21st century literature

Beth H. Piatote, Beading lesson (#Review)

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Beth Piatote’s “Beading lesson” is the thirteenth of fourteen stories in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, and with it, we move from the 1990s to the 2000s.

Beth H Piatote

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides very little information about Piatote. It simply says that she is Nez Perce and a Professor of Native American Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Wikipedia provides a little more, but not much in terms of life history. It tells us that she is a scholar and author, that she is “a member of Chief Joseph’s Tribe and the Colville Confederated Tribes”. And it expands on her academic qualifications and achievements a bit more. It seems most of her writing is academic, but she has had one short story collection published, The beadworkers, published by CounterPoint Press in 2019.

“Beading lesson”

“Beading lesson” is the shortest story in the anthology. Blaisdell gives its original date as 2002, but the source for the story is a 2008 Oxford University Press anthology, Reckonings: Contemporary short fiction by Native American women. However, I believe, from the GoodReads description of The beadworkers, that the story was also included there.

GoodReads describes The beadworkers, starting with, “A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings, while ruminating on a fractured relationship”. This perfectly captures the setting of “Beading lesson”, but of course there’s much more to it. Before I get onto that, however, I’ll add that the collection sounds interestingly varied, as it includes stories set in the 1960s and 1890. GoodReads concludes its description/promo with “Formally inventive, witty, and generous, the works in this singular debut collection draw on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life in the Americas”. I haven’t read the other stories, but my guess from reading “Beading lesson” is that the collection explores the cultural, social, political and economic role and implications of beadwork, and that it also uses the idea of beadwork literally, as a practice, and symbolically, to represent the wider culture.

So now, “Beading lesson”. The fractured relationship mentioned by GoodReads is with the aunt’s sister, that is, the niece’s mother. The story is told first person by the aunt, who gently and patiently shows her niece the intricacies of beading, as they make some earrings for the mother. However, as she passes on to her niece an important cultural skill, she also shares values and information that she believes are important for her niece to know. In other words, the skill teaching is part of wider mentoring, which is what all good skill teaching is about.

What makes this story interesting is the subject of this mentoring. It’s multifold – to pass on cultural traditions, to teach the niece some life-skills, and, eventually, maybe, to lead to a repair in the broken relationship with her sister. It appears that this sister, the youngest in her family, had been spoilt. As a result, she had not learnt the skills our narrator had learnt, and has lost culture. The aunt tells her niece:

I think sometimes she wishes she learnt to bead, but she didn’t want to when she was little. She was the youngest, so I think she was a little spoiled but don’t tell her I said that. She didn’t have to do things she didn’t want to, she didn’t even have to go to boarding school. 

The boarding school reference is intriguing. Our narrator is positive about her experience, when, quite often, such schools were sites of cultural loss.

As the lesson progresses, we learn that the narrator is passing on beadskills to men in prison, which gives them skill and pride. The subtle message here of course concerns Indigenous incarceration. We also learn that her beadwork has supported her in tough times, through times of “livin’ skinny”. And, we gain some insight into the politics of, let us say, “Indigenous arts and crafts”. The aunt tells her niece that when some people

buy your beadwork, they think it should last forever. Somebody’s car breaks down, he knows he got to take it to the shop, pay someone to get it goin’ again. But not with beadwork — not with something an Indian made. No, they bring it back 10 years later and they want you to fix it for free! They think because an Indian makes it, it’s got to last forever. Just think if the Indians did that with all the things the government made for us. Hey, you got to fix it for free! 

The use of vernacular for the aunt’s story could lull readers into thinking she is a sweet but simple old lady. However, as the story builds, it becomes increasingly clear that she knows exactly what she is about. We see her to be kind, wise, and generous, where it is warranted, but not stupid. She knows the value and importance of what she does, but she also knows exploitation and is resilient in its face. She knows that maintaining cultural practice is important to her people’s continuation. This a story in which the personal is quietly, but absolutely, infused with the political. It’s clever and delightful to read.

Beth H. Piatote
“Beading lesson” (orig. pub. 2002)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 100-103
ISBN: 9780486490953

Available online at High Country News.

Sebastian Barry, The secret scripture

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What follows here is an edited version of the first ever review post I wrote – back in December 2008 on a Blogger blog I set up for my reading group. I’ve been meaning for some time to bring it over here because I’d like to have Sebastian Barry represented on my blog! However, my review was written in a different style to the one I use now, so I’ve tried to update it a bit. This is difficult given it’s a long time since I read it! I apologise for its awkwardness.

I read The secret scripture because I’d heard great things about his previous novel, A long long way, which, like The secret scripture, was shortlisted for the Booker prize. The book is set in Ireland in contemporary times, with flashbacks to the 1930s, and is told through the voices of two characters: Roseanne, a centenarian who has lived in a mental hospital for over 50 years, and Dr Grene, a psychiatrist at the institution for 35 years. As Roseanne writes her life-story, which she hides under boards in her room, Dr Grene investigates the reasons for her being there with a view to deciding her future, because the hospital is slated for demolition. His understanding of her story and her own telling of it differ. What falls out is a tortured story of religion, family and politics at a time in Ireland when sides had to be taken, rules took precedence, and humanity was in short supply.

As he investigates Roseanne, Dr Grene, who is grieving over the death of his wife, Bet, spends a lot of time with Roseanne, and shares his own story with her.

“the assault of withering truth”

There was so much to like about the novel – the language, the characters (albeit most are loosely drawn), and the themes. I particularly liked Barry’s musings on “truth” and “history”, which is not new of course. I also liked the connection made between truth and health, that Roseanne’s “truth” was a healthy one.

Roseanne is intriguing as a narrator. I would call her reliable not because she tells us the correct facts necessarily (as it appears that she may not have) but because, as Grene says at the end, she tells us “her” truth and this truth “radiated health”. It may not hold up in a court of law but it gets to the heart of who Roseanne is. It is “vexing and worrying”, though, as Roseanne says, when different people’s truths (such as Fr Gaunt’s and Roseanne’s) cross each other. How true is (the perfectly named) Father Gaunt’s anyhow? His conveys the facts but contains no humanity, let alone empathy. He has no idea of who Roseanne is, but he does know the “law” (of the church at least).

“History, as far as I can see, is not the arrangement of what happens, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.” 

As those of you who know me might imagine, the exploration of truth was one of my favourite aspects of the book. In this novel it is so humanely nuanced, suggesting that we should look out for two truths – the facts and inner meaning – and decide which one should take precedence in any given situation. Facts, as we know only too well, are important but we should also heed the “hidden inner” truth as well. In relationships, for example, perhaps the “hidden inner” truth is equally if not more important. Why a person is saying or doing something, for example, may be more critical than what they are saying or doing.

