Review

Shaun Tan, Eric

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Shaun Tan, Eric cover

Eric bookcover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

When I bought Eric on a whim the other day (as you do!), I didn’t realise that it had been excerpted from Shaun Tan’s Tales from outer suburbia which I haven’t yet read, but have given to others. That’s okay though, because it means  that I’ve finally read a little of Shaun Tan, something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

Shaun Tan is an Australian multi-award-winning artist-writer (or is it writer-artist?) who has published books, worked in theatre and film, and had his work adapted by such luminaries as the Australian Chamber Orchestra. He is one versatile man! His best known works include The arrival (a wordless graphic novel about migrants) and Tales from outer suburbia (an anthology of 15 short illustrated stories about all sorts of strange things that happen in suburbia).

Eric picks up on what I believe is one of Tan’s common themes, that of being different or strange, an outsider. It is about a foreign exchange student who comes to stay with a family in – yes – suburbia, and how they all get along.

Tan’s is not a negative presentation – at least, not here. The mostly monochromatic drawings are whimsical and all focus on Eric, the visiting student, while the text is in the voice of a child of the house. The story is about tolerance and acceptance of what you don’t understand. It’s also about expectations that aren’t met – but accepting the things that happen instead. As Mum says in the book, “It must be a cultural thing”. Overall, it’s about the fact that other can reside with other – and yet it also allows discomfort and incomprehension to be an acceptable feeling.

This sounds like a simple book, and in some ways it is, but it’s not simplistic. Producing it as a gift-edition like this is a lovely idea. It will, I hope, introduce more people to Shaun Tan and his rather unique view on the world. It has certainly whetted my appetite.

Shaun Tan
Eric
Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010
[48pp.]
ISBN: 9781742372921

Musica Viva: The Harp Consort do Carolan’s Harp

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Turlough O'Carolan

Carolan (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Can you pronounce this? Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhallaín? Perhaps you’d prefer the English transliteration: Turlough O’Carolan. O’Carolan was a blind Irish harper* who lived from 1670 to 1738, and, according to Wikipedia, is believed by some to be Ireland’s national composer. He was also the composer and subject of this week’s Musica Viva concert.

Carolan’s music, the program notes said, “spans the divide between high art and popular styles and is a mixture of fashionable French Baroque dance forms, including minuets and jigs, combined with ancient Gaelic forms including laments and planxties**”. The Consort’s director, Lawrence-King added, during the concert, that he also incorporated Italian music that was being played in Ireland at the time. A true cosmopolitan it seems.

We’ve seen and enjoyed The Harp Consort before (around 2006), and so I was looking forward to this week’s performance. I was not disappointed. It was, by turns, wistful, humorous, lilting and lively – and thoroughly engaging. Mr Gums did hear one member in the audience suggest that they might as well have been at the Folk Festival! I can think of worse places to be – but this was, really, of a somewhat different ilk, albeit covering some similar ground. Anyhow, if you click on this link, you will hear some music emanating from their website. Go on, do it! If you are disappointed, I won’t expect you back here!

The performers at tonight’s concert were:

Celtic harp

Celtic Harp (Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

Before you read on, remember that I am not musically trained and would in no way call myself qualified to comment on technical skill and interpretation. However, this was the perfect performance for one such as me, who loves literature, dance and music, because it incorporated all three. Not only were there songs – with the words (fortunately with translation) printed in the program – but Andrew Lawrence-King told us Carolan’s story throughout the evening’s performance. I particularly enjoy concerts in which the musicians engage directly like this with the audience.

Then there was the dancing. If the other performers hadn’t been so engaging themselves, Steven Player would have stolen the show. He has a wonderful ability – as all good dancers do of course – to inhabit the character of each dance. The dancing style seemed to combine elements of Irish stepdancing and Scottish highland dancing – which probably makes sense since presumably these dance forms have all had some similar roots and influences. Anyhow, whatever it was, Player performed with grace and feeling – and gave his all.

And finally, the music. I have a soft spot for early music – for the lovely melodies and the gorgeous (in looks and sound) instruments. You can see from the performer list above that there was a wide range of instruments played. The music, including several songs performed with a lovely sweet voice by O’Leary, was appealingly diverse, ranging from laments to jigs, from love songs to comic ones.

It’s hard to pick a highlight from such a concert, but, I often find myself drawn to percussion. Metzler was fascinating to watch. He played numerous percussion instruments, including some unfamiliar to me, and a couple of novelty instruments (one to emulate birdsong, another the wind). And he, too, fully engaged with the character of the music he was performing, acting out parts when appropriate.

