Reading group book

Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road (#BookReview)

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When my reading group started back in 1988, most of us were time-poor mothers so we had a rule-of-thumb that our books could not be longer than 350 pages. Those days, however, are long gone, and some time ago we agreed that our January (aka summer) read could be a BIG book. Last year, for example, it was Demon Copperhead (my review). This year, some were keen to read Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, so that’s what we scheduled.

My problem is that while it’s summer, January is also tennis season. I don’t watch much sport, but I do love the tennis. Reading a big book while trying to keep up with the tennis is always a challenge. As is the fact that, as most of you know, I love short books. Give me a novella and I’m (usually) happy. However, I also love my reading group, and so I gave myself extra time and got stuck in. I was immediately engaged. The protagonist, fifty-two year old Campbell Flynn, art historian, writer and academic, captured me. There was a certain Jane Austen tone to the opening:

Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished.

Ha! He certainly was a tinderbox, as he was about to slowly implode. Further, as we soon discover, his childhood was not at all behind him, and is implicated in his unravelling. The first paragraph ends with some foreshadowing telling us that the first of his “huge mistakes” was not to “take people half as seriously as they took themselves”, with the second being “the proof copy” he had in his briefcase.

It is Thursday 20 May 2021, so the first wave of the pandemic is over but its long shadow provides a quiet background to the novel which is told over five parts, from Spring 2021 to Winter 2022, concluding around the time of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Now, back to my reading journey. I was interested, but as I read on, following the ups and increasing downs of Campbell’s life, along with those of an ever-growing cast of characters, there was a point where I started to baulk. It felt like a long wallowing in the ills of the modern western world. Did I need 640 pages of it? And then it clicked. I realised I was reading a modern take on the 19th century “condition-of-England” novel. These novels, as the The Victorian Web explains, “sought to engage directly with the contemporary social and political issues with a focus on the representation of class, gender, and labour relations, as well as on social unrest and the growing antagonism between the rich and the poor in England”. We’re talking Dickens’ “big” novels, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and south and Mary Barton, and so on. I loved them.

“a deep dive into the era’s shallows” (Campbell)

These novels have to be big, because a nation’s “condition” does not comprise one issue but a network of them, and this is what O’Hagan pulls apart in Caledonian Road. Through a cast of around 60 characters, O’Hagan explores a grab bag of the various ills we read about every day, with a British spin. All the big issues are here, including toxic masculinity; intergenerational wars; racism; modern technology with its related concerns like security, privacy, hacking, and digital identity; disruption as activist action; financial corruption and malfeasance; foreign interference; and human trafficking. Grab bag these might sound, but they are overlaid and connected by the traditional biggies – class, entitlement and privilege, economic inequality, and now, globalisation.

There’s a lot going on, but O’Hagan’s characters are vividly drawn, the plot is compelling if complicated, it is satirical in tone, and the language is so captivating that I enjoyed reading it after all. It is, necessarily, a disjointed read with the narrative constantly switching between the different storylines that make the whole, but I found I didn’t need the cast of characters helpfully provided at the beginning because the context always made clear who they were.

Before I return to the subject matter, I must share a couple of perfect character descriptions. First is Milo, a person whom Campbell doesn’t take seriously enough, and second is Candy, Campbell’s sister-in-law, the fey do-gooder wife of the egregious Duke of Kendal:

The young man had edges and they often glinted on the blade of his charm. (p. 76)
and
Candy stood like an emaciated meerkat looking out for an opportunity to enthuse. (p. 262)

So now, back to the “condition-of-England” idea. The characters range across the breadth of British society, from twenty-somethings to eighty-somethings, and include MPs, aristocrats, academics, journalists, business people, actors, criminals, activists, do-gooders, hackers, landowners, renters, gang members, migrants, factory workers, and lorry drivers. But, what most of them have in common is an idea of what England is. The most poignant comes from the migrants, like Polish Mrs Krupa and her son’s undocumented employee, also Polish, Jakub. As Jakub’s life, under the control of human-traffickers-cum-drug-lords, starts looking different to what he expected, he begins “to wonder if England was anything like the myth he … had bought into”.

O’Hagan, then, explores with clarity and a healthy sense of irony, today’s England (or Britain). The flawed but self-questioning Campbell – increasingly conflicted by his middle-class success and working-class origins – is our guide through a story in which hope, promise and sincerity are set against hypocrisy, greed and hatred. Desperate to remain relevant to the times, and to be a decent person, Campbell lets his guard down, allowing the driven, idealistic Milo into his life. Both are complex characters, who test our moral compass. Others not so much, like the aristocratic Duke of Kendal and Lord Scullion, the Russian oligarch Aleksandr Bykov, the corrupt billionaire William Byre, and the criminal Bozydar, all of whom, indirectly or directly, slash and burn those around them. In between are the decent, including women like Campbell’s wife Elizabeth and sister Moira, and the powerless, like rapper Travis and undocumented migrant worker Jakub.

Towards the end of the novel, the unravelling Campbell, who has become “lost in the sprawling web of it all”, inverts my favourite EM Forster quote when he reflects to himself, “only disconnect”. It’s a paradox. Campbell’s survival will depend on disconnecting from all that is wrong in his world (technologically and personally), while hanging tight – keeping connected, in other words – to all that is good. Ultimately, while O’Hagan paints a grim picture of what is wrong – the superficial, the hypocritical, the greedy and the cruel – in England, he also leaves us with a glimmer of hope. There are good people and they can prevail – but, will they, is the question we are left with.

PS Caledonian Road, being a big book, invites multiple responses. You can read those by Brona and Jonathan, who approached it from different angles and perspectives.

Andrew O’Hagan
Caledonian Road
London: Faber & Faber, 2024
642pp.
ISBN: 9780571381388 (Kindle edition.)

My reading group’s favourites for 2024

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Once again, I am sharing my reading group’s top picks for the year, because I know I’m not the only one who enjoys hearing about other reading groups.

I’ll start by sharing what we read in the order we read them (with links on titles to my reviews):

This year’s schedule was rather less diverse than we’ve done for a while, with eight of our eleven authors being Australian. (Next year will see some “correction” to this.) Last year we read only four Australian women, while this year we read seven (plus an Australian man). We did, however, schedule a classic (Vonnegut) which we omitted to do last year, but we read no books in translation, which is a bit ethnocentric of us. We read more nonfiction than we have for a while, with books by Flanagan, Funder and Winn, and we read fewer male authors, just two. However, despite the list looking less diverse from the author origin point of view, it is more diverse in subject matter, with nothing like the concentration we had last year on the status and condition of women’s lives. If I were pushed to name a flavour for this year, I’d say that there was a strong serving of (socio)political and/or philosophical issues in this year’s books.

