Review

Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones (Review)

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Jasper Jones cover (Courtesy Allen & Unwin)

Jasper Jones cover (Courtesy Allen & Unwin)

What is is about coming-of-age novels? Why do we like to read them long after we’ve (hopefully) come of age ourselves? Is it because we like to compare our own experience with that of others? Whatever the reason, it is clear that we do like to read them because they sure keep being written and published. In my few months of blogging I have already written about two, and have now read another, Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones.

Like many, though not all, such novels, Jasper Jones has a first person narrator. It is set in a small country town in Western Australia in the late 1960s, and the protagonist, Charlie, is the nearly 14-year-old son of a high school literature teacher. He is a reader and therefore, almost by definition in the world of teenage boys, not “cool”. The book opens with the town’s bad-boy, Jasper Jones, knocking on his window in the middle of the night and, to Charlie’s surprise and delight, asking him for his help. The plot revolves around the shocking help that Jasper wants, how Charlie responds and the impact on him, his friends and family.

It is  a pretty dark and gritty story, and Silvey, mostly, controls it well, though there are times when he pushes the melodrama button a little too heavily. Silvey teases us at the beginning with the notion that the book will be a re-setting of Harper Lee’s To kill a mockingbird. There’s a death, an indigenous person likely to be blamed for it, a much maligned apparently “mad” person,  an apparently thoughtful and wise father AND Charlie’s own regular reference to the book and to how Atticus Finch might think in particular situations. However, fortunately I think, Silvey is a little more sophisticated a writer than that and Harper Lee’s book functions more as a frame for the story and the ideas being explored than as a direct model for the plot.

One of the things I like in the novel is the friendship between Charlie and his Vietnamese refugee school-mate, Jeffrey Lu. I’m not a teenage boy but I have known some in my time! The dialogue between the two boys rings pretty true – their puns, their ribbing of each other, their jokey arguments. True too is their uneven burgeoning interest in the opposite sex – Charlie is attracted to classmate Eliza Wishart  and to enjoying some “sassytime” with her, while Jeffrey’s focus is on making the town cricket team.

The novel is neatly plotted – and while some of it is predictable it is not all so. The fact that Charlie fears insects seems to be resolved when we discover that his love-interest Eliza has a similar fear – but it reappears again, cleverly, in the denouement. The story is well-paced, and it deals with a range of side issues, such as racism (against the Vietnamese refugee family, and the “half-caste” Jasper Jones), on top of the usual coming-of-age ones, such as loss of innocence (in several meanings of the word). Many of the characters could be seen as stereotyped – the “bastard” cricket coach who aligns himself with the “boorish” bully boys, and the cold-hearted status-seeking shire president, to name two – but most of them work despite this. Charlie’s mother though stretches the imagination a little too much: she has married down, she has been forced to live in a country town too small for her, and she has lost a child. This does seem a bit of overkill and the panning out of her part of the story feels a bit like one too many layers in the book.

One of the concepts that Charlie explores is that of “timing and chance”. He learns that despite your best laid plans, time and chance sometimes take over and there’s not much you can do about it. Another issue that runs through the book is that of reading, words and language. Early on Jasper Jones tells Charlie he trusts him because:

But I hope you might see things from my end. That’s what you do, right?  When you’re reading. You’re seeing what it’s like for other people.

With this coming near the beginning of the book, it’s not surprising that Charlie’s ability to empathise, to see things from other points of view, is pushed to the limits as the story progresses. Charlie, whose ambition is to be a writer, also learns about the limits of words, about when they are useful and when they are not, and about finding the right ones to use when they are.

There are many thematic and stylistic things that can be talked about in this book, making it a good one for discussion but, in the end, it is a fairly traditional coming-of-age story in its style, tone and structure. That said, if you like such stories, as I do, there’s a good chance you’ll find this a compelling and entertaining even if not a particularly challenging read. And is there anything wrong with that?

Craig Silvey
Jasper Jones
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009
368pp.
ISBN: 9781741757743

The Young Victoria

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As I wrote in a past post, I do love a biopic! And this week I saw another one, The Young Victoria. In many ways it covers much the same ground as the 2001 miniseries, Victoria & Albert. Both show Victoria’s lonely childhood, the poor relationship between her mother and Victoria’s uncle the King, her mother’s poor choice of adviser, and the political manipulations from Europe to forge a match between her and Albert. However, while Victoria & Albert, being a miniseries and therefore longer, takes the story up to Albert’s death, The Young Victoria stops at the point where Victoria recognises that she can and should give Albert a “real” role in the palace/the monarchy. The essence of the story is not really spoilt by stopping it here – and, anyhow, the film fills in the rest of their story through a few end-titles.

