Women writers

Robyn Cadwallader, The anchoress (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 21 Comments

Robyn Cadwallader, The anchoressLet me start by saying that I’m not a big reader of historical fiction, and particularly not of non-Australian historical fiction, so to read a novel set in mediaeval times is quite a departure for me. However, I did want to read Robyn Cadwallader’s The anchoress for a number of reasons. Not only is Cadwallader an Australian writer living in the outskirts of my city, but we did meet a couple of years ago for a lovely lunch when she was in the throes of negotiating the publication of this book in three countries! And, besides this, the topic was so intriguing. I’m not a mediaevalist and had never heard of anchoresses and anchorholds before. It’s taken me sometime to get to it, but I finally have.

Now, one of the reasons I don’t jump to historical fiction is that I’ve tended to see it in terms of bodice-rippers and romances, and these don’t really interest me. But, The anchoress is not such a story. I don’t read back cover blurbs before I read books but towards the end of this book, as I was trying to guess where it might be going, I did look at the back, not because I wanted to know the end – because I didn’t – but because I was intrigued about how this book that was teasing me was marketed. The last sentence of the blurb is that the book is “both quietly heartbreaking and thrillingly unpredictable”. This reassured me that it wasn’t likely to go where a “genre” novel would probably go. Does that make sense?

Anchorites' cell, Skipton

Anchorite’s cell, Holy Trinity Church, Skipton, UK (Courtesy: Immanuel Giel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

So, the plot. It tells the story of Sarah, a young 17-year-old girl who, after some traumatic experiences including the death of a loved sister in childbirth, asks to be enclosed as an anchoress. This means she agrees to spend the rest of her life in a small stone cell, essentially “dead to the world”, tended to by a maid through a window in the wall and visited by a priest who will provide guidance and take her confession. Her support is paid for by a patron, the local Lord. She is given a Rule book as her guide, and is expected to provide advice to village women. Sarah’s story is told first person but, interspersed with hers – in shorter third person chapters – is the story of young, inexperienced Father Ranaulf, her priest-advisor-confessor. And so the stage is set for – well, we don’t quite know what.

As the story progresses, all sorts of narrative possibilities present themselves. Will she stay (like Sister Agnes) or leave (like Sister Isabella)? How will her relationship with Father Ranaulf develop? And why did Sarah really decide on this rather extreme course for her life (because, of course, there is a reason)? These all have the potential for melodrama or cliche, but Cadwallader keeps it grounded. There is drama – a fire – but even it is downplayed in the service of Cadwallader’s bigger themes rather than generating page-turning excitement.

However, it’s not plot that draws me in my reading, but character, themes and language. And here the main characters are well-drawn. The story takes place over the period of a year or so. At the beginning Sarah is an idealistic young anchoress, keen to do it right. She takes seriously her decision with the uncompromising enthusiasm typical of a young person, and so is determined to be disciplined. She allows herself no pleasure, not even some tasty food donated by the villagers, despite advice that this level of self-denial is not expected, and moves into self-flagellation. Over the course of the novel she comes to a more realistic understanding of what being “holy” might mean, and of what she needs to survive her chosen role. Father Ranaulf is also young and inexperienced, which results, initially, in stiff, black-and-white responses to Sarah. Over time, he too comes to a more humane understanding of her and of his role as her advisor. I’m almost tempted to call it a mediaeval coming-of-age story as these two young people come to a maturer world view. Anyhow, it’s nicely and realistically done.

There are other characters of course – Sarah’s maids, villagers who visit Sarah, various priests, and Sarah’s patron and local Lord, the somewhat cliched Sir Thomas. These are less rounded but they enrich the picture Cadwallader paints of mediaeval life, and contribute to the story-line.

“Body without a body”

“True anchoresses”, Sarah reads in her Rule, “are like birds, for they leave the earth – that is, the love of all that is worldly – and … fly upwards towards heaven”. Birds are a recurring motif in the novel, starting with a symbolic bird, the jongleur whom Sarah calls Swallow. “An acrobat”, she says in the opening paragraph of the novel, “is not a bird, but it is the closest a person can come to being free in the air. The nearest to an angel’s gift of flying”. For Sarah, being enclosed was her way of emulating Swallow, of leaping into the air, of being a “body without a body”. She yearns to be free of her body, to leave the senses behind, but the more she tries to escape them, the more they make themselves known. Her challenge is to reconcile this dichotomy, this need to deny the senses while still very much having them, this being, theoretically, dead to the world, while very much alive.

Tied up with Sarah’s challenge is the wider story of mediaeval life and values. Cadwallader conveys life at the times, mostly through the people who visit Sarah. Life, we discover, if we didn’t already know it, is hard for women. We meet women who are abused and assaulted, and we realise that their rights are few in a society which sees women as “lustful and tempting”. Father Ranaulf tell Sarah that:

It is man who is mind and soul, woman who is body.

Wise Father Peter allows women some advance on this when he tells Father Ranaulf that holy women can develop manly souls and “almost become a man”! But it is Sarah who really confronts Renaulf, and forces him to a more empathetic understanding of her (and, by extension, of other women).

Life is also hard for the poor, as Cadwallader tells through the villagers’ lack of power in the face of the Lord’s control over the land they work. And life is a challenge too for church-men, who have to manage villagers and lords while earning money to survive. Father Ranaulf wants to make beautiful books but must “produce an income”, not to mention advise an intelligent young woman who won’t accept his platitudes and thoughtless “rules”!

So, The anchoress is an engaging story. It’s about a time long distant, thus satisfying our historical curiosity, and it’s about power in gender and class, that still resonates today. But, above all, it is about human beings, about how we read or misread each other, about how (or if) we rise to the hard challenges, and about whether or not we accept a duty of care to those who come into our lives. An enjoyable read.

awwchallenge2016Robyn Cadwallader
The anchoress
Sydney: Fourth Estate, 2015
314pp.
ISBN: 9780732299217

Monday musings on Australian literature: Contemporary thoughts on Elizabeth Harrower

/ Whispering Gums / 21 Comments

Contemporary is an odd word isn’t it? I like using it, but worry about ambiguity, given it can mean either “living or occurring at the same time” or “belonging to or occurring in the present”. So, when I say “contemporary thoughts on Elizabeth Harrower”, how do you know which meaning I intend? Well, to put your minds at rest, in this instance I’m intending the former.

