Angela Meyer, Captives (Review)

May 13, 2015May 13, 2015 / Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

Have you read any flash fiction? Some of the pieces in Pulse would qualify but, besides this, I hadn’t read much until I picked up Angela Meyer’s collection Captives, which I bought for my Kindle last year. I bought it for a few reasons: I enjoyed and reviewed the short story collection she edited, The great unknown; I follow her blog Literary Minded; and of course I like short fiction. So I read Meyer’s book and was – dare I say it – captivated!

Meyer has divided her collection into 7 sections, the first 6 of which are titled using polarities – On/Off, Up/Down, In/Out, With/Without, Here/There, Then/Now – with the last being, simply, Until. The titles are as terse as the little works they contain. And a couple are very little, being just a couple of paragraphs, while the longest are, I’m guessing, around 500 words. This brings me to the matter of definition. How do we define flash fiction? Well, as with all definitions, there’s not complete agreement. Most agree that it can be as short as a sentence, but there’s no such agreement on the upper limit. Some say 300 words, some 500 words, and others 1000 words. The term itself was first used in the early 1990s, but there are other terms, including micro fiction and sudden fiction. I won’t discuss this further. I’m happy to be fluid about the definition, and I like the term flash fiction.

Writing a very short story sounds challenging to me. As Becky Tuch writes in The Review Review “Distilling experience into a few pages or, in some cases a few paragraphs, forces writers to pay close attention to every loaded conversation, every cruel action, every tender gesture, and every last syllable in every single word.” Meyer clearly understands this imperative, and demonstrates a sure grasp of the form. Indeed, several of the works included in Captives have been published elsewhere, which suggests her writing in this form has gained recognition.

Captives contains 37 pieces, and they vary greatly in topic, theme and setting. Some are set in the past, some the future, some in exotic places like Norway or Scotland, and others in Australia. Some are realistic, while others toy with the unexplained. Their protagonists range from a man who has accidentally locked himself in the toilet (“Thirteen tiles”) to a sister with a secret (“We were always close”). Some pieces have been inspired by news stories like those about men who lock up women for years (“Green-eyed snake”) or about the man who walked a tightrope across the Grand Canyon (“Tightrope walker’s daughter”). Other pieces reveal writers she admires, such as George Orwell (“Booklover’s corner”) and Italo Calvino (“One of the strings and their supports remain”). In all, though, the protagonists confront a challenge, a change, a decision, or they create worlds that suit themselves. As you’d probably expect given the form, we don’t always know the outcome. Meyer leaves clues, of course, and sometimes we can be confident we know what will happen, but other times those clues simply tease us with possibilities.

The collection starts with a bang, almost literally. In “The day before the wedding” the bride discovers something new about “her love”. He is out duck-shooting, and

Still her love had the gun trained on her, and she stood, and even when he lowered it and his expression revealed play, a joke, she knew she’d seen his true face.

I don’t think this spoils the story, because the conclusion which follows is one of those teasers I mentioned – unsettling, but for whom? Meyer’s language here is tight and spare, and uncompromising. I loved it, and knew I’d made the right decision to buy this book.

Subtitled “Bad things happen. Or they might. At any moment”, the collection is dark, overall. But, there are (somewhat) lighter pieces. In “Glitch”, Daniella finds a solution to her problem of hearing the devil, “the hiss of Beelzebub”, in the machines around her, and in “Brand new” the narrator finds comfort in the company of a brain-damaged elderly man. This story reminded me of my reading group’s joke that when we are old and have lost our memories we will just read the same book every month. Much cheaper, and just as much fun – if we choose the right book!

I can’t possibly cover all the pieces, so will look at one section, In/Out, which comprises six pieces. In “Meds” the narrator needs to decide whether he will join his partner and friends in their calm, medicated (or, as he sees it, capitulated) lives, while in “One of the crew” a woman fakes being a writers’ festival official. There’s an interesting paradox here: in the first story our protagonist is invited “in” but doesn’t want to accept, while in the second the woman wants to be “in” so pretends to be so. In two of the other pieces, the in/out dichotomy is more literal. There’s the aforementioned toilet prisoner in “Thirteen tiles”, and there’s “Foreign bodies”, in which Kate, a prisoner in gaol, starts to swallow increasingly bigger objects. The conclusion to this story, though, pushes literalism to the limit. Indeed, in many of the stories, Meyer plays with the tension between literalism or realism and the absurd or fanciful. There’s often a fine line …

I haven’t talked much about the writing, because the stories themselves are so powerful. However, part of the power of the stories comes from the writing, of course. It’s perhaps intrinsic to the form, but the writing is direct, spare. It can also be elliptical at times. Meyer expects her readers to work, but that too is the nature of short fiction. And there is tight pointed use of imagery, as in the opening paragraph of “We’ve always been close”:

My sister and I stretched a tarp over the mud to make a slide into the dam, just like when we were kids. It was full from the recent storm. Magpies called. From the dam, I splashed gritty brown water up onto the slide to give my sister something to slip on. She squealed and laughed and the sound dirtied my chest with guilt. She gripped my shoulders after landing, as she was afraid of the bottom. We’ve always been close.

On the surface a happy scene, but we know from the language that something is not quite right …

Captives is an appropriate title for the collection because, whether they know it or not, most if not all the protagonists are captives in one way or another – some physically, some psychologically or intellectually, some both. Some escape, while others remain trapped (at least to the best of our knowledge). Deborah, a psychologist in “Spark”, is trying to escape:

She had wanted to agitate the structure, to act out, in ways a psychologist should not.

Fortunately for us, though, Meyer is a writer of fiction and it is perfectly acceptable for her “to agitate the structure”. This she has done with confidence and flair. Not every story grabbed me equally, but I think that’s more to do with me and my experience. I wouldn’t be surprised if different readers found different stories worked best for them. So, my recommendation is that if you haven’t read flash fiction, this would be an excellent place to start.

