Monday musings on Australian literature: Silly names for the silly season

/ Whispering Gums / 28 Comments
Burrumbuttock sign

22 kms to Burrumbuttock (Courtesy: Carolyn I)

It’s nearing Christmas, and I’m getting busy, so today’s Monday musings will be short …

Ever since I started this blog series, I have wanted to write about Australian place names. We are not, I know, the only country to have interesting or fun place names – and I’d love it if you shared your favourites in the comments – but we do have some good’uns Downunder.

Oodnadatta,
Parramatta
Names to make your tonsils chatter
…
(From “Patter”, by Ronald Oliver Brierley)

Oodnadatta and Parramatta are just the beginning. What about Cabramatta, Wangaratta and Coolangatta? And then there’s Woolloomooloo. You have to concentrate to spell that one! (It’s a bit like, I suppose, Mississippi, isn’t it?) Many of these places appear in Lucky Starr‘s tongue twisting “I’ve been everywhere” song. You can listen to it online if you like… I love all these names. They tend to sound silly and poetic at the same time, and because of this many of them have found (and still find) their way into Australian verse and song.

Kurri Kurri Hotel

Kurri Kurri Hotel, Kurri Kurri, NSW

But, there is a type of name that is rather endemic here, and that is the reduplicated place name. The best known one is probably Wagga Wagga – “Don’t call Wagga Wagga Wagga”* – but it’s just one of many. Here are some of my favourites: Bong Bong, Drik Drik, Gatum Gatum, Grong Grong, Kurri Kurri, Tilba Tilba and Woy Woy. You can find more in Wikipedia. English comedian Spike Milligan‘s parents moved to Woy Woy in the 1950s, and Spike wasn’t above making fun of the town. In his novel Puckoon, he wrote

There is, somewhere in the steaming bush of Australia, a waterside town called Woy Woy (Woy it is called Woy Woy Oi will never know).

Finally, in a related but somewhat different vein, is the poem, “The Integrated Adjective” about the great Australian adjective. If you don’t know what that is, you soon will. The poem was written by John O’Grady, who wrote, under the pseudonym Nino Culotta, the 1957 novel, They’re a weird mob, a comic tale of an Italian migrant’s struggles to understand and fit into his new country. Anyhow, “The Integrated Adjective” is set in a bar and is the narrator’s record of the bar-time talk he overhears:

“…. Been off the bloody booze,
Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin’ kanga-bloody-roos.”

Now the bar was pretty quiet, and everybody heard
The peculiar integration of this adjectival word.
…

The town of course is really Tumbarumba, but do we let that spoil our story here? Abso-bloody-lutely not!

*Song by Greg Champion and Jim Haynes.

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

/ Whispering Gums / 16 Comments
Alexis de Tocqueville.

Alexis de Tocqueville (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

It’s not surprising, really, that after living in America for two decades Peter Carey should turn his pen to it. Having lived in the US twice myself, I well understand the fascination of trying to understand that large and paradoxical country. In Parrot and Olivier in America, then, Carey sets out to explore America through the eyes of two men from early nineteenth century Europe: Olivier Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont, a French aristocrat whose parents had barely survived the French Revolution, and John ‘Parrot’ Larrit, a poor Englishman who had been brought to France as a boy by another French aristocrat.

Olivier was born in 1805, the same year that French writer and historian Alexis de Tocqueville was born. This is not a coincidence as the novel is Carey’s loose re-imagining of Tocqueville’s trip to America, with a friend, to study American prisons. Like Tocqueville, Olivier undertakes his trip with the support of the July monarchy, but Oliver’s companion is not an equal. Rather it is Parrot, servant-class and twice Olivier’s age. An unlikely pair, really, but perfect for Carey’s purposes …

… which are to pry into, poke at, and peer under that great American experiment, Democracy. Through having two protagonists of such diverse backgrounds and perspectives, Carey is able to explore the issues from different angles, that of master and servant. And through choosing the picaresque as his form (or style), he is able to do so without being ponderous. In other words, the tone is comic, as befits a picaresque novel, and the narrative comprises a series of adventures in which our “heroes”, Parrot and Olivier, meet a range of characters along the way who test them and their ideas. The novel is told in alternating, and well-differentiated, first person voices – starting with Olivier and ending, very even-handedly, with Parrot. It is basically chronological, but there are flashbacks to fill in gaps and frequent overlaps caused by one telling a story followed by the other giving his version.

