Literature by period

Delicious descriptions: Chinua Achebe’s people and places

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Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart

First edition, from Heinemann (via Wikipedia)

In my recent post on Chinua Achebe’s classic, Things fall apart, I focused mostly on its themes and ideas, which drove the quotes I chose to share. Here I want to show more of his writing, including his wit and use of imagery.

I’ll start with this early description of the protagonist, Okonkwo, who is determined not to be like his failure of a father:

When he walked, his heels hardly touched the ground and he seemed to walk on springs, as if he was going to pounce on somebody. And he did pounce on people quite often. He had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists. He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had had no patience with his father.

At first the phrases “heels hardly touched the ground” and “walk on springs” conjured for me (anyhow) Jesus Christ walking on water, but they’re immediately followed by the very un-Christlike idea of pouncing on people, confirming that the reference is instead to powerful, predatory cats. The “slight stammer” could garner some sympathy from us. We can understand the frustration of not being able to speak fluently, but resolving it with his fists again undercuts the possibility of our sympathy. And the last two sentences! Love them. The economy – and wit – with which he makes the point. And to not respect his father? Unfortunately, for all his determination to not be like his father, to be an admirable man respected by all, he ends up with a son who doesn’t respect him. This is the sort of writing I love, writing that gives with one hand and takes away with another, that requires me to fully engage my brain as I read.

Oh, and the rhythm of this paragraph is lovely too – long sentence, short sentence, then long, followed by short, short. It just reads well.

There’s a lot of lovely imagery – mostly earth and nature related which you’d expect given the book’s setting – but I’ll just share one. It describes Okonkwo’s son Nwoye being tempted by the new (that is, Christian) religion:

But there was a young lad who had been captivated. His name was Nwoye, Okonkwo’s first son. It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul – the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry plate of the panting earth. Nwoye’s callow mind was greatly puzzled.

For an agricultural society, the image of rain on a “panting earth” provides a perfect description of Nwoye’s desperation for comfort.

Other imagery relates to aggression, violence, strength – wrestling, fire, knives – which is reflects the novel’s themes and the character of its protagonist. Again, I’ll just choose one example. It’s short and comes from Part 3 after Okonkwo has returned to his village to find the white man’s arrival has caused a breakdown in village relationships. Obierika says of the white man that:

He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

And with that, Achebe unites the novel’s title, its narrative arc, and the epigraph:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
(from “The second coming”, WB Yeats)

Such a beautifully conceived novel.

Jane Jose, Places women make (Review)

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Jane Jose, Places women make“Places”, Jane Jose writes in her book Places women make, “can lift our spirits and be inclusive, and add surprise, excitement, wonder or some beauty to day-to-day life in the city.” These sorts of places, which are essential to making our cities liveable, rarely just happen. They take planning, and who does this planning? Men. At least, it’s men, says Jose, who have been the “hero architects of most of Australia’s city buildings, leading the design, even if women were invisibly designing the detail behind the scenes.” So, in Places women make, she aims to right this imbalance, to bring to the fore the work women have done in making cities better. This is not, however, a feminist rant. She does not undermine the work done by men. She simply wants women to receive their share of recognition, not just because they deserve it but because it is important for other women – particularly young women – to know.

I had not heard of Jane Jose before reading this book, which proves her point rather because, in fact, she, a self-described urbanist, has been involved in urban planning for well over two decades. She has done this through many roles, including, at one point, Deputy Lord Mayor of Adelaide, her home town. Indeed, one of the fascinating aspects of the book is just how many ways people can contribute to urban planning and improvement. She tells of the obvious people – the architects and town planners – but there are others too, such as the civic leaders and politicians, the landscape designers and gardeners,  the heritage and environmental activists, and the philanthropists. Women – many of them – have performed all these roles, and she shares some of their stories. It’s inspiring reading.

The book is structured thematically, starting with her overall thesis about what women can offer to urban design. This is probably a good place to mention two – hmmm – mantras, I’ll call them, which pervade the book. One is straightforward, and that is, to (mis)use EF Schumacher’s phrase, “small is beautiful”. Although women have been, and are, involved in big projects, it is often in the “small” projects that they make their biggest impacts. Early on, she repeats a leading architect’s criticism of Sydney’s Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore. Jose writes that he

once criticised her to me for having paid too much attention to the small public places and parks in the city rather than driving major projects. He described the small projects she is promoting in the city as being “like tatting”. To my mind this shows a lack of understanding of how women see the small things adding up to a greater whole.

Jose goes on to discuss the projects and ideas Clover Moore has driven, arguing that Moore “understands that community places and activities are the glue in the community” and further, that beautiful, liveable cities “bear the fruit of a strong economy”. I’m not an economist, but there must be some truth to this argument I think. Anyhow, throughout the book, Jose describes many, many small community-focused projects initiated by women, from Wendy Whiteley’s magical Lavender Bay garden to Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Foundation, from Jane Lomax-Smith’s work on protecting Adelaide’s parklands to Tess Brady’s involvement in the creation of Australia’s first booktown at Clunes. Some of these, as you can tell, started small but ended much bigger, which is what happens to good ideas. From little things, big things grow (as Australia’s Paul Kelly sings).

The other mantra or thread is perhaps a little more problematic. It relates to what Jose calls a “feminine sensibility”. She defines this in terms of “creativity … intuition … lateral approach”, as having “a special relationship with community and village life”, and as taking the “long view”. She writes that “we know a female perspective is different from that of a man”. Intuitively – ha! – I understand what she is saying, but from a gender studies or feminist point of view this feels like dangerous ground. However, I’m going with her because her stories are powerful enough to argue her case. Women’s contributions have in general been overlooked or underplayed. Take for example Marion Mahony Griffin, wife of Walter Burley Griffin, credited as Canberra’s designer. It took decades for her part in what was clearly a partnership to be recognised.

What I enjoyed most about the book are the stories about projects, big and small, that women have initiated, some known to me, but many not. I enjoyed reading about Australia’s cities and what local women have fought for in them. This coming week I’ll be in Adelaide, the city where Jose cut her urban planning teeth. She writes about her involvement in the re-visioning of North Terrace and more specifically in activism to save Adelaide’s heritage architecture. I have visited Adelaide several times over the years, but on my visit last year, I was thrilled by how beautiful – and welcoming – it is, particularly North Terrace. We have Jane Jose, forensic pathologist Jane Lomax-Smith, architect Jackie Shannon Gillen, among others, to thank for that.

While her main focus is contemporary Australia, Jose also tells stories from the past. She describes how wives of Australia’s early administrators strongly affected the design of the cities they were in, women like Mrs Macquarie, wife of governor Lachlan Macquarie, and the energetic Lady Jane Franklin, wife of explorer and lieutenant governor of Van Dieman’s land, John Franklin. It is this Jane, in fact, who graces the book’s cover. (I have written about her before on this blog). These women are just two examples of women who, married to influential men, used their influence to affect city planning and design.

