Review

Winnie Dunn, Dirt poor Islanders (#BookReview)

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Book cover

When my reading group chose our books for the second half of the year, the shortlist for the Miles Franklin Award had not yet been announced. However, wonderfully, the three books we chose from the longlist, all ended up on the shortlist. One of those was Winnie Dunn’s debut novel, Dirt poor Islanders. It is the first novel published by a Tongan Australian, and adds a welcome strand to the body of Australia’s second and third generation migrant literature.

Dirt poor Islanders spans around a year when its protagonist Meadow is approaching 12 years old. It can, therefore, also be read as a coming-of-age novel. It is a raw, earthy, honest and sometimes confronting read that exposes the challenges faced by Australian-born migrant generations, who are caught between two worlds.

This is not a new story. However, what is impressive here is that Dunn, in her first novel, has found her own strong and clear voice. It’s there in the way she gets right into the head of her protagonist Meadow, who is, admittedly, modelled on herself. It’s there in the way she interweaves English and Tongan language, capturing the vitality in her migrant community. It’s also there in her use of repetition, some of it onomatopoeic, to give her writing rhythm and create a tone that’s sometimes melancholic, sometimes humorous. Dunn also doesn’t spoon-feed her readers. She expects us to go with the flow and make the necessary connections. It’s not hard reading, but it does require attention.

“this way of seeing myself as half … and never enough” (Meadow)

So, who is Meadow? She’s a young girl who lost her birth mother at the age of 4. At the novel’s opening she is the eldest of six children in a blended family comprising three children from her birth mother, one from her step-mother, and two from this second marriage. Another is on the way. Her father is 30 years old. Meadow is grappling with what it means to grow up Tongan, particularly one who is hafekasi (half-Tongan half-White) and feeling caught between two worlds, neither of which fully accept her. She is desperate for a mother, and feels closest to her namesake, aunt Meadow, who lives in Mount Druitt with our Meadow’s paternal grandmother and another four aunts.

We follow Meadow through a tumultuous year. Early on, she spends most weekends at her Nana’s house surrounded by the five aunts, but when her father buys a new house in Plumpton, he wants Meadow, her sister Nettie and brother Jared, to call that home. With her birth mother gone, however, Meadow feels “stuck” and insecure. Aunt Meadow, also known as Lahi, is her “mother-aunt” and her rock. The narrative is built around the wedding of this Lahi, who, Meadow believes, is more interested in women. She fears for her boyish aunt, but she also fears for herself, that she will lose this mother figure to whom she clings with all her being.

Now, Meadow wants to be a writer, so she’s an observant girl, well able to express her feelings. She sees the messiness – literal and figurative – of Tongan lives, and she shares the lessons she is learning about being Tongan, not all of which are pretty. For example, “Tongan meant dirty” (p. 37), “being a joke” (p. 73) and “second best” (p. 102). But, there are positives too. “Togetherness was what it meant to be Tongan” (p. 40) and “being Tongan meant eating together and being grateful to eat together” (p. 118).

Dirt poor Islanders, then, depicts a migrant family living under stress. Big families and low-paying jobs with long hours mean a chaotic home. Meadow’s scalp is nit-infested, and her home, decorated with second-hand goods, much picked off roadsides, is cockroach-infested. Her parents work hard to keep the family sheltered and fed, but the mess overwhelms. Flipping between maturity and immaturity, Meadow sees all this – the hard work, the exhaustion, the love – but she struggles to find her place, to accept her Tongan heritage.

It all finally comes to a head, and her father organises for her to go to Tonga, because, he says, “it’s time for youse to know what being a Tongan truly means” (p. 239).

Migrant literature encompasses both memoir and fiction, with the latter mostly being autobiographical or autofiction. Dunn confirmed in her Conversations interview that much of the novel’s family background comes from her life, but the novel diverges from real life in its narrative arc and the resolution of Meadow’s inner turmoil. This answered the question I had as I was reading, which was why Dunn had chosen fiction, like Melina Marchetta did in Looking for Alibrandi, over memoir, like Alice Pung did in Unpolished gem. It’s a choice. What matters are the truths conveyed, not the facts, and Dirt poor Islanders feels truthful.

This truth is not all raw and confronting as I may have implied at the beginning. It is also warm and humorous. Meadow, who doesn’t like rich, fatty Tongan food tells us:

If it came out of a can covered in sugar and sodium, Tongans were eating it. But back then, all I wanted was food that came out of a window. (p. 37)

Preferably at Maccas! There are also funny scenes, many relating to the wedding which occupies the novel’s centre, and which is another nod – besides the title and epigraph – to the book that clearly inspired Dunn, Kevin Kwan’s Crazy rich Asians.

“no one could live as half of themselves” (Meadow)

However, Dunn’s book is fundamentally different from Kwan’s, whose aim, he said, was, to “introduce a contemporary Asia to a North American audience”. Dunn did want to introduce Tongan Australian culture – and counteract the image presented by Chris Lilley in Summer Heights High – but through Meadow, she also explores the excruciating difficulties children caught between cultures face. By the end of the novel Meadow comes to understand a little more the “messy truth” of being an Islander, and that:

No one could live as half of themselves. To live, I needed to embrace Brown, pālangi, noble, peasant, Tonga, Australia – Islander. (p. 275)

Dirt poor Islanders is both shocking and exciting to read, which is probably just what Dunn intended. I feel richer for it!

Winnie Dunn
Dirt poor Islanders
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2024
293pp.
ISBN: 9780733649264

Wayne Bergmann and Madelaine Dickie, Some people want to shoot me (#BookReview)

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Having finally read Wayne Bergmann and Madelaine Dickie’s Some people want to shoot me, I am not surprised that it has been shortlisted in the Nonfiction category of this year’s Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. It is moving; it is clearly written; and it is informative about big issues. Wayne Bergmann is a Nyikina* man and Madelaine Dickie a kartiya (white) woman, making this one of those collaborative novels I wrote about recently.

Before I continue, a little on its form. This is a work of nonfiction. It is essentially memoir, written in third person by Bergmann and his collaborator, Dickie. And, being a memoir, it has a specific focus. In this case, it is one underpinned by a powerful sociopolitical message concerning the right of First Nations people to survive and prosper on their own land.

“walking in two worlds”

So … Some people want to shoot me is about a man who realised he must walk in two ways – the kartiya way and the old people’s way, that is the white way and the way of his traditional culture. For his heart and soul he needed to walk the traditional ways, but in his head, seeing the suffering and the social and economic dysfunction caused by dispossession and powerlessness, he had to walk the kartiya way. The book exposes just what a tough balancing act this was – and is. It demanded (demands) strength, bravery, nous, clarity of purpose – and the support of family.

The book opens with a Prologue which sets the scene. It’s 2011 and Bergmann, who is at breaking point after years of negotiating on behalf of Kimberley Traditional Owners, walks out of a meeting with a mining company and heads, with his wife and children, back to country:

to the mighty Martuwarra, the Fitzroy River – lifeblood of Nyikina country, Wayne’s country, his children’s country – made by Woonyoomboo when the world was soft.

