Women writers

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Vol. 2)

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Mansfield Park book covers
Mansfield Park book covers

As I wrote last month, my Jane Austen group is doing a slow read of Mansfield Park this year, meaning we are reading and discussing the novel, one volume at a time, over three months. This month was Volume 2 (that is, chapters 19 to 31). It starts with the return of the patriarch, Sir Thomas Bertram, from his plantation in Antigua, and ends with Fanny rejecting Henry Crawford’s proposal.

Last month, I said that the thing that struck me most in volume 1 was the selfishness, or self-centredness, of most of the characters. I wondered whether Austen was writing a commentary on the selfishness/self-centredness of the well-to-do, and how this results in poor behaviour, carelessness of the needs of others, and for some, in immorality (however we define that). Having now read volume 2, I’m still on this path – together with a couple of other, somewhat related ideas, education, which I also mentioned last month, and parenting.

But first, the selfishness and self-centredness continues. In this volume, Maria marries and she and Julia leave Mansfield Park, leaving Fanny the only young woman at the Park. Mary Crawford, over in the parsonage, no longer has a young female friend to entertain her, so her sister Mrs Grant thinks Fanny would suffice:

Mrs. Grant, really eager to get any change for her sister, could, by the easiest self-deceit, persuade herself that she was doing the kindest thing by Fanny, and giving her the most important opportunities of improvement in pressing her frequent calls. 

Here is one of the reasons I love Austen. She knows exactly how we justify our actions to ourselves.

Anyhow, as a result, Fanny spends more time with Mary, as a favour to others, resulting in, Austen writes,

an intimacy resulting principally from Miss Crawford’s desire of something new, and which had little reality in Fanny’s feelings.

Examples like this pepper the volume. Lady Bertram doesn’t want Fanny to accept a dinner invitation because it would affect her “evening’s comfort”. After all, as Austen writes, “Lady Bertram never thought of being useful to anybody”. Late in the volume, Lady Bertram rises to the occasion, or thinks she does. She sends her maid to help Fanny dress for her first ball, and says so during the ball when Fanny’s appearance is complimented. “Chapman helped her to dress. I sent Chapman to her.” Yes, she did, but only after she was dressed and too late to help Fanny who was already dressed! Austen adds:

Not but that she was really pleased to have Fanny admired; but she was so much more struck with her own kindness in sending Chapman to her, that she could not get it out of her head.

Mrs Grant, Mary and Lady Bertram aren’t the only selfish, self-centred people in this volume. There’s the egregious Henry Crawford who had played, in volume 1, with the feelings of Maria and Julia, and then leaves Mansfield, in volume 2, with nary a word to either of them:

Henry Crawford was gone, gone from the house, and within two hours afterwards from the parish; and so ended all the hopes his selfish vanity had raised in Maria and Julia Bertram.

That’s not the end of Henry, though, because he’s soon back, telling his sister Mary, “my plan is to make Fanny Price in love with me”. In my Jane Austen group, we discussed that as his frivolous flirtation moved to something more serious – as he started to truly see, we believe, Fanny’s value – he gives no thought to whether Fanny will love him. That’s a given! He’s a catch!

There’s more I could say on this theme – I haven’t even mentioned Mrs Norris – but there are other ideas to talk about. I started to see in volume 2 that Mansfield Park is also about parenting, and, relating to this, I’d argue that in this volume we see the beginning of the education of Sir Thomas.

However, Sir Thomas is a controversial character in my group. Some detest him, rather like Mr Yates who had never seen a father so “unintelligibly moral, so infamously tyrannical” as Sir Thomas. But, along with some others, I see Sir Thomas differently.  Sure, he’s formal, but he loves his children – and he has no support in that wife of his. When he realises how silly Maria’s fiancé is, he wants to give her an out. Unfortunately, Maria wants to escape home and its restraints, so doesn’t take it. Sir Thomas is – admittedly – relieved because it suits his wish “to secure a marriage which would bring him such an addition of respectability and influence”. An example of new money, he’s a product of his times, and a “good” marriage can only help! However, as the volume progresses, Sir Thomas looks out for Fanny, wanting to give her opportunities, despite Mrs Norris’ attempts to keep puttng Fanny down.

For me, a recurring theme in Austen’s novels, in fact, is parenting. Lady Bertram is completely hands-off, letting Mrs Norris (as I mentioned in volume 1) have too big a hand in her daughters’ upbringing, to their detriment. Sir Thomas, on the other hand, is strict and – well, let’s talk about how it all plays out in volume 3. Here, though, he is kind to Fanny and wants well for her.

I have more to say on this, but I’ll leave it here as there are two ideas I’d like to share from my group’s discussion.

One of our members talked about the Australian critic John Wiltshire’s discussion of the disempowerment of women in his book Jane Austen and the body. He argues that caring for servants and the working class is a traditional role for genteel but otherwise disempowered woman, but that “this benevolence has a Janus face” because it replicates the inferior-superior social relationships that characterise the wider society. Mrs Norris, Wiltshire argues, “punishes others for her own dependency and frustration, whilst being able to hide this from herself in the guise of generosity to the recipients and loyal service to the system”.

Similarly, all at Mansfield Park have, through their adoption of poor Fanny Price “basked in the pleasure of benevolence”. But this has let Fanny become Mrs Norris’ victim. Both Fanny and Mrs Norris, says Wiltshire, are outsiders, “fringe-dwellers”; both are single, defenceless females who are “not part of the family except by courtesy. The one lives in the small White House, on the edge of the estate, the other in the little white attic at the top of the house”. Wiltshire argues that Fanny becomes the scapegoat upon whom Mrs Norris can “exercise her frustrations and baffled energies”. By scolding and punishing Fanny, she can “appease her own sense of functionless dependency and reaffirm the strictness of the social hierarchy which gives meaning to her life”. An interesting idea which I plan to think more about. It doesn’t excuse Mrs Norris, but it might explain her!

The other idea I want to share came from a young American visitor to our meeting. While she had read Austen and other classic authors, she said that her main reading, currently, is romance and general fiction. So, as she was reading Mansfield Park, she looked for tropes common to the romance genre. And, she found two significant ones, which could cement Austen’s reputation as the mother of the romance genre! The first trope is the idea of friends (or, here, cousins) becoming lovers, and the other is the romantic heroine’s belief that she’s “not like other girls”. She’s not as pretty, not as outgoing, and so on, as her rivals. Fanny makes this sort of observation in a discussion with Edmund about how she likes hearing Sir Thomas talk about the West Indies. She says she is “graver than other people” and concludes:

… but then I am unlike other people, I dare say.