Overall, what I liked about the concert was the sensitivity with which the Harp Consort played the music, and the energy and exuberance they invested in the performance. It was, as they say, the total package.

Late in the concert came the comic drinking song, “Bumper Squire Jones”. It seems appropriate to end with some lines from it:

Ye clergy so wise
…
Come here without failing
And leave off your railing
‘Gainst bishops providing for dull stupid drones;
Says the text so divine,
“What is life without wine”
Then, away with the claret –  a bumper, Squire Jones.

None of us needed a claret that night. We were high enough without it.

*Harper: You learn something new everyday. According to Wikipedia, “harper” is used in the folk tradition, and “harpist” in the classical. The Musica Viva program used both, indicating perhaps that this was a bit of a cross-over concert!

**Planxty may, say the notes, have been coined by Carolan. It signifies popular, animated pieces in jig rhythm.

Alex Miller, Lovesong

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Alex Miller, Lovesong

Lovesong bookcover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Lovesong is my first Alex Miller novel, which is a bit embarrassing, really, given that he has won the Miles Franklin Award twice.

John was the quiet type … Except when he was telling me his story. Even then there was something quiet and private in the way he spoke about himself and Sabiha; as if he was telling himself the story; going over it to find its meaning for himself. Looking for something he’d missed when it was happening to him.

As you can probably tell from this quote, Lovesong is one of those story-within-a-story novels. Its basic plot is fairly simple. John, an Australian, tells the story of his life in Paris with his Tunisian wife, Sabiha, to Ken, a retired novelist. Retired? Well, so he says, but can he resist a good story when he hears one?

John and Sabiha’s love story is not exactly straightforward, which is foreshadowed early in the novel when Ken first meets Sabiha and notes “a sadness in the depths of her dark brown eyes”. He begins to wonder about “her story”. Adding a little complexity to this is a loose parallel in Ken’s life. He lives with his 38-year-old daughter, Clare, who during the novel starts a love affair of her own. Sabiha is, coincidentally, about 38 when the “crisis” in her life occurs. There are other parallels in the novel, such as Sabiha’s aunt Houria and her marriage to Dom, and Ken’s marriage to his wife Marie. Again, these are loose. They provide depth and perspective rather than the direct commentary that parallels often seem to do.

This is a surely structured novel. Miller manages to be simultaneously subtle and obvious so that you are conscious of being led along, but you are not always sure where to or what it might mean. Early in the novel, Clare tells her father that “Love is never simple”. A little later, Sabiha’s father reflects on his daughter and wonders, rather more prophetically than he realises, what “makes some people so different from others that they cannot share a common fortune with them”.  Alongside these early thematic hints is a whole slew of comments about story-telling and writing, about story-telling as “confession”, as “craving for absolution”, as, in fact, catharsis. In other words, the novel is also self-consciously metafictional, which is not surprising given that the first person narrator, Ken, is a novelist.

Meanwhile, there is John and Sabiha’s actual story – and again, the plotting is sure. We learn early that Sabiha wants just one child, “her child. There was only one”. And we learn of her closeness to her maternal grandmother. These two things, dropped lightly in the book, play a significant role in the development of the plot.

The novel is full of irony, starting with the title and its romantic connotations being undercut by other sorts of songs. And there is this from Sabiha’s aunt Houria:

Don’t try sorting out the rest of your life tonight, darling. You’ll see, it’ll all work out in the most unexpected ways.

This is doubly ironic because, eventually, Sabiha does attempt to sort out her life, rather than let it work out, and the result, while giving her what she wants, is also not what she expected. What’s that adage? Be careful what you wish for? And yet, that’s not what the novel is about. It’s not a cautionary tale. Rather, without being coy, it’s a meditation on the mystery and power of love – and, I would say, on innocence and experience in its many guises.

But it’s about other things too, such as the importance of home and place. Both Sabiha and John spend much of their lives living away from their respective homes. Ken, at the novel’s start, has just returned from spending time in Venice and is trying to decide whether to return. It’s also about Life – and the inevitability of change: “Change being forced on them, even as they stood still”. John feels it, Ken feels it.

But again and again, we come back to stories and storytelling. Partway through the novel Ken thinks:

There were things I could have added to his story, but I didn’t want to make it up this time. The truth is … I have never really liked making it up. My imagination, such as it is, needs the facts to feed off. I could see the directions I might go in with John and Sabiha’s story, but I resisted. I wanted to hear the truth from John.

And yet, it is not so simple as it sounds. At the end, he wonders:

I had her story now, but it is one thing to have a story and another to write it. How was I to articulate the delicate complexities that must give weight and depth and beauty to her story, those things that most easily elude us?

