Literature by period

Jeremy Chambers, The vintage and the gleaning

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Jeremy Chambers, The vintage and the gleaning Bookcover

Bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

There’s something I haven’t had an opportunity to share with you, until now that is – and that is that I love to visit wine regions. Not just because I like wine but also because I like the areas in which wine is made. The landscape is often beautiful, the wineries themselves vary so much in architecture and cellar-style, and, because of the culture that usually attends wine, there is often good dining and, if you’re lucky, some great music too. I was consequently very happy to read The vintage and the gleaning by the new Australian writer, Jeremy Chambers. It is set in in a winemaking town on the Murray River in northeast Victoria, an area I have visited and enjoyed many times – and so I was ready to sit back and enjoy.

And, enjoy it I did. However, there is very little – in fact, I’d go so far as to say none – of the glamour of the wine industry in this book. That this is so is clearly intended by Chambers. As one of the vineyard labourers says near the end, after a night of some violence:

I thought we was meant to be the civilised ones, he says. Winemaking town.

The irony, then, is keenly felt!

So, what is the book about? It doesn’t have a strong plot. Its first person narrator is Smithy, a man who would be in his 60s. He’s now a vineyard labourer, after having been a shearer for 47 years. He’s also now sober, necessitated by poor health from  years of heavy drinking. The story takes place over two weeks – starting on Monday and ending two Mondays later –  and the novel is structured by the days of this fortnight. Most “chapters” (unnumbered and unnamed) commence with the name of the day, and many are followed by “Spit doesn’t show”: “Tuesday, Spit doesn’t show and Lucy catches a snake”. Spit, we discover, is Smithy’s rather recalcitrant adult son, but the story is not about him. Rather, his chronic absence is symptomatic of the pretty dysfunctional masculinity that is the “stuff” of this novel.

Civilised Northeast Victoria - Sunday Creek Bridge, Pfeiffer's Winery

Smithy is a quietly engaging character. Through his inner reflections and discussions with others, particularly the publican’s wife, we learn that drink has been his ruin:

Can’t hardly remember me own life. Because I drank it all away, you understand.

And that

Nowadays I’m doing all the thinking I should have done when I was young … When I could have done things right. But all I got now is memories and regrets. And there’s not a thing in the world I can do about it. That’s it. That’s me life. Gone. Can’t change a thing. Can’t put it right.

Paralleling this is the story of Charlotte, the young woman whom he had found one night on the railway track after she’d been severely beaten by her husband, Brett. In the second half of the novel, just as Brett is being released from jail for this beating, Charlotte (in her mid 30s) stays with Smithy and tells her story. She also sees her life as having “gone”:

I just can’t make a new start … I just can’t. I don’t have it in me anymore. I feel like everything’s over, like it’s already ended …

Chambers gives a lot of time to Charlotte’s story – we learn that she was a “horrible private school bitch” who married Brett, already prone to violence, against her parents’ wishes. She’s inclined to blame others for her troubles – her father who indulged her and Brett for obvious reasons – though she does have the occasional flash of recognition of her own part in her life’s trajectory. And yet, unlike Smithy, who says his life is over but is quietly trying to change, she seems incapable of acting upon the little self-knowledge she has achieved, saying that her life is “not something I can change”. To tell more, however, would give away the plot, such as it is … so we shall leave Smithy and Charlotte here.

While the novel has some awkwardness – Charlotte’s story for example is a little drawn out – my only real reservation relates to the scattered references to Aboriginal Australians, and particularly to the institutionalisation of Aboriginal children. I understand where Chambers’ heart is coming from, but can’t quite connect it all with the rest of the story. It’s perhaps a case of the first-time novelist trying to include too much.

There’s a lot to like about the book. It is carefully structured but not slavishly so. The language evokes the rhythms and atmosphere of the place and its people: birds, insects, the sun, and the ever-present gum trees backdrop the story well and are made to serve the book’s resigned, if not downright foreboding, tone. The dialogue captures what I would describe as “laconic Australian”: terse but with the occasional touch of dry humour. The title is lovely: vintage refers of course to winemaking, but also evokes age in general (and thus Smithy); gleaning is an agricultural term and therefore appropriate, but also implies the gathering of knowledge (such as Smithy does through the course of his life).

This is a very new book, but it has also been reviewed by Lisa at ANZlitLovers. She believes Chambers is a writer to watch, and I can only agree.

Jeremy Chambers
The vintage and the gleaning
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010
264pp.
ISBN: 9781921656507

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Charles Dickens and Australia

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Charles Dicken, c1860

Dickens, c. 1860 (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Here’s something completely different for my Monday musings! Not an Australian author, not even a foreign born author who came to Australia (though, being the great traveller he was, he did consider a lecture tour), but Charles Dickens does have a couple of interesting “connections” with Australia. These connections are supported by the existence of some letters written by him at the National Library of Australia.

On convicts and migration in general

Transportation of convicts to Australia – actual, implied or threatened – features in several of his novels. These include John Edmunds in Pickwick Papers (1836-37), the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist (1837-1839), Mr Squeers in NicholasNickleby (1838-39), Alice Marwood in Dombey and Son (1846-48), and Magwitch (probably the most famous of all) in Great expectations (1861), not to mention Jenny Wren who threatens her father with transportation in Our mutual friend (1864-65). Dickens apparently learnt quite a lot about convict life, and particularly the penal settlement on Norfolk Island, from his friend Alexander Maconochie (to whom I refer in my review of Price Warung’s Tales of the early days).

