Literature by period

What did Jane Austen look for in a novel?

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There are those who don’t get Jane Austen. Some think her novels are silly romances while others think that she writes stories about the well-to-do who, they feel, aren’t relevant or worthy subjects.

Nothing, really, could be further from the truth. Her novels may be romantic but they are more than simple romances. Jane Austen loved to satirise human foibles (as she did Mr Collins’ pomposity in Pride and prejudice). She cared deeply about the lot of women who had little financial support (such as Jane Fairfax in Emma). With the exception of Emma, in fact, her heroines are not rich, and some are in quite precarious financial situations. However, she wanted them to be able to choose partners they love and respect (as Elizabeth Bennet does in Pride and prejudice) … though she knew that this wasn’t easy or straightforward in Regency times.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the author herself – in a letter to her niece Fanny – written only months before she died:

He and I should not in the least agree, of course, in our ideas of novels and heroines. Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked.

What better manifesto or clearer indication of her novelistic imperative could she have left for us? Life and people weren’t perfect, and nor would her novels be.

Elliot Perlman, The street sweeper (Review)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lisa of ANZLitLovers also liked this novel.

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

William Gilpin and travel photography

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Yes, I know that William Gilpin, about whom I wrote in my last post, died before photography, though only just. He died in 1804 and, according to Wikipedia, the first permanent photograph produced by a camera was made in 1826. However, the notion of cameras – through the camera obscura – was already well known. This, however, is not really the subject of today’s post. The subject is the third essay in his Three essays, which is titled “On the art of sketching landscape”.

The thing is that this essay reminded me of travel photography because his main focus is “taking views from nature” the intention of which, he says

may either be to fix them in your own memory – or to convey, in some degree, your ideas to others.

Aren’t these our two main aims in taking travel photographs? That is, to help us remember our travel and/or to share out experiences with others?

He then goes on to give advice about how to sketch, some of which is specifically about the tools and implements of sketching, but some of which relates more broadly to composing pictures. For example, he writes of getting “the best point of view” for the scene you wish to sketch (or, for us, to photograph), stating that “a few paces to the right, or left, make a great difference”. He’s right there. There are times when I’ve been too lazy, or felt I didn’t have enough time, to walk about looking for the best aspect, only to be sorry later when I’ve seen someone’s better photograph of the same scene.

And he talks about “scale”, that is,

how to reduce it [the scene] properly withing the compass of your paper: for the scale of nature being so very different from your scale … If the landscape before you is extensive, take care you do not include too much: it may perhaps be divided more commodiously into two sketches …

Today of course we can take panoramic photos, and we can enlarge (or crop) to our heart’s content when we download our images onto our computers. Still, the better the original photo, the easier later editing is, eh?

His advice then starts to get more interesting, because he goes on to differentiate between making a sketch that “is intended merely to assist our own memory” and one “intended to convey, in some degree, our ideas to others“. These latter sketches, he says, “should be somewhat more adorned”. Now, part of this adornment is simply about the detail. A sketch to remind us of what we have seen may only require “a few rough strokes”, while one that is to convey something to others who have no idea of the place, needs “some composition … a degree of correctness and expression in the out-line – and some effect of light”.

But, he then goes further to suggest that “nature is most defective in composition; and must be a little assisted”. In other words, it is alright “to dispose the foreground as I please”. Yes, fair enough. We do this often, don’t we, in composing or enlarging/cropping photos? But, it is also alright, he says, to take further liberties:

I take up a tree, and plant it there. I pare a knoll, or make an addition to it. I move a piece of paling – a cottage – a wall – or any removable object, which I dislike.

He qualifies this, though, by saying that “liberties … with the truth must be taken with caution”. We should not, he says, introduce “what does not exist” but can make “those simple variations … which time itself is continually making”.

All this made me think of photography, digital in particular, and how easy it is to remove or modify or manipulate an image to make it look better … and made me realise that no matter what tools we have to hand, this is something we have always liked to do. And this is the point that Gilpin is making with his theory of “the picturesque” because, if you remember the definition I gave in my previous post, it is about “that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture”.

What I take away from all this – ignoring Gilpin’s tendency to pomposity and prescription, for which he was, fairly I think, satirised – is that he is talking about the difference between “reality”, or what is actually there, and an aesthetic “truth” relating to the ideas (and even feelings*) conveyed by the scene. And that makes sense to me.

