Review

Irma Gold and Craig Phillips, Megumi and the bear (Review)

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Irma Gold Craig Phillips Megumi and the bear book cover

Courtesy: Walker Books Australia

Now here’s something different at the Gums! I don’t, as you’d know, make a practice of reviewing children’s literature, though I have done a few cross-over adult-young adult novels. So, when Irma Gold and Craig Phillips’ children’s picture book, Megumi and the bear, landed in my letterbox a week or so ago I was challenged. Not only is it a picture book, but its cover – featuring a child and a bear making snow angels – suggest that it has little to do with Australia. Why should Whispering Gums make an exception for this book?

Well, the reasons are twofold. Firstly, I’ve reviewed two works by Irma Gold before (her short story collection, Two steps forward, and the anthology she edited, The invisible thread) and so was intrigued to read something different again by her. She’s one hard-working, versatile author, which I think you have to be if you want to make writing your career. Secondly, while it’s not set in Australia – usually something has to be Australian for me to make an exception – it is set in Japan. At least, Craig Phillips’ illustrations were inspired by his observing a little girl playing in the snow in Hokkaido. I love Japan – and have been to Hokkaido. Exception made!

Now, with two mid-late twenty-something children, I’ve not read a picture book for a long time but, as I picked this up and read it, a whole pile of memories of loved books came back, but first, the story. Like most picture books, its narrative line is simple – a young girl, Megumi, meets a young bear in a forest and they become good friends, playing together again and again until one day the bear doesn’t appear. Megumi is sad, and goes into the forest every day, to wait … until eventually she starts to forget and goes into the forest with her friends … It’s a lovely story about friendship, loss, time and memory.

Craig Phillips’ water colour illustrations are delightful – clear, uncluttered and colourful within a restrained palette. The bear and Megumi’s feelings are nicely conveyed through their facial expression and movement. Irma Gold’s text is also clear and simple, but not simplistic, with a nice use of repetition, “But the bear doesn’t come”, in the central section. The narrative is well-paced, keeping the story moving while providing time to consider (and feel) what is happening. The text is visually appealing. The topic sentence on each double-page spread is presented as a wavy line using an italicised font, with the following sentences in straight-lined plain text. This adds a lovely touch of whimsy to the presentation – and, I suspect, could help the out-loud reader get into a rhythm.

All this made it an enjoyable read – but what I enjoyed most was how it reminded me of other childhood loves, my own or ones made with my kids. The idea of a child playing with a bear brings to mind, of course, Winnie the Pooh. This is not at all a Christopher Robin and Pooh-like story but it plays into that notion of a friendship between children and bears. Going into the forest to play with a wild creature recalls Sendak’s Where the wild things are. Our bear here is not a wild thing – he’s sweet and small – and Megumi and the bear may not engage in wild rumpus, but they do have fun in the forest away from adults. And, this next probably sounds even less likely, but I was also reminded of the song “Puff, the Magic Dragon“. Again a completely different story and theme – and in fact quite the reverse in that here it’s the animal which goes missing – but both explore a friendship with “other” that is made and then lost. Hmm, now I think about it, these connections are pretty loose, but isn’t this partly what reading is about? Enjoying, remembering, connecting, making our own paths through literature and its meanings for us?

The thing is, whatever you make of it, Megumi and the bear is a gorgeous book that I can imagine loving to share with a grandchild, if I had one!

Irma Gold and Craig Phillips (illus)
Megumi and the bear
Newtown: Walker Books Australia, 2013
ISBN: 9781921977909

(Review copy courtesy Walker Books Australia)

Louis Nowra, Into that forest (Review)

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Louis Nowra, Into that forest

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Louis Nowra is one versatile and prolific writer, having written novels, non-fiction, plays and screenplays, essays and even libretti. Into that forest is his latest work. It was shortlisted for the Young Adult Novel prize in the 2012 Aurealis awards and the Ethel Turner Young People’s Literature prize in this year’s NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. I read this for my reading group. We don’t often do youth literature but every now and then one pops up that we think might interest us … such as a book by Nowra.

The first thing to say is that the novel is written in a unique voice. Here is its opening:

Me name be Hannah O’Brien and I be seventy-six years old. Me first thing is an apology me language is bad cos I lost it and had to learn it again. But here’s me story and I glad to tell it before I hop the twig.

And what a story it is … this novel feeds into several Australian, and wider, literary traditions. There’s the lost child and the feral child motifs (reminding me of Dog boy). There’s Tasmanian Gothic, and there’s also a bit of the fairy-tale about it. Subject-wise it covers some significant ground: environmental issues (involving both the extinct Tasmanian tiger and the whaling industry) and what we’d now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This might sound rather mechanistic, but there’s no sense of “ticking off”. It’s not didactic, and it’s all logical within the framework of the book.

Set in the late 19th century, it tells the story of two young girls, Hannah (then 6) and Becky (7) who find themselves lost in the bush (oops, forest!) after their boat capsizes in a storm and Hannah’s parents drown. They are taken in by a Tasmanian Tiger pair, and live with them for four years. Meanwhile, Becky’s father, Mr Carsons, is out looking for her. Eventually they are found, but the process of re-integration is not easy. The novel has a small cast of characters, which keeps it tightly focused. Besides Hannah’s parents who die near the beginning, there’s our two young protagonists, Becky’s father, his friend Ernie, the “tiger man”, a few other minor characters – and of course, the tigers, named Dave and Corinna by Hannah.