That’s the nuts and bolts of it, but how does it come across? Well, in a word, exuberantly. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its serious side, but just that it’s rather fun to read. At least, it was for me, though that could be because of my personal history with America. Here, for example, are some of the observations which caught my attention:

On not needing government (Parrot talking with a tradesman):

‘When there is enough for all,’ the nail-maker said, ‘there is no need for government.’
‘But what of the poor.’
‘No man who will work can be poor.’

A little myopic methinks – but an idea that seems to be still entrenched in America?

On the focus on money and trade (Olivier):

No matter how strong their religious sentiments, or their passion about the reform of criminals, the Americans quickly revealed themselves to be obsessed with trade and money … They had got their hands on a mighty continent from which the least of them could, by dint of some effort, extract unlimited wealth. There being so much to be extracted it scarcely mattered how they were governed, because there is no need to argue when there is plenty for all.

For all, that is, if you are able to work, are not black and not indigenous! Even aristocratic Olivier noticed some of these contradictions.

On the ability to be self-made (Peek, the banker, to Olivier):

‘Experiment,’ he cried, laughing too violently for my taste. ‘There is no experiment. We make this transformation every day. It is called rags-to-riches …’

And on the possibility of art and culture in a democracy (Olivier):

… They [paintings in Philadelphia] made me think that the taste for ideal beauty – and the pleasure of seeing it depicted – can never be as intense or widespread among a democratic as an aristocratic people.

Hmm…Peter Carey is on record as expressing concern for the survival of culture. He said in his closing address at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival that ‘We have yet to grasp the fact that consuming cultural junk … is completely destructive of democracy’. In other words, Olivier/Carey question whether “high” art and “total” democracy are mutually exclusive? Somewhat related to this is Carey’s ongoing interest (see My life as a fake, and Theft: a love story) in authenticity in art. He explores it here through Olivier’s love of art, and the artistic endeavours of several characters, including Parrot and his mistress.

As for the story itself, there is a lot to enjoy. Olivier and Parrot have a complex relationship that develops from mutual disdain to a cautious friendship as the novel progresses. For all his attempts to be open-minded, Olivier never totally accepts the notion of equality between “men”, but Parrot, from both his early training and a generous nature, manages to tolerate and even accommodate this. Besides these two, there are characters from all strata of society: aristocrats, printers, bankers, land-owners, artists, actors, and so on. And, of course, there are romances, with Olivier’s playing out to a rather ironic conclusion.

One little demur, though. The book did not really engage me emotionally – something I tend to expect in longer novels – and I wonder whether this is partly due to the picaresque genre whose episodic and comic nature can have a distancing effect. Is this a failing? I think not, but it was noticeable, and means that the writing and ideas have to be powerful enough to carry the reader along. And mostly they do here, largely due to the novel’s pacing.

So, what is Carey’s conclusion? Well, it’s pretty even-handed, with both the aristocrat and the servant summing up their experience of America. But, in a twist on Tocqueville, the last words are Parrot’s. As a reader who always looks to see if structure informs the meaning, I wonder if this tells us something. Then again, there could be an element of irony in it. However you read it, there is no real answer to the question in the epigraph:

Can it be believed that the democracy which had overthrown the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists? (Alexis de Tocqueville)

Prophetic words, eh.

Peter Carey
Parrot and Olivier in America
London: Faber and Faber, 2010
578pp
ISBN: 9780571253319

Joanna Biggar, That Paris year (Guest post)

/ Whispering Gums / 16 Comments

When I received That Paris year via the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program, I got the sudden attack of the guilts! How was I to review this book alongside all the other books I wanted to read? And then the thought struck me! My daughter, Hannah (aka Wayfaring Chocolate), is a reader, was an exchange student (albeit in the USA), and had recently been to and fallen in love with Paris. Perhaps she might like to read and review it  – and, yes, she would (with not too much arm-twisting). I posted a version of that review, as required, on LibraryThing, and then suggested we post it here too. She did some small revisions and … here it is … Thanks, Hannah!

Wayfaring Chocolate’s review of That Paris year, by Joanna Biggar

That Paris year, book cover
Book cover (Image: Courtesy: Alan Squire Publishing)

That Paris year weaves together the story of five American female college students on exchange at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1962. There is something dream-like about the narration of the girls’ lives as it is J.J., one of the five, who recounts the story of each, through her own memories, tales the others have told her and, at times, her own surmising about what may or may not have happened in their lives. It is not that J.J. is an unreliable narrator, but that the novel reads in the same way that life is experienced – as a sometimes clear, sometimes hazy pinning together of what we ourselves remember and feel, what others have told us of their own lives, and the threads we create in our minds to tie the two together. Moreover, this novel shows how sometimes, in pulling together our own and others’ stories, we have the potential to blur the boundaries of our selves:

Still, I wondered at it, wondered where she had disappeared when she recited Eve’s thoughts as if they were her own.

