Review

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

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Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

The Penelopiad bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

This is the second time I have read Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. Much as I enjoyed it the first time around, I probably wouldn’t have read it again if it hadn’t been scheduled for one of my online bookgroups. However, given that scheduling and the fact that I had recently listened to Simon Armitage’s dramatisation of The odyssey, I didn’t mind reading it again – and it is short! My rereading though ended up being a little disjointed as I was trying to finish off a number of competing contracts at the time as well as prepare for a ten-day trip to our warm Top End. This review may be similarly disjointed!

The book is part of Canongate’s Myths series in which recognised writers were asked to retell well-known myths. At the time of publication, Atwood said that she tried a number of myths and had nearly given up when she suddenly recollected the story of Penelope and her hanged maids – and her childhood reaction to it. The result is a rather fresh – and cheeky – look at the story told through Penelope’s and the hanged maids’ eyes, from, not surprisingly, a feminist (or at least female) perspective.

The story is told through a large number of short chapters in Penelope’s voice, and these are interspersed with commentary from the hanged maids, emulating, appropriately enough, the idea of a Greek chorus. The way Atwood uses it, the chorus provides a satiric perspective on Penelope’s view of the story. The story is told in flashback, with the narrators all speaking from Hades, where they now reside. It is not a standard revisionist feminist treatise that simplifies the world to one of gender power discrepancies (even though that is what underlies it all). We get to “feel” what it might have been like to have lived then. Atwood’s characters are “real” and operate in a complex world where game-playing and manipulation are de rigueur if you are going to survive.

In Homer, Penelope is presented as “the quintessential faithful wife” (Atwood’s introduction) who brings up their son and cleverly fends off suitors while waiting patiently for Odysseus’ return. When he returns, he kills the suitors and twelve of Penelope’s maids. Atwood, again in her introduction, says that in choosing to tell the story through Penelope and the maids she wanted to focus on “what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really doing?”. Her Penelope is something rather more than the constant wife of The odyssey. She, the part daughter of a watery Naiad, is a slippery character to pin down. She is highly jealous of her beautiful cousin Helen (she of Troy fame) and she is capable of making her own power plays. She is of high birth, contrasting her with the twelve maids who, by their own admission “were born to the wrong parents. Poor parents, slave parents, peasant parents, and serf parents…”.

What I enjoyed most about this book – besides the story Atwood tells – is its sly humour. It is genuinely funny, albeit in a dark or sometimes gruesome way. Much of the humour arises out of Penelope’s playing with the truth. In fact the book plays continually with the idea of “stories”. In the first chapter, Penelope says:

Now that all the others have run out of air, it’s my turn to do a little story-making. I owe it to myself. I’ve had to work myself up to it; it’s a low art, tale-telling … So, I’ll spin a little thread of my own.

A little further on in the book, she says, when reporting one of the prevailing stories about her, that “there’s some [my emphasis] truth to this story”. And so, as we read we need to remember that she too is telling us a story, and that there’s no guarantee that her story is any more “true” than another’s. This idea is reinforced by the fact that the maids comment on what Penelope tells us. Their and Penelope’s perspectives are not always the same. That is, their truths are different. This notion of stories versus stories is made even more clear in the chapter titled “Waiting” in which Penelope recites all the opposing stories and rumours about what Odysseus was doing/what was happening to him during the 10 years of his return. Reader beware, I say. In fact, at one point in the book where Penelope questions whether the “maids were making some of this up”, I wrote in the margin “Where is the truth”? I love the way Atwood plays with myth-making in a book about a myth – and, in doing so, also calls into question her own storytelling. Very postmodern!

I won’t go on. It’s a little uneven, with the maids’ story in particular being not quite as well integrated as it perhaps could. And yet, I’d recommend it, if you haven’t already read it. It’s clever, funny and compassionate – but its compassion is not a naive one. Rather, it has wide open eyes and knows that nothing is ever as simple as it looks – particularly when you find yourself in a situation where there is imbalance of power. Games will be played – and the powerless, such as women and particularly poor maids, will usually lose. And this, in the end, is Atwood’s (somewhat heavy-handed) point. As Penelope says in her last chapter:

Even with my limited access I can see that the world is just as dangerous as it was in my day, except that the misery and suffering are on a much wider scale. As for human nature, it’s as tawdry as ever.

Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2005
199pp.
ISBN: 9781920885953
NB: Cover image used above is from the new 2007 edition.

Herz Bergner, Between sky and sea

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Hans Bergner, Between sea and sky
Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

Do you read introductions to novels? And, if you do, do you read them before or after you read the novel itself? I read them, but always afterwards because I like to come to  novels as objectively as I can. And so, this is what I did with Herz Bergner’s  Between sky and sea which won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal for Book of the Year in 1948. I’d never heard of it. (Well, I wasn’t around then, but still …!) However, this year Text Publishing has republished it, which is a pretty savvy decision because, as Arnold Zable suggests in the introduction, it has some resonances for contemporary Australia – but more on that anon. Zable also tells us that while Bergner, a Polish Jew who emigrated to Australia in 1938, wrote the book in Yiddish, it was first published in English, having been translated by another Australian Jewish novelist, Judah Waten.

The novel has a straightforward plot. It tells the story of a group of Jewish refugees from the Nazi invasion of Poland who are passengers on an old Greek freighter bound for Australia where they hope for a new life. (Australians, at least, will see the contemporary resonances now. Think SIEV X, for example). There is, though, an older resonance which Bergner presumably knew – that of the MS St Louis which tried to find a home for Jewish refugees in 1939 after they were turned away from Cuba (and which later inspired the book Voyage of the damned, so titled because, as many of you know I’m sure, they continued to be turned away as they went from port to port). These resonances and more are all referred to in the Introduction. Knowing readers will pick many of them up, but isn’t that the fun of reading? To pick them up yourself? So, read the book, I say, and then the rather fine Introduction.

Anyhow, back to the book. As I was reading it, I couldn’t help also thinking of that allegorical boat trip, the Ship of Fools. This is not that allegory – they are not fools, and the boat does have a captain, but as I read the novel I felt that awful sense of a world out of control that the allegory represents.

If this book were a film, it would be described as having an ensemble cast, because it has no identifiable heroes or heroines, no real anti-heroes either. Rather, it has a bunch of people who are thrown together by circumstance but who have little in common other than that they are Jewish refugees. Their backgrounds are diverse and they vary in their practice of Judaism (if they practise it at all). They include Nathan and Ida (who lost their respective spouses and children while escaping the invasion), the know-it-all Fabyash and his family, the flirty but mostly kind-hearted Bronya and her stolid overweight husband Marcus, Mrs Hudess and her two daughters (whose only remaining possession is one doll), and several others. As you might expect with such a set up, the novel explores the increasing tensions – the arguments, the pettinesses alongside the kindnesses – that occur as supplies of food and water dwindle and people get sick, while the journey goes on and on without an end in sight:

They were ashamed to lift their heads, to look each other in the face, and for two reasons. Because Fabyash had sunk so low that he had stolen food from a child, and because Mrs Hudess, who was regarded as such a refined person, had burst forth with the language of the coarsest market vendor. To what depths suffering can bring a person.

The strength of the novel is, in fact, its characterisation. Despite its almost non-existent plot (though there is a climax that I won’t give away), the novel maintains our interest because its characters are real in the way they relate to each other and their circumstances. We know these people, we are these people. In this regard it is a little different from those Holocaust novels – many of which also deal with “ordinary” people – that work on a larger-than-life heroism-betrayal scale.

Towards the end of his introduction, Zable quotes Waten regarding the translation. Waten apparently translated it with Bergner by his side, and says that Bergner was “very odd because he wanted every word translated, and if the number of words came out fewer in English he wasn’t very happy. He never really mastered the English language”. This makes a bit of sense because there are times when the novel feels a little – well – wordy. This never becomes a big problem, however, because Bergner’s imagery (mostly simile and analogy) tends to be fresh and is often two-edged:

A soft haze shimmered in the summer air, caressing their faces like spider webs. [on Nathan and Ida’s escape from Warsaw]

and

For a moment the moon shone through, glittering like a lance, and then it was quickly hidden again.

and

… at midday when the sun was ripe and full like a great golden pear that hung heavily from the centre of the sky.