Elizabeth Harrower, A few days in the countryMany of you know who Harrower is, but for those who don’t, she’s an Australian writer who was active in the 1950s to 1970s, and then largely disappeared from view. She was born in 1928 and is still alive. Four of her five novels were published in the 1950s to 1960s. The fifth novel, In certain circles, was written in the late 1960s to early 1970s, but not published until 2014, because she withdrew it from publication at the time. Her short story collection, A few days in the country, and other stories, was published last year, but includes stories dating back to the 1960s. (I have reviewed three of her books.)

So, she was an unknown to many of us when her books started appearing in Text Publishing’s Classics series. What a find she’s been, but what, I wondered, was thought about her in her heyday, and where did she fit in that literary world. To Trove, therefore, I went – and found the snippets I’m sharing today.

The first comes from “Your bookshelf” by Joyce Halstead in The Australian Women’s Weekly in 1961. Halstead writes briefly about Harrower’s third novel, The catherine wheel, which was published in 1960. She describes the plot, and concludes with her assessment:

An intense, probing study of human relationships, intricately and interestingly resolved, and deserving of high literary praise.

That certainly accords with my experience of Harrower’s writing, though I haven’t read this one – yet.

Elizabeth Harrower The watch towerNext comes another article from The Australian Women’s Weekly, this time in 1966. (Why was this very literary writer mainly featuring in a women’s magazine?) The article is titled “Op art? … Commas caused full stop” and is about her fourth novel, The watch tower. It conveys a lovely sense of Harrower’s down-to-earthness:

We mentioned the publishers’ description of her as “one of Australia’s most sensitive and psychologically perceptive novelists.”

“You know, you shouldn’t blame writers for what other people say about them,” said Miss Harrower.

She says that she had never studied psychology, and that:

“Because I am interested in people, it doesn’t mean that I go around consciously analysing them … Sometimes it is years afterwards that you remember an occurrence which, when it happened, just flowed past you.”

She then describes “having words” with her publisher (for whom, in fact, she worked herself, because writers, she said, need to have a job unless they are “a Morris West or have a private income”):

“When the publishers sent me the proofs I found they had altered all my ‘whichs’ to ‘thats’ and had taken out a lot of commas. I didn’t like it — so I changed them all back.”

I love this. I much prefer “whichs” to “thats”, regardless of what grammarians say about nonrestrictive and restrictive clauses, and I’m inclined to use more commas than less, despite modern style!

My city’s newspaper, The Canberra Times, also wrote about The watch tower, in early 1967. The reviewer, John Laird, admires Harrower’s writing, saying she:

employs a style distinguished by its sensitivity and subtlety, and displays considerable ability in capturing the flow of thoughts, emotions, and sense-impressions in the minds of her two main women characters.

But, he concludes that

What is not so convincing is the portrait of Laura’s misogynic husband. To me he seems a specially concocted figure, largely an embodiment of the malevolent and destructive forces that constantly menace the women characters in Elizabeth Harrower’s novel world.

I wonder how many women would find him “not so convincing”? Seems like Mr Laird wants to underplay the gender aspect of the “malevolent and destructive forces” menacing the women?

The next two articles* also come from The Canberra Times. One, in 1967, announces that Harrower (along with George Johnston and Thomas Keneally) had won a 12-month Commonwealth Literary Fund Fellowship, which is, I expect, the Fellowship that led to In certain circles, the one she withdrew from publication.

Second time around …

The other article comes from 1979, and we are now getting into re-issues of her work. The article, written by Lyn Frost, is titled “Fine Australian writing new and rediscovered”. It announces a new imprint, Sirius Quality Paperbacks, by Angus and Robertson. “The first six books”, Frost writes, “are by women and some have been out of print for far too long. Teachers of Australian literature must be grateful for their appearance.” I sure hope they were! The authors include Henry Handel Richardson, Eleanor Dark, Christina Stead and, of course, Elizabeth Harrower. In fact, the six books include two of Harrower’s, The Catherine wheel and The long prospect (which Stead called Harrower’s “masterpiece”). Frost is impressed by Harrower’s writing, saying:

I can’t think how I’ve missed reading Harrower’s perceptive work before this.

How embarrassing is it that this was exactly the response many of us had over 30 years later when Text started republishing her!

Then, along similar lines, comes critic Peter Pierce in 1988 reviewing Murray Bail’s The Faber book of contemporary Australian short stories in The Canberra Times (again). It’s a “real” review which discusses the anthology at some depth, including reference, naturally, to some of the works included. One is Elizabeth Harrower’s “The cost of things” (which also appears in A few days in the country, and other stories). Pierce describes Harrower as “Too little celebrated and too long silent in Australian literature”. (I had to laugh at Pierce’s comment that the anthology is “misleadingly titled” but that “Bail is unapologetic about including stories written nearly half a century ago”. “Contemporary” by any other name!)

There are other brief references to Harrower – including to her being a National Book Council Award judge in 1981 – but I’ll conclude with another article from The Canberra Times. It’s one of those weekly new-paperback-releases columns, and this particular week’s bunch, in 1995, included Harrower’s The long prospect (ETT Imprint). Columnist (and local English teacher) Veronica Sen calls it a “determinedly unsentimental novel”, and says that it treats “suburban small-mindedness and the pain of growing up … with panache”.

If you haven’t read Harrower yet, I hope my post has pushed you a little further in her direction.

* The Canberra Times has been digitised, to date, by the NLA, up to 1995, whereas the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, has been digitised to 1954. Disparities like this are primarily due to what permissions are granted by the respective rights holders.

Helen Garner on writers and writing (in Everywhere I look)

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments
Helen Garner, Everywhere I look

As I promised in my main review of Helen Garner’s engaging book of essays and jottings, Everywhere I look, I am here doing a little follow-up post on her discussions of other writers. I enjoyed reading her thoughts about specific writers, but even more I liked that in talking about these writers she gave away her own writing preferences.

