On the literary road: Omeo, Omeo, wherefore art thou Omeo?

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The Omeo Plains near Benambra from Mount Blowhard

Omeo Plains (Released into Public Domain, by John O’Neill, via Wikipedia)

Ok, that’s a pretty weak beginning I know, but hands up if you’ve ever heard of Omeo in Victoria, Australia? I must say that I hadn’t until recently when I started planning our latest foray into Victoria. We decided to  travel to Melbourne via the Great Alpine Road, in Victoria’s High Country … and in that gorgeous region we found a very pretty little town called  Omeo.

And so, I checked my literary guide* and I discovered some interesting literary connections for the town. It was part of the big Gold Rush of the 1850s, and the area features in novels by Rolf Boldrewood and Henry Kingsley. I’m a bit embarrassed that I really hadn’t been aware of Kingsley until a year or so ago, but Omeo features in his best-known novel, The recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859), and in another of his novels The Hillyars and the Burtons (1865). This latter novel apparently incorporates a story inspired by the Omeo Disaster of 1854 in which a number of diggers rushed over the Great Dividing Range from Beechworth searching for gold. It was not successful, however, and some of the diggers did not survive their return trip.

Boldrewood is a better known writer, primarily for his novel, Robbery under arms. It is another novel of his, though, Nevermore (1892), that features this area, which he saw as wild and lawless. In this novel he recreates three real events that rather support his assessment – the murder of Cornelius Green, the Ned Kelly Gang cattle rustling, and the Tichborne Claimant affair. All of these had connections with Omeo. Cornelius Green was a gold-buyer who was hatchetted to death by two bushrangers in 1859. The Tichborne claimant, who made a fake claim on a fortune and a title in England, had worked around Omeo in the 1850s. It was a well-known case at the time in both England and Australia. And the Kellys, well, if you don’t know them, click the link to Wikipedia and all will be revealed!

By 1900 Omeo had become far more respectable and was recognised for the beauty that we saw on our visit. Poet Bill Wye wrote:

There’s a wild charm in the mountains that is not met elsewhere,
Free as the vagrant winds, and pure as snow
There are songs in fountains, bubbling in the hills up there,
That echo the name of ‘Omeo’…

Not great poetry perhaps, but you get the picture, as you do in the following which was included by one RH Croll in his 1928 book on bushwalking:

As I came over Livingstone
The day was like a flame,
But suddenly I saw below,
Far and far and far below,
The shining roofs of Omeo
And said its singing name.

Ah, Omeo, Omeo, methinks you deserve better poets than these!

*Peter Pierce (ed)
The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 (rev ed)
501pp.
ISBN: 0195536223

Michael Sala and truthful fictions

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Michael Sala The last thread bookcover

The last thread (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

Michael Sala doesn’t actually use the term “truthful fictions”. That was a character in Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the river. But he could have.

Yesterday I heard Sala interviewed on ABC Radio National‘s Life Matters about his debut novel The last thread, which I reviewed last week. Presenter Natasha Mitchell commenced by mentioning the transitions, secrets and traumas that characterise Michaelis/Michael’s life in the novel. She asked why he had chosen the fictional, rather than memoir, route. He responded that he had started writing his story in first person but got swamped by emotions, and then he read J.M. Coetzee’s autobiographical novel*. He realised, he said, that he could write about the child he used to be “as if he were someone else”. (I love hearing how writers – as I also reported in my Jessica Anderson post – learn from other writers.)

This is fair enough I think. There are those who like a “memoir”, as it were, to be a “memoir”, but in our post-postmodern world in which we know that truth is a slippery beast at best, what difference does it really make? How important is it to be able to say Michael Sala did this, felt that, experienced such-and-such versus, for example, how does a child navigate abuse and how does such a child translate those experiences into functional adulthood? How important are questions of fact against exploration of these emotional “truths”?