As in Dog boy, the description of life with the tigers is pretty visceral. At first Becky resists living like a tiger – perhaps because she still has a father whom she hopes will find her – but eventually she too succumbs, if succumb is the word. It is, after all, a matter of survival. And so they shed their clothes, start to move mostly on all fours, and develop keen animal instincts (of sight, hearing and smell). They also develop a taste for raw food and become adept at hunting. The descriptions of killing and eating the prey are not for the squeamish – “I were starving and the taste of blood made me feel even more hungry” and “What were ever in that shiny pink gristle surged through me in waves of ecstasy” – but they are important to our understanding of what their lives had become. Hannah says:

God knows where me sense of survival came from. Maybe it’s natural cos humans are just animals too.

There is a bogey man here – the tiger man or bounty hunter, whom Hannah had met before, through her parents. To the girls he is more brutal than the tigers. He’s “evil”, kills tiger pups, does “stuff to himself that were rude”. But, perhaps, he’s just another survivor, albeit a not very pleasant one?

While Hannah is the narrator, Becky’s character is the more complex one. She struggles more with the change forced upon them:

She didn’t want to forget. Me? I thought it were stupid to try and remember like Becky did. I didn’t see any use for it. Me English started to shrivel up, like an old dry skin a snake gets rid of. It just lies there in the grass rotting away and then vanishes with the wind. I took to talking in grunts, coughs and hoarse barks like the tigers. This annoyed Becky no end. But it were simple – the tigers understood me. Becky warned I were making a mistake. You will forget your language. You will forget your parents. You are becoming an animal, she’d say. Why argue with her? She were right on every level.

Becky initially fights against the brutality of the hunt – there’s a horrific description of the tigers attacking seals – but then surprises Hannah by rather fearlessly exerting some dominance in the pack. She was of course desperately hungry by then, but it shows Hannah that:

she were really stubborn if she wanted something. She were brave, she were stubborn, she were smart, she were tough.

Unfortunately, Becky is not as tough – or as adaptable – as Hannah thought, and consequently precipitates the novel’s rather shocking conclusion.

It’s a pretty bold novel – but less so than, say, Lord of the flies. There’s plenty to discuss, particularly regarding the subjects I suggested at the beginning of the post. The big theme, though, the one common to feral children books, has to do with defining our nature. What separates human from animal? What would you do to survive – and what would that say about the essence of humanity? Good stuff for young adults, and a gripping read too for we older readers.

Louis Nowra
Into that forest
Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2012
ISBN: 9781743311646 (Kindle ed.)

Carrie Tiffany, Mateship with birds (Review)

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Mateship with Birds (Courtesy: Pan MacMillan)

Book Cover (Courtesy: Pan MacMillan)

Carrie Tiffany is on a roll. Last month her second novel, Mateship with birds, won the inaugural Stella Prize, and this month it won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. It has also been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award. Many bloggers* have already read and reviewed it so, once again, I’m the last kid on the block, but I have finally got there.

Like her gorgeous first novel, Everyman’s rules for scientific living, Mateship with birds is set in rural Victoria in the past, this time, the early 1950s. Its central characters are the lonely, gentle dairy farmer, Harry, whose wife has left him, and his also lonely neighbour, Betty, who has brought her fatherless children to the country and who works in the local aged care home. The novel takes place over a year, a year that is paced by the life-cycle of a kookaburra family which Harry watches and documents in the spare righthand column of his old milk ledger. These notes, which are interspersed throughout the novel, are delightful and poetic, albeit brutal at times:

They work in pairs
against a fairy wren.
Dad buzzes the nest,
the wren throws herself on the ground
to draw him away.
She pluckily performs her decoy
– holding out her wing as if it is broken.
A small bird on the ground
is easy picking.
Club-Toe finishes her off.

They also provide commentary on the main story which is, as you’ve probably guessed, a love story. It is, however, no traditional romance. The boy and girl, Harry and Betty, are well past their youth and are cautious, given their previous experiences of love and relationships. They reminded me a little of Kate Grenville‘s rather dowdy protagonists in The idea of perfection. They care for each other in all sorts of practical ways: Betty cooks meals for Harry and tends his health, and Harry looks out for Betty and her children, fixing things when he can. A sexual tension underlies all their interactions – over many years – but it’s not openly expressed.  (“When he’s invited to tea he leaves immediately the meal is finished, as if unsure of what happens next”). Harry gradually takes on the role of “father figure” for Michael. However, when Michael becomes interested in a girl and Harry decides to pass on some “father-son” knowledge (“an explanation of things – of things with girls? Of … details of the workings”), including some rather specific physical advice regarding women, Betty is not impressed.

It sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it, but there’s something about Tiffany’s writing that makes it feel fresh, original. Part of it stems from her particular background as a scientist and agricultural journalist. Again, like her first novel, she grounds the story in her knowledge of farming life, but not in so much detail as to be boring. Rather, her descriptions give the novel its underlying rhythm – the landscape and the creatures inhabiting it (the kookaburras, owls, magpies, and so on); the milking; the driving into town; the way country neighbours help each other out; the sense of life going on regardless of the little dramas, the kindnesses and the cruelties, that occur. The writing is evocative but has a resigned and rather laconic tone that fits the rural setting.

Although a short book – a novella, really – it’s richly textured. There’s the main narrative drive which flips between Harry and Betty and includes flashbacks to their past, occasional dialogue, gorgeous descriptions (“The eucalypts’ thin leaves are painterly on the background of mauve sky – like black lace on pale skin”), and lists of plants, animals, medications, and so on. Interspersed with this main narrative are Harry’s kookaburra log, Betty’s notebook, Little Hazel’s nature diary, and Harry’s letters to Michael. And all this is layered with imagery involving mating, mateship, birds and humans. You can imagine the possibilities that Tiffany teases out from these. It’s all carefully constructed but doesn’t feel forced. It just flows.