I loved this insight from a first-time reader of the novel.

So much more to say … but there will be more opportunities to talk Austen, I dare say! Meanwhile, thoughts?

Rachel Matthews, Never look desperate (#BookReview)

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One of the most appealing things about Rachel Matthews’ third novel, Never look desperate, is that it features some decent men. In this #metoo era, which differs little from what came before, there’s plenty of fiction which shows men in less than stellar light. And that’s fair enough. One of the reasons I read fiction is to expand my understanding of the issues I care about. I can feel along with the so-called sad girl stories, and applaud the angry feminist ones. However, most men I know, like most women I know, are decent human beings trying to live good, fulfilled lives. And this, essentially, is the subject matter of Matthews’ novel.

Never look desperate follows three main characters, in alternating, third-person chapters. These characters are 49-year-old Bernard, 54-year-old Minh, and Bernard’s recently widowed 70-year-old mother Goldie. It is set in Melbourne, immediately post-pandemic. People are starting to get out and about again, but the pandemic’s shadow lingers in the background. Bernard and Minh are single, lonely, and seeking connection.

Bernard, a photographer who works at Officeworks, dearly misses his father Marvin, who had died 12 months ago. He also wears a locket encasing some of his dead-ex-wife’s ashes around his neck. He had loved his wife, and the fact that they were divorced when she died, does not lessen his grief. With both gone, he feels that from now, “the world would keep taking pieces of him”, but he’s surviving – just. The last time he’d had sex, on a Tinder date, “it was all over in one minute and 10 seconds – the same time it took him to microwave porridge”.

Vietnamese-born Minh, who came to Australia by boat when she was seven, works at the Kino cinema complex. She has never married, though has had her share of boyfriends. She loves her mother, but rarely sees her because her evangelical step-father had kicked her out long ago. We first meet her as she wakes, gasping, from “night terrors”, and we soon learn that she carries trauma from the loss of her father on that boat from Vietnam and from the racism she experienced as the only Vietnamese kid at school.

Goldie is more complicated. She’s “alternative”, and uncompromising. She is implicated in her husband’s death, though this is not a legal issue in the novel, because she had slowly replaced his blood pressure tablets with alternative medicines. She has a new lover, but she’s prickly – and grief and ageing are not making her any easier to be with. However, Franz is hanging in there. As she does with the other characters, Matthews nails her with sentences like this:

Goldie didn’t really have friends. Her old workmates from a community centre in Collingwood, found her difficult to work with, but we were grateful when she wrestled with management for better conditions.

She is the most difficult character for readers to identify with, but she has her own baggage, including a tough upbringing, during which her mother would lock her in a dark laundry, aka “the Thinking Room”.

“the world was different now” (Goldie)

So, we have three people who are all grieving or have suffered losses in their lives. Bernard and Minh meet early on via the dating app Tinder, and through the rest of the novel there’s a rom-com type tension regarding whether they will overcome their anxieties and get together. The novel’s other main tension concerns whether there will be a rapprochement between Goldie and Bernard, whose upbringing had been difficult with such an inflexible, “alternative” mother, and who believes that she does not grieve his beloved father. We though know better. (Marvin, whom we only know by hearsay, is one of the book’s joys.)

Now this might all sound ho-hum, but it’s definitely not, for a few reasons. One is the humour. Matthews captures the place and time, and her characters, with light satire that preserves their humanity while letting us laugh at the things they and we do in these strange times of ours. She hones in on some of the absurdities and pretensions of our times, without condemning. After all, who knows who will have the last laugh! That said, the IKEA and cruise-ship scenes are priceless.

Another reason is the characterisation. These characters are real. We know them, and, even if we are not exactly like them, we have surely suffered similar sadnesses and insecurities. This week, for example, we lunched with a recently widowed friend, and as I greeted her with a hug, she said “oh, a lovely hug”. One of the points Matthews makes so eloquently in this novel is the longing “to be touched” in those left alone – especially during the pandemic. So, there’s genuine pathos here, too, as we watch our characters struggle, hard, to beat back their justifiable fears and reconnect.

Related to the characterisation is the setting. Melburnians will love all the grounding references to places, products and businesses that carry signals for those who know, but are self-explanatory enough for those who don’t. The novel is also peppered with pop-culture references, particularly to music but also to film and TV shows, which will be more universal for the generations involved.

Then there is the quiet wisdom. Bernard’s dad had told him once that “a sad day is only a day”. This is not to minimise intense grief, of course, but it puts into perspective the little ups and downs that we can let get on top of us if we don’t take care. Matthews shows the various kindnesses people meet through life, often in unexpected places, and also that online-friendships, like Minh has with Suzy in New York, are real and sustainable.

Goldie recognises early in the novel that “the world was different now. She just had to find her way”. By novel’s end, our characters are finding their way. The future isn’t guaranteed, but they are on their way with a little more connection in their lives. What did E.M. Forster say in Howard’s End? “Only connect”. Yet again, we see his wisdom – and Matthews has given it to us in a funny, warm-hearted novel that is a real pleasure to read.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed this novel.

Rachel Matthews
Never look desperate
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2023
297pp.
ISBN: 9780645565393

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge, via Scott Eathorne, Quikmark Media)

Marjorie Barnard, The lottery (#Review, #1937 Club)

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This will probably be my only review for the 1937 Year Club but I am thrilled to do it, because it is by Marjorie Barnard, an author whom I have mentioned many times, but have not yet managed to review here. My post is on a short story from her collection, The persimmon tree and other stories, which is one of the very few short story collections I’ve read more than once. It is so good. And don’t just take it from me. Carmel Bird mentions it in her bibliomemoir, Telltale, calling it “extraordinarily powerful”.

I wasn’t sure, in fact, what I was going to read for this week. I certainly hadn’t considered this collection because it was first published in 1943 but, rummaging around Trove, I discovered a story by Marjorie Barnard in The Bulletin of 6 January 1937. The page was titled “Of a lottery winner: First Prize” but I recognised it immediately, and let out an internal whoop. Here was my chance.

“The lottery”, as it is titled in the collection, has been anthologised, including in The Penguin best Australian short stories (1991), though the titular story, “The persimmon tree” is, I believe, the most commonly anthologised from the collection.

