21st century literature

Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize, 2011

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Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge

Image created by Matt of A Novel Approach

This week, to whet your appetite (unbeknownst to you!), I focused my Monday Musings on Asian Australian writers … What, do you say, was I whetting your appetite for? Well, for a plan to review the longlist for this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize, which is an annual literary award given to the best novel* by an Asian writer published in the previous calendar year. The plan involves a team – conceived by Lisa and Matt (see below) – of bloggers who will review, between them, all the longlisted titles.

The longlisted books are:

Our Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 blogging team consists of

Each blogger will post her/his own review/s and will also post links to reviews on team members’ blogs.

After the announcement of the shortlist next January and before the winner is announced in March, we will, if possible, select a shadow winner. Watch this space (well, not THIS ACTUAL SPOT) for updates.

Thanks to Kevin from Canada whose Shadow Giller Prize Jury inspired our plan. And again, thanks to Lisa for getting our ball rolling and to Matt for creating our logo. We hope our readers enjoy this coordinated approach to providing reviews …

* The novel can be either written in English or translated to English.

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler question

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Howard Jacobson's The Finkler question

Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler question (Courtesy: Bloomsbury Publishing)

Whispering Gums, as you would expect, writes erudite marginalia and so you’d be in for a treat if you ever obtained my copy of Howard Jacobson‘s 2010 Booker award winning novel, The Finkler question. The margins are peppered with my reactions, like, you know, “Ha!” and “Oh dear”. Riveting stuff … and yet, what comments would you make in this book? Ah yes, “stereotyping” is another one, because that, really, is the springboard from which this rather funny book is written.

Do I need to summarise the plot? I feel that I’m about the last blogger to read this book, but just in case I’m not, here goes …  It concerns three longstanding friends: Julian Treslove and Sam Finkler who have been friends since schooldays, and Libor Sevcik who was their teacher at school. At the beginning of the book, Finkler and Libor, both Jews, have been recently widowed. Treslove, the non-Jew, is the “honorary third” widower because he is single (yet again). The novel’s premise is that Treslove would like to be a Jew …

Why, you might ask, would Treslove want to be a Jew (or, a Finkler, as he privately calls them – and hence the title)? It is not an accident that Treslove’s occupation when the novel opens is to be a paid double (or “lookalike”) of famous people at parties, conferences, corporate events:

Treslove didn’t look like anybody famous in particular, but looked like many famous people in general, and so was in demand if not by virtue of verisimilitude, at least by virtue of versatility.

And that’s pretty much how his Jewishness goes too. He might look and play the part but, deep down, can a non-Jew ever really be Jewish? Treslove is about to find out.

Jacobson has a way with words. It was this, together with the endless discussion, using every Jewish stereotype going, of what makes a Finkler (a Jew, remember!) a Finkler, that kept me going through a book that I wasn’t really sure was going anywhere. I laughed at Treslove’s incomprehension of Finkler (the character, this time):

“Do you know anyone called Juno?” Treslove asked.
“J’you know Juno?” Finkler replied, making inexplicable J noises between his teeth.
Treslove didn’t get it.
“J’you know Juno? Is that what you’re asking me?”
Treslove still didn’t get it. So Finkler wrote it down. D’Jew know Jewno?
Treslove shrugged. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

Oh dear! “Julian Treslove knew he’d never be clever in a Finklerish way” but, despite this, he continues with his goal to be Jewish. Meanwhile, Finkler, grieving for his wife and a marriage he still doesn’t understand, tries to dissociate himself from Jews (particularly Zionists) through membership of the ASHamed Jews. And Libor, grieving heavily for his true love, tries to dissuade Treslove from his ambition.

The book chronicles a year or so in the life of these three as each confronts his particular challenge. Treslove falls in love with Libor’s (Jewish) great-niece, Hephzibah, furthering, he hopes, his path to Jewishness; Finkler starts to fall out with the ASHamed Jews though not with their anti-Zionist principles; and Libor starts to fall out of life itself. All of this is told with both warmth and humour. The humour is always there, and yet is never pushed so far that the humanity of the characters is lost. You feel for them, despite their flaws and foibles. You want Julian, the hopeless father and failed lover, to make a go of it this time. You want Finkler to make peace with his Jewishness. And you want old Libor to get over his grief and join the world again. But through all this, you wonder, why? Why is Jacobson writing this story?

I have a few ideas. One may simply be to capture the diversity of Jewishness. Through all the stereotypes that made me laugh (Jews are musical, brokenhearted, rich, clever, comic, and so on), Jacobson shows that Jews, like any other group, are not all the same, cannot all be put in the one basket. Another  reason, though it’s depressing to think it’s needed, may be to defend Jews in an anti-Semitic world, to show their humanity. You care for these characters whose troubles with identity, love and loss are universal. And another may be to explore Zionism, safely. Can Zionism be defended? Has it changed into something more ugly, something that undermines its original conception?

In the end I did like this book because, while I was contemplating the “why”, I was engaged by the characters and their stories. The novel commences with Treslove, the would-be Jew, but it concludes with Finkler, the troubled Jew. Here he is, towards the end:

He was a thinker who didn’t know what he thought, except that he had loved and failed and now missed his wife, and that he hadn’t escaped what was oppressive about Judaism by joining a Jewish group that gathered to talk feverishly about the oppressiveness of being Jewish. Talking feverishly about being Jewish was being Jewish.

Ha! You said it, Mr Jacobson, I’m tempted to say. But that would be too smart-alecky of me because the book is, in fact, as much about humanity as it is about being Jewish.

