Review – Short stories

Willa Cather, Peter (Review)

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Surely a whole year can’t have passed since I last wrote about a Library of America short story? But yes, it has. My last one was Robert Frost’s “The question of a feather” in July last year. Many times I’ve chosen one to read, and many times I’ve let other things get in the way – but finally I sat down to read a short piece by Willa Cather, one of my favourite American writers. The story is “Peter” and was apparently her very first published piece. It was published when she was 19 as the result of her university professor sending it off to a magazine.

LOA’s notes, as usual, provide some interesting background, including the information I’ve just provided above. They say that she went on to publish it two more times in 1892 and 1900, each with some revisions, and then incorporated its essence into her novel My Antonia which I’ve reviewed here. No wonder it felt familiar!

English: Willa Cather's childhood home in Red ...

Willa Cather’s childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska. (Photo courtesy: Museumsparrow via Wikipedia)

It is, essentially, a character sketch. Its focus is Peter, an old man – now 60 – who emigrated to Nebraska from Bohemia with his wife, oldest son Antone, and other children five years before the story starts. In Bohemia, Peter had been a second violinist “in the great theatre in Prague”.  Without belittling the important role of second violinists, I think in terms of Cather’s story, “second” is meant to convey something about Peter:

He could never read the notes well, so he did not play first; but his touch, he had a touch indeed …

Why he could never read the notes well, we are not told, but we can guess because his neighbours in Nebraska see him as “a lazy, absent-minded fellow”. In fact, it is his son who runs the place:

… people said he was a likely youth, and would do well. That he was mean and untrustworthy every one knew, but that made little difference. His corn was better tended than any in the country, and his wheat always yielded more than other men’s.

There is no love lost between these two rather unappealing men. The story starts with Peter telling his son that “thou shalt not sell it [the violin] until I’m gone”. From his son’s point of view, Peter can no longer play due to trembling and the money would be useful. For homesick Peter though it’s his link to happier times. He doesn’t like “the country, nor the people, least of all he liked plowing”. Cather’s characterisation is effective. We are forced to choose between the hard but hardworking Antone who is trying to support the whole family in a harsh land, and the rather pathetic Peter who, even in his past, was “a foolish fellow, who cared for nothing but music and pretty faces”. Antone and Peter are set up as foils for each other, opposites, and Cather wants us, I think, to see and understand but not judge.

This is a classic migrant story, in which the old find it harder to adapt than the young, for whom the immigration was usually made in the first place! It’s also a father-son/generational clash story. Neither understands each other, and neither seems inclined, it seems, to make many concessions. Given all this, the ending is both shocking and not surprising.

It’s an impressive debut for a 19-year-old writer. However, according to LOA’s notes, Cather regretted allowing her professor to publish it before her style matured. Her biographer Phyllis Johnson wrote that the older Cather “warned aspiring young writers against too early publication”. I wonder why? What damage does she think it did to her? As a reader, I love having access to early works like this – or, to say, Jane Austen’s juvenilia. They illustrate, as LOA suggests, the writer’s “the literary journey”.

What do you think? Do you like to read early/youthful works of favourite writers, or would you rather only read their mature works?

Willa Cather
“Peter”
First published: The Mahogany Tree, May 1892.
(Published several times after this, in various revised versions)
Available: Online at the Library of America

Barbara Baynton, A dreamer (Review)

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Finally, having reviewed three stories in Barbara Baynton’s collection Bush studies, I start at the beginning with the story “A dreamer”.

This story is a little different to the three* I’ve reviewed to date, primarily because men do not play a significant role in the action or denouement of the plot. The plot is a simple one: a young pregnant woman arrives at a remote railway station, at night, expecting to be met by someone with a buggy. When that proves not to be the case, she decides to walk “the three bush miles” despite the windy, rainy night because it was “the home of her girlhood, and she knew every inch of the way”. Except …

… as it turns out, on a dark rainy night, she doesn’t. Baynton recounts the drama of the young woman’s walk – a wrong choice at a fork, near drowning on a creek crossing – and in the process idealises the mother-child relationship against hostile nature:

Her mother had planted these willows, and she herself had watched them grow. How could they be so hostile to her?