Who was Marjorie Barnard?

Marjorie Barnard (1897-1987) was an Australian novelist and short story writer, critic, historian and librarian. She wrote five collaborative novels with Flora Eldershaw, under the pseudonym, M. Barnard Eldershaw. Their first novel, A house is built, was published in 1929, having jointly won, with Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo, The Bulletin prize in 1928. Their last, the futuristic Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow was censored, and published in an expurgated edition as Tomorrow and tomorrow in 1947. Barnard also wrote works of literary criticism, and is credited with writing the first assessment of Patrick White (in Meanjin in 1956) and the first biography of Miles Franklin. (Jill Roe writes of the biography in the ADB, saying that “written with misgivings and before the release of Franklin’s voluminous papers, it exhibited characteristic virtues, with insight and style making up for ambivalence and inevitable error.”)

Barnard, along with Eldershaw, and other Sydney-based writers, like Frank Dalby Davison, was deeply concerned about the social and economic upheavals of the 1930s. These three, known as “the triumvirate”, held literary soirees which were attended by like-minded writers including Xavier Herbert and Miles Franklin. They were active in promoting writer’s rights (through the Fellowship of Australian Writers), and opposed censorship. She was a pacifist, and was apparently named in those political witch hunts of the 1950s, making her cautious about what she admitted to in terms of political affiliations. She was one of many writers who corresponded with, and often asked advice of, Nettie Palmer. She was a significant force.

In 1983, she was awarded the Patrick White Award, as was also her admirer Carmel Bird, years later. Hers was a long, and active life – far too long for me to cover here – and unfortunately, I don’t think anyone has done a biography of her. She is more than a worthy subject.

“The lottery”

What is so “extraordinarily powerful” about The persimmon tree and other stories is the quietly controlled but clear-eyed way Barnard interrogates human experience, in general, and women’s experience, in particular. Many of the stories have a strong feminist undercurrent, and “The lottery” is one of these. What makes it remarkable is that it is told third person through the perspective of the husband, which sets us up to align with him – perhaps.

The story is set in suburban Sydney. It starts with the husband, Ted Bilborough, having just boarded the ferry on his way home from work. His co-passengers tell him – show him in the paper, in fact – that his wife had won the lottery, “Mrs. Grace Bilborough, 52 Cuthbert-street.’… First prize, £5OOO, Last Hope Syndicate.” The thing is, Ted didn’t know. We then follow him on his way home as he goes through various emotions – and as he does so, we glean a picture of who he is and the sort of life his wife has led. A disconnect builds between how he – the perfect unreliable narrator – sees that life and the way we do.

At first, we are told that “everyone likes Ted”. He’s decent, it seems, in that typical-for-the-time suburban-husband way, and because of this “he’d always expected in a trusting sort of way to be rewarded, but not through Grace”. It’s little qualifications like this – “but not through Grace” – that give the game away.

Alongside Ted’s thoughts are descriptions of the evening. They too contain nuances that suggest deeper truths are at play. “The sun was sinking into a bank of grey cloud, soft and formless as mist” and two pine-trees have a “soft arrested grace”, a bit like his Grace, we readers might think. A little further on, “Ted could see that the smooth water was really a pale, tawny gold with patches, roughened by the turning tide, of pale frosty blue”.

He wonders how she’d paid for the ticket, “He hadn’t noticed any difference in the housekeeping, and he prided himself he noticed everything”. He starts to rethink Grace, who’d been “a good wife”, while he’d been “a good husband”. Indeed, “theirs was a model home” but, “well, somehow he found it easier to be cheerful in other people’s homes than in his own”. Whose fault is this? Well, Grace’s of course!

She wasn’t cheery and easy-going. Something moody about her now. Moody. He’d worn better than Grace; anyone could see that, and yet it was he who had had the hard time. All she had to do was to stay at home and look after the house and the children. Nothing much in that. She always seemed to be working, but he couldn’t see what there was to do that could take her so long. 

And so it continues, Ted ruminating on the situation, on their marriage, and on how things might proceed – even starting to feel a bit magnanimous with this money that’s not his own – until he arrives home, and discovers exactly what Grace intends. It’s all in the name of the Syndicate!

The writing is delicious. Spare, and accessible, it nails women’s lives and the constrictions so many live under. There is little agency for many of her women, and Barnard draws this with such simple but knowing realism it takes your breathe away. I love many of the stories in the book – and this is as good as any of them.

* Read for the 1962 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon (Stuck in a Book) who, I discovered, has reviewed the collection.

Marjorie Barnard
“The lottery” (orig. pub. in The Bulletin, 6 January 1937)
in Marjorie Barnard, The persimmon tree and other stories
London: Virago Press, 1985 (first published by Clarendon in 1943)
pp. 97-105

Full text of The persimmon tree and other stories is available online at the Internet Archive

Thomas King, Borders (#Review)

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Thomas King’s “Borders” is the eleventh of fourteen stories in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. Like the previous story by Duane Niatum, it was also written in the 1990s.

Thomas King

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides some basic information about King, but I am supplementing that with information from Wikipedia which introduces him as an “American-born Canadian writer and broadcast presenter who most often writes about First Nations”. He was born in California in 1943, and “self-identifies as being of Cherokee, Greek, and German descent”. He has written novels, children’s books, and short stories. 

King studied in Californian schools and universities, before earning his PhD at the University of Utah. Between his various degrees, he worked in many jobs, including spending three years in New Zealand. He moved to Canada in 1980, where he worked as an academic until he retired.

In terms of his First Nations activity, our main interest here, Wikipedia says that “his 1986 PhD dissertation was on Native American studies, one of the earliest works to explore the oral storytelling tradition as literature”. He is committed to a wide range of issues concerning First Nations rights, prospects and culture, but most relevant to his story, “Borders”, is a statement Wikipedia shares from his book, The inconvenient Indian:

“The issue has always been land. It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people”.

“Borders”

According to Blaisdell, “Borders” appears in King’s 1993 short story collection, One good story, that one, which was a best-seller in Canada. “Borders” is one of those frequently anthologised stories, apparently, which doesn’t surprise me because it is a ripper. From what I’ve read about King’s writing, “Borders” feels typical of his approach, with its conversational style and use of humour to convey a serious message. King adapted this story into a teleplay for a CBC anthology drama series, and it has also, recently, been turned into a graphic novel for a younger readers.