Howard Jacobson
The Finkler question
London: Bloomsbury, 2011
370pp.
ISBN: 9781408818466

Monday musings on Australian literature: Meanjin’s Tournament of Books

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Henry Handel Richardson in 1945, a year before...

Henry Handel Richardson, 1945 (Presumed Public Domain. Courtesy: Wikipedia)

Many Monday musings ago I wrote about the reduced visibility of women writers in Australia. I wasn’t the only one concerned and things have been afoot to up the ante for women writers. For example, a new award targeting women writers, the Stella Prize, was announced earlier this year. And now Meanjin, a longstanding literary magazine, is emulating the Morning News’ Tournament of Books (to which a favourite blogger, Hungry like the Woolf, introduced me a couple of years ago) by conducting a tournament comprising books by Australian women writers.

Meanjin describes the tournament as follows:

The way it works is this: 16 books are chosen … and then divided into pairs. A judge is given a pair, reads them both, writes up their decision process and announces which of the pair they deem the better book. That book then progresses into the next match to go up against a winner from a previous round. It’s a sporting tournament for people who don’t like sport.

This year, in light of the discussion around women’s writing and literary prizes, we’ve selected a short list of novels exclusively by Australian women. The list has been chosen by us, and is incomplete, capricious and arbitrary. That’s ok. There’s no way you could do Australian women authors justice in 16 books…

Fair enough … and being this upfront about their selection makes it hard for us to complain, doesn’t it? And really, I wouldn’t want to, because I can’t imagine we’d ever get universal agreement on 16 books, anyhow.

The tournament schedule can be viewed at the Meanjin site so I won’t detail it here, but I will list* the 16 books, partly because it’s a useful list, despite its arbitrariness, for those interested in Aussie women’s lit:

Regular readers of my blog will recognise some of my favourite and oft-mentioned authors here. Interestingly, a couple of young adult/children’s novels (those by Carmody and Marchetta) have been included – one of their “capricious” decisions, perhaps! Not that I have anything against such novels – I thoroughly enjoyed Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi – but I wonder whether they have the weight to beat a Stead or an Astley, a Wright or a Jolley, for example. Well, keep reading …

Round 1 results

  • Match 1, Gilgamesh beat The lost dog. Both are interesting books but Gilgamesh is a beautiful one. I would have chosen it too.
  • Match 2, The children’s Bach beat Mr Scobie’s riddle. This is harder. I love The children’s Bach but have not read Mr Scobie’s riddle. I’m not sure it’s the Jolley I’d have chosen … but, oops, I said I wasn’t going to go there, so let me just say that this match is a tricky one – the judge thought so too – and I’m glad I wasn’t asked to call it!
  • Match 3, My brilliant career beat Tirra lirra by the river. Another hard one, but My brilliant career would have to be the sentimental favourite in this pairing. And, anyhow, how could I not agree with a book the judge called “chick-lit amongst the gums” and “Austen in an Akubra with a broad Australian twang and some permanent sun damage”?
  • Match 4, Looking for Alibrandi beat Harp in the south. Interesting decision. A main criterion for the judge seemed to be the ability to stand the test of time … but, but, I argue, Looking for Alibrandi is only 20 years old while Harp in the south has already stood the test of time. And, I’m not sure that Alibrandi reaches adult audiences in the same way that Harp does. Still, perhaps I should read Alibrandi again to be sure.
  • Match 5, The secret river beat A kindness cup. Both good books, and a very hard choice … one the judge clearly found hard too. It seems as though it was Astley’s more dystopian view that was the deciding factor. That seems a bit of a cop out to me!
  • Match 6, The man who loved children beat Obernewtyn. Now this must surely have been a no-brainer and the judge agrees, explaining why they were (mis)matched in the first place. I’ll say no more.
  • Match 7, The fortunes of Richard Mahony beat Of a boy. Another pretty obvious choice, really. While I do think a short novel or novella can beat a hefty tome, this is probably not the hefty tome to be up against!
  • Match 8, The world beneath beat Carpentaria. Now this does surprise me. The latter won the Miles Franklin award while The world beneath was not shortlisted. I don’t think we should give excessive credence to awards but it seems the judge gave the match to The world beneath because he found Carpentaria “difficult”. Is this fair or right, I cry into cyberspace? No, but at least the judge admits to being “covered in the stench of subjectivity”, so all one can do is vote Carpentaria back in the zombie round.

Plot, humour  and readability seemed high on the various judges’ agendas. They would not be my top criteria but, as this tournament is mainly about promotion of women writers and having some fun, I’ll say no more, except that I’ll report again on the tournament after the second round has been played …

* The two linked titles are to reviews on this blog. I’ve read many of the books listed, but mostly long before I started this blog.

Nora Krouk, Warming the core of things

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Nora Krouk, Warming the core of things, book cover

Nora Krouk, Warming the core of things (Image courtesy Hybrid Publishers)

life wrapped in bundles
of painful joy
(from “Skies will be luminous”)

The reason I like to read poetry is the obvious one – the way poets can capture a feeling or idea in just a few carefully chosen words that are presented through a controlled rhythm. Nora Krouk fills this bill nicely!

I hadn’t heard of Krouk before this book came to my attention … but she’s been around for a while. In fact, she’s 90 years old and has been in Australia since 1975. She is the daughter of a Polish Catholic father and a Jewish mother. She was born in China, married in Shanghai and lived in Hong Kong before emigrating to Sydney. She was educated in Russian schools and has written poetry in Russian and English. She has been published internationally, and has won several awards. Phew! I don’t usually provide such detail about authors, but it seems appropriate to do so here.

