Literature by period

Peter Carey, The chemistry of tears (Review)

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Peter Carey Chemistry of tears bookcover

Gorgeous bookcover (Courtesy: Penguin Group, Australia)

It may sound strange, but when I think of Peter Carey, I also often think of Margaret Atwood. Their works and concerns are very different, I know, but the thing is that both produce highly varied oeuvre. They take risks; they try new forms, voices and genres. This is not to say that I only like writers who do this – after all, I love Jane Austen – but I am always intrigued to pick up a Carey or an Atwood. Consequently, I was keen to read Carey’s latest, The chemistry of tears.

As a librarian-archivist who also worked with museum materials, I was engaged from the first chapter which introduces 40-something Catherine, one of the two protagonists. She’s an horologist and senior conservator in a museum, and the novel opens with her discovery that her (secret) married lover of 13 years, another museum employee, has died. She’s devastated. She also thinks their relationship has been a secret, but soon discovers that her boss, Eric Croft, knows about it. Aware of her grief, he allocates her to a project away from the main museum building. And, he provides her with an assistant, Courtauld graduate Amanda. Catherine has been a calm, rational creature but warns us that she is now “a whirring mad machine”. Hang onto that image. The date is April 2010. Hang onto that date.

The second protagonist is Henry Brandling, who is the author of the exercise books Catherine finds in the tea chests containing her project. This project is to reconstruct a Vaucanson style Digesting Duck which Henry commissioned for his consumptive son. Henry’s part of the story takes place in 1854.

The novel is narrated pretty much alternately in first and third person voices. The first person is Catherine relating her progress with her project, and with her pervasive grief, while Henry’s story is told in third person, based on Catherine’s reading of his exercise books. Henry’s is a pretty wild story that sees him travel from England to Karlsruhe, Germany, to find someone able to make the automaton and then on to Furtwangen to oversee its construction by watchmaker Sumper. Henry’s faith in himself and the somewhat enigmatic Sumper are sorely tested as the manufacture proceeds in a rather secretive and chaotic manner within a household that also includes the moody Frau Helga, her odd but clever son, Carl the Genius, and the silversmith-cum-fairytale-collector Arnaud.  Meanwhile, in 2010, Catherine’s progress is no less erratic, due partly to her own self-centred grief-stricken behaviour and partly to the not completely transparent actions of assistant Amanda.

There were times, I must say, when I wondered if Carey were pushing his plot too hard – when Catherine’s behaviour got just a little too irrational or paranoid, or when Sumper (if not Henry) became a little too obsessive – but these times were fleeting because he always managed to pull it back just as I thought he was going over the edge.

Carey uses a whole grab-bag of devices to tell this tale. I liked the obvious but not slavish parallels between grieving Catherine and her clever but a-little-too-independent assistant Amanda, and between worried father Henry and his rather independent watchmaker Sumper. These parallels encourage us to think more deeply about what is really going on in the two domains, to consider who is rational and who isn’t, or whether no-one is. Carey also uses humour and satire, some light foreshadowing, and effective imagery, in addition to the structure and voice I’ve already described. Looked at individually, none of these is particularly innovative, but in concert they result in something rather fresh and, more than that, something that is entertaining while also challenging the intellect.

If you know Carey, though, you will know that this novel is about more than two people resolving their respective griefs. Remember my instructions in the second paragraph to hang onto an image and a date? They are clues to the bigger themes of the novel. The date, April 2010, is the date of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This is a serious and distressing issue for Amanda. And what caused the oil spill? Why, a big machine of course. Carey’s theme, however, is a little more complex than simply demonstrating the negative effects of industrialisation, that triumph of the 19th century, on our lives today. Enter the automaton story-line …

Automata, you’ll be aware, represent scientists’ attempts to imitate life but, as Henry recognises early in his quest, they are “clever” but “soul-less” creatures. Catherine also reflects on automata in her first chapter:

But really, truly, anyone who has ever observed a successful automaton, seen its uncanny lifelike movements, confronted its mechanical eyes, any human animal remembers that particular fear, that confusion about what is alive and what cannot be born.

The plot – well, the theme – thickens, because Henry and Catherine’s automata, the duck, isn’t quite what it appears to be. And here, Carey cheekily introduces and twists the ugly duckling story because, as we learn early in the novel, the duck is in fact a swan – and a swan, in reality and myth if not in fairytale, is something both “beautiful and pitiless”. Carey uses it to suggest that science may be taken too far … and to represent …

The other big theme of science versus belief, the paradox of scientific and industrial endeavour towards perfection versus the chaos of humanity. As Eric says to Catherine late in the novel:

Do you know, I find the notion that mysteries must be solved to be very problematic. […] Why do we always wish to remove ambiguity?

Is this Carey confronting us head on with our own paradoxes? With the fact that we are happy with, want even, our modern culture’s tendency to produce open endings, to recognise that not all can be neatly explained, while at the same time expecting science to push and push and push for answers. Accepting mysterium tremendum, suggests Carey, is the stuff of life.

Lisa of ANZLitLovers also liked this novel.

Peter Carey
The chemistry of tears
Camberwell: Hamish Hamilton, 2012
268pp
ISBN: 9781926428154

(Review copy courtesy Penguin Group, Australia)

Elia Kazan, Audience tomorrow: Preview in New Guinea (Review)

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Photo portrait

Publicity still, c 1960, from the Elia Kazan Collection of the Cinema Archives at Wesleyan University (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In my previous life I worked in a film library and film archive, so I was drawn to this week’s Library of America offering, “Audience tomorrow: Preview in New Guinea” by film director Elia Kazan*. My interest was strengthened by two more facts. Firstly, the title mentions New Guinea, which I visited twice in the late 1970s. Secondly, it was published in 1945 suggesting it might be about the war, and I am interested in reading about the two world wars. All up, it looked like an article for me.