The narrative comprises two storylines which are alternated with each other. It is told first person through the eyes of a young boy. One storyline concerns his much older sister, Laetitia, leaving home at the age of 17 to live in Salt Lake City, Utah, while the other tells of a trip he makes with his mother some five or so years later to visit this sister. The crux of the story, though, lies in what happens at the US-Canada border. Asked to give her “citizenship”, the mother insists “Blackfoot” and is denied entry. She refuses to offer anything else. As a result, she and her son get caught in a no-man’s land when, attempting to return to Canada, the same response to the same question results in her being refused entry there too. As one of the border officials tries to explain to her, “it’s a legal technicality, that’s all”.

Of course, that’s not all. Blackfoot people ranged across the great northwest of America in what is now known as America and Canada. For our narrator’s mother, that land is her “citizenship”, not that she is American or Canadian, and she will not back down.

From the opening, the mother is established as sensible, no-nonsense. She doesn’t want Laetitia to go to Utah, and she doesn’t give in easily, pointing out the negatives right until they leave her at the border. But Laetitia will go and her mother is eventually proud of her, because she hadn’t “gone floating after some man like a balloon on a string” nor had she “snuck out of the house … to chase rainbows down alleys. And she hadn’t been pregnant.”

We first meet the border, as mentioned above, when the mother and son (our narrator) take Laetitia there, from where she’ll get a bus to Salt Lake City. We see the border, but mother and son don’t attempt to cross it at this point. The writing, at this early point, captures the obstinacy and strength in both mother and daughter, alongside the love between them::

The wind had come up and it blew Laetitia’s hair across her face. Mum reached out and pulled the strands out of Laetitia’s eyes, and Laetitia let her.

“Laetitia let her”. Conveys so much, doesn’t it?

Anyhow, it’s a few years later, when mother and son set off to visit Laetitia that the fun starts. Our narrator sets it up beautifully, his “mom” packing food for the trip, while he plaintively hopes they can “stop at one of those restaurants too, right?” The pacing of the border conversations is perfect. We chuckle, but we see the point too. When the mother gives up trying to get into the USA, and tries to return to Canada, the humour continues. The Canadian border guard, after some friendly small talk, asks

“Where are you coming from?”
“Standoff”.
“Is that in Montana?”
“No.”
“Where are you going?”
“Standoff.”
The woman’s name was Carol and I don’t guess she was any older than Laetitia. “Wow, you both Canadians?”
“Blackfoot.”

And it starts again. It’s just delicious. “Mom” is polite, but also determined to make her point and not. give. in. There are no histrionics, there’s no violence. Just polite behaviour on all sides. (But, the description of the few days they spend in this limbo region, visiting the duty free shop and sleeping in the car, did remind me of that Kath and Kim episode when Kath and Kel spend their honeymoon at the airport.)

The language is direct and spare, told from a pre-teen’s point of view. He reports rather than comments, but in that reportage we see the truth – of the strength of the mother’s identity and determination to preserve it, and of her wisdom in dealing with her daughter.

Hachette’s promo for the graphic novel version describes it as resonating “with themes of identity, justice, and belonging”. It is exactly that. I imagine the graphic novel is a winner, because the short story sure is.

Thomas King
“Borders” (orig. pub. 1991)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 84-94
ISBN: 9780486490953

Shankari Chandran, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens (#BookReview)

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Shankari Chandran’s Miles Franklin Award winning novel, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens, was my reading group’s March book. Unfortunately I was out of town at the time of the meeting, but of course I wanted to read it – and I did, finally!

Like many people, I think, when I first saw the book, I assumed it was one of those cosy crime novels set in a nursing home or retirement village. The title and the pretty cover certainly suggest that. Only a fraction of this first impression was right, though. It is set in a nursing home, and crimes do occur, but it is not a crime novel and nor is it cosy. Instead, it is a serious, thoughtful and immersive novel that covers many issues confronting modern multicultural Australia, but that also has one main driving idea – which I’ll get to soon.

First, though, I want to clear up another assumption I had, which was that Chandran is a Sri Lankan-Australian writer. Wikipedia told me otherwise. It describes her as a British-Australian writer, who was born in London to Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka. She grew up in Canberra, and studied law at the University of New South Wales, before working as a human rights lawyer in London for a decade. She now lives in Sydney. Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens is her third novel. GoodReads describes her first novel, Song of the Sun God (2017), as being “about three generations of Australian Tamil women and the choices they make to survive Sri Lanka’s civil war“. I don’t know what that novel’s overarching idea is, but Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens also draws from its main characters’ experiences during that civil war, and I do have a view on what drives it, so let’s get to the novel.

It is set in the Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home in a fictional Sydney suburb called Westgrove, which situates it in Sydney’s multicultural western suburbs. The home is taken over in the early 1980s by Sri Lankan migrants, Cedric, Zakhir, and his wife Maya who wants to transform it to a place “where people will be valued”. The novel is told through multiple alternating voices, but starts with a Prologue which describes the home and which, if you read carefully, also prepares us for what’s to come:

Arabian jasmine climbs the wooden trellises staked in the garden beds. They are bold travellers, dark vines carrying white stars up the two-storey walls and around the windows of the residence. The plant grows obediently in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney, but its tropical ancestors are a wild breed, a vine that grows rampant in the villages of Sri Lanka, a home more familiar to many of the residents.

“Bold travellers”, “dark vines”, and “white stars” together with words like “obediently” and “wild” suggest a tension that we are going to explore.

We then start the narrative proper. It’s 2020, and Maya is now old and living as a resident in the home – albeit one who still holds many strings. Ruben is attending her, and we become aware that he bears fresh and old scars on his body. As the narrative progresses, we learn that the fresh scars come from recent racist attacks on him in the vicinity of the home, while the old scars relate to his experiences in Sri Lanka during the war. These scars more literally embody the tensions that pervade the novel.

From here, the rest of our narrators, all third person, are gradually introduced – Ruben; Maya’s daughter Anjali (Anji), who now manages the home; Anji’s old schoolfriend Nikki, who is the home’s geriatrician; and Nikki’s husband Gareth, who is white-Australian and a local councillor. There are other characters, including, most significantly, Anji’s also white-Australian husband, Nathan, and Maya’s aforementioned husband, Zakhir who disappeared, now presumed dead, ten years before the novel’s opening.