So, what did I know about Garner’s writing before this? One is that she tends to write from her own life and experience. This is why, I’m sure, she moves so comfortably between fiction and non-fiction, but it’s also something that has got her into trouble at times. Some critics argued that her first, generally applauded novel, Monkey grip, was just her diary; others suggested that The spare room is not really a novel either. Garner has retorted – and I take her point – that when she writes novels drawing from her life, she selects, orders and constructs a narrative and that that is art.

The other main thing I’ve noted is that her writing is on the sparer side of the spectrum. She can be highly evocative but she doesn’t go much for metaphorical flourishes. I’ve quoted her before as saying that Thea Astley’s writing “is like a very handsome, strong and fit woman with too much makeup on … This kind of writing drives me berserk”. I was reminded of this when I read her piece in this collection on Tim Winton. She says about first meeting him at a writers’ weekend in 1982. She had not long before written a review of his first novel:

Stabbed with panic, I scoured my memory for what I’d said in my review. I liked the novel and had said so; but from the lofty eminence of a minimalist who’d published  fully two books, I’d drawn attention to what I saw as his overworked metaphors …

Fascinating, because as much as I love Winton, I clearly remember thinking something similar about his second novel, Shallows.

But now, with that introduction, I’ll get to what I really want to share. Her discussions about writers come mainly from two (“Notes from a brief friendship” and “The journey of the stamp animals”) of the book’s six sections. The writers she talks about include Australians Tim Winton (“Eight views of Tim Winton”), Elizabeth Jolley (“My dear lift-rat”), and Barbara Baynton (“Gall and bare-faced daring”), the American journalist Janet Malcolm (“The rapture of first-hand encounters”), and the English novelist who needs no introduction here Jane Austen (“How to marry your daughters”). Each of these gave me little insights into Garner, and I’m just going to tease you with a smattering because – well, you know why, because you should read the book yourself.

Although I’ve already mentioned Winton, I’ll share one more thing. It relates to Garner’s interest in (and reputation for) sentences, and is an exchange from their ongoing correspondence:

I sent him a jubilant letter: ‘Hey! I’ve just written a 200-word sentence which is syntactically perfect!’ ‘I couldn’t care less,’ he replied, ‘about that sort of shit.’

For all this, though, she likes Winton!

Garner loves Elizabeth Jolley for her ability “to strike a note of mortification and inject it with the tincture of the ridiculous that makes it bearable.” That’s Jolley alright, and I can see that both she and Garner, while very different writers, do both look at the world, at people’s relationships in particular, with a sort of self-deprecating sense of absurdity that can lighten darkness. Does that make the sense I think it does?

I was surprised by her piece on Barbara Baynton – about whom I have written frequently here – not because I was surprised to find she admires Baynton but because I didn’t know she did! Her piece starts:

I was well into my forties when I came upon Barbara Baynton’s story “The chosen vessel”, and I have never got over it.

Yep, I know what she means. I was late to Baynton too, and equally stunned. Garner is impressed, of course, with the power of Baynton’s stories, with their lack of romanticism, particularly about women’s lives. But what I want to share here is her comment on Baynton’s writing.  She recognises that some of Baynton’s sentences can seem “clogged and heavyhanded” to modern ears, but, Garner writes

… my God, when she hits her straps, she can lay down a muscular story […]

At their height, her dry, sinewy sentences stride forward, powered by simple verbs.

You are probably getting a picture of the sort of writing Garner likes – direct, clear, fearless, like Jolley, like Baynton.

And then there’s the American journalist Janet Malcolm, of whom I’ve heard but not read (to the best of my knowledge). Malcolm, she says, has been her greatest teacher. I’ll just share a comment from her opening paragraph:

I have never met her, or heard her speak, but I would know her voice everywhere. It is a literary voice, composed and dry, articulate and free-striding, drawing on deep-learning, yet plain in its address, and above all fearless …

Need I say more?

And finally, Austen. She surprised me when, describing herself sitting down to read Pride and prejudice in 2013, she said that she wasn’t sure when, or even whether, she’d read it before! What? However, she writes,

I sharpened a pencil and sat down at the kitchen table.

Just how I like to read, with a pencil in hand. Garner goes on to describe her experience of reading Austen – providing wonderful writer’s commentary on the style, the narrative arc, the characters – and how she became hooked:

I lowered the blinds against the heat, unplugged the phone and moved operations to my sopha, where, dispos’d among charmingly group’d cushions, I settled in for the duration.

… as did I, to read more of her (first?) impressions! She continued, still with her writer’s eye:

In order to keep my eye on how Austen was actually doing things, I was having to work hard against the seduction of her endlessly modulating, psychologically piercing narrative voice, her striding mastery of the free indirect mode.

She describes how Austen “gives us five enthralling pages of Elizabeth thinking“, she provides commentary on how the story proceeds, but best is her perspective on that “piece of trash” Lydia and her role in ensuring that the loose ends aren’t quite so perfectly wrapped up as Garner feared they would be. It’s a delicious piece of writing – Garner’s I mean – about a delicious piece of writing. I laughed.

And now, I must get Garner’s previous collection of essays, The feel of steel …

Helen Garner, Everywhere I look (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 37 Comments

Helen Garner, Everywhere I lookI was very sad to come to the end of Helen Garner’s latest essay collection, Everywhere I look. It was such a joy – such a joy – to read. Garner ranges across a wide variety of subjects from a kitchen table to Russell Crowe, from some of the darkest things humans do to each other to the beauty of ballet dancers in rehearsal, and she does it in a natural, warm voice that makes you almost feel as if she’s sitting across that kitchen table from you. While it would be cheeky of me to say that I now understand her, this collection provides wonderful insight into the way she thinks, how she goes about the business of living, why she writes the things she does. We come to know her as a human being who muddles through life, making mistakes, questioning herself, confronting challenges, rather than as the literary doyenne she in fact is. In other words, as she always does, she lays herself open.

I call these essays, but some are probably better described as articles or perhaps even columns, and there are a few which read more like collections of jottings or diary entries. Form isn’t the important thing here, it’s the content. The collection comprises 33 pieces, all but three of which have been previously published. Three date back to the 1990s. Many were published in Monthly, and some others in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s not always obvious why they were originally written, but in this collection they have been loosely grouped into six broad thematic groupings, starting with “Part One: White paint and calico”, which is all about homes and things domestic, and ending with “Part Six: In the wings”, which I’d describe as comprising reflections about life and self. The cover, designed by the award-winning WH Chong, is just gorgeous, and I found myself looking at it several times as I read, opening it out to look at the whole front-and-back panorama.