In other words do we need to know the “facts” to understand the truths? I’m thinking now of Kate Jennings. I’ve reviewed two of her books here, her autobiographical novel, Snake, and her autobiography of sorts, Trouble: Evolution of a radical. Snake is a novella that chronicles Girlie’s life in a complicated family. We know it mirrors much of Jennings’s “real” childhood but we can’t be sure what are the facts and what are scenes created to convey her emotional truths. Trouble, described as an “unconventional autobiography”, is a collection of Jennings’ writings – journalistic articles, poems and excerpts from novels – that have been put together in such a way as to convey something about her life. We may not be able to glean from these slippery books a lot of citable “facts” but both tell us a lot about who Jennings is, about where she came from and what she believes.

All this of course begs the more fundamental question of how factual memoir is anyhow? But that is something I’ll leave – for the time being anyhow. Meanwhile, there’s a scene in Sala’s autobiographical fiction in which his mother discusses his problematical father with her sister:

“He’s a wonderful man,” Elfje says. “We’ve become great friends. Oh, he makes me laugh!”
“That’s one side of him,” Mum says.
“Yes, yes, we all have versions of events, stories to tell.”
“Stories?” Mum says. “Is that what you think they are?”
(from The lost thread, by Michael Sala)

Therein lies the rub. Whatever we read, memoir or fiction, we surely must always be aware that it is “one side” we are getting. Could it be, says she provocatively, that something labelled fiction is a more honest recognition of this fact?

* Coetzee has written more than one work of autobiographical fiction but Sala wasn’t clear which he’d read. I’m assuming he at least read the first one titled Boyhood: Scenes from a provincial life.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Jessica Anderson

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Every now and then I feature a specific writer in my Monday Musings – and they’ve usually been women because they tend to be overlooked. Take Jessica Anderson (1916-2010), for example. Most keen AusLit readers will know her because her novel Tirra lirra by the river made quite a splash when it was published in 1978, but my sense is that her “fame” doesn’t go much past this.

She is, however, one of our great writers:

  • She won the Miles Franklin Award award, twice: Tirra lirra by the river in 1978, and The impersonators in 1980.
  • The impersonators also won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award in 1981.
  • Her book of short stories, Stories from the warm zone and Sydney stories, won The Age Book of the Year in 1987.
  • Tirra lirra by the river was included in Australian classics: 50 great writers and their celebrated works, by Jane Gleeson-White.
  • Tirra lirra by the river was also included in the admittedly eclectic, but international, The modern library: The 200 best novels in English since 1950, by Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín
  • She is taught in many university (and, I believe, high school) literature courses.
  • She’s a good example of a late bloomer, with her first novel, An ordinary lunacy, being published when she was 47.

An ordinary lunacy was, in fact, published in England, having been rejected by Australian publisher, Angus and Robertson. Gleeson-White quotes Anderson saying that she didn’t think Australian publishers in the 1960s would like her novel about “how a utilitarian society treats those with unserviceable gifts”. Ouch!

Of course, like most late bloomers, Anderson had been writing long before she was first published. It was probably the increased focus on women stemming from the second wave of feminism in the 1970s which resulted in authors like her getting their chance. There’s that fashion thing again, eh? But this doesn’t mean that she didn’t deserve it. Beatrice Davis, one of the Miles Franklin judges, said that Tirra lirra by the river “has an unpretentious elegance, an individual quality so different from the realistic documentary that still dominates the field in Australian novels”. Here is the opening sentence:

I arrive at the house wearing a suit – greyish, it doesn’t matter. It is wool because even in these sub-tropical places spring afternoons can be cold. I am wearing a plain felt hat with a brim, and my bi-focal spectacles with the chain attached. I am not wearing the gloves Fred gave me because I have left them behind in the car, but I don’t know that yet.

I love this opening, which introduces us to the narrator, Nora Porteous, late in her life, as she returns “home” after many decades away. It’s so precise, and yet with tantalising hints of uncertainty. Oh dear, as I pick it up, I feel I want to read it all over again and follow Nora as she reviews her life, and the decisions she made in search of “her place”, only to end up back where she started, thinking, processing and wondering.

Most of Anderson’s work was contemporary, but she did write one historical novel, The commandant (1975), which she calls her favourite. I reviewed it as part of Sydney University Press’s Australian Classics Library. Like Nora in Tirra lirra, the main character here, Frances, is not in her “place”. She’s with family, but her views, her aspirations, are different to those around her. She must navigate this family, this society, to develop her self.