Fedra Olive Grove

Gilpin would not like the rows of olive trees here, but would probably like the irregular somewhat rough tree.

* There is, I believe, much academic debate about whether Romanticism rejected or extended the ideas of the Picturesque. I’m inclined to think it’s not a case of either/or but a more complex development.

William Gilpin, Jane Austen and the picturesque

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I was introduced to William Gilpin by Jane Austen. Well, not by her so much as by her brother, Henry, who told us* that she was “enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque at a very early age”.

Engraving of Rev. William Gilpin.

William Gilpin (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, No. 231, August, 1869.Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

This month my local Jane Austen group decided to look a little more deeply at Gilpin, his Picturesque, and what Jane Austen really thought. William Gilpin (1724-1804) was an English vicar, schoolteacher, prolific writer and amateur painter. He is remembered primarily for his theory of “the picturesque”. The “picturesque”, according to my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, dates back to 1703 with the meaning, “in the manner of a picture; fit to be made into a picture”. In his Essay on Prints (1768), Gilpin defined it as “… a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture”.

The blogger at Austenonly has written an excellent post on Jane Austen and Gilpin in which she proposes – and my group here agreed with her – that Austen was enamoured of him because he appealed to her sense of the ridiculous. He expresses his opinions so dogmatically, he is so opinionated, that she can’t help mocking him. How could she not satirise a man who seriously suggests (“Essay 1: On Picturesque Beauty”, Three Essays) that, when it comes to a portrait, “the highest form of picturesque beauty” is not “the lovely face of youth smiling with all its sweet dimpling charms” but “the patriarchal head” with its “lines of wisdom and experience … the rough edges of age”. Being a woman of a certain age, I rather like Mr Gilpin! But, seriously, is it really a matter of either/or?

Or someone who writes (in the same essay):

A piece of Palladian architecture may be elegant in the last degree. The proportion of its parts — the propriety of its ornaments — and the symmetry of the whole, may be highly pleasing. But if we introduce it in a picture, it immediately becomes a formal object, and ceases to please. Should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must, use the mallet, instead of the chisel : we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps. In short, from a smooth building we must turn it into a rough ruin. No painter, who had the choice of the two objects, would hesitate a moment.

We must presume that he is not speaking literally when he suggests taking a mallet to a pleasing building in order to make it picturesque! But Jane Austen is sure to have laughed and, as you’ll read in Austenonly’s post, there are many examples in Austen’s novels, particularly Pride and prejudice, Sense and sensibility and Northanger Abbey, in which she satirises the picturesque.

On the other hand, there are also places where she seems to exhibit an appreciation and understanding of Gilpin’s theory because, while Gilpin could be dogmatic, he also argued convincingly for a seeing nature with “a picturesque eye”. He writes in “Essay 2: On Picturesque Travel” about enjoying “the great works of nature, in her simplest and purest stile, open to inexhaustible springs of amusement”, and says

Nor is there in travelling a greater pleasure, than when a scene of grandeur bursts unexpectedly upon the eye, accompanied with some accidental circumstance of the atmosphere, which harmonises with it, and gives it double value.

I’ll illustrate this with two examples of travellers in Austen. First is her description of Fanny’s return to from Portsmouth in Mansfield Park:

Her eye fell everywhere on lawns and plantations of the freshest green; and the trees, though not fully clothed, were in that delightful state when farther beauty is known to be at hand, and when, while much is actually given to the sight, more yet remains for the imagination.

There is also a lovely, similarly genuine, description of the environs of Lyme in Persuasion in which she writes of a “sweet, retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rocks among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide …”

The question that comes to mind then is whether she is satrising the picturesque or slavish adherence to it or, even perhaps, its somewhat slippery nature. In fact, Jane Austen, landscape and the Regency is a pretty inexhaustible topic. And so, while I thoroughly enjoyed my brief introduction to Mr Gilpin, I’d love to find time to read more, particularly his travel writings about various parts of the British Isles. Meanwhile, I can’t resist leaving you with another Gilpin satirist, William Combe (1741-1823), who in 1809, as Dr Syntax, wrote the poem “The Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque”. It starts with

I’ll make a tour – and then I’ll write it.
You well know what my pen can do,
And I’ll employ my pencil too:-
I’ll ride and write, and sketch and print,
And thus create a real mint;
I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there,
And picturesque it everywhere.
I’ll do what all have done before;
I think I shall – and somewhat more.
At Doctor Pompous give a look;
He made his fortune by a book:
And if my volume does not beat it,
When I return, I’ll fry and eat it.

