Women writers

Anna Rosner Blay, Sister, sister (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 18 Comments

BlaySisterHaleSome of the most vivid memories of my Sydney-based late teens and early twenties relate to spending time with Jewish people, business friends of my father. We went to parties in their homes, to weddings and bar mitzvahs. These were always happy, family-oriented occasions. I had crushes on the sons. I knew that most of these people had come to Australia after the war, had suffered during the war, many in concentration camps, but I knew little more than that. The war was back then and this was now. I have no idea what those sons knew or thought about their parents’ pasts. Anna Rosner Blay’s biography-cum-family-memoir, Sister, sister, has reminded me of those days and made me wonder, yet again, about the lives whose paths I so airily crossed.

Around that time, I also started reading “Holocaust literature”. I’ve read memoirs about surviving the war, including most recently Halina Rubin’s Journeys with my mother (my review), and novels about survival, such as Imre Kertèsz’s Fateless (my review), but Anna Rosner Blay’s Sister, sister adds new ground to my reading. Not only is it about two sisters, Polish Jews, who survived the war from the early restrictions, through ghetto, concentration camps, death marches and factories, to their eventual emigration to Australia, but it also exposes the longterm effects of Holocaust experiences, particularly on the next generation. It’s a moving book.

Three voices

Blay presents the story in three voices: those of her aunt Janka and mother Hela, and her own. Janka and Hela’s voices are clearly identified interview-style, while her voice is conveyed via italics without her name being appended. An interesting decision, but it works. Blay captured the sisters’ stories via tape-recorder and notebook, and then “transcribed and rearranged” them, primarily, I’m assuming, to get them into chronological order, given the stories came out in fits and starts, late in the sisters’ lives. Towards the end of the book Blay writes:

My mother’s accounts are often disjointed, abbreviated, shreds that veer away from the painful reality. But at other times they are laid out before me, complete and pulsating with life, precious jewels that I must handle very carefully.

She has, indeed, handled them (and her aunt’s) memories very carefully to produce a story that is horrifying, horrifying as a personal story, but also because it is clearly representative of a more universal experience of the millions of Jews who suffered under the Nazi regime, which just compounds the horror.

I’ll start with the universal. A survival story, Sister, sister describes the brutality, degradation and humiliation which the Germans visited upon the Jews during the war. You’ve heard the stories before, but, oh dear, to read yet again of the utter inhumanity is appalling. I couldn’t possibly quote the most brutal, so here’s a minor example. Both women ended up separately at Auschwitz. Both were stripped, shaved, sent into showers (that were – what a relief – real showers) – and then tossed random clothing and mismatched shoes. Hela received two left clogs causing blisters, while Janka’s pair comprised “one with a high heel and the other flat. I therefore walked with a limp.”

Surviving this war was, Janka tells, “a macabre game of chance”:

We hardly ever knew what would turn out to be good for us and what should be avoided, possibly by subterfuge. Sometimes being led to a train could mean being sent to a small camp with a factory, and easy work; other times it could mean being sent to death. Sometimes you could save your life just by lingering, which was dangerous in itself. There was no way of knowing how to survive …

And this brings me to the personal, because while the sisters’ experiences are universal, they are also deeply personal. One of the things that Blay does very well is capture Janka and Hela’s individual personalities. Janka tends to be more expansive, telling more stories in more detail. She is also “braver”. She lingers (drawing her sister or friends back) when she thinks to go forward means death; she lies about her skills when she thinks that will get her a better “job” and/or keep her with people she knows; she negotiates black market deals (to swap her mismatched shoes, for example); and so on. She identifies these, and other situations she survives, as “miracles”. The younger Hela – just 18 years old when the war ends – is, by her own admission, less brave, more fearful. She relies on her sister and later, a friend, to keep herself together when times get tough. She’s lucky to end up, towards the end of the war, as a Schindlerjuden, through her musician husband. But this is not to say she’s a wuss. She’s a hard worker, a skilled seamstress, and she survived. You had to be strong as well as lucky to survive. Janka, ten years Hela’s senior, says:

When we were girls Hela was like a flower that had opened too early, its fragile petals still crumpled and sheltered from the ways of the world. But she also had the strength to persist in harsh times, and to continue to flourish even in a storm.

Through directly presenting the sisters’ personal voices, Blay brings them alive as individuals in addition to representing them as survivors in general.

But, there’s a third prong to this story, the one that apparently forms the crux of Magda Szubanski’s recent memoir Reckoning. I’m talking the impact on the next generation. This is where Anna’s voice comes in. Again Blay handles this well, with Anna’s italicised reflections appearing intermittently in response to comments by one or other sister. Her voice is mostly gentle, without histrionics, but we are left in no doubt as to the longterm impact of the experience on the sisters and the way this has transmitted to the next generation. There are losses galore – losses of people and connections, for a start. Anna describes visiting a school friend who shows some of her “treasures” – a war medal, photos, some family jewellery. Anna writes:

She asks if I like the treasures; I nod, unable to speak. The tightness grows to a hollowness, an empty feeling that can’t be filled. The threads that link Linda to her past are strong, glowing. They are made manifest by the treasures before me, and I sense that it is not the objects themselves that have so taken my breath away. It is not their beauty or value that tugs at me, but the world of significant connections that surrounds them.

So, not only are there no grandparents, but there no objects to provide a link, a sense of history. Other losses are deeper, more psychological. Hela’s fear of hunger, of death, of fear itself, are also transmitted, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so, to her daughter:

My mother is always anxious at mealtimes. She coaxes me to eat more and checks how much I am putting in my mouth.

AND

I never trust strangers.

AND

My earliest nightmare is of a narrow cobblestoned lane. Fences on both sides crowd me in. As I walk along, alone, I realise I am being followed. An old man comes behind me with a sack, and grabs me …

Anna’s comments are not chronological, because they respond more organically to the sisters’ experiences, but together they convey how experiences – even when the telling of them has been withheld until late in life – carry through to the next generation. Anna’s stories, though, never overwhelm her aunt’s and mother’s because they are the main game. Anna sums it up best late in the book:

the enormity of the injustice and of the horror defies expression … [yet] … The power of the human spirit to survive, despite everything, is limitless.

Sister, sister was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year Award and the New South Wales Premier’s Award in 1998. It’s not hard to see why.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also read and admired this book.

awwchallenge2016Anna Rosner Blay
Sister, sister
Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, 1998
264pp.
ISBN: 9780868066479

(Review copy courtesy the author)

Kate Chopin, A pair of silk stockings (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 16 Comments
Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin (Public domain, via Wikipedia)

Over the years, the Library of America‘s (LOA) Story of the Week has published seven short stories by Kate Chopin, and I’ve posted on four of them. Now comes my fifth. It was actually published in February. I noted it, printed it out, but have only now found time to sit down and read it, and of course, I’m glad I did. It’s another little treasure.