According to Gleeson-White, Anderson greatly admired the novelist, Henry Green (recently featured by Stu at Winston’s Dad) for his “poetic brevity”. I think this brevity is partly what draws me to Anderson. Stories of women feeling at odds with their lot are not, after all, unusual, but it takes some skill to cover several decades in less than 150 pages, as Anderson does in Tirra lirra. Anderson was also, says Gleeson-White, inspired by Christina Stead for showing her “there was an Australian background I could use: the urban background of For love alone“. I’d love to understand this a little more … what was it about Stead’s urban background that differed from that of other Australian writers?

Near the end of Tirra Lirra, Nora says:

I find myself thinking that we were all great story-tellers at number six. Yes, all of us, meeting in passages or assembling in each other’s quarters or in the square, were busily collating, and presenting to ourselves and the other three, the truthful fictions of our lives.

“Truthful fictions”. An intriguing concept that we can read several ways … but that is for another day. In the meantime, I commend Jessica Anderson to those of you who haven’t read her. Meanwhile, I must read her One of the wattle birds which has been languishing on my TBR for far too long.

Note: This post is not a review for the Australian Women Writers 2012 challenge, but I plan this year to write a number of posts supporting the challenge’s promotion of Australian women writers … which is not a hard ask given my reading priorities!

Dorothy Porter, On passion (Review)

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Do you read “little” books? You know those small books that are carefully placed on bookstore sales counters where you are buying the book you really came for? I don’t often, but every now and then one catches my eye. Today’s review is of such a book from Melbourne University Press‘s Little books on big themes series. It’s by Dorothy Porter and is titled On passion. She finished it just before she died in December 2008. I think I could be justified in calling that poignant, don’t you?

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 Badge

Australian Women Writers Challenge (Design: Book’dout – Shelleyrae)

Dorothy Porter was (is, really) a well-regarded, successful Australian poet. I reviewed her last collection, The bee hut, a couple of years ago. It’s a wonderful collection full of the pains and joys of living. It is, you could say, a passionate book. One of the poems I quoted in that review is about the passion for writing, for finding the perfect way to express an idea:

and your pen slashes ahead
like a pain-hungry prince
hacking through
the bramble’s dragon teeth
to the heart’s most longed for
comatose, but ardently ready
princess.
(“Blackberries”)

So, writing, of course, was one of her passions but in this little essay Porter explores all sorts of meanings of the word (for her). She starts with her adolescent passions – her youthful religious faith which was replaced by her “dark gods, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix” whose “daemonic songs” were her “new hymns”.

From here she explores the various ways passion has been part of her life … woven always with poetry, hers and others, and music:

Music has been my draught of intoxication since the very moment I first heard the Beatles in early 1964 […] I have been a Beatles pop/rock music maniac ever since, and have written virtually all my poems to rock riffs and rhythm – the catchier, the darker, the louder, the gutsier the better.

She talks in one section of Dionysus and moderation, strange bedfellows, eh? She argues that Euripides best understood the Dionysian, by exploring “how best to respect and live with it”. She admits, though, that “moderation was not something I embraced with Delphic calm, but something I gutlessly and gracelessly caved into” because, for example, she and drugs did not mix!

Nature too features, snakes in particular. “Real and living snakes are sacred to me” she says and then explores Minoan snake worship versus “the debased and diabolical serpent-demon of the Judaeo-Christian Garden of Eden”. She talks of the Rainbow Serpent in Australian Aboriginal Dreaming but admits that, when she actually confronts a King Brown snake in the desert, her worship did not stop her getting “the shock of my life”. She also refers to DH Lawrence‘s poem “Snake”, which I fell in love with in my teens. Lawrence describes the visit of the snake  as “a sacred event”. Porter says she always forgets the ending, how Lawrence’s fear gets the better of him so that he scares the snake away. She remembers only the vision of the wild thing being watched (and appreciated) by the poet.

