Reading

Kate Jennings on Gutless Fiction

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Did I say in my review of Kate Jennings‘ Trouble that she’s not backward in coming forward? If not, I do now and will cite as an example her essay “Gutless fiction” which was first published in The Australian Financial Review in 2005. The article was inspired by her becoming aware of  “prejudices against so-called business fiction”.

Business fiction? Have you ever heard of – or thought about – business fiction? Must say that it’s not something I’ve thought enough about to have a prejudice against. Apparently neither had she until she wrote Moral hazard, her novel drawing from her experiences on Wall Street. So, she did some research and among the writers she read were Anthony Trollope,  Theodore Dreiser, Zola, H.G.Wells, William Dean Howells, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Louis Auchincloss and Christina Stead. Hmmm…maybe I do have a subconscious prejudice against business fiction because, with a couple of notable exceptions, these are not writers I’ve read or read much of. I have not read, for example, Christina Stead’s House of all nations which, she says, is one of the best novels ever written about banking.

As I was reading her article, the novel that popped immediately into my head was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the vanities. Sure enough she mentions this one a little way into the essay. She says that her research suggested that “as the century [20th I presume] progressed, fiction where business or businesspeople were either subjects or drove the plot was all but abandoned by serious novelists” but she does recognise that there have been satires “that fall under the business novel rubric”. Other modern satires she mentiond, besides Wolfe’s, include Money by Martin Amis, England England by Julian Barnes, and Nice work by David Lodge. Oh-oh … I’ve read these three authors but not these particular books! Am I one of the prejudiced ones (without knowing it?)

Satires are all very well, she says, but her concern is that “sober [my stress] fictional treatments of business are scarcer than conservatives who are pro-regulation”! “How,” she asks, “did we go from Trollope, Dreiser, Lewis and Zola to Sebold, Eggers, Foer and Cunningham, from full-blooded questioning fiction to a tottery, homogenised, gutless, ingrown ‘produce’? Not to put too fine a point on it.” Tell us what you feel Kate!

She believes, quite rightly I’m sure, that there are fashions in fiction and that this particular issue can be partly explained through the long-running argument between HG Wells and Henry James over what was “the proper stuff” of fiction. Wells, she says, was about the “larger world” whereas James argued for “feeling and characterisation”. One, I suppose, you could describe as more exterior, and the other interior. James won she says, and so our fiction turned to “dysfunctional families, psychological malaise, affairs of the heart, eccentricities, freaks”. As a result, the exterior – or the “scene” as she calls it – which still interests us has become the province of non-fiction, of memoir in particular. But, she says, as good as some of these works are, these books

are no substitute for unflinching works of fiction that engage our public and private selves, our intellect and emotions. More able to inhabit the skins of its characters, fiction can capture the ambiguity and caprice inherent in human behaviour and then give it context and causality in ways that nonfiction rarely can.

She gives some reasons why she thinks fiction has lost its punch – writing schools, an over reliance on irony, and marketing – but I won’t go into those here. I’ll just leave you to think about whether you agree with her. Is contemporary fiction gutless? Is it all “too self-aware, too self-conscious, too knowing. Too clever“? While I can see her point, I don’t totally agree, and wonder if she has looked too narrowly. Sebold and Cunningham, for example, would not be among the first authors off my tongue as my pick of contemporary “literary” fiction. What about you?

What is a classic: Guest post at DesertBookChick

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Those who read this blog may have come across DesertBookChick (DBC) before. She’s the one who doesn’t like Jane Austen! In fact, she admits that, despite being a PhD, she’s a bit anxious about classics in general. However, not one to shy away from a challenge, she has declared August Classics Month on her blog. She is running a range of activities for this, including guest posts. Today the guest blogger is me. Do go check out her blog. And, if you’ve come here from there, you are most welcome to check me out!

Anyhow, writing that post – and reading some of the comments already made on DBC’s blog this month – has made me think more on this whole classics business. And here is what I think…

They must speak to some universal truth

That is, what they say about human nature has to ring as true today as when they were written. There is a fascinating little paradox here though, because classics can come and go. Clearly there is something more going on – something, perhaps, commercial or political or academic, which brings me to …

They must stand the test of time (and place)

Little Black Dress

Little Black Dress, says Clker.com (Courtesy: Chika87 at Clker.com)

To know they ring as true today as when they were written, some time must have elapsed. Think classic fashion. A classic LBD (aka little black dress) is one which looks as smart (note, not trendy, not funky, but smart) today as it did 30 years ago. It may show its age around the edges – perhaps an older style fabric, or a slightly different length – but it still works beautifully.

