21st century literature

Jeremy Chambers, The vintage and the gleaning

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Jeremy Chambers, The vintage and the gleaning Bookcover

Bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

There’s something I haven’t had an opportunity to share with you, until now that is – and that is that I love to visit wine regions. Not just because I like wine but also because I like the areas in which wine is made. The landscape is often beautiful, the wineries themselves vary so much in architecture and cellar-style, and, because of the culture that usually attends wine, there is often good dining and, if you’re lucky, some great music too. I was consequently very happy to read The vintage and the gleaning by the new Australian writer, Jeremy Chambers. It is set in in a winemaking town on the Murray River in northeast Victoria, an area I have visited and enjoyed many times – and so I was ready to sit back and enjoy.

And, enjoy it I did. However, there is very little – in fact, I’d go so far as to say none – of the glamour of the wine industry in this book. That this is so is clearly intended by Chambers. As one of the vineyard labourers says near the end, after a night of some violence:

I thought we was meant to be the civilised ones, he says. Winemaking town.

The irony, then, is keenly felt!

So, what is the book about? It doesn’t have a strong plot. Its first person narrator is Smithy, a man who would be in his 60s. He’s now a vineyard labourer, after having been a shearer for 47 years. He’s also now sober, necessitated by poor health from  years of heavy drinking. The story takes place over two weeks – starting on Monday and ending two Mondays later –  and the novel is structured by the days of this fortnight. Most “chapters” (unnumbered and unnamed) commence with the name of the day, and many are followed by “Spit doesn’t show”: “Tuesday, Spit doesn’t show and Lucy catches a snake”. Spit, we discover, is Smithy’s rather recalcitrant adult son, but the story is not about him. Rather, his chronic absence is symptomatic of the pretty dysfunctional masculinity that is the “stuff” of this novel.

Civilised Northeast Victoria - Sunday Creek Bridge, Pfeiffer's Winery

Smithy is a quietly engaging character. Through his inner reflections and discussions with others, particularly the publican’s wife, we learn that drink has been his ruin:

Can’t hardly remember me own life. Because I drank it all away, you understand.

And that

Nowadays I’m doing all the thinking I should have done when I was young … When I could have done things right. But all I got now is memories and regrets. And there’s not a thing in the world I can do about it. That’s it. That’s me life. Gone. Can’t change a thing. Can’t put it right.

Paralleling this is the story of Charlotte, the young woman whom he had found one night on the railway track after she’d been severely beaten by her husband, Brett. In the second half of the novel, just as Brett is being released from jail for this beating, Charlotte (in her mid 30s) stays with Smithy and tells her story. She also sees her life as having “gone”:

I just can’t make a new start … I just can’t. I don’t have it in me anymore. I feel like everything’s over, like it’s already ended …

Chambers gives a lot of time to Charlotte’s story – we learn that she was a “horrible private school bitch” who married Brett, already prone to violence, against her parents’ wishes. She’s inclined to blame others for her troubles – her father who indulged her and Brett for obvious reasons – though she does have the occasional flash of recognition of her own part in her life’s trajectory. And yet, unlike Smithy, who says his life is over but is quietly trying to change, she seems incapable of acting upon the little self-knowledge she has achieved, saying that her life is “not something I can change”. To tell more, however, would give away the plot, such as it is … so we shall leave Smithy and Charlotte here.

While the novel has some awkwardness – Charlotte’s story for example is a little drawn out – my only real reservation relates to the scattered references to Aboriginal Australians, and particularly to the institutionalisation of Aboriginal children. I understand where Chambers’ heart is coming from, but can’t quite connect it all with the rest of the story. It’s perhaps a case of the first-time novelist trying to include too much.

There’s a lot to like about the book. It is carefully structured but not slavishly so. The language evokes the rhythms and atmosphere of the place and its people: birds, insects, the sun, and the ever-present gum trees backdrop the story well and are made to serve the book’s resigned, if not downright foreboding, tone. The dialogue captures what I would describe as “laconic Australian”: terse but with the occasional touch of dry humour. The title is lovely: vintage refers of course to winemaking, but also evokes age in general (and thus Smithy); gleaning is an agricultural term and therefore appropriate, but also implies the gathering of knowledge (such as Smithy does through the course of his life).

This is a very new book, but it has also been reviewed by Lisa at ANZlitLovers. She believes Chambers is a writer to watch, and I can only agree.

Jeremy Chambers
The vintage and the gleaning
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010
264pp.
ISBN: 9781921656507

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Dinaw Mengestu, An honest exit

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There are, I suppose, two exits in Dinaw Mengestu’s short story “An honest exit”, which you can read at The New Yorker. One is the exit the father in the story made, when a young man, from his home in Ethiopia and the other is his final exit from life. (No spoiler here: we are told he dies in the first line of the story.) Mengestu is an Ethiopian-born American writer. According to Wikipedia, this short story is an excerpt from his coming novel, How to read the air, and clearly belongs to that growing body of work, Immigrant Literature.