The collection is organised into three sections, and the order of these sections is interesting: In memoriam, Renewals, Transitions. I like the way it moves from death, through awakenings and rebirths, to change accompanied by uncertainty. This order keeps us on our toes. It offers no easy conclusions to the challenges posed in the first section but neither does it suggest hopelessness as the reverse order might have.

The poems are, for the most part, very accessible. Elizabeth Webby is quoted on the back of the book as saying that the poems “will appeal to both those who usually read poetry and those who don’t”. I’m in the middle ground here – I like to read poetry but don’t read it often enough – and I think Webby is right. Many of the poems have stories – seemingly about people Krouk knows – and those stories speak to the ordinary things of life which, for someone of Krouk’s age, include memory, aging, loss and death. These things are explored with a sense of enquiry and some resignation, rather than with a railing and ranting. The poems move between her daily life and historical events (some of which she or her family experienced), particularly the horrors that occurred under Hitler and Stalin.

I commenced this review with two lines from a poem in the Renewals section because they encapsulate what seems to be Krouk’s philosophy: Life is not easy, she’s saying, but there is much to enjoy and wonder at. The first poem in the book is a widow’s poem. It speaks of grief, but it also introduced me to something interesting about her poetry, what Anna Kerdijk Nicholson describes on the back of the book as her “idiosyncratic rhythm and lineation”:

I don’t weep much.     I read
and write     even cook     then
catch myself and return to you
(from “Fima (1914-2008)”)

These spaces in her lines control, force even, the rhythm for the reader. They allow us to breath, to feel the sense of the words and, in a way, they provide a more intimate, conversational tone to the work. They slow us down and prevent us from rushing through the poems.

Aging and memory, as I’ve already mentioned, are recurrent themes in the collection.  Memory, though, is a pretty broad church, and Krouk explores it in its various guises – from loss of memory to remembering the (often painful) past:

They chase a name
a thought     an event
(“The couple”)

It’s different for us
we have no grave
He was last seen
in the prison yard
(from “For Leon K” who died under Stalin’s regime)

But not all the poems are about challenge. There are lighter poems, and there is humour. I loved her short poem about a young smiling woman:

A smile is hovering over our street
a light funny quizzical smile
It slipped off her lips
brushed past the creamy cheek
…
dripped over a sunny wattle and stayed.
(from “A young woman”)

Much of her imagery is domestic, everyday. There are family dinners and bridge afternoons with friends. Jacarandas and gums, camellias and lavender feature, grounding her poetry in her Australian life. But, there are also allusions to things literary (such as Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and political/historical (as mentioned earlier), which confirm her as a poet of universal concerns.  Some of her poems combine the Australian and the political – such the example below, which demonstrates that she is capable of more than a little irony:

Where do we turn Matilda     Lead the dance
As promised in the anthem     we advance
(from “Sorry”)

There are also a few specifically religious poems, but I found some of these (“Widowed a hundred times”, and “I am not envious Lord”) a little too melodramatic for my liking, while others, such as her meditation on snakes (“Snakes are much maligned”), engaged me. Poetry, as I’ve said before, is such a personal thing.

Krouk has lived long and experienced much. There are many more poems I’d love to excerpt – and maybe I will in a future post. Meanwhile, I can’t think of a better way to summarise this book than through her own words:

Under the skies     luminous
things drop
(from “Skies will be luminous”)

Nora Krouk
Warming the core of things
Melbourne: Hybrid Publishers, 2011
126pp.
ISBN: 9781921665431

(Review copy supplied by Hybrid Publishers)

Irma Gold, Two steps forward

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Irma Gold's Two steps forward Bookcover

Irma Gold's Two steps forward (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

Irma Gold’s* Two steps forward is, apparently, the last release in Affirm Press’s Long Story Short series. I have reviewed two others previously – Gretchen Shirm’s Having cried wolf and Leah Swann’s Bearings – but, before talking about this book, I must say how much I love the books themselves. I am starting to read eBooks. I recognise they are likely to be the future and they do offer advantages over print books. They take up less space, for a start. You can change font size to suit your eyes. And, eReaders have inbuilt dictionaries which can be useful when you are reading while out and about (or are just too plain lazy to get off your seat to find the dictionary). But, this doesn’t mean I don’t like print books – especially lovely ones to look at and hold like this Affirm Press series. I like their slightly smaller size and their simple, clear, modern design. The three I’ve read also have very stylish monochromatic covers. There’s little, in fact, not to like about them.

Now, though, the book. This is one of those short story collections, like Swann’s Bearings, that has its own title rather than one drawn from one of the stories within. I like that – and the title of this book, Two steps forward, is a particularly clever one, because of course it immediately calls forth the complete saying “two steps forward one step back”. This concept works well for the stories in Gold’s book.

