21st century literature

Edition de luxe: A collection of short stories

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Edition de luxe: A collection of short stories inspired by our hotelsLast October, I wrote a Monday Musings post on writers-in-residence programs. The first one I listed, because I listed them alphabetically, was Accor Hotels MGallery Literary Collection. This is (or was?) a collaborative program with Melbourne’s The Wheeler Centre. Quoting what I wrote then, ‘it involved providing eight award-winning Australian writers with a short residence in one of Accor’s boutique MGallery hotels and commissioning those authors to write a short story which will be published in a book which will be “presented exclusively to guests at MGallery Hotels”.’ Well, it just so happens that this weekend we are staying in one of these hotels, and what did I find but the book of short stories titled Edition de luxe: A collection of short stories inspired by our hotels. Woo hoo!

It’s a nicely presented little book, with, for each writer, a brief bio, their short story, a brief history of the hotel plus that hotel’s special appeal, photographs, and a “memorable moment” describing something you might be able to enjoy if you stayed at the hotel. This is marketing after all, in addition to offering the treat of a bit of support to writers. The marketing bit comes to the fore when you look at the table of contents. It lists the title of the story, and the name of the hotel at (or about) which it was written, but NOT the name of the writer! Harumph. I’m always irritated when names of authors are not given due recognition in listings.

So, without further ado, I’m going to name the writers, 6 women and 2 men, who appear in the book. They are:

  • Favel Parrett (“Gold”)
  • Graeme Simsion (“Slideshow”)
  • Chris Flynn (“The prophecy, 1931”)
  • Robyn Annear (“Batman’s Hill lives”)
  • Toni Jordan (“Like a kindness”)
  • Debra Oswald (“Dog grooming”)
  • Alison Croggon (“Hello”)
  • Hannie Rayson (“Pip”)

I’ve read the stories – of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this! They are all 2-3 pages, some fiction, some not. They probably, the fiction ones anyhow, qualify as flash fiction, depending on your definition.

The first story, Favel Parrett’s “Gold”, is a little mood piece about what she sees from the balcony of her room at Mount Lofty House, “her” hotel, naturally. It’s non-fiction, and I enjoyed her description of the end of the day:

Time is measured in light. Evening shadows begin to stretch over the valley. The gold moves further and further away towards the horizon, chased by the sun going down.

Nice, peaceful.

The fiction pieces vary in tone from the poignant or sad, like Graeme Simsion’s “Slideshow”, with its little surprise ending, and Alison Croggon’s more worrying “Hello”, to the more lightly humorous, like Chris Flynn’s “The prophecy, 1931” about Walter Lindrum (set in Melbourne’s Hotel Lindrum) and Hannie Rayson’s sperm-donor-inspired final story in the collection, “Pip”. Historian Robyn Annear explores Melbourne’s Batman’s Hill, razed in the 1860s to make way for the railway, in her story “Batman’s Hill lives”, and Toni Jordan, in the Blue Mountains, recounts a chance encounter, which may or may not be real but which makes a sweet story, in “Like a kindness”. But, perhaps, though it’s hard to choose, I most liked Debra Oswald’s “Dog grooming” with its tale of subversion and catharsis.

I won’t say more. These are little pieces, perfect for reading in a hotel at the end of a busy working or travelling day. Quality writers, thoughtful stories. I wonder what, if any, feedback Sofitel/Accor and the Wheeler Centre have had, how the writers found the experience, and whether the project will be repeated.

Jane Jose, Places women make (Review)

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Jane Jose, Places women make“Places”, Jane Jose writes in her book Places women make, “can lift our spirits and be inclusive, and add surprise, excitement, wonder or some beauty to day-to-day life in the city.” These sorts of places, which are essential to making our cities liveable, rarely just happen. They take planning, and who does this planning? Men. At least, it’s men, says Jose, who have been the “hero architects of most of Australia’s city buildings, leading the design, even if women were invisibly designing the detail behind the scenes.” So, in Places women make, she aims to right this imbalance, to bring to the fore the work women have done in making cities better. This is not, however, a feminist rant. She does not undermine the work done by men. She simply wants women to receive their share of recognition, not just because they deserve it but because it is important for other women – particularly young women – to know.

I had not heard of Jane Jose before reading this book, which proves her point rather because, in fact, she, a self-described urbanist, has been involved in urban planning for well over two decades. She has done this through many roles, including, at one point, Deputy Lord Mayor of Adelaide, her home town. Indeed, one of the fascinating aspects of the book is just how many ways people can contribute to urban planning and improvement. She tells of the obvious people – the architects and town planners – but there are others too, such as the civic leaders and politicians, the landscape designers and gardeners,  the heritage and environmental activists, and the philanthropists. Women – many of them – have performed all these roles, and she shares some of their stories. It’s inspiring reading.

The book is structured thematically, starting with her overall thesis about what women can offer to urban design. This is probably a good place to mention two – hmmm – mantras, I’ll call them, which pervade the book. One is straightforward, and that is, to (mis)use EF Schumacher’s phrase, “small is beautiful”. Although women have been, and are, involved in big projects, it is often in the “small” projects that they make their biggest impacts. Early on, she repeats a leading architect’s criticism of Sydney’s Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore. Jose writes that he

once criticised her to me for having paid too much attention to the small public places and parks in the city rather than driving major projects. He described the small projects she is promoting in the city as being “like tatting”. To my mind this shows a lack of understanding of how women see the small things adding up to a greater whole.

Jose goes on to discuss the projects and ideas Clover Moore has driven, arguing that Moore “understands that community places and activities are the glue in the community” and further, that beautiful, liveable cities “bear the fruit of a strong economy”. I’m not an economist, but there must be some truth to this argument I think. Anyhow, throughout the book, Jose describes many, many small community-focused projects initiated by women, from Wendy Whiteley’s magical Lavender Bay garden to Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Foundation, from Jane Lomax-Smith’s work on protecting Adelaide’s parklands to Tess Brady’s involvement in the creation of Australia’s first booktown at Clunes. Some of these, as you can tell, started small but ended much bigger, which is what happens to good ideas. From little things, big things grow (as Australia’s Paul Kelly sings).

The other mantra or thread is perhaps a little more problematic. It relates to what Jose calls a “feminine sensibility”. She defines this in terms of “creativity … intuition … lateral approach”, as having “a special relationship with community and village life”, and as taking the “long view”. She writes that “we know a female perspective is different from that of a man”. Intuitively – ha! – I understand what she is saying, but from a gender studies or feminist point of view this feels like dangerous ground. However, I’m going with her because her stories are powerful enough to argue her case. Women’s contributions have in general been overlooked or underplayed. Take for example Marion Mahony Griffin, wife of Walter Burley Griffin, credited as Canberra’s designer. It took decades for her part in what was clearly a partnership to be recognised.