Most of Chopin’s writing – including her most famous novel, The awakening, which I’ve read twice – offers commentary on the lives of women in late nineteenth century America. “A pair of silk stockings”, as you can probably tell from the title, doesn’t depart from this.

I enjoyed, as I usually do, LOA’s introductory notes. They are always succinct, yet hone in on something particularly relevant about the writer and the work. The notes to this story remind us that Chopin met with some resistance to her stories, both because of her themes and what literary historian Richard Gray calls her “subversive streak”. Go Chopin! However, what interested me most in these notes was something I’d forgotten, Chopin’s interest in Guy de Maupassant. I loved Maupassant’s short stories in my youth, and still have my little now-yellowing paperback of his stories. Chopin wrote about why she liked Maupassant, in 1896:

Here was life, not fiction; for where were the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making. Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw.

LOA’s notes continue to say that Maupassant’s influence on her was substantial, particularly in his “emphasis on psychological character development” and in the use of “the surprise or disconcerting ending”. That’s certainly the case in “Desirée’s baby” (my review).

But today’s post is about “A pair of silk stockings”, which critics argue is one of her best short stories, one critic contending, in fact, that “it is one of the best pieces in turn-of-the-century American literature by anyone”. It is certainly an excellent read – a quiet slice of life with a little bite. The story concerns “Little Mrs Sommers” who suddenly finds herself with a little windfall of $15. We are not told the source of this money, because that’s not the point. The point is how it makes Mrs Sommers feel and what she does with it.

First, though, who is Mrs Sommers? We don’t know a lot about her, but enough. She has a few children – “the boys and Janie and Meg”. I’m sure Chopin is making a little point in naming the girls but not the boys. Anyhow, she is not well off, and has to scrimp and save to dress her children. She “knew the value of bargains” and could line up at sales and “elbow her way if need be” with the rest of them.  She has not always been poor apparently, having once known “better days”, but she doesn’t think of those now:

She had no time—no second of time to devote to the past. The needs of the present absorbed her every faculty. A vision of the future like some dim, gaunt monster sometimes appalled her, but luckily to-morrow never comes.

So, this money, which has “given her a feeling of importance such as she had not enjoyed for years”, needs careful consideration to ensure she makes “proper and judicious use” of it. She doesn’t “wish … to do anything she might afterward regret”.

That’s the set up. As you can probably imagine, for all her careful planning, things work out very differently. The day she goes shopping she’s “faint and tired” having forgotten to eat lunch with all the “getting the children fed and the place righted, and preparing herself for the shopping bout”. She goes shopping – yes – but what she buys and does with her money is nothing like what she planned. Now I could tell you what she spends it on, without telling you the punch-line, but I won’t. It’s only five pages, and is a good read – not only for what it tells us but for its insight into turn of the century American life.

And this last point is what critic Robert D Arner says we should see in the story. It’s not just a story about a poor, struggling woman, but about the whole society, one that is “caught between traditional ideas of feminine roles and the newly emergent American ‘culture of consumption’.” This is not the gut-wrenching Chopin of The Awakening or “Desirée’s baby” but it’s no less poignant for its recognition of the pressures women face in negotiating their lives in a world over which they have little control – not to mention a world in which the temptations to buy are starting to abound.

Kate Chopin
“A pair of silk stockings”
First published: Vogue, September 16, 1897
Available: Online at the Library of America

Charlotte Wood, The natural way of things (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 36 Comments

Charlotte Wood, The natural way of thingsWell, I wrote this week’s Monday musings on Australian dystopian fiction as a lead in to my review of Charlotte Wood’s award-winning The natural way of things, but I wasn’t expecting to get the perfect intro for my review! In the post’s comments, author and publisher Anna Blay pointed us to an article by Maria Popova in an online digest called Brain Pickings. The article, titled “The Power of Cautionary Questions: Neil Gaiman on Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Why We Read, and How Speculative Storytelling Enlarges Our Humanity”, starts with this:

“The important thing,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in contemplating the cultural role of speculative fiction and the task of its writer, “is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live.” In doing so, she argued, imaginative storytelling can intercept the inertia of oppressive institutions, perilous social mores, and other stagnations of progress that contract our scope of the possible.

I would agree that the thing is “not to offer any specific hope of betterment” but to jolt the reader into thinking about what is, what might be, if we do nothing. It’s certainly how I’d see most dystopian fiction I’ve read, including Charlotte Wood’s novel, but not being a big reader of speculative fiction I haven’t sat down before and articulated it.

So, what is it that Charlotte Wood wants to jolt our minds about? For those of you – overseas readers at least – who haven’t read or don’t know of it, the plot tells the story of 10 women plucked from their normal lives and transported to a nightmarish place in the middle of nowhere – referencing the mythology of the forbidding Australian outback? – where they are imprisoned behind an electric fence and controlled, labour-camp style, by two boorish men, bruiser Boncer and the preening Teddy. The women pass from disbelief and anger, through resignation, to a sort of acceptance and attempt to make the best of their situation. There are shades of Margaret Atwood’s The handmaid’s tale here and also, perhaps of William Golding’s Lord of the flies, but not derivatively. This is very much its own work.

But now, back to my question. Wood’s target is misogyny, and specifically the way it plays out through the scapegoating of women for their sexuality – whether for assaults that happen to them or for sexual activities they may engage in consensually (think affair with a politician or the flight attendant in a “mile-high” situation) but for which the man is let off while the woman is excoriated. Early in the novel each girl is given a “nickname” which “explains” why they are there such as “army slut”, “cabinet minister’s moll”, “airline girl”, “cruise girl” and “football girl”. You get the picture, I’m sure. The girls are also named. Wood does respect and individualise her characters, beyond just being types. There is one other woman in the picture, and that’s Nancy. She’s on the staff with Boncer and Teddy. She dresses as a rather grotesque nurse who looks after the so-called “hospital” – and represents those enabling women who often feel special but don’t realise that they too are under control.

I came to this book ready to love it. Although I’ve avoided reading reviews, I’ve not been able to help hearing all the accolades, and it sounded like a book and topic that would be right up my alley. It is, and I “enjoyed” reading it, but I’m having trouble defining and articulating my somewhat uncertain response to it. I love the heart, I love the desire to attack an issue that’s absolutely critical, I love the overall narrative concept, I was compelled to keep reading, and I thought the ending was powerful. So, why uncertain? I’ll try to tease it out a bit.

Menace?