Angela Meyer
Captives
Design: Sandy Cull
Carlton South: Inkerman and Blunt, 2014
ISBN: 9780987540126

Dymphna Cusack, Jungfrau (Review)

May 8, 2015March 2, 2018 / Whispering Gums / 25 Comments

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Are there some historical periods that particularly fascinate you? There are for me, and one of those is that between the two world wars. It was a complex time encompassing both economic hardship and great social change. A time when many of those Victorian era constraints were being lifted and women, in particular, were starting to enjoy an independence and freedom they hadn’t had before the First World War. Dymphna Cusack’s first novel, Jungfrau, is set in this period and deals with this very subject.

I have written about Cusack before, when I reviewed A window in the dark, her memoir about her time as a teacher. Because of its relevance to this novel, I’ll reiterate a couple of the points I made in that review. Cusack, I wrote, had a finely honed moral and social conscience, and was acutely aware of injustice. She was convinced of the “wickedness of our economic system”, and abhorred the power those with money had over others. She was consequently outspoken on social and economic justice issues, and was particularly critical of the treatment of “that much-maligned creature, the woman teacher”. A window in the dark was written forty years after Jungfrau, and is a memoir, but you can see the genesis of her values and ideas in this, her first novel.

Jungfrau is set in Sydney over a few months in the 1930s. It concerns three young women in their mid to late twenties: the rational, realistic and religious Eve, the emotional, dreamy and vulnerable Thea, and the modern, pragmatic, confident Marc. Eve and Thea have been good friends for several years. Marc is Thea’s friend, but Eve and the free-thinking Marc do not like or understand each other. At the novel’s opening, Eve and Thea are talking about Thea’s interest in a man twice her age, a married university professor. Eve cautions Thea about the risks, but Thea is ready “to take life—use it—now, instead of letting it use me”. Eve gently retorts that “If you leave yourself open to the world, it will rush in on you”.

Indeed, Eve, who has seen first hand in her maternity ward the results of poor, single women taking life, suggests that experiencing life “is much safer in books”. She says to Thea:

When you talk about getting in touch with reality and finding out what life is, all you really mean is following your instincts in spite of the consequence … Only, if you take your friend Marc’s prattling literally, I’d advise you to learn more about physiology than you know at this moment. You can’t safely combine what your modern friends rather euphemistically call ‘experience’ with a degree of ignorance that’s almost mid-Victorian. You’ll need to be practical if you’re going to be a realist. Marc’s evidently both.

The novel, as you’ve probably guessed by now if the title hadn’t given it away, explores what happens when Thea does not heed Eve’s advice and lets this relationship develop. I’d call this a coming-of-age novel but, having been written by Cusack, its themes are as much social as psychological. What did it mean for a woman at that time to have an affair with a married man, and what were her options with the – hmm – consequences?

The trouble is that while obstetrician Eve and social worker Marc are daily faced with the grim realities of life, teacher Thea evades them. Here’s Eve on her ward rounds,

All this rot about reality, this frenzied escape into abstractions, had curiously little to do with life as she knew it. … Here was reality. Tortured bodies, tired minds, birth and death. Nothing vague about this; no escaping from facts; no sheltering behind fancies.

Acerbic Marc has her own view on woman’s lot:

Women are cursed, all right. If you wither on the virgin stem you go all pathological; if you go off the deep end you get some foul disease; and if you marry and have dozens of young you die of exhaustion.

By contrast, here is Thea discussing the real Jungfrau with her professor:

“Yes,” he said almost inaudibly, “white, proud and untouched. But they’ve built a funicular almost to the top of it now, and the tourists swarm all over it like flies.”

“Poor thing! I don’t mind climbers and mountaineers; but it must hate the tourists soiling it—”

“That is usually the fate of the proud and the untouched,” he said, digging his stick in the turf, and she recoiled as though struck, her hands flung out in a gesture of defence.

Oh dear, we readers think – and so would Eve and Marc if they’d heard this conversation. Their lot, though, is to love Thea and to watch in dismay as she takes life to an edge that she is not fit to handle.

The critical thing about this book is that Cusack doesn’t judge these three women for their choices. We might find Marc a more sympathetic, more appealing personality, of the three, but Cusack is even-handed. She understands human psychology and empathises with women. Her ire is focused more on society’s expectations and rules than on any one woman’s decision or behaviour. I described this novel earlier in my review as a coming-of-age novel, but it could equally be called a novel of ideas. In it Cusack exposes “the reckless squandering of human possibilities”, of lives “anaesthetised by half-baked education, political platitudes and doles”. Economic inequities, abortion, women’s independence, and the meaning of freedom are her targets.

I read this book as part of my long-term plan to read classic Australian literature – and I enjoyed it immensely. While the social milieu is very different from now – thank heavens – the emotional truths transcend the particulars of time and place. The language did feel a little overblown at times. It has that DH Lawrence sort of emotional intensity that can sometimes be a little too melodramatic, or declamatory, for my 21st century ears. And yet, paradoxically, one of the novel’s real pleasures came from its descriptions of Sydney. Cusack catches the landscape – the plants, the light, the water – beautifully (but I’ll save sharing a couple of those for a Delicious Descriptions post).

I imagine this was a confronting novel at the time of publication, but I hope it got people thinking, as Cusack surely intended. Cusack, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Miles Franklin, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, to name the best known from that era, were fierce and intelligent writers. We are lucky to have them.

Dymphna Cusack
Jungfrau
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012 (Orig. ed. 1936)
ISBN: 9781743431450 (ebook)

Note: I do need to have a little whinge. There were several errors/typos in my kindle edition, which is disappointing and did spoil the read a little.

