Review

Hartmann Wallis, Who said what, exactly (#BookReview)

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Hartmann Wallis, Who said what exactlyNever mind Hartmann Wallis’ question Who said what, exactly, I want to know who Hartmann Wallis is, exactly! You would think the author bio at the front of the book might tell you, now wouldn’t you? But, no. Well, not exactly. There is an author bio, and it does tell you stuff – truthful stuff such as the titles of two previous books he had written – but at the end of it I was none the wiser. I was starting to think that it was all part of a big joke …

And, in a way it is, but more on that anon. First, I can tell you that I did suss out who Hartmann Wallis is – it’s Robin Wallace-Crabbe who has also written under another pseudonym, Robert Wallace. You can read all about him – them – in Wikipedia which describes him “as a curator of exhibitions, literary reviewer, cartoonist, illustrator, book designer, publisher and a commenter on art”. That “cv” goes someway towards explaining Who said what, exactly. 

Now, when Finlay Lloyd sent me this book, a year ago – I’m so embarrassed – publisher Julian Davies wrote “not sure if this strange little book will engage you, but here it is for you to take a look”. Well, it did engage me – from the beginning. However, I am (almost) lost for words on how to write about it, but will give it my best shot.

Davies opens his letter by describing the book as containing “playful, punchy, iconoclastic poetry”. It is that, but I would also add “clever” and “erudite”, although those words could put people off giving it a go. That would be a shame, because you don’t have to understand all the allusions, all the references, to enjoy or even understand the poems. They are best read as playfully as they have been presented – and if you do that, you get the gist, and sometimes get deeper meanings too!

The poems start on the book’s cover, with one called “Left side of the temple of sorrow”. It opens:

‘Think about it God is dead and has left
The intellectual property rights relating to
Just about everything to a bunch of American
Corporations. Way to go He reckoned they said.

The poem then turns to “real” property, and has digs at religious organisations and banks. The opening poem in the book itself mocks – well – poetry (or readers of poetry, or both):

They don’t make poems like they used to anymore,
I’m thinking about poems with stories, the sort of thing
To excite teenagers, to make men languishing in jail
Feel better about their potential …
(from “At the end of the rainbow there’s a pot of gold”)

It then goes on to suggest the sort of “heroic” story that would appeal to “People out here in ‘don’t-give-us-any-more-poetry-land'”, a story, perhaps, about a man who steals from an old man who has fallen over in the street. Are you getting the drift now?

The poems tackle all sorts of subjects, from the dullness of suburbia to the pretensions of art (in its widest meaning); from the smugness of modern life, its sense of entitlement, its concern for doing things the approved way, to the ills (and cruelties) of our world. Take this, for example:

Kids barricaded among, haha, educational toys
With buttons to press, lead free etc., and books
Encoded, decoded to colour in; why not to burn?
(from “Of birds and these”)

And this, on reading

… an anthology
Of 1971 and earlier poetry;
Couldn’t believe the classical references,
The ‘I’m going to grant you
A look into my mind’.
[…]
In the anthology no reference to war raging in Vietnam.
(from “Anthology”)

There is joy in wordplay; there are strange segues; there’s dialogue, characters, and narratives; there are allusions to history, religion, art; there’s pathos, even. These poems keep you on your toes, but they also make you laugh (or grimace).

The poems are supported by illustrations by Phil Day, whom you’ve met before in this blog in my review of Crow mellow. The drawings are black and white, sometimes child-like, sometimes not, sometimes representational, sometimes not, sometimes complete, but mostly more unfinished-looking. In other words, they are a bit wild, and thus support the poetry beautifully, whether or not the link between text and image is clear.

Is this “good” poetry? I’m not sure I’m qualified to tell – and anyhow it’s not really even the point – but I did enjoy the poems. I liked their irreverence, and the heart (and intellect) behind it all.

Hartmann Wallis
(with drawings by Phil Day)
Who said what, exactly
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2016
??pp. [no pagination provided and I’m not going to count them!]
ISBN: 9780994516510

(Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd)

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Too afraid to cry (#BookReview)

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ANZ Lit Lovers Indigenous Literature Week bannerHaving reviewed Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha woman Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poetry collection, Inside my mother (my review) for Lisa’s ANZlitLovers Indigenous Literature Week, 2017, I decided to also read her 2012 memoir, Too afraid to cry. It filled in a lot of gaps, which is not necessary to appreciate or comprehend the poetry but which does deepen the understanding.

The memoir’s dedication starts with the lines:

this is a poetic memoir
a story of healing
not burdened by blame

And that is pretty well what it is. It’s not an angry book, so much as a sorrowful one. Sorrow about the abuses and losses that affected her childhood and early adulthood, in particular. The sorrow starts early, when she’s young, and abused. She writes of her uncle rubbing her leg inappropriately, and progressing to assault, though she doesn’t say that because she’s only 7 years old. However, while she may not have the language to analyse what was happening to her, she does have the language to describe the feelings:

I felt the icy wind inside my head begin to blow. I could not move. The icy wind is very dangerous.

This “icy wind” becomes a metaphor throughout the book for the abuse, for her memory of it, and for its impact on her psyche until she can no longer cry – “the ice block had turned to stone, and now there was no moisture left inside me”. Hence the title of the memoir.

So, to summarise the book before I delve any further, Too afraid to cry is the story of a young indigenous baby adopted by a non-indigenous family. It’s a good loving family, with parents who, unable to have children, adopted four – two from the mission – and fostered another. But this family, as loving as it is, is a deeply religious one which does not understand the pain experienced by children from a different culture to its own. The result is that Eckermann is left to contend with racism and abuse that she, too, does not initially understand. Here, for example, is a schoolyard experience:

[I] didn’t notice that they had begun to form a circle around me, but I did notice that the icy wind was blowing inside my head and was starting to freeze my guts. Someone held me while other hands pulled my underpants down. There was a strange noise in my ears, like a faraway scream, but I could still hear the sounds of those doing the laughing and teasing. They said they wanted to know if I was the same as other girls. Someone laughed, saying they didn’t know if ‘boongs’ were different. I was frozen with the icy wind roaring through my body. I didn’t want to know what a ‘boong’ was.