Clearly, it was this knowledge which inspired the letter he wrote to the 2nd Marquess of Normanby (George Augustus Constantine Phipps), who was Secretary of State for the Home Office . He suggests

a strong and vivid description of the terrors of Norfolk Island and such-like-places, told in a homely narrative with a great appearance of truth and reality, and circulated in some very cheap and easy form (if with the direct authority of the Government, so much the better) would have a very powerful effect on the minds of those badly disposed … I would have it on the pillow of every prisoner in England. (3 July 1840, Original in the National Library of Australia, Ms 6809)

He offers to write this narrative, gratis. As far as I know, although Dickens and the Marquess were friends, nothing ever came of this offer.

While Dickens deplored the treatment of convicts in the penal settlements, he also saw Australia as a land of opportunity. The transported Magwitch, as we know, made his fortune in Australia. Mr Micawber, debt-ridden at the end of David Copperfield, emigrates to Australia and becomes a sheepfarmer and magistrate. But, perhaps the strongest evidence of Dickens’ belief in Australia as a place where people could get ahead, is the emigation of his sons.

On his sons

Two of Dickens’ sons – Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens* (nicknamed Plorn) – emigrated to Australia, both with their father’s encouragement.

Alfred (1845-1912) migrated to Australia in 1865. He worked on several stations/properties in Victoria and New South Wales and as a stock and station agent, before partnering with his brother in their own stock and station agency, EBL Dickens and Partners. He died in the United States in 1912, having left Australia on a lecture tour in 1910. Dickens’  youngest son, Edward (1852-1902), went to Australia in 1869. He also worked on stations before opening the stock and station agency with his brother. He later worked as a civil servant and represented Wilcannia in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in 1889-94, but he died, debt-ridden, in 1902 at Moree. Australia did not quite turn out to be the land of opportunity for these two that Dickens had hoped, but fortunately he was not around to see it!

A couple of Dickens’ letters to his sons are held at the National Library of Australia. One was written in 1868, not long before Plorn left England, and includes some fatherly advice:

Never take a mean advantage of anyone in any transaction, and never be hard on people who are in your power …

The more we are in earnest as to feeling religion, the less we are disposed to hold forth on it. (26? September 1868, Original in National Library of Australia, Ms 2563)

One does rather wish that Dickens had taken his own advice regarding not being “hard on people who are in your power” in his treatment of his poor wife Catherine.

Eighteen days before he died in 1870, he wrote this to Alfred:

I am doubtful whether Plorn is taking to Australia. Can you find out his real mind? I note that he always writes as if his present life were the be-all and end-all of his emigration and as if I had no idea of you two becoming proprietors and aspiring to the first positions in the colony without casting off the old connexion (1870, Original in National Library of Australia, Ms 6420).

These are just two of the many letters that he wrote to (and about) his sons in Australia. More can be found in published editions of his letters. I have chosen these particular ones purely because we have them here in Canberra. It’s rather a treat to be able to see Dickens’ hand so far away from his home.

Do you enjoy close literary encounters of the handwritten kind?

Arnold Jansen op de Haar, King of Tuzla

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Translated works always represent a challenge. There is something slightly disconcerting about knowing that you are not reading the actual words of the author, but someone else’s interpretation of them. There’s been some discussion of this around the blogs and in the media this year, partly because of the publication of Why translation matters by award winning literary translator Edith Grossman.

Ramona Koval, of Radio National‘s The Bookshow, interviewed Edith Grossman earlier this year. Koval introduced the interview with:

According to Edith Grossman, translation is a strange craft, generally appreciated by writers, undervalued by publishers, trivialised by academics, and practically ignored by reviewers.

Well, maybe translators are ignored by professional reviewers, but I’ve often seen the issue discussed in blogs and online bookgroups. We are keenly aware of the translator’s role and have been known to compare translations. Anyhow, to continue… The Wikipedia article on Grossman includes a quote from a speech she made in 2003:

Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.

Arnold Jansen op de Haar, King of Tuzla bookcover

Book cover (Courtesy: Holland Park Press)

This brings me nicely to Arnold Hansen op de Haar’s King of Tuzla. I found it a strangely compelling book. I can’t say I loved it, and at the beginning I nearly gave it up, but it’s short and so I decided to push on. However, more of that anon. First a brief plot. It tells the story of a young Dutch army officer, Tijmen, who finds himself in the middle of the Bosnian War as part of a UN unit, and tracks his experience of the war and his feelings about it. Interspersed between his story are little “cameo” stories about various civilians and the impact of the war on them. In fact, the novel starts with one such cameo, the Muslim Galib who had been a civil servant but had lost his job due to the war and was now a farmer. These cameos do not become part of the main narrative.

The book is divided into 5 parts. The first three parts are essentially chronological, while the last two are told after the war, in flashback, some of it through Tijmen’s journal entries. Overall I liked the structure of the book. The early chronological sequence, the interspersed cameos that gave “life” (albeit often horrific) to the matter-of-factness of the military detail, and the change in pace and perspective in the last two parts give the book interest by layering meaning.

The characterisation of Tijmen and his fellow officers is effective. Tijmen himself is an intriguing character: a bit of a loner, interested in the arts (reading, ballet, iceskating), ambitious (but “Eleven years later and still he had got nowhere”), and a little proud (the King of Tuzla, the Duke of Sapna, is how he sees himself during the conflict). I must say, though, that I don’t quite know why the book has been described as a coming-of-age novel. He is an adult when the novel starts and, while he is a little naive in the ways of the world, I saw no coming-of-age focus.