Kazan, who made some great films including A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden, wrote “Audience tomorrow” about his visit to New Guinea during the war as an advisor to the military. “Our mission” he said, as quoted in LOA’s introductory notes, “was to set up self-entertainment units for the soldiers, to keep men from going nuts before they were shipped to other theatres of action or home. The soldiers didn’t think much of the USO shows”. Apparently, they liked the big name acts, but most shows were by “third-rate cabaret entertainers”.

Kazan’s visit to New Guinea was part of a wider Pacific tour. LOA’s notes state that while he was in the Philippines, his most recent film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, was screening. He was pleased that his film was being shown and that the soldiers seemed to enjoy it, but he wrote later in his autobiography that he was bothered by the “contrast between the terrible intensity and cost of what was happening around me and the sentimental fairytale I’d made”.

“Audience tomorrow” is a fascinating article, mainly for the insight it provides into Kazan. There’s very little of the horror of war here and it almost sounds like propaganda at times. The young soldiers are idealised:

The boys … were kids from around the block. You kept feeling that you recognised someone. They did not seem like soldiers. Their stance was easy and casual, their smiles shy and fresh, never arrogant or domineering. They were the citizen soldiers of a democracy: tow heads, red heads, Italians, Negroes, Greeks, Irish. The mood was congenial, the night soft, all about was harmony.

Also, “our army is beautifully organised, beautifully equipped”, and, after briefly mentioning the “ambulatory cases” and “the shell-shocked”, he praises the “New Medicine”:

I remembered with a start of joy that 97% of the wounded in our army recover. All thanks to the New Medicine.

He was there, after all, in the employ of the military.

It’s interestingly written. Its opening made me think I was about to read a short story – or a film script perhaps?:

Eddie Moran wasn’t going with us. He had a bad headache, and his bones ached. Someone suggested Eddie might have a touch of dengue fever …

But this is not a story about Eddie Moran, or any other character, in fact. The Eddie Moran reference enabled him to set the context: “the talk about dengue furnished a striking contrast to our ‘cocktails and dinner downtown’ before going to the theatre back in New York”. In other words, they were off to the theatre but one of a very different ilk to his usual experience. It was a “Soldier Show program”, that is, one produced by the GIs themselves. He was surprised about “the degree of hunger with which the men craved entertainment, the eagerness with which they offered to participate in programs”, both in front of and behind the scenes.

He describes the theatre (called “The Medicine Bowl” as it is at a hospital), the attendees (including the WACS who, my horrified feminist brain read, had curfews), and some of the acts in the show. Rain eventually forces the show to end – “there is hell in the bowels of the weather here” – but his article goes on to describe the post-show action in the Officers’ Club. Again he is positive about the quality of the young men whose:

language was highly technical, their faces new to a razor … these kids made me feel out of it. Something had passed me by. Folks, there’s a new generation.

Did I tell you that Kazan was 35 at the time? Anyhow, this “new generation” is the point of the article. He recognises that these men “are citizens, not soldiers” who want to go home. He suggests they have idealised the “States” but fears that the States “can’t hope to live up to the picture these boys have in their mind’s eye”. Interestingly, he argues that:

These twelve million men are potentially the greatest unified body of Public Opinion our country has ever known. They could, if brought together, insist that an organisation be found and made to function that would never permit a repetition and intensification of this nightmare.

This is an aside, though. His main argument is that these “fellows who come back will be demanding” of the entertainment industry. “We’ll have to be good to survive,” he says. “If we’re not, we’ll feel our failure where it really hurts: at the box office”. He concludes the article, which was published in Theatre Arts, with a plea to the industry

to make what is in the theatres a live experience for the people, not merely a kill-time. All the people of the nation have grown some during the war. Twelve million men have grown a lot. Some of us may not know it, but we are being challenged!

Kazan, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller went on to give it their best shot.

Elia Kazan
“Audience tomorrow: Preview in New Guinea”
First published: Theatre Arts, October 1945
Available: Online at the Library of America

*Kazan had a stellar but rather controversial film and theatre career. Wikipedia is a good place to start if you’d like to read more.

Willa Cather, My Antonia (Review of eNotated edition)

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Portrait Willa Cather 1936

I am a Willa Cather fan, and have read some of her novels and short stories, so was intrigued when eNotated Classics offered me an eNotated version of Cather’s My Ántonia for review. eNotated? That sounded like something worth exploring so, although I’ve read the novel before, I decided to read it again. I wasn’t sorry. It’s still a wonderful read.

My aim here is not so much to review the book, though I won’t be able to resist saying a little, but to explore this eNotated edition that I read on my Kindle. I understand from the website that eNotated Classics produces books for the Kindle, the Nook and iBooks. The company’s aim is to take “advantage of eBook technology to extend and enrich books in a way that increases understanding, engagement and reading pleasure”. Did they achieve this aim for me? That is the question!

I’d say yes and no – and will explain by discussing what I see as the three main components of the eNotated version.

eNotation links

These are underlined text (words or phrases) that you click for added information, which can be dictionary-style definitions, brief encyclopaedic-like descriptions, or interpretations. The eNotations can also be read as a group by clicking a single link at the beginning and end of each chapter, and they appear at the end of the book. In fact, the novel finished at the 77% mark in the book, with the last 23% comprising the eNotations and other material.

I was disappointed that many of the eNotation links contained the same information that the Kindle dictionary contains. Since the latter is faster to access by simply moving the cursor to the word to be looked up, those eNotations were rather superfluous. However, perhaps this depends on the dictionary the e-reader accesses, making the experience different with different e-readers.

There were a few of the more interpretive style and I appreciated those. One concerned the relevance of the play Camille which the narrator Jim sees with Lena. This sort of notation can be useful to students who may not, for example, know the play.

A useful feature is their identification system, which comprises a bracketed number at the end of each paragraph and each eNotation, making them easy to cite and to find. The number is obvious as you read, but you soon get used to it.

