Literature by period

Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road

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Before you all (well, those of you of a certain age at least) gasp and wonder how it could be that I haven’t read this delightful little tome before, I assure you that I have. However, on our drive home today from our week at the coast, we listened to an unabridged audiobook version, and I can’t resist sharing some thoughts from this most recent acquaintance with the book.

For those of you who haven’t read it, 84 Charing Cross Road could I suppose be described as a sort of epistolary memoir. It comprises the correspondence between an American writer and bibliophile, Helene Hanff, and Frank Doel of Marks & Co, a London bookshop specialising in secondhand and antiquarian books. The correspondence starts in 1949 and covers the next two decades. Over time, others in the Marks & Co family join in, but the essential relationship is always that between bookbuyer Helene and bookseller Frank. In a horrible bit of blurb writing, it is described on the back of my (almost antiquarian itself) paperback as “the very simple story of the love affair between …”. Well, that cheapens it because it’s not a love affair in the usual sense. It’s a business relationship that also becomes a friendship. He is married, she is not … and no romance ever ensues.

I am not going to write a full review of the “story”, about how Helene sent “care packages” to the staff of Marks & Co to brighten up their postwar rations-ridden lives, about its humour and humanity. Rather, I thought I’d just share a couple of the comments she, a true bibliophile, makes about books and reading.

One is to do with marginalia. Hanff, like me, likes marginalia. She does it herself, and she likes it in the secondhand books she buys. She says in response to a book received as a gift:

I wish you hadn’t been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf . It’s the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you’d decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning  pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.) (16 April 1951)

Another year, another book gift, and here is her response:

I do think it’s a very uneven exchange of Christmas presents. You’ll eat yours up in a week and have nothing left to show for it by New Year’s Day. I’ll have mine until the day I die – and die happy in the knowledge that I’m leaving it behind for someone else to love. I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some book-lover yet unborn. (12 December 1952).

Hanff was clearly a slow-reader and liked re-reading, but she was not sentimental about books per se. Here she is on managing her books:

I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I’m never going to read again like I throw out clothes I’m never going to wear again. It shocks everybody. My friends are peculiar about books. They read all the bestsellers, they get through them as fast as possible, I think they skip a lot. And they NEVER read anything a second time so they don’t remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in the wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on your shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life BUT YOU DON’T THROW IT OUT! NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not? I personally can’t think of anything less sacrosanct that a bad book or even a mediocre book. (18 Sept 1952)

Ellen of Fat Books and Thin Women would agree I think. Check out her recent post in praise of re-reading, and see for yourselves. Those of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while will know that I too am not averse to a bit of re-reading. There is a special joy in revisiting loved books and learning from them anew, isn’t there?

Finally, (only) because I’m missing my Jane Austen meeting today due to the aforesaid travel, I will share with you her discovery of Jane Austen. Hanff, you see, was not one for “stories”. “It’s just stories. I don’t like stories” she wrote in an undated letter around 1963/64. She preferred history (“i-was-there-books”), essays, poetry and the like. However, in 1952, she discovered Jane Austen “and went out of my mind over Pride & Prejudice …”. I’m sure I would have liked Helene Hanff.

Helene Hanff
84 Charing Cross Road (Audio CD)
Read by Juliet Stevenson and John Nettles
Hachette Audio (orig. pub. 1970)
2 hrs (approx) on 2 compact discs
ISBN: 9781405502559

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Marjorie Barnard on the sun and heat

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Marjorie Barnard

Marjorie Barnard (Courtesy: State Library of New South Wales, via Wikipedia)

My first Delicious descriptions post was from Barbara Hanrahan on the sun in Adelaide, so I thought we might travel to Sydney for this one. As it’s still in summer in our neck of the woods, here is Marjorie Barnard in The persimmon tree and other stories (1943), also on the sun – and its enervating effect:

In the wealthy suburbs of the North Shore and Vaucluse a change had taken place too. It was as if the earth had been squeezed so that all the fine houses that had nestled so comfortably in the contours and in the greenery, were forced up to the light. They bulged out, exposed, and the sun tore at them. The gardens that had embowered them were perished. Tinder dry, fire had been through many of them, scorching walls and blistering away any paint that remained. Most of these houses were empty or inhabited as if they were caves, by people who had come in from the stricken country. The owners had fled, not so much from present hardship, as from the nebulous threat of the future, the sense of being trapped in a doomed city. The shores of the harbour were lion-coloured or drab grey. Sandhills showed a vivid whiteness. Only the water was alive and brilliant. And it was salt. (from “Dry spell”)

I like her point that nature doesn’t discriminate (even though we know that, in reality, the well-off do often have the wherewithal to avoid its worst effects). And I love the last sentence – the short finality of it.