Then there’s the language. It is beautiful, poetic. Poetic usually means two things to me, mostly in combination – language that is rich in imagery and that has a strong rhythm. Barry’s writing has wonderful rhythm, which he creates through the use of repetition, and particularly thought the careful use of punctuation, and long sentences interspersed with short sentences to give a lovely flow. This example near the opening almost reads like blank verse:

“That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains stood sway. They were not sure, no more than me, of that dark spot, those same mountains.

There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind of plunging animals, in floods.

The river also took the rubbish down to the sea, and bits of things that were once owned by people and pulled form the banks, and bodies too, if rarely, oh and poor babies, that were embarrassments, the odd time. The speed and depth of the river would have been a great friend to secrecy.

That is Sligo town I mean.”

He sets a powerful tone in these opening few paras – the rhythm is slow but with just an edge of awkwardness that catches you off guard. And the language conveys something untoward – “cold”, “dark”, “black”, “rubbish”, “secrecy”. These are not repeated but, used in combination in such a few concentrated paragraphs, they give a sense of the story to come. It’s an evocative opening and it engaged me quickly.

As for characters, Roseanne engaged me from the start; she always felt authentic. I wasn’t always so sure of Dr Grene. Did we need all the Bet stuff, albeit was moving? Perhaps, given the role of men in women’s lives, and in Roseanne’s in particular, we are meant to be on guard. However, he particularly started to lose me towards the end, when he started to more actively investigate Roseanne’s history. From a plot point of view it was logical and understandable, but the voice became more prosaic, ordinary, in some sense that seemed to lose Grene’s particularity.

My main issue with the book was, in fact, the ending. It was contrived. Maybe Dr Grene’s voice felt more forced towards the end because even Barry knew his plot resolution was a bit too neat and didn’t quite know how to do it! Fortunately, plots aren’t the main indicator for me of a good read.

Dr Grene’s choosing, in the last para, the bright and open rose rather than a uniform neat one, suggests an acceptance of being open to many truths, to the imperfections of the world, than to that tidy, dry version of the world that we get from Fr. Gaunt. This softens the neat plot conclusion somewhat – as does the fact that Barry doesn’t go in for the full cliched emotions that such a story might commonly close on. Consequently, despite some misgivings, I’d happily read more Barry because I loved the heart and openness in his exploration of truth, and his writing is so engaging.

Kimbofo also reviewed this way back when!

Sebastian Barry
The secret scripture
London: Faber and Faber, 2008
300pp.

Donna M. Cameron, The rewilding (#BookReview)

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Quite coincidentally, earlier this month, I read and posted on Willa Cather’s short story “The bookkeeper’s wife” which commences with a young man, Percy Bixby, sitting in his office deciding to do something in order to keep his flashy fiancée Stella. That was published in 1916. I have now just finished Donna M. Cameron’s novel, The rewilding, which was published in 2024. It commences with another young man, Jagger Eckerman, is sitting in his office deciding to do something that will lose him his flashy fiancée Lola. Both young men are caught up in fraud, Percy of his own making, Jagger unwittingly, though that doesn’t make him entirely blameless. From here the stories part company, so we will leave Percy, whose story I’ve already told, and look at 27-year-old Jagger.

Jagger has been living the high life. Caught up in his own privileged lifestyle, he’s been carelessly signing documents he shouldn’t, until finally the penny drops and he wakes “up to the fact that every aspect of his life is a farce”. So, he clicks Send on his whistle-blowing email and scarpers. The problem is that the only place he can think to scarper to is a cave in a national park south of Sydney, and when he gets there he finds someone else already holed up in the same spot, the 24-year-old “feral” eco-warrior, Nia Moretti. As the accompanying publicity sheet says, it is hatred at first sight, but they soon realise they need each other, whether they like it or not.

The rewilding starts with a bang and barely lets up for the length of its 300 pages. It’s a genre-bending work of eco-literature that combines thriller, road story and romance. The central thriller-driven plot is not my favourite type of story – I’m not much interested in watching or reading about chases, violence and suspense – but Cameron handles her material confidently, creating a book that I enjoyed reading despite myself. I just hurried through the bits that were less interesting to me. Why I was happy to read it is what I want to focus on here.

First, there’s the genre-bending aspect. Cameron balances the thriller components with more reflective and tender sections, with moments of interpersonal tension, with touches of humour, gorgeous natural descriptions, and serious themes. Second, the story is well-paced, and the writing fresh but accessible. It is primarily told third person through Jagger’s perspective, but this is occasionally interspersed with short chapters in Nia’s voice, in which she speaks to a mysterious “you”. These provide additional insights into Nia that Jagger can’t know, while also increasing the mystery. Who is this “you”? What has happened to Nia? Third, the two main characters are nicely developed. Jagger is on the run, scared and uncertain about what his future holds. Still grieving his mother’s death and the mistakes he’s made, he is fundamentally decent and an optimist. Nia, on the other hand, is an uncompromising idealist, and pessimistic, but reveals a softer side. Gradually, as is typical of the romance genre, the antagonism between them is relaxed, although not, of course, without setbacks.

“a capitalist suit” versus “the feral”

And finally, there are the themes. For me, a good story isn’t enough. I need some meat, some ideas that make the time I put into reading worthwhile, and this book has meat – personal and political. In the personal realm, Jagger is a young man who had lost his way but, when some truths become clear to him – when he realises his relationship had been built on a lie and his workplace was engaging in a waste removal scam – his better self, the one his recently dead mother had so carefully tried to engender in him, comes to the fore. In his suit and fancy shoes, he surprises Nia with his deep knowledge of and love for nature. Likewise, Nia is struggling with a personal loss. She is resentful of the “capitalist suit” who comes into her cave, and finds ways of using him – and his money – to her own ends but, despite her toughness, she has a heart. So, on the personal level, The rewilding is a novel about values, about the lines you draw, about the life you choose to live and what that means personally and …

politically, because this is also a novel about climate activism. Nia and her radical Earth Rebellion mates, the Lorax, are determined to save the planet. Their focus is a mining operation in northern Queensland which is about to proceed without permission. First, though, she has something to do in disaster-struck, flooded Brisbane, something that puts her and Jagger’s lives at risk. On the run, and being followed by hit men, he has no option but to go along with the only person who can help him. It is at this point, before the final dramatic confrontation at the mine, that Nia starts to unbend a little towards Jagger and his perspective.

“Why be scared of change?”