In other words, this is a clever book, but not inaccessibly so. It’s generous, not judgemental. It’s also pretty earthy, with regular allusions to and descriptions of sex. If I have any criticism, it’s  in the persistent references to sexuality. At times, I wanted to say, “ok, I get it, sex – in its beauty, carnality, and sometimes cruelty and brutality – is integral to life” but I kept on reading because … of the writing. I love Tiffany’s writing. I mean, how can you not like writing like this description in which Harry compares Betty to Michael’s girlfriend Dora:

Not like Betty. His Betty is heavier, more complicated. Betty meanders within herself; she’s full of quiet pockets. The girl Dora might be water, but his Betty is oil. You can’t take oil lightly. It seeps into your skin. It marks you.

Australian Women Writers ChallengeI also kept reading because I wanted to know what it was all about. Why was Tiffany writing this particular story, I kept thinking. For some reviewers (see the links at the end), it is primarily about family, for others it is about the relationship between men and women, but for Tiffany it’s about desire. I can see that it is about all these things, but here’s the thing, the book starts with the description of four attacks by birds on humans followed by a description of cockatoos damaging crops. This, together with the sexual imagery, the frequent references to animal behaviour and to humans’ relationships with animals, suggests to me another theme to do with the nature of life, with the nature of our relationships with animals, and with how we accommodate the animal versus the human within ourselves. I’ll give the final word to the birds:

Mum, Dad, Club-Toe
break off their
preening,
squabbling,
loafing,
to attack.
They lose themselves in the doing.
I struggle to tell them apart.
Knife-beaked,
cruel-eyed,
vicious;
there is no question
they would die for the family
– that violence is a family act.

This book packs a punch!

* You may like to read the reviews written by Lisa (ANZLitLovers), John (Musings of a Literary Dilettante), Matt (A Novel Approach) and Kim (Reading Matters).

Carrie Tiffany
Mateship with birds
Sydney: Picador, 2012
208pp.
ISBN: 9781742610764

Jane Austen’s letters, 1796-1800

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Austen's desk, Chawton. (Photo: Monster @ flickr.com)

Austen’s desk, Chawton. (Photo: Monster @ flickr.com)

For the past five years my Jane Austen group has been reading Jane Austen’s letters in a rather higgledy piggdledy manner*. We have nearly finished now. We have just done her first letters, and next year we will conclude, logically at last, on her final letters. What a fascinating time we’ve been having.

Jane Austen’s first published letter was written in January 1796, when she was just 20, and it is in this first letter that she mentions Tom Lefroy, the young man, also just 20, with whom she had a romantic attachment. Lefroy later became the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. When asked many years after her death about his relationship with Austen, he admitted to a “boyish love”. Here is our first mention, in Letter 1:

… I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs. Lefroy [Tom’s aunt and a friend of the Austens] a few days ago.

In Letter 2, a few days later, she mentions a party to be held at the Lefroy home the next night:

I look forward with great impatience to it, as I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white Coat.

Is she expecting a proposal from Tom? The “great white Coat” is a tongue-in-cheek (and, perhaps, also self-preserving) reference to her comment in the previous letter about his morning coat being “a great deal too light”. Later in the letter, which she started on Thursday and finished on Friday, comes:

Friday. — At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea.

The only other reference to Tom Lefroy occurs well over a year later in November 1798, Letter 11:

Mrs. Lefroy did come last Wednesday, and the Harwoods came likewise, but very considerately paid their visit before Mrs. Lefroy’s arrival, with whom, in spite of interruptions both from my father and James, I was enough alone to hear all that was interesting, which you will easily credit when I tell you that of her nephew she said nothing at all, and of her friend very little. She did not once mention the name of the former to me, and I was too proud to make any enquiries [my stress]; but on my father’s afterwards asking where he was, I learnt that he was gone back to London in his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practise.

It’s all very tantalising – but at the very least it’s pretty clear that Jane Austen learnt something about love and loss from this experience. A brief description of the “affair” can be read here on the JASA website.

Austen, though, was not one to wallow. I loved her comment in a later letter (January 1799) that:

I had a very pleasant evening, however, though you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it; but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it. (Letter 18)

A positive philosophy that she does seem to have lived by, if her letters are to be believed.

These letters, like those I’ve written about previously, provide much information about her life and times – about the dangers of childbirth, health and medical treatment, men’s careers, farming, housekeeping and fashion – often delivered in Austen’s witty, often also acerbic tongue. As before, I’ll share just a few here …

Fashion

Austen talks a lot about clothing in the letters, so much so that some readers find it boring. However, her fashion talk tells us more than simply what she and Cassandra are wearing. For example, we learn about the craze for Marmalouc caps, which reminds us of the Napoleonic Wars as the caps were inspired by Egyptian turbans after the Battle of the Nile in August 1798. We learn about Austen’s tight financial situation. Caps and gowns were re-trimmed to suit another Ball or season, items are shared (the Marmalouc cap itself was borrowed from sister-in-law Mary Austen). Best of all, though, we get her wit such as her description of the rage for wearing flowers and fruits (Letter 21) in Bath. In Letter 22, she responds to Cassandra’s request for some Bath fashion, but she’s having trouble deciding:

I cannot decide on the fruit until I hear from you again. – Besides, I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit. – What do you think on that subject?

Childbirth, Health and Medical Treatments

I could write a whole post just on her discussion of health-related matters. We hear of women dying in childbirth, of people taking or drinking the Waters in Bath for assorted health concerns, of her mother’s using laudanum for pain, of the use of electricity for pain relief … Again, though, there’s often a sting in the tail. It’s generally believed that Jane had a tricky relationship with her mother who was somewhat of a hypochondriac. In several of these early letters she reports on her mother’s health. Here is one (Letter 18):

She is tolerably well – better on the whole than she was some weeks ago. She would tell you herself that she has a very dreadful cold in her head at present; but I have not very much compassion for colds in the head without fever or sore throat.

In other letters, though, she does show more tenderness!