As a biopic, it’s a lovely romance. As a film, it’s a pretty traditional costume drama. That said, the acting is excellent – with Emily Blunt as Victoria and Rupert Friend as Albert being particularly convincing. The costuming and the sets are sumptuous. The script is crisp and natural.  The music is full and strong, but a little heavy-handed in places, a little too traditionally appropriate to an historical royal biopic, if you know what I mean.

From my knowledge, the film is pretty accurate historically, with just a few bits here and there exaggerated for dramatic effect. It deals lightly but clearly enough with the various political agendas running at the time – as they related to Victoria. All in all, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable film…and if it’s about anything (besides, that is, being the story of Victoria and her Albert) it’s about the idealism of youth. What a lovely pair they made.

António Lobo Antunes, The natural order of things

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António Lobo Antunes, 1998 (Photo: Gonçalo Figueiredo Augusto, from Wikipedia, under Creative Commons Licence, CC-BY-3.0)

António Lobo Antunes, 1998 (Photo: Gonçalo Figueiredo Augusto, from Wikipedia, under Creative Commons Licence, CC-BY-3.0)

Virtuosic? Tour de force? These are such clichéd terms to use in a review – and yet, I can find no other words to better describe Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes’ 1992 novel, The natural order of things. This is one of those beautifully written, but rather challenging, books that you know you really should read again to get all those nuances, relationships, and connections that you sense but can’t quite fully grasp. If that puts you off reading the book, so be it, but in doing so you’ll miss something quite special.

As you might expect the title is ironic – there is very little natural order here. The novel does not follow the “natural (aka chronological) order” either of fiction or of life. The characters – including a middle-aged man living with a schoolgirl, a miner who “flies” underground, a girl/woman who spends her life in an attic, an ex-secret policeman who teaches hypnotism by correspondence – do not fit the “natural order” either.

The imagery is rich, evocative and effective in building up a picture (mostly of disorder and decay) and a feeling (mostly of melancholy, if not despair). The rhythm – produced by repetition, and by run-on paragraphs that don’t begin with new sentences – compels you on. The characters are convincingly drawn despite their often mad-sounding confusions. The mixing of the surreal with the real works – as does the weaving of two scenes from different points in time in the same sentence, not to mention the telling of a story by two voices in the same sentence. Somehow he makes it work. Here is an example:

…and eleven months later I met Mr Valadas at a restaurant and liked his double chin, he wasn’t as handsome as the skin doctor who hated Verdi, but I felt sorry for him, always by himself, eating lunch all alone,

and my sister Teresa, who kept looking at you and shaking as if she’d been hit by the world’s worst tragedy, “When is the wedding Fernando?” [p. 186]

Two voices alternating in one long run-on sentence – and for some reason, you go with the flow and know who’s speaking when. But that is the thing to do with this book – go with the flow.

So, what is it about? In superficial terms it’s about, as the blurb on my back cover says, “two families and the secrets that bind them”. But really, there’s not a strong plot, though several stories are told. The novel comprises 5 books, each of which is broken into chapters told from two alternating points of view, resulting in 10 voices. The stories are set between 1950 and around 1990 and deal, in their various ways, with post-1974 Carnation Revolution Portugal and the resultant disintegration of Portuguese society (not only in Portugal but in its African and Timorese colonies). This said, the over-riding sense of the book is one of personal stories, of past, present and the way memory works, and not of politics:

Relax, don’t lose your temper, I swear I’m doing the best I can, but that’s how memory is, it has its own laws, its own rhythm, its own whims, … (p. 23)

In a bit of self-consciousness that brings us back to earth, the second last voice in the book, the dying Maria Antonia, says:

I amused myself by imagining that the redheaded girl was the sister of my neighbours at the Calçada do Tojal, I moved her to the house of the Vacuum Oil employee and the imprisoned army officer … my nephew announced with a smile , “You’re going to live forever, Aunt Antonia”, and I nodded so as not to upset him, I stuck a Tyrolean hat on his head and place him in Hyacinth Park of Alcântra, married to a diabetic girl from Mozambique or … [p.263]

because we who are from here but are not from here, who are from a here that no longer exists, have filled up these buildings with the silt of mementos and albums and letters and faded pictures from the past, and our present is occupied by these ruins of memory, not only the memory of those who preceded us, but the memory of ourselves, because we also forget, because names and images and faces get lost in a fog that makes everything equally blurry, … [p. 274] … with me will die the characters of this book that will be called a novel, which I’ve written in my head, fraught with a fear I won’t talk about, and which one of these years someone, in accord with the natural order of things, will repeat for me in the same way that Benefica will be repeated in these random streets and buildings, and I, without wrinkles or gray hair, will water my garden with the hose in the late afternoon, and the palm tree at the post office will grow again, … [p.277-8] … even if we’re not very large trees, and even if they knock us down, we’ll remain in photos, in scrapbooks, in mirrors, in the objects that prolong and remember us, … [p. 278]

And so here is made clear what should already be clear through the way the book is written and structured – though the repetition of phrases, the recurrence of bird and tree images, and the intertwining of stories and voices – and that is that the present and past intermingle and repeat each other, that the real and the unreal both have a place, that nothing really ends or begins, and that, perhaps, no matter how bad things are there is hope. What also seems to be made clear is that this has all been the fabrication of Maria Antonia – or has it? After all it is not she but the redheaded girl (Julieta) who has the last say. Read it and decide for yourself.

(Translated by Richard Zenith)

Maile Meloy, Liliana

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[WARNING: SPOILERS IF YOU CARE]

Fun but flimsy was my first reaction on reading the short story Liliana by American writer Maile Meloy. But, after reading it a couple of days ago, I found that it kept popping back into my head. What seemed at first to be a funny little story – about a grandmother who returns from the dead – turned out to have a few things to think about.

It is, I guess, both an inheritance and a second-chance story but with a difference. It is told first person by the thirty-something grandson, recently laid-off work and so functioning as house-father. Inheriting a little of Liliana’s millions would not be unwelcome (to him, anyhow). However, Liliana, the flamboyant independent one has left her money to the RSPCA – that is to animal welfare! When Liliana turns up on our narrator’s doorstep alive and well – at the beginning of the story – our narrator clearly thinks he’s still in with a chance.

In the next few pages – it’s a tight little story – we learn about the complexities of family, about need/neediness and about, really, the failure of imagination. We learn that if you don’t make it on the first chance, you are unlikely to make it on the second – particularly if neither situation is based on sincerity…and our narrator is not exactly dripping with that particular virtue:

…I thought about Jesus and Elvis. People had wanted them back, badly, and still do. But who would have willed Liliana back…

and

My wife, whose family is Jewish, says that I tricked her into falling in love with me by withholding my grandmother’s Nazi-movie past until it was too late, which is entirely true – I’m not an idiot.

Get the picture? This is a man who thinks he might get a job simply by using “new fonts with which to express my accomplishments”.

And so, our narrator, who had lived a somewhat Bohemian life as a child but had yearned for and created a “buttered saltines in front of TV” sort of life, is not the sort of person to engage his grandmother. “Well, you aren’t very much like your father, thankfully … But you aren’t very much like me either”. The story therefore ends much as it begins – no grandmother, no inheritance and no job. He knows he failed, but does he know why? Meloy doesn’t really answer this – and perhaps that’s part of her skill. She drops some choice words, and the rest is up to us.

(PS As well as being published online, “Liliana” appears in Meloy’s latest collection, Both ways is the only way I want it.)

Barack Obama, Dreams from my father

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Dreams from my father, Australian paperback (Cover: Courtesy Text Publishing)

Dreams from my father, Australian paperback (Cover: Courtesy Text Publishing)

I must be about the last person on earth to read Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from my father. However, that’s not going to stop me adding my voice to the accolades heaped on the book! When it was originally published in 1995, it was subtitled “A story of race and inheritance”. This does not appear on the cover or title page of my 2009 reprint of the 2004 edition. Why is that? Maybe they just thought they’d keep it simple?

Anyhow, this aside, there’s a lot that can be said about this book – and in fact a lot has been said. I don’t really want to go over that ground again. Yes, it has a three part structure (Origins, Chicago and Kenya). Yes, it’s beautifully written with some lovely reflective prose. Yes, it contains the germ of his philosophies about race and politics. But, what did I get out of it?