There are a lot of characters – the ten captive women, plus Boncer, Teddy and Nancy – though Wood focuses on two young 19-year-olds in particular, Yolanda the “football girl” and Verla “the cabinet minister’s moll”. We get more into their heads. They are analytical about their situations and plan and act in ways to improve their situations. A cautious friendship develops between them. As well as being differentiated in this way from the rest of the group, they are also differentiated from each other by two facts: Yolanda wasn’t tricked like all the others into accepting the agreement that got them to this place, while Verla, who guiltily remembers “gratefully signing the fake legal papers”, believes that her “Andrew”, the cabinet-minister, still loves her. The other women are more problematic. We don’t get to know them well, but what we do see suggests that they have not cottoned on. They focus on finding ways to groom themselves, they reject Yolanda’s feral way of managing the situation, they fall on the fancy handbags at the end and willingly follow the new man who appears. They seem to have learnt little. But, perhaps that’s also the point. They have a right to be the young women they are. See, I’m talking myself into understanding this as I go …

And then there’s the men. They are scary, certainly, and brutal, particularly in the beginning:

So she didn’t see the man’s swift, balletic leap – impossibly pretty and light across the gravel – and a leather covered baton in his hand coming whack over the side of her jaw …

The man Boncer cast an aggrieved look at them, is if they were to blame for the stick in his hand …

But pretty soon we see that they, too, are, in a way, victims of the system. They’ve been fooled it seems into being there, on promises of bonuses, and are ultimately pathetic. I certainly don’t want to excuse them – they’ve made choices. However, as the supporting system seems to fail, they start to rely on the women’s ability to keep the show going. The women realise that these men don’t know what’s happening any more either. There’s an uneasy tension between captors and captives – and with that cracks start to show in the menace, albeit some menace remains.

Natural?

The writing is good. There’s even humour, such as tempeh-loving, yoga-doing but clueless Teddy. The novel is structured by the seasons, starting in Summer, moving through Autumn and ending, appropriately, in Winter. The story is told third person, mostly focusing on Yolanda and Verla. They’re engaging, though they are also pretty slippery to fully grasp. There’s a distance that we never quite penetrate. We “see” Yolanda’s strength and Verla’s self-deception, but we don’t, I think, see “into” them.

Wood uses effective recurrent imagery or motifs, particularly smells, rabbits, horses and birds. The opening line is “So there were kookaburras here”, suggesting some sort of normality. In her interview with Annette Marfording long before this book was written, Wood discusses using kites and kite-flying to suggest “flight and escape”, and then she says “I realise I have a lot of birds”, which I assumed implies that they too suggest “flight and escape”. In The natural way of things, birds also suggest the related idea of “freedom”, but when hawks appear, we see another side, that of predator and prey. All relevant to the book.

Then there’s the irony in the title, “the natural way of things”, because there’s nothing “natural” about what the book describes. The title appears in the text once in a paragraph that occupies its own page. It’s powerful:

What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched , or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls they would be called. Would it be said, they ‘disappeared’, ‘were lost? Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of all these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it do themselves. They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshalled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them.

The “natural” way of things! Referring back to Ursula le Guin, I’d say that Wood has presented here a “persuasive alternative reality”. Indeed, it’s not far removed from Wood’s inspiration: the Hay Institution for Girls to which “problem” teenage girls were sent in the 1960s and 1970s, and treated with great cruelty. But, who or what is the enemy? Looking at Le Guin again, this would be “perilous social mores” (and those who uphold them) – the fact that the scapegoating of women is still “allowed” to happen. There’s (a little) more awareness now, but this behaviour is not stopping, not by a long shot. All of us, I’m sure, recognise the recent inspirations for Wood’s “girls”. Anna Krein’s Night games (my review) makes an interesting companion read.

So, where do we go from here? Dystopian novels don’t have to give answers, indeed they rarely do, they “simply” shine the light. The light Wood has shone is, though, a very complex one indeed. I think I’ll be reading this one again when my reading group does it in July.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) has also read it and has posted her comments plus links to other reviews.

awwchallenge2016Charlotte Wood
The natural way of things
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2015
315pp.
ISBN: 9781760111236

Sonya Hartnett, Golden boys (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 18 Comments

Sonya Hartnett, Golden boysAlthough Sonya Hartnett has written a large number of books, for children, young adults and adults, I’ve never read her, which is something I’ve been wanting to rectify. My opportunity came in May when my reading group scheduled her latest novel, Golden boys, for discussion. It was shortlisted for several awards last year, including the Miles Franklin Award – and has by now, I expect, been reviewed to within an inch of its life, but that’s not going to deter me!

You can tell, with Golden boys, that Hartnett is an experienced writer for young people. The book’s protagonists, the perspectives through whom the story is told, are all pre-teen. The three main voices are 12-year-old Colt, eldest son of the well-to-do Jensons, and almost 13-year-old Freya and 10-year-old Syd, children of the working class Kileys. The set up is that the Jensons have moved into a working class suburb for a reason that starts to become clear as the book progresses.

The novel opens with Colt:

With their father, there’s always a catch: the truth is enough to make Colt take a step back. There’s always some small cruelty, an unpleasant little hoop to be crawled through before what’s good may begin: here is a gift, but first you must guess its colour.

It’s a powerful beginning, and we’re right there. The scene is played out through Colt’s eyes. He’s been through these games before and he doesn’t want to play. He’s starting to realise there’s something darker behind his father’s generosity: “His father spends money not merely on making his sons envied, but on making them – and the word seems to tip the floor – enticing. His father buys bait.”

The second (unnumbered) chapter starts with Freya:

Freya Kiley has started to see things she hasn’t before. Until recently she has lived as every child must: as someone dropped on a strangers’ planet, forced to accept that these are the ways of this world.

But, on the next page we read

Now she’s older and smarter, and she’s starting to see that the world is a castle, and that a child lives in just one room of it. It’s only as you grow up that you realise the castle is vast and has countless false floors and hidden doors and underground tunnels … And as you get older, you’re forced out of the room, whether you want to go or not. Freya wants, with urgency, to go.

This lovely castle motif recurs through the novel. Anyhow, here we have two young people on the cusp of adolescence living in families which are headed (because this is the late 1970s when men still tended to “head” the family) by two problematical fathers – the superficially charming, generous but creepy Rex Jenson, and the detached, sometimes violent Joe Kiley. You have probably guessed what some of the themes are … but they are tied up with the plot, and …

I’m not going to talk about the plot because I have other issues to explore. I’ll just say that it builds slowly, inexorably, as the neighbourhood children gravitate to the well-endowed Jenson home, until we reach the climax . It’s expected – has been cleverly foreshadowed – and yet is surprising in exactly how it plays out. It’s painful, but clever too in resolving little while exposing a lot.

Adult? Young Adult?

