Reading

Jenny Ackland, The secret son (#BookReview)

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Jenny Ackland, The secret sonMelbourne-based author Jenny Ackland has tried something rather audacious in her debut novel, The Secret Son. Instead of following the autobiographical route that many first novelists do, she has leapt right in and tackled, albeit from left field, one of Australia’s most controversial legends, Ned Kelly. But, here’s the rub: it’s not exactly about Ned Kelly. It’s far more complex than that.

The secret son spans more than a century, from the 1880s to 1990 and beyond. It is set in both Turkey and Australia, and it weaves two stories. One concerns the 19th-century-born James who ends up living in Turkey, having gone to fight at Gallipoli in 1915, and the other tells of Cem, a 23-year-old Turkish-Australian man who is related to the village where James had lived and who travels there in 1990, ostensibly to learn about his heritage and identity. These two men – James/Jim and Cem/”Jem” – work subtly as foils or parallels for each other. James is intelligent, gentle and hardworking, but somewhat passive. He imagines who his father might have been, what sort of man he was. Cem, on the other hand, is young, directionless, well-meaning but rather self-centred. Turkish taxi-driver, Ibrahim, pins his uncertainty immediately, telling him:

You must know who you are and what man you want to become.

What sort of man he wants to become is something Cem struggles with, making this, partly but by no means primarily, a coming-of-age novel.

This brings me to one of the delights in reading this book, which is Ackland’s depiction of life in the Turkish village she calls Hayat (Turkish, she says, for “heart”). It reminded me of some books I read years ago, such as Beverley Farmer’s stories set in a Greek village. Farmer had married a Greek man and lived for some time in Greece, which explained her convincing insight into village life and relationships. Ackland’s depictions were similarly convincing, so I wanted to know how she’d done it. I found the answer in an ABC Books and Arts interview with her. She too had travelled to Turkey, married a Turkish man, spent time there as a bride and young mother. With this knowledge and experience, and an ability to individuate characters, Ackland creates a world that engaged me.

But now you are probably wondering how Ned Kelly fits into all this. It has to do with a historian named Harry whom Cem meets on the plane. Harry has a theory that Ned Kelly had a secret son who fought at Gallipoli and ended up staying in Turkey. His quest is to prove this theory and, in one of those coincidences that all travellers know about, the village where he believes this son went to is the same one that Cem’s family was from. So the scene is set – but the story that unfolds has less to do with Ned Kelly than with families and secrets, paying debts, and growing up.

I started this post by saying that Ackland has been audacious in this, her debut novel, and I implied that it was because of the Ned Kelly plotline. However, her audaciousness extends beyond this. It’s in the novel’s complex structure, too, in the way she weaves the two men’s stories, to-ing and fro-ing in time. It’s in the recurring motifs like bees and honey, tea and sugar, and woven rugs, that she uses to help keep us grounded. And it’s particularly in the change of voice between the more traditional third person voice used for most of the story to first person for the perspective of Berna, who is the village’s wise woman-cum-fortune-teller. Berna also happens to be Cem’s grandmother and James’ daughter, which effectively connects the two story lines. (The family relationships in this book are, I must say, complicated, and require an attentive reader to keep track!)

Anyhow, Berna provides the main link in the novel’s second plot which is about the “debt” Cem discovers he is expected to pay for something his grandfather Ahmet had done long before he’d left the village for Australia. This plotline exposes dissension in the village, and through it Ackland explores ideas about love and loyalty, truth and lies, revenge and forgiveness, not to mention the application of wisdom versus tradition. As the novel progresses, more of the “truth” about what happened comes out, and the plot thickens as we wonder what will be asked of Cem and what he will do in response. Meanwhile, the Ned Kelly storyline weaves its own path between James, Harry, and the village with the help of a woman pilot called Linda. While complex, it’s sensitively done, with, in the end, enough resolution to be satisfying without being too neat and implausible.

There are many angles from which this book can be talked about, besides those I’ve mentioned. There’s a father-son theme, a cheeky metafictional theme about a book called The secret son, Cem’s family experience in Australia as a child of immigrants, and gender. There’s also the idea of debts due by later generations, which Berna argues is not valid, but which her brother Mehmet supports. It’s relevant, I think, that Berna has the last word in the novel.

Early on Berna tells us that “truth” is not the be-all, that sometimes “life is better with surprises in the recipe”. She’s a wise woman, and this, The secret son, is a wise book. It might be a debut novel, and it might push its readers to keep up at times, but the ideas it explores, and its tolerant, generous treatment of its flawed characters, are those of a humane writer.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) was impressed by the book too.

AWW Badge 2018Jenny Ackland
The secret son
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2015
327pp.
ISBN: 9781925266160

Reading highlights for 2017

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I do hope I don’t disappoint my Monday Musings fans too much, but as this Monday also happens to be January 1, I’d like to use it to share my reading highlights for the year. Rest assured – if you care – that Monday Musings will be back. (Indeed, next week’s is already in the bag.)

So, to my 2017 reading highlights. As usual, I won’t be naming a top ten, or somesuch, because as I’ve said before I’m a wuss. It’s too hard. I could never be a literary awards judge. However, I had a great reading year – albeit a very unusual one – as you will see …

First, though, this year’s …

Literary highlights

Muse bookshop

Muse bookshop (before an event)

Literary highlights mean for me literary events, and there were many wonderful events in Canberra this year. I missed a lot f them because I was away or had clashes, but those I did attend gave me much to think about:

  • Festival Muse: Muse is one of my favourite places in Canberra. Billing itself as “Food, Wine, Books”, Muse is a cafe, bookshop and event venue. They regularly hold author events, but early in the year they organised a literary festival. The sessions I attended were wunderbar. Given our Canberra location, their Festival, like the Canberra Writers’ Festival, includes quite a bit of political content. I wrote two posts (Women of the Press Gallery, Robyn Cadwallader author interview)
  • Canberra Writers Festival on which I wrote four posts (Day 1, Day 2 Pt 1, Day 2 Pt 2, Day 2 Pt 3): I loved the variety of sessions I attended, but had to miss the last day due to a cold which made attending the second day hard enough. Roll on 2018.)
  • Author interviews: I missed so many this year, but I did enjoy hearing Charlotte Wood, Sofie Laguna, and Jelena Dokic.
  • Two annual lectures at the NLA, which I try to make a fixture in my calendar: the Seymour Biography Lecture, given this year by Raimond Gaita; and the Ray Mathew Lecture given by Kim Scott. These lectures are the best – and we always follow them up with supper at Muse! What’s not to like!

Reading highlights

As in previous years, I’m going to discuss this year’s reading highlights – the books that made the biggest impression – under categories appropriate to this year’s experience (links to my reviews).

