Review

Nigel Featherstone, Bodies of men (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 24 Comments

Nigel Featherstone, Bodies of menNigel Featherstone’s latest novel, Bodies of men, is a brave book – and not because it’s a World War 2 story about love between two soldiers at at time when such relationships were taboo, though there is that. No, I mean, because it’s a World War 2 story that was inspired by Featherstone’s three-month writer-in-residence stint at the Australian Defence Force Academy, in 2013. That’s not particularly brave, you are probably thinking, but wait, there’s more. What’s brave is that this novel, this story inspired by that residency, is about some darker sides of war – it’s about deserters, and violence from your own side, for a start … It’s certainly not about heroics, or, to be accurate, not the sort of heroics you’d expect. Courage, it shows, comes in many forms.

Here is what self-described pacifist Featherstone wrote in his blog two months into his residency:

I came here with the idea of exploring ‘masculinity in times of conflict’ …  Perhaps, like always, I’m being driven by that central question: what does it mean to be a good man, which, of course, is almost exactly the same as asking, what does it mean to be a good person?  But the military, especially the Australian kind of military, is all about men, isn’t it, the warrior, that iconic ‘digger’, that myth of our country, that brave saviour of everything we’re meant to stand for (whatever that is).

Those men who could do no wrong.  Except I don’t believe that for a second.

So, what did Featherstone actually write? It’s the story of two Australian soldiers from Sydney. William is from a conservative, well-to-do North Shore Sydney family, with a Member of Parliament father, while James comes from a poorer working class family, with a widowed mother who runs a shop but who’s also a socialist, a pacifist, and committed to helping homeless people. The boys had met and spent a few times together in their youth, but had lost touch for some years – until they find themselves in Egypt in 1941.

The novel opens with a reconnaissance that turns into an ambush. At an important moment, William, just off the boat, prevaricates, but James, there with a different military section, takes the initiative, and saves the day. The men vaguely recognise each other – “The officer”, thinks James, “does look familiar … but no it can’t be” – but have no opportunity to follow up, each returning immediately to their sections. From here the narrative, told third person from the alternating perspectives of William and James, follows the two men on their different paths. William, soon to be a lieutenant, is sent to manage a training camp in the desert. Believing he needs to redeem himself from that first experience of action, he sees this as an opportunity. He excels as a leader of men, finding the right balance between toughness and friendliness, but is dogged by his cold father’s voice, and worries about his ability to be the man his father expects. However, his mind is on that young man he glimpsed. Meanwhile, James goes AWOL on a military motorbike, which he crashes. Luckily, a family takes him in, a family which has its own tricky background and secrets, but James is just the right person to not rock their boat, so a warm relationship develops.

It’s not long before William works out a way of tracking James down. The story is told chronologically, but with frequent flashbacks which fill in that boyhood friendship. It was short, but intense. Both felt it, but William, in particular, struggled to understand it. It is therefore James, who, upon their renewed acquaintance, takes the lead – and the novel becomes, in part, a love story. Featherstone finds the right balance, here, conveying their tenderness and warmth, without sentimentality. We are never allowed to forget that this is war-time, and that both William and James are taking serious risks in their desire to be together.

However, this is not simply a boy-meets-boy, boy-loses-boy, boy-finds-boy again story. As mentioned above, Featherstone’s goal was to explore what it means to be a good man, against the backdrop of war. We do see some action, besides that opening scene, and there is an over-riding sense that something sinister could happen at any moment, but the main theme concerns men and their reactions to their circumstances – soldiers, men in hiding, men displaced, men in resistance. Each of these men provides the reader with a perspective on how men might choose to be. Courage and risk-taking, passion for a cause, recklessness, fear, commitment to helping others, tenderness and kindness – all of these come into play as the story progresses. And, as in all good novels, there are no simple answers. A love story this might be, but a genre romance or war-story it’s not.

How does Featherstone achieve this? Well, sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint these things, isn’t it? In a later post on his blog, Featherstone says that he wrote 38 drafts. You can tell this, and yet you can’t tell. You can tell, because you can feel the craft in the book. You can’t tell, because it also feels organic, not overworked. There’s skill in that. This skill includes the characterisation. William and James are sensitively fleshed out, well individuated, and grow through their experiences. But there are other characters too, including two strong women characters. James’ grounded, supportive mother is one, and open-minded Yetta, the woman who cares for James after his accident is another. It is she who articulates some of the novel’s main messages, including:

‘People must care for people. It’s not more complicated than that.’

There’s skill also in the narrative structure. The novel has a lightly episodic touch, with little breaks marked on the paper between “scenes”, but the story nonetheless flows. These breaks simply provide a way for the narrative to be progressed without unnecessary explication.

And, of course, there’s the writing. It’s spare, and yet perfectly evocative – of life at William’s desert camp, of the nervous busy-ness of war-time Alexandria where wells of quietness can also be found, and of William and James’ love. Here’s an example showing the edgy sort of tone Featherstone creates:

But now, something new: he was – he and James both were – sliding into the back seat of a car. They were being driven along one of Alexandria’s palm-lined boulevards; before long they were surrounded by blackness. William wound down his window and was about to yell, BUGGER THE WAR! – the night was getting away from him – but he managed to drag the words back down to where they belonged, in the pit of his gut.

Bodies of men, then, is a war novel that questions war. But, it is told with a generous touch that doesn’t undermine or betray those who choose to go. It’s a page-turner, underpinned by a fundamental understanding of humanity. It’s a very good read.

Nigel Featherstone
Bodies of men
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2019
324pp.
ISBN: 9780733640704

 

Sayaka Murata, Convenience store woman (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 33 Comments

Book coverConvenience store woman, which won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize, is Sayaka Murata’s 10th novel, but her first translated into English. Hopefully, it won’t be the last. A rather unusual book, it elicited a stimulating discussion at my reading group last week.

The convenience store woman of the title is 36-year-old Keiko Furukawa. She isn’t “normal”, and her family worries she will never fit in to society. However, when 18 years old, she obtains work at a newly opened Smile Mart convenience store, and quickly feels comfortable, undertaking routine daily tasks, and following the store’s rules. Eighteen years later, she’s still there. This is not seen as a valid situation for a woman of Keiko’s now mature age. Why isn’t she married? And why doesn’t she have a better job? Then she meets another convenience store worker, the also, but differently, nonconformist Shiraha, and she thinks she can solve both their problems by having him move in with her.