The way I test this for literature is not by defining an arbitrary amount of time but by a more pragmatic rule-of-thumb. And that is multiple reprintings – not in the first flush of publication, but some years down the track. The more years down the track and the more reprintings, the more classic perhaps? Or, at least, the closer it gets to the pantheon of classics, like, say, Shakespeare and Jane Austen!

But it is not always quite this simple

Some books die and then are revived. Sometimes this is to do with “fashion” in academia as writers fall in and out of favour (but I’m not going to explore this one now). Sometimes though there is something more, shall we say, political going on. And here I’m referring to minorities, such as, oh, women! In the 1970s, with the revival of feminism, there appeared a number of publishers who fossicked out works by women that had been lost (the works that is, not the women!). Virago Press and The Women’s Press are two biggies, but there were (and still are) many others. They (re)introduced us (or me at least!) to writers like Elizabeth von Arnim. These presses revealed that, while the meaning of “classic” as expressing something universal may be a commonly agreed thing, what we get to read is a highly constructed thing.

I’d love to know what you think. What do you mean by classic (excluding the Greeks for the time being!)? Do you purposefully choose or not choose to read classics, or is the notion of making such a distinction irrelevant to you? What are your favourite classics?

And, if you are interested in what some others are saying on this, do pop over to DesertBookChick. While there, you could always help me in my project of changing her mind about Jane Austen!

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.

Do you marginalia?

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I do, but I wouldn’t class myself with the likes of Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Nabokov and Mark Twain, to name just a few famous marginalians (if that’s not a word, it is now!). And so, I enjoyed a recent article, titled “Marginal”, which you can read online in The New Yorker. It’s written by Ian Frazier, an American writer and humorist (according to Wikipedia).

Since my last post was rather long, I won’t bore you with a long one this time. You’d be far better off spending your precious time reading the article yourself. It is short, just over a page, and well worth reading for its little survey of the marginalia practices of some of our best known writers.

Here are some things you’ll discover:

  •  Coleridge used abbeviations such as LM for “ludicrous metaphor”!(This is apparently known as “hostile marginalia”.) I use shorthand too – but I’m far more boring than this. My marginalia tends more to the descriptive than the “critical”, though I might occasionally be moved to write something like “What the?”!
  • Mark Twain was a voluminous marginalia scribbler, and he too could be less than positive at times, writing on one occasion that “A cat could do better literature than this”.
  • Nabokov “graded” the stories in an anthology from The New Yorker. He gave Shirley Jackson‘s “The lottery” an A … but you’ll have to read the article for yourself to see to whom he gave A+!

And so, do you write marginalia? If you do, do you always do it and what form does yours take? If you don’t, why don’t you?

Louann Brizendine, The female brain

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Louann Brizendine (Courtesy: Andy Feinberg)

Louann Brizendine, 2009 (Image: Andy Feinberg released into the Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Beware – the F-word is coming! Yes, Feminism. It might be a dirty word in some quarters, but I regard myself as a feminist – 1970s style – and so I approached Brizendine’s best-selling book, The female brain, with my cautionary antennae out. It’s not the sort of book I would necessarily have chosen myself but it was a bookgroup read and my number one reading priority is my bookgroup’s schedule. And, really, I’m glad I read it because it is good to keep up with the various arguments and debates going on.

The way I see it – and it’s pretty obvious really – the influences on our behaviour are threefold:

  • biological/biochemical
  • genetic
  • environmental/social

The BIG question is, then, in what proportion do these play out in our lives? Clearly men and women are not the same – you just have to look at us to see that – but as a young woman I believed that environmental factors were the strongest in determining the course of women’s lives. And I still think that’s largely the case. Environmental (or socio-cultural) factors may not necessarily be the determining factors in our individual behaviours but I believe they still do play a major role in the trajectory of women’s lives. As I’m sure they do for men too – but I believe that women still tend to draw the shortest straw.