What I enjoyed most about the book are the stories about projects, big and small, that women have initiated, some known to me, but many not. I enjoyed reading about Australia’s cities and what local women have fought for in them. This coming week I’ll be in Adelaide, the city where Jose cut her urban planning teeth. She writes about her involvement in the re-visioning of North Terrace and more specifically in activism to save Adelaide’s heritage architecture. I have visited Adelaide several times over the years, but on my visit last year, I was thrilled by how beautiful – and welcoming – it is, particularly North Terrace. We have Jane Jose, forensic pathologist Jane Lomax-Smith, architect Jackie Shannon Gillen, among others, to thank for that.

While her main focus is contemporary Australia, Jose also tells stories from the past. She describes how wives of Australia’s early administrators strongly affected the design of the cities they were in, women like Mrs Macquarie, wife of governor Lachlan Macquarie, and the energetic Lady Jane Franklin, wife of explorer and lieutenant governor of Van Dieman’s land, John Franklin. It is this Jane, in fact, who graces the book’s cover. (I have written about her before on this blog). These women are just two examples of women who, married to influential men, used their influence to affect city planning and design.

In addition to casting her net historically, Jose also crosses the seas. She ends her book with a special tribute to the influential American urbanist Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), who inspired her belief that cities can be villages or communities. But she also refers to other international women, such as American landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, Chilean landscape architect Teresa Moller, and London-based Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid.

What more can I say? Places women make is a fascinating book written by a woman passionate and clearly knowledgeable about her subject. If I have any complaints they are minor, and yet I do need to say them. One is that while she provides a wonderful list, at the end, of the women whose stories she tells, there is no index. I’d love an index. The other is that there are no foot-notes or end-notes documenting her sources, just a brief reading list. These don’t affect the book’s worth as a popular introduction to her subject, but they’d be much appreciated by those of us interested in a little more!

And now, since you can’t really “spoil” a book like this, I’ll end with Jose’s conclusion because it says it all:

Cities matter. They are alive and they change, they are the places we live our lives and make our memories. It takes commitment, imagination and passion to make even the smallest idea for change blossom from an idea into a park, a playground, a library or a shaded street. With the influence of women, cities can be better places. Tomorrow’s children need the places women make.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also enjoyed the book.

awwchallenge2016Jane Jose
Places women make: Unearthing the contribution of women to our cities
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2016
213pp
ISBN: 9781743053942

(Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press)

Sarah Kanake, Sing fox to me (Review)

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Sarah Kanake, Sing Fox to meBack in late 2011, I wrote a Monday Musings post on 19th century Australian Gothic. I’ve always intended to post more on the topic, including one on Tasmanian Gothic. Well, here’s a start, because Sarah Kanake’s debut novel, Sing fox to me, is a good example of modern Tasmanian Gothic. I wrote in my first post that “Australia had (and has) plenty to inspire a Gothic imagination: strange unforgiving nightmarish landscapes, weird vegetation and imaginary creatures”. I was referring then primarily to the outback, but Tasmania, while not exactly “the outback”, has plenty to excite the Gothic imagination.

Why does pretty, verdant Tasmania work so well for a Gothic sensibility? To start with it has some forbidding (albeit beautiful) landscape – remote mountains, dense bush, mist and cold – and it’s an island, which provides an added layer of isolation. Then, there’s its violent history. Tasmania had some of Australia’s most brutal convict prisons. Many escaped, many died, and there are all sorts of horror stories, including those concerning the alleged cannibal, Alexander Pearce. It’s also infamous for the near-genocide of its indigenous population. It’s a place, in other words, in which ghosts and spirits are easy to imagine. But this is not all. Tasmania is home to the world’s only carnivorous marsupial – the small but ferocious and appropriately named Tasmanian devil. And, particularly relevant to this book, it was the last home of Australia’s most famous, most controversial, extinct animal, the Thylacine aka Tasmanian tiger.

Sarah Kanake calls on these, together with the archetypal Australian lost-child story, to write a novel that’s fundamentally about loss. All sorts of loss – people, animals, homes, and love. The novel commences with a brief unlabelled prologue describing the disappearance of 14-year-old River Snow Fox on a rainy night (of course!) On the same night one man’s home is lost, another man’s leg is permanently injured by a falling tree, and the kookaburras cackle. We then jump twenty years. It’s 1986, and River’s older brother David Fox is returning to his childhood mountain home – Fox Hill or Tiger Mountain, take your pick – with his twin sons, the biblically named Jonah and Samson. He plans to leave them with his father Clancy Fox – the man with the injured leg – who is still grieving, still looking for his missing daughter. Relationships are fraught. Clancy and his son don’t get on; angry, hurt, lonely Jonah is resentful of his loving Down syndrome twin Samson; Samson, with his “extra heavy chromosome”, often feels overlooked; and Clancy doesn’t know how to be a grandfather. The scene is set …

There are three other people on the mountain: Murray, son of the indigenous George, who was Clancy’s friend and the man who lost his home; Murray’s partner, the pregnant Tilda; and Tilda’s daughter Mattie, who is deaf. Depending on how you look at it, there could be a fourth person on the mountain, because George, now dead, regularly appears to Clancy.

Now, I wouldn’t blame you if you were starting to think this is all laid on a bit thick – gothic setting, a hermitic old man, a ghost, a missing girl, unhappy twins, a Down syndrome boy and a deaf girl, a pregnant woman and an indigenous man. What I found though was that while my mind (my rational self) was questioning this, my heart (my emotional self) was becoming more and more engaged. It works, I think, because Kanake doesn’t play to melodrama, as the original Gothic novels did. She keeps it psychologically real, even when unexplainable things happen. She also knows of what she writes. The brief biography provided by Affirm Press says that Kanake grew up with “a brother with Down syndrome and two Aboriginal foster brothers”. This reassured somewhat my modern concern about dominant-culture writers presuming to write for “other”.

“We love a version of the tiger, and it’s not real”

So Jonah remembers his father once telling him. What’s real is, in fact, one of the book’s underlying challenges. Readers have to make a leap of faith and accept that what we read is “real” for the characters. The characters, on the other hand, need to work out their “reality” and come to terms with it.

Sing fox to me is one of those books where the structure, the narrative form in particular, supports the meaning. In other words, Kanake’s use of alternating points of view for the three main characters – Clancy, Jonah and Samson – mirrors the separation of their lives. Of course they are together sometimes, physically, but there’s little meeting of minds and hearts. Meaning is also supported by strong, sustained imagery. Nature works on both physical and metaphorical levels. Clancy’s tiger pelt, worn by Clancy and then stolen by Jonah, seems to live and breathe. The mountains, rivers and trees are similarly active.