Aminatta Forna, The hired man (Review)

April 29, 2015February 28, 2017 / Whispering Gums / 11 Comments

Early in Aminatta Forna’s The hired man, the narrator Duro is told by his old, ex-best friend Krešimir, “People have moved on, Duro. Maybe you should too”. At this point we are not sure exactly what they have moved on from but we guess it might have something to do with war – and as the story progresses we discover we are right.

The hired man is Forna’s third novel, but my first to read. All of them, together with her memoir The devil that danced on water, deal with the prelude and aftermath of war. In The hired man it’s the Croatian War of Independence which occurred in the early 1990s. Forna, though, never names the war, and while there is some description of war-time action, she doesn’t provide any real historic details about who, what or where.

The novel is set in the fictional town of Gost, and commences in 2007 with Duro, our first person narrator, telling us that “at the time of writing I am forty-six years old”. Later we realise he is writing for a future reader, after he dies. He writes

… I have to tell this story and I must tell it to somebody, so it may as well be you, come to sort through my belongings.

The trapdoor is opened …

So, what is the story he has to tell – and why is he suddenly compelled to tell it now? Well, towards the end of the novel he says this:

Laura arrived in Gost and opened a trapdoor. Beneath the trapdoor was an infinite tunnel and that tunnel led to the past.

You don’t know who Laura is, though, do you, so it’s time I introduced the plot. The novel spans Duro’s life from his childhood to his mid-forties. He tells of his family, and his boyhood friends, particularly the aforementioned Krešimir and his younger sister Anka, with whom Duro fell in love. He tells how his relationship with Krešimir crumbled as Krešimir’s true, cruel, nature became apparent, and why he left Gost for a few years, returning just before the war started. And he tells us about the “chaos” that ensued during the war, “when men turned to hunting each other”. I don’t want to give too much away here, but let’s just say that by the time the war starts his relationship with Anka had moved, necessarily, from that of lover to good friend.

We jump then sixteen years to 2007 – when Duro is living alone and friendless – though the novel is not told in this linear way. It’s told more organically as the changes resulting from the opening of the “trapdoor” stimulate memories and bring the past back to Duro. This trapdoor is opened because Krešimir sells the “blue” house, the home he’d shared with Anka and their parents, to Laura and her husband who plan to renovate it, sell it, and move on. Duro, we discover, is a handyman, and he becomes Laura’s “hired man” for this renovation, and in the process becomes the family’s friend.

There is an underlying theme here of the British moving into Europe, oblivious of history and inherent dangers:

The way the English saw it, the past was always better. But in this country our love of the past is a great deal less, unless it is a very distant past indeed, the kind nobody alive can remember, a past transformed into a song or a poem. We tolerate the present, but what we love is the future, which is about as far away from the past as it is possible to be.

These English do not understand, for example, that the “fields that used to be ploughed … are now full of wild flowers because nobody dares to walk in them in case they put their foot on a mine and are blown to pieces.”

“I imagine myself with the body of a bird, a raven. Outstretched wings and neck, rigid beak and shining eye, I swoop over the ravine and hover over the town.”

So, here is Duro, standing “guard over the past” like a predatory bird. And here is Laura, reminding him of Anka who, though we don’t know why, is no longer in Gost. And here is “the chill of unfinished business”. The stage is set … but here I’ll leave the plot.

What is beautiful about this novel is that, despite its depiction of brutality and betrayal, and despite a sense of menace, it is restrained – and it’s restrained because Forna’s focus is not violence and revenge, though there are elements of these in the novel. Her interest is how people live with each other after war, and particularly after Civil War when traitors, collaborators, opportunists and victims, depending on your point of view of course, must all live together. The novel made me think of Olivera Simić’s Surviving peace which I reviewed last year. It’s a memoir, and Simić does not still live in her Serbian home, but she makes very clear that surviving a war, particularly ethnically-driven civil war, is just the beginning.

What is also beautiful about this novel is Forna’s writing – her use of imagery, symbolism, irony and parallels to convey her meaning. Birds and colours have multiple connotations, some positive, natural, others menacing. The “ravine” on the edge of town bears witness to beauty and horror. Hunting suggests violence and predation, but is also a source of sustenance and defence. The title, itself, “the hired man”, has both benign and malignant meaning …

As does the idea of masculinity, “with its undercurrent of aggression”. For Duro, it encompasses loyalty, protectiveness, and reliability alongside strength and control, while for men like Krešimir and Fabjan, the town bully, it means power and competitiveness, and is attended by a sense of menace.

Nothing, in other words, is simple in Forna’s world, and the language conveys this subtly but emphatically.

‘Well this is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. You don’t notice it any more, but you don’t know how lucky you are.’

Laura, new to the town, is oblivious to the irony of her utterance, and so are we as the novel starts – but, we soon learn differently. It is not a pretty town but by the end some rapprochement, uneasy though it still may be, has been achieved. This is a moving but realistic book about just how difficult it is to survive peace.

Aminatta Forna
The hired man
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013
ISBN (Kindle ed): 9781408818770

Jane Rawson, A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (Review)

April 21, 2015August 30, 2015 / Whispering Gums / 37 Comments

The weirdest thing happened when I put down Jane Rawson’s debut novel, A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists: I started imagining things! This is weird because I’m not a particularly imaginative or fanciful person, so it must have been this book that did it. Let me explain …

First though, I need to say that I’ve been keen to read this book for some time. It started with the cover. I tend not to focus a lot on covers but some do grab me. This one, with its chequerboard of maps, is both eye-catching and intriguing. Then there’s the title. As a librarian/archivist, I’m drawn to organisation and lists but don’t mind a little anarchy every now and then. Is that what’s going on here, I wondered? And finally, there’s its MUBA award win last year. So it came down to a case of three strikes and you’re out – or, more accurately, in – and I bought the book. Well, what a read, because …

A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists is a very unusual book. It traverses two places and times: Melbourne in 2030 and a sort-of imaginary San Francisco in 1997. It is, partly at least, a cli-fi* book. 2030 Melbourne is a bleak place – it’s very hot, clean water is harder to come by and more expensive than beer, soap is a luxury, and UN peacekeepers are in town. The rich survive as they do, but poverty is common, and many people live on the streets or in humpies. Bodies are regularly found in the streets. It’s a world you expect in dystopian novels, except that despite appearances, this novel is not completely dystopian.

