21st century literature

Rachel Hennessy, The heaven I swallowed (Review)

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Rachel Hennessy, The heaven I swallowed

Cover: Courtesy Wakefield Press

It feels strange to be reviewing a Vogel Literary Award runner up, which Rachel Hennessy’s The heaven I swallowed was in 2008, in a year when the judges decided not to award the prize because they didn’t find ‘that special quality that a winning entry has’. C’est la vie I suppose, but what a shame for this year’s entrants. I hope it doesn’t discourage them. Rejections can be good for you – or so I’ve been told.

The heaven I swallowed is Hennessy’s second novel, though I hadn’t heard of her before. Her first, The Quakers, won the Adelaide Festival Award for an Unfinished Manuscript. She has also had many short stories published, a short play performed, and a short film, Not Waving, Drowning, screened at several festivals. She’s clearly been around.

According to Wakefield Press’s Media Release, The heaven I swallowed was inspired by Hennessy’s grandmother who was a member of the Stolen Generations, and by her paternal great-aunt whose husband fought in the second world war. The novel is set in the 1950s, with flashbacks to the past. It tells the story of Grace (Gracie to her husband Fred) and opens around 1950 when Grace is 40. She’s alone, having lost her husband, Fred, to the war, and childless, having had a miscarriage after Fred enlisted. She decides to take in 12-year-old Aboriginal girl, Mary, who, we later realise, is a stolen child. Grace, though, has been told that Mary’s an orphan. Caring for her, Grace says, represents “the epitome of my goodness”. The novel is divided into two parts, with the second part set 5 years after the first.

My problem is how to talk about it without giving too much away. Telling you what separates the two parts would rather spoil the tale. It’s not a heavily plot-driven story, but there are some significant events that mark its progress, so instead I’ll focus on character and style. And, I’ll start by saying the novel reminded me of Anita Brookner. Grace could have stepped right out of a Brookner novel. She’s an outsider, she’s isolated, she’s lonely. She was an orphan, brought up by nuns – and that seems to have set her off on a path from which she finds it hard to deviate.

This orphan business leads to one of the main themes of the novel – secrets, lies and deception. Grace identifies with orphans. She often reads about them. Jane Eyre, David Copperfield and Tom Jones all make appearances in the novel. Consequently, Grace feels an affinity with Mary – though Mary says she has a mother. When Grace discovers, via her parish priest who had organised Mary’s placement, that Mary’s mother is looking for her, she accepts the priest’s advice and hides this fact from Mary. After all, as Father Benjamin says, “the girl’s much better off with you”. Yep, that’s true! She’s learning a lot about housework! Such was usually the lot of stolen generation girls.

This, though, is not the only lie in Grace’s life. There’s another big one that shadows her – to do with her role as a widow – and there are innumerable small ones. Many are those “little white lies” people tell, but in Grace’s case they are a way of life and serve to isolate her from those people who do reach out to her. Meanwhile, she is doing her best to raise Mary, albeit relying a little too much on the nuns’ methods she experienced, methods that were short on love and high on rules. One of the rules concerns lying: “Don’t lie to me again Mary”, she says. The irony, the hypocrisy, is not lost on the reader.

The heaven I swallowed is a well-plotted novel with lovely links that unite the plot, characters and themes. For example, the opening scene is a flashback to an experience Grace has when she was 12 – a visitation at night from what she believes is the Virgin Mary. Twenty-eight years later, 12-year-old Mary comes to stay with her. She feels Mary as a “presence”, but she also comes to love her, in her own way. Visits, visiting, presence, shadows run through the novel – some physical, some imagined, some spiritual. They provide much of the novel’s tension.

The story is told first person, by Grace. I found her a sympathetic character, but Murray Waldren on the back cover of my edition calls her “a memorable monster”. That’s a little harsh, I think. Grace makes many, many mistakes, but she’s a person in pain, describing herself at one point as “alone and untethered”. She’s not intentionally cruel, she’s not vicious, but she’s defensive and self-centred. In trying to protect herself she hurts both others and herself. It’s a credit to Hennessy that she can write about a “perpetrator” of the Stolen Generations with such compassion – she enables us to empathise with Grace without at all condoning her behaviour.

It would be hard for any book to follow Hilary Mantel‘s Bring up the bodies, and I must say that for the first few pages of this novel I was a little disengaged. Here we go, I was thinking, another girl damaged by her religious upbringing, but Hennessy soon got me in. She has captured the era – the 1950s with its small-mindedness, its gossipy church communities, its racism and sexism – convincingly. She seems to have listened to her family’s stories well!

As for Mary? Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out what happens to her. I recommend you do, because this is a quiet but fierce little book about real people and real situations. It’s not always pretty, but it has a heart.

Rachel Hennessy
The heaven I followed
Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2013
182pp.
ISBN: 9781862549487

(Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press)

Hilary Mantel, Bring up the bodies (Review)

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Hilary Mantel, Bring up the bodies

Courtesy: HarperCollins Australia

In her author’s note at the end of her second Thomas Cromwell novel, Bring up the bodies, Hilary Mantel writes that:

In this book I try to show how a few crucial weeks might have looked from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view. I am not claiming authority for my version; I am making the reader a proposal, an offer.