I enjoy writing like this that contains layers of meaning that make you think a little before you move on. The language is not particularly complex, but Bergner has a habit of inserting a word or phrase that undercuts your expectation and keeps you reading.

The themes are both particular and universal – particular because they specifically depict the anti-Semitism that was rife during World War 2 (to the extent that even the crew on the boat treat the passengers as less than human), and universal because they explore the various ways humans behave under stress. The overriding theme – the biggie, in fact – is the way we continue to turn away other. The irony is that even when we are the other – such as the Jews on this boat – we find otherness amongst ourselves to turn away (until a bigger calamity forces us to reconnect). Will we ever change? I fear not. In fact, that’s what makes the universal, universal, isn’t it?

It is encouraging to see publishers like Sydney University Press and Text Publishing – not to mention of course Penguin –  reissuing long out-of-print Australian classics. I hope it pays off, not only because I like to see forgotten Australian classics brought to life again but because, as in this book, the messages conveyed by these classics can be as valid today as they were when they were first written.

Herz Bergner (trans. by Judah Waten)
Between sky and sea
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010 (first ed. 1946)
215pp.
ISBN: 9781921656316

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Shirley Jackson, Charles

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Before I start this review, I have a technical question. Does anyone know why advice to bloggers about maximising your site always say not to use something like “here” for a hyperlink but, rather, to add the link to the actual name of what is being linked to? In other words, to make the link so – Shirley Jackson’s Charles – rather than so – Shirley Jackson’s Charles can can be read here? I have done both but I have tended to prefer the “here” approach when I am making a link to the actual text of the item I am reviewing. Otherwise, the chances are – and this has happened – that the blog’s readers miss it because they will not know that the link under the title is the actual story and not just a link to an article about (or a source to buy) the story. My preference is to go for the unambiguous approach – but is there a really BIG reason why I shouldn’t? Enquiring minds – well mine anyhow – would love to know.

Anyhow, on to what will be a brief review of this week’s Library of America story. It’s by – well, if you’ve read the first para you’ll know by now – Shirley Jackson. Another American writer I’ve never heard of! Apparently she is best known for her “tales of psychological horror” (LOA introductory notes) but this one that they’ve presented to us, “Charles”, is an ordinary domestic life story. It was published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1948 and, again according to LOA, “is one of the first of her numerous semi-autobiographical stories of life as a 1940s housewife raising children who sometimes seemed one step outside her ability to control them”.

Well, that certainly seems to the the case in “Charles” because it is clear that the young protagonist of the story has it all over his parents. It’s a nice little story but rather predictable. I’d be surprised if any experienced reader didn’t “get” it some long time before the end. This spoils the story a little – although perhaps Jackson is playing a game with the reader, willing us to see what the parents clearly don’t? Whatever her intentions,  it nicely shows the wiliness of children and the gullibility of many parents. I think though, that to properly assess Ms Jackson, I should read one of her psychological tales rather than this little slice-of-life piece.

Animal Kingdom (Movie)

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If you thought No Country for Old Men was grim, take a look at the new Australian movie Animal Kingdom which won the World Cinema Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. While No Country for Old Men was chilling in its portrayal of – there’s no other way to say it – evil, Animal Kingdom is more “down and dirty”. It deals with the escalation of violence between a relatively small-time (or so it seemed at the start) crime family and the police – and comprehends those grand themes of love, loyalty and betrayal. It’s set in Melbourne in the 1980s, a time when lawlessness was, let’s say, a little rife not only among criminals (ha!) but within the police force. I can’t remember the last time I saw a drama that brought so many shocked gasps from the audience – even when you knew what was going to happen!

The focus of the story is “J” (Josh), played by newcomer James Frecheville, whose mother dies at the start of the film. This results in his moving in with his grandmother and uncles, they making up the crime family in question. Josh, not yet 18 years old, quickly finds himself in a tricky situation from which he seems unable to extricate himself. As the criminal behaviours increase, so does our awareness of just how dysfunctional Josh’s extended family is, not to mention how murky the so-called “law” is, so that we, the audience, become almost as disoriented as Josh about who to trust. The film is beautifully controlled right up to the end: it has a (partially) satisfying resolution but at the same time leaves much unresolved. How good is that?