It’s a short book, at just 176-pages in the print edition, and is told first person. Now, for those of you who remember my recent discussion of first person voices, Convenience store woman is a perfect example of an effective use of first person. The main theme is the push for conformity, the push to follow the expected narrative of a life, but our narrator, Keiko, is not, for whatever reason, able (or willing) to conform. This theme is particularly relevant to Japan, which has a reputation for conformity and group behaviour, but it’s also universally relevant, because many societies, my own included, are not good at coping with people who stray from the “norm”.

So, Keiko is different. She’s been different all her life. She knows it, and she’s mystified. She’s particularly mystified by the way people often behave which seems counter to logic, and also by the way people cheer up when they think she’s behaving “normally”. An example of the former happens in her childhood, which she tells us via flashback. There’s a schoolyard fight. The kids call for the fight to stop, so she goes to the toolshed, gets a spade and bashes one of the kids with it. Everyone is horrified,

“But everyone was saying to stop Yamazaki-kun and Aoki-kun fighting! I just thought that would be the quickest way to do it,” I explained patiently. Why on earth were they so angry? I just didn’t get it.

An example of the latter occurs after she invites Shiraha to live at her place. Everyone assumes they are in a relationship. “They were all so ecstatic”, she wondered, she says, “whether they’d lost their minds”. Listening to her friends “go on”, she says,

was like hearing them talk about a couple of total strangers. They seemed to have the story wrapped up between them. It was about characters who had the same names as we did, but who had absolutely nothing to do with me or Shiraha.

There it is – the expected story or narrative of life!

Of her convenience store colleagues, she says:

I was shocked by their reaction. As a convenience store worker, I couldn’t believe they were putting gossip about store workers before a promotion in which chicken skewers that usually sold at 130 yen were to be put on sale at the special price of 110 yen. What on earth had happened to the pair of them?

As you can see there’s a good deal of humour in this book. You can also see why this story could only be told first person. Any other voice would risk undermining Keiko’s authenticity, her reality.

So, for Keiko, it’s “convenient” having Shiraha at her place. Everyone is happy for her, and she likes that “they’ve stopped poking their nose into my business”.

However, while Keiko, for all her strangeness, is a likeable character, Shiraha is not. He has no desire to work, and takes advantage of her wish to appear “normal”, even though it satisfies his need for the same. He excuses his laziness by criticising society and its unfair gender expectations on men:

“Naturally, your job in a convenience store isn’t enough to support me. With you working there and me jobless, I’m the one they’ll criticize. Society hasn’t dragged itself out of the Stone Age yet, and they’ll always blame the man. But if you could just get a proper job, Furukura, they won’t victimize me anymore and it’ll be good for you, too, so we’d be killing two birds with one stone.”

Worse, he’s arrogant and cruel:

“I did it! I got away! Everything’s okay for the time being. There’s no way you’ll be getting pregnant, no chance of me ever penetrating a woman like you, after all.”

Actually, he only “got away” because Keiko had the idea of his moving in. Fortunately, she has no interest in sex, so his comment falls on flat ears – but we notice it.

The novel, then, hinges on the idea of normality, with the word “normal” recurring throughout the novel. Early on, Keiko realises that “the normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects”. This is why, it dawns on her, her family wishes to “cure” her. She is therefore grateful for the convenience store, where she can operate as “a normal cog in society” – until her age makes it no longer “normal”. The charming Shiraha has his own take:

“People who are considered normal enjoy putting those who aren’t on trial, you know. But if you kick me out now, they’ll judge you even more harshly, so you have no choice but to keep me around.” Shiraha gave a thin laugh. “I always did want revenge, on women who are allowed to become parasites just because they’re women. I always thought to myself that I’d be a parasite one day. That’d show them. And I’m going to be a parasite on you, Furukura, whatever it takes.”

Shiraha shows us that Murata’s understanding of deviations from the norm is nuanced, not simplistic.

Anyhow, later in the novel, after her sister asks “How can we make you normal?”, Keiko comes to recognise that her sister is happier seeing her as “normal”, albeit with “a lot of problems”,

than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible.

In the end, Keiko does resolve her conundrum regarding how to live in a way that is true to herself. It is inspired, in fact, by the convenience store, which I think we can read as a microcosm of society. She suggests that “a convenience store is not merely a place where customers come to buy practical necessities, it has to be somewhere they can enjoy and take pleasure in discovering things they like”. She can play a role in that.

Convenience store woman is a wonderful read. Perfect in tone and voice, and fearless in its exploration of the confining nature of “normality”, it forces us to look beyond, and imagine other lives and ways of being.

Sayaka Murata
Convenience store woman
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
London: Portobello Books, 2016 (trans. ed. 2018)
eISBN: 9781846276859

Enza Gandolfo, The bridge (#Bookreview)

/ Whispering Gums / 24 Comments

Book coverIf there are people I admire more than any others, it’s those who are able to empathise with, and forgive, someone who has done them great wrong. This complex question of forgiveness – of self and of others – is one of the issues explored in Enza Gandolfo’s Stella Prize short-listed novel, The bridge. However, it’s only one aspect of this intelligent, moving book.

Melburnians, and Australians of a certain age, will remember the West Gate Bridge disaster in 1970. The bridge collapsed during construction, killing 35 and injuring 18 of the 60 workers there at the time. It was, and still is I believe, Australia’s worst industrial accident, and it frames Gandolfo’s book. The novel starts in 1970, introducing us to 22-year-old Italian-born Antonello and his workmates, another Italian Sam, and Slav (whose nickname conveys his origins). Gandolfo quickly sets up the scene – the bonding between these men, and something of their lives and aspirations – before describing the collapse in the next chapter. She captures the horror of those hours in clear, descriptive, but not overblown language that perfectly captures the shock, panic and emotion of the event for all who experienced it – the workers, their families and those in the vicinity.

Antonello survives, but some of his friends don’t, and nor does his boss, Bob, who’d been “like a father” to him. Antonello, along with Bob and his mates, had started to realise that things weren’t right, but, as a rigger, he had no formal responsibility for what happened. However, guilt and trauma attach to him. His lovely relationship with his young wife Paolina survives, but is never quite the same. Gandolfo conveys so well how devastating to a life – to lives – a traumatic event can be, how life can change in a moment. You understand why, these days, counsellors are immediately sent in when tragedies occur.

The book then jumps, in Chapter 4, to 2009, and we meet 19-year-old Jo. Like Antonello she belongs to the working class. She lives in a rather dilapidated weatherboard house near the bridge, with her single supermarket worker mother, Mandy. She is in her last year of school, and has a best friend, Ashleigh, who comes from a comfortable middle-class family where the mother is a high school principal. Jo is the needier of the two, Ashleigh being more clever, more confident, and increasingly more involved with her boyfriend. Jo feels she’s losing her.