Indeed, the novel has been described as a “genre-buster”. It is, for example, also a time-travel story, which brings me to the plot. Our protagonist is 33-year-old Caddy, who is living rough, having lost her husband and home in a heatwave-induced fire a couple of years before the novel opens. Like many in this devastated city, she survives on odd jobs – working in a bar, doing courier work, and selling her body. She has friends – an indigenous man and wheeler-dealer Ray, and bar-owner Peira. She also likes to write, and this is where San Francisco comes in because the story she is writing is set in 1997 San Francisco. It’s about two orphans-cum-childhood friends, 17-year-old Simon and 14-year old Sarah. They spend their time following a quest started by their parents in which they have to stand at least once in every 25-foot square of the USA, in order to see the whole country. With me?

At first this story of Caddy’s is told in italics within the main story, but in Part Two the narrative shifts and whole chapters are told in Sarah’s voice. Meanwhile, Caddy, with Ray who has bought some used and apparently magical maps, time-travels from Melbourne to San Francisco where they meet her creations. Still with me? Hope so, because it gets tricksier. This “travel” involves passing through a sort of netherworld called The GAP, where we find the Office of Unmade Lists, and other sections including Tupperware Lids, Partially Used Pens, and Suspended Imaginums. Suspended Ims, as we in the know call it, is where the things that people imagine but “don’t come true” end up. I think that’s where my brief imaginings have gone!

This sounds more complex than it is – or, should I say, it’s conceptually complex but not hard to follow. Indeed it’s a hoot to read, because for all the grim, grittiness of this climate-damaged world, there’s warmth, love and humour – and a delightful sense of the absurd. I loved Rawson’s exploration of the two universes, the “real” and the “imagined”, and the way she has them meet. She messes with our minds! It made me think of Marion Halligan’s comment about her main character in Fog garden. Halligan writes: ‘She isn’t me. She’s a character in fiction. And like all such characters she makes her way through the real world which her author invents for her. She tells the truth as she sees it, but may not always be right.’ Halligan’s purpose is different, but the concerns, those to do with where imagination ends and reality begins, are similar.

That said, I’m not 100% sure of what Rawson’s purpose is, but I think she’s playing with her readers, with the idea of writing fiction, and with the meaning of fiction itself. Take, for example, her character Simon responding to Caddy telling him he’s her creation:

‘You come in here and tell us we’re imaginary, and now you’re saying you’re not even a very good writer! What do you mean? Like we’re all two-dimensional and shit, not fleshed out at all? Unrealistic? Is that what you’re saying? I don’t feel unrealistic. I feel pretty pissed off actually, which is kind of a realistic response to someone telling you you’re a shithouse imaginary character.’

Caddy looked at Ray like he might somehow get her out of this. He still had his head in his hands.

‘Sorry’, she said. ‘You’re heaps more complicated than what I imagined, if that helps.’

I love the sly, tongue-in-cheek allusion here to literary theory, to EM Forster’s notion of flat and round characters. This is just one of several references in the book to the things readers and critics talk about.

A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists is a fun, absurd, clever book in which Rawson somehow marries her very real concerns about the future of our earth with a belief that human compassion and ingenuity will survive, and wraps it up in an exploration of the complex relationship of imagination to reality. Imagination, Rawson seems to be saying, is the real stuff of life.

So, my recommendation is: Don’t worry about the book making complete sense. Suspend your disbelief, enjoy the ride, and realise that here is a lively intelligence you don’t want to miss.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also enjoyed the book.

Jane Rawson
A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2013
318pp
ISBN: 9781921924439

* Jane Rawson was, and maybe still is, Editor of Energy & Environment at The Conversation

Biff Ward, In my mother’s hands (Review)

April 2, 2015February 28, 2017 / Whispering Gums / 30 Comments

Courtesy Allen & Unwin

“Profoundly moving”, “a kind book”, and “harrowing” could be blurb words for Biff Ward’s memoir, In my mother’s hands, but they’re not. They are some of the words used by members of my reading group when we discussed the book this week with – lucky us – the author in attendance.

It’s quite coincidental that I happened to be reading this book right when Annabel Smith asked me to name my favourite memoir for her Friday Faves, which resulted in my follow-up post on memoirs this Monday. However, I’m glad it happened this way, because it’s given me an excuse to continue the discussion a little more. There’s so much to say about Ward’s book, but for this post I’m going to explore just two aspects: the reading experience, and its literary qualities.

On reading In my mother’s hands

So, let’s start with the story. Biff Ward is the daughter of one of Australia’s most influential historians of the mid-twentieth century, Russel Ward. At our meeting, she told us that people expected her to write his biography, but, she said, that was never her interest. Instead, she found herself writing about her mother. In doing this, though, she did in fact write about her father – but in a memoir, not a biography, because this book is about her experience of living in a family with an increasingly delusional, paranoid mother. What that experience was like – and how she eventually unravels the full story – makes compelling reading.

But, there’s more to reading this book than the story, strong as it is. There is how Ward tells it. She evokes the times beautifully – particularly the 1950s and 1960s – showing, in particular, the devastating result of the lack of understanding or awareness of mental illness. And she does this while inhabiting the child she was at the time, that is, she manages to tell those years from her child’s eye view, interspersing this voice with her experienced adult one. Take, for example, her description of when, as a teenager, she’s home when her mother is visited by “top girl” or “the queen bee of the university wives”. Ward believed this visit showed her mother was being talked about publicly, and she felt “shame and embarrassment” as “Top Girl bustled down the hall and out the front door”. That word “bustled” perfectly captures the idea of a “busybody”. Later, though, she sees it differently:

Now I can see that the network of women, connected through the university where their husbands worked, might have cared about my mother. Or might have wanted to care but were not sure how to go about it.

