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Julian Barnes, The sense of an ending (Review)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Izzeldin Abuelaish, I shall not hate (Review)

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

Dr. Abuelaish & Rabbi David

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gillian Mears, Foal’s bread (Review)

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Gillian Mears' Foal's bread

Foal's bread cover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Foal’s bread is Gillian Mears’ first novel in around 16 years, though she has published short stories in the interim. This is a shame because she is a beautiful writer, particularly when she writes about the place she knows best, the farms of the New South Wales north coast.

Foal’s bread is about the Nancarrow family. Most of it takes place between 1926 and around 1950, as it follows the fortunes of Noah (Noey/Noh), her husband Roley (Rowley), and the extended family with which they live. Their main business is dairying, but their passion is the sport of horse high jumping. At the beginning of the novel, Roley is an Australian high jump champion and Noey a young 14 year-old girl with promise. They meet, marry (early in the novel, so no spoilers here) and start working hard to achieve their dream of having their own high jumping team. Hope on, Hope ever, is their motto. That’s the broad plot; the story is far more complex.

This is an archetypal story of strong country people coping (or not) with “luckiness and unluckiness” in life. In its depiction of hardship, stoicism and the will to survive in rural families, it reminded me – in tone if not in story – of Geoff Page’s The scarring. The hardship may come from different quarters, but in both there is a sense of forces out of one’s control combining with things of the characters’ own making. That mix – of characters’ judgement or behaviour clashing with luck (usually bad) – tends to make for a good story, in the right hands. It’s a bit Shakespearean in a way, the clash of character with “the elements”.

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 Badge

Australian Women Writers Challenge (Design: Book'dout - Shelleyrae)

In Foal’s bread, the “bad luck” has many sources, some human and some natural, such as incest, lightning strikes, giving birth to a disabled child, war and drought. How the characters cope with the trials confronting them is the core of the novel. Unfortunately, more often than not, they don’t cope very well. Why? Mainly due to their very human failings. Noey and Roley, whose marriage commences with great love and big dreams, don’t know how to communicate when calamity hits. Noey’s mother-in-law, Minna, lets her jealousy (“of the happiness she’d never seen before”) get the better of her and prefers to increase the tension between her son and his wife rather than to ameliorate it.

By now you’ll be thinking this sounds like a miserable story, and in some ways it is. But it’s not all darkness. While the novel has an almost elegiac tone, its movement is towards light. It has a three-part structure. There’s a very short Preamble which sets a tone of harshness and brutality with its references to incest, bushfires, floods, and animal cruelty.”Watch out you don’t cry” we are warned. Then there is the bulk of the novel in which the story of Noey and Roley is played out. This is followed by a Coda, set some 50 years later, in which we learn that “the old voices remain … funny, flinty, relentless”. These voices are carried into the future by Lainey, the strong, resourceful daughter of Roley and Noey, “her mother’s daughter through and through”.

A strong story, but what gives this novel its real power is the writing. Mears mixes the rough, ungrammatical country-speak of the era with glorious, rhythmical language describing the magpies, butcherbirds, trees, creeks and hills of One Tree Farm. The “one tree” is a jacaranda, and it features throughout the novel. It could almost be, dare I say it, a character. Early in the novel, when all is full of hope, it quivers “to create the feeling of a big bosomed woman wanting to waltz”. Later, as things start to collapse, it loses its leaves, but at the end “the old tree lives on … like a huge purple cloud hiding the rooflines”.

And then, of course, there are the horses. Reading this book reminded me a little of reading Tim Winton’s Breath. Mears does for horse high-jumping what Winton did for surfing. She made me feel the joy and beauty of the jump, of pushing oneself to achieve just that little bit more in a risky sport, of having a dream that keeps you going, of doing “the impossible”. Mears, like Winton, knows her subject inside out, and you feel it in her writing.

I fear I haven’t done the book justice. I’ve not really described its complex plot. I’ve named only a few of its large cast of colourful characters. It’s an ambitious book with big themes and a big style. Not everyone loves it. Some find the dialogue tricky or some descriptions overdone; some think the ending is disappointing; some think it’s stereotypical in places. I think none of these things. I’d love to know what you – if you’ve read it – think!

Gillian Mears
Foal’s bread
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011
370pp.
ISBN: 9781742376295

(Uncorrected proof copy received from Lisa of ANZLitLovers in a blog giveaway)

Fergus W. Hume, The mystery of a hansom cab (Review)

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Hume Mystery of a Hansom Cab

The mystery of a hansom cab (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

Sometimes you just have to break your reading “rules” don’t you? Two of mine are that I’m not much into detective fiction (despite having reviewed Peter Temple’s Truth here) and I don’t read self-published books – but then along came Fergus Hume‘s The mystery of a hansom cab. It’s a classic Australian crime novel – and it was “originally” self-published (says she cheekily)!

I’m not, you now know, an aficionado of crime fiction, so my assessment of this book may be the skewed one of a newbie not versed in the intricacies of crime writing. However, I must say that I found this a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging book, and would recommend it to crime and non-crime readers alike, for reasons that will soon become obvious. But first, the plot.