The winners …

This year all eleven of our regularly attending members voted, meaning the maximum a book could get was 11 votes, and that there were 33 votes all up. The rules were the same. We had to name our three favourite works, and all were given equal weighting. This year, unlike last year, the top three positions were closely fought and we ended up with three clear winners. Last year, there was a runaway winner, and then two second and two third place getters. 2024’s top three places were:

  1. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (8 votes)
  2. Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko (7 votes)
  3. Stone Yard devotional by Charlotte Wood (6 votes )

Last year, the highly-commendeds right behind the two third place getters, but this year, the next two books were a few votes behind, at three votes each: Question 7 by Richard Flanagan and Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran.

As for my three picks, it was very tough (as it usually is). I got something out of every book I read, and many will stay with me for a long time, but, like last year, the group’s number 1 pick was not in my top three. This is not to say I didn’t like Demon Copperhead, because I did very much, but that I loved something else more. My three books, in alphabetical order, were Marion Halligan’s Wishbone, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, and Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard devotional. I chose these because Halligan just knows human beings and uses wit and humour to show us ourselves; because Lucashenko tells us our history from a First Nations perspective and does it with fierce honesty but also with humour and generosity; and because Wood explores the place of stillness, silence, solitude, contemplation in our noisy, troubling world.

Selected comments

Not everyone included comments with their picks, and not all books received comments, but here’s a flavour of what was said:

  • Demon Copperhead: Commenters used superlatives like “huge”, “outstanding”, “brilliant”, “powerful” but also commented on its exploration of poverty and disadvantage, and its relevance to now.
  • Edenglassie: Commenters focused on the value, the importance, of seeing our history through a First Nations perspective, and how it brought our intellectual knowledge to life.
  • Stone Yard devotional: Commenters talked about its gorgeous evocation of place (as we all know the Monaro), and loved its sparseness, introspection, meditativeness, its exploration of solitude and silence.
  • Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens: Commenters liked its exposing the traumas involved in human movement, of its mix of politics, culture and human suffering, with one calling Chandran a “true story-teller”.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, particularly if you were in a reading group this year. What did your group read and love?

Marion Halligan, Wishbone (#BookReview)

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My reading group’s last meeting of the year took the form of a tribute to Marion Halligan, who died earlier this year and who had generously attended our meeting when we discussed her Valley of grace (my review). We have done this once before with Helen Garner (albeit she hadn’t died) and it worked well. The process is that we choose something we want to read and share our thoughts with the group. I have read several of Halligan’s books, but I have a few on my TBR, so of course I chose one of those, Wishbone, her fourth novel, published in 1994.

Before I share my thoughts on that, I thought you might like to know what everyone read. Ten members attended the meeting. Some read two books, while others chose a short story or article. It is, after all, a busy time of year. The novels read were, in chronological order, Wishbone (1), The golden dress (2), The fog garden (1), Valley of grace (1), Goodbye sweetheart (2). Three people read her most recent memoir, Words for Lucy, while others read selections from Canberra tales (“Most mortal enemy”), The taste of memory (the first piece), Canberra Red (“A city of mind”), and Shooting the fox (“Shooting the fox”). In other words, we read widely across her oeuvre, resulting in an enjoyable – and occasionally excitable – meeting as we teased out some of her themes and ideas, including how much of her fiction was drawn from life!

“who knows what the hell is going on”

So now, Wishbone. It tells the story of a woman, Emmanuelle, her “motley family”, and the wishes they have for themselves. The novel starts with a young, passionate Emmanuelle having an affair with a married man, but it soon jumps some years hence when she is now married (to a man named Lance), and living in well-heeled Sydney with two children, Maud and William. The rest of the novel follows a period in the lives of these four and others in their close circle – friends, family and employees. During this time, we experience a life-threatening stroke, extra-marital affairs, mistaken assumptions, and a suspicious death, all set within perfectly rendered scenes of domesticity. Halligan can make you gasp with her audaciousness.

As I was reading this novel, a light dawned for me about why I so often use Jane Austen as a benchmark for writing I love. I do like all sorts of writing, but I am particularly drawn to writing that exposes human nature with wit, irony and a generous spirit. This is what Austen does, and this is also what Halligan does. Wishbone is a generous story about messy human lives. Halligan writes with a knowingness about those deep-down thoughts, wishes, and desires we all have, but she is also forgiving about her characters’ foibles and less admirable traits and behaviours. In Wishbone, she explores the tension between our wishes – particularly regarding love – and living with what you’ve got.

There’s something of a fatalist element, here, in the sense that we think we have choice in all this, but choice proves in fact to be elusive. Things happen that we have no control over. Late in the novel, as Emmanuelle sits around the kitchen table with her two children and au pair Mel, in what looks to be a cosy domestic scene, a question – which is both literal and existential – is suddenly proffered, “who knows what the hell is going on”. Who indeed? (And who is asking the question? Emmanuelle, surely, but there’s also an omniscient voice overlaying the characters’ perspectives. At least I believe so. Wishbone slides seamlessly between voices and perspectives in a way that never loses the reader, but that ensures we see multiple sides of things.)

This brings me to style, and how Halligan does what she does. Halligan is a born short-story writer. As I started Wishbone, I almost wondered whether I was reading a book of short stories. Every chapter is gorgeously titled and most felt like they could stand on their own as little nuggets from a life. The opening chapter, The Glade, tells of Emmanuelle’s youthful affair with her married man. It starts:

The difficulty of a love affair between a young woman and a married man may be its logistics. Where can they go? He lives with his wife. She lives with her parents.

They can’t afford hotels, and anyhow it’s too risky as the town is small, but Brian knows “a good place”, a little glade under a cliff. Whenever Brian thinks of going to the glade, he whistles Handel’s tune, “Where e’er you walk”, which “always gladdened his wife’s heart, because she knew her husband was feeling cheerful”. Halligan’s discussion of this song, Brian’s behaviour, and the wife’s response is delicious in more ways than this little irony, but I will just share Halligan’s nailing the point, with “the song told her about the walking and the sitting but what she didn’t know about was the lying”. Just think of the double meaning in that last word! This writing just makes you splutter.

From here, the plot unfolds quietly but surely. Hints are dropped but aren’t heavy-handed, so we are still surprised when certain events occur, which brings me to the title, and its reference to wishes. In the third chapter, The Man in the Train, there is a mostly mundane discussion about wishes until the chapter’s titular, and unnamed, “man” asks Emmanuelle what she would wish for. Her answer?

I would wish for the gift of making dangerous choices.