Rather, I want to talk about voice and audience. When writers write in the voice of young people, or through the eyes of young people, there’s an immediate assumption, fear even, that the work is for young adults, but this isn’t necessarily so, though it can probably make such books cross more easily between adult and young adult readers. This is where Hartnett’s adult-marketed Golden boys sits. Its subject matter extends beyond a narrow focus on teenage experience, like first romantic relationship, first sexual experience, feelings of alienation or otherness, conflict with parents, and so on, to exploring the experience of awakening awareness to the reality of adult life. Here – this awakening – is the focus of Colt and Freya’s consciousness. How are they going to make sense of the flawed adult world they are now seeing? How are they to move through it? Will they survive their loss of innocence (and we are not talking sexuality here, but that deep shock when your view of the world, your sense of safety, is shaken to the core.) I should reiterate here that there are other youthful perspectives, including that of 10-year-old Syd who provides a neat counterbalance to Colt and Freya. At 10 he still has the self-focus of a child, not yet aware of “adult” life. What he wants for Christmas, whether he can still swim in the Jensens’ pool, and whether being a gangster would be a good career are what occupy his mind!

Hmmm, I’m not sure still that I’ve explained why this is a book that should interest adults – those adults who think, perhaps, “been there, done that”. It’s relatively easy to argue that the book, meaty though it is, would appeal to young adults, but why would a book in which all the perspectives are those of young people appeal to adults? Well, first there’s the subject matter, which addresses pedophilia and domestic violence. Just because we see these events through a young perspective doesn’t mean the exploration is superficial or irrelevant to an adult reader. Indeed, this perspective adds weight, because we see what the children see and the impact on them, how they try to process what they actually see, and how they comprehend the behaviour and responses of the various adults. When traumatic things happen in “real” life, it’s the adults we see and hear – the adults who are interviewed on the radio or television, the adults who write the memoirs or exposés. Hartnett presents the other side, the missing voices of the young – and I found her young people to be psychologically convincing. They are aware, perceptive and curious – but their understanding has limits, such as Freya’s taking the full blame for her parent’s situation because she was the reason they married. Hartnett, though, never sells them short, and neither I think should we.

And then there’s the writing. The imagery fits beautifully. There’s the castle motif for Freya, and a subtle but ominous repetition of the colour “black” from that bike in the opening scene to local bully Garrick’s fringe being described in the last scene as “blown back from his forehead like black grass on a sandy dune”. Descriptions tend to be physical. When Colt is confronted by the boys “the sun becomes an inferno, claws tigerishly at his neck”. On another occasion, one of Freya’s little sisters “skitters off like something twanged from a catapult”. The novel, in other words, is a joy to read – despite the unpleasant subject matter – for the imagery, careful plotting, characterisation, and that ending which manages to surprise despite our basic expectations being met.

Earlier, I quoted Freya as seeing the world or life as a castle. Towards the end, as things become more and more clear, she considers:

If she has spent her life rummaging through a castle of countless rooms, she thinks she must have found the vault at the castle’s core, because inside it there is nothing but her wits.

And that is the lesson, in the end, that both Freya and Colt learn. They will have to make their own decisions, rely on their wits, if they are going to survive this flawed, not always safe, world.

awwchallenge2016Sonya Hartnett
Golden boys
Hamish Hamilton, 2014
238pp.
ISBN: 9781926428611

Monday musings on Australian literature: Spotlight on Charlotte Wood

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments
Courtesy: Annette Marfording

Courtesy: Annette Marfording

This is the third in my occasional series of Spotlight posts inspired by Annette Marfording’s Celebrating Australian Writing: Conversations with Australian Authors. (See the end of this post for links to the first two.) Since Charlotte Wood won this year’s Stella Prize, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction (NSW Premier’s Literary Awards), and has just been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award for her latest novel The natural way of things, who better to choose for my third post.

Charlotte Wood is no stranger to awards. She has written five novels to date, and each of them has won or been shortlisted for awards, which is a pretty impressive achievement. She has also written a non-fiction work on food, Love and hunger, and edited an anthology, Brothers & sisters. Oh, and she has numerous essays, and newspaper and journal articles under her belt too. She is about to publish another book, The Writer’s Room, which will contain interviews with Australian writers selected from the digital magazine of the same name that she edited for three years.

And this makes a good place to segue to Annette Marfording’s interview with her, which took place back in 2010. Marfording’s first question was about awards. Wood indicated that she was “anti-awards” and that the book she thought was her best, The children (at that time she’d published three novels), had received the least notice in awards listings. She says:

I guess it’s easy when you’ve been shortlisted a couple of times to start dismissing it, but the whole prize culture is kind of damaging to literature, I think. It turns books into a horserace and it’s not good for writers and it’s not good for writing either.

This is not an uncommon view, and I do understand her point. The arts are not something that can be objectively measured like, say, a 50m freestyle swim or a high jump, but the money and recognition can, on the other hand, be very helpful to careers, particularly, I suspect, early ones. Wood admits that the money is useful, and can help writers keep writing.

Charlotte Wood (Courtesy: Wendy McDougall)

Charlotte Wood (Courtesy: Wendy McDougall)

Marfording then asks Wood about some of the ideas that recur in her novels – family, and abuse and violence. Regarding family, Wood says that it’s because “the intensity of human relationships plays out so well in families”. She doesn’t think that abuse and violence are strong themes – in those first three books – though agrees that there’s an abusive relationship in Pieces of a girl, and there is psychological warfare in her books. As she says “A story without any friction is not a story.” True!

Some questions naturally come up in most interviews with writers – recurrent themes being one. Another relates to the writing process, use of research, drawing from other people’s lives, and so on. Marfording asked Wood about these as well. Regarding her process, Wood said that “I start writing and see what happens”. She doesn’t plan, so sometimes the shape of the book comes quickly, other times not so. She doesn’t do a lot of research she says, but may check out the odd specific thing.

And then of course there’s that issue of writing from the perspective of other, such as a male point of view. Wood said that she used to worry about this, but her view is that, despite gender, we are not all that different in the way we think. So, she tries to avoid focusing on the physical issues – which are different – and keeps instead to the mental space.

They also discussed her writing, which is often described as “lyrical”. Wood says that with more experience she had become “sparer”, that at first she was “so lyrical that it kind of made you throw up”. Imagery, it seems, comes easily to her. In this she reminded me of Thea Astley who also found imagery easy and did put some readers off. She too became a little more spare in her later years, though perhaps not to the degree that Wood describes herself doing. Wood talks of actively focusing on character, plot and structure, and balancing that with her interest in language and lyricism.

Other topics discussed included the anthology, Brothers & sisters that she edited, and the place of short fiction in Australia. Re the latter, Wood said she felt things were improving, with new works by Cate Kennedy, Paddy O’Reilly, Robert Drewe, Tony Birch and Nam Le recently appearing. Wood says that:

a short story is perceived as a step to a novel, and there is nothing less true. I find them so hard to write that I hardly ever write them.