Note the “icy wind” again. As childhood turns to adolescence, Eckermann, who had been an excellent student, begins to withdraw from her family and turns instead to alcohol and drugs to cope with the pain and sense of disconnect. It’s not a surprising story, but it’s a useful one for those who don’t understand what disconnection from one’s own culture can do, particularly in a society where difference is not tolerated. Eckermann learns much later, apparently, of the ridicule her adoptive mother had faced for having aboriginal children.

Anyhow, gradually, after many experiences, painful ones, risky ones and some more positive, Eckermann finds her way to her own culture, and healing begins:

Slowly the stone inside me turned to ice and then the ice began to melt. I felt real tears on my face for the first time in my adult life.

What’s remarkable about the memoir – something you may have guessed from what I’ve written – is her ability to get into her head at the time, to write from the point of view of the age and person she was when the things she describes happened, rather writing them as memory that she is now reflecting and commenting on. Of course the telling of the experience, the choosing of which experiences to tell, is a form of commentary, but I’m sure you get my point.

The memoir is remarkable for other reasons too. It’s told in 92 short anecdotal chapters, which are divided into four parts. The style is spare, with short, simple sentences. This is a book which shows rather than tells. Much of the commentary is conveyed through poems inserted between some of the chapters, such as “Heroin” between Chapters 45 and 46. It’s a short poem, like most of hers, and uses repetition and powerful wordplay on the word “arms”, to invoke prostitution, loving and heroin. The last stanza reads:

in their arms
they survive
a modern world.

Some of the poems appear again – the same or sometimes changed* – in Inside my mother.

Another aspect of the memoir, which adds to its sense of almost mythic universality, though is probably also done to protect individuals, is her minimal use of actual names. Her siblings, for example, include Big brother, Foster brother, and some relations are Aunty and Uncle. She does though name her mothers.

Too afraid to cry is an innovative and evocative memoir, which manages to convey hurt and pain, truthfully, but with a generosity that is humbling.

aww2017 badgeAli Cobby Eckermann
Too afraid to cry
Elsternwick: Ilura Press, 2012
224pp.
ISSN: 978-1-921325-29-8 (eBook)

* Changed, I think. I’m writing this in California, and my copy of Inside my mother is back in Australia.

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Inside my mother (#BookReview)

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ANZ Lit Lovers Indigenous Literature Week banner

Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha woman, has featured a few times on this blog, including in my review of her verse novel, Ruby Moonlight, and my Monday Musings post on her winning the valuable Windham-Campbell Prize this year. She is now appearing again as I review her poetry collection, Inside my mother, for Lisa’s ANZlitLovers Indigenous Literature Week, 2017.

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Inside my mother

Inside my mother is a challenging read, particularly if you are an occasional reader of poetry like I am, but it’s well worth the effort – for the insights it offers, and for the pure pleasure of reading a skilled wordsmith. As the title suggests, the collection’s focus is mothers – and there’s a reason for this, one all too familiar to First Nations Australians. Cobby Eckermann’s family has a history of children being taken from their mothers – her mother was taken from her mother, Cobby Eckermann was taken from hers, and then Cobby Eckermann had to give up her son for adoption. You can hear and feel the pain of these losses in the collection, but you can hear more too, because while these losses frame the collection, Eckermann doesn’t confine herself to them.

The collection is divided into four parts, which build up in intensity until we reach the last part in which the focus is squarely on grandmothers, mothers and children – and the attendant losses.

The poems, though, are not all grim in tone, they vary in form, and they are held together by recurring motifs or ideas, specifically, mothers (of course), sky, earth and birds, all of which make perfect sense given the author, her culture and themes. The first poem is one of a small number of shape poems. Shaped like a bird’s wing, and titled “Bird song”, it references the power of Indigenous spirituality, and ironically comments on how it was so often co-opted by the church. It gets the collection off to a good start. Part 3 starts with another poem about birds, “Tjulpu”. It comprises two-line stanzas, with a separate final last line, and attests to the power of birds for the speaker. “Life is extinct/without bird song”, it starts.

The first First Nations Australian poet I ever read, probably like most Australians around my age, was Oodgeroo Noonuccal (or Kath Walker, as my still loved edition had her). When I started reading Inside my mother, I wasn’t immediately reminded of Noonuccal, but when I got to the devastating poem written in the voice of a woman who drinks too much, “I tell you true”, I immediately thought of Noonuccal’s poems and their effective blend of the personal and the political. The poem is a plea for people to not rush to judge when they see someone “drunk and loud and cursing/Don’t judge too hard ‘cos you don’t know/What sorrows we are nursing”.

This poem looks simple. It uses those traditional rhetorical tools of rhyme and repetition to produce a singsong rhythm which satirically mocks the seriousness of the story it is telling. The effect is mesmerising. The second verse starts:

I can’t stop drinking I tell you true
Since I found my sister dead
She hung herself to stop the rapes
I found her in the shed

Other poems deal with traditional culture (“Vengeance”), political issues (“Hindmarsh Island”, “Kulila”, “Oombulgarri“), love (“Love 22/06/10”), stolen generations (“Severance”, “First born”, “The letter”), to name just a few. The meaning of some of these, particularly those I’ve listed under political issues, depend on knowledge of the politics they reflect. I needed, for example, to look up Oombulgarri.

Some poems are more personal (or, personally political!), such as “Eyes”, to give just one example. “Which eyes will she need today”, the speaker asks? Those of terror, or submission, or of “wonder or contempt”. I won’t tell you which ones she chooses, but they’re appropriate for the overall tone of this collection, reflecting its sorrow and its grit.

And then some, as usually happens with poetry collections, I found a little obscure, although, as I reread many for this review, more of them fell into place. You can’t rush poetry.

While it’s not my favourite poem in the collection, the last poem in Part 1 is appropriate to end on because it addresses the theme of this year’s NAIDOC Week. It’s called “Lament”, and is another poem featuring two-line stanzas, and repetition. Of the six stanzas, three are the same: “I can not stop/must sing my song”. And why can’t he stop? Because he’s the “last speaker/of my mother tongue.” Language. So important.

aww2017 badge

Ali Cobby Eckermann
Inside my mother
Artarmon: Giramondo, 2015
90pp.
ISBN: 9781922146885

 

Kim Mahood, Position doubtful (#BookReview)

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Kim Mahood, Position doubtfulKim Mahood’s memoir Position doubtful is a such a stimulating read. That might sound weird for a book whose subtitle is Mapping, landscapes and memories, but the thing is that it hits the spot in so many ways that are central to the issues confronting Australians right now. In other words, it’s about our relationship to place. Specifically, it’s about how kartiya* (non-indigenous Australians) comprehend our love for place, how we reconcile that vis-à-vis that of indigenous Australians, and how we go about respecting each other’s relationship with our land. Mahood may not explicitly generalise it like this, as for her it’s a personal journey – one exploring her experience of place and her reckoning of that with the indigenous owners – but I believe we can extrapolate her thinking to encompass something more universally Australian.

