21st century literature

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead (#BookReview)

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Barbara Kingsolver’s latest – and multi-award winning – novel, Demon Copperhead, was inspired, as I’m sure most of you know, by Charles Dickens’ autobiographical novel, David Copperfield. Indeed, Demon Copperhead opens with an epigraph from that novel:

“It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.”

This could be an argument for writing historical fiction, and is certainly relevant to Kingsolver’s political intent, but for the novel’s protagonist it’s far more personal. Several times through the novel Demon refers to the point at which things changed – usually for the worse – but it’s two-thirds through where he makes it clear

Where does the road to ruin start? That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get the handle on some choice you made. Or was made for you. […]

In my time I’ve learned surprising things about the powers stacked against us before we’re born. But the way of my people is to go on using the words they’ve always given us: Ignorant bastard. Shit happens.

But, I’m jumping ahead here … so let’s back up a bit. I started by referencing the fact that the novel was inspired by David Copperfield, and it was inspired by it for one very good reason, which Kingsolver explains in her Acknowledgements:

I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.

So there you have it. Kingsolver has transferred Charles Dickens’ London of the early to mid-nineteenth century to Lee County Virginia from around 1990 to 2004 or so. While Demon struggles to make something of his life against all odds, not recognising or accepting until later that those odds were stacked against him from the start, Kingsolver, like Dickens, is a reformer doing her best to ensure that we will see from that start just how stacked those odds are at every level. I was expecting the book to be primarily about the OxyContin/opioid addiction crisis but it is much broader than that. It’s about poverty and the intergenerational trauma that this engenders – and how this helps lay the foundation for something like OxyContin to take hold.

“What matters in a story is the heart of its hero” (Demon)

I admit that I was not initially keen to read this novel. Not only is it very long, but I’ve read (and, yes, enjoyed) Barbara Kingsolver before, and I have higher priority books on my TBR. However, it was my reading group’s first read of the year, so of course I read it. It’s not a perfect novel, but Demon’s voice was so engaging and the translation of Dickens to Appalachian America is so pertinent to contemporary politics, that I’m glad I read it.

I can see, though, why it’s one of those divisive novels that engenders strong feelings one way or another. For a start, translating Dickens to contemporary times is risky. Dickens’ novel, being published in serial form, is long and episodic, with a large cast of characters, a touch of melodrama, and a lot of detail. A big, baggy, monster in other words. This style does not necessarily suit contemporary readers, but this is what you get with Demon Copperhead.

Like Dickens’ novel, Demon Copperhead wears its heart on its sleeves, meaning it’s not subtle. It can be didactic at times, as in Mr Armstrong’s lessons on capitalism and coal mining companies and Tommy’s discussion of historical truths. Its large cast of characters aren’t quite stereotypes but many are clearly typified by their behaviour – the bad characters who manipulate and use others (like stepfather Stoner, foster-father Crickson, and anti-hero Fast Forward), the weak characters who are well intentioned but can do more harm than good (like Coach), the kind hearts who pick Demon up when he’s down but can’t properly guide him (like the Peggotts), and the shining lights who try to set him on the right path but know he has to decide for himself (namely June and Angus).

In other words, Demon Copperhead is an in-your-face novel, which could be alienating. However, what kept me engaged was the character of Demon himself. Born to a junkie mother and orphaned at 11 when she ODs on oxy, he has a vivacity, an openness, and a heart that you want to see survive, despite setback after setback after setback. He’s “resilient”, a survivor, which is something those around him see early on. This is not to say, though, that he will survive, because even survivors need a hand, and this is what Demon sometimes gets, sometimes doesn’t, and, distressingly, sometimes eschews because he is determined not to be helped, to make his own decisions, to be his own man.

Regardless, once Demon had me, I was in. I have lived in Virginia (albeit very middle-class northern Virginia) and I have driven through various parts of Appalachia. I am interested in the culture, and, having recently read JD Vance’s Hillbilly elegy (my review), I am interested in how it is playing out in contemporary America. Kingsolver explores the role played by big pharma in targeting poor Appalachian regions with their painkillers, at a time when the region was suffering from the callous withdrawal of coal companies*. She shows how socioeconomic factors like these, combined with systemic failures in child welfare, not to mention poor educational opportunity, and the ongoing ostracism of “hillbillies”, contribute to the rise of MAGA politics in the USA.

She also shows the opposite, because while Demon is aware of the factors that work against him, he also sees what can sustain – good people offering the right support, the best parts of rural traditions, and nature, whose benefits are both spiritual and practical. The question is, are these enough? Or, what is needed to make them enough?

You have probably noticed by now, that I am not doing my usual sort of review here. This is partly because, being a multi-award winning Barbara Kingsolver novel, Demon Copperhead has already been written about ad infinitum, and partly because I wanted to tease out my own feelings about such a polarising novel. Yes, I can see – even agree with – some of the criticisms. It’s long and detailed, is didactic in places, and is not what you’d call subtle – rather like Dickens, in fact. However, the power of the story and its accompanying messages, combined with Demon’s utterly captivating voice, got me over the line. Kingsolver, I’d say, does her epigraph proud, whichever way you read it.

* One of my reading group members share an article about this very issue in a January 28 article in The Guardian.

* For a more traditional review of the novel, do check out Brona’s.

Barbara Kingsolver
Demon Copperhead
London: Faber & Faber, 2022
644pp.
ISBN: 9780571376490 (eBook)

Al Campbell, The keepers (#BookReview)

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Al Campbell’s debut novel, The keepers, is a complex and ambitious novel about parenting, specifically about parenting children who are deemed too difficult by society, leaving their mothers, or carers, to survive, or not, as best they can. It’s confronting but, unfortunately, all too real.

That this is its theme is obvious from the novel’s opening page, which is titled “Scrapbook #12”, and comprises a news report from abc.net.au, 23 April 2018 (original here). The lead sentence reads, “special needs group pays tribute to 11yo boy with autism killed by train after escaping from respite care”. I remember this case.

We are then launched into the main storyline, which concerns Jay, a mother and full-time carer for her twin autistic sons, Frank and Teddy, and features a cast of other characters, some real, like her unsupportive husband Jerrik, and some imaginary, mainly her childhood “friend”, Keep (short for Keeper). Alternated with this storyline, which is told chronologically through time-stamped sections (like “Monday 2:06am” and, later, “4 days till extubation”), is the story of Jay’s childhood, in which she had experienced abuse and neglect at the hands of a grandfather and her dysfunctional mother. These sections are also time-stamped (such as “10 years old, autumn). Interspersed with these are scrapbook entries, like the one opening the novel. They are compiled by Jay, who clips and shares stories about the neglect and, even, murder of children with disabilities. As I said, complex and ambitious.

