21st century literature

David Foster Wallace, Federer as religious experience (Review)

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David Foster Wallace‘s essay “Federer as religious experience” is several years old now. I did plan to read it a couple of years ago when I first came across it but, somehow, I didn’t. However, this week, Lisa at ANZLitLovers reviewed a David Foster Wallace essay collection which includes this essay*. She decided not to read it because tennis “is just running around on a court hitting a ball with a racquet”. I suggested in my comments that there’s some congruence, affinity perhaps, between sports and the arts in that sport is (can be) about drama, beauty and character. She dared me to review the essay on my blog, so here I am! Never let it be said I’m a wuss!

Roger Federer, Master Series Monte Carlo 2007

Roger Federer, Master Series Monte Carlo 2007 (Photo credit: Lijan Zhang, using CC-BY-SA 2.0, Wikipedia)

Unlike Lisa, I have read David Foster Wallace. Hmm, I’m cheating a little when I say this – something Roger Federer, the god of modern tennis, would be above I’m sure – because I’ve only read one short story, “All that”, which I reviewed two years ago. A couple of commenters on that post suggested that Wallace’s essays and magazine articles are a good place to start. I enjoy essays, so liked the sound of that.

Wallace does not specifically discuss the “drama” and “character” aspects of tennis, although drama is implied at times such as in his description of the 2006 Nadal-Federer Wimbledon final as a “revenge-narrative” and he does touch on some players’ personalities. However, I was thrilled to find the following discussion of “beauty” on page 2 of my printed out version:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

[ …]

Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace of the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s…

Beauty is not, really, the goal of literature either, but those of us who love reading love it best when the writing is “beautiful”. That beauty can take many forms, but we all know it when we see it – not, of course, that we all agree, but that’s partly the fun and challenge of it all. I’d say that Wallace’s writing in this essay is beautiful. It’s there in the way his language slides between the formal, the journalistic and the colloquial; in the way he slips in appropriate classical, literary and pop culture allusions expecting us to get them all even though he’s writing about something as pedestrian (!) as sport. It’s there in the touches of satire, the slices of tongue-in-cheek wit, and the sly digs at some of the hallowed aspects of the sport. (“Wimbledon is strange”, he writes. “Verily it is the game’s Mecca, the cathedral of tennis; but it would be easier to sustain the appropriate level of on-site veneration if the tournament weren’t so intent on reminding you over and over that it’s the cathedral of tennis”.) And it’s also there in the essay’s very structure and its shifts in tone. Despite all this beauty, though, I did get a little lost in the blow-by-blow description of an actual point played between Roger Federer and the hunky Rafael Nadal. Wallace is clearly a connoisseur of tennis.

Robert Atwan, the man behind Best American essays, defines the best essays:

To my mind, the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process–reflecting, trying-out, essaying.

Wallace’s essay embodies all of these. Wallace clearly loves the sport and knows his stuff. Not only can he identify all the tennis strokes, from cross-court backhands to forehands with topspins, but he knows the history of the game and has his own views on who was the progenitor of the power-baseline game. I particularly enjoyed his analysis of the game’s trajectory in the modern era and his assessment of Federer’s impact on it. There is also a sense, as Atwan likes, of his working out as he goes along what makes Federer Federer.

I would, though, add to Atwan’s definition, that the best essays have to be interesting (durr) and, I think, they need to surprise the reader with some new angles or fresh ways of seeing. Wallace does this too. He doesn’t knock Federer-worship – in fact he’s a worshipper himself – but he explores Federer from what he calls metaphysical and technical points of view. And he entertains us while doing so. That to me is a good essay.

David Foster Wallace
“Federer as religious experience”
Published in The New York Times’ Play Magazine, August 20, 2006
Available: Online nytimes.com

* The essay is apparently retitled “Federer Both Flesh and Not” in this collection.

Frank Moorhouse, Cold light (Review)

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As I reached around the two-thirds point in Frank Moorhouse‘s Cold light, the third tome in his Edith trilogy, I wanted to cry out “Enough already”! It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying (most of) it, and it’s not that it’s a bad book, but it does go on – and on. It’s a book, I think, that could do with a severe prune. But perhaps that’s just li’l ol’ novella loving me talking!

For those not familiar with Frank Moorhouse’s Edith Trilogy, a little summation. The first book, Grand days (1993) sees Edith Campbell Berry join the League of Nations as an enthusiastic, idealistic ingénue. She’s “plucky”, as most reviewers point out, which she needs to be because she wants to change the world. It was, as I recollect, a thoroughly engrossing  a thoughtful insight into Europe at that time. The second book, Dark palace (2000), I haven’t read, though it is in the TBR. Embarrassing eh? It won the Miles Franklin Award after Grand days had been controversially rejected for not being, according to the judges’ interpretation of the award conditions, “Australian enough”. Dark palace chronicles the failure of the League and, with it, of the ideal of internationalism. This ideal, or at least her desire to make the world better, is something that Edith still hankers for at the start of Cold light. Unlike the first two novels, which are set in Europe, Cold light is, until the last few chapters, set in Canberra. That of course gave it added interest for me.

The three novels cover the middle half of the twentieth century – from the early 1920s to the early 1970s – with Cold light “doing” 1950 to 1973. Edith must be in her 40s when the novel opens and is well into her 60s by its close. This can be a challenging time of life for a woman and Frank Moorhouse’s exploration of the issues women face – biologically, socially, and intellectually – is sensitively and authentically done. Edith’s challenges are compounded by the fact that she wants to work – in the public sphere – but in 1950s Australia married women, as she was, were not entitled to work for the government. Edith does manage to get around this in various ways, mostly by being employed under honorariums and the like. Not very satisfactory, but better than nothing.