POSTSCRIPTS:

  1. I have been at the coast this week, and so scheduled my first two Delicious Descriptions for this time. I promise I won’t be bombarding you bi-weekly with these. (The dictionaries are confused! I looked up “bi-weekly” and it can mean both “twice a week”, as I mean here, of course, and “every two weeks”. How silly is that! Anyhow, perhaps “semiweekly” is the preferable term.)
  2. And Sarah (you Devoted Reader you), this one’s for you. May you experience no more such heat in Sydney this summer.

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Barbara Hanrahan on the sun

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When you read do you come across passages that you just want to hang onto forever – but (if you’re a blogger) when you go to write your blog review you can’t quite make them fit? I do, and have been pondering for some time what to do about it. Then, suddenly, it came to me. How about a series of posts comprising favourite bits from books (and other writing)? And so, “Delicious descriptions from Down Under” was born. The posts will be occasional – and some times more occasional than others – but I’ll just see where it takes me.

For my first one, I couldn’t go past Barbara Hanrahan‘s The scent of eucalyptus (1973) which I reviewed recently. It’s full of “delicious descriptions” but the one I wanted to share has to do with the Sun, with, specifically, hot sunny days in the city of Adelaide. I was in Adelaide on a scorchingly hot long January weekend many moons ago, and haven’t forgotten it. Here is Hanrahan:

Myilly Point, Darwin, shutters

Shutters

The sun is everywhere.

It is in the garden: peering huge-eyed over the berry bush, roosting behind the chimney, floating like a fried egg in puddles. It mocks me when I burn my bare feet on the earth and scorch my fingers on the iron fence. It peels my nose to jigsaw puzzles, gilds my skin with freckles, turns the hair on my arms to gold.

It is in the house: spangling the passage with leopard spots, turning the sheepskin rug tawny, casting zebra stripes through the shutters. It curdles the milk, melts the butter, shows the dust, fades the curtains. It steals into vases and drinks their water; creeps up the cold tap and turns it hot.

Such intense summer heat that goes on for days is typically – though not solely I know – Australian. I love the way she gives the sun life, the way she mixes up her imagery and yet consciously but not rigidly uses a symmetrical structure to make it read more like poetry than prose. It works beautifully – for me, anyhow.

Madeleine St John, The women in black

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The women in black, Madeleine St John, book cover

The women in black bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

One thing mystified me as I started reading Madeleine St John‘s The women in black and that is why she would write a book in 1993 about 1950s? It seemed an odd choice. And then, as I read further, it started to become clear. The time period represents one of those cultural watersheds that nations experience. In this particular case, it was a time of social change: not only were things starting to change for women, but the “reffos” or “Continentals” (as the post-war European refugees were disparagingly called) were beginning to impact Australian culture.

St John chronicles these changes lightly, with warmth and gentle humour, but also with determination. It’s not a coincidence, I think, that St John, born in 1941, would have been around the age of the youngest character, Lisa/Lesley Miles, at the time the book is set.

Hmm … having introduced a character now, I’d better talk briefly about the plot. It centres around the women who work in the Ladies’ Cocktail Frocks and the more exclusive Model Gowns sections of a fictional (but thinly veiled DJs) upper crust department store in Sydney called Goode’s, and takes place over the few weeks before and after Christmas. Model Gowns is staffed by one woman, the Continental or reffo, Magda, while Ladies’ Cocktail is staffed by the middle-aged Miss Jacobs, the 29-year-old almost-on-the-shelf Fay Baines, the 31-year-old married-but-so-far-childless Patty Williams. There is also the buyer Miss Cartwright. Overseeing them all is, of course, a man, Mr Ryder. Into this mix is thrown 17-year-old Lesley (who changes her name to Lisa) Miles, who has just finished her Leaving Certificate.

The story is told in short chapters, each one devoted to one or more of these characters. The tone is (almost conspiratorially) conversational, which invites the reader in. St John draws her characters effectively through brief sections of perfectly caught dialogue and succinct but apt descriptions. The style is witty, with light wordplay and irony. Here are some excerpts from Chapter 2:

Mrs Williams was a little, thin, straw-coloured woman with a worn-out face and a stiff-looking permanent wave. Her husband Frank was a bastard, naturally.  [ …]

At the weekends she visited her mother or one of her sisters; Frank drove her there and fetched her, and while she was ‘jaw, jaw, jawing’ he played golf on the public course at Kingsford or drank in the pub. He was a bastard of the standard-issue variety, neither cruel nor violent, merely insensitive and inarticulate.

[…]  as she left the surgery, the physician looking idly at her back view thought, she’d clean up quite well with a new hairdo, some paint on her face and a black nightie; but the husband probably wouldn’t notice, the bastard …

By the end of chapter 2 I was hooked. In three and a bit pages we were told all we needed (and probably more than we wanted) to know about poor little Patty Williams and her bastard of a husband. But Patty’s is just one story. There’s also Fay Baines who’s desperate to be married but meets all the wrong men through her well-meaning night club manager friend, Myra; and Lisa Miles who expects to do well in her end-of-school results but whose father thinks women have no business at university. Into this mix are thrown the outgoing, confident (but “god awful” to the women in black) Magda and her also Continental/reffo husband Stefan.