Also contributing to my reading enjoyment was how seamlessly Ward incorporated her research into the story to substantiate her feelings and ideas. She quotes from letters her father wrote to his parents and sister. (How wonderful that these were kept, says this librarian-archivist!) She talks of speaking to friends and family members later about their memories. She shares her research into official records. She refers to her father’s autobiography. And so on. None of this is tedious, but is woven naturally, logically, into the narrative.

Then there’s Ward’s honesty in confronting difficult truths, and her ability and willingness to reflect on her experiences and comprehend their meaning or implications. Here she is, for example, on her response to her father’s overwhelming (and surely unreasonable) request for her to look after her mother for a year:

I didn’t know that somewhere inside me was a plan. My motivation was buried way too deep for me to connect that first touch of an erect penis with the request Dad had made of me.

You can probably guess the outcome.

It would be easy to read this book with anger – to be angry particularly with Russel Ward for his failings – but that would, I think, miss the point. Ward is not angry – and indeed her father did a lot right too. Her tone is more one of sadness, than of anger. She appreciates the culture of the times and she knows that people are flawed. I loved this – the generosity with which she relates what was clearly a traumatic upbringing.

What makes a memoir literary?

This might sound like a snooty question, but literary non-fiction is a recognised genre, and memoirs are making literary award lists. So, what makes one memoir stand out over another in terms of literary qualities? Critic Barbara Lounsberry captures my perspective: “Verifiable subject matter and exhaustive research guarantee the nonfiction side of literary nonfiction; the narrative form and structure disclose the writer’s artistry; and finally, its polished language reveals that the goal all along has been literature.” (from Wikipedia)

So, narrative form, structure and “polished” language. While I wouldn’t call In my mother’s hands particularly innovative or challenging in terms of style and technique, I would call it skilled and polished. Ward’s use of her child’s voice interspersed with her more reflective adult one effectively draws the reader in. Her use of foreshadowing – such as “I missed seeing that I had been provided with a rehearsal of what was to come” and “It’s hard, looking back, to pick the precise moment when a turning point arrives, when your life is about to change” – picks up on a structural device common in fiction. (It also neatly demonstrates the memoirist’s ability to think back).

The jewel in the crown, though, is her language. Ward’s writing is generally direct and to the point, but she has a great eye for metaphor and produces some gorgeous images that can encompass multiple ideas. I loved this description of her mother’s increasing (often self-imposed) alienation within the family:

Even when there weren’t visitors, we hardly spoke to her. As her delusions grew, as she had almost no everyday conversation, we cut off from her, twig by twig. Our family tree grew its gnarled limbs around us and through us, in the imperceptible way trees do, so that we didn’t notice how weirdly shaped we all were.

This obviously distorts the traditional family tree motif but also, I think, subtly suggests the tree of (non) life?

And then there’s the title itself. In my mother’s hands references so many ideas – the fact that children are (rather defencelessly) in their parents’ hands; the idea that as a nurse her mother had had caring, nurturing hands; her mother’s grotesque habit of gouging and hurting her hands (invoking Lady Macbeth, and the mystery at the heart of the book); and her mother’s terrifying attempt to strangle Ward in her bed when she was 12 years old. Literal, symbolic, metaphoric. They’re all there in those four words.

The chapter titles are similarly evocative, usually brief and apt, such as Brittle, Knife, The Cobweb, Running. Language is, in fact, a significant issue in the book because in those awful days when mental illness was not understood, Ward, her father and younger brother had no language to explain to each other, let alone to outsiders, what they were experiencing. Sometimes Ward would lie, she said, because “when there are not adequate words, fiction will suffice”; other times they would use “shorthand” to obscure the reality.

I could write more about the language in this book, because I found it perfectly tuned to the story and to conveying the feelings within, but I’ll leave it here.

At the end of our meeting, I mentioned to Ward her longlisting for the Stella Prize. She smiled a little wryly, and said, in relation to missing out on the shortlist, that she felt in good company being “rejected with Helen Garner and Sonya Hartnett”! She sure is – and on the basis of this book, I’d say she well deserves being mentioned in the same breath as those writers.

Biff Ward
In my mother’s hands
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014
268pp.
ISBN: 9781743319116

Jane Austen, Emma Vol 2 (continuing thoughts)

March 22, 2015March 30, 2015 / Whispering Gums / 4 Comments

The friendship plot – that theme I discussed in my post on Volume 1 of Emma – thickens in Volume 2. Several “new” friendships are presented, as Austen continues to deepen our understanding of what constitutes community via the little village of Highbury. For Jane Austen, I think we are going to realise, friendship is both a deeply personal thing as well as something that underpins society.

In Volume 2, three people are introduced to Highbury – Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, about whom we’d heard heard in Volume 1, and Mrs Elton, the new bride of Highbury’s minister, Mr Elton. Through them, and the previously introduced characters, we are introduced to several facets of “friendship”. Positive examples include:

Colonel Campbell’s generous act of friendship to Jane Fairfax’s late father by taking Jane into his household and educating her along with his daughter;
Mr Knightley’s neighbourly style of friendship in providing food from his estate to the Bates and transport for them to a wintry evening dinner-dance;
Emma’s similarly neighbourly friendship in providing food to the Bates;
Miss Campbell’s open-hearted, trusting acceptance of her fiancé’s preference for her friend Jane Fairfax’s piano playing over her own; and even
Mr Woodhouse’s entertaining some of the older women in the town.

Jane Austen – protofeminist?