Theme indications

Now this one bothered me somewhat. See what you think: here are the first lines of the novel as they are presented in this eNotated version:

Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa (TIME) in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden – Jim Burden as we still call him in the West.

Throughout the novel sentences or phrases are treated like this – formatted in italics followed by (TIME), (NARRATOR) or (ELEGIAC). The “How to read this book” section at the beginning of the book explains that these italicised passages are cited in the relevant theme essay – Time, Narrator or Elegiac – at the end.  These are not really “themes” in the literary analysis sense: “Time” is a theme but “Narrator” relates to voice, and “Elegiac” relates to tone. I did find these a little intrusive and wonder whether they would have been better handled as links to the essay they occur in without the bracketed upper case word to show the way.

Additional information

At the end of the book are several items designed to add value. Most of these are not unique to e-Books. They are the eNotations (which you can click on to go back to the text), the three theme essays, a History of Nebraska, a Willa Cather Timeline, a Key Event Timeline, a Bibliography and Images. These are all useful value-adds. I liked the fact that the 12 images can be enlarged, something I can’t do with maps and images in the travel guide I bought last year. It was fascinating to see an image of a Dugout house in Nebraska, though photo credits next to the captions would have been good.

I’m not a Cather expert, but I found the Theme essays interesting – and expect they’d help both students and general readers. The bibliography is short and looks useful, though the most recent citation is dated 1987 which seems a little old. The novel might be a classic, but scholarship continues …

And now to the book itself

How do I love this book? Let me count the ways! I love its meditation on the past, on how the past intrudes into the present. Jim Burden is, really, “burdened” by his past. He meets Antonia when he is a 10-year-old orphan arriving in Nebraska to live with his grandparents, and she a 14-year-old Bohemian immigrant arriving with her family to settle there.  They end up on neighbouring farms and become friends when her father asks Jim to teach Antonia how to speak English. The novel then follows the next 30 or so years of their lives – the first four “books” cover 10 years from the novel’s opening, while the last “book” jumps to 20 years later. Jim, the narrator, keeps an eye on what happens to “my” Antonia over the years, but the book is as much about him and his inability to move on from the past. He says near the end:

In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

 I love its language and tone. It’s delicious to read. I’d probably describe it as “melancholic” or “meditative” but I wouldn’t argue with Bedell’s “elegiac”. Here is an early description as Jim arrives in Nebraska from the greener, more lush Virginia:

Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

Lovely, simple, spare writing.

And I love Cather’s description of pioneer life, and pioneer characters. Much of what she writes could easily apply to 19th century Australia. The landscape is different – but is similarly bare and harsh – and the ethic mix is different – but the experiences and hardship are universal. It’s a life and environment in which character is writ large – and Cather draws her characters beautifully. Even the minor ones – such as farm hands Jake and Otto who disappear early in the novel – are vivid. Here is Jim on Ántonia, late in the novel:

She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.

This is one of those novels that stays with you and I’d recommend it to anyone. Would I recommend this eNotated edition? Yes. It’s a good attempt to take advantage of the eBook format and, while there are features that didn’t  work perfectly for me, at USD5.99, it’s hard to beat.

Willa Cather
The eNotated My Ántonia
eNotated by Barbara Bedell
eNotated Classics, V1.00 12/1/2011 (based on 1918 edition)
Kindle edition
ISBN: 9780982744864

(Review copy supplied by eNotatedClassics.com)

Julian Barnes, The sense of an ending (Review)

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I should have known I wouldn’t be the first to think of it, but during my reading Julian Barnes‘ Booker Prize winning novel, The sense of an ending, I was suddenly reminded of TS Eliot‘s The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It was the melancholic tone, the sense of life having passed one by, that did it:

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him?

Doesn’t that remind you of “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”? I don’t usually read reviews before I write my own, but I wondered if my thought had come to anyone else. Of course it had. I googled “julian barnes sense of an ending prufrock” and up came several hits. Oh well, I thought, at least I’m not going to sound totally foolish. There is safety in numbers, after all, which brings me back to Tony, the novel’s protagonist, who says, at another point in the novel:

I’m not odd enough not to have done the things I’ve ended up doing with my life.

I admit to having a certain fellow feeling with Tony, a self-confessed “average” person who’s led an average life “of some achievements and some disappointments”. But, enough self-revelation, let’s get on with the review.

I’ll start by saying that this book is right up my alley. Firstly, it’s a novella and regular readers here know how I love a good novella. Secondly, it’s a good novella, by which I mean it’s tightly constructed and sparely written. And thirdly, plot is not the main point; character and life are Barnes’ focus.

Nonetheless, while there’s not a strong plot, there is of course a story, and it concerns the aforesaid Tony. He’s the first person narrator and is a reliably unreliable one. He tells us this on the second page, while at the same giving away the novel’s essential form:

But school is where it all began, so I need to return to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.

This tight little para tells us a few things about what’s to come. The word “deformed” combined with the idea that he “can’t be sure of the actual events” tells us to beware, that imperfect (for whatever reason) memory is at play. The mention of returning “to a few incidents” describes the basic structure of the novel, as it does indeed focus on and tease out the ramifications of a “few incidents”.  And the reference to school hints that there might be something of the bildungsroman about it.

I still haven’t told you anything about the story, though, have I? It’s divided into two parts. In Part One, Tony is in his teens and twenties and focuses on his three male friends and his first serious girlfriend, Veronica. This part is less than 60 pages and, as Tony promises at the beginning, primarily comprises a few scenes from his life, linked by some running commentary. There are classroom scenes and a particularly memorable one involving his first  (and only) weekend visit to his girlfriend’s home. We come back to this scene in the second part. I loved how, after spending some 50 pages on his youth, Tony wraps up around 40 years of his adult life in two pages. Impressive writing.