From here, the book starts in Chapter 1 the way memoirs usually do – at the beginning. For Bergmann, the beginning is Woonyoomboo who tasked the Nyikina people to look after country. This they did, until the arrival of white settlers in the late 19th century, when things “radically changed”. The first two chapters chronicle some of this change through the lives of Bergmann’s forbears. It depicts a world where the legacy of nuns, monks, ethnographers, pastoralists and miners “was still felt acutely”, where “frontier massacres had occurred within living memory”, and “where justice, under whitefella law, didn’t often grace Kimberly Aboriginal People”. Bergmann, who was born in 1969, saw this, felt this, and took on the pastoralists, mining companies and governments to “upend the status quo”.

Of course, such upending doesn’t come easily, and the people doing this upending aren’t always understood and appreciated, which is where we came in at the Prologue. The book details, chronologically, Bergmann’s work, from his early work with the KALACC (Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre) and his realisation that for Aboriginal people to be empowered under Western law and able to make systemic changes, “they needed to understand the kartiyas’ law system inside out”. So, he did a law degree, and then, at the age of 33, became CEO of KLC (Kimberley Land Council) and here is where the really hard work started, and it was not pretty. It demanded every ounce of energy, intelligence and resilience, he could muster.

Bergmann had to be clear about the role, which was, as a native title representative body, “to facilitate a process and follow procedure in accordance with native law to allow Traditional Owners (TOs)” to make decisions “about their country”. This meant consulting with the TOs and ensuring they understood what they were being asked for and what was being offered. When stakes are high, emotions also run high. Some environmentalists, for example, would turn against TOs (and thus the KLC) when their views diverged, but sometimes TOs believed that some development was advantageous to their people. Then, of course, there were times TOs didn’t agreed with each other, or when there was disagreement between TOs and others in their communities. This is to be expected, of course. Do all kartiyas agree? But, it makes for very difficult times, and Bergmann was at the centre. As well as working with the relevant Kimberley TOs, Bergmann was also negotiating with the Western Australian government and, for example, the Woodside mining company, negotiating not only the actual agreements, but for money and resources to carry out consultations so that the TOs could come to the table well informed. All this is explained clearly in the book, making it well worth reading for anyone who has not followed native title cases closely. It’s both enlightening and chastening.

Bergmann made some significant deals, but it was a bruising time, so after a decade, wiser and with a clear view ahead, he moved on to establish KRED Enterprises. A charitable business, wth the tagline of “walking in two worlds”, its aim was (and is) to support cohesive Aboriginal economic development in the Kimberley, to encourage businesses run by and for Aboriginal people. The rest of the book covers Bergmann’s work – under the KRED umbrella and in other areas (including buying a newspaper, the National Indigenous Times) – all focused on the one goal, to pull his people out of poverty and disadvantage, to ensure they have the opportunities available to all Australians, and in so doing to improve their lives and outcomes. Nothing less will do.

We had to create some wealthy Aboriginal organisations, and wealthy Aboriginal people, so we could shape our own future, on our own country.

Woven through the accounts of Bergmann’s work are stories about his personal life, some good times but also the egregious attacks his wife and children faced at the height of his KLC work. We come to see the truth of Dickie’s description of him in her Introduction, as “demanding, smart, intensely political and visionary”. This is a man who puts himself on the line because he is driven to see First Nations Australians prosper.

Some people want to shoot me packs a lot into its 223 pages. That it covers so much, with great clarity and readability, is due to the writing. It’s well structured, and employs some narrative techniques, including evocative chapter titles and the occasional foreshadowing, which keep the story moving. At the end of the book is an extensive list of Works Cited and a Select Bibliography, which provide authority for what has gone before, if you need it.

Meanwhile, here are some words by another First Nations leader, Clinton Wolf:

One thing you’re going to get from Wayne is the truth. Some people like hearing it. And some don’t.

This book tells Wayne’s story, and I did like hearing it. It’s a great read about a great Australian, telling truths we all need to hear.

* First Nations cultures are orally-based, which results in inconsistent spellings when their languages are written. This post uses the spellings that Bergmann and Dickie use in their book.

Wayne Bergmann and Madelaine Dickie
Some people want to shoot me
North Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2024
223pp.
ISBN: 9781760992378

Andrea Goldsmith, The buried life (#BookReview)

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Titles are intriguing things, and we don’t always pay them the attention they deserve, but the title of Australian writer Andrea Goldsmith’s ninth novel, The buried life, is worth thinking about. It is the third novel I’ve read by Goldsmith, and, like the others, is a contemporary story focusing on relationships and the stresses her characters confront, stresses that we will know ourselves or recognise in those around us, stresses that make her characters relatable. The title, however, hints at the direction this novel will take, which is to look at the way these stresses can often be hidden for years. But they will out, one way or another.

This is a confidently written novel, using techniques I love. First, Goldsmith calls on music, art and literature to illuminate her ideas. What reader doesn’t enjoy that? And then, she uses a formal structure, comprising four named parts, each of which contains named chapters that open with a revealing epigraph. Part 3, for example, is titled “The buried life” and its first chapter’s epigraph comes from Matthew Arnold’s same titled poem:

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life

If we hadn’t realised it by this time, the point is clear. This novel, which explores big themes encompassing friendship, love and death, is also about the thoughts and feelings we bury inside – hidden from others, and sometimes also from ourselves. We have three people – 43-year-old Adrian, an academic specialising in Death Studies, his 28-year-old neighbour Kezi, an artist who makes paper by hand, and 57-year-old Laura, a social scientist who works in town planning. At the beginning of the novel, Adrian and Kezi are friends, and do not know Laura. However, a chance meeting between Adrian and Laura in a Melbourne city cheese shop brings her into the fold, and our trio is complete.

the “carefully constructed life”

Each of these characters has things that are buried, just waiting to resurface. For the “temperate” Adrian, suffering the break-up of a 10-year relationship, it’s his parents. They had died when he was very young and he was brought up by loving grandparents – so lovingly, in fact, that he had denied for decades the impact on his life, including his chosen career, of his parents’ early deaths. For the outwardly confident lesbian, Kezi, it is also parent-related. Rejected in her late teens by her highly religious – read fundamentalist – parents for her sexuality, she craves their love and acceptance. And then there’s Laura, a successful career woman who seems to have the perfect marriage. “Seems”, however, is the operative word because very quickly the reader realises that her narcissistic husband is dismantling her, “piece by piece”. But Laura cannot see that her constant modifications to keep Tony happy is self-destructive. It’s worth it, she feels, for what she believes he gives her.