Magda takes an interest in Lisa and invites her home. She also tries a little matchmaking with Fay. Meanwhile, Patty does try that black nightie, with consequences she would never have foreseen. It could all go horribly wrong but, without spoiling anything too much, I’ll simply say that St John’s book follows, loosely and more lightly, the Jane Austen tradition, that is, it’s a comedy of manners. Unlike Austen though, she’s writing in an historical, rather than contemporary, time-frame, and so has a slightly different goal in mind – and that is documenting the social change I mentioned in my opening paragraph.

Two simple examples of this are “kissing” between friends, and food. Here is Lisa on “kissing”:

And she [Magda] kissed her on the cheek. Lisa smiled shyly at her. I’ve heard she thought, that Continentals kiss each other much more than we do: it means nothing. They do it all the time, even the men. The men even kiss each other.  But how strange I feel.

This little paragraph struck me; I realised that my friends and I kiss each other in greeting but it was not, I think, the norm among my parents’ generation. In one or two generations, in fact, the often-maligned (in the book and in reality at the time) Continentals had effected quite a change. And then there’s the food. By the end of the book, Lisa, Fay, and even Lisa’s father had tasted and enjoyed such exotic foods as salami. And again I reflected on the immense change in diet from my parents’ to my generation.

I won’t tell you more of the story. It’s a gentle one, but there is a drama concerning Patty, and some little tensions surrounding Fay and Lisa, that keep the book moving while it observes a society in change. There are some perfect descriptions of Sydney, such as this of the women coming to do their last minute Christmas shopping:

From the wooded slopes of the salubrious North Shore to the stuccoed charm of the Eastern Suburbs, from the passé gentility of the Western ditto to the terra incognita of the Southern had they travelled by train, bus, tram and even taxi cab to this scene of final frantic activity.

It’s a book almost of vignettes than of fully realised stories, and there’s the odd clumsy or heavy-handed bit, but St John has nonetheless managed to convey a convincing picture of Australian society at the time, while also telling an engaging and generous tale. And, just to show she has a sense of humour, St John, who was a libertarian at university, injects near the end her own little in-joke. Here is Lisa’s father on the possibility of her going to university:

But I’ll tell you one thing: if I decide you can go, and you do go, if I ever hear of you being mixed up with any of those libertarians they have there, you’re out of this house like a shot and I never want to see you again, is that understood? Right then. If you go, no libertarians, not even one.

I wonder what St John’s father – the prickly politician Edward St John – said to her!

Lisa at ANZLitLovers has also reviewed the book.

Madeleine St John
The women in black
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010 (orig. 1993)
234pp.
ISBN: 9781921656798

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

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Freedom bookcover, by Jonathan Franzen

Freedom bookcover (Courtesy: HarperCollins Australia)

Hmm … where to start? Half way through this book I was tiring. I wanted to say to Franzen “Enough already” (which, if you’ve read the book, has a certain appositeness). I also started to think of those song lines, so well-known to my generation:

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

In fact, I thought of starting this post with that quote, but decided it would be just a little too twee – but somehow it ended up in the first paragraph nonetheless.

In some ways, Jonathan Franzen‘s latest novel, Freedom – which I must be the last blogger to read – is an interesting companion piece to Peter Carey‘s Parrot Olivier in America. They are wildly different in tone, style and historical setting but both explore the foundation upon which America is based, that of freedom of the individual. America tends to parlay this word about a little too, shall I say, freely, a little too unaware at times that freedom is not a simple concept but one that needs to be modified by a few “ifs” and “buts”. It’s these “ifs” and “buts” that confront Franzen’s characters, and that are recognised in those now immortal song lines. In other words, what Franzen’s characters find is that freedom in and of itself is no great shakes. It cannot exist in a vacuum …

But first, the plot. It chronicles the relationship of nice-guy Walter and mixed-up Patty Berglund (and, along the way, their family and friends). The opening paragraph starts around the middle of the chronology, with a rather teasing statement that Walter “had made a mess of his professional life” and then tracks back a few years to the early years of Walter and Patty’s marriage, before tracking back further to their youth and courtship, and then returns to the starting point and on to their future. Through this journey, Walter and Patty, residents of the Twin Cities, grow up, get married, have children, move east, get into a range of “pickles”, and … but that would be telling so I’ll leave the plot there.