The trouble is that the book is a bit of a plod to read at times, and I wonder whether this is to do with the translation. So, here’s the rub: do I place my concerns at the author’s or the translator’s feet? Part of the problem is the flow. It felt clipped and jerky, but not in a way that seemed like it was done for effect. And at times, the sentences just plodded on one after another, like a boring history text. Maybe all this was intended, but I found it hard going. In addition, there are errors, such as “the colonel still lay there snorting” (“Snoring” seems more likely) and some awkward expressions, such as “It was some minutes before Eddy was able to extricate himself from the situation with some difficulty”. Is this a translation problem? “With some difficulty” seems redundant, and makes the sentence clunky to read.

There are, however, also some lovely images and gorgeous rhythms. I particularly liked this, for example (despite the errant, to me, semi-colon after “popes”):

This was the area where the different population groups overlapped like different geological strata. It was the land of popes; the mullahs and rabbis, the Christians, the Muslims, the Jews and the gypsies. The land of the long hot summers and the long severe winters, of rakija, walnuts and prunes and the land of the centuries-old struggle between the Turks, Hungarians, Austrians and Germans…

And this poignant description of Tijmen’s flat:

Eight years in the same flat, where time’s mechanism had jammed. No-one had been loved there.

In the end, figuratively speaking as we learn this two-thirds of the way through the book, the war is too much for Tijmen and he leaves the army. The book concludes with some nicely structured words beautifully conveying what he had earlier described as “this uselessness, this futility, human helplessness”. (Wouldn’t it be better with another “this” before human?) This may not be the best war novel I’ve read, but it has its power.

This book has received some varied reviews. You may like to read a couple: Stu at winston’s dad and Lisa at ANZLitLovers.

Arnold Jansen op de Haar
(Trans. by Paul Vincent)
King of Tuzla
London: Holland Park Press, 2010
(Orig. pub. 1999)
199pp.
ISBN: 9781907320064

(Review copy supplied by Holland Park Press)

Dinaw Mengestu, An honest exit

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There are, I suppose, two exits in Dinaw Mengestu’s short story “An honest exit”, which you can read at The New Yorker. One is the exit the father in the story made, when a young man, from his home in Ethiopia and the other is his final exit from life. (No spoiler here: we are told he dies in the first line of the story.) Mengestu is an Ethiopian-born American writer. According to Wikipedia, this short story is an excerpt from his coming novel, How to read the air, and clearly belongs to that growing body of work, Immigrant Literature.

As it turns out it was rather an apposite read for me, given all the “Stop the boats” calls we Aussies have just heard during our recent election. I wish more people would read stories like this. They might then realise that boat people (let’s forget the people smugglers for a moment) are not opportunists gaily leaving their homes to sail to a “better” place. They are leaving their home, their culture, their life – and they do not usually do it lightly or with ease.

Anyhow, this particular story starts with the father’s death and the son, a college teacher in Early American literature, deciding to tell his father’s story to his students.  However, as is only too common, he doesn’t know the full story:

I needed a history more complete than the strangled bits that he had owned and passed on to me – a short, brutal tale of having been trapped as a stowaway on a ship. So I continued with my father’s story, knowing I would have to make up the missing details as I went.

And so, over the course of a few lessons, he tells a story to his students, about how his father managed to get to Sudan, and from there, through the help of a man called Abrahim (“like the prophet”), onto a ship bound for Europe. As we hear the story – which is believable even if not necessarily factual – we also learn a little about the son. He says, for example, that he calls his place of work “the Academy”, a name he has stolen from a Kafka story about a monkey who’s been trained to give a speech to an academy:

I used to wonder if that was how my students and the other teachers, even with all their  liberal, cultured learning, saw me – as a monkey trying to teach their language back to them.

We see how disconnected he feels from both his father and his life. However, as he tells his story he seems to start to (re)connect a little:

They [his students] had always been just bodies to me … For a few seconds though I saw them clearly …They were still in the making, each and every one of them. Somehow I had missed that … As I walked home that night I was aware of a growing vortex of e-mails and text messages being passed among my students. Millions of bits of data were being transmitted … and I was their sole subject of concern. I don’t know why I found so much comfort in that thought, but it nearly lifted me off the ground, and suddenly, everywhere, I felt embraced.

A little further on, we learn that his father’s story is being spread around the “Academy”, albeit distorted as these things go. He hears various versions involving the Congo, Rwanda and Darfur! He is at one point called into the dean’s office:

“… How much of what they’re [students] saying is true?”

“Almost none of it,” I told him …

“Well, regardless of that,” he said, “it’s good to see them talking about important things. So much of what I hear from them is shallow, silly rumours. They can sort out what’s true for themselves later.”

The narrator is a little disconcerted by this, by the idea that “whether what they heard from me had any relationship to reality hardly mattered; real or not, it was all imaginary to them”. And yet, he himself is making a lot of it up as he goes! He continues his story with the students, ending at the point his father leaves Sudan as a stowaway. He says:

My students, for all their considerable wealth and privilege, were still at an age where they believed that the world was a fascinating, remarkable place, worthy of curious inquiry and close scrutiny, and I’d like to think I reminded them of that. Soon enough they would grow out of that and concern themselves with the things that were most immediately relevant to their own lives.

What he doesn’t do is tell the real truth of his father’s escape. Rather, when he gets to this point in his father’s story, he says “I knew that it was the last thing I was going to say to my class”. We don’t actually know what he does next because the rest of the story concerns his father, but it seems that there is a third exit in the story, his from teaching. It probably is “an honest exit”. All in all, this is an intriguingly layered story about migration, dreams and trust, stories and truth, teachers and students, and privilege.