Irma Gold is a writer and editor. She has been published in various journals, such as Meanjin and Island, but this is her first published collection. Well done her, because it’s an engrossing collection. Gold’s writing is clear and warm, and she demonstrates in this collection an ability to handle a range of voices and points of view. There are 12 stories in the book: five are told 1st person, two 2nd person, and the other five 3rd person. Her protagonists are mostly women, but there are a few male voices too. The stories could be described as “scenes from a life” (well, lives, really). Her characters include a single mother hoping for love (“The art of courting”), an empathetic woman working in a refugee detention centre (“Refuge”), a father experiencing his first access visit, after two years, with his 8-year-old daughter (“Tangerine”), an emotionally-neglected teen girl living in a caravan park (“Sounds of friendship”), an old homeless man (“Great pisses of Paris”), and so on. The characters are authentic. You know who they are, what they feel, and what they are confronting:

You notice how thin your lips have become, how the flash of greasy fuchsia looks almost crude. You pull at the loose skin on your neck, and the spongy puffs around your eyes filled with lines, the skeleton veins of a dead leaf. (“The art of courting”)

I want to touch him, but the space between us is fractured. (“Refuge”)

I compose sentences in my head, but none of them work. (“Kicking dirt”)

Says they can’t afford to waste cash on stuff they don’t need, though apparently alcohol is essential. (“Sounds of friendship”)

There’s a painful vulnerability to her characters, as they confront their particular challenges, such as visiting a terminally ill friend (“The visit”), facing a miscarriage (“The third child”), or trying to reconnect with a young daughter (“Tangerine”). Their lives are finely observed, so much so, in fact, that you feel you’ve been there – even if you haven’t. Their triumphs, when they have them, are hard won.

I also liked Gold’s use of imagery. It’s apt, evocative, and is not overdone or pushed too far – which suggests careful writing, good editing, or both:

 A day leaking away with a spill of apricot. Air stung with lavender. (“The art of courting”)

… and Abby catches the cold-barrelled words Mick fires at her mother. (“Sounds of friendship”)

But it was all icing slathered over stale cake. (“The anatomy of happiness”)

The tone doesn’t vary much, but this doesn’t spoil the experience. The stories, overall, have a somewhat melancholic air, as the characters struggle to keep a forwards momentum in their lives ahead of a backwards one. And, there are touches of humour (mostly wry) and some occasional irony (such as a reference to our anthem’s “boundless plains to share” in “Refuge”) that provide relief.

Endings are always hard … at least that’s what E. M. Forster told us in Aspects of the novel … but Irma Gold has handled them well. Keeping with the title, most of her stories have more hope than not – but none are fully resolved. Like life really.

Irma Gold
Two steps forward
Mulgrave, Vic: Affirm Press, 2011
(Series: Long Story Shorts, 6)
192pp.
ISBN: 9780980790474
Also available in eBook format

(Review copy courtesy Affirm Press)

* I was tickled to note in her Acknowledgements that Gold spent some time at Varuna Writers’ Centre.

Hazel Rowley, Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage

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First Family of the United States

Roosevelt Family, 1919 (Courtesy: Franklin D Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, via Wikipedia

I wonder what would make an Australian biographer decide to write about an American couple? And I wonder, having now read Hazel Rowley’s Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage, what she would have made of, say, Joseph and Enid Lyons, Australia’s own political power couple. Unfortunately we’ll never know as Rowley died just around the time this, her latest biography, was released. There is, of course, good reason for writing this story: Franklin and Eleanor are an interesting couple, and they did have an impact on the international stage, as well as their national one.

In her acknowledgements at the end of the book, Rowley writes:

I learned quickly that all sources, both primary and secondary, were unreliable. There was so much that could not be said, even in private letters…

Therein lies the rub for the would-be biographer of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. There’s a lot of primary source material available. They wrote copiously to each other and to others, others wrote copiously to them and to others about them. There are diaries written by many in the Roosevelt circle. There’s Eleanor’s newspaper column, My Day, which she wrote for nearly three decades. And there are memoirs, interviews, and sundry other items documenting their private and public lives. Indeed, even though it’s known that some significant letters were destroyed, the biographer of Franklin and Eleanor is challenged by a surfeit of records, unlike those poor biographers of Jane Austen who try to make a lot out of what is a rather small historical record.

And yet, there are still gaps. This is, in the end, what makes fact different from fiction, isn’t it? When you are writing about real people you cannot know everything in their hearts, you cannot be sure of their real motivations, and so whatever biography we read, no matter how thoroughly researched and well written it is, there are things we will never know. With fiction – and maybe I’m being a little ingenuous – the character only exists in the author’s mind and on the page. Whatever the author tells us is all we can know and we must work with that …

Enough intro, let’s get to the book. Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage is an extraordinary read. The research Rowley did was clearly comprehensive – as the endnotes demonstrate. Rowley takes, she says, a different tack to the other biographies out there by choosing to focus specifically on the marriage. Her thesis is that it was not simply a patched up compromise (after Franklin’s betrayal with Lucy Mercer) or simply a political marriage, but “a joint endeavour, a partnership that made it possible for the Roosevelts to become the spectacular and influential individuals they became”.

And that’s certainly how she presents it … and, moreover, how the evidence she presents suggests it was, though we’ll never know, really, what interior compromises the couple made in terms of their personal happiness. Eleanor was devastated by Franklin’s love affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918, and divorce was apparently mentioned. Threats of disinheritance and of loss of his political career plus, it seems, his love for Eleanor resulted in reconciliation and the marriage continued. However, it did shift gear, particularly after Franklin’s polio attack in 1922, and began to encompass a variety of “romantic friendships” for both. Eleanor wrote, many years later in her book You learn by living that

You must allow someone else to meet the need, without bitterness or envy, and accept it.

That tells us, I think, that the “new” marriage was not easily come by. But it also tells us that it was come by. And so, in the mid-1920s during Franklin’s “recovery” from polio,

Franklin had Warm Springs [resort bought by FDR]; Eleanor had Val-Kill [cottage]. Franklin had Missy; Eleanor had Nancy and Marion. Both had Louis Howe.