I found Lovesong an engrossing read. Its writing engaged me, it’s accessible, and it tells a great story, while also exploring the art and meaning of storytelling. I am left though with one question: Whose story is it to tell?

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also liked this book. You can read her review here.

Alex Miller
Lovesong
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009
368pp.
ISBN: 9781742371290

We unfold – or do we?

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It’s been a while since I reviewed something other than books and writing here, but tonight Mr Gums and I went to the Sydney Dance Company’s performance of We unfold, and so it’s time I thought for another performing arts review.

We Unfold, photo by Tim Richardson

We unfold (Image: Tim Richardson, via twitpic, http://twitpic.com/9up5t )

The choreographer – and artistic director of the company – Rafaela Bonachela describes his creation as follows:

I wanted to create a piece about our needs and desires to slowly unfold, revealing ourselves to those around us … we unfold is collective discovery, a self-examination of our emotional cores. [Program]

The work uses 14 (or so) dancers, and incorporates music by Ezio Bosso, video art by Daniel Askill and costume design by Jordan Askill.

The dancing was beautiful. It was fluid but also had a feet-planted-firmly-on-the-ground muscularity, resulting in a performance that had both strength and beauty. The music was powerful, but perhaps a little too insistent at times. There wasn’t a lot of dynamic range – it seemed either strong and loud, or stronger and louder. The video art, on the other hand, was quite mesmerising, making it sometimes hard to know where to look – at the dancers or the video behind them. The costuming was effectively minimal for a dance about “emotional cores”, with neutral colours and, for the women, light barely-there diaphanous shifts/tops/dresses (take your pick).

So, what was it all about? The video art suggested a range of things. At times I thought I was seeing a progression of the elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. At other times I thought I was seeing evolution, or at least its commencement in the Big Bang Theory. Then again, there was also a suggestion of Adam and Eve in two sequences, one featuring a man rising from a crouching position, and the other featuring a woman who was, at the end of the sequence, suspended in mid-air. Perhaps it was all of these? Perhaps it was about all these basic things that make us who we are.

In the program notes, Bonachela said that the work was developed collectively with the dancers by encouraging them to improvise during the creation process. He wanted them to explore their willingness to open up, or not, to each other and said that this resulted in different connections and relationships being developed. There was certainly that. I enjoyed, for example, seeing gender roles played with. Not only did men lift women, but men lifted men, women lifted women, and women lifted men. Dancers moved fluidly from solo to duet, trio and larger groupings – and they did it surely.  Overall, it was a very “ground-based” piece, earthy rather than light and airy. In fact some moves were reminiscent of something primeval (which made me think evolution) but neither these nor anything else seemed to turn into any sort of “narrative”, even in an abstract sense. In other words, the unfolding connections weren’t particularly obvious to us. By the end, we felt like we’d watched a sequence of beautiful, well-executed and very watchable moves, but something that was a bit repetitious or, as Mr Gums so succinctly put it, somewhat one-dimensional.

This is the first time we have seen the company since Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon (artistic director and associate director) left in 2007 after 30 years with the company. We unfold didn’t grab us quite the same way as previous performances (such as Boxes, Tivoli, Grand, The Director’s Cut) have – but the dancing was excellent, as we’ve come to expect, so we’ll be back.

Thea Astley, The multiple effects of rain shadow (Review)

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There are two main reasons why I like – actually love – to read Thea Astley. One is her language, her wonderful way with words that may, at times, be over-the-top but that is never clichéd. The other is her passion for the underdog, and thus for social justice in a world where it is often conspicuously absent.

Island, Palm and Sun

Island with palm, because Penguin will not answer emails regarding bookcover use (Courtesy: OCAL, via clker.com)

The multiple effects of rainshadow is Astley’s second last novel. Its overall subject matter is, as one character says late in the book, “the unmoored behaviour of humans”, an effective image given the book’s central motif is an island. It has a very loose plot which is based on an actual event that occurred on Palm Island in 1930. Palm Island was, at that time, essentially a dumping ground for Indigenous Australians deemed to be “problems”, but the event in question concerned the white superintendent, mad with grief at the recent death of his wife, running amok and setting fire to buildings (including his own home in which his children were sleeping). He was eventually shot (and killed) by an Indigenous man under the (cowardly) order of the white deputy superintendent. The novel explores, through multiple points of view and over a period of around 30 years, the impact of this event on six white people who were present on the island at the time – but interspersed between these voices is the voice of Manny, the man who shot the super. This is, I think, a pretty risky thing to do but Astley is not one to shy away from risks in her writing.