And what an offer it is! In my review of the first novel, Wolf Hall, I quote Cromwell’s statement that “…homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man”. This was related to the theme of the book – the machinations behind the scenes that change the world, something that we Australians are more familiar with right now than we’d like to be. (This is, in fact, a very modern book.) Anyhow, Bring up the bodies continues this theme but with a difference …

That difference is Thomas Cromwell’s motivations, but more on that anon. The plot concerns Henry’s desire to replace Anne Boleyn with Jane Seymour as his wife – and we all know where that led! It’s a much tighter plot – and a somewhat shorter book – than Wolf Hall. It takes place over about 9 months, from September 1535 to Summer 1536, and while the political climate is still evident – the continuing struggle to entrench the Church of England over the Roman Catholic Church and attempts at social welfare reform – politics and political change are not so much to the forefront in this second novel. Why? Well, because ….

Mantel wants to propose a motivation for Master Secretary Cromwell’s engineering of Anne’s downfall: revenge. Now, the word “revenge” is not, at least I don’t recollect it, actually used in the novel, though the softer word “grudge” appears a couple of times. But this is the motivation that Mantel proposes. It’s all to do with which men were and weren’t tried for treason (adultery with Anne) and their role in the downfall of Cromwell’s much-loved mentor, Cardinal Wolsey. Why, for example, was Thomas Wyatt never tried despite his professed attraction to Anne, while Henry Norris was? You’ll have to read the book – although you probably already have, given how late I am coming to it – to see Mantel’s proposition.

It is this revenge “take” on Cromwell that unifies Bring up the bodies in the way that the story of the separation of England from Rome and the Acts of Supremacy unified Wolf Hall even though both are ostensibly about the downfall of a queen. However, I don’t want to write a lot more about the plot and subject matter because I’m guessing many of the reviews before me have done that. What I want to write about is her writing. It’s breathtaking – the way she gets us into Cromwell’s head, the way she makes us feel the times, and particularly the way she uses language to drive the plot and themes.

Appealing to the subconscious, being almost subliminal, is common in fiction, I suppose, but Mantel does it with such aplomb. It’s the dropping of words and ideas that you barely notice or first notice and think they mean one thing only to find they are pointing to another. Take Wolsey for example. When he is first mentioned in the novel, it’s logical, it’s part of filling in the backstory that is common in sequels. But, the thing is, he is dead, long dead before this novel starts, and yet his name keeps cropping up. It’s always logical, but it starts to carry some larger weight – which becomes apparent as the denouement draws near. There are other words too – phantoms, spoils, truth, angels – which start to convey more than their literal meaning or which, through repetition, point us to larger meanings or themes. None of this is heavy-handed. You could almost miss it, but it’s there – drip, drip, drip.

If people had one criticism of Wolf Hall, it was Mantel’s use of the third person “he” for Thomas Cromwell. It seems Mantel took this to heart, so in Bring up the bodies she frequently qualifies the pronoun, using “he, Cromwell”. It does the job, though for one who didn’t find Wolf Hall a problem, it did feel a little clumsy to me at times – but I forgave her that. There’s so much to love.

Towards the end, during the process dissolving Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the Lord Chancellor says

The truth is so rare and precious that sometimes it must be kept under lock and key.

This is deeply cynical (and ironic). The “council” of men has decided to grant the decree annulling the marriage but to keep the reason secret. Why? Because they really couldn’t agree on a valid one – they just knew it had to be done.

Bring up the bodies is a beautifully constructed but chilling novel in which Cromwell’s character becomes murkier and murkier. What’s to admire and what’s not is the question that confronts us every step of the way. Like many, I can’t wait for The mirror and the light, the next instalment of Cromwell’s story – and would love it if Mantel continued with the Tudors after that. What a fascinating time it was – and what a spin Mantel puts on it.

Hilary Mantel
Bring up the bodies
London: Fourth Estate, 2013
462pp.
ISBN: 9780007315109

Krissy Kneen, Steeplechase (Review)

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Krissy Kneen, Steeplechase

Cover: WH Chong (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

Darn that Australian Women Writers  Challenge! It has introduced me to a bunch of Aussie women writers I hadn’t heard of previously, one of whom is today’s author, Krissy Kneen. I may not have read her quite as soon as I have – there are so many I want to read – if it hadn’t been for Text Publishing sending me Steeplechase. It’s Kneen’s third book but first novel. She has also written Affection: An intimate memoir, which was shortlisted in 2010 for the non-fiction prize in the (now-defunct) Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, and Triptych a work of literary erotica. Steeplechase, the frontmatter tells us, is Kneen’s first non-erotic work.

It is a contemporary novel about two sisters, told in first person by the younger, Bec. Both are artists, but while Bec is an art teacher who also paints and exhibits, her sister Emily is a wildly successful artist whose works have been sold for astronomical prices by Sotheby’s. Bec, 40, lives in Australia, and Emily in China. They hadn’t seen or spoken to each other for 23 years when, out of the blue, at the beginning of the novel, Emily calls Bec and invites her to Beijing, telling her she has already bought the plane ticket. So the novel begins, and gradually the cause of their separation, “the terrible thing”, is revealed. It involves madness … Madness and art. An irresistible subject.

