Review – Novels

Tasma Walton, I am Nannertgarrook

/ Whispering Gums / 9 Comments

As we got ready for our recent Melbourne trip, I was thinking about the then upcoming announcement of the Stella Prize shortlist, so I packed the two longlisted books I already had. But then, en route, we listened to the Secrets of the Green Room interview with Tasma Walton about her longlisted novel, I am Nannertgarrook. I was intrigued, so I bought it, and, lo and behold, it was shortlisted. My next read was decided.

I am Nannertgarrook, which co-won last year’s ARA Historical Novel Prize, joins the increasing number of historical fiction novels written by First Nations authors, like Kim Scott’s That dead man dance (my review) and Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (my review). These novels make critical contributions to the truthtelling process. For far too long, Australians have been fed historical novels telling Australian history from the white settler perspective. It’s well past time that we heard other perspectives, particularly those of First Nations peoples.

So, I am Nannertgarrook is an early settlement story. It starts in 1833 in Nerrm (Port Phillip Bay), in Boonwurrung Nation, and moves slowly west to Bald Island, in Noongar Nation in south-western Western Australia, ending around 30 years later. It is based on the story, documented in colonial records, of Tasma Walton’s ancestor, Nannertgarrook (or Eliza ‘No-one’ Nowen/Gamble) who was snatched from her home and sold on the slave market to a sealer.

“in a horror story made real”

The novel opens, idyllically, with some of the traditional features of historical romance fiction, including Nannertgarrook’s romantic descriptions of her “strong” perfect husband: “His kiss stirs a yearning in my belly”, “He is mine … and I am his”. I recollected that publisher Anita Heiss’s goals for the Bundyi imprint is to publish “Commercial fiction: romance / chick lit, historical fiction, contemporary fiction” (see my post), and started to think this was going to be a bit too formulaic for me. But, it soon took a turn, and I realised that, although it had a compelling story-line, I am Nannertgarrook was not going to be a plot-driven book. Instead, it is a considered novel about grief, abuse, and rapaciousness, about true savagery, and about community and resilience in the face of a world ending.

I am Nannertgarrook is told first person through Nannertgarrook’s eyes. It follows her life as “her” sealer keeps moving them west, further and further away from all she knows. We feel her despair when, each time they board his boat, he turns towards the setting sun, and she knows she is not going home. The novel is driven, in fact, by a rich meaning of “home”, because here is the story of a young mother plucked, not only from her family and people but from partway along her journey to full knowledge of her culture. An ongoing grief through the novel is what she doesn’t know and now may never learn:

How different is my world now … the certainty of millennia-long knowledge and experience lost to me on the other side of the horizon. And for the first time a maternal fear creeps up my spine and wraps an icy hand around my heart. Will my baby be safe? Can I do this alone, without my Elders, my aunties, my countrywomen by my side?

This visceral grief – for her beloved Sea Country, and for the knowledge she will never have – combined with her attempts to understand, and then live lightly and fairly on unfamiliar Countries thread through the novel. Walton conveys, by showing, what living on Country is and means (just as Dank did in her nonfiction work, We come with this place). She does not play down to her readers. Indeed, she uses around 150 words from Nannertgarrook’s Boonwurrung language in her telling. There is a glossary at the back, to which I referred occasionally, but in most cases the words were understandable in context or quickly became familiar. These words, like bubup (child/baby), liwurruk (sister), and murrup (spirit/soul) breathe life into the telling. They are not italicised or differentiated in any way. It is up to the reader to go with the flow, and it works, because it gives the story its own flow and authenticity.

Nannertgarrook’s despair over her loss of home and family is pervasive, but I can’t ignore the elephant in the room, the physical horrors to which she and her companions were subjected. Walton handles this – the abuse, the rape, the brutalisation of women and children from very young ages – with skill. She does not build up suspense, nor does she describe it in great detail. These would sensationalise, and effectively downplay, the ongoing nature of the brutality. There is enough distressing description for us to know it, and to remember that it – and the fear of it – is constant. Like Nannertgarrook, we breathe a sigh of relief when the sealers leave the women on land while they go off on their killing sprees.

Related to the physical abuse is the issue of naming. Walton said in the interview that she did not grace the sealers with names, because they did not deserve such recognition. These men, of course, did name “their” women, so Nannertgarrook became Eliza, or, when her sealer felt like belittling her further, “No-one”. Walton, naturally, uses Boonwurrung names for her characters. These aren’t easy for our settler ears, but tough, eh? We won’t learn if we don’t hear.

“insatiable white ghosts”

Two main themes underpin this novel. One is Nannertgarrook’s abduction. A personal story, it also exemplifies the destruction of communities, country and, thus, culture by the early settlers, and it foreshadows the legacy of trauma. The other theme is the rapacious behaviour of the sealers, whalers and others, who killed everything in their path, paying no heed to preserving species into the future. This behaviour typifies the rapaciousness of settler culture in general. The destruction of trees, the indiscriminate killing of kangaroos and joeys, are documented in the novel. Nannertgarrook sees it all, and feels the “shocked hush of irreparable decimation” in the land.

Ultimately, I am Nannertgarrook interrogates one word, warragul, the Boonwurrung word for savage. The novel is divided into three main parts, with the central part titled “Warragul”. It becomes quickly clear just who the savage is, and it’s not the people who “come with this place”. Nannertgarrook knows it, and we know it, but it’s a point worth making in a world where language, sometimes all too subtly, infiltrates the way we understand each other.

So, after some early reservations, I found I am Nannertgarrook an impressive read – moving and informative.

Near the end of the novel, Nannertgarrook hears herself identified as Eliza:

Fierce, righteous anger propels the words from my mouth. Not Eliza. Not No-one. My words are clear and strong. I am Nannertgarrook.

Walton’s novel returns her ancestor Nannertgarrook to her rightful place as a human being deserving of respect. It also constitutes a powerful assertion of identity, much like, dare I say it, Helen Reddy’s “I am woman, hear me roar”. Nannertgarrook, quietly but strongly, roars in this novel.

Tasma Walton
I am Nannertgarrook
Sydney: Bundyi, 2025
263pp.
ISBN: 9781761426698

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

I have not read Ann Patchett for a long time. In fact, I’ve only read one novel, Bel Canto, way before blogging, and one nonfiction piece, “The bookshop strikes back” (my review). So, when I saw all the love her latest novel, Tom Lake, was getting in 2023’s end-of-year lists (including Kate‘s annual compilation), I thought it might be time to read her again, and added it my reading group’s suggestions list. With others having read and enjoyed various of her books, we reached consensus and scheduled it for March.