Each of the five girls followed in this novel is initially set out as markedly different. Yet for all their varied degrees of attractiveness, confidence, studiousness and self-awareness, ultimately each girl seems focused on one thing above all else: the quest for love, sex, and a life partner. It is this that weakened the novel a little for me as, while I myself am a female university student in my early twenties with a deep love of Paris who wouldn’t mind not being single, I felt suffocated by the constant idea thrumming through this novel that a man is what will, ultimately, define me as a young woman.

The novel certainly deals with other aspects of women’s coming-of-age, such as coping with parents’ divorce, class dichotomies, living in a foreign country, and navigating the limits – or limitlessness, it seems at times – of friendship. I only wish some of these narrative threads had been fleshed out in more detail. Such issues are as relevant today as they were during the novel’s 1962 setting, and the evocative writing of Joanna Biggar ensures that the reader is cognisant of this. The political tension between America and France at this point in history, the insecurities one character (Gracie) faces when comparing her homeliness with the long-legged grace of her statuesque friends, even the novelty of putting on an American Thanksgiving dinner in Paris – these are concepts that Biggar tackles with humour, grace, and a fair degree of sympathy.

For example, even when Gracie’s dogged belief that her intelligence is a curse preventing men from liking her made me want to reach into the book and shake her by the shoulders, I couldn’t help but feel both sympathy and understanding for her in the following:

By trusting me, by believing there was a place of revelation – Paris – where possession of all womanly secrets was obtained, she had simply been delivered into another of Dante’s circle. In only a few short weeks, she already felt doomed … by being short, ill-dressed, and homely in the world capital of style.

One thing I did particularly enjoy was that there were times during the reading when I felt that all I had to do was close my eyes to believe myself back in a smoky Parisian cafe, or perhaps on a beach in Avignon with the wind rising, or sitting by the Seine watching stylish Parisian women strut past me. Biggar has a talent for evoking a Paris, and a France, that is both familiar yet not clichéd, and this was something I particularly took pleasure in. There were also moments when particular lines jumped out at me as if they were my own, such as when one character tells another that:

Maybe it’s just that you have a way of listening like you’re hearing more than I even know I’m saying […] Jocelyn listens too, so much so that sometimes I think she can play back to me what I’ve said. Maybe she doesn’t hear in quite the same way.

Haven’t we all had people in our lives who, we know, implicitly “get” us, and others with whom conversations only ever take place on the surface? I think Biggar captures the way in which both types of friends are valuable in different ways. In fact, you could read her novel as a study of different types of friendship (and, as I’ve mentioned above, how for some women friendships are apparently mediated through and in reference to men).

Yet despite my slight reservations with the novel, I would still recommend it for anyone who has had, or wants, a Paris Year of their own. This novel brought back memories of my own time in the City of Lights and, for that, I am grateful.

Joanna Biggar
That Paris year
Bethesda: Alan Squire Publishing, 2010
469pp
ISBN: 9780982625101

(Review copy courtesy Alan Squire Publishing, via LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program)

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Victorian Literary Map

/ Whispering Gums / 6 Comments

This week’s Monday Musings will be a brief one, partly because my time is tight (I really must finish Parrot and Olivier in America by tomorrow) and partly because I’m primarily going to post a link to a map: the online interactive Victorian Literary Map.

As you might have guessed from my various Literary Road postings, I am rather partial to maps, particularly when they are combined with a subject of interest to me. Consequently, I was rather thrilled when I came across the Victorian Literary Map. It is a project of the State Library of Victoria, and was part of the Library’s Independent Type: Books and Writing in Victoria exhibition which celebrated Melbourne’s establishment as a UNESCO city of literature. It has Flash (with a clickable map) and Text (with a clickable alphabetical listing of towns) versions. The introduction to the text version says, simply:

Victoria is a state of rich and diverse literary culture.
View the places where some of our greatest writing was created or set, and learn about our writers and their origins.