But now, that common challenge of writing about a collection: what to discuss, what to leave out. I am going to leave out one thing, and that’s her discussion of writers and writing, because I want to save that for another post. Perhaps I’ll start with some “yes” moments, not that I have to always agree with writers to appreciate them, but affirmation can be nice. There’s her jotting in “When not writing a book” in which she expresses elation over the election of Obama. What an exciting time that was, even for us antipodeans. Her statement – “To think I’m alive when this happened” – is one many of us shared. I remember popping a bottle of bubbly with my patchwork group for the occasion.

There are delightful, often humorous, anecdotes about family life, especially about her grandchildren who now live next door to her, and there are little jewels of description, such as this perfect one of Christmas mornings:

The unnerving silence of Christmas morning. No sound of traffic. Sun lies fresh on everything. Birds sing with unnatural sharpness. The air is still.

And I did love her reference to a criticism of Muriel Spark in “Funk paradise”, another diary style piece:

Apparently her letters make no reference whatsoever to current events. So?

This accusation is also levelled at Jane Austen – for both her novels and letters – the implication being that to be valid you have to be political. I contest that. Austen and Spark write compassionately but incisively about human nature. Let others do politics if they will!

However, the section that grabbed me most was “Part Four: On darkness”. Here she explores the dark sides of human nature through five stories/cases about people who have done terrible things to others. This is subject-matter that many readers shy from, and those who do this tend to make those of us who don’t feel a bit ghoulish. Garner writes in this section about some well-known cases in Australia including the rape-murder of Jill Meagher (“The city at night”) and the murder of Luke Batty by his father (“The singular Rosie”). The fifth and last piece in this section is called “On darkness” and it’s about the Robert Farquharson trial which is the subject of her book, This house of grief (my review). In her opening paragraph she writes:

When the book came out I was struck by the number of interviewers whose opening question was ‘What made you interested in this case?’ It always sounded to me like a coded reproach: was there something weird or peculiar about me, that I would spend seven years thinking about a story like this.

She continues, describing how she would try to come up with “sophisticated explanations” for her curiosity, but eventually tired of being defensive. She outlines the complexity of the case – the ordinary people who behave in ways that even they can’t understand or explain – and asks why this is not worth exploring. She says:

People seem more prepared to contemplate a book about a story as dark as this if the writer comes galloping out with all moral guns blazing. A friend of mine told me that the woman who runs his local bookshop had declared she would, under no circumstances, read my book. Surprised, he asked why. ‘Because’, she replied. ‘I know that nowhere in the book does she say that Robert Farquharson is a monster.’

If he had been a monster, I wouldn’t have been interested in writing about him. The sorts of crimes that interest me are not the ones committed by psychopaths. I’m interested in apparently ordinary people who, under life’s unbearable pressure, burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.

This is why I like Garner. She’s generous, openly questioning, tender, but fierce too. And just in case you think she has no “moral guns”, read her piece in the last section, “The insults of age”, in which she describes her reaction to a young teenage girl whom she’d seen intimidating/disrespecting some Asian people. Garner writes:

… I saw the Asian woman look up in fear, and something in me went berserk.

In two strides I was behind the schoolgirl. I reached up, seized her ponytail at the roots and gave it a sharp downward yank. Her head snapped back. In a voice I didn’t recognise I snarled, ‘Give it a rest, darling.’ She twisted to look behind her. Her eyes were bulging, her mouth agape. I let go and she bolted away to join her friends …

This is why I like Garner!

There is so much in this book, lighter stuff too, but I’ll leave those delights for you to discover.

In “My dear lift-rat”, her delightful piece on Elizabeth Jolley, Garner says that she frequently wrote about Jolley’s books “in literary magazines, trying not to go over the top”, and that Jolley would write “formal” thank you letters. “I never knew”, Garner wrote, “whether she really liked them, or if she thought I had missed the point”. If Garner can feel that way about writing reviews (or critiques), then I don’t feel so badly about having the same worries! I sure hope, though, that I haven’t missed her points in this one.

awwchallenge2016Helen Garner
Everywhere I look
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2016
227pp.
ISBN: 9781925355369

Edith Wharton, Writing a war story (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

According to Keirsey, Edith Wharton may have b...

Edith Wharton (Presumed Public Domain via Wikipedia)

“Writing a war story” is quite different to the Edith Whartons I’ve read to date, and it was clear from the opening sentence – “Miss Ivy Spang of Cornwall-on-Hudson had published a little volume of verse before the war”. It was the comic tone that did it. All the previous works of hers I’ve read, several novels and novellas, plus a couple of short stories, have been serious, if not downright tragic. However, Wharton was a prolific writer, so I wasn’t completely surprised. In fact, I was rather thrilled to have come across this story via the Library of America (a few months ago now).

I haven’t yet read the highly recommended biography of Wharton by Hermione Lee, but I’ve heard enough about her life to know that she lived in France during the First World War, and that she contributed significantly to the war effort. As LOA’s notes tell us, she stayed in France when the war started while others fled. She raised money, visited the front, established refugee hostels and homes for children. She was admired widely but she, herself, apparently underplayed her role, believing, writes LOA, “that nothing she did could compare with the agonies suffered by the soldiers and their families”. Her story, “Writing a war story” satirises both this role and the idea of writing stories for soldiers, for the war effort.

The plot is simple. Ivy Spang, who had published, to minimal recognition, a book of verse, is asked to contribute a short story to a new magazine, The Man-at-Arms, aimed at convalescent soldiers. Flattered, she accepts, and, due for leave from her volunteer work of “pouring tea once a week” for soldiers in a hospital, she sets off “to a quiet corner of Brittany”, because

devoted though she was to her patients, the tea she poured for them might have suffered from her absorption in her new task.