For those who haven’t caught up with it, Tom Lake is set on a family cherry orchard in Michigan during the COVID pandemic. It is a dual timeline story in which the narrator, 57-year-old Lara, tells her three twenty-something daughters, about her past, specifically about the summer she played Emily in Thornton Wilder’s classic play, Our town, and the romance she had with Duke, a co-actor who later became a huge star. Lara was just 24-years-old, and these were the golden days of youth when all seemed possible. As we flip between past and present, while the family picks the sweet cherries and the tart, feelings are explored and insights about life, love, and the decisions we make are revealed and turned over. The girls come to know their parents better, and see perhaps why fame is not necessarily all it appears, while Lara gets the monkey of her past off her back. This does not mean Tom Lake is one of those angsty books about the past coming back to haunt you. It’s a quieter, more subtle story about children’s fascination with their parents’ pasts, and what parents choose to tell – and when. It is also about the way in which revisiting the past can bring new insights (just as re-reading a great novel can produce new thoughts and ideas). Lara thinks, near the end:

“The beauty and the suffering are equally true. Our Town taught me that. I had memorized the lessons before I understood what they meant.” (Ch. 18)

All this would normally appeal to me, and I did enjoy reading the novel. I was fascinated by the whole summer stock theatre business because it has frequently popped up in my reading and viewing over the years. And, I loved her characterisation. The differentiation of the three sisters – Emily, Maisie and Nell – and Lara’s understanding of their separate personalities was well done and engaged me from the start.

This is not surprising. Tom Lake is Patchett’s 9th novel, so she knows how to construct and tell a story. Her metier seems to be interpersonal relationships within small groups of people. This novel’s focus is two such groups – the Tom Lake theatre group in 1988 and the family on the farm in 2020. These groups are well characterised. You feel you are there rehearsing in the theatre or swimming in the lake, or at the farm chatting over dinner or picking cherries. The voyeur in me loves being in places outside my experience, so I loved these beautifully depicted places.

But, it is a quiet novel and, as much as I enjoyed the read, I also found it somewhat unsatisfying. It’s not that it was completely predictable because, although we know from the start where Lara ended up, the journey does have some interest. It’s more that it’s a sweet, warm-hearted story, while I like a bit more edge or bite in my reading, a bit more meat.

And, there was potential for meat. Tom Lake is an intergenerational story which explores that mystery between children and their parents’ lives. It reminded me how my brother and I learnt things that surprised us about our parents’ courtship right in the last months of their lives. This story is a bit about that, about how, when and what you tell your children and why. When Lara’s husband Joe had, sometime in the past, inadvertently let drop that Lara had dated the now celebrity actor Duke, he is surprised by how much the children care. So, with the family isolated together due to the pandemic, Lara embarks on telling her story, “knowing full well that the parts they’re waiting to hear are the parts I’m never going to tell them”. This is warmly and skilfully done, so that by the end the girls accept the story they are given.

The interactions reveal other intergenerational issues too. The girls challenge Lara when she uses what is to them “politically incorrect” language. When she introduces her understudy, Pallace, who is also a dancer, Lara describes her “preposterous” legs, but is quickly criticised for “objectifying” her. And, when she describes Duke’s “craziness”, she is interrupted again and told she can’t use words like “crazy” or “nuts” or “insane”. They’re “pejorative”. She should only use his “diagnosis” and only if he didn’t mind. She should just say “what happened … Just the facts, without attaching any judgment to it”. These are gorgeous interactions that mirror the sort of conversations many of us are having as we navigate modern sensibilities. Patchett handles them with grace and generosity – not to mention a lovely touch of humour.

Indeed, one of the book’s strengths is the learning between generations, and the gentle wisdom imparted. When the girls jump onto an event involving Duke, calling it “the happiest day” in her life, Lara reminds them that it was “not by a long shot”. It was simply “the happiest day of the summer of 1988”.

So far so good … I can see why people (including me) enjoyed it. It is warm-hearted, and nicely reflective about youth and the perspectives of age. But, it also disappointed. Tom Lake crosses some genres that interest me – pandemic literature, farm literature, climate change literature (cli-fi), coming of age stories, and the sliding-door trope, and I wanted these explored more. I wanted her to tackle the questions left hanging, such as climate change and Emily’s decision not to have children.

However, Tom Lake is not that book, and I shouldn’t expect it to be, so I won’t. But, even without that, it just felt a bit saccharine (including the farm cemetery with its “benevolent” shade), a little too neatly tied up. Difficulties are hinted at, but in the end the sweet cherries win out over the tart. I, though, like my desserts just that little bit tart.

Ann Patchett
Tom Lake
London: Bloomsbury, 2023
310pp.
ISBN: 9781526664235 (eBook)

Samantha Harvey, Orbital (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 38 Comments

Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novella, Orbital, is one of those novels you want to keep by your side after you’ve finished it, hoping that its calm beauty and quiet provocations will stay with you just that little bit longer. And here, in this opening sentence, I am channelling the “you” voice that she slips into occasionally but so effectively throughout her novel.

I am late to this book but I have wanted to read it for a long time, so was thrilled when my reading group scheduled it for February. I had avoided reading about it – sorry all you bloggers out there – but had heard enough to know it was different, that it didn’t have a strong narrative but involved a few astronauts orbiting the earth in a spacecraft. I wanted to come at this difference with a clear mind, ready to see what I thought, uninfluenced by the opinions of others. This is my usual modus operandi, but for “different” books, I find it especially beneficial.

Now, when my reading group meets, the first thing we do, before we start the to-and-fro of discussion, is briefly share our first impressions. Mine were that it is a beautiful book about earth and a deep book about humankind, and that I loved how Harvey balanced multiple paradoxes – science versus wonder, human inventiveness versus our rapaciousness, the beauty of the planet versus its exploitation. I also commented that it is another book that pushes what a novel is. It is not one thing or another, but combines many things – nature writing or eco-literature, philosophical treatise, literary realist novel, the one-day-novel, and more, all without a strong narrative arc or major character development, though there is a story and there are characters.

So, where to start? I’d like to start halfway in with Orbit 7, but I should explain that the novel is told chronologically over a 24-hour period during which the craft (based on the International Space Station) orbits the earth 16 times. Each chapter is named for an orbit, or part of an orbit, as in “Orbit 7” or “Orbit 3, descending”. We start with “Orbit minus 1” which sets the scene. It is early Tuesday morning in early October, and there are six astronauts on board, “nothing unusual about this anymore, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard”. Routine perhaps, but the chapter ends by telling us that they will return to earth “full of stories and rapture and longing” albeit “their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner”. Immediately, this sets up the push-pull nature of this remarkable book.

Over the next 6 orbits we are introduced to the six astronauts/cosmonauts – Roman and Anton (Russians), Nell (English), Chie (Japanese), Shaun (American), Pietro (Italian) – and to some of the “events” that loosely frame the novel, a typhoon building over the Philippines, Chie’s mother’s death, and the launch of the first lunar expedition in decades. We are also introduced to life on board the spaceship, to something about the astronauts’ personalities and their roles on board, and to how microgravity affects the body. And, through Harvey’s glorious prose, we feel the magic and awe of being in space and see the gorgeousness of the earth:

this thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness … An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright (“Orbit 7). 

This thing, with sights like the auroras,

the flexing, morphing green and red of the auroras which snake around the inside of the atmosphere fretful and magnificent like something trapped (Orbit 4, ascending).