There is so much to like about this novel, starting with Campbell’s characterisation of Jay and her sons. It’s vivid and empathetic, which is not surprising given her own life experience. Write what you know, authors are told. These people are not her and her sons, but she knows them intimately, and the scenes featuring them shine off the page, even non-verbal Teddy who communicates via iPad, and especially patient, stuttering Frank. I’d love to share some of the interactions between Jay and her sons, because the warmth, the humour, the patience, the imagination make for some great reading and convey some of the joys in their relationship, but I’m not sure they’d work out of context, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Meanwhile, another strength of the novel is Campbell’s energetic, evocative writing. It starts with a bang and rarely lets up. The language is often breathtaking in its ability to capture a moment, a feeling. On the first page after the scrapbook entry, Jay refers to it as “the horror on the page a thing of thorns in my hands” and on the next page, the unsettled night outside is conveyed through a “lone plucky lamppost mooned by wanton whacks of lightning”. She’s talking in these opening pages to the mysterious and shape-shifting Keep, whose “latest incarnation” is “bald as bone and mouthless. No breath of course. Without ears … Some ancient mica, colourless and brittle? … His appearance is rarely the same”. The reader is immediately introduced to one of the meanings of the title, Jay’s “keeper”. Described later as her “poultice and protector, destroyer of others”, Keep has been with her since her difficult childhood. Another meaning is that her two sons, despite what the system might think or suggest, are “keepers” – at least until she is no longer around. What then? This question underpins all that Jay does and feels, and lies just beneath some of the uglier scrapbook items.

But, Campbell, does ask a lot of her readers. The structure is complex, which, on its own, would not be a problem, multiple storylines, after all, not being new. But, there is a lot going on. The exciting but idiosyncratic style, the switches in voice, the sudden appearances of Keep and later “the Other Things”, the shifts in storylines from mother-Jay to youthful-Jay, demand a level of attention that can sometimes get in the way of the story. I’m not convinced, in fact, that Jay’s childhood story – readable and interesting though it is – adds enough. Is it intended as another example of how the system lets children down? If so, I don’t think it’s needed, as Jay’s story with her sons, is powerful enough. Is it intended to contrast her own style of mothering with that of her mother, or to introduce the idea of child abuse? If so, these seem like different stories, and ones that potentially weaken what seems to be her intention to highlight the desperate situation families with special needs children find themselves in.

In other words, Campbell’s main story, as I see it, is a mother’s “warrior” style love for her “different” children, and the system that lets them – the children and the parent/carer – down, again and again. She tells of doctors who refuse to listen or heed, of the social welfare bureaucracy (through the NDIS) with its irrational rules, of schools which can be inflexible, of people in parks and shops who would rather not see her children – and so on. If it’s infuriating for the reader, imagine what it’s like for the parents.

Overall, The keepers is a powerful story that wants us all to understand the life of the carer, the very difficult questions confronting them as they and their children age, and the way the system all too often treats them as lesser or as too hard or as “types” to be slotted into rules and regulations. For Campbell, the personal is the political, and vice versa in fact. She would like to believe there is real truth and commitment to the idea that it takes a village to raise a child, but “some village we turned out to be”, she says to Keep at one point. And right there it occurred to me that this book, despite its flaws, is the sort of thing that should be selected for the Prime Minister’s Summer reading list.

Al Campbell
The keepers
St Lucia: UQP, 2022
336pp.
ISBN: 9780702265488

Rebecca Campbell, Arboreality (#BookReview)

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Arboreality, by Canadian writer Rebecca Campbell, won the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. However, not being much of a speculative fiction reader, I didn’t discover this book through this award. Fortunately, some bloggers I follow, like Bill (The Australian Legend), do follow this genre, and his review convinced me that this climate change dystopian work fits into the sort of speculative fiction that does interest me.

Before I talk about the book, however, a little about the prize. It was established in 2022, in honor of Ursula K. Le Guin, and is currently worth $25,000. It has some specific criteria: it’s an English-language award for a single work of “imaginative fiction”, and intends to honour authors who “can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now”. This last bit is interesting – “real grounds for hope”. It reminds me of the Barbara Jefferis Award, which now seems to be in abeyance, but which was controversial because it stipulated that the winning work had to depict “women and girls in a positive way [my emph] or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”. I don’t believe literature must offer hope or be positive, but I have no problem with awards sponsors making such stipulations.

So now, that out of the way, the book. It is set on Vancouver Island, a beautiful part of the world that I have visited. It’s novella in size, but, structurally, is best described as a collection of six inter-connected short stories:

  • “Special collections”
  • “Controlled burn”
  • “An important failure”
  • “Scion and root stocks”
  • “Pub food”
  • “Cathedral arboreal”

These stories are presented more or less chronologically, starting with the first two stories being set in the very near future (up to around 2050) with the last encompassing 2100. They are linked in various ways – by location; by characters (encompassing family and friends, ancestors and descendants, over time); and, as you’d expect, given the title, by trees, particularly but not exclusively, the arbutus and its mutant version, the golden arbutus. Each story focuses on a specific issue or idea and plays it out through personal stories, such as an academic saving books from a “crumbling” library (“Special collections”); a suburbanite trying to revive a devastated garden with local plants, as one-by-one his neighbours leave (“Controlled burn”); a luthier hunting for seasoned tonewood, via the black market if necessary, to make a Cremona-worthy violin (“An important failure”). These highly personalised stories are placed in context, through the addition of another voice – an omniscient narrator, in italicised sections – which conveys the wider ecological, economic and political picture. We see the land change through fire and rising sealevels; we hear of space colonisation; we learn of pandemics. It’s cleverly done, and although it requires concentration, I was more than willing to go with it because the vision Campbell presents is compelling in its awful believability. That, I think, is what telling a near-future story can achieve. It’s hard to pretend it won’t happen.

“What are we going to do?”

What makes this book so beautiful, however, is the way Campbell manages convey both absolute horror alongside a sense of hope born of human ingenuity, resilience, and sheer doggedness. Jude and Berenice, fighting a losing battle in their mission to save books, must constantly downgrade their expectations, which means becoming more and more selective about what is saved (and therefore also what is lost to human knowledge), but they don’t give up, and these books are seen in 2100. Similarly, Bernard, in his now empty suburb where gardens have died due to a watering ban, doggedly works to find plants that will live in his and neighbouring gardens, which we see, a few generations later in “Cathedral Arboreal”, has become a forest. And Mason’s “secret history” violin also appears in this last story in another generation. These people will not let go even though they are very aware of what has been lost, of what they have lost.