Writing and novels

Her own writing is rarely mentioned in these early letters, but the first version of Pride and prejudice, then titled First impressions, is referred to a couple of times. Here is a tongue-in-cheek reference to her friend and future sister-in-law Martha Lloyd reading it:

I would not let Martha read “First Impressions” again upon any account, and am very glad that I did not leave it in your power. She is very cunning, but I saw through her design; she means to publish it from memory, and one more perusal must enable her to do it.

But, my favourite comment on writing in this group of letters relates to her assessment of the novel, Fitz-Albini, that she and her father were reading (Letter 12):

We have got “Fitz-Albini;” my father has bought it against my private wishes, for it does not quite satisfy my feelings that we should purchase the only one of Egerton’s works of which his family are ashamed. That these scruples, however, do not at all interfere with my reading it, you will easily believe. We have neither of us yet finished the first volume. My father is disappointed – I am not, for I expected nothing better. Never did any book carry more internal evidence of its author. Every sentiment is completely Egerton’s. There is very little story, and what there is told in a strange, unconnected way. There are many characters introduced, apparently merely to be delineated. We have not been able to recognise any of them hitherto, except Dr. and Mrs. Hey and Mr. Oxenden, who is not very tenderly treated.

The novel was apparently highly autobiographical and in it, according to the Gentleman’s Magazine (1837), Egerton “depicted with the utmost freedom the foibles not only of his neighbours and acquaintances, but even [my stress] those of his own family and relations”.  What I most like about Austen’s comment though is the insight it gives into her views on what makes a good novel. It shouldn’t be so transparently the author’s opinions; it should have a clear storyline; and the characters should have some substance. Ah Jane, she knew how to write …

* Past posts discussing the letters: The first covered her letters from 1814 to 1816, the second from 1811 to 1813, the third from 1807 to 1809, and the fourth from 1801-1806.

Andrew Croome, Midnight empire (Review)

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Andrew Croome, Midnight Empire

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Andrew Croome’s latest novel Midnight empire is yet another read this year that is outside my usual fare. I read it because of my reading group’s focus this Centenary year on Canberra writers. It wasn’t a big ask, though, because I had read and enjoyed his first novel, Document Z. While both deal with spies, they are very different novels: Document Z is historical fiction, while Midnight empire is a thriller. I wonder what Croome will do next. Romance? Interestingly, Croome, who attended my reading group’s discussion, suggested that Midnight empire is more like a first book. This is because when writing Document Z, he could always go back to the historical record when he stalled, but with Midnight empire he had to rely on his own ideas to keep the story going. Croome told us that the inspiration for the book was drones and, developing that, the idea that with drones people can conduct “war” from their office desk. What does this mean for our psyches, he wonders. And where is the line between who is at war and who isn’t? But more on that later.

First, a little about the plot. The protagonist, Daniel Carter, is a rather naive 26-year-old computer programmer whose company’s encryption algorithm has been bought by the US government for its drone program. Daniel is sent by his Canberra-based company to Creech Airforce Base, outside Las Vegas, to install the software and make sure it runs properly. Suddenly he finds himself at war, albeit sitting at a computer terminal in the American desert, a long way from Afghanistan and Pakistan where the actual war is being waged. Unlike the airforce pilots and CIA agents Daniel is working with, he has not been trained for war.

Parallelling the story of Daniel’s professional life is his personal one. He comes to Las Vegas despite the wishes of his long-term girlfriend Hannah. Their relationship has been foundering and his, to her mind, not well thought through decision to go to Las Vegas is the catalyst for her to break up. Daniel is disappointed, but it leaves him free to meet someone new – and he does, of course. He meets the beautiful Russian, Ania, at the poker table. This is Vegas after all!

As you would expect for the genre, things start to go awry. An agent double-crosses them, pilots start dying mysteriously in Vegas, and the drones are sent in to Peshawar to take out their target. Daniel becomes perturbed about the morality of what he sees and decides to leak some information. Meanwhile, his life with Ania becomes complicated when she tells him her brutal husband has come to Vegas looking for her. Daniel is torn between his work and his personal responsibilities, and starts crossing even more lines from which he may not be able to return. As we read on, we are not sure who to trust or believe. Is or isn’t Ania the traditional spy-tale Femme Fatale? And are the CIA starting to suspect him?

Daniel … in the lion’s den

Croome has, I suspect, chosen Daniel’s name for its allusive – and ironic – value: we can see where Daniel is, but he seems pretty oblivious. Fairly early in their relationship Ania questions Daniel about his work. She’s mystified by the fact that he says he’s fighting a war, even though he didn’t volunteer for it and wasn’t conscripted:

‘Then why are you here?’

‘It is simply that I have a job. I am doing my job.’

You are at war because of your job?’

‘Yes’.

She seemed to find this amusing. ‘But that is not romantic,’ she said. ‘How am I supposed to believe that you are my hero, if it is your job?’

She tries to understand this war in which he says that he won’t be killed. It’s not a war, she believes, if he is not in danger of being killed. Daniel sees it differently:

‘We drop bombs on people … They are trying to harm people and we blow them up. I don’t know what else you’d call it’.

At this point, the war is just like a job to Daniel.  He goes to work on the base, they track targets with the drones, and he goes back to his temporary home in Vegas and lives his life. When he is reminded by his CIA boss Gray that “like it or not, you happen to be at war” his reaction is disingenuous:

if people were dying or endangering one another, it had stuff-all to do with him. Gray could shove it. If the alertness of your encryption operator was your primary concern, you needed your priorities set straight.

He has a point – to an extent – and yet, as his ex-girlfriend had clearly understood, he had agreed to be part of it. Not long after this, they attack their target, completely demolishing a building in which people, including children, had been. It’s remote, cold, clinical … Daniel looks for the children hoping they’ve not been taken out too, but “where were they?” And yet, still, the penny hasn’t fully dropped. Ania, as Hannah had before her, wants Daniel to recognise what he is doing:

I am just saying think, Daniel … I am just saying there are choices – there are decisions to make.