But …

“humanity doesn’t know when to stop”

This is a novel that accommodates paradox. Alongside beauty and wonder, we are early introduced to other thoughts and perspectives. In the second chapter, “Orbit 1, ascending”, the idea of perspective is introduced through a postcard Shaun has depicting Velázquez’s “Las Meninas“, a painting which poses more questions than it answers about who is looking, who is being looked at, what is the subject, is there a subject, what is real and what is not. (This is one of a few images referenced in the novel that stimulate questions about perspective, that encourage us to see things from different angles.) By “Orbit 4, ascending”, this question has developed into a recognition that their view is “half-mast”, that we are not at the centre of it all. The thinking is existential:

we grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness and in a flash of innocence we feel quite glad – if we’re not special then we might not be alone … And so, in loneliness and curiosity and hope humanity looks outwards.

By “Orbit 5, descending” through to “Orbit 7″, we are around halfway through the novel, and Harvey moves us on to thinking about the other side of the equation, which is not how humans feel but what we do. The push-pull tension between wonder and destruction, between the potential power of curiosity and the more negative “force of human want”, comes to the fore. Chie’s mother, who was born because her mother survived Nagasaki, tells her daughter “be afraid my child at what humans can do; you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop …” (Orbit 5, ascending).

Then, two chapters later in “Orbit 7” comes this:

One day they look at the earth and they see the truth. If only politics were a pantomime … Instead they come to see that it’s not a pantomime, or it’s not just that. It’s a force so great that it has shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought from here so human-proof.

… Every retreating or retreated or disintegrated glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every burning oil spill . . .

The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first.

And there we have it, “the hand of politics”,”the amazing force of human want” that has “sculpted and shaped” every part of the planet. From this point on, the paradoxes – or tensions – that we had been subtly led to become more overt, but this is not a depressing novel. The book’s power and beauty lie in Harvey’s ability to inspire us with earth’s beauty while also posing, through her outsider-insider astronauts, our most pressing question: how do (or can) we harness the positive power of human wonder and curiosity without also embodying the negatives.

Ultimately, while not denying the underlying challenges, Orbital reads as a hymn to our “wild and lilting world”. We, like Harvey’s astronauts, see the news and have lived our lives – but, this does not make our hope naive (to paraphrase “Orbit 7”). Lovely.

Kimbofo and Brona have also reviewed this book.

Samantha Harvey
Orbital
Vintage, 2024 Original. pub. 2023)
136pp.
ISBN: 9781529922936

Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 41 Comments

My reading group has a tradition of choosing a “big” book for our January read. We also like to do a classic each year. This year the two coincided when we chose Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, as our 2026 starting book. I have read several Gaskell novels and stories – plus Nell Stevens’ bio-memoir, Mrs Gaskell and me: Two women, two love stories, two centuries apart (my review) – but her first novel has been a gap, so when one of our members suggested Gaskell, I proposed Mary Barton. And phew, it generated a great discussion!

Most of you will know Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), I’m sure, but I’ll briefly introduce her here. She is a significant English novelist, who is best known for her “social problem” novels, Mary Barton (1848) and North and south (1854-5), and for her more comic novel, Cranford (1864-6). Lesser known is her biography of her friend, The life of Charlotte Bronte, which was controversial, and is covered by Stevens in her book. Relevant to this post is that Gaskell married a Unitarian Minister, and lived in Manchester where she worked with the poor.

So, Mary Barton … Admired, apparently, by Charles Dickens, it is set in Manchester around 1840, a time when the cotton trade was facing a serious downturn, with all the flow-on economic ramifications in a newly industrialising society. It focuses on two working-class families, the Bartons and the Wilsons, and on John Barton’s questioning the distribution of wealth and the master-worker relationship. Early in the novel, Barton’s wife dies, leaving him to raise his daughter Mary. Increasingly concerned about the deteriorating economic conditions facing himself and his co-workers, John becomes involved in Chartism and the Trade Union Movement. Meanwhile, Mary tries to make her own way in the world, as a seamstress. Although she has been loved by Jem Wilson since childhood, she is initially attracted to and pursued relentlessly by Harry Carson, the son of a wealthy mill-owner. When Harry is murdered, the plot thickens and in the novel’s second half the personal and socioeconomic issues come to a head.

Now, the common challenge – how to write about a classic? What can we add to discussions about books that have been extensively analysed by academics and students? Sure, Mary Barton is less studied than the Austens and Dickens, the Whites and Steinbecks, but still …

I could focus on my reading group’s discussion, and I will do some of that, but during our discussions I cannot, of course, explore my own thoughts at depth – or even raise them all – so these together with a couple from our discussion will be my focus.

And I’ll start with form. Mary Barton is a mid-nineteenth century novel, and like novels of that time, it is big and baggy. It was Henry James, who, semi-critically, described some 19th-century novels as “large, loose, baggy monsters”. His specific comment was “what do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” If I understand correctly, he was referring to big story canvases that lacked “composition” or “form”. This is what I was thinking as I was reading Mary Barton. I jotted down that it felt messy and confused between forms – a social problem novel, a romance or sentimental novel, a melodrama, a morality tale, crime fiction, an adventure story – but this was a time when the novel was still relatively new and finding its way.

As for my reading group, most found it slow to start, and very wordy, with several wanting Gaskell to just “get on with it”. However, the second half, when the pace picks up, grabbed everyone’s attention, resulting in most of us greatly appreciating it.

“the grinding, squalid misery”

Certainly, I forgave the book its “messiness”, because it tells a powerful story about inequality and precarity (discussed in this week’s Monday Musings). Gaskell offers a real and moving insight into the society of the time, and into some of the thinking that was happening. She writes with the compassion that came – at least in part – from her dissenting Unitarian background, and she shocked many of her peers with her realistic portrayals of the grimy sides of life. She had strong moral views but was humanitarian in her application of them. Some in my group felt she was a little tough on the women – particularly John’s straying sister-in-law Esther – but I (and others) disagreed, believing Gaskell was prepared to offer redemption to the fallen woman.

This is not to say, however, that Gaskell didn’t bother me at times. An aspect of this novel is its high level of authorial intrusion. Mostly it conveys information that her characters cannot know – or perhaps that she could not find a way for them to impart – about the wider socioeconomic background. But, at times it is attended by what comes across to a modern reader as a patronising tone. Early in the novel, for example, she – the author-narrator – discusses John Barton who has just lost his wife and who sees only himself, and his kind, as sufferers. She writes:

I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters: but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks. True that with child-like improvidence, good times will often dissipate his grumbling, and make him forget all prudence and foresight. (p. 24)

She goes on to explain that while “earnest men” like John Barton had seen suffering, he was a good worker, who felt “pretty certain of steady employment”, and so

… he spent all he got with the confidence (you may also call it improvidence) of one who was willing, and believed himself able, to supply all his wants by his own exertions. (p. 24)

However, when his employer fails, and the other mills start failing, he has nothing to fall back on and “his life hung on a gossamer thread”. Gaskell’s obvious compassion is tempered by a middle-class value judgement regarding being “provident”, which reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of what we recognise as “precarity” wrought by capitalism and industrialisation.

the “human condition”

The novel ends with a serious discussion between John Carson’s friend, Job Legh, and mill-owner, Mr Carson, with Job trying to explain to Carson, “the effect produced on John Barton by the great and mocking contrasts” he saw in the “human condition” around him. Eventually, after an open-minded conversation, Mr Carson comes to understand at least something of the other side and attempts to improve how the masters do business.