As the novel progresses, various characters express their wishes. Emmanuelle’s friend Susie idly wishes she were a widow, while au pair Mel wishes she were beautiful. Emmanuelle wants more passion from her husband, while chauffeur Stuart wants money. And so on … What these characters learn, you won’t be surprised to hear, is that their seemingly ordinary, or common, wishes often carry a danger that is not expected. You know that saying, “be careful what you wish for”. But Halligan’s book is no simple moral tale. What Emmanuelle realises near the end, in fact, is that all choices can be dangerous. Susie asks her:

Have you ever wished Lance dead?
I’ve wished him different.
And did that come true?
Not in ways that I’d have chosen.

Where does this leave us? We won’t stop wishing, and we certainly can’t stop making choices, but we can think about our choices and be realistic about the outcomes, whether they are the expected or unexpected ones. In the end, Emmanuelle probably has the answer:

being alive is like reading a book. You might think you’ve got a fair idea of the plot but you don’t actually know what’s going to happen next, you’re as much a mystery to yourself as a character in a novel. Perhaps the secret is just to keep turning the pages.

Reading Wishbone has reminded me how much I enjoy Halligan. I must get back to that TBR.

Marion Halligan
Wishbone
Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1994
235pp.
ISBN: 0855615974

Raynor Winn, The salt path (#BookReview)

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While my reading group’s main fare is fiction, we do include nonfiction in the mix. In fact, this year has been unusual as we’ve scheduled three nonfiction books – Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (my review), Anna Funder’s Wifedom (my review), and, last month, Raynor Winn’s The salt path. I can’t recollect how The salt path came to be chosen, and nor could the 8 (of our 11) members who attended the meeting, but we weren’t about to complain.

Many of you will know this book already, given it became a bestseller after its publication in 2018. It was shortlisted for some major awards, and won the inaugural RSL Christopher Bland Prize (which I would call a “late bloomer” prize.) However, in case it escaped your notice, I will briefly summarise it. The book opens with two disasters befalling author Raynor and and her husband of 32 years, Moth. He is diagnosed with a rare, terminal degenerative disease called CBD (corticobasal degeneration) and, in an ultimately unjust court case, they lose their home which was also their livelihood. They have nothing but each other (and their two children who, fortunately, are young adults linving away from home). What do you do in a situation like this? You decide to walk England’s challenging 630-mile South West Coast Path, wild camping most of the way. That’s what.

Although it’s essentially a memoir, The salt path is better described as a road story that combines memoir, nature writing and social commentary. I would also argue that it’s a work of creative nonfiction, partly because of its strong narrative arc (albeit this is not uncommon in memoir and travel writing) but also because it includes dialogue (which, given there’s no evidence to the contrary, has presumably been recreated for the book). The result is a book which interweaves description, anecdote, personal reflection, social commentary and dialogue in a way that maintains our interest because it never bogs down in one mode or another. The balance Winn achieves is not only between these modes, but also in tone, which moves between serious and scared, melancholic and thoughtful, and light and humorous.

“you’ve felt the hand of nature … you’re salted” (woman on path)

I want to explore a little more how the combination of memoir and road story works to tell Winn’s story. Memoir, by definition, deals with a particular issue or time period in a person’s life. This gives the story a natural trajectory which conveys how that issue is handled or progresses – and/or what happens over that chosen time – until some sort of resolution or conclusion is reached. A road story has an even more obvious or natural narrative arc – the beginning of the trip, the middle with all the events and challenges met on the way, and the trip’s end (which may or may not be the originally intended one.)

So, in The salt path, the memoir, with its central issues being Moth’s illness and their homelessness, is framed by the road story, which describes the physical journey, that is, the landscape they walk through, and their experience of walking and wild camping. As in most road stories, we meet characters along the way, some positive or helpful, some amusing, and others negative or obstructive. And, as is also common in travel literature, we are introduced to issues that are relevant to the places travelled through. In this case they include conflicting ideas about heritage, conservation and the role of the National Trust in the communities and regions along the path.

There is, then, a lot to this book and while it works well as a coherent whole, some parts, of course, left a stronger impression than others. The strongest was their experience of the path, particularly given its recognised toughness combined with their impecunious state, inexpert preparation, and Moth’s ill-health. They were often hungry, wet and cold, and they walked at half the pace of Paddy Dillon whose guidebook they followed, but as time wore on Moth’s health improved. Why is a question never fully answered because they didn’t know why. Years later, he is still alive, still with the condition. Their strong interpersonal connection sustains them when little else does! And there is always the nature. This is Winn’s first book but she can clearly write. Her descriptions of the environment – the wildlife, the landscape, the vegetation, the sea – and of their feelings as they walk through it are perfect, like:

“A hidden land of weather and rock, remote and isolated. Unchanged through millennia yet constantly changed by the sea and the sky, a contradiction at the western edge. Unmoved by time or man, this ancient land was draining our strength and self-will, bending us to acceptance of the shaping elements.”

“The moon climbed into a clear sky, just past full, polishing the landscape in tones of grey and silver.”

After some time of walking the path, they start to look weathered – peeling skin, ragged clothes, and so on. It is around this time that they meet a woman who recognises the look. She tells them “you’ve felt the hand of nature … you’re salted”. Winn’s title is more than a literal description of a sea-swept path. It is also about being part of the nature, the life, they walk through.

From early in the book, however, another theme is introduced that threads through the book – homelessness. Obviously, it occupied Winn’s mind because they were suddenly homeless, but as the book progresses, she supplements their personal experience of being homeless with facts and figures. The facts are sobering, but they are made powerful by Raynor and Moth’s firsthand experience. For example, very quickly they became cautious about being honest about their circumstances, because it affected people’s attitudes to them:

“We could be homeless, having sold our home and put money in the bank, and be inspirational. Or we could be homeless, having lost our home and become penniless, and be social pariahs.” 

All sorts of other thoughts and issues arise, as you would expect on a long walk. Another is the aformentioned issue of protecting heritage and the environment, and the role of the National Trust. Locals complain about National Trust restrictions affecting their traditional jobs, but she also sees all the money coming in from the resultant tourism and senses “a strong whiff of hypocrisy”. In an area dug up for clay-mines, she discusses the various approaches taken after the mines have gone. One is creating an attraction like the Eden Project. Returning the land to its original state seems the least likely option, because “no tourist is going to pay to walk over a meadow with a leaflet that says, ‘You’d never know it, but this used to be a mine.’” By contrast, there’s the town of Tyneham that had been requisitioned during World War Two, and where

Strangely enough, limited public access, a lack of intensive farming and the occasional blasting by small-arms fire has allowed wildlife and vegetation to thrive throughout the ranges. A form of khaki conservation that no one expected to be the outcome when the villagers left their homes as part of the war effort.