The voices are, in chapter order:

  • Manny Cooktown, first person, the indigenous “shooter” and main narrator who commences the story and appears between each voice, but does not conclude the novel
  • Mrs Curthoys, first person, landlady on Palm Island at the time of the incident
  • Gerald Morrow, third person, writer/editor who had gone to the Island to work as a foreman, for which he had no skill or experience, and who was in fact escaping the Island in a boat at the time of the incident
  • Captain Brodie, third person, the Superintendant who ran amok and was shot by Manny
  • Mr Vine, third person, a school teacher on the Island at the time of the incident
  • Father Donellan, third person, priest who visits regularly from the mainland and is responsible for the Island’s religious “needs”
  • Leonie née Curthoys, first person, daughter of Mrs Curthoys and so on the Island at the time of the incident
  • Omniscient author who carries the last chapter

Looks complex eh? But in fact it’s pretty straightforward in terms of knowing who is who, as each voice “manages” its own chapter. The chronology is a little trickier as many of the characters (let’s call them that from now on) flip between their present (some are writing from many years after the event) and the past. Did you notice that the first person voices belong to the two groups most recognised by Astley as disadvantaged: women and indigenous Australians? A subtle but clever use of her narrative structure to give them a voice!

The setting is, after all, very much a white patriarchal world, and marriage is seen in that light. Vine, for example, is told to get a wife  for

‘The boring bits. You know. Meals. Washing. Shopping. Kids. All that sort of thing. A man hasn’t time for that sort of thing.’

‘Why not a housekeeper, then?’

‘You are green. Cost too much …’

Not surprisingly Mrs Curthoys and Leonie do not find marriage much to their liking. The main underdogs in this novel though are the indigenous people, many of whom are brought to the Island – and therefore separated from their country – as problems, and are treated with disdain at best and real cruelty at worst by most of the white residents (from 1918 when the settlement begins to 1957 when the book closes). Astley offers, I’m afraid, little hope. She is not a cheery writer: her goal is to shock us into attention – and that she does. However, I can imagine some critics accusing her of putting contemporary views about feminism and indigenous relations in characters’ mouths. I would argue though that contemporary ideas do not spring from a vacuum, and that therefore the occasional more sensitive/egalitarian views expressed in the novel are historically valid.

I said at the beginning of this review that one of the main reasons I like Thea Astley is her language, so here are some examples of her imagery:

…whistlestop hamlets scattered along briefly tarred roads that led to further sprawls moated by loneliness …  [from school-teacher Vine, heading to a country school]

And I am weary of  a Celtic charm that is shaken like spice over any dish within gulping reach. We bore each other rancid. [Leonie on marriage and her philandering husband]

At least I’ll have tried. At least I’ll be learning to decline the gumleaf, conjugate the seasons. [Vine’s “do-gooder” son Matthew]

She also effectively mixes up the rhythm to make points or convey feeling, using short snappy sentences, repetition of phrases (such as Morrow’s “swing dip drag” as he sails across the sea), and punctuation-free streams of consciousness:

There was an unalterable plane geometry to his movements: the clock the tea/toast the clock the bell the classroom the toted piles of exercise books the bell the repeated texts the stale jokes the texts the bell the common-room bitchings the clock the bell … the … the … [schoolteacher Vine]

Astley is often quite self-conscious about the act and role of writing, and this is certainly the case in this novel. I’ll give just one example, the bitter rant of failed writer Gerald Morrow, who is jealous of the success of another, to him, lesser writer:

There must be a million readers out there who crave boredom! Who love the dangling participle! Who wallow in truisms and fatuous theorisings! … Slap in your popular aphorisms, buddy, but don’t make ’em think!

You could never accuse Astley of not making you think, but there has to be some irony here, some little sense of self-deprecation even, in the fact that she put these words in the mouth of a failed writer, as if she knew that for all her passion there’s only so much you can achieve with words. That may be so, but Astley has given it a darned good try!

Thea Astley
The multiple effects of rainshadow
Camberwell: Penguin, 1996
296pp.
ISBN:  9780143180265

James Thurber, The lady on the bookcase

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James Thurber, 1945

Thurber, 1945 (Courtesy: life.com, for personal non-commercial use)

If you like to think of yourself as a critic, read this. It is last week’s offering from the Library of America, and is an essay by James Thurber titled “The lady on the bookcase”; it was first published in The New York Times Magazine in 1945 under the title “Thurber as seen by Thurber”. I read it as a general spoof on the art of criticism; the Library of America says he “teases [his] colleagues and editors at The New Yorker.”