… he [Clancy] wanted to tell Murray that something had changed on his mountain. The boys were waking things up, stirring life back into old death. (Part 3)

The trees relaxed and the leaves swayed, almost as if they could finally breathe. The creek rushed, not because it was chasing anything, but because it longed to feel the smooth and stable rocks underneath … (Part 6)

Kookaburras act as a sort of malevolent chorus. Their “cackling” laughter resounds throughout the book as a commentary on the misguided quests going on below them. They are there in the beginning when Clancy realises River is lost – “the laughter turned to cackling as the kookaburras gathered in the branches overhead” – and they are there when he realises the futility of his obsessive twenty-year long obsessive quest:

Finally he understood the kookaburras, those buggers at the end of their fucking tethers. Those damned birds knew he should have been laughing with them all along.

“Feeling sorry was in every real Tasmanian’s blood”

Kanake packs a lot into her imagery – and I haven’t begun to tease out all the permutations. I haven’t talked about Jonah’s love of another tiger, Shere Khan, for example, or of the fox motif. There’s also a lovely portrayal of disability in the novel, which I might explore another day. Most of it does, however, come back to loss. Children go missing, parents leave, a friend and a wife have died; animals are lost or killed or extinct. These losses are personal, but there could also be a political reading. Am I being too fanciful to suggest that Clancy’s loss of River, the girl who “said she could sing the tigers to her”, and his futile, obsessive search, could be read as Tasmania’s loss of the Tiger, and the desperate hope that the next claimed sighting will be real? Or that through telling a story about loss and personal ghosts, Kanake is also calling attention to the ghosts of Tasmania’s past?

A step too far? Perhaps. But this book is such a rich read that it invites a very personal response. I’d love to hear from others who have read it.

awwchallenge2016Sarah Kanake
Sing fox to me
South Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2016
266pp.
ISBN: 9781922213679

(Review copy courtesy Affirm Press)

Elizabeth Harrower, A few days in the country, and other stories (Review)

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HarrowerCountryTextThere’s something about Elizabeth Harrower. I’ve just read her Stella Prize shortlisted short story collection A few days in the country, and other stories – and wow! Really, just wow! If you’re a regular reader here, you’ve probably noticed that I’m not one to effuse excessively about books, anymore than I’m one to pan them. I’m careful about what I choose to read, so most of what I read I enjoy. There are, after all, a lot of good and inspiring writers around. But Harrower – the more I read her, the more I see why Patrick White and Christina Stead liked her. She really is something. Her shrewd intelligence, sharp wit, and ability to penetrate the hearts of her characters in just a few words is breathtaking.

Enough though of the superlatives. They are easy to say, but can I prove they are just? I’ll give it a go. As I was reading – and enjoying – Tegan Bennett Daylight’s collection Six bedrooms (my review) I was thinking, yet again, about the current preference for writing in first person. I certainly don’t reject this narrative voice, because I do enjoy the intimacy of it, but I sometimes wonder whether it has become a little de rigueur, perhaps reflecting today’s me-focus? I don’t mean, in saying this, to criticise contemporary writers, because the self is part of the zeitgeist – and to capture that you have to use its modes. However, there’s also something to be said for standing back a little, and this is what a third person voice can do. It is, in fact, what Jane Austen is admired for – her clear-eyed ability to analytically, but wittily, comment on her society, to skewer its pretensions, entrapments and hypocrisies. Harrower exerts the same clear eye, though her focus is more the psyche to Jane Austen’s society.

Now to the collection, itself. The first thing to say is that this is a collection of twelve stories, ten of which have been published before, some as far back as the 1960s and others as recent as last year. Some have been multiply published in anthologies, and some have been reworked. Oh, and eleven are told in third person, with just one in first! There is a subtle underlying structure to the collection, with the first four being about young people – starting with ten-year-old Janet in the opening story, “The fun of the fair”, then moving on to teenagers and young women – followed by the later stories which feature married couples or single adults facing the lives they have made for themselves. The last shocking story, the titular “A few days in the county”, could only be at the end.

There is, I’d say, an overall theme to the collection, and it is best expressed by Clelia in the penultimate story, “It is Margaret”. Her mother, Margaret, has just died and Clelia is dealing with her step-father, a very controlling man reminiscent of Felix in The watch tower (my review) and Hector Shaw in this collection (“The beautiful climate”). Clelia thinks:

Here it was again–the mystery that pursued her through life in one form, in another, returning and returning, presenting itself relentlessly for her solution: how should human beings treat each other?

This is one of those chilling stories about the power people, men usually, can exert over others, and the way women, more often than not, submit to that power, as Margaret did. But Margaret – the title allluding to one of my all-time favourite poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and fall” – has died, and “there was no further harm Theo could do”. We hope.

This theme, the way people treat each other, is at the heart of every story, and culminates in the final one, “A few days in the country”. What an unnamed someone did to the protagonist Sophie is not made explicit, only hinted at, but the consequences are devastating for her. An undivulged act having a dramatic impact on the protagonist is also explored in the tenth story, “English lesson”, nicely setting us up for this last story and again suggesting a careful hand in ordering the stories.

The consistent world view regarding power and manipulation in the way human beings treat each other is offset by variety in setting, character, story and tone. I was intrigued, for example, by two that read almost like little fables, “Alice”* and “The cornucopia”. Both are written third person, but with an added layer of distance. That is, they are written from a neutral position (“third person objective”), rather than by a narrator who takes us into the heads of the characters, interpreting their feelings and attitudes (“third person limited” or “subjective”). Regardless of how you describe the technique, however, the change in tone adds variety to the reading experience and forces us to look at humanity from a different, cooler, standpoint.

So, “Alice” then. She is a little girl unappreciated by a mother who prefers her sons:

Luckily for the mother, she also had two sons, younger than the girl–golden, milky boys not made entirely of wood and flames like their mother, nor of guileless life like their sister, but a mixture of both, and somehow not quite enough of either. They were extremely pretty children just the same. Like Alice, the brothers had remarkable hair and eyes, but their great triumph over her was that they were boys. She began to perceive that this, more than curls or thoughtful ways, was what pleased. The question was: could one terribly good girl ever, in her mother’s eyes, equal one boy? And the answer was no. (“Alice”)

The story goes on to chronicle Alice’s life, her struggle to be recognised and accepted in a family, then a world, where boys didn’t have to try, “they were welcome when they arrived.” Alice marries, but still wants her mother’s love. However

If Alice had a fault, dangerous to her survival, it was that she was inordinately reluctant to learn from experience. She would not. Because the lesson would be so sad.

Clelia in “It is Margaret”, by contrast, did learn lessons from her step-father, and you can see why Alice resists learning hers:

She would have known much less about good and evil without his lessons, but she had paid a good deal for them.

Lessons are another ongoing theme in the book.