Kneen plots the story well, interspersing the present chronology with flashbacks. The sisters’ mother, we’re told, was mentally ill, and the three of them – mother and daughters – lived in the country with their grandmother Oma, an art conservator. She’s a strong woman, a matriarch, is Oma. The steeplechase metaphor is introduced in the first chapter, through imaginative play directed by Emily in which the girls pretend to be horses galloping and jumping through a course designed by, yes, Emily. “The steeplechase is dangerous”, Emily explains to Bec.

At first it seems that Emily is the typical bossy big sister, who likes to control and scare her little sister. And Bec is the typical younger sister, adoring and long-suffering. Gradually though it becomes clear that something is not quite right with Emily, that she is going the way of her mother. Around this time we “meet” Raphael who may, or may not, be Emily’s lover and who, on one dramatic night, seems to also become 15 year-old Bec’s lover. But, is he real? (According to the 16th century art historian and biographer, Vasari, the artist Raphael died prematurely due to a fever brought on by a night of excessive sex! I suspect the choice of name isn’t a coincidence.) Kneen teases us throughout with questions of reality and fantasy, drawing us into a world where it’s hard to know where “madness” may start and end.

Meanwhile, in the present, the novel starts with Bec recovering from gall-bladder surgery. She returns to work where we meet, among her students, 23-year-old John who is her lover. Bec, “the good girl”, feels guilty about this, recognising the ethical dilemma it creates.

But, that’s enough of the plot … It’s certainly more than I usually provide in my reviews but this is, largely, a plot-driven book. How is Emily now? Will Bec go visit her? What was “the terrible thing”? Why is Bec signing paintings in Emily’s name? Does John really love Bec? Is Bec a good artist? And, even, is Bec herself sane? These are some of the questions that arise as the novel progresses.

Australian Women Writers ChallengeSteeplechase is compelling. It’s well-written and surely structured, with the shifting between present/life and past/memory all but coalescing at the climax. Kneen draws clearly but not slavishy on the traditions of the Gothic and mad-women. She teases us with paradox – Emily’s calm ordered room versus Bec’s messy chaotic one – and irony. Are they really “safe, protected, locked up tight” when Oma closes up the house at night?

I enjoyed her sensitive depiction of sisterly relationships, of the rivalry that runs parallel to unconditional love. She explores what happens when two sisters end up in the same career, one successful and the other not obviously so, and the lack of confidence that can ensue. We believe Bec’s self-assessment that she’s lesser, though there is a hint partway through the novel that she may be better than she thinks. Kneen weaves this though a story that explores madness, art, and memory that threatens to derail. My only reservation is that for a book which ponders the complexity of love (sibling and romantic), the nexus between madness-sanity and art, and the role of memory in constructing self, the resolution is just a little too neat. But that may just be me! It is, for all that, a darn good read.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed the book.

Krissy Kneen
Steeplchase
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013
224pp
ISBN: 9781922079879

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Susan Hawthorne, Limen (Review)

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Susan Hawthorne, Limen, book cover

Cover: Courtesy Spinifex Press

Limen is a lovely word, isn’t it? It’s the title of Susan Hawthorne’s recently published verse novel. You probably know what it means, but just in case you’d forgotten like I had, it means threshold or doorway. This Limen though is a verse novel!

If you are uncertain about novels in verse, this would be a great one to try. The story is easy to follow; the language spare and beautiful, but accessible. It has a chronological structure with nine parts (titled Day 1 to Day 9) bookended by a Prologue and an Epilogue. The plot is straightforward. It’s about two women (Woman 1 and Woman 2) who go on a camping trip to the river – a favourite spot – with their young dog (Dog) . They arrive, full of anticipation for a good time, but “thunderclouds gather/on the horizon”. Overnight it rains and by Day 6, the longest section in the novel, they are trapped by the rising river. The story is told through the eyes of these three characters, each having a clearly defined role and personality.

Woman 1 is the driver and, perhaps because of this, is the more anxious one. She can’t sleep at night (“sleep avoids me/my head pops up”, “river rises by stealth/night terror”). Woman 2 is initially less worried, reporting on their activities (“we make lunch/talk in the dampness”) and on how Woman 1 is going, but as the waters rise she too becomes concerned:

she tells me her fears
only now do I understand
her wakefulness
her restless checking of the river at night
(Day 6)

The dog remains calm, caring only for physical comforts (“my ever-filling bowl/gone”), stick-chasing games, and the presence of its owners (“I sleep/curled paws/your body warm next to mine”).

Two men they had met in the local town appear, tow their bogged car out, and leave, telling them “you’ll be right mate” (in the italics Hawthorne effectively uses for dialogue). However, the river defeats them once again so they decide to “stay with the car”. Two young indigenous men, brothers and miners, appear, offer help, then set off to walk to the mine when the river can’t be crossed. The women, worried about the young men’s safety despite “their bush knowledge/carried on down the generations”, wait. Finally, other cars appear and they face the river crossings in convoy…

Limen is a beautiful read. It has its tensions but it’s not a thriller. The strangers they meet are not sinister, but just other people trying to manage the flooding river. The lack of names for any of the characters gives it a mythic tone. Hawthorne describes the joys of camping – the physical beauty, the spiritual peace, the time for talk and reflection – and the disappointments and fears – the pig-hunting that destroys the tranquility, the floods that threaten their safety. The writing is spare. There’s lovely imagery referencing female lives (“the river is a necklace of pools”, “paperbark/ruffled as a frilled ballgown” and “clouds are crocheted close/threatening”) but when the tension is highest the language becomes terse and plain. The story’s momentum is carried by changes in rhythm – from the more lyrical descriptive sections to those pared down to the basics:

start
rev
release

nothing
(Day 6)

The text is supported by simple, stylish, irregularly interspersed, black and white illustrations – a lizard, tire tracks, patterns in the mud.