The scene is set in the first paragraph when he reports on a cartoonist complaining about being rejected:

“Why is it”, demanded the cartoonist, “that you reject my work and publish drawings by a fifth-rate artist like Thurber?” Ross came quickly to my defence like the true friend and devoted employer he is. “You mean third-rate”, he said quietly, but there was a warning glint in his steely gray eyes that caused the discomfited cartoonist to beat a hasty retreat.

Just this beginning, before I read any more, reminded me of why I had enjoyed Thurber in my baby-boomer youth when many of us read a bit of Thurber. Thurber was a writer and cartoonist, and in this essay he combines the two to poke fun at criticism … and at how editors tend to show a journalistic rather than a critical interest in his work by wanting to know the stories behind his work rather than analysing it.

He writes that:

I have never wanted to write about my drawings and I still don’t want to, but it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to do it now, when everybody is busy with something else, and get it over quietly.

… and, to continue his satire, he talks about “shoving” some of his originals around the floor until they “fell, or [he says archly] perhaps I pushed them, into five separate categories”. He goes on to describe the categories, illustrating each with some of his cartoons:

  • the Unconscious or Stream of Nervousness category
  • the space between the Concept of the Purely Accidental and the Theory of the Haphazard Determination
  • the theory of the Deliberate Accident or Conditioned Mistake
  • the Contributed Idea category
  • the Intentional or Thought-Up category

If you haven’t worked it out by now, you can’t take much of what he says seriously – and that is his point. Don’t, he tells us, try to categorise or apply psychological theories to someone’s work, go for a run instead. Then again, I wouldn’t take this too seriously either, because Thurber is also being disingenuous: in the tradition of the satirist, he sets us up at every point, only to pull us down again. After all, like any creative artist, he wants us to look at and respond to his work.

Have a look at it … I’m sure you’ll enjoy the ten cartoons reproduced even if you don’t want to read the essay.

Rudyard Kipling, An interview with Mark Twain

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Rudyard Kipling

Kipling, somewhat older than 23! (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

How could I resist reading this offering from the Library of America, featuring as it does two giants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Both are writers I know well in a superficial way: I’ve really read only a little of their works. This essay, I thought, presented an interesting opportunity to get to know them from a different perspective.

“An interview with Mark Twain” was published in 1890, the year after Kipling, then 23 years old and on his overseas tour to Europe and the USA, interviewed the great man. Twain was 54, and staying in Elmira, NY, at the time. We know from the opening lines that Kipling idolises Twain:

You are a contemptible lot, over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners, and some Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V.C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain … Understand clearly that I do not despise you, indeed I don’t. I am only very sorry for you, from the Viceroy downward …

Clearly this is going to be a positively reported interview! The essay starts though, rather humorously, with the challenges Kipling faced in locating Clemens (as he was known) but, one-third of the way into the essay, we finally meet Twain who, despite his grey hair (that “was an accident of the most trivial”) looked “quite young”.

Kipling’s next comment rather continues his hero-worship – and reflects the way many of we readers think when we think of our favourite writers:

Reading his books, I had striven to get an idea of his personality, and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality. Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face to face with a revered writer.

You might think, from all this, that the rest of the interview will be rather hagiographic, with Kipling hanging on Twain’s every words. But, while there is an element of that, Kipling is delightfully self-conscious and there is a lovely sense of like minds engaging. Kipling reports on a conversation that ranges over a number of issues, including copyright, about which Twain has strong feelings, believing that a writer (and his heirs) should maintain control over “the work of his brains” (Kipling’s words) in much the same way as you might own “real estate” (Twain’s analogy). If you search the Internet, you will find a number of references to Mark Twain and copyright. As an (ex) librarian/archivist, I have a complicated relationship with copyright. I believe in abiding by it, I believe that creators need recompense for their work and that copyright is one way they can ensure that, but I also like people to be able to access the works they wish. According to my Internet research, Twain did not seek perpetual copyright, but enough to protect/provide for his immediate heirs. That sounds fair enough to me. And, it sounded fair enough to Kipling, though he was a little tongue-in-cheek in reporting that he saw Twain’s point, because he follows it up with “When the old lion roars, the young whelps growl. I growled assentingly”.

[If you are interested in copyright in the USA, check this timeline prepared by the Association of Research Libraries.]

Anyhow, they move on to discuss Twain’s books, and the possibility of a sequel to Tom Sawyer. Twain, teasingly, suggests that he hasn’t decided, that he could “make him rise to great honour and go to Congress” or he could “hang him”! This was too much for Kipling who says “I lost my reverence completely” arguing that Sawyer “was real”. Ah, fiction and reality I thought! This essay is speaking to me again.

