Review

Emma Ashmere, The floating garden (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

Emma Ashmere, The floating gardenI had a little chuckle when, fairly early in Emma Ashmere’s novel, The floating garden, we discover that our main character, Ellis Gilbey, writes a gardening column under the name Scribbly Gum! Good name, I thought. If it hadn’t been for my school song inspiration, this would have been the name for me!

There’s another synchronicity for me, though, and it relates to the setting of this story. Last week I did a presentation on old Australian ads for an organisation I’m involved in. One of those ads was The charmed cup*. It was made in 1929, runs for around 8 minutes (can you believe it?), and is for Bushells tea. It also, coincidentally, contains footage of the Sydney Harbour Bridge mid-construction. It’s this construction which sets the scene for Ashmere’s story … so now, let’s get to it.

The floating garden is set in Sydney in 1926 when construction on the Sydney Harbour Bridge had started and houses in Milson’s Point on the north of the harbour were being  demolished with little or no compensation to the residents of those homes. One of those residents is middle-aged Ellis Gilbey, who has run a boarding house for over twenty years. At the novel’s opening the last of her boarders has left and she, with other residents in the street, is hoping against hope that some compensation will be offered. Meanwhile, in a well-to-do part of Sydney, south of the harbour, is 30-something Rennie Howarth, a young English artist who had “taken the outstretched arm of an Australian man she hardly knew and had sailed from everything cold, sad and stale”. Unfortunately that Australian man, Lloyd, who had brought her to a life of luxury, was also abusive.

Part 1 of the novel alternates the story of these two women, with more of the chapters devoted to Ellis. Whether these two women are connected, or are going to be connected, we don’t discover until Part 2 of this three-part novel. While we are wondering about this, Ashmere is busy drawing some parallels between the women – both have experienced brutal men in their lives, Ellis her father and then an employee in a house where she’d lived as a young woman, and of course Rennie her husband; both had toyed with theosophy; and both find themselves house hunting. Another parallel occurs within Ellis’s life when, destitute, she is taken in by an older woman, and then, when that doesn’t work out, destitute again, she is taken in by another older, but this time kinder, woman. These parallels are not laboured, but provide a subtle foundation to the story being told, and help hold it together.

Ashmere’s main focus is Ellis. In her story, we shift between past and present, while Rennie’s story is focused on her present. Ellis, we discover, had run away from her farm home, when she was a teen, after her mother died, and had found herself, rather by accident, in the home of theosophist, Minerva Stranks, aka Strankenstein, around the turn of the century. It was out of the frying pan and into the fire for Ellis, as Minerva is a cruel taskmaster and a charlatan, to boot. Ellis is sexually attracted to Minerva’s other protégé, the pretty Kitty Tate. Her belief that Kitty cares for her helps her survive her time in the house until … well, I won’t give this away, but by the novel’s opening, Ellis had been carrying guilt and regret for twenty-seven years.

We are not given the same depth of background for Rennie’s life before the present, but we learn that she’d had a couple of exhibitions in London before fleeing to Australia with Lloyd, and that she’d been a lively, fun woman before her marriage to a man who physically abused and emotionally manipulated her. In Australia her art changes from “polite English watercolours” to “bolder, flatter, earthier colours” that are all-round too confronting for Lloyd. She represents, as Ashmere explained in an interview on ABC’s Books and Arts Daily, the new modernist art movement, a movement which rejected tradition for something bolder. That’s certainly Rennie.

So, despite the parallels in their lives, Rennie works largely as a foil for Ellis, not only because of their class difference, but because she’s lively and risk-taking against Ellis’ more cautious approach to life, which is understandable given her greater age and particular experiences. If I have a frustration with the novel, it would be that Rennie’s story is not as developed as Ellis’s and that perhaps her main role is to be this foil or plot-device to move Ellis on rather than a character in her own right. This is more observation, though, than complaint, because overall the writing is evocative without being overdone, and the characters are engaging,

What I particularly enjoyed about the novel is that Ashmere does for the underprivileged of 1920s Sydney what Ruth Park did for the 1950s in Harp in the south. They are very different books in terms of their narratives and themes, but both exude warmth and sympathy for their motley crew of marginalised characters, and both are valuable for their social history. In The floating garden this includes evoking the about-to-be dispossessed Milson’s Point community, the charlatan fringe of theosophy, the colour of Paddy’s Markets, the energy of the artistic/bohemian community, and the opening up of land in the rural outskirts of Sydney, in Lane Cove.

The novel’s overall theme has to do with memories, guilt and grief, with the idea that you really can’t move on if you haven’t resolved your past. Late in the novel, as Ellis starts to understand the truth of what had happened all those years ago, Ashmere writes:

She’d grown used to her memories for all these years and now her grief – her guilt – had grown around them in the same way a tree’s trunk grew around a rock until both the rock and the tree risked mutual destruction if prised apart.

But sometimes, there can only be progress if they are prised apart – and prised apart they eventually are, of course.

The floating garden is a very enjoyable book. It deals with real issues honestly but gently, and it brings to life a past world in a way that enhances our understanding of the present.

awwchallenge2015Emma Ashmere
The floating garden
North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2015
243pp.
ISBN: 9781742199368

(Review copy supplied by Spinifex Press)

* Unfortunately, the ad is broken into three clips on this page. Clip 2 contains the Bridge footage.

Bacchus, Ruth & Hill, Barbara, First things first: Selected letters of Kate Llewellyn 1977-2004 (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 9 Comments

Ruth Bacchus and Barbara Hill, First things firstIt might look like I’ve suddenly hired myself as author Jessica White’s PR Consultant as this is the second post in a row that I’ve opened with her, but the coincidence was too great for me not to. You see, this week, White posted on her Facebook Author Page that she’d received funding for a novel from the Australia Council for the Arts, and exulted that “I’m so happy that I can a) afford to eat for the next 6 months …”. One of the several threads running through Kate Llewellyn’s letters in First things first is her struggle to survive financially as a writer. More on that anon …

First, how do you review a book of letters? Yes, I know I’ve done it before for Jane Austen’s letters, but that’s different. Jane Austen is long gone, and was long gone when her letters were first published. Kate Llewellyn is still, fortunately I might add, with us, so, as well as reviewing a book about a living author, which of course bloggers/reviewers do frequently, I’m reviewing something very personal, a book of her letters. She didn’t put this selection together – Charles Sturt University academics Ruth Bacchus and Barbara Hill did – but she allowed her letters to be published, “trusting us”, the editors say in their preface, “with the contents of her life”. And that, I think, is a brave thing to do. But then again, you have to be brave to be a writer, don’t you?

Some of you, particularly if you’re not Australian, may not know Kate Llewellyn, but she’s an Australian poet and prose writer. Her prose includes travel writing, autobiography, and what the editors describe as “a hybrid blend she has made her own and perhaps pioneered in Australian women’s writing – a sensuous journal, studded with poetry, laced with recipes and concerned with ‘the weather, domesticity, love, art, gardening, the names of plants, a woman’s simple daily tasks and her heart’s thoughts’*”. She also co-edited The Penguin book of Australian women poets, which I own and often refer to.

Now, back to my question of reviewing a book of letters. Late-ish in the book, Llewellyn writes in a letter to Ianesco (artist Ian North) about reading John Cheever’s journals:

I did not know at times if I should be reading them, it seemed even prurient. But I had to keep on reading … and to think he wasn’t even trying … just did it for himself … […] … sizzling honesty.