We’ve lived here for ten thousand years. Someone survived everything history threw at them, the fires and tsunamis, the earthquakes, the smallpox, the settlers. Empire. Capitalism. Someone’s going to survive this. (Benno, c. 2071, in “Scions and Root Stocks”)

The ecological story Campbell tells, alongside the human one, is fascinating, albeit probably more challenging to those of us who don’t know the plants of the region and their significance – the garry oak, the arbutus, the camas (lily), fireweed, Douglas fir, and so on. I know some of the plants she names, but I don’t know their particular role in the culture, their horticultural essence and value, or their symbolic meaning (if any any). Some I looked up, and some I didn’t, but certainly Campbell’s story is rich with interconnections here too, between past, present and future, and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous practices.

One of the meanings of “arboreality” is “of, relating to, or resembling a tree” which makes it a good literal title for a book in which trees stand for so much that is important to life – ecologically, culturally, and psychologically. But Campbell is also, perhaps, playing with the “sheltering” notion implied in “arbor” and “reality”.

The Ursula K. LeGuin Prize’s selection panel wrote:

Arboreality is a eulogy for the world as we know it. Rebecca Campbell’s extraordinary, deeply felt book explores the difficulties of the long hard project of survival. There are no heroes or villains here—only people making brave, difficult choices, out of hope and love for their community, for art, knowledge, and beauty. Arboreality imagines things that we haven’t yet considered about what can and will go wrong with our gardens, libraries, and archives if we don’t act now (maybe even if we do). In her masterful and profoundly ethical stories, Campbell asks us what might be saved, what must be saved, and what it will take to do so. 

‘What are we going to do?” asks Jude in the opening story, “Special collections”. Well might he ask. Arboreality is an astonishing book because of the way it imagines the dire, with all its attendant griefs, side-by-side with survival (and its attendant, hope). This makes it a bit discombobulating because we are constantly surprised by what happens next. The world is not beautiful, and life is tough, but people are surviving and working their way through what life has thrown at them. I don’t imagine Campbell intends us to think, “it’s alright then, let’s continue along our merry, destructive ways” but more that when (because we are, it seems, past “if”) we are confronted with the worst, humans can, and hopefully will, find ways through. The question is: is this the future we want?

Rebecca Campbell
Arboreality
Hamilton, Ca: Stelliform Press, 2022
128pp.
ISBN: 9781777682330 (eBook)

William Trevor, The hill bachelors (#Review)

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Well, Kim (Reading Matters) and Cathy’s (746 Books) “A year with William Trevor” project is all but over, and I’ve only done one post – on the titular story in the little The dressmaker’s child collection. The second story, “The hill bachelors” (as in bachelors living in the hills), was first published in his collection titled The hill bachelors.

William Trevor (1928-2016), as most of you will know, is an Irish writer of novels and novellas, short stories and plays. He is particularly good at writing about marginalised people, or those who are loners or outsiders, and writes authentically about them, regardless of their age or gender. “The hill bachelors” is another of these, though perhaps more a variation on the theme. Is the protagonist Paulie marginalised? In a sense perhaps? Is he a loner or outsider? Again, it depends on how you see him, and the choices he makes.

Trevor is one of those writers who lets the reader work out who’s who, what’s what, as we go. The first two paragraphs of this story describe a 68-year-old woman, wearing mourning clothes, waiting for “them” who will decide her future. Very little is overtly explained, but by the end of the second paragraph, we know that she has worked hard and got on with whatever life has thrown at her – and, it seems, she will continue to do so with a calm resignation.

Then, we are introduced to a man we come to realise is her 29-year-old son, Paulie. He is coming for his father’s funeral/wake. He is the youngest of five children, and had not had a good relationship with his “hard” father. It soon becomes apparent that the mother expects the children to work out what will happen to her now – and what will happen to her now, as soon becomes apparent, is that Paulie will return to the family farm. After all, “he was the bachelor of the family”, and his job as a lorry driver “wasn’t much”. However, to do this he will have to give up the woman he loved as she is not interested in a farm life.

While he is working out his notice back in town, his mother is helped by neighbours, the bachelor Hartigan and his sister. It is this sister who introduces the idea of the hill bachelors. She suggests that Paulie would not want to come back because

“It’s bachelors that’s in the hills now. Like himself,” Miss Hartigan added, jerking her bony hand in the direction of the yard, where her brother was up on a ladder, fixing a gutter support.
“Paulie’s not married either, though.”
“That’s what I’m saying to you. What I’m saying is would he want to stop that way?”

Seeing bewilderment in Paulie’s mother’s face, she goes on to explain that “the bachelors of the hills found it difficult to attract a wife to the modest farms they inherited”.

And so Paulie comes back. He “harboured no resentment … it was not the end of the world”. What was “the end of the world”, however, was hearing the woman he loved say that life on a farm did not attract her. He works hard, and he starts dating local women, but Miss Hartigan seems to have known whereof she spoke.

The story is told third person, through the alternating perspectives of the mother and Paulie. We hear what the the rest of the family thinks, or has done, mostly through Paulie’s and his mother’s thoughts and assumptions, through their deep knowledge of how their family works and of the rural traditions within which they live. There is a little dialogue, but not much. Paulie and his mother are both “types” and yet quietly individualised too.

There’s no big drama in this story, just ordinary people making the decisions that seem right at the time. Paulie’s mother is not unkind or demanding. Indeed, she offers to move in with a married daughter, and, in a little revelatory moment, Trevor lets on that she’d shed some private tears in her early days on the farm. She would do her best to make it easy for a new wife, unlike her own experience. However, marriage to a man from the hills has taught her passivity, to do what she’s told, so she resigns herself – as we are led, from the opening paragraphs, to expect she’d do – to see out her lot. Paulie, too, seems resigned, like his mother, to play out the role set for him, even if it means joining the titular hill bachelors.

All this makes it a far more complex story than it might seem on the surface. It means that, as much as we’d like to, it’s hard to see Paulie as a victim, because he does have a choice, difficult though it may be. But the pull of tradition and responsibility is strong, and while Paulie is aware of what is happening to him, he is resigned to it. Ultimately, as he himself realises, “guilt” and “goodness” have nothing to do with it, it just is what it is, “enduring, unchanging” – and he is not going to buck it.

Trevor thus leaves it for us to think about – to think what the different choices might mean for his mother, for Paulie, and, more widely, for the rural way of life that, regardless of their decisions or their own thoughts about it, does seem to be on its way out. It is up to us readers to ponder the bigger picture, to wonder where that will get him, them or the farm. After all, if he doesn’t marry, what will happen? In continuing their rural traditions, will anything be ultimately achieved, or will this be another sad little life?