In addition to casting her net historically, Jose also crosses the seas. She ends her book with a special tribute to the influential American urbanist Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), who inspired her belief that cities can be villages or communities. But she also refers to other international women, such as American landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, Chilean landscape architect Teresa Moller, and London-based Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid.

What more can I say? Places women make is a fascinating book written by a woman passionate and clearly knowledgeable about her subject. If I have any complaints they are minor, and yet I do need to say them. One is that while she provides a wonderful list, at the end, of the women whose stories she tells, there is no index. I’d love an index. The other is that there are no foot-notes or end-notes documenting her sources, just a brief reading list. These don’t affect the book’s worth as a popular introduction to her subject, but they’d be much appreciated by those of us interested in a little more!

And now, since you can’t really “spoil” a book like this, I’ll end with Jose’s conclusion because it says it all:

Cities matter. They are alive and they change, they are the places we live our lives and make our memories. It takes commitment, imagination and passion to make even the smallest idea for change blossom from an idea into a park, a playground, a library or a shaded street. With the influence of women, cities can be better places. Tomorrow’s children need the places women make.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also enjoyed the book.

awwchallenge2016Jane Jose
Places women make: Unearthing the contribution of women to our cities
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2016
213pp
ISBN: 9781743053942

(Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press)

Frederick Law Olmsted, Trees in streets and in parks (Review)

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I last came across the American landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, a few years ago when I was doing some freelance research for a Canberra 2013 centenary project. This was because Olmsted, who designed New York’s Central Park with Calvert Vaux, inspired Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin, the original designers of Canberra. Now, it just so happens, that my current read is a book by Jane Jose, Places women make, about the contributions women make to the development of cities. In it she talks of Marion Mahoney Griffin, and her role in the design and planning of Canberra, a garden city. So, when a piece by Frederick Law Olmsted titled “Trees in streets and in parks” popped up as last week’s Library of America’s Story of the Week, I decided it was for me.

Frederick Law Olmsted

By James Notman, Boston, 1893, engraving of image later published in Century Magazine (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s a fascinating piece for its insight into nineteenth century thinking about trees, parks and cities. The article was published in a journal called The Sanitarian. He commences by disagreeing with an idea promulgated by French art critic, Charles Blanc, that nature is not beautiful, only design can be so described! Olmsted admits that some trees can be poorly or inappropriately planted or maintained but even those can be – well let him say it

But looking up at the continuous green canopy which these maltreated trunks support, swaying in the light summer breeze against the serene blue beyond—swaying not only with the utmost grace of motion, but with the utmost stately majesty—I say that cheaply, inconsiderately as the planting work was done, if the result is not to be called beautiful, it is only because it has more of sublimity than beauty.

Take that Monsieur Blanc! However, sanitation being his apparent main interest, he moves on to talk about parks and their importance to the “sanitary apparatus of a large town”. Parks are important for providing clean air to city residents. Travellers to London, he writes, had until recently described its myriad parks as ‘“airing grounds,” “breathing places,” “the lungs of London”’. Although times are changing, “the atmospheric theory”of the value of parks still holds strong, he says. For people to benefit from this air, the parks have to be attractive, so trees are planted for their decorative value.

However, it is not for their air-purifying value, nor for a decorative motive, that he plants trees in his parks. His reason doesn’t “interfere with or lessen the value of a park as an airing ground”, but not pursuing decoration as a goal results, he suggests, in a more attractive and less costly park. So, what is his purpose? Well, it has to do with defining “sanitation” more holistically: it’s not just about supporting the body but also encompasses the mind. Yet, he realises,

It is plainly not enough to answer that it is to move the mind recreatively, because that is equally the motive of Punch and Judy, of a flower-garden, of a cabinet of curiosities, of jewelry.

Frederick Olmsted

Portrait of Olmsted, at (the beautiful) Biltmore Estate, 1895, by John Singer Sargent (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Admitting he’s not a scientific expert, he argues that “the recreative and sanative value of large parks” comes from what he describes as an unconscious process. He distinguishes, in other words, between “conscious, or direct recreation, and unconscious, or indirect recreation”. Designing the placement of trees (and other garden objects) to call people “to a halt, and to utter mental exclamations of surprise or admiration” runs counter to this idea of “unconscious recreation”. A park’s highest value lies, rather, in “elements and qualities of scenery” to which the minds of those experiencing them give “little conscious cogitation” at the time. These elements or qualities “are of too complex, subtle and spiritual a nature to be readily checked off, item by item, like a jeweler’s or a florist’s wares”.

He provides an analogy. It’s the difference he says

between the beauty of a common wildflower seen at home, nearby others of its class, peeping through dead leaves or a bank of mossy turf, and that of a hybrid of the same genus, double, of a rare color, just brought from Japan, now first blooming in America, taken from under glass, and shown us in a bunch of twenty, set in an enameled vase against an artfully-managed back-ground.

In other words, coming across a scene, flower, tree unexpectedly and perhaps without even consciously stopping to comment on it, may have “a more soothing and refreshing sanitary influence”. These are the natural, simple pleasures that “cottagers in peasant villagers” have always been able to enjoy. And here he moves to a more political point. With the growth of cities and the development of the rich, with “the prominence given by the press to the latest matters of interest to the rich and the fashion-setting classes”, the problem is that

the population of our country is being rapidly educated to look for the gratification of taste, to find beauty, and to respect art, in forms not of the simple and natural class; in forms not to be used by the mass domestically, but only as a holiday and costly luxury, and with deference to men standing as a class apart from the mass.

This impoverishes us, dissipates tastes that once brought happiness. It’s a very appealing attitude to parks and park-making, though I must say his language is not the most straightforward to read.

The National Association for Olmsted Parks summarises the legacy of Frederick, his sons and their successors as:

The Olmsteds believed in the restorative value of landscape and that parks can bring social improvement by promoting a greater sense of community and providing recreational opportunities, especially in urban environments.

I think this is what you’ll be hearing about again soon, when I review Places women make!

Frederick Law Olmsted
“Trees in streets and in parks”
First published: In The Sanitarian (September 1882).
Available: Online at the Library of America

Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart (Review)

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Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart

First edition, from Heinemann (via Wikipedia)

At last I’ve read that classic of African literature, China Achebe’s Things fall apart. It all came about because this year ABC RN’s classics book club is doing Africa. As I’ve been wanting to read this book for a long time, and as my reading group has been making a practice of choosing one ABC RN bookclub book a year, I recommended Things fall apart and – woohoo – they agreed. I am so happy! OK, so I’m easily pleased, but …

The funny thing is that as I started it, I did wonder what all the acclaim was about. Yes, I was finding the writing gorgeous, and yes, I found all the detail about life in the little Igbo village of Umuofia fascinating, but were these enough for its huge reputation? Then, I got to Part 2 – this is a classic three-part book – and the arrival of white man and the missionaries in southeastern Nigeria. The plot started to thicken – but, not just the plot. The whole gorgeous structure of the novel, its complexity and its sophisticated analysis of human society and the colonial imperative started to become clear.