The rewilding is a wild, dramatic novel. It does push the boundaries of credibility at times, but probably no more than you expect in a thriller. Ultimately, through her characters and their fierce, lively conversations, and through her fast-paced plot which offers a few scenarios, Cameron explores the critical issues confronting us and asks the big questions we are asking, without resorting to overt didacticism.

Climate change novels can be bleak, but many authors, even those writing the bleakest of stories, talk at writers festivals about wanting to leave their readers with some hope. That this was Cameron’s intention is foreshadowed in the epigraph from Tolkien’s The lord of the rings, “Where there’s life, there’s hope”. So, at the end, certain rapprochements are achieved, but the conclusion is real rather than simplistic. It recognises that life is messy and change is hard but that it’s worth keeping on trying. The rewilding is a worthy addition to Australia’s eco-literature field.

Donna M. Cameron
The rewilding
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2024
309pp.
ISBN: 9781923023062

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge, via publicist Scott Eathorne of Quikmark Media)

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (#BookReview)

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Broadly speaking, Melissa Lucashenko’s latest novel, Edenglassie, does for southeast Queensland what Kim Scott’s That deadman dance does for Noongar country in southwest Western Australia. Both tell of the early days of their respective colonies from a First Nations perspective; both are written in a generous spirit but with absolute clarity about the dispossession that took place; and both suggest things could have been different.

Unlike That deadman dance, however, Edenglassie, is a dual narrative story. The main storyline, featuring two young people, Mulanyin and Nita, is set around the Magandjin or Meanjin (Brisbane) region during the mid-1850s, making it just a little later than Scott’s first contact narrative. Dispossession, massacres and other brutalities from the colonisers were met with armed resistance, but there were also attempts to work together. Paralleling this historical story is a modern one, featuring Granny Eddie, Winona, and Dr Johnny, set in the same area at the time of its 2024 bicentenary. These stories, one using historical realism and the other modern humour, riff off each other to provide a complex picture of the colonial project – then and now.

Melissa Lucashenko said much that interested me in the conversation I attended for this book, but here I’ll focus on two points she made. One is that the book’s central question is “what was going through these people’s [the colonisers’] minds?” Things could have been different then, she said, and could still be now. The other point is that she wanted to counteract the trope of the dying race. This idea has been slowly changing since Mabo, she said, but is still evident. The modern storyline, with its confident and politically involved Goorie characters, ensures that we see a vibrant, living culture in action.

Realising these two ideas is a big ask, and in my reading group there were some equivocations, but I think Lucashenko pulls it off, through creating engaging characters who come alive on the page and narratives that ring true to their times. Mulanyin, the kippa (young initiated man) from the historical period, and Winona, the fiery young woman in modern times, represent the passion of youth. They are impatient and want things to happen – or change – now. Both, however, also have elders guiding them – in the Goorie way, which is to encourage people to work it out for themselves and to remedy their mistakes.

“needing to endure the unendurable” (Mulanyin)

So, what is it that these young characters must contend with? The novel starts with two pointed events. In the modern storyline, Granny Eddie trips over a jutting tree root and is ignored by passersby until two young brown faces – Malaysian students as it turns out – help her up and get her to hospital. The modern scene is set, and all is not well.

We then flash back to 1840 where members of the Goorie Federation are looking forward to the imminent departure of the dagai, only to be told that this is now unlikely. A Goorie mother wonders what

If life never returned to normal. If the rule of law was never restored. What would her son see as a man? … Would her daughters be subject to the terrors the dagai brought?

What indeed?

Having asked the question, Lucashenko then moves her historical story to 1854-1855. Mulanyin is living with his law-brother Murree north of his own saltwater Nerang/Yugambeh home. Here, he is in close contact with the colonisers, and particularly with the Petries. At this time, the Petries, particularly the young Tom Petrie, were sympathetic to, and tried in their own way to work with, the Goories on whose land they resided. Lucashenko seems to be saying that, given colonisation was happening and wasn’t going to be undone, there were ways in which it might have been made to work (or, at least, work better). Conversations between Tom, Mulanyin, and other characters, explore their differences, particularly regarding attitudes to country. Mulanyin wants to know

what goes on in the brain of an Englishman? When he arrives in another man’s country to steal his land, and water, and game, and then with a straight face, calls those he steals from thieves? Is this how it is in Scotland? Is this why your people have fled that terrible place?’

The ensuing discussion has Tom struggling to explain the English, but admitting that “in their ignorance, they don’t understand that the land here has its own Law. They think that only their British law exists”. However, he says, they “respect some boundaries still … Those that are well defended”.

What did ‘well defended’ look like, Mulanyin wondered, if not like a thousand Goories assembled at the Woolloongabba pullen pullen? If not like Dundalli, leading the warriors who had willingly assembled under him, from Dugulumba to K’gari?

Fair point, Mulanyin.

Meanwhile, the modern-day characters are living with the fall-out from the failure of the colonisers to make it work and of the colonised to succeed in their resistance. Goories are still here, yes, but life is a struggle, and Winona wants to fight back, wants “to bite em hard onetime, while we got the chance”. She can’t understand why Granny Eddie, who grew up “with a dirt floor and empty belly” doesn’t think she deserves more. Granny, though, is two things. A pragmatist who sees that “Dagai not going away! We gotta get on with them”. And she’s an elder well-versed in her culture, so when Winona takes a hardline with Dr Johnny, who claims Aboriginal heritage, Granny says

“You’re thinking like a whitefella when ya close him out. That’s not our way. We bring people in, we bring our Mob home, and we care about them. We teach them how to behave proper way…”

Further, she argues,

“We can’t be sunk in bitterness … Or stuck in the past. We need to focus on the good dagais, like Cathy and Zainab, and them Petries, and –.”

Winona, Granny Eddie and Mulanyin all make sense, but they speak from different angles. What makes Edenglassie so interesting is the way Lucashenko gives space and respect to these angles. She certainly shows what was lost – and the utter unfairness of it. But, with the generosity of spirit we keep seeing, she also shares through her characters what living with deep connection to country means. And, she encourages everyone to think about alternative ways we can do this.

Towards the end of the novel, Gaja (Aunty) Iris shares an important story with our modern protagonists, introducing it with

we all know how important our stories are … People all over the world keep their stories close. Middle Eastern people believe … that by telling a story you can change the world, and nothing is as powerful as the right story at the right time.

With ideas about truth-telling and decolonisation becoming part of modern Australian culture, now feels like the right time for stories like Edenglassie. It might be an uncomfortable time to be a settler Australian, but that’s nothing compared with what First Nations people have endured and continue to endure. The least we can do is try to understand. Books like Lucashenko’s not only help us along this path but give us a lively read at the same time.