The fascinating thing about the Roosevelts is the loyalty they inspired in the people who worked with them. Many of the long-standing friendships and relationships chronicled in the book are with the secretaries, body guards, campaign managers, journalists who were in their employ or worked alongside them. There are stories galore in the book about how they opened their homes, including the White House, to others, enjoying communal living way before the 1960s.

The book is, as I’ve already mentioned, well-researched. Most of what Rowley tells us appears to be based on primary records (that are well documented in the extensive endnotes at the back of the book), and she occasionally indicates when she thinks the “facts” have been modified with an eye on posterity. But there are also times when she makes assumptions, such as her belief that Franklin and Lucy did not have a real “affair” because they had little opportunity to be alone; because Lucy was Catholic, single and probably a virgin; because they would have feared pregnancy; and so on. All logical enough but the facts aren’t known.

While the book is about their marriage, we don’t learn a lot about their parenting style. However, their political life is told at a general level – FDR’s New Deal, CCC and Lend-Lease programmes, his relationship with Churchill, and Eleanor’s political works including her involvement in the creation of the United Nations. We learn a little of how Eleanor’s more radical ideas were tempered by the supportive but more political Franklin. I loved a government official’s description of Eleanor at the United Nations General Assembly:

Never have I seen naiveté and cunning so gracefully blended.

As a 21st century reader, I was also interested in the behaviour of the press and how the extent of FDR’s handicap was either hidden from the press or, sometimes, hidden by the press from the public:

From today’s perspective, it is astounding that the press stuck to the rules. Even journalists who disliked Roosevelt respected the dignity of a handicapped man.

They weren’t perfect though. Towards the end of his life when he was sick and convalescing in the South, FDR was driven in his car one day in front of the press simply to halt the rumours that had started to fly. He apparently said:

Those newspapermen are a bunch of God-damned ghouls.

Little did he know!

It’s a great read – for its analysis of the “extraordinary marriage” and for its picture of the times. I thought, as I read of Eleanor’s debut early in the book, that her young womanhood was somewhat close in time and place to the women who populate Edith Wharton’s novels, but Eleanor, through either luck or good judgement, escaped the lives and fate of those characters. How lucky, really, for the world that she did.

Hazel Rowley
Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage
New York: Farrer, Strauss and Giroux, 2011
345pp.
ISBN: 9780374158576

Leslie Cannold, The book of Rachael

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Bookcover Leslie Cannold The book of Rachael

The book of Rachael (Cover image: Courtesy Text Publishing)

For someone who doesn’t seek out historical fiction, I seem to have read a lot of it lately. Leslie Cannold’s The book of Rachael is the third historical novel I’ve read in succession – and it’s the third with an author’s afterword/postscript, which suggests to me some uncertainty in the writers about historical fiction. Tansley quoted Doris Lessing’s statement that fiction is “better at” the truth than the factual record. Brooks addressed concerns that the imagined record might be interpreted as fact. Cannold takes a different tack. Her book, like Brooks’, involves an imagined heroine telling a story about some “real” historical people, in her case Joshua (Jesus) and Judah (Judas). Cannold writes:

I wonder now whether it really makes sense to call this sort of writing historical fiction. Can setting entirely fictional characters to roam in the landscape of a multi-authored, oft-redacted religious tale really be described as historical? Not if the criteria include scholarly examination of verifiable, chronologically ordered events. So, I don’t think of “The book of Rachael” as historical fiction. I think of it as the bringing to life of a fictional character by evoking the time and place in which the character’s story is set. In “The book of Rachael” I have set the fictional sisters to roam across the historicised terrain of the gospels.

Hmm … I’m not going to get into definition discussions here. It is what it is, regardless of what we call it, and in this case it’s a first person story of Rachael, the invented sister of Jesus and wife of Judas. The rest as they say is (more or less) history … at least as far as the Jesus and Judas story goes. But, of course, there’s more to it than this. Cannold creates a whole life for Rachael from her childhood in Nazareth, as the second daughter of Yosef and Miriame, to her life post-Crucifixion. She’s a girl out of her time – something even her rather hard mother recognises (“Oh Rachael … how hard the world is for you”). She chafes under the strictures of being female (learning “in no uncertain terms what it meant to be a girl”). Like Brooks’ Bethia she wants to learn and so she listens in to her brothers’ lessons when she can. Also like Brooks’ Bethia, she channels some of her intelligence and curiosity into studying to be a healer, as an apprentice of the old crone Bindy. Then she meets Judah, angry young rebel to the gentler, more humble Joshua, and the book seems to shift a little on its axis.

Leslie Cannold was named one of Australia’s top twenty public intellectuals in 2005, and this year she was named Australian Humanist of the Year. She’s an academic, activist and ethicist with particular interest in women’s rights. She wrote The book of Rachael because, she said, “what kind of world painstakingly records the names and stories of important people’s brothers but not their sisters”. She wanted, in other words, to place women in the history, much like Anita Diamant wanted to do in The red tent, but fiction is not her usual métier and I think it shows.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s an entertaining read, and her evocation of the times, her well-researched imaginings of how women’s lives went are engaging and engrossing, particularly in the first half of the novel. But, the writing is often forced. I’m never quite comfortable with first person narrators who describe their own behaviour in terms that are usually used by a third person, such as “sobbing as if my heart would break” and “hissing like a cat, I …”. The romance with Judah is also laid on a bit thick. Almost every time they meet – he is often away fighting – sex is explicitly described. I don’t think I’m prudish, but it did start to read more like a boddice-ripping romance than serious historical fiction. Here’s an example:

Judah blocked my mouth with a kiss. The sort of kiss that involved him sucking my lower lip until my breasts heaved and my skin seemed to sparkle like stars. The sort of kiss where I might forgive him almost everything.