The story commences with a newspaper report of a murder that takes place in a hansom cab, and over the next few chapters we learn the name of the victim (a young man, Oliver Whyte, who was drunk at the time of his death) and that he was killed by a passenger who got into the cab, ostensibly to see him safely home. The detective on the case fairly quickly deduces that the murderer is a rival for the affections of a young society woman … and from here, as it always does, the plot thickens. The accused murderer declares his innocence, that he indeed has an alibi, but he will not divulge the information it would “curse” the life of his fiancée. The trial occurs and is resolved halfway through the novel. The rest explores … but wait, if I tell you this, I’ll give too much away, so I’ll stop here. The resolution, when it comes, is not a complete surprise but neither is it completely predictable. At least, not to non-aficionado me.

Australian Literature Month Platypus logo

Read for Reading Matters' Australian Literature Month

Now, why do I like it? To start with, it’s a well-told story, with nicely delineated characters. Then there’s the setting: it is primarily set in Melbourne, with a little excursion into the country, in the 1880s. This was a boom-time for what was known then as “Marvellous Melbourne” and Hume describes life in this well-to-do post-Gold Rush city with gorgeous clarity. Most of it concerns the middle classes – the professionals and self-made men – but we are also taken into the slums where prostitutes struggle to survive. Hume does not have the social justice goals of, say, William Lane (in The workingman’s paradise) but he doesn’t shy from describing some of the seamier aspects of the city:

Kilsip and the barrister kept for safety in the middle of the alley, so that no one could spring upon them unaware, and they could see sometimes on the one side, a man cowering back into the black shadows, or on the other, a woman with disordered hair and bare bosom, leaning out of a window trying to get a breath of fresh air … Kilsip, turning to the left, led the barrister down another and still narrower lane, the darkness and gloom of which made the lawyer shudder, as he wondered how human beings could live in such murky places.

Hume then describes the woman they had gone to meet, Mother Guttersnipe (how Dickensian is that?):

… a repulsive-looking old crone; and in truth, her ugliness was, in its very grotesqueness well worthy the pencil of a Doré.

This brings me to another aspect I enjoyed. It is chockablock with allusions to Shakespeare and the classics, and references to what the writer of the introduction describes as the “middle-brow, middle-class, international entertainment culture of North America and Europe”, such as the artist Doré, the composer Offenbach, and the writers Poe, Dickens and De Quincy. There’s also a cheeky reference to novelist Mrs Braddon – “Murdered in a cab … a romance in real life, which beats Mrs Braddon hollow” – containing a clue that readers of the time might have picked up.

There’s the 19th century style – third person omniscient, descriptive chapter titles, a touch (but not too much) of melodrama, light satire and humour, the use of little homilies (often to introduce chapters), and a (very) neatly tied up conclusion. This is not ponderous, heavy-handed 19th century writing, but good well-paced story-telling supported by lovely description and observations. Most of the light relief comes through minor characters, like the landlady Mrs Sampson and the young-man-about-town Felix Rolleston. Here is Mrs Sampson:

She was a small, dried-up little woman, with a wrinkled yellow-ish face. She seemed parched up and brittle. Whenever she moved she crackled, and one went in constant dread of seeing a wizen-looking limb break off short like the branch of some dead tree. When she spoke it was in a voice hard and shrill, not unlike the chirp of a cricket.

She is, for all this, a warm-hearted woman, but whenever she appears so do such words as “crackle’, “rustle”, and “chirp”. Beautifully vivid, but nicely controlled.

It is of course also 19th century in its worldview … and so has a patriarchal flavour. Our “plucky” heroine, Madge, buys “a dozen or more articles she did not want” writes the author. And in the resolution the men decide what they will and will not share with the women involved – “it would be useless to reveal” the truth to one female character as “such a relevation could bring her no pecuniary benefit”, and to another because “such a relation could do no good, and would only create a scandal”. The infantilisation of women, eh?

Fate also makes its appearance in the novel, from early on when the accused murderer’s life “hangs on a mere chance” to late in the novel when the author makes his position clear. He writes that men:

… created a new deity called Fate, and laid any misfortune which happened to them to her charge. Her worship is still very popular, especially among lazy and unlucky people, who never bestir themselves … After all, the true religion of fate has been preached by George Eliot when she says that our lives are the outcome of our actions. Set up any idol you please upon which to lay the blame of unhappy lives and baffled ambitions, but the true cause is to found in men themselves.

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll be saying it again: I could write on and on about this book. It has so much to explore and it would be fun to do so, but at this point I’ll simply recommend it to you and hope that you’ll find time to discover and enjoy it too. It was, in its time, a best-seller …

Fergus W. Hume
The mystery of a hansom cab
(The Australian Classics Library)
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010
(Orig. pub. 1886)
293pp.
ISBN: 9781920899561

(Review copy supplied by Sydney University Press)

Andrew O’Hagan, The life and opinions of Maf the dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe

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Andrew O'Hagan 2009

O'Hagan 2009 (Courtesy: Treesbank, CC-BY 3.0, via wikipedia)

Andrew O’Hagan‘s The life and opinions of Maf the dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe is a fun – though also serious – book, so I’m going to start with something trivial, just because it will provide a laugh to those who know me:

Like all dogs, I take for granted a certain amount of sanctioned laziness, but beaches, tanning, ice-cream? To me the beach is an unfixed term on a roasting spit, a stifling penance …

Yep, Maf and me, we don’t like beaches*! Enough digression, though … on to the book. First off, I liked it – but how to describe a book that roams so widely yet has such minimal plot? The story is told first person by Maf the dog. Maf (short for Mafia Honey) is a Maltese Terrier who was given (in reality as well as in fiction) to Marilyn Monroe by Frank Sinatra. In the first few chapters Maf moves from Scotland, where he is born, to the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (of the Bloomsbury set), to the Los Angeles home of Natalie Woods’ parents, to Frank Sinatra to … well, you know who now. In the rest of the book we follow Maf as he lives with Marilyn Monroe, in New York and Los Angeles, in the last couple of years of her life.