Goldsmith slowly unfolds her characters’ stories in such a way that we, like others in their circles, understand their buried lives long before they do. Adrian’s academic colleague, Mahindra, not to mention his ex-lover, Irene, sees what Adrian doesn’t about his choice of a career in Death Studies, but Adrian continues to insist that his childhood was simply his “normal” and had nothing to do with it. Laura’s sister Hannah and friend Jules constantly point out to her the way her husband undermines her, and the harm it is doing, but, despite knowing she tiptoes around him, she is convinced “she had become a better person with Tony”. He is her “normal”. The younger Kezi is more in touch with her inner self. Her pain and desires are not so much buried as kept at bay. She “wanted her parents’ love … she wanted them to love her as she was, and not as they wanted to her to be”. This want is threatening to sweep away “her carefully constructed life”.

So, three characters, all waiting – in our minds at least – for the trigger that will reveal their inner selves in a way that can no longer be ignored, that will force them to “shed their old skins”. In Part 3, Adrian, thinking that whatever relationship he’d been building with Laura was over, walks to the cemetery, listening to Mahler, whom he has recently discovered. As he sits on a fallen log, the “past rushes in”. Memories of his father and the loss he’d endured come to the fore, and he finds himself “crying for the little boy, crying for the grown-up man … mourning the buried life”. Back home, he picks up Arnold’s poem and recognises that for him

it was not desire, as in Arnold’s poem, that had pulled up the past from ‘the soul’s subterranean depth’, rather he had been ambushed by what insisted on at last being acknowledged.

As the novel progresses from here, Laura and Kezi are also forced to acknowledge the truths they had been resisting. It’s a powerful novel about how hard we work to deny the truths right in front of us, and it works well because it does this through characters that are so utterly believable. We will them to work it out.

However, the novel is also about death. It is never far away, given Adrian’s research and the deaths that surround our characters. Indeed, the final epigraph, which comes from Philip Roth, tells us that “Life’s most disturbing intensity is death”. Those of you who know Goldsmith will know that she lost her beloved partner, the poet Dorothy Porter, back in 2008. Porter’s last poetry collection, The bee hut (my review) ends with a poem written just a couple of weeks before her death from cancer. It concludes with “Something in me / despite everything / can’t believe my luck”. Death is sad, but some writers can write about it with such beauty, as Porter does in this poem. Penelope Lively also does it at the end of Moon tiger. And Goldsmith does it at the end of this novel, because you won’t be surprised to know that in a book with this title and subject matter, someone does die. It brought me to tears, not so much the death, terribly sad though it is, but the writing of it. It is inspired.

The buried life is a moving read, one made even more so if, as you read it, you play some of those Mahler pieces Adrian loves. I dare you to be disappointed.

Andrea Goldsmith
The buried life
Transit Lounge, 2025
321pp.
ISBN: 9781923023253

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge via Scott Eathorne, Quikmark Media)

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge (#BookReview)

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Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer prize winning novel Olive Kitteridge has been around for 17 years, but it’s only now that I have managed to read it. And that’s because my reading group scheduled it as our June read. It’s not that I didn’t want to read it – I really did – but other books kept getting in the way. I realise now that I should not have let that happen because Olive Kitteridge is a wonderful read.

Now, how to describe it? The first thing is its form. It’s more like a collection of linked stories, or what its Wikipedia article calls a short story cycle. Although I’ve read many linked short story collections, I haven’t come across this term before. I’d like to explore it some time, but not now, because I’m keen to talk about the book. I will say, though, that some in my reading group found the episodic form somewhat disconcerting at first. However, despite this, almost all of us thoroughly enjoyed the book. Why? Well, as it turned out, the form is partly what makes it such a strong and moving read.

As most of you will know, the novel is set mostly in the late 20th and very early 21st centuries in the fictional small-town of Crosby, in coastal Maine. It comprises 13 chapters – or stories – that explore the life of retired schoolteacher Olive Kitteridge and her relationships with family and friends. In some of the chapters Olive is front and centre, but in others she makes a cameo appearance, sometimes just as a passing reference. The end result is as much a picture of a small town as it is of Olive, though Olive is our lynchpin. As one of my reading group members said, her question as she read each story was, “Where’s Olive?”

everyone thinks they know everything and no one knows a damn thing. (“River”)

So, while my reading group talked about the form and the gorgeous writing, we mostly focused on the picture painted of a small town – which, said one, provides an antidote to the “apple-pie” image we typically get of small-town America – and on the character of Olive. She is complex and not easy for readers to like, but we found her real, and most of us did like her. The opening story, “Pharmacy”, doesn’t pull any punches in its depiction of Olive. She comes across as curmudgeonly, uncompromising. She is cutting about her husband Henry’s new young pharmacy assistant and unwilling empathise with her. She is prickly and vengeful with her son’s new bride, Suzanne (“A Little Burst”), while Bob in “Winter Concert” wonders how Henry can “stand” her.

However, there are many occasions where Olive is kind and compassionate, where she sees need in others and helps or offers to help, where, as Henry describes it, “all her outer Olive-ness” is stripped away. For example, ex-student Julie remembers Olive telling a class

“Don’t be scared of your hunger. If you’re scared of your hunger, you’ll just be one more ninny like everyone else.” (“Ship in a bottle”)

And Rebecca recollects Olive saying to her at school, “if you ever want to talk to me about anything you can” (“Criminal”). Olive also quietly talks a young man, an ex-student, down from suicide (“Incoming tide”) and she and the truly “nice” Daisy try hard to help the young anorexic Nina (“Starving”).

Olive, too, can be insightful. In “Security”, for example, we read that sometimes she had “a sense of just how desperately hard everyone in the world was working to get what they needed”. And she suffers, especially from a “rupture” with her beloved son, and from grief over husband Henry’s massive stroke.

So, what we have is a character who can be tough and acerbic – even engage in a little schadenfreude – but also be sensitive and empathetic. This led me to see the book as being about more than a picture of a small town, much as that is a central and engaging part of it. The form – the interconnected short stories about life in the town – supports this view of the novel. However, this form also supports another way of looking at it, one encompassing something fundamental about our humanity.

In each story, we see characters confronting some crisis or challenge in their lives – some big ones, some quieter ones. We never see these stories fully through. They are vignettes, even those featuring Olive. This made me think about how little we know others, and perhaps even ourselves? We never fully know what others think of us, or what impact we have on others, but in this book – largely because of its form – we do see, for example, how Olive is, or has been, viewed or remembered, both positively and negatively. No one perspective is right, but each contributes to a picture of a person. This is how life goes. We see little parts of people’s lives, and sometimes we are little or big parts of people’s lives, but what do we truly know?

A bleak interpretation of this could be that it exposes our essential aloneness, but a more positive perspective is that it reminds us that we are all “real” people with good and bad, hard and soft selves. Books like Olive Kitteridge encourage us to look around corners, to not take one aspect of a person at face value, to be generous to others and ourselves. It also reminds us that we never stop learning about ourselves (or others). Certainly, at the end of this book, Olive, in her early 70s, is still discovering things about herself and her feelings. She isn’t giving up, no matter how tough things have become.