The interview concludes with some discussions about the “business end” of writing – publishing, editing and writing courses – topics which always interest me, even though I have no plans to write a novel, memoir or any other book!

A question they didn’t really cover, but which was asked by Booktopia in their Q&A with her in 2011, was which writers she admires. She tells them:

I admire any writer who has the courage to push through the barriers of ambition and vanity to get to the real thing – truth and beauty. Some of the best writers I know are struggling to get published, but they keep going because they are real artists. For the same reasons – truth and beauty – I respect and admire Alice Munro, Helen Garner, Anne Enright, Marilynne Robinson, Kim Scott, Richard Ford, Joan London, William Maxwell and Nina Bawden, among others.

What a lovely range of writers – they give a great sense of her writerly values don’t they?

Wood comes across as calm and level-headed – and I have heard other writers say that she’s generous in mentoring others. I have decided that my next book has to be The natural way of things.

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. You can purchase the book from its distributor, lulu.com.

 

Bidda Jones and Julian Davies, Backlash: Australia’s conflict of values over live exports

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

Bidda Jones and Julian Davies, BacklashWhen co-author and publisher Julian Davies sent me Backlash to review, he described it as “our latest and perhaps most ambitious book so far – non-fiction”. Hmm, I thought, that’s quite something from the publisher of some very interesting and, it seems to me, ambitious books. But now, having read Backlash, I understand what he meant. For a start, Backlash comes straight from the heart of its writers, but more than this, it is ambitious in that its goals and messages reach beyond the specific issue of live exports and animal welfare, as important as those are.

It’s unlikely, if you’re Australian, that you didn’t see or hear about the 2011 Four Corners television episode on the live export of animals to Indonesia, A Bloody Business*. While the actual audience on the night was, Jones and Davies say, comparatively small, the impact – in the short-term in particular – was huge. This book tells the wider story – how the program came about and what happened afterwards. In doing so, it explores the ramifications of the trade, weighs economic expediency against ethical considerations, exposes the democratic processes by which decisions are made, and asks us to think about what it all says about us as a people. As the subtitle says, it’s about “conflict of values”. Live export might be the subject of this particular story but, for Jones and Davies, it exemplifies something bigger, something to do with the sort of society we wish to be and how we might get there. For this reason, as for any, Backlash is a valuable read.

What I didn’t know, or didn’t remember, when I started reading the book is that co-author and zoologist Bidda Jones, head of science and policy at RSPCA Australia, along with Lyn White, animal activist and now campaign director for Animals Australia, were the people who took the issue to Four Corners. It was Jones’ research and White’s video footage which convinced Four Corners to do the story. After the broadcast, politician Barnaby Joyce asked Jones and White why they hadn’t taken the story to him and his Opposition colleagues. The reason was simple, they had tried approaching politicians but had failed to garner any interest. So, to the media it was.

There is no fancy writing here. The book uses plain, direct language as befits its aims. There is little use of flashy rhetorical devices to sway opinion. The authors focus instead on fact and logic to present their case. The book is carefully structured. It starts with an introduction which sets out the book’s aims and explains that although both authors contributed to the book it has been written in Bidda’s first person voice. Chapter 2 briefly recounts their experience of watching the Four Corners program. The book then moves back in time and, over several chapters, chronicles how the program came about: the research (which included Lyn White’s filming trip to Indonesia), the lobbying, and the strategic planning. We then return, at Chapter 16, to the screening of the program and a description of its content. The rest of the book discusses the show’s aftermath. They detail the main cases for and against live export of animals, the initial widespread strong reaction which resulted in the government imposing a short-term ban on live export to Indonesia, and the backlash against this decision which resulted in live export being restored. Since then, they argue (though others argue differently), no real progress has been achieved in improving the welfare of animals. It’s a distressing and depressing story about the failure of our duty of care to animals.

The book is not, as they admit in the Introduction, “an unbiased examination of the different sides of the live export debate”, that is, they decisively argue the animal welfare case, just as Bill McKibben in Oil and honey starts from the basis that he is a climate change activist. However, they also argue that they don’t take “an inflexible ideological position”. They recognise that ours is a “pluralistic society” with many different stakeholders. I understand this to mean that they are vegetarians** who would prefer no animals be killed for food, but they recognise that there are many people who do wish to eat meat. Their position, then, is not to stop animal farming altogether, but to ensure that the welfare of the animals involved is given the priority it should in a civilised society.

Achieving better animal welfare, though, is easier said than done. In chapter after chapter, they demonstrate how “money speaks and is heard”, how bureaucratic processes are manipulated, how changes in political personnel subvert plans, how public policy is too often formed under the influence of power-plays and egos rather than logic and reason. And so, despite a huge public outcry and clear public concern, in the end economic arguments outweighed ethical considerations. The few recommendations made to improve animal welfare conditions were either watered down (such as mandatory stunning pre-slaughter made “a recommendation” not “mandatory”), were not given a proper regulatory framework, and/or got lost in the bureaucracy.

By now, you are probably wondering if the book is all about nay-saying, but it’s not. Jones and Davies propose a range of options, starting with improving the welfare of animals involved in live export. This means improving the selection of animals to be exported, improving the transport conditions under which they are exported, and then improving their treatment and slaughter at the other end. Better, though, they argue, would be to stop live export altogether and focus on the meat trade. This is what New Zealand decided to do in 2007 when it ceased live export out of concern for animal welfare and for its reputation as a country which cared about animal welfare. The problem is that ceasing live export requires longterm planning (including the rebuilding of abattoirs in northern Australia) but contemporary Australian politics is epitomised by “short-termism” underpinned by “a built-in avoidance of complex issues”. I don’t think many of us would argue with their statement that:

Altering the land management practices of pastoralists over millions of hectares requires a long-term outlook and courageous decision-making – rare qualities in today’s political climate.

And so, issues like animal welfare concerns, environmental degradation and insecure export markets are ignored in favour of short-term economic gains.

At the beginning of the book, Jones and Davies state that

a central premise of this book is that a well-governed society develops ways to reconcile economics and welfare so that both suffer as little as possible.

They stay true to this throughout demonstrating that it is possible to balance economic considerations with ethical concerns. (Just look at New Zealand for a start!) Australians, Jones and Davies believe, have shown that they (we) do not condone “entrenched cruelty” to animals, but so far people power has not won out. This story has a way to go yet …

awwchallenge2016

* You can watch the program online (in Australia at least) but warning, it it VERY unpleasant viewing.
** Please see Bidda’s comment below clarifying that they are not vegetarians, as I thought I’d read.