How indeed? This story is another example of Baynton’s gothic, of her non-romantic view of the Australian bush which is, for her, alienating and forbidding, particularly for women. If the language of the opening paragraph is unsettling – “night-hidden trees”, “closed doors”, “blear-eyed lantern” – it only gets worse as nature seems to conspire against the woman. The wind fights her “malignantly” and the water is “athletic furious”, but the woman sees “atonement in these difficulties and dangers”. Atonement for what is not made quite clear but it might simply be that the young woman has been away for some time: “Long ago she should have come to her old mother”. Visions of her mother and memories of her childhood keep her going: “soft, strong arms carried her on”. To avoid spoilers, I’ll leave the plot here. You can read the story at the link below.

In my last post on Baynton, I wrote briefly on reading short story collections in the order they are presented, rather than in the ad hoc way I’ve done with this collection. Mostly, I do read collections from beginning to end. Had I done so with this collection, I would have had, with this story, an effective introduction to Baynton’s style and themes without being confronted with her full fury. In other words, “A dreamer” is the perfect first story in a collection which ends with “The chosen vessel”*.

Barbara Baynton
“A dreamer”
in Bush studies
Sydney University Press, 2009
ISBN: 9781820898953

Available online: in Bush studies at Project Gutenberg.

This review will count towards my Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013.

*For my first three reviews of stories in this book, click the appropriate title: Scrammy ‘and, Squeaker’s mate, The chosen vessel.

Barbara Baynton, Scrammy ‘and (Review)

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Barbara Baynton.

Presumed Public Domain: via Wikipedia

Back in November, Trevor at Mookse and the Gripes, decided that rather than write a single review of Alice Munro’s latest collection of short stories, Dear life, he would, over a period of time, read and review the individual stories.  Now, there’s something to be said for reviewing a collection of short stories as a collection because authors do put a lot of effort into the order of those stories. Reading them over a long period of time or, worse, out-of-order, could disrespect the author’s art. However, reviewing each story individually, enables us to give each one real recognition, and that has its value too methinks. Anyhow, this is what I’ve decided to do with Barbara Baynton‘s collection, Bush studies. I have, so far, reviewed the second story, “Squeaker’s mate”, and the sixth and last story, “The chosen vessel”. Today I’m going to review the third story, “Scrammy ‘and”, partly because Debbie of ExUrbanis likes it. Next, maybe, I’ll start at the beginning! I hope Baynton isn’t turning in her grave.

In her post on Australian classics for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012, Australian novelist Jennifer Mills wrote of discovering Barbara Baynton, saying that reading her was “an absolute pleasure”. She wrote:

Her work is distinguished by her rural character studies and a poignancy which verges on despair, and her stories are prototypes for the proliferation of outback gothic in our literature now. Baynton is part Henry Lawson, part Eudora Welty, and a master of the tension and texture of the short story form.

I couldn’t say it better myself! Mills’ comment that Baynton’s a master of “tension and texture” in the short story form is particularly true for “Scammy ‘and” because this story commences, quite deceptively as it turns out, with a fair dose of humour. It concerns an old shepherd and his dog Waderloo (Waterloo). The story starts with a flashback to a few weeks previously when the old man’s neighbours had headed into the nearest town to await the birth of their first baby (which, the old man thinks, “will be a gal too, sure to be! Women are orlways ‘avin’ gals. It’ll be a gal sure enough”.) The story then jumps forward to when the old man, having notched up the passing weeks, expects the young couple, who clearly provide some sense of security, to be back.

The humour in the first part of the story derives from Baynton’s description of the relationship between the man and his mate Waderloo as they go about their business. Here for example is the man talking to the dog about fixing a hat:

‘It’s all wrong, see!’ The dog said he did. ”Twon’t do!’ he shouted with the emphasis of deafness. The dog admitted it would not …

… and so on. The man and his dog resemble a Darby and Joan pair, dependent on each other, loyal to each other, but also having their little tiffs. However, underlying what seems like a light-hearted character study are intimations of something darker. First there’s the misogyny which features regularly in Baynton’s work. The old man is critical of the young woman despite her apparent attempts to help him, including fixing the hat. “‘The’re no good'” he says of women. This misogyny becomes more pointed in the parallel story of the man’s irritation with the ewe whose “blanky blind udder” means she can’t feed her “blanky bastard” of a lamb, and that he must feed it. Later on though the ewe is shown to be perfectly capable of teaching her lamb to drink.