The reading … it was a year of …

  • Sara Dowse, As the lonely blyLosing myself in grand sweeps: There was Sara Dowse’s As the lonely fly which spanned the lives of Russian Jewish émigrés to Israel and the USA over most of the twentieth century; Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko which looked at Koreans in Japan over the same period; and Catherine McKinnon’s Storyland which, in an inventive structure, told the story of a region of southeast Australia from the late 18th century to a 28th century dystopian future! Now that was a grand sweep! All three books were great reads which gave me plenty to think about.
  • Exploring displacement: As I reviewed my reading for the year, the theme of displacement kept popping up, book after book. I wonder why that would be!? The first two grand sweep books fit this theme, but others included Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Too afraid to cry (about being an indigenous child adopted into a non-indigenous family), Stan Grant’s Talking to my country (about indigenous people’s displacement by colonial settlers), Yuri Herrera’s Signs preceding the end of the world (about Mexicans making the crossing to the USA), AS Patrić’s Black rock white city (about Serbian refugees in Australia), Hoa Pham’s Lady of the realm (about a Vietnamese Buddhist nun displaced in her own country) and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The sympathizer (about Vietnamese refugees in the USA).
  • Ali Cobby Eckermann, Inside my motherDelving into indigenous Australia: While I only read four works by indigenous Australians, they were a varied, inspiring lot: Ali Cobby Eckerman’s memoir Too afraid to cry and her poetry collection Inside my mother, Stan Grant’s hybrid memoir Talking to my country, and the Writing black anthology edited by Ellen van Neerven. These, and two other books, The stolen children edited by Carmel Bird, and Kim Mahood’s Position doubtful, contributed significantly to my growing understanding of life as experienced by indigenous Australians and how I might accommodate this understanding in my own life.
  • Indulging in short stories: Are you surprised! Okay, okay, I can’t name them all, so I’m picking the four that jumped into my head: Rebekah Clarkson’s Barking dogs and Karen Thompson’s Flame tip, which were connected by location and theme; the more traditional collection, Stephanie Buckle’s Habits of silence and Stephen Orr’s Datsunland.
  • Anos Irani, The scribeMeeting unusual narrators: Unlike some readers who look askance at odd narrators, I’m open to them (in the hands of great writers, anyhow). Ian McEwan’s foetus in Nutshell and Carmel Bird’s skeleton in the cupboard in The family skeleton took me along with them into their – hmm – challenging families. The transgendered Madhu in Anosh Irani’s The parcel fits here too, though perhaps shouldn’t (be seen as unusual, I mean). The confessional tone maintained by the unnamed mole (of the spy not furry variety) narrating Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The sympathizer made him a somewhat unusual narrator too. And finally, how can I forget the slippery Hartmann Wallis in the eponymous (sort of) Who said what, exactly.
  • Discovering the lives of “real” others in fiction and non-fiction: Heather Rose’s novel The museum of modern love and Bernadette Brennan’s literary portrait A writing life; Helen Garner and her work were standouts here.

There were many more great books, including several classics (see, I haven’t even mentioned she who should be named) and some fascinating biographies, but I need to finish somewhere – don’t I, dear patient reader.

Some stats …

And here is where there are some surprises (for me, anyhow):

  • 53% of my reading was fiction, short stories and novels (versus 63% in 2016, and even more in 2015): While I was vaguely aware this was happening, I must say I’m not happy with it. Part of the reason is that my reading group did more non-fiction this year – four out of eleven in fact – where we usually only do one, and part of it is due to review copies sent my way. Very few of the non-fiction I read were actively chosen by me. I hope to recalibrate this somewhat next year.
  • 73% of the authors I read were women (versus 65% and 67% in 2016 and 2015 respectively): Again, while I like to read women writers and count reading them as one of my specific reading interests, I didn’t actively seek to increase the proportion this year. I can’t blame my reading group for this one, as our ratio there was 55%!
  • 35% of the works I read were NOT by Australian writers (versus 32% in 2016!): Roughly one-third non-Australian, two-thirds Australian feels like a fair ratio to me.
  • 31% of the works I read were published before 2000 (similar to last year’s 35%): Again, I’m happy with this. I like to keep delving into past works, but it’s a challenge doing so while trying to keep up with the contemporary literary scene.

So, some trends I’m comfortable with, and some less so. I don’t usually set goals for the year – besides a soft goal of trying, vainly, to reduce the TBR pile – but in 2018 I will do my best to lift the fiction ratio (albeit my first review for 2018 will be – wah – non-fiction!) This is not to say I don’t like non-fiction, because I do, but I have felt the lack of fiction at times. I need it in my life.

Overall, it was a good reading year, and I have loved sharing it with you. So, as I wrote last year, a big thankyou for reading my posts, engaging in discussion, recommending more books and, generally, being all-round great people to talk with.

I hope you all have a wonderful 2018. I also hope that you will continue to visit me here to share your thoughts. (And I will do the same for those of you who have your own blogs. What a lovely community we have.)

What were your reading or literary highlights for the year?

My reading group’s top picks for 2017

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Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Passionate nomad, book coverThis year was my reading group’s 30th year, and for the first time ever we decided to vote on our top picks for the year. Will it become a tradition? Who knows? Anyhow, in the spirit of end-of-year lists, I thought you might be interested to see the result, because you will know some of these books.

First, though, here’s what we read in the order we read them (with links to my reviews). I missed one when I was travelling – unfortunately:

And now, the winners …

Min Jin Lee, PachinkoAll eleven of our currently active members voted. We had to name our top three picks, which resulted in 32 votes being cast (as one member only voted for two books). The top vote-getters are:

  1. Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee (7 votes)
  2. The museum of modern love, by Heather Rose (6 votes)
  3. Black rock white city, by AS Patrić (5 votes)

Highly commended were Nutshell by Ian McEwan (3 votes), and Our souls at night by Kent Haruf (3 votes). In other words, five books received 24 of the 32 votes cast, which is pretty decisive, don’t you think?

Heather Rose, The museum of modern loveBut of course, this is not a scientific survey. Votes were all given equal weight, even where people indicated an order of preference, and not everyone read every book, which means different people voted from different “pools”. If all had read every book Pachinko may have had even more votes (because my memory tells me that every one, or almost everyone, who read it voted for it.)

A few, including yours truly, tried to sneak in some extra “votes” but these were rejected by the returning officer (who happened to be yours truly!) These “extras” were for Stan Grant’s Talking to my country, Kent Haruf’s Our souls at night, Kim Mahood’s Position doubtful and AS Patrić’s Black rock white city.
 