And yet, there’s a niggle. Statistics – and the obvious evidence around us – show that the proportion of women in leadership roles, for example, in boardrooms, in politics, and so on, is way below what would be pro rata. Why is this? Is it the glass ceiling? Or, is there something else going on? Brizandine suggests women have “superior brain wiring for communication and emotional tones”. Does this discourage us from seeking these leadership roles which, in our current western capitalistic environment at least, tend to be adversarial if not downright aggressive. And then, the thinking and the niggles get murkier. What happens in non-western-capitalist societies? And in indigenous societies? In these (with some notable matriarchal exceptions), women also tend not to be the leaders. Why? Is human society inherently adversarial and aggressive – or is it just that men have made it so. If the latter, can women – with their superior emotional wiring! – change the nature of society?  You see, what happens? Round and round in circles.

And this brings me back to Brizendine, neuropsychiatrist and founder of the Director of the Women’s Mood & Hormone Clinic (which rather suggests where she is coming from). Her book focuses pretty much exclusively on biology. The backcover blurb describes the book in these terms: Brizendine “reveals how the uniquely flexible structure of the female brain determines not only how women think and what they value, but how they communicate and whom they will love”. It’s all in the biology you see! We are “programmed” to seek out the most symmetrical (yes, really, or so she says) good-looking male because it is all about reproduction of the species. Occasionally she qualifies her statements, such as “Humans are not quite so biologically determined [as Syrian hamsters, for example!]” (p. 132) but the  qualifications are minor and infrequent.

It all reads a little simplistically. Like any good non-fiction work, the book is comprehensively referenced with 23 pages of citations/notes and nearly 80 pages of references. However, she herself agrees that it is difficult to properly research the workings of the brain and so many of her arguments are made using either anecdotes, drawing conclusions from the animal world, or based on one-off studies. I don’t have the resources to check all her citations but the Nature magazine reviewer found them wanting in terms of  “scientific accuracy and balance”*. A quick search of the ‘net brings up counter arguments, such as those of Insitut Pasteur neurologist Catherine Vidal, who states that “the differences [in brain development] between individuals of one and the same gender are so great as to outweigh any differences between the genders”. And regarding male versus female test results in, say, mathematics, she says that the main factor is socio-cultural:

The second study, conducted last year with a sample of 300,000 in 40 countries, showed that the current socio-cultural environment is conducive to gender equality. ‘More girls are getting good test scores in maths,’ Dr Vidal highlighted. ‘In Norway and Sweden, the results are comparable, and in Iceland, the girls beat the boys.’ It should be noted, however, that the boys beat the girls in Korea and Turkey.

Of course, she’s talking more about intellectual/academic skills/achievement rather than behaviour which is more Brizandine’s focus – but it serves nonetheless to sound a warning about ascribing causes too simply.

I’m late reading this book which apparently caused quite a flurry when it was published in 2006. I’ll end with Deborah Tannen’s conclusion to her review in the Washington Post (2006):

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould once said he despaired of the constant question “Is it nature or nurture?” because “biology and environment are inextricably linked.” Ideally, readers will sift through the case studies, research findings and scientific conjectures gathered in this non-technical book and be intrigued by some while questioning others, bearing in mind the caution that hormones and brain structure play a role in gender differences but are not the whole story. And if this book joins a “nature” chorus that has swelled as a corrective to the previous pendulum swing toward “nurture,” we can assume that another corrective will follow. But given the character — and rancor — of our dichotomous approach to the influences of biology and culture, readers likely will be fascinated or angered, convinced or skeptical, according to the positions they have staked out already. That would be a pity.

Fair enough … and meanwhile, for me, the bottom-line remains: regardless of how similar or different we are, and why, all humans deserve to be respected and treated equally regardless of gender, race or religion.

*Nature, Vol. 443, 12 October 2006.

Louann Brizendine
The female brain
London: Bantam Books, 2007 (First pub. 2006)
352pp.
ISBN: 9780553818499

What my bookgroup will be reading for the rest of 2010

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Woman reading with cushion

Courtesy: Clker.com

I haven’t done this before – that is, discussed my reading group in my blog – but I thought I’d share the schedule my group decided on last night for the rest of the year. Our practice is to make our selections twice a year: 6 books for the first half of the year, and 5 books for the second half. The last meeting of the year is our Christmas meeting and we’ve discovered that scheduling a book when you are going to dine (not to mention embroiled in Christmas busy-ness) just doesn’t work. There are few rules. We focus on fiction but do occasionally read non-fiction, and the books need to be readily accessible, preferably in paperback. And, of course, it goes without saying that they need to be likely to engender discussion.