I won’t labour this further; I’m sure you’ve got the main theme by now.

The midnight empire …

How do you critique a novel like this, one that is more plot driven than I’m used to? What should my review focus on? Plot, character, setting are, I’m guessing, the critical things – and I’d give them the thumbs up. The plot is plausible, the character of Daniel believable, and the setting chillingly realistic. The resolution – particularly in terms of who is implicated – is a little more ambiguous than Croome apparently intended but that’s probably the risk you take when you start to play with genre formula. I did find some of the technical details – the encryption technology, and the ins-and-outs of poker playing – somewhat uninteresting at times, but that’s more to do with me and my reading focus I think. Overall, it’s a carefully orchestrated and gripping read that should appeal to a wide readership.

‘Aren’t you interested, though?’ she said. ‘That people would be able to do this – exist somewhere beyond the rest of us, surfacing, emerging at night, a strange midnight empire, you would almost say traceless.’

Ania is talking about the people – and they are real – who live in the storm drains beneath the Strip – but what, we wonder, about the other, infinitely more worrying midnight empires? Croome has made very clear in this novel why we should be intersted in them…

Andrew Croome
Midnight empire
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2012
238pp
ISBN: 9781743311127

Autumn and a favourite poem

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Autumn Leaves

Autumn leaves

I was lying in front of a sunny window reading my current novel this afternoon when an urge came upon me to write about one of my favourite poems. It’s one of the few I can recite from heart. The poem is “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it goes like this:

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Spring and Fall Quilt, 1985

Spring and Fall Small Quilt, 1985

Now, I know you Northern Hemisphere people are enjoying spring and looking forward to the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, but down here in the south it is autumn which is, for me and I suspect many of us, a bittersweet time. Sweet because the weather is usually mild and stable, and the light soft and warm, but bitter because there’s a chill in the air, the days are shortening and the frosts are coming. It is for this paradox – and its implications, its recognition of our mortality – that I love Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall”.

What I love about this poem is what I love about Hopkins in general. Firstly there’s his heart that is so openly on show in all his poems, both the religious crisis poems and the ones about life and nature. Then there’s the tone, which is, in this poem, rather melancholic. After all, he is telling the child, Margaret, that what she’s really grieving for, though she’s unaware of it now, is her own mortality. I also love his rhythm (which he called “sprung rhythm“) and how in this poem there’s a jolt towards the end when he makes his main point.  And associated with this, the rhyme, which is appropriately simple here for a poem addressed to a child. But most of all, I love his language, particularly his imagery and the neologisms (like “wanwood leafmeal”). Or, perhaps, not quite most of all … I think most of all I love the way the language so perfectly matches the heart.

The older I get, the more I understand and love this poem!

Do you have poems that come back to you again and again at different points in your life?

Dorothy Johnston, The house at number 10 (Review)

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Johnston, House at Number 10 bookcover

Courtesy: Wakefield Press

Dorothy Johnston‘s The house at number 10 has one of the cheekiest opening sentences I’ve read for a long time … but I’m not going to tell you what it is. If you are interested you’ll have to find out for yourselves – and tell me if you agree.

I decided to read this novel for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’d known of Dorothy Johnston since the 1980s but have only read some short stories (specifically, those in the recent Canberra-focused anthologies, The invisible thread and Meanjin’s Canberra Issue.) Secondly, I chose this particular novel because it is set in Canberra and this Centenary year I’m focusing a little, though not exclusively, on books set in Canberra or by Canberra writers.

Dorothy Johnston was a founding member of the Seven Writers, a group of women writers in Canberra who met for many years to share and critique each other’s writing. They have become the stuff of legend, at least to Canberra readers. Johnston has written several novels including four crime novels set in Canberra. She has also been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award – twice. But The house at number 10 is not one of her crime novels, nor one of the shortlisted novels. It is, though, a good read … and it’s time I got to it!

The novel is set in the early 1990s, on the cusp of the legalisation of the sex industry in Canberra. Its protagonist, late-twenties-something Sophie, has been left by her husband, Andrew, not for another women but for “a floating, open-ended freedom”, for “a raft of girls”. They are sharing the care of their four-year-old, rather self-possessed daughter, Tamsin, and Sophie, now living in the garden flat at the back of the old widow Mrs B’s home, needs to support herself. So she applies for a job in a small, newly established and rather shabby brothel in the suburb of Kingston, at 10 Andover Street. Hence the novel’s title. The novel explores Sophie’s various relationships – with Elise and Kirsten who work in the brothel, with Marshall the brothel owner and Elise’s partner, with her landlady, with her old friend (and architect) Ann, with a couple of her clients, and of course with her estranged husband and her daughter.

There is a little bit of the “oh what tangled webs we weave” about this novel as Sophie strives to keep her two lives separate – but Johnston is not so much interested in mysteries and intrigues here as in how we navigate complicated relationships and cope with betrayal. It’s a surprising set-up but it works, because she keeps the story grounded in the relationships and not in its potential for salaciousness.

And the relationships are what keep you reading, as Johnston slowly draws the various characters into Sophie’s new life. Ann designs a renovation for the brothel, Mrs B takes over fixing up its garden. Characters look out for each other – Kirsten deflects Marshall who is keen to try out this new “girl”, while Sophie looks out for Kirsten through a long illness; Ann and Mrs B accept Sophie’s choice, supporting her while also offering advice. Not all is rosy though. Elise is suspicious and prickly, and Ann has a little fling with Andrew, albeit with Sophie’s not-overly-happy knowledge.