What a hoot …

* in his biographical note to the posthumously published first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion

The Most Underrated Book Award 2012

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

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

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

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

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

Sefi Atta, A bit of difference (Review)

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Sefi Atta, A bit of difference

Book cover (Courtesy: Spinifex Press)

Nigerian writer Sefi Atta was once an accountant. Interesting switch that, accountant to writer, but Atta seems to have made it with great success. Her first novel, Everything good will come, won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, and received an Honourable Mention in the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. Her short story collection, News from home, won the Noma Award for Publishing. I don’t usually itemise awards but it seemed appropriate to do so for a writer who is probably little known to most of my readers. It provides some context to her standing.

However, I mentioned her previous profession for another reason. The main character in her most recent novel, A bit of difference, is a Nigerian accountant. I’m not sure how autobiographical the novel is but Atta clearly understands something about the world of accountants!

The novel is set in the early-mid 2000s, just post the war in Iraq, and takes place over a few months in the life of its protagonist, Deola (pronounced, we are told in the first chapter, “day-ola”). Aged 39, Deola is the director of internal audit for an international charitable foundation. Her role is to audit organisations that receive its grants. The novel starts with her travelling to the Atlanta, USA, office and sets the tone for her dissatisfaction regarding where she is in her life, that is, an unmarried, childless Nigerian expat living in London.

Deola and I have little in common, but I have lived the expat life twice, once in my early 30s and again in my late 30s-early 40s and I understood her desire to be with people who have a “shared history”. The trouble of course is that having gone to boarding school and then worked in England for many years, her “shared history” is a little muddy. However, she starts to feel it’s back in Nigeria, despite her own misgivings and those of her English and Nigerian friends in London.

This is not a book with a page-turning plot. It simply follows several months in the life of an unsettled woman who’s trying to make a decision. It’s told 3rd person, but from Deola’s point of view, and is chronological, with flashbacks to explain to us how she’s got to where she is. Despite the potential, given its setting, it’s not a grim novel. There’s humour – in some funny scenes, entertaining dialogue, effective use of irony. And there’s a wide cast of well-diffferentiated and rather colourful but very real characters – from the thirty-something sister in Nigeria who still likes hip-hop to the not-yet successful Coetzee-enthusiast Nigerian novelist friend in London.

What is most interesting in the novel is its multiple, intertwining themes: the often lonely life of the middle-class expat, race relations in England, African identity and politics, and the way even the enlightened or educated people in both cultures don’t always meet eye-to-eye. I was reminded, as I was reading the book, of Anita Heiss’s talk at the Readers Festival I attended last month. She said she wanted to write novels about young, professional, urban indigenous women to show that their concerns are much the same as their anglo-Australian contemporaries, with the added issue of racial identity and politics to contend with.

And so, as I believe Heiss’s “chicklit” novels do, Atta’s novel explores those universal concerns of belonging and identity, but set against a particular environment where ethnic distrust and/or racial and class hierarchies threaten the self, both at home and in the “adopted country”. Deola feels somewhat of an outsider. In England, she feels her views or experience are not respected by her employing organisation and she is conscious always of being black in a white country. Back home in Nigeria, she’s aware of corruption, and of the way Nigerians rank and distrust each other on a whole range of grounds. England may be characterised by “phony egalitarianism” but Nigeria doesn’t seem much better. Through a character like Deola, Atta can tease out the misunderstandings – or arrogance even – of western organisations trying to “do good” for developing countries while also showing the lack of cohesion in those very countries receiving the help. Fortunately for Deola, at least on a personal level, help might be on the way in the form a man she meets on a business trip to Lagos. But, like most modern novels, nothing is quite as simple as it seems …

Two motifs run through the novel – the fear of HIV/AIDS and the threat of “armed robbers”. These are the “bogies” of contemporary Africa, and serve as a constant reminder that for all the universalities, this novel is also particularised to Africa. A bit of difference is an interesting and satisfying book primarily for this very reason, for, that is, the fact that it so beautifully integrates an engaging personal story with one having a wider political resonance.