The book though is less about Marilyn Monroe (that “strange and unhappy creature”) than it is about America and the author’s exploration of the issues that occupied, or typefied, America in the early 1960s. They were years of hope and excitement, when people believed they could (re)make themselves (“Let me start again” say the migrants coming in through Ellis Island). John F Kennedy was elected in 1960 and the Civil Rights movement was about to take centre stage. But Maf sees the American paradox, sees that the ideals of liberty and happiness are by no means assured.

A repeated motif in the book is that of interior decoration – and its literal meaning can be overlaid with something a little more symbolic:

My hero Trotsky would have made a great interior decorator: after all, decoration is all about personality and history, the precise business of making, discovering, choosing the conditions of life and placing them just so. The best decorators finding it quite natural to inject a splash of the dialectical into their materialism.

It’s a clever motif because it encompasses the perspective (the floor) from which dogs (like Maf) see and describe the world, the (often superficial) fascination with home decoration (which sees, for example, Monroe going to Mexico to buy goods that she never unpacks), and the more existential notion of “decorating” or fashioning oneself.

Another motif running through the book is Trotsky. The above quote comes early in the book, but there are many other references, including this one quite late:

Wasn’t he [Trotsky] the god of small things and massive ideas, a cultivator of man’s better instincts? That, my friends, is the greatest work of the imagination: not action, but the thought of action.

Maf sees Trotsky as an enlightened being, who might, just might have shown us the way, had he been given the chance. But, let’s move on, because this book – chockablock as it is with philosophers, artists, writers, actors, critics and politicians – rarely stands still. We are continually on the move, either physically as Maf moves from place to place, or mentally as Maf explores idea after idea, such as fiction and art versus reality, tragedy versus comedy, humans versus animals, interior decoration, psychoanalysis, politics and fame, master versus servant (even in the great democracy). These are not didactically or artificially explored in a let’s-tick-off-another-obsession way. They are neatly integrated into the story as Marilyn, with Maf in tow, experiences the last years of her life. She dines with Frank Sinatra, discusses books with Carson McCullers, is treated by her therapists, attends Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, discusses civil rights with JFK, works with Cukor on Something’s gotta give, and so on. As far as I can tell, all the facts of her life presented here are “real” – as are the major cultural movers and shakers depicted within. It can be daunting to confront so many names in such a short space, but there are some good laughs here if you just go with the flow.

While the facts are interesting, however, what makes the book are Maf’s observations. Somehow, O’Hagan manages to imbue Maf with a persona, a voice, that works. It’s not twee or sentimental. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek, it’s knowing, and it’s clear-eyed but with compassion where compassion’s due. Maf notices for example the paradox contained in:

… the upper classes arguing in favor of radical politics while their servants set down their tea in front of them.

One of the issues that crops up regularly is the line between art/fiction and reality, which is not surprising in a book populated with actors and other artists. Early in the book Maf tells us that dogs**:

have none of that fatal human weakness for making large distinctions between what is real and what is imagined.

I like this. I fear that too often we polarise life/reality and art/imagination, particularly in literary analysis. We might express discomfort, for example, with a dog narrating a story about people! We “trust” realism, and we distrust or are uncomfortable with the opposite, with what we deem to be “not believable”.

A little later, playing with this idea from a different tack, he tells us:

We are what we imagine we are: reality itself is the true fiction.

Marilyn’s inability to sort this out probably contributes to her undoing. The book’s title suggests that we will get to understand Marilyn, but we don’t. She is, at the end, as elusive, “unearthly”, “abstracted”, as ever she was … which is probably the most realistic (ha?) way to go!

Maf says Marilyn taught him that:

A novel must be what only a novel can be – it must dream, it must open the mind.

Can’t say better than that … and this book, I reckon, gives it a good shot.

Andrew O’Hagan
The life and opinions of Maf the dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe
London: Faber and Faber, 2011
279pp
ISBN: 9780571216000

* A footnote, emulating Maf whose footnotes add to the fun of the book. I do like to visit the coast, to look at the sea. It’s the beaches – the spending hours on them – that I don’t like.

** In a footnote, Maf tells us there’s been a long tradition of animals speaking for humans, listing such writers as Cervantes, Orwell, Woolf, Swift, Checkhov, Gogol and Tolstoy, just in case we decide to question a tale told in his voice!