Here, though, is my challenge – a challenge faced by all bloggers writing about much-analysed classics – what can I add? I haven’t actually read any of the analysis, except for my edition’s introduction, so I risk either going over the same old ground, or heading off on a completely irrelevant tangent, but I’m going to try. And how I’m going to try is to talk about a few of the aspects of the book that stood out to me, which, as is my wont, will focus more on how it is written than with the story itself.

However, I will start with a brief synopsis of the story, just in case there are others out there who haven’t read it. The plot is fairly simple: it tells the story of Okonkwo. Born to an “ill-fated”, “lazy and improvident” man, he decided early in life that he would not be like his father. He becomes a powerful and respected “warrior” in his community, one known to be hardworking but who could also be cruel to his family or to anyone who showed weakness. He is determined to be a “man”, to never show a “female” side. Male-female dichotomies are, in fact, an underlying thread in the novel. Whenever things go wrong for him, his response is always aggressive: if you aren’t confronting a situation head on, you are a “woman”. This inflexibility, his unwillingness to waver from his tough-minded course, results in his downfall. He could be seen I think as a classic tragic hero, as the man who could have been great but for a tragic flaw, an inability to be flexible, an unwillingness to marry his two sides.

This idea of two parts is fundamental to how the novel is structured and how the themes are developed – and Achebe conveys it through dichotomies and parallels. There’s the male-female one, which Okonkwo battles within himself. “When did you become a shivering old woman” he asks himself regarding the distress he feels after engaging in a violent act. Later, he is surprised to hear of a husband who consulted his wife before doing anything:

 ‘I thought he was a strong man in his youth.’ ‘He was indeed,’ said Ofoedu. Okonkwo shook his head doubtfully.

But there are other dichotomies, and two, in particular, that I found interesting. One is between  Okonkwo and his friend Obierika. Both are respected men in the village, and both adhere to their traditions and conventions, but Okonkwo, who is “not a man of thought but of action” is so fearful of appearing weak he follows the “laws” rigidly. Obierika on the other hand is more thoughtful:

Obierika was a man who thought about things. When the will of the goddess had been done, he sat down in his obi and mourned his friend’s calamity. Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offence he had committed inadvertently? But although he thought for a long time he found no answer. He was merely led into greater complexities. He remembered his wife’s twin children, whom he had thrown away. What crime had they committed?

A similar dichotomy is set up between two missionaries:

Mr Brown’s successor was the Reverend James Smith, and he was a different kind of man. He condemned openly Mr Brown’s policy of compromise and accommodation. He saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness.

So, we have dichotomies established within the two cultures he’s describing – the African and colonial/missionary – but these two sets of dichotomies also work as parallels for each other, reflecting the differences, the conflicts in fact, that can occur within both (all) cultures.

Now I get to more uncomfortable ideas. Okonkwo’s tragedy could be seen to mirror Africa’s, but this is a tricky thing to consider. Okonkwo’s flaw we know. Did Africa, likewise, have a flaw or weakness? We criticise colonialism – and surely it is a bad thing, the subjugation of one people by another, the taking of one people’s land by another – and yet … Achebe himself benefited from the education brought by the missionaries, and in Things fall apart he tells us that some Igbo villagers saw positives:

The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umuofia.

Some even saw positives in the religion.

So, Achebe is not uncritical of either side of the colonial equation – the colonisers and the colonised – but his final point in the novel makes clear his attitude to the colonial project. In the last paragraph we learn that District Commissioner plans to write a book. Its title, “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger”, euphemistically describes the colonisers’ mostly violent/aggressive subjugation of African people as “pacification” and demonstrates an arrogant assumption that a society not like their own is “primitive”. For Achebe, then, the overriding point of Things fall apart is not so much to present the positives and negatives within the two opposing cultures, but to expose the disdain with which the colonisers treated African people, and the way they denigrated African culture.

This is such an honest and provocative book, one that would bear multiple re-readings – like all good classics. Have you read it?

Chinua Achebe
Things fall apart
London: Penguin Classics, 2001 (orig. pub. 1958)
ISBN (e-book): 9780141393964

Sarah Kanake, Sing fox to me (Review)

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Sarah Kanake, Sing Fox to meBack in late 2011, I wrote a Monday Musings post on 19th century Australian Gothic. I’ve always intended to post more on the topic, including one on Tasmanian Gothic. Well, here’s a start, because Sarah Kanake’s debut novel, Sing fox to me, is a good example of modern Tasmanian Gothic. I wrote in my first post that “Australia had (and has) plenty to inspire a Gothic imagination: strange unforgiving nightmarish landscapes, weird vegetation and imaginary creatures”. I was referring then primarily to the outback, but Tasmania, while not exactly “the outback”, has plenty to excite the Gothic imagination.

Why does pretty, verdant Tasmania work so well for a Gothic sensibility? To start with it has some forbidding (albeit beautiful) landscape – remote mountains, dense bush, mist and cold – and it’s an island, which provides an added layer of isolation. Then, there’s its violent history. Tasmania had some of Australia’s most brutal convict prisons. Many escaped, many died, and there are all sorts of horror stories, including those concerning the alleged cannibal, Alexander Pearce. It’s also infamous for the near-genocide of its indigenous population. It’s a place, in other words, in which ghosts and spirits are easy to imagine. But this is not all. Tasmania is home to the world’s only carnivorous marsupial – the small but ferocious and appropriately named Tasmanian devil. And, particularly relevant to this book, it was the last home of Australia’s most famous, most controversial, extinct animal, the Thylacine aka Tasmanian tiger.

Sarah Kanake calls on these, together with the archetypal Australian lost-child story, to write a novel that’s fundamentally about loss. All sorts of loss – people, animals, homes, and love. The novel commences with a brief unlabelled prologue describing the disappearance of 14-year-old River Snow Fox on a rainy night (of course!) On the same night one man’s home is lost, another man’s leg is permanently injured by a falling tree, and the kookaburras cackle. We then jump twenty years. It’s 1986, and River’s older brother David Fox is returning to his childhood mountain home – Fox Hill or Tiger Mountain, take your pick – with his twin sons, the biblically named Jonah and Samson. He plans to leave them with his father Clancy Fox – the man with the injured leg – who is still grieving, still looking for his missing daughter. Relationships are fraught. Clancy and his son don’t get on; angry, hurt, lonely Jonah is resentful of his loving Down syndrome twin Samson; Samson, with his “extra heavy chromosome”, often feels overlooked; and Clancy doesn’t know how to be a grandfather. The scene is set …

There are three other people on the mountain: Murray, son of the indigenous George, who was Clancy’s friend and the man who lost his home; Murray’s partner, the pregnant Tilda; and Tilda’s daughter Mattie, who is deaf. Depending on how you look at it, there could be a fourth person on the mountain, because George, now dead, regularly appears to Clancy.