But, there are intimations of other menace too.  Things are awry at the farm – including a tomahawk and an axe gone missing. Scrammy is mentioned in the second paragraph. The old man says:

”twarn’t Scrammy.’ But the gloom of fear settled on his wizened face as he shuffled stiffly towards the sheepyard.

As the story progresses, our disquiet increases, though for a while we are not quite sure where the problem is – is it an external threat or is it internal? The old man suspects “ther blacks”, “not poor ole Scrammy, ‘cos Scrammy wouldn’t ‘urt no-one”.  Baynton builds the tension slowly, but gradually, inexorably, it becomes clear – and halfway through the story the perspective shifts from the old man to the vagrant one-handed Scrammy, who’s seen the old man counting out his money. The menace grows. It’s melodramatic and almost a comedy of errors as Scrammy misreads clues … but I’ll leave the plot here.

Again, there’s none of Lawson’s pioneer romanticism here. Rather, this is a powerful story about refusing to see the truth –  or perhaps being scared of the truth. It’s not only the old man’s aloneness that makes him vulnerable but his prejudices. In the end, we see that wisdom is, in fact, more likely to be found in the ewe and the mother.

Barbara Baynton
“Scrammy ‘and”
in Bush studies
Sydney University Press, 2009
ISBN: 9781820898953

Available online: in Bush studies at Project Gutenberg

This review will count towards my Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013.

Thea Astley, Hunting the wild pineapple (Review)

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Thea Astley‘s “Hunting the wild pineapple” is both a short story and the title of a collection of connected short stories (that includes, of course, the title story). Today I am going to write on the short story as it’s one of the 16 included in the current Meanjin Tournament of Books – and it has made it through to the second round.

“Hunting the wild pineapple” is the third story of eight, which are all narrated by a man called Leverson. It is set in far North Queensland in a place called Mango, which she writes about again in her 1987 novel, It’s raining in Mango. In this story, Leverson, accompanied by the American Mrs Crystal Bellamy who is “impossibly researching the human geography of the north for a nonsense thesis”, is visiting a pineapple farmer called Pasmore. Pasmore, while waiting for a lobster to thaw for dinner, takes his guests on a somewhat alcohol-fuelled car-ride, first to hunt for wild pineapples and then to visit his two migrant farm workers, “the two”.

It is pretty vintage Astley, at least mid-career Astley as I know her, with its lush, evocative, “imagistic” (as she once described it) language and its focus on inequitable human relationships in which one group, usually white men, wield power over another – women, migrants, and (though not in this particular story) indigenous people.

The story is set in the 1970s, and is characterised by satire and irony. Leverson describes Pasmore as

a well-intentioned buddy who wanted to prove we’re not all grubbing away at soil up here, that we’re smooth, polished, and have swung quite nicely, ta ever so, into the sophisticated seventies.

So smooth that outside the house we are left gawking at a whopping heart-shaped swimming-pool filled with blue tears that blinked as a woman (his wife?) plunged from sight.

See what I mean about the language? It’s packed with images and ideas that rub somewhat uncomfortably against each other. In Astley, discomforting language is de rigueur; it, more than plot or characterisation, is the tool she uses to unsettle us, to shock us out of our comfort zone and force us to confront the unkindness, the viciousness, if not the downright violence that she sees lurking beneath the surface of human interactions. (I admit now that I don’t always get it on a rational level, but it rarely fails to move me.) In this story, the relationships she spears with her pineapples are those between husband and wife (Mr Pasmore and Tubs), employer and worker (Mr Pasmore and migrant workers, Tom and Georgy), and even between colleagues (Tom and Georgy).

And yet, it’s Astley’s language that has got her most into trouble, because it is heavily imagistic (not at all spare, until perhaps her very last works which were a little sparer, comparatively speaking) and some readers and critics don’t like it. Here, for example, is Leverson on Pasmore presenting his hunted down, “huge humped” pineapple to Mrs Bellamy:

… he tattooed her arms with spikes; the head spears stabbed her skin. He lit, post-coitally I think nastily, a cigarette.