Melissa Lucashenko
Edenglassie
St Lucia: UQP, 2023
306pp.
ISBN: 9780702266126

Delicious descriptions: Charlotte Wood on silence and solitude

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It’s some time since I wrote a Delicious Descriptions post, but I want to explore Charlotte Wood’s novel Stone Yard devotional (my review) just a little more. Although I finished it over a week ago, I keep thinking about its evocation of quiet lives in retreat – and what Wood might be saying.

I am, admittedly, a woman of “a certain age”, but, nonetheless, I am surprised to find that where once I loved filling my life with noise and action, I am now enjoying quiet. By noise and action, I don’t mean energetic activity – I’ve never minded being sedentary – but I mean I have never actively chosen quietness. Recently, however, this has changed. Now when Mr Gums and I drive long distances, for example, we often drive in silence – no music, no audiobooks, podcasts or radio programs, just silence. And, I like it.

It is this silence that Wood’s unnamed narrator in Stone Yard devotional seeks, and Wood writes about it in a way that not only makes it meaningful in terms of why we might seek it, but that is calming to read.

It starts the afternoon our narrator arrives at the abbey. “The silence is so thick,” she writes, “it makes me feel wealthy”. What an idea that is, “the silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy”. A couple of paragraphs later, she explains that the abbey’s welcome booklet says they “accept that guests might want total solitude”. “Noise is discouraged”, and guests “are free to decline joining others for eating or worship”. She “cannot think of a greater act of kindness than to offer such privacy to a stranger”.

A couple of pages after this, and despite not being required to join in, our narrator decides to go to Lauds in the little church, and finds herself wondering how they get anything done with all this toddling into church every couple of hours. But then she realises that this “is the work. This is the doing”. She finds herself “drenched in a weird tranquility” and she wonders whether this has come from

being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical, illicit.

Such silence, however, while appealing in theory, is not as simple as it sounds. She talks about the Lectio Divina, which Wikipedia describes as a traditional monastic practice comprising “four separate steps: read; meditate; pray; contemplate”. This is a step too far for our narrator at this point in her journey, and she finds herself arguing internally with what she is seeing, but

Despite this, the process is strangely beautiful. Sister Bonaventure says getting caught on a word is the point, and if you remain troubled or confused by it, you just ‘hand it over to God’. This is so antithetical to everything I have believed (knowledge is power, question everything, take responsibility) that it feels almost wicked. The astonishing – suspect – simplicity of just . . . handing it over.

The narrator is an atheist and the novel is not about religion per se, so she comprehends this concept more broadly in the sense of letting the things that bother you just sit, instead of endlessly turning them over.

This brings me to the idea I shared in my post on the novel, that of

waiting. An incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered.

Thoughts about stillness, silence, solitude, and contemplation, freedom and peace, form the backbone of this novel, but they are tested by the visitations or “visitants”. They are also specifically tested by the idea of an active life. Sister Helen Parry distances herself from the abbey’s inhabitants, getting on with her activist work via “internet video calls … calling for action on this or that”. She brings, says the narrator, “everything we so painstakingly left behind”. Local farmer Richard Gittens’ wife, Annette, views life at the abbey as “sick … unnatural”.

And yet … (indeed, Elie Wiesel’s “and yet” is the narrator’s favourite phrase) … the end, when it comes, seems to suggest that there is a place for all. And that, maybe, there is no either-or, but what is right for us at different points in time. A gift of a book for anyone interested in thinking about how to live in our noisy, troubled and troubling world.

Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional, Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2024

Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional (#BookReview)

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Charlotte Wood’s most recent novel, Stone Yard devotional, is set in the Monaro, a region just south of where I live. It’s a landscape that is much loved by many of us, including Nigel Featherstone, whose My heart is a little wild thing (my review) is also set there. The Monaro is expansive country, a dry, golden-brown plateau, characterised by rocky outcrops here and there, much as the cover shows. There are also hills in the distance, and big skies. Perfect country for contemplation, I’d say, which is exactly what Wood’s unnamed protagonist is doing there. (In fact, it’s also what Featherstone’s protagonist went there to do, for a very different reason – although, coincidentally, both books have something to do with mothers).

Stone Yard devotional is a quiet and warm-hearted read, one that asks its readers to not rush ahead looking for a plot, but to think about the deeper things that confront us all at one time or another. These things are hinted at by the two epigraphs, one being Australian musician Nick Cave’s “I felt chastened by the world”, and the other American writer Elizabeth Hardwick‘s “This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today”. Add these to the title – with its hardscrabble sounding “Stone Yard” set against the gentle, inwardness of “devotional” – and you have a sense of the intensity to be found within.

“a place of industry, not recreation”

While this is not a plot-driven novel, there is a definite narrative arc. Taking the form of undated journal entries, the novel covers a period in the life of a middle-aged woman who has left her city life – her husband, her job in threatened species conservation, and her friends – to live in an abbey on the Monaro. It starts with a five-day stay, which is followed by more stays until the time comes when she arrives and doesn’t leave. Why she does this is not explicitly explained but through her contemplations we come to see that there’s unresolved grief in her life over the death of her parents some three decades earlier and, alongside this, a level of existential despair which has built up over time.

This is the set up. The narrative arc comes from three “visitations” to the abbey – a mouse plague which ramps up as the novel progresses, and the celebrity “environmental activist nun” Helen Parry, who accompanies the bones of the murdered Sister Jenny who had left the abbey decades ago to work among poor women in Thailand. These three events, both real and metaphoric in import, present practical and moral challenges, “a rupture” but also “a frisson of change”, for our narrator, and for all at the abbey.

So, we follow Wood’s narrator as she settles into life at the abbey, taking on the role of cooking for the group, and, as their non-religious member, the shopping and other errands that need to be done. Much industry is required to keep the place running when there is no financial help from the church, but the main industry is emotional and spiritual (in its wider meaning). Early on, our narrator recognises that prayer and contemplation “is the work … is the doing”. For her, as an atheist, this is not religious in origin or intent, but nonetheless contemplation is the real work she does while living at the abbey.

Much of this contemplation is invoked by flashbacks to and memories of events from the past, some experienced by her and others that happened around her (like the suicide of a farmer). Many involve her beloved and humane mother, who, like nuns Helen and Jenny, was an “unconventional”, determined to continue along her path despite what others thought. Such contemplation is hard, and our narrator is tested by the “visitations”, particularly Helen Parry with whom she has history involving bullying at school. Our narrator wishes to apologise but, as she comes to see, the hard work is in coming to that point of apology, not in having the apology accepted. But, forgiveness and atonement are only part of the bigger questions posed in this novel. Grief, despair and, ultimately, how to live are also part of its ambit – and are set against the shadow of climate change and its implications for our lives and choices.