And now, here’s the challenge reviewers face. How much to give away of the story. What happens next, happens before a third of the novel is over, and you see it coming, but nonetheless it’s a shock, so I won’t give it away. (I note that some reviewers have, and some haven’t.) Let’s just say that a tragedy ensues and Jo is responsible – and, as it turns out, her friend Ashleigh is Antonello’s grand-daughter.

So, given I’ve decided not to spoil the plot, how best to discuss the rest of the novel, which still has over 250 pages to go?

Well, I could talk about the writing and characterisation. The novel is told chronologically, in third person, from multiple perspectives – from Antonello and Jo of course, but also Mandy, a legal aid lawyer Sarah, and a few others later in the novel. Gandolfo captures their feelings with such sensitivity and realism that by the time the novel is over we feel we know them. We experience their emotions, and go through their thought processes with them as they ponder what’s happened and whether they can possibly keep living in the face of their respective tragedies. It feels so true – and because of that, it breaks our hearts, more than once.

Then there’s the bridge. Its prime meaning here is literal, of course, but it is a gift to a writer because bridges can represent so many things – positive or negative, or, paradoxically both – that are reflected in this novel. They can symbolise progress, for example, but West Gate, which would bring two worlds closer together, was not seen positively by all:

“We don’t want those rich bastards coming over to the west”, was the general sentiment.

Bridges can also suggest connection and transition. In this novel, transition encompasses the idea of social mobility, which West Gate exposes, but it can also mean the transitions individuals make psychologically. It is this latter, often aided by the good connections that can occur between people, that ultimately brings some redemption in the novel.

This brings me to Gandolfo’s themes. Antonello, who has suffered from PTSD since the accident, realises late in the novel that his friend Sam, who had become a union activist, had made the more positive choice. It takes him a long time but finally he learns the lesson:

For years, the most persistent impulse was towards death; a desire to stop living … But life didn’t stop. It went on whether you lived it or not. You have to choose life. This is what he needed to tell them – if you stop living, you may as well die. If you stop living, you aren’t going to be able to love again, and everyone you know will pay for that, everyone.

Empathetic Paolina has always known this, but it’s a lesson that comes hard to the other characters. Anger, revenge, guilt – depending on their role in the events that occur – overwhelm them. And it is Antonello who is the lynchpin. He is able to help Jo, telling her that the best thing she can do is forgive herself and allow herself to live. Similarly, he encourages his own family not to succumb to the sadness, anger and bitterness which brought him such waste and pain.

Enza Gandolfo’s achievement is impressive. She presents us with a bunch of flawed – as in ordinary – characters, and she puts them in terrible but not unrealistic situations. She then has them experience all the emotions that you would expect. And she doesn’t judge. Instead, she makes us feel, confronting us to think about how we would react, and hoping that we will come to the same conclusion that Antonello does.

A character I’ve only briefly mentioned is Sarah, Jo’s legal aid lawyer. She talks about the storytelling aspect of trials:

That was the danger of a good story: you could elicit pity and empathy for even the worst sociopath … Sarah believed telling good stories, the ones people listened to and were swayed by, was a responsibility. It worried her that some people did not take it seriously enough.

It’s not a big leap, I’d say, to suggest that Gandolfo would extend this responsibility to novelists – and in The bridge, she shows what a responsible story can look like. Such a novel.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) was also moved by this book.

AWW Challenge 2019 BadgeEnza Gandolfo
The bridge
Brunswick: Scribe, 2018
375pp.
ISBN: 9781925713015

Amanda Duthie (ed.), Kin: An extraordinary filmmaking family (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 3 Comments

Book coverKin: An extraordinary filmmaking family is the second tribute book I’ve reviewed in Wakefield Press’s Don Dunstan Award series. The first, Margaret & David: 5 stars, was also edited by Amanda Duthie. Like that book, Kin contains short reflections and essays on the contribution made to Australia’s film industry and culture by Freda Glynn, her children Erica Glynn and Warwick Thornton, and her grandchildren Dylan River and Tanith Glynn-Maloney. The book also includes brief biographies of the five individuals involved, and a family tree, all of which help orient the reader.

In my review of Margaret and David, I focused on one aspect of the pieces that interested me, which was the commentary on what I called “the practice of criticism”. That made sense, because Margaret and David are critics. Freda Glynn and family are a very different awardees. They are indigenous Australians from central Australia, and they have championed and practiced Aboriginal screen story-telling for over three decades, their influence reaching way beyond Australia. Freda Glynn helped establish CAAMA (the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) and Imparja Television. Erica Glynn and Warwick Thornton are internationally renowned filmmakers (and more), with third generation Dylan River and Tanith Glynn-Maloney following in their filmmaking footsteps.

The pieces are written by a wide variety of indigenous and non-indigenous arts people from around the world, such as actor Deborah Mailman, authors Bruce Pascoe (whose Dark emu I’ve reviewed here) and Larissa Behrendt, critics Margaret and David (of course!), arts administrator Kim Williams, and American academic Faye Ginsburg, to name just some of the over 20 contributors.

Most of the pieces comprise personal reflections and heartfelt tributes to the various individuals in the family, but for those wanting a good overview of how it all started, Philip Batty’s longer piece, “Freda Glynn and the evolution of CAAMA: A personal reflection”, is well worth reading. Too few Australians know about our indigenous pioneers – who they are, let alone what they’ve done and the challenges they’ve faced doing it. Having worked, as most of you know by now, in the film archive/library industry most of my career, I became aware of CAAMA early in its existence, but I didn’t know half the story told by Batty – the personal and the political! He tells of CAAMA applying for money in 1988 from the Australian Bicentennial Authority:

Some city-based Aboriginal groups protested again CAAMA accepting the bicentennial ‘blood money’ and, on several occasions, Freda fronted up to these groups to argue that all government funding to Aboriginal organisations could be described as ‘blood money’. Indeed, at a particularly hostile meeting, I remember thinking back to the first time I met Freda when she was confronted by the all-white Citizens for Civilised Living [can you believe such a name!!]. On this occasion it was an all-Aboriginal crowd she confronted with the same bravery.

It’s important to note here that, as Stan Grant and so many others have stated, indigenous people are not united in their responses to how their cause should be progressed – any more than non-indigenous people are about their lives. I’m frequently astonished by how we white Australians seem to expect all other groups to be united in a way that we are not. It denies people the individual agency in their lives that we demand for ourselves.