It is regarding this resolution that one of my reading group members made the point that Gaskell does not offer a radical solution to the problem. Gaskell suggests that people understand each other better – “that the truth might be recognised that the interests of one were the interests of all, and, as such, required the consideration and deliberation of all” – rather than proposing a different economic or political system altogether.

I would add, though, that Gaskell did also believe in some practical reforms, one being in education. She frequently mentions John Barton’s lack of education affecting his ability to think through the issues that concerned him. Indeed, near that end, John admits that he had struggled to find “the right way”, because

“No one learned me, and no one telled me … they taught me to read, and then they never gave no books …” (p. 445)

In other words, he knows that education is more than just learning to read. Job tells Mr Carson, “it was most desirable to have educated workers, capable of judging [my emph], not mere machines of ignorant men” (p. 467).

So much more could be explored in this big book, but I’ll end here by saying that while its dramatic plot and well-delineated, rounded characters make Mary Barton enjoyable reading, it is Gaskell’s depiction of ongoing economic realities that makes it well worth reading.

Elizabeth Gaskell
Mary Barton
London: Penguin English Library, 2012 (Orig. pub. 1848, in 2 volumes)
497pp.
ISBN: 9780141974675 (Kindle edition.)

Carmel Bird, Crimson velvet heart (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

If you have read Carmel Bird’s memoir Telltale (my review), you will know about her love of story, particularly of history, and fairy story, and legends. You will also know about her love of objects, of beautiful objects or strange ones, and of the meanings embodied within them. And, if you have read anything by Carmel Bird, you will know her light touch, even when dealing with the most serious subjects. All these coalesce beautifully in her latest novel, which is also her first work of historical fiction, Crimson velvet heart.

“wars and princesses”

Crimson velvet heart is set during the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV (1638-1715). It tells the story of the “all but forgotten” Princess Marie Adélaïde of Savoy (1685-1712), who, in 1686 at the age of 11, is brought to France to marry Louis’ grandson, the Duke of Burgundy. Why? Well, it’s all to do with “wars and princesses”. Adélaïde’s fate was sealed by the Treaty of Turin which had been negotiated that very year between her father, the “wily” Victor Amadeus, and Louis. It ended Savoy’s involvement in the Nine Years War, and central to it was Adélaïde’s marriage. She was, effectively, a spoil of war, or, as the narrator more pointedly puts it, “a prize in a party game”. The wedding takes place the following year, when Adélaïde is 12, but is not consummated for another two years, after she becomes “a woman”. Her job, of course, is to produce an heir.

Bird’s novel tells the story of Adélaïde’s life from birth to death, but primarily focuses on her years at Court, which are cut short in 1712, when she dies, most likely of measles. She had, however, done her duty, having produced the required heir, the boy who was to become Louis XV. These are the essential facts.

However, when an author decides to write historical fiction, I want to know why. In the case of Crimson velvet heart, I see two reasons – one historical, the other more general. The historical comprises two questions which become apparent as the novel progresses but are put explicitly by the narrator near the end. They are: “Did Adélaïde really spy successfully for her father?”, and “Was the love between Adélaïde and Louis XIV ever consummated?”. The narrator then adds, slyly, “Is the second question more interesting than the first?” Now that’s a loaded question. Regardless, these two questions have occupied the minds of historians ever since, but we will never know the answers.

Crimson velvet heart, then, uses these two specific questions to frame a lively, engaging read about one of those fascinating periods in history that is populated by people – like Louis and Adélaïde – who lived large lives which have captured the imagination of people ever since. The novel portrays court life – its schemes and jealousies, excesses and dangers, and, of course, its splendour. The realities – the forever wars, the religious persecution, the disparity in wealth, the poor health (including terrible teeth) – are set against the opulence of lives lived in palaces and gardens, at balls and on horseback.

It is to Bird’s credit that she can juggle telling an entertaining story full of romance and intrigue, while simultaneously adding complexity to our thinking about history and humanity. She achieves this partly through using two narrators. One is the more traditional omniscient third person narrator, though “traditional” is not a word I’d ever use for Bird, while the other is one of the few fictional characters in the novel, a young nun, Sister Clare, who knew Adélaïde in her years at court and tells her story first person from a time after Adélaïde’s death. Whilst it’s not a rigid demarcation, the third person focuses mostly on the historical facts, including the wars and treaties, and on filling in background that Clare couldn’t know, while Clare provides the personal touch, offering (imagined) insights into who Adélaïde might have been. Clare’s picture is of a resourceful young woman, who is vibrant and enchanting, who suffers loss and pain, but who can also be manipulative and cruel.

However, Clare is also everywoman, a person who, through writing her “Storybook”, tries “to make sense of life’s bewilderments”. She’s like all of us who live through a time and only know what we can glean from our own observations and research, which in Clare’s time of course was primarily through conversations with others. Our narrator, on the other hand, has the advantage of a wider historical sweep, so understands more, though can’t know what isn’t known (if you know what I mean!) This is where Bird’s tone shows most. Her narrator offers a wise and thoughtful perspective, but with a lightly wry and knowing touch that is pure Bird. It starts early on, when the narrator reports on the priest’s blessing of the newly-born Adélaïde and her mother:

He commends them to the happiness of everlasting life. Time will tell. (p. 6)

That little addition, “time will tell”, told me I would enjoy this narrator’s point of view.

Bird also uses recurring motifs to underpin her story and its meaning. This is a story focusing on women, so domestic motifs abound. Tapestry, embroidery and weaving, knots and pincushions, are the stuff of women’s lives but they also produce wonderful metaphors for a story about war and court intrigue. As does colour, with crimson evoking both richness and blood. So, we have gorgeous images galore, like Clare trying to understand the religious hatred that has Catholics persecuted in England, and Protestants in France:

It is like … a tapestry sewn by lunatics so that it makes no sense as a picture. (p. 48)

The novel’s title, itself, refers to a crimson velvet heart pincushion in which Louis’ “secret wife”, Madame de Maintenon, keeps track of religious conversions, because “when there was one less Protestant in the world, then the world was a better place”.

There is another logic to these motifs, however, because tapestries, embroideries, and artworks are among the limited primary historical sources available to the historian of long-ago times. Bird’s narrator references these and cautions that “like the camera, the artist’s brush can lie, leaving a false trail for the historian to follow”.

Earlier in this post, I suggested there were two responses to the question about why Carmel Bird might have chosen to write this novel. My second encompasses the novel’s exploration of a universal that is uncomfortably relevant today, the complex relationship between war, territory and religion, and its comprehension of the paradoxes of human behaviour, in which love and betrayal, cruelty and kindness, reside side-by-side.

In the end, Crimson velvet heart presents just what Sister Clare set out to do when she began her Storybook, “a vision of the world in all its beauty, and with all its flaws”. It also embodies serious ideas about the art of history and storytelling. A wonderful read.