Cathy (746 Books) has reviewed the collection.

William Trevor
“The hill bachelors”
in William Trevor, The dressmaker’s child
London: Penguin Books, 2005
pp. 21-39
ISBN: 9780141022536
(First published in The hill bachelors, 2000)

Claire Keegan, So late in the day (#BookReview)

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In her final Novellas in November post, Cathy (746 Books) wrote about Claire Keegan’s short story “So late in the day”, and included an online link to the story. Having not read any of Keegan’s writing, to that point, and feeling the lack, I pounced – and was not disappointed.

“So late in the day” is a beautifully observed story told through the eyes of a man named Cathal. In it, he reflects on his relationship with a woman, Sabine, whom we come to realise is no longer around. Why? The story starts by encouraging us to empathise with him. His work colleagues seem worried about him, and his boss encourages him to go home early. The opening paragraph contains hints of things being a little awry or disturbed. It’s gloriously subtle. Every word carries weight, which makes the reading pure pleasure as you ponder just what the straightforward-sounding words and sentences are really signifying.

Life is clearly discombobulated for Cathal. For example, as he makes his way home, we are told:

For no particular reason, a part of him doubted whether the bus would come that day, but it soon came up Westland Row and pulled in, as usual.

The “for no particular reason” is telling, because there is a reason he feels uncertain, albeit we don’t know it yet, and his unawareness of why he feels this way is part of the issue.

So, the bus comes, and he finds himself sitting next to a woman who seems to want to talk. Hmm… he’s not happy. Soon, however, she turns to her book, The woman who walked into doors. Now, it’s a rare writer who inserts books into their stories randomly, but I didn’t know this book, so off I went to the internet and very quickly found that it is by Roddy Doyle. The Guardian quotes him on why he wrote this book which features a pre-existing character of his: “I had to give Paula a chance to explain why: why she married this man in the first place, and why she stayed with him.”

Gradually, then, the penny drops, but oh so slowly, because Keegan’s story is told from a man’s point of view, and this man is so woebegone, so clueless.

This is the sort of writing I like, writing that challenges the reader to work a bit, to read between the lines and not jump to simplistic responses. Cathal is an unreliable narrator. He does not see the whole truth, but Keegan draws out, from his own mouth, exactly what has happened, so that it all becomes clear to us, the reader, while he remains locked in his cluelessness.

There’s another challenge for the reader, though, besides sussing out what has happened, and it’s to do with how we feel. We start by feeling sympathy for him. He’s sad and lonely. But, as he talks about Sabine, a picture builds up. He is the more passive one in the relationship, but more than that, he is the taker. She organises the outings. She cooks, though he does grudgingly clean up, resenting the mess she makes. She’s generous, doesn’t “mind the cost” of nice food, spending “freely” at the markets, while he either tots up costs or, when he’s paying, makes mean choices. When he proposes to her, it’s devoid of romance. Is he emotionally repressed, and should we continue to feel for him, or is something else going on?

Quite late in the story, in a telling flashback, he remembers an occasion from his childhood. His brother had played a nasty trick at the dinner table on their nearly sixty-year-old mother, and instead of remonstrating with him the father joins the laughter. In this anecdote, and his reaction to it, we see the depth of his disconnect in how to relate to a woman, which adds to our growing awareness of an ungenerous, self-centredness in him. He doesn’t know how to give. There are occasional glimmers of awareness, but by the end, when we know exactly why he is so sad, why this day is so hard for him, we are left wondering what to think about him. Can he change? Or, more to the point, does he realise he needs to change? Does he fully comprehend the depth of his failure?

The French-translated title for this story is Misogynie, which makes no bones about its over-riding theme, but I like the subtlety, the multi-layered meanings behind “So late in the day”. To tease that out here, however, really would spoil the story for any of you wanting to read it.

Meanwhile, I’ll share this from early in the story. As Cathal is leaving work, we are told

He would ordinarily have taken out his mobile then, to check his messages, but found that he wasn’t ready—then wondered if anyone ever was ready for what was difficult.

Good question, but it doesn’t augur well for our narrator’s development does it?

An absolute gem of a story.

Claire (Word By Word) also liked it.

Claire Keegan
“So late in the day”
in The New Yorker, 28/2/2022

Available online at The New Yorker.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List, 2023

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December is when I start my round of regular end-of-year posts, and a new one I’m adding to the fold is the The Grattan Institute’s annual Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List. The institute is an Australian non-aligned, public policy think tank, which produces readable, reasoned reports on significant issues, like, most recently, the role of hyrdrogen in Australia’s green energy goals and an analysis of the keenly awaited review of the NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme).

My focus here, though, is another activity of theirs, their Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List, which they have published annually since 2009. This list, as they wrote on the inaugural 2009 list, comprises “books and articles that the Prime Minister, or any Australian interested in public debate, will find both stimulating and cracking good reads”.

As I wrote in last year’s post, the Institute’s then chief executive, Danielle Wood, said they aimed

to pick books that have something interesting, original, or thought-provoking to say on issues that are relevant to the Australian policy landscape. The books don’t have to be by local writers or about Australia … but they do have to address issues that have relevance in an Australian policy context.

I managed to read, after the event, two of last year’s list, Debra Dank’s We come with this place (my review) and Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow (my review). Dank’s is an obvious choice, but I love they they also chose something quietly, and perhaps even enigmatically, reflective about life and change in Au’s book.

Here is the 2023 list in their order, with a small excerpt from their reasoning:

  • Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life (on my reading group’s 2024 schedule, Brona’s review): “People don’t become invisible by accident … a powerful case study of the hidden lives of wives whose contributions are downplayed or entirely disregarded”
  • Ellen van Neerven, Personal score: “highlights the disproportionate impact of a changing climate on Indigenous people, the importance to Aboriginal health of story and being heard, and the complexity of gender and belonging, on and off the field. A new and transformative piece of sports writing … an essential read for anyone wanting to better understand sport, community, and power on sovereign land”.
  • Mark Considine, The careless state: Reforming Australia’s social services: “Australia’s social services are doing a bad job of looking after people … impressively summarises the problems, explains how we got here, and shows that what may seem like separate problems have many shared roots”. 
  • Micheline Lee, Lifeboat: Disability, humanity, and the NDIS (Quarterly Essay 91, September 23): “describes how the NDIS’s disempowering, confusing, and bureaucratic processes have worn out the trust of people with disability and their families … [yet] there is a warming tone of optimism running through Lee’s analysis”.
  • Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why government is failing in the digital age and how we can do better: “Technology is the front door to many government services … But too often, the design of online services is an afterthought, and users are left to grapple with lengthy, confusing, and duplicative processes … [and] bad design can entrench inequalities … “a compelling call to arms for better design and delivery of government services”.
  • Henry Dimbleby and Jemima Lewis, Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape: “explores the complex machinations of modern food systems … details how our food choices are influenced by the industries that make our food, and the environment that surrounds us … shows how our decisions about what foods to put in our shopping baskets are subtly but constantly influenced by a vast food system. The consequences are rarely good for us, our health, or our planet”.