What I most enjoyed about the novel was its coverage of some of the big issues of its time, particularly in relation to Australia: the planning of Canberra which was still in its infancy, the Cold War and the attempts to ban the Communist Party of Australia, and nuclear energy. One way or another, Edith becomes involved in each of these issues and serves as our guide. I particularly liked the discussions about Canberra and what sort of city it should be. Early in the novel it is described as a “toy city”, a “make-believe city”, an “unfinished city”, “a city that is not a city”. Some of those criticisms still hang over it now, though less so I hope. Certainly, Edith begins to warm to it and enthusiastically works for a few years with the Town Planning section. She initially envisions it as a place of “communal memory”, as “the living memory of the nation”. Fifteen years on, as the will-we-won’t-we-will-we-won’t-we artificial lake is finally “opened”, her thinking has moved on. She would like to see Canberra as a “social laboratory”, which would “try out all sorts of ideas for good living”, and as a “place for citizens to ask questions”. Moorhouse’s thorough research into Canberra’s planning shows through here, as it does in the other topics he covers in the book.

I also enjoyed much of his characterisation. The novel has a large cast of characters, so his list of “Who is who in the book” at the end, with the “real” people asterisked, is very useful. But, beware, because if you read Edith’s entry, you’ll find a potential spoiler. The best drawn characters are the fictional ones: Edith, her cross-dressing “lavender husband” Ambrose, and to a less extent her brother and Communist Party official Frederick, and his girl-friend-partner, Janice, for whom Edith has some confused feelings.

Edith is, of course, the focal character. The novel’s voice is third person subjective, that is, it is told through Edith’s eyes, her perspective. And Moorhouse does it well. Edith’s a living, breathing, believable human being – but there’s just too much of her. We spend too long with her questioning and ruminating on just about everything she confronts. She ponders, and wonders, she asks herself multiple questions – and it is all just too much. And yet, and I know I’m being contradictory, she’s an engaging character. But not “plucky”. Surely that’s a bit twee for a professional woman? I’d use the words resourceful and confident. Even when she doesn’t feel confident, she knows how to put on a show. Despite this, by the book’s end, she wonders if she’s “bungled” her life. She wonders, in fact, for many pages, and asks many questions (have I said that before?) in the process. She tries to recast her life as “a journey” rather than as a failure to achieve goals, which seems fair enough to me. She’s most concerned, at this point, with her personal rather than her professional life, and the fact that she’s had three husbands. Alluding to Othello, she concludes:

She had loved not too wisely, nor too well. But she had tried with all her might.

She sure had.

I also enjoyed the themes of the novel. There are many of them, in fact, but the two that interested me most are the failure of idealism and the challenges of aging. As the book draws to a close she wonders:

Perhaps she was wrong to assume that evolution was moving towards some humanistic paradise.

But she still believes that

Safety lay in candour – the open personality in an open society.

And I love her for it.

Finally, I liked the fact that this novel of uncertainties has a very certain end. Moorhouse was clearly determined to end with a bang, not a whimper. Overall though, I would have like some zing, some wit, or alternatively, something to wrench my guts. Instead, it was just a little too laboured for me to feel the “wow” that I’d hoped for. A good read? Yes. An interesting read? Definitely. But a great read? Not quite.

For a thorough and totally positive review, check out Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers.

Frank Moorhouse
Cold light
North Sydney: Vintage Books, 2011
719pp.
ISBN: 9781741661262

Suzanne Edgar, The love procession (Review)

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Amongst the madness of last year’s silly season was a little oasis, namely the launch of local poet Suzanne Edgar‘s latest collection, The love procession. It was an oasis not only because the launch was for a book of poetry, but also because it took place in the peace of a garden. Poetry and gardens – a match made in heaven don’t you think?

And in fact, there are gardens in this collection of poems, but before I write about the poems, I’d like to mention the title and cover. As Edgar explained at the launch, the title comes from a painting she loved in the Renaissance Exhibition held at the National Gallery of Australia a year ago. The painting, “Love procession”, is attributed to Marco del Buono and Giovanni di Apollonio, from the 1440s. Apparently it took many months for Edgar and the publishers to negotiate the rights to use the painting, but it was worth it because the end result is a simple, yet rich and stylish cover.

It’s a good title because the collection is about love – romantic and other – and about procession. About the procession of our lives – about love, life and death, about work and the things that keep us going, about friends and family, about nature that travels with us. The subject matter reflects the poet’s stage of life, someone who’s lived more than a few decades, who’s travelled, worked, lost friends and family, managed homes, experienced passion and peace. Well, you know what I mean. I could mention for example a poem about clutter, which conveys the melancholy of time passing:

Wilting hats from our salad days
match skirts too small at the waist.
(from “Silt”)

Or one about the real ravages of age:

A patch of muddy clay could well betray
unwary folk who have a metal hip
and hope to play again another day.
(from “Winter Sports”)

The collection’s first poem is – as you might expect – titled “‘Corteo d’amore’ (Love procession)” and is Edgar’s response to the painting. She imagines the groom waiting at the other end of the procession, reflecting. It’s a cheeky poem that contains both a sense of excitement and uncertainty, setting just the right tone for the rest of the collection:

To bed the girl had always been his goal
but laughing in the square, she’d seemed less grand.