There is not a dud amongst the cast. Frecheville’s playing of Josh as a rather naive, (superficially) expressionless and uncommunicative teen is so well done that it’s hard to tell when he actually grows up, but grow up he does do as the film progresses. It is in his interests though not to let on…and that certainly adds to the tension for the audience.  Jacki Weaver (who went to my old high school – that of the “whispering gums”) plays the increasingly disturbing – or is it disturbed? – unsubtle mother of her family of criminals with great subtlety. Her true colours are a long time coming out though you suspect that, being the mother of such a family, those colours are there! (The gorgeous) Guy Pearce manages to play the sensitive cop so sensitively that he comes across as real, rather than sentimental as can happen with such roles. And Ben Mendelsohn (last reviewed here in Beautiful Kate) plays the most unhinged of the criminal brothers with a quiet coldness that is truly scary. The rest of the cast is equally good … but it’s time to move on to ….

First time director David Michôd’s direction is sure. The camera is often low and in your face – so that you really are in there with the characters much of the time. The lighting is, appropriately, mostly subdued. The pace is slow, but not too much so, as nothing is overly dwelt on. There’s no playing for our emotions here: things happen, people react, and we move on. (I’d love to give an example or two but don’t want to spoil it). Some significant scenes aren’t shown at all – Michôd gives his audience the benefit of the doubt that we will get it.

A quick Google search brings up a number of tags for this film. Teen drama, Gangster film,  and Thriller are some I’ve seen. I, however, prefer plain old Crime drama. Whichever way you classify it, though, this is a film to see – but only if you don’t mind gritty, confronting films. If you prefer your movies light and cheery, go see Sex and the City 2!

Edward Field, WWII (Poem)

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Well, Library of America has surprised again. This week it is a poem (6 pages). I wasn’t expecting that, but as I like to delve into poetry every now and then I was rather pleased. The poem, “WWII” by Edward Field, was first published in 1967 in a collection titled Poets of World War II. According to LOA’s notes, the poem “recounts an actual incident” – and that’s certainly how it reads.

B-17 Bomber plan

B-17 Bomber (Royalty free image from Planes of WW2 website*)

It tells the story of an American bombing mission over Europe in which Field’s plane is damaged by flak and ends up having to ditch in the North Sea on its way back to England. It’s a very matter of fact poem that calmly documents the events, until the moment of ditching when, for a moment, the language becomes more expressive. Here is the beginning of the serious troubles with the plane:

Over the North Sea the third engine gave out
and we dropped low over the water.
The gas gauge read empty but by keeping the nose down
a little gas at the bottom of the tank sloshed forward
and kept our single engine going.

Pretty plainly descriptive. It sounds like they’re in a tight situation but they’ve got everything under control. And then, just nine lines on, that engine’s in trouble and we get:

listened as the engine stopped, a terrible silence,
and we went down into the sea with a crash,
just like hitting a brick wall,
jarring bones, teeth, eyeballs panicky.

Suddenly we get adjectives, a simile and a shift in rhythm, and we are right there with him. He then describes the exit from the plane, the rush for the life rafts which aren’t in a condition to accommodate them all, and the resulting loss of life among the crew. This, though, is not one of those heroic “band of brothers” war poems. It is about survival – our poet is not a coward, but neither does he risk his life to save others. He’s a realist. Soon after the plane ditches, he (the navigator) and the radio operator find themselves still on the plane, with the rafts already pushed off. Their colleagues tell him later that the cords holding the raft to the plane broke. He’s not 100% sure of that:

… but I wouldn’t have blamed them
for cutting them loose, for fear
that by waiting for us the plane would go down
and drag them with it.

Back to plain speaking. And it prepares us for when he too opts for survival – not by any sin of commission but by not engaging in heroics:

I chose to live rather than be a hero, as I still do today,
although at that time I believed in being heroic, in saving the world,
even if, when opportunity knocked,
I instinctively chose survival.