So, one biography, one part memoir-history-poetry, an essay, and three specific-issue-focused non-fiction works, with four by Australians, one by an American, and one from the UK. It’s good to see a First Nations author here again, and to see important issues – like disability, the challenges of the digital age, and modern food systems – front and centre in the Institute’s thinking.

I would, of course, love to see a greater recognition of the value of fiction to addressing “issues that have relevance in the Australian policy context”. Fiction has been included in the past, but not often. I wrote a little about some of their choices last year. We don’t know whether the relevant prime minister reads the suggestions, but some thoughtful or provocative fiction might be better summer reading for our poor top politician needing some break?

I could suggest Chris Flynn’s short story collection, Here be Leviathans (my review), and Carmel Bird’s Love letter to Lola (my review), to fill that bill. Short stories are perfect for busy people, and these two collections are entertaining but also offer some real meat in terms of thinking about various issues confronting humanity, including the environment and environmental destruction. Also Tony Burke made a good point about Paddy O’Reilly’s Other houses (Lisa’s review) which was shortlisted for this year’s Prime Minister’s literary awards and which is about a group of people we rarely read about, cleaners. Surely a book about the working life, that is, the battlers, the people whom journalists and politicians this year have constantly pointed out are “doing it tough”. Fiction about such lives would be perfect for our PM.

You can see all the lists, by year, to date at these links: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.

If you had the opportunity to make one book recommendation to the leader of your country, what would it be?

Holly Throsby, Clarke (#BookReview)

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My reading group’s last book of the year, Holly Throsby’s third novel, Clarke, was a popular end-of-year choice. It’s a straightforward but compelling read that was inspired by a story we were all across, the Lynette Dawson story. Inspired, though, is the operative word, as Clarke is not Lynette Dawson’s story.

For a start, while Clarke’s missing woman disappears in the same decade as Lynette, the 1980s, Throsby’s story is set in a different location (a regional town not a capital city) with a different sort of husband (a physiotherapist, not a teacher). Further, there is some sort of resolution a few years, not forty years, later. This was a wise choice by Throsby. It decouples the story from Lynette Dawson, which encourages us to see it as part of a bigger story. And, setting it in a smaller environment lets Throsby explore regional town life. This latter is one of the strengths of the book.

The novel opens with fifty-something Barney being visited by the police at the house he is renting. They have a warrant to excavate the backyard as the result of their having received new information concerning the disappearance of Ginny Lawson five years previously. Clarke tracks this new police investigation through the eyes of the neighbourhood, primarily Barney, his next-door neighbour Leonie, and Dorrie and Clive across the road. Leonie, Dorrie and Clive all knew Ginny and believe her husband Lou, now living in Queensland, is implicated. They have wanted this investigation ever since Ginny disappeared, but the police at the time weren’t much interested in missing women.

The main joy in reading the novel comes from Throsby’s handling of the relationships between her characters, and the way she conveys how neighbours and communities chat or gossip about and try to second-guess situations like these. They phone each other, visit each other, talk over the fence, and discuss it with their workmates. It’s so realistic, you can hear yourself doing the same over similar scenarios.

It’s a fundamentally tough story – a disappeared wife with its hints of domestic abuse, among other griefs – but Throsby handles it with a light touch, including occasional black humour. Here, for example is Leonie talking to her workmates about some concrete in Barney’s backyard that the police are now excavating. It’s clear that it had been a topic of conversation at the time of the disappearance:

The suspicious concrete’, said Varden.
‘Yes, because that’s what you do when your wife and the mother of your child has just disappeared’, said Leonie. ‘You landscape.’

There is also some subtle wordplay. For example, Ginny’s husband Lou’s “disturbing the dirt and who knows what else” in his back yard after his wife’s disappearance mirrors the disturbance felt by the neighbours. And there are some wonderful descriptions, like Leonie’s on her tricky relationship with her mother: “Leonie remembered the warmth of her mother as a heady storm that blew in fast but never stayed long”. Or on sad Barney: “His skin was kind of grey and rough and reminded Leonie of an egg carton”.

“It would be fantastic to be able to choose one’s memories. It would make life so much more bearable.” (Barney)

There are, as I hinted above, other layers to the the narrative besides the disappeared-Ginny plot line. Barney is no longer living with his wife Deb (but why?) and Leonie has her four-year-old nephew Joe living with her (why too?). Both people, it’s clear, are dealing with some sort of grief. Throsby drip-feeds us their backstories as we get to know them, and as they get to know each other. Dorrie, across the road, provides a voice of reason for Leonie, while also engaging in the neighbourhood speculations about Ginny.

I’ll leave the narrative there, and move onto the form. Clarke is fundamentally a crime story or mystery, but it doesn’t fit those genre expectations. It’s a cold case, but the criminal investigation occurs in the background. There is no protagonist detective, and we only meet the police through their interactions with the main characters. There is, admittedly, an element of the amateur-sleuth cosy-mystery going on. Our main characters do a little of their own “amateur surveillance”, as Barney calls it, and we would, of course, like to know what happened to Ginny. But, the main focus is on what is going on for Barney and Leonie, personally, and whether they will resolve the griefs in their lives that are holding them back. It reminded me of that idea that if you scratch just beneath the surface of most people’s lives you will find a sadness or tragedy.

So, my overall assessment? I thoroughly enjoyed the read. Throsby’s language, excellent characterisation, and authentic evocation of suburban 80s-90s Australia made it a compelling read. However, the twist near the end felt a bit forced, and the ending is a bit neat, albeit there was some restraint. Generally, I prefer edgier books, books that keep me thinking about where they are going. With Clarke, I wondered about what happened to Ginny, whether we’d find out, and whether a relationship would develop between Leonie and Barney, but it didn’t, for example, delve deeply into the fundamental issues that brought about the situation in the first place. As a result, it called more on my emotions than my mind, and I do like both.

Nonetheless, Clarke is an enjoyable read – and I’d happily recommend it to readers looking for generous stories about real people grappling with life’s challenges.