“Prurience” isn’t the word you’d use for reading Llewellyn’s letters, and these are letters so written for someone besides herself, but they were, initially anyhow, private and they contain a rawness and honesty, together with a poetic beauty, that struck me much the way it seems that Cheever struck her. This rawness and honesty is most apparent when she writes about her relationships with others (romantic and otherwise) and her struggle to survive as a writer. It’s this latter of course that Jessica White’s Facebook post struck a chord with.

“I wouldn’t want not to be vulnerable”

As a reader, I’m interested in how writers do it. How do they manage to write and live? Some, of course, produce bestsellers but they are few. Some have significant others who support them. But most, it seems, scrabble around putting together projects, applying for grants, undertaking speaking and teaching engagements to keep going. It is this, among other things, that Llewellyn conveys with fearless clarity through her letters. She details the challenges of co-editing the poetry anthology with Susan Hampton, and of the difficulty of finding a publisher when the first one fell through. She describes unsatisfying, if not downright unpleasant, experiences of some (though not all) writers’ retreats. She tells of sending pieces off to numerous magazines and editors and of writing applications for grants or positions as writer-in-residence, and shares the emotional and financial pain of rejection, alongside the occasional joy of success. She describes cobbling together projects, such as one which didn’t come to fruition with friend Marion Halligan. She loses confidence in writing poetry, and wants to change her prose style. She writes of “the spite and derangement of the literary world” and of the mismanagement of distribution. She wonders why certain poets don’t like her, questions why some reviewers feel the need to be cruel, and is aware that there are people on boards who “do not wish me well”. It’s an uncertain life, and yet, with her get-up-and-go spirit she writes:

I think there’s a lot to be said for perplexity and bewilderment. Certainty is not all it’s cracked up to be. (to Ianesco, 13 January, 1995)

So, I learnt quite a lot about the life of a working writer. I realise that, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, every writer’s life is different, and that each is likely to respond differently to the challenges, but experience tells me there’s a significant core in Llewellyn’s experience that’s true for many writers. What, though, did I learn about Llewellyn, herself?

Well, here is the challenge of course, because not only is a volume of letters, like this, one-sided, but these letters are a selection (and a selection, at that, of a period of her life). What letters weren’t included and how might they have affected our view of Llewellyn? Not much I think, because Llewellyn is so honest with her friends – and these letters are all to friends, many of whom are artists, writers and musicians – that you get a clear picture of her. She’s funny, vulnerable, emotional, warm-hearted, generous of spirit, depressed and lonely at times, subversive and yet a little conservative too. She can also, she’s aware, be rather full-on (high-maintenance, perhaps): “when I meet people I’m attracted to and with whom I feel great sympathy … I leap in”. She’s intelligent and, of course, creative.

One of the delights of the book, besides its various insights, is her writing. Funny that! It’s almost impossible to find one good example, but I’ll try. How about this description of a couple met at a dinner:

The former was a thin 50 year-old woman with husband to match … it was like talking to an oyster … a khaki woollen frock, grey hair, no colour anywhere, no lipstick … cold, grey, elegant, been everywhere, smoking, khaki skin, eyes like cold stones … I felt so defeated in my scarlet outfit I decided to try to get some reaction … (to Jerry Rogers, 19 June 1992)

Llewellyn, you have probably gathered, likes colour and life, and she likes “ardour … perhaps more than anything else in life”. Anyhow, I can’t leave it at one example, so will share a few more:

In fact, I think this town [Sofala] where not one building stands erect, but leans like a person into the wind, has only goats and tourists for income. (to Marion Halligan, 11 April 1994).

And

I swam in and out of it [Adelaide Writers’ Week] like a fish and took what came my way, be it seaweed or krill, but no bait, I hope. (to Marion Halligan, 11 April 1994).

And

… she [friend Jerry Rogers’ teen granddaughter] has been a real joy here … laughing like a gutter full of fresh rain after a drought, it is the loveliest laugh I ever heard. (to Ianesco and Mirna, 8 July 1996).

I will write another post or maybe two on this book – to share some of her thoughts on Australian writers, and a little of her humour. But, I don’t want to give the whole book away … which brings me to the question of whether I’d recommend it. Well, yes I would, but with, I suppose, a little qualification. This is a book of letters, and letters aren’t for everyone. With the best editing in the world, they can’t help but be disjointed. However, for me, Llewellyn’s voice is so compelling, her persona so open, and her writing so frequently funny, that I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent in her head.

awwchallenge2015Bacchus, Ruth & Hill, Barbara
First things first: Selected letters of Kate Llewellyn, 1977-2004
Mile End SA, Wakefield Press, 2015
299pp.
ISBN: 9781743053645

(Review copy supplied by Wakefield Press)

* Llewellyn’s own description of her best-selling book in this genre, The Waterlily, in a letter to Bob Boynes and Mandy Martin, 20 July 1987.

Virgil Thomson, Taste in music (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 4 Comments
Virgil Thomson portrait, 1947

Virgil Thomson, 1947 (Public Domain, from the Library of Congress via Wikipedia)

There are several reasons why now seemed an opportune time to write my first Library of America (LOA) post for 2015. The first reason is obvious. It’s June and I haven’t featured one yet. The second is because my last post was on music, so writing about an article by American composer Virgil Thomson seemed apposite. The third reason relates to an interesting comment Thomson makes about reviewing, recalling my recent post on the AustLit anthology of criticism.

And then there’s reason why this article, published by LOA back in February, initially attracted my attention. It’s because of Virgil Thomson himself. I first heard of him back in the 1970s as the composer of two beautiful American government sponsored documentaries, The plow that broke the plains (1936) and The river (1938), made by filmmaker Pare Lorents. I won’t reminisce about this now, but I enjoy noting these connections we make over our lives.

In my post on the Austlist anthology of criticism, I quoted the editors as defining criticism as  “interpretation”, something they differentiated from “reviews” which they saw as focusing on “evaluation”. In LOA’s introductory notes to Thomson’s piece, they quote Thomson’s explanation as to why, as music critic and editor for the New York Herald Tribune, he only used composers and performers as reviewers. He said:

It’s a writing job, but the subject is music and you’ve got to know a good deal about the subject in order to be believable. In order to be a reviewer, you have to forget whether you liked it or not and tell your reader what it was like.

Hmmm … a rose by any other name, eh? What Thomson calls “reviewing” is what the anthology editors call “criticism”. Whatever name we give it, I realise that I tend to prefer reviews/criticism that focus on analysing what the work is like, what makes it tick, more than whether the reviewer liked it. “Liking” is such a subjective thing and can depend so much on one’s experiences, preferences, personality even, whereas describing “what it was like” involves knowledge of the art form, the ability to “see” it in context, to understand how it does what it does, and to describe, perhaps, what it “means”. This is not to say that “liking” isn’t important, but that it is not necessarily the most important aspect – for me anyhow.

So, then, Thomson’s “Taste in Music”. He starts by differentiating taste “for” music, which he sees as the ability to enjoy music, pretty much indiscriminately, and taste “in” music, which involves liking certain kinds of music over others. He then discusses admiration versus liking, suggesting that “there are often striking contradictions between what musical people admire and what they like”. Admiration is about “reason” while “liking is an inspiration”. You can’t alter “liking”, he says, “by any act of will”. But “it will frequently alter itself … without warning”. I think we have all experienced that! Loving something, and then suddenly tiring of it, growing out of it perhaps.

Thomson’s main argument is that “development of taste” is not the main objective of music education, that the important thing is “understanding, that whole paraphernalia of analysis and synthesis whereby a piece is broken down into its component details, mastered, restored to integrity, and possessed”. This is true of literature too. How often have you heard people say that studying literature put them off reading, or off the classics. And yet, pulling apart books is the only way you learn to understand them, what makes them tick. Thomson goes on:

Persons unprepared by training to roam the world of music in freedom but who enjoy music and wish to increase that enjoyment are constantly searching for a key, a passport that will hasten their progress. There is none, really, except study.