Now, I wouldn’t blame you if you were starting to think this is all laid on a bit thick – gothic setting, a hermitic old man, a ghost, a missing girl, unhappy twins, a Down syndrome boy and a deaf girl, a pregnant woman and an indigenous man. What I found though was that while my mind (my rational self) was questioning this, my heart (my emotional self) was becoming more and more engaged. It works, I think, because Kanake doesn’t play to melodrama, as the original Gothic novels did. She keeps it psychologically real, even when unexplainable things happen. She also knows of what she writes. The brief biography provided by Affirm Press says that Kanake grew up with “a brother with Down syndrome and two Aboriginal foster brothers”. This reassured somewhat my modern concern about dominant-culture writers presuming to write for “other”.

“We love a version of the tiger, and it’s not real”

So Jonah remembers his father once telling him. What’s real is, in fact, one of the book’s underlying challenges. Readers have to make a leap of faith and accept that what we read is “real” for the characters. The characters, on the other hand, need to work out their “reality” and come to terms with it.

Sing fox to me is one of those books where the structure, the narrative form in particular, supports the meaning. In other words, Kanake’s use of alternating points of view for the three main characters – Clancy, Jonah and Samson – mirrors the separation of their lives. Of course they are together sometimes, physically, but there’s little meeting of minds and hearts. Meaning is also supported by strong, sustained imagery. Nature works on both physical and metaphorical levels. Clancy’s tiger pelt, worn by Clancy and then stolen by Jonah, seems to live and breathe. The mountains, rivers and trees are similarly active.

… he [Clancy] wanted to tell Murray that something had changed on his mountain. The boys were waking things up, stirring life back into old death. (Part 3)

The trees relaxed and the leaves swayed, almost as if they could finally breathe. The creek rushed, not because it was chasing anything, but because it longed to feel the smooth and stable rocks underneath … (Part 6)

Kookaburras act as a sort of malevolent chorus. Their “cackling” laughter resounds throughout the book as a commentary on the misguided quests going on below them. They are there in the beginning when Clancy realises River is lost – “the laughter turned to cackling as the kookaburras gathered in the branches overhead” – and they are there when he realises the futility of his obsessive twenty-year long obsessive quest:

Finally he understood the kookaburras, those buggers at the end of their fucking tethers. Those damned birds knew he should have been laughing with them all along.

“Feeling sorry was in every real Tasmanian’s blood”

Kanake packs a lot into her imagery – and I haven’t begun to tease out all the permutations. I haven’t talked about Jonah’s love of another tiger, Shere Khan, for example, or of the fox motif. There’s also a lovely portrayal of disability in the novel, which I might explore another day. Most of it does, however, come back to loss. Children go missing, parents leave, a friend and a wife have died; animals are lost or killed or extinct. These losses are personal, but there could also be a political reading. Am I being too fanciful to suggest that Clancy’s loss of River, the girl who “said she could sing the tigers to her”, and his futile, obsessive search, could be read as Tasmania’s loss of the Tiger, and the desperate hope that the next claimed sighting will be real? Or that through telling a story about loss and personal ghosts, Kanake is also calling attention to the ghosts of Tasmania’s past?

A step too far? Perhaps. But this book is such a rich read that it invites a very personal response. I’d love to hear from others who have read it.

awwchallenge2016Sarah Kanake
Sing fox to me
South Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2016
266pp.
ISBN: 9781922213679

(Review copy courtesy Affirm Press)

Elizabeth Harrower, A few days in the country, and other stories (Review)

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HarrowerCountryTextThere’s something about Elizabeth Harrower. I’ve just read her Stella Prize shortlisted short story collection A few days in the country, and other stories – and wow! Really, just wow! If you’re a regular reader here, you’ve probably noticed that I’m not one to effuse excessively about books, anymore than I’m one to pan them. I’m careful about what I choose to read, so most of what I read I enjoy. There are, after all, a lot of good and inspiring writers around. But Harrower – the more I read her, the more I see why Patrick White and Christina Stead liked her. She really is something. Her shrewd intelligence, sharp wit, and ability to penetrate the hearts of her characters in just a few words is breathtaking.

Enough though of the superlatives. They are easy to say, but can I prove they are just? I’ll give it a go. As I was reading – and enjoying – Tegan Bennett Daylight’s collection Six bedrooms (my review) I was thinking, yet again, about the current preference for writing in first person. I certainly don’t reject this narrative voice, because I do enjoy the intimacy of it, but I sometimes wonder whether it has become a little de rigueur, perhaps reflecting today’s me-focus? I don’t mean, in saying this, to criticise contemporary writers, because the self is part of the zeitgeist – and to capture that you have to use its modes. However, there’s also something to be said for standing back a little, and this is what a third person voice can do. It is, in fact, what Jane Austen is admired for – her clear-eyed ability to analytically, but wittily, comment on her society, to skewer its pretensions, entrapments and hypocrisies. Harrower exerts the same clear eye, though her focus is more the psyche to Jane Austen’s society.

Now to the collection, itself. The first thing to say is that this is a collection of twelve stories, ten of which have been published before, some as far back as the 1960s and others as recent as last year. Some have been multiply published in anthologies, and some have been reworked. Oh, and eleven are told in third person, with just one in first! There is a subtle underlying structure to the collection, with the first four being about young people – starting with ten-year-old Janet in the opening story, “The fun of the fair”, then moving on to teenagers and young women – followed by the later stories which feature married couples or single adults facing the lives they have made for themselves. The last shocking story, the titular “A few days in the county”, could only be at the end.

There is, I’d say, an overall theme to the collection, and it is best expressed by Clelia in the penultimate story, “It is Margaret”. Her mother, Margaret, has just died and Clelia is dealing with her step-father, a very controlling man reminiscent of Felix in The watch tower (my review) and Hector Shaw in this collection (“The beautiful climate”). Clelia thinks:

Here it was again–the mystery that pursued her through life in one form, in another, returning and returning, presenting itself relentlessly for her solution: how should human beings treat each other?

This is one of those chilling stories about the power people, men usually, can exert over others, and the way women, more often than not, submit to that power, as Margaret did. But Margaret – the title allluding to one of my all-time favourite poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and fall” – has died, and “there was no further harm Theo could do”. We hope.