Not very subtle, eh, but effective in its hints of sex, power and violence. Similarly, here is Pasmore knocking on the door of “the two”, he

drummed a neat riff on the wall beside the open front door, the over-familiar, paternalistic-presumptuous tat-a-tat, tat-tat, and emitted hearty cries of boss-lure …

Writer and critic Kerryn Goldsworthy, like me, likes Astley. She says*:

I love Thea Astley’s writing and always have. I love its densely woven grammar, its ingrained humour, its uncompromising politics, its demented metaphors, and its undimmed outrage at human folly, stupidity and greed. I love the way that even at its most savage and despairing, it has always had a suggestion of redemptive energy working away somewhere in the plot, no matter how subterranean, outmaneuvered or comprehensively beaten down….

This story is a good example of the Astley that Goldsworthy and I like. There’s a savage bite to it, but there’s also the slightest hint of the opposite. I wonder how far it will get in Meanjin’s tournament.

Thea Astley
“Hunting the wild pineapple”
in Hunting the wild pineapple and other related stories
Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1979, pp. 63-76
175pp.
ISBN: 9780140058437

* from “Undimmed Outrage”, Australian Book Review, Sept 1999, Issue no 214.

Barbara Baynton, The chosen vessel (Review)

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I’m blaming author and blogger Karen Lee Thompson again for this post, because she wrote a wonderful comment on my post on Barbara Baynton‘s short story “Squeaker’s mate”, and I’m going to quote it pretty much in full (I hope that’s ok from a copyright point of view – tell me if it isn’t Karen Lee):

Barbara Baynton wrote some wonderful stories and, had literary politics been a little more inclusive in the days of the Bulletin, I’m sure she would have received wider recognition. Many of Baynton’s short stories, like ‘Squeakers Mate’, turn ‘The Australian Legend’ on its head and, perhaps because of this, the male literary elite (A.G. Stephens, A.A. Phillips for example) chose to modify or explain her work in various ways.

An interesting example of this editorial intrusion is the politics surrounding Baynton’s ‘The Chosen Vessel’ (Baynton’s preferred title was ‘What the Curlews Cried’) which I have read, in its various forms, a number of times. Stephens published it as ‘The Tramp’. It is believed he wanted the title to shift the focus away from the central woman and it allowed for clarity between a ‘tramp’ (an isolated individual) and a ‘swagman’ (a virtuous kind of everyman of the bush). Stephens also cut a significant part of the story before publication.

For anyone who enjoys ‘Squeakers Mate’, I’d suggest a reading of ‘What the Curlews Cried’ (aka ‘The Chosen Vessel’ or ‘The Tramp’), preferably in its unabridged form.

“The chosen vessel” and “Squeaker’s mate” are Baynton’s best known and most anthologised short stories. However, I hadn’t read “The chosen vessel” before and so decided, on Karen Lee’s recommendation, to read the version in Bush studies. According to my brief research, and Karen Lee can correct me if I’m wrong, The Bush studies version is the final complete version Baynton presented for publication. However, it is not the same as the original version which was submitted as “What the curlews cried” and then significantly edited by the Bulletin.

Anyhow, if I thought “Squeaker’s mate” was tough, then this one is tougher. The female protagonist is left alone with her baby, rather like Lawson’s wife in “The drover’s wife”, but this woman faces a double whammy. Left by a cruel husband, she is terrorised by a “swagman” (not a “tramp” despite its first published title). She’s a town girl unfamiliar with bush life, but that’s not what scares her. I won’t detail the plot more because it’s a short story (around 8 pages) and you can find it in the online link below. The shorter Bulletin version, I understand, did not change what happened to the woman, but excised a whole section and thereby effectively changed the meaning of the story to suggest an isolated instance rather than something more systemic.

In the introduction to my Sydney University Press edition, Susan Sheridan confirms my statement in my “Squeaker’s mate” post that Baynton’s main concern was not the harshness or terrors of the bush and the land, which contemporary critics tried to argue, but male brutality to woman and, more significantly, “the impossible position that male culture constructs for ‘woman’ in the abstract”. She writes that woman is glorified as the Madonna, God’s “chosen vessel”,  but “at the same time the capacity for motherhood is regarded as confining her to the animal level of existence”. In “The chosen vessel” religious imagery – the mother and her baby are both mistaken for a ewe and a lamb and as a vision of the Madonna and child – is used to devastating ironic effect.

I’m not surprised that those late nineteenth century men found her writing confronting and that the Bulletin only ever published one of her short stories, but, for me, Baynton’s writing presents an alternative view of life in the bush that I’m glad we have available today.