You have probably realised by now that what I most love about this book is its writing. It just takes my breath away. Besides the variety already mentioned, there’s her language – the economy of her imagery, her tight pointed syntax. She can do irony. There’s not a lot that’s beautiful, for example, in “The beautiful climate”, and in “The cost of things” the real costs are more than monetary. And, yes, she can be funny – albeit mostly with biting wit – like:

The man had a lot to put up with, too, with the world not appreciating him as it should. (“Alice”)

and

Holding glasses, standing in strategic formation, the men were fascinated. Though the sum of money involved was trivial, it was, nevertheless, money, and the whole story began to symbolise some problem, to involve principles … By the instant, they grew harder. (“The cornucopia”)

It might sound from these that Harrower is only critical of men, but Julia in “The cornucopia”, with her Grades I, II and III friends will put you right on that!

You know how some writers just speak to you? Well, for me, it is writers like Jane Austen, Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley and now Elizabeth Harrower, writers whose sharp intellect and sly wit get to the nub of human experience and make me laugh and gasp in the one breath. Now, though, I’m stuck. I want to tell you about every story in this book, but I can’t. I’d bore you, and I need to move on. However, I hope I’ve encouraged you to try Harrower, if you haven’t already. Meanwhile, I can feel a Delicious Descriptions coming on!

awwchallenge2016Elizabeth Harrower
A few days in the country and other stories
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015
205pp.
ISBN: 9781925240566

* “Alice” was published in The New Yorker last year, and you can read it online. If you do, tell me if it does or doesn’t whet your appetite for more.

Tegan Bennett Daylight, Six bedrooms (Review)

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Tegan Bennett Daylight, Six bedroomsI have just read Tegan Bennett Daylight’s collection of short stories, Six bedrooms, in my quest to read at least some of the Stella Prize shortlist before the announcement of the winner on the 19th of this month. I haven’t read Daylight before – she has written three novels, among other things – so I was glad for the added incentive to read her now. It helped, of course, that Brother Gums and family gave me the book for my birthday!

So, Six bedrooms. It’s a collection of 10 short stories, seven of which have been published previously in literary journals and anthologies. Eight are written in first person, and the other two in third. While the stories are all complete within themselves, as you’d expect, one character, Tasha, appears in four of them, the first, fourth, seventh and tenth. Evenly spaced out in other words, providing a nice sense of continuity and a sort of narrative framework for the whole. That, briefly, is the form of the book, but let’s get now to the content.

Most of the stories could be described as coming-of-age stories, as most of the protagonists are in their teens or early twenties. If you define coming-of-age broadly – that is, as a time of growth, transition and establishing identity – almost all the stories could be described as that. In the last story, “Together alone”, for example, Tasha is 36 years old, but while she’s certainly more “together” than her first appearance at 15 years old, she still has unresolved issues in her life, mainly to do with a missing brother and an ex-husband. This brings me to the epigraph. It’s by Tim Winton, and says “… the past is in us, not behind us. Things are never over.” A truism, you might say, but in this world where “closure” seems to be the thing, it’s worth remembering.

Although only the four Tasha stories are linked by character, there are several themes that recur in the book, besides the coming-of-age one. One is closely related to coming-of-age – the idea of the misfit. How many of us felt we were misfits, had that excruciating sense of feeling out of step with everyone else, only to discover later that those who looked so together felt the same! Tasha, in her first appearance in the book’s opening story “Like a virgin”, goes to a party with her friend Judy. She’s 15 years old, and feels ashamed because they showed everyone else how unable they were to deal with a party. Jane, the younger of two sisters in “Trouble”, feels lonely and awkward, a poor copy of her sister, and despises herself. And so on. Rose in “J’aime Rose”, though, has a different take. She calls herself a misfit, then soon after argues that she isn’t because she “didn’t have the courage”. For her a misfit is one who stands out through, say, “triple-pierced ears” or “a radical devotion to a singer or a style”. A rose by any other name I’d say! Anyhow, misfit or not, Rose, like many of the book’s protagonists, is lonely and unconfident, which leads her, like those other protagonists, to behave selfishly or even spitefully at times. The thing is that it’s all so believable! Unfortunately.

Other recurrent themes or motifs include missing people (parents, in particular, but also siblings, who disappear or die) which can exacerbate outsiderness, lack of sexual confidence, and friendships that survive or don’t under the weight of adolescent self-obsession and inexperience. Tasha and Judy remain friends through the jealousies and little lies to the last story when they are in the thirties, while Sarah and Fern in “Other animals” can’t survive a terrible difference in experience that Sarah doesn’t understand until way later. Daylight captures beautifully here the naive narrator who describes what she sees without having the maturity to understand the shadows beneath.

I enjoyed all the stories, but some stood out more than others. The Tasha stories for example. Daylight doesn’t broadcast the continuity, but provides hints – the name of the friend, the alcoholic but loving mother, the brother – that clue you in to the fact these stories are about the same person.

I also particularly enjoyed the title story, “Six bedrooms”, one of the non-previously-published stories in the book. The six bedrooms refer to a share-house. After all, you couldn’t really have a book about adolescents and young adults without one share-house story! The narrator here is 19-year-old Claire. Daylight builds the story with tight, effective narrative control. The residents of five bedrooms are introduced in the first couple of pages leaving us to wonder about the sixth. We learn about him four pages in. And Claire tells us that she has a friend in the house, with whom she’d moved from a previous house, but it’s clear the friendship is not strong. That too is left hanging, unexplained, until later in the story when we realise there are other perspectives besides Claire’s. Gradually, the relationships and their tensions are developed as Claire tries to find her own way and place. She befriends William, the resident of the sixth bedroom, but it never quite goes the way she’d like:

William sat on the one single chair. I smiled at him but it was as though the smile missed him, went over his head.

AND

I waited for him to touch me. I left my hand lying beside him so he could pick it up, but his hands were busy. He was itchy, and he needed to smoke …

AND

I invented a persona for myself: I was a girlfriend. Almost.

The problem is that she, like other narrators in the book, is naive, and there are things about William that she, in her naiveté, missed completely. Her pain of feeling stupid and alone is palpable.

Ultimately, Six bedrooms is about youth’s painful lessons. Its power lies in the way it captures the small (and not so small) excruciating moments in our lives when we know things aren’t right, but we don’t know how to right them. There are no dramatic resolutions or big light bulb moments, but there are glimmers of a forward momentum in many of the characters’ lives, such as Tasha realising in “Together alone” that “I might have been harder to live with than I thought”. Mostly, though, it’s about accepting that “awkwardness and trouble are part of being alive’’ (“Trouble”), that things are, indeed, never quite over. Another good Stella shortlist choice.

awwchallenge2016Tegan Bennett Daylight
Six bedrooms
North Sydney: Vintage Books, 2015
215pp.
ISBN: 9780857989130

Debra Adelaide, The women’s pages (Review)

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Debra Adelaide, The women's pagesWhen I started reading Debra Adelaide’s latest novel The women’s pages I thought, “Oh yes, here’s another interesting story about women’s lives, how their options are limited, etc etc. I’ll enjoy this but I wonder why it was longlisted for the Stella?” And then, a few chapters in, I started to realise that behind this “interesting story about women’s lives” was a fine and witty intelligence that was playing games with me, that was exploring ideas about creativity and writing, that was looking at how life imitates art (or is it vice versa), as well as at the lives of women! Needless to say, by the end I was fully engaged, enjoying every word while I eagerly turned this woman’s pages.