Sefi Atta
A bit of difference
North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2012
219pp.
ISBN: 9781876756994

(Review copy supplied by Spinifex Press)

Zane Lovitt, The midnight promise (Review)

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Zane Lovitt, Midnight Promise

Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

Zane Lovitt’s debut book, The midnight promise, is one of those books for which I can’t decide how to start my review. I could go with the point, previously made in this blog, that I’m not a reader of crime and so cannot speak with authority on the subject. Or, I could write about the fact that one of the chapters in the book, “Leaving Fountainhead”, won the SD Harvey Short Story Award in Australia’s top crime awards, the Ned Kelly awards*. I could start with how Melbourne-based Lovitt joins the growing number of lawyers who write fiction. Or, I could start with the topic that interests me most, its form.

Because, if you haven’t noticed, I didn’t use the word “novel” once in my opening paragraph. There’s a good reason for this: The midnight promise is, if I can draw from the main media through which I consume crime, more like a detective series than a movie. I could have described it as a book of short stories, but that would be misleading. The ten chapters or stories all feature the one detective or “Private Inquiry Agent”, John Dorn, and they are told chronologically. Moreover, even though the book comprises ten separate cases, rather than one main case as would be expected in a novel, there is an overarching, albeit not immediately obvious, plot, defined by “the midnight promise”.

This form may, in fact, be one of the reasons I liked it. Each story is complete in itself while also forming part of a greater whole if you keep reading. The form is also, however, responsible for my only real criticism, which is that, almost without exception, the stories are structurally the same. They follow a present-flashback-present-flashback (and so on) structure. In a “true” book of short stories, I like things to be mixed up a bit; I like to see variety in style, in voice, structure, tone, language. That’s not the case here – but neither, I suppose, would it be the case in a television detective series, so perhaps my criticism isn’t valid. Still, a couple of times, I felt myself saying “here we go again …”.

John Dorn is not, I think, a particularly original character, for the genre. Like many crime protagonists, he’s somewhat of an outsider, a loner with a broken engagement behind him. He’s also a man of some principle which is why his is pretty much a hand-to-mouth existence. In the early stories his fee ranges from $400 a day to $250 a day to nothing depending on whether he wants (or believes in) the job or not. The higher the charge the less he wants it! For this reason we like Dorn, and want things to work out for him, but somehow, more often than not, he manages to shoot himself in the foot.

Being a private eye, his cases are varied, from marital spying to finding missing people to protection (of the innocent or the guilty). But the theme is consistent. It’s “the shitty things people do to each other” or, as he puts it more colourfully when describing roadkill in the final story:

We drive over two foxes, parallel, like one of them couldn’t bear to live without the other. Though what’s more likely is one fox was eating a dead fox and got hit by a car because he didn’t see it coming because he was distracted because the other fox was so delicious.

Not a grammatically beautiful sentence but appropriate and effective in the context. In fact, I liked Lovitt’s writing. The voice is first person, and the writing is generally direct and spare with the occasional well-placed image which works partly due to its rarity. Like this, for example:

I’ve heard rumours about his shady GST schemes, but everything I know about tax offences wouldn’t rouse a chihuahua from its beauty sleep.

The dialogue is realistic. There is humour – mostly in Dorn’s sardonic view of the world – which varies the tone. There is irony, as in the name of the character, Comedy, who is anything but funny, and in the story “Grandma’s House” whose title belies the horrors within.

And this brings me back to the form, to the fact that while each story is complete there is a trajectory in the book, heralded by the occasional bit of foreshadowing. We know something is going to happen that will change Dorn’s life, and probably for the worse. The crisis occurs in the seventh story, “The Crybaby Technique” – and it’s ironic because he was, in this particular case, only a bit player. Things change gear from here, leading to the final crisis in the tenth story which is significantly titled “Troy”. It’s a gripping read with a beautifully controlled out-of-control last page. You’ll have to read it to see what I mean.