Oh dear, he’s right, I know he is. And this is why I constantly say that my reports of Griffyn Ensemble concerts do not constitute reviews. They are reports of what I enjoyed, and what I made of the performance. I do not have the skills or training to review music.

Thomson also discusses the familiar versus unfamiliar in music. He writes that “the too old, the too new, the in-any-way strange, we resist simply because we do not know how to take them on”. We enjoy the familiar, he says, and this leads toward “a timid conservatism with regard to unfamiliar music”. He writes that:

The lay public will try anything, but it will be disappointed, on first hearing, in anything it has no method for remembering. We like the idea of being musically progressive, because progress is one of our national ideals; but we do not always know how to conduct a progress.

This is probably true of the new in all of the arts, don’t you think? “To hear music correctly”, he wrote, to “know one’s mind”, we need to be able to “hear patterns in sound”. This is what I feel about all music, but particularly new, unfamiliar work. I might sense patterns but on one hearing, and with almost no musical training, I don’t feel capable of “reviewing” it, of understanding let alone explaining what makes it tick, the same way I can, for example, with a novel. I am experienced at looking for patterns in literature, but not so for music. Thomson suggests that the untrained will “rarely know the difference between their tastes and their opinions”. Hmm … probably true.

His next point is that while professional musicians express “responsible opinions” based on knowledge, it is “lay opinion” which creates the “modes or fashions in consumption that make up the history of taste”.  Interesting. He admits that knowledgeable persons play some role in developing these “fashions” but that they can’t force the public to like what it doesn’t want. He argues that creators cannot behave freely with trendy music. You can’t tinker with what people like. For this reason, he says, unsuccessful or unfashionable music “is sometimes the best music, the freest, the most original”.

What I most enjoyed about Thomson’s essay, though, is that he doesn’t lay down the law. He knows music, like all arts I’d say, is a slippery beast. There “is no rule” that can’t be broken. He writes that:

Those who think themselves most individual in their likings are most easily trapped by the appeal of chic, since chic is no more than the ability to accept trends in fashion with grace, to vary them ever so slightly, to follow a movement under the sincere illusion that one is being oneself.

He then has a dig at intellectuals. “You can always sell to the world of learning” he says, “acquaintance with that which it does not know”!

In other words, the only real answer to understanding and appreciating music, is “labor, much study, and inveterate wariness [because] the pleasures of taste, at best, are transitory”. “Nobody”, he says, “professional or layman, can be sure that what he finds beautiful this year may not be just another piece of music to him next.”

So, having logically argued the meaning of responsible reviewing and the importance of understanding music, Thomson concludes that in the end “the pleasures of taste … are transitory”. The best we can do, he says, is consult our appetite about what we consume and after consuming it “argue about the thing interminably” with all our friends. On that basis, I think, the important thing is to enjoy what we read, hear or see, and when we write about it to be clear about the basis on which we are writing. Our readers can then assess our opinion on the basis of what they understand to be our background, knowledge and prejudices. What do you think?

Virgil Thomson
“Taste in music”
First published: In The musical scene, 1945.
Available: Online at the Library of America

The Griffyns take us north – way north

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

The time has come, I think, to talk about disclosures. I have been blogging for just over six years now, mostly on literature but also, occasionally, on other cultural experiences – including the Griffyn Ensemble. The thing is that Canberra is a small place and we who move around it start to get to know each other. This is not unusual, but it does complicate the issue of reviewing/blogging. I’ve attended seminars and/or read discussions on reviewing “in a small world”. How do you be “objective” (not that we can ever be totally objective) when there’s been personal contact? And yet, how many literary reviewers in Australia do not know, have not met, the writers they review? Similarly, for music reviewers, or theatre reviewers?  Few, I’d say, once they’ve been in the game for a while and are reviewing people who’ve also been in the game for a while.

So, what does this mean? To what degree are “reviews” invalidated by such connections? To date I have disclosed when I have received books for review, but what other disclosures should be made? I’d love to know what you think. Meanwhile, I will say that Mr Gums and I identify as Griffyn Ensemble supporters. We like what they do and would love others to enjoy them too. This, I think, you need to know.

Mt Stromlo burnt out telescope

Waiting for “Southern Sky”, in the roofless, burnt out telescope, Mt Stromlo, Nov 2013

Now that’s off my chest, let’s get to the latest concert, Northern Lights. It was unusual for the Griffyns in that it comprised one piece, albeit encompassing 14 movements, composed by their musical director Michael Sollis. As Sollis explained to us at the beginning, it was his response to Estonian composer Urmas Sisask’s piano piece Southern Sky. The Griffyns had performed Sollis’ arrangement of this, with narration by astronomer Fred Watson, in the Mt Stromlo observatory ruin in 2012, reprised in 2013. That concert too comprised one multi-movement piece. To compose his “response”, Sollis visited the Arctic Circle with Fred Watson in November 2014.

Now, here’s where I want to reiterate the comment I made regarding rereading in my recent review of Peter Carey’s Amnesia. The same goes, surely, for other art forms. Consequently, when Northern Lights finished I knew I’d love to hear it again because there was a lot going on: I know I’ve missed some musical connections and relationships, and some finer points of the story being told. But, I did enjoy it. Let me set the scene …

Griffon Ensemble's Northern Lights

Part of the stage set for “Northern Lights”

The performance took place in semi-darkness in the James O. Fairfax theatre at the National Gallery of Australia. We were given a glossy program booklet which featured photographs taken by Sollis on his tour, one photograph for each movement. It was a bit of a challenge to follow the program in the semi-dark but I managed pretty well. In his introduction, Sollis told us that, while Watson’s tour focused on the northern lights, he was aware of other lights too – particularly the long twilights – and that he wanted to capture this fuller experience in his piece. The semi-dark ambience, with occasional soft changes in light levels, was intended to convey some of this. I rather liked the dark – it certainly helped keep our focus on the music and the musicians for a start!

In keeping with the Griffyn Ensemble’s style, this was more performance than pure concert. Sollis incorporated both science and myth into his work, by paralleling a scientific narration by Fred Watson (via recording) with a Snow-White-like-fairy-story-cum-norse-myth about a young girl who, cursed, is banished from the sunny sky to a dark earth where the sun can’t reach. She must find the sun to break the curse. Consequently, the culmination of Northern Lights was not “The Aurora” (Movement 12), but “Celestial Sunlight” (Movement 15*). The story takes place over 24 hours, with the times marked against the movements in the program (except for the first and last movement).

Now the music. I guess you would broadly define it as modern or contemporary classical – but, before you think it, this does not mean it was discordant or inaccessible. It wasn’t traditional by any means in form or sound, but it was evocative music, impressionistic even, if I dare invoke that term.

The ensemble, in its current line-up, has been together for around 18 months now and they look comfortable together. It’s an unusual grouping of instruments but for the audience, or me at least, it provides some exciting opportunities to hear different combinations of sounds. In Northern Lights, Sollis pushed the instruments, including Susan Ellis’ voice, to convey a range of moods and sensations. We heard whales singing, water dropping, ice creaking, particles popping; we sensed the melancholy of the long nights and the joy of the aurora.