Well the main thing is that it’s one of the most authentic explorations of identity crisis that I have ever read. Here is a man born of a mixed race marriage, who was brought up by the “dominant” race’s family without any real contact with the minority race family but who, by the time he reaches adolescence, finds that those around him identify him with that minority race. Consequently, much of the book is spent on his working out how to live (and grow) as a black man in a white society. He is very honest in chronicling his path from rather wild, disaffected youth to thoughtful more together young man. He starts to make this transition when, in his early 20s, he leaves the high corporate life in New York for the life of a poor community organiser in the Southside of Chicago. And here I must admit I could NOT get that Jim Croce song out of my head:

Well the south side of chicago
Is the baddest part of town…

Some readers, I know, found the Chicago section slow-going, and  I suppose I did too but that doesn’t mean I didn’t find it engrossing because it is in this section that he really explores the many faces of race relations and starts to work through his own views and values. After all, it is here that he gets first-hand experience of what it is like to be poor, powerless and black and it is here that he not only starts to develop his philosophy but also hone his organisational skills. He’s pretty modest about it but it is clear that he is an empathetic person who engenders confidence in people. The other interesting thing about this identity crisis aspect of the book is that while, unlike many of the people he worked with/for he had not “grown up black”, he is one of the rare Americans to actually have direct African roots, something he explores in the third part of the book. All this actually makes him a bit of an insider/outsider in both white and black society. The resolution, when it comes at the end, is emotional and yet rather ordinary. He writes:

I felt the circle finally close. I realised that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d felt in Chicago – all of it was connected with a small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the colour of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle my birthright.

The other thing I got out of it was the exploration – mostly just subtly alongside other discussions – of the concepts of truth and authenticity. An historian he talks to in Nairobi towards the end of the book says, when discussing the historical challenges facing, say, post-colonial Africans, that “truth is usually the best corrective” and elaborates on this by suggesting that possibly “the worse thing that colonialism did was cloud our view of the past”. There’s much to think about in that statement! On a more personal level she says that what she wants for her daughter is less to be “authentically African” and more to be “authentically herself”. I can’t think of a better point on which to finish this little review of mine!

Beautiful Kate?

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Flinders Ranges (Photo: Georgie Sharp @ flickr, used under Creative Commons licence CC-BY-2.0)

Flinders Ranges (Photo: Georgie Sharp @ flickr, used under Creative Commons licence CC-BY-2.0)

[WARNING: SPOILERS, PROBABLY]

Well, I haven’t read the 1982 book by American novelist Newton Thornburg – in fact I hadn’t heard of it – but Rachel Ward has managed to produce out of it a stylish and engrossing film, aided by an excellent cast and gorgeous, often eerie, cinematography. It helps too that the film was shot in the remote but stunning Flinders Ranges of South Australia.

In case you haven’t heard, I’ll get it out now. The film deals with one of those big taboos – sibling incest. It is not sensational, it is not really voyeuristic; in fact it handles the topic with a great deal of sensitivity.  This is achieved partly by telling the story through flashback which, somehow, reduces the shock value and enables us to focus on the circumstances rather than the act. Forty-year old Ned (played with brooding but intelligent restraint by Ben Mendelsohn) returns to the family farm, with much younger fiancée (Toni, played by Maeve Dermody), to see his dying father (Bryan Brown). Also at the farm, caring for their father, is Ned’s younger sister, Sally (Rachel Griffiths). Ned, a writer, is clearly conflicted and has a prickly (to say the least) relationship with his father and so, as we’d expect, returning to the farm releases the ghosts of his past. This past includes a mother who died when he was young, a father who was rather harsh and domineering, and a twin sister (the Kate of the title played by Sophie Lowe) and older brother (Cliff), both of whom had died tragically in their teens. Mostly through flashbacks, the film explores the last summer in Kate and Cliff’s lives, and the events which led to their deaths, events which have reverberated for Ned ever since.

It’s not a particularly innovative film. The transitions between present and past are handled pretty traditionally – mostly fades triggered by an action, object or sound – but they are nonetheless smooth and subtle. The landscape, which is beautiful but stark and somewhat desolate, provides a perfect backdrop for the characters’ emotional lives. And the music, particularly Tex Perkins’, to use a cliché, haunting rendition of “This little bird”, supports the film superbly. The end result is a sureness in the direction belying the fact that this is Ward’s first feature – it might be fairly traditional in style but it is definitely not boring.