Underpinning all this is a tension stemming from Sophie’s grief and anger at her abandonment. She doesn’t rant, and she holds it together in front of her daughter, but her feelings are made clear when she meets her first client:

She handed him a condom and he rolled it expertly. Now, she thought, now, as grief at her failed marriage made barriers transparent, each one constructed of material so thin she could burst through it at will. Anger welled up, and resentment and self-pity. Blame struck out and swam through the lamplight towards this stranger who wore Andrew’s hair.

It’s a dangerous game she’s playing, particularly when she takes on Jack, who is into bondage, something the brothel has not offered before. For Sophie, though, it provides an opportunity to enact revenge on Andrew, displaced though it is to Jack. She knows he’s not Andrew, but she can imagine so – and this works for a while. However, you can’t of course maintain a secret or divided life forever. Eventually the crunch comes, and Sophie risks losing what matters to her most …

Besides her sensitive characterisation, Johnston also does place well. Canberra is rightly depicted as a place in which ordinary people live and go about their business, but she also captures its particular beauty – the “flat, clean” sun which has a “greedy kind of clarity”, and the light and colours of the changing seasons that are so marked in Canberra. The house at number 10 has a character of its own – shabby, but somehow warm with its worn out armchair and cosy kitchen. Not quite what you’d expect for a brothel – though how would I know – and yet it feels true. And there’s Sophie’s garden flat with its comforting garden:

There was the dark green garden, watered to the gills, and the sense it always gave her of luxury, repleteness, a deep satisfaction with its own existence.

Johnston uses imagery lightly but effectively. Sophie’s divided life is represented by her living on one side of the lake and working on the other. We often drive with her over the lake, making the transition clear. As the novel builds to its climax, the colour “red” and words like “fire” and blood” start to appear, suggesting anger, violence (real or imagined), and revenge. Contrasted with this are references to water, primarily via the lake and a Cupid fountain bought for the brothel’s garden, implying something more female, perhaps calming but also a little mysterious. And then, throughout, there’s gardening and its association with nurture and growth, with vision and imagination.

So what really is it about? Revenge is the motive for the plot, but it is not really the theme. Rather, it’s about facing life bravely and taking risks even if you “draw blood”, about friendship and the things you do for your friends, and about love in all its guises. A quiet book, despite its subject matter, and well worth the read.

AusLitMonth2013Dorothy Johnston
The house at number 10
Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2005
257pp.
ISBN: 9781862546837

Read for Australian Women Writers’ Challenge and Reading Matters’ Australian Literature Month.

Courtney Collins, The burial (Review)

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Book cover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Book cover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

I became aware of Courtney Collins’ The burial when it was longlisted for the Stella Prize. It has since been shortlisted for the Stella, shortlisted for the new writing award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award for new writing. It had previously been shortlisted for the 2009 Australian/Vogel Award for Unpublished Manuscripts. This is one impressive debut. While I’m attracted to several of the books longlisted for the Stella, I particularly wanted to read this one because of its subject matter; it is inspired by the life of Jessie Hickman, an Australian woman bushranger. I hadn’t heard of her before and thought this would be an interesting introduction. I wasn’t wrong. The burial is no ordinary historical fiction.

The bulk of the novel takes place in 1921 when 27-year-old Jessie, having had a gutful of her abusive, horse rustling husband Fitz, takes off, having first … well, let’s just say, done to him what she’d been wanting to do for a long time. In other words, she’s on the run. Now Jessie is no saint. She’s already been in prison for rustling, but she didn’t deserve the treatment she got at the hands of Fitz. The novel chronicles Jessie’s escape, and the story of the two men looking for her, Jack Brown, her lover and co-horse rustler for Fitz, and Sergeant Barlow, who has a story of his own. Escape is, we discover, Jessie’s speciality. It’s not for nothing that the book starts with a story of Houdini, or that Jessie’s horse is named for him.

As I read, I was reminded of two American writers – Toni Morrison and her powerful, gut-wrenching novel Beloved, and Cormac McCarthy and his western novels – for pretty obvious reasons. The burial is narrated by Jessie’s prematurely born daughter whom she kills and buries at the start of the novel, reminiscent of Sethe’s daughter Beloved, despite their different behaviours. And the elemental, evocative language along with the themes – human against human, human against nature, in a forbidding and lawless environment – immediately bring Cormac McCarthy to mind.

What is particularly impressive about this debut is Collins’ handling of the narrative voice and structure. The baby’s voice is generous and wise, not maudlin or pathetic. She cares about this mother of hers, and is a bit like a guardian spirit, albeit one without any power. Somehow, despite what Jessie did to her, she humanises Jessie and encourages us to feel sympathy rather than horror. Collins is light-handed in her use of this trope. As the novel progresses, it feels like a third person story, which it is, really, because it is not about the narrator but is her story of her mother. Every now and then, though, we are reminded of our narrator when she says “my mother”.  As for the structure, the narrative alternates, loosely rather than rigorously, between Jessie’s story and that of Brown and Barlow. It’s basically chronological but there are flashbacks to fill us in on Jessie’s origins as we follow her escape.

Back now to the story. Early in the novel, Jessie is released from jail to be an apprentice horse-breaker and domestic help to Fitz, and pretty soon we are told all we need to know:

Her hope was that her employer was a good man. But he was not.

I love the way Collins’ language flows – from lyrical description to the plain and straight.

Fortunately, Jessie, while fearful of this man who beats her, is also spunky and “found freedom in the ways she defied him”. There is a bit of the picaresque in the novel, as we follow Jessie’s escape and the various people she meets, but it has none of the lightness of that form. A better description is probably gothic. It’s a tough world Jessie finds herself in – one that is particularly cruel to women and children. She spends time, for example, with an old couple. The woman wants her because “All of these years in this miserable place I have prayed for the company of someone other than you and here she is. I am taking her”. The man’s response?  “She’s of no value”!