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler question

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Howard Jacobson's The Finkler question

Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler question (Courtesy: Bloomsbury Publishing)

Whispering Gums, as you would expect, writes erudite marginalia and so you’d be in for a treat if you ever obtained my copy of Howard Jacobson‘s 2010 Booker award winning novel, The Finkler question. The margins are peppered with my reactions, like, you know, “Ha!” and “Oh dear”. Riveting stuff … and yet, what comments would you make in this book? Ah yes, “stereotyping” is another one, because that, really, is the springboard from which this rather funny book is written.

Do I need to summarise the plot? I feel that I’m about the last blogger to read this book, but just in case I’m not, here goes …  It concerns three longstanding friends: Julian Treslove and Sam Finkler who have been friends since schooldays, and Libor Sevcik who was their teacher at school. At the beginning of the book, Finkler and Libor, both Jews, have been recently widowed. Treslove, the non-Jew, is the “honorary third” widower because he is single (yet again). The novel’s premise is that Treslove would like to be a Jew …

Why, you might ask, would Treslove want to be a Jew (or, a Finkler, as he privately calls them – and hence the title)? It is not an accident that Treslove’s occupation when the novel opens is to be a paid double (or “lookalike”) of famous people at parties, conferences, corporate events:

Treslove didn’t look like anybody famous in particular, but looked like many famous people in general, and so was in demand if not by virtue of verisimilitude, at least by virtue of versatility.

And that’s pretty much how his Jewishness goes too. He might look and play the part but, deep down, can a non-Jew ever really be Jewish? Treslove is about to find out.

Jacobson has a way with words. It was this, together with the endless discussion, using every Jewish stereotype going, of what makes a Finkler (a Jew, remember!) a Finkler, that kept me going through a book that I wasn’t really sure was going anywhere. I laughed at Treslove’s incomprehension of Finkler (the character, this time):

“Do you know anyone called Juno?” Treslove asked.
“J’you know Juno?” Finkler replied, making inexplicable J noises between his teeth.
Treslove didn’t get it.
“J’you know Juno? Is that what you’re asking me?”
Treslove still didn’t get it. So Finkler wrote it down. D’Jew know Jewno?
Treslove shrugged. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

Oh dear! “Julian Treslove knew he’d never be clever in a Finklerish way” but, despite this, he continues with his goal to be Jewish. Meanwhile, Finkler, grieving for his wife and a marriage he still doesn’t understand, tries to dissociate himself from Jews (particularly Zionists) through membership of the ASHamed Jews. And Libor, grieving heavily for his true love, tries to dissuade Treslove from his ambition.

The book chronicles a year or so in the life of these three as each confronts his particular challenge. Treslove falls in love with Libor’s (Jewish) great-niece, Hephzibah, furthering, he hopes, his path to Jewishness; Finkler starts to fall out with the ASHamed Jews though not with their anti-Zionist principles; and Libor starts to fall out of life itself. All of this is told with both warmth and humour. The humour is always there, and yet is never pushed so far that the humanity of the characters is lost. You feel for them, despite their flaws and foibles. You want Julian, the hopeless father and failed lover, to make a go of it this time. You want Finkler to make peace with his Jewishness. And you want old Libor to get over his grief and join the world again. But through all this, you wonder, why? Why is Jacobson writing this story?

I have a few ideas. One may simply be to capture the diversity of Jewishness. Through all the stereotypes that made me laugh (Jews are musical, brokenhearted, rich, clever, comic, and so on), Jacobson shows that Jews, like any other group, are not all the same, cannot all be put in the one basket. Another  reason, though it’s depressing to think it’s needed, may be to defend Jews in an anti-Semitic world, to show their humanity. You care for these characters whose troubles with identity, love and loss are universal. And another may be to explore Zionism, safely. Can Zionism be defended? Has it changed into something more ugly, something that undermines its original conception?

In the end I did like this book because, while I was contemplating the “why”, I was engaged by the characters and their stories. The novel commences with Treslove, the would-be Jew, but it concludes with Finkler, the troubled Jew. Here he is, towards the end:

He was a thinker who didn’t know what he thought, except that he had loved and failed and now missed his wife, and that he hadn’t escaped what was oppressive about Judaism by joining a Jewish group that gathered to talk feverishly about the oppressiveness of being Jewish. Talking feverishly about being Jewish was being Jewish.

Ha! You said it, Mr Jacobson, I’m tempted to say. But that would be too smart-alecky of me because the book is, in fact, as much about humanity as it is about being Jewish.

Howard Jacobson
The Finkler question
London: Bloomsbury, 2011
370pp.
ISBN: 9781408818466

Hazel Rowley, Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage

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First Family of the United States

Roosevelt Family, 1919 (Courtesy: Franklin D Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, via Wikipedia

I wonder what would make an Australian biographer decide to write about an American couple? And I wonder, having now read Hazel Rowley’s Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage, what she would have made of, say, Joseph and Enid Lyons, Australia’s own political power couple. Unfortunately we’ll never know as Rowley died just around the time this, her latest biography, was released. There is, of course, good reason for writing this story: Franklin and Eleanor are an interesting couple, and they did have an impact on the international stage, as well as their national one.