I do though have a small quibble with the story. I saw the film with two other people and all three of us struggled a little to understand Kate and the motivation for her behaviour. (Of course we are seeing it all through Ned’s eyes, but it does appear from other clues in the film that his eyes are reliable). Was it being motherless? Was it their isolation (their father insisted they be home-schooled through School of the Air)? Was it indeed this harsh remote father? Or, was it jealousy? This is a bit murky and spoils a little our full understanding of the situation – and, rightly or wrongly, it seems to lay much of the blame for what happens at her feet. That said, Kate is not demonised. Rather, she is presented (and played beautifully by Lowe) as charismatic, lively and risk-taking, but as trapped on a stage that is too small for her energies.

The resolution is pretty traditional but is not mawkish – we can’t help feeling glad that Ned comes to some rapprochement with his father, that he has put his ghosts to rest and that he may now move onto a more settled future. This is a gutsy feature debut for Ward – I look forward to her next one.

You know you are hooked

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…on blogging when you start writing your blog in your head while you are out and about enjoying something. This is what happened to me last night (and it’s not the first time) when I was at a Kate Ceberano concert (sorry Kate – but I did pull myself up quickly and start concentrating again). The concert was her Kate Ceberano – 25 Live Tour which celebrates her 25 years in show business. The support act was Carl Riseley, a rather gorgeous and confident “big band swing-style” singer and trumpeter from Queensland.

Anyhow, a little aside. One of the delights of being retired in Australia is that you get to listen to ABC Radio National programs on all sorts of topics. And so, just last week, I heard an interview on Bush Telegraph with Jim Haynes, the author of a book titled The ultimate guide to country music in Australia. There is a relevance I promise to this digression from an article on jazz-soul-pop-musical theatre singer Kate, and it is this: Haynes suggested that missing on the current country music scene in Australia are good interpreters of song. He said the tendency today is to want to be a singer-songwriter but that interpreting the songs of others is also an important part of the scene.

Kate and her band (including brother Phil at right) (Mobile phone image, August 2009)

Kate and her band (including brother Phil at right) (Mobile phone image, August 2009)

This brings us to Kate. Of course, interpretation is a more intrinsic part of the jazz scene but Kate’s concert included a delightful mix of interpreted and original songs, with the interpreted songs being every bit as engaging as the originals. Carl Riseley warmed us up nicely with an entertaining mix of mostly swing style music, interspersed with the odd bit of trumpet and finishing somewhat surprisingly (unless you follow Riseley I gather) with his version of Boz Scaggs‘ “Lido Shuffle”. And then Kate came on and sang for around 2 hours. She comes across as warm, confident and irrepressible. Her voice is powerful but also has a rich mellowness, and she sang a wide repertoire  including a song she wrote for her mother and her somewhat raunchy also self-penned hit single “Pash”, songs from her Jesus Christ Superstar days, her gorgeous version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and much more besides.

Oh, and curvaceous Kate looked wonderful in the sparkly long black dress she started in, the white diva gown she changed into, and the tight little black number that she wore to end the concert. 25 years on and Kate is still going strong. It’s hard to think that she won’t still be in another 25 years.  It was a truly joyous night.

Peter Godwin, When a crocodile eats the sun

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[WARNING: SOME SPOILERS]

Saltwater crocodile

Saltwater crocodile

We know it happens – is happening – but it is shocking to come face to face with it, that is, with the experience of living in a situation which was once ordered and safe but which, almost overnight, becomes chaotic and downright dangerous. This is the story Peter Godwin chronicles in his most recent memoir of life in Zimbabwe, When a crocodile eats the sun. The title comes from an old Zulu and Venda belief that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun. They see it as the worst of omens, “as a warning that he [the celestial crocodile] is much displeased with the behaviour of man below”. Two eclipses occur in the space of two years during the writing of the book. If you were not superstitious before, you might be after reading this! There is, however, an added layer to the crocodile motif: an old woman now living in a nursing home spends her time reading and rereading an old English magazine containing an article in which Churchill warns the English that “appeasement is feeding the crocodile, hoping it will eat you last”. There’s a reason I think that Godwin tells us this story twice in the book.