Now, back to the title. Clearly the women find themselves at a threshold. Do they wait, staying with the car, or do they go? There is no conflict between them, but there are gentle hints of other things amiss – a “black spirit dog … sniffing the Styx”, the pig hunting that destroys the peace, the white policeman who shows no concern about whether the two young indigenous men who set off on foot have made it through (“it’s their/problem if they’re/out there“). These aren’t laboured, but they suggest other thresholds and are there I’m sure for us to notice and consider. For the women

this tiny crack
in our lives
wind and rain strewn
stranded on the limen
[ …]
where we could
be on both sides of time
span beingness
like an unfinished arc
of a bridge
is closing
(Epilogue)

until, perhaps, next time …

Do read this novel, if you can, and see what you think.

Susan Hawthorne
illus. by Jeanné Brown
Limen
North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2013
166pp.
ISBN: 9781742198606

(Review copy courtesy Spinifex Press)

Anna Krien, Night games: Sex, power and sport (Review)

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Anna Krien, Night Games

Night Games (Courtesy: Black Inc)

Towards the end of her most recent non-fiction work, Night games, Anna Krien writes:

I wish I’d chosen to follow an ‘easier’ rape trial.

She’s concerned that what she’s written, what she’s finding, won’t “sit well with feminists or footballers”. She might be right, but that would be a shame, because what she’s produced is a rational and, yes, provocative analysis of football culture and the way society enables it. It’s about power, entitlement, complicity – and, of course, sex.

“… despite the verdict, I still don’t know who is guilty and who is innocent”

Like Helen Garner (The first stone and Joe Cinque’s consolation) and Chloe Hooper (Tall man), Anna Krien, whose Into the forest and Us and them I’ve previously reviewed, writes in the narrative non-fiction genre. It uses literary techniques to create a narrative about a real issue or event, and can involve the author putting herself (in this case) in the story. I like the style. If well done, it feels honest because the author is clear from page one about the facts (and their limits) she’s presenting, the ideas she’s exploring and, significantly, the challenges she personally faces during her exploration. Krien doesn’t shy away from confronting her feelings, but neither does she let them overshadow her ability to reason.

And so to Night games. The book tracks the rape trial of an AFL footballer. This has implications for the narrative. The name of the complainant must be suppressed, so Krien decides to suppress the defendant’s name too. The complainant’s testimony was given in closed court, so cannot be reported. This could seriously skew Krien’s story, except that she structures the book in such a way that, although the connecting narrative is the trial, the main game (ha!) is the surrounding culture. Also, Krien reverses traditional trial narrative (fictional and factual) and reports the verdict in her Prologue. This de-emphasises the trial drama, and focuses us on the issues she wants to explore. It’s intelligently done – and once again convinced me that Krien is a writer I want to watch.

The book has six parts – the Prologue, an Epilogue, and four parts in between in which Krein tackles what she sees as the critical issues. These are football culture, particularly regarding male bonding rituals, and attitudes to women and minorities such as black and gay players; rape and what she describes as the grey area surrounding consent; and the broader role of women in football, in various guises, including management and media. These parts could almost be read as separate essays, except that they are connected by the trial narrative, and by their thematic connections to each other.

“an abnormal society…”

Some of my family and friends looked a bit askance when I told them what I was reading. After all, rape is an unpleasant subject and I’m not a football follower – but, I am interested in gender and power, social relationships, and ethical behaviour, which are the book’s real subjects. The picture Krien paints of football culture is not pretty, but neither is it particularly new. Who hasn’t seen and heard, in recent years, news stories about drunken parties and sexual assaults involving footballers? Krien teases out what’s behind these behaviours, and it’s mostly to do with male bonding, a bonding that is characterised by bullying and by a “macho culture of humiliation” in which women become the objects through which the men (try to) prove themselves. It’s not quite that simple of course – and women can try to play the game too, can want footballer notches on their belts – but the pervading attitude, until recent moves to change it, has been one of male power and entitlement.

“… a moral quagmire”

More interesting to me was Krien’s discussion of “the grey area, the gulf of uncertainty between consent and rape”. She quotes academic Catherine Lumby, Rugby League’s advisor on gender and cultural change:

Yes, there are many instances of behaviour that we found in our research into players’ experiences that did not equate to sexual assault but are definitely extremely unethical behaviour – such as after having sex with a girl, throwing her out of your hotel room naked without her clothes for a joke. Or suddenly asking, ‘Do you mind if I invite my mate back?’

How easy, Krien asks, is it for women to say “no” in many of the, usually powerless, situations they find themselves in – and if they don’t say no, have they consented? Is acquiescence consent? If not, what is it? The issue of consent was the critical issue in the rape trial Krien follows in the book – and hence her wish for an ‘easier’ rape trial. I’m aware that, except for that stereotypical violent, sociopathic rapist we all think of, consent is the critical issue in many rape cases. But, what I liked about Krien’s discussion was her analysis of the consent issue within this particular culture and her questions concerning how it might be better negotiated and understood at the time the sex occurs and how it might be better handled legally. Underlying this, though, is the idea that there would be less need to worry about grey areas surrounding “consent” if the culture itself fostered respect and equality, not to mention ethical or moral behaviour.