AS Patric, Black rock white cityInterestingly, a few commented that there wasn’t one book in our schedule that they didn’t enjoy. Now, that’s an achievement! Of course, sometimes disagreement can engender the best discussions, but this year’s selection contained such meaty and/or “big” books that there always seemed to be issues to tease out.
Selected comments (accompanying the votes)
  • PACHINKO: Most members who commented on this one liked it for the cultural history it provides about Koreans in Japan, something which few us knew much about. One member added that  “the story was told so very well without pathos but with sympathy for the victims.”
  • THE MUSEUM OF MODERN LOVE: Comments on this included that it was revealing about “Abramovic the artist and the relationship with her audience”, with one member saying  “it was almost perfect. It satisfied on so many levels”.
  • BLACK ROCK WHITE CITY: Two members were uncertain about this to start with, one saying “I wasn’t really expecting to enjoy it but found I was totally absorbed very quickly” and another that “I started with low expectations and his beautiful writing won me over.” In the end, all who voted for it agreed, I’d say, with the member who called it “a fabulous and quirky story related to the migrant experience .”
  • NUTSHELL: The two members who commented on this one wrote “beautiful writing and a very innovative theme, makes me look at foetuses in a different way” and “clever, quirky and a lot of fun.”
  • OUR SOULS AT NIGHT: As for this one, if you’ve read Haruf you won’t be surprised at comments describing it as “a real gem”, as “deceptively simple with big themes and big heart.”

And next year, do I hear you ask?

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The sympathizerWe choose our schedule twice a year, so here are our books for the first half of 2018:
  • Rabih Alameddine’s An unnecessary woman
  • Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The sympathizer (which most of you know I’ve already read)
  • Claire Coleman’s Terra nullius 
  • Helen Garner night: read any from Garner’s oeuvre (an experiment. We’ve done poetry nights where we bring a poem or two to share, but never something like this.)
  • Richard Flanagan’s First person
  • Randolph Stow’s The merry-go-round in the sea (our classic, because we always like to do at least one)

If you are in a reading group – face-to-face or online – I’d love to hear your highlights and/or what you plan to read in 2018.

Caroline Moorehead, Dancing to the precipice (#BookReview)

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Unusually, my reading group read two biographies about non-Austrian women this year, Jane Fletcher Geniesse’s book on Freya Stark (my review) in January and now, this month, Caroline Moorehead’s book Dancing to the precipice: Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution on the French aristocrat Henriette-Lucy, Marquise de La Tour-du-Pin-Gouvernet. Interestingly, Moorehead has also written a biography of Freya Stark. Moreover, while Caroline Moorehead is an English writer, it turns out that her father was the Australian war correspondent and historian Alan Moorehead. How tangled is all this!

But now the book itself. Dancing to the precipice chronicles the life of French-born aristocrat Lucie, from her birth in 1770 to her death in 1853, a period which, you’ll realise, covers some of Europe’s and, in particular, France’s most tumultuous times. Lucie de la Tour du Pin, as Moorehead calls her, saw most of it up close and personal, but somehow managed to survive. The evocative title conveys a sense of how tenuous that survival could be. It comes from Lucie’s own words written just before the storming of the Bastille. She wrote:

Amid all these pleasures we were laughing and dancing our way to the precipice.

Lucie, Moorehead tells us, went on to say that while this blindness was pardonable among the young, it was “inexplicable in men of the world, in Ministers and above all, in the King”. She wasn’t wrong – and the rest of the book tells us how often throughout their lives they nearly went over the precipice.

Dancing to the precipice is a thorough work, thorough in its description of Lucie’s life, and thorough in the research carried out by Moorehead. The biography is footnoted (though not intrusively) and contains an extensive list of sources at the end. It is also well-indexed. All of these are important – to me, anyhow! The reason the book is able to be so thorough – without Moorehead ever needing to resort to gap-filling – is because her life is so well documented, by herself primarily.

Lucie, in fact, has been described as the Pepys of her generation because of the memoir she started writing when she was 49. Titled Journal d’une femme de 50 ans, it was published posthumously and covers her life through the Ancien Régime, the French Revolution, to the time of Napoleon, until March 1815 when he returned from exile on Elba. In her Afterword, Moorehead explains that in addition to this memoir, which apparently has never been out of print, she had access to an extensive collection of letters written by Lucie to a god-daughter and many others, and the papers and correspondence of her husband. A wealth of resources that I suspect many biographers would die for.

Except, it’s perhaps this wealth that has caused my one little criticism of what is, really, an excellent biography. My criticism, as you’ve probably guessed, concerns the amount of detail in the book. There were times when I wondered whether I really needed to know as much as she gave, for example, about the wedding of a half-sister or the love-life of her friend. In terms of social history, perhaps yes, but there were times I wanted a tighter focus, and to not be inundated with quite so much information about so many people. That said, Dancing to the precipice is a fascinating story about an astonishing period of history and an engaging and resilient woman.

There were many aspects of the book I enjoyed, starting with refreshing my old high school and university history studies in the French Revolution. As Moorehead revealed each new phase in that tortuous process by which France moved from the ancien regime to the final republic, I remembered. I loved the description of Lucie and her husband’s time as émigrés in Albany, NY, in America, and the resourceful way they fit into the life there, despite their aristocratic training. I also loved the descriptions of fashion and food in Paris, and of the salons, and the role played by women in encouraging intellectual discussion and debate. Every time the émigrés felt it was safe to return to Paris, the salons started up again (until, eventually, they didnt!) Moorehead draws a stark comparison between the engagement of women in public debate in France versus that of their English counterparts:

Englishwomen remained, to the surprise and annoyance of their French guests, firmly in their segregated and inferior places, expected to withdraw after dinner to allow the men to talk literature and politics. In England, a visitor smugly remarked, women were ‘the momentary toy of passion’, while in France they were companions ‘in the hours of reason and conversation’. As Jane Austen put it, ‘Imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms’, something that Lucie, brought up to talk intelligently, would find extraordinary. (Loc 4713)

What most retained my interest in the book, though, was Lucie herself. Always the aristocrat but also believing in the need for change, her resilience and resourcefulness in the face of blow after blow was inspiring. Besides the escapes from France and the returns, only to have to escape again, there was the loss of her children. Only one from her ten pregnancies outlived her, something Moorehead argues was extreme, even accounting for the times. Lucie was also unusual for a more positive feat, that of having a successful, loving marriage for 50 years. She and Frédéric were, it appears, true partners.