Anyhow, rant over. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this book. I’m unusually behind in my reviews, and this book is, in one sense, of specialist interest, though in another I’d argue that it would offer something to all Australians interested in our cultural history. It does have a political thread – of course – but that thread is unified by a single foundational idea, the idea that sits at the bottom of all that this impressive family does. I’ll let Bruce Pascoe tell you:

The real history of the country was eliminated from our curriculum, our society, our politics, our morality. If the best-educated people in the land, the mild professors and urbane historians, can fabricate a history of such blinding connivance then another tactic has to be employed if the oppressed are to receive any form of justice. And that tactic is on old one: story.

What Freda Glynn and her family have done – as this book shows – is to set up infrastructures (the CAAMA group supports music, film, television, radio, for example) that facilitate that story being told, to provide training for indigenous people in creating and producing their stories, and of course, to make stories themselves. Warwick Thornton’s films Samson and Delilah and Sweet country are just two examples of a swathe of productions members of this family have made and/or facilitated.

All I can say is may the Glynn family continue to make stories that tell us as it is! Meanwhile, I commend this book to you as an excellent introduction to all that can be done when people put their hearts and souls into something they believe in.

AWW Challenge 2019 BadgeAmanda Duthie (ed.)
Kin: An extraordinary filmmaking family
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2018
176pp.
ISBN: 9781743056028

(Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press)

Janet Lee, The killing of Louisa (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

Book coverI started reading Janet Lee’s historical fiction The killing of Louisa straight after reading Amor Towles’ A gentleman in Moscow (my review), which is also a work of historical fiction. They couldn’t be more different. Not only is one about a real historical figure in late 19th century Australia, while the other is about a fictional one in 20th century Bolshevik Russia, but one is told first person present tense, while the other is third person past tense.

Now, when first person present tense started appearing on the contemporary literary scene as the style-du-jour, I rather liked it. I liked its freshness, and the sense it gave of speaking directly to me. But then it started to wear a bit thin. This is not to say that I don’t like it – ever – just that it can be overused and not necessarily add to the experience. I loved the measured, sometimes wry, third person voice in Towles’ novel. It suited a book that seemed to be critiquing both human nature and an historical period. Did the first person voice suit Lee’s novel?

Well, let’s see. The novel is about Louisa Collins who, in 1889, was the last woman to be hanged in New South Wales. Her story is a horrifying one: she was tried four times for murder, with the fourth trial convicting her after the three previous ones failed to come to a decision. There’s more to it though, in that the first two were for the murder, by poison, of her second husband. When the juries could not agree, she was charged with the murder, also by poison, of her first husband. When that too failed, they returned to the first husband, and finally a guilty verdict was achieved, largely using the testimony of Louisa’s 11-year-old daughter May who admitted to seeing a box of “Rough on Rats” in the kitchen. The novel tells this story from Louisa’s point of view.

Formally, the story takes place over six weeks, from 26 November 1888, when she is in gaol waiting for her fourth trail, to 8 January 1889, when she is executed. However, of course, we want to know the full story of Louisa’s life and how she got to be where she was. Lee does this by having her tell her story to the prison chaplain, Canon Rich, while she awaits her execution.

It’s a moving story – of course. Born to a poor family in a country town, Louisa, when still a young teen, is found a job in the home of a lawyer by, it seems, the mother of a wealthy young man who fears her son is becoming too close to the girl. Louisa’s employer is good to her, and she’s happy, but at the age of 18, she is married her off to a man around 15 years her senior whom she barely knows. Charles is a butcher with his own business, and they both work hard, but, more through bad luck than bad management, the family, which seemed to be making a go of it, ends up living in Sydney, and poor. They take in boarders to supplement their income. It’s a world, of course, where women had no rights and little power, though Louisa does stand up for herself within her marriage, exerting a right to wrest some enjoyment out of her life. Things, however, become complicated when the flashy, confident Michael appears on the scene.

All, or most of, this Louisa tells Rich, with a fair degree of self-knowledge about her own failings but also with some insights into human nature (such as how recollections can change!) and how the world works. On her mistress spending years in mourning for a dead baby, Louisa says to Rich:

But the Missus had become like this because she was allowed to dwell upon her sadness for so long. Sometimes folk who suffer a tragedy can pick themselves up and dust themselves off and keep going on through life, and it is often the poorer ones who do this because they don’t have the luxury to stop and mourn […]

Mourning and feeling feeble is a luxury, and it is my observation that only the rich have that luxury, sir.

Louisa is not speaking from theory here; she has learnt the truth through her own experiences of loss.

However, hers a tricky story to tell, because, ultimately, we don’t know whether she was guilty or not, and Lee is not about producing a work of romantic fiction. So, she needs to tread a fine line. Using the primary resources available to her which comprise some letters, court and parliamentary records, and newspaper reports, she tells Louisa’s story.

And Louisa’s story is worth telling for several reasons. First, there’s that reason why many of us enjoy historical fiction, which is to learn, to feel, the social history of a period. Louisa’s first person voice conveys perfectly the lives of poor working women of the time – the hard work, the dust and grime, the worry, the powerlessness. She also conveys her increasing awareness of the need for representation for women in parliament. Knowing where we’ve come from and why we should do all we can not to go back there is a good reason for reading books like this.

But, unfortunately, the book also reminds us of how far we still have to go. One of the features of Louisa’s case is that old story of women being tried by society and the media for not behaving with the propriety expected of them. Louisa likes to have a good time, so she would dance and drink when an opportunity arose, and she argues for her right to do so. Worse though, she appears “cold” after the deaths of her husbands. She doesn’t wear mourning and she doesn’t cry and wring her hands. Heard that before? (Australians will immediately recall the Lindy Chamberlain case.) Louisa’s awareness of this issue is supported in the text by well-placed excerpts from primary sources, such as the snide remark in Parliament, comprising all men of course, about her “method of procuring divorce by means of arsenic”. The problem is that, still, even after Lindy Chamberlain, things haven’t changed, or not changed enough … we still have trial-by-media and women are still excoriated for not behaving in a so-called “womanly” way.

Janet Lee’s is not the first book about Louisa Collins. In 2014, journalist Caroline Overington published her history, Last woman hanged, after researching the case for some years. I haven’t read that, but I understand that she too presents an “open” story, that is, one that leaves it to the reader to consider the rights and wrongs of the case. And that, I think, is the right way to handle this story. What is wrong, though, is capital punishment! It is wrong for so many reasons, but one of the greatest of these is the risk of executing innocent people.