The way we create our schedule is to maintain a small – regularly pruned – list of recommendations, and call for more nominations just prior to the meeting. Then, we sit around and bandy the titles around until, through some sort of consensus (which may or may not involve bullying and bribery – of the nicest kind, of course), we come up with our list. If you are not at the meeting you just have to hope that the rest are kind enough to consider your wishes!

So, here is our list for the rest of this year:

  • Solar, by Ian McEwan
  • Truth, by Peter Temple
  • So much for that, by Lionel Shriver
  • The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoat, by David Mitchell
  • Parrot and Olivier in America, by Peter Carey

I’m looking forward to it. It’s a pretty typical reading group list, though with only one woman and not one translated text, it’s a little more white male anglo-oriented than most of our schedules. However, it’s a list that should, I think, provide for some good discussion. Expect to see these books appear on the blog in coming months.

Are you a member of a reading group? How do you choose your books, and what sorts of books work well with your group?

Eva Hornung, Dog boy

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Eva Hornung, Dogboy

Dog boy cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

I first read Eva Hornung when she was writing as Eva Sallis. It was her second novel The city of sealions, which is a pretty passionate and evocatively written exploration of cultural alienation and dislocation brought about primarily by migration.

In some ways Dog boy explores similar concerns, but its alienation is played out in a different way – through that fascinating archetype of the feral or wild child. In the novel, Hornung refers to a few modern examples of feral children, such as Oksana from the Ukraine; in an interview on the Literary Minded blog she says that the novel was inspired by a news story about a child living with dogs in Moscow. Guess where this book is set? You got it – Moscow! This intrigued me somewhat. Why would an Australian novelist read about a feral child in Moscow, go there to research and then write a novel? But Eva Hornung seems to be no ordinary novelist. She did her PhD in the Yemen and her settings – even if not her overriding theme – range rather widely.

And so to Dog boy. At the beginning of the novel Romochka, 4 years old, is alone in an apartment. He hasn’t seen his mother for a week or more and suddenly his uncle does not return. He senses the apartment building is being emptied and so after a couple of days being alone he heads out, and manages to get himself adopted by a dog, Mamochka, who lives with her four young puppies and two older offspring. How and why he is left alone is not the concern of this novel (which reminded me a little of Cormac McCarthy’s The road in which the cause of the devastation is also not the point). The novel tells the story of his life with the dogs and of what happens when he, four years later, comes to the attention of humans, specifically two scientists/doctors working in a children’s rehabilitation centre.

[WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS]

The story is told chronologically, and is divided into 5 parts. The first two parts cover Romochka’s first two years in the lair and how he gradually learns “to be a dog”. In the third part, Mamochka introduces a baby to the pack – to provide human company for Romochka. The baby is, ironically, called Puppy (by Romochka). Without giving any important plot points away, the final two parts deal with the boys’ renewed contact with the human world. It’s told in 3rd person but the perspective does shift, particularly in the last two parts where we see what’s happening through different eyes – the two scientists, Dmitry and Natalya, and Romochka himself. But even before this, we occasionally move between Romochka’s and the author’s perspective. It’s a technique that encourages us to understand, if not empathise with, the various experiences as they play out.

As I read this book, I felt I was in the hands of someone who knew what she was doing – even though at times I wondered exactly why she was telling this story. Not only does she viscerally describe Romochka’s gradual acceptance into the dog clan, his learning to hunt and his slow rise to dominance, but she starts to introduce humans at a time when our interest in an ongoing dog story would start to pall. This shift starts with Romochka’s increasing interest in people and builds up to the more or less inevitable conclusion – but that conclusion is not simple and is open-ended.

The language is evocative – sometimes beautiful but more often earthy and confronting to our senses. Hornung evokes Romochka’s life with the dogs with such attention to detail that it is entirely believable. She describes his animality, without being heavy-handed – he moves in “a wide lope”, uses his “paws”, and carries with him a horrible “stench” – but also shows his ability to use human logic and reasoning. At the time of his first capture, Romochka’s inner dog-human conflict is obvious:

Romochka wished bitterly … for true doghood. Were he really a dog, he would understand only their bodies, and not their words. Were he really a dog, he wouldn’t know their names, and their kids’ names. He wouldn’t … be paralysed by these lives that stretched before and after the station: he would know only their smell, only their aggression and torments; and what they ate.