Barbara Baynton
“The chosen vessel”
in Bush studies
Sydney University Press, 2009
ISBN: 9781820898953

Available online: in Bush studies at Project Gutenberg

Barbara Baynton, Squeaker’s mate (Review)

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Barbara Baynton 1892

Baynton 1892 (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

My last post was about this year’s Meanjin Tournament of Books which is pitting short stories against each other. One of the short stories is Barbara Baynton‘s “Squeaker’s mate”, which I’ve read before but a long time ago. I decided, though, to read it again, since I have easy access to a copy, on my shelves and online.

Author and blogger Karen Lee Thompson commented on my tournament post that she’d like to see a bout comparing “Squeaker’s mate” (1902) with Henry Lawson’s “The drover’s wife” (1892), and it would be delicious. I was tempted to do it here but I won’t. However, I did think of commencing this post with “Only a woman …” because, despite their broad similarities in subject matter and setting – the harsh life faced by pioneer women in the outback – there is a big difference in tone. Both stories chronicle the bravery and perseverance of bush women,  but Lawson’s story has an heroic, even somewhat romantic, tone. Not so with Baynton.

Squeaker’s mate, “the best long-haired mate that ever stepped in petticoats”, is a hardworking, taciturn woman whose mate, Squeaker, is a good-for-nothing. Here’s paragraph three:

From the bag she took the axe,  and ring-barked a preparatory circle, while he looked for a shady spot for the billy and the tucker-bags.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Squeaker, other than laziness, but “she knew the man, and her tolerance was of the mysteries”. However, things change dramatically early in the story when a tree falls on her, putting her out of action. Squeaker’s initial reaction is chilling – “he was impatient, because for once he had actually to use his strength” – and, a little later

he supposed he would have to yard them [the sheep] tonight, if she didn’t liven up. He looked down at unenlivened her.

It’s only in the last few paragraphs of the story that we learn “her” name. Significantly, it’s Mary.

The rest of the story chronicles his self-centred callous treatment of her, sometimes leaving her for days with no sustenance. All she has is her loyal dog which, for we readers, relieves, albeit slightly, our despair at her situation. There is no heroism in here, very little kindness even – but there is, on the part of Squeaker’s mate, resilience and, without giving away the story, a triumph of sorts.

Baynton is critical of men’s attitude to women – and this is a major theme of the story, though it’s not that simple either. Early on, a few men do show kindness to Mary – let’s dignify her with her name now – but their women put a stop to that. Mary had not been one for “yarnin'”, making her “unlikely” to be popular with them. Baynton writes:

It is in the ordering of things that by degrees most husbands accept their wives’ views of other women.

And so Mary is left alone.

The writing is compelling. It is told third person, but the perspective swaps between hers, his, and, later on, that of the woman he brings into their home. In some circumstances this narrative approach could provide an even-handed view of the characters, but here it only serves to reinforce our early opinion of them. In other words, Squeaker does not improve on acquaintance. Baynton plays effectively with the “word” mate, contrasting the roles, responsibilities and rights of mates as partners, alongside those of the Australian “mateship” tradition, with Squeaker’s un-mate-like, in all senses of the word, behaviour.

Imagery is used sparingly, but it’s pointed when it’s there. It is a tree that brings Mary down, and then late in the story Squeaker decides to clear some land:

So that now, added to the other bush voices, was the call from some untimely falling giant. There is no sound so human as that from the riven souls of these tree people, or the trembling sighs of their upright neighbours whose hands in time will meet over the fallen victim’s body.

A little melodramatic in that 19th century way maybe, but Baynton’s suggestion that there’s more solidarity among trees than the humans below is well made. In fact, while life is harsh, it’s not an unforgiving environment that is the main problem for Baynton’s characters.

It’s a grim but effective story that focuses mostly on gendered callousness in a world where survival would be best ensured by cooperation. In confronting gender issues, Baynton is part of a tradition of Australian women’s writing of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century that has, to a large degree, been forgotten a century or so later. It’s time to revive these early writers – and hopefully recent initiatives by Sydney University Press, Text Publishing and others, will do the job.