Carmel Bird
Crimson velvet heart
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2025
309pp.
ISBN: 9781923023512

Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge.

Colum McCann, Twist (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 24 Comments

Colum McCann said during the conversation I attended back in May that books are never completed until they are in the hands of readers who tell back what a book is about. This is essentially reception theory, which, referencing Wikipedia, says that readers interpret the meaning of what they read based on their individual cultural backgrounds and life experiences. In other words, “the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader”.

Although I don’t adhere to any theory absolutely, this makes some sense to me – as does my extrapolation from this that the reader’s background and life experiences contribute not only to the meaning they obtain from a work, but their assessment of it.

Colum McCann’s latest novel Twist was my reading group’s last book of the year. All of us were fascinated by its underlying story about the data – our data – travelling around the world via undersea cables, and the fragility or vulnerability of this data. But, when it came to assessing how much we liked the book, other things came into play, things that say as much about who we are as readers, what we look for in books, as they say about the book itself. For example, readers who look to empathise with appealing, rounded, human characters might assess Twist quite differently from those for whom ideas play a significant role in their preferences.

I’ll return to this, but first more on the novel. Twist is narrated by 50-something Irish novelist, Anthony Fennell, whose career had stalled. It “felt stagnant”, and he was feeling disconnected from life, “the world did not beckon, nor did it greatly reward”. He was, in fact, “unsure what fiction or drama could do anymore”. He needed, he tells us, “a story about connection, about grace, about repair”. Fortuitously, into his lap falls an assignment to write a long feature about a cable repair vessel, which is led by a man called John Conway (whose name, we soon realise, contains allusions to Joseph Conrad and also perhaps to that other well-known JC).

So, in the first few pages of the novel, we know we are being told a story from after the event by a writer who was there as it happened. We know this event relates to Conway because Fennell tells us on the opening page that something had happened to him, and that he is going to tell his version of what happened as best he can, which might take some “liberties with the gaps”. Conway, then, is central to the narrative arc, but we also know that the subject matter is data and the internet, and that the theme will concern ideas like connection and disconnection, brokenness and repair, fact, fiction and the limits of storytelling. It’s impressive, in fact, just how much of the rest of the book is set up in the first couple of pages.

The narrative proper then starts. It’s January 2019, and Fennell meets Conway, and his partner Zanele, in Cape Town, before joining the Georges Lacointe on its journey up the western African coast to the site of a cable break. It takes some time to get there, so we get to know Conway a bit more. He is a good leader, and his multicultural crew of men respect him. The first and main cable break is repaired at the end of Part One, and then things go seriously awry. Zanele, who was performing in her unauthorised climate-change-focused version of Waiting for Godot in rural England, suffers an acid attack. Life starts to “unravel” for Conway who cannot get away to help her. Indeed, as the back cover says, Conway disappears.

I will leave the plot there. It does get more complicated, so I’ve not spoiled it I believe. I will return instead to my opening point about readers and their assessments. Most of those in my group who had reservations focused on the characters. Conway and Zanele were too shadowy; they were not well-rounded; we didn’t know them well. And, why choose a hard-to-identify-with man like Fennell as a narrator? I understand these questions but they don’t concern me, because I read the book differently – so let’s look at that.

Twist draws from, or was inspired by, two classic novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby, with its story of a man’s obsessive love for an unattainable woman, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness and its story about the darkness at the centre of colonialism. While the narrative arc clearly owes much to Fitzgerald, McCann said during the aforementioned conversation that Conrad’s novel provides the more obvious literary parallel. Those tubes along the seabed, he said, follow old colonial routes, and suggest corporate or digital colonialism.

“There is no logic. The world is messy.” (Fennell)

Looking at the novel through this perspective provides a way of understanding why McCann has written it the way he has. It is not about Conway and Zanele. We only see them through the eyes of Fennell. They are established enough to draw us in but their prime role is to support the ideas – disconnection, connection, turbulence, repair – rather than to be the subjects of the story. We know Fennell somewhat better, as we need to. He is a flawed man, stalled in life and feeling disconnected from it. It is his journey through the narrative that carries our hopes for repair.

If I had any criticism, it would more likely concern the writing. McCann’s is an exuberant, epigrammatic style. It’s not hard to see what he is doing, the games he is playing with meaning and metaphor. However, I can enjoy this sort of writing. It keeps ideas to the fore. And they were ideas that interest me – zeitgeist issues about the fragility of our data; the line between doubt/certainty, connection/disconnection (emotionally, spiritually, technologically), and break/repair; and the messiness of life. It’s not hard to find quotable quotes, like “opinion, the obscene certainty of our days” (p. 218) and “the disease of our days is that we spend so much time on the surface” (p. 25). I enjoy these too!

Part Two opens with:

It is, I suppose, the job of the teller to rearrange the scattered pieces of a story so that they conform to some sort of coherence. Between fact and fiction lie memory and imagination. Within memory and imagination lies our desire to capture at least some essence of the truth, which is, at best, messy.

By the end, McCann has told a story which illuminates the messiness of our time. The truth is that there is no real coherence. There is – and probably always has been – just all of us trying to muddle through the best way we can. This is not earth-shattering news, but McCann exposes some of the issues, many driven by technology, that affect our trying today. The light he throws on these – and the personal progress Fennell makes – are why I enjoyed reading this novel.

Colum McCann
Twist
London: Bloomsbury, 2025
239pp.
ISBN: 9781526656957

Brian Castro, Chinese postman (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Serendipity is a lovely word, and is even lovelier when it touches my reading. Such was the case with my last two books, Olga Tokarczuk’s House of day, house of night (my review) and Brian Castro’s Chinese postman. The connections between them are simple and complex. Both focus more on ideas than narrative, are disjointed in structure (or, at least, in reading experience), and draw consciously on their author’s lives. They also seem to be questioning the nature of fiction itself, a question that is true of two other books I’ve read in recent times – Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & practice (my review) and Sigrid Nunez’s The vulnerables (my review). None of these books are fast reads, but they are rewarding ones.

The other thing that connects these books is that, because narrative provides more of a loose structure than a driving force and because they blend that narrative with ruminations, memoir, essay, vignettes, anecdotes, recipes even, they exemplify the idea that every reader reads a different book. This is not only – or even primarily – because we are not all men in our mid-70s with mixed ethnicity, to take Castro (and his protagonist) as an example. Rather, it is because we all think about and weigh differently the issues and ideas these authors focus on.

In The vulnerables Nunez refers to Virginia Woolf (as does de Kretser) and her “aspiration to create a new form. The essay-novel”. She also refers to Annie Ernaux’s nonfiction book The years, describing it as “a kind of collective autobiography of her generation”. I’ve digressed a bit here, but my point is that these writers have things to say about their time, their generation, the state of the world – and they are looking for better ways to say it. They are suspicious of pure narrative, and yet I think they also recognise, to some degree at least, that “story” is a way to reach people. Therein lies the tension that each tries to deal with.