In Part Two, Tony is confronted again with some of the major incidents from his youth and is forced to reconsider his sense of self. The most important of these incidents concerns the suicide of one of his friends … and gradually we get a whiff of a mystery, albeit one just hovering around the edges. This is because the mystery is not the main point.

Tony, in this part, is bequeathed, out of the blue, the diary of the friend who had committed suicide 40 years previously. Now, Tony believes that it is the witnesses to your life, those you spent time with, who “corroborate” who you are. As these people drop away, there is, he says “less corroboration, and therefore less certainty to what you are or have been”. He therefore sees this diary as potentially significant:

The diary was evidence; it was – it might be – corroboration. It might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump start something – though I had no idea what.

The bequest does “jump start something” but to what purpose is the moot point. An issue that occupies Tony is that of change. “Does character develop over time?” he asks and then continues, in one of those little postmodern touches we’ve become used to, “In novels of course it does, otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story”. You said it, Tony/Julian, we are tempted to respond, except that by this time Tony had so captured my attention that the minimal story was neither here nor there.

And this is where I’ll leave the story … and return to an issue I raised earlier in the post, that regarding its being something of a bildungsroman. It’s not a traditional coming-of-age novel because only the first part of the novel chronicles his development as a young man. But, something is jump started for Tony in his 60s that forces him to rethink who he had been and who he had become. Memory, he says, can lock you into

the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. I press the button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs and the usual stuff spins out. The events reconfirm the emotions – resentment,  sense of injustice, relief – and vice versa. There seems no way of accessing anything else; the case is closed.

Occasionally, however, something happens to break the loop, as it does for Tony. He is suddenly confronted with new (or, different) memories which bring new emotions. He looks at “the chain of responsibility” and sees “my initial there”. He learns that the things he’d thought fixed or certain can be dissolved, that memory cannot be relied upon and can, in fact, come back to bite you. Time and memory, Barnes shows us, are malleable, suggesting, to me at least, that perhaps we never really do come of age.

Julian Barnes
The sense of an ending
London: Vintage, 2011
150pp.
ISBN: 9780099564973

PD James, Death comes to Pemberley (Review, sorta)

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How do you review or evaluate a Jane Austen “sequel”*? Do we expect, want even, the author to channel Austen? I suspect the answer is as varied as are the readers of sequels, and it probably depends on why we read Austen. Those who are mostly interested in the stories and what happens to the characters are likely to have a completely different perspective from those who love Austen’s language and her very particular wry, sly eye on humanity. I fall into the latter group and this is why I am not drawn to sequels. I want to read Austen for Austen, and other writers for their style and worldview.

I have just read PD James‘ Death comes to Pemberley. I’d describe it as a traditional sequel, with a difference. That is, it picks up the story of Elizabeth and Darcy some six years after their wedding, but it is a crime novel, which adds an extra complication for the reviewer, because not only is there the issue of Jane Austen’s story and characters to consider, but there’s a shift in genre. This, I’ll admit right now, puts me at a double disadvantage: I don’t read Jane Austen sequels and I don’t read crime novels. So why did I read this book? Two reasons really. It was given to me by a friend and my local Jane Austen group decided to discuss it as part of this year’s focus on Pride and prejudice.

I’m glad I read it, mainly because I’ve been wanting to try a “sequel” for some time to understand what they are all about – and a sequel by a writer of PD James’ reputation seemed like a good one to try. However, I can’t say I really enjoyed it. It was, however a quick read – and I did find it intriguing to ponder what sequel readers look for.

Before I discuss that, I’d better say something about the plot, though that’s hard without giving too much away. The story proper starts on the night before a big annual ball. Elizabeth, Darcy, Colonel Fitzwilliam (now Viscount Hartlep), Georgiana and the Bingleys are all at Pemberley getting ready, when a carriage careens into view carrying, we soon discover, an hysterical Lydia claiming that her husband, Wickham, has been shot. Darcy, Colonel Fitzwilliam and a new character and suitor to Georgiana, Alveston, set off into the woods to find out if indeed this has been the case. The novel then, as crime novels tend to do, follows the story of a murder through inquest, trial and resolution. It’s an interesting enough plot, and one whose resolution I didn’t guess. But then, as I’ve already said, I’m not a crime reader.

But now, rather than review the book in my usual way, I’m going to talk about it specifically in terms of its “sequelness”. (Is that an ok neologism?). So here goes…

Characterisation

If there’s one thing a sequel should do, I think, it’s to be true to the characters. No matter what new situation they are placed in, they need to still be them. Unfortunately, in this novel, Elizabeth and Darcy do not come across as Jane Austen’s creations. Darcy spends most of the novel – which, remember, occurs six years after the wedding – bothering about his decision to marry Elizabeth and how it returned Wickham to his world. He’s not sorry about marrying Elizabeth but he mulls and mulls and mulls yet again about the implications feeling, for example, “that he had lost some respect in his cousin’s [Col Fitzwilliam] eyes because he had placed his desire for a woman above the responsibilities of family and class”. That’s not our Darcy!

Similarly, it’s a rather subdued Elizabeth we see. Sure, she’s older but she is still in her 20s. And sure, she’s now the mistress of Pemberley, but that doesn’t mean the young woman who stood up to Lady Catherine, unlike “sensible” girls who recognise their need of a husband, now has to be quiet and, yes, dull. Why doesn’t she tell Darcy of some clues and suspicions that may be relevant to the murder?

Would Charlotte Lucas really harbour resentment towards Elizabeth? James suggests she does:

… but it was unlikely that Charlotte had either forgotten or forgiven her friend’s first response to the news [that she’d accepted Mr Collins].