This theme, the way people treat each other, is at the heart of every story, and culminates in the final one, “A few days in the country”. What an unnamed someone did to the protagonist Sophie is not made explicit, only hinted at, but the consequences are devastating for her. An undivulged act having a dramatic impact on the protagonist is also explored in the tenth story, “English lesson”, nicely setting us up for this last story and again suggesting a careful hand in ordering the stories.

The consistent world view regarding power and manipulation in the way human beings treat each other is offset by variety in setting, character, story and tone. I was intrigued, for example, by two that read almost like little fables, “Alice”* and “The cornucopia”. Both are written third person, but with an added layer of distance. That is, they are written from a neutral position (“third person objective”), rather than by a narrator who takes us into the heads of the characters, interpreting their feelings and attitudes (“third person limited” or “subjective”). Regardless of how you describe the technique, however, the change in tone adds variety to the reading experience and forces us to look at humanity from a different, cooler, standpoint.

So, “Alice” then. She is a little girl unappreciated by a mother who prefers her sons:

Luckily for the mother, she also had two sons, younger than the girl–golden, milky boys not made entirely of wood and flames like their mother, nor of guileless life like their sister, but a mixture of both, and somehow not quite enough of either. They were extremely pretty children just the same. Like Alice, the brothers had remarkable hair and eyes, but their great triumph over her was that they were boys. She began to perceive that this, more than curls or thoughtful ways, was what pleased. The question was: could one terribly good girl ever, in her mother’s eyes, equal one boy? And the answer was no. (“Alice”)

The story goes on to chronicle Alice’s life, her struggle to be recognised and accepted in a family, then a world, where boys didn’t have to try, “they were welcome when they arrived.” Alice marries, but still wants her mother’s love. However

If Alice had a fault, dangerous to her survival, it was that she was inordinately reluctant to learn from experience. She would not. Because the lesson would be so sad.

Clelia in “It is Margaret”, by contrast, did learn lessons from her step-father, and you can see why Alice resists learning hers:

She would have known much less about good and evil without his lessons, but she had paid a good deal for them.

Lessons are another ongoing theme in the book.

You have probably realised by now that what I most love about this book is its writing. It just takes my breath away. Besides the variety already mentioned, there’s her language – the economy of her imagery, her tight pointed syntax. She can do irony. There’s not a lot that’s beautiful, for example, in “The beautiful climate”, and in “The cost of things” the real costs are more than monetary. And, yes, she can be funny – albeit mostly with biting wit – like:

The man had a lot to put up with, too, with the world not appreciating him as it should. (“Alice”)

and

Holding glasses, standing in strategic formation, the men were fascinated. Though the sum of money involved was trivial, it was, nevertheless, money, and the whole story began to symbolise some problem, to involve principles … By the instant, they grew harder. (“The cornucopia”)

It might sound from these that Harrower is only critical of men, but Julia in “The cornucopia”, with her Grades I, II and III friends will put you right on that!

You know how some writers just speak to you? Well, for me, it is writers like Jane Austen, Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley and now Elizabeth Harrower, writers whose sharp intellect and sly wit get to the nub of human experience and make me laugh and gasp in the one breath. Now, though, I’m stuck. I want to tell you about every story in this book, but I can’t. I’d bore you, and I need to move on. However, I hope I’ve encouraged you to try Harrower, if you haven’t already. Meanwhile, I can feel a Delicious Descriptions coming on!

awwchallenge2016Elizabeth Harrower
A few days in the country and other stories
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015
205pp.
ISBN: 9781925240566

* “Alice” was published in The New Yorker last year, and you can read it online. If you do, tell me if it does or doesn’t whet your appetite for more.

Tegan Bennett Daylight, Six bedrooms (Review)

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Tegan Bennett Daylight, Six bedroomsI have just read Tegan Bennett Daylight’s collection of short stories, Six bedrooms, in my quest to read at least some of the Stella Prize shortlist before the announcement of the winner on the 19th of this month. I haven’t read Daylight before – she has written three novels, among other things – so I was glad for the added incentive to read her now. It helped, of course, that Brother Gums and family gave me the book for my birthday!

So, Six bedrooms. It’s a collection of 10 short stories, seven of which have been published previously in literary journals and anthologies. Eight are written in first person, and the other two in third. While the stories are all complete within themselves, as you’d expect, one character, Tasha, appears in four of them, the first, fourth, seventh and tenth. Evenly spaced out in other words, providing a nice sense of continuity and a sort of narrative framework for the whole. That, briefly, is the form of the book, but let’s get now to the content.

Most of the stories could be described as coming-of-age stories, as most of the protagonists are in their teens or early twenties. If you define coming-of-age broadly – that is, as a time of growth, transition and establishing identity – almost all the stories could be described as that. In the last story, “Together alone”, for example, Tasha is 36 years old, but while she’s certainly more “together” than her first appearance at 15 years old, she still has unresolved issues in her life, mainly to do with a missing brother and an ex-husband. This brings me to the epigraph. It’s by Tim Winton, and says “… the past is in us, not behind us. Things are never over.” A truism, you might say, but in this world where “closure” seems to be the thing, it’s worth remembering.

Although only the four Tasha stories are linked by character, there are several themes that recur in the book, besides the coming-of-age one. One is closely related to coming-of-age – the idea of the misfit. How many of us felt we were misfits, had that excruciating sense of feeling out of step with everyone else, only to discover later that those who looked so together felt the same! Tasha, in her first appearance in the book’s opening story “Like a virgin”, goes to a party with her friend Judy. She’s 15 years old, and feels ashamed because they showed everyone else how unable they were to deal with a party. Jane, the younger of two sisters in “Trouble”, feels lonely and awkward, a poor copy of her sister, and despises herself. And so on. Rose in “J’aime Rose”, though, has a different take. She calls herself a misfit, then soon after argues that she isn’t because she “didn’t have the courage”. For her a misfit is one who stands out through, say, “triple-pierced ears” or “a radical devotion to a singer or a style”. A rose by any other name I’d say! Anyhow, misfit or not, Rose, like many of the book’s protagonists, is lonely and unconfident, which leads her, like those other protagonists, to behave selfishly or even spitefully at times. The thing is that it’s all so believable! Unfortunately.

Other recurrent themes or motifs include missing people (parents, in particular, but also siblings, who disappear or die) which can exacerbate outsiderness, lack of sexual confidence, and friendships that survive or don’t under the weight of adolescent self-obsession and inexperience. Tasha and Judy remain friends through the jealousies and little lies to the last story when they are in the thirties, while Sarah and Fern in “Other animals” can’t survive a terrible difference in experience that Sarah doesn’t understand until way later. Daylight captures beautifully here the naive narrator who describes what she sees without having the maturity to understand the shadows beneath.