So, would I recommend this book? Yes, to non-crime readers, like me, who look for character and good writing, and to crime readers who, I’m presuming, like intriguing cases with a detective who keeps you guessing. If I were a crime reader, I’d be saying I hope this isn’t the last we see of John Dorn, or of Zane Lovitt. In fact, I’ll say it anyhow …

Zane Lovitt
The midnight promise
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012
283pp.
ISBN: 978192192230

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

*In 2010. It also appeared in Scribe’s New Australian Stories 2, that same year.

Paddy O’Reilly, The salesman (Review)

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I’ve been wanting to read Paddy O’Reilly for the longest time but somehow haven’t managed to get to her so, as is my wont, I decided to read a short story of hers in the Griffith Review. She made her name, I think, with her short stories, but has also written novels/novellas and a screenplay, and is a regular contributor to Australia’s best literary magazines.

I know you wouldn’t expect this of me, but I’ve just told a lie – just a white one, your honour – because I have read a couple of articles by Paddy O’Reilly, and I did read her opening story in Scribe’s New Australian Stories 2, published in 2010. The story was titled “How to write a short story”. It’s a very short piece, just over a page, but it was my first, albeit very short, introduction to O’Reilly. The piece is presented as a recipe, with a list of steps, such as:

Test whether the story is done by inserting a reader. If the reader comes out clean, the story is done. If the reader comes out sticky, place the story back into the situation for another 500 words.

This story suggested to me that O’Reilly is not afraid to let women’s experience underpin her writing. But, this doesn’t mean that she wants her writing to be labelled “women’s fiction”. As she asks in her recent post for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012, what is women’s fiction? Writing for women? About women? By women? I’m inclined to agree with her that it’s not a useful distinction. What after all is “men’s fiction”? Categorising works as “women’s fiction” has the potential to (and in fact does already) marginalise, trivialise even, women writers and readers. So, like Paddy O’Reilly, I tend not to think in terms of “women’s fiction”. I do, however, and I’d argue this is quite different, like to focus on “women writers”.  Hence, here I am, reading (more) Paddy O’Reilly …

“The salesman” is set in a working class suburb of Melbourne where there’s 80% unemployment. It features a salesman (obviously), a young woman named Marly, and her boyfriend and his mate. The story opens with the young woman alone at home. It’s hot and life is clearly not much fun. Her boyfriend Shaun and his mate, Azza, spend their days working on cars, their heads “under the bonnet like stupid long-necked emus”. And, the fridge is “moaning”. Such language in the first paragraph makes it pretty clear that Marly is not a happy woman. In fact, we learn a little later on that she has lost part of a leg, creating an effective metaphor for a life that is missing something critical. Pran, the salesman, appears in the fourth paragraph. He’s a Hindu from Delhi but Marly, and later Shaun and Azza, persist in calling him a Paki.

Pran insists he’s not selling anything, but after Shaun and Azza return, we finally learn that what he is “selling” is a free offer! Shaun and Azza, as (stereotypically) men often do in these situations, lead Pran on while Marly is conflicted. Shaun is an “attentive” boyfriend. “She would not do better than this”, not better, she thinks, than a man “who had not once in eleven months raised a hand to her”. But, she’s attracted to Pran, to his “rich burnt-toffee” coloured skin and his “runny dark brown” eyes. It’s not just the physical though.  She senses through him, through her questions about his beliefs, that there could be more to life than hanging around waiting for the men to bring home beer and pizza. She does not want his visit to end in violence as, we are told, has happened before.

I’ll say no more about the plot. This is a story about the underside of modern Australia. It’s about poverty and deprivation and how these result in an arid, goal-less life in which there is little empathy for other. It’s about racism, about how, if you are the wrong colour, years of study can lead you to peddling “free offers” to people who can’t afford them. The ending is clever. While we are told the general outcome, we have to guess what really went down. What we do know, though, is that no-one ended up a winner. This is just the sort of story I like – it’s accessible, it has a clear vision with a tight focus, and it raises more questions than it answers. You can read it online at the link below.