There are other passions, but I’d like to conclude on the one dear to the heart of readers. She writes

I wonder if some of the most deeply passionate experiences of my life have happened between the covers of a book.

Not only do I love the idea that books have such an effect on us, but I also like her qualification: “some”, she says! Life is, after all, important too!

She describes Wuthering Heights as “the most scorching novel in the English language”; says that “there is, paradoxically, much more convincing grown up sex in Jane Austen than in Emily Brontë“. Oh, yes! She talks of Sappho’s love songs; admires one of my favourite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, for “pushing language as hard as it will go into ecstasy – and despair”; and describes Ginsberg as convincing her “of the power of language to shock”. She talks of love and desire, of wanting “to find and deliver scenarios, characters and poems that are magnetic with sexual energy” but asks, provocatively,

… how many readers have we lost because we have ignored the ancient silent cry: ravish me.

Near the end she wonders if reading had been the greatest passion of her life. She says – reminiscent of Francesca Rendle-Short and Michael Sala’s comments that writing/reading is dangerous – that

… at a more profound level I recognise that there is something very unsettling about a book.

Absolutely … but what say you about books, reading, passion?

Porter, Dorothy
On passion
Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2010
(Series: Little books on big themes)
96pp.
ISBN: 9780522858358

Michael Sala, The last thread (Review)

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Michael Sala The last thread bookcover

The last thread (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

It’s clear why Affirm Press chose a comment by Raimond Gaita for the front cover of their latest publication, Michael Sala’s autobiographical novel, The last thread. Gaita, for readers here who don’t know, wrote an award-winning memoir, Romulus, My Father, about growing up as a migrant with mentally unstable parents. Sala’s story is different but both boys suffered emotional deprivations that they chronicle in their books … except, and this is a big one, Sala’s book is classified as “fiction”, and we must therefore read it as such. A bit, in fact, like Francesca Rendle-Short’s Bite your tongue!

So, what is his story? The novel is told from Michaelis’ (later Michael’s) point of view. It is divided in two parts: Bergen Op Zoom and Newcastle. It starts, then, in the Netherlands when Michael is around three or four years old, and his brother, Con (Constantinos) three years older. But it’s not quite this simple, as in the first part which is told third person we follow them from the Netherlands to Australia to the Netherlands and then back to Australia. The family’s unsettled state physically – they also move multiple times in Australia – works metaphorically too because there is little emotional stability in the boys’ lives. At the start of the novel, the mother has left the boys’ father, the Cypriot Phytos, and is living with the physically and emotionally abusive Dutchman, Dirk. (“There’s no problem”, Michael writes of this handyman stepfather, “that he can’t solve with his hands”.) By the end, when the boys have grown up, the mother has been married a couple more times. She is skilled, you would say, at choosing wrong men: “The men in my life take advantage of me”, she says.

What makes this somewhat age-old story compelling is the writing. It is told more or less chronologically but in little vignettes. The two parts are divided into chapters, but the chapters themselves are broken into smaller sections that provide an eye into scenes from Michael’s world. It’s a child’s eye, until near the end, so we readers must try to fill the gaps between what Michael describes and what we know could be the meaning behind what he’s seeing. Why, we must ask ourselves, would a young boy think this:

Michaelis can’t imagine anything more frightening than living forever.

And Michael’s eye, though a child’s one, is very observant. He particularly notices faces, watching them it seems for signs of warmth and connection, but

Each time light blazes from the screen, it washes across Con’s face and reveals it like something carved from stone.

and

She [mother] holds her belly and sighs, and there’s a look in her eyes as if she might burst into tears.

I could be mistaken but it felt to me that as we moved through the second part, Newcastle, which is told first person by the adult Michael, the chronology became more disjointed, mirroring I think Michael’s growing awareness of what lies behind the dislocations in his family, and of its impact on him.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, there are secrets in this family that contribute to the dysfunctional behaviour. These secrets are not mentioned on the backcover, so I won’t mention them either. Sala handles them well. He doesn’t labour them but rather lets them hover in a way that we know they are there but that doesn’t let them occupy centre-stage. We learn to live with them, the way the family has to. In the way of modern novels, there’s no dramatic denouement …

In talking of the writing, I’ve mainly discussed the narrative style but I should also mention the language. It is, in a word, gorgeous. Here are just two descriptions that convey Sala’s ability to capture the essence of things. First, being dumped by a wave:

There is such strength in the sea. He has forgotten it until now. It pulls at his limbs so that his feet touch nothing and only his desperate grip keeps him there. A sensation comes to him of being separate, of seeing it all from a great distance as if he cannot reach out and touch the world. Then the noise dies in his ears, the sky appears again above him.