Of course, insights into the land – into the many ways it has been used, modified and re-used – are common to those who walk, and land-loving Raynor Winn is no exception. Her observations are idiosyncratic to her. Readers may not always agree, but she is real and honest.

There is much more to say, but I’ll conclude on the personal, because this is ultimately a personal journey as much as a physical one. Winn starts off, somewhat angry but mostly scared (very scared about her beloved Moth dying) and deeply worried about the future and whether they are doing the right thing. Slowly though, as Moth’s symptoms seem to subside, and as time passes, she senses change in herself

I was no longer striving, fighting to change the unchangeable, not clenching in anxiety at the life we’d been unable to hold on to, or angry at an authoritarian system too bureaucratic to see the truth. A new season had crept into me, a softer season of acceptance.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that The salt path is a book about reality, not miracles but not tragedy either. Its interest lies in the particular situation this couple finds themselves in, in the path itself, and in Winn’s ability to write about it all with warmth, humour and honesty.

So, how did my reading group like it? Very much overall. Depending on our own experiences and perspectives, we varied in our reaction to the different decisions they took, but as lovers of the environment we all appreciated the description of the walk, and as lovers of “stories” we enjoyed the anecdotes about the people they met. Of course, we had questions, and there were little niggles – some didn’t always like the tone, and some couldn’t believe the couple’s poor preparation and apparent lack of sunscreen! But the discussion we had was excellent. So, a good book all round.

Brona also reviewed this book (nearer its publication!)

Raynor Winn
The salt path
Penguin, 2018
273pp
ASIN: ‎ B0793GXSBL
ISBN: 9781405937528

Jane Caro, The mother (#BookReview)

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When my reading group scheduled Jane Caro’s debut novel, The mother, I was, I admit, not exactly enthusiastic, because my sense was that it was not going to be the sort of, shall I say, subtle writing I prefer. My sense was right, but I am not sorry I read it – partly because of the engaged discussion we had and partly for Caro’s intention.

The mother, then, is not a literary award-winner – the writing is fine but not exciting or breath-taking in the way I like – but, and it is a big but, it is an accessible, fictional exposé of the main points Jess Hill makes in her Stella Prize-winning See what you made me do: Power, control and domestic violence (my review). Hill explores family and domestic violence from every angle, but the most shocking and enlightening part for me concerned children, particularly the Family Court’s inability or refusal to see the risks to children from its parent access orders, even when the children themselves express fear. This point is powerfully made by Caro in her novel*.

But, let me step back a bit. The mother tells the story of 60-something middle-class Miriam Duffy who, widowed early in the novel, is pleased – and indeed grateful – when her emotional daughter, with whom she has had a tricky relationship, marries a perfect-seeming man. Gradually, however, little niggles about this relationship become bigger until one day they are confirmed when Ally returns home with two little children in tow, having left her husband. From here the situation deteriorates as the husband Nick escalates his bullying, predatory behaviour, and Miriam and Ally realise that the law is unable to protect them. The novel is described as a thriller, so I’ll give you just one more piece of information. It opens with a Prologue in which Miriam buys a handgun.

This brings me to the structure. After this Prologue, the novel is divided into two parts. In Part 1, Ally marries and soon after, Miriam is widowed. There is also a second, older, daughter who is in a stable marriage and has two children. During this part, Caro slowly drips out many of the flags that constitute coercive control, but that on their own don’t initially look like it or can be explained away – things like isolation from family and friends, use of a (demeaning) pet-name, jealousy, charm that is turned on and off at will, and surveillance, moving into sexual violence and gaslighting. This part ends with Ally’s return home. Part 2 commences four years later, and we are reminded of the Prologue, because Miriam is researching where she can buy a gun. Miriam and Ally have been systematically intimidated by Nick, and have reported his transgressions against Ally’s AVO (Apprehended Violence Order) again and again, but

Eventually they had stopped going to the police. It wasn’t that the cops weren’t sympathetic; it was just that they could not do anything.

In this part, Caro ratchets up the sense of helplessness (and hopelessness) the two women feel as Nick finds new ways to harass and terrify them. As I read it, I couldn’t help but think about all the news stories of recent years about murdered women and children. Nor could Miriam and Ally, but they turned the TV off the minute these stories came on. They were too close to home!

Like many issue-driven books, The mother did, as many in my reading group commented, feel didactic at times, and it is somewhat predictable. Some of us also felt that it was a little laboured in places. However, offsetting this is the novel’s characterisation and understanding of human nature. Caro conveys the complex human emotions we all experience under stress. She explores the lines and balance between what is acceptable in relationships and what is not, the fears about when to speak up, the justifications we try to find when things feel awry, and the feelings of guilt (particularly in mothers).

The mother is unapologetically a novel with a cause. With its compelling storyline and believable characters, it has a chance of reaching those who do not understand what coercive control is, and who do not realise that it crosses all demographics. Nick, for example, is a vet and Ally a PhD candidate. Miriam, a successful businesswoman, lives in comfortable North Shore Sydney.

This novel is being promoted primarily as a thriller, but I’m more inclined to see it as belonging to that long tradition of social problem novels. It may not be as sophisticated as the best of them, but its intention is clear, to drive social change. I hope it succeeds. I don’t imagine Jane Caro, or Jess Hill for that matter, will let matters lie until we see real, sustained change happening – and nor should we.

* This month there has been news about changes in family law in Australia, including removing the presumption of equal shared care, putting a focus on prioritising children’s best interests, and revamping the role of independent children’s lawyers. Time will tell what difference this makes in practice.

Jane Caro
The mother
Allen & Unwin, 2022
368pp.
ISBN: 9781761063893 
ASIN: B09MQ3PN1W

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (#BookReview)

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While my reading group’s main reading fare has, from the start, been contemporary fiction, we also mix it up a bit. We do non-fiction, for example, and most years we try to do a classic. Over the years we’ve done Jane Austen, Elizabeth von Arnim, Anton Chekhov, EM Forster, and Randolph Stow, to name a few. This year we turned to Kurt Vonnegut, and, because we couldn’t decide which book to do, we narrowed it to two – Cat’s cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five – and let members decide. You can tell from the post title which one I chose. This was because I have read Cat’s cradle, albeit decades ago. Most of the group, however, read Cat’s cradle, because they’d read Slaughterhouse-Five before.

So, Slaughterhouse-Five it is then – and I’m confronted by the old challenge of what to say about a classic, and a cult classic at that. This book has been analysed ad infinitum, and been found, as the decades have trundled by, to retain its relevance to new generations. However, before I say more, let me give a very brief synopsis, just in case there’s someone out there who doesn’t know the story.