The poem ends – surely this is not a spoiler? can you spoil a poem? – with the idea that “This was a minor accident of war”. Life and death – all in a day’s work!

I liked this poem. It was not what I expected when I started it: it has few of the usual hallmarks of war poetry. There’s no breast-beating patriotism, no histrionics; its tone is neither tragic, nor melancholic, nor heroic. It’s a plainly told story about one man’s experience of one event in war, and its power lies in that and the understated style in which he tells it. Thanks, once again, to the Library of America for presenting me with something a little different.

*B-17 Bombers were flown by Field’s company, the Eighth Airforce. Attribution as requested: “This image comes from Airforce Image Gallery and has been modified and can be found at Planes of World War II page”.

Charles Dickens, On travel

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Charles Dickens, On travel

On travel bookcover (Hesperus Press, via LibraryThing)

In the 3rd essay in Hesperus Press’s lovely little volume On travel, which comprises a selection of Dickens’ travel essays, Dickens (1812-1870) makes a reference to Laurence Sterne’s character Yorick. In one of those lovely bits of reading synchronicity, Hungry Like the Wolf posted last week on Laurence Sterne’s A sentimental journey through France and Italy which features said Yorick. In it Yorick lists various types of travellers including Idle travellers, Vain travellers, and Sentimental travellers. Yorick’s type that best suits Dickens would, I think, be his Inquisitive type. However, I think Yorick needed another category to describe a traveller like Dickens: the Observant traveller. (Hmm…I wrote this before checking out the Introduction by Pete Orford. In the first para he praises Dickens’ “talent of observation”. Great minds, and all that!)

There are 6 essays in this slim but rather gorgeously produced volume – don’t you love the allusion to the “armchair traveller” on the cover?:

  • The last cab driver and the first omnibus cab (1836)
  • The passage out (1841)
  • By Verona, Mantua and Milan, across the Pass of the Simplon into Switzerland (1843)
  • A flight (1851)
  • The Calais Night Mail (1863)
  • Some account of an extraordinary traveller (1850)

Reading these reminds me yet again why I love Dickens. I enjoy his acute observation of humankind and his sense of humour. He makes me laugh. Regularly. And then there is his versatile use of the English language. The man can write.

Four of the essays describe train and boat travel, including to America, and to and through Europe. His descriptions of the actual experience of travel and of the various passengers (such as the Compact Enchantress, Monied Interest and the Demented Traveller) he meets on the way are highly evocative. You feel you are on the trains and boats with him because he captures that sense of being tossed about in the sea and of rushing in a train through landscapes and – “bang” (his word) – through stations. But it’s not all sensory – as engaging as that is. There is satire here too – against others, and against himself. For example, in “The Calais Night Mail” he sends up his own love-hate relationship with Calais as well as the behaviour of an English traveller who “thinks it a quite unaccountable thing that they don’t keep ‘London time’ on a French railway”. (It was ever thus, eh?)

The thing about his writing is its diversity – he mixes up his rhythm; he uses allusions, irony and metaphor; he plays with tense and punctuation; and he uses repetition, to name just a few of the “tricks” in his writer’s bag. Just look at the variety in the following examples.

A wickedly satirical description of a man who was transported twice to Australia:

If Mr Barker can be fairly said to have had any weakness in his earlier years, it was an amiable one – love, love in its most comprehensive form – a love of ladies, liquids and pocket handkerchiefs. It was no selfish feeling; it was not confined to his own possessions… (“The last cab driver and the first omnibus cab”)

On a rough crossing to Calais:

I am bumped rolled gurgled washed and pitched into Calais Harbour… (“The Calais Night Mail”)

A description of the Demented Traveller:

Faculties of second Englishman entirely absorbed in hurry. Plunges into the carriage, blind. Calls out of the window concerning his luggage, deaf. (“A flight”)

And then this little pointed comment written in 1863 but alluding to an earlier trip in 1843:

and I recognise the extremely explosive steamer in which I ascended the Mississippi when the American civil war was not, and only its causes were. (“The Calais Night Mail”)

Dickens was, as we realise from the last essay in the collection, more than aware of the horrors of slavery, not to mention the plight of “the fast-declining Indians”. His willingness to express such awareness did not always endear him to Americans but, as Pete Orford writes in the Introduction, Dickens was equally prepared to be satirical of home as abroad.