But, the task proves harder than she’d imagined. She struggles to find “Inspiration”, her mind being full of the one serious but unfortunately pretentious and condescending review, by the editor of Zig-Zag, of her published verse collection. She tells her companion, Madsy, that “people don’t bother with plots nowadays” and that “subject’s nothing”. Eventually, in desperation, she accepts Madsy’s offer to use/collaborate on one of the “stories” Madsy had jotted down from her hospital volunteer work. They agreed that Ivy would take the basic story but add her literary “treatment”. You can probably guess the outcome, but you should read the story to see just how it comes out. There’s a photo and a famous novelist involved too. In addition to the satire on “literature” and war volunteer work, there’s also a gender dig.

One of the things I most enjoyed about the story was its satire of literary pretensions, and how easy it is for an unconfident writer to be derailed by the wrong sort of praise, as Ivy is by Mr Zig-Zag!

In the story’s conclusion, a novelist laughs at her story, before he realises she’s the author. When he realises, and she asks for feedback:

He shook his head. “No; but it’s queer—it’s puzzling. You’ve got hold of a wonderfully good subject; and that’s the main thing, of course—”
Ivy interrupted him eagerly. “The subject is the main thing?”
“Why, naturally; it’s only the people without invention who tell you it isn’t.”
“Oh,” she gasped, trying to readjust her carefully acquired theory of esthetics.

Poor Ivy! I liked the fact that Wharton’s satire is subtle, not over the top. We readers can see what’s coming but Ivy isn’t ridiculed. We feel for her aspirations but we can see that her lack of confidence has laid her open to influence. And there’s irony here because that very influence, that editor of Zig-Zag, had warned her of “not allowing one’s self to be ‘influenced'”, of the importance of “jealously guarding” her “originality”.

There’s more to this story, particularly for people interested in Edith Wharton’s biography. My point is that whatever your interest – literature, war literature, Edith Wharton herself – this story has something to offer, as well as being a good read (with a subject, or two!)

Edith Wharton
“Writing a war story”
The Library of America
Originally published in Woman’s Home Companion, 1919
Available: Online

Larissa Behrendt, Under skin, in blood (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 21 Comments

ANZLitLovers ILW 2016In my last review – that for Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Ruby Moonlight – I shared the following lines:

Jack knows the remainder of the conversation
before it was spoke ya see any blacks roaming
best ya kill ’em disease spreading pests
(“Visitor”, from Ruby Moonlight)

Quite coincidentally, this point I was making, that it was not “the blacks” who brought disease, turned out to be the subject of my second choice for Lisa’s 2016 Indigenous Literature Week, Larissa Behrendt’s short story, “Under skin, in blood”. I chose it because I wanted to read at least something by Behrendt.

The story is told in first person by an older woman – called Nana Faye by Merindah, the granddaughter she’d raised – and is divided into three parts. The first and third parts are set in the present while the middle part flashes back to Faye’s past as she tells us why she no longer has her husband and son (Merindah’s father).

In the present, Faye (and Merindah) live in Faye’s grandmother’s country, Gadigal land, around Sydney. But Faye spent her married life, the place where Merindah was born, in Baryulgil on the land of the Bunjalung people. Faye’s flashback is inspired by a discussion she has with university student Merindah who is researching the Northern Territory’s Kahlin Compound, a place to which “half-caste children” (members of the Stolen Generations) were taken between 1911 and 1939. It had – and here you’ll start to understand my introductory paragraph – high rates of leprosy. Merindah is researching claims – claims which have indeed been made and researched – that children there were used as guinea pigs for leprosy drugs. Whether or not these claims are true – they may never be fully resolved due to lack of records – the case causes Faye to comment that the most lethal things white settlers brought to Australia were not guns and alcohol but “microbes” which were “flowing through their veins, floating in their blood, under that skin like bark from a ghost gum tree”. Leprosy, in other words, and malaria, small pox, syphilis, influenza. These killed more indigenous people in the first year of white settlement than bullets.

But these microbial-based diseases are not the main focus of Faye’s memories. It’s the mine in Baryulgil, the mine that opened in 1944 and which everyone thought made them lucky. Having lost their land to the pastoralists, but having decided to stay to be close to their country, the people suddenly found they had jobs – but, what were they mining? Asbestos! Faye tells of the tragic impact asbestos had on her husband Henry and son Jack:

… the mine we felt lucky to have, that gave us the benefits of work and kept the community together was slowly but surely killing us.

The scandal is that there was awareness of deleterious health effects of asbestos in the early 20th century, and certainly by the 1960s its relationship to mesothelioma was recognised. Australia’s best known asbestos mine, Wittenoom, was closed in 1966, ostensibly for economic, not safety reasons. It is telling though that Baryulgil was not closed until 1979. Faye says that the official enquiries that came later found

the mine was barely profitable and only continued to operate to prevent permanent unemployment among the Aboriginal workers in the area. Turned out this employment that was supposed to be doing the community a favour was actually a death sentence.

So, Wittenoom was closed more than a decade earlier because it wasn’t profitable, but different decision-making was used for Baryulgil. Now, normally, I’d approve of decision-making that took into account social values but this one is a bit suss.

This is, I have to say, a fairly didactic story. It could almost have been an essay, except that Behrendt has clearly thought, as she in fact says in her interview with Annette Marfording, that telling it as a story, showing the impacts of policy on human beings, would be the more effective way to go. So, while the story imparts a lot of factual information, Faye shares the devastating impact on her of losing her husband and son. She also tells how indigenous cultural practices work to their disadvantage in a white world. She says:

The hardest thing is to trust these people. These people who have the power of life or death over you, and use that power carelessly. These people we are mute to argue against. And our words never seem a match for what they wrote down, even though we have good memories and they make mistakes.