So, there was more to enjoy about the biography than to criticise, and I’m very glad I read it. I’ll conclude with a quote from the book describing Frédéric’s last days, and his statements about the importance of studying history:

He now spent much of his time in his room, reading and writing to [grandson] Hadelin, long letters mulling over his own life and urging the young man to study, to think on serious matters, to develop a taste for reflection. He should turn, he wrote, towards ‘the vast questions of humanity: there you will find true riches’. […]  It was in history, he told Hadelin, that he should seek to find ways of understanding the world, and to learn how to make his mark on it; for it was to history that ‘one must look to discover motives and judgements, the source of ideas, the proof of theories too often imaginary and vague’. Reflection, he added, was ‘the intellectual crutch on which the traveller must lean on his road to knowledge’.

It’s astonishing that this couple who, Moorehead writes, stood out “for the reckless ease with which they challenged political decisions they considered to be lacking in morality or common sense”, regardless of who was in power, survived into their old ages. It says, I suspect, something about both the respect with which they were held and their ability to judge when it was time to skedaddle. A most interesting read.

Caroline Moorehead
Dancing to the precipice: Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution
London: Vintage, 2010
ISBN: 9781409088929 (ePub)

Stan Grant, Talking to my country (#BookReview)

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Stan Grant, Talking to my countryHistory is, in a way, the main subject of my reading group’s October book, Stan Grant’s Talking to my country. I’m consequently somewhat nervous about writing this post, because discussions of history in Australia are apt to generate more emotion than rational discussion. I will, though, discuss it – through my interested lay historian’s eyes.

However, before we get to that, I’d like to briefly discuss the book’s form. Firstly, it’s a hybrid book, that is, it combines forms and/or genres. In the non-fiction arena, this often involves combining elements of memoir with something else, like biography, as in Gabrielle Carey’s Moving among strangers (my review). In Grant’s case, he combines memoir with something more polemical – an interrogation of Australian history, and how the stories we tell about our past inform who we are and how we relate to each other.

Secondly, and probably because it’s not a straight memoir – Grant wrote his memoir, The tears of strangers, in 2002 – the book is structured more thematically than chronologically, though a loose chronology underlies it. For example, his discussion of the lives of his grandparents and parents doesn’t happen until Part 3, and then in Part 4 he discusses the government’s policies for handling “the ‘Aboriginal problem'”, particularly that of assimilation (or, more accurately, “absorption”.) This structure enables him to focus the narrative on his theme, so let’s now get to that.

The book opens with an introductory chapter titled, simply, My country: Australia. In it, Grant sets out why he wrote the book, which is to convey to non-indigenous Australians just what life is like for indigenous people, to explain that although history is largely ignored it still “plagues” indigenous people, and to tell us that the impetus for him to finally write the book was the booing of indigenous football player Adam Goodes in 2015. And here, in very simple terms, Grant states his thesis:

This wasn’t about sport; this was about our shared history and our failure to recognise it.

He goes on to explain that while some tried to deny or excuse it, his people knew where that booing came from. From my point of view, it’s pretty clear too.

“the gulf of our history”

Now, I’m not going to summarise all his arguments – or the stories of his and other indigenous people’s experiences – but I do want to share some of his comments about history. As Grant is clearly aware – and what Australian isn’t – history is politicised, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. My generation, the baby-boomers, grew up learning that Captain Cook discovered Australia and that Governor Phillip established the first settlement. If Aboriginal people were mentioned, it tended to be in passing. They were merely a side-bar to the main story. We may have learnt about the missions (and the “great” work they were doing) and we may have learnt in later years of schooling that many indigenous people lived in poverty, but we weren’t told about the massacres and violence that occurred, and nor was it ever suggested that we* had invaded an already occupied land. However, as we now know, these things we weren’t told are incontrovertible facts, supported by evidence.

Some, unfortunately, still ignore these facts and some try to interpret them differently, while the rest of us accept them but feel helpless about how to proceed. And this leads directly to Grant’s underpinning point, which is that we – black and white Australians – meet across “the contested space of our shared past”. Elsewhere he states it a little less strongly as “the gulf of our history”. I love the clarity of these phrases. They explain perfectly why discourse in Australia regarding indigenous Australians can be so contentious and so often futile. Grant’s point is that we can’t progress as a unified nation until this space is no longer contested, until the gulf is closed or bridged.

Grant puts forward a strong case based on experience, anecdote and hard facts (such as the terrible, the embarrassing, statistics regarding indigenous Australians’ health outcomes, incarceration rates, etc) to encourage all Australians, “my country” as the title says, to understand why, for example, when we sing the national anthem – “Australians all, let us rejoice” – indigenous people don’t feel much like joining in. What do they have to rejoice about? Where is their “wealth for toil”.

Suffice it to say that I found this a powerful book. While in one sense, it didn’t teach me anything new, in another it conceptualised the current state of play for me in a different way, a way that has given me new language with which to frame my own thoughts.

By now, if you haven’t read the book, you’ll be thinking that it’s a completely negative rant. But this is not so. It’s certainly “in your face” but Grant’s tone is, despite his admitting to anger, more generous. His aim is to encourage us white Australians to walk for a while in the shoes of our indigenous compatriots and thus understand for ourselves what our history, to date, has created. He believes that good relationships do exist, that there is generosity and goodwill but that, as the Adam Goodes episode made clear, bigotry and racism still divide us.

Late in the book Grant discusses the obvious fact that this land is now home to us all, that many of us have been here for generations and “can be from nowhere else”. Rather than rejecting “our” claims to love this place, he writes that this should make it easier for us to understand indigenous people’s profound connection to country. He writes:

I would like to think that with a sense of place comes a sense of history; an acceptance that what has happened here has happened to us all and that to turn from it or hide from it diminishes us.

And so, rather than telling indigenous people that “the past is past” and “to get over it”, it would be far better, far more honest, far more helpful, for us non-indigenous people to say, “Yes, we accept what we did and understand its consequences. Now, how should we proceed?” Is this really too hard?

Stan Grant
Talking to my country
Sydney: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2016
230pp.
ISBN: 9781460751978

* And by “we”, I mean, as Robert Manne explains it, not “we” as individuals, but as the nation.

Gabrielle Carey, Moving among strangers (#BookReview)

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Gabrielle Carey, Moving among strangersEmma’s guest Monday Musings post last week on Randolph Stow provided the impetus for me to finally retrieve Gabrielle Carey’s Moving among strangers: Randolph Stow and my family from my TBR pile. I’ve been wanting to read it for the longest time, but … well, those of you with big TBRs will understand.

Moving among strangers, whose title comes from a line in Stow’s novel The girl green as elderflower, is an unusual book. It’s partly a biography of Stow, and partly a memoir of Carey and her family, but Carey wouldn’t call it either. She says in her prologue:

… this book is not a biography. Neither is it a work of literary analysis or scholarly enquiry. It is more like a ‘mostly private letter’, to use Stow’s phrase, written out of curiosity, and tenderness towards a man whom I have come to think of as an almost-relative, a dear friend of my mother’s, and the ideal literary mentor.