This is just one of many episodes. “Enough already”, I wanted to cry. Yes, feminists are women too, but passion can be conveyed so much better through a little restraint. Just look at Jane Austen, whom Cannold must love, given her sneaky tribute: “It is a truth widely known that the desire of the amorously infatuated to hear their lover’s name, to speak it and hear it spoken aloud, make them tiresome company”.

There are, however, some beautiful descriptions, such as this:

Of these years, little is left to me by way of coherent memory. Instead, what I recall is like a mosaic, vividly coloured tiles affixed at different points on a large white wall: discrete scenes of colour and movement floating in a sea of empty whitewashed space.

Cannold handles the complex stories surrounding Jesus (Joshua) with a lovely subtle restraint, neither labouring their miracle aspects nor discounting them. I don’t want to give away the end – beyond what everyone knows of the biblical history. I found the conclusion for Rachael moving and redemptive but it didn’t have the feminist punch I expected from the way the novel started. Does that matter? Perhaps not. I’d love to hear what others say.

The book of Rachael
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2011
328pp.
ISBN: 9781921758089

Review copy supplied by Text Publishing

Geraldine Brooks, Caleb’s crossing

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Geraldine Brooks, Caleb's Crossing

Caleb’s crossing book cover (Courtesy: HarperCollins Australia)

In the Afterword to her latest novel, Caleb’s crossing, which was inspired by the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College, Geraldine Brooks describes the reactions of members of the Wampanoag Tribe:

Individual tribal members have been encouraging and generous in sharing information and insights and in reading early drafts. Others have been frank in sharing reservations about an undertaking that fictionalises the life of a beloved figure and sets down an imagined version of that life that may be interpreted as factual. This afterword attempts to address those reservations somewhat by distinguishing scant fact from rampant invention.

This concern – “an imagined version … that may be interpreted as factual” – should by now be familiar to readers of Whispering Gums. In fact, this book has several synchronicities with my recent and current reads. There must be something in the water! Firstly, the issue of fictionalising the life of a historical figure is something I have raised a few times, but most recently in my review of Tansley’s A break in the chain. And then there’s Scott’s That deadman dance which explores early contact in Australia between white settlers and indigenous people. Very different stories and yet several similar concerns and issues, such as those regarding land, education, and cultural attitudes to material possession and to hunting. And there’s more! My next review will probably be Leslie Cannold‘s The book of Rachael which is set in biblical times and features a fictional woman who loves learning and rebels against the strictures of her gender.

I love it when my reading interacts closely like this, when books enable me to explore and play off ideas against each other – so I thought, given this and the fact that there are already many reviews out there, that I’d tease these out a little instead of my more usual review. But first a brief outline of the plot, which provides a mostly imagined backstory to the real Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk through the eyes (journals) of the fictional white girl/woman Bethia Mayfield. The book starts in 1660 when Bethia is 15 years old, but it quickly flashes back a few years to when she met Caleb while out clamming and it describes the friendship which developed between them, forged by a mutual interest in learning about each other’s culture. Idyllic really, but of course it doesn’t last. Caleb is noticed as a young man with the potential to achieve in the white world and comes to live with Bethia’s family, so he can be taught by her father. Eventually, Caleb and another indigenous student, Joel Iacoomis, go to school and then Harvard along with Bethia’s not particularly clever brother, Makepeace. By a cruel twist of fate, Bethia goes with them as an indentured servant. She’s not too disappointed about this because she hopes to surreptitiously acquire a bit of learning too. That’s the gist of the story … and if you know the history, you’ll also know roughly how it all ends, but I won’t spoil that here.

And so to the first issue, fictionalising a historical figure. Brooks is upfront in saying hers is “rampant invention” inspired by “scant fact”. Like Grenville in The secret river, Brooks uses a real figure to explore how and why it might have been, though, unlike Grenville, she retains the name of her inspiration. This muddies the water for the unwary reader but it is common to historical fiction. How many novels have been written about, for example, Anne Boleyn? I have no problem with this. She and Grenville, unlike Tansley, are very clear about their fiction and are not afraid to imagine where there are gaps. Her Caleb may not be the Caleb of history but he is a Caleb whose motivations makes sense:

You will pour across the land, and we will be smothered … We must find favor with your God, or die.

And this brings me to the second synchronicity, that concerning early contact between white settlers and indigenous inhabitants. Brooks (a white Australian author based in the USA) and Kim Scott (a Noongar author from Western Australia) explore similar territory but from different points of view: hers is told in the voice of a white woman, and Scott’s has a more complex narrative voice but from an indigenous perspective. Both explore the complexity in motivations. In white society, we see the whole gamut from altruism through attempts to “get along”/cooperate to arrogance, cruelty and greed. And we see an equally complex response from the indigenous people, from Caleb’s “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em” to Tequamuck’s anger and aggression. The end result, as history shows us, is the same … and neither book (nor Grenville’s) is anything other than realistic about it.

Finally, there’s the gender issue. This – like Grenville’s writing about colonial attitudes to indigenous people – is where writers are often criticised for being anachronistic, for putting modern attitudes into the mouths of historical people. It’s a criticism I tend not to share (providing the character is coherent within the text). “New” ideas do not pop out of nowhere. They grow and develop over time, and they grow from exceptional people – not necessarily well-known people, but people who thought ahead of their times – and novelists, almost by definition, tend to explore the “exceptional”. I have no problem believing that a “Bethia” or a “Rachael” lived in their times … just as I have no problem with what some critics have called Thornhill’s “anachronistic sensitivites” in The secret river.