In her acknowledgements at the end of the book, Rowley writes:

I learned quickly that all sources, both primary and secondary, were unreliable. There was so much that could not be said, even in private letters…

Therein lies the rub for the would-be biographer of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. There’s a lot of primary source material available. They wrote copiously to each other and to others, others wrote copiously to them and to others about them. There are diaries written by many in the Roosevelt circle. There’s Eleanor’s newspaper column, My Day, which she wrote for nearly three decades. And there are memoirs, interviews, and sundry other items documenting their private and public lives. Indeed, even though it’s known that some significant letters were destroyed, the biographer of Franklin and Eleanor is challenged by a surfeit of records, unlike those poor biographers of Jane Austen who try to make a lot out of what is a rather small historical record.

And yet, there are still gaps. This is, in the end, what makes fact different from fiction, isn’t it? When you are writing about real people you cannot know everything in their hearts, you cannot be sure of their real motivations, and so whatever biography we read, no matter how thoroughly researched and well written it is, there are things we will never know. With fiction – and maybe I’m being a little ingenuous – the character only exists in the author’s mind and on the page. Whatever the author tells us is all we can know and we must work with that …

Enough intro, let’s get to the book. Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage is an extraordinary read. The research Rowley did was clearly comprehensive – as the endnotes demonstrate. Rowley takes, she says, a different tack to the other biographies out there by choosing to focus specifically on the marriage. Her thesis is that it was not simply a patched up compromise (after Franklin’s betrayal with Lucy Mercer) or simply a political marriage, but “a joint endeavour, a partnership that made it possible for the Roosevelts to become the spectacular and influential individuals they became”.

And that’s certainly how she presents it … and, moreover, how the evidence she presents suggests it was, though we’ll never know, really, what interior compromises the couple made in terms of their personal happiness. Eleanor was devastated by Franklin’s love affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918, and divorce was apparently mentioned. Threats of disinheritance and of loss of his political career plus, it seems, his love for Eleanor resulted in reconciliation and the marriage continued. However, it did shift gear, particularly after Franklin’s polio attack in 1922, and began to encompass a variety of “romantic friendships” for both. Eleanor wrote, many years later in her book You learn by living that

You must allow someone else to meet the need, without bitterness or envy, and accept it.

That tells us, I think, that the “new” marriage was not easily come by. But it also tells us that it was come by. And so, in the mid-1920s during Franklin’s “recovery” from polio,

Franklin had Warm Springs [resort bought by FDR]; Eleanor had Val-Kill [cottage]. Franklin had Missy; Eleanor had Nancy and Marion. Both had Louis Howe.

The fascinating thing about the Roosevelts is the loyalty they inspired in the people who worked with them. Many of the long-standing friendships and relationships chronicled in the book are with the secretaries, body guards, campaign managers, journalists who were in their employ or worked alongside them. There are stories galore in the book about how they opened their homes, including the White House, to others, enjoying communal living way before the 1960s.

The book is, as I’ve already mentioned, well-researched. Most of what Rowley tells us appears to be based on primary records (that are well documented in the extensive endnotes at the back of the book), and she occasionally indicates when she thinks the “facts” have been modified with an eye on posterity. But there are also times when she makes assumptions, such as her belief that Franklin and Lucy did not have a real “affair” because they had little opportunity to be alone; because Lucy was Catholic, single and probably a virgin; because they would have feared pregnancy; and so on. All logical enough but the facts aren’t known.

While the book is about their marriage, we don’t learn a lot about their parenting style. However, their political life is told at a general level – FDR’s New Deal, CCC and Lend-Lease programmes, his relationship with Churchill, and Eleanor’s political works including her involvement in the creation of the United Nations. We learn a little of how Eleanor’s more radical ideas were tempered by the supportive but more political Franklin. I loved a government official’s description of Eleanor at the United Nations General Assembly:

Never have I seen naiveté and cunning so gracefully blended.

As a 21st century reader, I was also interested in the behaviour of the press and how the extent of FDR’s handicap was either hidden from the press or, sometimes, hidden by the press from the public:

From today’s perspective, it is astounding that the press stuck to the rules. Even journalists who disliked Roosevelt respected the dignity of a handicapped man.

They weren’t perfect though. Towards the end of his life when he was sick and convalescing in the South, FDR was driven in his car one day in front of the press simply to halt the rumours that had started to fly. He apparently said:

Those newspapermen are a bunch of God-damned ghouls.

Little did he know!

It’s a great read – for its analysis of the “extraordinary marriage” and for its picture of the times. I thought, as I read of Eleanor’s debut early in the book, that her young womanhood was somewhat close in time and place to the women who populate Edith Wharton’s novels, but Eleanor, through either luck or good judgement, escaped the lives and fate of those characters. How lucky, really, for the world that she did.

Hazel Rowley
Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage
New York: Farrer, Strauss and Giroux, 2011
345pp.
ISBN: 9780374158576

Geraldine Brooks, Caleb’s crossing

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Geraldine Brooks, Caleb's Crossing

Caleb’s crossing book cover (Courtesy: HarperCollins Australia)

In the Afterword to her latest novel, Caleb’s crossing, which was inspired by the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College, Geraldine Brooks describes the reactions of members of the Wampanoag Tribe:

Individual tribal members have been encouraging and generous in sharing information and insights and in reading early drafts. Others have been frank in sharing reservations about an undertaking that fictionalises the life of a beloved figure and sets down an imagined version of that life that may be interpreted as factual. This afterword attempts to address those reservations somewhat by distinguishing scant fact from rampant invention.