So, let me describe this personal aspect of the journey first, because this is, essentially, a memoir. It primarily covers the twenty years or so, from the mid 1990s, during which Mahood, chasing “unfinished business”, made annual trips back, from her Canberra region base, to the Tanami Desert region where she’d spent her childhood on a cattle station run by her parents, but which is now owned by the local Warlpiri people. She chronicles her desert art trips with Pam Lofts, the mapmaking she does to document country and stories, her various itinerant jobs, and most of all her relationships in the communities in which she stays, particularly Mulan (a Walmajarri community) and Balgo (where she works early on in the art centre).

Maps underpin her way of viewing and understanding place, and have become, also, the basis of her art practice. Early in the book, she writes:

In recent years I have made a number of maps with Aboriginal people, designed to reveal common ground between white and Aboriginal ways of representing and understanding country … The information marked on them is a mixture of Aboriginal knowledge – traditional camp sites, the birthplaces of individuals, the tracks of ancestors – scientific information about ancient shorelines and archaeological investigations, and the template of bores and paddocks and tracks and boundaries that represent the cattle stations and stock routes of white settlement. They serve different purposes – aboriginal, scientific, testimonial, environmental – depending on when and where they are used. Often there is a mismatch between my interpretation and the Aboriginal interpretation of their purpose.

So, this is a story about communication and negotiation, about sharing knowledge and understanding, about layers and multiple meanings, and above all, about respect for other while standing one’s own ground. The way Mahood navigates all this – the accommodations and understandings she works through, socially, personally, intellectually, scientifically, artistically and philosophically – is, really, what the book’s about. And it’s what makes it such a relevant read.

Now it’s my turn, I’m going to tell my side of the story

But of course, to write this story, she had to confront that issue I’ve raised here several times before of kartiya speaking for and/or about indigenous people. She addresses this in the last chapter (without specifically discussing the issue itself), when she describes visiting Mulan in September 2015 to tell them about her book. She organises several meetings, and reads “everything” that she thinks “might offend or upset people”. She is particularly anxious about her suggestion that the “popular version” of a massacre story she’s been told could be “a compilation of several distinct events” but she needn’t have worried. Her listeners nodded in agreement and pointed her to other people she could talk to.

This massacre “story” reminded me of another ongoing thread of mine – that one about “fact” versus “truth”. The truth is that massacres occurred – that’s not denied – but the evidence is now so murky that the various “facts” presented don’t always align. Does this mean the history, the recording of massacres, is wrong? I don’t think so.

a template of country infused with multiple meanings

The book is structured more or less chronologically following her trips, but she does move backwards and forwards occasionally – to finish an experience or flesh out a story. In between the more chronological, narrative chapters, are specifically reflective ones where she pauses to explore an idea. One is titled “Mapping Common Ground”. In it she articulates her ideas about language, maps, and being human. She says that “mapmaking was the common ground” on which she and her “Aboriginal companions put together our different conceptions of country”. She describes how maps “captured the imagination of the local mob”. They provided

concrete evidence of the knowledge that existed in the country, and they represented country in a way that everyone could understand, including the kartiya upon whom so much of the negotiations about land depended. … But the maps also aggravated the simmering arguments about who came from where, who owned which place.

And there, you see, is the politics. Politics is not Mahood’s focus but it is there, and the more you know about indigenous history, past and present, in Australia, the more you see it in the book. It’s there in the implications of changing a word from “custodians” to “ownership”, in the absence of middle-aged men resulting in matriarchies, in the “unintended consequences” of the 1968 equal wages bill, in the high prevalence of disease like diabetes, in who has or controls the money, and so on. It’s rather a mess, but “fixing” is not Mahood’s aim here, so she notes and moves on.

The title itself subtly references the underlying politics. Literally it means “of uncertain position” and is often used, for example, to indicate shipwrecks. However, when her father used the term, while navigating in the Tanami Desert, Mahood writes:

The term lodged in my mind as a metaphor for the way in which white Australians move through and occupy the country, especially the less accessible parts of it. And while the advent of satellite technology has given us the tools to find and map geographic locations with great accuracy, it seems to me that our position in relation to the remote parts of the country is more doubtful than it ever has been.

Metaphor, in fact, underpins much of how Mahood sees and explains the world, and I enjoyed that aspect of her writing, the way she finds some term or experience or object to reference bigger meanings.

Position doubtful is not exactly an easy read, but it’s a thoroughly engaging one. As memoirs go, it’s a strange hybrid, combining wonderfully warm and sometimes funny anecdotes about the people she meets and travels with, oral histories, indigenous creation stories, poetic insets, travel writing containing beautiful descriptions of landscapes, and of course her introspective reflections on who she is and what she’s doing. She allows herself to be vulnerable, and yet there’s a strong sense of self there too.

Kim Mahood, Gia Metherell

Bessie’s map, from the book and shown at CBR Writers Festival, 2016

I’ll close with some comments she makes regarding a trip to Lake Gregory with local owners and kartiya, including the palaeontologist Jim Bowler. It’s aim was to create “a cross-cultural document” showing “the interplay between  Aboriginal knowledge and western scientific knowledge in a form … easily accessible to both Walmajarri and kartiya“. She writes:

To have the ancient geography interpreted simultaneously through modern science and the Waljirri or dreaming, lays down a template of country infused with multiple meanings. While I don’t believe the creation stories in a literal way, they breathe animate life into the landscape in a form as potent and awe-provoking as the deep-time story Jim’s science tells. They complement rather than contradict each other.

And then, she talks of a discussion with Bessie, premier traditional owner for the area, in which they look at Bessie’s painting (see my image above) and the big painted map created during the project. As they talk, Mahood writes:

In putting together these two ways of conceptualising the same place, I experience a cognitive shift from which I will never entirely cover.