Style

I’m not sure that a sequel must ape Austen’s style … which is just as well because James doesn’t really. The problem is that I think she tried. She’s clearly a good writer, but it probably would have been better for her to stick to what she does best. There were moments of wit and humour, but much was ponderous. Here is Georgiana’s suitor speaking to Darcy:

Forgive me, sir, but I feel I must speak. You discuss what Miss Darcy should do as if she were a child. We have entered the nineteenth century; we do not need to be a disciple of Mrs Wollstonecraft to feel that women should not be denied a voice in matters that concern them. It is some centuries since we accepted that a woman has a soul. Is it not time that we accepted that she also has a mind?

This is way too didactic and preachy for Austen, particularly for a non-Mr-Collins-like character. The dialogue, overall, lacks Austen’s light touch – and is often stilted without capturing the formality of the period.

There were times too when I felt she was more Dickens than Austen. Some of her characters’ names are pure Dickens, such as Hardcastle, Pegworthy and Belcher.

However, I understand that James is known for her settings – something that Austen did not focus much on – and her descriptions of place are generally evocative and effective.

Observations

Along with her style, it’s the way Austen hones in on human behaviour and describes it with brevity and wit  that keeps me coming back to her. James was clearly keen to match Austen in this area and occasionally made me smile, as with this description:

… had exacerbated a disagreement common in marriages wherein an older husband believes that money should be used to make more of it, and a young and pretty wife is firmly of the view that it exists to be spent; how otherwise, as she frequently pointed out, would anyone know that you had it?

And this comment by the imperious Lady Catherine:

I have never approved of protracted dying. It is an affectation in the aristocracy; in the lower classes it is merely an excuse for avoiding work.

These little commentaries were like beacons in the forest … and showed me that, despite the misses in the novel, James does “get” Austen.

Genre

Then there’s the genre shifting. This is both a crime novel and historical fiction. I can’t speak much for the crime aspect except to say I thought it was well plotted and kept me guessing. I didn’t work out whodunnit, but when it came, the clues generally made sense. James also incorporated some Gothic elements – nature awry, dark woods and possible ghosts – something that Austen didn’t write, though she did spoof readers of Gothic fiction in her Northanger Abbey.

The historical fiction aspect was mixed for me. James had clearly researched the period thoroughly and I enjoyed learning about the practice of law, in particular. However, there were times when it felt that she just had to impart some information, whether or not it was essential to the story. Interesting enough, but it got in the way of her story.

Unlike Austen, who is often criticised for not writing about current events, James makes regular references to the Napoleonic war – and to English nationalism. This is fine. I don’t think a sequel has to limit itself to Austen’s subject matter.

I’d love to write more, but have already taken up way too much of your precious reading time. I’ve probably panned the novel more than I originally intended to. This is because it’s not the book for me – but it’s by no means a “bad” book. If you like Austen sequels, you’ll probably like it. If you like crime novels or are a fan of PD James, you could very well like it. But if you like Austen for her Austen-ness, then, like me, you’d probably rather read Pride and prejudice  – again. Horses for courses, as they say.

Death comes to Pemberley
London: Faber and Faber, 2011
310pp
ISBN: 9780571283583

*  Sequel in this Jane Austen context are books written by other writers based in some way on Austen’s novels. They can be “real” sequels (or prequels) in that they take an existing novel and tell us what happened next (or before); they can be retellings of a particular novel; or they can take another approach, such as tell the story of, or from the point of view of, another character.

Chris Flynn, A tiger in Eden (Review)

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Flynn Tiger in Eden
Courtesy: Text Publishing

Are all people redeemable, regardless of what they’ve done? This is the question that confronts us in Chris Flynn’s debut novel, A tiger in Eden. I wondered, as I was reading this book, what inspired Flynn to write – in first person – about a man who was a violent thug during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and how he managed to achieve such an authentic voice. I don’t read reviews before I read books, and I didn’t read the press release which came with the book until I’d finished it, but when I did I discovered that Flynn was born in Belfast during the period he writes about. “I was born into the war and knew nothing else growing up”, he says.

He has seen horror, he says. He has had guns pointed at him, and he has heard “stories of torture and cruelty so nightmarish I would not recount them to someone who had grown up outside of Northern Ireland. You don’t want that in your head”. This, however, is the world of Flynn’s protagonist, the thug-on-the-run, Billy Montgomery, whose head is full of violent memories and whose hands are stained with blood. “Sometimes”, he says, “I reckon the worst thing that can happen to a person is surviving”.

I don’t want to say too much about the story because it’s a slim book with a small cast of characters and a pretty straightforward plot. To say too much would give it away. It’s set in Thailand in the mid 1990s. The aforesaid thug Billy, who is not short of a penny due to his criminal past, is hiding out. But, here’s the interesting thing. Billy is a sympathetic character, despite the violence we know he’s done (though we don’t know the full extent until near the end) and even despite the violence we see him enact in the first half of the novel. He’s sympathetic because we realise early on that he’s trying to work through something, that he’s carrying some terrible baggage he wants to shake off.

It’s the mark of a good writer to be able to make an unappealing character sympathetic. And Billy is pretty unappealing. Not only is there his violent past, but his attitude to women is (or, at least has been) appalling, as has been his attitude to Catholics and various other “lesser”, to him, members of society. But, this book is really about the education of young Billy and so, through the love of a couple of good women (which is, yes, a little corny) and some other meaningful encounters, a Buddhist retreat, and reading, Billy starts to think about his life and, consequently, starts to confront his demons.

One of the things that makes Billy work is his voice. The novel is told first person in the vernacular of his ilk. This means there’s liberal use of swear words*, minimal punctuation, and the grammar is, shall we say, idiosyncratic. The result is a voice that sounds authentic – and, in this case, reliable. The only thing stopping Billy from telling the truth at times is the pain it would release.