As it turns out it was rather an apposite read for me, given all the “Stop the boats” calls we Aussies have just heard during our recent election. I wish more people would read stories like this. They might then realise that boat people (let’s forget the people smugglers for a moment) are not opportunists gaily leaving their homes to sail to a “better” place. They are leaving their home, their culture, their life – and they do not usually do it lightly or with ease.

Anyhow, this particular story starts with the father’s death and the son, a college teacher in Early American literature, deciding to tell his father’s story to his students.  However, as is only too common, he doesn’t know the full story:

I needed a history more complete than the strangled bits that he had owned and passed on to me – a short, brutal tale of having been trapped as a stowaway on a ship. So I continued with my father’s story, knowing I would have to make up the missing details as I went.

And so, over the course of a few lessons, he tells a story to his students, about how his father managed to get to Sudan, and from there, through the help of a man called Abrahim (“like the prophet”), onto a ship bound for Europe. As we hear the story – which is believable even if not necessarily factual – we also learn a little about the son. He says, for example, that he calls his place of work “the Academy”, a name he has stolen from a Kafka story about a monkey who’s been trained to give a speech to an academy:

I used to wonder if that was how my students and the other teachers, even with all their  liberal, cultured learning, saw me – as a monkey trying to teach their language back to them.

We see how disconnected he feels from both his father and his life. However, as he tells his story he seems to start to (re)connect a little:

They [his students] had always been just bodies to me … For a few seconds though I saw them clearly …They were still in the making, each and every one of them. Somehow I had missed that … As I walked home that night I was aware of a growing vortex of e-mails and text messages being passed among my students. Millions of bits of data were being transmitted … and I was their sole subject of concern. I don’t know why I found so much comfort in that thought, but it nearly lifted me off the ground, and suddenly, everywhere, I felt embraced.

A little further on, we learn that his father’s story is being spread around the “Academy”, albeit distorted as these things go. He hears various versions involving the Congo, Rwanda and Darfur! He is at one point called into the dean’s office:

“… How much of what they’re [students] saying is true?”

“Almost none of it,” I told him …

“Well, regardless of that,” he said, “it’s good to see them talking about important things. So much of what I hear from them is shallow, silly rumours. They can sort out what’s true for themselves later.”

The narrator is a little disconcerted by this, by the idea that “whether what they heard from me had any relationship to reality hardly mattered; real or not, it was all imaginary to them”. And yet, he himself is making a lot of it up as he goes! He continues his story with the students, ending at the point his father leaves Sudan as a stowaway. He says:

My students, for all their considerable wealth and privilege, were still at an age where they believed that the world was a fascinating, remarkable place, worthy of curious inquiry and close scrutiny, and I’d like to think I reminded them of that. Soon enough they would grow out of that and concern themselves with the things that were most immediately relevant to their own lives.

What he doesn’t do is tell the real truth of his father’s escape. Rather, when he gets to this point in his father’s story, he says “I knew that it was the last thing I was going to say to my class”. We don’t actually know what he does next because the rest of the story concerns his father, but it seems that there is a third exit in the story, his from teaching. It probably is “an honest exit”. All in all, this is an intriguingly layered story about migration, dreams and trust, stories and truth, teachers and students, and privilege.

To end, I might just return to Kafka’s “Report to the Academy” in which the ape says, “There is an excellent German expression: to beat one’s way through the bushes. That I have done. I have beaten my way through the bushes. I had no other way, always assuming that freedom was not a choice”. It rather suggests to me that there’s more than one reason our narrator alludes to Kafka’s monkey…

Ian McEwan, Solar

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Ian McEwan Solar bookcover

Bookcover (Used by permission of the Random House Group Ltd)

I don’t know whether I believe your story, but I’ve enjoyed it.

So says McEwan’s latest creation, Michael Beard, to a character he has “done wrong”. This more or less sums up my feelings about Solar, the novel in which this statement appears. I am a McEwan fan and have greatly liked most of the 5 or 6 of his books that I’ve read but, while I found this one readable, I’m not convinced that it completely comes together into a coherent whole. This may have something to do with the fact that McEwan has tried for something lighter here and hasn’t quite pulled it off.

Do I need to describe the plot? It’s been reviewed so much by now that I presume most readers here already know it. However, to be on the safe side, here goes. It’s all about Nobel Laureate physicist, Michael Beard, who at the start of the book is 53 years old, 15lbs overweight and at the end of his 5th marriage (due to his incurable, it seems, womanising). On top of this he is struggling to keep his career alive: he is surviving, mostly on speaking engagements, while he waits, hopes, for a new inspiration. This is the set up. And, as is typical of McEwan, a little way into the book an event occurs that will be life-changing. In Beard’s case it will kickstart his career. How that occurs – and its eventual fallout – forms the rest of the book.