It’s a cognitive shift that is gradually happening throughout Australia – I hope – as we all come to terms with our different ways of seeing our history and our relationship to place and each other. This book makes an excellent contribution to this process.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) appreciated this book too. Her write-up fills in some of the gaps I couldn’t cover without writing a tome.

aww2017 badgeKim Mahood
Position doubtful: Mapping, landscapes and memories
Brunswick: Scribe, 2016
320pp.
ISBN: 9781925321685

* Kartiya: white people (there is no one indigenous word for white people)

Emily Maguire, An isolated incident (#BookReview)

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Emily Maguire, An isolated incidentEmily Maguire’s novel, An isolated incident, reminded me of Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things (my review). Sure, An isolated incident is a crime novel, albeit a genre-bending one, while The natural way of things is a dystopian novel, but both deal with the same fundamental issue, misogyny. Wood exposes the scapegoating of women for their sexuality, while Maguire tackles violence against women (and in doing so, also traverses some of the same ground regarding attitudes to women’s sexuality).

That Maguire is going to confront the issue head-on is implicit in the irony of her title. Twenty-five-year-old Bella’s murder may have happened in an isolated place, and such murders may be rare in her small country town, but as we all know in our media-fuelled times, violence against women is not isolated. Indeed, it happens with terrible frequency. Maguire makes sure that not only do we not forget this, but that we see it in its entirety.

I started by saying that An isolated incident is a genre-bending crime novel. Now, I’m no expert in crime fiction but I know enough to recognise that this book inverts our expectations. In a nod to the genre, the novel is told chronologically with the chapters named by the date, such as “Monday, 6 April”. However, it is not told from the point-of-view of the police or detectives, and it does not focus on the whodunnit aspect, though the investigation does provide an ongoing thread. Instead, the story is told through two voices – the first person voice of Chris, Bella’s grieving big sister, and the third person voice of journalist May who has come to town with her own demons regarding a married lover. This narrative approach enables Maguire to broaden her reach, to focus on things other than catching the criminal, because that is the least relevant – I almost said least important except of course we do want these perpetrators off our streets – part of the story. The most relevant is why does this violence happen, and how does it affect those involved.

Maguire does not, however, provide any answers to these questions. Who knows why it happens? But Maguire does show some of the ways misogyny plays out in everyday life, from the “all piss and wind … harmless” pest who follows women in his car, through men who won’t take no, the men in the pub who know about violent men but do nothing, the schoolboy who enacts his sexual attraction by creating ugly pictures, to actual domestic violence resulting in a wife’s death. It’s powerful because it’s all so real – and true. And, definitely not isolated.

In a telling exchange between May and Chris, May says:

‘… You don’t realise how much most men dislike women. And knowing that, most women can’t relax around men the way you do. Can’t let ourselves show that we like them even if we really do.’

‘Ah. That’s a different thing, though. I like ’em fine, but I’m never relaxed, not fully. It’s like with dogs. All the joy in the world, but once you’ve seen a labrador rip the face off a kid, you can’t ever forget what they’re capable of.’

Late in the novel, Chris ponders this whole issue of the things men do and don’t do, and, heartbreakingly, decides:

… and there are men … who are pure and good of heart and intent and who only want to be our friends and brothers and lovers but we have no way of telling those from the others until it’s too late, and that, perhaps, is the most unbearable thing of all.

Similarly powerful is the way Maguire captures bereaved sister Chris’ grief. Chris is a down-to-earth, small-town barmaid who’s not above taking the odd man home for a little necessary money on the side. Her grief, her loss, is overwhelming, threatening to upset her sanity, and Maguire captures it well, including showing the impact of requiring a relative to identify a body when that body has been horrifically disfigured. The memory of how Bella looked, and imagining how the disfigurement occurred, add significantly to Chris’s grief.

An intriguing thread in the novel concerns the role of writing. Through May being a writer, Maguire explores, initially, the exploitative behaviour of journalists. They sweep into town en masse, intrude on people’s lives, trot out their jargon-laden reports about “close-knit” communities, and when the excitement is over, breeze out again to the next drama. May is one of these, until something about this story, and about Chris, results in her quitting her job to stay.

She explains to her brother why. It’s because she wants her writing to help overcome “the fear, the injustice”, whether by helping to catch the killers or just writing about Bella in a real way rather than simply as a victim. A little later, she tries to convince Chris to talk to her, arguing that her writing may help bring justice. As she argues with Chris, we wonder how much of what she is saying is sincere and how much is desperation to get a story, now that she’s freelance. Maguire writes:

May had started speaking in desperation but as the words came she realised she had once believed all of this about the power of a well-written story. The quaver in her voice told her that maybe she still did.

Hmm, is this Maguire, too, arguing for the value of writing her novel – and for writing in general?

So, did I like the novel? I did enjoy reading it. Maguire’s writing is compelling: it was easy to engage with Chris particularly, and to be interested in journalist May. Maguire’s picture of Strathdee is convincing, and she successfully imbues the story with a complexity that offers no easy answers. If it has a failing, it’s that it’s spread a little thin across the issues – male violence, media intrusion, grief and closure – resulting in an ending that didn’t quite punch an emotional or intellectual point home.

Quite coincidentally, just as I finished this book, Mr Gums and I watched the 2008 miniseries of Sense and sensibility, whose script was written by Andrew Davies. Towards the end comes a line from Marianne, albeit not Austen’s. Having been “burnt” by the dastardly Willoughby, she asks Elinor,  “What do men want from us – perhaps they don’t see us as people but as playthings”. Fortunately, many (most, perhaps) men do see women as people, but these novels, together with books like Anna Krien’s Night games (my review), remind us that we still have a long way to go before there is true equality, true respect, between the sexes.

This book has been reviewed by several of my blogging friends, including Michelle (Adventures in Biography), Bill (The Australian Legend), Lisa (ANZLitLovers), Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest), and Kim (Reading Matters). Two didn’t like it much, the others were more positive!

aww2017 badgeEmily Maguire
An isolated incident
Sydney: Picador, 2016
343pp.
ISBN: 9781743538579

Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, A secret sisterhood (Pt 1) (#Review)

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Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, A secret sisterhoodMidorikawa and Sweeney’s book, A secret sisterhood, published this month, is subtitled The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf, by which you might guess why a copy came my way! And so, as homework for my Jane Austen group meeting this month, I’ve just read the first part, which is about Jane Austen and Anne Sharp. If this part is representative of the whole, then I’m going to enjoy the book – but will probably read (and post on it) part-by-part. Not only will that spread my enjoyment, but it will enable me to slip the reading of it in between other books.