In my group’s opening discussion, I said that I thought the novel offered many truths, albeit often uncomfortable ones. For example, in “Tulips”, which is a story about things going terribly wrong, Olive reflects, “There was no understanding any of it”. But, my favourite occurs in “Security”, when some rapprochement is being made with her son, and Olive thinks

whatever rupture had occurred… It could be healed. It would be leaving its scars but one accumulated these scars.

One surely does!

There’s so much more to talk about in this book – the spot-on descriptions, the quiet humour, the many beautifully wrought characters and their trials, and the political references such as to 9/11 and George W Bush which provide context. But the main story is the human, the personal. The novel closes with Olive reflecting deeply on her life and her choices, on how much had been “unconsciously squandered”. She realises that, while

It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.

I love getting inside the heads of characters like Olive, and so I loved Olive Kitteridge. I’ll be reading more Strout I’m sure.

Brona and Kate both read and enjoyed this long before I did!

Elizabeth Strout
Olive Kitteridge
London: Simon & Schuster, 2008
270pp.
ISBN: 9781849831550

Charles W. Chestnutt, Uncle Wellington’s wives (#Review)

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Charles W. Chestnutt’s long short story is the second in the anthology Great short stories by African-American writers sent to me by my American friend Carolyn. I have come across Chestnutt before, in the Library of America’s Story of the Week program, but they haven’t published this one and I haven’t written about him before.

Charles W. Chestnutt

The biographical notes at the end of the anthology provide a brief introduction to Charles Waddell Chestnutt (1858–1932), whom they describe as the “first commercially successful African-American writer of fiction”. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, and growing up in North Carolina, he “became a teacher, married, and moved to New York City, before returning to Cleveland, where he studied law”.

Wikipedia, of course, provides more. They describe him as “an American author, essayist, political activist, and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South”. His racial background is interesting, and I will quote Wikipedia here (without the references/links which cite sources for descriptors we no longer use):

His paternal grandfather was known to be a white slaveholder. He identified as African-American but noted that he was seven-eighths white. Given his majority-European ancestry, Chesnutt could “pass” as a white man, but he never chose to do so. In many southern states at the time of his birth, Chesnutt would have been considered legally white if he had chosen to identify so. By contrast, under the one drop rule later adopted into law by the 1920s in most of the South, he would have been classified as legally black because of some known African ancestry, even in spite of only being one-eighths black.

The anthology says that some of his best-known – and popular-at-the-time – stories, reproduced the dialect of uneducated storytellers, and Uncle Wellington is one such. Like this anthology’s first author Alice Ruth Moore, Chestnutt wrote about the color line, oppression, and themes of racism.

“Uncle Wellington’s wives”

I was rather tickled when I started reading “Uncle Wellington’s wives” because it delightfully pairs with the novel I had just read, Percival Everett’s James (my review). It is set post Civil War and satirically deals with the lure of the freedom of the North. The anthology describes it as ‘one of his fine and wry stories about “the Color Line”, a line that had consequential legal and social repercussions’. It tells of Uncle Wellington who, “living in a small town in North Carolina … yearns for something beyond his comfortable home with his impatient, hard-working wife”.

According to Wikipedia, the collection from which this story has been taken, includes many themes explored by 20th-century black writers. One of these, “the pitfalls of urban life and intermarriage in the North”, underpins “Uncle Wellington’s wives”. The story is built around the trope of a disgruntled, and somewhat lazy, husband – the titular uncle Wellington – of a hardworking, practical woman who keeps the show on the road. It opens with uncle Wellington Braboy returning home from a lecture at a meeting of the Union League (see Wikipedia) on the topic of “The Mental, Moral, Physical, Political, Social and Financial Improvement of the Negro Race in America”. It’s a topic, says the narrator, that is common in “colored orators” because “to this struggling people, then as now, the problem of their uncertain present and their doubtful future was the chief concern of life”. But, there was hope, and this speaker had “pictured in eloquent language the state of ideal equality and happiness enjoyed by coloured people at the North”. Indeed, the “mulatto” speaker had “espoused a white woman”.

Chestnutt tells of how the now inspired uncle Wellington goes about getting to the North to experience this land of milk and honey, this seemingly “ideal state of social equality”. He goes to a local lawyer to find out whether his wife’s money is his to control. It is, and it isn’t, he learns in a wonderful discussion of the finer points of law. Later, this issue of law’s finer points comes into play again when, now up North, he wants to get out of a marriage. The satire on the law is delicious.

Indeed, the satire throughout this story is delicious as uncle Wellington comes to appreciate the truth of that adage that “life is not always greener”. There might be more legal equality in the North, but that doesn’t mean people are equal. People don’t change overnight. White people don’t suddenly all treat coloured people as “equal”, regardless of what the law says. Coloured people can’t immediately achieve “equal” jobs, because they don’t have the skills and/or the education and/or the contacts. This is not all spelt out in the story, but it’s apparent nonetheless through what happens to uncle Wellington.

I mentioned at the start that an underlying trope for this story is the disgruntled, lazy, husband of a hardworking, practical woman. However, there are other tropes, including the prodigal son story. There are also other themes, besides racial equality, including that of the problems of illiteracy and poor education. Uncle Wellington’s not being able to read, for example, lays him open to not understanding his rights, or the law, and so on. It doesn’t play out badly here but we see the pitfalls and the risks he faces.

In the end, this story – without spoiling it too much – is not a tragedy. Chestnutt is generous to his protagonist, and so uncle Wellington learns a lesson without suffering too much. We see the truth in his wife aunt Milly’s response to him early on

“I dunno nuffin’ ’bout de Norf,” replied aunt Milly. “It’s hard ’nuff ter git erlong heah, whar we knows all erbout it.”

For aunt Milly, life with the people you know in the place you know is hard enough. This truth is repeated, in a different way, by the coloured Northern lawyer:

“Well, Mr. Braboy, it’s what you might have expected when you turned your back on your own people and married a white woman. You weren’t content with being a slave to the white folks once, but you must try it again. Some people never know when they’ve got enough. I don’t see there’s any help for you; unless,” he added suggestively, “you had a good deal of money.”

For Chestnutt, I understand, there’s the issue of loyalty to your race or people, or, to look at it the opposite way, of racial treason. The point is that there are no simple answers. Life and living are complex. Equality is the goal, but it doesn’t come easily, and it doesn’t come by denying your own. It comes with mutual respect and equal opportunity. These don’t change overnight. The Chestnutt Archive writes that:

As a young educator in Fayetteville, Chesnutt had remarked on the “subtle feeling of repulsion toward the Negro common to most Americans”; and yet he concluded that “the Negro’s part is to prepare himself for recognition and equality.” 

These ideas quietly, without didacticism, underpin “Uncle Wellington’s lives”.