Billy is, of course, the tiger in Eden, a potential threat to good people everywhere, but just to give it some added real and metaphoric punch, Flynn has our Billy confronting and staring down an actual tiger, an escapee from a zoo (just like Billy really). However, whilst I say Billy is “the” tiger in Eden, he is not the “only” tiger in Eden. Flynn shows Thailand to be a place spoilt if not corrupted by sex-tourists and cashed-up back-packers who abuse the locals one way or another. Here is Billy after realising that a genuine friends-only outing with a local Thai girl threatens her reputation:

The aul sex tourism had changed things for all these people, I could see that now ‘cos normal life no longer existed. It was kind of like how the Troubles had changed things back home, once you go down that road, sure there’s nothing going back, everything gets changed forever and not for the better. I felt ashamed so I did.

In other words, while Flynn’s main story is men like Billy, he manages to make a few other points along the way.

At the beginning of this post I said that the book confronts us with the question of redemption, and so it does, but that’s not so much what Billy is seeking. He does not specifically ask to be “saved”. He simply wants to be able – psychologically and actually – to put the past behind him and “make something” of his life. This is not a perfect book. It’s somewhat predictable and the supporting characters are not well fleshed out, but Billy is a character that will engage you and make you see the world from another angle. And isn’t that what reading is all about?

Chris Flynn
A tiger in Eden
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012
217pp.
ISBN: 9781921922039

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

* So it’s not the book for you if that offends.

Merlinda Bobis, Fish-hair woman (Review)

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Merlinda Bobis Fish-hair woman

Courtesy: Spinifex Press

How do you classify a book like Fish-hair woman by Filipino-Australian writer, Merlinda Bobis? Darned if I know, but I’ll have a go. It’s part war story, murder mystery, political thriller, romance, and historical epic. It draws on the magical realist tradition of writers like Isabel Allende, but overarching all this, it is a book about stories – about the stories we cleave to ourselves and the stories we tell others, the stories that convey the truth and the ones that hide it, the stories that change with time and those that never change.

But enough preamble, let’s get to the action. The book is set in the Philippines, with the core story taking place in a village called Iraya in 1987. It is a time of civil unrest: government soldiers fight communist insurgents (the historical New People’s Army), with privately-controlled armies added to the mix. The villagers are caught in the middle, struggling to survive under

violence dressed as salvation. What hopeful word, the sibilants a gentle hush: salvacion. The soldiers and the rebels spoke of this same cause, even as they remained in opposite camps and our village festered in between.

The central characters are Estrella, the fish-hair woman who uses her 12-metres-long hair like a net to retrieve the dead from the river (“trawl another victim of our senseless war”); her older “sister”, Pilar, who joins the communist insurgents; and Tony, the Australian journalist whom both had loved. These relationships are complicated by the fact that Estrella, whose mother died at the birth, is the illegitimate daughter of the most powerful man in the village, Mayor Kiko Estraderos (aka Doctor Alvarado), the man who runs the private army.

While the main action occurs in 1987, the time-frame moves between 1977, 1987 and 1997, with the story being mostly told from the perspective of 1997. By this time Pilar and Tony are among the dead or disappeared and Tony’s 19-year-old son Luke has been lured to the Philippines, on the pretext that his father is alive, by Kiko who wishes to “sanitise history and facilitate his return to politics”.

It’s a multi-layered story of political unrest, complicated village loyalties, and familial and romantic love. It is told in first person and third person, with changing points of view.  Sometimes we see through Estrella’s eyes, sometimes Luke’s, sometimes an omnipotent narrator’s or another character’s, and occasionally through newspaper clippings. Woven through it are recurring images and smells – the sweet lemongrass tainted by the corpse-laden river, the fireflies that light the dead so they can be found, and Estrella’s long hair that magically grows each time she senses violence and pain.

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 Badge

Australian Women Writers Challenge (Design: Book’dout – Shelleyrae)

This is one of those books that requires you to go with the flow. Its structure mimics the way we layer stories, the way we weave history and myth, stories and memories, so that at any one time we may or may not know where we are or who we are. Estrella, the fish-hair woman, and Stella, Doctor Kiko’s daughter, for example, are different facets of the same person, each with different stories.

There are simpler characters, too. One is Pay Inyo, the village gravedigger. He reminded me a little of the grandfather in Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village. He’s the peaceful man, the wise one who urges a humane path, who says it’s about perspective, “about how and from where you look … how far … and what you will to see”. But even he is unsure about the story:

But who is the hero in this story? Pay Inyo is not sure anymore, nor is he sure about what the story is in the first place. There are too many stories weaving into each other, only to unweave themselves at each telling, so that each story can claim prominence. Stories are such jealous things. The past and the present, ay, what wayward strands.

There were times, as I read, when I thought that Bobis may have created a few too many “wayward strands”. Some stories may not have been critical to tell, but her voice is so compelling and the language so expressive that I didn’t really begrudge her these, because by then I was well and truly along for the ride.

This is a novel set during war and yet it is not really about war. It is about people, “those whom we love and hate”, about how we use and manipulate stories to “save” or ” kill”, and, as Pay Inyo would like us to see, about collective grieving, collective responsibility:

This is the wake of the world: each of us standing around a pool that we have collected for centuries. We are looking in with our little pails … We try to find only what is ours. We wring our hands. Ay, how to go home with only my undiluted pail of grief? To wash my rice with or my babies, to drink? But the water is my dead kin, an enemy, a beloved, a stranger, a friend, someone who loved me or broke my heart. How to tell them apart? How to cleave water from water?

For all the sadness and brutality in this book, it has a big heart. And its message is clear. We are all in this together. How much better if we see it sooner rather than later.

Merlinda Bobis
Fish-hair woman
North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2011
303pp
ISBN: 1876756977

(Review copy supplied by Spinifex Press)

Izzeldin Abuelaish, I shall not hate (Review)

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Revenge is a concept that I just don’t get. No, let me put that another way. I understand the emotions that give rise to the desire for revenge – though I’ve never, admittedly, been tested myself, not like, say, Izzeldin Abuelaish. What I don’t understand is the belief that revenge is the answer, that it will make something (whatever that thing is) better. I’ve never seen it do so. In fact, what it seems to do is make things worse. And so, I admire Abuelaish’s stance in his book, I shall not hate, because if anyone has been tested, he has.