So now, Castro! There is a story, a sort of narrative, running through Chinese postman, and I’ll let publisher Giramondo explain it:

Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative inaction of age’, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He ranges widely, with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine…

The narrative arc, then, concerns this email correspondence with Iryna. It starts when she emails him:

Dear Professor, I am reading one of your books on the doorstep of war. You once wrote about war eloquently, so the critics said. I do not believe anyone can write eloquently about war. If you could find the time, could you please answer that question. (p. 29/30)

He doesn’t reply “of course”, because he suspects it’s a scam. But, the problem is, it’s got him thinking about his ‘”eloquence” in writing about war’. At this point, readers who have read the epigraphs will remember that one of them quotes John Hawkes*, who said, “Everything I have written comes out of nightmare, out of the nightmare of war”.

War – Ukraine, Vietnam, World War 2, and others – is, then, a constant presence in the novel. As is the aforementioned Iryna because, although she’s “probably a bearded scammer”, he does write back. He asks her about the “dogs in the Donbas”, hoping this “will shove aside the irritating accusation of eloquence”. And so a correspondence begins in which war and dogs, among other issues, are discussed. In other words, dogs become another thread in the novel, as do toilets, aging and its depredations, solitude, the writing life and more.

This is a “big” book, one that, as I’ve intimated, will be read differently by different people. Those concerned about where the world is heading will engage with the issues that mean something to them. Those of migrant background might most relate to his experience of discrimination and othering. Those of a certain age will relate to thoughts about mortality and managing the aging body. (To test or not to test is one question that arises.) Those of a literary bent will love the wordplay and clever, delightful allusions (and wonder how many more they missed. I loved, for example, the allusions to TS Eliot’s “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, a poem about anxiety and indecision which reflects Quin’s inner questioning about action and inaction. I also loved the wordplay that made me splutter at times.) And those interested in the form of the novel will wonder about where this is all leading!

“the unreliability of reason” (p. 232)

There is so much to write about this book, and I’m not sure I can capture the wonder of reading it, how ideas are looked at from every angle – inside out and upside down – in a way that illuminates and stimulates rather than confuses. It’s quite something.

I’ll try to explain something of this through two of the interweaving motifs – toilets and dogs. Both mean multiple things as Castro is not one to close things off. So, early on, toilets reflect the sort of cleaning work migrants must do to support themselves, as Abe does at University. Later, they are part of the aging person’s concern about bowel health. But, in between they could also symbolise feelings of disorder and helplessness, his “anxiety in the gut”, including just coping with “the difficult things of ordinary life”. Similarly dogs epitomise the instinctual, simple life, but, in stories like their being used for target practice, they could also represent innocent victims of war. Here of course, I’m sharing my personal responses to these motifs. There are many others.

No wonder Quin worries about the writing life. It’s something he, a writer, is driven to do, “it pushes fear into the background”, but does it achieve anything?

I’ve always believed it is the novel that carries all the indirect notes of empathy. It may even be violence that brings empathy to war and its suffering. It may be anything. Yet, the plasticity of the novel bends to all the obtuse emotions and accommodates them. Then all is confined to the scrapheap of having been read, having been experienced, having been second-hand and second-read. Major libraries are throwing out paper books. (p.140)

Chinese postman was my reading group’s September book, and it proved challenging, but that is a good thing. We had a lively discussion during which disagreement was not the flavour, but a genuine and engaged attempt to understand what Castro was on about. Whether we achieved that, who knows, but I am glad I have finally read Castro. I won’t be forgetting him soon.

* Wikipedia des John Hawkescribesa (1925-1998) as “a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended some traditional constraints of narrative fiction”. !

Brian Castro
Chinese postman
Artarmon: Giramondo, 2024
250pp.
ISBN: 9781923106130

Olga Tokarczuk, House of day, house of night (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 37 Comments

About 30 pages into Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, House of day, house of night, I turned to Mr Gums and said, I have no idea what I am reading, which is unusual for me. I certainly don’t pretend to understand everything I read, but I can usually sense a book’s direction. However, something about this one was throwing me, so …

I had a quick look at Wikipedia, and found this “synopsis”:

Although nominally a novel, House of Day, House of Night is rather a patchwork of loosely connected disparate stories, sketches, and essays about life past and present in … a Polish village in the Sudetes near the Polish-Czech border. While some have labeled the novel Tokarczuk’s most “difficult” piece, at least for those unfamiliar with Central European history, it was her first book to be published in English. [Accessed: 1 October 2025]

That made me feel better! I am more than comfortable with “loosely connected disparate stories” but am only generally-versed in Central European history. So, I decided to relax and go with the flow. From that point on, I started to enjoy my reading more, but it was slow going, because the “disparate stories” demand attention. It’s not a book you whizz through for story, but one you savour for thoughts and ideas, and for the connections you find along the way.

Tokarczuk calls it, in fact, a “constellation novel”, which I understand builds on thinking by the German critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). According to academic Louis Klee, who has written on “the constellational novel”, “these novels are recognizable by the presence of a first-person narrator committed to drawing affinities and making connections among disparate things”. They can be non-linear and incorporate various forms of writing from essayistic to lyrical to fragmentary, and encourage readers to find their own connections (like finding patterns in a constellation).

This well encapsulates House of day, house of night. It comprises numerous individually titled chapters (or sections or parts), some just a few paragraphs long, and others several pages. At first it felt disjointed, but it wasn’t long before an underlying structure started to reveal itself, one held together by a first-person narrator, a woman who had come to live in a small Polish village with her partner R – just like Tokarczuk and her husband did – three years before the novel opens. She tells of life in the village, and particularly of the relationship she develops with her neighbour, a somewhat mysterious old woman named Marta, who embodies a wisdom that she sometimes shares but other times must be gleaned from what she doesn’t say.

Interspersed with our narrator’s story, are other stories – some real, some magical, some past, some present – about the region and people in it. There’s a gender-fluid monk named Paschalis who is writing the life of the female saint Kummernis. There’s the unnamed couple who think they have it all, until each is visited by the same lover, a female for “he” and a male for “she”. There’s a religious community called the Cutlers who make knives and believe that “the soul is a knife stabbed into the body, which forces it to undergo the incessant pain that we call life”. There’s the wonderfully named Ergo Sum who had tasted human flesh in frozen Siberia, where he’d been deported in 1943, and believes he is turning into a werewolf. And so on. Some of these stories continue, for several chapters, woven around our narrator’s story, while others stand alone. Some are about people who think they have life worked out, while in other stories, the people don’t have a clue.

There’s more though, because scattered through the stories are ruminations on disparate things like dahlias, nails, comets and grass allergies. And threading through it all are various motifs, usually providing segues between chapters, encouraging us to see links and to ponder their meaning for us. These motifs include dreams, names, time, death, borders, mushrooms (potentially deadly), and knives. The more you read, the more connections you see between them and the stories. Many are philosophically-based, but are not hard to understand. In other words, the challenge is not in understanding, but in how we, individually, process the links we see. You might have already noticed some in my examples above, such as the idea of identity. Even the mysterious Marta, who disappears every winter, is unsettling. Who is she really?