It’s a rather complicated structure that owes a lot to postmodernism with its forwards-backwards movement, stories within a story (that is, Patty’s autobiography, told third person, in two distinct parts), a certain intratextuality (such as Patty’s autobiography being read by characters in the novel), the odd font change, and shifting points-of-view. It’s not, however, postmodern in its concerns – and is instead rather earnest, which is part of its problem. I’m not saying that it needs to be postmodern – we don’t need more self-conscious irony and clever playing with the idea of fiction – but it needs something fresh and challenging in characterisation, language and/or tone to carry it right through its 560 pages. Instead, it gets bogged down in too much earnest detail about life in modern America. It’s as though Franzen had a lot of things he wanted to say – about middle-class life, parenting, education, the environment, gentrification, politics, and music – and he was darned sure he was going to say them. We get, therefore, references to 9/11, Cheney and Bush, the war in Iraq, Obama, hints about the GFC, and so on. It’s a bit like Dickens, but without the sustained satire.

That said, there are some funny set pieces, such as the interview Richard (Walter’s friend and rival, and also lately successful rock star) gives to a young fan who wants to use Richard to attract a girl. Richard likens rock music to making chiclets, to being part of not against corporate, capitalist America. And I did love the description of why Walter preferred the aggressive driving of his young assistant, Lalitha, to driving himself:

Walter had come to prefer the anxiety of being her passenger to the judgmental anger that consumed him when he was at the wheel – the seemingly inescapable sense that, of all the drivers on the road, only he was traveling at the right speed, only he … [and on it goes for a page of road-rage inducing complaints].

But, getting back to the main game, what is this “freedom” all about? Most of the characters yearn for and/or experience freedom of one sort or another – they want to live their own lives their way. This can include not working, following one’s own heart regardless of the needs of those around you, having sex with whomever whenever you please, not being responsible for others, not doing the hard yards. And most find that the end result is not a satisfying one.

Walter, whom I presume is Franzen’s main mouthpiece, says:

The reason the system can’t be overthrown in this country … is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they’re not so hung up on personal liberties … The Europeans are all-round more rational, basically. And the conversations about rights in this country isn’t rational. It’s taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it ..

This makes sense to me … but, the thing is that there are so many references to freedom that it is hard to locate the main message. This one is political. There are also more personal messages. Here is a description of Walter’s grandfather:

(The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone to, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.)

And of Walter’s father:

He hated the blacks, the Indians, the well-educated, the hoity-toity, and especially, the federal government, and he loved his freedoms (to drink, to smoke, to hole up with his buddies in an ice-fishing hut) the more intensely for their being so modest.

We see parents giving children a “free pass” only to find those children, such as Walter’s brother Mitch, being a “free man” in the sense that he has no home, no secure job, no responsibilities. We see men, like Richard and Joey, thinking the freedom to have sex with anyone anytime will make them happy, but Joey, for example, after an amusing (to the reader!) scene in which he tries to live his fantasy, discovers who he really is:

This wasn’t the person he thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to choose, but there was something  comforting about being an actual definite sometime …

And at this point he starts to grow up …

There is a lot to enjoy about this book, despite its bagginess. The characters do engage, flaws and all, and Franzen’s heart is, for me, in the right place. When I got to the end, I smiled and felt that Franzen had achieved something, even if it is simply to show that Freedom is a far more complicated concept than people like to think.

Jonathan Franzen
Freedom
London: Fourth Estate, 2010
562pp.
ISBN: 9780007318520

Mario Vargas Llosa, The feast of the Goat

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Mario Vargas Llosa, signing books

Mario Vargas Llosa signing books in 2010 (Courtesty: Daniele Devoti, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-2.0)

If Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa‘s The feast of the goat had been a traditional historical novel, chances are it would have started with the assassins concocting their plan and then worked chronologically to its logical conclusion. But, it is not a traditional historical novel, as is reflected in the structure Vargas Llosa has chosen to tell his story.

Before we get to that though, the plot. The central story revolves around the dying (literally) days of the 30-year Trujillo (“the Goat”, “the Benefactor”, “the devil”) regime in the Dominican Republic. This means the main action takes place in 1961. However, overlaying this is the perspective of Urania, the daughter of one of Trujillo’s head honchos. She’d left the country days before the regime ended and cut herself completely off from her father – for thirty-five years, until her sudden return at the novel’s start. The novel is told from these two time perspectives – 1960/61 and 1996 – and from multiple points-of-view*, the main ones being:

  • Urania
  • Trujillo
  • The conspirators/assassins

But this isn’t all there is to this novel’s structure and narrative style. I’m not quite sure how Vargas Llosa gets away with it, but he has written a book that is very accessible (once you get across the intricacies of Latin American names) and yet also rather complex. This complexity is found, primarily, in the structure. The book can, essentially, be divided into two parts. Chapters 1-16 proceed pretty systematically, cycling through, in turn, the stories of Urania, Trujillo (usually with one of his offsiders), and the Conspirators (usually focusing on one of them in particular). By Chapter 16 the two major crises of the book have occurred or been introduced. The last 8 chapters continue to cycle through different points-of-view but not in the same systematic order. In other words, the narrative structure becomes erratic and the rhythm more urgent, as chaos and uncertainty take over.