Bidda Jones and Julian Davies
Backlash: Australia’s conflict of values over live exports
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd Publishers, 2016
207pp.
ISBN: 9780994516503

(Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd Publishers)

Jane Jose, Places women make (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 16 Comments

Jane Jose, Places women make“Places”, Jane Jose writes in her book Places women make, “can lift our spirits and be inclusive, and add surprise, excitement, wonder or some beauty to day-to-day life in the city.” These sorts of places, which are essential to making our cities liveable, rarely just happen. They take planning, and who does this planning? Men. At least, it’s men, says Jose, who have been the “hero architects of most of Australia’s city buildings, leading the design, even if women were invisibly designing the detail behind the scenes.” So, in Places women make, she aims to right this imbalance, to bring to the fore the work women have done in making cities better. This is not, however, a feminist rant. She does not undermine the work done by men. She simply wants women to receive their share of recognition, not just because they deserve it but because it is important for other women – particularly young women – to know.

I had not heard of Jane Jose before reading this book, which proves her point rather because, in fact, she, a self-described urbanist, has been involved in urban planning for well over two decades. She has done this through many roles, including, at one point, Deputy Lord Mayor of Adelaide, her home town. Indeed, one of the fascinating aspects of the book is just how many ways people can contribute to urban planning and improvement. She tells of the obvious people – the architects and town planners – but there are others too, such as the civic leaders and politicians, the landscape designers and gardeners,  the heritage and environmental activists, and the philanthropists. Women – many of them – have performed all these roles, and she shares some of their stories. It’s inspiring reading.

The book is structured thematically, starting with her overall thesis about what women can offer to urban design. This is probably a good place to mention two – hmmm – mantras, I’ll call them, which pervade the book. One is straightforward, and that is, to (mis)use EF Schumacher’s phrase, “small is beautiful”. Although women have been, and are, involved in big projects, it is often in the “small” projects that they make their biggest impacts. Early on, she repeats a leading architect’s criticism of Sydney’s Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore. Jose writes that he

once criticised her to me for having paid too much attention to the small public places and parks in the city rather than driving major projects. He described the small projects she is promoting in the city as being “like tatting”. To my mind this shows a lack of understanding of how women see the small things adding up to a greater whole.

Jose goes on to discuss the projects and ideas Clover Moore has driven, arguing that Moore “understands that community places and activities are the glue in the community” and further, that beautiful, liveable cities “bear the fruit of a strong economy”. I’m not an economist, but there must be some truth to this argument I think. Anyhow, throughout the book, Jose describes many, many small community-focused projects initiated by women, from Wendy Whiteley’s magical Lavender Bay garden to Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Foundation, from Jane Lomax-Smith’s work on protecting Adelaide’s parklands to Tess Brady’s involvement in the creation of Australia’s first booktown at Clunes. Some of these, as you can tell, started small but ended much bigger, which is what happens to good ideas. From little things, big things grow (as Australia’s Paul Kelly sings).

The other mantra or thread is perhaps a little more problematic. It relates to what Jose calls a “feminine sensibility”. She defines this in terms of “creativity … intuition … lateral approach”, as having “a special relationship with community and village life”, and as taking the “long view”. She writes that “we know a female perspective is different from that of a man”. Intuitively – ha! – I understand what she is saying, but from a gender studies or feminist point of view this feels like dangerous ground. However, I’m going with her because her stories are powerful enough to argue her case. Women’s contributions have in general been overlooked or underplayed. Take for example Marion Mahony Griffin, wife of Walter Burley Griffin, credited as Canberra’s designer. It took decades for her part in what was clearly a partnership to be recognised.

What I enjoyed most about the book are the stories about projects, big and small, that women have initiated, some known to me, but many not. I enjoyed reading about Australia’s cities and what local women have fought for in them. This coming week I’ll be in Adelaide, the city where Jose cut her urban planning teeth. She writes about her involvement in the re-visioning of North Terrace and more specifically in activism to save Adelaide’s heritage architecture. I have visited Adelaide several times over the years, but on my visit last year, I was thrilled by how beautiful – and welcoming – it is, particularly North Terrace. We have Jane Jose, forensic pathologist Jane Lomax-Smith, architect Jackie Shannon Gillen, among others, to thank for that.

While her main focus is contemporary Australia, Jose also tells stories from the past. She describes how wives of Australia’s early administrators strongly affected the design of the cities they were in, women like Mrs Macquarie, wife of governor Lachlan Macquarie, and the energetic Lady Jane Franklin, wife of explorer and lieutenant governor of Van Dieman’s land, John Franklin. It is this Jane, in fact, who graces the book’s cover. (I have written about her before on this blog). These women are just two examples of women who, married to influential men, used their influence to affect city planning and design.

In addition to casting her net historically, Jose also crosses the seas. She ends her book with a special tribute to the influential American urbanist Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), who inspired her belief that cities can be villages or communities. But she also refers to other international women, such as American landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, Chilean landscape architect Teresa Moller, and London-based Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid.

What more can I say? Places women make is a fascinating book written by a woman passionate and clearly knowledgeable about her subject. If I have any complaints they are minor, and yet I do need to say them. One is that while she provides a wonderful list, at the end, of the women whose stories she tells, there is no index. I’d love an index. The other is that there are no foot-notes or end-notes documenting her sources, just a brief reading list. These don’t affect the book’s worth as a popular introduction to her subject, but they’d be much appreciated by those of us interested in a little more!

And now, since you can’t really “spoil” a book like this, I’ll end with Jose’s conclusion because it says it all:

Cities matter. They are alive and they change, they are the places we live our lives and make our memories. It takes commitment, imagination and passion to make even the smallest idea for change blossom from an idea into a park, a playground, a library or a shaded street. With the influence of women, cities can be better places. Tomorrow’s children need the places women make.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also enjoyed the book.

awwchallenge2016Jane Jose
Places women make: Unearthing the contribution of women to our cities
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2016
213pp
ISBN: 9781743053942

(Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press)

Frederick Law Olmsted, Trees in streets and in parks (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 18 Comments

I last came across the American landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, a few years ago when I was doing some freelance research for a Canberra 2013 centenary project. This was because Olmsted, who designed New York’s Central Park with Calvert Vaux, inspired Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin, the original designers of Canberra. Now, it just so happens, that my current read is a book by Jane Jose, Places women make, about the contributions women make to the development of cities. In it she talks of Marion Mahoney Griffin, and her role in the design and planning of Canberra, a garden city. So, when a piece by Frederick Law Olmsted titled “Trees in streets and in parks” popped up as last week’s Library of America’s Story of the Week, I decided it was for me.