Enough rambling, back to the book! Did I enjoy it? Yes. Did I think it worked? Partly. Geraldine Brooks is a good storyteller and I read this book in quicksmart time. I was interested in the characters and I wanted to know what happened to them. Brooks evokes the era well, using enough vocabulary and phrasing of the period to immerse you in the time and place. Her physical descriptions are beautiful. You know exactly why Bethia would prefer her island home to the streets of Cambridge. The themes – colonial cross-cultural conflict, gender roles, coping with loss – are valid and clear. And her wide cast of characters realistically cover the gamut of attitudes you’d expect.

And yet, I’m not sure she quite pulls it off. My concern is not so much with her vision, with the ideas she puts in the mouths of her characters, but with her mode of telling. She is rather heavy-handed with the foreshadowing. It’s a valid technique given the story is told in retrospect but it feels overused, which somewhat devalues its dramatic impact. I also wonder whether telling Caleb’s story through Bethia’s eyes means we don’t get to know Caleb well enough, resulting in our not being as emotionally engaged with him as we could be. There are hints of sexual tension between Bethia and Caleb but they are never played out. Perhaps doing so would have turned it to melodrama and yet, once hinted, it needed some resolution. I tend to like first person stories and the immediacy they provide, but maybe a different narrative voice (even multiple points of view) would have been better here.

All that said, it’s an enjoyable read. Reasonably early in the book, Bethia writes:

this truth my mother had voiced … that it could not go on, this crossing out of one world and into another.

Near the end she wonders:

If I had turned away from that boy … and ridden back to my own world and left him in peace with his gods and his spirits, would it have been better?

Would it? Now there’s the million dollar question!

Geraldine Brooks
Caleb’s crossing
London: Fourth Estate, 2011
306pp.
ISBN: 9780007367474

Ginny Jackson, The still deceived

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Brother Gums and his partner, who live in our southernmost state, Tasmania, often give me books by local writers, many of whom I may not easily come across on “the mainland”. Their offering last Christmas was one of these, The still deceived, a collection of poems by Ginny Jackson. It was published by one of Australia’s wonderful, small independent presses, the Ginninderra Press. Tragically, Jackson died before the book was launched, though she did, I am told, see a copy. The cover image is a somewhat cryptic lithograph titled “High noses” by Jackson – a talented woman clearly – and the cover design is by her son Evan Dowling.

The title is that of the last poem of the book, and it puts a seal on the overall theme of the collection which has to do with the challenges we humans face in trying to understand, to make sense of, the life we find ourselves in. The last three lines are:

Even the less deceived
don’t seem to get it –
mortality, eternity.

There is a melancholic (“the slow crank of a melancholic tune”), even bleak, thread running through the poems. I don’t think this means that all the poems were written in the shadow of her imminent death. However, the last poems in the book do confront mortality head on, which could suggest that the 65 poems are presented chronologically in the order they were written. But maybe not. The idea of death is also a logical way to conclude a collection that deals, as this one does, with the challenges of existence.

And so to look at the collection a little more closely. The first poems could be loosely described as vignettes from a life though they are not so much about particular experiences as about the ideas and feelings engendered by the things we experience. The first poem, “Scientific method”, rather archly sets the scene for her exploration of the ways we humans misunderstand or misinterpret the things we see and experience:

When you’re first sent to the frontier
…
the sketches you bring back
will really be of your own world

and in doing so we “miss the hum of truths”.

The middle poems are about life cycle – about love, pregnancy, motherhood, and middle age, and about aging relatives. Some of her lightest poems are here, such as in her descriptions of babies (“Joy comes combing up your limbs” in “Baby love”) and children. “Domestic” conveys the monotony of housework in a nursery-rhyme-like jingle: “In the kitchen with the grimy doors/the pot is calling the kettle black”.

Moth (Courtesy: Myriorma, from flickr, using CC-NC-BY-SA 2.0)

Moth (Courtesy: Myriorma, from flickr, using CC-NC-BY-SA 2.0)

And then of course are the final poems which deal very specifically with death. I particularly like “Getting off the bus”:

It’s hard to get off right,
with dignity, it’s hard to leave
as they pull off from the curb,
a swaying cargo, brightly lit
of all the living, trundling on,
into their future lives.

What a devastatingly apposite image. And “Moths” whose behaviour is described as:

Like the story of this life
which flings itself at timelessness
while overhead the speedy flash
of multiple sunrises clash
with quick uncomprehended dusks.

There is a welcome and refreshing variety in the poems – in form and tone, as well as in subject. She uses rhyme at times – including, even, rhyming couplets – which provides a lovely change of pace. Much of her imagery draws from nature (“even the flight of a bee/forms a tacking jig with destiny”) and several poems describe Tasmania albeit often contrasting the power and permanence of nature (“and yet the tree’s roots grasp the rock,/the sea forever smashes on the shore”) with change wrought by humans (“where forests, still, are daily trashed”) and “our insect brevities”. But then there’s the occasional more industrial image, as in “Metal”. There are poems that don’t quite work, which may be because the image is too obscure or the logic not quite right, or simply because the connections don’t work for me. Poetry is such a personal thing. I enjoyed this collection for its world view, its intriguing imagery and the challenges it offered me.