“jumbled and jangled”

Ha, did I say brief synopsis? Easier said than done, but I’ll give it a try. Slaughterhouse-Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, from his early years, through his time as an American soldier during World War II including being in Dresden when it was bombed, to the post-war years. During his life, Billy is also abducted by flying saucer and taken to the planet of Tralfamadore, where he is displayed in a zoo. The critical issue underpinning all this is that Billy was damaged by his wartime experiences, something we now recognise as PTSD. Vonnegut conveys – and represents – Billy’s discombobulation, his trauma, through a complex non-linear, non-chronological narrative, in which Billy, who “has come unstuck in time”, travels not only back and forth through time, but also back and forth between Earth and Tralfamadore. 

Slaughterhouse-Five is, as a result, a challenging, sometimes mystifying read, but it is also an exhilarating one, because Vonnegut tells his story through satire and absurdity, both of which I love. In the first chapter, the narrator, who is Vonnegut, tells us about writing the book we are now reading. As he hands his finished book to the publisher, he says

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

Alongside the occasional appearance of this first-person narrator, we have the unsuccessful science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, who can also be read as a version – caricature – of Vonnegut. His “unpopularity was deserved”, the narrator tells us. “His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good”. But, Billy loves him. We first meet Trout when Billy is introduced to him by Rosewater, another patient in the hospital to which Billy had committed himself when he feels he is “going crazy”:

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes.

If you’ve read the novel, you will know that “so it goes” is its over-riding refrain. Used over 100 times, at moments of murder, death, and other disasters, it functions as a motif, one that both underlines and undermines the horror, by drawing attention to it, then passing it off. The constant opposition, in the novel, of the serious with the offhand keeps the reader unsettled, which is part of the point.

The occasional self-conscious appearance of the author/Vonnegut and the references to Kilgore Trout, along with its story-within-a-story framework, its wild playing with time and place, its fragmentary approach to storytelling, and its unapologetic undermining of “reality”, make this book a postmodern work, if that interests you. By this I mean what sort of work it is doesn’t matter, really. It’s what the work says or makes you feel that really counts. However, it’s these features and techniques which enable Vonnegut to convey what he wants to say in such a powerful way. The how of it is inseparable from the meaning of it.

Slaughterhouse-Five is said to be about many things, including war and pacifism, fate and free will, our experience of time. I could discuss each of these in turn, but the academics already have. I’ll simply say that my primary takeaway is that it’s about the absurdity and incomprehensibility of life and, by example, about how our everyman Billy Pilgrim copes (or doesn’t) with such life.

Slaughterhouse-Five was published at the height of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement. It was, it seems, the right novel at the right time. Although Vonnegut had had some success before, this was the novel that apparently established him. I can see why. With wars just keeping on coming – and being just as horrific and absurd as the ones that came before them, I can also see why this novel continues to speak to new generations of readers. I mean, how can you not laugh at Billy on display in Tralfamadore:

Then he did exercises he had learned in the Army—straddle jumps, deep knee bends, sit-ups and push-ups. Most Tralfamadorians had no way of knowing Billy’s body and face were not beautiful. They supposed that he was a splendid specimen. This had a pleasant effect on Billy, who began to enjoy his body for the first time.

And, you know what? I’m going to leave you right here, because if this doesn’t convey why this book is such a complex, funny, humane read, I don’t know what will.

Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The children’s crusade
Horizon Ridge Publishing, 2024 (Orig. pub. 1969)
199pp.
ASIN: ‎ B0D9SKLL68

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (#BookReview)

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Broadly speaking, Melissa Lucashenko’s latest novel, Edenglassie, does for southeast Queensland what Kim Scott’s That deadman dance does for Noongar country in southwest Western Australia. Both tell of the early days of their respective colonies from a First Nations perspective; both are written in a generous spirit but with absolute clarity about the dispossession that took place; and both suggest things could have been different.

Unlike That deadman dance, however, Edenglassie, is a dual narrative story. The main storyline, featuring two young people, Mulanyin and Nita, is set around the Magandjin or Meanjin (Brisbane) region during the mid-1850s, making it just a little later than Scott’s first contact narrative. Dispossession, massacres and other brutalities from the colonisers were met with armed resistance, but there were also attempts to work together. Paralleling this historical story is a modern one, featuring Granny Eddie, Winona, and Dr Johnny, set in the same area at the time of its 2024 bicentenary. These stories, one using historical realism and the other modern humour, riff off each other to provide a complex picture of the colonial project – then and now.

Melissa Lucashenko said much that interested me in the conversation I attended for this book, but here I’ll focus on two points she made. One is that the book’s central question is “what was going through these people’s [the colonisers’] minds?” Things could have been different then, she said, and could still be now. The other point is that she wanted to counteract the trope of the dying race. This idea has been slowly changing since Mabo, she said, but is still evident. The modern storyline, with its confident and politically involved Goorie characters, ensures that we see a vibrant, living culture in action.

Realising these two ideas is a big ask, and in my reading group there were some equivocations, but I think Lucashenko pulls it off, through creating engaging characters who come alive on the page and narratives that ring true to their times. Mulanyin, the kippa (young initiated man) from the historical period, and Winona, the fiery young woman in modern times, represent the passion of youth. They are impatient and want things to happen – or change – now. Both, however, also have elders guiding them – in the Goorie way, which is to encourage people to work it out for themselves and to remedy their mistakes.

“needing to endure the unendurable” (Mulanyin)

So, what is it that these young characters must contend with? The novel starts with two pointed events. In the modern storyline, Granny Eddie trips over a jutting tree root and is ignored by passersby until two young brown faces – Malaysian students as it turns out – help her up and get her to hospital. The modern scene is set, and all is not well.

We then flash back to 1840 where members of the Goorie Federation are looking forward to the imminent departure of the dagai, only to be told that this is now unlikely. A Goorie mother wonders what

If life never returned to normal. If the rule of law was never restored. What would her son see as a man? … Would her daughters be subject to the terrors the dagai brought?

What indeed?

Having asked the question, Lucashenko then moves her historical story to 1854-1855. Mulanyin is living with his law-brother Murree north of his own saltwater Nerang/Yugambeh home. Here, he is in close contact with the colonisers, and particularly with the Petries. At this time, the Petries, particularly the young Tom Petrie, were sympathetic to, and tried in their own way to work with, the Goories on whose land they resided. Lucashenko seems to be saying that, given colonisation was happening and wasn’t going to be undone, there were ways in which it might have been made to work (or, at least, work better). Conversations between Tom, Mulanyin, and other characters, explore their differences, particularly regarding attitudes to country. Mulanyin wants to know

what goes on in the brain of an Englishman? When he arrives in another man’s country to steal his land, and water, and game, and then with a straight face, calls those he steals from thieves? Is this how it is in Scotland? Is this why your people have fled that terrible place?’