This concern – “an imagined version … that may be interpreted as factual” – should by now be familiar to readers of Whispering Gums. In fact, this book has several synchronicities with my recent and current reads. There must be something in the water! Firstly, the issue of fictionalising the life of a historical figure is something I have raised a few times, but most recently in my review of Tansley’s A break in the chain. And then there’s Scott’s That deadman dance which explores early contact in Australia between white settlers and indigenous people. Very different stories and yet several similar concerns and issues, such as those regarding land, education, and cultural attitudes to material possession and to hunting. And there’s more! My next review will probably be Leslie Cannold‘s The book of Rachael which is set in biblical times and features a fictional woman who loves learning and rebels against the strictures of her gender.

I love it when my reading interacts closely like this, when books enable me to explore and play off ideas against each other – so I thought, given this and the fact that there are already many reviews out there, that I’d tease these out a little instead of my more usual review. But first a brief outline of the plot, which provides a mostly imagined backstory to the real Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk through the eyes (journals) of the fictional white girl/woman Bethia Mayfield. The book starts in 1660 when Bethia is 15 years old, but it quickly flashes back a few years to when she met Caleb while out clamming and it describes the friendship which developed between them, forged by a mutual interest in learning about each other’s culture. Idyllic really, but of course it doesn’t last. Caleb is noticed as a young man with the potential to achieve in the white world and comes to live with Bethia’s family, so he can be taught by her father. Eventually, Caleb and another indigenous student, Joel Iacoomis, go to school and then Harvard along with Bethia’s not particularly clever brother, Makepeace. By a cruel twist of fate, Bethia goes with them as an indentured servant. She’s not too disappointed about this because she hopes to surreptitiously acquire a bit of learning too. That’s the gist of the story … and if you know the history, you’ll also know roughly how it all ends, but I won’t spoil that here.

And so to the first issue, fictionalising a historical figure. Brooks is upfront in saying hers is “rampant invention” inspired by “scant fact”. Like Grenville in The secret river, Brooks uses a real figure to explore how and why it might have been, though, unlike Grenville, she retains the name of her inspiration. This muddies the water for the unwary reader but it is common to historical fiction. How many novels have been written about, for example, Anne Boleyn? I have no problem with this. She and Grenville, unlike Tansley, are very clear about their fiction and are not afraid to imagine where there are gaps. Her Caleb may not be the Caleb of history but he is a Caleb whose motivations makes sense:

You will pour across the land, and we will be smothered … We must find favor with your God, or die.

And this brings me to the second synchronicity, that concerning early contact between white settlers and indigenous inhabitants. Brooks (a white Australian author based in the USA) and Kim Scott (a Noongar author from Western Australia) explore similar territory but from different points of view: hers is told in the voice of a white woman, and Scott’s has a more complex narrative voice but from an indigenous perspective. Both explore the complexity in motivations. In white society, we see the whole gamut from altruism through attempts to “get along”/cooperate to arrogance, cruelty and greed. And we see an equally complex response from the indigenous people, from Caleb’s “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em” to Tequamuck’s anger and aggression. The end result, as history shows us, is the same … and neither book (nor Grenville’s) is anything other than realistic about it.

Finally, there’s the gender issue. This – like Grenville’s writing about colonial attitudes to indigenous people – is where writers are often criticised for being anachronistic, for putting modern attitudes into the mouths of historical people. It’s a criticism I tend not to share (providing the character is coherent within the text). “New” ideas do not pop out of nowhere. They grow and develop over time, and they grow from exceptional people – not necessarily well-known people, but people who thought ahead of their times – and novelists, almost by definition, tend to explore the “exceptional”. I have no problem believing that a “Bethia” or a “Rachael” lived in their times … just as I have no problem with what some critics have called Thornhill’s “anachronistic sensitivites” in The secret river.

Enough rambling, back to the book! Did I enjoy it? Yes. Did I think it worked? Partly. Geraldine Brooks is a good storyteller and I read this book in quicksmart time. I was interested in the characters and I wanted to know what happened to them. Brooks evokes the era well, using enough vocabulary and phrasing of the period to immerse you in the time and place. Her physical descriptions are beautiful. You know exactly why Bethia would prefer her island home to the streets of Cambridge. The themes – colonial cross-cultural conflict, gender roles, coping with loss – are valid and clear. And her wide cast of characters realistically cover the gamut of attitudes you’d expect.

And yet, I’m not sure she quite pulls it off. My concern is not so much with her vision, with the ideas she puts in the mouths of her characters, but with her mode of telling. She is rather heavy-handed with the foreshadowing. It’s a valid technique given the story is told in retrospect but it feels overused, which somewhat devalues its dramatic impact. I also wonder whether telling Caleb’s story through Bethia’s eyes means we don’t get to know Caleb well enough, resulting in our not being as emotionally engaged with him as we could be. There are hints of sexual tension between Bethia and Caleb but they are never played out. Perhaps doing so would have turned it to melodrama and yet, once hinted, it needed some resolution. I tend to like first person stories and the immediacy they provide, but maybe a different narrative voice (even multiple points of view) would have been better here.