To end, I might just return to Kafka’s “Report to the Academy” in which the ape says, “There is an excellent German expression: to beat one’s way through the bushes. That I have done. I have beaten my way through the bushes. I had no other way, always assuming that freedom was not a choice”. It rather suggests to me that there’s more than one reason our narrator alludes to Kafka’s monkey…

William James, On some mental effects of the earthquake

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William James

William James (Presumed public domain, via Wikipedia)

There are a couple of reasons why I was intrigued to read this week’s Library of America offering. The most obvious is that it’s by William James. Not only is he a recognised American philosopher and psychologist, but he is also the brother of Henry James, and I have come across him several times in that context. For that reason alone, I was keen to read something by him, albeit a fairly small and very specific piece.

The other main reason, though, is more personal. In 1990, my family and I went to live in Southern California for a few years and, I have to say, there were several fears attached to this decision: guns, pollution, and earthquakes, not to mention the high probability that our kids would be kidnapped from under our noses in the queue for Disneyland! Well, the latter, you may be surprised to know, didn’t happen – and, while we were there during the Rodney King riots, we didn’t really have any run-ins with guns. We did, however, experience pollution. As for earthquakes, it just so happened that we were out of town on vacation for the two biggest that occurred during our time. All we experienced were a couple of tremors. Nonetheless, like all good Californians, we had our earthquake kit ready to go.

After that long introduction, let’s get to James. This essay, titled “On some mental effects of the earthquake” (1906), was written a few days after James and his wife, who were at Stanford University at the time, experienced the big San Francisco earthquake of 1906. He starts the essay with his east coast friend’s farewell statement: “I hope they give you a touch of earthquake while there, so that you may also become acquainted with that Californian institution”. Hmm … what’s that saying? What I’d say is: Be careful what you wish for?

As it turned out, the good people of Stanford were far enough away from the centre to feel the big shake (and quite a lot of damage) but minimal loss of life. James’s first reaction, once he realised what he was experiencing, was:

glee and admiration; glee at the vividness with which such an abstract idea or verbal term as “earthquake” could put on when translated into sensible reality and verified concretely [me: I think this means “at the excitement of experiencing an earthquake” don’t you!?]; and admiration at the way in which the frail little wooden house could hold itself together in spite of such a shaking. I felt no trace of fear; it was pure delight and welcome.

Ever the psychologist philosopher, he then analyses and articulates his early spontaneous non-fearful response. He said he “personified” it as having “animus and intent”, that it was easy to perceive it as “a living agent”. He goes on to say that he now understood how people mythologised catastrophe, that “it was impossible for untutored men to take earthquakes into their minds as anything but supernatural warnings or retributions”.  He also observes that most people slept outside the next few nights, not simply to be safer in case of a recurrence “but also to work off their emotion, and get the full unusualness out of the experience”. That makes sense to me and I rather like his way of articulating it.

In San Francisco proper, though, the situation was different (as we know). There was more devastation, and a lot of death. He managed to get to SF for the day and draws some conclusions from that too. As he says, his business is not with the “material ruin” but “with ‘subjective’ phenomena exclusively”. What he saw were people going about their business:

It was indeed a strange sight to see an entire population in the streets, busy as ants in an uncovered ant-hill scurrying to save their eggs and larvae.

And he is surprised, as were the officials, by the lack of criminal activity, besides petty pilfering. Is this the same now? Anyhow, this is not his main point. Two things, he says, stand out, and they are both “reassuring to human nature”:

  • “the improvisation of order out of chaos”: he notes that there are some people who are natural organisers (“natural order-makers”) and that at times like this they get to work. He suggests that while much of this was “American, much of it Californian” it would have happened in any country in crisis. In  fact, he says that “Like soldiering, it lies always latent in human nature”.
  • “universal equanimity”: he suggests that the expressions of horror and pathos came from elsewhere, but that the people experiencing the crisis just got on with recuperating. He writes that “the cheerfulness, or, at any rate, the steadfastness of tone, was universal. Not a single whine or plaintive word did I hear from the hundred losers whom I spoke to. Instead of that there was a temper of helpfulness beyond the counting”. And again, he suggests “it is easy to glorify this as something characteristically American, or especially Californian…But I like to think that what I write of is a normal and universal trait of human nature”.

I must say that I do like his lack of nationalism in all this, his suggestion that these positive and admirable traits are “human” rather than “American”. We have had many, many catastrophes and disasters since then, and I’d like to think that what James saw in 1906 has held true. But has it? Does more looting and crime go on now (as the media always implies)? Or, do the people on the ground immediately organise to help themselves and each other? Being one who likes to see the good us, I’d like to think so.

Edgar Allan Poe, Hop-Frog

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Edgar Allan poe

Edgar Allan Poe (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

I am loving the way Library of America is encouraging me to finally read authors I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. Yes, they are short works, but at least I am getting a sense of these authors – and that’s a start. This week’s offering is Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog”. Like the other works I’ve blogged about, you can read it online at the Library of America.

I must admit I only knew of Poe as primarily a writer of Gothic and horror stories, so I was a little surprised to discover that “Hop-Frog” is a satire. It starts with:

I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed to live only for joking…

I rather wondered if this was going to be a fairy story, but I quickly realised that it was something quite different. We discover in the first paragraph that the surest road to the king’s favour was to tell jokes, and that the king had 7 ministers who were all accomplished jokers. The king’s jokes, however, do not rely on wit. Rather

He had a special admiration for breadth in a jest, and would often put up with length, for the sake of it. Over niceties wearied him … upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better than verbal ones.

Do you sense the likelihood that a trick is to be played? If so, you’d be right. Without giving too much away, I will say that there are two more characters in this story, the king’s fool, because every king should have one, and a young dancer. Now, the fool is the Hop-Frog of the title. He is a crippled dwarf. Here is Poe’s description of Hop-Frog:

…Hop-Frog [the name given to him by the seven ministers] could only get along by a sort of interjectional gait – something between a leap and a wiggle – a movement that afforded illimitable amusement, and of course consolation, to the king, for (notwithstanding the protuberance of his stomach and a constitutional swelling of his head) the king, by his whole court, was considered a capital figure.