I’ll leave my discussion of Krien’s arguments and thesis here, otherwise I’ll end up writing an essay myself. I’ll simply add that I like Krien’s self-questioning and analytical, rather than emotional, approach. There’s no list of sources at the end, which I missed, but she clearly identifies her extensive research as she goes, naming the people and works she consulted. I also like her writing. It’s accessible and logical, but has fresh turns of phrase that lift it out of dry reportage.

If you weren’t inclined to read this book, think again, because I found Night games to be illuminating beyond its specific focus on football culture. It is also an excellent read.

Anna Krien
Night games: Sex, power and sport
Collingwood: Black Inc, 2013
268pp.
ISBN: 9781863956017

(Review copy courtesy Black Inc)

Irma Gold and Craig Phillips, Megumi and the bear (Review)

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Irma Gold Craig Phillips Megumi and the bear book cover

Courtesy: Walker Books Australia

Now here’s something different at the Gums! I don’t, as you’d know, make a practice of reviewing children’s literature, though I have done a few cross-over adult-young adult novels. So, when Irma Gold and Craig Phillips’ children’s picture book, Megumi and the bear, landed in my letterbox a week or so ago I was challenged. Not only is it a picture book, but its cover – featuring a child and a bear making snow angels – suggest that it has little to do with Australia. Why should Whispering Gums make an exception for this book?

Well, the reasons are twofold. Firstly, I’ve reviewed two works by Irma Gold before (her short story collection, Two steps forward, and the anthology she edited, The invisible thread) and so was intrigued to read something different again by her. She’s one hard-working, versatile author, which I think you have to be if you want to make writing your career. Secondly, while it’s not set in Australia – usually something has to be Australian for me to make an exception – it is set in Japan. At least, Craig Phillips’ illustrations were inspired by his observing a little girl playing in the snow in Hokkaido. I love Japan – and have been to Hokkaido. Exception made!

Now, with two mid-late twenty-something children, I’ve not read a picture book for a long time but, as I picked this up and read it, a whole pile of memories of loved books came back, but first, the story. Like most picture books, its narrative line is simple – a young girl, Megumi, meets a young bear in a forest and they become good friends, playing together again and again until one day the bear doesn’t appear. Megumi is sad, and goes into the forest every day, to wait … until eventually she starts to forget and goes into the forest with her friends … It’s a lovely story about friendship, loss, time and memory.

Craig Phillips’ water colour illustrations are delightful – clear, uncluttered and colourful within a restrained palette. The bear and Megumi’s feelings are nicely conveyed through their facial expression and movement. Irma Gold’s text is also clear and simple, but not simplistic, with a nice use of repetition, “But the bear doesn’t come”, in the central section. The narrative is well-paced, keeping the story moving while providing time to consider (and feel) what is happening. The text is visually appealing. The topic sentence on each double-page spread is presented as a wavy line using an italicised font, with the following sentences in straight-lined plain text. This adds a lovely touch of whimsy to the presentation – and, I suspect, could help the out-loud reader get into a rhythm.

All this made it an enjoyable read – but what I enjoyed most was how it reminded me of other childhood loves, my own or ones made with my kids. The idea of a child playing with a bear brings to mind, of course, Winnie the Pooh. This is not at all a Christopher Robin and Pooh-like story but it plays into that notion of a friendship between children and bears. Going into the forest to play with a wild creature recalls Sendak’s Where the wild things are. Our bear here is not a wild thing – he’s sweet and small – and Megumi and the bear may not engage in wild rumpus, but they do have fun in the forest away from adults. And, this next probably sounds even less likely, but I was also reminded of the song “Puff, the Magic Dragon“. Again a completely different story and theme – and in fact quite the reverse in that here it’s the animal which goes missing – but both explore a friendship with “other” that is made and then lost. Hmm, now I think about it, these connections are pretty loose, but isn’t this partly what reading is about? Enjoying, remembering, connecting, making our own paths through literature and its meanings for us?

The thing is, whatever you make of it, Megumi and the bear is a gorgeous book that I can imagine loving to share with a grandchild, if I had one!

Irma Gold and Craig Phillips (illus)
Megumi and the bear
Newtown: Walker Books Australia, 2013
ISBN: 9781921977909

(Review copy courtesy Walker Books Australia)

Louis Nowra, Into that forest (Review)

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Louis Nowra, Into that forest

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Louis Nowra is one versatile and prolific writer, having written novels, non-fiction, plays and screenplays, essays and even libretti. Into that forest is his latest work. It was shortlisted for the Young Adult Novel prize in the 2012 Aurealis awards and the Ethel Turner Young People’s Literature prize in this year’s NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. I read this for my reading group. We don’t often do youth literature but every now and then one pops up that we think might interest us … such as a book by Nowra.

The first thing to say is that the novel is written in a unique voice. Here is its opening:

Me name be Hannah O’Brien and I be seventy-six years old. Me first thing is an apology me language is bad cos I lost it and had to learn it again. But here’s me story and I glad to tell it before I hop the twig.