All that said, it’s an enjoyable read. Reasonably early in the book, Bethia writes:

this truth my mother had voiced … that it could not go on, this crossing out of one world and into another.

Near the end she wonders:

If I had turned away from that boy … and ridden back to my own world and left him in peace with his gods and his spirits, would it have been better?

Would it? Now there’s the million dollar question!

Geraldine Brooks
Caleb’s crossing
London: Fourth Estate, 2011
306pp.
ISBN: 9780007367474

Kim Scott, That deadman dance

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Kim Scott That Deadman Dance
(Image courtesy Picador Australia)

About a third of the way into Kim Scott‘s novel That deadman dance is this:

We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar and tea and blankets that we’d lose everything of ours. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours.

And, it just about says it all. In fact, I could almost finish the post here … but I won’t.

That deadman dance is the first Indigenous Australian novel I’ve read about the first contact between indigenous people and the British settlers. I’ve read non-Indigenous Australian authors on early contact, such as Kate Grenville‘s The secret river, and I’ve read Indigenous authors on other aspects of indigenous experience such as Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria and Marie Munkara’s Every secret thing. Kim Scott adds another perspective … and does it oh so cleverly.

The plot is pretty straightforward. There are the Noongar, the original inhabitants of southwest Western Australia, and into their home/land/country arrive the British. First, the sensitive and respectful Dr Cross, and then a motley group including the entrepreneurial Chaine and his family, the ex-Sergeant Killam, the soon-to-be-free convict Skelly, the escaped sailor Jak Tar, and Governor Spender and his family. The novel tracks the first years of this little colony, from 1826 to 1844.

That sounds straightforward doesn’t it? And it is, but it’s the telling that is clever. The point of view shifts fluidly from person to person, though there is one main voice, and that is the young Noongar boy (later man), Bobby Wabalanginy. The chronology also shifts somewhat. The novel starts with a prologue (in Bobby’s voice) and then progresses through four parts: Part 1, 1833-1836; Part 2, 1826-1830; Part 3, 1836-1838; and Part 4, 1841-44. And within this not quite straight chronology are some foreshadowings which mix up the chronology just that little bit more. The foreshadowings remind us that this is an historical novel: the ending is not going to be fairytale and the Indigenous people will end up the losers. But they don’t spoil the story because the characters are strong and, while you know (essentially) what will happen, you want to know how the story pans out and why it pans out that way.

What I found really clever – and beautiful – about the book is the language and how Scott plays with words and images to tell a story about land, place and home, and what it means for the various characters. His language clues us immediately into the cross-cultural theme underpinning the book. Take, for example, the words “roze a wail” on the first page:

“Boby Wablngn” wrote “roze a wail”.
But there was no whale. Bobby was remembering …
“Rite wail”.
Bobby already knew what it was to  be up close beside a right whale …

Whoa, I thought, there’s a lot going on here and I think I’m going to enjoy it. Although Bobby’s is not the only perspective we hear in the book, he is our guide. He is lively and intelligent, and crosses the two cultures with relative ease: just right for readers venturing into unfamiliar territory. He’s a great mimic, and creates dances and songs. The Dead Man Dance is the prime example. It’s inspired by the first white people (the “horizon people”) and evokes their regimented drills with rifles and their stiff-legged marching. There’s an irony to this dance of course: its name foretells while the dance itself conveys the willingness of the Noongar to incorporate (and enjoy) new ideas into their culture.

In fact there’s a lot of irony in the novel. Here is ex-Sergeant Killam:

Mr Killam was learning what it was to have someone move in on what you thought was your very own home. He thought that was the last straw. The very last.

And who was taking his land? Not the Noongar of course, but the Governor … and so power, as usual, wins.

The novel reiterates throughout the willingness – a willingness supported, I understand, by historical texts – of the Noongar to cooperate and adapt to new things in their land:

Bobby’s family knew one story of this place, and as deep as it is, it can accept such variations.

But, in the time-old story of colonisation, it was not to be. Even the respectful Dr Cross had his blinkers – “I’ve taken this land, Cross said. My land”. And so as the colony grew, women were taken, men were shot, kangaroos killed, waters fouled, whales whaled out, and so on. You know the story. When the Noongar took something in return such as flour, sheep, sugar, they were chased away, imprisoned, and worse.

I’d love to share some of the gorgeous descriptions in the book but I’ve probably written enough for now. You will, though, see some Delicious Descriptions in coming weeks from this book. I’ll finish with one final example of how Scott shows – without telling – cultural difference. It comes from a scene during an expedition led by Chaine to find land. They come across evidence of a campsite:

You could see where people camped – there was an old fire, diggings, even a faint path. Bobby was glad they’d left; he didn’t want to come across them without signalling their own presence first, but Chaine said, No, if we meet them we’ll deal with them, but no need to attract attention yet.

Need I say more*?

The book has garnered several awards and some excellent reviews, including those from my favourite Aussie bloggers: Lisa (ANZLitLovers), the Resident Judge, the Literary Dilettante, and Matt (A Novel Approach). Our reviews differ in approach – we are students, teachers, historians, and librarian/archivists – but we all agree that this is a book that’s a must to read.