Just how “feminist” you see Jane Austen depends somewhat on your definition of feminism, but for me she demonstrates a clear recognition of the (economic) inequalities that affect women’s lives and of the (societal) factors that hold them back. She demonstrates this in Emma by presenting a heroine who is independently wealthy and who therefore has no economic need to marry. Emma recognises this and says early in the novel, in volume 1 in fact, that she won’t marry:

“I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry … without love, I am sure I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine. Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want: I believe few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house as I am of Hartfield; and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man’s eyes as I am in my father’s.”

Part of the trajectory in Emma is for her to learn that there are other reasons to marry besides those of money and consequence. By contrast, her foil/double, Jane Fairfax has no independent wealth. The most likely course of life for her is to be a governess, but it’s not a cheery thought:

“I did not mean, I was not thinking of the slave-trade,” replied Jane; “governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies…”

For Jane Fairfax, a good marriage would save her from what she sees as a pretty devastating fate.

Contrasting these two quite different situations is Mrs Elton. In Austen, as in most authors, you need to be aware of who is speaking when assessing what they say. Mrs Elton is a figure of ridicule in Emma, rather like Mr Collins in Pride and prejudice. She’s the upstart who “has a horror of upstarts”. Her idea of standing up for women involves counteracting Mr Weston’s statement that “delicate ladies have very extraordinary constitutions”. She says:

I always take the part of my own sex; I do indeed. I give you notice, you will find me a formidable antagonist on that point. I always stand up for women; and I assure you, if you knew how Selina feels with respect to sleeping at an inn, you would not wonder at Mrs. Churchill’s making incredible exertions to avoid it. Selina says it is quite horror to her; and I believe I have caught a little of her nicety. She always travels with her own sheets; an excellent precaution.

The satire here is multi-layered, but includes ridiculing Mrs Elton’s notion of standing up for women by asserting their focus on niceties!

More …

There’s a lot more I could discuss about this volume, such as its perfect plotting in which very little happens, or is said, that doesn’t move the plot forward, but that does it in such sly ways that we are barely aware it’s happening. However, I think I’ve made the main points here that particularly caught my attention during this re-read … so, onto volume 3 in April.

Jessica White, Entitlement (Review)

March 15, 2015November 22, 2018 / Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Entitlement is a powerful title for Australian author Jessica White’s second novel, but then White wanted to explore some powerful themes – though they are, unfortunately, somewhat belied by the rural romance/saga looking cover. The author bio at the front of the book tells us that White grew up on a property in northwest New South Wales and it becomes clear very early in the book that she knows whereof she speaks!

Of what does she speak, then, you are probably asking? Entitlement is set in contemporary times on a cattle property near a fictional place called Tumbin. The story starts with 29-year-old Cate McConville, now a practising GP, returning home because her parents wish to sell the property. She, with other family members, is a partner in the business, and all need to agree to the sale. But, Cate’s holding out – not because she loves farming and wants to return, but because her only sibling, her much-loved brother Eliot, had disappeared several years earlier and she wants him to have a home to return to. The farm – the land – also contains her memories of, and therefore her link to, him.

While the plot-line is established gradually, the first chapter sets the book’s tone and style. It tells us there’s tension between Cate and her parents; that memory is going to feature strongly in the telling; and that indigenous issues are likely to be part of the story. The book then progresses, introducing more and more characters over the next few chapters. Each chapter tends to be dedicated to one character, or a small group of characters, and usually involves flashbacks, as the character remembers something from, or reflects on, the past. White handles this well. There are many characters, but the present-flashback narrative style keeps them clear and in their place (if that makes sense). This style does risk becoming a little rigid, but White breaks it up every now and then with a chapter purely set in the present, or one that commences in the past.

Very early, as the characters are introduced, the themes start to become clear. The story is told within two main contexts – farming succession and indigenous connection to land. Over-riding all this is the notion of stolen and lost children. Local indigenous man, Mellor, has worked for a couple of decades for the McConvilles, as had his wife until she’d died of cancer. His extended family, particularly his two aunts, live with him on the edge of the property, and have experienced the stealing of their children. Cate’s father, Blake, is racist and dismissive of indigenous people and their rights, while her mother Leonora, by contrast, is on friendly relations with Mellor and his family.

Now, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll have read some of my discussions of non-indigenous people writing about indigenous issues. It’s uneasy ground to walk on, but for White, with her farming background, the issues of stolen children and indigenous land rights are things she’s likely to have lived. I’m not surprised she wanted to explore it. Indeed, she wrote a comment on this blog nearly two years ago, saying that this novel:

raises the question of who, in contemporary Australia, is entitled to the land? I also tried to show, through the break up of a white family that was fighting over land, how Indigenous people have been affected by their dispossession. I don’t think it’s a question that can ever be answered, though I did aim for a (probably utopian) resolution at the end of the book.

She couldn’t do this, really, without creating indigenous characters and that means of course that she had to present (her understanding of) their attitudes. I think she’s handled this sensitively, but of course I’m non-indigenous. I did wonder if she’d stepped onto shakier ground when she drew comparisons between Cate’s mother’s loss with that of the stolen generation mothers. However, in her acknowledgements White thanks “Michael Aird and Sarah Martin for their conversations and resources on Indigenous culture and history”. She has not, it seems, walked this ground lightly. And she doesn’t leave it at country and stolen generation issues, but touches on other injustices, such as indigenous health and housing, and racist violence.

White is on safe ground when she discusses the land and farm from Cate’s point of view. I thoroughly enjoyed her descriptions of the landscape and farm life – little scenes of her father and uncle undertaking farm tasks, of Mellor tending to fences, or of Cate running through the land, for example. Here’s a description of an Australia Day picnic:

Flies and mosquitoes plucked at their skin. The scents of the bush were drawn out by the heat and bundled together like a sweet, loosely woven shawl. Kangaroos bounded away in alarm as they made their way up the hill. Crickets whirred, rising from the long grass, and cockatoos screeched.