And next, of his mother’s house:

The rooms and corridors of my mother’s house became like the arteries of a heart attack victim, all clogged up. Even the breeze had to bend in half to get through.

I’ve read quite a bit of autobiographical/biographical fiction, fiction-cum-memoirs, and memoirs in recent months, and some I’ve found a little wanting here and there. This, though, is hard to fault – if, that is, you like reading more for the interior than the exterior, for what’s going on inside rather than for what’s happening in the material world.

In the very last pages of the book, Michael’s mother says that “words and stories can be dangerous” (echoing Francesca Rendle-Short’s “to think, to write, is dangerous”). They can indeed, but sometimes that danger can have positive outcomes. I hope that, for Sala, the dangers of putting his story, his truths, on the page will be restorative. There’s no guarantee though that such bravery will have its just rewards … in life or in fiction.

Michael Sala
The last thread
Mulgrave: Affirm Press, 2012
238pp
ISBN: 9780987132680

(Review copy supplied by Affirm Press)

Monday musings on Australian literature: On the making of a classic

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Having completed the book, I tried to get it published, but everyone to whom I offered it refused even to look at the manuscript on the ground that no Colonial could write anything worth reading. They gave no reason for this extraordinary opinion, but it was sufficient for them, and they laughed to scorn the idea that any good could come out of Nazareth – i.e. the Colonies. (Fergus Hume in the Preface to the 1898 revised edition of his The mystery of a hansom cab)

Rather coincidentally, I finished reading Fergus Hume’s The mystery of a hansom cab a few days after I wrote last week’s Monday Musings on nurturing Australian classics. The quote above doesn’t exactly relate to today’s topic on the creation of a classic but to the difficult business of getting published in the first place. However, it does lead nicely into today’s discussion, partly because a book must be published before it can hope to be a classic (duh!), but mainly because today’s topic was inspired by the new introduction to Sydney University Press’s 2010 edition of Hume’s novel.

In this introduction, Robert Dixon of Sydney University commences by stating that when people are asked to nominate the most popular Australian writers of the late nineteenth century they tend to name Marcus Clarke (The term of his natural life), Rolf Boldrewood (Robbery under arms), Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson. They do not, in other words, mention Fergus Hume whose book achieved “impressive sales”. Nor do they mention writers like Ada Cambridge (whom I’ve featured in a past Monday musings). Why?

Dixon has some suggestions. One is commercial, that is availability. He quotes another academic in the field, Paul Eggert, as saying that a “consensus about the nineteenth-century classics emerged quite suddenly among reviewers around the Centenary year of 1888, which hardened into an orthodoxy” in early histories of literature. This resulted in Clarke’s, Boldrewood’s and Kinsley’s (The recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn) novels becoming available cheaply and in quantity. But why these particular works? Well, Dixon says that there was a growing interest in the colonial past, an “emerging literary nationalism”, which

not only displaced a generation of female authors of domestic realism, such as Catherine Spence, Ada Cambridge and Catherine Martin, but also male writers of urban-based popular fiction, including Fergus Hume and Nat Gould.

He continues:

By the time the first critical evaluations of Australian literature came to be written in the early decades of the new century, Eggert notes, ‘the die had been cast’. The mystery of a hansom cab was urban, not pastoral, international rather than national in outlook, and ‘neither a detective story nor a turf tale* was going to compete seriously with the Kingsley-Clarke-Boldrewood trio’.

Interesting, eh? The logical outcome, of course, is that if a book is overlooked early in its life (due to “fashion” or the “fickle finger of fate”) it has a hard road back to serious recognition. But then, feminist studies over the last half century have already shown us how books (art, music, or whatever endeavour you care to mention) by women have regularly been overlooked by the creators of “the canon”.