And what a story it is … this novel feeds into several Australian, and wider, literary traditions. There’s the lost child and the feral child motifs (reminding me of Dog boy). There’s Tasmanian Gothic, and there’s also a bit of the fairy-tale about it. Subject-wise it covers some significant ground: environmental issues (involving both the extinct Tasmanian tiger and the whaling industry) and what we’d now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This might sound rather mechanistic, but there’s no sense of “ticking off”. It’s not didactic, and it’s all logical within the framework of the book.

Set in the late 19th century, it tells the story of two young girls, Hannah (then 6) and Becky (7) who find themselves lost in the bush (oops, forest!) after their boat capsizes in a storm and Hannah’s parents drown. They are taken in by a Tasmanian Tiger pair, and live with them for four years. Meanwhile, Becky’s father, Mr Carsons, is out looking for her. Eventually they are found, but the process of re-integration is not easy. The novel has a small cast of characters, which keeps it tightly focused. Besides Hannah’s parents who die near the beginning, there’s our two young protagonists, Becky’s father, his friend Ernie, the “tiger man”, a few other minor characters – and of course, the tigers, named Dave and Corinna by Hannah.

As in Dog boy, the description of life with the tigers is pretty visceral. At first Becky resists living like a tiger – perhaps because she still has a father whom she hopes will find her – but eventually she too succumbs, if succumb is the word. It is, after all, a matter of survival. And so they shed their clothes, start to move mostly on all fours, and develop keen animal instincts (of sight, hearing and smell). They also develop a taste for raw food and become adept at hunting. The descriptions of killing and eating the prey are not for the squeamish – “I were starving and the taste of blood made me feel even more hungry” and “What were ever in that shiny pink gristle surged through me in waves of ecstasy” – but they are important to our understanding of what their lives had become. Hannah says:

God knows where me sense of survival came from. Maybe it’s natural cos humans are just animals too.

There is a bogey man here – the tiger man or bounty hunter, whom Hannah had met before, through her parents. To the girls he is more brutal than the tigers. He’s “evil”, kills tiger pups, does “stuff to himself that were rude”. But, perhaps, he’s just another survivor, albeit a not very pleasant one?

While Hannah is the narrator, Becky’s character is the more complex one. She struggles more with the change forced upon them:

She didn’t want to forget. Me? I thought it were stupid to try and remember like Becky did. I didn’t see any use for it. Me English started to shrivel up, like an old dry skin a snake gets rid of. It just lies there in the grass rotting away and then vanishes with the wind. I took to talking in grunts, coughs and hoarse barks like the tigers. This annoyed Becky no end. But it were simple – the tigers understood me. Becky warned I were making a mistake. You will forget your language. You will forget your parents. You are becoming an animal, she’d say. Why argue with her? She were right on every level.

Becky initially fights against the brutality of the hunt – there’s a horrific description of the tigers attacking seals – but then surprises Hannah by rather fearlessly exerting some dominance in the pack. She was of course desperately hungry by then, but it shows Hannah that:

she were really stubborn if she wanted something. She were brave, she were stubborn, she were smart, she were tough.

Unfortunately, Becky is not as tough – or as adaptable – as Hannah thought, and consequently precipitates the novel’s rather shocking conclusion.

It’s a pretty bold novel – but less so than, say, Lord of the flies. There’s plenty to discuss, particularly regarding the subjects I suggested at the beginning of the post. The big theme, though, the one common to feral children books, has to do with defining our nature. What separates human from animal? What would you do to survive – and what would that say about the essence of humanity? Good stuff for young adults, and a gripping read too for we older readers.

Louis Nowra
Into that forest
Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2012
ISBN: 9781743311646 (Kindle ed.)

Carrie Tiffany, Mateship with birds (Review)

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Mateship with Birds (Courtesy: Pan MacMillan)

Book Cover (Courtesy: Pan MacMillan)

Carrie Tiffany is on a roll. Last month her second novel, Mateship with birds, won the inaugural Stella Prize, and this month it won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. It has also been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award. Many bloggers* have already read and reviewed it so, once again, I’m the last kid on the block, but I have finally got there.

Like her gorgeous first novel, Everyman’s rules for scientific living, Mateship with birds is set in rural Victoria in the past, this time, the early 1950s. Its central characters are the lonely, gentle dairy farmer, Harry, whose wife has left him, and his also lonely neighbour, Betty, who has brought her fatherless children to the country and who works in the local aged care home. The novel takes place over a year, a year that is paced by the life-cycle of a kookaburra family which Harry watches and documents in the spare righthand column of his old milk ledger. These notes, which are interspersed throughout the novel, are delightful and poetic, albeit brutal at times:

They work in pairs
against a fairy wren.
Dad buzzes the nest,
the wren throws herself on the ground
to draw him away.
She pluckily performs her decoy
– holding out her wing as if it is broken.
A small bird on the ground
is easy picking.
Club-Toe finishes her off.