The embarrassing thing is that I haven’t read Adelaide before – well, that is, I haven’t read her fiction before. I have read some of her non-fiction. Her Australian women writers: A bibliographic guide was groundbreaking and is still highly valuable, and the book of critical essays which she edited, A bright and fiery troop: Australian women writers of the nineteenth century, is a significant work. She also edited and introduced Dymphna Cusack’s A window in the dark which I’ve reviewed here.

But her fiction? I’ve been remiss, but no more, because The women’s pages sure has me intrigued. It starts off straightforwardly enough with protagonist Ellis being asked to a 10th wedding anniversary barbecue. Adelaide sets the scene perfectly. It’s the 1960s and Ellis is a young domestically-competent mother who’s not happy in her marriage. She can’t imagine still being married to her (albeit perfectly decent) husband for another 8 years. So far so good – I’m interested. Then, chapter 2 introduces us to “not yet forty” Dove from current times. She is grieving for her mother and, we discover, is writing the story about Ellis. From here, the chapters alternate Ellis and Dove’s story until around halfway through the book where they start to intrude a little on each other, where in the same chapter we find Dove musing on where Ellis’s story is going or on how Ellis is exerting “maddening autonomy” on her story! What is going on, we start to wonder?

So, as well as being a story – and an authentic story at that – about women’s lives, The women’s pages is also a metafiction about the art and process of writing fiction. Here, for example, is Dove with a sort of writer’s block:

But Dove had run out of ideas. When the baby was born, she had a fair idea, but exactly where, and how, resisted her imagination. Doubtless because she had no experience in this respect, she could not bring herself to visualise a pregnancy and the birth of a baby. She knew this was nonsense, if she were to call herself a writer of fiction, and that she needed to do something about this, even if it simply meant googling the subject.

Write what you know, or else research! I enjoy these sorts of mind-games played by authors; I don’t mind being reminded of the author’s hand.

However, while the metafiction thread is an important part of the novel, there are other threads or themes. Motherhood is a major one. Childbirth and childrearing feature, but the overriding idea is that of missing mothers, the silences about them, the gaps they leave. Ellis’s mother had left her when she was a baby, and Dove was adopted (by a loving mother, but …).  A related thread is the new word to Ellis’s world, “feminism”. There are illegal abortions and adoptions, alongside women striving to develop careers. Ellis gets a job in the magazine industry. By the mid-1970s change is afoot. She senses “the whole country shifting around … with these tall god-like creatures [the Whitlams] in charge”, but she’s not fooled into believing “there was really such a thing as equality”. When she’s offered a promotion, her male boss tells her he expects “absolute commitment”, that is, there must be no “running off to get married, or taking time out to look after children”. Adelaide knows the decades of which she speaks, and her evocation of them is spot on.

Then there’s Adelaide’s exploration of imagination and invention, particularly in the metafiction thread. And this is where another important aspect of this novel comes into view – Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s novel is introduced at the beginning of chapter 2, with Dove blaming it for her decision to write her novel about Ellis (whose name references Emily’s pseudonym Ellis Bell). The “gaps and shadowy images and half truths” in Wuthering Heights “had infected her [Dove’s] imagination” and out of it Ellis’ story emerged. For most of The women’s pages, Brontë’s novel acts as a sort of simmering undercurrent, surfacing every now and then, not always overtly, to impose an added layer on the narrative. But at the end, as Ellis’s complicated family background is finally revealed, it comes to the fore. We even have a Catherine, an Edgar and a Nell, but the parallels aren’t laboured.

Dove writes, around halfway through the novel, that

she had not meant to write the story of women, but that was how it had appeared, that was the only story in her head. The more she delved into the lives of her characters the more it was about missing or silent women and the more it seemed it was her job to find them and open their mouths and lay them across the pages. Ellis had stepped out of a longer story, one in which women were always grasping for some sense of authenticity, and in which mothers in particular were absent. Wuthering Heights had almost no mothers and certainly none whom you could say were good to any degree. They were all dead or dying, or simply blank spaces, unnamed and unacknowledged, as if their progeny – Heathcliff, Catherine, Hindley, Edgar, Nelly – had been produced by magic, or had just sprung up out of the earth …

I said in my opening paragraph that Adelaide’s writing is “witty”. I didn’t mean by this “funny”, though it is wryly amusing at times. No, I meant “knowing”, “astute”, “clever”. Adelaide’s development of Ellis and Dove’s story is beautifully controlled. The women’s pages could, in fact, be read as an expert’s guide on how to write a novel. More interesting to me, though, is the light it throws on the intense emotional investment novelists can make in their work, on the sometimes complex nexus between character and author:

What, Dove wondered, had she done? Or had she done it? Maybe it had happened exactly like this and she was merely recording the facts.

See what I mean? I imagine Adelaide had fun writing about Dove writing about Ellis.

This is a delicious read that engages both the mind and the heart, and has an ending that brings you up with a start. Yes, I can see why it was longlisted for the Stella.

awwchallenge2016Debra Adelaide
The women’s pages
Sydney: Picador, 2015
295pp
ISBN: 9781743535981

(Review copy courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)

Fiona Wright, Small acts of disappearance (Review)

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Fiona Wright, Small acts of disappearanceIt would be a rare person these days, from Western cultures anyhow, who didn’t have some brush with an eating disorder, whether through a friend, a family member, or personal experience. And yet it is one of our most misunderstood afflictions, which is where Fiona Wright’s Small acts of disappearance: Essays on hunger comes in. Wright, born in 1983, is a published poet. However, in her mid twenties, in her first hospital day program for her seriously low weight, she had to admit to herself that she was, indeed, one of “those women”, one of those women, that is, whom she’d always thought were “vain and selfish, shallow and somehow stupid”.

Now, many of you know that I am interested in form. Well, Small acts of disappearance is interesting in this regard. On the surface, it is what it says it is, a collection of essays, but it is also, in effect, a memoir of Wright’s experience of one of medicine’s most mystifying conditions, anorexia nervosa. There are ten essays, the title of each commencing with “in” as “In Colombo”, “In Hospital” and “In Hindsight”. This word “in” has a literal meaning, but its repetition also accentuates that she really is “in” something that she cannot, must not, distance herself from. While there is a loose sort of chronological drive to the essays, the first one, “In Colombo”, does not start at the beginning, not that there is, in these things, a clear beginning. She goes to Colombo as a newly graduated journalist in her early twenties, around three years after what she defines as the formal onset of her condition, but years before she commences any dedicated sort of treatment. It is in Colombo, however, when she thinks “things changed” and her “illness grew more complicated”, and so it is from here that she launches her set of essays exploring this “illness”.