The novel is divided into three parts, labelled simply 2000, 2005 and 2009. If Beard was 15lbs overweight in 2000, in 2005 he is 35lbs overweight and by 2009 that has increased to 65lbs. This might tell you something about him: he is out of control in every aspect of his life – physically, emotionally, intellectually and morally. He is not, as you might gather from this, a likable man, but it is mainly through his eyes – told third person – that we experience the novel.

As the title suggests, the book’s subject matter is solar energy and climate change. And some of the best parts are those in which McEwan satirises the politics of climate change. In an amusing sequence, Beard is invited to the arctic along with a number of artists (making him the proverbial sore thumb) to experience climate change first hand. While he is there he observes the increasing chaos in the “bootroom” where the outdoor clothing is kept. From day one, the “bootroom” doesn’t work as people take items from pegs that are not their own resulting by the end of the week in no-one wearing a complete outfit that fits them. This works pretty well as a metaphor for the chaos and disorganisation in the climate change community. Add to this scenes like the idealistic climate-changers scooting about the ice in their gas-guzzling skidoos and you get a rather funny, and pointed, episode in the book.

The tone of the book is, in fact, comic-satiric which is a bit of a departure for McEwan who has tended to write books that are more dramatic, many with a “thriller” component. Here, though, there are even moments of slap-stick, such as when Beard early in the book pretends that he has a woman in the house in an attempt to make his wife jealous – all to no effect, but in terms of the novel’s plot it results in a deeply ironic statement:

Clearly he had been in no state to take decisions or to devise schemes and from now on he must take into account his unreliable mental state and act conservatively, passively, honestly, and break no rules, do nothing extreme.

Not long after this episode he does the complete opposite. Some of the members of my reading group found the book very funny but for me it fell a little flat. I saw the satire and thought it was clever at times, but it was sometimes more pathetic than highly comic, and at other times a little heavy-handed. Here, for example, is Beard on the bootroom:

How were they to save the earth – assuming it needed saving, which he doubted – when it was so much larger than the bootroom?

Now, most readers would already have got the point. I’m not sure that we needed to have it hammered home like this.

The focus of the book, as you will have gathered by now, is Beard and we spend a lot of time in his head. This is not a problem in itself, except that he never seems to change. He’s a gluttonous, arrogant, self-centred womaniser at the beginning and is the same at the end. He is also morally bankrupt – something you will discover soon enough if you read the book. Does a character have to change for a book to work? Not necessarily – think Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume – but we do have to stay interested in the character and Beard, for me, became a little boring. There was too much of the same – too much womanising, too much alcohol and fatty, fast food, too much self-aggrandisement – that I started to think “enough already”.

The key question to ask, then, is why has McEwan chosen such a character? The answer seems to be that McEwan wanted to express his fear – cynicism even – about 21st century humankind’s ability to enforce change. Early in the novel is this:

Beard was not wholly sceptical about climate change. It was one of a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it and expected governments to meet and take action … but he himself had other things to think about …

Himself, basically. Is McEwan saying Beard is us, is Everyman? If so, I can’t help thinking he’s got a point, but I’m not sure he’s written the book – like, say, Animal farm – that sustains the trope well enough to last the distance.

Oh dear, I fear now that I have been more critical than I meant to, because I did find the book readable. I did want to know what happened. I liked a lot of the language. And I did enjoy many of the observations McEwan makes throughout the book – about reason and logic versus idealism, about feminism, and of course about politics. Take for example the following, which is very apposite given that we downunder are in the middle of a Federal election campaign:

He was aggressively apolitical – to the fingertips, he liked to say. He disliked the overheated non-arguments, the efforts each side made to misunderstand and misrepresent the other, the amnesia that spooled behind each ‘issue’ as it arose.

I can relate to that …

Finally, there is a sly bit of self-deprecation running through the book about stories, imagination and the arts. I had to laugh at Beard’s comment that:

People who kept on about narrative tended to have a squiffy view of reality, believing all versions of it to have equal value.

I’ll leave you to decide what you think of McEwan’s version here.

Ian McEwan
Solar
London: Jonathan Cape, 2010
283pp.
ISBN: 9780224090506

M.J. Hyland, This is how

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Bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

If you want to read a book that is quick (and seemingly simple) to read and yet satisfyingly complex, then MJ Hyland’s This is how is for you. I’ve been wanting to read Hyland for a while and, having now done so, this won’t be the last.

So where to start? The novel is a first person story told by a young, somewhat disengaged 23-year-old man, Patrick Oxtoby. It is set in the late 1960s, perhaps early 1970s, but the setting and period barely matter really, as this is very much a book about character (and, humanity in general).