This sort of exploration, however, can only work if we like the telling, and I found it thoroughly compelling. Stone Yard devotional is delicious for its details about life in an abbey on the “high, dry, Monaro plains, far from anywhere”, and for its insights into the women living there. No character is fully developed, but each, from the “business-like but soft-looking” leader Sister Simone to the distressed Sister Bonaventure, feels real in the role she’s been given in the narrative. While there’s not a lot of dialogue, our narrator reports on interactions between the women, and these contribute to her contemplations about life. She is not perfect and admits to moments of pettiness and poor judgement in her dealings with her co-habitants. Contrasting this little community is local farmer Richard Gittens, who supports the abbey in many practical ways and who represents, as our narrator recognises, “decency”.

All this is told in spare but expressive writing that maintains a tone which is serious and reflective, but which never becomes bleak.

There is no single, final enlightenment, but rather, as the narrator says earlier in the novel, “an incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, [a] sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered”. This is the sort of writing I love to read. In some fundamental way, it reminded me of my favourite Wallace Stegner quote. In Angle of repose, he wrote that “civilisations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations”. Through living this life in retreat, Wood’s narrator comes to know herself better. In so doing, she is able to lay some of her demons to rest, not through any major crisis but through quiet contemplation. The abbey does, indeed, turn out to be a “place of refuge, of steadiness. Not agitation”.

Interestingly, and perhaps pointedly, the novel ends on an anecdote about the narrator’s mother and her “reverence for the earth itself”. Ultimately, Wood invites us, without exhortation, to not be “chastened by the world” but to do the hard work of thinking about what is really important. A compassionate, and gently provocative, book.

Kimbofo (Reading Matters) also liked this book.

Charlotte Wood
Stone Yard devotional
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2023
297pp.
ISBN: 9781761069499

Sean Doyle, Australia’s trail-blazing first novelist: John Lang (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Sean Doyle’s literary biography, Australia’s trail-blazing first novelist: John Lang, provides insights not only into this “idiosyncratic” man, but into two colonial societies – Australia and India – through the early to mid nineteenth-century. Doyle’s is not the first biography of John Lang, but it’s the first I’ve read.

However, Lang (1816-64) himself is not new to me. In 2018, I reviewed his 1853 novel, The forger’s wife, when it was published by Grattan Street Press in their Colonial Australian Popular Fiction series. But, even that wasn’t my first mention of Lang, as I had written briefly about him in a 2012 Monday Musings on Australia’s “pioneer novelists”. In that post, I wrote that he was born at Parramatta, went to Cambridge in 1838 where he became a barrister, and returned to Sydney in 1841, before leaving again a few years later to live in India and England. All this is covered in excellent detail in Doyle’s biography (with relevant clarifications).

John Lang, The forgers wife

I also noted that, according to (my 1994 edition of) The Oxford companion to Australian literature, “the enigma surrounding the life and personality of John Lang has not, even a century later and in spite of considerable literary research, been completely solved”. It is, however, believed he wrote the fiction work, Legends of Australia, which was anonymously published in 1842. The Oxford companion suggests that authorship of this “would entitle Lang to the distinction of being the first Australian-born novelist”. I added that there is a 2005 biography of Lang by Victor Crittenden, whose title says a lot: John Lang: Australia’s larrikin writer: barrister, novelist, journalist and gentleman. He was a contributor to Charles Dickens’ periodical Household Words. All of this is also covered by Doyle, but with additional research, which confirms some of the information that the Oxford companion writers “believed”.

Sean Doyle opens his book with a Preface which sets his biographer’s ground rules. Arguing that the richness of Lang’s life is in the details, he admits that not only did Lang lack a champion “to carry his flame posthumously”, but that there are few contemporary sources and what does exist is sketchy. No diaries or letters are known to survive. So, the temptation of course is to look to his novels, but, as Doyle cautions, while these can be “a looking-glass into his own life … any correlation requires caution”. His process then was “to assemble the verifiable facts, identify the spaces between them, and navigate the spaces with the firm aim of being true to what we know of his temperament, life and times”. He argues that Lang’s “known actions and ways inform the spaces of the unknown”.

Doyle then moves to his Introduction where he makes a strong argument for why this man deserves this biography, starting with Lang’s being “the first Australian-born novelist”, not with 1853’s The forger’s wife, but with Violet, or the danseuse, which was published in 1836 (and identified as being by Lang in Crittenden’s biography). Doyle names many other firsts, including the first Australian satire (Legends of Australia, 1842), full-length detective-novel in English (The forger’s wife, 1853), Indian travelogue by an Australian (Wanderings in India, 1859), and supernatural tale by an Australian (“Fisher’s ghost”, 1836). Other firsts include making the first translation of a classic (a Roman poem) in New South Wales. These firsts, Doyle admits, were more easily come by in the early days of a colony, but argues this doesn’t diminish the achievement.

“He just couldn’t help being idiosyncratic” (Doyle)

The rest of the book, until the Epilogue, chronicles Lang’s life, in nicely readable detail, through 25 chronological and clearly titled chapters, such as “Chapter 1, Family and Social Background”; “Chapter 11, Calcutta, 1842”; and “Chapter 21, Furlough in the UK (and a Creative Peak) 1852-’54”. In the telling, Doyle conveys much about Lang’s personality and character, which he gleans from the sources he has. These include, for example, newspaper reports of Lang’s “ill-advised” comments on the franchise and representation in New South Wales’s colonial legislature while seconding Wentworth’s motion supporting the idea. This is just one of many occasions in Lang’s life – as documented by Doyle – in which he shoots himself in the foot (as they say!) The end result is a biography that portrays a man – a “currency lad” no less – who had a lot of talent, a lot of heart and a lot to offer but who, more often than not, undercut himself through poor judgment and/or poor timing and/or an inability or refusal to read the times and produce accordingly. Lang wanted to emulate Dickens’ success, but “he just couldn’t help being idiosyncratic” – in his literary, personal and political lives.

Nonetheless, Lang achieved much in his relatively short life of 47 years. He is, argues Doyle, better known in India, than Australia, largely because of his support of Rani of Jhansi during her battles against the East India Company, but also for, as a barrister, winning Sikh Jyoti Prasad’s suit against the Company. Indeed, Doyle’s coverage of Lang in India at the time the Company fell and the British Raj commenced makes good, albeit distressing reading. It’s an ugly history, as we know. Lang also established, in 1845 in Meerut, a newspaper titled The Mofussilite, which documented many of India’s sociopolitical challenges of the time, and was often critical of the Company and the British.