I can’t possibly talk about all 14 movements, so I’ll just mention a few highlights which I hope I’ve remembered correctly. In “Amnesia near a  Stream” (2) played by the full ensemble, I particularly enjoyed the swelling sounds of Laura Tanata’s harp to evoke dawn or, at least, the awakening of the girl sent to earth. I also loved the harp’s gentle repetitive phrases in “Goodnight Aurora” (14), but in other movements this traditionally angelic instrument surprised us with more grating sounds. There was a lovely, melodic, singing folk-like tune, reminding me somehow of the American west, from Chris Stone’s violin in “Under Ground” (8). This piece was accompanied by some beautiful percussive effects from Holly Downes’ double bass. “Floating” (9) featured Susan Ellis, with eerie echo, and the violin. Ellis also moved us with what must surely have been challenging high humming in “Emerging Dots of White” (7). Kiri Sollis was kept busy playing piccolo, flute and alto flute (thought not all at once!) In “Excited Particles Flying High” (11) the piccolo shone as the excitement built. The sound of sheets of paper vibrating and crackling at the end of this movement was wonderfully effective. Through all this Sollis was busy conducting (with his body or eyes), attending to the mixing in of the spoken word components, or playing his guitar or mandolin.

The overriding questions are, I suppose, how well did the science work with the fairy story, and does the music hang together as a whole work. I can’t answer that on one performance, but I certainly came away feeling I’d once again experienced excellent musicians playing music that engaged both my brain and my spirit. What more can you ask, really?

Ensemble: Holly Downes (double bass), Susan Ellis (soprano), Kiri Sollis (flutes), Chris Stone (violin), Laura Tanata (harp), Michael Sollis (director/composer plus plucked strings).

* Although the last movement was no. 15, there were only 14 movements, as there was no no. 13 – a nod, presumably, to superstition and perhaps to the mystical aspects of the journey we were taken on.

Peter Carey, Amnesia (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

CareyAmnesiaHamishSomewhere sometime ago I read that serious reviewers should read the book they are reviewing at least twice. I think this is good advice, but I admit that with so many books I want to read I rarely follow it. Peter Carey’s latest novel Amnesia is one that well warrants rereading. It assaults you with ideas and action that aren’t easily assimilated on the first read. However, time marches on, so to write this review I am going (or, to be honest, I’m choosing) to rely on the notes I took, supported by a quick flick through. Please read my review in this light!

Amnesia is a satire, and satires can be pretty tricky to read. They’re slippery. They can be funny, but not necessarily. They tend to be about ideas or issues, so their characters are created to serve that end and may not be fully developed or particularly sympathetic. This can make satires tricky to engage with, particularly if you’re the sort of reader who loves to engage with characters. Amnesia presents the reader with some of these challenges. It’s a romp, a thriller, a drama – but in the end it’s all about activism, cyber security and journalism, about politics and the relationship between Australia and the United States of America. I enjoyed it, though the pace was so cracking at times I found it hard to keep up.

The novel starts with a worm, the Angel Worm, which infects the computer control systems of Australian prisons, releasing their locks. Because Australian prison security was designed by American corporations, the worm also infected nearly 5,000 American prisons. Prisoners of all sorts, including asylum seekers, were freed. The U.S. is not amused. As the story breaks, our protagonist, Australia’s self-described “sole remaining left-wing journalist” Felix Moore, is being tried in court for defamation. He’s “grateful for a story big enough to push me off the front pages”. Unfortunately, in the sort of irony typical of satire, he soon finds himself out of the frying pan and into the fire, because, of course, the parents of one of the Worm’s creators are old university friends, Sando Quinn and his wife Celine.

So here’s the set up. Felix is destitute. His book is to be pulped, and his wife has kicked him out. To his rescue comes another old university friend, Woody Townes, who pays him a lot of money to write a book about worm-creator Gaby. Felix soon learns though that this book is not going to be his book expressing the truth as he discovers it, but a book that says … well, let’s just say that here the adventure, romp, thriller, drama, whatever you want to call it, begins.

What then is being satirised? Let’s start with the four main characters, Felix, Sando, Celine and Woody. They met as students at Monash University and became friends. They were radicals and activists who believed they could change the world. They organised marches and protests, they voted in Whitlam and the Labour Government, and they were affronted and angry by Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975. But, who are they now? One of Carey’s targets is this: what happens when radicals grow up? Woody turns capitalist property developer with hints of something worse; Sando is a politician who tries to keep the faith but discovers the compromises he has (or wants) to make; actor Celine sees herself as Bohemian but becomes seduced by the “finer” things in life and doesn’t want to mix with the working class; and journalist Felix sees himself as the tell-it-all saviour but recognises that in the process he has “become an awful creature”.  It’s not a pretty picture.

Underlying this is a thread exploring Australia’s relationship with the USA. There’s the Battle of Brisbane (a two-day fight and riot between American soldiers and locals during World War 2), discussion of US involvement in Whitlam’s dismissal, and, fictionally, fears of what might happen if the US extradited Gaby. (Julian Assange anyone?) Early in the novel, Felix agrees that Woody has a point regarding the extradition risk:

Everything we knew from life suggested that America would do what it liked and Australia would behave like the client state it always was.

Carey also satirises journalism, particularly the sort that prides itself on exposés in search of the truth. Felix becomes the pawn in a game to produce a story that suits the person who gains control of him – by whatever method they can, by money, say, or by abduction. Woody suggests at one stage that Felix make things up to put Gaby in a positive light, but Felix, who believes there’s “no such thing as objective journalism” argues that this doesn’t equate with making things up! Through the course of the book Felix moves (or, more correctly, is moved through mysterious mechanisms) from a classy high-rise in Melbourne, to a remote primitive shack on the Hawkesbury River, and thence to a motel room in the Blue Mountains. All the while he doggedly listens to tapes of mother, Celine, and daughter, Gaby, talking, talking, talking.

Their story of life in Melbourne, from when Gaby was born, significantly on 11 November 1975, is great reading. Melbourne-born Carey knows the city and captures its life, rhythms, and diversity beautifully. The writing is gorgeously descriptive at times, and often funny, but can also be biting.

I think, too, that there’s an element of Carey sending himself up. I’m not suggesting, despite some obvious similarities between character Felix and creator Carey, that Amnesia is intended in any way to be autobiographical. But, in several of the references to writers and writing, I detect digs at some of the criticisms that have been levelled against him. How about, for example, Felix’s comment at the end that:

For the crime of expressing pleasure that my book would be available to future generations, I was judged not only immoral but vain and preening …

Oh Peter, I thought!

To conclude, though, what is all this satire for? Well, the title says it. There’s a reason Gaby was born on the day of the dismissal, and that she becomes the next generation of activists (or hacktivists) – and the reason is that Carey does not want us to forget. He wants us to “maintain the rage”*, to remain aware and vigilant of what is happening, and of whose fingers are in which pie. It’s not subtle, but then what satire is, and it perhaps tries to pack too much in, but it is both an entertaining and a provocative read. I’d be more than happy to read it again.

Peter Carey
Amnesia
Hamish Hamilton, 2014
367pp.
ISBN: 9781926428604

* I drafted my review and then trawled the net, and what did I find but an interview with Carey in The Australian that says just this. I didn’t steal it, promise!

Richard Lloyd Parry, People who eat darkness (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

ParryDarknessCapeCommenting on my review of Helen Garner’s This house of grief, Ian Darling recommended Richard Lloyd Parry’s People who eat darkness: Love, grief and a journey into Japan’s shadows. I’m ashamed that I rarely follow up the great recommendations I receive here, and I admit that it’s odd that when I did this time it was for a genre I rarely read, true crime. But, I was intrigued because it’s about a crime in Japan, and Japan is a country that I love to visit. Fortunately, Ian didn’t lead me astray. It’s a fascinating book.