And yet, there’s more. For example, the novel is told primarily in third person, with the point-of-view changing chapter to chapter. But, every now and then, for just a sentence or two, or maybe a paragraph, the voice lapses into second person. This happens most often with Urania and conveys the sense that there has been some trauma that she hasn’t been able to fully integrate/recover from. We discover the origins of this trauma in Chapter 16, but it is not fully revealed until the last chapter.

… You were still a girl, when being a girl meant being totally innocent about certain things that had to do with desire, instincts, power, and the infinite excesses and bestialities that a combination of those things could mean in a country shaped by Trujillo. She was a bright girl … (Chapter 16)

This little slip into second person in Urania’s story is telling.

Okay, so this is the architecture, the behind-the-scenes technical stuff, but why write it this way? Well, the reasons are intellectual and emotional. Intellectual in that the multiple alternating points-of-view enable us to get a number of “stories” first hand. Through the eyes of the perpetrators and the disaffected, we explore the regime, and how, as happens so often with dictatorships, the early benefits are gradually (but surely) overshadowed by the corruption and violence perpetrated to maintain power, and how this leads to the assassination conspiracy. And emotional in that the constant shifting in perspective, particularly from people we can trust to those we can’t (to the best of our knowledge), and back again, unsettles and discomforts us … just as those who lived through the regime were kept on edge.

It’s impossible, without writing a thesis, to cover all the angles in this book, so I’m just going to look at one more – the characterisation of Trujillo himself. A historical novelist (rather like a biographer) has to choose what to include and what to exclude when describing a person. Vargas Llosa was lucky, really, that Trujillo had some traits that made this choice rather easy, traits that work on both the literal level and the ironic and metaphoric. Fairly early in the novel is this description of Trujillo

…that master manipulator of innocents, fools, and imbeciles, that astute exploiter of men’s vanity, greed and stupidity.

Fairly typical, wouldn’t you say, of a dictator? But, Trujillo was also fastidious about cleanliness and appearance, believing that

Appearance is the mirror of the soul.

If that’s so, then Trujillo’s “soul” is a very superficial thing because his disdain for the rights and feelings of others is palpable. Throughout the novel, Vargas Llosa sets Trujillo’s obsession with personal care (“the man who did not sweat, did not sleep, never had a wrinkle on his uniform, his tuxedo, or his street clothes”) against the coldness of his mind. That his mind is cold is made perfectly clear through his attitude to his offsiders (whom he liked to scare – “it cheered him to imagine the sizzling questions, suppositions, fears, suspicions he put into the head of that asshole who was the Minister of the Armed Forces”) and to women. This regime values machismo above all: it’s brutal to those those less powerful, and has careless disregard for the innocent. Women, of course, bear the brunt:

Again the memory of the girl at Mahogany House crossed his mind. An unpleasant episode. Would it have been better to shoot her on the spot, while she was looking at him with those eyes? Nonsense. He had never fired a gun gratuitously, least of all for things in bed. Only when there was no alternative, when it was absolutely necessary to move this country forward, or to wash away an insult.

Trujillo was nothing if not a master of self-justification.

How it all falls out, what happens after Chapter 16, is both expected and unexpected as those involved do or don’t do what they’d committed to. The end result is a devastating portrayal of how the political becomes the personal! Not a new message, perhaps, but The feast of the Goat is a compelling read that engaged my heart and mind. I recommend it.

Mario Vargas Llosa
(Trans. by Edith Grossman)
The feast of the goat
London: Faber and Faber, 2002
475pp.
ISBN: 9780571207763

* As in most historical fiction, the novel is peopled with historical characters and fictional ones. Most, in fact, are historical but Urania and her father, though based, I understand, on real people, are fictional.

David Mitchell, Earth calling Taylor

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Fist full of money

Money, money, money (Courtesy: OCAL from clker.com)

And now for something a little different from novelist David Mitchell, a short story titled “Earth calling Taylor”. You can read it online at FT.com. FT.com is the online version of the Financial Times, so it’s not surprising that Ryan Taylor, the protagonist of the story, works in the finance industry. The story starts with Ryan waiting to hear whether he has received the promotion to portfolio manager that he’s expecting.

The scene then shifts to a hospital, where Ryan joins his mother and step-siblings to visit his father who is recovering from a fall. It seems to be a happy and supportive family – they are sitting around the bed, squabbling with the father, who is clearly “on the mend”, over a game of Scrabble. His brother, Jason, is (“only”, says Ryan) a speech therapist and his sister is a successful lawyer in human rights areas, while Ryan, as we know, works at the more self-centred, self-serving end of the occupation spectrum.