Now, that is probably the most important message in the story.

awwchallenge2016Larissa Behrendt
“Under skin, in blood”
in Overland (203), Winter 2011
Available online

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Ruby Moonlight (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 31 Comments

ANZLitLovers ILW 2016Ali Cobby Eckermann has been on my radar for a while, so when Lisa announced her 2016 Indigenous Literature Week, I decided Eckermann’s verse novel Ruby Moonlight would be my first choice. This novel won the poetry prize and the book of the year in the 2013 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

I enjoy verse novels but don’t read them often enough to build up a comprehensive understanding of the form. Eckermann’s Ruby Moonlight is the shortest and sparest of those I’ve reviewed on this blog, but its narrative is just as strong. It is set in colonial South Australia – the not-very-poetic subtitle being “a novel of the impact of colonisation in mid-north South Australia around 1880” –  and tells the story of Aboriginal teenage girl, Ruby Moonlight, whose family is massacred by white settlers. The novel reads like a classic three-act drama. It opens with the massacre and Ruby’s lonely wanderings, and then moves into a somewhat idyllic phase when Ruby meets the also lonely “colourless man”, Miner Jack. They become friends and lovers, giving each other the company and warmth they both so desire:

good friendships
blossom
slowly
(from “Friends”)

and

in the moonlight
solace is shared
in this forbidden friendship
( “Solace”)

But it can’t last, of course, not in that place and time, because neither the colonisers nor the Aboriginal lawmen will accept it: “it is the oasis of isolation/that tolerates this union”. Nothing else.

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Ruby MoonlightThe poetry, as you can see from my excerpts, is spare. There’s no punctuation, not even apostrophes, and no capitalisation except for proper names. Lines are generally short, and description is generally minimal. There’s a lovely but restrained used of repetition, and the rhythm is matter-of-fact, that is, it moves the story along with few flourishes (if that makes sense). The story is told through separately titled poems, each of which occupies its own page, though some only part of it. The titles are simple and to the point – “Ambush”, “Friends”, “Oasis”, “Hate”, “Cursed”, “Sunset”. You could almost track the trajectory of the story through its titles. This spareness, I think, enhances the emotional power. The poems say what they need to say without embellishment.

The excerpts above are from more narrative-focused poems, but there are also poems which provide context, describing the seasons as time passes, commenting on the landscape within which our characters operate, providing a sense of the country’s spirits watching, tending, ready to act. The novel opens on the poem “Nature” which sets the scene perfectly by conveying the opposing faces of nature – “sometimes/turning to/butterfly” or sometimes just to “dust” – which also subtly heralds the coming massacre. And, a few poems in, soon after the massacre, comes one describing nature’s nurturing of Ruby:

chirping red-browed finches lead to water
ringneck parrots place berries in her path
trust nature
(“Birds)

The words “trust nature” are repeated at the end of each couplet in this poem, providing a soothing mantra for Ruby.

Most of the poems are presented in couplets or triplets, but occasionally one uses a different structure, usually to mark a dramatic change. Early in the novel is the devastating, shaped-poem, “Ambush”, in which all lines but one comprise single words (“hack/hack/hack” it starts); and half-way through is another shaped-poem, “Tempo”, which marks both the passing of time and acts as a transition from a short time of idyll for Ruby and Jack to the appearance of others:

Jack knows the remainder of the conversation
before it was spoke ya see any blacks roaming
best ya kill ’em disease spreading pests
(“Visitor”, immediately after “Tempo”)

The irony of it! Who brought disease?

So, Ruby and Jack. One of the delights of the book is the sympathetic representation of these two characters. Bereft after the loss of her family, Ruby stumbles across Jack, a loner who scrapes a living out of fur-trapping. Both are outcasts in colonial Australia, Jack an Irishman, a hated “Mick” (“a music-less man stands aloof at the bar/scowling his hatred for the Micks”, from “Loose”) and of course Ruby, a lubra or black woman. These two cautiously find a “small trust … growing” (“Solace”) between them, but it is a “forbidden friendship”, forbidden from both cultures, so their times together are snatched carefully. Ruby is watched by members of another mob, people who are “slowed by fatigue” and “weary with worry” (“Signs”), and who know the dangers:

camp smoke whispers
tell story of the killings
(“Whispers)

Jack and Ruby become the target of the aforementioned “music-less man” – a man who’d lost his “music heart” after an act of barbarity – and his hired help, two brothers “with rotten teeth smirks” (“Scheme”). Hatred and greed fuel these men. And so the scene is set, but it doesn’t quite play out the way you expect, because Eckermann wants to focus more on our universal need for warmth, love and companionship, and also on survival.

The novel is imbued with indigenous presence, from the opening where Ruby’s family live in “Harmony” in their environment, through her meeting with the other mob, the Cloud people, “on their winter trek”, to the appearance of “Kuman”, her guardian spirit who guides her to safety.

Ruby Moonlight is a special read that adds another perspective and voice to colonial contact narratives, a voice that pays respect to indigenous law and traditions, addresses the politics of contact, but also recognises our personal and universal need for love and companionship. It’s a warm and generous book, but it doesn’t pull punches either. A good read.

awwchallenge2016Ali Cobby Eckermann
Ruby Moonlight
Broome: Magabala Books, 2012 (2015 reprint)
74pp.
ISBN: 9781921248511

Monday musings on Australian literature: Spotlight on Larissa Behrendt

/ Whispering Gums / 17 Comments

Courtesy: Annette Marfording

Courtesy: Annette Marfording

This is the fourth in my occasional series of Spotlight posts inspired by Annette Marfording’s Celebrating Australian Writing: Conversations with Australian Authors, and this time I’m featuring an indigenous author to coincide with Lisa’s (ANZLitLovers) Indigenous Literature Week.

Larissa Behrendt is the perfect subject for what is also NAIDOC Week, not only because she has a few books under her belt, but also because her new book published earlier this year, Finding Eliza, explores how colonisers have written about indigenous people. Behrendt is a Eualeyai/Kamillaroi woman, and in her interview with Marfording describes herself as a Type A person. Looking at what she has achieved in her less that 50 years I can well believe it. She is currently Professor of Indigenous Research and Director of Research at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has won awards for her fiction, and been on the boards of various arts organisations including the Sydney Writers Festival, Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Museum of Contemporary Art. She was the National NAIDOC Person of the Year in 2009 and NSW’s Australian of the Year in 2011. As a lawyer, she has served on many boards, review committees and land councils, most of them indigenous-related. The list is impressive.

Marfording’s interview occurred in August 2010. As she does with each of her interviews, Marfording commences with a brief biography of her subject at the time of the interview, and follows the interview with a biography update to the time of publication. It’s nicely done.

