Discovering Charles Meere: Art and allusion (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 16 Comments

Joy Eadie, Discovering Charles MeereThe award for my last review of the year goes to something a little left field for me, Joy Eadie’s Discovering Charles Meere: Art and allusion. I say left field because it is, essentially, a book of art criticism, and I don’t do much of that here (or anywhere, for that matter!) However, when Halstead Press offered me a copy for review a few months ago, I was intrigued, so accepted the book. And here is why I was intrigued …

In the email offering me the book, the publisher wrote:

Australian Beach Pattern is Meere’s most famous work and hangs in the Art Gallery of NSW. However, despite its popularity and recognition, it has been labelled by critics as an unimaginative work which glorifies an Aryan ideal of mid-twentieth Australia, and Meere’s name is hardly known.

And thus my interest was aroused, because earlier this year I had been to the Brave New World: Australia 1930s exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. One of the sections was titled “Body culture” and the commentary noted that “the evolution of a new Australian ‘type’ was also proposed in the 1930s – a white Australian drawn from British stock, but with an athletic and streamlined shape honed by time spent swimming and surfing on local beaches.” The notes referred to the problematic aspects of this idea in an era when eugenics was on the rise in Germany.

While the exhibition didn’t, in fact, include Charles Meere, it is in this context that his most famous work, “Australian Beach Pattern” (online image) dated 1940, has been seen and it is this interpretation that Joy Eadie refutes by offering her own reading of the painting. She does this by analysing the painting and comparing it with like works from his oeuvre to develop her ideas about his themes and world view.

Eadie’s thesis is, essentially, that within Meere’s coolly formal application of an Art Deco-cum-neoclassical style lie recurring features including “a certain dry wit, irony, the use of allusion and appropriation, oblique reference to the historical context and to being in a certain time and place, while recalling other times and places”. These features, she argues, are not easily apparent in one work, such as “Australian Beach Pattern”, but they become evident in the context of several works.

Robert Drewe, The bodysurfersHowever, before I discuss the book, I should explain for those who don’t know that “Australian Beach Pattern” is one of Australia’s iconic images. It was used on the program for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, on the cover of Robert Drewe’s The bodysurfers, and apparently features in curriculum materials about democracy in Australian schools. Merchandise featuring it is also amongst the most popular at the Art Gallery of News South Wales, where the painting has resided since 1965. But now, to the book …

It starts with a brief biography of the little-known British-born Meere (1890-1961), then moves on in Chapter 2 to analyse the poster (“1978 … 1938 150 Years of Progress”) he created for NSW’s 1938 Sesquicentenary celebrations. Referencing some of the tensions of the anniversary planning and using the careful eye for detail needed by an art critic, Eadie identifies features of the poster which depart from traditional poster style, and proposes that Meere’s aim was to subvert the “nationalistic hubris” of the anniversary story. Her analysis includes the suggestion that Meere alludes to Hieronymous Bosch’s “Ship of Fools” painting to comment on the practice of sending British outcasts to the other side of the world. She notes his inclusion of tall strong Aboriginal people on the shore, his placing of his own signature in proximity to these figures, and argues that his “choice of black to proclaim the joyous message of progress” was “deliberate and ironic”.

In this vein – analysing Meere’s painting style, use of colour, allusions to European paintings, historical context, and so on – Eadie discusses picture after picture, including of course “Australian Beach Pattern”, to build up her argument concerning Meere’s more subversive commentary on contemporary culture, and she is, overall, convincing. Her close reading of the paintings, mirrors, really, the close textual analysis literary critics do. And her challenge with Meere reminded me of that issue regarding the value to criticism of knowing the creator that I raised in my recent review of Bernadette Brennan’s book, because, in Meere’s case, it appears there are “no diaries or notebooks recording his artistic practice” so, says Eadie, “one can only speculate”.

And speculate she does, sometimes drawing long bows. These show the depth of her research, but with little evidence for what Meere actually knew, saw, experienced or thought, these bows rely on our agreeing with her assumptions – particularly regarding his alluding to other works. Her analysis of his “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” painting is fascinating but relies on our making a number of leaps with her. In her chapter discussing the origins of the large number of “copies” of “Australian Beach Pattern” which regularly hit the market, the speculations build, but, as she does elsewhere, she admits to them, calling one idea “highly speculative”. Other times, she explains that she had to work from digital or reproduction copies of works in private hands, and that her analysis could change on seeing the work itself. None of this, however, gets out of hand, and her arguments are clear.

Discovering Charles Meere might sound dry and suited only to specialists, but not so. Eadie’s writing is engaging and refreshingly free of academic jargon and meaningless polysyllabic words. The book is short, nicely produced, and is well-illustrated, making it easy to follow her argument. As for the content, it should appeal to anyone interested in Australian art and 20th century Australian culture. I enjoyed my foray into the outfields of my reading interests!

aww2017 badgeJoy Eadie
Discovering Charles Meere: Art and allusion
Braddon: Halstead Press, 2017
96pp.
ISBN: 9781925043389

(Review copy courtesy Halstead Press)