Holly Throsby
Clarke
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2022
346pp.
eISBN: 9781761185540

Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize 2023 Winning Books Launch with Conversation

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I have written about Finlay Lloyd’s 20/40 Publishing Prize a few times now, so I hope I’m not imposing too much on your precious time. However, this weekend was the launch here in Canberra, and it involved a conversation led by a favourite Canberra journalist, Virginia Hausseger, with the two winning authors. I had to go.

The participants

Rebecca Burton and Kim Kelly are the two winners, and I’ve introduced them before, so just to recap, Burton is an editor and author of two young adult novels, while Kelly is also an editor and the author of twelve adult historical fiction novels.

Virginia Hausseger is, to use Wikipedia’s description, an “Australian journalist, academic advocate for gender equity, media commentator and television presenter”. She is well-known to Canberra audiences, having been our local ABC news presenter from 2001 to 2016.

Julian Davies did the introductions. He is the inspiring publisher and editor behind Finlay Lloyd, a company he runs with great heart and grace (or so it seems to me from the outside.)

The conversation

Before the conversation started proper, Julian provided some background to the prize. Human nature, he said, seems drawn to large things. Why else would we have things like the Big Potato! What is it about large things? He sees it related to the “tussle between quality and quantity” and thinks there’s something problematic in our tendency to admire the grand and overlook the miniature. (Yes!) He believes restrictions can liberate writers, and sees the novella form as perfect for this. It can encourage succinctness while allowing room for development. I don’t expect he had any argument about that in the room.

He reminded us that it was judged blind (by two old men and three young women). That it was won by published writers shows that those who have developed their craft are likely to shine through.

Then, Virginia took over …

On their novellas

Kim described her novella with beautiful succinctness saying it was set in 1922 Sydney in the wake of World War 1, just as the city was starting to wake up. It’s about grief, and about how recognising pain in the other leads to the young women rescuing each other. She added a little later that many novels have been written about the War, but not so many about after it, and even fewer about young women’s experience of that time.

She has written three novellas, and “kind of” knows at the beginning which form the story will be. The impetus for this one was wanting to impress a potential PhD supervisor. While researching Trove she saw the ad for the Room (which she included as an epigraph.) Virginia remarked that the closing pages set up a whole new story.

Rebecca said that hers was about two teenage sisters over six weeks of summer in 1986. The old sister, who is anorexic, has been admitted to hospital for bed-rest, and the younger sister visits her daily. It’s about what the sisters learn about each other, and the impact of this condition on the family.

She said that she hadn’t set out to write a novella, but she is comfortable with a word length which is shorter than the standard novel. Then she saw the prize! Writing adult fiction is a new genre for her, but she had stopped reading YA fiction and adores literary fiction. A friend suggested that she write what she reads. Sounds good advice to me.

On Ladies Rest and Writing Room

Kim explained that rest and writing rooms “were a thing” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for men and women. What is special about hers is that it was in a department store, and how it was advertised.

Dotty’s grief comes out in shopping addiction and behaving as though she had a death wish. She is so tied up in herself that she doesn’t notice her old schoolmate Clarinda. The book is built around the moment of recognition, that is, when Dotty “sees” Clarinda.

When Virginia commented on how well the “story gallops along” while still being “tight, descriptive, elegant”, Kim said that was the “magic of editorial process”. Also, she said, she knows that Sydney well.

On Ravenous girls

Answering where her story came from, Rebecca said that it was a story she had to write. Frankie had been with her for a long time, and a story about her childhood kept coming to her. The trickiness was not so much the 1986 summer story, but managing the way the time telescopes at the end. She wanted to nod at the years that go by after someone comes out of hospital.

When Virginia commented on how well she’d handled the scene of another girl post-hospital, providing an alternative glimpse of how it goes, Rebecca said she wanted to tell other stories because every story is different.

Young Frankie loves her sister, but is bewildered. An enlightening moment for her is when she realises that sister Justine is the only one allowed to suffer, that her own pain is not seen. She realises that the story she’s been told is not right. Hers is a story of loss, grief, sadness. She’s left to her own resources, and because her older sister is sick, she’s left with no role model.

As for Justine, she uses hunger to mute her desires. Rebecca said that her working title was Yearn, and quoted that great line from the novella, “I don’t want to want the things I want”. Justine feels shame for wanting things, and so starves herself for wanting them.

On the physical process of writing

Kim throws her whole self into a new project, trying to get it all down before she loses her emotional or imaginative connection. Then she goes away, coming back some time later to a “full tub of play dough” that she can then mould. She is able to quarantine the time to work this way because as a freelancer she can manage her time. She loves to be free to fly through the story.

Rebecca has a very different more measured process. She works part-time to a set roster, so has a “chipping away” process. Since her new job, she has created a ritual involving getting up an hour earlier than usual, making a cup of tea and writing for an hour. This helps her manage the peaks and troughs that happen with writing. If things go badly she can get up and go away, leaving it for the next time, and if they go well, she can get up feeling good! It’s important for her not to get obsessed with writing.

On the editing process

Rebecca said for her it went structural edit, then copy edit, then the final proofread. The delight of working with small publisher was that time was allowed for growth.

Kim seconded Rebecca’s comment about the delight of working with Julian, who “cares about words and ideas”. In her worklife as commercial fiction editor, time is of the essence, so she luxuriated in the “nurturing” experience of working with Julian.

On what’s next

Kim’s next project is her PhD, which will include a story about an ancestral grandfather who intersects with Dickens. It’s an idea she has had for a long time, but she will need to try Rebecca’s “chipping away” approach for this!

Rebecca has these characters in head, and wants to see these young girls into adulthood. This could mean three related novellas, the next set in 1993 with Justine in recovery and in her first relationship. She wants to explore recovery because some never move beyond “functional recovery”. The third book she’d like to be about Frankie in her 30s or 40s to see how things have worked out for her. Some of these futures are hinted at in Ravenous girls.

Virginia was an excellent, well-prepared and enthusiastic interviewer. She knew the books well and showed genuine interest in them and their authors.

There was no Q&A which suited me, as I had to rush off to get to my monthly Jane Austen meeting where we were to discuss the up-and-comers in Austen’s novels. However, I did have a very brief chat, as I was leaving, with the other “old man” judge, John Clanchy whose writing I love and who had commented on my recent novella post. He talked about his interest in the form and the choices writers need to make when working within it, such as which characters or stories to develop and which to leave by the wayside.

The Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize Winning Books of 2023 Launch
Harry Hartog Booksellers, Kambri Centre, ANU
Saturday, 18 November, 12.30-1.30pm

Kim Kelly, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (#BookReview)

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Early in the month I reviewed the first of the two winners of Finlay Lloyd’s inaugural 20/40 Publishing Prize, Rebecca Burton’s Ravenous girls (my review). It was set in Sydney in the 1980s. Now, as promised, I bring you the other winner, Kim Kelly’s Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room. It is also set in Sydney, but in the early 1920s. Some of you will know Kim Kelly, as she has published around 12 novels, mostly historical fiction. Not only that but she was longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize 2022 and shortlisted for the Viva La Novella 2021 prize with her novella, The rat catcher: A love story.

So, she has written novellas, before. A check on her GoodReads page revealed others, including what I think is her best known book, Wild chicory. So, she, like Rebecca Burton, is comfortable with the novella form (or length).

Finlay Lloyd describes the book on their website like this:

Two young women, brought up to expect conventional lives, are thrown together in unexpected circumstances. Each has suffered a devastating loss that challenges their belief in life and themselves. It’s rare to come across a work of deep psychological insight conveyed with such verve and lightness of touch.

As I said in my opening paragraph, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room is set in 1920s Sydney. The title is explained in the first of two epigraphs. It comes from an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald, in 1922, for the Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room in Farmer’s department store. This “artistic room” was intended as a place of respite for busy shopping ladies. It was also where they could also write any “urgent notes” for “the very next mail”. Writing facilities were provided for the purpose. The room was, of course, intended for the well-heeled, as you paid a “nominal charge of 8d.” to avail yourself of its charming “rose shades”. The second epigraph comes from Sappho, which might or might not tell you something!

The story is told in from alternating third person perspectives of two young women. One is the apparently entitled Dotty, who comes from a wealthy business family and who uses the Room in the opening chapter. She is introduced, however, on the street outside where she plays chicken with a tram every Tuesday on her way to Farmer’s and its titular room. Why does she do this? We soon come to understand the pain this young woman, who seems on the outside to have it all, is dealing with. And it’s to do with World War 1, if you haven’t already guessed from the time setting.

The other young woman is down-on-her-luck Clarinda, who has just started work as the Room’s attendant. She went to school with Dotty, but Dotty, in her grief, doesn’t notice her, which doesn’t surprise Clarinda after her shooldays’ experiences with Dotty. Clarinda has her own sadness, partly stemming from losses in the War, but also from the fact that due to her father’s tragic death she and her mother are now on the proverbial hard times.

The narrative takes place over a few weeks encompassing Christmas, and comes to a head when Dotty’s pain becomes too much for her, resulting in a crisis in the Corset Salon (next door to the Ladies Rest and Writing Room). Clarinda steps in to protect Dotty, and, through what ensues, both young women grow. Clarinda treats Dotty with compassion and forgiveness, while Dotty wakes up to sadnesses in others.

What I most enjoyed about the book is its evocation of post WW1 1920s Sydney. Kim Kelly knows the place and the time well, and, despite the shortness of the novella form, she vividly captures a city and people in flux – the grief of wartime loss, the changing workforce as men return home after the war, the increasing migration, the excitement of change in the air, but with old social values and class structures still in place.

Clarinda, for example, was grateful for having finally landed a decently paid job:

It certainly beat unreliable casual waitressing at three shillings a luncheon, or three and six per dinner service, or sixty hours per week as a shop assistant at considerably less than two pounds, both of which she’d done, piecing together a living. All the better paying more respectable clerical positions for which she was qualified, were being given to returned soldiers, and that was fair enough, except that nothing fair had happened for Clarinda since her brothers were ripped from this life and …

So much is told in these words.

Kelly is also adept at characterisation, creating two well-differentiated characters in Dotty and Clarinda. They immediately come to life on the page, which is particularly important in a novella where there’s no time to waste. We care about them both, because we are privy to what’s going on for them, and thus to their isolation, even if those around them aren’t.

The writing and plotting are assured. Kelly is clearly experienced in writing historical fiction where description and rhetorical language are used to create the sort of atmosphere and tone needed to drive a plot forward. Kelly does this very well, and I quickly became engrossed in these two girls’ lives. It’s a novella that wears its heart on its sleeves, and I wondered at times whether some pulling back might have challenged us readers to delve into more of the complexities, and maybe leave us with more questions than answers. But, that would have been a different book. As it is, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room is beautifully accessible and will hopefully attract more people to the novella form. It and Ravenous Girls would make excellent stocking stuffers for busy readers in your lives. And I don’t mean this condescendingly! I am referring to their perfect stocking-stuffer size!

As with all Finlay Lloyd books, the design is gorgeous, with an appealing monochromatic cover featuring a woman’s hands writing a letter. Very different to your usual historical fiction cover.

Ladies Rest and Writing Room is a good read about a significant and complicated time in our history. Like Ravenous girls, it is a compassionate book, this one about navigating deep loss and the grief that attends it, and, even more, about the importance of generosity in dealing with others. I wish these two books well and thank Finlay Lloyd for sponsoring such an appealing, targeted prize.

Read for Novellas in November. Lisa (ANZ Litlovers) and Theresa (Theresa Smith Writes) have reviewed both winners in one post, but I have done them separately.

Kim Kelly
Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2023
122pp.
ISBN: 9780994516596

Chris Hammer in conversation with Jack Heath

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Apologies for those of you expecting a Monday Musings. I did think about it, as this conversation turned out to be a bit of a Chris Hammer retrospective so it could have worked as one of my Monday Musings spotlight-on-an-author post. However, after considering my options, I decided to call this post what it is, a report of an author event. It was held at the wonderful Muse Canberra, a restaurant-cum-bookshop or vice versa, where co-owner Dan did the introductions before passing the baton to Jack Heath to conduct the conversation.

The participants

Chris Hammer is a multi-award-winning local Canberra author, who worked for 30 years as a journalist, during which he also published two nonfiction books. Since 2018, when he was 58, he has written six bestselling crime novels. (If he’d been around when I wrote my Late Bloomers post in 2011, he would have qualified – as the only man!) His first three novels (Scrublands, Silver, and Trust) feature the journalist Martin Scarsden, with the next three (Treasure and dirt, The tilt, and The seven) featuring a detective duo, Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan. The seven was the official subject of the conversation.

Jack Heath is also a local writer – of fiction for children/young adults and adults. He is definitely not a late bloomer, having published his debut novel, The lab, in 2006, when he was 20. Since then he has written around 40 science fiction and crime novels. His new book, Kill your husbands, is coming out now.

From these intros, I think you’ll be able to work out who’s who in the pic!

The conversation

I loved that Jack launched straight in, with little of the usual pleasantries. It was clear that they were comfortable with each other, which is probably not surprising, both being Canberra-based crime writers.