Now, my problem is what to say about the plot without spoiling the first third of the novel, so I think I’ll say nothing except what the back cover tells us. It says that “it is a novel about crime; though not a crime novel” and that “it has an almost stately pace and yet it’s thrilling”. These, together with my opening comment that it is simple but complex, should convey what a rather paradoxical read this is. The novel opens with the following:

I put my bags down on the doorstep and knock three times. I don’t bang hard like a copper, but it’s not as though I’m ashamed to be knocking either.

Who is this? Why does he describe his knocking in such terms? Well, we soon learn that Patrick, newly jilted by his fiancée, has come to this little seaside town to start a new job as a mechanic. He’s intelligent – though dropped out of university – and comes with good recommendations as a mechanic from his previous employer. But he is a very singular person, one who is not totally comfortable in his own skin. This is apparent from the beginning: here is more from the first page:

‘I thought you’d be here hours ago.’
It’s after ten and I was due at six. My mouth’s gone dry, but I smile, friendly as I can.
‘I missed the connection,’ I say.
I’ve not meant the lie, but she’s forced me.

Hmm, now I really was wondering who this is and, given the suggestion that the novel is about a crime, I wondered whether he is the criminal and whether he had already committed a crime? I also started to wonder as I continued to read the first few pages whether he was an unreliable narrator. But no, he is essentially reliable; he is, in fact, very much himself – but himself is a complex (aren’t we all) human being who carries quite a bit of baggage. I’m not quite sure how Hyland does it but throughout the novel she manages to unsettle her readers and keep us that way: at times we empathise with Patrick and feel sympathy for him and then suddenly he distresses if not horrifies us – and we wonder anew, Who is this man?

MJ Hyland

MJ Hyland, London, 2008 (Courtesy: MJ Hyland via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

In my opening para I said it was a quick and seemingly simple read. This is because the style is simple and direct. Patrick tells his story in present tense, with just the occasional flashback. Sentences are mostly short and simple, and the paragraphs tend to be short too. There is quite a lot of dialogue and not a lot of description. And what description there is tends to be short, sharp and vivid (“This blow is like a dose of poison in my veins, a hot sharp shot through my legs and arms, through my bowels and bladder”). Patrick is introspective at times but he doesn’t wallow in it. All this gives us a picture of a pretty simple character, which he is – and isn’t at the same time. There is, we are aware, quite a gap between what he says and thinks (most of the time) which could make him seem coldly manipulative. Yet, he’s not that. It’s more that he’s a somewhat damaged soul trying to survive in a world that doesn’t seem to go the way he would like – and it is this that leads to his trouble.

He likes to be in control (“I wanted her to go, and now she’s gone it’s like rejection, feels like it was her idea and not mine”) but he doesn’t try to bend others to his will. He has an uncomfortable relationship with the truth (“She put her hand on her heart and gives me a big smile and I’m reminded of when I told the girl in the theatre foyer that I was nervous and how the truth got a good reaction out of her as well”) but it’s more to do with self-protection than with any specific desire to deceive others. He has a complicated relationship with his family and they with him, but most of what we know is from his perspective so it is difficult to know the “truth” (if  a simple “truth” there can be in families). As he says:

I’m not sure if the truth will make any sense. The truth is, I thought I was rejecting my mother when I left home … But it turns out she was the one doing the rejecting and it’s just the same with my father.

The “real” truth, though, is probably somewhere in between.

Does he* grow throughout the novel and is there a resolution? To some extent he does get to know himself better but the resolution seems to be more that he learns to live with his situation (“life’s shrinking to a size that suits me more”) rather than grow as a person. But maybe that’s what maturity/development is really about?

Whatever the case, this is one of those truly original creations – a character who, as the back blurb says, “is fully himself and yet stands for all of us”. I haven’t been so intrigued by and engrossed in a character for a long time. The plot is slim but I barely noticed. I’ll definitely be reading more Hyland.

MJ Hyland
This is how
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009
376pp.
ISBN: 9781921656484

Review copy supplied by Text Publishing.

* An aside. I couldn’t help wondering at times whether Patrick, with his social awkwardness and slightly obsessive behaviour, might be autistic to some level, but this never comes out and I am uncomfortable ascribing a pathology to a character when the author hasn’t done so.

Haruki Murakami, Blind willow, sleeping woman

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Murakami, Blind willow, sleeping woman

Bookcover, used by permission of the Random House Group Ltd

Granted, my fiction contains more than its share of invention, but when I’m not writing fiction I don’t go out of my way to make up meaningless stories. (from “Chance traveller”, 2005)

This is as good a way as any to commence my review of Haruki Murakami’s recent short story collection, Blind willow, sleeping woman, because it clues you in immediately to the games Murakami plays with his reader. In “Chance traveller”, we are told that the “I” “means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of the story” and that most of the story is “third-person narrative”. In fact, this short story, like several in the book, comprises a story-within-a-story, a story told to a narrator who is present in the story himself.