The impetus for the book, as Midorikawa and Sweeney (M&S from now on) explain in their Introduction, was to suss out literary friendships among female writers. They argue that literary male friendships, such as between Byron and Shelley, and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, are well-known and documented, but not so much those of women writers. They say, in fact, that “the world’s most celebrated female authors are mythologised as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses.” Jane Austen, for example, is seen as “a genteel spinster”, but there is more to her story than that – and M&S set about researching it.

Now, Anne Sharp is not unknown in Austen scholarship, so after reading M&S’s section, I decided to remind myself of what I already knew about this woman. She appears in several of Austen’s extant letters (Deirdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen’s letters) and in many biographies, such as those by Claire Tomalin and Carol Shields. Where she doesn’t appear, however, is in the first official Memoir of Austen written by her nephew, James Edward Austen Leigh in 1869. Why is this?

Jane Austen by sister Cassandra (surely public domain!)

Well, as Austen scholars and aficionados know, the Austen family worked hard to create what they thought was a suitable image of their famous relation. Letters were destroyed, for a start, and Jane Austen’s romances were not mentioned in the first edition. M&S argue that the family wanted to emphasise her neat handwriting, the precise way “she dropped sealing wax on her letters”, her matchless needlework. This is perhaps a little exaggerated, but the Memoir, we know, needs to be treated with some caution.

Anyhow, the real question is: was Austen-Leigh’s omission of Anne Sharp from his memoir justified, or are M&S drawing a long bow? Well, as with all research, it depends a little on your perspective and/or goals. M&S want to argue a literary friendship for Austen, and Anne Sharp would be the closest candidate for this role.

One of the features of Austen section (as I haven’t read the rest) is the insight they give into the challenges of literary research. There is, we know, a dearth of primary sources about Austen’s life. We have her letters – but their value is limited by two main factors. First, sister Cassandra destroyed any she thought were not conducive to the image of Jane that she wanted to leave, but also, Austen’s most revealing letters would have been to Cassandra, and of course she would only have written to Cassandra when they were apart. Consequently, events which occurred when they were together were less likely to have been recorded and would not have been recorded with the same openness. (Austen did write to other people, but we have even fewer of those letters. Hands up who keeps letters!)

However, as M&S found, there are other sources and these have not always been fully researched (or perhaps not even known about). For example, Austen’s niece Fanny, for whom Anne Sharp was governess, kept diaries from the age of 10. M&S write that Fanny’s “unpublished notebooks and letters” have been “largely unmined” by scholars but her writings show what must have underpinned the “deep affection” between Jane and Anne, which is the fact that Anne was a writer.

So, there in Fanny’s diaries are references to Anne Sharp’s playwriting, and M&S spend some time developing their thesis from these diaries, as well as from other sources including sister-in-law Mary Lloyd’s “pocketbook” and references to Anne in Austen’s letters. Along the way, they also research some of Sharp’s own story. M&S argue that although biographers have generally ignored the rapport between the two, Sharp was in fact a “trusted literary friend”. They cite evidence for this, including that Austen asked Sharp for her opinion on some of her novels and that Sharp responded with some writerly commentary.

Also, Sharp was one of the very few non-family members to whom Austen gave one of her 12 presentation copies of the first edition of Emma. Two others went to the Prince Regent (who’d asked for a dedication) and the established author Maria Edgeworth. M&S cite this act as indicative of the esteem in which Austen held Sharp. They also argue that her sending a copy to Edgeworth demonstrates her desire to establish some kind of literary alliance or friendship. Was it that, or did she just want the endorsement of an established author? We don’t know but M&S could be right. Whatever she wanted, however, she didn’t get it from Edgeworth.

More evidence they cite for the importance of Sharp to Austen is that Sharp was, as far as records show anyhow, one of the last people to whom Austen wrote before her death. And, she was one of the people to whom Cassandra sent not only a lock of Austen’s hair after her death, but a couple of other mementoes as well.

Have M&S convinced me of this friendship? Yes, I think so, though I’m not sure they’ve completely proved Austen’s desire for “a literary friendship”. However, this first part of A secret sisterhood is a good read, not just because I love all things Jane but because of the open way they share the process and challenge of literary research. I expect each part will be different because the sources and existing knowledge will be different, but I’m looking forward to reading them and will share my thoughts with you (eventually).

Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
A secret sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf
(Uncorrected proof)
London: Aurum Press, 2017
306pp.
ISBN: 9781781315941

(Review copy received from publisher’s rep)

My literary week (8), a cultural life

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There’s always something going on here in the nation’s capital, besides politics that is and despite the belief in some circles that it is a soulless place! In fact, it’s so busy here – so packed full of things to do – that my reading has been pretty slow of late. However, I have been active, and thought some of my activities might interest you.

Blog mentoring – and a question for you

In my last Monday musings I mentioned that I’ll be mentoring two ACT Lit-bloggers for the rest of this year. We had our first meeting last weekend, and one of the issues we talked about – and it’s one we’ll continue to talk about – relates to what litblogging actually is. What is the difference, we want to explore, between litblogging, review and criticism? Where are the lines, what are the crossovers? We tossed a few ideas around, including the issue of informality/formality, but there’s a lot more to explore regarding content (and these concepts of review, criticism, analysis) and audience (who reads blogs, what do blog readers look for, and can this audience be widened?)

So now I’m throwing it over to my brains trust – that is, you who read this blog – because you cover a wide range of backgrounds. What say you to these questions? And how (or where) do you think litblogs fit into literary culture?

Coranderrk

I mentioned Coranderrk on this blog a couple of years ago. It was an Aboriginal Station in Victoria, established and successfully run by some remaining local indigenous people, and it operated from 1863 to 1924. I came to the story through the Bread and Cheese Club’s activity in the 1950s when they held working bees to repair the cemetery and restore the monument of leader William Barak to its rightful place in the town.