They also provide commentary on the main story which is, as you’ve probably guessed, a love story. It is, however, no traditional romance. The boy and girl, Harry and Betty, are well past their youth and are cautious, given their previous experiences of love and relationships. They reminded me a little of Kate Grenville‘s rather dowdy protagonists in The idea of perfection. They care for each other in all sorts of practical ways: Betty cooks meals for Harry and tends his health, and Harry looks out for Betty and her children, fixing things when he can. A sexual tension underlies all their interactions – over many years – but it’s not openly expressed.  (“When he’s invited to tea he leaves immediately the meal is finished, as if unsure of what happens next”). Harry gradually takes on the role of “father figure” for Michael. However, when Michael becomes interested in a girl and Harry decides to pass on some “father-son” knowledge (“an explanation of things – of things with girls? Of … details of the workings”), including some rather specific physical advice regarding women, Betty is not impressed.

It sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it, but there’s something about Tiffany’s writing that makes it feel fresh, original. Part of it stems from her particular background as a scientist and agricultural journalist. Again, like her first novel, she grounds the story in her knowledge of farming life, but not in so much detail as to be boring. Rather, her descriptions give the novel its underlying rhythm – the landscape and the creatures inhabiting it (the kookaburras, owls, magpies, and so on); the milking; the driving into town; the way country neighbours help each other out; the sense of life going on regardless of the little dramas, the kindnesses and the cruelties, that occur. The writing is evocative but has a resigned and rather laconic tone that fits the rural setting.

Although a short book – a novella, really – it’s richly textured. There’s the main narrative drive which flips between Harry and Betty and includes flashbacks to their past, occasional dialogue, gorgeous descriptions (“The eucalypts’ thin leaves are painterly on the background of mauve sky – like black lace on pale skin”), and lists of plants, animals, medications, and so on. Interspersed with this main narrative are Harry’s kookaburra log, Betty’s notebook, Little Hazel’s nature diary, and Harry’s letters to Michael. And all this is layered with imagery involving mating, mateship, birds and humans. You can imagine the possibilities that Tiffany teases out from these. It’s all carefully constructed but doesn’t feel forced. It just flows.

In other words, this is a clever book, but not inaccessibly so. It’s generous, not judgemental. It’s also pretty earthy, with regular allusions to and descriptions of sex. If I have any criticism, it’s  in the persistent references to sexuality. At times, I wanted to say, “ok, I get it, sex – in its beauty, carnality, and sometimes cruelty and brutality – is integral to life” but I kept on reading because … of the writing. I love Tiffany’s writing. I mean, how can you not like writing like this description in which Harry compares Betty to Michael’s girlfriend Dora:

Not like Betty. His Betty is heavier, more complicated. Betty meanders within herself; she’s full of quiet pockets. The girl Dora might be water, but his Betty is oil. You can’t take oil lightly. It seeps into your skin. It marks you.

Australian Women Writers ChallengeI also kept reading because I wanted to know what it was all about. Why was Tiffany writing this particular story, I kept thinking. For some reviewers (see the links at the end), it is primarily about family, for others it is about the relationship between men and women, but for Tiffany it’s about desire. I can see that it is about all these things, but here’s the thing, the book starts with the description of four attacks by birds on humans followed by a description of cockatoos damaging crops. This, together with the sexual imagery, the frequent references to animal behaviour and to humans’ relationships with animals, suggests to me another theme to do with the nature of life, with the nature of our relationships with animals, and with how we accommodate the animal versus the human within ourselves. I’ll give the final word to the birds:

Mum, Dad, Club-Toe
break off their
preening,
squabbling,
loafing,
to attack.
They lose themselves in the doing.
I struggle to tell them apart.
Knife-beaked,
cruel-eyed,
vicious;
there is no question
they would die for the family
– that violence is a family act.

This book packs a punch!

* You may like to read the reviews written by Lisa (ANZLitLovers), John (Musings of a Literary Dilettante), Matt (A Novel Approach) and Kim (Reading Matters).

Carrie Tiffany
Mateship with birds
Sydney: Picador, 2012
208pp.
ISBN: 9781742610764

Michael Sala’s The last thread is 2013’s Pacific Region Winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize

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Michael Sala The last thread bookcover

The last thread (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

I don’t know about you but I find blogging a challenge when I’m travelling, as I have been for much of May. I love my iPad for staying in touch, but I don’t find it easy to write blog posts on it – either via the WordPress app or the browser. And, our old PC laptop that we share for travelling just isn’t the same as my MacBook Pro. Consequently, I decided to delay posting on Michael Sala’s win, announced yesterday, until I got back today.

It’s an exciting win – of course, what win isn’t! – and means that Sala is now in the running for the overall Commonwealth Book Prize which will be announced on 31 May. I am particularly thrilled because it was published by a small, not yet well-known publisher, Affirm Press, which has published some lovely books over the last couple of years.

I reviewed Sala’s novel last year. It’s autobiographical, and has clearly been a challenge for him and his family*. I closed my review with:

In the very last pages of the book, Michael’s mother says that “words and stories can be dangerous” (echoing Francesca Rendle-Short’s “to think, to write, is dangerous”). They can indeed, but sometimes that danger can have positive outcomes. I hope that, for Sala, the dangers of putting his story, his truths, on the page will be restorative. There’s no guarantee though that such bravery will have its just rewards … in life or in fiction.

It’s exciting for Sala that his bravery has brought him recognition. He has also been shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams New Writing Award in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Prize. I wish him well in both awards – and congratulate him and Affirm Press on their achievements to date.

* As comments from his family on my original post show.