And, he’s edgy, so he leaves them, on a flimsy excuse, to go check for messages on his Blackberry. He’s not a very appealing character – he blatantly and unrepentantly fantasises about a nurse in the lift, he wishes for a little cocaine to settle himself down while swigging some hard liquor from his hip flask, he jumps to the wrong (read, negative) conclusions about people, he throws a tantrum when the expected message doesn’t arrive, and so on.

Running through the main narrative are intonations by his boss Calvin Hathaway on such subjects as “wanting” (in an uber-capitalist meaning of the word) and a little third person, somewhat mock-heroic, tale in which Ryan stars as himself:

The crowd went wild. King Ryan is anointed.

Rather puerile, eh? When he reads his Blackberry messages and, with only one to go, still hasn’t received the hoped-for message, he thinks “suddenly I’m down to my last life”. An appropriate pop culture allusion that mocks his intensity.

Fortunately, our Ryan is not all bad. Set against his comparatively minor concerns are some characters with real miseries in their lives, providing a nice contrast with his petulance over the “will-I-won’t-I” promotion problem. And, he shows that he can in fact evince some empathy for others, such as for an old, sick woman in hospital. “I’ll be her, one day” he thinks, and responds kindly to her. However, when she calls him “a very kind young man”, he thinks that that’s not an “accusation” he hears at his workplace.

The resolution, though formally open-ended, is somewhat predictable and yet, due to the various undercurrents Mitchell has injected into the story, you want to keep thinking after you’ve finished reading. By rounding out Ryan just a little, Mitchell encourages us to feel some sympathy for him at the end, even though we think that his values are rather skewed.

The irony is that the story takes place on New Year’s Eve – but, we wonder, will Ryan make the most of his new start (whatever that turns out to be)?

Jane Austen, Sense and sensibility (Vol. 1)

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Ch 22 of Sense and Sensibility, (Jane Austen N...

From Chapter 22, illus. by CE Brock (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

This year is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s first (published) novel, Sense and sensibility. To celebrate this, my local Jane Austen group plans to discuss the novel over the next three months, volume by volume. We tried this last year with Mansfield Park and valued the opportunity it presented to delve a little more deeply into the novel – not only the characters and themes, but the writing and structure. Consequently, in this post I’m going to focus on Volume 1 (chapters 1 to 22) which ends with Lucy Steele’s dramatic announcement to Elinor.

But first, some caveats. I’m going to assume that most readers who come to this post will know the story – and if you don’t, the Wikipedia article provides a good summary. Also I am not going to write a formal review but just share some of the ideas that have struck me during this slow reading*.

I have always liked Sense and sensibility, partly because I’m fascinated by the dichotomy Austen sets up between the two sisters: Elinor (sense) and Marianne (sensibility). And yet, it’s not an easy-to-like novel. The heroines aren’t as sparkly nor the heroes as dashing or heroic as in Austen’s next novel, Pride and prejudice. It feels more serious, less witty – though not as serious as Mansfield Park. This could be because its premise – the sudden drop in wealth for Mrs Dashwood and daughters and their dislocation from their family home, due to the death of their husband/father – mirrors what happened to Jane and her mother and sister after Rev. Austen’s death in 1805. It wasn’t until the family settled in Chawton in 1809 that Austen, to the best of our knowledge, returned seriously to her writing. I wonder if this novel is her working through this very real experience of grief and insecurity. (Interestingly, a very similar story is played out at the beginning of Tracey Chevalier’s Remarkable creatures in which she describes the removal of the Philpot sisters from London to Lyme Regis in 1805).

That’s the historical background to the novel – and forms its social milieu. But there is more to the novel than social history. Austen is a far more complex writer than that. Take, for example, the money issue. There is a lot of focus on money and income in volume 1 – on who has what – indicating Austen’s real awareness of the issue, and yet Mrs Dashwood does not focus on husband hunting for her daughters. In fact, she says:

“I do not believe,” said Mrs. Dashwood, with a good humoured smile, “that Mr. Willoughby will be incommoded by the attempts of either of my daughters towards what you call catching him. It is not an employment to which they have been brought up. Men are very safe with us, let them be ever so rich. …”

This is no Mrs Bennet … but she’s not without her faults either.

And, take the dichotomy issue. It’s actually not quite as clear-cut as the title would suggest. Check the way our two heroines are introduced:

Elinor … possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence. She had an excellent heart; her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong: but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn, and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught.

Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s. She was sensible and clever; but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent. The resemblance between her and her mother was strikingly great.

In other words, Elinor has sense (“coolness of judgment”) but is also emotional (“her feelings were strong”); and Marianne is emotional (“eager in everything … no moderation”) but also has sense (“sensible and clever”).