The ensuing discussion has Tom struggling to explain the English, but admitting that “in their ignorance, they don’t understand that the land here has its own Law. They think that only their British law exists”. However, he says, they “respect some boundaries still … Those that are well defended”.

What did ‘well defended’ look like, Mulanyin wondered, if not like a thousand Goories assembled at the Woolloongabba pullen pullen? If not like Dundalli, leading the warriors who had willingly assembled under him, from Dugulumba to K’gari?

Fair point, Mulanyin.

Meanwhile, the modern-day characters are living with the fall-out from the failure of the colonisers to make it work and of the colonised to succeed in their resistance. Goories are still here, yes, but life is a struggle, and Winona wants to fight back, wants “to bite em hard onetime, while we got the chance”. She can’t understand why Granny Eddie, who grew up “with a dirt floor and empty belly” doesn’t think she deserves more. Granny, though, is two things. A pragmatist who sees that “Dagai not going away! We gotta get on with them”. And she’s an elder well-versed in her culture, so when Winona takes a hardline with Dr Johnny, who claims Aboriginal heritage, Granny says

“You’re thinking like a whitefella when ya close him out. That’s not our way. We bring people in, we bring our Mob home, and we care about them. We teach them how to behave proper way…”

Further, she argues,

“We can’t be sunk in bitterness … Or stuck in the past. We need to focus on the good dagais, like Cathy and Zainab, and them Petries, and –.”

Winona, Granny Eddie and Mulanyin all make sense, but they speak from different angles. What makes Edenglassie so interesting is the way Lucashenko gives space and respect to these angles. She certainly shows what was lost – and the utter unfairness of it. But, with the generosity of spirit we keep seeing, she also shares through her characters what living with deep connection to country means. And, she encourages everyone to think about alternative ways we can do this.

Towards the end of the novel, Gaja (Aunty) Iris shares an important story with our modern protagonists, introducing it with

we all know how important our stories are … People all over the world keep their stories close. Middle Eastern people believe … that by telling a story you can change the world, and nothing is as powerful as the right story at the right time.

With ideas about truth-telling and decolonisation becoming part of modern Australian culture, now feels like the right time for stories like Edenglassie. It might be an uncomfortable time to be a settler Australian, but that’s nothing compared with what First Nations people have endured and continue to endure. The least we can do is try to understand. Books like Lucashenko’s not only help us along this path but give us a lively read at the same time.

Melissa Lucashenko
Edenglassie
St Lucia: UQP, 2023
306pp.
ISBN: 9780702266126

Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional (#BookReview)

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Charlotte Wood’s most recent novel, Stone Yard devotional, is set in the Monaro, a region just south of where I live. It’s a landscape that is much loved by many of us, including Nigel Featherstone, whose My heart is a little wild thing (my review) is also set there. The Monaro is expansive country, a dry, golden-brown plateau, characterised by rocky outcrops here and there, much as the cover shows. There are also hills in the distance, and big skies. Perfect country for contemplation, I’d say, which is exactly what Wood’s unnamed protagonist is doing there. (In fact, it’s also what Featherstone’s protagonist went there to do, for a very different reason – although, coincidentally, both books have something to do with mothers).

Stone Yard devotional is a quiet and warm-hearted read, one that asks its readers to not rush ahead looking for a plot, but to think about the deeper things that confront us all at one time or another. These things are hinted at by the two epigraphs, one being Australian musician Nick Cave’s “I felt chastened by the world”, and the other American writer Elizabeth Hardwick‘s “This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today”. Add these to the title – with its hardscrabble sounding “Stone Yard” set against the gentle, inwardness of “devotional” – and you have a sense of the intensity to be found within.

“a place of industry, not recreation”

While this is not a plot-driven novel, there is a definite narrative arc. Taking the form of undated journal entries, the novel covers a period in the life of a middle-aged woman who has left her city life – her husband, her job in threatened species conservation, and her friends – to live in an abbey on the Monaro. It starts with a five-day stay, which is followed by more stays until the time comes when she arrives and doesn’t leave. Why she does this is not explicitly explained but through her contemplations we come to see that there’s unresolved grief in her life over the death of her parents some three decades earlier and, alongside this, a level of existential despair which has built up over time.

This is the set up. The narrative arc comes from three “visitations” to the abbey – a mouse plague which ramps up as the novel progresses, and the celebrity “environmental activist nun” Helen Parry, who accompanies the bones of the murdered Sister Jenny who had left the abbey decades ago to work among poor women in Thailand. These three events, both real and metaphoric in import, present practical and moral challenges, “a rupture” but also “a frisson of change”, for our narrator, and for all at the abbey.

So, we follow Wood’s narrator as she settles into life at the abbey, taking on the role of cooking for the group, and, as their non-religious member, the shopping and other errands that need to be done. Much industry is required to keep the place running when there is no financial help from the church, but the main industry is emotional and spiritual (in its wider meaning). Early on, our narrator recognises that prayer and contemplation “is the work … is the doing”. For her, as an atheist, this is not religious in origin or intent, but nonetheless contemplation is the real work she does while living at the abbey.

Much of this contemplation is invoked by flashbacks to and memories of events from the past, some experienced by her and others that happened around her (like the suicide of a farmer). Many involve her beloved and humane mother, who, like nuns Helen and Jenny, was an “unconventional”, determined to continue along her path despite what others thought. Such contemplation is hard, and our narrator is tested by the “visitations”, particularly Helen Parry with whom she has history involving bullying at school. Our narrator wishes to apologise but, as she comes to see, the hard work is in coming to that point of apology, not in having the apology accepted. But, forgiveness and atonement are only part of the bigger questions posed in this novel. Grief, despair and, ultimately, how to live are also part of its ambit – and are set against the shadow of climate change and its implications for our lives and choices.

This sort of exploration, however, can only work if we like the telling, and I found it thoroughly compelling. Stone Yard devotional is delicious for its details about life in an abbey on the “high, dry, Monaro plains, far from anywhere”, and for its insights into the women living there. No character is fully developed, but each, from the “business-like but soft-looking” leader Sister Simone to the distressed Sister Bonaventure, feels real in the role she’s been given in the narrative. While there’s not a lot of dialogue, our narrator reports on interactions between the women, and these contribute to her contemplations about life. She is not perfect and admits to moments of pettiness and poor judgement in her dealings with her co-habitants. Contrasting this little community is local farmer Richard Gittens, who supports the abbey in many practical ways and who represents, as our narrator recognises, “decency”.