I enjoyed all the stories, but some stood out more than others. The Tasha stories for example. Daylight doesn’t broadcast the continuity, but provides hints – the name of the friend, the alcoholic but loving mother, the brother – that clue you in to the fact these stories are about the same person.

I also particularly enjoyed the title story, “Six bedrooms”, one of the non-previously-published stories in the book. The six bedrooms refer to a share-house. After all, you couldn’t really have a book about adolescents and young adults without one share-house story! The narrator here is 19-year-old Claire. Daylight builds the story with tight, effective narrative control. The residents of five bedrooms are introduced in the first couple of pages leaving us to wonder about the sixth. We learn about him four pages in. And Claire tells us that she has a friend in the house, with whom she’d moved from a previous house, but it’s clear the friendship is not strong. That too is left hanging, unexplained, until later in the story when we realise there are other perspectives besides Claire’s. Gradually, the relationships and their tensions are developed as Claire tries to find her own way and place. She befriends William, the resident of the sixth bedroom, but it never quite goes the way she’d like:

William sat on the one single chair. I smiled at him but it was as though the smile missed him, went over his head.

AND

I waited for him to touch me. I left my hand lying beside him so he could pick it up, but his hands were busy. He was itchy, and he needed to smoke …

AND

I invented a persona for myself: I was a girlfriend. Almost.

The problem is that she, like other narrators in the book, is naive, and there are things about William that she, in her naiveté, missed completely. Her pain of feeling stupid and alone is palpable.

Ultimately, Six bedrooms is about youth’s painful lessons. Its power lies in the way it captures the small (and not so small) excruciating moments in our lives when we know things aren’t right, but we don’t know how to right them. There are no dramatic resolutions or big light bulb moments, but there are glimmers of a forward momentum in many of the characters’ lives, such as Tasha realising in “Together alone” that “I might have been harder to live with than I thought”. Mostly, though, it’s about accepting that “awkwardness and trouble are part of being alive’’ (“Trouble”), that things are, indeed, never quite over. Another good Stella shortlist choice.

awwchallenge2016Tegan Bennett Daylight
Six bedrooms
North Sydney: Vintage Books, 2015
215pp.
ISBN: 9780857989130

Elizabeth Harrower, In certain circles (Review)

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Elizabeth Harrower, In certain circlesThere’s an interesting story behind Elizabeth Harrower’s last novel, In certain circles. It was all set for publication in 1971, following her very successful The watch tower (my review), when Harrower pulled it. Why? I wondered about this as I read it, and I have some ideas, but more on that anon. First, the story.

In certain circles chronicles the lives from youth until their forties of five people – well-to-do brother and sister Russell and Zoe Howard, orphans from an impoverished background Stephen and Anna Quayle, and Lily the teenage sweetheart and then wife of Russell. Part way through the novel, Stephen and Zoe also marry, as does Anna outside the circle. The story starts and ends with Zoe, but the perspective shifts a little along the way between the various characters. It’s a story of idealism and wasted opportunities, of the decisions we make (or don’t make) and their unintended consequences. It’s also about the way the past can drive those decisions. The setting is Sydney, not long after World War 2, though it’s never made explicit. Harrower is not interested in time and place, just people – who they are, why they do what they do, and how it impacts their deepest selves.

Commentators discussing Harrower invariably tell us that Australian literary luminaries Patrick White and Christina Stead praised her writing. You can see why – she writes with their intensity, probing deeply into the psyches of her characters to explore motive, feeling and behaviour. I’d also liken her to the recently deceased Anita Brookner, who, coincidentally, was born the same year as Harrower, 1928, and who also intensely explored the psyches of her characters.

The thing about Harrower’s writing here, though, is that while character is her focus, a strong sense of form underpins her style. The novel is, for example, presented in three clearly delineated parts, which facilitates time-jumps without the need for extensive explanation and gives it the narrative arc of a classic three-act drama.

So, Part 1 is set just after the war. Zoe is a bright, “fearless”, world-at-her-feet young seventeen-year-old, who often doesn’t mean what she says and is not known for her “social conscience”. She is, clearly, ready for a fall. A perfect Act 1 set up in other words. Big brother Russell, on the other hand, has been touched by experience, including being a prisoner-of-war, and has a more realistic perspective of the world. He sees disadvantage and he wants to right it. The opening scene is a tennis party at the Howards, to which Russell has invited the orphans and at which his fiancée Lily is also present. Our five characters are thus properly introduced to us and each other.

Part 2 starts eight years later, when Zoe is 25 years old and has just returned, upon her mother’s death, from a blossoming career in film and photography in Europe. The course of her life changes at this point, and she marries Stephen who is now in business with her brother Russell. She finds herself deeply in love with this man who, when she was 17, had both attracted and repelled her with his judgement of and opposition to her. In this part, the characters have settled into some sort of stable routine, but we readers see the cracks even if the characters themselves don’t. Take Zoe, our main character, for example:

Excessively, even for someone in love, Zoe had found a chameleon-like capacity for fitting herself to Stephen’s moods.

Hmm, we think … and this too:

From riding the crest of a wave, from taming tigers, she had turned into this new thing–a suppliant, but a suppliant with a purpose: all to be well with Stephen.

The conversations between them are chilling – because Zoe submits and submits her self to his views and ideas.

Meanwhile, Lily, for whom family is all (“it was not only a sort of pity Lily felt for anyone unrelated to her, but an involuntary antagonism”) and who has given up her career for her children, is becoming frustrated with Russell’s focus on a wider humanity. And Anna, now widowed, realises where her love truly lies – Russell.

Then comes Part 3, as it inevitably must. Zoe is nearly 40, and not happy. (We could have told her!) After 15 years of self-denial and subsuming her self to Stephen, she is a changed woman, to her detriment, and she knows it. That fall we assumed at the beginning has finally come – and not just for Zoe. The denouement is dramatic, rapid and effective in shaking up the characters’ complacencies and self-destructive compromises, just as you’d rightly expect in a narrative of this sort.

Besides this three-part structure, Harrower also employs form in her character handling. The novel starts with two sets of siblings and one outsider, Lily, but by the middle of part 2, they have re-formed into two couples and a different outsider, Anna. This rearranging of pairs-and-outsider creates parallels and counterpoints that keep the story tight and focused, exposing tensions and differences.

“wasted years”

But form, of course, is used for a purpose, which is to explore themes important to Harrower. In certain circles is not as claustrophobic or as chilling as The watch tower, but they have similar concerns, such as loneliness and a feeling of entrapment. These play out differently in In certain circles, where the focus is on wasted talents, through lack of opportunities, and wasted lives, through difficult pasts or poor decisions, but the result is the same – loneliness, desolation, and entrapment, conscious or otherwise.