It may sound odd to say this about a short story collection but I found it a bit of a page-turner. It comprises 24 stories written between 1980 and 2005. There are a lot of similarities between the stories  – the “disconnected” tone, the frequent use of first-person narrator, the story-within-a-story technique, and the regular use of flashbacks – but Murakami’s inventions are so varied and odd that you are compelled on.

What I love about Murakami is the matter-of-fact rather detached tone he uses to tell stories that often start off being quite ordinary but usually end up taking us to the strangest places. By focussing on the ordinariness of people, by including seemingly unimportant everyday and often pedantic-sounding details, Murakami lulls us into believing in his world so that when the bizarre happens – as it often does – we accept it with barely a blink.

Those of you who know about Murakami know that he is enamoured, if that’s not too strong a word, with the West – and his stories are peppered with allusions to Western culture from Elvis to Richard Strauss, from John Ford to Balzac. His cultural knowledge is quite prodigious. It is this “westenisation” that has, historically, put him at odds with the Japanese literary establishment. He explores this amusingly but pointedly in his story “The rise and fall of Sharpie Cakes” (1981/82) which satirises the drive to conformity and tradition. The final words of this story are:

From now on I would make and eat the food that I wanted to eat. The damned Sharpie Crows could peck each other to death for all I cared.

Like Murakami’s novels, these stories tend to be about alienation and loneliness. Most of his characters have trouble connecting with others, and when they do it often doesn’t go as well as they hope. Murakami  seems to see being alone as the essential condition of life:

He found it natural to be by himself:  it was a kind of premise for living. (“Tony Takitani”, 1990).

In  “The Ice Man” (1991) the couple go to the South Pole which “turned out to be lonelier than anything I could have imagined”. “The year of spaghetti”  (1981/82) concludes with the narrator alone, cooking spaghetti and suggesting that, in exporting durum, the Italians had exported “loneliness”. And so on, from story to story. Somewhat related to this focus on loneliness is a sort of fatalism, a view that life is not to be understood but just is:

Life: I’ll never understand it. (says Tony Takitani, in “Tony Takitani”, 1990)

Life is pretty damn hard. (says a girl to the narrator in “A ‘Poor Aunt’s’ story”, 1980/81)

That’s life. (says the young man, about something pretty trivial, in “A perfect day for kangaroos”,  1981/82)

He had to be as true to his homosexuality as he was to his music. That’s music, and that’s life. (“Chance traveller”, 2005)

Get all the fun out of life while you’re still able. They’ll serve you the bill soon enough. (“Hanalei Bay”, 2005)

And alongside all this, Murakami explores the fine line between reality and unreality or illusion. His characters tend to either escape reality when they can or find it slipping away from them – or, conversely, find it intruding when they don’t want it. The young couple in “A folklore for my generation” (1989) find “reality … invisibly starting to worm its way between them”. The first-person narrator in “Man-eating cats” (1991) writes that “for a second or two my consciousness strayed on the border between reality and the unreal … I couldn’t get a purchase on the situation” and a little later says “From time to time I was sure that I could make out the cat’s eyes, sparkling between the branches. But it was just an illusion”. And in one of my favourite stories, “A ‘Poor Aunt’ story” (1980/81), the fictional aunt becomes “real”, “stuck” to the narrator’s back, and disconcerts his friends:

‘Gives me the creeps’, said one friend.
‘Don’t let her bother you. She minds her own business. She’s harmless enough.’
‘I know, I know.  But, I don’t know why, she’s depressing.’
‘So try not to look.’
‘OK, I suppose’. Then a sigh. ‘Where’d you have to go to get something like that on your back?’
‘It’s not that I went anywhere. I just kept thinking about some things. That’s all.’

Not only do I like this for its idea – the making concrete of the thing you are thinking about – but it’s a good example of Murakami’s facility with dialogue.  “A ‘Poor Aunt’ story” has to be a bit of a writer’s manifesto – about the power and the limits to that power of words (and perhaps more generally of art). In fact, the idea of art as salvation appears a couple of times in the book. Earlier in this story it is suggested that writing about something, like a poor aunt, means “offering it salvation” and in “A seventh man” (1996) there’s a sense that art may offer “some kind of salvation … some sort of recovery”.

I could write much more on this book – tease out delicious story after delicious story, and give lots of examples of his expressive imagery, such as “I was beginning to feel like a dentist’s chair – hated by noone but avoided by everyone” (“A ‘Poor Aunt’ story”). However, that might spoil the pleasure for you (if you haven’t already read it), so I will finish with Murakami’s own words from his introduction:

My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left behind. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are the guideposts to my heart, and it makes me happy as a writer to be able to share these intimate feelings with my readers.