Her characters, too, are real; they are imperfect, believable human beings. Cate’s inflexibility, her selfish unwillingness to understand the health issues forcing the need to sell, made me cross but the pain, the loss, driving her behaviour is believable. Her parents are presented as having a loving relationship, but not without its tensions and conflicts. And so on.

Entitlement is an engrossing and serious, though not a grim read. As White admits, she does try for a positive resolution, which could almost do the seriousness of the issues a disservice. However, the story is not completely neatly tidied up, presumably because she realised that her question – how do we handle conflicting relationships to this land so many of us call home – does not have a simple answer. It’s therefore important that both indigenous and non-indigenous writers put stories and ideas out there for us to think about. It can only help the discussion, don’t you think?

Jessica White
Entitlement
Melbourne: Viking, 2012
289pp.
ISBN: 9780670075935

(Signed copy won in a blog giveaway)

Stella Prize 2015 Shortlist

March 13, 2015March 15, 2015 / Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

I rarely write longlist, shortlist and winner posts, but for the Stella Prize I don’t mind making an exception. Last month, I posted on the longlist, and yesterday, the shortlist was announced.

Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil (Hachette): short story collection that I really must read, a debut book
Emily Bitto’s The Strays (Affirm Press): another debut book, this a novel that’s been garnering excellent reviews, and I’m keen to read this.
Christine Kenneally’s The Invisible History of the Human Race (Black Inc): the only non-fiction in the list, about her research into DNA and humanity’s origins.
Sofie Laguna’s The Eye of the Sheep (Allen & Unwin): second adult novel by an award-winning playwright and writer for children, about an individual young boy who may be, though it’s apparently not stated, on the autism spectrum.
Joan London’s The Golden Age (Random House): the only shortlisted book by a well-established novelist. I love her writing so need to read this. All these “must reads” make me wonder what I have been reading!
Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light (UQP): another debut book, and an intriguing collection of short, long and interrelated stories. I reviewed it last month.

It’s great seeing so many smaller publishers in the mix. Reminds us again that we should not overlook them when we are seeking quality books! This Stella Prize link will give you all the gen on the shortlist, including excerpts.

I was disappointed not to see Helen Garner’s The house of grief shortlisted, but not having read all the books, I’m in no position to pass judgement.

PS Apologies to those who saw it for the early incomplete posting of this post. I’m on the road and, against my better judgement, stupidly tried to use WordPress’s app. I like most things about WordPress, but detest the iPad app, so I tediously finished this in the browser on the iPad. Not a fun thing to do.

Lynette Washington (ed), Breaking beauty (Review)

March 11, 2015September 5, 2016 / Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

Courtesy: MidnightSun

As I’ve said before, I usually don’t read book introductions until the end. In the case of Breaking beauty, an anthology of short stories edited by Lynette Washington, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had read it first because Brian Castro’s intro gave nothing away while at the same time saying a lot. He starts by noting that the short story is making a come-back, “and wondering why it ever went away, perhaps because we were too imbued with the great whatever novel in the Borealis of canons or by the glossy fits of fashionable shades of grey”. Love the bite in that!

It’s a great introduction. It’s erudite, pithy, and often tongue-in-cheek. Castro says, reading my mind, “what good is an intro-duction if you haven’t been in-ducted, or even read the stories”. What indeed? And yet, his “intro-duction” manages to craftily incorporate the stories and their contexts, the ideas that drive them, without over-explaining or giving anything away. It is one of the most delicious introductions I’ve read in a very long time – unlike my introduction, so let’s move on!

Breaking beauty is a collection of stories by graduates of the University of Adelaide’s Creative Writing course. As Castro hints through a reference to Rousseau and as Washington states more directly, the stories explore the “complementary forces” and “dualities” encompassed by the idea of beauty, the notion that “there is no beauty without ugliness”. There are 28 stories, of which 22 are by women. They range in length from three or four pages to ten or so. Five of the stories have been published elsewhere, including Melanie Kinsman’s heart-rending “A paper woman” which was published in the Margaret River Press’s The trouble with flying (my review).

As you would expect, the stories look at beauty from all sorts of angles, physical, emotional, spiritual, even intellectual, but they rarely tell it straight. In Matthew Gabriel’s “To my son”, for example, an ugly father presents, to his apparently similarly ugly son, his solution for “neutralising physical appearance” which, he believes, will “not only rid the world of ugly’s plague but also its inextricable and toxic inverse”. Jo Lennan’s “A real looker” explores an extra-marital passion that resulted in a daughter who struggles to understand the adult world of passion, and a father transfers this passion to a boat called Marilyn. Sean Williams’ “The beholders” is a speculative fiction piece which cleverly twists the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

In other stories, beauty is more abstract . The second story, Corrie Hosking’s “A well strained fence”, is told first person by a young man for whom beauty is neatness and order. It’s a nicely sustained story that epitomises what a complicated notion or concept beauty is. It also neatly provides me with an opportunity to talk about voice. Just over half the stories are told first person, and two are told second person. One of these, Mary Lynn Mather’s mother-and-child story, “Whatever happened to the fairy-tale ending”, uses second person effectively to convey an emotion that is almost beyond bearing.

But of course voice is about more than which “person” is used; it’s about the persona used to tell the story, that is, about how the narrator of that story sounds to us. In short story collections – particularly anthologies – we usually find a great variety in voice (and, related to this, tone). Lynette Washington, in “Lia and Amos”, uses a matter-of-fact, reporter-like third person voice to tell a story with an unusual twist. The voice keeps us on our toes, divulging only what is going on in the moment, with no backstory or additional information, so that the end, when it comes, surprises and yet seems natural at the same time, because nothing has been sensationalised. By contrast, Rosemary Jackson’s narrator, Athina in “Athina and the sixty-nine calorie burn”, exudes the distressing (in this case), naive confidence of the young while the reader knows exactly what’s going on.