Clicking on a place (in the map or index) can retrieve:

  • the name/s of writer/s associated with the place. Click on an author and the little pop-up “card” contains an image of the writer, a brief biography, a list of references and, where they exist, related links to another writer in the map
  • work/s set in or about the place. Click on the work and the little pop-up comprises an excerpt from the work
  • events or other literary activities associated with the place, such as Clunes Booktown

The map seems a little limited though, because the text version introduction also contains the following:

NOTE: Only towns and places that have literary records will show in the index.

Lake View House, Chiltern
Lake View House, Chiltern (Courtesy Golden Wattle, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 2.5)

This must be why Chiltern does not appear in the map, because it certainly has literary associations. The Australian author Henry Handel Richardson lived in Lake View House for a short time, and set the early years of what is probably her most famous novel (trilogy), The fortunes of Richard Mahoney, in the town. It’s a pretty little town well worth visiting, and so it’s a shame it doesn’t appear on the map.

Anyhow, click on the map and have a look around. It’s a nice idea, though it could do with updating, in a technological sense (such as implementing some Web 2.o functionality), and expansion, in terms of content (as Victoria’s literary heritage is clearly richer than the map shows).

Oh, and I’d love to know if there are other web-based initiatives designed to help we literary travellers.

The long and short of it, novelistically speaking

/ Whispering Gums / 25 Comments

The novella has ambivalence built into its DNA. It’s neither one thing nor the other and tends to make you think even as it lures you down blind alleys and serves up irresolute endings.

(The Daily Beast)

Readers of this blog know that I am partial to short novels, particularly novellas. I always feel a little self-conscious saying this. I worry. Does it make me sound

  • Lazy, as in I can’t be bothered to read a long book? Or,
  • Impatient, as in I want to rack up my book reading stats and long books slow that down?

And to be honest, maybe there is a little bit of truth in these.

Big Fat Book

A long book requires a long commitment. Reading any literature requires attention and if you don’t have the concentrated time to give to a long book, you risk “losing the plot”, figuratively and literally speaking. In other words, if you read it in too many short spurts over too long a period of time, it can be hard keeping it all in your head. In the same time-frame you could very well have read two, three, four  or even six novellas (if, say, you were reading Vikram Seth‘s A suitable boy). You would have experienced a number of different perspectives on the world rather than just one – and you probably would have been challenged multiply by the often elliptical nature of the short novel. And this brings me to why I really like short novels …

I like, as the Daily Beast quote above says, being made to think while being lured down blind alleys and served up irresolute endings. Of course, the modern long novel can do that too … But with a short novel you tend to get tight prose. There are no wasted words. There are no long digressions – or multiple storylines …

What, no digressions? This is where the Big Fat Book comes in. When I wrote my post on novellas nearly a year ago, I said I’d write a post on long novels – and finally I am getting around to it, because, despite my general preference for short novels, I have read and enjoyed long ones*. First, here are some that I’ve read and enjoyed in the last decade:

Not a lot of them, eh, but memorable every one. And the reason is, I think, that you live with long novels. A short novel can engage your emotions, of course, but it is, I think, a more intellectual engagement in which our feelings are continually monitored by our brains: what are we feeling and why? A long novel is different. You become part of its life; the characters become “real” in a way that they rarely do in a short novel and you feel their loss when the book ends. This makes the reading experience very different. The brain is engaged, of course, but the emotions take the upper hand.

In fact, generalising wildly, I see the reading experience as going a bit like this:

  • In the short novel, with its tight prose and often minimal plot, your brain works hard to understand what is happening, where it is going, what it is all about, and then is suddenly confronted with an emotional kick at the end.
  • In the long novel, with its multiple story-lines and often frequent digressions, your emotions become engaged as you live the characters’ lives with them, love, cry, hate, worry with them, and then, when it’s all over, your brain comes in to work out what it was all about.
Detail from photographic portrait of Charles D...
Dickens, who wrote short and long novels (Image: Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

I say this relatively not absolutely, because of course we engage both emotion and intellect in all our (fiction) reading. However, it seems to encapsulate, for me at least, the mechanics behind my rather different responses to reading a short versus a long novel. Does this make any sense?

Anyhow, I’d better finish here and get back to my current, long and rather engaging, novel, Peter Carey‘s Parrot and Olivier in America. Review coming just as soon as I manage to finish it …

* A NOTE ON DEFINITIONS: Leaving aside those specific terms of “novellas” and “big fat books”, my rule of thumb definition is that short novels are under 300 pages, and long novels over 500 pages. The rest are, well, just novels.