However, as I read the volume 1, the issue that kept raising its head was that of “judgment”. I’m not sure whether it will continue to do so in the next two volumes, and I need to think about how the judgment issue plays out in other novels, but it does seem that Austen is exploring people’s ability to judge – and most seem to be not very good at it. Sir John Middleton, who praises the Steele sisters, is confident in his judgment, as is Marianne of hers on Willoughby – and we know how those turn out. Meanwhile, Edward, says, Elinor, “distrusts his own judgment” – and he is probably right to (in some matters at least!) Elinor, on the other hand, recognises that she has made errors at times and suggests that you need “time to deliberate and judge”. Related to all this is the fact that Marianne tends to judge people by surface factors, whereas Elinor tries to understand what makes people (such as Edward, Col Brandon, Mr Palmer) behave the way they do. I look forward to seeing whether this idea continues to be specifically explored in volumes 2 and 3.

But let’s move on to Austen’s writing; specifically, her plotting. Until recently, Emma was my least favourite Austen. Then I read it again more attentively and was bowled over by how beautifully it is plotted. I started to notice something similar in Sense and sensibility but will just give one particular example – how Austen uses parallels to create links between the storylines and move the plot along. These parallels, though, aren’t all slavish, aren’t exact. Here are some from volume 1:

  • Willoughby asks for/is given a lock of Marianne’s hair; Edward wears a ring made of Lucy’s hair
  • Willoughby and Edward both leave Barton Cottage in different but less than happy circumstances, and the Dashwoods ascribe this, in both cases, to the influence of strong controlling women – Willoughby’s aunt, and Edward’s mother
  • Elinor states that correspondence between Marianne and Willoughby would convince her of their engagement; later, evidence of correspondence between Lucy and Edward convinces her of their engagement.

And here I shall finish, mainly because I’ve gone on long enough. There is so much more to say, but maybe they will still be relevant in volume 2. Meanwhile, I’d love to know what other Austen readers think …

* Our little nod, perhaps, to the Slow-Reading Movement which I must admit does hold some attractions for me.

Barbara Hanrahan, The scent of eucalyptus

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Writer-artist Barbara Hanrahan was born half a generation before I was and in the city of Adelaide not a country town in Queensland, but the childhood she depicts in her first novel, The scent of eucalyptus, could almost have been mine. Almost, but not quite, as I was brought up in a standard nuclear family and she by three women – her mother, grandmother, and Aunt Reece (who had Downs Syndrome) – resulting in a somewhat different experience of home-life even if not of wider society.

And there’s another more crucial difference. The half generation time lag accounts for a major change appearing on the horizon – in the education of women. Hanrahan, like my mother who was born nearly half a generation earlier, suffered from the reduced opportunities and low expectations that were women’s lot back then. Both were expected to undertake commercial training at high school – rather than join the academic streams they desired – in order to fulfil “the plan” as Hanrahan calls it:

“( … Our expectations were swallowed by shorthand symbols, hammered by typewriter keys, imprisoned by the columns of a neatly-ruled ledger whose credit column never balances its debit.)

I was part of a school that was a factory, pumping forth each year, from the swollen Commercial class, the girls of fifteen who would go to work as typists and clerks. At eighteen they would be engaged, at twenty, married, at thirty – old. These were the girls I stood with under the lacquered fig trees in the Grade Seven photograph. (They are at their prime at the age of twelve … )

How sad that is. I loved this book from beginning to end. The writing is poetic – not the sort of poetry that is full of allusions and ambiguities in which you have to work hard to locate meaning, but the sort that paints word pictures of both the physical and emotional landscape. An example is her description of a visit to relations in the hills:

“I remember rising while it was still dark to visit them; … watching the sky turn pale and frayed with light; seeing houses jump forward from the darkness; hearing the cold voices of first roosters, the kookaburra’s ruffled peal.”

The writing is rhythmic. There are few wasted words, there is effective use of repetition, there is stream of consciousness, and she uses punctuation precisely to control flow and meaning.

Hanrahan tells her story more or less chronologically, with thematic chapters interspersed at appropriate points and occasional asides foreshadowing her future. The novel spans her life – this is an autobiographical novel – from birth to puberty. It’s not strong on plot, but there is a powerful story here about the development of self. For example, in chapter 2, we see the origins of the artist she was to become: “As a child and ever after, the minute, hidden facets of things intrigued me”.

The first few chapters introduce us to the significant people – the “important” three – in her life. Here she is on her mother:

“My mother was a lark whose tongue was cut; a gull with clipped wings. She learned to expect nothing that she did not strive for … My mother trod a familiar path; hedged by as many briers as Sleeping Beauty’s ever was”.

Such economy of expression that conveys so much. She writes similarly of her grandmother and aunt, and we learn how “the three” love and support each other but also harbour disappointments. These, though, our narrator is barely aware of:

“(I was deceived by familiarity. I didn’t see, couldn’t see, forgot to reason.)”