Paddy O’Reilly
“The salesman”
Published in the Griffith Review, Edition 29, August 2010
Availability: Online at the Griffith Review

Nancy Cato, All the rivers run, Book 1 (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 16 Comments

It’s been a long time since I reviewed an audiobook or, more accurately, reviewed a book via its audiobook version. As I’ve said before, I don’t listen often to audiobooks, but last month Mr Gums and I did a long drive and so decided to listen to Nancy Cato‘s All the rivers run. I referred to this novel a few Monday Musings ago, because it was one of Australia’s early, successful adaptations for television.

Enough introduction though, time to talk about the book. Our audiobook contained the first book* of Philadelphia (Delie) Gordon’s saga. It starts her story when, in 1890 at the age of 13 she is orphaned in a shipwreck off the coast of Victoria. She is taken in by her dour aunt and more welcoming uncle who lead a spartan prospecting life at Kiandra in the Australian Alps. When her uncle Charles strikes it rich – that is he finds a large nugget of gold – the family (with her cousin, Adam, who is three years older than she) move to a sheep farm on the Murray River not far from Echuca. This first book, which is pretty much a coming-of-age story, finishes when Deli (as she prefers to be called) leaves home at the age of 17, after a tragedy has struck the family.

This is not really the sort of book I would normally read, though it is the sort of book I’d listen to on audiobook. Why so? Well, at the risk of being called a literary snob, I tend not to read sagas (whether they be historical fiction, fantasy or whatever). This is because their focus tends to be plot rather than style, structure, theme and, even perhaps, character development, though I know aficionados will argue with me and they will probably be right (to a degree!). Anyhow, there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just not what I prefer to read. However, such stories are perfect for listening to in the car. Literature requiring intense concentration is not a safe bet when you are driving (or even when you are navigating). Horses for courses, as they say.

Cato’s book, like good historical fiction, captures the social history of the era well, particularly the tail end of the gold rush, the 1890s depression, life along the Murray River for the pastoralists and paddle steamers, the challenges faced by women in a male dominated society. She also touches on the dispossession of the indigenous people, showing the women working as “house-girls” for the pastoralists and their all too often descent into prostitution, often as the result of being used by and bearing the children of their white male bosses. Cato was, apparently, an active campaigner for indigenous land rights as well as for conservation.

I enjoyed Cato’s vivid descriptions of the landscape. The plot is a little predictable and the characters are somewhat stereotypical – the welcoming, easy-going farmer, the tough wife, the handsome son champing at the parental bit – but not so much that they don’t engage. Delie in this first book, for example, is a believable young girl, orphaned and taken in essentially by strangers and then experiencing her first love. She’s bright but not brash, independent but not without uncertainties.

I enjoyed one little description in particular. At a moment when things are going wrong for Deli, Cato writes that “a pair of kookaburras laughed sardonically”. I liked this description because only recently I’d been thinking about the first white settlers in Australia and what they made of the birds here, many of whom can sound pretty raucous. I wondered, in particular, what they thought when they first heard a kookaburra’s “laugh” as we describe it. Sardonic, is a very good description of it!

Overall then, it’s an enjoyable read, if you enjoy historical sagas, are interested in life in country Australia in the 1890s – and particularly if you have a long drive ahead of you! You could do way worse …

Nancy Cato
All the rivers run: A river not yet tamed (Audio CD)
Read by Kate Hosking
Bolinda Classics
6 hrs 15 mins on 5 discs
ISBN: 9781742336732

* Note: As far as I understand it, the three books in the trilogy were originally separately published as: All the rivers run (1958); Time, flow softly (1959); and But still the stream (1962). Recent editions, however, combine the three novels into one volume titled All the rivers run. I am not sure where the title A river not yet tamed comes from, but it looks like it might be Bolinda’s title for the first part of their recording of the trilogy.

Karen Jennings, Finding Soutbek (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments
Jennings Finding Soutbek
Finding Soutbek (Courtesy: Holland Park Press)

I don’t, as a rule, accept review copies of books by non-Australian authors, but when New Holland Press offered me Finding Soutbek by South African writer, Karen Jennings, I was intrigued. Intrigued because of connections in our countries’ respective histories, and because I’ve read several books set in South Africa (by, for example, JM Coetzee, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer). This is Jennings’ first novel, but she has written and published poetry and short stories, winning both the Maskew Miller Longman Award in 2009 and the Commonwealth Short Story Competition‘s Africa Region prize in 2010.