The brightest spot in the novel occurs when Jessie meets a gang of young rustlers led by the 16-year-old Joe in a spirit of mutual support and cooperation. She joins them and helps them in a well-planned heist in which they manage to steal 100 cattle, sell them at saleyards and return to the hills before the owner notices the loss. It is remote country, after all. However, the theft is discovered and a bounty is put on Jessie’s head – for the cattle they believe she’s stolen and for the rumoured murder of Fitz. And so the final hunt begins involving a bunch of men who are after the bounty, and Brown and Barlow who hope to get to her first.

For a while the gang stays hidden but, eventually, some of the hunters get close:

That’s the sound of desperate men, said Joe. I know this type of man, said Bill. He has no god. And he is all the more dangerous to us because, worse than that, he has no law in him or myth to live by.

Jessie, at her insistence, heads off alone, setting up the climax which is not totally unpredictable – after all, one can’t stay on the run forever – but which contains its surprises.

This is a novel about a hard world in which

A man can rape or kill and expect no consequence except his own consequence. You mean conscience? Consequence is what I said and what I mean to say!

But it is also about love and forgiveness, magic and myth, resilience and resourcefulness … I’ll not forget it quickly.

Courtney Collins
The burial
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012
ISBN: 9781743311875 (Kindle ed.)

Read for Australian Women Writers’ Challenge and Reading Matters’ Australian Literature Month.

Helen Trinca, Madeleine: A life of Madeleine St John (Review)

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Trinca, Madeleine
Madeleine (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

I wanted to read Helen Trinca’s biography Madeleine for several reasons. First, of course, being a reader, I’m interested in biographies and autobiographies of writers. Secondly, Madeleine St John belongs to that group of Australians, half a generation or so older than I am, that has made quite a mark on the literary and arts world. Her friends and acquaintances included Sydney University peers Clive James, Bruce Beresford, Robert Hughes, Richard Walsh, most of whom lived ex-pat lives like she did. Thirdly, her father Edward St John, was a controversial conservative politician (and then barrister) who fought injustice and whom Justice Michael Kirby described as “a contradictory, restless, reforming spirit”. And finally, I was hoping to find out more about what happened to Bruce Beresford’s plan to film her first novel, The women in black. Trinca covers all these bases and more in her biography.

Madeleine was – as Trinca ably, but fairly it seems, demonstrates – a complicated and difficult woman. She could be called a tragic figure if we define that as a person brought down by a flaw in their character or make-up. Trinca’s Madeleine, though, would probably not agree with that assessment. As far as she was concerned, her troubled life was solely caused by her father, “the ghastly Ted”. More on that anon. First I’d like to quote from a letter Madeleine wrote as she was trying to write her first novel:

I somehow feel (not for quite the first time) that life is beyond my capacities … meanwhile am trying to write some fiction, which is abominably difficult & and therefore terrific – but horrifying.

This quote says a lot about St John – about how hard she found life, and about the heightened way she lived it.

Madeleine was born in 1941 to Edward St John (Ted) and his lively, sophisticated wife Sylvette. Sylvette did not, for several reasons carefully explored by Trinca, adjust well to the life of wife and mother. She became an alcoholic and mentally unstable, to the point that Ted, apparently in order to protect his two daughters, placed them in boarding school in 1953. They didn’t understand, and were miserable. The next year their mother took her life, a fact which was not made clear to the girls at the time and which Madeleine never accepted. Ted remarried the next year a women ten years his junior, 27-year-old Val Winslow. Madeleine never accepted this either and at the age of 18 was told to leave home. While she saw and communicated with her family, on and off, for the rest of her life she never reconciled with them and believed to the end that they were the architects of all that was wrong with her life. We will never know the truth of course, and many records have been destroyed. However, while mistakes were made, partly due to individual personalities and family dynamics and partly as a consequence of the childrearing practices and patriarchal attitudes of the time, Ted and Val, Trinca argues, did their best to support Madeleine but she never gave them an inch, never saw things from any other perspective but her own. Tragic, really, however you define it …

… and making her, I think, a tricky subject to write about. Madeleine was, and there is documentation from a variety of sources to support this, a controlling and emotionally erratic friend who would, as one said, “just destroy everything, destroy a relationship”. She was, as we’d say now, high maintenance, and wanted, needed, to call the shots. And yet, people stuck with her, because she was witty, intelligent company, and also because people saw her need. Trinca handles this minefield with a clear, even-handed but sensitive eye, enabling us to feel Madeleine’s pain while being frustrated at her inability to lift herself out of it.

St John moved to London in the 1960s, leaving, more or less by mutual agreement, her first and only husband behind in the USA, and eventually took out English citizenship. She was horrified when, on being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel The essence of the thing, she was hailed as an Australian writer. She didn’t want to be aligned with the place, but she was the first Australian woman to be shortlisted for the Booker, so no wonder she was hailed that way.

Trinca’s biography is a traditional, chronologically told one. It’s tight, with little superfluous detail but enough examples to provide a good picture of Madeleine and her life. I particularly enjoyed the chapters covering the writing and publication of her novels. The book is very well documented, using clear but unobtrusive numbers linked to extensive notes at the end. In her acknowledgements, Trinca details what records she had available and where the gaps are. In addition to the oral history St John recorded (covering the first couple of decades of her life), Trinca had access to letters by and to Madeleine (though many were destroyed) and other documentation such as wills, and obituaries written by those who knew her. Trinca also interviewed many of the significant people in her life. I was intrigued to discover names familiar to me in other contexts, such as filmmaker Martha Ansara. The older we get, it seems, the more we discover our paths have crossed in interesting ways with others.