I might as well come clean now. I am not very good at keeping up with all the world’s trouble-spots and so was rather horrified last year by the events surrounding the elections in Zimbabwe. I had thought Mugabe was doing a good job – and I think he did in the very beginning – but clearly I had taken my eyes off the ball long ago because as most of you will know I’m sure things had been going downhill there for well over a decade. It is the political change in Zimbabwe since about 1996 that forms the backdrop to this book.

Morgan Tsvangirai, 2009 (Photo: Harry Wad)

Morgan Tsvangirai, 2009 (Photo: Harry Wad, using CC-BY-SA licence)

Godwin recounts how with increasing violence Mugabe (who is 80 by the end of the book), through various groups and organisations such as his ZANU-PF, seizes land, uprooting both white and black farmers and workers – any one who appears to oppose him – in his quest to retain power.

Excluding the prologue, the book starts in July 1996 and ends in February 2004, with each chapter titled by the date of a visit Godwin, now residing in the USA, makes back to his home country. During these trips, many of them justified by a journalistic assignment, Godwin visits, with some bravery it seems to me, besieged white farmers and the families of people who have been murdered. However, while the conflict between Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC and the ZANU-PF is central to the book, Godwin also explores his family, particularly in relation to his discovery, in middle age, that his father was a Polish Jew who had been sent to England to avoid the coming Holocaust. Without labouring the point, Godwin draws some parallels between the experience of Jews and of white farmers in Zimbabwe. He also, on a more personal level, parallels himself with his father: “Like Poland was to him, Africa is for me: a place in which I can never truly belong, a dangerous place that will, if I allow it to, reach into my life and hurt my family”. In a lovely bit of – hmm, je ne sais quoi – his father, who started life as Polish Jew but who lived most of it as an English Christian, is buried as an African Hindu.

Godwin has a lovely style – some nice turns of phrase without being over-florid. Here’s one such: “It is winter in Africa, when the warm breath of day dies quickly on the lips of dusk”. The book is rich in anecdotes and observations. Topics as wide ranging as the legend of the hippopotamus’s creation, the story of Livingstone, and the life-cycle of the aid worker are all neatly fitted into the narrative. He  tries a little to explain and perhaps even justify the role of whites in Africa – methinks he is on somewhat shaky ground here but I suppose, like all colonial societies, what’s done is done and we need to find ways for peaceful co-existence. Too late now I suppose to worry about the rights and wrongs of the past…but he could perhaps have been a bit more cognisant of the entrenched inequities beneath the current strife.

At the heart of the book though is the people – the strong-willed parents who despite themselves start to become the children, the rebel-broadcaster sister who flees to England, the white farmers and black supporters of the MDC who face each day with amazing (to me, anyhow) bravery, the black workers and labourers who struggle along often quite loyally while nothing really improves for them, and so on. This is its richness.

Near the end of the book, Godwin makes one albeit backhanded concession to Mugabe:

Mugabe has managed to achieve something hitherto so elusive; he has created a real racial unity – not the bogus one portrayed in the beer commercials of the new South Africa, but something more substantial, a hard-won sense of comradeship, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule.

Perhaps the crocodile hasn’t quite yet had its day!

Jim Crace, Being dead

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The old “so many books, so little time” mantra means that I very rarely read a book more than once (other than my Jane Austens of course), but I have read Jim Crace’s Being dead twice. I love this book. I know some find the subject matter unappealing but I find it not only fascinating but rather beautiful.

Beach near Bermagui, New South Wales

Beach near Bermagui, New South Wales

For those who haven’t heard of this novella (really), its plot centres on a murder. Joseph and Celice, a middle aged couple (and, significantly, zoologists), are bashed to death on a secluded part of a beach at the book’s beginning and, from this point, the story moves in multiple directions to explore a number of before and after scenarios relating to this event. In fact, one of the things I like about the book is its four-part structure, and its forwards-backwards movement in time as the different strands of the story are played out. Crace moves backward from the moment of their death to the beginning of that day, and alongside this he recounts forward the story of their relationship from the point of their meeting. The third strand concerns their daughter as she reacts to the news of their disappearance, and the final strand, which is the one that turns off some readers, chronicles the decomposition of their bodies as they lie undiscovered in the dunes. It’s not for nothing he makes them zoologists!