There is, then, an idiosyncratic sort of chronology or narrative arc, which provides a structure for what is essentially a set of thematic essays. Linking them are some recurring threads, in addition to the condition itself of course. One of these relates to the paradoxical and perverse nature of the condition, and another to language. I’m going to be perverse and start with the second of these, language. Wright, being a writer, loves language, so as well as writing the book in her own gloriously clear and evocative language, she also shares the “new” language she learns. There’s the language of treatment (“In Increments”), for example, which she describes as “a jargon, that language that speaks only to the initiated, that carries with it its own definition of inclusion”, and the language of group therapy and recovery (“In Group”). She considers the implications of the language, of how it normalises the way the initiates communicate. Group language and behaviours, she explains, mean sufferers can identify each other, like it or not, outside treatment.

In my opening paragraph I suggested that anorexia nervosa is a misunderstood condition. Wright herself had believed that “those women” were vain and stupid. However, through years of treatment she comes to realise that the very opposite is true, that anorectics (her label) tend to be people (men and women) “who think too much and feel too keenly, who give too much to other people”. She says of the women she met in treatment that they were “some of the bravest but also most vulnerable that I had ever met”. The awful thing, the challenge for treatment, is the condition’s perverse and paradoxical nature. No matter which way you look at it, there’s likely to be a contradiction. Sufferers “fear death” and yet let their bodies destroy themselves; their desire for control often triggers the illness, but the illness, the hunger, wrests control from them and takes over; they want anonymity while their emaciated bodies draw attention to themselves; the pain of hunger numbs other pain; and, so on. Hunger, she writes, is addictive, heightening the senses, creating a feeling of “hyper-alertness”. It “feels so good” that “even now” on the road to recovery, she can miss it. Wright’s analysis of the psychology and pathology of eating disorders is clear and authentic.

While much of the book chronicles her personal experiences, Wright supports her impressions/findings with knowledge gleaned from reading and research. This gives the book a gravitas not usually found in the “sick-lit” (sub-)genre, to which this book may or may not belong, depending on the breadth of your definition. She describes the Minnesota Hunger Experiment, which was conducted during World War 2 on conscientious objectors to ascertain the physiological and psychological impacts of extended periods of starvation or malnutrition. She analyses fictional characters who exhibit disordered eating in novels by Christina Stead (For love alone), Tim Winton (Cloudstreet) and Carmel Bird (The Bluebird Cafe).

She also devotes an essay (“In miniature”) to miniatures, which themselves have a contradictory nature. They unsettle our perception, she writes, while also attracting us. So, she interrogates her love of miniatures from childhood, teasing out of this a pathology that desires to be small and that likes clear boundaries. She writes:

To be miniature, then, is to occupy space differently, and especially, pointedly, to have a different occupation of public space. We disturb it with our discrepancy, even as our smallness means that we occupy less of it. I think sometimes that the drive to hunger, the drive towards smallness, is about precisely this: we feel so uncertain, so anxious about our rightful place in the world, that we try to take up as little of it as possible. It is a drive to disappear that can only ever succeed in making us more prominent, more visible, because it makes us as different and offensive on the outside as we so often feel we are at heart.

And then, scarily, she describes how the crafting of miniatures takes “real skill, exceptional care, and time”. Oh dear. Hunger, she says, “narrows the world so minutely and completely” that it brings the world “back under our command”. But, “it is a false and contradictory kind of command … We possess the world, perhaps, but in the process we are dispossessed of our own selves.” It is a long way back, and as she makes clear in her book, she hasn’t yet quite worked out how to live “a full-sized life”.

I’ll close, logically, with her last essay “In Hindsight” which, in another structure, could have been the opening essay because in it she looks back, back, back to origins. In hindsight, she sees aspects of her childhood and adolescence that contained hints of what was to come. All along she’s told us that her disorder had a particular physical trigger when she was 19 years old, but here, in the last essay, she writes:

I’ve resisted telling this other story, I think, because I don’t want to hear it myself.

And then she exposes all those early signs, with such heart-breaking, self-exposing honesty. I’m not surprised Small acts of disappearance has made it to the Stella Prize shortlist. Wright offers us a clear-eyed, analytical but moving insider’s view of a devastating and still mystifying condition. It’s a gift of a book.

awwchallenge2016Fiona Wright
Small acts of disappearance: Essays on hunger
Artarmon: Giramondo, 2015
193pp.
ISBN: 9781922146939

Tony Birch, Ghost River (Review)

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Tony Birch, Ghost river“Some people believe in religion. Well, I believe in stories.” So says Ren to his friend Sonny late in Tony Birch’s third novel Ghost River. Ren and Sonny are two young adolescent boys who live in Melbourne’s old inner-city suburb of Collingwood. It is the late 1960s, when Collingwood was a largely blue-collar neighbourhood. Ghost River is a novel about the power of stories – it’s also about the power of friendship, and the importance of community.

Last year I reviewed a short story by Tony Birch – Spirit in the night – but this is my first novel by him. While I can’t, therefore, speak authoritatively on his fiction, I’ve noticed some recurring themes or ideas in these two works. Both have young men as their protagonists, both deal with disadvantage, and both set fundamentalist style Christianity against a more humanist view of the world. Interesting. Relevant here too is that Birch is an indigenous Australian writer*. Indigeneity is an overt issue in Spirit in the night, but in Ghost River it’s present, underpinning the respect for place in particular, but is by no means in your face. It is important, sometimes, to put indigenous issues front and centre, but it is equally important for it to be a given, rather than always identified, teased out, featured.

Now, the plot, because this is a book with a strong plot, a story in other words! The novel starts with Sonny moving into Ren’s neighbourhood, Sonny being around 13 years old and Ren a year younger. Sonny lives with a drunken, abusive father. He’s tough, and wiser than Ren in the ways of the street. Ren lives in a stable, loving home with his mother and stepfather. He’s a dreamer, draws birds in particular, and soaks up stories. Early in the book, Sonny rescues Ren from a bully attack at school and from then on “it became the two of them, for better and worse”. The novel chronicles their friendship, as they explore their world and face its challenges – of which, you won’t be surprised to hear, there are many more for Sonny.

Their world is dominated by the river, a place Ren loves and knows “as good as anyone and better than most”, and to which he soon introduces Sonny. The river becomes their playground – a place to which they escape and where they test their skills. It also introduces them to another community, “the river men”, a small group of homeless men led by Tex. Through these colourfully named men – Tex, Tallboy, Big Tiny, Cold Can, and of course the Doc (there’s always a Doc isn’t there!) – Ren and Sonny learn much. They learn practical survival skills, but mostly they learn about loyalty, leadership and the value of mutual support. And they hear stories,

prison stories, drinking stories, lost dog stories, and tales of their years on the road. … Other stories were sacred, recited in hushed tones and observed in silence, except for the crack and groan of the fire.