Early in the novel, when she’s still 17, Zoe escapes a room of older people, “away from miserable white faces and wasted years”. Ironically, this is exactly how Zoe finds herself twenty odd years later, because Stephen has, “without the least desire to deflate or wound”, dissolved the last of her “ideas and ambitions”, leaving her trapped, demoralised, “detesting the person she had become”.

Zoe is not the only one. The other characters too find themselves having wasted at least some aspect of their lives, some because they can’t let go of (or are damaged by) the past, others because they honour decisions and commitments they’ve made.

There are many roads by which these characters come to the wasteland in their lives, and Harrower presents them with an acuity that is also generous. She doesn’t judge. Even when, at the beginning, Zoe is arrogant and self-involved, Harrower encourages us to like her because she’s lively and good-hearted rather than malicious. Stephen would be even easier for us to dislike, but his pain, his genuine love for his sister, and his obliviousness to “the damage he had done”, enable us to understand rather than hate him.

And now, here I am, way past when I should have finished this post, but having barely touched on the writing – and I should discuss it, because it is delicious. Harrower nails feelings, attitudes and motives with a pithiness that takes your breath away. Watch out for a Delicious Descriptions post!

So, returning to my opening para, why might Harrower have pulled her novel? I understand that she submitted it, pulled it and re-worked it, then submitted it again, and pulled it permanently. I can see why she may have done this: the drama that precipitates the resolution is a little far-fetched though she explains it well enough to make it work; Russell is comparatively shadowy even among the less developed characters; and occasionally the perspective feels a little clumsy or laboured, as if she hasn’t fully resolved how to bring all her personages into the frame as she desires. But, are these serious enough for the book not to have been published? I don’t think so. Neither did Text, and neither, we have to presume, did that original publisher. It is literature’s gain that this book has finally seen the light of day.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also enjoyed the book.

awwchallenge2016Elizabeth Harrower
In certain circles
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2014
250pp.
ISBN: 9781922182968

Debra Adelaide, The women’s pages (Review)

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Debra Adelaide, The women's pagesWhen I started reading Debra Adelaide’s latest novel The women’s pages I thought, “Oh yes, here’s another interesting story about women’s lives, how their options are limited, etc etc. I’ll enjoy this but I wonder why it was longlisted for the Stella?” And then, a few chapters in, I started to realise that behind this “interesting story about women’s lives” was a fine and witty intelligence that was playing games with me, that was exploring ideas about creativity and writing, that was looking at how life imitates art (or is it vice versa), as well as at the lives of women! Needless to say, by the end I was fully engaged, enjoying every word while I eagerly turned this woman’s pages.

The embarrassing thing is that I haven’t read Adelaide before – well, that is, I haven’t read her fiction before. I have read some of her non-fiction. Her Australian women writers: A bibliographic guide was groundbreaking and is still highly valuable, and the book of critical essays which she edited, A bright and fiery troop: Australian women writers of the nineteenth century, is a significant work. She also edited and introduced Dymphna Cusack’s A window in the dark which I’ve reviewed here.

But her fiction? I’ve been remiss, but no more, because The women’s pages sure has me intrigued. It starts off straightforwardly enough with protagonist Ellis being asked to a 10th wedding anniversary barbecue. Adelaide sets the scene perfectly. It’s the 1960s and Ellis is a young domestically-competent mother who’s not happy in her marriage. She can’t imagine still being married to her (albeit perfectly decent) husband for another 8 years. So far so good – I’m interested. Then, chapter 2 introduces us to “not yet forty” Dove from current times. She is grieving for her mother and, we discover, is writing the story about Ellis. From here, the chapters alternate Ellis and Dove’s story until around halfway through the book where they start to intrude a little on each other, where in the same chapter we find Dove musing on where Ellis’s story is going or on how Ellis is exerting “maddening autonomy” on her story! What is going on, we start to wonder?

So, as well as being a story – and an authentic story at that – about women’s lives, The women’s pages is also a metafiction about the art and process of writing fiction. Here, for example, is Dove with a sort of writer’s block:

But Dove had run out of ideas. When the baby was born, she had a fair idea, but exactly where, and how, resisted her imagination. Doubtless because she had no experience in this respect, she could not bring herself to visualise a pregnancy and the birth of a baby. She knew this was nonsense, if she were to call herself a writer of fiction, and that she needed to do something about this, even if it simply meant googling the subject.

Write what you know, or else research! I enjoy these sorts of mind-games played by authors; I don’t mind being reminded of the author’s hand.

However, while the metafiction thread is an important part of the novel, there are other threads or themes. Motherhood is a major one. Childbirth and childrearing feature, but the overriding idea is that of missing mothers, the silences about them, the gaps they leave. Ellis’s mother had left her when she was a baby, and Dove was adopted (by a loving mother, but …).  A related thread is the new word to Ellis’s world, “feminism”. There are illegal abortions and adoptions, alongside women striving to develop careers. Ellis gets a job in the magazine industry. By the mid-1970s change is afoot. She senses “the whole country shifting around … with these tall god-like creatures [the Whitlams] in charge”, but she’s not fooled into believing “there was really such a thing as equality”. When she’s offered a promotion, her male boss tells her he expects “absolute commitment”, that is, there must be no “running off to get married, or taking time out to look after children”. Adelaide knows the decades of which she speaks, and her evocation of them is spot on.

Then there’s Adelaide’s exploration of imagination and invention, particularly in the metafiction thread. And this is where another important aspect of this novel comes into view – Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s novel is introduced at the beginning of chapter 2, with Dove blaming it for her decision to write her novel about Ellis (whose name references Emily’s pseudonym Ellis Bell). The “gaps and shadowy images and half truths” in Wuthering Heights “had infected her [Dove’s] imagination” and out of it Ellis’ story emerged. For most of The women’s pages, Brontë’s novel acts as a sort of simmering undercurrent, surfacing every now and then, not always overtly, to impose an added layer on the narrative. But at the end, as Ellis’s complicated family background is finally revealed, it comes to the fore. We even have a Catherine, an Edgar and a Nell, but the parallels aren’t laboured.

Dove writes, around halfway through the novel, that

she had not meant to write the story of women, but that was how it had appeared, that was the only story in her head. The more she delved into the lives of her characters the more it was about missing or silent women and the more it seemed it was her job to find them and open their mouths and lay them across the pages. Ellis had stepped out of a longer story, one in which women were always grasping for some sense of authenticity, and in which mothers in particular were absent. Wuthering Heights had almost no mothers and certainly none whom you could say were good to any degree. They were all dead or dying, or simply blank spaces, unnamed and unacknowledged, as if their progeny – Heathcliff, Catherine, Hindley, Edgar, Nelly – had been produced by magic, or had just sprung up out of the earth …

I said in my opening paragraph that Adelaide’s writing is “witty”. I didn’t mean by this “funny”, though it is wryly amusing at times. No, I meant “knowing”, “astute”, “clever”. Adelaide’s development of Ellis and Dove’s story is beautifully controlled. The women’s pages could, in fact, be read as an expert’s guide on how to write a novel. More interesting to me, though, is the light it throws on the intense emotional investment novelists can make in their work, on the sometimes complex nexus between character and author:

What, Dove wondered, had she done? Or had she done it? Maybe it had happened exactly like this and she was merely recording the facts.