But now back to my original question regarding voice. As I started The killing of Louisa, I felt I wanted a third person omniscient voice telling this story. I wanted a considered voice giving me the pros and cons of the case. However, as I read on, I became engaged by Louisa’s voice, particularly by the tone Lee achieves which, while containing an element of sorrow and self-pity, is neither pathetic nor whiny. By adding excerpts from the sources, Lee provides some of that overview I wanted.

The killing of Louisa, then, is not only an engrossing story about a shameful case from the past, but one that intelligently grapples with the challenges of presenting such a case through historical fiction.

AWW Challenge 2019 BadgeJanet Lee
The killing of Louisa
St Lucia: UQP, 2018
268pp.
ISBN: 9780702260223

(Review copy courtesy UQP)

Amor Towles, A gentleman in Moscow (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

Cover for Amor Towles A gentleman in MoscowAmerican writer Amor Towles’ third novel, the best-selling A gentleman in Moscow, generated a surprisingly lively discussion at my reading group last week, because beneath its engaging, accessible exterior are some puzzles. These puzzles relate primarily to Towles’ intentions. What were they? Why did an American investment banker write an historical fiction novel about a Count in Bolshevik Russia?

But, I’m rushing ahead, so I’ll slow down and do the right and proper thing, which is to start  with a plot outline. The novel opens in Moscow in 1922, when our protagonist Count Rostov – once a hero of “the prerevolutionary cause” but now a “Former Person” – is sentenced to indefinite house arrest in the grand hotel, the Metropol, in which he has been living for four years. Not only that, but he is to live in the old servant’s quarters rather than in his luxurious suite. Fortunately, our count is nothing if not resourceful, and he quickly decides that “if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them”. The next 450 pages or so chronicle the next three decades or so of the Count’s life under this house arrest, detailing life in the hotel and the relationships he forges over that time. It is, unexpectedly, a thoroughly enjoyable read, but why, exactly? What is it all about?

While most of my reading group loved the book, albeit a couple of us had this niggling “why” question, one member found it “intellectually dishonest”. She could not accept the Count as being in any way representative of Russian aristocrats of the time, and she felt that the novel glossed too easily over the real horrors of the period. Why did she feel so strongly about this, while the rest of us, mostly well-versed in Russian history, did not feel the same way? Well, I don’t know exactly, but I think it might have something to do with form and tone.

I’m going to explore this a little rather than focus on the content, partly because it intrigues me and partly because I presume that quite a few of you will have read the book and know its content. So, here goes. The novel is historical fiction, but what sort? It’s not your bodice-ripping romance nor the swash-buckling adventure that exemplify this genre. But, neither is it the sort of social realism that is the most common alternative to the romance or adventure approach. What, then, is it? Well, as I was reading it, I had visions of Austen. Sorry, but it’s true! It’s not Austen, of course, but it has a comedy-of-manners ring to it, complete with Austen-like commentary, not to mention her satiric and ironic touches.

This means that although, as its own blurb says, it takes place during “some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history”, the focus is elsewhere. It’s on the Count and the small community surrounding him; it’s on how does one, in fact, adapt to living under such circumstances. Some of you will know Jane Austen’s famous comment in a letter to her niece about her subject matter:

You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life – 3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.

It’s not a stretch to see the story of the Count’s life in the Metropol through this prism. Indeed, the above-mentioned blurb continues to say that the Count, stripped of his luxuries, “is forced to question what makes us who we are”. This journey was the book’s main story for me. We do learn about Stalin’s regime, through characters who come to the hotel and interact with the Count, but the Count’s personal story is the main game.

So, what does he learn? Early on, he vows “to master his circumstances through practicalities”, and this he does by tailoring his life and expectations. His initial change from hotel guest to prisoner sees him still living pretty much the high life, free to relax and dine, but by the end of the novel he is working as the Head Waiter in the main restaurant, for which, in fact, his aristocratic training in etiquette had well qualified him. He had said that “his model for mastering his circumstances” would not be Dantés planning revenge, nor Napoleon imagining his triumphal return, but “a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe”. Crusoe, in other words, adapted, confronting the challenges as they arose.

As with most of Austen’s protagonists, the Count’s “learnings” are not overly dramatic. He’s already a generally decent, sensible sort of person, but late in the novel, he tells his lover, Anna, in a discussion comparing American “conveniences”, like dishwashers, with Russian privations,

“I’ll tell you what is convenient … To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

These inconveniences revolve around the deep relationships he develops through his imprisonment and the demands that such relationships entail. They result in a man who is described by his interlocutor at the beginning as being “without purpose” turning into someone very purposeful.

What’s also Austen-ish is the commentary, the astute observations made about human nature, such as:

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour …

If there’s one thing Austen recognises it’s the capriciousness of humans. Another Austen-like statement is this one: “It is a fact of human life that one must eventually choose a philosophy”.

But, still, why write such a story? Towles, himself, has said that he wanted to write about someone forced to live in a grand hotel, and that he had “no central theme”. Rather, he wanted to create a work that would be “satisfyingly cohesive” but “prompt varied responses from reader to reader, and from reading to reading.”

Consequently, while my reading of the book encompasses seeing it as critiquing the corruption, hypocrisies and loss of freedoms that characterised the Bolshevik regime, my overall response is a broader one, which is that, unlike the Count’s friend Mishka and the little-girl-turned-mother Nina, we would do better to develop and rely on our personal set of values, to work on our relationships and the attendant responsibilities not to mention on our own adaptability to circumstances, as the Count does, than commit to any single “ism”.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) thoroughly enjoyed this book too.

Amor Towles
A gentleman in Moscow
London: Viking, 2016
502pp.
ISBN: 9781448135509 (Kindle ed.)

Vicki Laveau-Harvie, The erratics (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 37 Comments

Book coverTruth is that, while I like to read at least some of the Stella Prize shortlist, I didn’t have Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s memoir, The erratics, on my high priority list, though the more I heard about it, the more intrigued I became. However, it was winning the prize that tipped it over into my must-read category. What a challenging read it is.

The erratics is the story of how Laveau-Harvie and her sister responded to their estranged aging parents’ needs as infirmity caught up with them. Canadian-born Laveau-Harvie had, decades earlier, escaped the family home in rural Alberta moving, eventually, to Australia. Her younger sister had also escaped, though not so far. She lived in Vancouver. It all came to a head when their 94-year-old mother’s hipbone “crumbles and breaks” putting her in hospital. Laveau-Harvie and her sister regroup to help – their father, in particular, who, they discover, had been being systematically starved by their mother. The story of this dysfunctional family, and the sisters’ actions to save their father and ensure their mother is deemed incompetent, never able to return home, is arresting.