The Epilogue provides a thoughtful summation of Lang’s achievements and significance, particularly in terms of his writing, and of the social, political, literary and personal circumstances that affected who he was and what he achieved. It makes a case for Lang’s place in Australia’s literary history, arguing that

without his balanced depiction of the convict era, the colony’s story is lopsided. This matters: a culture is the sum of the stories it tells itself.

The Epilogue, in fact, is a useful document on its own.

The biography is written in a popular-history style, meaning it has a strong narrative drive, with a liberal use of exclamation marks, some foreshadowing, and, for some chapters, serial-like cliff-hanger endings (which feel appropriate to Lang’s era). Doyle wants to understand Lang’s character and actions, and he pursues this with the gusto of a story-teller but with an eye on the facts and truths as he sees them.

Doyle is clearly keen to get the story of Lang and “his rollicking times” known. His research feels thorough and the characterisation as accurate as he can glean from this research. There are end-notes which cite sources for important points and a list of mainly secondary sources (biographies, histories, articles and websites). At times I would have liked to better understand which gaps were being filled, which thoughts and feelings were guessed rather than known, albeit Doyle heralds some with “maybe”-type markers and recognisable pop-psychology. There is no index, which is a big negative for me in biographies, but I know they are expensive, and the chronological telling will help people hone in on where the persons or events they are researching might be.

I did have questions as I read. What was Lang’s attitude to his wife and children, who left him in India, and whom he apparently never saw again, and where did First Nations people fit in those early colonial days of “big” men and their “progressive” ideas? But these are not necessarily germane to the main story here. Lang’s life is story enough, and Doyle has delved as far as he can.

Australian’s trail-blazing first novelist makes good reading for anyone interested in Australia’s literary history.

Note: Four of Lang’s works are available at Project Gutenberg Australia.

Sean Doyle
Australia’s first trail-blazing novelist: John Lang
Newport, NSW: Big Sky Publishing, 2023
372pp.
ISBN: 9781923004382

(Review copy courtesy the author.)

Gail Jones, Salonika burning (#BookReview)

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Australian author Gail Jones’ ninth novel, Salonika burning, is a curious but beautiful novel, curious because she fictionalises four real people for whom she has no evidence that they met or knew each other, and beautiful because of her writing and the themes she explores. The novel is set during World War 1, but its focus is firmly on the interior rather than the grand stage of battle.

It opens dramatically with the burning of the city of Salonika (Thessaloniki). This is another curious thing, because this destructive event was caused not by an act of war but an accidental kitchen fire. Also, the novel is not set in Salonika but some 90 miles off, in and around “the field of tents that comprised the Scottish Women’s Hospital”, on the shores of Lake Ostrovo in Macedonia. It is 1917, and the novel’s narrative centre is this hospital and those working in and around it. Here, not Salonika, is where our four main characters are based — Stella, an assistant cook/hospital orderly; Olive, an ambulance driver; surgeon Grace; and Stanley, an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps. They are based on the Australians, writer Miles Franklin and adventurer Olive King, and the British painters, Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In her Author’s Note, Jones makes clear that she has fictionalised these characters, and that while all are known to have worked in the vicinity, there is no evidence that they met or even knew each other. It is “a novel which takes many liberties and is not intended to be read as a history”. This is fine with me. After all, a novel, by definition, is not history. The novel follows these characters over a few months after the burning of Salonika.

“everything was coming apart”

So, why Salonika? I see a few reasons. For a start, its burning sets the novel’s tone. On the first page we are presented with opposing ideas. The sight of the burning city is described as “strangely beautiful” but, on the other hand, “alarm, instant fear, the sufferings of others … were no match for excitement at a safe distance”. As the fire died, “excitement left and in its place was a murky lugging of spirit”. Throughout the novel, Salonika represents these contradictions, this tension between what is ugly, what is beautiful; between what is random, what is not; and in how to respond to, or feel about, what is being experienced.

The Salonika fire also encompasses the idea of witness and representation. In the opening scene, Jones describes a painting made of the fire by William T. Wood. It is a “morning-after scene, brightly calm, with a floaty view from the heavens” done in his “signature pastels, remote as a child’s dream and thinly decorative”. Those who saw this painting later, she writes, “saw the pretty lies of art”, whereas “former residents and soldiers said, No, it wasn’t like that”. This tension too is played out in the characters as they think about how they might represent their experience.

The burning of Salonika, then, embodies several ideas that are followed through in the novel. But, Salonika is also relevant to the plot. The novel’s narrative arc lies mainly in the characters and their emotional reactions to what is happening as the months wear on. Not only is there the war with its injured and dying soldiers, but malaria is rife, and the privations they experience, professionally and personally, are exacerbated by the burning of Salonika and the attendant shortage of essential provisions – food, petrol, medical supplies. However, a plot also unfolds, and it is something that happens on the way to Salonika, well into the story, which sets the novel’s final drama in motion.

Salonika burning traverses themes that are the stuff of the best war literature – themes that expose the “idiocy of this war, of all wars” and its impact on those caught up in it – but it offers its own take. The telling feels disjointed, particularly at the start, with its constant switching between the perspectives of the four characters who interact very little with each other until well into the novel – and even then it’s often uneasy, as befits their temperaments. And yet, the novel is compelling to read, primarily because of these characters. They are beautifully individuated, so flawed, so human, so real.

Olive, who is the first character we meet, and the one who closes the novel, is confident, tough and practical. Grace, too, is tough, doing her “duty” with a “dull vacancy”. Stella, at 38, the oldest of the four, is “cranky and wanting more”, more excitement to write about, but she believes in “chin-up and perseverance”, while the youngest, 26-year-old Stanley, is “ill-fitted … to this life of rough cynical men”.

These are “intolerable” times, and we are privy to their struggle to maintain their sanity. Olive resorts to her German grammar to escape the emotional load, while Stanley has his mules and favourite painters, his “Holy Rhymers”. Stella, “writing jolly accounts in her diary”, thinks about what stories she will tell, while Grace has her favourite brother to think about and write to. The disjointed structure mirrors, I think, their sense of isolation. Contact and the potential for friendship is there, but Matron discourages emotional engagement. There’s “no room for emotion”, she says, just “duty”. Olive, who seems to represent the novel’s moral centre, thinks otherwise:

It seemed another kind of duty, not to forget. Olive wanted to speak of what she had seen and known, though she suffered too much remembrance.