Surprising that, eh? The young dancer is Trippetta, also a dwarf but a well-proportioned one. As the story goes, Hop-Frog is asked by the king to come up with an idea for a costume for him and his ministers to wear to a Masquerade Ball. Before obtaining Hop-Frog’s ideas, however, they torment him by making him drink alcohol, something they knew did not agree with him:

But the king loved practical jokes, and took pleasure in forcing Hop-Frog to drink and (as the king called it) “to be merry”.

As you have probably guessed, the resolution involves a practical joke that rather turns on the king – but, other than telling you that, my lips are sealed. To this extent the story is pretty predictable. What makes it a good story, despite this, is not only the way Poe plots it (because it is perfectly set up), but the satirical language in which it is told. I particularly loved this:

“…Characters, my fine fellow; we need characters – all of us – ha! ha! ” and as this was seriously meant for a joke, his laugh was chorused by the seven.

Not knowing much about Poe, I read this as a satire of power, of the way the powerful can have no qualms about humiliating and belittling those less powerful. And, indeed, the story works very well on this level. However, there is, apparently, the possibility of something else also going on. According to LOA’s brief introductory notes, scholars note the parallel between Hop-Frog and his tormenters, and Poe and his critics. The notes also suggest other parallels with Poe’s life such as his being an orphan, and his problems with alcohol. There is more discussion of these parallels in the Wikipedia article on the story.

All that said, it is, in the end, a revenge story – and a pretty fine one at that. I should read more Poe.

Helen Garner, Cosmo cosmolino

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When I returned to seriously reading Australian writers back in the 1980s, there were four women writers who caught my attention, and I have loved them ever since. They were Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007), Thea Astley (1925-2004), Olga Masters (1919-1986) and Helen Garner (b. 1942). Garner, the youngest by a couple of decades, is the only one still here, still writing novels, short stories, non-fiction and journal articles. I say I love her, but I can’t say I always agree with her. In fact, sometimes she makes me mad – but I admire her honesty and love her writing.

Cosmo cosmolino is not her most recent work. It was published in 1992 and has been on my TBR pile since my brother gave it to me in 1995. How embarrassing! But it finally managed to scramble to the top and I’m glad it did. It’s an intriguing book: it looks like two short stories (“Recording angel” and “Vigil”) and a novella (“Cosmo cosmolino”), but nowhere on the cover or the title page does it say “a collection of short stories”. This means, I think, that we are meant to see it as a novel.

So, how does it work as a novel? Each story would, I’m sure, stand perfectly well alone, but the two short stories also work as back stories to the novella. The tricky thing though is that the connections between these three are only obvious if you are an attentive reader – or, if you re-read it. For me it was a bit of both. I got some of the connections first time around, and others when I flicked through it to prepare this review. This is not a big problem but there is more depth if you have “got” the back stories when you read the final story.

And so, what are the three stories?

  • “Recording angel”. A recently separated woman (who is clearly Janet in the final story) visits an old friend and his wife in Sydney. This friend is seriously ill with brain cancer. He has not only been an important support and rescuer for her but the one who has “recorded” her life. And, he is never backward about telling her his view of what that is. She doesn’t always like or agree with this view, but she nonetheless fears the possibility that in sickness he will “forget everything” and that she will thereby lose an important connection with herself. There is a brief mention in this story of Ursula, who is the mother of the girl in the second story.
  • “Vigil”. A young woman, who is clearly “out of it” and waiting for her father to rescue her, has a boyfriend Ray(mond), who appears to be there more for the “good times” than for a mutually supportive relationship. When things go wrong, he’s not there for the count. This, we discover in the final story, is something he’s been trying to rectify ever since.
  • “Cosmo Cosmolino”. Three rather lonely people – the aforementioned Janet and Ray plus the rather fey artist, Maxine – find themselves sharing Janet’s house. It’s an uneasy grouping.  Ray is waiting for his big brother Alby (who once lived in Janet’s house) to arrive and take him away; Maxine would like a baby but is running out of time; and Janet is recovering from a broken marriage and doesn’t really know what she wants.

These are not strongly plot-driven stories. However, quite a bit happens on the emotional front, and this is Garner’s real subject.

Which brings us to the themes

Taken together, these stories are about the muddles people get into, particularly regarding their relationships with each other. Poor decisions, missed opportunities and the never-ending seeking for meaningful connection are the stuff of her fiction. But there is a departure in this book: the introduction of a spiritual (and at times magical) element, often involving some sense of “visitation”.

Angel Wings

Angel wings(Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

In the first story, the distraught woman is visited at the end by “a small, serious, stone-eyed angel of mercy”. In the second story Ray is dragged into a rather ghoulish underworld-like scene, after which he is told “You’ll be right … Things’ll be different now”. And in the final story there are all sorts of hints of spiritual happenings, including the “dark column” that shadows Janet, and Maxine’s “magical realist” flight “into the blinding upper sky” where “nameless souls and sacraments outrageously disport themselves”.

It all feels very un-Garner-like. She is usually firmly grounded in the real world of messy relationships where people struggle to connect and find meaning. But I should have been prepared: the novel’s epigraph from Rilke reads “Every angel is terrible”. “Terrible”, of course, has two meanings, and I suspect Garner is playing on both here – on the fear angels engender and the awe. As this paradox implies, there is no suggestion here of easy answers but more of possibilities. Here is Janet at the end:

Our minds are not hopeful, thought Janet; but our nerves are made of optimistic stuff.