I particularly loved this interview not only because Marfording asks, as she does in all the interviews, thoughtful, relevant questions showing her understanding of the subject, but because in this interview she covers some issues of particular interest to me. More on that anon.

Marfording asked Behrendt, as she tends to ask all award-winners, what winning awards means to her. Behrendt admits that it is affirming to win an award but also says that the richest prize is when a reader tells her that a book “touched” them or that it’s “like me and I never see myself in a book”.

Some of the questions Marfording asked relate to the autobiographical nature of her work, as her two novels, Home (2004) and Legacy (2009), both draw strongly on her family, with Home looking particularly at the stolen generation issue and Legacy being more specifically about her father and her relationship with him. She said that although Home was heavily fictionalised, her father found it hard to read. “It was flattering to me as a writer,” she said, “because it meant I’d got it right.”

Marfording also questioned Behrendt about the fact that her two novels also tend to be issue-based. As a fiction reader, I loved Behrendt’s response. She said that, as a lawyer, she has advocated and written factual pieces on many of the same issues, but that

telling a story that actually explains how a policy can impact on somebody’s life so personally, telling that story from a really human point of view, can influence more people than the most eloquent legal argument, especially when you can talk to somebody through the universals that they understand, like the love between siblings, the love between parents, etc.

I love this reference to universals – to the things that bring us all together. She mentions them again later in the interview, but here I want to share her gorgeous language. She said:

I’ve got very strong opinions, and I think it was a real learning process to learn that sometimes it’s through the whisper of a story that you can influence people more than through the louder, shouting style of activism.

There were other questions too, but I want to conclude on two that focused on her as an indigenous writer, one on labelling, and the other on the issue of non-indigenous people writing about indigenous people (which, as you know, I’ve raised here a few times).

Regarding labelling, Behrendt described it as a complex question. While she has no problem being identified as an indigenous writer, she said it can become problematical when writers are pigeonholed. For example, at the Byron Bay Writers Festival she was invited on a panel discussing “fathers”, a panel that recognised the diversity of perspectives, but in many festivals indigenous writers are lumped together on a panel about indigenous writing. She said that:

What we like to say is that within our writing – and I think that’s true of every Aboriginal author – there are universal themes about family, about love, about betrayal, about hurt, about anger and jealousy, and these are the things that actually unite us.

It’s a problem, in other words, when indigenous authors are seen to be writing only about indigenous subjects. Love it. The comment reminded me of Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and light (my review) in which some of the stories didn’t focus on or clarify race or ethnicity of the characters. They were just about people. For Behrendt, any story – whether the focus is an indigenous issue or not – is, essentially, about universals.

Larissa Behrendt, Finding ElizaAnd finally, that issue about non-indigenous writers writing on indigenous people. Again Behrendt is thoughtful rather than dogmatic. She says she’s always interested in how non-indigenous people portray indigenous people – hence, obviously, Finding Eliza – but that it’s difficult for them to do it authentically because they don’t know enough about Aboriginal life and culture. The reverse is a little different because Aboriginal people are “so bombarded with the dominant culture”. She identifies some writers who have not done it well – albeit she respects their hearts – and then names some who have impressed her. Kate Grenville in The secret river is one. Grenville, she says, doesn’t try an Aboriginal point of view. Instead

through using her non-indigenous characters, by showing their ignorance, their violence, their sense of entitlement, their fear, she tells a very strong story about Aboriginal experience. You read her book and you know exactly what it was like for Aboriginal people.

Grenville talks in Searching for The secret river about the issue of presenting the indigenous perspective. It was something she thought carefully about. Nice to see she’s been vindicated, in the eyes of Behrendt anyhow. The other effective portrayal she offers is Liam Davison’s The white woman. (Davison was tragically killed in the MH-17 disaster, and Lisa reviewed The white woman, as well as his other novels, as a tribute to him.) Behrendt says that Davison tells the story of massacres in Gippsland but relates

the story from the perspective of somebody who goes out as part of those hunting parties, and by getting into the psyche of the kind of person that can actually commit the most brutal aspects of a colonisation of a land, he tells a very strong story about Aboriginal people.

So, while she doesn’t see it as a no-go zone for non-indigenous writers, she does believe that the level of ignorance makes it a difficult challenge.

Another great interview with a writer who’s been in my list of must-reads for a long time. I’ll be starting soon with a short story. Watch this space.

Previous Spotlight posts:

Annette Marfording
Celebrating Australian Writing: Conversations with Australian Authors
Self published, 2015
273pp.
ISBN: 9781329142473

Note: All profits from the sale go to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. To find out where you can purchase this book, please check Marfording’s website.

 

Dorothy Johnston, Through a camel’s eye (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

When should I give up saying that I don’t read crime? In the last seven years, I’ve posted nine reviews tagged crime fiction (of which one was a guest post). Perhaps just over one a year still qualifies as not reading crime? Then again, what’s the point of saying it, if every now and then I do read crime? I think there is a point – it advises that I’m not a crime fiction expert, so my posts need to be read from that point-of-view, and it also tells readers not to come here looking for posts on crime.

So now, with that off my chest, I’ll get to Dorothy Johnston’s crime novel, Through a camel’s eye. It’s the first novel in her new crime series, Sea-change mysteries. I decided to read it for two reasons. One is that I’ve read and posted on two other works by her and was interested to see how a Miles Franklin shortlisted author might approach crime fiction. The other is that she was going to be in town last weekend and we’d agreed to meet for a quick cuppa, so I thought this would be the time to read her latest book (though I didn’t finish it in time). I didn’t plan to quiz her about the book, but I did want to show some support for a hardworking author. As with most of the crime novels I’ve read while blogging, I wasn’t sorry about my decision to expand my horizons a little.

Dorothy Johnston, Through a camel's eyeBefore I write about the book, though, I do want to mention the cover. It features a soft-edged image of a camel, lighthouse, and boardwalk. It’s gentle, atmospheric and, woo-hoo, it doesn’t have an image of a tiny man or a woman’s back as has been popular in recent times. The murder victim is, however, a woman, which, given women do not comprise the majority of homicide victims, is another issue that crops up in commentaries. The point here, though, is that Johnston does not delight in gruesome detail. We gradually discover during the course of the novel how the murder took place but the details, the victim’s emotions, the appearance and/or treatment of the body are not focused on. This is because Johnston’s interest lies elsewhere.