Charles W. Chestnutt
“Uncle Wellington’s wives” (first published in The Atlantic Monthly, 1898)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 5-35
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online at ClevelandStateUniversityPressbooks

Percival Everett, James (#BookReview)

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Well, let’s see how I go with this post on Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel James. I read all but 30 pages of this novel before my reading group’s meeting on 27 May. I was not at the meeting as I was in Far North Queensland, but I wanted to send in some notes, which I did. The next day, our tour proper started and I did not read one page of any novel from then until the tour ended. So, it was some 15 days later before I was able to pick it up to finish it. I found it surprisingly easy to pick up and continue on but, whether it will be easy to remember all my thoughts to write about it, is another thing. However, I’ll give it a go.

I greatly enjoyed the read. The facts of slavery depicted here are not new, but Everett offers a clever, engaging and witty perspective through which to think about it, while also being serious and moving. In terms of form, it’s a genre-bender that combines historical and adventure fiction, but I would say these are overlaid with the road novel, a picaresque or journey narrative, those ones about freedom, escape and survival rather than adventure.

Now, I’m always nervous about reading books that rewrite or riff on other books, particularly if I’ve not read the book or not read it recently. I’m not even sure which is true for Huckleberry Finn, given I came across that book SO long ago. Did I read it all in my youth? I’m not sure I did, but I don’t think it mattered here, because the perspective is Jim’s, not Huck’s. More interesting to me is the fact that at times James reminded me of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, such as when James says “we are slaves. What really can be worse in this world” (pt 2, ch 1) and his comment on the death of an escaping slave, “she’s just now died again, but this time she died free” (pt 2 ch 6).

Before I say more, however, I should give a brief synopsis. It is set in 1861 around the Mississippi River. When the titular slave, James, hears he is about to be sold to a new owner some distance away and be separated from his wife and daughter, he goes into hiding to give himself time to work out what to do. At the same time, the young Huck Finn fakes his own death to escape his violent father, and finds himself in the same hiding place as James. They set off down the river on a raft, without a firm plan in mind. The journey changes as events confront them, and as they hear news of a war coming that might change things for slaves. Along the way they meet various people, ranging from the cruel and brutal through the kind and helpful to the downright brave. They face challenges, of course, and revelations are shared. The ending is satisfying without being simplistic.

“It always pays to give white folks what they want” (James)

All this makes for a good story, but what lifts it into something more is the character and first-person voice of James. Most of you will know by now that Everett portrays James as speaking in educated English amongst his own people but in “slave diction” to white people and strangers. On occasion, he slips up which can result in white people not understanding him (seriously!) or being confused, if not shocked, that a black man can not only speak educated English but can read and write. Given the role language plays as a signifier of class and culture, it’s an inspired trope that exemplifies the way slavery demeans, humiliates and brutalises human beings.

James – the book and the character – has much to say about human beings. There’s a wisdom here about human nature. Not all slaves, for example, see things the same way. Some are comfortable in their situation (or, at least, fear change), while some will betray others to ingratiate (or save) themselves. But others recognise that there is no life without freedom and will put themselves on the line to save another. We meet all of these in the novel. And, of course, we meet white people of various ilks too. Some of the most telling parts of the novel are James’ insights into the assumptions, values and attitudes of white people and into how slaves, and presumably coloured people still today, work around these. It would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious:

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them … The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior’ …” (pt 1 ch 2)

AND

It always made life easier when white folks could laugh at a poor slave now and again. (pt 1 ch 12)

Everett piles irony upon irony, daring us to go with him, such as when James is “hired” (or is he “bought”, he’s not quite sure) to perform with some black-and-white minstrels, and has to be “painted black in such a way as to appear like a white man trying to pass for black”:

Never had a situation felt so absurd, surreal and ridiculous. And I had spent my life as a slave. (pt 1 ch 30)

There are other “adventures” along the way of course – including one involving a religious revival meeting. James is not too fond of religion, differentiating him, perhaps, from many of his peers.

Is James typical of slaves of the time? I’m not sure he is, but I don’t think that’s the point. This is not a realist novel but a novel intending to convey the reality of slavery and what it did to people. James jolts us into seeing a slave’s story with different eyes. We are forced to see his humanity – and perhaps the joke is on “us” white people. Making him sound like “us” forces us to see him as “us”. We cannot pretend he is other or different. This is seriously, subversively witty, I think.

And this brings me to my concluding point which is that the novel interrogates the idea of what is a “good” white person. No matter how “good” or “decent” we are, we cannot escape the fact that we are white and privileged. No matter what we say or do, how empathetic we try to be, it doesn’t change the fundamental issue. James makes this point several times, such as “there were those slaves who claimed a distinction between good masters and cruel masters. Most of us considered such to be a distinction without difference” (pt 1 ch 15). I suppose this is “white guilt”, but I don’t really know how to resolve it. Talking about it feels like virtue signalling, but not talking about it feels like a denial of the truth. There were times when the book felt a little anachronistic, but that’s not a deal-breaker for me because historical fiction is, fundamentally, the past viewed through modern eyes. And how are we really to know how people felt back then?

I’d love to know what you think if you’ve read the novel (as for example Brona has!) 

Percival Everett
James
London: Mantle, 2024
303pp.
ISBN: 9781035031245

    Jane Austen, Emma (Vol. 2, redux 2025)

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    EmmaCovers

    In April, I wrote a post on Volume 1 of Emma, sharing the thoughts that had come to me during my Jane Austen’s group’s current slow read of the novel. This month, I’m sharing some ideas that Volume 2 raised for me.

    I wrote in my Volume 1 post that, during this read, what popped out for me was the idea of young people lacking guidance. It relates to issues like character development and to themes like parenting (which Austen regularly explores in her novels.) The question with these slow reads always is, will an idea that pops up in one Volume continue in the next? Well, in this case my answer is yes and no.

    Jane Austen, Emma, Penguin

    What I mean by this is that this notion expanded for me in Volume 2 to encompass the idea of “nature versus nurture”. Now, I’m not saying that Austen was specifically engaging in that debate, but that she has a lot to say about both aspects of our character. Before I continue, I will just share that I did wonder when the “nature versus nurture” debate started?

    My searches, including via Wikipedia and two AI services, revealed that while ideas about innate (nature) vs. learned traits (nurture) can be traced back to ancient philosophy, the “nature versus nurture” debate, as a formal concept, began in the mid-1800s with Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who coined the term in his 1874 publication, “English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture”. In case you are interested, Chat GPT advised that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle debated discussed the role of “heredity and environment in shaping individuals” with Plato leaning towards nature (“innate knowledge”) and Aristotle towards nurture (“experience and environment”). And Wikipedia identifies Chen Seng having asked a similar question in 209 BCE. These aren’t the only people to have thought about the question, and Wikipedia’s article is useful if you are interested. But I’ll move on as the history of the debate is not my focus here.

    What kept popping up for me – as I looked to see how my guidance-of-young-people theme was developing – were various comments Austen was making about nature and nurture. I’ll share just a few.