All I can say to this is, what a fascinating heart to know…

Haruki Murakami
(Trans: Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin)
Blind willow, sleeping woman
London: Vintage Books, 2007
436pp.
ISBN: 9780099488668

Eva Hornung, Dog boy

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Eva Hornung, Dogboy

Dog boy cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

I first read Eva Hornung when she was writing as Eva Sallis. It was her second novel The city of sealions, which is a pretty passionate and evocatively written exploration of cultural alienation and dislocation brought about primarily by migration.

In some ways Dog boy explores similar concerns, but its alienation is played out in a different way – through that fascinating archetype of the feral or wild child. In the novel, Hornung refers to a few modern examples of feral children, such as Oksana from the Ukraine; in an interview on the Literary Minded blog she says that the novel was inspired by a news story about a child living with dogs in Moscow. Guess where this book is set? You got it – Moscow! This intrigued me somewhat. Why would an Australian novelist read about a feral child in Moscow, go there to research and then write a novel? But Eva Hornung seems to be no ordinary novelist. She did her PhD in the Yemen and her settings – even if not her overriding theme – range rather widely.

And so to Dog boy. At the beginning of the novel Romochka, 4 years old, is alone in an apartment. He hasn’t seen his mother for a week or more and suddenly his uncle does not return. He senses the apartment building is being emptied and so after a couple of days being alone he heads out, and manages to get himself adopted by a dog, Mamochka, who lives with her four young puppies and two older offspring. How and why he is left alone is not the concern of this novel (which reminded me a little of Cormac McCarthy’s The road in which the cause of the devastation is also not the point). The novel tells the story of his life with the dogs and of what happens when he, four years later, comes to the attention of humans, specifically two scientists/doctors working in a children’s rehabilitation centre.

[WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS]

The story is told chronologically, and is divided into 5 parts. The first two parts cover Romochka’s first two years in the lair and how he gradually learns “to be a dog”. In the third part, Mamochka introduces a baby to the pack – to provide human company for Romochka. The baby is, ironically, called Puppy (by Romochka). Without giving any important plot points away, the final two parts deal with the boys’ renewed contact with the human world. It’s told in 3rd person but the perspective does shift, particularly in the last two parts where we see what’s happening through different eyes – the two scientists, Dmitry and Natalya, and Romochka himself. But even before this, we occasionally move between Romochka’s and the author’s perspective. It’s a technique that encourages us to understand, if not empathise with, the various experiences as they play out.

As I read this book, I felt I was in the hands of someone who knew what she was doing – even though at times I wondered exactly why she was telling this story. Not only does she viscerally describe Romochka’s gradual acceptance into the dog clan, his learning to hunt and his slow rise to dominance, but she starts to introduce humans at a time when our interest in an ongoing dog story would start to pall. This shift starts with Romochka’s increasing interest in people and builds up to the more or less inevitable conclusion – but that conclusion is not simple and is open-ended.

The language is evocative – sometimes beautiful but more often earthy and confronting to our senses. Hornung evokes Romochka’s life with the dogs with such attention to detail that it is entirely believable. She describes his animality, without being heavy-handed – he moves in “a wide lope”, uses his “paws”, and carries with him a horrible “stench” – but also shows his ability to use human logic and reasoning. At the time of his first capture, Romochka’s inner dog-human conflict is obvious:

Romochka wished bitterly … for true doghood. Were he really a dog, he would understand only their bodies, and not their words. Were he really a dog, he wouldn’t know their names, and their kids’ names. He wouldn’t … be paralysed by these lives that stretched before and after the station: he would know only their smell, only their aggression and torments; and what they ate.

The fight went out of him altogether. He stared dumbly, balefully without growling or snapping, unresistant even when he was pushed around. He was no longer sure that hiding his human side would get him released, but he remained a dog …

The big question to ask is, Why did Hornung choose to tell such a story? There is the obvious reason, that of our ongoing fascination with the wild child phenomenon and what it might tell us about what it means to be human. But there is also Hornung’s ongoing interest in alienation and, related to that, the abuse of humans by other humans (particularly where there is social disintegration). For all our horror at the way Romochka lives, we also see that he is not only safe but well nurtured in his life with the dogs. Was this boy, Natalya and Dmitry ponder, “better off living with dogs than with humans”. This question, that comes towards the end, represents a big shift from Dmitry’s earlier “proper awareness of the philosophic and scientific divide between man and animal”. The second part of the novel, in fact, explores this question at some depth. How big is the divide really? And to what extent is man a beast? All this is explored with more than just a little skepticism about scientific research and the tension between nice neat theory (and the chance it offers for professional glory) and messy reality. There is a lot in this book for keen readers to consider. It’s one that I will remember for some time.