See what I mean? I imagine Adelaide had fun writing about Dove writing about Ellis.

This is a delicious read that engages both the mind and the heart, and has an ending that brings you up with a start. Yes, I can see why it was longlisted for the Stella.

awwchallenge2016Debra Adelaide
The women’s pages
Sydney: Picador, 2015
295pp
ISBN: 9781743535981

(Review copy courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)

Fiona Wright, Small acts of disappearance (Review)

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Fiona Wright, Small acts of disappearanceIt would be a rare person these days, from Western cultures anyhow, who didn’t have some brush with an eating disorder, whether through a friend, a family member, or personal experience. And yet it is one of our most misunderstood afflictions, which is where Fiona Wright’s Small acts of disappearance: Essays on hunger comes in. Wright, born in 1983, is a published poet. However, in her mid twenties, in her first hospital day program for her seriously low weight, she had to admit to herself that she was, indeed, one of “those women”, one of those women, that is, whom she’d always thought were “vain and selfish, shallow and somehow stupid”.

Now, many of you know that I am interested in form. Well, Small acts of disappearance is interesting in this regard. On the surface, it is what it says it is, a collection of essays, but it is also, in effect, a memoir of Wright’s experience of one of medicine’s most mystifying conditions, anorexia nervosa. There are ten essays, the title of each commencing with “in” as “In Colombo”, “In Hospital” and “In Hindsight”. This word “in” has a literal meaning, but its repetition also accentuates that she really is “in” something that she cannot, must not, distance herself from. While there is a loose sort of chronological drive to the essays, the first one, “In Colombo”, does not start at the beginning, not that there is, in these things, a clear beginning. She goes to Colombo as a newly graduated journalist in her early twenties, around three years after what she defines as the formal onset of her condition, but years before she commences any dedicated sort of treatment. It is in Colombo, however, when she thinks “things changed” and her “illness grew more complicated”, and so it is from here that she launches her set of essays exploring this “illness”.

There is, then, an idiosyncratic sort of chronology or narrative arc, which provides a structure for what is essentially a set of thematic essays. Linking them are some recurring threads, in addition to the condition itself of course. One of these relates to the paradoxical and perverse nature of the condition, and another to language. I’m going to be perverse and start with the second of these, language. Wright, being a writer, loves language, so as well as writing the book in her own gloriously clear and evocative language, she also shares the “new” language she learns. There’s the language of treatment (“In Increments”), for example, which she describes as “a jargon, that language that speaks only to the initiated, that carries with it its own definition of inclusion”, and the language of group therapy and recovery (“In Group”). She considers the implications of the language, of how it normalises the way the initiates communicate. Group language and behaviours, she explains, mean sufferers can identify each other, like it or not, outside treatment.

In my opening paragraph I suggested that anorexia nervosa is a misunderstood condition. Wright herself had believed that “those women” were vain and stupid. However, through years of treatment she comes to realise that the very opposite is true, that anorectics (her label) tend to be people (men and women) “who think too much and feel too keenly, who give too much to other people”. She says of the women she met in treatment that they were “some of the bravest but also most vulnerable that I had ever met”. The awful thing, the challenge for treatment, is the condition’s perverse and paradoxical nature. No matter which way you look at it, there’s likely to be a contradiction. Sufferers “fear death” and yet let their bodies destroy themselves; their desire for control often triggers the illness, but the illness, the hunger, wrests control from them and takes over; they want anonymity while their emaciated bodies draw attention to themselves; the pain of hunger numbs other pain; and, so on. Hunger, she writes, is addictive, heightening the senses, creating a feeling of “hyper-alertness”. It “feels so good” that “even now” on the road to recovery, she can miss it. Wright’s analysis of the psychology and pathology of eating disorders is clear and authentic.

While much of the book chronicles her personal experiences, Wright supports her impressions/findings with knowledge gleaned from reading and research. This gives the book a gravitas not usually found in the “sick-lit” (sub-)genre, to which this book may or may not belong, depending on the breadth of your definition. She describes the Minnesota Hunger Experiment, which was conducted during World War 2 on conscientious objectors to ascertain the physiological and psychological impacts of extended periods of starvation or malnutrition. She analyses fictional characters who exhibit disordered eating in novels by Christina Stead (For love alone), Tim Winton (Cloudstreet) and Carmel Bird (The Bluebird Cafe).

She also devotes an essay (“In miniature”) to miniatures, which themselves have a contradictory nature. They unsettle our perception, she writes, while also attracting us. So, she interrogates her love of miniatures from childhood, teasing out of this a pathology that desires to be small and that likes clear boundaries. She writes:

To be miniature, then, is to occupy space differently, and especially, pointedly, to have a different occupation of public space. We disturb it with our discrepancy, even as our smallness means that we occupy less of it. I think sometimes that the drive to hunger, the drive towards smallness, is about precisely this: we feel so uncertain, so anxious about our rightful place in the world, that we try to take up as little of it as possible. It is a drive to disappear that can only ever succeed in making us more prominent, more visible, because it makes us as different and offensive on the outside as we so often feel we are at heart.

And then, scarily, she describes how the crafting of miniatures takes “real skill, exceptional care, and time”. Oh dear. Hunger, she says, “narrows the world so minutely and completely” that it brings the world “back under our command”. But, “it is a false and contradictory kind of command … We possess the world, perhaps, but in the process we are dispossessed of our own selves.” It is a long way back, and as she makes clear in her book, she hasn’t yet quite worked out how to live “a full-sized life”.

I’ll close, logically, with her last essay “In Hindsight” which, in another structure, could have been the opening essay because in it she looks back, back, back to origins. In hindsight, she sees aspects of her childhood and adolescence that contained hints of what was to come. All along she’s told us that her disorder had a particular physical trigger when she was 19 years old, but here, in the last essay, she writes:

I’ve resisted telling this other story, I think, because I don’t want to hear it myself.

And then she exposes all those early signs, with such heart-breaking, self-exposing honesty. I’m not surprised Small acts of disappearance has made it to the Stella Prize shortlist. Wright offers us a clear-eyed, analytical but moving insider’s view of a devastating and still mystifying condition. It’s a gift of a book.

awwchallenge2016Fiona Wright
Small acts of disappearance: Essays on hunger
Artarmon: Giramondo, 2015
193pp.
ISBN: 9781922146939