    The first one to come to my attention in Volume 2, concerned Jane Fairfax, who was orphaned as a toddler and brought up, at first, by her grandmother, Mrs Bates, and aunt, Miss Bates. Austen describes her as a three-year-old

    “her being taught only what very limited means could command, and growing up with no advantages of connection or improvement to be engrafted on what nature had given her in a pleasing person, good understanding, and warm-hearted, well-meaning relations.” 

    So, “nature had given her” a good start, and her relations had nurtured her as best they could with their “very limited means”. However, soon after, the Campbells (the family of a friend) had taken her in:

    “She had fallen into good hands, known nothing but kindness from the Campbells, and been given an excellent education. Living constantly with right-minded and well-informed people, her heart and understanding had received every advantage of discipline and culture”.

    And then, Austen seems to make the point that Jane Fairfax’s innate character, her disposition, was such that good nurturing had found fertile opportunity: “Her disposition and abilities were equally worthy of all that friendship could do…” Unfortunately, with no money, her destiny looked likely to be governessing, which the Campbells knew and did their best to prepare her for, but that’s another story …

    As for Frank Churchill, in my last post regarding guidance, I noted that Austen suggests that, with his guardian family (his aunt and uncle at Enscombe), he had been left to his own devices with little guidance other than “his own comfort”. In this volume, Austen says more about his nature

    “He seemed to have all the life and spirit, cheerful feelings, and social inclinations of his father, and nothing of the pride or reserve of Enscombe.”

    It seems that at least some of the Churchills’ nature had not been nurtured into Frank. Ironically, it’s Emma’s father, Mr Woodhouse, who identifies some flaws in his behaviour, calling him “not quite the thing”, though his reasons are fussy.

    And then there’s the third character whom we meet in Volume 2, Mrs Elton. These are Emma’s thoughts, and she is a snob, but nonetheless, she hones in on some points relevant to my thinking:

    and the quarter of an hour quite convinced her that Mrs. Elton was a vain woman, extremely well satisfied with herself, and thinking much of her own importance; that she meant to shine and be very superior, but with manners which had been formed in a bad school, pert and familiar; that all her notions were drawn from one set of people, and one style of living; that, if not foolish, she was ignorant, and that her society would certainly do Mr. Elton no good.

    We don’t know how much of this comes from Mrs Elton’s nature, but Emma does lay a much blame for her behaviour and character on her nurture.

    Then there’s sweet Harriet, whom we met in Volume 1, and whom Emma considered, then, “not clever, but she had a sweet, docile, grateful disposition” and only needed to be “guided by any one she looked up to”. In Volume 2, her nature is again referenced, in terms of “the many vacancies of Harriet’s mind”! Poor Harriet. What will happen to her? Wait for Volume 3!

    Finally, it’s Emma’s brother-in-law Mr John Knightley, who shows particular sense, when he provides these instructions to Emma on caring for his sons while he’s away:

    ” .. Do not spoil them, and do not physic* them.” 
    “I rather hope to satisfy you both,” said Emma; “for I shall do all in my power to make them happy, which will be enough for Isabella; and happiness must preclude false indulgence and physic.”

    [* Meaning, don’t medicate them as their mother, Emma’s sister, is wont to do.]

    There’s no reference here to specific moral, or any other education, but we can infer from this, and our knowledge of the man, that he is well aware of the importance of good nurturing to his sons.

    Of course, there were other issues that intrigued me in Volume 2, but these ideas are the ones I want to document this go round with Emma.

    Any thoughts?

    Shelley Burr, Vanish (#BookReview)

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    With Vanish, the third novel in her Lane Holland series, Burr mixes it up yet again, which appeals to me because my main reason for not liking genre fiction is that it can be formulaic. I know this is why many like it, and I understand that need for comforting reading. It’s just not my need.

    So, a brief recap. In Wake (my review), we are introduced to a private investigator, Lane Holland, who arrives in a remote, outback, fictional town to investigate an old missing persons case. He’s keen and caring, but he also has his own agenda – and the resolution is shocking. The next book, Ripper aka Murder town (my review), is set in a different country town. It initially looked like something different, as Lane is in prison from Wake‘s fallout, but it soon becomes a dual investigation story that coalesces when it turns into both a murder and a missing persons case.

    And now, book 3. It seems you really can’t keep a good PI down, even if he is in prison! Vanish is set a few years later. Lane is still in prison but, because of prison governor Carver’s vested interest, he soon manages to get himself on a pre-parole release program in order to continue the unsolved investigation from Ripper. If you’ve read Ripper you’ll know what that is, and if you haven’t, it becomes clear very soon. My point, though, is that once again Burr has produced a highly readable crime novel that manages to be a bit different from the preceding book, while retaining enough familiarity for those invested in her characters and worldview. It’s a fine balance that Burr has trodden nicely.

    Like its predecessors, Vanish belongs to the rural noir sub-genre, and is consequently, noir-ish – or Australian Gothic – in tone. It features characters we have met in the previous novels, including Lane Holland, his sister Lynnie, and his first client Mina McCreery. Further, its plot centres again on a missing person. In Vanish, however, there’s more than one missing person. A serial missing persons case!

    Some stay. Some leave. Some disappear.

    “Some stay. Some leave. Some disappear” appears above the title in the book’s first Australian edition (as you can see in the cover pic above). What it references is the main setting of the novel – a farm near Hume Weir, southeast of Albury, an area Burr knows well. At the novel’s opening, Lane has tracked down several missing people as having visited this farm, then disappearing from view – hence the tag line. What is this farm, and why have some people disappeared? Lane wants to find out and Carver, with his daughter still missing, is happy to help him do so.

    Consequently, with ankle bracelet, a prison guard minder, and an agreement for him to work at the farm, Lane arrives – but not without a mysterious-sounding death having just happened on the road in. This, of course, captures Lane’s attention – and we’re off.

    Now Lane is, of course, your suspicious type. He takes nothing at face value, and he closely observes all that’s going on around him. There’s something about this farm that doesn’t feel right. Is it a community of like-minded people who want to escape their old lives and live more simply, growing their own food and reducing their energy impact on the world? Or is it a cult? How genuine is the owner Sam Karpathy, not to mention his recently deceased father? What do the people in the nearby township know, and why do they seem evasive when Lane tries to find out? And, why is a certain person from a previous novel there too?

    Oh, and who is the trapped, sick, or injured person whose story is told in short italicised sections interspersed with the main narrative? (It added to the intrigue, and I didn’t guess it at all.)

    As in her previous novel, Burr’s builds her crime story around wider issues. In Ripper for example it was “dark tourism”. Here, it is the idea of people wishing to live eco-minded, sustainable lives. So, as the investigation progresses, Burr also interrogates what this sort of life means in terms of whether or not you compromise and why, whether you stockpile for an end-of-world scenario, whether you eschew western medicine, and so on. These are questions Lane considers as he tries to understand the community he is living in. And it starts with the controlling Karpathy.