Dog boy is Sallis aka Hornung’s 6th novel. She has won or been nominated for awards for many of her novels and yet she is not particularly well-known. Her change of name may have contributed to this but, whatever the reason, I think it’s a shame. Her writing is clear, accessible and evocative – and yet has a depth and passion that is worthy of the prizes she wins. May we see more of her.

Eva Hornung
Dogboy
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009
293pp.
ISBN: 9781921656378

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Jeffrey Eugenides, Extreme solitude

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I’ve only read one work by Jeffrey Eugenides, and that was his grand saga of an immigrant family in America, Middlesex. I enjoyed its sweep and the insight it provided into the social history of twentieth century America from an immigrant point of view, and I liked the way he mixed light and dark in his story-telling. “Extreme solitude” is, though, a short story, and was published this month in The New Yorker. It is a rather tongue-in-cheek take on young love viewed through the changing literary theory scene in early 1990s (I think) academia.

The story opens with Madeleine and her realisation that she loves Leonard, whom she’d met in an “upper-level semiotics seminar”. This class is taught by a lecturer who had changed from his long-standing allegiance to New Criticism (and its focus on text) to Semiotics and the ideas of theoreticians like Roland Barthes. Semiotics was only just reaching academia – at least in my neck of the woods – in the very early 1970s and so the tensions between these two approaches to literary criticism somewhat passed me by.

Madeleine, as I’m sure I would have in her place, initially found Semiotics mystifying and unhelpful. After a few seminars she goes to the library to find a nice nineteenth century novel:

to restore herself to sanity. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

But then, “for reasons that were entirely extracurricular, semiotics began making sense” and it all, of course, has to do with love! She’s reading Roland Barthes’ A lover’s discourse and comes across his description of “a lover’s discourse” as being “extreme solitude”. She connects – because it describes her feelings for the somewhat self-sufficient Leonard. From then on, the story plays in a lovely tongue-in-cheek way with love and particularly with the “signs” or “signifiers” of love (as Semiotics would have it), with the language one uses (as in the loaded “I’d love to” come out with you), and with all those early relationship behaviours that you try to “deconstruct” to find out whether he does or doesn’t.

It’s a pretty straight-forwardly structured short story, and the ending is a little pat. But made its point clearly. I read “Extreme solitude” as a clever and playful take on the limits of theory … and I thought it was fun.

Peter Temple’s Miles Franklin win, Ruckus

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Peter Temple’s winning this year’s Miles Franklin award* with his crime novel Truth has caused a bit of a ruckus – and, consequently, there’s been some interesting discussion about it on various blogs. The discussion mainly concerns the implications of a so-called genre novel winning this traditionally “literary fiction” award, but there is also some discussion of the literary “worthiness” of Temple’s work. If you are interested in this discussion, you may like to check out:

As I wrote in my own post and have commented elsewhere:

  • I have not read this novel yet – though I did read and was impressed by his previous novel The broken shore;
  • I am not a reader, in general, of crime fiction.

As is my wont, I don’t have strong feelings about this. I was surprised by the win (not so much because of its “genre” nature but because I’d read more mixed reviews of it than of some of the other shortlisted books), but I’m also interested in the strength of feeling its win has engendered. I would be sorry if we tried to categorise eligibility for the prize based on some notion of “genre”, and yet I recognise that “genre” implies adherence to conventions that can make it hard for writers to achieve the level of creativity and “difference” (or innovation) that we tend to expect in our literary prize winners. For me, then, the issue is whether the novels longlisted, shortlisted and then awarded literary prizes like this have achieved that level of  “literary” interest that we readers look for. Time will tell whether I think Temple has achieved this in Truth.

* The Miles Franklin Award conditions are that the work express “Australian life in all its phases”. I’m not sure what “in all its phases” means as I can’t imagine any one book exploring all aspects of Australian life. I have to assume that Peter Temple’s novel being set in Melbourne does meet this criterion.

PS (a few hours later): Silly me did not check the conditions. It is not “in all its phases” as I read elsewhere but “in any of its phases”. That makes more sense and is what I assumed was meant anyhow. Temple clearly meets this.

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

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Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

The Penelopiad bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

This is the second time I have read Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. Much as I enjoyed it the first time around, I probably wouldn’t have read it again if it hadn’t been scheduled for one of my online bookgroups. However, given that scheduling and the fact that I had recently listened to Simon Armitage’s dramatisation of The odyssey, I didn’t mind reading it again – and it is short! My rereading though ended up being a little disjointed as I was trying to finish off a number of competing contracts at the time as well as prepare for a ten-day trip to our warm Top End. This review may be similarly disjointed!