Dr. Abuelaish & Rabbi David

Dr. Abuelaish & Rabbi David, Oct 2009 (Photo credit: achituv, using CC-BY-SA 2.0)

For those of you who don’t know his story, Abuelaish was born in the Jabalia Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip in 1955. Through hard work and persistence, the encouragement of several teachers, and the support of his mother, he became a doctor, eventually specialising in gynaecology and obstetrics, and becoming an infertility expert. This, though, is not what the book is about. It’s about his ability to rise above horrific personal tragedy – the killing of three of his daughters by Israeli Defence Force (IDF) shells in January 2009 during a 23 day attack on Gaza* – and his decision:

I had two options to choose from: I could take the path of darkness or the path of light.

He chose the path of light, because, as he writes:

I believe in co-existence, not endless cycles of revenge and retribution. And possibly the hidden truth about Gaza can only sink in when it is conveyed by someone who does not hate.

Though making this choice – towards light – was clearly a conscious act, we readers aren’t surprised because we’ve seen him making this same choice throughout the book despite, as he says, being “tested by brutal circumstances the whole of my life, as have many people in Gaza”.

The book chronicles his life from birth to the tragedy – and then his response. He tells about his family’s leaving their farm (which was subsequently taken over by Ariel Sharon!) to join the refugees in Jabalia, and their lives in the camp. He describes the struggle to survive – under grinding poverty that’s rather reminiscent of Frank McCourt’s in Angela’s ashes. He understands how poverty and long-standing oppression lead to acts of violence. As a young boy, he saw education could provide a way out but writes of how without the encouragement of teachers he could well have given up in order to work to help support his parents and siblings. And, he describes his early experiences with Israelis, including working on an Israeli farm during a school vacation, and their joint recognition that they had more similarities than differences.

More alike than different. That’s one of the threads of his story. Another is his belief – and this, again, is a belief he has chosen – that good can come of bad. That’s how he has survived and will, presumably, always survive the setbacks that confront him. One of the lessons of the book is, I think, this one of choice – it is within us all to choose light over dark, hope over desperation. A cynical reader could see Abuelaish as naive except, and this is a big except, he has walked the talk. Not only did he experience the violent (I can’t begin to describe what he saw in his daughter’s bedroom minutes after the attack) deaths of his daughters but throughout his life he has faced immense obstacles to get where he’s got and to maintain his generous positive philosophy. Just reading his descriptions of getting in and out of Gaza – such as he did on a regular basis to work in an Israeli hospital – has made me decide that I will never again complain about being held up a few minutes at an airport for a random security check!

This is not literary fiction, but the story is so compelling it rises above the plain prose. If I had any criticism it would be that it gets a little repetitive at times – but then, I get the sense that life is pretty repetitive in Gaza! He tells his story chronologically, with the odd out-of-sequence digression to make a point. And, there is the rare use of medical imagery to convey an idea. He describes hate as a chronic disease and says:

I am a physician, and as a consequence I see things most clearly in medical terms. I am arguing that we need an immunisation program, one that injects people with respect, dignity, and equality, one that inoculates them against hatred.

It might sound like most of the book is just about talk, but Abuelaish is about more than that. He recognises that action is needed. This action can be as simple as bringing people together so they can share their experiences, find commonalities and learn to trust again. Trust in the Middle East is, he says, “gasping for air”. But, the point I really like is his argument that empowering women, changing their status and role, is a critical part of the solution. Girls need to be properly educated and women’s values need to be better “represented through leadership at all levels of society”. The impediments to achieving this are both financial and cultural, and he has established a foundation titled Daughters for Life to work towards this aim. “Investing in women and girls”, he writes, “is a way out of poverty and conflict”.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going … and Abuelaish is one tough, in the best senses of the word, guy. This is a book I won’t be forgetting in a hurry.

Izzeldin Abuelaish
I will not hate: A Gaza doctor’s journey on the road to peace and human dignity
London: Bloomsbury, 2010
237pp.
ISBN: 9781408814147

* This is not a spoiler. If you don’t come to the book already knowing the basic story, you will know it from the back page and from the foreword and opening chapters.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Louisa Atkinson, and indigenous Australians

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Louisa Atkinson (1834-1872)

Louisa Atkinson (1834-1872) (Courtesy: Artist unknown, via Wikipedia)

Time for another Monday Musings highlighting an Australian literary pioneer, this time Louisa Atkinson. I came across Atkinson a few years ago when I was researching Australian women writers for Wikipedia. She’s one of those women who achieved much in her field but who, I believe, is little known. She was a journalist, novelist and naturalist. She was born in 1834, in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, just a couple of hours’ drive from where I live.

There’s a good general biography of her online at the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but here is the gist:

  • She collected and painted plant specimens for well-known scientists of the time including Ferdinand von Mueller, and she is commemorated in the Atkinsonia genus as well as several plant species.
  • She was a rebel when it came to clothing. While, as is typical of her time, she was highly religious, she shocked the good women of her rural neighbourhood by wearing trousers for her naturalist ramblings and pony-riding.
  • She was a well-regarded botanical artist. Twentieth century Australian artist Margaret Preston described her drawings as having “unexpected elegance and extreme accuracy”.
  • She was the first Australian woman to have a long-running series of articles in a major newspaper. This was her natural history series, A Voice from the Country, which ran for 10 years from 1860.
  • AND she is credited as being the first Australian-born woman to publish a novel in Australia. It was titled Gertrude, the emigrant girl: A tale of colonial life (1857). This and her second novel, Cowanda: A veteran’s grant (1859), are available as etexts from the University of Sydney’s excellent SETIS project (to which I’ve linked the titles). Gertrude tells the story of a young immigrant girl hired to be a housekeeper in a country house by Mrs Doherty who, to give a sense of Atkinson’s style, is described in the first chapter as “a small woman, with a brown careworn countenance; the index of generous emotions, strong passions, and acute griefs, which had worn her straight features into sharp outlines, and given a restless keenness to her small dark eyes”.