I’m not a big reader of crime, in fiction or non-fiction form, but I have read a small number of true crime books over the years, starting, long ago, with Truman Capote’s In cold blood. True crime books vary in emphasis, but the ones that attract me are those that throw light on character and society. This is certainly the case with Parry’s People who eat darkness which tells the story of Lucie Blackman, a 21-year-old English woman who went missing in Tokyo in the summer of 2000 and whose remains were found that winter. Parry writes early in the book that “the story was familiar enough – girl missing: body found: man charged – but … it became so complicated and confusing, so fraught with bizarre turns and irrational developments, that conventional reporting of it was almost inevitably unsatisfactory, provoking more unanswered questions than it could ever quell”.

And so Parry attempts to answer these questions. In so doing he covers a lot of ground. He gives us biographies of both Lucie and the man convicted of killing her, Joji Obara; he exposes Japanese discrimination against Koreans; he explains the role of “hostesses” in modern Japanese culture; he explores Japanese policing and the wider justice system; he looks at the media; and he tells the story of the devastating impact of the murder on Lucie’s family. He’s a good writer and tells it well, but I felt we didn’t need as much of Lucie’s biography as he gave. We needed to know a little about her, of course – including why she was in Japan working as a hostess in Roppongi – but, while it was relevant to delve into Obara’s life, I did wonder about the relevance of telling us about, for example, Lucie’s various friends and earlier boyfriends. Did he include all this to balance out the space he was giving to the perpetrator? Why should Obara get more airplay, after all? The victim is often invisible enough. Still, it’s a long book and could have been tightened a little in this area.

However, this is a minor niggle, because Parry has written a compelling story. I must say that I feel uncomfortable using the word “story” for such a devastating event, and even more uncomfortable calling it “compelling”, but I can’t think of any alternative language, so will just have to continue. What makes it compelling is that this is a crime story that departed the usual scripts. Parry analyses the hows and whys of these departures.

“conquest play”

The first “script relates to the murder: it was not, it seems, premeditated but a date-rape (or, “conquest play” as the perpetrator so chillingly called it) that went terribly wrong. Obara had been practising for many years his perverted idea of “conquest play” in which he invited (or lured) women to spend time with him, during which he would sedate them with chloroform or date-rape drugs to enable him to carry out sexual acts. His behaviour had resulted in the death, in 1992, of an Australian woman Carita Ridgeway, but her death had not been recognised as a “murder”. This, together with the failure of the police to follow up a number of complaints about Obara, meant that Lucie was the next unlucky one to not survive Obara’s gruesome idea of “play”. Obara, though, argued to the end that she died of a self-administered overdose.

“not Japanese”

The next “script” is the trial, which did not run the typical Japanese course. Trials in Japan, Parry tells us, “do not resemble fights, battles or sporting events, as the adversarial logic of its laws seems to prescribe, but rather ‘ceremonies’ or ’empty shells’, devoid of even minor disagreements.” However, Obara fought his case vigorously. Parry describes in great detail Japan’s justice system, from policing to the trial and appeals. In Japan, he says, “you are not innocent until proven guilty”. He quotes sociologist David Johnson’s statement that “Prosecutors, like just about everyone in Japan, believe that only the guilty should be charged and that the charged are almost certainly guilty”. Consequently, in Japan, over 90% of those committed to trial are convicted – and a confession is expected. Parry writes:

‘The police are experienced in persuading people to confess,’ a senior detective told me. ‘We make efforts to let the criminal understand the consequences of their actions. We say things like “The sorrow of the victims is truly deep” and “Have you no sense of reflection on what you have done?” But he was not that kind of person. With him those tactics would never work.’ The detective had no difficulty in explaining this quirk in Obara’s character, although he hesitated a little in spelling it out to a foreigner. ‘It is hard for you to understand, perhaps. But it’s because he is . . . not Japanese.’

Obara was of Korean background, you see, and, as Parry details, Japan does not treat its Korean citizens well. Why Obara was the way he was is too complex to discuss here – though Parry makes a good attempt in the book – but from the police point of view, he was “not Japanese” and, once arrested, did not follow the expected path of a charged man.

“the most terrible, terrible event”

Finally, Lucie’s family, rather than presenting “a tight-knit” unit as is so often presented in post-tragedy media reporting, was bitterly divided. Her parents had been divorced many years before her murder, but it was not amicable. Lucie and her two younger siblings, Sophie and Rupert, lived with their mother Jane, while father Tim lived on the Isle of Wight. Lucie was close to her mother, and often kept the peace between her sister and mother. If all this was a sad situation before Lucie died, it was devastating after. The parents could agree on nothing, from how they responded to the media to how they would inter Lucie.

Jane is a more shadowy figure, because she largely kept to herself. Tim though, with Sophie, was active in the search for Lucie, using whatever resources he could garner. Parry clearly got to know him well, and presents to us an intriguing, sometimes contradictory, man, one who said that the death of his daughter was “the most terrible, terrible event of my life” and yet who could say he felt sorry for Obara. Parry writes of this that:

Nothing better caught the complexity of Tim’s own character, his stubborn unorthodoxy, which to me was so likeable and admirable, but which to many people was repellent. Almost on principle, he refused the obvious point of view and the temptations of conventional morality. The high ground was his for the taking, but instead of marching ahead to claim it, he dawdled and skirted around it, finding shades of pathos and ambiguity where others could see only black and white. Onlookers were not merely puzzled by this – they were appalled.

Parry’s portrait of Tim is one of the most interesting aspects of the book, but his picture of a family destroyed is heart-wrenching. Here is Sophie on the day Lucie’s remains were interred:

What was most glaringly obvious was how Lucie’s death had changed the relationships between all of us, and how as a brother and a sister, and a mum and a dad, we were just four strangers sitting round a table.

It’s a desperately sad story, which had longterm ramifications for Lucie’s siblings.

“the drive to pass judgement”

Parry, an English journalist based in Tokyo, spent around ten years researching this book. He attended the very lengthy trial, spoke to family, friends, police and others involved, and read a lot of written material including letters, diaries and emails. He tells the story from a first person point of view, sharing his research process along the way. He is not actively “in” the story like, say, a Helen Garner, but we can discern his hand.

Humans, he writes

are conditioned to look for truth which is singular and focused, hanging for all to see, like a clear, full moon in a cloudless sky. Books about crime are expected to deliver such a photographic image, to serve up a story as dry as a shelled and salted nut. But as a subject, Joji Obara sucked away brightness; all that was visible was smoke or haze, and the twinkling upon it of external light. The shell, in other words, was all that was to be had of the nut; but the surface of the shell turned out to be fascinating in itself.

Near the end, he suggests that the “drive to pass judgement was one of the extraordinary effects of the case”. It is to his credit that he manages to steer an astutely observed but even course through unexpected scripts to capture the complexity of its “actors”, and thus of humanity. There is value in reading a book like this.

Richard Lloyd Parry
People who eat darkness: Love, grief and a journey into Japan’s shadows
London: Jonathan Cape, [2011]
404p. (in print ends.)
ISBN: 9781448155613 (ePub)

Jane Austen, Emma Vol 3 (continuing thoughts)

/ Whispering Gums / 29 Comments

I’ve now finished my re-read of Emma, and found that the theme of friendship, which I discussed in my Volumes 1 and 2 posts, did continue to play out in the last volume. In those previous posts, I suggested that Austen was presenting friendship as having both personal and social value, and I gave examples of different acts of friendship, some generous, others more questionable if not down-right self-serving.