The book is part of Canongate’s Myths series in which recognised writers were asked to retell well-known myths. At the time of publication, Atwood said that she tried a number of myths and had nearly given up when she suddenly recollected the story of Penelope and her hanged maids – and her childhood reaction to it. The result is a rather fresh – and cheeky – look at the story told through Penelope’s and the hanged maids’ eyes, from, not surprisingly, a feminist (or at least female) perspective.

The story is told through a large number of short chapters in Penelope’s voice, and these are interspersed with commentary from the hanged maids, emulating, appropriately enough, the idea of a Greek chorus. The way Atwood uses it, the chorus provides a satiric perspective on Penelope’s view of the story. The story is told in flashback, with the narrators all speaking from Hades, where they now reside. It is not a standard revisionist feminist treatise that simplifies the world to one of gender power discrepancies (even though that is what underlies it all). We get to “feel” what it might have been like to have lived then. Atwood’s characters are “real” and operate in a complex world where game-playing and manipulation are de rigueur if you are going to survive.

In Homer, Penelope is presented as “the quintessential faithful wife” (Atwood’s introduction) who brings up their son and cleverly fends off suitors while waiting patiently for Odysseus’ return. When he returns, he kills the suitors and twelve of Penelope’s maids. Atwood, again in her introduction, says that in choosing to tell the story through Penelope and the maids she wanted to focus on “what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really doing?”. Her Penelope is something rather more than the constant wife of The odyssey. She, the part daughter of a watery Naiad, is a slippery character to pin down. She is highly jealous of her beautiful cousin Helen (she of Troy fame) and she is capable of making her own power plays. She is of high birth, contrasting her with the twelve maids who, by their own admission “were born to the wrong parents. Poor parents, slave parents, peasant parents, and serf parents…”.

What I enjoyed most about this book – besides the story Atwood tells – is its sly humour. It is genuinely funny, albeit in a dark or sometimes gruesome way. Much of the humour arises out of Penelope’s playing with the truth. In fact the book plays continually with the idea of “stories”. In the first chapter, Penelope says:

Now that all the others have run out of air, it’s my turn to do a little story-making. I owe it to myself. I’ve had to work myself up to it; it’s a low art, tale-telling … So, I’ll spin a little thread of my own.

A little further on in the book, she says, when reporting one of the prevailing stories about her, that “there’s some [my emphasis] truth to this story”. And so, as we read we need to remember that she too is telling us a story, and that there’s no guarantee that her story is any more “true” than another’s. This idea is reinforced by the fact that the maids comment on what Penelope tells us. Their and Penelope’s perspectives are not always the same. That is, their truths are different. This notion of stories versus stories is made even more clear in the chapter titled “Waiting” in which Penelope recites all the opposing stories and rumours about what Odysseus was doing/what was happening to him during the 10 years of his return. Reader beware, I say. In fact, at one point in the book where Penelope questions whether the “maids were making some of this up”, I wrote in the margin “Where is the truth”? I love the way Atwood plays with myth-making in a book about a myth – and, in doing so, also calls into question her own storytelling. Very postmodern!

I won’t go on. It’s a little uneven, with the maids’ story in particular being not quite as well integrated as it perhaps could. And yet, I’d recommend it, if you haven’t already read it. It’s clever, funny and compassionate – but its compassion is not a naive one. Rather, it has wide open eyes and knows that nothing is ever as simple as it looks – particularly when you find yourself in a situation where there is imbalance of power. Games will be played – and the powerless, such as women and particularly poor maids, will usually lose. And this, in the end, is Atwood’s (somewhat heavy-handed) point. As Penelope says in her last chapter:

Even with my limited access I can see that the world is just as dangerous as it was in my day, except that the misery and suffering are on a much wider scale. As for human nature, it’s as tawdry as ever.

Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2005
199pp.
ISBN: 9781920885953
NB: Cover image used above is from the new 2007 edition.

Peter Temple’s Truth wins the 2010 Miles Franklin

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Peter Temple, Truth

Truth bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

So, the waiting is over and Peter Temple has won the 2010 Miles Franklin Award. I’m kicking myself that I haven’t read it yet. I am not much of a crime-fiction reader – in fact I could probably count on one hand the crime novels I’ve read – but I did like his The broken shore (which itself won quite a few awards, though not the Miles Franklin). Truth is a sequel – at least in part – to The broken shore.

I’ll be interested to read the commentary on this announcement over the next few days but the win does suggest that the literary crime novel is becoming fully ensconced into the literary mainstream. According to one report Truth is the first work of “genre fiction” to win this award since it was established in 1957.

The Miles Franklin Trust website describes the novel as follows:

Temple’s winning novel is the much anticipated sequel to The Broken Shore and comprehends murder, corruption, family, friends, honour, honesty, deceit, love, betrayal – and truth. A stunning story about contemporary Australian life, Truth is written with great moral sophistication.

I’m not averse to a bit of moral sophistication, and you all know by now that explorations of truth engage me – so Truth here I come, soon!