I have only dipped into Atkinson’s novel, Gertrude, to get a sense of her writing so I won’t write any further on that. What is interesting to explore a little is her experience of indigenous Australians. Elizabeth Lawson in her book on Atkinson, The natural art of Louisa Atkinson, wrote that her father created a model farm, but

Oldbury’s promise was clouded by its exploitation of the convict system and by its dispossession of the local Gandangara people, a dispossession the family at least recognised. And just above the house on a natural terrace of the mountain rose a great Aboriginal grave-mound with carved funeral trees which Louisa was later to sketch. This mound and its increasing desolation stood in silent rebuke of Oldbury’s enterprise, of its new English place-names and all they signified.

Nonetheless, Lawson writes that Atkinson befriended, and retained life-long friendships with Aboriginal people both at Oldbury and in the Shoalhaven area where she spent some time. That she had sympathy for them is clear from one of her columns for A Voice from the Country (22 Sept 1863) in which she wrote:

These unhappy races have become rather a tradition, than a reality, already in many districts …

She describes their lives, their homes, their hunting with a naturalist’s, and sympathetic, eye:

On one occasion, when the remnants of three different friendly tribes had assembled for a grand corroboree or dance, I made plan of the encampment; each tribe was slightly apart trom the other, divided by a sort of street. Thus, the inviters (?) were clustered in the centre, having, I think, seventeen camps; the Picton tribe on the right hand, five camps, and the Shoalhaven on the left, comprising ten or eleven gunyahs, consecutively forming a village.

She also writes:

The men were severe to their wives, striking and even killing them – when under the influence of anger, but I believe these cases were far less frequent when they had not lost virtues and acquired vices from the so-called Christian people who invaded them.

Interesting, and sensitive, observation. She talks of the problem of drinking:

Intemperance is one of the vices so sadly prevalent among them, they know what its fatal results are, lament them, but have not courage to resist. How frequent is the paragraph in the country paper of an aborigine’s death from this cause, how many have sunk unrecorded. A great sin lies on us as a people, for much has been done to injure, and little to benefit the poor original possessors of our farms and runs.

And thus she confirms that thinking about indigenous Australians with a humane and clear-eye did not pop up suddenly in the mid to late 20th century!

Louisa Atkinson tragically died not long after (but not due to) the birth of her first child, when she was only 38. What a lot she achieved in a rather short life – and what an interesting person she would have been to know.

Virginia Woolf, The mark on the wall (Review)

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Back in November I wrote a post titled Nettie Palmer on short stories which resulted in Stefanie (of So Many Books) recommending one of her favourite short stories, Virginia Woolf‘s “The mark on the wall”. I told her I’d read it and, finally, I have.

This is the sort of story I like. It doesn’t have a strong plot but is the meditation of a lively, creative mind. This meditation is inspired by a mark on the wall which leads the first person narrator to wonder what the mark is, and what it might signify. She doesn’t want to get up to investigate, preferring to let her mind wander, as it will, on the possibilities:

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw to feverishly, and then leave it …

The story does progress, albeit in an organic, stream-of-consciousness way, rather than according to any clear logic. She wonders if the mark is a hole, then thinks it could be a stain, or even, perhaps, something more three-dimensional like a nail head that has broken through the paint. At the end, we do discover what the mark is, but that’s not the point of the story. The point is what she thinks about as she considers the mark …

And the things she thinks about are wide-ranging as we have come to expect in stream-of-consciousness, a technique of which Woolf was one of the early pioneers. The thing about stream-of-consciousness is not only that it tends to roam over a wide range of ideas and topics, but that these ideas and topics are very loosely connected. Sometimes the thread between them is barely visible, usually because the connection is idiosyncratic to the thought processes of the narrator.

This is the case with “The mark on the wall”. The first paragraph uses strong imagery – based around the colours of red and black – which encouraged me to expect something more dramatic than what did, in fact, follow. In the third paragraph she exclaims:

Oh! dear me, the mystery of life. The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity!  To show how very little control of our possessions we have — what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilisation …

Nothing, though, is accidental in Woolf’s story, no matter how much the stream-of-consciousness form may lull us into thinking it is. This is the story of a woman concerned about the meaning or import of reality. She ponders the shallowness of “things” (including, even, knowledge). In the second paragraph she suggests the mark may have been made by a nail holding up a miniature that would have been

a fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in this way — an old picture for an old room.

She writes of how we like to construct positive images of ourselves but how fragile this is, of how superficial reality is. Interestingly, while the story flits from idea to idea, there’s one motif (besides the mark) that recurs, Whitaker’s Table of Precedency. Whitaker’s exemplifies “the masculine point of view which governs our lives”. She uses it to represent the faith we have in rules, and the way we let rules and reality prevent our seeing the “sudden gleams of light”.

There’s a funny sequence in which she imagines a Colonel pontificating with other men on the history of objects like ancient arrowheads. The  Colonel, she imagines, might suffer a stroke and his last thought would be, not his wife and family, but the arrowhead which, she suggests in her stream-of-consciousness way,

is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson drank out of — proving I really don’t know what.

That made me, a librarian-archivist, laugh!

And so, what is it about? Well, the mark seems to represent the unwelcome intrusion of reality into her life – it gets in the way of her thinking (of her desire “to catch hold of the first idea that passes”) while also, paradoxically, offering inspiration to her thoughts. An intriguing story. And, like Stefanie did to me, I recommend it to you.

Virginia Woolf
“The mark on the wall”
Originally published: 1919
Available online at The Internet Archive