Kim Scott
That deadman dance
Sydney: Picador, 2010
400pp.
ISBN:  9780330404235

* I should add, in case I have misled, that for all the truths this novel conveys about colonisation, it is not without vision and hope. It’s all in the way you read it.

Lloyd Jones, Hand me down world

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I used to find myself saying, I can’t imagine. But, I’ve since found out, you can – it’s just a case of wanting to.

Hand me down world, bookcover

Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

What this character is talking about is empathy – and empathy, the having or not having it, is for me a major theme of New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones’ latest novel, Hand me down world. The novel is chock-full of characters who vary in their ability to empathise or not with other humans, to behave altruistically or selfishly towards others, to treat others with the dignity that all humans deserve or as nobodies to be ignored (or worse). These are not, in the real world, absolute alternatives but continuums along which we all position ourselves when relating to others. I think this positioning is one of the fundamental challenges of being human, and Lloyd Jones explores it in a novel which got me in from the get-go. In other words, I loved it.

This is a novel with a simple plot but a complex narrative. The plot concerns a young, poor African woman, a hotel worker, who leaves Africa using human-traffickers to find her son in Berlin. Why she does this is a shocking story revealed in the first chapter. The book follows her journey until its inevitable but not totally predictable conclusion.

What is particularly interesting about the book is how Jones has chosen to tell the story. It is divided into five parts:

1. What they said
2. Berlin
3. Defoe
4. Ines
5. Abebi

The first two parts comprise 13 chapters, each named for the narrator telling that part of the story. All but one of the narrators are first person and they chronicle their experience with the woman (whom we come to know as Ines) as she journeys to and finally arrives in Berlin. The third person narrator is “The inspector”. Why he is third person initially mystified me, but it all becomes clear when he reappears in Ines’ part. As I was reading these early chapters, I was reminded of Gabriel Garcia Marquez‘s Chronicle of a death foretold because they sounded like witness statements (and that, in fact, is what we later discover they are). This is not, though, a whodunnit, any more than Marquez’s book is, although a death does occur. Intrigued? You should be.

Anyhow, it is in these early chapters that the “empathy” theme starts to play out as it is in them that we hear how Ines gets from Africa, via Italy, to Berlin. She is “helped” by a number of people including a truck driver, snail collector, an alpine hunter, a chess player and a film researcher. Some of these people help her expecting nothing, some help her only if she gives something in return (and I’m sure you can guess what that might be), some help her but would like something in return, some are unsure whether to help her or not, and so on. It certainly makes you wonder what you would do, how far out of your way you would go.

Suffice it to say, she makes it to Berlin, manages to find a job, and starts searching for her son. But, I won’t talk more on that, so you can discover for yourself how her story plays out. What I will talk about instead are some of the other features of the book that make it such an interesting read.

Several metaphors run through the novel, but they never feel overworked. One that I particularly liked concerns phantoms/ghosts. Lloyd uses them to describe the marginalised or dispossessed. The pastor (who better to talk about ghosts?) speaks of ghosts in a number of contexts, including:

The ghost remains a spectre, no more than a possibility. Something to be afraid of. A manifestation of fear, such as the opposition parties in each and every undemocratic regime in Africa.

The other ghosts – the real ghosts if I may call them that – are simply those whom we choose not to see.

Ines, of course, is one of these – and later, when she considers stealing her son, she talks of teaching him “to turn himself into a ghost”. Another motif that runs through the book is that of versions and lies. Most of the early narrators are not exactly reliable, several people do not go by their own name and there are references to things being transformed (such as snails which can change gender and lungfish which can live in and out of water). When Defoe describes the lungfish (below) we see its reference to the way people change, to how we can transform (for good) or dissemble (for ill, such as the father of Ines’ baby):

Now he arrived at the question that interested him. At which point does it become the one thing and cease to be the other? In becoming that new thing how much does it retain of the other?

One of the little side stories in this multilayered novel concerns the old blind man Ralf in whose household Ines finds work. We learn from Ralf’s ex-wife, Hannah, that after her gentle, kind father-in-law had died they found a photograph that revealed his secret past as a photographer of atrocities during the Nazi regime. Ralf’s inability to come to terms with his father’s contradictory, secret past brings about the breakdown of his marriage. Meanwhile, Ines lies, steals and pretends in order to achieve her goal of developing a relationship with her son:

I had to see him. And that need turned me into someone with no heart or conscience. I didn’t care how the money was earnt.

It is difficult in fact to know who the real Ines is … but she is a wounded soul. Who are we to judge? Throughout the novel, in fact, Jones confronts us with imperfect people and challenges us to consider both them and their circumstances. How far can, should, our empathy extend? Uncomfortable questions but ones we must face.

During Ines’ story she says “I was shown more kindness than abuse” which reminded me of Rieux’s statement at the end of The plague that “there are more things to admire in men to despise”. I like to think they’re right but, with Camus and Jones, I also know that we need books like this to remind us that we still have a way to go …

Lisa at ANZLitlovers also enjoyed this book.

Lloyd Jones
Hand me down world
Melbourne, Text Publishing, 2010
352pp
ISBN: 9781921656682