Equally arresting is Laveau-Harvie’s writing. It’s not surprising that she won the Stella (not to mention the Finch Memoir Prize and being shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards), because the writing grabs your attention with an impressive sureness of tone and language. It’s particularly impressive because it is, apparently, 70-something Laveau-Harvie’s first book.

The back-cover blurb of my edition concludes with: “a ferocious, sharp, darkly funny and wholly compelling memoir of families, the pain they can inflict and the legacy they leave, The erratics has the tightly coiled, compressed energy of an explosive device  – it will take your breath away”. It does all of that.

First, it’s an astonishing story of a mother who seems incapable of the love we expect from a parent. I’ll share the quote that you’ll have read before if you’ve read about this book:

One of the few coherent messages my mother repeated to me and my sister as we grew up, a message she sometimes delivered with deceptive gentleness and a touch of sadness that we weren’t more worthy prey, was this one, and I quote: I’ll get you and you won’t even know I’m doing it.

If you are a parent who feels guilty about mistakes you made in your parenting, you can rest easy after reading this (unless of course you are like Laveau-Harvie’s mother!) Most of us, I’m sure, made our mistakes inadvertently, not with the intent behind this woman’s behaviour. The problem in Laveau-Harvie’s family was compounded by the fact that their father, while not brutal like their mother, was weak, believing (or, at least accepting) everything his wife said about their daughters.

So, the story, itself, is compelling – in the strange behaviour of these two parents, and in the willingness of the daughters, despite being rejected by their mother, including being given no formal role in managing her affairs, to step in and do the hard stuff out of love for their father and, I guess, a sense of responsibility. But, in addition to the story, what makes this memoir particularly compelling is, as I’ve already said, the writing itself.

It’s a tight, spare read at just over 200 pages. It has stunning descriptions, but I’ll exemplify it with the metaphor contained in the title itself, a metaphor that draws from a geologic formation called the Foothills Erratics Terrain in the town nearest her parents’ home:

Countless years ago, the Okotoks Erratic fell in on itself and became unsafe to climb upon. It dominates the landscape, roped off and isolated, the danger it presents to anyone trespassing palpable and documented on the signs posted around it.

Unfortunately, Laveau-Harvie’s mother came with no such sign.

There is a deft handling of chronology, with the occasional bit of foreshadowing. And then there is the tone, which is achieved by a crisp story-telling style that is direct, colloquial, witty even, and that focuses on the facts with little explication, all the while conveying the challenges faced by the two sisters in negotiating their relationships with each other, their father and their mother. One of Laveau-Harvie’s techniques is to undercut a description or plan with a short, emphatic sentence like “That was the plan” or “I can’t fix this” or “I don’t do this”.

It’s an invidious situation, and you can’t help but feel their pain. She writes at one stage of not remembering certain events:

I do know this: where there is nothing, there must be pain; that’s why there is nothing. Be glad if you forget.

There’s another of those short concluding sentences – “Be glad if you forget”. It’s powerful.

The strongest part of the narrative concerns the relationship with her sister who, still living in Canada, is the person on-site, and who has always been less able distance herself from the pain. There’s a telling sentence about their choices of mementoes from the house:

I salvage a few other things … things from my childhood … my sister takes only things acquired by my mother after we had left home, heavy crystal goblets, silver serving plates, full dinner sets of translucent china. I want only the connection to the past, she wants never to feel it again.

So, this sister, the one who wants to distance the past takes on, at a cost to her health, more than Laveau-Harvie believes sensible: “I can see sinkholes of simmering resentment about to develop between us.” Laveau-Harvie explores the challenges of siblings negotiating the care of aging parents with the clear-eyed honesty she applies to the whole story, albeit, at times, I wondered how the sister felt about her depiction. Presumably, it’s ground they’ve well-covered between each other.

The book, then, is compelling and many readers, like Kim (Reading Matters), have found it a “compulsive read”. I did too. But, there was also something about the tone that disquieted me, as it did Kate (booksaremyfavouriteand best). This surprised me because I wasn’t expecting to feel this way. I love fearless honesty. It’s one of the reasons (besides her writing) that I like Helen Garner so much. She is not afraid to say the hard, unpalatable things. And yet, I found it difficult at times here. I think it’s because I felt some of this “honesty” was attended by an unkindness, by a willingness to laugh at another’s expense (though, admittedly, she also frequently laughs at her own).

An example is her description of the array of carers she and her sister put in place for their father. It’s funny, and has an element of truth, recognisable by anyone who has experienced the situation. But I bridle at name-calling, so “the gold-digger” and “the housekeeping slut” did not make me laugh. (I particularly hate women calling other women “slut”, even a “housekeeping” one – but that may just be me!) And then there’s the description of the breakage of some fine china freighted to Australia:

I imagine customs officers dropping the box because it has a label that says ‘Fragile’, satisfied at the sound of something delicate breaking.

Ultimately, however, although I couldn’t help reacting, occasionally, with the disquietude that I did – I realise I can’t judge. How can I, when the family life she experienced is beyond my ken? And, the ending is inspired. She draws on myths about the Okotoks to lay her mother – that “bitterly unhappy and vindictive old woman” – to a potentially more peaceful rest.

The erratics, then, is an impressive debut. It’s compelling and, significantly, it prompts us to think about the importance of love, responsibility and respect within all families.

AWW Challenge 2019 BadgeVicki Laveau-Harvie
The erratics
Sydney: Fourth Estate, 2019 (Orig. pub. 2018)
217pp.
ISBN: 9781460758250

José Jorge Letria, If I were a book (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Book coverIf I were a book is one of those “gift” books you give to readers – and it was in that spirit that it was given to me for my birthday a couple of years ago. It’s a delight of a book, and is somewhat quirkier than these sorts of book-lovers’ gift books often are, which is why I’ve decided, finally, to share it with you. Or, have you seen or read it already?

My edition is a little hardback of 60 plus pages produced in San Francisco in 2014. The original, however, was published in Portugal in 2011, the author being Portuguese. The illustrator, André Letria, happens to be his son. Now I hadn’t heard of José Jorge Letria before, but he was born in the Lisbon District of Cascais, in 1951, and is apparently, says Google’s translation from a Portuguese biography, “a journalist, poet, playwright, fiction writer and author of a vast work for children and young people.” This biography also tells us that he has won many many national and international literary awards, including the Unesco International Prize (France), the Barcelona Classical Poetry Prize, the Plural Prize (Mexico), the Prize of the Paulista Association of Art Critics (São Paulo), and the Gulbenkian Prize. He has won prizes for “the environment in children’s literature” and the Manuel de Arriaga Prize for his contribution to the defense and dissemination of animal rights. He has been on many Portuguese, European and international literary boards, and his books have been translated into “over a dozen” languages. Yet, I hadn’t heard of him, until, that is, I was given this delightful ….