Barbara Baynton
“Squeaker’s mate”
in Bush studies
Sydney University Press, 2009
ISBN: 9781820898953

Available online: in Bush studies at Project Gutenberg

Zane Lovitt, The midnight promise (Review)

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Zane Lovitt, Midnight Promise

Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

Zane Lovitt’s debut book, The midnight promise, is one of those books for which I can’t decide how to start my review. I could go with the point, previously made in this blog, that I’m not a reader of crime and so cannot speak with authority on the subject. Or, I could write about the fact that one of the chapters in the book, “Leaving Fountainhead”, won the SD Harvey Short Story Award in Australia’s top crime awards, the Ned Kelly awards*. I could start with how Melbourne-based Lovitt joins the growing number of lawyers who write fiction. Or, I could start with the topic that interests me most, its form.

Because, if you haven’t noticed, I didn’t use the word “novel” once in my opening paragraph. There’s a good reason for this: The midnight promise is, if I can draw from the main media through which I consume crime, more like a detective series than a movie. I could have described it as a book of short stories, but that would be misleading. The ten chapters or stories all feature the one detective or “Private Inquiry Agent”, John Dorn, and they are told chronologically. Moreover, even though the book comprises ten separate cases, rather than one main case as would be expected in a novel, there is an overarching, albeit not immediately obvious, plot, defined by “the midnight promise”.

This form may, in fact, be one of the reasons I liked it. Each story is complete in itself while also forming part of a greater whole if you keep reading. The form is also, however, responsible for my only real criticism, which is that, almost without exception, the stories are structurally the same. They follow a present-flashback-present-flashback (and so on) structure. In a “true” book of short stories, I like things to be mixed up a bit; I like to see variety in style, in voice, structure, tone, language. That’s not the case here – but neither, I suppose, would it be the case in a television detective series, so perhaps my criticism isn’t valid. Still, a couple of times, I felt myself saying “here we go again …”.

John Dorn is not, I think, a particularly original character, for the genre. Like many crime protagonists, he’s somewhat of an outsider, a loner with a broken engagement behind him. He’s also a man of some principle which is why his is pretty much a hand-to-mouth existence. In the early stories his fee ranges from $400 a day to $250 a day to nothing depending on whether he wants (or believes in) the job or not. The higher the charge the less he wants it! For this reason we like Dorn, and want things to work out for him, but somehow, more often than not, he manages to shoot himself in the foot.

Being a private eye, his cases are varied, from marital spying to finding missing people to protection (of the innocent or the guilty). But the theme is consistent. It’s “the shitty things people do to each other” or, as he puts it more colourfully when describing roadkill in the final story:

We drive over two foxes, parallel, like one of them couldn’t bear to live without the other. Though what’s more likely is one fox was eating a dead fox and got hit by a car because he didn’t see it coming because he was distracted because the other fox was so delicious.

Not a grammatically beautiful sentence but appropriate and effective in the context. In fact, I liked Lovitt’s writing. The voice is first person, and the writing is generally direct and spare with the occasional well-placed image which works partly due to its rarity. Like this, for example:

I’ve heard rumours about his shady GST schemes, but everything I know about tax offences wouldn’t rouse a chihuahua from its beauty sleep.

The dialogue is realistic. There is humour – mostly in Dorn’s sardonic view of the world – which varies the tone. There is irony, as in the name of the character, Comedy, who is anything but funny, and in the story “Grandma’s House” whose title belies the horrors within.

And this brings me back to the form, to the fact that while each story is complete there is a trajectory in the book, heralded by the occasional bit of foreshadowing. We know something is going to happen that will change Dorn’s life, and probably for the worse. The crisis occurs in the seventh story, “The Crybaby Technique” – and it’s ironic because he was, in this particular case, only a bit player. Things change gear from here, leading to the final crisis in the tenth story which is significantly titled “Troy”. It’s a gripping read with a beautifully controlled out-of-control last page. You’ll have to read it to see what I mean.

So, would I recommend this book? Yes, to non-crime readers, like me, who look for character and good writing, and to crime readers who, I’m presuming, like intriguing cases with a detective who keeps you guessing. If I were a crime reader, I’d be saying I hope this isn’t the last we see of John Dorn, or of Zane Lovitt. In fact, I’ll say it anyhow …

Zane Lovitt
The midnight promise
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012
283pp.
ISBN: 978192192230

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

*In 2010. It also appeared in Scribe’s New Australian Stories 2, that same year.

Paddy O’Reilly, The salesman (Review)

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I’ve been wanting to read Paddy O’Reilly for the longest time but somehow haven’t managed to get to her so, as is my wont, I decided to read a short story of hers in the Griffith Review. She made her name, I think, with her short stories, but has also written novels/novellas and a screenplay, and is a regular contributor to Australia’s best literary magazines.