I enjoyed Finding Soutbek. It’s an ambitious, layered novel that switches between the 17th century and the present in a small, remote community in South Africa, the fictitious Soutbek in an area called Namaqualand. The town comprises two groups of people, the upper-towners and the lower-towners. In a neat reversal of expectations, the upper-towners are the poor, the under-class, who at the novel’s opening, have just been hit by a fire for the second time in a reasonably short period. The novel tells the story of what happens in the town after this fire, interspersed with chapters from The History of Soutbek, written by the Mayor and a local Professor, about the community’s founding in the 17th century. This history presents the town as having utopian origins, based on “communal living, sharing and acceptance”.

The novel’s main characters are this Mayor and his wife Anna, the destitute teenage girl Sara who appears in the town at the beginning of the novel and is reluctantly taken in by the Mayor, and Willem who lives in the upper town but who also happens to be the Mayor’s nephew. Jennings explores the relationships between these (and other) characters as the Mayor, the town’s first coloured mayor in fact, struggles to achieve his personal goals in a climate that seems to stall him at every step. The potential benefits of The History are undermined by the post-fire chaos in the upper town. There is a dark side to this mayor, to the way he treats others in his quest for personal wealth and power. Anna sees this and recoils from it, and finds herself increasingly isolated until Sara’s arrival. Willem, attracted to Sara, joins these two in a companionship that sees them jointly reading The History.

The themes are pretty universal – power and oppression, the rich controlling the poor, social inequality – but there is also something that seems particularly South African. That is, the book reminded me of works I’ve read by Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing. I’m thinking particularly of Gordimer’s short story Six feet of the country and Lessing’s novella The grass is singing, which, like Finding Soutbek, describe marital tensions deriving from a life characterised by the exercise of power by one group over another. This sort of conflict is evident too in JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, though his occurs between father and daughter, rather than husband and wife. These works are more complex and hard-hitting than Jennings’ novel, but they all seem to reflect a pre- and post-Apartheid South African literary aesthetic.

What interested me most about the book though was The History which purports to be based on the previously unknown journals written by the leader of a previously unknown unofficial expedition in 1662. A few chapters into the history, we learn a little more of the Mayor’s co-author, the Professor. We learn he has fallen into disrepute because his previous histories had been pro-Apartheid, had in fact argued that Apartheid should have been “carried further”. Moreover, we are told,

he felt no remorse for his actions. He believed that what he had done was fair and just … He had moulded the past into a suitable present, giving people historical proof of what they already believed.

So, a little way into The History we readers are forewarned. It may not do to be taken in. Willem is intrigued, “attracted by the utopia it described … [and] … its answers for a better life”. But, the oldest man in the village makes him wonder and so he starts to read other histories. Late in the novel he says

History says that for centuries humans have been trying to rule other humans, taking the land and everything else for themselves. That’s all the history you need to know. There’s nothing else.

You might guess from this that the utopian vision presented in The History may not be quite as it looks – and you’d be right but I won’t give too much away of how it all plays out. I’ll simply say that I like the fact that Jennings has tackled the writing of history, and how easily it can be made to serve a purpose. As we in Australia know, “history”, whether knowingly fabricated or not, can completely miss the point. And this can have devastating consequences.

While I enjoyed the book, I had some reservations. The History chapters are longer than they need be for the point they are making and this slows the book down somewhat. And the characters are kept a little at a distance. This is partly due to the almost mythic tone and partly to the shifting point of view. It’s the sort of tone I like, but it fights a little here with the very real story going on, and the shifting point of view makes it hard for us to fully engage with the characters. We don’t get to know them quite well enough to fully empathise with them, and this lessens somewhat the book’s emotional impact.

Finding Soutbek is, nonetheless, a good read. The plot is logically developed, the writing is good and the subject matter is relevant. Jennings writes in her Acknowledgements:

At all times I have been careful to remember that though this is a piece of fiction, it is a tale nonetheless which represents a sore reality, and I have tried my utmost to relate it in a sympathetic and sensitive manner.

She has done exactly that and, despite my reservations, I’m glad I read it.

Karen Jennings
Finding Soutbek
London: Holland Park Press, 2009
273pp.
ISBN: 9781907320200

(Review copy supplied by Holland Park Press)