It would be nice to think that “quality” (I’m not going to get into definitions of that now) will rise to the top but, while we probably agree in general that those books currently labelled “classics” are so, it’s pretty clear that there are many more works out there equally deserving of the label – if only we knew about them. That’s the real pity of it … so I’d like to thank all those publishers who, over recent years, have sussed out “quality” older works and re-introduced them to us. I hope they keep doing so.

All that said, it begs the question about today’s authors and books, doesn’t it? Will the swag of awards we have now be the arbiter of what become future classics? Or will best-selling status be the go? Will future publishers suss out the overlooked – and what will they be? Oh for a crystal ball.

Addendum to last week

In last week’s post I reported that Melbourne University did not teach one Australian literature course in 2011. Here is student Stephanie Guest’s take on the situation as she reported in the Australian Book Review (undated):

… at the University of Melbourne, there was only one subject on Australian literature, ‘The Australian Imaginary’. To my chagrin, the handbook reported that it was not available in 2011. There may be specialised branches of Australian literature taught in Croatia and Texas, but at Melbourne there was not even a general course on offer. The carelessness towards Australian literary studies was clear from the listing in the course curriculum of Murray Bail as ‘Murray Bird’.

The head of the English department told me that staff shortages, reduced funding for the Arts Faculty, and low student interest in the subject were responsible for the absence of Australian Literature in 2011.

* Nat Gould’s milieu

Fergus W. Hume, The mystery of a hansom cab (Review)

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Hume Mystery of a Hansom Cab

The mystery of a hansom cab (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

Sometimes you just have to break your reading “rules” don’t you? Two of mine are that I’m not much into detective fiction (despite having reviewed Peter Temple’s Truth here) and I don’t read self-published books – but then along came Fergus Hume‘s The mystery of a hansom cab. It’s a classic Australian crime novel – and it was “originally” self-published (says she cheekily)!

I’m not, you now know, an aficionado of crime fiction, so my assessment of this book may be the skewed one of a newbie not versed in the intricacies of crime writing. However, I must say that I found this a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging book, and would recommend it to crime and non-crime readers alike, for reasons that will soon become obvious. But first, the plot.

The story commences with a newspaper report of a murder that takes place in a hansom cab, and over the next few chapters we learn the name of the victim (a young man, Oliver Whyte, who was drunk at the time of his death) and that he was killed by a passenger who got into the cab, ostensibly to see him safely home. The detective on the case fairly quickly deduces that the murderer is a rival for the affections of a young society woman … and from here, as it always does, the plot thickens. The accused murderer declares his innocence, that he indeed has an alibi, but he will not divulge the information it would “curse” the life of his fiancée. The trial occurs and is resolved halfway through the novel. The rest explores … but wait, if I tell you this, I’ll give too much away, so I’ll stop here. The resolution, when it comes, is not a complete surprise but neither is it completely predictable. At least, not to non-aficionado me.

Australian Literature Month Platypus logo

Read for Reading Matters' Australian Literature Month

Now, why do I like it? To start with, it’s a well-told story, with nicely delineated characters. Then there’s the setting: it is primarily set in Melbourne, with a little excursion into the country, in the 1880s. This was a boom-time for what was known then as “Marvellous Melbourne” and Hume describes life in this well-to-do post-Gold Rush city with gorgeous clarity. Most of it concerns the middle classes – the professionals and self-made men – but we are also taken into the slums where prostitutes struggle to survive. Hume does not have the social justice goals of, say, William Lane (in The workingman’s paradise) but he doesn’t shy from describing some of the seamier aspects of the city:

Kilsip and the barrister kept for safety in the middle of the alley, so that no one could spring upon them unaware, and they could see sometimes on the one side, a man cowering back into the black shadows, or on the other, a woman with disordered hair and bare bosom, leaning out of a window trying to get a breath of fresh air … Kilsip, turning to the left, led the barrister down another and still narrower lane, the darkness and gloom of which made the lawyer shudder, as he wondered how human beings could live in such murky places.