It all started when, as her mother was dying in 2009, Carey wrote to Stow in England letting him know of her mother’s condition. It was his response, which came four days after her mother’s death, which set Carey off. She’d known there’d been a connection, of course, but she didn’t know much about it. Stow wrote that Joan’s letters from London, when he was a schoolboy and undergraduate, “were like a window on the world”. Why, Carey wondered, did her mother correspond “with a young man, an adolescent, thirteen years her junior, who wasn’t even a relation?” This question is never properly answered in the book, not because there’s something salacious to discover (in case you were wondering), but because some connections made in life don’t have explanations beyond the fact that they occur. If that makes sense.

So, as the book progresses, Carey follows a Stow trail, “like a groupie”. She interrogates his novels and other writings, and reactions to them. She reads the letters Stow wrote to members of her and his family. And she visits the places in England where Stow had lived and meets some of the people who knew him there. One of the main strands in her story concerns Stow’s unease with Australia – with his feeling rejected by Australia and/or his rejecting Australia. There is no answer to this question either, but Carey’s exploration of the issue is enlightening (particularly given all those other Australian intellectuals who left in the 1960s – some well known like Germaine Greer and Clive James, others less so like Jill Ker Conway and Ray Mathew. Each story is different but there is probably a thread that links them too?)

There are many angles, in fact, from which I could write on this engaging but slippery book. There’s Carey’s sharing of her own history – the loss of her mother, her tricky relationship with her sister, the death by suicide of her father, and so on. There’s the form of the work and how it fits into what seems to be a new breed of biography-memoirs that is popping up. And of course, there’s Stow, himself. He comes across as an elusive character, and that’s probably because he was. When she, having made connection with him, enthusiastically tries to engage him, by correspondence, in a literary discussion about his and her mutual interest in James Joyce, he shuts her down, albeit politely, explaining that he was “old and ailing” which, in fact, he was. He died the next year.

This doesn’t deter her – for which we should be grateful because although the book is not, as she forewarns us, a biography, we do, nonetheless gain insight into Stow. She paints a picture, in the end, of a man at odds with the country in which he was born though exactly why is hard to say. Did he reject Australia – with its “depressing tolerance, even worship, of the second-rate” (his words) – or did Australia reject him with its inability to understand his work. Australian critics, apparently, panned his novel Tourmaline, for example, rejecting its combination of “fable and poetry” with “realism”. A later critic, Carey says, notes that Tourmaline represented a change, a move away from “bush realism … towards something more experimental”. However, at the time, as is so often the case with innovative creators, this was not recognised and Stow’s “too truthful, too confrontational of conventional attitudes” novel was not appreciated in his own country. Stow felt the rejection.

But, Carey is wary of coming to conclusions, as she constantly reminds us. At one point, when she has questions and no answers, she tells us that given there’s no one alive to tell her “the real story”, she “can only imagine”, but a page or two later, she says

But I could be wrong. Being wrong, I realised, is how I’ve spent most of my life: misinterpreting, misunderstanding, misjudging, miscommunication. Words slip and slide, as T.S Eliot said, or as Stow put it, ‘words can’t cope’.

A strange thing for a writer to say, perhaps? And yet, perhaps not. Perhaps, it’s something only a writer could say?

You are probably getting the gist now of this unusual book – and hopefully, realising what a delightful, engrossing and stimulating read it is. It is not a long book, and is therefore not comprehensive. If you want, for example, to read about the Stow book I know best, his first Miles Franklin winner, To the islands, you won’t find it here. What you will find though is an intelligent analysis of Stow the man and of his work. You will also gain, or, at least I did, some insights into literary Australia of the mid to late twentieth century – not a list of luminaries, or even a history, but a sense of the life and times, and of how one particular writer did (or didn’t) navigate it.

Near the end, Carey returns to a theme she introduced earlier in the book, that of twinning or duality of perspectives. She concludes that, in the Essex pub where she met people who had known Stow in the latter years of his life, she found “twin versions” of him, one “content in his lifestyle, in his aloneness, who was self-sufficient and independent” and one “who was uncomfortable in his own skin, internally and perpetually in conflict over his sexuality, his nationality and his identity.”

If you are interested in Stow, in Australian literary history more broadly, and/or in Carey herself, this is a book for you.

aww2017 badgeGabrielle Carey
Moving among strangers: Randolph Stow and my family
St Lucia: UQP, 2013
232pp.
ISBN: 9780702249921

My literary week (9), some thoughts about fiction …

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It’s been a busy week, what with getting ready for our road trip to Port Macquarie, and then doing said road trip, so reading has been slowed down somewhat. However, that doesn’t mean that things literary have been forgotten.

Why write fiction?

Anos Irani, The scribe

Like most of you who read this blog, I expect, I’m always looking out for discussions about what literature is all about, particularly from the writers who create this things we read. This week, I listened to a couple of interviews with authors, and loved what they had to say.

I’ll start with Anosh Irani whose latest novel The parcel I reviewed a few days ago. In an interview on Canada’s CBC, he said:

I had to tell the truth. For me that was the most important thing. Tell it in the form of a story but make it as truthful as possible.

Fiction is a beautiful way to get to the higher kind of truth.

There’s a difference between facts and truth. Factual information is what I learned when I did my research but truth can be an emotional truth; it can be a spiritual truth. These are things that you can arrive at through fiction, that’s why I love the novel. […]

The idea for me when I write a novel is to find what is human in the worst kinds of experience. […]

There are questions that the reader will also ask that have no answer and that is the whole point that sometimes there aren’t any answers. […]

I think literature should make us a little uneasy, a little uncomfortable, it should cause a shift in our unconsciousness because only when we are disturbed will we go in search of something [and he then refers to great novels like Rohinton Mistry’s A fine balance, Albert Camus’ The outsider and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita as examples. Yes!]

SNAP, I thought, because the previous day I’d heard Richard Fidler interview Richard Flanagan, and Flanagan too had talked about truths and about questions without answers:

Novels are something we go to because they remind us that implicit in each of us is a universe of possibilities, some better, some worse […]

It’s said now that reality has outstripped fiction, and that fiction can’t deal with this new reality, but […]

I genuinely believe in the novel as one of the great spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic traditions and at its best it speaks to fundamental truths about the human condition. It’s not that it has answers but … it asks the necessary questions we need to ask, of ourselves and of our times.