A strength of the novel is the way these characters inveigle their way into our hearts and minds so that we care about them, even the unappealing Gareth who, blinded by self-pity, rashly but unintentionally unleashes the dreadful drama that unfolds. It all hinges on racism. Chandran exposes the awful truth of how endemic racism is in Australian society and how, as a result, things can so quickly get out of hand. Interspersed with this present-day storyline are Maya’s, Ruben’s and Zakhir’s backstories, which explain why they had come to Australia – personally, in terms of what they had experienced during the civil war, and politically, in terms of their Tamil heritage and what that civil war was about.

I said at the beginning that the novel covers many issues which confront modern Australia, but that it also has one main driving idea. The issues include racism, colonialism, and multiculturalism; trauma, loss and grief; friendship, family and community; and the role played by the media, including social media, in fuelling emotions rather than encouraging reason. Underpinning these issues is the idea that drives the narrative – storytelling, and “the most powerful” of all stories, history. By framing her story within the Sri Lankan civil war and its battle over contested histories, Chandran makes her novel relevant to all cultures and societies where history has been used to oppress minorities resulting in violence, disempowerment and oppression, where distortion produces misinformation and confusion that can be manipulated to serve personal and political ends.

As grim and confronting as much of it is, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens is not without hope. Alongside Chandran’s exploration of the misuse of history is a commitment to the positive value of story. To this end Maya, from the beginning, interviews all residents of the home, capturing their lives and their dreams in order to properly know and care for them. This provides the book with another underlying tension, that between histories that erase and stories that “must not be erased”.

Does it all work? Chandran holds a lot of balls in the air. Early on I felt caught in an awkward amalgam of a contemporary novel about middle class angst (husband versus wife, daughter versus mother, and so on) and one exploring critical political ideas. Also, there’s constant moving backwards and forwards in place and time, the plot felt a little contrived in places, and the main themes are hammered home. However, Chandran balances the tone well, mixing light humour and satire with sadness and tragedy, and the characters are vividly and sympathetically drawn. The end result is a book that reveals our essence, and asks us to consider how we might live together in respectful community. Consequently, despite some unevenness, I greatly enjoyed the read.

Shankari Chandran
Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens
Ultimo: Ultimo Press, 2022
360pp.
ISBN: 9781761151408

Sigrid Nunez, The vulnerables (#BookReview)

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Sigrid Nunez has been on my radar for a long time. So, why now? I blame Jonathan (Me Fail? I Fly!), since it was his post on Nunez’s latest novel, The vulnerables, that captured my attention and encouraged me to make now her time. What an intriguing book! I have no idea whether it is like her other books, but it certainly captivated me.

What exactly is it, was my first question? A novel, says its subtitle. Its probably best described as autofiction, but it did feel at times like a book of essays. In fact, late in the novel, our narrator who, like Nunez herself, is a writer, refers to Virginia Woolf and her aspiration

to invent a new form. The essay-novel. Chapters of fiction alternating with nonfiction chapters, “a terrific affair” that would include, well, everything: “satire, comedy, poetry, narrative . . . And there are to be millions of ideas but no preaching—history, politics, feminism, art, literature—in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire hate & so on.”

On the next page, Nunez writes of Annie Ernaux who told her diary that “Tonight, I know I have to write ‘the story of a woman’ over time and History.” And so she did, some twenty years later. Ernaux’s book, says Nunez, is “a personal narrative spanning the period between 1941 … and what was then the present day, 2006: the autobiography of a woman that was also a kind of collective autobiography of her generation”.

Both of these encapsulate, to some degree, what Nunez is doing in The vulnerables. I like essays, so I enjoyed the “essay-novel” feel of this book, including its cheeky toying with where the boundaries are in what she is doing. And, I like personal narratives, not to mention the idea of a book being “a kind of collective autobiography” of a generation.

Nunez and I are of the same broad generation, although with some significant differences given she was born in New York in 1951 to a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. But, we are both women of a certain age and so were designated “vulnerable” at the start of the pandemic, which is where the novel opens – in the northern spring of 2020. It is here, early on in the pandemic, when she is “breaking the rules” by going out and about too much, that a young friend admonishes her, telling her, “You’re a vulnerable … And you need to act like one.”

There is so much to write about in this book – her exploration of our generation, and how we are seeing things in these last decades of our lives. The discussions our narrator has with her friends about gender, for example, mirror mine, as does her awareness of the changes that come with ageing. Her concern about what happened in American politics in 2016, and its ongoing implications, mirror that of many of us. As do her references to racial and social injustice, the climate crisis … and so on. All heightened, here, by the pandemic, whose uncertainties shape the book’s tone. But, I want to focus on one particular aspect, her exploration of writing.

Our narrator is, as I’ve said, of a certain age. She’s seen a lot of life, and a lot of writing, and here she ponders, though her lively stream-of-consciousness style, the role, meaning, and form of writing. She begins with the opening sentence – “It was an uncertain spring” – from Virginia Woolf’s The years. But, just a few paragraphs on we are told that one of the first rules of writing is to “never open a book with the weather”, albeit our narrator has “never understood why not”. Between the opening sentence and this statement, she admits that she remembers almost nothing about Woolf’s book, and then writes that:

Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described.

I felt right then and there that this was going to be a book for me. I rarely remember plots, but frequently remember how books made me feel, how I reacted to them.

Why are you making things up?

The vulnerables is deceptively simple. Our narrator takes us into her confidence about what is happening to her, and what she is thinking, as she moves through those early days of spring and into lockdown stage, when she accepts the task of pet-sitting a miniature macaw named Eureka in a classy New York apartment, only to find herself sharing this role with a disaffected, but opinionated Gen Z son of friends of the apartment owner. She calls him Vetch, a prickly metaphoric contrast to the old-lady flowers, like hydrangeas, that she had previously regaled us with.

Woven through this loose plot, are our narrator’s thoughts on a range of subjects. It has a relaxed stream-of-consciousness feel, but is, nonetheless, formally stylish, using subtle repetition, metaphor, sly humour and literary allusions, to develop her ideas. It’s also erudite with frequent digressions that explore anything from the relevance (or not) of Dickens and what, say, J.M. Coetzee thinks about writing, to a discussion of My octopus teacher and of how the events of 2016 stopped speculative fiction author William Gibson in his tracks. This might feel random at the start, but the links are there, and the ideas – the questions – slowly build. It’s the sort of book that invites you to go with the flow, and if you do, you will eventually not only see the pattern, but will also have been both entertained and inspired to think.