So, when I saw that the play Coranderrk, which was first performed in 2013, was going to be part of his year’s Canberra Theatre Centre season, I bought tickets, and we finally got to see it this week. It tells the story of the community’s attempt to obtain formal control over the land when local farmers started making moves to move them on! They felt the land was too valuable to be run by Aboriginal people (!), and so, as the program says,

the men and women of Coranderrk … went head-to-head with the Aboriginal Protection Board at a Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry to be allowed to continue.

The play tells this story primarily using words from sources of the time – mainly evidence and testimony from the Inquiry. The four actors – three men and one woman – each play several indigenous and non-indigenous characters to tell the story of the conflict. It is, really, like a documentary in play form (called, I believe, verbatim theatre), and it could have been very dry. Fortunately, I like documentaries. And anyhow, the writers do manage to inject the words, the story, with a sense of theatre, partly through little recurring motifs, like banter over a hat, and word plays, as well as, of course, the drama of the story itself.

It’s not a happy outcome, as you’d expect for the time, but the program says “The production aims to encourage a shared understanding of the past between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.” It is just one of the many stories that are coming out now about our colonial past and that we Australians need to know if we are to advance as a “real” nation, that is, as one that knows its true history.

Coranderrk
Written by Andrea James & Giordand Nanni
Directed by Eva Grace Mullaley
Produced by Ilbijerri Theatre Company & Belvoir
Canberra Theatre Centre, 14-15 June 2017

John Waters

John Waters, NFSAOne of my several post-retirement commitments is involvement in the Friends of the National Film and Sound Archive. Like most Friends organisations we volunteer for our “parent” body, and we organise events. Recently, we ran a bus tour of the suburb of Moncrieff, whose streets are named “to honour Australia’s music history”.  We enjoyed driving around the streets, being regaled by local music expert David Kilby with biographies of and entertaining clips from such performers as Johnny O’Keeffe, Jimmy Little, Harold Blair and June Bronhill.

Then, this week, we presented an evening, to a full house, with the wonderfully generous Australian actor John Waters who willingly gave up his time, driving himself to Canberra, to talk about his career in film and, at the same time, promote the importance of preserving Australia’s audiovisual history. The NFSA is “our nation’s album” he said, and “who doesn’t like a family album”. Exactly.

There was more to my week, including my local Jane Austen group’s discussion today of the plethora of biographies about our Jane – but I think I’ll save that for another post. There’s only so much culture you can manage at a time!

Rebekah Clarkson, Barking dogs (#BookReview)

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Rebekah Clarkson, Barking dogsThe best way to describe Rebekah Clarkson’s debut book, Barking dogs, is that it’s a portrait of a community undergoing social change. This community is Mount Barker on the outskirts of Adelaide. Once a farming community, it is now, says Wikipedia, “one of the fastest growing areas in the state”, the province of developers, the aspirational and the upwardly mobile, rich pickings in other words for an observant novelist. But, did you notice that I said “debut book” not “novel”? This is because, superficially, this book presents as a collection of short stories. However …

What’s in a name? It reminded me of the recent discussion about Junot Díaz’s debut book, Drown, on the ABC’s First Tuesday Bookclub. Drown is also a collection of short stories, but panel members argued that it could be defined as a novel because “the stories are too interlinked for us not to see it as a narrative whole”. Drown, though, does have the same narrator throughout, which Clarkson’s book doesn’t. Her book is probably closer to Tim Winton’s The turning. Like Barking dogs, its stories are set in the same place, and it has some recurring characters, though, from memory, I’d say recurring characters are a stronger feature of Clarkson’s book.

The question is, of course, does any of this matter? Not really, except that calling it a novel might attract more readers – you know, those who say they don’t like short stories. And, it is always relevant to consider form, even if, in the end, the actual label is irrelevant.

The form, style and structure of Barking dogs, do, in fact, give us much to consider. There are, for example, 13 stories. Are we meant to consider the “negative” implications of the number 13 in terms of this community’s future? Why does Clarkson start the collection with a troubling story (“Here we lie”) set at a later time in the book’s chronology, and end with a story set at the earliest time (“If it wasn’t this”)? The fact that this last story, although set in the seemingly idyllic rural days, ends rather bleakly on the image of a tree “alone, stark and bare” suggests that Clarkson recognises the complexity in all communities. Again, I was reminded of Pulitzer prize-winning author Paul Beatty on the First Tuesday panel talking about how he sometimes plays around with the order of the stories in Drown, and how this changes its impact.

Regardless of the overall intention, though, the stories make great reading. Whether they are told 1st, 2nd or 3rd person, and whether the narrator is male or female, young, middling or older, or struggling financially or more well-off, Clarkson is able to get inside her characters’ heads. She captures, and explores, the feelings, values and thoughts, the confusions, uncertainties, and pretensions, of her town’s inhabitants. We can “see” it all: the struggle to pay mortgages, to maintain meaningful marriages, to raise their children (or to conceive them in the first place), to get on with their neighbours, to achieve the lives to which they aspire.

A number of motifs run through the book, including the murdered girl Sophie Barlow (whose family appears in the second story, “Something special, something rare”, but whose story is never fully told), the Wheeler family which forms the main connecting thread in the collection, and of course the barking dogs of the title. These, together with the setting, contribute to the coherence of the whole.

Some stories stood out more than others. This may say more about my particular interests, rather than the quality of the stories, but it may also be that the stories that are more connected by characters are more engaging because of the story development they entail. It’s a book that would bear multiple readings, because even skimming it for this review revealed further links and connections that I missed on my first pass.

The overall theme, that of a community going through change, is beautifully encapsulated in the story “Hold me close”, in which the recently widowed Edna, a long-term resident of the town’s now rural outskirts, struggles to understand the aspirations and lifestyle of her daughter, Andrea, who has moved back to the area. Andrea lives in a “ex-display home village” and, Edna thinks, is more interested in appearance than substance. This tension between striving for success and being, hmm, more real is played out in various ways in the other stories.

The Wheelers

But, perhaps the best way to illuminate the book is to look briefly at how the Wheeler family is woven through the book. The Wheelers are 49-year-old Malcolm, a successful management professional, his confident teacher wife, Theresa, their 11-year-old son Martin who’s been diagnosed with Asperger’s, and Jasper, their barking dog. They epitomise the new families in the area – their aspirations, their values, and their problems – and at least one of them appears, or is referred to, in seven of the stories. The first references are in passing. In “Something special, something rare”, Martin has been physically bullied by Liam Barlow, but we don’t meet him specifically, and in the following story “World peace” he is again referred to, this time by one of his classmates. We gather he’s a little different, and doesn’t fit in well with the normal schoolyard cut-and-thrust.