As you will probably guess, I love this idea of novels’ role being to ask us questions without necessarily providing the answers. Irani certainly does it. He presents some complex if not discomforting moral questions, and leaves the reader to think about how to react. His only request, I’d say, is for us to react with humanity, to not be quick to judge (particularly if we haven’t walked in those shoes.) Sometimes, as he says, there are no answers.

MUBA (Most Under-rated Book Award)

The Invisible War book cover

While on the road, I did check my Twitter feed every now and then, and one that caught my attention came from the Small Press Network (SPN). It announced this year’s MUBA award shortlist. I have written about these awards before, and have read the odd nominee, but this list comes completely out of left-field for me. The books are:

  • Briohny Doyle’s The island will sink (Brow Books, an imprint of Lifted Brow magazine): a debut novel that sounds like it’s in the dystopian cli-fi tradition
  • The invisible war: A tale on two scales (Scale Free Network): a surprising-sounding graphic novel for young adults set in the first World War and about bacteriophage that fights dysentery! This book has won educational publishing awards, but I guess is unknown/underrated in the general realm.
  • Susan McCreery’s Loopholes (Spineless Wonders, whom I’ve mentioned before in a post on Specialist Presses): a collection of micro-fiction about family life and relationship – no piece is more than 250 words
  • Christina Kennedy’s Horse Island (Zabriskie Books): set around Tuross Lake in NSW’s south coast, a beautiful part of the world only about three hours drive from me. This book chronicles Kennedy’s commitment to native Australian plants.

What a fascinating bunch. The winner will be announced next month.

How we read …

Another thing readers like me like to read about is how other readers read. I don’t mean what they read, or how many books they read, but how they actually read. This can include things like whether they write marginalia or not, or how many pages they read before they give up on a book, or whether in fact they ever give up a book once started. Consequently, I loved this from a Canadian blogger I love to visit, Buried in Print. It’s from her review of a book by Sarah Dunn called The arrangement, and she writes:

And when I say ‘entertaining’, I mean I chuckled aloud several times and paused more than once to let the book settle into my lap so I could enjoy the idea of the scene described.

I related to this. I often do the same. Not just for funny scenes, but for moving ones, or gorgeously written ones that I want to let soak in. It slows down the reading of course – but, when you are moved (to laugh, cry or wonder), you are moved, and you don’t want to rush that, do you?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Grateful Brits send books to Aussies

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As I was searching Trove for another topic, I came across some articles that I just had to share, particularly given my recent posts on bookswapping and bookselling for charity.

These articles date from post-World War 2 when Britain was living under strict rationing, which continued for a long time – until 1954, in fact. To help the struggling Brits out, Australians – often through CWA (Country Women’s Association) groups – sent food parcels. The British people were very grateful, as an article from the Molong Express and Western District Advertiser (Wednesday 14 January 1948) conveys. Molong, a small town in central New South Wales, was one of the many towns to send food across the waves, and in this article, the editor writes that “almost daily, the Town Clerk (Mr. E. H. Scott) receives letters of appreciation from British people for gifts of food from the Molong municipality. The writers range from all walks of life — from hospital matrons to mayors and old age pensioners.”

Mr Scott, he continues, provided some of these letters for the paper to publish. Here’s a selection:

I wish to thank you and the residents of Molong for the generous gifts of food to our people. I wish you could have seen the gratitude of the old people  … Some of them could not express their thanks for tears, but so many said “Thank the dear people of Australia for me.” …  Mayor of Blackburn

AND

We thought it was really very kind of you to send us such wonderful food parcels, and, although we know that you have been thanked by the authorities here in England, we felt obliged to send you a personal letter of thanks. To people like us who have only one ration book, it is a little difficult at times, although, of course, we are not grumbling. We thank you very much for your kindness …

AND

We have today received at the hospital … a gift of tinned jams, marmalade and tinned rabbit from Australia … I felt that I must write, and tell you just what that thought means, for us. Not only are we extremely grateful for your kindness, but the thought and spirit behind the gift means perhaps more to us when we think that you, so many miles away, have spared such a lot of time and have given, so much that we may share the good things of your country. I am afraid it is beyond my powers of expression to make you realise exactly what we feel, but I do want you all to accept our most sincere and grateful thanks. With all good wishes and much happiness to you all, I remain, yours sincerely  … Matron, Liverpool.

AND

I have just been presented with two tins of jam, one tin of powdered soup, one tin of casserole rabbit and 2 lb. of dried pears, being a present from you … there is no name on the tins to go by, only “From the residents of Molong, N.S.W.” I address this letter to thank you very much … Hardly a week passes without a cut in our food ration, and a little extra food is very welcome. The extra food is for my wife and myself — both old age pensioners … may God bless you …

I guess it’s only right that we sent back to England some of those pesky rabbits! Seriously though, what wonderful letters. They would surely have encouraged continued kindness from the citizens of Molong. (And doesn’t your heart go to Eva Wood who says, “Of course, we are not grumbling”?)

That’s the background to this post!

“Book parcels for food”

Early on in this process of Australians sending food to Britain, the British wanted to reciprocate in some way. As London-based R. G. Lloyd Thomas wrote in The West Australian (7 September 1946):

For long the people of Britain have been rather worried by the one-sided traffic in gifts from Australia. They have received very gratefully enormous quantities of food parcels and found no tangible method of appreciation which would satisfy their independent spirit.

Book Stack

(Courtesy: OCAL, from clker.com)

But then, the “Women’s Institute, the equivalent in this country of the C.W.A.” lit upon an idea, that of reciprocating with parcels of books for distribution “to the people of the outback and the nearer but still amenity-remote areas which lack public libraries, and find it difficult to obtain an adequate supply of books”. What a wonderful idea, eh?

Not all the books would be new, Thomas writes:

Collections are being made of books regarded as suitable, some new, some from the bookshelves of the donors, and others purchased secondhand. They are being cleaned and repaired when necessary and made up into parcels which will be sent to the people and organisations who have been sending gift food parcels to Britain. The first consignment of books to Western Australia will be sent from Lancashire and Yorkshire Women’s Institutes.

An article in The Sydney Morning Herald (27 July 1946), describes the geographical arrangements a little more: “the Yorkshire and Lancashire institutes will send books to Western Australia, South Wales to New South Wales. Cheshire and Staffordshire to South Australia, Cambridgeshire and adjoining counties to Tasmania, Surrey and Middlesex to Queensland, and Essex and Bucks to Victoria”.

Lloyd Thomas, noting that “one of the few things here off the ration is books”, says that the women hope to reach every person and organisation responsible for sending food parcels. He comments on “the joy and humiliation these food parcels have brought to the women of England”, and that

the naturally proud independence of the people has been disturbed by the one-sidedness of the gesture. The majority could and would willingly pay for the parcels – but to do so would destroy the fundamental requirement of admission of these parcels, that they are unsolicited gifts.