What most inspired me was Nunez’s exploration of what sort of writing is most relevant now. She shares the thoughts and experiences of many of the great writers of the last century or so – Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, J.M. Coetzee, to name a few. Early in the novel she quotes Coetzee who said that what comes in late life to many writers is “an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death.”

Then, late in the novel, in a wry comment about the pandemic and its distinction between “essential” and other workers, she notes that of writers, the only ones deemed essential were the journalists. She seems to agree, writing that “silence all the journalists and we’d have the end of human rights”. And, more pointedly, she responds to the question of whether there is still a place for fiction, with:

Growing consensus: The traditional novel has lost its place as the major genre of our time. It may not be dead yet, but it will not long abide. No matter how well done, it seems to lack urgency. No matter how imaginative, it seems to lack originality. While still a powerful means of portraying human character and human experience, somehow, more and more, fictional storytelling is coming across as beside the point. More and more writers are having difficulty quieting a voice that says, Why are you making things up? 

There is fear about “the growing use of story as a means to distort and obscure reality”. But, in her subversive way, Nunez explores both sides. She writes of her time with Vetch, saying

… even now I sometimes find myself talking to him. But when I do he is never ‘Vetch.’ Always his real name. His sweet name.
But how could any of this have really happened? I must be making it up.

Does it matter whether she’s making it up or not?

It is a little before this, that our narrator discusses Woolf’s thoughts about creating her new form, “the essay-novel”, and then teases out what we might want now (including a funny dig at reader’s guides for book clubs). It’s not simple or straightforward – indeed, it’s paradoxical, it’s “elegy and comedy” combined – but, in the end, what she has written is a novel. A strange, or different, almost essay-novel it may be, but there, I’d say, is your answer.

Sigrid Nunez
The vulnerables: A novel
London: Virago, 2023
250pp.
ISBN: 9780349018096

Monday musings on Australian literature: Vale Yasmine Gooneratne (1935-2024)

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It was through the Jane Austen Society of Australia’s (JASA) newsletter, Practicalities, that I learned of the death of Yasmine Gooneratne, a woman with whom I have crossed paths – one way or another – three times. She was an academic at Macquarie University, where I did my undergraduate degree; she wrote a novel, A change of skies (1991), which my reading group discussed back in 1996; and, she was the patron of JASA (and you know how I love Jane).

You can find quite a lot about Yasmine Gooneratne on the Internet, if you are interested, so I’m just going to focus on a few points that struck me, and I hope will interest you.

“No nonsense”

A site called The Modern Novel provides a useful potted biography, so I will start with that. It says that she was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1935 as Yasmine Bandaranaike, which means she was “a member of the well-to-do Ceylonese family which included Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the first woman prime minister in the world”. She studied at the University of Ceylon and Cambridge University, and in 1962, she married the doctor and environmentalist Dr Brendan Gooneratne (who died in 2021). They emigrated to Australia in 1972, where she lived for 35 years, according to Wikipedia, before returning to Sri Lanka. It was here, in her home country, that she died on 18 February this year.

AustLit provides more detail, which includes that she was founding Director of Macquarie University’s Post-Colonial Literatures and Language Research Centre from 1989-1993, and that she was awarded an AO (Order of Australia) in 1990 “for her distinguished contribution to Sri Lankan and Australian literature”. She won (or was listed for) a number of awards in Australia and elsewhere.

Gooneratne wrote over twenty books, including novels, some poetry and short story collections, as well as many works of non-fiction, but she seems little known outside academic circles (and JASA). Indeed, my initial – and general – search for this post brought up many references to her but no news items on her death. I had to search a little more specifically for that. This was interesting given that, on the several internet sites I found, she is described as widely known. DBpedia* calls her a “Sri Lankan poet, short story writer, university professor and essayist” and says that “she is recognised in Sri Lanka, Australia and throughout Europe and the U.S.A., due to her substantial creative and critical publications in the field of English and post-colonial literature”.

When I did find something about her death, I was delighted to find an obituary written by her daughter Devika Brendon. Initially posted in the Sunday Times on 18 February 2024, it has been shared on many other sites including the blog I am quoting from. It provides a loving and personal tribute to her mother, but one which I suspect also rings true to the person Gooneratne was. Devika Brendon tells us that:

Yasmine Gooneratne as a private individual left clear instructions about what she wished regarding her funeral. Her directives show a great deal about her character and her values. ‘No public notices. No public viewing. No public funeral. No memorial lectures. No fuss. No feathers. No posturing. No performativeness. No photographers. No selfies. No celebrities. No nonsense.’

I have mentioned Gooneratne a few times on this blog, including in a brief Monday Musings post I wrote in 2013 on Migrant literature. It had been a long time since I’d read A change of skies (and it’s even longer now), but I wrote that the novel was about “educated middle class migrants – like herself I presume – who work to find a balance between fitting into the new culture while at the same time preserving their Sri Lankan identity”. If you want a better flavour of this work, check out this post written in 2012 by someone called Elen on a blog called the southasiabookblog. Elen says that Gooneratne’s “portrayal of the immigrant experience is as funny and poignantly ironic as Jhumpa Lahiri’s work on a similar topic is earnest”. I wish I could remember it that well, but I read it when I was immersed in parenting and my memory is general. This description of Gooneratne’s tone, however, sounds like the writing of an Austen-lover!

I will end with another paragraph written by her daughter because, not only does it tell us a lot about Gooneratne but, if you are an Austen fan, you will love the final line:

She had great contempt for hypocrisy and cruelty. She had a great sense of humour and a lively sense of fun. As she was a person of moral integrity, the repulsive conduct of people who prey upon the vulnerable saddened her, especially as she grew older. While always choosing to believe the best in people, she found herself unable to accept the lies that are spun by opportunists and predators on a daily basis. Her good opinion, once lost, was lost forever.