Hume then describes the woman they had gone to meet, Mother Guttersnipe (how Dickensian is that?):

… a repulsive-looking old crone; and in truth, her ugliness was, in its very grotesqueness well worthy the pencil of a Doré.

This brings me to another aspect I enjoyed. It is chockablock with allusions to Shakespeare and the classics, and references to what the writer of the introduction describes as the “middle-brow, middle-class, international entertainment culture of North America and Europe”, such as the artist Doré, the composer Offenbach, and the writers Poe, Dickens and De Quincy. There’s also a cheeky reference to novelist Mrs Braddon – “Murdered in a cab … a romance in real life, which beats Mrs Braddon hollow” – containing a clue that readers of the time might have picked up.

There’s the 19th century style – third person omniscient, descriptive chapter titles, a touch (but not too much) of melodrama, light satire and humour, the use of little homilies (often to introduce chapters), and a (very) neatly tied up conclusion. This is not ponderous, heavy-handed 19th century writing, but good well-paced story-telling supported by lovely description and observations. Most of the light relief comes through minor characters, like the landlady Mrs Sampson and the young-man-about-town Felix Rolleston. Here is Mrs Sampson:

She was a small, dried-up little woman, with a wrinkled yellow-ish face. She seemed parched up and brittle. Whenever she moved she crackled, and one went in constant dread of seeing a wizen-looking limb break off short like the branch of some dead tree. When she spoke it was in a voice hard and shrill, not unlike the chirp of a cricket.

She is, for all this, a warm-hearted woman, but whenever she appears so do such words as “crackle’, “rustle”, and “chirp”. Beautifully vivid, but nicely controlled.

It is of course also 19th century in its worldview … and so has a patriarchal flavour. Our “plucky” heroine, Madge, buys “a dozen or more articles she did not want” writes the author. And in the resolution the men decide what they will and will not share with the women involved – “it would be useless to reveal” the truth to one female character as “such a relevation could bring her no pecuniary benefit”, and to another because “such a relation could do no good, and would only create a scandal”. The infantilisation of women, eh?

Fate also makes its appearance in the novel, from early on when the accused murderer’s life “hangs on a mere chance” to late in the novel when the author makes his position clear. He writes that men:

… created a new deity called Fate, and laid any misfortune which happened to them to her charge. Her worship is still very popular, especially among lazy and unlucky people, who never bestir themselves … After all, the true religion of fate has been preached by George Eliot when she says that our lives are the outcome of our actions. Set up any idol you please upon which to lay the blame of unhappy lives and baffled ambitions, but the true cause is to found in men themselves.

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll be saying it again: I could write on and on about this book. It has so much to explore and it would be fun to do so, but at this point I’ll simply recommend it to you and hope that you’ll find time to discover and enjoy it too. It was, in its time, a best-seller …

Fergus W. Hume
The mystery of a hansom cab
(The Australian Classics Library)
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010
(Orig. pub. 1886)
293pp.
ISBN: 9781920899561

(Review copy supplied by Sydney University Press)

Delicious Descriptions from Down Under: Francesca Rendle-Short on writing

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In my recent review of Francesca Rendle-Short’s fiction-cum-memoir, Bite your tongue, I concluded on the suggestion that for Rendle-Short the act of writing, as well as of reading, “changes things”. Today I thought I’d share two excerpts from her novel that confirm this, one from her fictional persona of Glory, and the other from her writing as herself.

First, Glory:

Glory decides writing is a way of thinking: to think, to write, is dangerous. Transgressive. It is no small thing for Glory to tell this story in Glory’s way, to put into words things that until now have been left unspoken, to pin her heart to the page. Writing changes things, changes everything. It’s a risky business. (end Ch. 9)

And then, Francesca:

Looking at photographs is a bit like reading books; they invite acute feeling. You reveal yourself in the most intimate of moments. They elicit desire; illicit desire. Because in my family desire was illicit, like alcohol, like dancing. If you pay enough attention to small things, there is a chance for connection, a chance for transformation and transfiguration to occur. Writing grows skin, grows bones, a new heart. Just watch. D. H. Lawrence knew this. He attests that Lady Chatterley’s lover* was a beautiful book, that it was tender like a naked body. (end Ch. 25)

This is pretty raw stuff … and it tells us a bit about what sort of writer Rendle-Short is, about why she writes, about what literature means to her. It also, by-the-by, gives a good sense of her rhythmic, evocative style. I did like this book.