Partway through the book, a fundamentalist Christian family moves next door to Ren, comprising Reverend Beck, his wife and their daughter Della. We soon realise that Father Beck’s relationship with his daughter has a dark side (if you take my meaning).

Meanwhile, Sonny struggles at school and is eventually pushed too far by a vindictive, cruel teacher. He leaves and gets a job at the local newsagent. Brixey, the newsagent, is one of those men who can look beneath the surface to see potential and, rightly, sees potential in Sonny. It’s not long before Sonny is working hard – using his nous to work some deals, and subcontracting Ren to help out before and after school. Ren, you see, is saving for a camera so he can photograph, as well as draw, his beloved birds.

And then, completing this cast of characters, are the bad guys. There’s Foy the corrupt policeman, gangster Vincent and his henchman, and Chris the illegal SP bookmaker. Through no fault of his own, Sonny, with Ren tagging along as support, gets caught in Vincent’s net, and things become seriously nasty.

Have you noticed how much I’ve focused on the story in my discussion? It’s rare for me to spend so much time in a review on what happens, but it is hard not to here, given the importance of plot. However, there are other aspects worth talking about, particularly the river. It is the main motif – physical but also spiritual and metaphorical – that runs through the book. Unfortunately the river is threatened by plans to build a freeway. For the boys and the river men this spells disaster, the river being important to their wellbeing:

Walking home from their excursions upriver Ren would feel a little different. He couldn’t make sense of it. He knew it was a feeling he craved, but one in danger of slipping away from him. Even Sonny would be calmer. He would look up at the sky as if he was trying to unravel a mystery.

Tallboy tells the boys stories of the river, of how it had changed over time and of the “ghost river” beneath the existing one. He draws “a swirling snake” in the dirt and says:

‘This is her. And when a body dies on the river, it goes on down, down, to the ghost river. Waiting. If the spirit of the dead one is true, the ghost river, she holds the body to her heart. If the spirit is no good, or weak, she spews it back. Body come up. Simple as that.

And so it comes to pass – but you’ll have to read the book to find out more. Tallboy tells the boys, after hearing the freeway plans, “The river. Now, she needs you most of all.”

This is, essentially, a coming-of-age story. There is humour here, particularly in some of the early descriptions of the characters; the pacing is good; the dialogue believable; and the main characters are well drawn. But does it all work? It might just be me, because I’m more interested in character and ideas than plot, but I did find the plot a bit loose, primarily due to having multiple storylines. I’m not sure whether we really needed the Reverend Beck story, and I didn’t love the gangster-bookmaker-corrupt policemen story either though I suppose (says she, the comfortable middle-class white female reader) young boys can get caught up in nasty business. These seemed to me to get in the way of, dilute even, the save-the-river story. However, these plotlines certainly reinforce the idea that life is tough, and that it often requires difficult decisions. Tough, but not impossible. It’s not a spoiler, I think, to say that the novel’s resolution is cautiously hopeful.

“Books”, Ren’s stepfather Archie tells him, “can take you places”. While Ghost River didn’t work for me on all levels, it did take me to a very interesting place and time. I’m not at all sorry that I went there.

Lisa also reviewed this book, from the perspective of someone who knows Melbourne, the river and the freeway (which was, in the end, built. Of course)!

Tony Birch
Ghost river
St Lucia: UQP, 2015
294pp.
ISBN: 9780702253775

(Review copy courtesy UQP)

* As for many people, his origins are mixed, Irish Catholic on his mother’s side, and Jamaican-Indigenous Australian on his father’s.

Helen Macdonald, The human flock (Commentary)

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I know, I know, I sound like I’m obsessed with Helen Macdonald. I’m not, but I am interested in nature and landscape, and she has thought and researched at length about the topic. I’ve called this post a commentary, because it’s not a review. Rather, I’m going to draw on both an On Nature column she wrote for The New York Times Magazine and her book H is for hawk (my review) – and look at a political issue she raised in both writings.

I’ll start with a comment that occurs near the beginning of H is for hawk. Early in her hawk training sessions, she takes Mabel out walking in the streets of her town, but almost no-one speaks to her. They all saw her, she says, how could they not, but “they just pretended they hadn’t”. Except for those who did. A man from Kazakhstan saw her. They discuss Kazakh falconers, and he tells her “I miss my country”. A Mexican cyclist “skids to a halt” and admires Mabel, saying he’s never seen a hawk so close, only high in the sky where they are “free”. And then she realises

that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holiday … I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn’t entirely normal.

I thought, interesting, but moved on, with her, to the next part of her story.

Then, late in the book, she’s out walking with Mabel again, and runs into a retired couple she knows. They exchange pleasantries, including discussing the beauty of a herd of deer they’d all seen. Their conversation concludes with:

“Doesn’t it give you hope?” he says suddenly.
“Hope?”
“Yes,” he says. “Isn’t it a relief that there’re things still like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in.”

Helen is horrified, but says nothing. However, as she walks home she thinks

… I should have said something. But embarrassment had stopped my tongue. Stomping along, I start pulling on the thread of darkness they’d handed me.

She thinks of why and how people and creatures move between countries, of Göring’s desire to move Jews from Germany, of Finnish goshawks in England, of a Lithuanian mushroom gatherer in England who couldn’t understand why English people didn’t know which mushrooms in their woods were and weren’t edible. She says:

I think of all the complicated histories that landscapes have, and how easy it is to wipe them away, put easier, safer histories in their place.

Today’s “Old England”, for example, is not, actually, the England of 100 years ago, let alone 400 hundred years ago, given the impact of settlement and agriculture on the land and its “natural” inhabitants. And those deer? Well, they and the hare are “legacies of trade and invasion”, albeit back to Roman times. Immigrants in their day, in fact. She suggests that instead of fighting “for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are”, we should “fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness”.

Starling murmuration

Starling murmuration, by Walter Baxter, using CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This brings me to the article, “Human flock”, she wrote for The New York Times Magazine. It’s about waiting and watching at a lake in Hungary for a flock of Eurasian cranes on their southward migration. Are you catching my (her) drift now? She talks of various migrating birds, sandhill cranes, snow geese, and starlings. She describes a murmuration, the collective noun for a flock of starlings. She discusses why these birds flock. The reasons include for protection (out of fear), to signpost where they are to other starlings, and for warmth. These flocks, though, are also made up of “thousands of beating hearts and eyes”, of individual birds in other words..

As she watches and thinks, her mind turns to “more human matters”, to the “razor-wire fence” built by the Hungarian government to keep Syrian refugees out. She writes:

Watching the flock has brought home to me how easy it is to react to the idea of masses of refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of moving starlings or tumbling geese, to view it as a singular entity, strange and uncontrol­lable and chaotic. But the crowds coming over the border are people just like us — perhaps too much like us.