Dr Peter Kocan wins the 2010 Australia Council Writer’s Emeritus Award

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Some literary awards tend to fall somewhat under the radar, and one of these is the Australia Council‘s Writer’s Emeritus Award – even though it’s a fairly generous one: $50,000. This is one of those lifetime awards; it is given to a writer over 65 years old* (hence, I suppose, the “emeritus”) for “exceptional contribution to Australian writing”. Previous winners include well-known and lesser known writers, such as: Eleanor Dark, Ray Lawler, Barbara Jefferis, Christina Stead, Barry Oakley, Margaret Scott and Judith Wright McKinney.

I’m embarrassed to say, though, that I haven’t read this year’s winner, Peter Kocan. He is an interesting fella! In 1966, when he was 19 years old, he was found guilty of the attempted assassination of the then Federal Government Opposition Leader, Arthur Calwell, resulting in a prison sentence and a place in an institution for the criminally insane. It seems that he managed to turn that experience into an opportunity and took up writing in 1967. He has published novels, plays and poetry (with his first two poetry collections being published while he was still in prison). Much of his writing is, apparently, autobiographical, and therefore deals with prison life, mental health, and post-prison alienation.

He is a writer I am going to look out for …

*Note: I think this age definition must have been dropped in recent years as Kocan was born in 1947. Presumably though it is still intended for “older” writers.

POSTSCRIPT: Guy of His Futile Preoccupations has written an excellent, thorough review of Kocan’s novel, The treatment and the cure. It’s well worth reading if you’d like a sense of Kocan and his writing.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The future of Australian literature

/ Whispering Gums / 11 Comments

‘If their [Australian writers’] work is so interesting,’ comes the query, ‘why isn’t it known here [London]?’

This query was put to Australian novelist and literary figure, Vance Palmer, in 1935! When I read it, I couldn’t help thinking plus ça change. A few months ago I wrote on Hilary McPhee‘s concern about the continued low profile of Australian literature overseas. She said that, while the situation has improved since the 1980s when she first wrote on the issue, it is uneven because Australian writers are “cherry-picked”. In other words, Tim Winton, Peter Carey and maybe David Malouf are known, but who else?

Anyhow, back to Palmer and 1935. His response to the question was

No use to reply that it [Australian writers’ work] is hardly known on their native heath!

That was probably so … and during the 193os and 1940s, Vance and his wife Nettie Palmer, along with writers like Flora Eldershaw, Marjorie Barnard and Frank Dalby Davison worked hard to raise awareness in Australia of Australian literature, and to secure good funding support for writers. The Palmers personally mentored writers like Eldershaw, Barnard and Davison. Nettie Palmer, in particular, corresponded regularly with writers, advising and encouraging them. Vance Palmer wrote for newspapers and journals, and lectured widely, on Australian literature.

Why do we need a national literature?

In the article “The future of Australian literature”, Palmer discusses why it’s important to have a national literature. He asks, “Why all this fuss about having a literature of our own? Why waste time writing books when ‘all the best and the latest’ can be imported from overseas?” His answer is not surprising to we readers:

The answer, of course, is that books which are revelations of our own life can’t be imported, and that they are necessary to our full growth. … since the world is divided into nations and societies, it is necessary that these shall find their own forms of expression, each subtly different from the others.

… we have to discover ourselves – our character, the character of the country, the particular kind of society that has developed here – and this can only be done through the searching explorations of literature. It is one of the limitations of the human mind that it can never grasp things fully till they are presented through the medium of art. The ordinary world is a chaos, a kaleidoscope, full of swift, meaningless impressions that efface one another; the world of a well-pondered novel or drama is designed as an orderly microcosm where people and things are shown their true significance. And so, unless a country has its life fully mirrored in books it will not show a very rich intelligence in the business of living.

He goes on to suggest that through literature, we

  • learn to understand and adjust to our surroundings or landscape (the physical, I suppose). In Australia at that time this meant learning “to live with our bonny earth with a spirit of affection. It is not the same haggard landscape our ancestors looked on with loathing” but has its own beauty in its, for example, wattle and gums.
  • discover our roots, find out who we are (what he calls, the social). In Australia at that time, that included exploring themes of exile and immigration, “the theme of the vanishing race, with its wild charm and its tragic doom”, and themes related to Australia-at-war and coping with universal economic conditions.