Andrew Croome, Midnight empire (Review)

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Andrew Croome, Midnight Empire

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Andrew Croome’s latest novel Midnight empire is yet another read this year that is outside my usual fare. I read it because of my reading group’s focus this Centenary year on Canberra writers. It wasn’t a big ask, though, because I had read and enjoyed his first novel, Document Z. While both deal with spies, they are very different novels: Document Z is historical fiction, while Midnight empire is a thriller. I wonder what Croome will do next. Romance? Interestingly, Croome, who attended my reading group’s discussion, suggested that Midnight empire is more like a first book. This is because when writing Document Z, he could always go back to the historical record when he stalled, but with Midnight empire he had to rely on his own ideas to keep the story going. Croome told us that the inspiration for the book was drones and, developing that, the idea that with drones people can conduct “war” from their office desk. What does this mean for our psyches, he wonders. And where is the line between who is at war and who isn’t? But more on that later.

First, a little about the plot. The protagonist, Daniel Carter, is a rather naive 26-year-old computer programmer whose company’s encryption algorithm has been bought by the US government for its drone program. Daniel is sent by his Canberra-based company to Creech Airforce Base, outside Las Vegas, to install the software and make sure it runs properly. Suddenly he finds himself at war, albeit sitting at a computer terminal in the American desert, a long way from Afghanistan and Pakistan where the actual war is being waged. Unlike the airforce pilots and CIA agents Daniel is working with, he has not been trained for war.

Parallelling the story of Daniel’s professional life is his personal one. He comes to Las Vegas despite the wishes of his long-term girlfriend Hannah. Their relationship has been foundering and his, to her mind, not well thought through decision to go to Las Vegas is the catalyst for her to break up. Daniel is disappointed, but it leaves him free to meet someone new – and he does, of course. He meets the beautiful Russian, Ania, at the poker table. This is Vegas after all!

As you would expect for the genre, things start to go awry. An agent double-crosses them, pilots start dying mysteriously in Vegas, and the drones are sent in to Peshawar to take out their target. Daniel becomes perturbed about the morality of what he sees and decides to leak some information. Meanwhile, his life with Ania becomes complicated when she tells him her brutal husband has come to Vegas looking for her. Daniel is torn between his work and his personal responsibilities, and starts crossing even more lines from which he may not be able to return. As we read on, we are not sure who to trust or believe. Is or isn’t Ania the traditional spy-tale Femme Fatale? And are the CIA starting to suspect him?

Daniel … in the lion’s den

Croome has, I suspect, chosen Daniel’s name for its allusive – and ironic – value: we can see where Daniel is, but he seems pretty oblivious. Fairly early in their relationship Ania questions Daniel about his work. She’s mystified by the fact that he says he’s fighting a war, even though he didn’t volunteer for it and wasn’t conscripted:

‘Then why are you here?’

‘It is simply that I have a job. I am doing my job.’

You are at war because of your job?’

‘Yes’.

She seemed to find this amusing. ‘But that is not romantic,’ she said. ‘How am I supposed to believe that you are my hero, if it is your job?’

She tries to understand this war in which he says that he won’t be killed. It’s not a war, she believes, if he is not in danger of being killed. Daniel sees it differently:

‘We drop bombs on people … They are trying to harm people and we blow them up. I don’t know what else you’d call it’.

At this point, the war is just like a job to Daniel.  He goes to work on the base, they track targets with the drones, and he goes back to his temporary home in Vegas and lives his life. When he is reminded by his CIA boss Gray that “like it or not, you happen to be at war” his reaction is disingenuous:

if people were dying or endangering one another, it had stuff-all to do with him. Gray could shove it. If the alertness of your encryption operator was your primary concern, you needed your priorities set straight.

He has a point – to an extent – and yet, as his ex-girlfriend had clearly understood, he had agreed to be part of it. Not long after this, they attack their target, completely demolishing a building in which people, including children, had been. It’s remote, cold, clinical … Daniel looks for the children hoping they’ve not been taken out too, but “where were they?” And yet, still, the penny hasn’t fully dropped. Ania, as Hannah had before her, wants Daniel to recognise what he is doing:

I am just saying think, Daniel … I am just saying there are choices – there are decisions to make.

I won’t labour this further; I’m sure you’ve got the main theme by now.

The midnight empire …

How do you critique a novel like this, one that is more plot driven than I’m used to? What should my review focus on? Plot, character, setting are, I’m guessing, the critical things – and I’d give them the thumbs up. The plot is plausible, the character of Daniel believable, and the setting chillingly realistic. The resolution – particularly in terms of who is implicated – is a little more ambiguous than Croome apparently intended but that’s probably the risk you take when you start to play with genre formula. I did find some of the technical details – the encryption technology, and the ins-and-outs of poker playing – somewhat uninteresting at times, but that’s more to do with me and my reading focus I think. Overall, it’s a carefully orchestrated and gripping read that should appeal to a wide readership.

‘Aren’t you interested, though?’ she said. ‘That people would be able to do this – exist somewhere beyond the rest of us, surfacing, emerging at night, a strange midnight empire, you would almost say traceless.’

Ania is talking about the people – and they are real – who live in the storm drains beneath the Strip – but what, we wonder, about the other, infinitely more worrying midnight empires? Croome has made very clear in this novel why we should be intersted in them…

Andrew Croome
Midnight empire
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2012
238pp
ISBN: 9781743311127