These essays provide a fascinating insight into how Dickens viewed his world and the people in it, and present wonderful exemplars of his writing. They also demonstrate how widely travelled he was, which, by broadening his understanding of humanity, must have fed his fictional muse too. Orford concludes his Introduction with some lines from the last essay. I can’t really think of a better way to end this than to repeat some of them too. Dickens wrote:

The more man knows of man, the better for the common brotherhood among us all. (“Some account of an extraordinary traveller”)

Some of Dickens’ words and allusions (though there are “notes” in this edition) may be a little obscure now, and some sentence structures are a little complicated to our modern eyes, but if you have any interest in Dickens or travel writing in general, you will enjoy this. I certainly did.

Charles Dickens
On travel
Hesperus Press, 2010
91pp.
ISBN: 9781843916123
(Review copy supplied by Hesperus Press via the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program)

NOTE: I must apologise for once again hitting the Publish button too early and sending some half-finished gobbledy-gook to your various readers and email accounts. I should either take Tony’s advice and draft in Word or adopt Farnoosh’s recent “Slow down” admonition (to herself), because clearly I’m not getting it right at present! I beg your forgiveness.

Nathanael West, Business deal

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This week’s Library of America offering was (or “is” since it’s still this week, but “was” cos I’ve read it – all this tense stuff can be so bothering!) Nathanael West’s Business deal. It’s short, and I’d just finished my novel for bookgroup, so I decided to read it.

I don’t know much about Nathanael West, other than recognising his name, but according to Wikipedia he lived from 1903 to 1940. Another writer who died young – though he wasn’t quite so young as the likes of poor Keats and Stephen Crane, neither of whom even made 30, and he died not of illness but in a car accident. Anyhow, Wikipedia describes West as “author, screenwriter and satirist”. The brief introductory notes accompanying the story say essentially the same thing. These notes suggest that his recognition as a writer comes mainly from his novels, but his money came from his plays. This LOA offering, however, is a short story. It was published in 1933 in a magazine called Americana, which apparently published a lot of satirical writing.

Business deal is about the head of a movie production company, which is rather aptly named “Gargantual Pictures”, planning his next takeovers while at the same time preparing not to pay a very successful young scriptwriter what he’s asking. This is not a subtle story, and neither character is particularly appealing:

The mongoose [the scriptwriter] sat comfortably and waited for the cobra [the company head] to strike again.

Effective image, eh? It is, in fact, a pretty typical negotiation story in which one side holds its ground while the other pulls out all arguments until one of them either capitulates or plays the winning card at just the right moment. I won’t tell which one is which, but if you think of which profession West was you may just work out who wins this particular deal! It’s a humorous if rather predictable story, but it does demonstrate the well-honed skills of a successful satirist. It is worth reading for that.

Andrea Goldsmith, Reunion

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Andrea Goldsmith, Reunion bookcover
Reunion bookcover (Courtesy: HarperCollins Australia)

I wanted to love Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion. And I expected to, as I remember enjoying the last book of hers that I read. But, somehow, I found it a bit of chore to read, though it did pick up towards the end. I think I understand why it was not listed for the 2010 Miles Franklin Award.

Friendships become swaddled in invisible protective layers and nothing short of a cataclysmic blow can break through to the inevitable stress points beneath.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Four university friends (three students, borderline baby-boomers and now in their mid-40s, and a lecturer, now around 60) find themselves all living in Melbourne again after some 20 years apart. All four had met in Melbourne, had moved together to England to continue studies and work, but had then gone their separate ways. At the beginning of the novel Jack, an academic and Islamic expert, is single and still in love with Ava; Ava, a novelist, is married to the unpopular Harry; Helen, a scientist, is a single parent; and Connie/Conrad, a philosophy lecturer, is on his third marriage but still philandering. Harry, who met them in England, is on the outer, but it is he who has engineered the reunion under the auspices of an organisation he has created, NOGA (Network of Global Australians).