Several stories, including some already mentioned, tackle contemporary society’s (over-)emphasis on beauty. Others look at a broader notion of aesthetics from some interesting angles. Rebekah Clarkson uses an argument about aesthetics – a finial, in fact – in “A simple matter of aesthetics” to expose male arrogance, while in Katherine Arguile’s “Wabi-Sabi” a man’s commitment to aesthetics puts his family’s health, indeed survival, at risk. Meanwhile, Stefan Laszczuk’s narrator in “The window winder” finds beauty in a very gruesome place.

There’s no way, of course, that I can mention all twenty-eight stories. The ones I’ve mentioned here aren’t the only ones I enjoyed. There are moving – and often painful – stories about love, about sons and mothers, nieces and aunts, husbands and wives, mothers and children. There are stories about ageing, and the losses that usually attend, in one form or another. And there’s Lilian Rose’s cheeky story about a very unusual “Ladies Tea Party”.

Castro writes in his introduction of “the fleeting and the fleeing before one’s eyes, as a good short story is wont to do, not allowing its meaning to fully emerge because that would kill it, but letting it flit mothlike into memory”. This definition of good short stories could also define “true” beauty – as I’m sure the writers in this diverse and enjoyable collection would agree.

Lynette Washington (ed)
Breaking Beauty
Rundle Mall: MidnightSun Publishing, 2014
228pp
ISBN: 978192522700

(Review copy supplied by Midnight Sun)

Jane Austen, Emma Vol 1 (Review, or perhaps just thoughts)

March 6, 2015April 10, 2025 / Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Every now and then my local Jane Austen group does a slow read of one of Austen’s novels. With 2015 being the 200th anniversary of the publication of Emma, we decided it was the logical choice for our next slow read. I love this activity because what happens when I re-read an Austen novel – particularly when I take part in a slow read – is that I “see” something new in the novel, something new to me that is, because it’s hard to think that anyone could come up with something totally new about Austen.

So, last time I re-read Emma, the thing that stood out for me was how beautifully plotted it is. There isn’t a word or action that doesn’t imply or lead to something telling, even if we don’t know it at the time. This read, with the plotting firmly in my brain, I’m finding that the aspect is flying a little under the radar. Instead, I’m noticing how often the word “friend” or notion of “friendship” is appearing. The novel, in fact, starts with Emma losing her ex-governess-then-companion Miss Taylor to marriage. They’ll remain friends but … so Emma, alone in a big house with her fussy, demanding, albeit gentle father, develops a friendship with Harriet, “the natural daughter of Somebody … [who] had no visible friends but what had been acquired at Highbury”.

This, though, is not the only friendship involving Emma to appear in Volume 1. Mr John Knightley, Emma’s brother-in-law, advises Emma “as a friend” that Mr Elton’s attentions are more than friendly, but Emma believes that she and Mr Elton “are very good friends, and nothing more”. Emma and her long-standing friend and neighbour, Mr Knightley, decide to “be friends again” after one of their quarrels. Meanwhile, we, like Mr Knightley, wonder whether Emma’s friendship is helpful to Harriet or not.

In the third paragraph of the novel, Austen suggests what she sees friendship to entail:

Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr. Woodhouse’s family, less as a governess than as a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma. Between them it was more the intimacy of sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office of governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long passed away, they had been living together as friend and friend, very mutually attached, and Emma doing just what she liked; esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgment, but directed chiefly by her own.

I’m talking about the words “and Emma doing just what she liked”. Miss Taylor/Mrs Weston, as Mr Knightley says to her later, had been a good companion to Emma but had also been better at submitting her will to Emma than in giving Emma the “complete education” he thinks she needed. Mr Knightley’s view of friendship encompasses providing honest, wise advice. He’s therefore severely angry with Emma when she encourages Harriet not to accept Robert Martin’s proposal:

You have been no friend to Harriet Smith, Emma.

There are other friendships in the novel that don’t directly involve Emma, some with and between neighbours, and some within families. Her father, Mr Woodhouse, may be “no companion” for Emma, but we learn in Chapter 3 that he “liked very much to have his friends come and see him”. One of those visiting friends is Miss Bates who feels fortunate to be “surrounded with blessings in such an excellent mother and so many good neighbours and friends”. And one of these “good neighbours and friends” is Mr Knightley who supplies the low-income Bates’ women with apples and other produce from his estate. Emma’s friend Harriet, herself, has friends who invite her to visit, the Martin family who manage a farm on Mr Knightley’s estate. See what’s happening? An intricate set-up of all sorts of friendships. Austen must be on about something.

Emma more than any of Austen’s six novels paints a fairly in-depth picture of a diverse community. There are the Westons, Mrs and Miss Bates, and their niece Jane Fairfax, Mr Knightley and his estate, Mr Elton the minister and his wife, Mrs Goddard and other members of her school, the new-money Coles, and various other members of the community who appear briefly, including the poor and gypsies. This is a more complete “Country Village” than we find in the other novels, even though her focus here is still her favourite, that is, “3 or 4 families” (Letter to her niece, Anna, 9 September 1814). It’s not surprising, then, that with such a wide and diverse group that friendship would feature more significantly. I look forward to watching and thinking about how she develops this concept over the next two volumes. Watch this space …

Yes, I think she works around that sort of area, though I'm not sure in what capacity. Well remembered. It's…

I remember rethinking dying with dignity in hospice after a comment from the lady at the Books Are My Favorite…

Good question Melanie, and there's probably no simple answer other than budget bottom line pressure and the arts always being…

Fair point Melanie, though while I think it would be a really sad thing to live with, I think I…

I can’t click “like” on that!

Whispering Gums

Books, reading and more … with an Australian focus … written on Ngunnawal Country

Women writers