These books, he says, will have special bookplates which will identify the donor and recipient, and it is hoped that the books will “form a valuable link of friendship between Britain, the Dominions and the Colonies who have shown such a spontaneous and generous attitude.”

Interestingly, Lloyd Thomas concludes by noting that while the food recipients are too grateful to offer suggestions, certain items are particularly appreciated:

Rich fruit cakes travel well in tins and provide an exceptional luxury these days. Tinned meats and milk are always welcome and (provided it is packed only with tinned food) soap of any sort. Jam (with special emphasis on marmalade) is a much-appreciated supplement, and, if Australians themselves can obtain any, tinned fruit. Dried fruits, sweets and nuts are welcome rarities. In fact, outside coffee (plentiful and unrationed) tinned soups and meat extracts, any foodstuff is welcome. Honey and dripping, provided they are melted into tins to ensure transport through the tropics, are other precious commodities for the English housewife.

Such a lovely insight not only into rationing, but also the food and cooking culture of the time. I mean, dripping! (But this just shows my fortunate life, doesn’t it?)

I apologise for the heavy use of quotations in this post, but in stories like this, there’s nothing like the expression of the times. Anyhow, I’d love to know how successful this reciprocal program was …

Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Vol. 2

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Jane Austen, Persuasion

I recently posted my thoughts on Volume 1 of Persuasion, which I read for my Jane Austen group’s slow reading of the novel. This post, obviously, is on the second (and last) volume. As before, I’ll be focusing on reflections from this read rather than writing a traditional review. And, again, just in case you need a refresher on the plot or characters, please check Wikipedia.

Persuasion

… and Self-interest

Last meeting, my Jane Austen group discussed Lady Russell’s advice to Anne. Some found it wanting while others felt she was justified in recommending that 19-year-old Anne reject Captain Wentworth’s proposal. In Volume 2, we get to question Lady Russell’s judgement again, when she sees Mr Elliot as a good suitor for Anne.

So, we have a conundrum. She’s Anne’s friend and supporter, but she’s also a member of the aristocracy, which is not presented positively in the book, and her judgement is suspect. What are we to make of her?

At the end of the novel, Lady Russell is treated well. Is this because her advice, poor though it is (in hindsight, particularly), doesn’t stem from self-interest? Here is Austen wrapping up Lady Russell at the end:

There is a quickness of perception in some, a nicety in the discernment of character, a natural penetration, in short, which no experience in others can equal, and Lady Russell had been less gifted in this part of understanding than her young friend. But she was a very good woman, and if her second object was to be sensible and well-judging, her first was to see Anne happy.

If we agree that Lady Russell is redeemed because her focus was Anne’s happiness, not self-interest, where does this leave Mrs Smith? She was prepared not to share with Anne her knowledge of Mr Elliot’s character, her reason being:

After listening to this full description of Mr. Elliot, Anne could not but express some surprise at Mrs. Smith’s having spoken of him so favourably in the beginning of their conversation. “She had seemed to recommend and praise him!” “My dear,” was Mrs. Smith’s reply, “there was nothing else to be done. I considered your marrying him as certain, though he might not yet have made the offer, and I could no more speak the truth of him, than if he had been your husband. My heart bled for you, as I talked of happiness.

But, given her hopes for Anne interceding on her behalf with Mr Elliot, is there not some self-interest in her decision not to influence Anne? Mrs Smith’s situation was dire in a way that Lady Russell’s was not, but … Anyhow, she too is treated well in the novel’s wrapping up.

What this says to me is that while Austen gently satirises groups (such as the aristocracy) or ideas (such as persuasion/influence/advice-giving), she is not black-and-white about it. She understands humanity – and would like us to, too!

… or, being persuadable

Last post I commented on Anne’s wondering whether Captain Wentworth, after Louisa’s accident at Lyme, might have realised “that a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness, as a very resolute character.” Well, in the resolution, we discover that he did!

There, he had learnt to distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind.

Meanwhile, Anne tells him that, despite the pain it caused, her 19-year-old self was right to listen to Lady Russell:

I must believe that I was right, much as I suffered from it, that I was perfectly right in being guided by the friend whom you will love better than you do now. To me, she was in the place of a parent. Do not mistake me, however. I am not saying that she did not err in her advice. It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides.

This last sentence reminds me of that “good spirit” narrator in The museum of modern love (my review) who said in the opening paragraph, “It’s a human condition to admire hindsight. I always thought foresight was so much more useful”. If only Anne knew, eh, what the event would decide?

Anne Elliot, Fanny Price and Elinor

Jane Austen fans love to consider her characters, to discuss who is the worst villain or the best hero, or whether character X is like character Y, and so on. So, when my Jane Austen group discussed this volume, one member hesitatingly suggested that Anne Elliot could be seen as a mature Fanny Price (Mansfield Park). Yes, I said, I had the same thought! Not so some other members of the group, but here’s the thing. Both Anne and Fanny resist pressure or encouragement to marry people they don’t love, both have strong moral codes, both nearly lose their “love” to rivals, both are relied upon by their families to provide nurturing and support. There are differences. Anne, with her “higher” social position, has more power and agency than Fanny, the poor cousin, but a couple of could see a distinct similarity.

Another member responded that she saw a likeness to Elinor (Sense and sensibility). There is some argument for that too. Elinor is also a steady, moral character who is relied on by her family, and she too nearly loses her “love” to another. And, like Anne and Fanny, Elinor does not need to learn lessons the way Marianne (Sense and sensibility), Elizabeth (Pride and prejudice), Emma (Emma), and Catherine (Northanger Abbey) do. But she doesn’t have to contend with pressure from others the way Anne and Fanny do, which is why I’d see a closer connection between Anne and Fanny.

The Navy

Anne and Captain Wentworth, Ch 20
Anne and Captain Wentworth in front of her “formidable” family (CE Brock, Public Domain)

I said in my Volume 1 post that I’d talk about the Navy in this post, but I’ve ended up talking about other things. However, it’s worth mentioning that in Persuasion, Jane Austen, who had two Naval brothers, presents the Navy positively, as family-oriented men whose values draw more from having good relationships with their families and their “brother” officers  than from status/position. Here is Anne watching Admiral and Mrs Croft in Bath:

They brought with them their country habit of being almost always together. He was ordered to walk to keep off the gout, and Mrs. Croft seemed to go shares with him in everything, and to walk for her life to do him good. Anne saw them wherever she went. …  Knowing their feelings as she did, it was a most attractive picture of happiness to her. She always watched them as long as she could, delighted to fancy she understood what they might be talking of, as they walked along in happy independence, or equally delighted to see the Admiral’s hearty shake of the hand when he encountered an old friend, and observe their eagerness of conversation when occasionally forming into a little knot of the navy, Mrs. Croft looking as intelligent and keen as any of the officers around her.