The flock made her realise that “in the face of fear, we are all starlings, a group, a flock made of a million souls seeking safety”. But flocks can also be transformed into “individuals and small family groups wanting the simplest things: freedom from fear, food, a place to safely sleep”. It’s a powerful statement for humanity. And I like the way it picks up ideas she touched on but didn’t explore at depth in H is for hawk.

Nature, or, more accurately, exploring its meaning for us and our relationship to it, is clearly an ongoing project for her. I’ll be interested to see how her ideas develop – but for now, you may be pleased to know, I’m moving on to other books and ideas!

PS Helen Macdonald gave the closing address at the 2015 Sydney Writers’ Festival on “On looking at nature”. She gets into nature, history, culture and diversity. It runs for around 38 minutes, and makes for great listening.

Helen Macdonald
“On Nature: The human flock” in The New York Times Magazine, December 6, 2015.
Available: Online

Helen Macdonald, H is for hawk (Review)

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Helen Macdonald, H is for hawkMy reading really has been rather odd lately. I’ve read a memoir about horse-racing (Gerald Murnane’s Something for the pain), a novel about hedge-funds and investment banking (Kate Jenning’s Moral hazard), and now a grief memoir focused on falconry (Helen Macdonald’s H is for hawk). None of these are topics I would naturally pick up, but in each case I’ve enjoyed being presented these very different worlds. H is for hawk, this post’s subject, is additionally interesting because it combines three different forms of writing – memoir, biography and nature writing.

T. H. White lecturing on his Arthurian fiction (Courtesy John J. Burns Library, Boston College, via Wikipedia CC BY 2.0).

TH White (Courtesy John J. Burns Library, Boston College, via Wikipedia CC BY 2.0).

As I don’t read reviews before I read books, I really didn’t know what I was getting in for, except that I understood it was about a woman managing her grief through raising a hawk. It is about this, but it is about so much more too, including being a sort of mini-biography of novelist TH White. You probably know White through his most famous works, The once and future king and The sword in the stone, but you may not know that he also wrote a book called Goshawk about the training of his goshawk called Gos. Imaginative name that! Macdonald was far more creative. She named hers Mabel! (She does explain this surprising tame-sounding name).

Many people have written about falconry over the years so why does Macdonald light on TH White? Well, it’s complicated. She had read Goshawk when she was a young girl, and hadn’t much liked it. However, she read it again and

saw more in it than bad falconry … White made it a metaphysical battle. Like Moby-Dick or The old man and the sea, The goshawk was a literary encounter between animal and man that reached back to Puritan traditions of spiritual contest …

White, you see, wrote it after he’d left his teaching post in 1936 to live in a workman’s cottage. He was fleeing a world in which he, a homosexual, didn’t fit, a world in which he had to live “in perpetual disguise”. Macdonald suddenly recognises a fellow-feeling, writing that

I felt, for the first time, that my urge to train a hawk was for reasons that weren’t entirely my own. Partly they were his.

Because MacDonald was training her hawk to escape her grief following the sudden death of her beloved father. She was, she writes, “running” like White. Both, we gradually learn, experience a sort of madness that they need to resolve and recover from.

And so the book progresses in fits and starts, but chronologically so, as Macdonald parallels the awful and sad story of White and Gos with hers and Mabel’s. It makes fascinating reading.

Now, this book has been out for well over a year. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction (which our very own Anna Funder won for Stasiland) among other awards and shortlistings. It’s been comprehensively reviewed, I believe, so I fear reiterating what others have said before. Consequently, I’m just going to give a broad brush overview of my response to it (and follow up with a Delicious Descriptions post of some of its truly gorgeous nature writing).

To start with, I enjoyed it immensely. It fits into what we call literary or creative non-fiction. That is, it uses some novelistic techniques such as dialogue, poetic imagery and a narrative arc, but it is very definitely non-fiction. It contains a lot of fact about her life, and much research about falconry and TH White. And there are several pages of end-notes identifying sources of quotes, though these notes are not flagged in the text.

I was fascinated by her stories of falconry – her own and from the past – and I am always interested in the lives of writers. Macdonald is an historian by profession, and weaves history through the telling of her own experiences. Although as a child she had agreed with the general censure of White’s training of Gos, as an adult she is more sympathetic, empathising with White’s loneliness and understanding his lack of knowledge and experience. I must say that while I was intellectually interested in the falconry, I would be among those of her friends who find the idea “morally suspect”. It seems a cruel activity to me – and, in fact, cruelty is one of the many threads running through the book. White, who had been physically and emotionally abused as a child, was, apparently, a “sadomasochist”, though Macdonald argues that he consciously worked to keep that part of himself at bay.

This brings me to another aspect of the book I enjoyed – the way she weaves multiple ideas or themes through it. Freedom is one. Macdonald seeks it through her hawk:

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

Hawks seek it too, sometimes. Macdonald describes “bating”, in which a bird tries to fly from a fist or perch while still attached, as a “wild bid for freedom”. And White definitely seeks freedom. Macdonald frequently refers to his desire for it. She quotes his own writing:

A longing came to my mind, then, that I should be able to do this also. The word ‘feral’ had a kind of magical potency which allied itself with two other words, ‘ferocious’ and ‘free’ … To revert to a feral state I took a farm-labourer’s cottage …

Feral. This word conjures another theme, that of wildness. Both White and Macdonald revert to wildness in their own way – by training wild birds, and by withdrawing from society. Macdonald describes how she becomes, essentially, one with her hawk. She starts to think and see like a hawk, and is taken, she writes, “to the very edge of being human”. Eventually though, sense returns. She comes to understand that falconry is “a balancing act between wild and tame” – and not just for the hawk! She rejects American naturalist John Muir’s “earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal”, arguing instead that “the wild is not a panacea for the human soul.” All this makes me think that there’s a fourth form of writing that this book could fit into – the quest story – because it is, fundamentally, a quest for sanity and peace, for both Macdonald and White.

There are other ideas and themes, but I fear that my broad brush is starting to become a fine pen. I will write a little about nature and the environment in my Delicious Descriptions post, so will end my main analysis here.

I read this with my reading group. Some found Macdonald a little too self-obsessed for their liking. Why did the death of her father create such a schism in her soul? Why was she not able to see that her mother’s need, as the bereaved spouse, was surely greater? I wondered a little about this too, though it didn’t affect my appreciation of the book. The answer is, I suppose, that we are all different. For whatever reason – timing, perhaps, the quality of the father-daughter relationship, definitely – Macdonald’s father’s death knocked her for a six. Having accepted that as a given, I found H is for hawk a thoughtful, complex book that engaged me from the start.

This is a long post, I know, but I want to share one more thing. It occurs two-thirds of the way through the book, and, to me at least, shares one of life’s important lessons:

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

Helen Macdonald
H is for hawk
London: Vintage Books, 2014
300 pp.
ISBN: 9780099575450