I particularly like the way Edgar varies her tone throughout the collection. There are wry poems, and downright funny ones, and there are the passionate, the sorrowing, and the resigned ones. The style varies too. There are poems that rhyme and poems that don’t. There are three-line poems, a four-page poem, and even a bunch of sonnets. There are story poems and there are ones I’d describe as reflections. The imagery is generally accessible – at least it is to those of us who have lived (are living) similar lives in similar places. She invests the places and objects of our lives with meaning. There’s the woman, for example, who upsizes –

She tries a sea change, a tree change,
an elevated view change
(from “The Leavings”)

– losing, in the process, “her ghosts/ghosts of her children’s cries”. The doggerel-like rhyme and rhythm here are perfect for what Edgar clearly sees as the woman’s silly decision. Other poems speak of chairs that know our lives (“The Life of Chairs”), roll-top desks that trace a family’s history (“A Family Servant”), and of course the gardens that provide “refuge from summer’s sultry hours” (“Two Gardens”).

The poems are unmistakeably Australian with their references to the bush and of course gums, to wattlebirds and magpies, to drought and the pleasures of rain that only dry places know.

My favourite poems, though, are those scattered throughout that chronicle her relationship, at least they feel autobiographical, with her husband/lover/partner/significant other. They are often addressed to “you”. These poems speak of a long and deep love, but one also peppered, as real love is, with differences and squabbles. These poems made me smile, even where they spoke of loss, because they are honest.

Nearly halfway through the collection is a poem that starts:

I wonder where the poems went,
I used to think them heaven-sent.
Life is cluttered with noise and news
(from “Turn Off the Noise”)

Well, the poems are still here and I’d happily recommend Edgar’s collection as the perfect one to dip into whenever you want a respite from “noise and news”. These aren’t difficult poems, but that doesn’t mean they are trivial. Try them, if you can, and you’ll see what I mean.

Suzanne Edgar
The love procession
Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2012
107pp.
ISBN: 9781740277754

Rod Howard, A forger’s tale: The extraordinary story of Henry Savery, Australia’s first novelist (Review)

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Rod Howard, A forger's tale

Cover: courtesy Arcade Publications

“Name Australia’s first published novelist” is, I think, a question that would trick most Australians at a trivia night. Rod Howard, who wrote the biography, A forger’s tale, about this writer would agree, as would the writer in the West Australian in 1950 to whom I referred a couple of months ago. Henry Savery, in other words, is not a household name in Australia though, as Howard says in his Author’s Note, there are a couple of minor streets and a biennial short story competition named for him which prevent his complete slide into obscurity.

Why is this? Besides describing Savery as “a son of fortune undone by folly and fate”, Howard argues that the book, Quintus Servinton, received little attention during or in the years after his lifetime, partly because “it had neither the ghoulish titillation of a Newgate novel nor the fashionable allure of a society saga”. Moreover, its publication year, 1830, was a time he says “when public debate was dominated by Arthur’s Black Line* – a brutal but farcical attempt to corral the island’s remaining native inhabitants into the island’s southwestern corner”. Howard concludes, in the Author’s Note, that  “once you have become obscure it can be terribly difficult to enter the limelight”.

And so, as was also characteristic of the author’s life, the book’s poor “fate” was the result of a combination of factors – Henry’s own history (about which I’ll talk more next), the work itself, and external issues like the political and social situation of the day.

Who, then, was Henry Savery and how did he come to write the first “Australian-made novel”? He was born in England in 1791, the son of a generally respected country squire and magistrate. His father, Henry claimed, believed his son’s future had been foretold by a gypsy. Unfortunately, much of what the gypsy foretold did eventuate. Henry was three times “in danger of sudden or violent death”, by his own hand it must be said, and he did, at least three times, “undergo great reverses of fortune”, as much by his own poor decisionmaking, particularly regarding money, as by bad luck or the actions of others.

It’s a rather tortuous story characterised by politics, naiveté, poor decisionmaking, loyalty and betrayal. Howard manages to keep the narrative clear, though you do have to concentrate to keep all the characters straight. The Savery Howard presents is intelligent, hardworking, often foolish or imprudent rather than dishonest (though dishonest he was), and sometimes just plain unlucky. Right until near the end, he had influential friends who somehow managed to soften the legal impact again and again of his failures and misdemeanours. Howard’s book, in fact, provides an interesting and useful insight into the often grubby workings of 1820s-1840s colonial Tasmania, albeit through the specific lens of Henry’s life.

Fortunately (for us anyhow), Henry’s life was a colourful one. When young, he apprenticed himself as a gardener, but he was also interested in literature and demonstrated a capacity for business. However, it was the failure of an early business venture and a conviction for forgery that resulted in his being transported to Van Dieman’s Land in 1825 where his career, as it had been in England, continued its eclectic path and encompassed, among other things, various business enterprises alongside newspaper writing and editing.

Henry was, apparently, a good satirist. The columns he wrote anonymously for The Colonial Times while he was in prison in the late 1820s, and which were later published as The Hermit in Van Dieman’s Land, resulted in his employer being tried and imprisoned for libel. Although protected to the end by his employer, Henry of course lost the job. He couldn’t, it seems, take a trick. As soon as he got himself up, something would bring him down. Nonetheless, there were successes, one being that he established the colony’s first vegetable market. That gardening apprenticeship clearly came in handy. Howard writes at one point that “more lyrebird than magpie his situation provided ample scope for reinvention”. How, one wonders, could such a creative, hard-working man come to the ignominious end that he did? I suggest you read the book to find out more!