I was intrigued by the use of “nerves” rather than “souls” or “spirits” given what had gone before, but I rather like her use of that word. It’s effectively ambiguous.

Finally, the style

The thing that marks Garner out for me is her expressive language. Her books are rarely long. This isn’t because she doesn’t have much to say but because she doesn’t waste words. Read this:

… The heart of the house was broken. It ought to have been blown up and scraped off the surface of the earth.

But houses as well as their owners must soldier on …

and this:

… and the architraves had lost their grip on the walls, and slouched this way and that …

and, finally, this:

The room contracted around Ray again, fitting itself tightly to the shape of him, squeezing …

I love the atmosphere and emotion conveyed by language like this.  Garner uses a lot of imagery and symbolism – but never simply. Birds, for example, can augur wonder and hope, or, particularly when “the failure bird” appears, something completely different. There are also biblical allusions, such as when Ray denies three times that he knew his girlfriend. No wonder he’s dragged into the underworld for a bit of shock therapy! From beginning to tend, the language never sways from conveying a sense of things being awry because the characters’ lives are so.

Cosmo Cosmolino is one of those books that is both accessible and challenging – and that is just the sort of book I like to read.

Helen Garner
Cosmo cosmolino
Ringwood, Vic: McPhee Gribble, 1992
221pp.
ISBN: 0869142844

Ian McEwan, Solar

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Ian McEwan Solar bookcover

Bookcover (Used by permission of the Random House Group Ltd)

I don’t know whether I believe your story, but I’ve enjoyed it.

So says McEwan’s latest creation, Michael Beard, to a character he has “done wrong”. This more or less sums up my feelings about Solar, the novel in which this statement appears. I am a McEwan fan and have greatly liked most of the 5 or 6 of his books that I’ve read but, while I found this one readable, I’m not convinced that it completely comes together into a coherent whole. This may have something to do with the fact that McEwan has tried for something lighter here and hasn’t quite pulled it off.

Do I need to describe the plot? It’s been reviewed so much by now that I presume most readers here already know it. However, to be on the safe side, here goes. It’s all about Nobel Laureate physicist, Michael Beard, who at the start of the book is 53 years old, 15lbs overweight and at the end of his 5th marriage (due to his incurable, it seems, womanising). On top of this he is struggling to keep his career alive: he is surviving, mostly on speaking engagements, while he waits, hopes, for a new inspiration. This is the set up. And, as is typical of McEwan, a little way into the book an event occurs that will be life-changing. In Beard’s case it will kickstart his career. How that occurs – and its eventual fallout – forms the rest of the book.

The novel is divided into three parts, labelled simply 2000, 2005 and 2009. If Beard was 15lbs overweight in 2000, in 2005 he is 35lbs overweight and by 2009 that has increased to 65lbs. This might tell you something about him: he is out of control in every aspect of his life – physically, emotionally, intellectually and morally. He is not, as you might gather from this, a likable man, but it is mainly through his eyes – told third person – that we experience the novel.

As the title suggests, the book’s subject matter is solar energy and climate change. And some of the best parts are those in which McEwan satirises the politics of climate change. In an amusing sequence, Beard is invited to the arctic along with a number of artists (making him the proverbial sore thumb) to experience climate change first hand. While he is there he observes the increasing chaos in the “bootroom” where the outdoor clothing is kept. From day one, the “bootroom” doesn’t work as people take items from pegs that are not their own resulting by the end of the week in no-one wearing a complete outfit that fits them. This works pretty well as a metaphor for the chaos and disorganisation in the climate change community. Add to this scenes like the idealistic climate-changers scooting about the ice in their gas-guzzling skidoos and you get a rather funny, and pointed, episode in the book.

The tone of the book is, in fact, comic-satiric which is a bit of a departure for McEwan who has tended to write books that are more dramatic, many with a “thriller” component. Here, though, there are even moments of slap-stick, such as when Beard early in the book pretends that he has a woman in the house in an attempt to make his wife jealous – all to no effect, but in terms of the novel’s plot it results in a deeply ironic statement:

Clearly he had been in no state to take decisions or to devise schemes and from now on he must take into account his unreliable mental state and act conservatively, passively, honestly, and break no rules, do nothing extreme.

Not long after this episode he does the complete opposite. Some of the members of my reading group found the book very funny but for me it fell a little flat. I saw the satire and thought it was clever at times, but it was sometimes more pathetic than highly comic, and at other times a little heavy-handed. Here, for example, is Beard on the bootroom:

How were they to save the earth – assuming it needed saving, which he doubted – when it was so much larger than the bootroom?

Now, most readers would already have got the point. I’m not sure that we needed to have it hammered home like this.

The focus of the book, as you will have gathered by now, is Beard and we spend a lot of time in his head. This is not a problem in itself, except that he never seems to change. He’s a gluttonous, arrogant, self-centred womaniser at the beginning and is the same at the end. He is also morally bankrupt – something you will discover soon enough if you read the book. Does a character have to change for a book to work? Not necessarily – think Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume – but we do have to stay interested in the character and Beard, for me, became a little boring. There was too much of the same – too much womanising, too much alcohol and fatty, fast food, too much self-aggrandisement – that I started to think “enough already”.

The key question to ask, then, is why has McEwan chosen such a character? The answer seems to be that McEwan wanted to express his fear – cynicism even – about 21st century humankind’s ability to enforce change. Early in the novel is this:

Beard was not wholly sceptical about climate change. It was one of a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it and expected governments to meet and take action … but he himself had other things to think about …

Himself, basically. Is McEwan saying Beard is us, is Everyman? If so, I can’t help thinking he’s got a point, but I’m not sure he’s written the book – like, say, Animal farm – that sustains the trope well enough to last the distance.