* DBpedia describes itself as “a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured content from the information created in various Wikimedia projects”

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Vol. 1)

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Mansfield Park book covers
Mansfield Park book covers

This year my Jane Austen group is doing a slow read of Mansfield Park, which involves our reading and discussing the novel, one volume at a time, over three months. This month, we did Volume 1, which, for those of you with modern editions, encompasses chapters 1 to 18. It ends with the return of the patriarch, Sir Thomas Bertram, from his plantation in Antigua.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. Every time I re-read an Austen novel, I “see” something new, something new to me that is, because I can’t imagine there’s anything really new to discover in these much loved, much pored-over books. Sometimes my “new” thing pops up because in a slow read I see things I didn’t see before while I was focusing on plot, or character, or language, or … Other times, it might arise out of where I am in my life and what experiences have been added to my life since the previous read.

I’m not sure what is behind this read’s insights, but the thing that struck me most in the first volume this time is the selfishness, or self-centredness, of most of the characters. It’s so striking that I’m wondering whether Austen is writing a commentary on the selfishness/self-centredness of the well-to-do, and how this results in poor behaviour, carelessness of the needs of others, and for some, in immorality (however we define that.)

Mansfield Park has been analysed from so many angles. These include that it is about ordination (which Austen herself said was the subject she was going to write about); that it is a “condition of England” novel; and that it is about education. In the first chapter, in fact, Mrs Norris, the aunt we all love to hate, says

Give a girl an education, and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without farther expense to anybody.

The irony of course is that the sort of education that Mrs Norris supplies to the Bertram girls does not do them any favours. That’s not exactly where I’m going now, though we could argue that poor education – or poor upbringing – is behind much of the selfishness we see in the novel. So, maybe, I will end up talking about education by the end of the novel.

For now, however, I will share why I am thinking this way. For those of you who don’t know the plot, it centres around Fanny Price who, at the age of 10, is taken in by her wealthy relations, the Bertrams of Mansfield Park, to relieve her impoverished parents of one mouth to feed. Fanny Price is the Austen heroine people love to hate, but I’m not one of those haters. I believe that if you truly look at her character and her life, within the context of her situation and times, you will see a young girl whose good values and commonsense enable her to make the best of a very difficult situation.

That it is a difficult situation is made clear in several ways, including the fact that we are told in the opening chapter that she is to be treated as a second class citizen in the family. A “distinction” must be preserved; she is not her cousins’ equal. In the second chapter, we are told

Nobody meant to be unkind, but nobody put themselves out of their way to secure her comfort.

As the novel progresses, and the characters are introduced, they are, one by one, shown to be self-centred and/or selfish in one way or another. I won’t elucidate them all, but, for example:

  • Lady Bertram (her aunt) is, from the start, lazy and careless about the needs of others. Her own comfort, and that of her pug, supersedes all.
  • Mrs Norris (another aunt) is judgemental and parsimonious, ungenerous in mind and matter in every possible way.
  • Cousins Maria and Julia show no generosity to Fanny, unless it’s something that doesn’t materially affect them; they are “entirely deficient in … self–knowledge, generosity and humility”.
  • Cousin Tom “feels born only for expense and enjoyment”, and exudes “cheerful selfishness”.
  • Visiting neighbour, Henry Crawford, is “thoughtless and selfish from prosperity and bad example” and amuses himself by trifling with the feelings of Maria and Julia who provide “an amusement to his sated mind”.
  • Henry Crawford’s sister Mary is unapologetic about her selfishness, asking Fanny to forgive her, as “selfishness must always be forgiven…because there’s no hope of a cure”. This surely takes the cake!

And so it continues … the clergyman Dr Grant is an “indolent, selfish bon vivant”; and the self-important Mr Rushworth and the self-centred Mr Yates show no interest or awareness of the needs of others.

There are, of course, some redeeming characters. Cousin Edmund, in the first flush of love, can be thoughtless at times but it is his overall kindness that keeps Fanny going, and Mrs Grant also comes across as sensible and kind.

A couple of significant events occur in this volume – the visit to Mr Rushworth’s place at Sotherton, and preparations for staging a play, Lovers’ vows. These provide ample opportunity for the characters to parade their self-centredness. You can’t miss it. Fanny certainly doesn’t, as she watches those around her jockey for position in terms of their roles in the play:

Fanny looked on and listened, not unamused to observe the selfishness which, more or less disguised, seemed to govern them all, and wondering how it would end.

Fanny, however, also questions her own motives in refusing to take part in the play: “Was it not ill-nature, selfishness, and a fear of exposing herself?” But, in fact, she is the only one who is truly alert to the dangers within.

This “selfishness” theme is not, of course, the only issue worth discussing when thinking about Mansfield Park, as other members in my group made clear with their own discoveries. It is simply the one that stood out for me, during this re-read.

Thoughts anyone?

Carmel Bird and Jace Rogers, Arabella (#BookReview)

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If you have read Carmel Bird, and particularly if you have read her bibliomemoir Telltale (my review), you will know that she has a whimsical turn of mind. You will also know that she can turn her hand to most forms of writing, including children’s picture books. Her latest outing, Arabella, proves the point.

Arabella tells the story of two cats, and it starts like this:

Once in a cupboard
full of coats and old hats
lived the prettiest, sweetest
and littlest of cats.

The accompanying illustration shows the inside of a cupboard, with hats on a high shelf, coats hanging below them, and, spying from behind the boots at the bottom, a little cat. The illustrations are minimalist pen and black ink drawings with restrained, delightful touches of watercolour – just like you see on the cover.

On the next page we learn that this cat, who sleeps behind an umbrella, is named Miss Arabella. She is small, quiet and shy. Unfortunately, not only is she shy, she’s also a bit of a scaredy-cat – well, a frightened cat anyhow. She seems to be managing her life well until into it comes another cat named George. He’s confident, and he knows there’s another cat there – somewhere. How will Arabella cope? Will she cope? Well, I’m not going to tell you, but let’s just say that this is a perfect book to read to children who love animals, particularly those who love cats, and to children who are frightened or lonely, and who need a little encouragement to come out of their shell to explore the big wide world – especially with a friend.

Arabella is one of my favourite sorts of picture books, by which I mean, it’s a rhyming one. It flows along beautifully, with words that soothe and please, and with little shifts in rhyme and rhythm that alter the pace just when they ought, so that the reader is jolted out of that sing-song tone that is so easy to fall into with rhyming books. The story is charming, and the gentle, whimsical illustrations encourage engagement. The book has an old-world air but with a timelessness that speaks to now as much as to any time. It has, I believe, been successfully tested on Carmel Bird’s own grandchildren, to whom the book is dedicated.

But don’t take my word for it, see what you think. I’m sure you’ll be delighted, particularly if you have grandchildren.