    Lane, as he needs to be, is a trustworthy narrator for us. The novel is told third person, through his eyes, and he brings us along with him, sharing his thoughts and explaining his processes. His awareness of body language and his experience of human behaviour guide his actions. I loved those details. There’s risk and tension, some creeping around the farm at night, a locked room, magic mushrooms, and more. I didn’t find it edge-of-the-seat suspenseful, but I don’t like that anyhow, so the level of stress was just about right for me. The plot builds slowly, sending us off in various directions, and keeping us uncertain as we consider what Lane sees and questions. Is Karpathy, for example, coercive or simply wanting to keep control of a dream he is vested in. The denouement, when it comes, unfolds quickly, and at just the right time.

    I enjoyed the read. I have been invested in Lane from the beginning, and he continued to interest me in this book. He’s conscientious, intelligent and decent, but, appealingly, is not always sure of himself, particularly when it comes to relationships. Also, Burr evokes place well. The farm, which is set in mountains just far enough from a little town to feel isolated, feels believable, as do the natural disasters – flood and bushfire – which threaten it.

    My only question now is, will we see more of Lane? As a convicted felon he will not be able to renew his investigator licence. There is a hint at the end that there might be a way around it. Time will tell, but if you are a Lane Holland fan, I think you can have hope.

    Shelley Burr
    Vanish
    Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2023
    384pp.
    ISBN: 9780733652158

    (Review copy – an uncorrected book proof, hence no quotes – courtesy Hachette Australia)

    Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice (#BookReview)

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    Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel, Theory & practice, is a perfect example of why I should follow my own reading advice, which is that as soon as I finish a book I should go back and read the opening paragraphs, if not pages. I like to do this because there often lies clues to what the book is really about. It certainly is with Theory & practice.

    Theory & practice starts like a typical novel, whatever that is. We are in Switzerland in 1957, with an unnamed 23-year-old Australian geologist who is waiting for a bus to go up the mountain. Meanwhile, back in Australia “rivers of Southern Europeans are pouring into Sydney”. The story continues, with a flashback to his living in the country with his grandmother when he was six years old. During this time he steals her precious ring, and lets her blame her “native” worker Pearlie. The story, told third person, returns to 1957 and a potential tragedy when, writes the narrator, “the novel I was writing stalled”. And, just like that, we switch to first person.

    I wrote to my American friend after I finished it, that I needed to do a bit of thinking. I saw an underlying thread concerning colonialism, I wrote, but how does that tie in with the idea of “theory and practice”, and with my glimmer of something about the messiness of life and how it can be represented in art. And, to make things more complicated – in this rather slim book – the narrator is writing a thesis on Virginia Woolf’s The waves, in which Woolf attempted to play with the novel form, calling her novel a “playpoem”. In Theory & practice, de Kretser also plays with the form, but by using fiction, essay and memoir in a way that nods a little to autofiction, but that feels more intensely focused on ideas than narrative.

    So, here goes … With the jump to first person, our narrator introduces us to an essay titled “Tunnel vision”, by the British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, that she read in the London Review of Books. In this essay Weizman discusses what de Kretser characterises as “the application of Situationist theory to colonising practice”. She kept finding herself returning to the idea of “theory and practice” and her recognition that “the smooth little word ‘and’ makes the transition from theory to practice seem effortless” when she knew was not the case. She knew all about “the messy gap between the two”. Her novel had stalled because it wasn’t what she needed to write. What she needed to write about was the “breakdowns between theory and practice”.

    We then shift gear again, and flash back to when the narrator is a child and learning the piano, learning both musical theory and piano practice. The relationship between the two might have been obvious to her teacher but it wasn’t to her.

    “messy human truths” (p. 38)

    Are you getting the drift? I thought I was, but the novel shifted gear again to 1986 when the narrator, at the age of 24, moves from Sydney to Melbourne to undertake an MA in English. Her topic is to be Virginia Woolf and gender, drawing on feminist theory. She soon uncovers a confronting thread of racism in Woolf’s diaries – a reference to “a poor little mahogany coloured wretch”. This was E.W. Perera, a Ceylonese barrister, politician and freedom-fighter man who, according to Woolf, had only two subjects, “the character of the Government, & the sins of the Colonial Office”. He made Woolf uncomfortable, though husband Leonard sympathised. The problem for our “mahogany-coloured” narrator is that Woolf’s discomfort makes her uncomfortable, but her thesis supervisor, Paula, won’t agree to her changing direction to explore racism. Our narrator’s solution, on the advice of an artist friend, is to “write back to Woolf”, to find or create her own truth in Woolf’s story.

    Throughout the novel various parallels are drawn which illuminate the theme, even if they don’t resolve the mess. In her personal life, the narrator’s “practice” – a love affair with a man attached to another woman he claims to love – keeps butting up against her understanding of feminist theory and its key idea of supporting the sisterhood. Desire and obsession, she was finding, trumps theory every time. How to reconcile this? We are thrown into academia, with its politics and jealousies, and St Kilda’s colourful bohemian life, as she reaches for answers to questions both academic and personal.

    Concurrently, there is the mother-parallel, one in which regular phone calls from her mother offering practical help and advice interrupt the text and narrative flow, and contrast with the Woolfmother whose abstract presence continues to complicate our narrator’s research and understanding. On the one hand, says our narrator, Woolf said ‘”Imagine” and opened the doors to our minds’, but on the other, she was “a snob and a racist and an antisemite”. Both are as complicated – “messy”, dare I say – as any mother-daughter relationship.

    All this is told in prose that is captivating with its changing rhythms from the tersely poetic – “the evening felt jumpy, spoiling for a fight” – to realistic description, and natural dialogue.

    Eventually our narrator manages to squish her “ideas about Woolf’s novels into the corset of Theory”, but, perhaps recalling her earlier awareness that “theory taught us … to notice what was unimportant”, it does not fill her with pride. It does, however, fulfil the university’s requirements and she can move on.

    And so does the novel, making another leap to the end of the twentieth century, and on into the 21st century. She has more to say about the ways humans abuse others – as she’d been abused as a child, as Woolf and her sister had been abused, and as Donald Friend, in an interesting late discussion in the novel, abused young Balinese boys. Such is the legacy of sexism, racism and colonialism.

    Now, how does this short but invigorating novel bring all this together? By reminding us, as the novel has done all the way through, that life is messy, that neither art (including the novel) nor theory can provide the answer, though they might provide insights. This is why, I’d say, de Kretser continues to play with the novel form, to find ways to convey the reality (not the realism) of life. I will end with a Woolf quote shared by de Kretser two-thirds through the novel, because I think she would apply it to herself:

    “I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind & my eyes, refusing to be stamped & stereotyped.”

    Kimbofo also loved this book.