And so the novel progresses through infancy, kindergarten, and primary school until we reach the point at which I began this post. She paints perfect pictures of school days, of special holidays, of childhood friendships, of fears and hobbies, of a flirtation with religion, and of a sense throughout, but becoming stronger as she grows older, of being “different”:

“And as I grew older I became adept at leaping quicksilver from one of my selves to the other. And as I grew older the split grew deeper, yet I forgot it was there.”

This is a delicious novel – the language is almost mesmeric, capturing a world that has passed and yet is still part of our cultural landscape. I will finish with one final excerpt which delighted me. She, like most Australians, grew up with the image of outback Australia, our “sunburnt country”, firmly entrenched in her mind, but she, also like most Australians, was “a city child” and so she asks:

“But where were the hills of the history book, stitched with the pathways of Burke and Sturt and Leichhardt?- the hills of the sun-burned earth and budgerigar grass, and azure skies and fiery mountains we sang about at school before the flag spangled with all the stars of the Southern Cross I was never sure of seeing? Where were the old dark people I did not link with the lost couples on suitcases at the railway station? Where were the crocodiles and brolgas, the billabongs and snakes? Where were the flowers that wilted in blistered clay, the rusty waves of Spinifex that looped the cliff?

… I looked about me for the sunburned land. In vain.”

This is not the end of the book … but is as fine a place as any to end my review because it, as much as anything, conveys the paradox of her childhood – the knowing one thing but the seeing of/the being something else. This is a book for all Australians to read … and for anyone else who is interested in a thoughtful, lyrical rendition of a childhood.

Barbara Hanrahan
The scent of eucalyptus
St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1973
188pp.
ISBN: 0702225169

Kate Holden, The Romantic: Italian nights and days

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kate Holden, The Romantic book cover
Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

The romantic, by Kate Holden, is hard to categorise. In an interview with Richard Aedy on ABC Radio’s Life Matters she comments that, despite the success of her memoir In my skin, she was “a little bit uncomfortable with memoir” because it felt a bit “narcissistic”. And so this, her second book, she intended writing as a novel, albeit based heavily on her experiences in Rome. However, as she tells Aedy, her editor told her that most of what she’d written was not fiction, but “life” and so she decided to write it as memoir. So why my opening statement? Well, it’s because this memoir is told in third person.

Who, then, is Kate Holden? Today she is a professional writer living in Melbourne, but she was not always so. In my skin, which I read before my blogging days, is an astonishingly honest chronicle of her twenties when she was a heroin addict and sex worker. The romantic is a sequel of sorts. It tells the story of her year or so in Rome and Naples where she went to further her recovery, to, as she says, find herself. She tells Aedy that she decided on third person to enable her to maintain “critical distance from my own former self” (since the events in the book occurred around 2003) and to give the reader the prerogative of that distance too. Which, I think, is not a bad thing – as this is one very explicit book about, as she says, “the permutations of love, sex and romance”. Sex, though, predominates this threesome, if you get my drift.

Okay, that might be a cheap shot, because Holden is, again, fearlessly honest. The book, told chronologically, is divided into 7 parts, most of them named for a sexual/romantic partner, and some of these partners overlap a little. Throughout the book she alludes to poets – particularly the romantic poets, Byron and Shelley. In fact, each part of the book is introduced with a quote from a poet. In her interview with Aedy, she said that she wanted to be “honest, sincere and authentic like the Romantic poets”. Well, she certainly seems to be that, even if much of what she is being honest about is not exactly “romantic” – unless, that is, we define ongoing self-questioning as “Romantic”.

And here, in a way, is the rub. Holden is not only a fearless writer, she is also a good one. She knows how to string a sentence together, she describes character and evokes place well, and she expresses emotion clearly. But, I’m not sure what the point is for the reader. There is a lot of detail here about relationships – and sex in particular – that is not particularly positive for her. Around the middle of the book she writes:

She wishes to be free, virtuous, brave, joyous. The men around her say she is needy, neurotic, manipulative, disingenuous, hurtful, promiscuous. She knows she is deceptive, duplicitous and cynical. Somewhere in all of this is a portrait. She thinks this; and buries her face in the pillow.

This sort of self-analysis is the flavour of the book so that, in the end, it feels more like something that is therapeutic for her than enlightening for the reader.

The seventh part of the book – a short one named Kate – is introduced by the following lines from Byron:

I am not now
That which I have been.

I certainly hope so because the Kate in this book has, by the end, still not quite found herself. However, her interview with Richard Aedy in 2010 reveals a composed, confident and articulate woman. I look forward to seeing what this woman produces next.

Kate Holden
The romantic: Italian nights and days
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010
240pp.
ISBN: 9781921656743

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)