* Lady Chatterley’s lover was, of course, on her mother’s “burn a book a day” death list.

Monday musings on Australian literature: On nurturing Australian literary classics

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Over the weekend an article appeared in The Age describing the parlous situation regarding recognition of classic Australian literature. Written by Michael Heyward of Text Publishing, it’s titled “Classics going to waste” and argues that those who have the power

to choose and influence what people might read – publishers, professors, teachers, journalists, commentators, editors – have done a lamentable job of curating the primary materials of our literary history.

Heyward provides some embarrassing arguments to support his case. Here are three of them. In 2011, he says:

  • Melbourne University did not offer one course in Australian literature;
  • not a single (university, I presume) course taught Henry Handel Richardson‘s The fortunes of Richard Mahony, which he equated with not one Russian University teaching Anna Karenina; and
  • David Ireland‘s The glass canoe, which won the Miles Franklin in 1976, was not in print, while new copies can be bought of that year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Saul Bellow‘s Humboldt’s gift.

The good old cultural cringe is with us still. I was very disappointed when in the late 1990s/early 2000s my children were taught little or no Australian literature at high school but were taught, instead, books (albeit worthy) like Steinbeck’s Of mice and men. They read, while growing up, a lot of excellent Australian children’s literature but as soon as they moved into adult literature the situation changed, particularly in terms of their formal studies. Heyward quotes a Melbourne University academic, GH Cowling, saying, admittedly back in 1935, that

The rewards of Australian literature are not good enough to make it attract the best minds … Good Australian novels which are entirely Australian are bound to be few … Australian life is too lacking in tradition, and too confused, to make many first class novels.

Really! Really? This rather reminds me of VS Naipul’s recent statement that no women writers are his literary match because of their “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. Both views are pretty prescriptive, and seem to define good literature more by the importance of its subject matter rather than by the quality of its expression of ideas and experience. It’s why many people still – men more often – discount Jane Austen. But I digress!

Heyward then announces that Text plans to help rectify the accessibility issue by publishing a series of cheap versions of Australian classics – which seems, in publisher jargon, to include books only 20-30 years old, but who’s going to quibble? Good for them, I say. However, there are other publishers working in this arena. Here (excluding libraries and secondhand booksellers) are some current sources of Australian Classics:

For these initiatives to succeed, we need to buy the books. But to buy them we need to know they exist. How do we do that? Well, through reviews (hail litbloggers, for a start), through film and movie adaptations (of which there aren’t enough, says Heyward), through their being taught in schools and universities, and through online initiatives such as those I wrote about earlier this month.

Do you have any other ideas? And what, if any, is your favourite Aussie classic?

Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011: Reviews from the week January 15-21

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Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge

Logo by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach

Week 10 of our Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 project and, as I reported last week, we are still reading and reviewing. We are, however, slowing down now as most of our team have finished, or nearly finished, their reviewing. This week:

  • Jamil Ahmad’s The wandering falcon (Pakistan) by Matt of A Novel Approach. He thought it was an interesting description of time and place, but as a whole it left him cold. I was so tempted to buy the Granta Pakistan issue the other day but the TBR pile is so-o-o high.

And, if you missed it, I posted my review of Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please look after mom earlier this week.

Other Asian Literature News

The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012 has just been announced and the winner is Chinaman by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilake. The novel is about a retired, alcoholic cricket writer. According to the article in the Times of India, Karunatilake was awarded the prize for “exploring cricket as a metaphor to uncover a lost life”. Ah, cricket … perhaps that means The sly company of people, which is also about a cricket writer, will win our prize! Just joking!

Note: The DSC prize is for novels exploring South Asian themes. The writer can be of any ethnicity or nationality.

Quick links to Man Asian Literary Prize posts

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