And now, I should get to the story. It’s a police procedural set in a small coastal community in Victoria. The police station is run by a local, Constable Chris Blackie, who returned to the town when his mother was unwell and stayed on after she died. The novel starts, though, with Anthea, a young, recently graduated constable who has been sent to be Chris’ assistant. Her country-town placement has precipitated a break with her architect lover, and she’s pining. Actually, the novel doesn’t quite start with her, either – she’s just the first police officer we meet. The novel starts with one of the town’s “characters”, the recently mute Camilla Renfrew, watching a young woman, Julie, train a young camel. As Camilla walks away, she remembers that on a previous visit she’d heard a woman’s scream. And so there we have it, we think, the crime – and yes, one of the book’s two crimes is a murdered woman, but it’s not, in fact, the first crime we are confronted with. That honour goes to the aforementioned camel, Riza. He goes missing.

From these two crimes, Johnston spins an intriguing tale that keeps us wondering whether the crimes are connected or not – but you’ll have to read it yourself to answer that question. I want to talk instead about what I enjoyed most about the novel – characters and language.

… looking for drama

Most crime novels, I think, draw on archetypes. In this case, there’s the idea of a “sea-change” – particularly for Anthea – and the basic character set-up, the reserved, loner boss, and the fresh, unsettled, somewhat disengaged offsider. Anthea is “disappointed” to have been sent to Queenscliff, and thinks she has her boss pinned:

She would like to dismiss Chris Blackie as an old fuddy-duddy, or a closet-gay; but found she couldn’t, quite.

She’s attracted to “forceful men with definite ideas” but Chris is not that sort of man. He’s barely conscious of his “maleness”, and she doesn’t quite know how to respond to such a person. For his part, Chris would have been happy to run the station solo. Nonetheless, he’d been open to the idea of a woman, but

Anthea had come looking for drama. He’d seen it in her eyes the minute she walked in. Both the anticipation and the almost instantaneous disappointment …

He wasn’t to know of course that her first sight of him, bum-up tending the police station’s lavender and rose garden, hadn’t exactly inspired her.

So, we have an archetypal “misfit” situation – two people working together, neither of whom are completely comfortable in their skins. It is the development of these two characters and their relationship, rather than in solving the crime, that I enjoyed most in the novel. Anthea may have come “looking for drama” but Johnston develops her story quietly, tenderly, rather than dramatically. She achieves this by taking us into the heads of these two unsure people, showing us their thoughts, feelings and reactions.

Why are they unsure? Well, I’ve already described some of it, but there’s more – and this could be where those of you who don’t like coincidences may come a little unstuck, because there are several missing parents here. Anthea’s parents had died in an accident when she was three, while Chris’ father had drowned when he was ten. Camilla’s “cold, punitive” husband had died of a heart attack when her now adult son, Simon, was ten, something for which he seems to still blame her. And young Julie, the camel owner? Her parents had died in a car-crash when she was in her teens. Johnston doesn’t labour all this, but these losses provide background to the characters and help explain their lack of mooring. Coping with loss and resolving the past could also be seen as themes of the novel. Anthea, for example, needs to let go of her lover, while Chris needs to resolve the fears that are stunting him.

Besides these characters, there’s Johnston’s description of place and small town life. We meet the town’s denizens – farmers, teenagers, caravan park owners, retired solicitor. They are typical – they have to be for us to believe the town – but, overall, they work as individuals too. We see the pros and cons of small town living, the everyone-knows-everyone-else’s-business aspect alongside the looking-out-for-each-other part. Chris’ old cottage and Anthea’s flat, the paddocks and seascape, are all clearly, but succinctly, described, as are the characters. Here is a minor character:

His big frame relaxed as though someone pulled a peg that was holding complicated scaffolding in place.

And here is the physical environment, seen through the eyes of another minor character:

Camilla was fascinated by the thick white stalk of the lighthouse, appearing and disappearing through the fog. Behind her, the pier squatted as a vague horizontal line, a grey denser than the sky. Its verticals were lines of shadow legs, a giant centipede.

The crimes are solved, and Chris and Anthea progress in self-understanding, but enough openings are left for us to wonder where Johnston might take these characters next. Through a camel’s eye relies more on the little details of lived lives than on the big dramas to provide interest, which is exactly why I enjoyed it.

awwchallenge2016Dorothy Johnston
Through a camel’s eye
For Pity’s Sake Publishing, 2016
216pp.
ISBN: 9780994448521

Australian Women Writers 2016 Challenge completed

/ Whispering Gums / 25 Comments

The time has come to write my annual completion post for my one challenge of the year, the Australian Women Writer’s Challenge. As in previous years, I signed up for the top-level, Franklin, which involves reading 10 books and reviewing at least 6. I’ve exceeded this, and I plan to continue to add to the challenge, as I’ve done in previous years, but half-way through the year seems a good time to write my completion post.

I have, so far this year, contributed 14 reviews to the challenge.

Jane Jose, Places women makeHere’s my list in alphabetical order, with the links on the titles being to my reviews:

This is quite different to last year’s completion post list which included one classic and one book by an indigenous author. I like to read classics, and I also like to read indigenous authors, but this year so far I’ve read neither. Instead, I seem to have read significantly more non-fiction, six out of 14 in fact. By the end of last year’s challenge, I’d read seven non-fiction out of 27 books in total. Looks like I’ll exceed that this year unless I stop reading Australian women’s non-fiction pretty well right now.

It’s also a little different because it includes two books by an author, the wonderful Elizabeth Harrower. Of course, it’s not that I don’t read multiple books by authors – but this usually happens over time. I tend not to find an author and immediately go hell-for-leather with that author – not because I don’t want to, but because I have books lined up, which brings me to …

… plans for the rest of the year. I know I’ll be reading at least one indigenous woman, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and I do have a couple of classics I really want to get to this year, but the review copies are piling up and there’s my reading group schedule, so I’m just going to see how it goes. The best laid plans, and all that!

Do you plan your reading in advance – and if so, do you keep to it – or do you just read what comes?