The novel, then, is about this time of reunion: it explores who they are now, and the state of their relationships with each other. Sounds like the sort of thing that would interest me – Melbourne setting, characters with whom I would expect some level of identification, themes exploring love and friendship, and a writer whom I’ve enjoyed before. None of these, I should add, are essential for my reading enjoyment – I also like books set in exotic places and about very different characters – but familiarity often appeals too (doesn’t it?).

And yet, for me the book fell a little flat. It just didn’t feel quite original enough – in either ideas or language. It felt a little same-old-same-old. That said*, I found the characters interesting and convincing, although only one, Jack, changed in any significant way as the novel progressed. The narrative mode is multiple 3rd person subjective, with Jack’s perspective starting and ending it. It is told, chronologically, but with flashbacks to fill in the past. All this is well controlled and keeps the story moving nicely.

Goldsmith ranges across a lot of themes – love and friendship (of course); truth and fiction; secrets and memory; passion and obsession; modern communications; revenge and forgiveness; and science, ethics and politics. It is probably here that the novel palled most for me because many of these themes seem to go nowhere. Take the truth and fiction one. Those of you who read my blog know that I enjoy seeing this issue explored, but in this novel it’s raised, often with a nice level of irony, but is not really developed. For Ava, the novel writer, “there was no better vehicle for truth” than fiction, whereas for the scientist, Helen, “Ava’s work is only fiction – none of it is true”. Well, I thought, Goldsmith will unpack the ironies contained in these, but she doesn’t really. Perhaps that’s OK, perhaps it’s enough for us to notice them, but I wanted more.

At other times, the themes seem more like the author’s soapbox than ideas fully integrated into the story, albeit that the characters are her mouthpieces. Here, for example, is Jack expressing a rather stereotyped view of modern communication:

Whenever Jack looked back to his university experience and compared it with today’s university student life, so much seemed to have changed – even friendship itself. Without computers and mobile phones, face-to-face communication ruled the day.

The implication is that modern friendships are somehow less meaningful, but what does he really know and, further, what does the novel show us about it? Nothing really. Similarly, Helen rages about political interference in science, but the issue, while valid enough, seems a little fabricated in the context of the novel.

There are some funny set pieces, such as the young television make-up artist trying to hide Connie’s aging neck. Goldsmith does irony well – something I, as a Jane Austen aficionado, rather enjoy – and she peppers the novel with a lot of effective literary allusions – to Waugh, Wharton, James, and others. Moreover, there are some lovely descriptions, such as this one on Ava’s discomfort during her first weeks in England: “It was like being stranded on a sheet of clear glass with nothing but blackness underneath”. I’m not sure why I like this, but I do.

I’ve struggled to write this review, really, because there are things to like about this book. I decided to do a quick review of reviews out there and what I mostly found were positive reviews that each had some little reservation: “despite that minor misgiving”, “a rich and at times frustrating novel”, “despite a few stylistic glitches”, and “the novel was marred but not spoiled for me by …”. None though explored these reservations in any depth.

And so, rather than labour any more, I will close with the words of Helen’s teenage son, Luke. He says, in that simple, direct way that the young can do:

The truth can hurt. But that doesn’t make it less right.

The final irony is that Harry is hurt by a truth – but the truth he is hurt by and the real truth of the matter are two quite different things. And that, in the end, made the novel an interesting if not totally engaging read.

For a more positive perspective on this novel, check out Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers.

Andrea Goldsmith
Reunion
London: Fourth Estate, 2009
414pp.
ISBN: 9780732287832

*See my previous post on words to avoid!

Book Review Bingo, or Words to Avoid in Book Reviews

/ Whispering Gums / 29 Comments

Am I the last to hear about Michelle Kerns list of twenty most annoying book review clichés, published in examiner.com in March last year? I think it flickered across my radar briefly a little while ago but it was brought vividly to my attention last week when Ramona Koval (presenter of Radio National’s The Book Show here in Australia) interviewed Michelle Kerns and salon.com reviewer, Laura Miller. I’m not going to report fully on the interview: you can listen to it here if you want to.