Frederick Law Olmsted

By James Notman, Boston, 1893, engraving of image later published in Century Magazine (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s a fascinating piece for its insight into nineteenth century thinking about trees, parks and cities. The article was published in a journal called The Sanitarian. He commences by disagreeing with an idea promulgated by French art critic, Charles Blanc, that nature is not beautiful, only design can be so described! Olmsted admits that some trees can be poorly or inappropriately planted or maintained but even those can be – well let him say it

But looking up at the continuous green canopy which these maltreated trunks support, swaying in the light summer breeze against the serene blue beyond—swaying not only with the utmost grace of motion, but with the utmost stately majesty—I say that cheaply, inconsiderately as the planting work was done, if the result is not to be called beautiful, it is only because it has more of sublimity than beauty.

Take that Monsieur Blanc! However, sanitation being his apparent main interest, he moves on to talk about parks and their importance to the “sanitary apparatus of a large town”. Parks are important for providing clean air to city residents. Travellers to London, he writes, had until recently described its myriad parks as ‘“airing grounds,” “breathing places,” “the lungs of London”’. Although times are changing, “the atmospheric theory”of the value of parks still holds strong, he says. For people to benefit from this air, the parks have to be attractive, so trees are planted for their decorative value.

However, it is not for their air-purifying value, nor for a decorative motive, that he plants trees in his parks. His reason doesn’t “interfere with or lessen the value of a park as an airing ground”, but not pursuing decoration as a goal results, he suggests, in a more attractive and less costly park. So, what is his purpose? Well, it has to do with defining “sanitation” more holistically: it’s not just about supporting the body but also encompasses the mind. Yet, he realises,

It is plainly not enough to answer that it is to move the mind recreatively, because that is equally the motive of Punch and Judy, of a flower-garden, of a cabinet of curiosities, of jewelry.

Frederick Olmsted

Portrait of Olmsted, at (the beautiful) Biltmore Estate, 1895, by John Singer Sargent (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Admitting he’s not a scientific expert, he argues that “the recreative and sanative value of large parks” comes from what he describes as an unconscious process. He distinguishes, in other words, between “conscious, or direct recreation, and unconscious, or indirect recreation”. Designing the placement of trees (and other garden objects) to call people “to a halt, and to utter mental exclamations of surprise or admiration” runs counter to this idea of “unconscious recreation”. A park’s highest value lies, rather, in “elements and qualities of scenery” to which the minds of those experiencing them give “little conscious cogitation” at the time. These elements or qualities “are of too complex, subtle and spiritual a nature to be readily checked off, item by item, like a jeweler’s or a florist’s wares”.

He provides an analogy. It’s the difference he says

between the beauty of a common wildflower seen at home, nearby others of its class, peeping through dead leaves or a bank of mossy turf, and that of a hybrid of the same genus, double, of a rare color, just brought from Japan, now first blooming in America, taken from under glass, and shown us in a bunch of twenty, set in an enameled vase against an artfully-managed back-ground.

In other words, coming across a scene, flower, tree unexpectedly and perhaps without even consciously stopping to comment on it, may have “a more soothing and refreshing sanitary influence”. These are the natural, simple pleasures that “cottagers in peasant villagers” have always been able to enjoy. And here he moves to a more political point. With the growth of cities and the development of the rich, with “the prominence given by the press to the latest matters of interest to the rich and the fashion-setting classes”, the problem is that

the population of our country is being rapidly educated to look for the gratification of taste, to find beauty, and to respect art, in forms not of the simple and natural class; in forms not to be used by the mass domestically, but only as a holiday and costly luxury, and with deference to men standing as a class apart from the mass.

This impoverishes us, dissipates tastes that once brought happiness. It’s a very appealing attitude to parks and park-making, though I must say his language is not the most straightforward to read.

The National Association for Olmsted Parks summarises the legacy of Frederick, his sons and their successors as:

The Olmsteds believed in the restorative value of landscape and that parks can bring social improvement by promoting a greater sense of community and providing recreational opportunities, especially in urban environments.

I think this is what you’ll be hearing about again soon, when I review Places women make!

Frederick Law Olmsted
“Trees in streets and in parks”
First published: In The Sanitarian (September 1882).
Available: Online at the Library of America

Sarah Kanake and Down syndrome in literature

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

Sarah Kanake, Sing Fox to meIn the media release accompanying my copy of Sarah Kanake’s Sing fox to me (my review), we are told not only that Kanake’s brother has Down syndrome but that she has a PhD in creative writing from the Queensland University of Technology “on the representations of Down syndrome in Australian literature”.

As far as I know her thesis hasn’t been published. However, she has written about her interest elsewhere, including, most accessibly for us, at The Conversation. Her essay, which I’ve just found today, is titled “On telling the stories of characters with Down syndrome” (and you can read it online.) It’s an excellent essay, and I’ll come back to it in a minute.

When I wrote my review of Sing fox to me, I referred to Samson’s Down syndrome but I didn’t feature it. I chose to focus on other elements of the novel, namely the Gothic aspect, and the theme of loss. However, I did note that I’d like to come back to her characterisation of a person with Down syndrome, so I’m very pleased to have found her essay, which was published, in fact, the same day I published my post.

In the novel, Samson is presented as being very aware of his difference. He feels weighed down by his “heavy extra chromosome” which is how he characterises the impact of the syndrome on his life, particularly when he feels that impact is negative. It’s negative when his movements are limited (you can’t go beyond the fence, your brother must hold your hand when you cross the road, you can’t make toast for yourself); when people talk about him, in front of him, as though he isn’t there; when people ignore him, assuming he’s got nothing to contribute. All these happen in the book. But Samson does think, feel, know things. Just because he’s disabled doesn’t mean he’s stupid; it’s just that “the extra chromosome … sometimes slowed him down.”

By using multiple (third person) points of view, Kanake also portrays the responses of others to Samson. Jonah is resentful of his parents’ expectations that he’ll care for and be responsible for Samson. Mattie’s mother Tilda, kind as she is, doesn’t want Mattie to be introduced to Samson, she doesn’t want Mattie to be “stuck with disabled kids just because she’s deaf”.

In her essay, Kanake discusses our culture’s low expectation of people with Down syndrome, and how this translates in literature depicting them. She talks about how literary representations too often use characters with Down syndrome as plot devices, as points of conflict for the narrative. Indeed, she quotes Mark Haddon, author of that book featuring a character with autism, The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, as saying that he uses disability “as a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation”. Kanake also discusses how narratives involving characters with Down syndrome are mostly told through the perspective of the parents not the person him/herself. Characters with Down syndrome, in other words, rarely have “a voice and agency within the narrative”.

Consequently, in writing Sing fox to me, Kanake says

I was extremely conscious of representing and dissolving boundaries around my protagonist with Down syndrome, Samson Fox, in order to create a narrative where Samson was free to move, evolve and change.

At the end, without giving anything away, Samson, overlooked by others, decides, quietly but determinedly, to take matters his own hands:

Quietly, and without asking Murray or his granddad, he gathered up everything he would need and packed it carefully into his school port […]

Samson crossed the lawn to the gate. He was going to find his brother. No one would stop him or tell he couldn’t. Not Murray or Clancy. This time Samson could choose, and he chose to go beyond the house and beyond the fence and beyond the gate …

Breaking down barriers in other words!