If you need any proof that Madeleine is worth reading, Clive James’ statement made in 2006, the year she died of emphysema, may convince you:

Sometimes, when I’m reading one of the marvelous little novels of Madeleine St John, part of whose genius was for avoiding publicity, I think the only lasting fame for any of the rest of us will reside in the fact that we once knew her. (quoted by Trinca from his memoir North Face of Soho)

A slight exaggeration perhaps, given who the “us” are, but James clearly believed that this complex late bloomer who produced four novels in six years deserved more recognition than she was getting. Thanks to Text Publishing, all four of her novels are back in print and we have this thorough and highly readable biography. All we need now is to see The women in black in film!

Helen Trinca
Madeleine: A life of Madeleine St John
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013
280pp
ISBN: 9781921922848

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

The Griffyn Ensemble explores Water with the Swïne

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Griffyn Ensemble set up, Belconnen Arts Centre

Before the concert, at the Belconnen Arts Centre

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink
(from The rime of the ancient mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

I suppose it could be seen as clichéd to hear these words in a concert called “Water” but when the performers are the Griffyn Ensemble, cliché would be the furthest word from your mind.

“Water” was the last performance in the Water into Swine Festival, 28 March to 5 April, which was the result of an “exchange” between Canberra’s Griffyn Ensemble and Sweden’s Peärls Before Swïne Experience. The Swïne (“The Peärls are the music”, they say) specialise in performing new music and are consequently a good match for the Griffyns with their eclectic and open-minded approach to music.

This concert was a little different to previous Griffyn concerts we’ve attended. Firstly, of course, the Griffyn performers were supplemented by four Swedes; and secondly, the concert programming, perhaps because of the exchange, was a little looser. There was a theme – water – but the connections were, let us say, more fluid! And the program was, I think, a little less diverse, a little less eclectic. I love that they dare to program, as they did in Behind Bars, Johnny Cash next to Theodorakis next to Messaien next to new or lesser-known composers.

This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy “Water” – because I certainly did – or that it wasn’t eclectic – because it was. It just felt less so!

One of the things I enjoy about the Griffyn Ensemble that I may not have mentioned before is the balance they strike between formal professionalism and something more informal and intimate. Their performances mimic how I think chamber music was originally performed:

Because of its intimate nature, chamber music has been described as “the music of friends.” For more than 200 years, chamber music was played primarily by amateur musicians in their homes, and even today, when most chamber music performance has migrated from the home to the concert hall, many musicians, amateur and professional, still play chamber music for their own pleasure. Playing chamber music requires special skills, both musical and social, that differ from the skills required for playing solo or symphonic works. (from Wikipedia)

This, a sense of intimacy and joy, is what the Griffyn Ensemble manages to achieve – and it is special to be part of it. So, for example, “Water” incorporated a piece – Sloop John B – which was sung by five young boys led by soprano Susan Ellis and featuring young William (Will) Duff (from Behind Bars) who confidently held a second part against, at times, not only the main part sung by the other boys but other instrumental activity behind him. Also, we were addressed, naturally, conversationally, by Australian sailor Kanga Birtles who has circumnavigated the world solo. He spoke of the perils and joys of sailing, of trade winds and being on the water. His words supported the concert’s loosely defined motif which was to do with the old windjammers sailing from Europe to Australia. This motif was conveyed through Swedish pieces played by the Swïne, and pieces from Madagascar (courtesy Ravel), West Indies, Australia and the United States, played by various combinations of the two groups.

Griffyn Ensemble, Belconnen Arts Centre

Before the concert, Belconnen Arts Centre

The most powerful piece of the first half was Robert Erickson‘s Pacific Sirens performed by the full ensemble (piano, flute, harp, violin, cello, guitar, mandolin, percussion, voice – with recorded sound effects). It was an evocative and eerie piece that confirmed my preference for terra firma! I also enjoyed the world premiere of Australian composer Marián Budoš’ Clepsydra which, apparently, means water-clock. It’s a lovely piece with some jazzy elements to it.

While the first half focused primarily on the sea, the second half looked at water from various angles. One piece was the first movement of New Zealand composer Gareth Farr’s Taheke, which is Maori for waterfall. It was performed gorgeously by Kiri Sollis (flute) and Meriel Owen (harp). Flute and harp is a combination I usually enjoy. This half also featured the world premiere of Griffyn Ensemble director Michael Sollis’ Water into swine. Played by the Swïne (violin, cello, piano, flute), it also included vocalisations representing the dripping of water. As violinist George Kentros suggested, “there’s a hole in the bucket”. Playing their instruments while simultaneously vocalising (except for the flautist of course) looked pretty tricky but the players achieved it with a good deal of aplomb!

The Birtles family reappeared in the second half via a reading, by Susan Ellis, of some excerpts from Kanga’s mother (and Kiri Sollis’ grandmother) Dora Birtles’ journal Northwest by North about the trip she did in 1932 in a cutter from Sydney via New Guinea to Singapore. The reading was illustrated by Michael Sollis’ piece, Scenes from Ballad of a Highlands Man, which was performed surround-sound style with Michael and Kiri Sollis playing a traditional flute-like instrument from behind the audience.

I’ve mentioned only a few pieces played during the evening. We also saw Susan Ellis finger-clickin’ and barefootin’ around the “stage” to Alec Wilder‘s Sea Fugue Mama and heard, interspersed through the concert, the three movements of Swedish composer Klas Torstensson‘s Pocket size Violin Concerto, which challenged us with its mix of discordant and lyrical sounds and which was performed with confidence and enthusiasm by the group for which it was written.

Once again I thoroughly enjoyed the Griffyns. They always manage to put on a concert which appeals to a concert-goer like me, that is, one who is a reader-who-likes-music, who likes to think about what the music means, the stories it is telling, the emotions it is conveying. This concert, with its many watery atmospheres, gave me plenty to think about.

Other versions of some of the pieces: