Review

Sean Doyle, Australia’s trail-blazing first novelist: John Lang (#BookReview)

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Sean Doyle’s literary biography, Australia’s trail-blazing first novelist: John Lang, provides insights not only into this “idiosyncratic” man, but into two colonial societies – Australia and India – through the early to mid nineteenth-century. Doyle’s is not the first biography of John Lang, but it’s the first I’ve read.

However, Lang (1816-64) himself is not new to me. In 2018, I reviewed his 1853 novel, The forger’s wife, when it was published by Grattan Street Press in their Colonial Australian Popular Fiction series. But, even that wasn’t my first mention of Lang, as I had written briefly about him in a 2012 Monday Musings on Australia’s “pioneer novelists”. In that post, I wrote that he was born at Parramatta, went to Cambridge in 1838 where he became a barrister, and returned to Sydney in 1841, before leaving again a few years later to live in India and England. All this is covered in excellent detail in Doyle’s biography (with relevant clarifications).

John Lang, The forgers wife

I also noted that, according to (my 1994 edition of) The Oxford companion to Australian literature, “the enigma surrounding the life and personality of John Lang has not, even a century later and in spite of considerable literary research, been completely solved”. It is, however, believed he wrote the fiction work, Legends of Australia, which was anonymously published in 1842. The Oxford companion suggests that authorship of this “would entitle Lang to the distinction of being the first Australian-born novelist”. I added that there is a 2005 biography of Lang by Victor Crittenden, whose title says a lot: John Lang: Australia’s larrikin writer: barrister, novelist, journalist and gentleman. He was a contributor to Charles Dickens’ periodical Household Words. All of this is also covered by Doyle, but with additional research, which confirms some of the information that the Oxford companion writers “believed”.

Sean Doyle opens his book with a Preface which sets his biographer’s ground rules. Arguing that the richness of Lang’s life is in the details, he admits that not only did Lang lack a champion “to carry his flame posthumously”, but that there are few contemporary sources and what does exist is sketchy. No diaries or letters are known to survive. So, the temptation of course is to look to his novels, but, as Doyle cautions, while these can be “a looking-glass into his own life … any correlation requires caution”. His process then was “to assemble the verifiable facts, identify the spaces between them, and navigate the spaces with the firm aim of being true to what we know of his temperament, life and times”. He argues that Lang’s “known actions and ways inform the spaces of the unknown”.

Doyle then moves to his Introduction where he makes a strong argument for why this man deserves this biography, starting with Lang’s being “the first Australian-born novelist”, not with 1853’s The forger’s wife, but with Violet, or the danseuse, which was published in 1836 (and identified as being by Lang in Crittenden’s biography). Doyle names many other firsts, including the first Australian satire (Legends of Australia, 1842), full-length detective-novel in English (The forger’s wife, 1853), Indian travelogue by an Australian (Wanderings in India, 1859), and supernatural tale by an Australian (“Fisher’s ghost”, 1836). Other firsts include making the first translation of a classic (a Roman poem) in New South Wales. These firsts, Doyle admits, were more easily come by in the early days of a colony, but argues this doesn’t diminish the achievement.

“He just couldn’t help being idiosyncratic” (Doyle)

The rest of the book, until the Epilogue, chronicles Lang’s life, in nicely readable detail, through 25 chronological and clearly titled chapters, such as “Chapter 1, Family and Social Background”; “Chapter 11, Calcutta, 1842”; and “Chapter 21, Furlough in the UK (and a Creative Peak) 1852-’54”. In the telling, Doyle conveys much about Lang’s personality and character, which he gleans from the sources he has. These include, for example, newspaper reports of Lang’s “ill-advised” comments on the franchise and representation in New South Wales’s colonial legislature while seconding Wentworth’s motion supporting the idea. This is just one of many occasions in Lang’s life – as documented by Doyle – in which he shoots himself in the foot (as they say!) The end result is a biography that portrays a man – a “currency lad” no less – who had a lot of talent, a lot of heart and a lot to offer but who, more often than not, undercut himself through poor judgment and/or poor timing and/or an inability or refusal to read the times and produce accordingly. Lang wanted to emulate Dickens’ success, but “he just couldn’t help being idiosyncratic” – in his literary, personal and political lives.

Nonetheless, Lang achieved much in his relatively short life of 47 years. He is, argues Doyle, better known in India, than Australia, largely because of his support of Rani of Jhansi during her battles against the East India Company, but also for, as a barrister, winning Sikh Jyoti Prasad’s suit against the Company. Indeed, Doyle’s coverage of Lang in India at the time the Company fell and the British Raj commenced makes good, albeit distressing reading. It’s an ugly history, as we know. Lang also established, in 1845 in Meerut, a newspaper titled The Mofussilite, which documented many of India’s sociopolitical challenges of the time, and was often critical of the Company and the British.

The Epilogue provides a thoughtful summation of Lang’s achievements and significance, particularly in terms of his writing, and of the social, political, literary and personal circumstances that affected who he was and what he achieved. It makes a case for Lang’s place in Australia’s literary history, arguing that

without his balanced depiction of the convict era, the colony’s story is lopsided. This matters: a culture is the sum of the stories it tells itself.

The Epilogue, in fact, is a useful document on its own.

The biography is written in a popular-history style, meaning it has a strong narrative drive, with a liberal use of exclamation marks, some foreshadowing, and, for some chapters, serial-like cliff-hanger endings (which feel appropriate to Lang’s era). Doyle wants to understand Lang’s character and actions, and he pursues this with the gusto of a story-teller but with an eye on the facts and truths as he sees them.

Doyle is clearly keen to get the story of Lang and “his rollicking times” known. His research feels thorough and the characterisation as accurate as he can glean from this research. There are end-notes which cite sources for important points and a list of mainly secondary sources (biographies, histories, articles and websites). At times I would have liked to better understand which gaps were being filled, which thoughts and feelings were guessed rather than known, albeit Doyle heralds some with “maybe”-type markers and recognisable pop-psychology. There is no index, which is a big negative for me in biographies, but I know they are expensive, and the chronological telling will help people hone in on where the persons or events they are researching might be.

I did have questions as I read. What was Lang’s attitude to his wife and children, who left him in India, and whom he apparently never saw again, and where did First Nations people fit in those early colonial days of “big” men and their “progressive” ideas? But these are not necessarily germane to the main story here. Lang’s life is story enough, and Doyle has delved as far as he can.

Australian’s trail-blazing first novelist makes good reading for anyone interested in Australia’s literary history.

Note: Four of Lang’s works are available at Project Gutenberg Australia.

Sean Doyle
Australia’s first trail-blazing novelist: John Lang
Newport, NSW: Big Sky Publishing, 2023
372pp.
ISBN: 9781923004382

(Review copy courtesy the author.)

Thomas King and Natasha Donovan, Borders (#BookReview)

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Earlier this year I posted on Thomas King’s short story “Borders” from Bob Blaisdell’s anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. The story was written in 1991, but as I noted in my post, it has also been adapted into a teleplay for the CBC, and turned into a graphic novel for younger readers. I was intrigued, and because I loved the story, I bought the graphic novel, on the assumption that we will share it with our grandchildren in a few years.

To recap a little from my original post. Wikipedia describes King as an “American-born Canadian writer and broadcast presenter who most often writes about First Nations”. Born in California in 1943, he “self-identifies as being of Cherokee, Greek, and German descent”, and has written novels, children’s books, and short stories. I also shared from Wikipedia a quote they include from King’s book, The inconvenient Indian, because it’s relevant to Borders:

“The issue has always been land. It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people”.

In that post I summarised the story, and I’ll repeat that here too. The narrative comprises two alternating storylines, both of which are told first person through the eyes of a young boy. One storyline concerns his much older sister, Laetitia, leaving home at the age of 17 to live in Salt Lake City, Utah, while the other tells of a trip he makes with his mother some five or so years later to visit this sister.

The crux of the story lies in what happens at the US-Canada border. Asked to give her “citizenship”, the mother insists “Blackfoot” and is denied entry. She refuses to offer anything else. As a result, she and her son get caught in a no-man’s land when, attempting to return to Canada, the same response to the same question results in her being refused entry there too. As one of the border officials tries to explain to her, “it’s a legal technicality, that’s all”. Of course, that’s not all. Blackfoot people ranged across the great northwest of America in what is now known as America and Canada. For our narrator’s mother, that land is her “citizenship”, not that she is American or Canadian, and she will not back down.

So, to the graphic novel. The illustrator is Natasha Donovan, who is described at the back of the book as “a Métis illustrator, originally from Vancouver, Canada”. She has illustrated, among other books, “the award-winning graphic novel Surviving the city, as well as the award-winning Mothers of Xsan children’s book series.”

This graphic novel version of Borders is beautiful. It turns what is a perfectly suitable story for pre-adult readers into a book that should appeal to and engage these readers. It contains King’s full text as far as I can tell, enhanced (if I can use that word) with Donovan’s gorgeous drawings. Because it is designed for younger readers, the drawings are simple enough to appeal to younger readers, but they offer a subtle depth which make the story well worth reading in this form by older readers too. The original story is told in a spare style, which leaves the reader to imagine (work out) the ideas and emotions behind the words. In this graphic version, sometimes the illustrations replicate the words, but in many cases they value add. This is not to say that value-adding is necessary, as it’s a gem of a story, but that the drawings encourage the reader to stop, think, and consider what the words might be saying.

An example: of their second night stuck in border-limbo, our narrator says that “The second night in the car was not as much fun as the first, but my mother seemed in good spirits and, all in all, it was as much an adventure as an inconvenience”. The panel following this depicts chicken wire in the foreground with a flock of birds flying off in the background, conveying some of the tension between the constraint of borders and the idea of freedom. The next panel, also textless, shows mother and son companionably sitting on the boot of their car, eating their sandwiches. In the border-guard scenes, the narrator mentions their guns. Donovan picks this up, providing frequent close-ups of guns, gun belts and holsters when the guards are present, which suggests authority and, perhaps, menace without overplaying the idea of fear.

What I liked about this graphic version, too, is how much it encouraged me to “see” things from our young protagonist’s perspective. I saw it in the text, but it becomes more vivid and immediate in this version. We see him report what he is seeing, and his own thoughts; we see him inserting his boy-ish wishes and perspectives. There is a running theme, from the beginning, about food which marks his focus on the concrete, on his needs. He asks Mel, the duty-free shopkeeper, for a hamburger, which he doesn’t get, but the next day:

Mel came over and gave us a bag of peanut brittle and told us that justice was a damn hard thing to get, but that we shouldn’t give up.

I would have preferred lemon drops, but it was nice of Mel anyway.

In this way, King conveys the truth as experienced by our young boy, but the wider truth that is happening around him – the strength of the mother’s identity and her determination to preserve it. Occasionally, our young narrator perceives some of these truths too. He sees the pride – and yes, the not always positive stubbornness – displayed by his mother and sister, but concludes:

Pride is a good thing to have, you know. Laetitia had a lot of pride, and so did my mother. I figured that someday I’d have it too.

Hachette’s promo for the graphic novel version describes it as resonating “with themes of identity, justice, and belonging”. It is exactly that – and conveys so much that is both personal and political, making it a rich book for any age to think about and consider.

Thomas King (story) and Natasha Donovan (Illustrator)
Borders (text from the 1993 published version)
New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2021
[192pp.]
ISBN: 9780316593052

Gail Jones, Salonika burning (#BookReview)

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Australian author Gail Jones’ ninth novel, Salonika burning, is a curious but beautiful novel, curious because she fictionalises four real people for whom she has no evidence that they met or knew each other, and beautiful because of her writing and the themes she explores. The novel is set during World War 1, but its focus is firmly on the interior rather than the grand stage of battle.

It opens dramatically with the burning of the city of Salonika (Thessaloniki). This is another curious thing, because this destructive event was caused not by an act of war but an accidental kitchen fire. Also, the novel is not set in Salonika but some 90 miles off, in and around “the field of tents that comprised the Scottish Women’s Hospital”, on the shores of Lake Ostrovo in Macedonia. It is 1917, and the novel’s narrative centre is this hospital and those working in and around it. Here, not Salonika, is where our four main characters are based — Stella, an assistant cook/hospital orderly; Olive, an ambulance driver; surgeon Grace; and Stanley, an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps. They are based on the Australians, writer Miles Franklin and adventurer Olive King, and the British painters, Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In her Author’s Note, Jones makes clear that she has fictionalised these characters, and that while all are known to have worked in the vicinity, there is no evidence that they met or even knew each other. It is “a novel which takes many liberties and is not intended to be read as a history”. This is fine with me. After all, a novel, by definition, is not history. The novel follows these characters over a few months after the burning of Salonika.

“everything was coming apart”

So, why Salonika? I see a few reasons. For a start, its burning sets the novel’s tone. On the first page we are presented with opposing ideas. The sight of the burning city is described as “strangely beautiful” but, on the other hand, “alarm, instant fear, the sufferings of others … were no match for excitement at a safe distance”. As the fire died, “excitement left and in its place was a murky lugging of spirit”. Throughout the novel, Salonika represents these contradictions, this tension between what is ugly, what is beautiful; between what is random, what is not; and in how to respond to, or feel about, what is being experienced.

The Salonika fire also encompasses the idea of witness and representation. In the opening scene, Jones describes a painting made of the fire by William T. Wood. It is a “morning-after scene, brightly calm, with a floaty view from the heavens” done in his “signature pastels, remote as a child’s dream and thinly decorative”. Those who saw this painting later, she writes, “saw the pretty lies of art”, whereas “former residents and soldiers said, No, it wasn’t like that”. This tension too is played out in the characters as they think about how they might represent their experience.

The burning of Salonika, then, embodies several ideas that are followed through in the novel. But, Salonika is also relevant to the plot. The novel’s narrative arc lies mainly in the characters and their emotional reactions to what is happening as the months wear on. Not only is there the war with its injured and dying soldiers, but malaria is rife, and the privations they experience, professionally and personally, are exacerbated by the burning of Salonika and the attendant shortage of essential provisions – food, petrol, medical supplies. However, a plot also unfolds, and it is something that happens on the way to Salonika, well into the story, which sets the novel’s final drama in motion.

Salonika burning traverses themes that are the stuff of the best war literature – themes that expose the “idiocy of this war, of all wars” and its impact on those caught up in it – but it offers its own take. The telling feels disjointed, particularly at the start, with its constant switching between the perspectives of the four characters who interact very little with each other until well into the novel – and even then it’s often uneasy, as befits their temperaments. And yet, the novel is compelling to read, primarily because of these characters. They are beautifully individuated, so flawed, so human, so real.

Olive, who is the first character we meet, and the one who closes the novel, is confident, tough and practical. Grace, too, is tough, doing her “duty” with a “dull vacancy”. Stella, at 38, the oldest of the four, is “cranky and wanting more”, more excitement to write about, but she believes in “chin-up and perseverance”, while the youngest, 26-year-old Stanley, is “ill-fitted … to this life of rough cynical men”.

These are “intolerable” times, and we are privy to their struggle to maintain their sanity. Olive resorts to her German grammar to escape the emotional load, while Stanley has his mules and favourite painters, his “Holy Rhymers”. Stella, “writing jolly accounts in her diary”, thinks about what stories she will tell, while Grace has her favourite brother to think about and write to. The disjointed structure mirrors, I think, their sense of isolation. Contact and the potential for friendship is there, but Matron discourages emotional engagement. There’s “no room for emotion”, she says, just “duty”. Olive, who seems to represent the novel’s moral centre, thinks otherwise:

It seemed another kind of duty, not to forget. Olive wanted to speak of what she had seen and known, though she suffered too much remembrance.

This could neatly segue to that issue of representation, and the post-war work done by Stella, Grace and Stanley, but instead, I want to conclude with another idea. On a supply trip to Salonika, Olive, “driving in her safe foreign aura”, had been indulging in a dose of self-pity, but is suddenly confronted by the loss Salonika’s burning represented for its residents, “and only now understood that it was the woe of others that claimed importance”. Likewise, Stanley, Grace and Stella are confronted with the woes of others through the novel’s closing drama, and must decide where their humanity lies.

I started this post noting some curious things about Jones’ approach to her story, but these didn’t spoil the read. Rather, they added to my interest as I read it. Ultimately, Salonika burning is a true and tenderly written novel that captures the essence of war’s inhumanity, and then goes about extracting the humanity out of it. A worthy winner of the 2023 ARA Historical Novel Prize.

Lisa and Brona also read and enjoyed this book.

Further reading

Gail Jones
Salonika Burning
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2022
249pp.
ISBN: 9781922458834

Anton Chekhov, The lottery ticket (#Review)

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Back in April I posted on Majorie Barnard’s short story “The lottery” for Kaggsy’s and Simon’s 1937 Year Club. Commenting on that post, my American friend Carolyn said that in looking for Barnard’s story she found Chekhov’s “The lottery ticket”, written fifty years earlier in 1887. Of course, I had to read it too. There are enough similarities to make us think that Barnard very likely had read Chekhov’s story, but had decided to put her own spin on it. Whether we are right or not, the two stories make for an interesting comparison. I will try to discuss them without spoiling them, but there will be hints.

Both stories deal with a married couple and their reaction to the idea of winning a lottery, and both stories are told third person from the husband’s point of view. Marjorie Barnard’s is set in suburban Sydney, and explores what happens when a wife wins the lottery. She doesn’t tell him immediately so he finds out from others who had read it in the newspaper. On his way home from work, he thinks about what it all means, how “he” might spend it, and he then starts to find fault with his wife. She “wasn’t cheery and easy going” and hadn’t aged well (not as well as he had, anyhow), and so on. It ends, however, with the wife having the upper hand. Barnard’s story reflects her interest in gender, in how little agency women had, and how constricted their lives were.

This is not Chekhov’s prime interest. He is writing in a different place and time. In his story, it is also the wife who had bought the ticket, but it’s the husband who checks the newspaper and sees that there’s a “probability” that her ticket had won. However, rather than reading on and confirming whether that’s the case he suggests they wait:

Looking at his wife, Ivan Dmitritch gave a broad, senseless smile, like a baby when a bright object is shown it. His wife smiled too; it was as pleasant to her as to him that he only mentioned the series, and did not try to find out the number of the winning ticket. To torment and tantalize oneself with hopes of possible fortune is so sweet, so thrilling!

The hope of course is that they will have a lovely dream about the possibilities, those dreams we all occasionally have (even if we don’t buy lottery tickets!) But, if you know Chekhov, you’ll know that he is unlikely to be interested in unrealistic dreams, but in how ordinary people traverse life and their relationships. So, he lets Ivan dream – of “a new life … a transformation”. “That’s not money,” he says, “but power, capital!” He imagines paying off debts, buying “an estate”, going abroad. Occasionally, he notices that his wife is also dreaming. But, it comes to a head when he realises she’s dreaming of going abroad too. What? She’d be no fun to go with. She’d just talk about the children, complain about the cost of the food, not to mention want to spend money on looking after her relations,

And for the first time in his life his mind dwelt on the fact that his wife had grown elderly and plain, and that she was saturated through and through with the smell of cooking, while he was still young, fresh, and healthy, and might well have got married again.

So the story continues with this man who was, at the beginning, “very well satisfied with his lot” – including presumably, having his wife at home, cooking his meals, caring for the children – feeling very different about his life by the end.

The irony, in Chekhov’s as well as Barnard’s story, is that the lottery ticket was the belittled wife’s. Barnard, however, gives her wife agency, whereas Chekhov’s focus is on how money and greed can destabilise (or, is it reveal?) one’s values. However, the little point is still there, in the irony, in that early description of the husband with his “senseless smile, like a baby when a bright object is shown it”, and in so many of the husband’s attitudes towards his wife. Gender issues are not so forward in the resolution, but they are part of the picture.

Anton Chekhov
“The lottery ticket”
First published 1887
Available online at Classic Shorts

Michael Fitzgerald, Late (#BookReview)

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Australian author Michael Fitzgerald’s novel Late owes something to what is known as the alternate (alternative) history genre, or what I call “what if” novels. Here, the underlying story is, what if Marilyn Monroe had not died in 1962 but, instead, had instead escaped Hollywood’s oppressive celebrity culture and moved to Sydney, Australia?

It’s hard to imagine any celebrity who has inspired more books, films, songs – you name it – than Marilyn Monroe. Just check out Wikipedia’s page listing them. There are over twenty works of literature, of which I’ve only read one, Andrew O’Hagan’s The life and opinions of Maf the dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe (my review).

Now though, I should ‘fess up that nowhere in Fitzgerald’s book does he name Marilyn Monroe. His narrator is unnamed. However, she tells us she is also known as Zelda Zonk, a name once used by Marilyn Monroe, and the biography she gives us is that of Monroe down to her birth and death dates, the details of her marriages, and much more. So, given our narrator is intended to be Marilyn, the question is why? Why write a(nother) story using Marilyn, rather than start from scratch? And why do it using another of her personas, Zelda Zonk? I don’t know, but I’ll have a go at thinking about it.

So, let’s start with the setting. We are in 1980s Sydney, so Marilyn has been in Sydney for a couple of decades. She is living in a modernist (Harry Seidler-designed) building in Vaucluse, not far from some of the cliffs in Sydney which, in the 1980s, were also the site of gay-hate crimes known as the “Sydney cliff murders”. Notwithstanding that darkness, Sydney is beautifully evoked.

Early in the novel, our narrator meets a young man Daniel, who turns out to be gay and who is locked out of the apartment he is house-sitting. The relationship that ensues brought to mind Sigrid Nunez’s The invulnerables (my review) in which an older woman develops a friendship with a young man, but they are different books, so let’s move on. Our narrator and Daniel discover points on which they connect – from something as simple as their mothers’ names (Gladys and Gladyne) to something more fundamental like both having experienced adoption and a sense of being outsiders. Trust and tenderness develop between them, as they walk, ride on a ferry together, and cook a meal for Shabbat.

Now, a little aside: I’m not sure how to refer to the narrator because, as she writes in the opening paragraph of Scene (aka Chapter) 2, “I am not always Zelda, and Zelda is not always me”. Indeed, she writes, “Zelda is everything that I’m not […] She is the me who goes on living”, and later again, she is “the protectress of my spirit, of the shattered sense of me”. If I name her Zelda in my post, I am ignoring the distinction, and I don’t to do that. So, I am going to stick with the term “narrator”.

“What I have to say is important and personal” (Zelda)

Our narrator’s voice is variously wise, funny, erudite, and also at times self-deprecating. She is out to set the record straight in terms of her reputation as the “dumb blonde”, the “beautiful child”, the difficult actress who was always “late”:

You see, I wasn’t late: they were in a God-awful American hurry. Yes, let it be said for the record, being late wasn’t a problem: they were in this crazy rush to the moon. In any case, who aspires to be on time when, for my Art, readiness is all?

And when it really counted, let’s face it, my timing was perfect.

Drop-dead perfect.

So much in those few sentences.

She makes us see her life from a different perspective, such as the time she wore the see-through rhinestone dress to sing Happy Birthday to JFK. I don’t know what Monroe really thought or intended but that is perhaps not the point. Michael Fitzgerald gives her a voice that reflects on her experience, on how the culture manipulated her, on the hurts of being commodified and ignored as a person. Marilyn is a wonderful vehicle for interrogating celebrity, and Zelda for exploring how an escapee might see the experience and move on from it.

There are several questions to ask about this book, besides why Marilyn. Another is, why is she speaking now, a couple of decades after her arrival in Sydney? This one she answers – it’s because “the cliffs have been warning me, for months now, that evil dwells here”. And this is where Daniel as a young gay man comes in. He is the vehicle for exploring the homophobia of the time, the gay-hate crimes and cliff-murders. He is a gentle person with his own crisis, and is drawn to Zelda “like an old person or wounded animal is”. Our narrator empathises with him, and the other young men who have disappeared, and wants to help him. Their cliff-top nemesis is, pointedly, blond.

I won’t say more about the plot, because the novel’s main interest lies in the narrator’s musings. They are what I most enjoyed – her clever allusions to movies, books, poetry, and songs, her witty footnotes, her humanity, and the entertaining wordplay (starting with the multiple meanings of the title itself).

I don’t know if I understood the novel the way Fitzgerald intended, but I enjoyed the voice. It is confident, witty, in-your-face. “Without a sense of humour, we are animals, we are lost,” she says. It is also intelligent and thoughtful. This Marilyn – if I can call her that at this point – has come through and is living life the way she wants to live it, but she has heart too, and cares about the young men. It’s a surprising thing that Fitzgerald has done to put the two ideas together, but I think he has made it work. After all, why not have a gay icon care about saving young gay men?

So, I found it an absorbing to read, one that encourages us to think about who Marilyn might have been had she been allowed to be herself. And who Daniel might be if allowed to be himself!

Right near the end, our narrator comments,

Don’t you think it’s funny? How we still haven’t explored these shadows of the human heart?

Maybe we never will, fully, but books like this encourage us to keep trying.

Lisa also enjoyed and reviewed this book.

Michael Fitzgerald
Late: A novel
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2023
208pp.
ISBN: 9781923023024 

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge via publicist Scott Eathorne)

Anna Funder, Wifedom (#BookReview)

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Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life is a book with a mission, a mission that is implied in its full title. That mission is to examine the notion of “wifedom”, and the way patriarchy works to construct it, through the example of the invisible – or, as Funder also calls it, erased – life of George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

To do this, she wrangles Eileen out of the shadows of history to produce an intelligent, funny, warm-hearted, loyal and hard-working woman who, observed novelist Lettice Cooper, loved George “deeply, but with a tender amusement”. It’s an engrossing story, well-told. However, it’s a challenging read too.

Funder explains early in the book that her interest in Eileen came from reading something Orwell wrote about women and wives – after Eileen had died. It’s astonishingly misogynistic, and made her wonder who Eileen was and what she might have thought. Funder set about reading six Orwell biographies written between 1972 and 2003, but she found them unhelpful when it came to Eileen. Indeed, she says, they gave so little that they “started to seem like fictions of omission”. Funder then, logically, went to these biographers’ sources. She found some more bits and pieces about Eileen, but it wasn’t enough. All she had was “a life in facts, a woman in pieces”, so she “considered writing a novel – a counterfiction to the one in the biographies”. But, she was fascinated “by the sly ways” in which Eileen had been hidden, and she felt a novel couldn’t effectively explore this. Then she “found the letters”.

These were six letters that Eileen had written to her good friend Norah from just after her marriage in 1936 until 1944, but they had not been discovered until 2005. These letters gave her Eileen’s voice – and this voice was “electrifying”. Funder believed she could no longer write a novel. She writes,

I wanted to make her live, and at the same time to reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her, and that still holds sway today. I thought of it as writing a fiction of inclusion.