All this is told in spare but expressive writing that maintains a tone which is serious and reflective, but which never becomes bleak.

There is no single, final enlightenment, but rather, as the narrator says earlier in the novel, “an incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, [a] sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered”. This is the sort of writing I love to read. In some fundamental way, it reminded me of my favourite Wallace Stegner quote. In Angle of repose, he wrote that “civilisations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations”. Through living this life in retreat, Wood’s narrator comes to know herself better. In so doing, she is able to lay some of her demons to rest, not through any major crisis but through quiet contemplation. The abbey does, indeed, turn out to be a “place of refuge, of steadiness. Not agitation”.

Interestingly, and perhaps pointedly, the novel ends on an anecdote about the narrator’s mother and her “reverence for the earth itself”. Ultimately, Wood invites us, without exhortation, to not be “chastened by the world” but to do the hard work of thinking about what is really important. A compassionate, and gently provocative, book.

Kimbofo (Reading Matters) also liked this book.

Charlotte Wood
Stone Yard devotional
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2023
297pp.
ISBN: 9781761069499

Gail Jones, Salonika burning (#BookReview)

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Australian author Gail Jones’ ninth novel, Salonika burning, is a curious but beautiful novel, curious because she fictionalises four real people for whom she has no evidence that they met or knew each other, and beautiful because of her writing and the themes she explores. The novel is set during World War 1, but its focus is firmly on the interior rather than the grand stage of battle.

It opens dramatically with the burning of the city of Salonika (Thessaloniki). This is another curious thing, because this destructive event was caused not by an act of war but an accidental kitchen fire. Also, the novel is not set in Salonika but some 90 miles off, in and around “the field of tents that comprised the Scottish Women’s Hospital”, on the shores of Lake Ostrovo in Macedonia. It is 1917, and the novel’s narrative centre is this hospital and those working in and around it. Here, not Salonika, is where our four main characters are based — Stella, an assistant cook/hospital orderly; Olive, an ambulance driver; surgeon Grace; and Stanley, an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps. They are based on the Australians, writer Miles Franklin and adventurer Olive King, and the British painters, Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In her Author’s Note, Jones makes clear that she has fictionalised these characters, and that while all are known to have worked in the vicinity, there is no evidence that they met or even knew each other. It is “a novel which takes many liberties and is not intended to be read as a history”. This is fine with me. After all, a novel, by definition, is not history. The novel follows these characters over a few months after the burning of Salonika.

“everything was coming apart”

So, why Salonika? I see a few reasons. For a start, its burning sets the novel’s tone. On the first page we are presented with opposing ideas. The sight of the burning city is described as “strangely beautiful” but, on the other hand, “alarm, instant fear, the sufferings of others … were no match for excitement at a safe distance”. As the fire died, “excitement left and in its place was a murky lugging of spirit”. Throughout the novel, Salonika represents these contradictions, this tension between what is ugly, what is beautiful; between what is random, what is not; and in how to respond to, or feel about, what is being experienced.

The Salonika fire also encompasses the idea of witness and representation. In the opening scene, Jones describes a painting made of the fire by William T. Wood. It is a “morning-after scene, brightly calm, with a floaty view from the heavens” done in his “signature pastels, remote as a child’s dream and thinly decorative”. Those who saw this painting later, she writes, “saw the pretty lies of art”, whereas “former residents and soldiers said, No, it wasn’t like that”. This tension too is played out in the characters as they think about how they might represent their experience.

The burning of Salonika, then, embodies several ideas that are followed through in the novel. But, Salonika is also relevant to the plot. The novel’s narrative arc lies mainly in the characters and their emotional reactions to what is happening as the months wear on. Not only is there the war with its injured and dying soldiers, but malaria is rife, and the privations they experience, professionally and personally, are exacerbated by the burning of Salonika and the attendant shortage of essential provisions – food, petrol, medical supplies. However, a plot also unfolds, and it is something that happens on the way to Salonika, well into the story, which sets the novel’s final drama in motion.

Salonika burning traverses themes that are the stuff of the best war literature – themes that expose the “idiocy of this war, of all wars” and its impact on those caught up in it – but it offers its own take. The telling feels disjointed, particularly at the start, with its constant switching between the perspectives of the four characters who interact very little with each other until well into the novel – and even then it’s often uneasy, as befits their temperaments. And yet, the novel is compelling to read, primarily because of these characters. They are beautifully individuated, so flawed, so human, so real.

Olive, who is the first character we meet, and the one who closes the novel, is confident, tough and practical. Grace, too, is tough, doing her “duty” with a “dull vacancy”. Stella, at 38, the oldest of the four, is “cranky and wanting more”, more excitement to write about, but she believes in “chin-up and perseverance”, while the youngest, 26-year-old Stanley, is “ill-fitted … to this life of rough cynical men”.

These are “intolerable” times, and we are privy to their struggle to maintain their sanity. Olive resorts to her German grammar to escape the emotional load, while Stanley has his mules and favourite painters, his “Holy Rhymers”. Stella, “writing jolly accounts in her diary”, thinks about what stories she will tell, while Grace has her favourite brother to think about and write to. The disjointed structure mirrors, I think, their sense of isolation. Contact and the potential for friendship is there, but Matron discourages emotional engagement. There’s “no room for emotion”, she says, just “duty”. Olive, who seems to represent the novel’s moral centre, thinks otherwise:

It seemed another kind of duty, not to forget. Olive wanted to speak of what she had seen and known, though she suffered too much remembrance.

This could neatly segue to that issue of representation, and the post-war work done by Stella, Grace and Stanley, but instead, I want to conclude with another idea. On a supply trip to Salonika, Olive, “driving in her safe foreign aura”, had been indulging in a dose of self-pity, but is suddenly confronted by the loss Salonika’s burning represented for its residents, “and only now understood that it was the woe of others that claimed importance”. Likewise, Stanley, Grace and Stella are confronted with the woes of others through the novel’s closing drama, and must decide where their humanity lies.

I started this post noting some curious things about Jones’ approach to her story, but these didn’t spoil the read. Rather, they added to my interest as I read it. Ultimately, Salonika burning is a true and tenderly written novel that captures the essence of war’s inhumanity, and then goes about extracting the humanity out of it. A worthy winner of the 2023 ARA Historical Novel Prize.

Lisa and Brona also read and enjoyed this book.