The next four stories (4th, 7th, 9th and 11th) in which they appear are told from their perspectives, the first two from Malcolm’s, then one from Martin’s, and finally Theresa’s. I don’t want to give too much away, but we get the picture of a fairly kind, laissez-faire husband married to a more go-ahead, shall we say, proactive, wife. In the fourth story, “Raising boys”, we also meet their barking dog who is bothering his neighbour, and in the seventh, which is, structurally, the central story, Malcolm receives some terrible news which provides the book’s emotional heart. The penultimate story, “Jasper”, is shocking. It exposes the cracks in “society today”, such as unrealistic aspirations, lack of neighbourly communication, fractured marital relationships.

Interestingly, while the stories are not presented chronologically, the Wheelers’ “story” is, giving the book a clear narrative arc. The overall order, perhaps, provides its thematic one, one that warns against rose-coloured glasses about the past.

Unfortunately, I am using an uncorrected proof copy from which quotes are forbidden (though I have “quoted” one or two phrases which I hope is okay!). However, I do want to briefly mention the writing, which maintains an effective satirical tone while also conveying a level of tenderness for the characters. There’s some lovely irony too. We know for example, that poor Graham Barlow’s vision for his business, Winners, is unlikely to be realised (“Something special, something rare”), and that Gladeview Park, where many of our characters live, does not provide the “Serene and fun-filled living” environment promised on the estate’s sign (“Jasper”).

Barking dogs offers a thoughtful, intelligent look at contemporary suburban life. It explores what a pristine, homogenous white middle-class enclave might look like. Unfortunately, it looks more like a bunch of isolated individuals than a healthy community, partly because the pressures that drive them seem to prevent real engagement with each other. It doesn’t need to be this way.aww2017 badge

Rebekah Clarkson
Barking dogs (Uncorrected bound proof)
South Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2017
240pp.
ISBN: 9781925475494

(Review copy courtesy Affirm Press)

Linda Neil, All is given (#BookReview)

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Linda Neil, All is given, coverLinda Neil’s second book, All is given, is subtitled “a memoir in songs”.  I wondered if this meant her memoir would be structured around specific songs – but that’s probably way too prosaic an idea. Certainly, it’s not what I got! I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I didn’t know of Linda Neil, who is described in the brief author bio as “writer, songwriter and documentary-producer”, but I did enjoy getting to “know” her through this book.

The memoir starts with “Prologue: Songbook”, and immediately I had one of those glimmers of enlightenment because she opens with the end of a house concert. Now, friends of ours hold house concerts. They are such wonderful to-be-treasured occasions, which provide a beautiful way of enjoying music away from big formal concert halls or noisy popular venues. For the performer, however, there are challenges. The concert that Neil opens her memoir on finished at 11pm, and she was hungry, not to mention “spent” after nearly three hours of “singing and telling stories”. Not so, necessarily, the audience. They were energised, inspired, and wanting to talk with her in this lovely intimate venue! So, with food from her host in her hand she sits to chat with one of these people – and discovers that what the woman really wanted to do was share her own stories, which had been stimulated by the concert. Neil, as it turned out, enjoyed hearing her stories – but I learnt a lesson about house-concert etiquette!

Another issue comes up in this opening chapter which attracted my attention. She says that many people think love songs, which she was singing, are autobiographical. However, she writes,

in my experience, they may well be inspired by real people, but the form of a song means that, from this basis of fact, changes need to be made. A bass line is added perhaps. Something high is included. A man becomes a woman. A five-letter name expands to eight …

and so on. The point is, “the facts may not always be true, but the feelings certainly are”. “YES”, I wrote in the margin. And I loved her rider: “and if some events did not happen exactly the way they are described, perhaps they should have”. Haha! Love it. That is what creativity, and living, are about…

Hence, she writes in the last paragraph of this opening chapter:

So think of this collection of stories as a book of songs that contains improvisations and variations on themes of truth. If you listen closely enough you might even be able to hear the fabric of facts and fiction as they are stitched together.

What follows are delightful, non-chronological, stories of travel. This book, in fact, is as much travel memoir as a musical one, and as much about travel to the self as about the places she visits – Shanghai, Paris, Kathmandu, Kolkata, Ulaanbaatar, to name a few – though she writes engagingly about them too.

… a pilgrim of the imagination …

All is given is just a lovely read. Neil presents as a person with such an open heart and curious mind, with such a willingness to give things a go and to test her own preconceptions, that she can’t help but be interesting to read. And when you add to this, her clear, fresh prose, well, you have a book that is a winner on multiple levels. Here, for example, she’s in Paris:

Sometimes a city is the kind of place where, despite being on your own, you are never alone.  Where sitting under a statue or leaning over a balustrade of a bridge is an invitation. You have to discern very quickly, though, who might waylay you, who might waste your time and who might be, like you, a pilgrim of the imagination on a voyage through change. But if your antenna is working properly, the chance encounter with a stranger might bring you something you need at that particular moment in time, something that might not come in any other part of the world, but exactly where you sense of wonder and curiosity has led you, across oceans and skies, out of safety into the unknown.

I wanted to share all of this, but particularly that phrase “a pilgrim of the imagination on a voyage through change”.

This is what the book is about. It’s partly, of course, about the places she goes, the people she meets, the seemingly serendipitous discoveries, such as the recording studio in Kathmandu and the YWCA in Kolkata where she meets a group of people volunteering at Mother Theresa’s Missionaries of Charity, but it’s mainly about the things she learns.

She learns, for example, on her first solo trip, which paradoxically is the last one described in the book, not to travel with the Lonely Planet Guide, because “travel was best unplanned”. It’s a lesson I’m starting to learn. I can’t imagine giving up the guides altogether – not being, clearly, a complete “pilgrim of the imagination” – but I’m gradually freeing myself from the shackles of “musts” to the wonders of “let’s explore”. She experiences the “gift of stories – of listening to and receiving them, of being in the right place at the right time”. This is “the magic of travel”. She learns that she can sometimes be “prim”, when she lectures a young girl on modest dressing in India, where she was “once open-minded”, but on the other hand, that she could be “free”, in opening up to people, where once she “might have felt more cautious”. These are the surprises of travel.