This could neatly segue to that issue of representation, and the post-war work done by Stella, Grace and Stanley, but instead, I want to conclude with another idea. On a supply trip to Salonika, Olive, “driving in her safe foreign aura”, had been indulging in a dose of self-pity, but is suddenly confronted by the loss Salonika’s burning represented for its residents, “and only now understood that it was the woe of others that claimed importance”. Likewise, Stanley, Grace and Stella are confronted with the woes of others through the novel’s closing drama, and must decide where their humanity lies.

I started this post noting some curious things about Jones’ approach to her story, but these didn’t spoil the read. Rather, they added to my interest as I read it. Ultimately, Salonika burning is a true and tenderly written novel that captures the essence of war’s inhumanity, and then goes about extracting the humanity out of it. A worthy winner of the 2023 ARA Historical Novel Prize.

Lisa and Brona also read and enjoyed this book.

Further reading

Gail Jones
Salonika Burning
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2022
249pp.
ISBN: 9781922458834

Michael Fitzgerald, Late (#BookReview)

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Australian author Michael Fitzgerald’s novel Late owes something to what is known as the alternate (alternative) history genre, or what I call “what if” novels. Here, the underlying story is, what if Marilyn Monroe had not died in 1962 but, instead, had instead escaped Hollywood’s oppressive celebrity culture and moved to Sydney, Australia?

It’s hard to imagine any celebrity who has inspired more books, films, songs – you name it – than Marilyn Monroe. Just check out Wikipedia’s page listing them. There are over twenty works of literature, of which I’ve only read one, Andrew O’Hagan’s The life and opinions of Maf the dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe (my review).

Now though, I should ‘fess up that nowhere in Fitzgerald’s book does he name Marilyn Monroe. His narrator is unnamed. However, she tells us she is also known as Zelda Zonk, a name once used by Marilyn Monroe, and the biography she gives us is that of Monroe down to her birth and death dates, the details of her marriages, and much more. So, given our narrator is intended to be Marilyn, the question is why? Why write a(nother) story using Marilyn, rather than start from scratch? And why do it using another of her personas, Zelda Zonk? I don’t know, but I’ll have a go at thinking about it.

So, let’s start with the setting. We are in 1980s Sydney, so Marilyn has been in Sydney for a couple of decades. She is living in a modernist (Harry Seidler-designed) building in Vaucluse, not far from some of the cliffs in Sydney which, in the 1980s, were also the site of gay-hate crimes known as the “Sydney cliff murders”. Notwithstanding that darkness, Sydney is beautifully evoked.

Early in the novel, our narrator meets a young man Daniel, who turns out to be gay and who is locked out of the apartment he is house-sitting. The relationship that ensues brought to mind Sigrid Nunez’s The invulnerables (my review) in which an older woman develops a friendship with a young man, but they are different books, so let’s move on. Our narrator and Daniel discover points on which they connect – from something as simple as their mothers’ names (Gladys and Gladyne) to something more fundamental like both having experienced adoption and a sense of being outsiders. Trust and tenderness develop between them, as they walk, ride on a ferry together, and cook a meal for Shabbat.

Now, a little aside: I’m not sure how to refer to the narrator because, as she writes in the opening paragraph of Scene (aka Chapter) 2, “I am not always Zelda, and Zelda is not always me”. Indeed, she writes, “Zelda is everything that I’m not […] She is the me who goes on living”, and later again, she is “the protectress of my spirit, of the shattered sense of me”. If I name her Zelda in my post, I am ignoring the distinction, and I don’t to do that. So, I am going to stick with the term “narrator”.

“What I have to say is important and personal” (Zelda)

Our narrator’s voice is variously wise, funny, erudite, and also at times self-deprecating. She is out to set the record straight in terms of her reputation as the “dumb blonde”, the “beautiful child”, the difficult actress who was always “late”:

You see, I wasn’t late: they were in a God-awful American hurry. Yes, let it be said for the record, being late wasn’t a problem: they were in this crazy rush to the moon. In any case, who aspires to be on time when, for my Art, readiness is all?

And when it really counted, let’s face it, my timing was perfect.

Drop-dead perfect.

So much in those few sentences.

She makes us see her life from a different perspective, such as the time she wore the see-through rhinestone dress to sing Happy Birthday to JFK. I don’t know what Monroe really thought or intended but that is perhaps not the point. Michael Fitzgerald gives her a voice that reflects on her experience, on how the culture manipulated her, on the hurts of being commodified and ignored as a person. Marilyn is a wonderful vehicle for interrogating celebrity, and Zelda for exploring how an escapee might see the experience and move on from it.

There are several questions to ask about this book, besides why Marilyn. Another is, why is she speaking now, a couple of decades after her arrival in Sydney? This one she answers – it’s because “the cliffs have been warning me, for months now, that evil dwells here”. And this is where Daniel as a young gay man comes in. He is the vehicle for exploring the homophobia of the time, the gay-hate crimes and cliff-murders. He is a gentle person with his own crisis, and is drawn to Zelda “like an old person or wounded animal is”. Our narrator empathises with him, and the other young men who have disappeared, and wants to help him. Their cliff-top nemesis is, pointedly, blond.

I won’t say more about the plot, because the novel’s main interest lies in the narrator’s musings. They are what I most enjoyed – her clever allusions to movies, books, poetry, and songs, her witty footnotes, her humanity, and the entertaining wordplay (starting with the multiple meanings of the title itself).

I don’t know if I understood the novel the way Fitzgerald intended, but I enjoyed the voice. It is confident, witty, in-your-face. “Without a sense of humour, we are animals, we are lost,” she says. It is also intelligent and thoughtful. This Marilyn – if I can call her that at this point – has come through and is living life the way she wants to live it, but she has heart too, and cares about the young men. It’s a surprising thing that Fitzgerald has done to put the two ideas together, but I think he has made it work. After all, why not have a gay icon care about saving young gay men?

So, I found it an absorbing to read, one that encourages us to think about who Marilyn might have been had she been allowed to be herself. And who Daniel might be if allowed to be himself!

Right near the end, our narrator comments,

Don’t you think it’s funny? How we still haven’t explored these shadows of the human heart?

Maybe we never will, fully, but books like this encourage us to keep trying.

Lisa also enjoyed and reviewed this book.

Michael Fitzgerald
Late: A novel
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2023
208pp.
ISBN: 9781923023024 

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge via publicist Scott Eathorne)

Anna Funder, Wifedom (#BookReview)

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Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life is a book with a mission, a mission that is implied in its full title. That mission is to examine the notion of “wifedom”, and the way patriarchy works to construct it, through the example of the invisible – or, as Funder also calls it, erased – life of George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

To do this, she wrangles Eileen out of the shadows of history to produce an intelligent, funny, warm-hearted, loyal and hard-working woman who, observed novelist Lettice Cooper, loved George “deeply, but with a tender amusement”. It’s an engrossing story, well-told. However, it’s a challenging read too.