About the creators:

If you read my blog regularly you will know Carmel Bird (my posts). Born in lutruwita/Tasmania, she has been a fixture on the Australian literary scene since the 1980s when her first novel, Cherry Ripe, was published. She has written over ten novels, multiple short story collections, and much more besides. In 2016, she was awarded the Patrick White Award.

You may not, however, have heard of Jace Rogers. He is an artist who lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, where Bird now resides. His Facebook Page told me more, and gave me a sense of why he would have worked well with Carmel Bird. His intro is “My work salutes the anti hero. Fragments of brain clutter drawn out, cut up and cemented in binder medium” and his email address is given as jaceartyfarty@gmail.com. Love it.

Carmel Bird (text) and Jace Rogers (illustrations)
Arabella
Castlemaine: Treasure Street Press, 2023
33pp.
ISBN: 9780646883601

(Review copy courtesy the author. This book is published by Carmel Bird’s own – new – publishing company, which might make it self-published, but then again, might not. The book is available in bookstores, like Readings, but also direct from the author: carmel@carmelbird.com, $25 plus $6 postage)

Karen Viggers, Sidelines (#BookReview)

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I don’t usually start a book review by relating its content to my own experience, but local author Karen Viggers’ latest novel Sidelines invites exactly this. Sidelines is about children’s sport and what happens when the competitiveness gets out of hand. It was largely inspired by Viggers’ own experience as the mother of sporty children, and by an ugly parental brawl at a children’s football match that happened during those years.

My children’s sport experience was blissfully different. Our son played cricket, and his coach’s last name was McPhun – I kid you not. He was the perfect children’s sport coach. His focus was on “phun” and teamwork. He encouraged those kids, was fair about opportunity, did not favour his own son, and we parents had the best time. I loved seeing the enthusiasm with which the kids played, and their resilience when they were out for a duck, despite having gone in to bat with dreams of sixes and high scores. You won’t be surprised, perhaps, to hear that our kids were not in the elite division, but this should not make any difference. Unfortunately, however, it probably does.

So, Sidelines. As Viggers explained at the meet-the-author event I attended – and as is obvious if you read it – her novel has a structure rather like Christos Tsiolkas’ The slap*. This means that the novel’s story or plot is progressed through a sequence of different, third person, points of view encompassing the parents and children involved in the sport. Sidelines is a little different though because in Tsiolkas’ book, the slap occurs in the first chapter and we then watch the fall-out from that action. Viggers’ novel commences with a prologue describing an ambulance arriving at a sports ground where a badly injured child is lying far from the goal-posts. “What the hell happened here?” We then flash back to nine months earlier and, through those sequential voices, we work our way towards what had happened and why.

“It’s not meant to be fun” (a football father)

The novel focuses on two families – the well-to-do Jonica, Ben, and their 13-year-old twins, Alex and Audrey; and the Greek-Australian working class family of Carmen, Ilya, and their daughter Katerina. Into this mix comes Griffin and his single-parent Dad, Lang. Griffin is a natural, and his appearance upsets the team’s sporting and interpersonal dynamics. The characters telling the story are Jonica, Carmen, Audrey, Katerina, Ben, and finally, Griffin. For each voice, there is a thematic word or phrase that provides insight into, and commentary on, that character.

The first voice, Jonica’s, initially made me feel I was reading one of those stories about a dysfunctional family. You know, the well-to-do family with the successful, professional, and controlling husband, the privileged children, and the wife and mother caught somewhere in the middle. And there is some of this aspect in the novel, because, as becomes clear, part of the story Viggers is telling is one of class. So, in Jonica’s story we see the tropes of her class. Everything is laid on in a material sense, but the two females, in particular, aren’t happy. Jonica, like her husband, is a lawyer, but she is frustrated about not working. Ben, you see, “likes having her at home”, and insists she is needed to look after the children. He will “support her” (and the family) while she supports the children. There’s an irony in this word, “support”, which is Jonica’s theme, because, as Viggers said during the author talk, there’s a fine line between “support” and “pressure”. Audrey certainly feels more pressure than support.

The next voice is that of the other mother, Carmen, whose daughter, Katerina, like Audrey, is trying out for a place in the boy’s team where, as Ben had told Jonica, girls will learn “speed and aggression”. While Jonica tries, unsuccessfully, to resist her husband’s pressure to push the children, Carmen is more like Ben. She wants her daughter to achieve where she had failed, and she will manipulate and kowtow as much as is necessary to ensure this happens. Her theme or motif is “goal poacher”, the one who “attempts to shoot goals from loose balls … and uses other non-traditional ways of scoring”. Perfect for the resourceful Carmen.

And so the novel progresses through to Audrey’s and Katerina’s voices, where we see the pressures that their parents don’t. These girls do want to play well, but they also want other things in their lives. They are teens, for heaven’s sake! And Viggers’ rendition of them convinced me.

The penultimate voice is Ben’s, and here, in particular, is where Viggers’ choice of a multi-voice structure shines, because, while he’s still unlikable, we also see his point of view. Ben is the alpha male, no doubt about it, but he loves his family and he’s not so tuned out that he doesn’t sense something is wrong with Audrey in time to take critical action. This is the value of reading, being able to see a situation from another point of view. We don’t have to agree with Ben – I’m sure few of us do – but we can see where he’s coming from and that he’s human. This awareness can be achieved with third person voices, of course, but Viggers has effectively used first person voice here to directly confront readers with her protagonists’ thoughts.

By the end of the novel I was impressed by the careful and sophisticated way in which Viggers had developed and explored her main idea, which is to encourage us to think about our attitudes to and behaviour around competitive children’s sport. She offers no easy solutions. This is not a didactic book. There are many points left open for readers to think about. Can you play for fun, for example, and what does that look like?

In the above-linked interview with Viggers, she said she has realised that she is an issues-based writer. This is exactly what I thought as I started reading Sidelines. On the surface, it departs from her previous, environment-themed novels but, in fact, like those novels, it takes an issue Viggers cares about and explores it through characters who are real on the page. I enjoyed the read, but more than that, I hope it gets read and talked about in places where it matters.

* Interestingly, another Tsiolkas book, Barracuda (my post), starts with elite children’s sport, but while class is also an element, it takes a long view of what happens when things don’t go to plan.

Karen Viggers
Sidelines
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2024
343pp.
ISBN: 9781761470714