While the novel resolves some of the challenges faced by its characters, the ending is not simplistic and much is still left unresolved on the mountain (as you’d expect in a “true” Gothic novel, I think.) Samson is just one part of this. Down syndrome does, yes, define, and sometimes limit, him, but it is not the crux of the novel – which is why, really, it was not the focus of my review. I think that means Kanake has achieved her goal?

Sarah Kanake, Sing fox to me (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 30 Comments

Sarah Kanake, Sing Fox to meBack in late 2011, I wrote a Monday Musings post on 19th century Australian Gothic. I’ve always intended to post more on the topic, including one on Tasmanian Gothic. Well, here’s a start, because Sarah Kanake’s debut novel, Sing fox to me, is a good example of modern Tasmanian Gothic. I wrote in my first post that “Australia had (and has) plenty to inspire a Gothic imagination: strange unforgiving nightmarish landscapes, weird vegetation and imaginary creatures”. I was referring then primarily to the outback, but Tasmania, while not exactly “the outback”, has plenty to excite the Gothic imagination.

Why does pretty, verdant Tasmania work so well for a Gothic sensibility? To start with it has some forbidding (albeit beautiful) landscape – remote mountains, dense bush, mist and cold – and it’s an island, which provides an added layer of isolation. Then, there’s its violent history. Tasmania had some of Australia’s most brutal convict prisons. Many escaped, many died, and there are all sorts of horror stories, including those concerning the alleged cannibal, Alexander Pearce. It’s also infamous for the near-genocide of its indigenous population. It’s a place, in other words, in which ghosts and spirits are easy to imagine. But this is not all. Tasmania is home to the world’s only carnivorous marsupial – the small but ferocious and appropriately named Tasmanian devil. And, particularly relevant to this book, it was the last home of Australia’s most famous, most controversial, extinct animal, the Thylacine aka Tasmanian tiger.

Sarah Kanake calls on these, together with the archetypal Australian lost-child story, to write a novel that’s fundamentally about loss. All sorts of loss – people, animals, homes, and love. The novel commences with a brief unlabelled prologue describing the disappearance of 14-year-old River Snow Fox on a rainy night (of course!) On the same night one man’s home is lost, another man’s leg is permanently injured by a falling tree, and the kookaburras cackle. We then jump twenty years. It’s 1986, and River’s older brother David Fox is returning to his childhood mountain home – Fox Hill or Tiger Mountain, take your pick – with his twin sons, the biblically named Jonah and Samson. He plans to leave them with his father Clancy Fox – the man with the injured leg – who is still grieving, still looking for his missing daughter. Relationships are fraught. Clancy and his son don’t get on; angry, hurt, lonely Jonah is resentful of his loving Down syndrome twin Samson; Samson, with his “extra heavy chromosome”, often feels overlooked; and Clancy doesn’t know how to be a grandfather. The scene is set …

There are three other people on the mountain: Murray, son of the indigenous George, who was Clancy’s friend and the man who lost his home; Murray’s partner, the pregnant Tilda; and Tilda’s daughter Mattie, who is deaf. Depending on how you look at it, there could be a fourth person on the mountain, because George, now dead, regularly appears to Clancy.

Now, I wouldn’t blame you if you were starting to think this is all laid on a bit thick – gothic setting, a hermitic old man, a ghost, a missing girl, unhappy twins, a Down syndrome boy and a deaf girl, a pregnant woman and an indigenous man. What I found though was that while my mind (my rational self) was questioning this, my heart (my emotional self) was becoming more and more engaged. It works, I think, because Kanake doesn’t play to melodrama, as the original Gothic novels did. She keeps it psychologically real, even when unexplainable things happen. She also knows of what she writes. The brief biography provided by Affirm Press says that Kanake grew up with “a brother with Down syndrome and two Aboriginal foster brothers”. This reassured somewhat my modern concern about dominant-culture writers presuming to write for “other”.

“We love a version of the tiger, and it’s not real”

So Jonah remembers his father once telling him. What’s real is, in fact, one of the book’s underlying challenges. Readers have to make a leap of faith and accept that what we read is “real” for the characters. The characters, on the other hand, need to work out their “reality” and come to terms with it.

Sing fox to me is one of those books where the structure, the narrative form in particular, supports the meaning. In other words, Kanake’s use of alternating points of view for the three main characters – Clancy, Jonah and Samson – mirrors the separation of their lives. Of course they are together sometimes, physically, but there’s little meeting of minds and hearts. Meaning is also supported by strong, sustained imagery. Nature works on both physical and metaphorical levels. Clancy’s tiger pelt, worn by Clancy and then stolen by Jonah, seems to live and breathe. The mountains, rivers and trees are similarly active.

… he [Clancy] wanted to tell Murray that something had changed on his mountain. The boys were waking things up, stirring life back into old death. (Part 3)

The trees relaxed and the leaves swayed, almost as if they could finally breathe. The creek rushed, not because it was chasing anything, but because it longed to feel the smooth and stable rocks underneath … (Part 6)

Kookaburras act as a sort of malevolent chorus. Their “cackling” laughter resounds throughout the book as a commentary on the misguided quests going on below them. They are there in the beginning when Clancy realises River is lost – “the laughter turned to cackling as the kookaburras gathered in the branches overhead” – and they are there when he realises the futility of his obsessive twenty-year long obsessive quest:

Finally he understood the kookaburras, those buggers at the end of their fucking tethers. Those damned birds knew he should have been laughing with them all along.

“Feeling sorry was in every real Tasmanian’s blood”

Kanake packs a lot into her imagery – and I haven’t begun to tease out all the permutations. I haven’t talked about Jonah’s love of another tiger, Shere Khan, for example, or of the fox motif. There’s also a lovely portrayal of disability in the novel, which I might explore another day. Most of it does, however, come back to loss. Children go missing, parents leave, a friend and a wife have died; animals are lost or killed or extinct. These losses are personal, but there could also be a political reading. Am I being too fanciful to suggest that Clancy’s loss of River, the girl who “said she could sing the tigers to her”, and his futile, obsessive search, could be read as Tasmania’s loss of the Tiger, and the desperate hope that the next claimed sighting will be real? Or that through telling a story about loss and personal ghosts, Kanake is also calling attention to the ghosts of Tasmania’s past?

A step too far? Perhaps. But this book is such a rich read that it invites a very personal response. I’d love to hear from others who have read it.

awwchallenge2016Sarah Kanake
Sing fox to me
South Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2016
266pp.
ISBN: 9781922213679

(Review copy courtesy Affirm Press)