The fight went out of him altogether. He stared dumbly, balefully without growling or snapping, unresistant even when he was pushed around. He was no longer sure that hiding his human side would get him released, but he remained a dog …

The big question to ask is, Why did Hornung choose to tell such a story? There is the obvious reason, that of our ongoing fascination with the wild child phenomenon and what it might tell us about what it means to be human. But there is also Hornung’s ongoing interest in alienation and, related to that, the abuse of humans by other humans (particularly where there is social disintegration). For all our horror at the way Romochka lives, we also see that he is not only safe but well nurtured in his life with the dogs. Was this boy, Natalya and Dmitry ponder, “better off living with dogs than with humans”. This question, that comes towards the end, represents a big shift from Dmitry’s earlier “proper awareness of the philosophic and scientific divide between man and animal”. The second part of the novel, in fact, explores this question at some depth. How big is the divide really? And to what extent is man a beast? All this is explored with more than just a little skepticism about scientific research and the tension between nice neat theory (and the chance it offers for professional glory) and messy reality. There is a lot in this book for keen readers to consider. It’s one that I will remember for some time.

Dog boy is Sallis aka Hornung’s 6th novel. She has won or been nominated for awards for many of her novels and yet she is not particularly well-known. Her change of name may have contributed to this but, whatever the reason, I think it’s a shame. Her writing is clear, accessible and evocative – and yet has a depth and passion that is worthy of the prizes she wins. May we see more of her.

Eva Hornung
Dogboy
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009
293pp.
ISBN: 9781921656378

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

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Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

The Penelopiad bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

This is the second time I have read Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. Much as I enjoyed it the first time around, I probably wouldn’t have read it again if it hadn’t been scheduled for one of my online bookgroups. However, given that scheduling and the fact that I had recently listened to Simon Armitage’s dramatisation of The odyssey, I didn’t mind reading it again – and it is short! My rereading though ended up being a little disjointed as I was trying to finish off a number of competing contracts at the time as well as prepare for a ten-day trip to our warm Top End. This review may be similarly disjointed!

The book is part of Canongate’s Myths series in which recognised writers were asked to retell well-known myths. At the time of publication, Atwood said that she tried a number of myths and had nearly given up when she suddenly recollected the story of Penelope and her hanged maids – and her childhood reaction to it. The result is a rather fresh – and cheeky – look at the story told through Penelope’s and the hanged maids’ eyes, from, not surprisingly, a feminist (or at least female) perspective.

The story is told through a large number of short chapters in Penelope’s voice, and these are interspersed with commentary from the hanged maids, emulating, appropriately enough, the idea of a Greek chorus. The way Atwood uses it, the chorus provides a satiric perspective on Penelope’s view of the story. The story is told in flashback, with the narrators all speaking from Hades, where they now reside. It is not a standard revisionist feminist treatise that simplifies the world to one of gender power discrepancies (even though that is what underlies it all). We get to “feel” what it might have been like to have lived then. Atwood’s characters are “real” and operate in a complex world where game-playing and manipulation are de rigueur if you are going to survive.

In Homer, Penelope is presented as “the quintessential faithful wife” (Atwood’s introduction) who brings up their son and cleverly fends off suitors while waiting patiently for Odysseus’ return. When he returns, he kills the suitors and twelve of Penelope’s maids. Atwood, again in her introduction, says that in choosing to tell the story through Penelope and the maids she wanted to focus on “what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really doing?”. Her Penelope is something rather more than the constant wife of The odyssey. She, the part daughter of a watery Naiad, is a slippery character to pin down. She is highly jealous of her beautiful cousin Helen (she of Troy fame) and she is capable of making her own power plays. She is of high birth, contrasting her with the twelve maids who, by their own admission “were born to the wrong parents. Poor parents, slave parents, peasant parents, and serf parents…”.