Now, having finished the novel, I’d like to identify the different sorts of friendships which Austen presents to her readers:

  • neighbourly/kind friendship
  • “general” friendship
  • self-serving friendship
  • “true” friendship

Since I touched on some of these in previous posts, I will just expand a little more here. Neighbourly or kind friendship encompasses giving mostly practical support to others. In Emma this includes, for example, providing transport or food to poorer women in the neighbourhood. Many characters offer this sort of friendship, including, even, the unpopular Mrs Elton.

General friendship, on the other hand, is the sort of hail-fellow-well-met tolerance/acceptance of other people, with little regard to substance. Mr Weston is a perfect example of this. He’s “straight-forward, open-hearted”. He doesn’t discriminate against people on the basis of, say, class, but neither does he discern between sincerity and superficiality. And he’s inclined to gossip rather than hold his counsel. Here’s Emma on Mr Weston at the Crown where he is hosting a dance. He’d invited her to arrive early to pronounce on whether everything is in order, but she finds that he had similarly invited many other “friends”:

Emma perceived that her taste was not the only taste on which Mr. Weston depended, and felt, that to be the favourite and intimate of a man who had so many intimates and confidants, was not the very first distinction in the scale of vanity. She liked his open manners, but a little less of open-heartedness would have made him a higher character.—General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.—She could fancy such a man.

Such a man is, of course, Mr Knightley. Emma is, admittedly, a bit of a snob and likes to be recognised for her “place” in Highbury, but nonetheless, Mr Weston is presented to us as someone who “takes things as he finds them, and makes enjoyment of them somehow or other” rather than one who can be relied upon, for example, to make good judgement about character. He’s an appealing character, but not the ideal man.

Self-serving (or self-aggrandising) friendship is epitomised by the execrable Mrs Elton whose protestations of friendship, particularly towards Jane Fairfax, belie her real motivations, which are to look good and to spite Emma. She chooses her friendships on the basis of what they do for her.

And then there’s “true” friendship, the sort of friendship which is not swayed by superficial concerns, which is not scared to speak the truth, and which quietly works for the benefit of others without looking for praise or recognition. This is the sort of friendship offered by Mr Knightley, who tells Emma when he feels she’s behaved rudely or improperly, who consistently judges people correctly, and who is prepared to make sacrifices for the benefit of others.

There are readers who find the relationship between 21-year-old Emma and 38-year-old Mr Knightley a little paternalistic, if not creepy, but I’d argue these were different times with different expectations and mores. Emma is not a push-over and it’s clear that Austen sees their relationship as one built on love and “true” friendship. The last lines of the novel are:

The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade; and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detailed by her husband, thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own. “Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! Selina* would stare when she heard of it.” But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.

Before I leave this topic of friendship, I want to mention a somewhat related topic – that of civil falsehoods. Austen introduces the term through Frank Churchill who, on being encouraged by Emma to go hear Jane Fairfax play the pianoforte, expresses an inability to pretend to like it if the instrument’s tone is poor. He says “I am the wretchedest being in the world at a civil falsehood”. The irony, of course, is that he is being false to Emma. Emma, though, blithely unaware, tells him that “I am persuaded that you can be as insincere, as your neighbours, when it is necessary”.

Emma, more than any of Austen’s novels, deals with a whole community. Austen teases out the idea that communities survive on the basis of “civil falsehoods”, that these falsehoods are at times “necessary”. On another occasion, when Mr Weston invites Mrs Elton to the Box Hill picnic, stating that “she is a good-natured woman”, a disappointed

Emma denied none of it aloud, and agreed to none of it in private.

Emma, in other words, does the polite thing and holds her tongue. But Austen knows there are costs, and that there is a place for “civil falsehoods” and a place for honesty. Falsehoods, even civil ones, Austen argues need to be handled with care. By the end of the novel, it’s clear that she, like Emma, would always prefer “openness” to concealment. I wonder if this is why she, known for her sharp tongue, felt Emma would be a heroine that only she would like!

Re-reading

Noticing this friendship theme is just one of the delights I’ve had in this re-reading of Emma. Each time I read it, I notice more – both in terms of Austen’s concerns and her technique.

Illustration, Emma and Mrs Weston

“Jane Fairfax. Good God! You are not serious!” (Illus, by CE Brock)

One feature that interested me this read is the way she shows characters’ real love interests by whom they are watching (out for). It’s subtle and can be missed on early reads but it’s there. For example, while everyone thinks Frank Churchill is interested in Emma, Frank is watching out for Jane Fairfax. When Jane arrives at the Crown with her aunt, Miss Bates, it looks as though it’s Miss Bates whom Frank tends – “Miss Bates must not be forgotten” he says to his father as he rushes out to make sure they don’t get wet. But Miss Bates, in her chatter, lets drop his real interest:

My dear Jane, are you sure you did not wet your feet? It was but a drop or two, but I am so afraid: but Mr. Frank Churchill was so extremely—and there was a mat to step upon. I shall never forget his extreme politeness.

Similarly, when Emma and Harriet discuss a past occasion when they were with Mr Knightley and Mr Elton, Emma remembers where Mr Knightley had been standing, while Harriet only remembers Mr Elton:

“Stop; Mr. Knightley was standing just here, was not he? I have an idea he was standing just here.”

“Ah! I do not know. I cannot recollect. It is very odd, but I cannot recollect. Mr. Elton was sitting here, I remember, much about where I am now.”

Absolutely delicious. By the time this occurs, Harriet is over Mr Elton, and Emma is still unaware of her love for Mr Knightley, all of which adds to our delight in reading this scene.

Another technique which struck me was how often characters mis-read clues, how often they assume the wrong reason for an occurrence. Near the end, Mr Knightley holds Emma’s hand and is “on the point of carrying it to his lips—when, from some fancy or other, he suddenly let it go”. Emma doesn’t read this as love but as a sign of “perfect amity”. And when Frank, on his return to Highbury, visits Emma but doesn’t stay long, she assumes “it implied a dread of her returning power, and a discreet resolution of not trusting himself with her long”. However, the real truth, we realise on subsequent readings if not our first, is that he wants to visit Jane.

I could, in fact write three times this and more, on Emma, but I’d rather not. I’d much prefer it if these little tidbits encouraged you to read it (again!). At 200 years old, and despite its dated snobbery, this is a book that still has much to offer about human nature – and about skilful writing. I’m sure to read it again.

* Selina is Mrs Elton’s sister whom she sees as the arbiter of all things impressive.

Angela Meyer, Captives (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

Angela Meyer, CaptivesHave you read any flash fiction? Some of the pieces in Pulse would qualify but, besides this, I hadn’t read much until I picked up Angela Meyer’s collection Captives, which I bought for my Kindle last year. I bought it for a few reasons: I enjoyed and reviewed the short story collection she edited, The great unknown; I follow her blog Literary Minded; and of course I like short fiction. So I read Meyer’s book and was – dare I say it – captivated!

Meyer has divided her collection into 7 sections, the first 6 of which are titled using polarities – On/Off, Up/Down, In/Out, With/Without, Here/There, Then/Now – with the last being, simply, Until. The titles are as terse as the little works they contain. And a couple are very little, being just a couple of paragraphs, while the longest are, I’m guessing, around 500 words. This brings me to the matter of definition. How do we define flash fiction? Well, as with all definitions, there’s not complete agreement. Most agree that it can be as short as a sentence, but there’s no such agreement on the upper limit. Some say 300 words, some 500 words, and others 1000 words. The term itself was first used in the early 1990s, but there are other terms, including micro fiction and sudden fiction. I won’t discuss this further. I’m happy to be fluid about the definition, and I like the term flash fiction.