Since writing that article, Kerns has created a “game” called “Book Review Bingo“. It contains 24 clichés – with some changes from the original 20 – and they’re listed below (in alphabetical order so you can quickly locate, or not, your favourites):

  • at once (as in something is “at once a romance and a mystery”)
  • beautifully written
  • compelling
  • epic
  • fully realised
  • gritty
  • haunting
  • in the tradition of
  • lyrical
  • nuanced
  • pitch-perfect
  • powerful
  • readable
  • riveting
  • rollicking
  • stunning
  • sweeping
  • that said
  • thought-provoking
  • timely
  • tour de force
  • unflinching
  • unputdownable
  • x meets x (such as “McCarthy meets Hemingway”)

In the interview, the three speakers (Koval fully engaged in this one) discussed (and disagreed to some degree on) favourite (can you call them that?) clichés. One disagreement concerned “that said”. Miller, and I agree with her, suggested it’s not a cliché but more of a connecting word/phrase, a word you use to move from one point or sentence to another. Miller suggested that “however” is used for similar purposes, and that you would never call it a cliché.

That said(!), my questions to you are:

  • Do you agree with these clichés?
  • What is your view on clichés? Do you actively avoid them? Are there times when you think they can be used?
  • Do you have your own pet clichés (that you use, or hate to see used)?

I do try hard to avoid clichés but I know I don’t always succeed – and sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be a better word. What about you?

And, if you are further interested in the subject, you may also like to read Kerns’ report on Robert McCrum’s (of the Guardian) publisherspeak (aka blurbspeak) list. It will make you laugh, if nothing else.

Stephen Crane, When man falls, a crowd gathers

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (Presumed public domain, via Wikipedia)

This week’s Library of America offering is a sketch/article by Stephen Crane. Now, while I suppose most Americans have read what I believe to be Crane’s most famous work, The red badge of courage, I’m afraid I haven’t – and so, when this opportunity to read something by him arose, I was more than happy to take the opportunity. You can too, by reading it here. (It’s well worthwhile, and is less than 5 pages.)

According to the Library of America’s notes, the story was published in 1894 in The New York Press under the following heading:

When man falls, a crowd gathers
A Graphic Study of New York Heartlessness
Gazing with Pitiless Eyes
“What’s the Matter?” That too Familiar Query

That pretty much sums it up really. The notes also say that it was based on a real incident. It’s a simple story: a man and a boy are walking in the street one evening, when the man suddenly falls to the ground. Immediately a crowd gathers, ready to criticise (“Oh, a jag, I guess”) rather than help. The boy indicates, however, that it’s a fit but this still doesn’t result in any obvious sympathy or assistance. Instead, the crowd pushes closer and closer wanting a view. The language used to describe the crowd’s behaviour leaves us in no doubt as to the intent:

Those in the foremost rank bended down, shouldering each other, eager, anxious to see everything. Others behind them crowded savagely for a place like starving men fighting for bread.

This is writing that pulls out all stops to make its point: the rhythm (“shouldering each other, eager, anxious to…”), the word choice (“savagely”) and the imagery (likening their behaviour to that of survival) work together to create a powerful picture in just two sentences. The language continues in this vein building up a tension between the crowd, which shows more interest in the spectacle, and the helpless boy who is unsure what to do to help his companion. It’s not until halfway through the story that someone offers some help – but still the majority stands by:

There were men who nearly created a battle in the madness of their desire to see the thing.

Meanwhile others with magnificent passions for abstract statistical information were questioning the boy. “What’s his name?” “Where does he live?”

Eventually, a policeman (“a man whose life was half-pestered out of him by the inhabitants of the city”) appears, exhibiting “the rage of a placid cow”. (A wonderful oxymoron that reminded me of Tony’s recent post on the subject.) Gradually, but with continued difficulty described in similar evocative language, the man is helped.

This is delicious writing: it’s almost, but not quite, over the top in the way it piles up the imagery. What saves it from being hyperbolic is that it is, unfortunately, all too believable – for then, and for now. It’s not for nothing I think that Crane titles it “when man falls” not “when a man falls”, making it rather clear that this is not a one-off situation. What a shame Crane (1871-1900) died so young.