“it’s hard … for history to find you”

This is where the book gets tricky, because, while I found Wifedom a fascinating read, it raised questions too, and they are intrinsic to what Funder is trying to achieve, and how she goes about achieving it. The book is divided into five parts, with the first part titled “Wifedom, A Counterfiction”. What does this mean? She doesn’t immediately explain what I have described above. Instead, she opens her book on a scene in which she imagines Eileen writing a letter to Norah – and she includes excerpts from that letter. This throws us readers in at the deep end. As we get into the book, we come to recognise these imagined sections, because they are identified by indentation, and opening and closing graphical symbols, but at the beginning it’s a bit mystifying, albeit an engaging way to capture our interest.

Early in the read, then, it becomes apparent that Wifedom comprises a complex mixture of processes and forms. The imagined sections are interspersed throughout the book between more traditional biographical writing about Eileen and George’s life. And interspersed between these are reflections from Funder’s own life, because one of her points is that the patriarchy, the “patri-magic”, which erased Eileen’s life from George’s biography, still exists and is evident in her own life as a wife and mother, despite her supportive husband and “egalitarian” marriage. I’m not going to focus on this aspect of the book, though, because it seems to fade away somewhat as Eileen and George’s story picks up, and is not, anyhow, where I want to go in this post.

Instead, I want to tease out the process. Early on Funder writes that

Looking for Eileen involved the pleasure of reading Orwell on how power works. Finding her held the possibility of revealing how it works on women: how a woman can be buried first by domesticity and then by history.

This is not particularly new. Anyone interested in feminism is aware of how women have been lost in (and thus to) history. However, Funder’s book is enlightening in this regard. She does an excellent job of interrogating how it can happen. It happens when biographers ignore or play down the role of women in their subjects’ lives. Through cross-matching her sources she finds example after example of Eileen’s contributions being downplayed or omitted. She shows how the use of passive voice and terms like “wife” rather than Eileen’s name work to make her disappear. (Orwell does it himself in Homage to Catalonia.) She finds examples where biographers, disconcerted by some of George’s behaviour, excuse it (how often are men excused!), or, uncertain about evidence, will rephrase it. For example, Funder writes that Eileen

noted his extraordinary political simplicity – which seems to have worried one of the biographers, who rewrote her words to give him an ‘extraordinary political sympathy’.

Eileen’s words come from a 1938 letter to Marjorie Dakin. The biographer is Crick. (Another of the textual clues to readers in this book is that Eileen’s words are conveyed in italics, while the words of others are enclosed in quotation marks.)

But here’s the challenge – interpretation. Funder writes early in her book that,

As serendipity would have it, in 2020 Sylvia Topp published Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, which contained much material I hadn’t found, and was thrilled to read, though we interpret it differently, and so build differing portraits of Eileen.

She does not explain what she means here, but in the very thorough Notes at the end of the book, Funder elaborates on Topp’s approach to Eileen. Put simply, Topp, Funder says, sees Eileen as one of those celebrated people’s partners who devoted their lives “joyfully to assisting the talented partners in all their various needs knowing all along that they would be under-appreciated, and often ignored, and yet never faltering in their dedication, or in their willingness to submerge their own personal talents into their partners’ success.” Topp, then, sees Eileen as a “helpmeet of genius” while Funder is interested, as she writes in these Notes, “in examining what it took, perhaps, to be in that marriage, and that dream”.

So, what we have here is interpretation. Topp had the same sources that Funder did. Indeed, she added some to Funder’s arsenal. But, she interprets them differently. As a feminist, I easily aligned with Funder’s interpretation, but as I read I also had this little niggle that Funder was interpreting her sources – from the perspective of her times, values and gender – just as other biographers had before her.

Wifedom was my reading group’s April book. Our conversation focused mainly on the biographical content – on Eileen’s life, on George Orwell and his books, and on the impact of patriarchy on Eileen. We were horrified by the life led by Eileen, as Funder tells it – and the facts seem inarguable. Their relationship appeared to us to have been so one-sided. Eileen did all the domestic work, and it was hard work given the primitive rural cottage that they called home. She was, often, the main breadwinner, and she did his typing, as well as offering editorial comment. She was necessary to him. Meanwhile, he focused on his writing and, we gathered, chasing other women. And yet, Eileen stayed with George. Why, we wondered?

We didn’t delve into the interpretation issue, albeit I would have loved to, but I needed more time to collect my thoughts. We did, however, discuss why we thought Eileen stayed with George which, I guess, was us interpreting what we’d read! Various ideas were put forward, including that Eileen might have been a “rescuer”, or that she knew she was unlikely to have been published herself (in a patriarchal world) and so channelled her energies through George, or, simply, that she loved him and, much like Topp argued, willingly helped him in any way she could.

So, there you have it! History, biography, it’s all a matter of the facts you have, and the way you see them. I don’t mean to devalue the biographer’s art by that statement, but simply to recognise that even the most formal, most rigorously documented biography will, necessarily, be affected by the biographer and their times. For this reason, I found Wifedom an absorbing and provocative read, though perhaps only partly in the way Funder intended.

Anna Funder
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life
Hamish Hamilton, 2023
511pp.
ISBN: 9781760143787

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Vol. 2)

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Mansfield Park book covers
Mansfield Park book covers

As I wrote last month, my Jane Austen group is doing a slow read of Mansfield Park this year, meaning we are reading and discussing the novel, one volume at a time, over three months. This month was Volume 2 (that is, chapters 19 to 31). It starts with the return of the patriarch, Sir Thomas Bertram, from his plantation in Antigua, and ends with Fanny rejecting Henry Crawford’s proposal.

Last month, I said that the thing that struck me most in volume 1 was the selfishness, or self-centredness, of most of the characters. I wondered whether Austen was writing a commentary on the selfishness/self-centredness of the well-to-do, and how this results in poor behaviour, carelessness of the needs of others, and for some, in immorality (however we define that). Having now read volume 2, I’m still on this path – together with a couple of other, somewhat related ideas, education, which I also mentioned last month, and parenting.

But first, the selfishness and self-centredness continues. In this volume, Maria marries and she and Julia leave Mansfield Park, leaving Fanny the only young woman at the Park. Mary Crawford, over in the parsonage, no longer has a young female friend to entertain her, so her sister Mrs Grant thinks Fanny would suffice:

Mrs. Grant, really eager to get any change for her sister, could, by the easiest self-deceit, persuade herself that she was doing the kindest thing by Fanny, and giving her the most important opportunities of improvement in pressing her frequent calls. 

Here is one of the reasons I love Austen. She knows exactly how we justify our actions to ourselves.

Anyhow, as a result, Fanny spends more time with Mary, as a favour to others, resulting in, Austen writes,

an intimacy resulting principally from Miss Crawford’s desire of something new, and which had little reality in Fanny’s feelings.