Writing a very short story sounds challenging to me. As Becky Tuch writes in The Review Review “Distilling experience into a few pages or, in some cases a few paragraphs, forces writers to pay close attention to every loaded conversation, every cruel action, every tender gesture, and every last syllable in every single word.” Meyer clearly understands this imperative, and demonstrates a sure grasp of the form. Indeed, several of the works included in Captives have been published elsewhere, which suggests her writing in this form has gained recognition.

Captives contains 37 pieces, and they vary greatly in topic, theme and setting. Some are set in the past, some the future, some in exotic places like Norway or Scotland, and others in Australia. Some are realistic, while others toy with the unexplained. Their protagonists range from a man who has accidentally locked himself in the toilet (“Thirteen tiles”) to a sister with a secret (“We were always close”). Some pieces have been inspired by news stories like those about men who lock up women for years (“Green-eyed snake”) or about the man who walked a tightrope across the Grand Canyon (“Tightrope walker’s daughter”). Other pieces reveal writers she admires, such as George Orwell (“Booklover’s corner”) and Italo Calvino (“One of the strings and their supports remain”). In all, though, the protagonists confront a challenge, a change, a decision, or they create worlds that suit themselves. As you’d probably expect given the form, we don’t always know the outcome. Meyer leaves clues, of course, and sometimes we can be confident we know what will happen, but other times those clues simply tease us with possibilities.

The collection starts with a bang, almost literally. In “The day before the wedding” the bride discovers something new about “her love”. He is out duck-shooting, and

Still her love had the gun trained on her, and she stood, and even when he lowered it and his expression revealed play, a joke, she knew she’d seen his true face.

I don’t think this spoils the story, because the conclusion which follows is one of those teasers I mentioned – unsettling, but for whom? Meyer’s language here is tight and spare, and uncompromising. I loved it, and knew I’d made the right decision to buy this book.

Subtitled “Bad things happen. Or they might. At any moment”, the collection is dark, overall.  But, there are (somewhat) lighter pieces. In “Glitch”, Daniella finds a solution to her problem of hearing the devil, “the hiss of Beelzebub”, in the machines around her, and in “Brand new” the narrator finds comfort in the company of a brain-damaged elderly man. This story reminded me of my reading group’s joke that when we are old and have lost our memories we will just read the same book every month. Much cheaper, and just as much fun – if we choose the right book!

I can’t possibly cover all the pieces, so will look at one section, In/Out, which comprises six pieces. In “Meds” the narrator needs to decide whether he will join his partner and friends in their calm, medicated (or, as he sees it, capitulated) lives, while in “One of the crew” a woman fakes being a writers’ festival official. There’s an interesting paradox here: in the first story our protagonist is invited “in” but doesn’t want to accept, while in the second the woman wants to be “in” so pretends to be so. In two of the other pieces, the in/out dichotomy is more literal. There’s the aforementioned toilet prisoner in “Thirteen tiles”, and there’s “Foreign bodies”, in which Kate, a prisoner in gaol, starts to swallow increasingly bigger objects. The conclusion to this story, though, pushes literalism to the limit. Indeed, in many of the stories, Meyer plays with the tension between literalism or realism and the absurd or fanciful. There’s often a fine line …

I haven’t talked much about the writing, because the stories themselves are so powerful. However, part of the power of the stories comes from the writing, of course. It’s perhaps intrinsic to the form, but the writing is direct, spare. It can also be elliptical at times. Meyer expects her readers to work, but that too is the nature of short fiction. And there is tight pointed use of imagery, as in the opening paragraph of “We’ve always been close”:

My sister and I stretched a tarp over the mud to make a slide into the dam, just like when we were kids. It was full from the recent storm. Magpies called. From the dam, I splashed gritty brown water up onto the slide to give my sister something to slip on. She squealed and laughed and the sound dirtied my chest with guilt. She gripped my shoulders after landing, as she was afraid of the bottom. We’ve always been close.

On the surface a happy scene, but we know from the language that something is not quite right …

Captives is an appropriate title for the collection because, whether they know it or not, most if not all the protagonists are captives in one way or another – some physically, some psychologically or intellectually, some both. Some escape, while others remain trapped (at least to the best of our knowledge). Deborah, a psychologist in “Spark”, is trying to escape:

She had wanted to agitate the structure, to act out, in ways a psychologist should not.

Fortunately for us, though, Meyer is a writer of fiction and it is perfectly acceptable for her “to agitate the structure”. This she has done with confidence and flair. Not every story grabbed me equally, but I think that’s more to do with me and my experience. I wouldn’t be surprised if different readers found different stories worked best for them. So, my recommendation is that if you haven’t read flash fiction, this would be an excellent place to start.

awwchallenge2015Angela Meyer
Captives
Design: Sandy Cull
Carlton South: Inkerman and Blunt, 2014
ISBN: 9780987540126

Dymphna Cusack, Jungfrau (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 25 Comments
Dymphna Cusack, Jungfrau

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Are there some historical periods that particularly fascinate you? There are for me, and one of those is that between the two world wars. It was a complex time encompassing both economic hardship and great social change. A time when many of those Victorian era constraints were being lifted and women, in particular, were starting to enjoy an independence and freedom they hadn’t had before the First World War. Dymphna Cusack’s first novel, Jungfrau, is set in this period and deals with this very subject.

I have written about Cusack before, when I reviewed A window in the dark, her memoir about her time as a teacher. Because of its relevance to this novel, I’ll reiterate a couple of the points I made in that review. Cusack, I wrote, had a finely honed moral and social conscience, and was acutely aware of injustice. She was convinced of the “wickedness of our economic system”, and abhorred the power those with money had over others. She was consequently outspoken on social and economic justice issues, and was particularly critical of the treatment of “that much-maligned creature, the woman teacher”. A window in the dark was written forty years after Jungfrau, and is a memoir, but you can see the genesis of her values and ideas in this, her first novel.

Jungfrau is set in Sydney over a few months in the 1930s. It concerns three young women in their mid to late twenties: the rational, realistic and religious Eve, the emotional, dreamy and vulnerable Thea, and the modern, pragmatic, confident Marc. Eve and Thea have been good friends for several years. Marc is Thea’s friend, but Eve and the free-thinking Marc do not like or understand each other. At the novel’s opening, Eve and Thea are talking about Thea’s interest in a man twice her age, a married university professor. Eve cautions Thea about the risks, but Thea is ready “to take life—use it—now, instead of letting it use me”. Eve gently retorts that “If you leave yourself open to the world, it will rush in on you”.

Indeed, Eve, who has seen first hand in her maternity ward the results of poor, single women taking life, suggests that experiencing life “is much safer in books”. She says to Thea:

When you talk about getting in touch with reality and finding out what life is, all you really mean is following your instincts in spite of the consequence … Only, if you take your friend Marc’s prattling literally, I’d advise you to learn more about physiology than you know at this moment. You can’t safely combine what your modern friends rather euphemistically call ‘experience’ with a degree of ignorance that’s almost mid-Victorian. You’ll need to be practical if you’re going to be a realist. Marc’s evidently both.

The novel, as you’ve probably guessed by now if the title hadn’t given it away, explores what happens when Thea does not heed Eve’s advice and lets this relationship develop. I’d call this a coming-of-age novel but, having been written by Cusack, its themes are as much social as psychological. What did it mean for a woman at that time to have an affair with a married man, and what were her options with the – hmm – consequences?

The trouble is that while obstetrician Eve and social worker Marc are daily faced with the grim realities of life, teacher Thea evades them. Here’s Eve on her ward rounds,

All this rot about reality, this frenzied escape into abstractions, had curiously little to do with life as she knew it. … Here was reality. Tortured bodies, tired minds, birth and death. Nothing vague about this; no escaping from facts; no sheltering behind fancies.