… love-letter to the book and reading. I fell in love with its passion and idealism. The book comprises two-page spreads, each one containing an image and the phrase “If I were a book” followed by a response. So, the first image shows a person looking at a book on a park bench, with the phrase “If I were a book, I’d ask someone in the street to take me home.” (What a nice sign that would make for a street library!) The next shows this same person opening a larger-than-life book, inside which there are stairs descending into unknown depths, with the phrase “If I were a book, I’d share my deepest thoughts with my readers”. And so it continues…

What makes this book so delightful is the personalising of the book (as in “if I were a book”), the ideas expressed in these personalised phrases, and the illustrations. I’m not sure what is allowed by copyright, but I’ve chosen three images to share with you, so you can see what I mean:

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I’ve chosen these three because the one suggests the way I like to read – slowly, savouring the words and ideas – and because the other two contain aspirations that I’d love books to achieve. You can see how in some images the book is supersized, while in others its size is more “normal”. The images are simple but beautifully whimsical, the colour palette is minimalistic, and the text’s font feels a little worn and loved.

And here, I think I’ll leave it, because what more, really, can I say?

José Jorge Letria
If I were a book
Illustrated by André Letria
Translated by Isabel Terry
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2014 (orig. pub. 2011)
[64pp.]
ISBN: 9781452121444

Julian Davies, Call me (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 24 Comments

Book coverI wasn’t sure what I was in for when I started reading Call me, the latest offering from that tricksy duo, novelist Julian Davies and illustrator Phil Day. But, it soon became clear that what was before me was a coming-of-age story. What, I wondered, was Davies doing writing such a novel? Then I remembered that this was the author who gave us, most recently, Crow mellow (my review), so I decided to relax and go with the flow. Sensible me, because this is a sophisticated take on the genre, geared to an adult audience.

The story starts in the first person voice of a young woman called Caddie, who is in bed with a young man called Pip. They are both in their last year of school, and the story spans the last couple of months of that year, through their eyes. However, the tricksiness starts here, because Caddie’s voice is first person, while Pip’s is third person subjective. Why? An author doesn’t make these decisions lightly, so I usually want to know why. It’s particularly interesting here because this is a male author choosing to write his female character in first person, and the male in third person. I’ll come back to this because right now you are probably wanting to know more about the actual story than these technicalities!

“This is Australia” (Pip’s friend, Stu)

So, the story. Caddie and Pip have been in a relationship for around a year at the start of the novel, but it’s geographically challenged because Caddie lives in the city (in Canberra, in fact) while Pip lives in the country, an hour or so’s drive away. Davies knows whereof he speaks because he too lives about an hour’s drive from Canberra. Caddie’s parents see themselves, according to Pip, as “high middle class”. They both run businesses, her father’s being an investment business called Capital Capital, and her mother’s an art gallery called Sense and Sensibility (because, as she apparently told Pip, “she was lapping up Jane Austen while her friends were still  playing with their dolls”). They keep “upgrading” their homes, and they fight a lot. Pip’s parents, on the other hand, describe themselves as “feral middle class”. Sydney escapees, they live in the not-quite-finished house they built themselves; they take a loving but laissez-faire approach to parenting; and they get on well. All this introduces the city-versus-country theme that recurs in Davies’ works, including Crow Mellow and his Meanjin piece about building his own home (my review). It’s pretty clear where Davies’ preference lies!

The majority of the novel takes place over 15 days, and chronicles, in lovely nuanced detail, the tensions that develop in Pip and Caddie’s relationship due to Pip’s decision to leave school only weeks before the end. Their thoughts and feelings are told alternately in chronologically named chapters, like “Day One” and “Day Eight (Still Later)”. Although Caddie is critical of her parents, in the way that teenagers often are, she’s following the traditional path of working hard at school and planning to go to university. She is totally into mobile phones and social media. Pip is a more independent thinker. He’s not interested in social media, and only has a phone because Caddie gave it to him. And yet, in a neat paradox, Caddie records her thoughts in a diary, while Pip records his into his phone! This is pure Davies, by which I mean nothing is simple or straightforward.

So, we have the city-versus-country theme, plus a subtle questioning of modern technology, including our reliance on it and its potential for misuse. A third theme relates to education. Pip’s decision to leave school stems from his refusal to live by external expectations that don’t feel authentic to him. He hates the “petty rules” and, as Caddie explains it, “the kind of society we live in that the education system feeds”. He has no alternative plans but feels incapable of “passively endorsing” a system he doesn’t believe in.

“What kind of person am I?” (Caddie)

Accompanying these more sociological themes are personal, psychic ones. Both Caddie and Pip are deeply concerned with their identity, specifically with what it is to be “a person”. Caddie, living in her “sheltered” house and uncomfortably aware of the material benefits provided by her parents, wonders not only “what kind of person” she is, but, more broadly, “what does it mean to be a person.” This question of personhood is frequently burdensome to her. Pip, however, has a different take, recognising that “he is only one person”. One of the challenges they face is negotiating their own and each other’s personhoods. Late in the novel, when their relationship is floundering, Pip wonders “did the new, distant Caddie undermine and diminish his sense of her as the person he thought he knew?” Meanwhile, Caddie “wonders who Pip is that he can hold this view.”

Call me, then, is essentially a book of ideas that questions, in a lightly satirical way, aspects of modern Australian society, but it’s not boringly didactic, partly because the ideas are explored though some engaging characters. These include two we met in Crow Mellow, making this book a sort of “companion piece”. The characters are the wise Phil Day, a teacher who, cheekily, happens to share a name with the book’s illustrator, and the ridiculously named cynic, Dick Scrogum (aka Scrotes). Scrogum’s opinionated banter and Day’s quiet conversations encourage Pip to dig a little deeper into the reasons for his decision.

These characters, however, are only part of why the book doesn’t become mired in earnestness. Another reason is that, surprisingly, as the book progresses, it becomes apparent that there’s more to it than just Caddie and Pip’s relationship; there is in fact quite a plot developing. Who are the mysterious callers on Pip’s phone and what do they want? Should we be worried about them? And what about the gun that Pip has? It is pretty much de rigueur that once a gun is mentioned in a narrative it’s going to be used, but will it? Is this book not what it looks, but, really, some sort of crime-mystery-thriller? You’ll need to read it to find out.