Oh dear, I fear now that I have been more critical than I meant to, because I did find the book readable. I did want to know what happened. I liked a lot of the language. And I did enjoy many of the observations McEwan makes throughout the book – about reason and logic versus idealism, about feminism, and of course about politics. Take for example the following, which is very apposite given that we downunder are in the middle of a Federal election campaign:

He was aggressively apolitical – to the fingertips, he liked to say. He disliked the overheated non-arguments, the efforts each side made to misunderstand and misrepresent the other, the amnesia that spooled behind each ‘issue’ as it arose.

I can relate to that …

Finally, there is a sly bit of self-deprecation running through the book about stories, imagination and the arts. I had to laugh at Beard’s comment that:

People who kept on about narrative tended to have a squiffy view of reality, believing all versions of it to have equal value.

I’ll leave you to decide what you think of McEwan’s version here.

Ian McEwan
Solar
London: Jonathan Cape, 2010
283pp.
ISBN: 9780224090506

M.J. Hyland, This is how

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Bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

If you want to read a book that is quick (and seemingly simple) to read and yet satisfyingly complex, then MJ Hyland’s This is how is for you. I’ve been wanting to read Hyland for a while and, having now done so, this won’t be the last.

So where to start? The novel is a first person story told by a young, somewhat disengaged 23-year-old man, Patrick Oxtoby. It is set in the late 1960s, perhaps early 1970s, but the setting and period barely matter really, as this is very much a book about character (and, humanity in general).

Now, my problem is what to say about the plot without spoiling the first third of the novel, so I think I’ll say nothing except what the back cover tells us. It says that “it is a novel about crime; though not a crime novel” and that “it has an almost stately pace and yet it’s thrilling”. These, together with my opening comment that it is simple but complex, should convey what a rather paradoxical read this is. The novel opens with the following:

I put my bags down on the doorstep and knock three times. I don’t bang hard like a copper, but it’s not as though I’m ashamed to be knocking either.

Who is this? Why does he describe his knocking in such terms? Well, we soon learn that Patrick, newly jilted by his fiancée, has come to this little seaside town to start a new job as a mechanic. He’s intelligent – though dropped out of university – and comes with good recommendations as a mechanic from his previous employer. But he is a very singular person, one who is not totally comfortable in his own skin. This is apparent from the beginning: here is more from the first page:

‘I thought you’d be here hours ago.’
It’s after ten and I was due at six. My mouth’s gone dry, but I smile, friendly as I can.
‘I missed the connection,’ I say.
I’ve not meant the lie, but she’s forced me.

Hmm, now I really was wondering who this is and, given the suggestion that the novel is about a crime, I wondered whether he is the criminal and whether he had already committed a crime? I also started to wonder as I continued to read the first few pages whether he was an unreliable narrator. But no, he is essentially reliable; he is, in fact, very much himself – but himself is a complex (aren’t we all) human being who carries quite a bit of baggage. I’m not quite sure how Hyland does it but throughout the novel she manages to unsettle her readers and keep us that way: at times we empathise with Patrick and feel sympathy for him and then suddenly he distresses if not horrifies us – and we wonder anew, Who is this man?

MJ Hyland

MJ Hyland, London, 2008 (Courtesy: MJ Hyland via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

In my opening para I said it was a quick and seemingly simple read. This is because the style is simple and direct. Patrick tells his story in present tense, with just the occasional flashback. Sentences are mostly short and simple, and the paragraphs tend to be short too. There is quite a lot of dialogue and not a lot of description. And what description there is tends to be short, sharp and vivid (“This blow is like a dose of poison in my veins, a hot sharp shot through my legs and arms, through my bowels and bladder”). Patrick is introspective at times but he doesn’t wallow in it. All this gives us a picture of a pretty simple character, which he is – and isn’t at the same time. There is, we are aware, quite a gap between what he says and thinks (most of the time) which could make him seem coldly manipulative. Yet, he’s not that. It’s more that he’s a somewhat damaged soul trying to survive in a world that doesn’t seem to go the way he would like – and it is this that leads to his trouble.

He likes to be in control (“I wanted her to go, and now she’s gone it’s like rejection, feels like it was her idea and not mine”) but he doesn’t try to bend others to his will. He has an uncomfortable relationship with the truth (“She put her hand on her heart and gives me a big smile and I’m reminded of when I told the girl in the theatre foyer that I was nervous and how the truth got a good reaction out of her as well”) but it’s more to do with self-protection than with any specific desire to deceive others. He has a complicated relationship with his family and they with him, but most of what we know is from his perspective so it is difficult to know the “truth” (if  a simple “truth” there can be in families). As he says:

I’m not sure if the truth will make any sense. The truth is, I thought I was rejecting my mother when I left home … But it turns out she was the one doing the rejecting and it’s just the same with my father.

The “real” truth, though, is probably somewhere in between.

Does he* grow throughout the novel and is there a resolution? To some extent he does get to know himself better but the resolution seems to be more that he learns to live with his situation (“life’s shrinking to a size that suits me more”) rather than grow as a person. But maybe that’s what maturity/development is really about?

Whatever the case, this is one of those truly original creations – a character who, as the back blurb says, “is fully himself and yet stands for all of us”. I haven’t been so intrigued by and engrossed in a character for a long time. The plot is slim but I barely noticed. I’ll definitely be reading more Hyland.

MJ Hyland
This is how
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009
376pp.
ISBN: 9781921656484

Review copy supplied by Text Publishing.

* An aside. I couldn’t help wondering at times whether Patrick, with his social awkwardness and slightly obsessive behaviour, might be autistic to some level, but this never comes out and I am uncomfortable ascribing a pathology to a character when the author hasn’t done so.