I know you wouldn’t expect this of me, but I’ve just told a lie – just a white one, your honour – because I have read a couple of articles by Paddy O’Reilly, and I did read her opening story in Scribe’s New Australian Stories 2, published in 2010. The story was titled “How to write a short story”. It’s a very short piece, just over a page, but it was my first, albeit very short, introduction to O’Reilly. The piece is presented as a recipe, with a list of steps, such as:

Test whether the story is done by inserting a reader. If the reader comes out clean, the story is done. If the reader comes out sticky, place the story back into the situation for another 500 words.

This story suggested to me that O’Reilly is not afraid to let women’s experience underpin her writing. But, this doesn’t mean that she wants her writing to be labelled “women’s fiction”. As she asks in her recent post for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012, what is women’s fiction? Writing for women? About women? By women? I’m inclined to agree with her that it’s not a useful distinction. What after all is “men’s fiction”? Categorising works as “women’s fiction” has the potential to (and in fact does already) marginalise, trivialise even, women writers and readers. So, like Paddy O’Reilly, I tend not to think in terms of “women’s fiction”. I do, however, and I’d argue this is quite different, like to focus on “women writers”.  Hence, here I am, reading (more) Paddy O’Reilly …

“The salesman” is set in a working class suburb of Melbourne where there’s 80% unemployment. It features a salesman (obviously), a young woman named Marly, and her boyfriend and his mate. The story opens with the young woman alone at home. It’s hot and life is clearly not much fun. Her boyfriend Shaun and his mate, Azza, spend their days working on cars, their heads “under the bonnet like stupid long-necked emus”. And, the fridge is “moaning”. Such language in the first paragraph makes it pretty clear that Marly is not a happy woman. In fact, we learn a little later on that she has lost part of a leg, creating an effective metaphor for a life that is missing something critical. Pran, the salesman, appears in the fourth paragraph. He’s a Hindu from Delhi but Marly, and later Shaun and Azza, persist in calling him a Paki.

Pran insists he’s not selling anything, but after Shaun and Azza return, we finally learn that what he is “selling” is a free offer! Shaun and Azza, as (stereotypically) men often do in these situations, lead Pran on while Marly is conflicted. Shaun is an “attentive” boyfriend. “She would not do better than this”, not better, she thinks, than a man “who had not once in eleven months raised a hand to her”. But, she’s attracted to Pran, to his “rich burnt-toffee” coloured skin and his “runny dark brown” eyes. It’s not just the physical though.  She senses through him, through her questions about his beliefs, that there could be more to life than hanging around waiting for the men to bring home beer and pizza. She does not want his visit to end in violence as, we are told, has happened before.

I’ll say no more about the plot. This is a story about the underside of modern Australia. It’s about poverty and deprivation and how these result in an arid, goal-less life in which there is little empathy for other. It’s about racism, about how, if you are the wrong colour, years of study can lead you to peddling “free offers” to people who can’t afford them. The ending is clever. While we are told the general outcome, we have to guess what really went down. What we do know, though, is that no-one ended up a winner. This is just the sort of story I like – it’s accessible, it has a clear vision with a tight focus, and it raises more questions than it answers. You can read it online at the link below.

Paddy O’Reilly
“The salesman”
Published in the Griffith Review, Edition 29, August 2010
Availability: Online at the Griffith Review

Andrew Blackman, Nights on Fair Isle (Review)

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You probably know by now that I occasionally like to review short stories that are available online, most often those published by the Library of America.  So when author and blogger, Andrew Blackman, recently posted that one of his stories had been published online, I thought I’d check it out.

“Nights on Fair Isle” is, he says, the first time he has had a short story available free on the internet, but he expresses uncertainty about the value of reading online and asks his readers’ opinions. Good question and one I’d like to answer … somewhat anyhow, and then bat it on to you. I don’t as a rule read fiction online. I read novels on an e-Reader but I don’t think that’s the same as online, or is it? And I read short stories and essays that are made available online. But, here’s the rub. I don’t read them online. I print them out and read the hard copy instead. This might just be the product of my babyboomer-dom… I could in many cases, I suppose, download stories and essays onto my e-Reader, but mostly I think what’s the point. It’s just as fast to print it out.