But now, the novel, Quintus Servinton (available at Project Gutenberg Australia) which was written in 1830 after a stint in gaol for debt. It is an autobiographical novel in which, Howard writes,

Henry had taken the Hermit’s merciless gun, and turned it, with deadeye aim, upon himself.

Henry, himself, writes in his Preface:

Although it appears under this shape,—or, as some may perhaps call it, novel,—it is no fiction, or the work of imagination, either in its characters or incidents. Not by this, however, is it pretended to be said that all the occurrences it details, happened precisely in their order of narration, nor that it is the mere recital of the events of a man’s life—but it is a biography, true in its general features, and in its portraiture of individuals; and all the documents, letters and other papers contained in its pages are transcripts, or nearly so, of originals, copied from the manuscript, which came into the author’s hands ….

In his Author’s Note, Howard writes of the challenges he faced in researching the book due to the paucity of primary source material. He recognises the dangers in mining fiction for fact but he discovered that “many important aspects of Quintus Servinton (subtitled A tale founded upon incidents of real occurrence) could actually be verified as fact”. Fact in fiction, fiction in fact. It was ever thus, eh?

I would love to report that after writing this – our first – novel, Henry went on to have the happy, successful life that he envisaged for himself in his book and as had in fact been foretold by the gypsy, but that’s not quite how it turned out. Henry, described as “a man of talent” by the last judge to try him, ended his days in the notorious Port Arthur gaol.

Despite being published in an unusual, diminutive format, A forger’s tale is a traditional biography. I appreciated the Author’s Note and list of sources at the end, but would have liked an index. This though is a minor quibble. Howard has an engaging style making the book an enjoyable read for anyone interested in Australian literature, colonial Australia, convict stories or Tasmanian history. Thanks Brother Gums for a great Christmas gift!

Rod Howard
A forger’s tale: The extraordinary story of Henry Savery, Australia’s first novelist
Melbourne: Arcade Publications, 2011
197pp.
ISBN: 9780987171481

* The Black Line has been the subject of some recent Tasmanian fiction, including Richard Flanagan’s Wanting and Rohan Wilson’s The roving party.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Coming up in 2013

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In a first for Whispering Gums, I have decided to post about coming attractions. It seemed an appropriate first Monday Musings for the year. But, how to do it? As I can’t possibly list them all, I’m going to make a selection and group them in sets that make sense to me. So here, as you’ve heard me say before, goes. Remember, this is just a selection reflecting the sorts of books I’d like to read. Whether or not I actually manage to read them all is another thing entirely.

John Maxwell Coetzee

Coetzee, 2006 (Courtesy: Mariusz Kubik, via Wikipedia)

Fiction from authors I’ve read before

  • J.M. Coetzee, The childhood of Jesus (March 2013 from Text Publishing): It’s been over 5 years since Coetzee’s last piece of fiction, Diary of a bad year (my review). I look forward to seeing whether Coetzee plays further with the novelistic form, as he has in recent outings, in this new offering.
  • Richard Flanagan, The narrow road to the deep north (August 2013 from Random House): Similarly it’s been over 4 years since Flanagan’s Wanting (which I read before starting this blog). This new novel, I gather, moves from Australia where his previous novels have been set to the Burma-Siam death camps.
  • Andrea Goldsmith, The memory trap (May 2013 from Fourth Estate): Goldsmith’s last novel Reunion (my review) was not my favourite Goldsmith, but she’s well worth watching.
  • Joan London (November 2013 from Random House): I don’t know the title of London’s next book, but I can’t wait to see it, as her Gilgamesh (which I virtually gifted to Stu) is one of my favourite Australian novels. My review of her most recent novel, The good parents (2008), was one of my first reviews on this blog.
  • Alexis Wright, The swan book (August 2013 from Giramondo): It’s been nearly 7 years since Indigenous author Wright’s last novel, Carpentaria (my review). It won the Miles Franklin award in 2007 so a new one from her is long-awaited.

Fiction from authors I’ve been meaning to read

  • Georgia Blain, The secret lives of men (April 2013 from Scribe): A collection of short stories and you know how I like short stories.
  • Fiona Capp, Gotland (July 2013 from Fourth Estate): Apparently about a reluctant Prime Minister’s wife, but this article written by Capp in 2009 might throw some light on the title.
  • Steven Carroll, A world of other people (May 2013 Fourth Estate): A Miles Franklin Award winning author I haven’t read. Boo me!
  • Robert Gott, The holiday murders (February 2013 from Scribe): OK, I’m lying with this one. Gott is not an author I’ve been meaning to read. In fact, I’d never heard of him. He has written children’s books, crime (not my genre), and a newspaper cartoon. Why then you are probably asking am I including him? Well, he, like PL Travers of Mary Poppins fame, was born in the same not-well-known town that I was, Maryborough in Queensland. And that’s good enough in my mind to give him a nod!
  • Chris Womersley, Cairo (September 2013 from Scribe): I’m still hoping to find time to read Womersley’s second and well-reviewed novel, Bereft, but if I don’t, this might well be my introduction to him.

Debut fiction

  • Balli Kaur Jaswal, Inheritance (February 2013 from Sleepers)
  • Lesley Jørgensen, Cat & fiddle (February 2013 from Scribe)
  • Maurilia Meehan, Madame Bovary’s haberdashery (April 2013 from Transit Lounge): Described as quirky crime novel, so I might just be interested.