Near the end of the book is a clue to why Crace has chosen this structure. He writes that “Earth is not a visionary and can’t be blamed for what’s ahead. It is retrospective … It is the past that shapes the world, the future can’t be found in it”. It seems to me to be a pretty fatalistic – what will be, will be – view of the world, and one I rather like. I don’t think he’s quite saying we can’t change our world but he is saying that what we do, what is now, shapes it and our lives, that there’s no future mystery out there waiting to make something of us. Right near the end is this:

Nothing could be changed or amended, except by the sentiment of those who were not dead. That’s the only Judgement Day there is. The benefits of hindsight. The dead themselves are robbed of hindsight.

So what about the characters who are the focus of all this? Crace has in fact chosen pretty ordinary, fairly unlovable (except to themselves) not-particularly-admirable characters. By doing this he makes the point that we all have our lives, that the only really important thing is love, and that there is dignity in that. As he writes: “Love songs transcend, transport, because there is such a thing as love”.

And it is all told in language that is rhythmic and oddly beautiful despite the horror of the subject matter:

The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but they were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet.

Crace is a great stylist, I think, which is why he can tell such a story in four parts but in less than 200 pages. Take the title for example: the use of the present participle “being” is very telling. Present participles imply action, continuation, ongoingness, but death is usually seen as the end. In this book there are several continuations: the world, the natural world in particular, continues, and Joseph and Celice’s love continues. Oh, and they stay dead. Great title.

So, to labour the point, his message is that we and only we make our lives:

There is no remedy for death – or birth – except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

Carpe diem I suppose – but an oh so eloquent evocation of it!

Musica Viva concert: Steven Isserlis & Dénes Várjon

/ Whispering Gums / 2 Comments
Cello (Photo by Jamilsoni, used under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No-derivative Works 2.0)

Cello (Photo by Jamilsoni, used under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No-derivative Works 2.0)

I haven’t written about all the Musica Viva concerts I’ve attended this year because I don’t really have any music review skills. However, I can’t resist writing a little about this one. This is the third time we’ve seen the cellist Steven Isserlis, each time accompanied by a different pianist, and we’ve never been disappointed. He is one of those expressive performers who actively communicates with the audience through his playing.

Tonight’s program was all Schumann – played by two Schumaniacs (as Isserlis described themselves when introducing their encore – another piece by Schumann!). This despite the fact that Schumann, while apparently liking the cello having played it as a child, wrote little for it. Only one of the six programmed pieces was written for cello; the rest were written for instruments as varied as violin, oboe, clarinet and piano. Whatever they were originally written for, the arrangements for cello and piano that we heard tonight were delightful and could, to my ears anyhow, have always been intended that way. The program was:

  • Fantasiestücke, op 73
  • Märchenbilder, op 113 (arranged Alfredo Piatti)
  • Violin Sonata no 3 in A minor (1853) (arranged Steven Isserlis)
  • Three Romances, op 94
  • Adagio and Allegro, op 70
  • Fünf Stücke im Volkston, op 102 (the one originally for cello and piano)

Schumann is a Romantic composer, and his pieces clearly reflect that period – they are variously sweet, melancholic, dramatic, humorous even, but never discordant or jarring.  The playing was lovely. That said, some of my companions felt that the piano often overwhelmed the cello. Others of us, though, almost forgot the piano (gorgeous as it was) existed, so focused were we on Steven. He is hard not to focus on with his somewhat wild curly locks and animated playing. He is also unflappable: just as he finished a movement of one piece a baby in the audience squawked. Isserlis pulled a humorous face and commented that while a couple of notes might have been out of tune, it wasn’t that bad, and then muttered something about “critics”! What a charmer!

I guess my only criticism, if you could call it that, is that the program was all Schumann. Schumann is lovely and the program had some colour to it, but I would probably have enjoyed a little wider variety – a little discordance perhaps to counterpoint all the lyricism. This is but a petty point to make about a lovely evening’s music played by delightful performers. And who could be more delightful than a performer whose voicemail apparently goes like this:

Please leave me a nice uplifting message to make my day, make my life worthwhile. (Musica Viva Concert Program)

What more can I say!

PS If you are interested, here is a YouTube of Isserlis and Várjon playing Schumann’s Arbendlied Op 85 No 12, which was the encore at our concert.