I’m tempted to compare Jackson with Dorothy Porter who put her collection, The bee hut, together as she, too, was dying of cancer, but they are different. There’s more action and anger, and, paradoxically, also more joy in Porter’s poems, than in Jackson’s quieter, more resigned poems which see humans as either powerless (at best) or foolish (at worst). I’ll end though on a positive image. It’s a poem (“On planting”) praising trees, and it ends thus:

I wish we could all be as loyal.
If we could talk
only as that bright rush of leaves,
a haze of sun or moonlight
on our heads, softly embracing
one another and the sky.

If indeed …

The still deceived
Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2010
72pp.
ISBN: 9781740276122

Tangea Tansley, A break in the chain: The early Kozminskys

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Bookcover for Tansley's A break in the Chain

Book cover* (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

In the postscript to her novel A break in the chain, Tangea Tansley quotes Doris Lessing‘s statement that ‘fiction is better at “the truth” than a factual record’. This gets to the nub of my challenge with this book, which is a fictionalised account of three generations of the author’s family, particularly her great grandparents and grandparents. As I was reading it I was reminded of Kate Grenville‘s discussion in Searching for the secret river on how she commenced writing The secret river as nonfiction and ended up writing fiction. But more on that anon.

There’s a lot to like about this book, particularly if you are interested in Australian social history. It starts in Prussia in 1856 with a young man, Simon Kosmanske (later Kozminsky), playing violin to the cows on his father’s dairy farm. His father, Moses, does not think Simon is taking his work seriously enough, and so orders him to “Go to Australia and make an old man proud”. Australia, at the time, was of course at the height of the gold rush and was many a man’s destination. Simon, though, didn’t want to go, but go he did – and he eventually established Kozminsky, the fine jewellery and objet d’art store that still operates in Melbourne.

The novel chronicles in five parts the story of Simon, his marriage to Emma, and of his son Israel and his marriage. The first part which describes Simon’s trip to Australia and his first years in the colony as he tries to establish himself is fascinating. And then the story moves into the main drama which gives rise to the title. This drama centres on Judaism, its observance, and decisions made to marry within or outside of the faith. It is an intriguing story with some strong and interesting characters. However, as Tansley explains in her enlightening postscript, there are many gaps in knowledge about some of the key characters, particularly Emma. She writes:

For a family of journalists and writers, my family has left behind a sad lack of primary source material: no journals or diaries or letters and a dearth of documents of any kind. This meant that what was originally planned as a documented biographical work became instead a hybrid – a family memoir laced with fiction.

Those of you who know the Kate Grenville saga regarding The secret river will see why I was thinking of it as I read this book. I’m not sure that Tansley has pulled it off quite as well as Grenville. I wonder whether, in fact, she kept too close to the “facts” while aiming to write fiction. She writes, again in the postscript:

I resisted the temptation to write Emma into a fictional background, although Kozminsky family stories present a number of alternative lives for Emma.

Grenville, on the other hand, moved more thoroughly into fiction, changing the name of her protagonist from that of her ancestor, which freed her to explore more creatively just what might have happened in the lives of settlers like her ancestor. She did this because she found her factual account wasn’t working. Grenville says:

I was determined to write a book of non-fiction, but the only parts of this ‘assembly’ that were interesting were the ‘flights of fancy’ where I’d created the flesh to put on the bones of research. Where, in a word, I’d written fiction.

Grenville started off researching Solomon Wiseman because she “needed to know” what had happened in the early settlement, particularly between the settlers and the indigenous inhabitants. Tansley wrote her book to search out the “truth”, for past and future generations of her family but also “to fill what I see as a gap in the settler history of Victoria”. These goals she achieves pretty well, particularly the latter one, but I think she has used the story-telling mode of fiction to give us the “facts” rather than get to those larger “truths” that we can find in fiction. And this is probably because the story’s drama is hampered by her decision to not tackle the central mystery: what was Emma’s past that affected her so, and why, without giving anything away, did the family react as they did to Israel’s marriage? It is in this, I think, that the “truths” can be found. Without them, we have an interesting story, a good social history, but we don’t understand the real “truth” behind the “break in the chain”.

Overall, though, Tansley’s style is sure. She uses a chronological narrative structure, with a third person point of view in which the perspective shifts occasionally from character to character. These work well for the story she wants to tell. While there’s the occasional misstep in the writing (a forced image, or a too-obvious statement), she also writes some lovely descriptions particularly as the novel progresses and she warms to her story. Take this for example:

Bending to the ground he pulled at a shoot of grass only to find  that an entire yard of runner came loose with it. He flung it away. Damned rhizomes. They had a lot in common with extended families. Not much to be seen on the surface, but underneath you could be sure there was a vast network of tentacles working away in their subterranean hideout, linked for the term of their natural lives in dark and closeted conspiracy.

My final assessment? Well, it’s interesting for its social history. It’s also engaging for Tansley’s generosity towards her characters despite their flaws and the mistakes they make. And I enjoyed the opportunity it has given me to further tease out my response to the history-as-fiction question. I’ll conclude though on another question. Emma says to Israel that “the past is only good for the experience it provides”. Does this imply a duty to share the past (something Emma herself doesn’t do)?

Tangea Tansley
A break in the chain: The early Kozminskys
Mulgrave: Affirm Press, 2011
315pp.
ISBN: 9780980790467

Review copy supplied by Affirm Press

* The cover image is a detail from Frederick McCubbin‘s Study in blue and gold. The subject is Eileen Kozminsky, Tansley’s grandmother.