Examples like this pepper the volume. Lady Bertram doesn’t want Fanny to accept a dinner invitation because it would affect her “evening’s comfort”. After all, as Austen writes, “Lady Bertram never thought of being useful to anybody”. Late in the volume, Lady Bertram rises to the occasion, or thinks she does. She sends her maid to help Fanny dress for her first ball, and says so during the ball when Fanny’s appearance is complimented. “Chapman helped her to dress. I sent Chapman to her.” Yes, she did, but only after she was dressed and too late to help Fanny who was already dressed! Austen adds:

Not but that she was really pleased to have Fanny admired; but she was so much more struck with her own kindness in sending Chapman to her, that she could not get it out of her head.

Mrs Grant, Mary and Lady Bertram aren’t the only selfish, self-centred people in this volume. There’s the egregious Henry Crawford who had played, in volume 1, with the feelings of Maria and Julia, and then leaves Mansfield, in volume 2, with nary a word to either of them:

Henry Crawford was gone, gone from the house, and within two hours afterwards from the parish; and so ended all the hopes his selfish vanity had raised in Maria and Julia Bertram.

That’s not the end of Henry, though, because he’s soon back, telling his sister Mary, “my plan is to make Fanny Price in love with me”. In my Jane Austen group, we discussed that as his frivolous flirtation moved to something more serious – as he started to truly see, we believe, Fanny’s value – he gives no thought to whether Fanny will love him. That’s a given! He’s a catch!

There’s more I could say on this theme – I haven’t even mentioned Mrs Norris – but there are other ideas to talk about. I started to see in volume 2 that Mansfield Park is also about parenting, and, relating to this, I’d argue that in this volume we see the beginning of the education of Sir Thomas.

However, Sir Thomas is a controversial character in my group. Some detest him, rather like Mr Yates who had never seen a father so “unintelligibly moral, so infamously tyrannical” as Sir Thomas. But, along with some others, I see Sir Thomas differently.  Sure, he’s formal, but he loves his children – and he has no support in that wife of his. When he realises how silly Maria’s fiancé is, he wants to give her an out. Unfortunately, Maria wants to escape home and its restraints, so doesn’t take it. Sir Thomas is – admittedly – relieved because it suits his wish “to secure a marriage which would bring him such an addition of respectability and influence”. An example of new money, he’s a product of his times, and a “good” marriage can only help! However, as the volume progresses, Sir Thomas looks out for Fanny, wanting to give her opportunities, despite Mrs Norris’ attempts to keep puttng Fanny down.

For me, a recurring theme in Austen’s novels, in fact, is parenting. Lady Bertram is completely hands-off, letting Mrs Norris (as I mentioned in volume 1) have too big a hand in her daughters’ upbringing, to their detriment. Sir Thomas, on the other hand, is strict and – well, let’s talk about how it all plays out in volume 3. Here, though, he is kind to Fanny and wants well for her.

I have more to say on this, but I’ll leave it here as there are two ideas I’d like to share from my group’s discussion.

One of our members talked about the Australian critic John Wiltshire’s discussion of the disempowerment of women in his book Jane Austen and the body. He argues that caring for servants and the working class is a traditional role for genteel but otherwise disempowered woman, but that “this benevolence has a Janus face” because it replicates the inferior-superior social relationships that characterise the wider society. Mrs Norris, Wiltshire argues, “punishes others for her own dependency and frustration, whilst being able to hide this from herself in the guise of generosity to the recipients and loyal service to the system”.

Similarly, all at Mansfield Park have, through their adoption of poor Fanny Price “basked in the pleasure of benevolence”. But this has let Fanny become Mrs Norris’ victim. Both Fanny and Mrs Norris, says Wiltshire, are outsiders, “fringe-dwellers”; both are single, defenceless females who are “not part of the family except by courtesy. The one lives in the small White House, on the edge of the estate, the other in the little white attic at the top of the house”. Wiltshire argues that Fanny becomes the scapegoat upon whom Mrs Norris can “exercise her frustrations and baffled energies”. By scolding and punishing Fanny, she can “appease her own sense of functionless dependency and reaffirm the strictness of the social hierarchy which gives meaning to her life”. An interesting idea which I plan to think more about. It doesn’t excuse Mrs Norris, but it might explain her!

The other idea I want to share came from a young American visitor to our meeting. While she had read Austen and other classic authors, she said that her main reading, currently, is romance and general fiction. So, as she was reading Mansfield Park, she looked for tropes common to the romance genre. And, she found two significant ones, which could cement Austen’s reputation as the mother of the romance genre! The first trope is the idea of friends (or, here, cousins) becoming lovers, and the other is the romantic heroine’s belief that she’s “not like other girls”. She’s not as pretty, not as outgoing, and so on, as her rivals. Fanny makes this sort of observation in a discussion with Edmund about how she likes hearing Sir Thomas talk about the West Indies. She says she is “graver than other people” and concludes:

… but then I am unlike other people, I dare say.

I loved this insight from a first-time reader of the novel.

So much more to say … but there will be more opportunities to talk Austen, I dare say! Meanwhile, thoughts?

Rachel Matthews, Never look desperate (#BookReview)

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One of the most appealing things about Rachel Matthews’ third novel, Never look desperate, is that it features some decent men. In this #metoo era, which differs little from what came before, there’s plenty of fiction which shows men in less than stellar light. And that’s fair enough. One of the reasons I read fiction is to expand my understanding of the issues I care about. I can feel along with the so-called sad girl stories, and applaud the angry feminist ones. However, most men I know, like most women I know, are decent human beings trying to live good, fulfilled lives. And this, essentially, is the subject matter of Matthews’ novel.

Never look desperate follows three main characters, in alternating, third-person chapters. These characters are 49-year-old Bernard, 54-year-old Minh, and Bernard’s recently widowed 70-year-old mother Goldie. It is set in Melbourne, immediately post-pandemic. People are starting to get out and about again, but the pandemic’s shadow lingers in the background. Bernard and Minh are single, lonely, and seeking connection.

Bernard, a photographer who works at Officeworks, dearly misses his father Marvin, who had died 12 months ago. He also wears a locket encasing some of his dead-ex-wife’s ashes around his neck. He had loved his wife, and the fact that they were divorced when she died, does not lessen his grief. With both gone, he feels that from now, “the world would keep taking pieces of him”, but he’s surviving – just. The last time he’d had sex, on a Tinder date, “it was all over in one minute and 10 seconds – the same time it took him to microwave porridge”.

Vietnamese-born Minh, who came to Australia by boat when she was seven, works at the Kino cinema complex. She has never married, though has had her share of boyfriends. She loves her mother, but rarely sees her because her evangelical step-father had kicked her out long ago. We first meet her as she wakes, gasping, from “night terrors”, and we soon learn that she carries trauma from the loss of her father on that boat from Vietnam and from the racism she experienced as the only Vietnamese kid at school.