On moving from nonfiction to fiction 

Although his first novel only came out five years ago, Chris said that fiction had always been a passion. Like many writers, he has in his drawer a very bad one he wrote in his 20s (that will never see the light of day – unless, joked Jack, you don’t destroy it and your literary executor thinks otherwise! We all know some of those examples.) Chris said he didn’t have the talent or attention span for fiction when he was young, so he turned to journalism, but persistence pays off.

On dramatic openings

The seven starts with a bizarre death. Is this his modus operandi, Jack wondered. Chris’s answers to this and the next question were fantastic, taking us through his novels, and, at the same time, his development as a writer. I’m not sure I’ve ever attended such a lucid discussion of a writer’s oeuvre in one session before.

After giving a sly little plug to the premiere of the Scrublands TV series on Stan later this week, Chris said not all start like that, but most, including Scrublands, do. He finds it works effectively.

However, Scrublands did not start like that. He was six or seven drafts in before he decided to start with a prologue describing the murder. He was learning on the job, he said. The narrative then jumps a year with his journalist investigating the murder on its first anniversary.

With The Seven, the dramatic opening death marks the start of a contemporary story. The homicide detectives arrive. (The murder victim is an accountant. They are good victims, Chris said, because they have secrets. That got a laugh.) Anyhow, the killer is still on loose, so the detectives are in a race against time. But, there are two other storylines: a university student in the 1990s who decides to do his thesis on the history of irrigation (during which he finds some skeletons); letters from an Indigenous girl from 1913. The connection between them all is not clear until near the end.

On his voices

All Chris’ novels are set in Australia, and all but one are rural. Will this always be the case? Further, Scrublands, his debut novel, features a journalist, a bit like himself. It is set in the present, but gradually, through his later books, he has been moving back in time, and diversifying his characters. How did he get into voices that aren’t a middle-aged ex-journalist?

Chris described his development beautifully:

  • Scrublands, the first of his journalist series, has a simple structure, and is told completely chronologically.
  • Silver, the second in the series, has similar trajectory but there are flashbacks.
  • Trust, the third (and currently final) in the series, has two alternating points-of-view.
  • Treasure and dirt, the first of his detective duo (Ivan-Nell) series, has a dramatic prologue (like Scrublands) and alternating points-of-view. The duo start finding crimes in the past, and this got him into some exposition. However, writers are always told to show-not-tell, so in ….
  • The tilt, the second Ivan-Nell book, he decided not to use exposition, which meant needing to create voices from the past. The 1973 voice wasn’t a big stretch since he was alive then, but the 11-year-old boy from World War 2 was a challenge, so he created an old man looking back on his time as an 11-year-old. This novel has multiple (four, I think) points-of-view.
  • The Seven, the third Ivan-Nell book, also has multiple points-of-view from different times, but they include a 15 to 16-year-old Indigenous girl. Before I or anyone could ask the question, Chris said that we need diverse – including Indigenous – characters in books, otherwise it’s terra nullius all over again. But there’s the issue of appropriation, so he decided to tell her story through letters, which, he said, can be unreliable, given people “present” themselves through letters.

Each book, he told us, has built on the experience of the previous books, with the latest ones being “more accomplished”. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are better stories! Jack interrupted, though, with the comment that Chris just keeps getting better and better.

By this point in the session, I felt we were getting gold.

On second-guessing issues of the day

Jack noted that many of his books seem to have second-guessed coming issues of the day (such as reference to Afghanistan war crimes in 2018’s Scrublands, and irrigation corruption in The seven). How did he do it?

Some has been luck, some has come from keeping his ear to the ground (with his journalist friends). For example, rumours were just starting to appear regarding the SAS-Afghanistan war crimes when he was writing Scrublands, so he included that. Given it’s fiction, he didn’t have to be factual. Most of his books are set in rural Australia, where ongoing concerns are climate change and Indigenous dispossession. These are part of The seven. It’s not hard to write his stories, he said, because, given its history, “the Australian continent is a crime scene”. Touché. He added that “Crime writers often touch on matters of societal concern”.

However, the opal mines’ skulduggery in Treasure and dirt he made up, only to be told later that what he’d described really does happen.

On changing his setting

Most of his novels, except for Trust, are set in dying country towns, but The seven’s setting is a beautiful, tidy town. Was he playing against his “type”?

The answer in a single word was No – but he was looking for something new. An earlier novel had featured a lot of water, and he thought water-trading would be good to explore, but not in that book. The town in The seven is fictional, but is based on Leeton, which was planned by Canberra’s Griffins. It has circular layouts and lovely art deco buildings.

On being a nice guy!

Finally, Jack, saying what a nice guy Chris was, offered four reasons: 1. he’s not really nice, but is a villain; 2. he’s so successful, he can afford to be generous; 3. he came to success late, so he realises how lucky he is; and 4. he’s just always been very nice!

Having learnt from his two nonfiction books how hard it is to make a living from writing, Chris considers himself fortunate to be “living the dream”. Scrublands was life-changing, and he is very grateful. He is financially secure and doesn’t have to struggle for that work-life-writing balance that most writers do. Also, Australian crime writers are welcoming and collegial, and – unlike many journalists – have their egos under control!

Q & A

There was a brief Q&A, some of which required knowledge about Hammer’s earlier books.

  • On whether there will be more Ivan and Nell books, or a new tortured detective: The next book is another Ivan one, but he is thinking of bringing journalist Martin back. (The way this questioner started her question made Jack and Chris palpably nervous about spoilers!)
  • On whether he plots carefully: As I’ve heard authors say before, Chris said there are the “plotters” (like Jane Harper) and the “pantsers” (like himself). He has a setting, an idea, and a few plot lines, and then sees how it goes. If he doesn’t know where the plot is going, how can the reader, the implication being this is good in crime writing. He also wants his main character/s to have “skin in the game”. There is usually an emotional storyline, whose trajectory he knows, but the crime plotting is done constantly as he goes.
  • On his “silly” character names, which critics have commented on: If I understood correctly, he said that as he was writing Scrublands, he got a bit bored and created fun names. He feels sheepish about them now as he is stuck with them, the reason being he has many recurring characters, and can’t really have recurring characters with exotic names alongside new ones with plain names. Also, his editors didn’t complain, which they’d do if they disapproved. And, one reader told him that the distinctive names helped her keep track of who’s who.

A wonderfully lively session, one enjoyed also by Mr Gums who has read three of the novels, and bought a fourth from Muse.

Chris Hammer in conversation with Jack Heath
Muse (Food Wine Books)
Sunday, 12 November 2023, 3-4pm