What I enjoyed most about this book – besides the story Atwood tells – is its sly humour. It is genuinely funny, albeit in a dark or sometimes gruesome way. Much of the humour arises out of Penelope’s playing with the truth. In fact the book plays continually with the idea of “stories”. In the first chapter, Penelope says:

Now that all the others have run out of air, it’s my turn to do a little story-making. I owe it to myself. I’ve had to work myself up to it; it’s a low art, tale-telling … So, I’ll spin a little thread of my own.

A little further on in the book, she says, when reporting one of the prevailing stories about her, that “there’s some [my emphasis] truth to this story”. And so, as we read we need to remember that she too is telling us a story, and that there’s no guarantee that her story is any more “true” than another’s. This idea is reinforced by the fact that the maids comment on what Penelope tells us. Their and Penelope’s perspectives are not always the same. That is, their truths are different. This notion of stories versus stories is made even more clear in the chapter titled “Waiting” in which Penelope recites all the opposing stories and rumours about what Odysseus was doing/what was happening to him during the 10 years of his return. Reader beware, I say. In fact, at one point in the book where Penelope questions whether the “maids were making some of this up”, I wrote in the margin “Where is the truth”? I love the way Atwood plays with myth-making in a book about a myth – and, in doing so, also calls into question her own storytelling. Very postmodern!

I won’t go on. It’s a little uneven, with the maids’ story in particular being not quite as well integrated as it perhaps could. And yet, I’d recommend it, if you haven’t already read it. It’s clever, funny and compassionate – but its compassion is not a naive one. Rather, it has wide open eyes and knows that nothing is ever as simple as it looks – particularly when you find yourself in a situation where there is imbalance of power. Games will be played – and the powerless, such as women and particularly poor maids, will usually lose. And this, in the end, is Atwood’s (somewhat heavy-handed) point. As Penelope says in her last chapter:

Even with my limited access I can see that the world is just as dangerous as it was in my day, except that the misery and suffering are on a much wider scale. As for human nature, it’s as tawdry as ever.

Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2005
199pp.
ISBN: 9781920885953
NB: Cover image used above is from the new 2007 edition.

Who’s watching you read (and other readerly things)?

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Recently I reviewed Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion. It was a less than stellar review, but the book did contain some fun observations about readers and reading. So, I thought I’d share a few with you. The first one is:

With books a clearly signed shortcut to the soul, you would have to be either very stupid or very careless to make your reading public.

How do you feel about people seeing what you read? Do you try to hide the book you are reading? Do you show it off with pride? Or, do you not care one way or another?

And then, to put it another way, do you assess others – particularly those you don’t know – by what you see them reading?

Regarding the first set of questions, I really don’t care a lot. I don’t try to hide what I’m reading but neither do I flaunt it, mostly because if I’m reading I’m too engrossed in what I’m doing to worry about the others around me. As for the last question? Well, I might, possibly, maybe assess people just a little by what they are reading. But, this isn’t a character assessment so much as a “could I engage in a conversation with this person” sort of assessment. If they are reading a book that interests me there’s a chance I’ll make a comment – so, if you don’t want a strange 50-something woman starting up a conversation with you, you’d better make sure you are not reading Jane Austen (see below)!

The second one is to do with marginalia, which is something I’m guilty of doing:

She handles the books delicately, she turns pages, she reads paragraphs, she is gripped by old underlinings and margin scribblings, and wonders again how people can part with their books, particularly those that have hooked so deeply into their thoughts.

Must admit I wonder too … I am one of those people who finds it very hard to part with my books though, as I edge closer to old age, I can feel the ties that bind loosening, albeit ever so slowly – which is just as well as one day I will have to down-size. I may as well start preparing myself, emotionally, for it now.

Mansfield Park bookcovers

Not Pride and prejudice, but close!

And the final one I’ve chosen has to do with book lovers’ firsts:

Wine lovers remember their first taste of good wine, orchid growers their first glimpse of an orchid, musicians the first time they heard Bach. Book lovers, too, have their firsts: the first book they read by themselves; their first visit to a library; the first book they bought with their own money; and for many, the discovery of second-hand bookshops.

Hmm, booklover friends, do you remember all those firsts? I don’t think I do. I do have book memories, of course, but they are not firsts. One memory is how, as a child , I judged the success of Christmas by how many books I received. Another is how and when I fell in love with Jane Austen. It was Pride and prejudice of course, and I was 14 years old.

All this goes to show that even a book that left me wanting, still had something to make me think.