Twain replies that Sawyer “is real … he’s all the boys that I have known or recollect” but then goes on to say that:

Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer’s life, and gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically, according to the joggle, turn out a rip of an angel.

He calls this Kismet, and asks whether Kipling agrees. Kipling does to a degree, but suggests that Sawyer isn’t Twain’s property any more, “he belongs to us”. Hmmm…I’m not sure that this is the aspect of “reality” in fiction that interests me, but the discussion (which is not reported further) is interesting, if only because it reflects topics that engaged these two writers.

They they go on to discuss “truth and the like in literature” but the discussion focuses more on autobiography and Twain’s view that no matter how much an autobiographer may lie about him/herself, the “truth” will out. Ain’t that the truth! All of us writing blogs give ourselves away, regardless, I think, of how we may try to “present” ourselves… But, I think I’ll move on from this possibly murky mire!

And then, in a fascinating little discussion of novel-reading comes this point which may interest we bloggers. It’s about assessing novels. Twain says:

You see … every man has his private opinion about a book. But that is my private opinion. If I had lived in the beginning of things, I should have looked around the township to see what popular opinion thought of the murder of Abel before I openly condemned Cain. I should have had my private opinion, of course, but I shouldn’t have expressed it until I had felt the way.

Is he saying what I think he’s saying? A little later in the essay, and on a slightly different topic, Kipling says “and I am still wondering if he meant what he said”! Knowing a little of Twain, I must admit I’m wondering what was “true” in his comments, and what wasn’t … so much of his “truth” is behind rather than in his words.

Twain goes on to talk about fiction and fact, implying that he prefers the latter, that he doesn’t “care for fiction”. He then gives this advice which I love:

“Get your facts first, and” – the voice dies away to an almost inaudible drone – “then you can distort ’em as much as you please”.

I can’t think of a better point upon which to close this post … but, by way of conclusion, I found at The Huffington Post this comment made by Twain, many years later, about the meeting:

I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any person he had met before–though he did not say it, and I was not expecting that he would. . . . He was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known.

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are not the only fruit

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Winterson, Oranges are not the only fruit, book cover

Book cover: Used by permission of the Random House Group Limited

As I was reading Jeanette Winterson’s novella Oranges are not the only fruit, the question, rightly or wrongly, that was uppermost in my mind was “What is it with the oranges?” Is there something about oranges that I don’t know? Something specific that they symbolise?  I racked (wracked) my brain for something in my literary past that would give me a clue, but I came up with nothing. I guess she wanted to choose a motif to represent her mother’s limiting interactions with her and an orange seemed as good as anything? Certainly oranges are a recurring motif, and her mother regularly insists they are “the only fruit” until the end when a “pineapple” makes its appearance. I’m not sure, however, that this change heralds anything in their relationship other than compounding the paradoxes that seem to underpin this novel.

This is an intriguing book. It is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel which tells the story of the first person protagonist, Jeanette, who was adopted by a religious zealot and is being brought up to be a missionary. However, around the age of 16 she discovers that her (homo)sexual leanings do not meet her mother’s (or her church’s) approval and, well, the plot is slim but perhaps I will leave it here nonetheless…

The novel exhibits some of the hallmarks of postmodernism, of which the most obvious is its metafictional elements, the way it contains stories within stories and plays around with the idea of stories in relation to “truth”. It all begins with Winterson naming the main character after herself and modeling that character’s life on much of her own, resulting in our being, from the start, teased by notions of what is “true” and “real”.

The book is divided into chapters titled appropriately, given Jeanette’s upbringing, by books of the Bible, such as Genesis, Joshua and Ruth. These titles are descriptive but also symbolic and even a little satirical; Jeanette, for example, has walls to confront just like Joshua. And the narrative, while roughly chronological, intermittently leaps from “reality” to “fantasy” as Jeanette tries to escape or make sense of her experience of life. Sometimes these stories – such as the Winnet story near the end – represent a parallel fantasy life for what is happening to her, but other times the reference point is more indirect, and draws on history and myth such as the King Arthur legend (and Sir Perceval’s search for the Holy Grail).