This continues her feelings from late Volume 1 when the visiting party in Lyme had spent time with Captain Wentworth and his naval friends. She saw their hospitality, their lack of “the usual style of give-and-take invitations, and dinners of formality and display” that typified her circle. “These would have been all my friends,” she thinks, and the idea lowers her spirits. It’s surely no coincidence that in this novel Austen presents some of the worst of the aristocracy with its focus on appearance and position against the best of the Navy with, as Louisa notices, “their friendliness, their brotherliness, their openness, their uprightness”.

And then there’s the last line of the novel:

She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance.

What does this mean, besides the point that being married into the Navy means you will always have the worry of war? Many have discussed the meaning of “more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance”, with some believing that it is Austen suggesting a new world in which the professional classes, the middle class, represented here by the Navy, is gaining ascendance in English life.

What do you think?

Heather Rose, The museum of modern love (#BookReview)

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Heather Rose, The museum of modern loveAs I neared the end of Heather Rose’s Stella Prize-winning novel The museum of modern love, I slowed down. I wanted, of course, to know how it was going to resolve, but I wanted to savour it too. It doesn’t seem right to rush the end of thoughtful books like this.

But, I have to admit that I was initially hesitant about reading the book, as I am about any book inspired by a person or work I don’t know. I fear missing something important. However, I did want to read it and my reading group scheduled it. The die was cast. Then, as I was about to start reading, Brother Gums sent me a link to the documentary Marina Abramović: The artist is present about her and the performance piece which inspired this novel. I was set! As it turned out, I think Rose’s writing is evocative enough that it wasn’t necessary to have seen the film, but it did add a layer to the experience.

So, what is The museum of modern love about – besides love, that is? Its centre is performance artist Marina Abramović’s 75-day piece, The Artist is Present, which she performed at MoMA in the spring of 2010, to accompany a large retrospective exhibition of her work. The piece involved her sitting, still, quiet, at a table all day, 6 days a week (MoMA is closed Tuesdays), with gallery attendees invited to take turns to sit opposite her and share a gaze. It was an astonishing success, with, by the end, people camping out overnight to get the chance to sit. Many attended for days just to watch, creating, as Rose describes it, quite a community of spectators. In the end, over 850,000 people attended, with 1,545 people sitting (including Rose). (All are recorded at flickr.)

Anyhow, from this premise, Rose weaves an engaging, thoughtful story about art and love. It has two main narrative strands, telling the real Marina Abramović’s story and that of an attendee, the fictional musician Arky Levin, whose life is stalling, partly due to a restraining order made by his now-unresponsive terminally-ill wife that he not visit her. Interspersed with these, enriching the exploration of the themes, are smaller stories of other attendees, and family and/or friends of the protagonists. It’s narrated by a mysterious third person voice, who starts the novel with

He was not my first musician, Arky Levin. Nor my least successful. Mostly by his age potential is squandered or realised. But this is not a story of potential. It is a story of convergence.

This is a very particular omniscient narrator, some sort of artist’s muse who self-describes late in the novel as a “good spirit, whim … House elf to the artists of paint, music, body, voice, form, word”, one whose job is sometimes just “to wake things up”. This could be cutesy or forced, but it isn’t because Rose doesn’t overdo it. Mostly the story progresses without the intrusion of this narrator, so that when s/he appears we pay attention.

The moral conundrum at the novel’s heart is – is art enough or is love more important? It’s explored primarily through Levin, whose friends suggest he should appeal Lydia’s court order.

I know you’re going to say that she wanted you to do this; she wanted you to make music. But is that enough?

Music, it sounded feeble suddenly in the face of the yawning gap between life before Christmas and life these past four months. (p. 158)

So what does Levin do? Continue to live his increasingly lonely life making music, or follow his heart?

Levin’s story is off-set against other stories, notably that of Jane Miller, a friendly, recently widowed art teacher visiting New York from Georgia. She is lonely, like Levin, missing her husband “achingly, gapingly, excruciatingly. Her body hadn’t regulated itself to solitude.” She becomes one of the mesmerised watchers, but she also connects with others in the crowd, including Levin and Brittika, a PhD student from the Netherlands who is writing her thesis on Marina. Jane forms a natural link between the two themes of love and art.

What, then, is art?

The first time Jane attends the performance, she overhears people in the crowd questioning what the show is about, asking what is art, in fact. There are, of course, the naysayers, the ones who say that “art is irrelevant. If everything goes to crap, it won’t be art that saves us”. But Jane thinks differently, and turns to the man next to her who is, you guessed it, Levin, and says

I think art saves people all the time … I know art has saved me on several occasions.

As the novel progresses, various claims are made for art. Our muse, speaking particularly for artists, believes that “pain is the stone that art sharpens itself on time after time” and that “artists run their fingers over the fabric of eternity”. Marina’s art teacher says to her 16-year-old self that  “Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart”, which causes Marina to consider that “Art … could be something unimaginable”. At one point Marina is reported as saying “I am only interested in art that can change the ideology of society”.

Jane, the viewer, though, has her own epiphany:

And maybe this was art, she thought, having spent years trying to define it and pin it to the line like a shirt on a windy day. There you are, art! You capture moments at the heart of life.

But, I think it is art critic Healayas who makes the clearest, simplest point when she says during a discussion about Marina’s performance:

She simply invites us to participate … It may be therapeutic and spiritual, but it is also social and political. It is multi-layered. It is why we love art, why we study art, why we invest ourselves in art.

… and what has love got to do with it?

Everything, if art, as all this suggests, is about humanity.

Let’s look specifically at Levin. It would be easy to criticise him, as his friends and daughter gently do, for being passive. But, we do get the sense that Lydia encouraged his passivity in their life together, that she liked to be in control, not in a control-freak way but in that way that super-competent people can do. Moreover, Lydia made her order out of love for him, to let him continue creating his art, rather than look after her which she didn’t believe was in him. So, what’s Levin to do? How does he reconcile his love against hers?

The resolution when it comes is triggered by art, by Marina’s performance. And this, as Jane believes art can do, probably saves him. I say probably because Rose, clever writer that she is, leaves the ending uncertain. As she and Levin realise,

the best ideas come from a place with a sign on the door saying I don’t know.

This is an inspired and inspiring book that leaves you pondering. I’ve only touched the surface.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also liked the novel.

aww2017 badgeHeather Rose
The museum of modern love
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2016
284pp.
ISBN: 9781760291860