Funder explains early in the book that her interest in Eileen came from reading something Orwell wrote about women and wives – after Eileen had died. It’s astonishingly misogynistic, and made her wonder who Eileen was and what she might have thought. Funder set about reading six Orwell biographies written between 1972 and 2003, but she found them unhelpful when it came to Eileen. Indeed, she says, they gave so little that they “started to seem like fictions of omission”. Funder then, logically, went to these biographers’ sources. She found some more bits and pieces about Eileen, but it wasn’t enough. All she had was “a life in facts, a woman in pieces”, so she “considered writing a novel – a counterfiction to the one in the biographies”. But, she was fascinated “by the sly ways” in which Eileen had been hidden, and she felt a novel couldn’t effectively explore this. Then she “found the letters”.

These were six letters that Eileen had written to her good friend Norah from just after her marriage in 1936 until 1944, but they had not been discovered until 2005. These letters gave her Eileen’s voice – and this voice was “electrifying”. Funder believed she could no longer write a novel. She writes,

I wanted to make her live, and at the same time to reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her, and that still holds sway today. I thought of it as writing a fiction of inclusion.

“it’s hard … for history to find you”

This is where the book gets tricky, because, while I found Wifedom a fascinating read, it raised questions too, and they are intrinsic to what Funder is trying to achieve, and how she goes about achieving it. The book is divided into five parts, with the first part titled “Wifedom, A Counterfiction”. What does this mean? She doesn’t immediately explain what I have described above. Instead, she opens her book on a scene in which she imagines Eileen writing a letter to Norah – and she includes excerpts from that letter. This throws us readers in at the deep end. As we get into the book, we come to recognise these imagined sections, because they are identified by indentation, and opening and closing graphical symbols, but at the beginning it’s a bit mystifying, albeit an engaging way to capture our interest.

Early in the read, then, it becomes apparent that Wifedom comprises a complex mixture of processes and forms. The imagined sections are interspersed throughout the book between more traditional biographical writing about Eileen and George’s life. And interspersed between these are reflections from Funder’s own life, because one of her points is that the patriarchy, the “patri-magic”, which erased Eileen’s life from George’s biography, still exists and is evident in her own life as a wife and mother, despite her supportive husband and “egalitarian” marriage. I’m not going to focus on this aspect of the book, though, because it seems to fade away somewhat as Eileen and George’s story picks up, and is not, anyhow, where I want to go in this post.

Instead, I want to tease out the process. Early on Funder writes that

Looking for Eileen involved the pleasure of reading Orwell on how power works. Finding her held the possibility of revealing how it works on women: how a woman can be buried first by domesticity and then by history.

This is not particularly new. Anyone interested in feminism is aware of how women have been lost in (and thus to) history. However, Funder’s book is enlightening in this regard. She does an excellent job of interrogating how it can happen. It happens when biographers ignore or play down the role of women in their subjects’ lives. Through cross-matching her sources she finds example after example of Eileen’s contributions being downplayed or omitted. She shows how the use of passive voice and terms like “wife” rather than Eileen’s name work to make her disappear. (Orwell does it himself in Homage to Catalonia.) She finds examples where biographers, disconcerted by some of George’s behaviour, excuse it (how often are men excused!), or, uncertain about evidence, will rephrase it. For example, Funder writes that Eileen

noted his extraordinary political simplicity – which seems to have worried one of the biographers, who rewrote her words to give him an ‘extraordinary political sympathy’.

Eileen’s words come from a 1938 letter to Marjorie Dakin. The biographer is Crick. (Another of the textual clues to readers in this book is that Eileen’s words are conveyed in italics, while the words of others are enclosed in quotation marks.)

But here’s the challenge – interpretation. Funder writes early in her book that,

As serendipity would have it, in 2020 Sylvia Topp published Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, which contained much material I hadn’t found, and was thrilled to read, though we interpret it differently, and so build differing portraits of Eileen.

She does not explain what she means here, but in the very thorough Notes at the end of the book, Funder elaborates on Topp’s approach to Eileen. Put simply, Topp, Funder says, sees Eileen as one of those celebrated people’s partners who devoted their lives “joyfully to assisting the talented partners in all their various needs knowing all along that they would be under-appreciated, and often ignored, and yet never faltering in their dedication, or in their willingness to submerge their own personal talents into their partners’ success.” Topp, then, sees Eileen as a “helpmeet of genius” while Funder is interested, as she writes in these Notes, “in examining what it took, perhaps, to be in that marriage, and that dream”.

So, what we have here is interpretation. Topp had the same sources that Funder did. Indeed, she added some to Funder’s arsenal. But, she interprets them differently. As a feminist, I easily aligned with Funder’s interpretation, but as I read I also had this little niggle that Funder was interpreting her sources – from the perspective of her times, values and gender – just as other biographers had before her.

Wifedom was my reading group’s April book. Our conversation focused mainly on the biographical content – on Eileen’s life, on George Orwell and his books, and on the impact of patriarchy on Eileen. We were horrified by the life led by Eileen, as Funder tells it – and the facts seem inarguable. Their relationship appeared to us to have been so one-sided. Eileen did all the domestic work, and it was hard work given the primitive rural cottage that they called home. She was, often, the main breadwinner, and she did his typing, as well as offering editorial comment. She was necessary to him. Meanwhile, he focused on his writing and, we gathered, chasing other women. And yet, Eileen stayed with George. Why, we wondered?

We didn’t delve into the interpretation issue, albeit I would have loved to, but I needed more time to collect my thoughts. We did, however, discuss why we thought Eileen stayed with George which, I guess, was us interpreting what we’d read! Various ideas were put forward, including that Eileen might have been a “rescuer”, or that she knew she was unlikely to have been published herself (in a patriarchal world) and so channelled her energies through George, or, simply, that she loved him and, much like Topp argued, willingly helped him in any way she could.

So, there you have it! History, biography, it’s all a matter of the facts you have, and the way you see them. I don’t mean to devalue the biographer’s art by that statement, but simply to recognise that even the most formal, most rigorously documented biography will, necessarily, be affected by the biographer and their times. For this reason, I found Wifedom an absorbing and provocative read, though perhaps only partly in the way Funder intended.

Anna Funder
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life
Hamish Hamilton, 2023
511pp.
ISBN: 9781760143787