“people are woefully similar”

This is the sort of book you would expect of a Nobel prizewinner. The writing is simple but expressive, and is accompanied by a rich, dark, and often ironic humour. We have border guards who don’t want to deal with a dead body so they quietly shove it to the other side of the border. And Leo the clairvoyant who says “Thank God people have the capacity for disbelief — it is a truly bountiful gift from God”. That made me splutter.

Underpinning all this – the thing that gives the book its heft – is a quiet but somewhat resigned wisdom. It interrogates some big questions – our willingness (or not) to see what is happening in front of us, our relationship to place, how we comprehend time, and who we are. These are explored through universal binaries, not only the night-and-day contained in the title, but life and death, change and stasis, ripening and decay. How do we live with – and balance – these parts of ourselves, of life?

But, House of day, house of night is also set in a particular place and time, southwest Poland, just post World War 2. This area, explains the Translator in her note, was part of the German Reich until 1945, when the Allies agreed to move Poland’s borders west. Many Poles left their old lands of the east (now part of the USSR), and resettled in this once German area in the west, occupying homes left by the evacuated Germans. This specific history is also found in the book, with Polish families hopefully, greedily, digging up German treasures, for example, and Germans sadly returning to see their old places.

House of day, house of night offers no answers, but it sure asks a lot of questions – about how, or whether, we can move forward into more humane, and hence more fulfilling lives.

This brings me to the ending. I won’t spoil it – it’s impossible in a story like this anyhow – but we close, appropriately, on the idea of constellations and finding patterns, and a hope that it is possible to find a pattern that explains it all. It is deliciously cheeky. And, on that note, I will end.

Olga Tokarczuk,
House of day, house of night
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Melbourne: Text publishing, 2025 (Orig. pub. 1998; Eng trans. 2002)
298pp.
ISBN: 9781923058675

Review copy courtesy Text Publishing

Louise Erdrich, The night watchman (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 30 Comments

Louise Erdrich’s Pulitzer Prizewinning The night watchman is historical fiction about a community fighting back against a government set on “terminating them”. Erdrich, whom I have reviewed before, is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota and it is the story of this community’s response to something called the House Concurrent Resolution 108 that she tells in The night watchman.

Passed by Congress on August 1, 1953, this Resolution would, says Erdrich in her Afterword, “sever legal, sacred, and immutable promises made in nation-to-nation treaties”. Or, as Wikipedia explains, it would “end reservations and tribal sovereignty” and “integrate Native Americans into mainstream American society”.

As it happens, Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was Chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Advisory Committee at the time and recognised this resolution for what it was. He is the inspiration for Thomas Wazhushk, one of Erdrich’s two protagonists. Thomas is a man of two cultures:

Watching the night sky, he was Thomas who had learned about the stars in boarding school. He was also Wazhashk who had learned about the stars from his grandfather, the original Wazhashk. (p. 17)

Throughout the novel Thomas strategically draws on these two selves in order to perform his role, which is to keep the community safe (or, at least, safer, than they would be if the Government’s plans came to fruition).

This is both a sophisticated and a grounded novel. Grounded in the way Erdrich uses her storytelling ability to create a compelling narrative peopled by a large cast of wonderfully individuated characters. We are interested in them all, and this makes the novel a darned good read. Sophisticated in how Erdrich subtly layers her story to enrich its meaning. The overall structure comprises two parallel but related stories or journeys: Thomas’s fight for his community’s survival, and his niece Patrice’s journey to find both her missing sister and her own path in life. Erdrich’s writing is simple, plain, but also imbued with gorgeous lyricism, metaphor and symbolism. The novel is threaded, for example, with physical holes, wells, caves, ship holds, and falls, which never let us forget the precariousness of these people’s lives.

She also peppers the story with humour, which reminds us no matter how serious things are, people can still have a laugh. There are many laugh-out-loud moments, alongside a recognition of humour’s role in how we navigate the things we confront. In Minneapolis, Patrice finds herself in a strange and potentially dangerous situation, and has

the sort of feeling and thinking that could only be described in Chippewa, where the strangeness was also humorous and the danger surrounding this entire situation was of the sort that you might laugh at, even though you could also get hurt… (p. 131)

“Survival is a changing game” (Biboon)

Overlaying all this is Erdrich’s exploration of how language works, how it can be used to clarify or obfuscate, to inspire or deflate. Her writing embodies this knowledge. So, for example, Thomas receives the Resolution papers and reads them carefully. He sees

their unbelievable intent. Unbelievable because the unthinkable was couched in such innocuous dry language. Unbelievable because the intent was, finally, to unmake, to unrecognize. To erase as Indians … his people, all of us invisible and as if we never were here, from the beginning, here. (p. 79)

His people were being targeted, the papers said,

for emancipation. E-man-ci-pation. Eman-cipation. This word would not stop banging around in his head. Emancipated. But they were not enslaved. Freed from being Indians* was the idea. Emancipated from their land. Freed from the treaties that Thomas’s father and grandfather had signed and that were promised to last forever. (p. 80)

Later, the once dapper but now frequently drunk Eddy Mink cuts to the chase, stunning officialdom with his plain language statement:

The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States. (p. 200)

Meanwhile, as Thomas builds his case, Patrice, who works in the Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing Plant where Thomas is the titular night watchman, sets off for Minneapolis to look for her sister. Vera had gone there with her new husband but had not been heard of since. What Patrice finds in the city, how people can be exploited, is shocking, and she returns home somewhat wiser but with more to learn about herself and the ways of humans.

Surrounding Thomas and Patrice is a large community of people – family, friends, neighbours, work colleagues, teachers, coaches, visiting missionaries, and even a ghost. The interactions between these people build up a picture of a community that functions despite external stresses and the usual internal disagreements. This makes engrossing reading because these characters are so real, including the two Mormon missionaries who not only add humour and pathos but also represent the naiveté of supporters of a faith – in the form of Utah Senator Arthur V. Watkins – that was driving the Resolution.

Similarly, our protagonists’ interactions with specific individuals make great reading while also advancing the narrative and the ideas. When Thomas is with his father Biboon and Patrice with her mother Zhaanat, we feel their spiritual connection with their culture, and their desire to learn from their elders. When Thomas is with the white teacher and boxing coach, Barnes, we see how little non-Indian society understands the existing situation and the implications of the Resolution. Thomas patiently – and generously – explains to the clueless Barnes why Indians are not, and can never be, “regular Americans”. And, why he, Barnes, cannot be an Indian! Just look at this writing:

“If I married an Indian woman,” said Barnes, “would that make me an Indian? Could I join the tribe?”
He was awed at the possible sacrifice he could be making.
Thomas looked at the big childish man with his vigorous corn-yellow cowlicks and watery blue eyes. Not for the first time, he felt sorry for a white fellow. There was something about some of them—their sudden thought that to become an Indian might help. Help with what? Thomas wanted to be generous. But also, he resisted the idea that his endless work, the warmth of his family, and this identity that got him followed in stores and ejected from restaurants and movies, this way he was, for good or bad, was just another thing for a white man to acquire.
“No,” he said gently, “you could not be an Indian. But we could like you anyway.”

In statements like “he was awed at the possible sacrifice he could be making”, Erdrich conveys more about cultural superiority than just this man’s thoughts.