Goldie is more complicated. She’s “alternative”, and uncompromising. She is implicated in her husband’s death, though this is not a legal issue in the novel, because she had slowly replaced his blood pressure tablets with alternative medicines. She has a new lover, but she’s prickly – and grief and ageing are not making her any easier to be with. However, Franz is hanging in there. As she does with the other characters, Matthews nails her with sentences like this:

Goldie didn’t really have friends. Her old workmates from a community centre in Collingwood, found her difficult to work with, but we were grateful when she wrestled with management for better conditions.

She is the most difficult character for readers to identify with, but she has her own baggage, including a tough upbringing, during which her mother would lock her in a dark laundry, aka “the Thinking Room”.

“the world was different now” (Goldie)

So, we have three people who are all grieving or have suffered losses in their lives. Bernard and Minh meet early on via the dating app Tinder, and through the rest of the novel there’s a rom-com type tension regarding whether they will overcome their anxieties and get together. The novel’s other main tension concerns whether there will be a rapprochement between Goldie and Bernard, whose upbringing had been difficult with such an inflexible, “alternative” mother, and who believes that she does not grieve his beloved father. We though know better. (Marvin, whom we only know by hearsay, is one of the book’s joys.)

Now this might all sound ho-hum, but it’s definitely not, for a few reasons. One is the humour. Matthews captures the place and time, and her characters, with light satire that preserves their humanity while letting us laugh at the things they and we do in these strange times of ours. She hones in on some of the absurdities and pretensions of our times, without condemning. After all, who knows who will have the last laugh! That said, the IKEA and cruise-ship scenes are priceless.

Another reason is the characterisation. These characters are real. We know them, and, even if we are not exactly like them, we have surely suffered similar sadnesses and insecurities. This week, for example, we lunched with a recently widowed friend, and as I greeted her with a hug, she said “oh, a lovely hug”. One of the points Matthews makes so eloquently in this novel is the longing “to be touched” in those left alone – especially during the pandemic. So, there’s genuine pathos here, too, as we watch our characters struggle, hard, to beat back their justifiable fears and reconnect.

Related to the characterisation is the setting. Melburnians will love all the grounding references to places, products and businesses that carry signals for those who know, but are self-explanatory enough for those who don’t. The novel is also peppered with pop-culture references, particularly to music but also to film and TV shows, which will be more universal for the generations involved.

Then there is the quiet wisdom. Bernard’s dad had told him once that “a sad day is only a day”. This is not to minimise intense grief, of course, but it puts into perspective the little ups and downs that we can let get on top of us if we don’t take care. Matthews shows the various kindnesses people meet through life, often in unexpected places, and also that online-friendships, like Minh has with Suzy in New York, are real and sustainable.

Goldie recognises early in the novel that “the world was different now. She just had to find her way”. By novel’s end, our characters are finding their way. The future isn’t guaranteed, but they are on their way with a little more connection in their lives. What did E.M. Forster say in Howard’s End? “Only connect”. Yet again, we see his wisdom – and Matthews has given it to us in a funny, warm-hearted novel that is a real pleasure to read.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed this novel.

Rachel Matthews
Never look desperate
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2023
297pp.
ISBN: 9780645565393

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

Marjorie Barnard, The lottery (#Review, #1937 Club)

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This will probably be my only review for the 1937 Year Club but I am thrilled to do it, because it is by Marjorie Barnard, an author whom I have mentioned many times, but have not yet managed to review here. My post is on a short story from her collection, The persimmon tree and other stories, which is one of the very few short story collections I’ve read more than once. It is so good. And don’t just take it from me. Carmel Bird mentions it in her bibliomemoir, Telltale, calling it “extraordinarily powerful”.

I wasn’t sure, in fact, what I was going to read for this week. I certainly hadn’t considered this collection because it was first published in 1943 but, rummaging around Trove, I discovered a story by Marjorie Barnard in The Bulletin of 6 January 1937. The page was titled “Of a lottery winner: First Prize” but I recognised it immediately, and let out an internal whoop. Here was my chance.

“The lottery”, as it is titled in the collection, has been anthologised, including in The Penguin best Australian short stories (1991), though the titular story, “The persimmon tree” is, I believe, the most commonly anthologised from the collection.

Who was Marjorie Barnard?

Marjorie Barnard (1897-1987) was an Australian novelist and short story writer, critic, historian and librarian. She wrote five collaborative novels with Flora Eldershaw, under the pseudonym, M. Barnard Eldershaw. Their first novel, A house is built, was published in 1929, having jointly won, with Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo, The Bulletin prize in 1928. Their last, the futuristic Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow was censored, and published in an expurgated edition as Tomorrow and tomorrow in 1947. Barnard also wrote works of literary criticism, and is credited with writing the first assessment of Patrick White (in Meanjin in 1956) and the first biography of Miles Franklin. (Jill Roe writes of the biography in the ADB, saying that “written with misgivings and before the release of Franklin’s voluminous papers, it exhibited characteristic virtues, with insight and style making up for ambivalence and inevitable error.”)

Barnard, along with Eldershaw, and other Sydney-based writers, like Frank Dalby Davison, was deeply concerned about the social and economic upheavals of the 1930s. These three, known as “the triumvirate”, held literary soirees which were attended by like-minded writers including Xavier Herbert and Miles Franklin. They were active in promoting writer’s rights (through the Fellowship of Australian Writers), and opposed censorship. She was a pacifist, and was apparently named in those political witch hunts of the 1950s, making her cautious about what she admitted to in terms of political affiliations. She was one of many writers who corresponded with, and often asked advice of, Nettie Palmer. She was a significant force.

In 1983, she was awarded the Patrick White Award, as was also her admirer Carmel Bird, years later. Hers was a long, and active life – far too long for me to cover here – and unfortunately, I don’t think anyone has done a biography of her. She is more than a worthy subject.

“The lottery”

What is so “extraordinarily powerful” about The persimmon tree and other stories is the quietly controlled but clear-eyed way Barnard interrogates human experience, in general, and women’s experience, in particular. Many of the stories have a strong feminist undercurrent, and “The lottery” is one of these. What makes it remarkable is that it is told third person through the perspective of the husband, which sets us up to align with him – perhaps.

The story is set in suburban Sydney. It starts with the husband, Ted Bilborough, having just boarded the ferry on his way home from work. His co-passengers tell him – show him in the paper, in fact – that his wife had won the lottery, “Mrs. Grace Bilborough, 52 Cuthbert-street.’… First prize, £5OOO, Last Hope Syndicate.” The thing is, Ted didn’t know. We then follow him on his way home as he goes through various emotions – and as he does so, we glean a picture of who he is and the sort of life his wife has led. A disconnect builds between how he – the perfect unreliable narrator – sees that life and the way we do.

At first, we are told that “everyone likes Ted”. He’s decent, it seems, in that typical-for-the-time suburban-husband way, and because of this “he’d always expected in a trusting sort of way to be rewarded, but not through Grace”. It’s little qualifications like this – “but not through Grace” – that give the game away.