Non-fiction

  • Anna Goldsworthy, Quarterly Essay (June 2013 from Black Inc): I’ve reviewed a couple of Quarterly Essays (by Krien and Flannery) and am interested in this one which will apparently be on misogyny/feminism in Australian politics.
  • Anna Krien, Night games (May 2013 from Back Inc): I’ve reviewed Krien’s Into the woods about forestry in Tasmania (my review) and her Quarterly Essay (see above). I enjoy her style and perspective. This book is apparently about the rape trial of a footballer.
  • John Safran, Murder in Mississippi (July 2013 from Penguin): This intrigues me – an Australian writing about the murder of a white supremacist in the American south – but then Safran has made somewhat of a career of investigating religion and related issues around the world.
  • Helen Trinca, Madeleine (April 2013 from Text): I’ve reviewed one of Madeleine St John’s novels, The women in black (my review), and know a little of her life. She was apparently the first Australian women to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She’s also a peer of Australian expat intellectuals, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Clive James and filmmaker Bruce Beresford who, many years ago, optioned The women in black for film. I’d love to read this biography.

For more information about these or other books coming out in 2013, you might like to check the publishers’ websites:

Tim Flannery, After the future: Australia’s extinction crisis (Review)

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Quarterly Essay No 48 Cover

Quarterly Essay 48 cover (Courtesy Black Inc)

Tim Flannery is an Australian palaeontologist-cum-environmentalist who has been on the public stage for a couple of decades now. He has published several books on environmental issues, some best-sellers, including The future eaters and The weather makers. He was Australian of the Year in 2007, has starred in three television documentary series with comedian John Doyle, and is currently Chief Commissioner of Australia‘s Climate Commission.  With the environment being his passion, he is used to controversy, but many of us regard him as a national treasure. There, I’ve shown my hand!

Needless to say, I enjoyed his current Quarterly Essay titled After the future: Australia’s new extinction crisis. In it he analyses the causes of the second wave of extinctions, and suggests solutions.

The essay is divided into 8 short sections. Near the end of the second section, Flannery writes

I hope the message is loud and clear. Australian politics, and the bureaucracy that supports it, is failing in one of its most fundamental obligations to future generations, the conservation of our natural heritage.

It’s scary stuff. On the preceding page he discusses public ignorance, arguing that most people are unaware that a new wave of extinction is happening, and that those who are aware “commonly believe that our national parks and reserves are safe places for threatened species”. I fall into this latter camp, I’m afraid. I knew it wasn’t all hunky-dory but I had assumed that the parks and reserves were working. Apparently not. The reasons are complex. Funding is of course one aspect and underpins some of the issues he raises, such as the lack of resources and support for effective planning and management, and a decrease in scientifically trained staff able to research and monitor the situation.

However, Flannery argues there are more systemic issues, mostly relating to “politics”. One is the increasingly risk-averse behaviour of governments, resulting in their being prepared to do nothing rather than risk failure. Another is the fact that the environment is no longer the bipartisan issue it once was, with the right increasingly seeing the environment as a left issue. The conservatives are, paradoxically, losing interest in conservation! Environmental stewardship, Flannery argues, once inspired leaders of the right, like Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan in the USA, and Malcolm Fraser in Australia. It was Malcolm Fraser “who first used federal powers to prevent sand mining on Fraser Island, who proclaimed Kakadu a national park, and who ended whaling in Australia”. However, the rise of green parties (here and in other first world nations) is alienating the right, and yet are not always friendly to conservation. “Animal rights issues, such as opposition to the culling of feral species”, for example, “can sometimes get in the way of environmental stewardship”. The result of environmental issues being seen through the lens of party politics and ideology is that the effort to discredit conservation has resulted in the rejection of science as “a guide to action”. This, says Flannery, is dangerous territory.

While Flannery spends around a third of the essay setting out the problem and discussing the causes, his main thesis is that the current focus of environmental programs on preserving ecosystems is not working – and he presents some convincing arguments for changing the focus to saving individual species. He describes programs in the Kimberleys which are managed by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (with which he is connected) in partnership with indigenous groups, using their fire management techniques. But his most impressive example is a privately managed program in Papua New Guinea, the Tenkile Conservation Alliance, focused on saving a tree kangaroo. He argues that it “is a prime example of saving an ecosystem by concentrating on saving a species”, and asks:

How is it that one Australian couple has almost single-handedly transformed the fortunes of a people and the biodiversity of a mountain range while trying to save  an endangered species of tree kangaroo? The answer is simple: the Thomases [zoologists] set clear goals, used scientific methods to monitor their progress, and reported back to the people.

I’m not sure I’d call that simple. Or, perhaps I’d say the process is simple, but deciding on environmental priorities and finding the right mix of people/organisations to manage it is not so simple. Flannery’s solution is there needs to be:

  • a legislative commitment to zero tolerance on further extinctions;
  • the establishment of a Biodiversity Authority [yes, I know, another bureaucratic body] that is independent of government, that has “unequivocal targets”, and which faces strong consequences [what, I wonder?] on failure to deliver; and
  • the acceptance and formal involvement of non-profit organisations in managing biodiversity programs.

The Conversation, an Australian academic and research sector blog, is currently running a weekly series on endangered species. A commenter on last week’s post suggested outsourcing the listing of endangered species to peak groups, pretty much mirroring Flannery’s argument regarding partnerships between the government and non-government sectors.

Overall, the essay is clearly argued, but occasionally Flannery makes a statement that jars. One is his statement that “even under Labor governments with a strong green bent, national parks are not always safe” which he supports using the example of the Bligh Government’s starting the process of de-gazetting a part of the Mungkan Kaanju National Park with a view to returning it to its traditional Aboriginal owners. He doesn’t elaborate on this. I wrote in the margin, “Is this wrong”? Not surprisingly, at least one indigenous leader, Marcia Langton, took offence. I suspect it was a case of Flannery finding a poor example to support his argument regarding national parks being threatened even by supposedly sympathetic governments, but I don’t know.

Despite odd moments like this, I did find his argument convincing. However, as I’m sure he’d say himself, it’s not a guaranteed solution. Early in the essay he makes a point of discussing scientific method, arguing that “science is not a search for the truth” but about “disproving hypothesis”.  The hypothesis he proposes here is surely worth testing given the failure of current methods. It begs his early questions, though, regarding political and social will, which may in fact be the critical variables that we need to resolve.

Tim Flannery
“After the future: Australia’s new extinction crisis”
in Quarterly Essay, No. 48
Collingwood: Black Inc, November 2012
107pp.
ISBN: 9781863955829

(Review copy supplied by Black Inc.)

Nigel Featherstone, I’m ready now (Review)

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Featherston, I'm ready now, book cover

Book cover (Courtesy: Blemish Press)

Way back in my youth when I started studying literature, I thought I had to get the “right” interpretation. It made reading a little scary, I must say. However, as I gained confidence, I discovered that there are as many responses to a novel as there are readers, something I was reminded of when I attended this week’s launch of Nigel Featherstone’s novella, I’m ready now. And here’s why…

The book was launched by Canberra journalist and biographer, Chris Wallace. She spoke eloquently about the book telling us that it’s about how you can make a change in your life no matter how old you are – whether you’re 30 as Gordon is in the book or 50 as his mother, Lynne, is. She said too that it promotes the idea of living an imaginative life. I thought, yes, she’s right, it does do these things. And then Nigel spoke, and he said that for him the book can be summed up in one word, liberation. And I thought, yes, I can see how it’s that. But I had framed it a little differently from my reading.

Before I give you my different-but-on-a-similar-track take, I’d better tell you something about the plot. It has a small cast of characters, which is pretty much what you’d expect in a novella. They are Gordon, a gay man turning 30 who lives in Glebe and works as a photographer; his old schoolfriend Shanie, who followed Gordon to Sydney; Levi, Gordon’s boyfriend of a year or so; and Gordon’s mother Lynne who, recently widowed, comes up from Hobart to stay with Gordon for a short while. Lynne has put the large family home on the market, and the auction will be held while she’s away. Meanwhile, Gordon is almost at the end of his Year of Living Ridiculously, which is a year of rather self-destructive high living that he designed, and is doggedly keeping to, for his 30th year. He plans to crown this year with something he calls The Ultimate. But then Mum, Lynne, arrives, and puts The Ultimate at risk. What Gordon doesn’t know is that his mother has a grand plan herself, now that she’s free. (Ha! Liberation you see.)

This sounds pretty simple, really, doesn’t it? However, there are complications. Lynne’s husband, Eddie, was not Gordon’s father. Gordon’s father, Patric Finn, walked out on him and his mum when he was around a year old, and neither has completely resolved the abandonment. It’s not that Eddie wasn’t a good husband and father, because he was, but he never fully understood Gordon, and for Lynne he was “a head kind of love, not a heart kind of love”.

What is lovely about Featherstone’s writing – as I also found in his Fall on me – is that he manages to build tension and mystery around his characters’ behaviour without undermining their realness or humanity, and without alienating us readers. We warm to them even while we wonder about the wisdom of their decisions and motivations. Featherstone also uses imagery and allusions lightly. Water, for example, can be a cliched symbol in stories of change and growth, but here it’s appropriate and not laboured. What more logical thing is there to do on a hot night in Sydney than to go for a dip in the sea?

Besides the characterisation, I also like the novella’s voice and structure. It’s told first person in the alternating voices of Lynne and Gordon, and is effectively paced, largely through varying the length of the chapters*. The book opens with a mere half-page chapter in Lynne’s voice, and then moves to mostly longer ones in the main part of the book. They shorten towards the end as the pace builds, keeping us involved and wondering what these two will finally decide to do and what role Shanie and Levi might play in it all.

Now though to how I would describe the novel – and for me it is about coming to terms with the past. Both Gordon and Lynne have not had unhappy lives but both have in some way been damaged by their abandonment. Almost half way through the novel, they both say something significant. Lynne, reflecting with real generosity on Patric’s unheralded departure, says

I think he wanted to be free, a free young man. There have been times – many times – when I’ve found myself actually admiring his audacity to grab life, to run with it, to run as far as he could.

She then tells us that her plan is to leave Australia to live in “a farmhouse on a hill in the beloved country [Ireland] of my mother”. In the next chapter, Gordon’s, we learn in a flashback why he commenced his Year of Living Ridiculously. It’s to discover “what it is that makes me feel most alive”. He wants to “to lean over the cliff, figuratively speaking … to live as vividly as possible” – but his chosen method is clearly not working. The idea, though, reminded me of Fall on me in which the son tells his dad that “safety doesn’t always equal life”. Both these novellas, in a way, explore what Wallace described as “living an imaginative life”.

They are both, too, about something Lynne says towards the end, which is that “life must move forward; anything else is sacrilege”, and yet, paradoxically, her wish for Gordon could be seen to be the opposite: she wants him to go back to find what “hurt him all those years ago”.