And this brings me to “story” and “history”. Readers of my blog will know that these notions, and the related one of “truth”, fascinate me when they are played out in fiction. I tend to enjoy reading books that deal self-consciously with them, that recognise the challenges and ambiguities inherent in them – and this is one of those books. Jeanette, the character, has some interesting things to say on these topics around the time the “truth” of her life, her sexuality, is becoming clear. She says in the short chapter titled Deuteronomy: The last book of the law:

Of course that is not the whole story , but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained … People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so they know what to believe and what not to believe. This is very curious …

And she goes on to discuss how history, the past, “can undergo change” because “the lens can be tinted, tilted, smashed”. She recognises that “perhaps the event had an unassailable truth” but we all see it through our own lens. Tellingly, near the end of the book, in the chapter titled Ruth, she runs into Melanie, her first lover (now married with a child):

…she [Melanie] laughed and said we probably saw what had happened differently anyhow … She laughed again and said that they way I saw it would make a good story, her version was just the history, the nothing-at-all facts.

Melanie, it seems, does not have the imagination to re-vision her “story”.

So, did I enjoy this book? Yes, pretty much. I like her attempt to make sense of what was a very particular childhood, and to try to draw from it some larger “truths” about how we might all manage the “stories” of our lives. It is not a straightforward read – and it is first novel with, perhaps, a little of the overdone in it. I’m not sure why, for example, she suddenly decides to include a little rant against Pol Pot. It usefully supports a point she is making about the uses of history, but it is odd in a story that is nowhere else political. Perhaps that’s just being post-modern!

In her introduction to my 1991 Vintage edition, Winterson claims to have written an experimental, anti-linear novel. Well, it is a bit of that I suppose, though not dramatically so. I would have called it reasonably linear – at least in the chronological sense – but perhaps the ideas in it do “spiral” (as she calls it) a bit in the way she toys, through the various narratives, with the idea of “story” and what it means to us. What it means, I think, is not always clear – we like stories but we cannot (perhaps need not) always draw conclusions from them. That is the paradox of our lives. As she says near the end

…not all dark places need light. I have to remember that.

Jeanette Winterson
Oranges are not the only fruit
London: Vintage, 1991 (orig. 1985)
171pp.
ISBN: 9780099935704

Jane Austen’s letters, 1811-1813

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Mansfield Park book covers

Mansfield Park book covers - Penguin wins

Early in my blogging career I wrote a post on the letters Jane Austen wrote (well, those remaining anyhow) between 1814 and 1816. This was to coincide with my local Jane Austen group’s reading of Emma. This year we are reading Mansfield Park and so decided to read the letters she wrote during her writing of that novel, which was published in 1814.

These letters are less rich than the later ones in terms of containing specific information about her writing style and process, and they can be somewhat demanding to read as they are full of the names of people met and places visited. Le Faye, who edited the edition I read, provides excellent annotations and indexes to the letters so that you can look up the people and the places, but this can be tedious if you just want to get on with it. However, if you go with the flow, not worrying too much about all this detail, you can in fact glean a lot.

The most significant thing you learn, besides her biting wit as you will quickly see from the quotes below, is what a keen observer of people she was. This becomes very clear in a letter written from London in 1811, in which she speaks of visiting some museums:

… I had some amusement at each, tho’ my preference for Men & Women always inclines me to attend more to the company than the sight.

The letters are, consequently, full of her observations of people, and it’s easy to tell that they come from the pen of Jane Austen:

They have been all the summer, in Ramsgate, for her health, she is a poor Honey – the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well – & who likes her spasms & nervousness & the consequence they give her, better than anything else.

And I can’t help thinking that this woman provided the model for Miss Bates in Emma:

Miss Milles was queer as usual and provided us with plenty to laugh at. She undertook in three words to give us the history of Mrs Scudamore’s reconciliation, & then talked on about it for half an hour, using such odd expressions & so foolishly minute that I could hardly keep my countenance.

Many readers of Jane Austen, and I am one of them, see her as a protofeminist. There is a lovely, very Austen-ish, comment in an 1813 letter which supports this view. It regards the poor treatment of the Princess of Wales by her husband, the future George IV:

I suppose all the World is sitting in judgement upon the Princess of Wales’s Letter. Poor Woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband – but I can hardly forgive her for calling herself “attached and affectionate” to a Man whom she must detest…

And there is this on the education of the children of Reverend Craven:

…She looks very well & her hair is done up with an elegance to do credit to any education … & the appearance of the room, so totally un-school-like, amused me very much. It was full of all the modern Elegancies – & if it had not been for some naked Cupids over the Mantlepiece, which must be a fine study for Girls, one should never have Smelt Instruction.

As many of you probably know, her first novels were not published under her name, but during these years it was becoming harder for her to maintain her anonymity. In 1813, she writes to her brother Frances:

… but the truth is that the Secret has spread so far as to be scarcely the Shadow of a secret now – & that I believe whenever the 3rd [her third novel published, Mansfield Park] appears, I shall not even attempt to tell lies about it. – I shall rather try to make all the Money than all the Mystery I can out of it. – People shall pay for their Knowledge if I can make them.