Anyhow, the story. It’s a little story … And I mean that literally in terms of its length not as a comment on its quality. In just three pages (in my printout version), Blackman tells a tightly controlled story of loneliness and how one woman goes about soothing her soul to enable her to keep on going day after day in a big city, London to be exact. We don’t know where Aurelia is from, but we do know that she wasn’t an English-speaker when she arrived in London. Not long after her arrival, she stumbles on the shipping  forecast on the radio and hears a “gentle male voice intoning” words like “Low, Fastnet, nine seven three, falling slowly”. Each night she tunes in to the same words, and thinks it’s a nightly prayer that she’s hearing. Eventually of course she’s put right, but she goes on tuning into the forecast for its soothing sound …

And for the way it reminds her of her mother’s “sweet lullabies … that chased away the shadows and fears”. Blackman neatly segues from the shipping forecast to the sea and Aurelia’s favourite sea-based fairy story, and effectively uses the paradoxes inherent in sea/water imagery to convey both fear and calm. I won’t relate more of the story though … after all it’s short enough for you to read yourselves via the link below. I’ll just say that I liked the way Blackman gently explores the power – and limit – of dreams and reverie to keep you going. It’s a realistic rather than grim or depressing story.

Meanwhile, do you read online? And if so, do you think it changes the way you read, or what you read?

Andrew Blackman
“Nights on Fair Isle”
SolquShorts, 2012
Availability: Online

Melissa Lucashenko, The silent majority (Review)

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I have reviewed many individual short stories by Americans (through the Library of America), but not by Australians. Time to rectify that a little, and why not with a short story by Melissa Lucashenko, an Australian writer of European and indigenous Australian heritage. She is an award-winning novelist and an essayist, but I hadn’t read her – until now.

You might be wondering why I chose her and this story? But it’s obvious really. I was pottering around the web and came across this:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, Jo decided, that a bored teenager with a permanent marker is a pain in the bloody neck.

How could I go past it? I had to read it to see what it – and Lucashenko whom I was keen to read – was all about. It’s a short, short story, well suited, I suppose, to publication in a magazine like the Griffith Review. Jo is a single mum of indigenous heritage and during the course of the story is mowing the grounds of the cemetery in the small northeastern NSW town of Mullumbimby. Her teenage daughter Ellen is supposed to be babysitting her young nephew Timbo while Jo does her mowing but, like a teenager, gets bored and “tags” Timbo with slogans such as “Better Conditions or I ring DOCS*” and “Pay me a living wage”. The daughter is needling her mother, but there is of course double meaning for the reader in these slogans, messages about the conditions many indigenous Australians face.

The story mainly comprises Jo’s thoughts as she gets on with her mowing. She reflects on those who lie in the ground beneath her – the Protestants and Catholics, in their separate sections. They are the literal “silent majority” of the title, and she wonders about their stories, now lost with the erasure by time of their details on the gravestones. Jo wonders about

These stories that had once been so important to the town, that had needed carving in granite: where were they now.

Stories, though, are important to Jo – and, in my experience, are an important treasured part of indigenous Australian culture. Jo is a little worn by her “previous life and its discontents” in which an Eeyore-like man Gerry kept dragging her into “his tight white world”. In fact, she appears not to have much time for people, with her “favourite humans living in the pages of books” and her preferred living creatures being horses. She quotes Walt Whitman – I found that interesting – on horses:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
… not one is demented with the mania of owning things.

Hmmm … this certainly conveys to me a sense of cynicism about humans, of all colours. But the real point of the story comes in the third last paragraph, with her pondering on what the land was like before, when it was

not yet doomed by the axes and greed of men who – months and years from anything they thought of as home – had tried to slash and burn their way to freedom here.

So what we have here is a meditation, in a way, on stories and their importance, on animals and land, and on walking a line between white and indigenous culture. It’s not all melancholic, as what I’ve said here might suggest. There are some touches of humour. Overall, I was intrigued by her writing and I liked the story, though it felt a little undeveloped. I understand that Lucashenko’s next novel is set in the Mullumbimby area. I wonder whether this story is part of it – or, at least, whether Jo appears in it. I hope so.

Melissa Lucashenko
“The silent majority”
Published in the Griffith Review, Edition 26, November 2009
Available: Online at the Griffith Review

*The Department of Community Services which is feared by struggling parents for fear their children will be taken away.