And so for me, the book is about “living imaginatively” and about liberation, but it is also about how the past can stall us if we don’t get it in the right perspective. Featherstone opens the book with two epigraphs, one being TS Eliot’s “Home is where one starts from”.  I think that, in a way, says it all.

Nigel Featherstone
I’m ready now
Canberra: Blemish Books, 2012
156pp.
ISBN: 9780980755688

(Review copy supplied by Blemish Books)

* for want of a better word for the numbered parts.

Kate Grenville, The lieutenant (Review)

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Kate Grenville, The lieutenant book cover

Bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

I first came across William Dawes, the inspiration for Kate Grenville’s The lieutenant, in Inga Clendinnen’s award-winning history, Dancing with strangers (2003). But this is not the only book that Grenville’s novel brought to mind, as it also reminded me of Kim Scott’s That deadman dance. (Intriguing that both these books use a dance motif, but it’s an historically valid one).

However, before I talk more about these connections and their relevance, I should briefly describe the plot. The novel is set during the first years of the white settlement of Australia. (The very fact that I write the “white” settlement says something about how far we have come in the last two centuries, though we still have some way to go). Daniel Rooke, the protagonist, is a young astronomer. He has been chosen for the First Fleet on the recommendation of the Astronomer Royal who believes that a significant comet will appear in the southern hemisphere in late 1788-early 1789. With this role in mind, Rooke manages to largely separate himself from the day-to-day hurly burly of the first year or two of settlement by creating an observatory, of sorts, for himself, on a hill (now called Dawes Point) overlooking Sydney Cove. Here, in his isolation, he is visited by a group of indigenous people, mostly women and children, and develops a particular relationship with the young 12-13 year old girl, Tagaran. They learn each other’s language, which Rooke chronicles in his journals. All this generally reflects the story of William Dawes whose journals Grenville (and Clendinnen) read, but, as Grenville writes in her author’s note:

Although I made use of historical sources, I departed from them in various ways. This is a novel; it should not be mistaken for history.

Meanwhile, back in 2003, Clendinnen wrote of Dawes, bemoaning his earlier-than-wished-for departure from the colony:

His departure cost us access to the local language as it was spoken at the time of contact. It possibly also cost us a brilliant ethnography, although his tender conscience  might not have allowed him to open the people to easier communication, and to more disruptive exploitation.

Grenville does a good job of imagining the Dawes described by Clendinnen as an “introspective, scholarly type” in her characterisation of Daniel Rooke. She introduces him as a socially awkward but sensitive and thoughtful young man who joined the military not for love of war but because it provided the best chance for a poor young man to make a life for himself. From this supposition she develops a credible character whose final actions in the book pretty closely mirror what we know of Dawes.

I will leave Rooke here for a moment, though, to talk a little more about the conjunction between the three books I mentioned in my introductory paragraph. The significant point they all make is what Clendinnen calls “acts of kindness” by the indigenous Australians in the early days of settlement (in the east, in the case of Grenville and Clendinnen, and the west in the case of Scott). All three writers describe a willingness to be generous that was not recognised or accepted by the colonial invaders. Now, I know that here I am speaking of history and fiction in the one breath and I know that, as Grenville wrote, novels should not be mistaken for history. However, modern readers can, I think, glean the truths, regardless of form or genre, if the writers provide the appopriate signposts.

Take The lieutenant. In it, Grenville is still smarting I think from the criticism she received from historians regarding her claims about the historical value of The secret river. The book contains many rather sly allusions to facts, reality and truths. I particularly liked Rooke’s contemplation about the value of his journals in which, as well as documenting the language he was learning, he described his interactions with indigenous Australians, telling stories that actually happened but whose meaning, he discovered, could be distorted. He considers omitting all but the dry documenting of language, but then realises:

Making an expurgated version of the notebooks would kill them. Like a stuffed parrot, they would be real, but not true.

With a little sleight of hand, Grenville uses a fictional character and his fictional journal to talk about the use of historical sources and the telling of stories from them. Do you simply present the “facts” or do you tell a story –  either factual as in history or fictional as in novels – from those facts in which you aim to draw out the truths as best you see them. Am I drawing too long a bow? I don’t think I am.

And so, as you can probably tell, I enjoyed the novel. It suffers from a little earnestness in tone but that doesn’t get too much in the way of a good story about how first contact in the first settlement played out. It’s not the only story about first contact but it is a valid one – and it helps us understand how an all too human inability to walk in the shoes of the other resulted in a catastrophe of major proportions that we are still working through today.

Kate Grenville
The lieutenant
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2008
307pp.
ISBN: 9781921656767

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing. An unsolicited review copy received in 2010 so I’m afraid I’ve taken my time to get to it.)

Elliot Perlman, The street sweeper (Review)

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Elliot Perlman‘s latest novel, The street sweeper, is a complex book with a pretty simple message. It’s complex because of its multiple interconnecting storylines that move back and forth between World War II, the American Civil Rights era, and contemporary times. It has multiple themes, about which I’ll write further, but the underlying message is simply this: history is important. Related to this is the idea that all things are connected. Let me explain …

The original characters in the novel, those from whom the connections flow, are two lawyers, the Jewish Jake Zignelik and African-American William McCay. Both were active in civil rights in the 1960s. However, as the novel starts, Jake has been dead for some time, and William is in his 80s. The baton, in a way, has been passed to their sons, Charlie and Adam who are historians at Columbia University. It is around 2008, and both men have lost their way somewhat. Charlie is a successful academic, so successful that his administrative duties are not only tearing him away from his main love, research, but also from the important relationships in his life, those with his father, wife and teenage daughter. Adam’s problem is different. His career has stalled. He hasn’t published anything for so long that he will not get tenure – and Charlie, who has been his mentor, but who has let that relationship slide too, can’t help. Adam, believing it’s the honourable thing to do, breaks up with his long-standing girlfriend, Diana, on the basis that he’s unable to be the husband and father that he believes she wants.