And now, I’ll return to that question I posed at the beginning about voice. Both first person and third person subjective voices offer easy engagement with characters but can only offer limited perspectives. Telling the story through two such voices widens the perspective, by letting us see Caddie and Pip through each other’s eyes as well as their own. In other words, we get a little touch of omniscience alongside close engagement. But, why is one voice first person and the other third? I’m not sure really, but maybe it’s something to do with the fact that Pip is the main protagonist, and that Caddie, as the “I”, represents both herself and the reader (who is, perhaps, likely to be more like her – female, sincere, somewhat conservative, but also open-minded and keen to explore). By being more directly in her head, we are encouraged to question, as she does, certain assumptions and values. I suspect too that there may be something autobiographical about this novel. Is Pip like Davies’ younger self? And does putting Pip at one step remove provide him with a little space to interrogate the boy he was? Certainly Caddie seems to question who Pip is more than vice versa. I’m probably wrong about this, but at least I’ve given it a shot!

As I say all too often, there is so much to say about this book. I haven’t even touched on the gorgeous landscape descriptions of a region I love. Nor on the clever segues, nor Phil Day’s whimsical illustrations, nor the humour, nor, indeed, what a beautiful book is it to look at, hold and read. However, I’ve written enough for now.

Call me, then, is not only an engrossing story about the psychic growing-up of its protagonists, but one that also offers provocative commentary on both humanity in general and modern society in particular. Them’s big boots, but Davies pulls it off, resulting in a book that’s both intelligent and fun to read.

Julian Davies
Call me
Illustrated by Phil Day
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd Publishers, 2018
363pp
ISBN: 9780994516541

(Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd Publishers)

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 23 Comments

Marilynne Robinson, GileadOnce again I have reason to start a book post with a discussion of the title, this time Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead. Gilead, in the context of this novel, has a literal and metaphorical meaning, literal because it takes place in the fictional Iowan town of Gilead, and metaphorical because “gilead” may also connote “hill of testimony”. This novel is, in fact, dying minister John Ames’ testimony of his life and values, something he is writing for his 7-year-old son to read when he is older.

Given Gilead was published in 2004,  many of you may already have read it, as well as her next two books, Home and Lila, which form a trilogy and which, I understand, cover the same people but from different perspectives. I read Gilead with my reading group. Responses were mixed, but many of us were interested enough to want to read Lila, at least, to see her perspective.

I was, though, one of those who liked the book unconditionally. I agree that it’s slow to get into, which is not helped by the fact that it has no chapters, excepting one “break” heralding a slight change of pace towards the end. This break occurs when a certain piece of information comes out about John Ames’ namesake, Jack (John Ames Boughton). It is around here that the book picks up in interest significantly because there’s a suggestion that there might even be a plot! However, given I’m a reader who doesn’t seek a strong plot and that I rather like spare writing in a melancholic tone, I was engaged from the beginning. It is melancholic, naturally, because the narrator knows his life is running out, but it’s more resigned than sad.

So, what is this essentially plot-less book about? That depends a bit, I’d say, on each reader’s perspective. For some the book is very much about theology and religion. John Ames speaks a lot about the Bible, about biblical characters and stories, and about death and heaven. Some in my group found his religion old-fashioned. And it is to some extent – partly because of its era. Ames was born in 1880 and the book is set in 1956 when he is 76 years old. John Ames also talks a lot about his family – his father and grandfather, in particular, who were both ministers. Now, Ames’ being born in 1880 means his father, and grandfather, were alive during the Civil War. We learn quite a bit about the history of the abolitionists in Iowa and Kansas. Ames’ grandfather was a John Brown follower, which meant that he was not above using violence to achieve the goal. His father on the other hand, having seen what his father did and thought, was a pacifist. Most of my reading group enjoyed this historical-cultural aspect of the novel.

But, what interested me most about the book was what I saw as one of its main themes, which concerns how to live a good life. In the opening paragraph Ames refers to a conversation with his young son. He writes

I told you that you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are may ways to live a good life.

Late in the novel, he says something much simpler than this, though. He says

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

Is he departing from the idea of living a good life, to just living your life? I’m not sure. Pretty much at the novel’s central point he refers a statement by theologian John Calvin that we are actors on a stage with God being the audience. Ames interprets this as suggesting that we are “the artists of our own behaviour”, and, further, that God as audience implies an aesthetic rather than (as well as?) a moral aspect to God’s reaction to us. He explores the implications of this role of God’s a little further but, while it was interesting, it’s not where I want to take this post. I have other ideas to share!

One of the main threads – or themes – in the novel concerns fathers and sons. This is pretty obvious, really, given the whole book is framed as a letter from a father to a son in which Ames discusses his wishes for his son, but it is amplified through his discussion of the relationship between his grandfather and father, and between his father and himself. The relationships are complex, as I’ve already suggested. But, his thoughts on these relationships are intensified by his relationship with and attitudes to his namesake, the aforementioned Jack, to whom he is a “second father”. It is Jack who forces Ames to reassess his values and attitudes, not to mention his understanding of his worth as a Christian minister.

The problem is that Jack has been a bad boy. He became involved with a young girl, and a child ensued – after which he scarpered, leaving his family to work out what to do. Ames struggles with his attitude to Jack – particularly when Jack reappears 20 or more years later, as Ames is writing this letter. He says of Jack’s behaviour:

It was something no honourable man would have done … And here is a prejudice of mine, confirmed by my lights through many years of observation. Sinners are not all dishonourable people. But those who are dishonourable never really repent and never really reform … in my experience, dishonour is recalcitrant.

This is his own view, he admits, because “no such distinction occurs in Scripture”. Again, we are turned to formal theology, but again, I am going to turn away. The point for me is, regardless of what is “scriptural” or not, that Ames struggles with the idea of forgiveness, of acting with grace towards Jack. This forms his inner conflict as he considers father-son relationships, his preaching to his flock, and his relationship with his old friend and Jack’s father, Boughton. It is through this conflict, through finally opening himself to really listen to Jack, that he comes to a deeper more all-encompassing idea of what “grace” and, within that, forgiveness, really mean.

And that’s why I liked this book. It’s quiet but it deals with the essence of what confronts each of us every day in our relationships with each other. It deals with the disquietude that we all confront when people don’t behave in the ways we think they ought. Ames describes it as “that old weight in the chest, telling me there is something I must dwell on, because I know more than I know and must learn it from myself.” You don’t have to be a minister or a Christian to have the same hope that John Ames does, which is “to die with a quiet heart”. Gilead is, to me, a lovely book about what it means to be human and to live with humanity.

Marilynne Robinson
Gilead
London: Virago, 2006
282pp.
ISBN: 9781844081486