Haruki Murakami, Blind willow, sleeping woman

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Murakami, Blind willow, sleeping woman

Bookcover, used by permission of the Random House Group Ltd

Granted, my fiction contains more than its share of invention, but when I’m not writing fiction I don’t go out of my way to make up meaningless stories. (from “Chance traveller”, 2005)

This is as good a way as any to commence my review of Haruki Murakami’s recent short story collection, Blind willow, sleeping woman, because it clues you in immediately to the games Murakami plays with his reader. In “Chance traveller”, we are told that the “I” “means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of the story” and that most of the story is “third-person narrative”. In fact, this short story, like several in the book, comprises a story-within-a-story, a story told to a narrator who is present in the story himself.

It may sound odd to say this about a short story collection but I found it a bit of a page-turner. It comprises 24 stories written between 1980 and 2005. There are a lot of similarities between the stories  – the “disconnected” tone, the frequent use of first-person narrator, the story-within-a-story technique, and the regular use of flashbacks – but Murakami’s inventions are so varied and odd that you are compelled on.

What I love about Murakami is the matter-of-fact rather detached tone he uses to tell stories that often start off being quite ordinary but usually end up taking us to the strangest places. By focussing on the ordinariness of people, by including seemingly unimportant everyday and often pedantic-sounding details, Murakami lulls us into believing in his world so that when the bizarre happens – as it often does – we accept it with barely a blink.

Those of you who know about Murakami know that he is enamoured, if that’s not too strong a word, with the West – and his stories are peppered with allusions to Western culture from Elvis to Richard Strauss, from John Ford to Balzac. His cultural knowledge is quite prodigious. It is this “westenisation” that has, historically, put him at odds with the Japanese literary establishment. He explores this amusingly but pointedly in his story “The rise and fall of Sharpie Cakes” (1981/82) which satirises the drive to conformity and tradition. The final words of this story are:

From now on I would make and eat the food that I wanted to eat. The damned Sharpie Crows could peck each other to death for all I cared.

Like Murakami’s novels, these stories tend to be about alienation and loneliness. Most of his characters have trouble connecting with others, and when they do it often doesn’t go as well as they hope. Murakami  seems to see being alone as the essential condition of life:

He found it natural to be by himself:  it was a kind of premise for living. (“Tony Takitani”, 1990).

In  “The Ice Man” (1991) the couple go to the South Pole which “turned out to be lonelier than anything I could have imagined”. “The year of spaghetti”  (1981/82) concludes with the narrator alone, cooking spaghetti and suggesting that, in exporting durum, the Italians had exported “loneliness”. And so on, from story to story. Somewhat related to this focus on loneliness is a sort of fatalism, a view that life is not to be understood but just is:

Life: I’ll never understand it. (says Tony Takitani, in “Tony Takitani”, 1990)

Life is pretty damn hard. (says a girl to the narrator in “A ‘Poor Aunt’s’ story”, 1980/81)

That’s life. (says the young man, about something pretty trivial, in “A perfect day for kangaroos”,  1981/82)

He had to be as true to his homosexuality as he was to his music. That’s music, and that’s life. (“Chance traveller”, 2005)

Get all the fun out of life while you’re still able. They’ll serve you the bill soon enough. (“Hanalei Bay”, 2005)

And alongside all this, Murakami explores the fine line between reality and unreality or illusion. His characters tend to either escape reality when they can or find it slipping away from them – or, conversely, find it intruding when they don’t want it. The young couple in “A folklore for my generation” (1989) find “reality … invisibly starting to worm its way between them”. The first-person narrator in “Man-eating cats” (1991) writes that “for a second or two my consciousness strayed on the border between reality and the unreal … I couldn’t get a purchase on the situation” and a little later says “From time to time I was sure that I could make out the cat’s eyes, sparkling between the branches. But it was just an illusion”. And in one of my favourite stories, “A ‘Poor Aunt’ story” (1980/81), the fictional aunt becomes “real”, “stuck” to the narrator’s back, and disconcerts his friends:

‘Gives me the creeps’, said one friend.
‘Don’t let her bother you. She minds her own business. She’s harmless enough.’
‘I know, I know.  But, I don’t know why, she’s depressing.’
‘So try not to look.’
‘OK, I suppose’. Then a sigh. ‘Where’d you have to go to get something like that on your back?’
‘It’s not that I went anywhere. I just kept thinking about some things. That’s all.’

Not only do I like this for its idea – the making concrete of the thing you are thinking about – but it’s a good example of Murakami’s facility with dialogue.  “A ‘Poor Aunt’ story” has to be a bit of a writer’s manifesto – about the power and the limits to that power of words (and perhaps more generally of art). In fact, the idea of art as salvation appears a couple of times in the book. Earlier in this story it is suggested that writing about something, like a poor aunt, means “offering it salvation” and in “A seventh man” (1996) there’s a sense that art may offer “some kind of salvation … some sort of recovery”.

I could write much more on this book – tease out delicious story after delicious story, and give lots of examples of his expressive imagery, such as “I was beginning to feel like a dentist’s chair – hated by noone but avoided by everyone” (“A ‘Poor Aunt’ story”). However, that might spoil the pleasure for you (if you haven’t already read it), so I will finish with Murakami’s own words from his introduction:

My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left behind. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are the guideposts to my heart, and it makes me happy as a writer to be able to share these intimate feelings with my readers.

All I can say to this is, what a fascinating heart to know…

Haruki Murakami
(Trans: Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin)
Blind willow, sleeping woman
London: Vintage Books, 2007
436pp.
ISBN: 9780099488668