None of these characters, though, is the street sweeper of the title, because there is another significant character, the one who opens the novel. This is Lamont Williams, an African-American who has just started work as a janitor at a cancer hospital in a pilot program for ex-convicts. He, like Adam, is close to 40 years old. Lamont, we soon learn, is a good man to whom bad things happen, just like the hero in Perlman’s first novel, Three dollars. He is, in fact, innocent of the crime that put him in jail but his colour and poverty meant he didn’t have a chance – just like the Jews in war-time Europe.

The novel focus primarily on these two men – Adam and Lamont – as they struggle to get their lives on track. Lamont’s story sees him getting to know hospital patient and Holocaust survivor Henryk Mandelbrot who tells Lamont over a period of nearly 6 months of his experience under Nazism, particularly in Auschwitz. Mandelbrot wants his story known, and insists that Lamont learns and remembers it. Meanwhile, Adam, initially reluctantly, looks into a research project suggested by Charlie’s father William, one that sees him also learning about the horrors of the Holocaust. As the novel progresses, and more characters – from the past and present – are introduced, the connections and links between people multiply, rather like a Dickensian novel. There is, though, a point to these connections. Early in the novel, Perlman writes that

you never know the connections between things, people, places, ideas. But there are connections.

And these connections, whether we know it or not, can direct the trajectory of our lives – as they do for the characters in The street sweeper. There is also a central ideological connection in the book, and this is that there are “parallels between the situation of blacks in the United States and the Jews in Germany”.

A major theme of the novel – one of Perlman’s pet themes in fact – is that of moral responsibility, of what makes a “good” person. As so often happens, those who have the least but, paradoxically, the most to lose, are quickest to take the moral path. Early in the novel, and four days into his 6 months probation, Lamont is accosted by Mandelbrot who asks a favour. This favour is something Lamont is not supposed to do – it’s not his job – but, seeing the old man’s distress, he risks losing his job to do the right, the moral, thing. Late in the novel, a professional woman who has nothing to lose but a bit of her time is asked to do a moral thing. She experiences a jolt when, after a passage of time, she realises that she’d been prevaricating about an issue of justice. Not all characters though come to this realisation regarding their moral duty.

I said in my opening paragraph that the underlying message of the novel is that history matters. This is conveyed throughout the book by discussions about history and the role of historians, by showing historians going about their business, by reference to the “long causal chain” and to the importance of remembering, and most of all, by the refrain, “tell everyone what happened here”. You won’t be surprised to know that I loved the fact that Perlman explicitly and implicitly explores the theory and practice of history here, but it deserves a post of its own so watch this space … I’ll simply say now that Perlman explains in his author’s note which characters are based on “real” historical figures, and he provides an extensive list of the sources he used.

The question I always ask when reading historical fiction is why has the author decided to tell this story from the past? In Perlman’s case the answers are obvious. First it’s the one made explicitly in the novel, and that is to “tell everyone what happened here”. Then there’s the more implicit one to do with why we need to know what happened, and that is to ensure that the horrors visited upon the Jews in the Holocaust and the African-Americans in the US don’t happen again. And finally it’s to remind us of our basic moral responsibility which is, as William says to his son, to “Do what’s right here, Charlie”.

I could pick some holes in the novel. It’s big and a little baggy around the edges. It can verge on didacticism at times. And, to make the necessary connections, Perlman relies a lot on coincidence, which could seem contrived if you haven’t bought into the story. But, here’s the thing. I have read many good, even excellent, books this year. However, The street sweeper, like Rohinton Mistry‘s A fine balance and Margaret Atwood‘s The handmaid’s tale, is one that will stay with me long after I’ve forgotten the name of the characters, long, even, after I’ve forgotten how the plot falls out. And that, for me, is the best sort of read.

Lisa of ANZLitLovers also liked this novel.

Elliot Perlman
The street sweeper
Kindle edition
Random House, 2011
ASIN: B005LV7O4S

The Most Underrated Book Award 2012

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A short post! I have just read on the SPUNC site that Kobo is sponsoring an award to highlight books that were released by independent publishers and members of the Small Press Network (SPUNC) and that did not receive wide recognition.

The shortlist for the inaugural award was announced this week, and the titles are:

The award apparently recognises both the publisher and author. The winner will be announced, the SPUNC announcement says, on 8 November at the opening of the Independent Publishing Conference during a special gala night and literary debate at the Wheeler Centre.

Good on Kobo I say. Books published by smaller presses are often overlooked in the major literary awards partly, I presume, because the authors usually aren’t well enough established to be noticed and partly because small publishers don’t have the marketing clout and distribution networks to get their books out to enough readers and reviewers. I hope this new award will help raise the profile of the authors and their hardworking publishers.

* I have a soft spot for Irma Gold, and not just because I’ve read and enjoyed her book. She lives in my city, and is currently coordinating the production of, and editing, The invisible thread, an anthology of works “by writers who have an association with the Canberra region”. The book represents a major literary contribution to Canberra’s 2013 Centenary Celebrations, and is planned to be the focus of many literary events over the coming year. Watch this space!