When Patrice is with her girlfriends and workmates, Valentine and Doris, we see how her goals diverge from their more girlish ones, and when she is with Wood Mountain we see her inner conflict about her chosen direction. As a young person, her journey is more personal than Thomas’s but they coalesce when it comes to saving the community.

“Assimilation. Their ways become your ways.” (Roderick)

I loved spending time with these characters. In fact, so did most of my reading group, as this novel was our September read. We enjoyed her vividly drawn characters – and their perfect names, like Juggie Blue, Wood Mountain, Louis Pipestone, Millie Cloud, and Patrice not Pixie. We teased out the complexity of the storytelling, the way Erdrich seemed to effortlessly incorporate complex ideas into a compelling narrative. This starts right at the title, The nightwatchman, which is both literal, Thomas’ job, and metaphorical, in his role of keeping watch as the community’s Chairman. I was reminded a little of Melissa Lucashenko’s novels, in which tough stories are told with compassion and humour to paint a picture of real people confronting a world that’s against them.

Early in the novel, Thomas moves that the Committee call the Resolution the “Termination Bill [because] Those words like emancipation and freedom are smoke”. This bill heralded what is now called the Termination Era (1953-1968). As Erdrich explains in her Afterword, this is what happened to 113 tribal nations. Although some regained recognition, “31 are now landless” and “24 are considered extinct” (p. 447).

The night watchman is one of those books that hits the spot – the heart spot and the mind spot. Recommended.

* The novel is set in 1953, and Indian is the term most commonly used when the specific Chippewa is not.

Louise Erdrich
The night watchman
London: Corsair, 2020
453pp. (Kindle edition.)
ISBN: 9781472155337

Winnie Dunn, Dirt poor Islanders (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 23 Comments
Book cover

When my reading group chose our books for the second half of the year, the shortlist for the Miles Franklin Award had not yet been announced. However, wonderfully, the three books we chose from the longlist, all ended up on the shortlist. One of those was Winnie Dunn’s debut novel, Dirt poor Islanders. It is the first novel published by a Tongan Australian, and adds a welcome strand to the body of Australia’s second and third generation migrant literature.

Dirt poor Islanders spans around a year when its protagonist Meadow is approaching 12 years old. It can, therefore, also be read as a coming-of-age novel. It is a raw, earthy, honest and sometimes confronting read that exposes the challenges faced by Australian-born migrant generations, who are caught between two worlds.

This is not a new story. However, what is impressive here is that Dunn, in her first novel, has found her own strong and clear voice. It’s there in the way she gets right into the head of her protagonist Meadow, who is, admittedly, modelled on herself. It’s there in the way she interweaves English and Tongan language, capturing the vitality in her migrant community. It’s also there in her use of repetition, some of it onomatopoeic, to give her writing rhythm and create a tone that’s sometimes melancholic, sometimes humorous. Dunn also doesn’t spoon-feed her readers. She expects us to go with the flow and make the necessary connections. It’s not hard reading, but it does require attention.

“this way of seeing myself as half … and never enough” (Meadow)

So, who is Meadow? She’s a young girl who lost her birth mother at the age of 4. At the novel’s opening she is the eldest of six children in a blended family comprising three children from her birth mother, one from her step-mother, and two from this second marriage. Another is on the way. Her father is 30 years old. Meadow is grappling with what it means to grow up Tongan, particularly one who is hafekasi (half-Tongan half-White) and feeling caught between two worlds, neither of which fully accept her. She is desperate for a mother, and feels closest to her namesake, aunt Meadow, who lives in Mount Druitt with our Meadow’s paternal grandmother and another four aunts.

We follow Meadow through a tumultuous year. Early on, she spends most weekends at her Nana’s house surrounded by the five aunts, but when her father buys a new house in Plumpton, he wants Meadow, her sister Nettie and brother Jared, to call that home. With her birth mother gone, however, Meadow feels “stuck” and insecure. Aunt Meadow, also known as Lahi, is her “mother-aunt” and her rock. The narrative is built around the wedding of this Lahi, who, Meadow believes, is more interested in women. She fears for her boyish aunt, but she also fears for herself, that she will lose this mother figure to whom she clings with all her being.

Now, Meadow wants to be a writer, so she’s an observant girl, well able to express her feelings. She sees the messiness – literal and figurative – of Tongan lives, and she shares the lessons she is learning about being Tongan, not all of which are pretty. For example, “Tongan meant dirty” (p. 37), “being a joke” (p. 73) and “second best” (p. 102). But, there are positives too. “Togetherness was what it meant to be Tongan” (p. 40) and “being Tongan meant eating together and being grateful to eat together” (p. 118).

Dirt poor Islanders, then, depicts a migrant family living under stress. Big families and low-paying jobs with long hours mean a chaotic home. Meadow’s scalp is nit-infested, and her home, decorated with second-hand goods, much picked off roadsides, is cockroach-infested. Her parents work hard to keep the family sheltered and fed, but the mess overwhelms. Flipping between maturity and immaturity, Meadow sees all this – the hard work, the exhaustion, the love – but she struggles to find her place, to accept her Tongan heritage.

It all finally comes to a head, and her father organises for her to go to Tonga, because, he says, “it’s time for youse to know what being a Tongan truly means” (p. 239).

Migrant literature encompasses both memoir and fiction, with the latter mostly being autobiographical or autofiction. Dunn confirmed in her Conversations interview that much of the novel’s family background comes from her life, but the novel diverges from real life in its narrative arc and the resolution of Meadow’s inner turmoil. This answered the question I had as I was reading, which was why Dunn had chosen fiction, like Melina Marchetta did in Looking for Alibrandi, over memoir, like Alice Pung did in Unpolished gem. It’s a choice. What matters are the truths conveyed, not the facts, and Dirt poor Islanders feels truthful.

This truth is not all raw and confronting as I may have implied at the beginning. It is also warm and humorous. Meadow, who doesn’t like rich, fatty Tongan food tells us:

If it came out of a can covered in sugar and sodium, Tongans were eating it. But back then, all I wanted was food that came out of a window. (p. 37)

Preferably at Maccas! There are also funny scenes, many relating to the wedding which occupies the novel’s centre, and which is another nod – besides the title and epigraph – to the book that clearly inspired Dunn, Kevin Kwan’s Crazy rich Asians.

“no one could live as half of themselves” (Meadow)

However, Dunn’s book is fundamentally different from Kwan’s, whose aim, he said, was, to “introduce a contemporary Asia to a North American audience”. Dunn did want to introduce Tongan Australian culture – and counteract the image presented by Chris Lilley in Summer Heights High – but through Meadow, she also explores the excruciating difficulties children caught between cultures face. By the end of the novel Meadow comes to understand a little more the “messy truth” of being an Islander, and that:

No one could live as half of themselves. To live, I needed to embrace Brown, pālangi, noble, peasant, Tonga, Australia – Islander. (p. 275)

Dirt poor Islanders is both shocking and exciting to read, which is probably just what Dunn intended. I feel richer for it!

Winnie Dunn
Dirt poor Islanders
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2024
293pp.
ISBN: 9780733649264