She learns, too, in Mongolia that “freedom” is not the simple concept we like to think it is, that for many Mongolians the initial liberation from Russia was “a catastrophe”. Her Mongolian friend reminds her, once again she says, that:

western narratives of history aren’t the only ones, and that … there are many ways to tell the story of our collection past.

A lesson we Australians are very slowly learning now as we come to grips with different versions of our colonial past. She learns, through this and other experiences, “not to romanticise places” where the reality for the locals is very different, but also to “be happy with tiny moments”.

And so the memoir goes. I’ve focused on travel’s lessons because those reflections spoke to me. Another reviewer could very well pick up the musical motifs, her journey through sound, or perhaps explore the organic way she intersperses moments from her youth with those from travel. The point is, whatever your interest, All is given is an engaging, enjoyable read by a writer-musician who sees that being “real and true” is sometimes different from “being perfect or even good”, but who often manages to achieve both.

aww2017 badgeLinda Neil
All is given: A memoir in songs
St Lucia: UQP, 2016
238pp.
ISBN: 9780702254093

(Review copy courtesy UQP)

Ian McEwan, Nutshell (#bookreview)

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Ian McEwan, NutshellLike Carmel Bird’s Family skeleton, which I reviewed recently, Ian McEwan’s Nutshell has a narrator who won’t appeal to those who don’t like devices like skeletons in cupboards or babies in wombs. However, repeating what I said in my review of Bird’s book, it all depends on the writer’s skill, and McEwan, like Bird, is a skilful writer. Consequently, when the novel opened with “So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in, what I’m in for”, I relegated my disbelief to the pillion and set off for the ride.

As you’ll have guessed from that opening quote (if you didn’t already know), our narrator is a foetus. In my experience, McEwan writes strong, attention-grabbing first chapters, and Nutshell delivers here too. Our foetus-narrator, close to being born, is forced to be party to, or at least cognisant of, a plot concocted by his mother, Trudy, and uncle, Claude, to kill his father. Ring any bells? Yes, he (and it is a “he”) is a Hamlet in the wings. This is a clever modern riff on Hamlet, exploring many of the same issues, such as revenge, action versus inaction, corruption. It’s also a commentary on what we could grandly call the modern condition – on our world which is “too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage”.

SORT OF SPOILER (so miss this paragraph if you wish)

If you know your Hamlet what I say next won’t be a spoiler, and if you don’t know your Hamlet, the part I’m giving away happens slap-bang in the middle of the book, hence is not, I’d suggest, a spoiler? So, with that fair warning, here goes. Nutshell is a tight, murder-mystery. For the first half of the book, the question is “will they do it?”, while in the second half, it’s “will they get away with it?” We are privy to most of the plotting and planning because our foetus goes, of course, wherever his mother does. However, this is as much an ideas-driven book as a plot-driven one so, I’m going to move onto some of the ideas the novel teases out.

McEwan is clear about what he sees as the “rotten state” (one of the many allusions in the novel to Hamlet) the world is in. There are references to world powers out of control. Europe  is “in existential crisis, fractious and weak”, while China, “too big for friends or counsel” is “cynically probing its neighbours’ shores”. “Muslim-majority countries” are “plagued by religious puritanism” and “foe-of-convenience” America, now “barely the hope of the world” is “guilty of torture”. There’s also the nuclear threat, climate change “driving millions from their homes”, the “urinous tsunami of the burgeoning old”, and our increasing loss of liberty in the service of security. For our foetus, though,

Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies. And now in commentaries. Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so long-lived.

It’s an attitude I like – and is what makes Nutshell not the bleak book it could be.

How does McEwan get away with all this?

The book, though, is not without its awkwardness. Sometimes the “rants” are a little too much, providing a virtual grab-bag of the world’s ills, from the loss of the Enlightenment’s rationality to the threat of North Korea. And sometimes our foetus-narrator is a little too knowing. Most of the time, McEwan makes clear why his narrator knows what he knows, including the limits to his knowledge, but sometimes our imaginations are stretched just a little too far. This is a very-knowing, very smart, highly articulate foetus, one who is not above giving his mother a kick:

In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She’ll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are better informed by the morning.

It is his “one morsel of agency” (and he uses it, giving, perhaps, Hamlet a lesson!) It is through these radio talks that our foetus learns most of what he knows about the world. Overall, McEwan maintained the conceit well, and I enjoyed the foetus-narrator’s view on the world he expects soon to join. Fortunately, my disbelief stayed on the pillion!

Besides this, the book is fun to read. There are allusions galore – not only to Hamlet but to a wide range of literary works. I would have missed many but I enjoyed spotting others, such as Jane Austen’s “two inches of ivory”, Julian Barnes’ “sense of an ending” and of course Hamlet’s “rotten state” and “a piece of work”. There is probably a bit of McEwan showing off here – flexing his literary credentials – but spotting allusions gave me little fillips of pleasure! There are also many funny scenes, including several involving descriptions of the lovemaking of the adulterous schemers:

I brace myself against the uterine walls. This turbulence would shake the wings off a Boeing. My mother goads her lover, whips him on with her fairground shrieks. Wall of Death! On each occasion, on every piston stroke, I dread that he’ll break through and shaft my soft-boned skull and seed my thoughts with his essence, with the teeming cream of his banality.

The question of course has to be asked: why choose such a narrator? I’m sure there’s more than one answer to this question. I have no idea what McEwan has said so I could be way off here, but early on our narrator describes himself as “an innocent”, “a free spirit”, a “blank slate”, albeit becoming less blank by the day. Is he the perfect naive (but certainly not unreliable) narrator, able to comment, “unburdened by allegiances and obligations” on the murky world, or is McEwan suggesting there’s no such thing as innocence? Or, is his function to answer that question of whether we should bring children into the world. In the end, I think that McEwan’s message – or one of them anyhow – is that the world is worth hanging around for. It is “Beautiful. Loving. Murderous”, like Trudy, and our foetus wants to live it, hoping he will find meaning. An engaging read.

Ian McEwan
Nutshell
London: Vintage, 2016
ISBN: 9781473547131 (ePub)

(A reading group read)