As the poor daughter of a deceased clergyman, Austen highly valued the money she made from her books.

All this said, she does say a few specific things about writing. I found this one particularly interesting. It’s related to her finally receiving her “own darling Child” (that is, Pride and prejudice). She writes that:

There are a few Typical [typographical] errors – & a ‘said he’ or a ‘said she’ would sometimes make the Dialogue more clear – but ‘I do not write for such dull elves/As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves’*.

Hmm … perhaps that’s what Hilary Mantel would like to say to those readers who can’t cope with her use of “he” in Wolf Hall.

Another comment that gives us a sense of what she sees as important in a novel is this on Mary Brunton’s novel Self control:

I am looking over Self Control again, & my opinion is confirmed of its’ being an excellently-meant, elegantly-written Work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it.

Jane Austen, you see, was a realist. And in this section of letters we also discover the amount of research she did to get her facts right in Mansfield Park – ships, hedgerows in Northamptonshire, and buildings in Gibraltar are all things she wanted to get right.

These letters are full of other things too – family, food, and fashion feature heavily, as do the books she’s reading and the theatre she attends. If I have piqued your interest you can read them online here. In the meantime I’ll end with one of my favourite quotes from this section:

By the bye, as I must leave off being young, I find many Douceurs in being a sort of Chaperon for I am put on a Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like.

Is it any wonder I like Jane Austen?

* Jane Austen here paraphrases Sir Walter Scott’s lines from his long poem Marmion.

Deirdre Le Faye
Jane Austen’s letters (3rd ed)
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995
642pp.
ISBN: 9780192832979

Note: The spellings, punctuation etc used in the above quotes come from Le Faye’s edition.

P.T. Barnum, In France

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P.T. Barnum, by Matthew Brady

P.T. Barnum (Presumed Public Domain. By Matthew Brady, via Wikipedia)

When I saw that this week’s Library of America story was by P.T. Barnum, I knew I had to read it. Like most people I’ve heard of Barnum and his travelling shows, but had never read anything by him.

“In France” is not a short story, as most of the Library of America offerings are, but an excerpt from his 1869 memoir Struggles and triumphs. The whole memoir can be read online at the Internet Archive, here. While “In France” is the title of Chapter 12 in the memoir, the Library of America has not selected the whole chapter. Rather, they have published the middle of it, focusing on the story of how Barnum managed to present “General Tom Pouce” (ie Thumb), wearing his famed Napoleon Bonaparte costume, to the anti-Bonapartist King Louis Philippe. This was 1844, and Stratton (Tom Thumb) was just 6 years old!

You don’t read this for the writing. As memoir, or as travel writing, it is pretty prosaic. He doesn’t do much reflection – at least in this excerpt. You do not get a sense of how he felt about what he was doing, and you certainly get no idea of how his “exhibit”, General Tom Thumb, felt about being dressed up in costumes and paraded. However, it is interesting for its insights into Barnum’s modus operandi – particularly his economic and diplomatic nous. He knew how to work the system, though we are given the impression that he was a hard but not a dishonest negotiator. There is a funny little story running through this excerpt about the licence fee he needed to pay for exhibiting “natural curiosities”. Barnum felt the fee (25%) was too high and succeeded in negotiating a lower one, partly because the official involved did not believe that Barnum would make much money. When it came time for renewal, the official realised his mistake but was once again (legally) finessed by Barnum who argued that Tom Thumb should not be seen as a “natural curiosity” but as a “theatrical” performance (which incurred a much lower 11% tax)!

He also talks about how he worked his promotion – and makes this delightful comment on the French versus the English:

Thus, before I opened the exhibition all Paris knew that General Tom Thumb was in the city. The French are exceedingly impressible; and what in London is only excitement, in Paris becomes furor.

I don’t know when merchandising associated with the arts/performance first took off, but in Paris in 1844 it was in full flight. Barnum writes that:

Statuettes of ‘Tom Pouce’ appeared in all the windows, in plaster, Parian, sugar and chocolate; songs were written about him and his lithograph was seen everywhere. A fine café on one of the boulevards took the name of ‘Tom Pouce’ …

While this merchandising, generated by others for their own benefit, clearly also served Barnum well, there’s no mention of his licensing Tom Thumb’s image for promotional purposes. I can’t help thinking that the master showman missed an opportunity here!

Like the previous Library of America offering this is a short piece: it’s well worth reading for our “historical” if not “natural” curiosity!