Alongside Ted’s thoughts are descriptions of the evening. They too contain nuances that suggest deeper truths are at play. “The sun was sinking into a bank of grey cloud, soft and formless as mist” and two pine-trees have a “soft arrested grace”, a bit like his Grace, we readers might think. A little further on, “Ted could see that the smooth water was really a pale, tawny gold with patches, roughened by the turning tide, of pale frosty blue”.

He wonders how she’d paid for the ticket, “He hadn’t noticed any difference in the housekeeping, and he prided himself he noticed everything”. He starts to rethink Grace, who’d been “a good wife”, while he’d been “a good husband”. Indeed, “theirs was a model home” but, “well, somehow he found it easier to be cheerful in other people’s homes than in his own”. Whose fault is this? Well, Grace’s of course!

She wasn’t cheery and easy-going. Something moody about her now. Moody. He’d worn better than Grace; anyone could see that, and yet it was he who had had the hard time. All she had to do was to stay at home and look after the house and the children. Nothing much in that. She always seemed to be working, but he couldn’t see what there was to do that could take her so long. 

And so it continues, Ted ruminating on the situation, on their marriage, and on how things might proceed – even starting to feel a bit magnanimous with this money that’s not his own – until he arrives home, and discovers exactly what Grace intends. It’s all in the name of the Syndicate!

The writing is delicious. Spare, and accessible, it nails women’s lives and the constrictions so many live under. There is little agency for many of her women, and Barnard draws this with such simple but knowing realism it takes your breathe away. I love many of the stories in the book – and this is as good as any of them.

* Read for the 1962 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon (Stuck in a Book) who, I discovered, has reviewed the collection.

Marjorie Barnard
“The lottery” (orig. pub. in The Bulletin, 6 January 1937)
in Marjorie Barnard, The persimmon tree and other stories
London: Virago Press, 1985 (first published by Clarendon in 1943)
pp. 97-105

Full text of The persimmon tree and other stories is available online at the Internet Archive

Thomas King, Borders (#Review)

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Thomas King’s “Borders” is the eleventh of fourteen stories in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. Like the previous story by Duane Niatum, it was also written in the 1990s.

Thomas King

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides some basic information about King, but I am supplementing that with information from Wikipedia which introduces him as an “American-born Canadian writer and broadcast presenter who most often writes about First Nations”. He was born in California in 1943, and “self-identifies as being of Cherokee, Greek, and German descent”. He has written novels, children’s books, and short stories. 

King studied in Californian schools and universities, before earning his PhD at the University of Utah. Between his various degrees, he worked in many jobs, including spending three years in New Zealand. He moved to Canada in 1980, where he worked as an academic until he retired.

In terms of his First Nations activity, our main interest here, Wikipedia says that “his 1986 PhD dissertation was on Native American studies, one of the earliest works to explore the oral storytelling tradition as literature”. He is committed to a wide range of issues concerning First Nations rights, prospects and culture, but most relevant to his story, “Borders”, is a statement Wikipedia shares from his book, The inconvenient Indian:

“The issue has always been land. It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people”.

“Borders”

According to Blaisdell, “Borders” appears in King’s 1993 short story collection, One good story, that one, which was a best-seller in Canada. “Borders” is one of those frequently anthologised stories, apparently, which doesn’t surprise me because it is a ripper. From what I’ve read about King’s writing, “Borders” feels typical of his approach, with its conversational style and use of humour to convey a serious message. King adapted this story into a teleplay for a CBC anthology drama series, and it has also, recently, been turned into a graphic novel for a younger readers.

The narrative comprises two storylines which are alternated with each other. It is told first person through the eyes of a young boy. One storyline concerns his much older sister, Laetitia, leaving home at the age of 17 to live in Salt Lake City, Utah, while the other tells of a trip he makes with his mother some five or so years later to visit this sister. The crux of the story, though, lies in what happens at the US-Canada border. Asked to give her “citizenship”, the mother insists “Blackfoot” and is denied entry. She refuses to offer anything else. As a result, she and her son get caught in a no-man’s land when, attempting to return to Canada, the same response to the same question results in her being refused entry there too. As one of the border officials tries to explain to her, “it’s a legal technicality, that’s all”.

Of course, that’s not all. Blackfoot people ranged across the great northwest of America in what is now known as America and Canada. For our narrator’s mother, that land is her “citizenship”, not that she is American or Canadian, and she will not back down.

From the opening, the mother is established as sensible, no-nonsense. She doesn’t want Laetitia to go to Utah, and she doesn’t give in easily, pointing out the negatives right until they leave her at the border. But Laetitia will go and her mother is eventually proud of her, because she hadn’t “gone floating after some man like a balloon on a string” nor had she “snuck out of the house … to chase rainbows down alleys. And she hadn’t been pregnant.”

We first meet the border, as mentioned above, when the mother and son (our narrator) take Laetitia there, from where she’ll get a bus to Salt Lake City. We see the border, but mother and son don’t attempt to cross it at this point. The writing, at this early point, captures the obstinacy and strength in both mother and daughter, alongside the love between them::

The wind had come up and it blew Laetitia’s hair across her face. Mum reached out and pulled the strands out of Laetitia’s eyes, and Laetitia let her.

“Laetitia let her”. Conveys so much, doesn’t it?

Anyhow, it’s a few years later, when mother and son set off to visit Laetitia that the fun starts. Our narrator sets it up beautifully, his “mom” packing food for the trip, while he plaintively hopes they can “stop at one of those restaurants too, right?” The pacing of the border conversations is perfect. We chuckle, but we see the point too. When the mother gives up trying to get into the USA, and tries to return to Canada, the humour continues. The Canadian border guard, after some friendly small talk, asks

“Where are you coming from?”
“Standoff”.
“Is that in Montana?”
“No.”
“Where are you going?”
“Standoff.”
The woman’s name was Carol and I don’t guess she was any older than Laetitia. “Wow, you both Canadians?”
“Blackfoot.”

And it starts again. It’s just delicious. “Mom” is polite, but also determined to make her point and not. give. in. There are no histrionics, there’s no violence. Just polite behaviour on all sides. (But, the description of the few days they spend in this limbo region, visiting the duty free shop and sleeping in the car, did remind me of that Kath and Kim episode when Kath and Kel spend their honeymoon at the airport.)

The language is direct and spare, told from a pre-teen’s point of view. He reports rather than comments, but in that reportage we see the truth – of the strength of the mother’s identity and determination to preserve it, and of her wisdom in dealing with her daughter.

Hachette’s promo for the graphic novel version describes it as resonating “with themes of identity, justice, and belonging”. It is exactly that. I imagine the graphic novel is a winner, because the short story sure is.

Thomas King
“Borders” (orig. pub. 1991)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 84-94
ISBN: 9780486490953