    Michelle de Kretser
    Theory & practice
    Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2024
    184pp.
    ISBN: 9781923058149

    (Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

    Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Vol. 3)

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    Mansfield Park book covers
    Mansfield Park book covers

    A year ago, my Jane Austen group did a slow read of Mansfield Park, meaning we read and discussed it, one volume at a time, over three months. I posted my thoughts on volume 1 (chapters 1 to 30), and volume 2 (chapters 19 to 31), but I missed the third meeting, and never wrote up the final volume (chapters 32 to 48). However, this year my reading group scheduled Mansfield Park for our Classic read, so I’m taking the opportunity to share my thoughts on that last volume.

    But first, a brief intro. The reading group member who recommended we read Mansfield Park did so because she wanted to see whether she would better like this, her least favourite Austen, on another read. She didn’t. I understand this. Mansfield Park is regularly identified as Austen’s hardest book to like. It feels prudish to modern eyes; its protagonist Fanny isn’t exciting nor is her romance; and it is more serious and certainly less sparkling than its predecessor, Pride and prejudice. Re this latter point, Jane Austen collected opinions on the novel from friends, family and others, and reported that one Mrs Bramstone “preferred it to either of the others — but imagined that might be her want of Taste — as she does not understand Wit.”

    Now, my thoughts …

    Volume 3 starts the day after Fanny has rejected Henry Crawford’s proposal. As someone in my reading group said, all the novel’s action takes place in the final chapters, and I mostly agree, although significant events do take place in the previous volumes, including the visit to Sotherton and the plan to put on the play, Lovers vows.

    I wrote in my first two posts that what was striking me most was the selfishness, or self-centredness, of most of the characters. It suggested to me that Austen was critiquing the selfishness/self-centredness of the well-to-do, and how this results in poor behaviour, carelessness of the needs of others, and for some, in immoral behaviour. (I think we could equate these ideas with today’s concerns about “entitlement”.) This thread continued in volume 3. Indeed, here is where it all comes home to roost, confirming my sense that Mansfield Park is fundamentally about morality.

    Fanny is clearly the novel’s moral centre. She quietly observes, and reflects on, what goes on around her. As one of my reading group members said, it is through her eyes, her thoughts, that we see the novel’s world. In the first chapter of volume 3, Sir Thomas speaks to Fanny about Henry’s proposal, explaining why she should accept him. Henry is

    a young man … with everything to recommend him: not merely situation in life, fortune, and character, but with more than common agreeableness, with address and conversation pleasing to everybody.

    Then he adds pressure. She owes Henry gratitude for his role in obtaining advancement for her brother in the navy, and marrying Henry is her duty to her family as such a marriage can only help them. Sir Thomas is therefore perplexed and shocked at Fanny’s ongoing refusal – despite these persuasions – to consider Henry. He asks:

    “Have you any reason, child, to think ill of Mr. Crawford’s temper?”
    “No, sir.”
    She longed to add, “But of his principles I have” …

    However, she feels that to tell Sir Thomas of her observations of Henry’s unprincipled behaviour towards Julia and the engaged Maria would betray them – so, she’s caught and says nothing. She hoped Sir Thomas – “so discerning, so honourable, so good” – would accept her “dislike” as sufficient reason. Unfortunately, not only can he not accept it, but he accuses her of wilfulness and ingratitude. It’s mortifying.

    To his credit, however, Sir Thomas backs off, planning to let nature take its course, and, with a little judicious encouragement from the sidelines, he believes Henry will win her round. So Henry continues to press his suit, and Fanny continues to hold steady, reflecting at one point on “his want of delicacy and regard for others”. A few chapters on, Mary Crawford also presses her brother’s suit, but Fanny – she who is called wimpy by many modern readers – pushes back, telling Mary,

    I had not, Miss Crawford, been an inattentive observer of what was passing between him and some part of this family in the summer and autumn. I was quiet, but I was not blind. I could not but see that Mr. Crawford amused himself in gallantries which did mean nothing.

    While Fanny is coping with this, Edmund is moving forward with his plans to win Mary Crawford’s hand, despite her rather telling hatred of his chosen profession as a clergyman. Fanny – not altogether disinterested it has to be admitted – had observed Mary’s poor values, but it takes Edmund a long time to see her for what she is, for her lack of “principle”, her “blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind”. Edmund is convinced that Mary had been corrupted by the influence of others. He talks of “how excellent she would have been, had she fallen into good hands earlier” (instead of those poor influences she had in London. City versus country values is another thread running through this novel.)

    I could expand more on this selfishness-leading-to-poor-behaviour-or-immorality theme because examples abound in the volume, but my aim here is to just share some ideas. And, I want to share another one…

    I also mentioned another developing theme in my post on volume 1, the education of Sir Thomas. Interestingly, this is related to something I am observing in my current slow read of Austen’s next novel Emma, that of the quality of guidance given to young people and what happens when that guidance is faulty, misguided and/or not grounded in good moral teaching. It’s not a new theme for Austen, as you can see in Edmund’s comments above about Mary Crawford. But, it’s Sir Thomas’s learnings as one of those who does the guiding that I want to focus on.

    Like many of Austen’s characters, in fact, Sir Thomas engenders a variety of reactions from readers. Some see him as harsh and uncompromising. It’s easy to argue this when you see the way his children – and niece – fear him. But others, and I am one, see him as a father trying to bring up his children as best he can, with little help from the indolent Lady Bertram. Fanny, our moral centre, talks of his “parental solicitude”. We see hints of his kindness in volumes 1 and 2, but it is in volume 3 that we see what he is really made of. He’s a man of his times, of course, but one who had his children’s best interests at heart and who realised too late that his raising of them had been misguided.

    Now, before I continue, I want to make a little comment about style and structure. For most of the book, though there are departures, we are in Fanny’s head, seeing what she sees, thinking what she thinks, but in the book’s final chapter, Austen breaks the fourth wall and talks to us directly. It opens with a favourite quote:

    Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

    “I quit”, she says, drawing attention to the fact that she is telling us a story, and she continues this way:

    My Fanny, indeed, at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of everything…

    The rest of the chapter wraps up the novel and her characters. She devotes a few pages to “poor Sir Thomas”, telling us that he “was the longest to suffer” due to “the anguish arising from the conviction of his own errors in the education of his daughters”. He reflected on the negative impact on Maria and Julia of the “totally opposite treatment” they had lived under

    where the excessive indulgence and flattery of their aunt had been continually contrasted with his own severity. […]

    Here had been grievous mismanagement; but, bad as it was, he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments, the authorised object of their youth, could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them.

    Just look at those last few sentences … there, I think, is Austen’s driver for this novel. Maria and Julia had been allowed to focus on “elegance and accomplishments” with no attention paid to “the moral effect on the mind”. Mary Crawford is similarly misguided.

    Jane Austen, as we know, could be witty and acerbic with the best of them, but in this most serious novel of hers she may have shared the moral and social values dearest to her heart.

    Thoughts?