Acerbic Marc has her own view on woman’s lot:

Women are cursed, all right. If you wither on the virgin stem you go all pathological; if you go off the deep end you get some foul disease; and if you marry and have dozens of young you die of exhaustion.

By contrast, here is Thea discussing the real Jungfrau with her professor:

“Yes,” he said almost inaudibly, “white, proud and untouched. But they’ve built a funicular almost to the top of it now, and the tourists swarm all over it like flies.”

“Poor thing! I don’t mind climbers and mountaineers; but it must hate the tourists soiling it—”

“That is usually the fate of the proud and the untouched,” he said, digging his stick in the turf, and she recoiled as though struck, her hands flung out in a gesture of defence.

Oh dear, we readers think – and so would Eve and Marc if they’d heard this conversation. Their lot, though, is to love Thea and to watch in dismay as she takes life to an edge that she is not fit to handle.

The critical thing about this book is that Cusack doesn’t judge these three women for their choices. We might find Marc a more sympathetic, more appealing personality, of the three, but Cusack is even-handed. She understands human psychology and empathises with women. Her ire is focused more on society’s expectations and rules than on any one woman’s decision or behaviour. I described this novel earlier in my review as a coming-of-age novel, but it could equally be called a novel of ideas. In it Cusack exposes “the reckless squandering of human possibilities”, of lives “anaesthetised by half-baked education, political platitudes and doles”. Economic inequities, abortion, women’s independence, and the meaning of freedom are her targets.

I read this book as part of my long-term plan to read classic Australian literature – and I enjoyed it immensely. While the social milieu is very different from now – thank heavens – the emotional truths transcend the particulars of time and place. The language did feel a little overblown at times. It has that DH Lawrence sort of emotional intensity that can sometimes be a little too melodramatic, or declamatory, for my 21st century ears. And yet, paradoxically, one of the novel’s real pleasures came from its descriptions of Sydney. Cusack catches the landscape – the plants, the light, the water – beautifully (but I’ll save sharing a couple of those for a Delicious Descriptions post).

I imagine this was a confronting novel at the time of publication, but I hope it got people thinking, as Cusack surely intended. Cusack, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Miles Franklin, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, to name the best known from that era, were fierce and intelligent writers. We are lucky to have them.

awwchallenge2015Dymphna Cusack
Jungfrau
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012 (Orig. ed. 1936)
ISBN: 9781743431450 (ebook)

Note: I do need to have a little whinge. There were several errors/typos in my kindle edition, which is disappointing and did spoil the read a little.

Aminatta Forna, The hired man (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 11 Comments

Aminatta Forna, The hired manEarly in Aminatta Forna’s The hired man, the narrator Duro is told by his old, ex-best friend Krešimir, “People have moved on, Duro. Maybe you should too”. At this point we are not sure exactly what they have moved on from but we guess it might have something to do with war – and as the story progresses we discover we are right.

The hired man is Forna’s third novel, but my first to read. All of them, together with her memoir The devil that danced on water, deal with the prelude and aftermath of war. In The hired man it’s the Croatian War of Independence which occurred in the early 1990s. Forna, though, never names the war, and while there is some description of war-time action, she doesn’t provide any real historic details about who, what or where.

The novel is set in the fictional town of Gost, and commences in 2007 with Duro, our first person narrator, telling us that “at the time of writing I am forty-six years old”. Later we realise he is writing for a future reader, after he dies. He writes

… I have to tell this story and I must tell it to somebody, so it may as well be you, come to sort through my belongings.

The trapdoor is opened …

So, what is the story he has to tell – and why is he suddenly compelled to tell it now? Well, towards the end of the novel he says this:

Laura arrived in Gost and opened a trapdoor. Beneath the trapdoor was an infinite tunnel and that tunnel led to the past.

You don’t know who Laura is, though, do you, so it’s time I introduced the plot. The novel spans Duro’s life from his childhood to his mid-forties. He tells of his family, and his boyhood friends, particularly the aforementioned Krešimir and his younger sister Anka, with whom Duro fell in love. He tells how his relationship with Krešimir crumbled as Krešimir’s true, cruel, nature became apparent, and why he left Gost for a few years, returning just before the war started. And he tells us about the “chaos” that ensued during the war, “when men turned to hunting each other”. I don’t want to give too much away here, but let’s just say that by the time the war starts his relationship with Anka had moved, necessarily, from that of lover to good friend.

We jump then sixteen years to 2007 – when Duro is living alone and friendless – though the novel is not told in this linear way. It’s told more organically as the changes resulting from the opening of the “trapdoor” stimulate memories and bring the past back to Duro. This trapdoor is opened because Krešimir sells the “blue” house, the home he’d shared with Anka and their parents, to Laura and her husband who plan to renovate it, sell it, and move on. Duro, we discover, is a handyman, and he becomes Laura’s “hired man” for this renovation, and in the process becomes the family’s friend.

There is an underlying theme here of the British moving into Europe, oblivious of history and inherent dangers:

The way the English saw it, the past was always better. But in this country our love of the past is a great deal less, unless it is a very distant past indeed, the kind nobody alive can remember, a past transformed into a song or a poem. We tolerate the present, but what we love is the future, which is about as far away from the past as it is possible to be.

These English do not understand, for example, that the “fields that used to be ploughed … are now full of wild flowers because nobody dares to walk in them in case they put their foot on a mine and are blown to pieces.”

“I imagine myself with the body of a bird, a raven. Outstretched wings and neck, rigid beak and shining eye, I swoop over the ravine and hover over the town.”

So, here is Duro, standing “guard over the past” like a predatory bird. And here is Laura, reminding him of Anka who, though we don’t know why, is no longer in Gost. And here is “the chill of unfinished business”. The stage is set … but here I’ll leave the plot.

What is beautiful about this novel is that, despite its depiction of brutality and betrayal, and despite a sense of menace, it is restrained – and it’s restrained because Forna’s focus is not violence and revenge, though there are elements of these in the novel. Her interest is how people live with each other after war, and particularly after Civil War when traitors, collaborators, opportunists and victims, depending  on your point of view of course, must all live together. The novel made me think of Olivera Simić’s Surviving peace which I reviewed last year. It’s a memoir, and Simić does not still live in her Serbian home, but she makes very clear that surviving a war, particularly ethnically-driven civil war, is just the beginning.

What is also beautiful about this novel is Forna’s writing – her use of imagery, symbolism, irony and parallels to convey her meaning. Birds and colours have multiple connotations, some positive, natural, others menacing. The “ravine” on the edge of town bears witness to beauty and horror. Hunting suggests violence and predation, but is also a source of sustenance and defence. The title, itself, “the hired man”, has both benign and malignant meaning …

As does the idea of masculinity, “with its undercurrent of aggression”. For Duro, it encompasses loyalty, protectiveness, and reliability alongside strength and control, while for men like Krešimir and Fabjan, the town bully, it means power and competitiveness, and is attended by a sense of menace.

Nothing, in other words, is simple in Forna’s world, and the language conveys this subtly but emphatically.

‘Well this is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. You don’t notice it any more, but you don’t know how lucky you are.’

Laura, new to the town, is oblivious to the irony of her utterance, and so are we as the novel starts – but, we soon learn differently. It is not a pretty town but by the end some rapprochement, uneasy though it still may be, has been achieved. This is a moving but realistic book about just how difficult it is to survive peace.

Aminatta Forna
The hired man
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013
ISBN (Kindle ed): 9781408818770