Further reading

Gail Jones
Salonika Burning
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2022
249pp.
ISBN: 9781922458834

Anna Funder, Wifedom (#BookReview)

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Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life is a book with a mission, a mission that is implied in its full title. That mission is to examine the notion of “wifedom”, and the way patriarchy works to construct it, through the example of the invisible – or, as Funder also calls it, erased – life of George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

To do this, she wrangles Eileen out of the shadows of history to produce an intelligent, funny, warm-hearted, loyal and hard-working woman who, observed novelist Lettice Cooper, loved George “deeply, but with a tender amusement”. It’s an engrossing story, well-told. However, it’s a challenging read too.

Funder explains early in the book that her interest in Eileen came from reading something Orwell wrote about women and wives – after Eileen had died. It’s astonishingly misogynistic, and made her wonder who Eileen was and what she might have thought. Funder set about reading six Orwell biographies written between 1972 and 2003, but she found them unhelpful when it came to Eileen. Indeed, she says, they gave so little that they “started to seem like fictions of omission”. Funder then, logically, went to these biographers’ sources. She found some more bits and pieces about Eileen, but it wasn’t enough. All she had was “a life in facts, a woman in pieces”, so she “considered writing a novel – a counterfiction to the one in the biographies”. But, she was fascinated “by the sly ways” in which Eileen had been hidden, and she felt a novel couldn’t effectively explore this. Then she “found the letters”.

These were six letters that Eileen had written to her good friend Norah from just after her marriage in 1936 until 1944, but they had not been discovered until 2005. These letters gave her Eileen’s voice – and this voice was “electrifying”. Funder believed she could no longer write a novel. She writes,

I wanted to make her live, and at the same time to reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her, and that still holds sway today. I thought of it as writing a fiction of inclusion.

“it’s hard … for history to find you”

This is where the book gets tricky, because, while I found Wifedom a fascinating read, it raised questions too, and they are intrinsic to what Funder is trying to achieve, and how she goes about achieving it. The book is divided into five parts, with the first part titled “Wifedom, A Counterfiction”. What does this mean? She doesn’t immediately explain what I have described above. Instead, she opens her book on a scene in which she imagines Eileen writing a letter to Norah – and she includes excerpts from that letter. This throws us readers in at the deep end. As we get into the book, we come to recognise these imagined sections, because they are identified by indentation, and opening and closing graphical symbols, but at the beginning it’s a bit mystifying, albeit an engaging way to capture our interest.

Early in the read, then, it becomes apparent that Wifedom comprises a complex mixture of processes and forms. The imagined sections are interspersed throughout the book between more traditional biographical writing about Eileen and George’s life. And interspersed between these are reflections from Funder’s own life, because one of her points is that the patriarchy, the “patri-magic”, which erased Eileen’s life from George’s biography, still exists and is evident in her own life as a wife and mother, despite her supportive husband and “egalitarian” marriage. I’m not going to focus on this aspect of the book, though, because it seems to fade away somewhat as Eileen and George’s story picks up, and is not, anyhow, where I want to go in this post.

Instead, I want to tease out the process. Early on Funder writes that

Looking for Eileen involved the pleasure of reading Orwell on how power works. Finding her held the possibility of revealing how it works on women: how a woman can be buried first by domesticity and then by history.

This is not particularly new. Anyone interested in feminism is aware of how women have been lost in (and thus to) history. However, Funder’s book is enlightening in this regard. She does an excellent job of interrogating how it can happen. It happens when biographers ignore or play down the role of women in their subjects’ lives. Through cross-matching her sources she finds example after example of Eileen’s contributions being downplayed or omitted. She shows how the use of passive voice and terms like “wife” rather than Eileen’s name work to make her disappear. (Orwell does it himself in Homage to Catalonia.) She finds examples where biographers, disconcerted by some of George’s behaviour, excuse it (how often are men excused!), or, uncertain about evidence, will rephrase it. For example, Funder writes that Eileen

noted his extraordinary political simplicity – which seems to have worried one of the biographers, who rewrote her words to give him an ‘extraordinary political sympathy’.

Eileen’s words come from a 1938 letter to Marjorie Dakin. The biographer is Crick. (Another of the textual clues to readers in this book is that Eileen’s words are conveyed in italics, while the words of others are enclosed in quotation marks.)

But here’s the challenge – interpretation. Funder writes early in her book that,

As serendipity would have it, in 2020 Sylvia Topp published Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, which contained much material I hadn’t found, and was thrilled to read, though we interpret it differently, and so build differing portraits of Eileen.

She does not explain what she means here, but in the very thorough Notes at the end of the book, Funder elaborates on Topp’s approach to Eileen. Put simply, Topp, Funder says, sees Eileen as one of those celebrated people’s partners who devoted their lives “joyfully to assisting the talented partners in all their various needs knowing all along that they would be under-appreciated, and often ignored, and yet never faltering in their dedication, or in their willingness to submerge their own personal talents into their partners’ success.” Topp, then, sees Eileen as a “helpmeet of genius” while Funder is interested, as she writes in these Notes, “in examining what it took, perhaps, to be in that marriage, and that dream”.

So, what we have here is interpretation. Topp had the same sources that Funder did. Indeed, she added some to Funder’s arsenal. But, she interprets them differently. As a feminist, I easily aligned with Funder’s interpretation, but as I read I also had this little niggle that Funder was interpreting her sources – from the perspective of her times, values and gender – just as other biographers had before her.

Wifedom was my reading group’s April book. Our conversation focused mainly on the biographical content – on Eileen’s life, on George Orwell and his books, and on the impact of patriarchy on Eileen. We were horrified by the life led by Eileen, as Funder tells it – and the facts seem inarguable. Their relationship appeared to us to have been so one-sided. Eileen did all the domestic work, and it was hard work given the primitive rural cottage that they called home. She was, often, the main breadwinner, and she did his typing, as well as offering editorial comment. She was necessary to him. Meanwhile, he focused on his writing and, we gathered, chasing other women. And yet, Eileen stayed with George. Why, we wondered?

We didn’t delve into the interpretation issue, albeit I would have loved to, but I needed more time to collect my thoughts. We did, however, discuss why we thought Eileen stayed with George which, I guess, was us interpreting what we’d read! Various ideas were put forward, including that Eileen might have been a “rescuer”, or that she knew she was unlikely to have been published herself (in a patriarchal world) and so channelled her energies through George, or, simply, that she loved him and, much like Topp argued, willingly helped him in any way she could.

So, there you have it! History, biography, it’s all a matter of the facts you have, and the way you see them. I don’t mean to devalue the biographer’s art by that statement, but simply to recognise that even the most formal, most rigorously documented biography will, necessarily, be affected by the biographer and their times. For this reason, I found Wifedom an absorbing and provocative read, though perhaps only partly in the way Funder intended.

Anna Funder
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life
Hamish Hamilton, 2023
511pp.
ISBN: 9781760143787