Katharine Susannah Prichard

Katharine Susannah Prichard, by May Moore (Presumed Public Domain, State Library of NSW)

He argues that change was occurring, that a national literature was developing – and gave many examples including works by those mentioned above, as well as writers like Katharine Susannah Prichard and Christina Stead.  He suggests that one of the reasons for improvement was the growth of publishing in Australia. What these publishers produce might be uneven in quantity and literary value, he said, “but at least they have taken the Australian background for granted, and that has marked an advance”. However, he bemoans the lack of “lively and intelligent [literary] criticism” which he believes is essential to writers finding “their proper audience”.

Palmer concludes positively, believing that there has been “a bubbling in our drought-scaled springs”. He says that the new literary pulse will have a significant impact on Australia in the next 50 years and will “quicken its imagination, stimulate its powers of introspection, and make it as interesting to itself as every country should be”.

There’s a lot to think about here – in terms of how Australian literature has progressed (within and without the country) and how we see the role of national literatures in our more globalised world. How important is national literature? My answer is that while nationalism, taken to exclusionist extremes, can be rather scary, we still do need to understand our own little corners of the world, in both their local, unique and their wider, universal meanings and implications.

What do you think? And how important is it, particularly with so many writers on the move, to define nationality?

Vance Palmer
“The future of Australian literature”
First published in The Age, February 9, 1935
Availability: Online

Toni Jordan, Fall girl

/ Whispering Gums / 9 Comments

Jordan Fall Girl

Fall girl cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

It’s just as well I’m not one of those readers who likes to draw conclusions about writers’ lives from their writing, because if I were I’d be seriously concerned about Toni Jordan. You see, her latest novel, Fall girl, is about a con-artist, a very experienced one in fact. And Jordan writes so convincingly you’d almost think … ah, but we’re not going there, are we!

Now, Toni Jordan writes chick lit, but it’s chick lit with a difference. The heroine of her first novel, Addition (which I reviewed earlier in this blog’s history) has obsessive compulsive disorder and at the start of the novel is almost a recluse. She is not, in other words, your typical chick lit heroine.  And so it also is with Fall girl‘s heroine, Della. She too is a little off-the chick-lit-beaten track. She is:

  • not in normal employment;
  • not really upwardly mobile (as her family lives in a dilapidated mansion, and tends to spend up big “wins” rather than using the money to improve their lifestyle);
  • not focused on fashion and appearance (though she does prefer to dress well); and
  • not looking for a husband (though of course this being chick lit, romance does rear its head).

The hero, Daniel Metcalf, however, is somewhat more typical: “he looks like a model from an adventure store catalogue”. He is tanned, strong, big and muscled, and there is a little nod, I think, to Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy in him. But there is also a bit of a mystery about him that our heroine needs to resolve if she is to succeed in this, her biggest “sting” by far.

What can I say about it? It’s a fun read. The plotting and characterisation are good. It’s told first person, in a mostly light tone, but there is light and dark, as not everything runs smoothly (of course). There are some lovely comic scenes – particularly during the scientific expedition on which Della (aka Dr Ella Canfield) takes her mark, Daniel, to demonstrate how professionally his grant money will be spent. Without giving anything away, the resolution is in keeping with chick lit without being completely, neatly tied up.

Is there anything else to it? The writing is good – in a traditional, straightforward way – and the structure is generally chronological, with the odd flashback to fill in Della’s family background. It drips with irony, but in a light-hearted, rather tongue-in-cheek way. Jordan knows that we know the conventions of the genres – of both chick lit and the con – and plays them to effect. We read, and we smile, not grimace. But, there is something else here too, something besides the chick lit and the con story, and that is a coming-of-age story. Not the traditional adolescent story, but we discover as the novel wears on that twenty-something Della has not really achieved self-determination. Everything she does is in accord with her training and her father’s “rules”. Towards the end of the book, her stepmother Ruby talks to her about her upbringing in the family and her inculcation into its “business”, and says:

What you choose to believe is up to you, Della. You don’t have to listen to anybody. You have to make up your own mind.

But, of course, being a Jordan novel, it’s not typical “coming-of-age” either and what Della decides is part of the fun of the ending.

This is a light, entertaining read – and yet it’s not lacking in things for readers to think about. In fact, it’s just the right sort of read for the Christmas holidays. Lisa at ANZLitLovers would probably agree – but go check her review for yourself.

Toni Jordan
Fall girl
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010
234pp.
ISBN: 9781921656651

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Edith Wharton, A journey

/ Whispering Gums / 23 Comments

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

Edith Wharton (Presumed Public Domain via Wikipedia)

I am a fan of Edith Wharton and have read around seven of her novels, some of which are part of my personal canon. However, I have only read a couple of her short stories, and she wrote quite a few of those too. In fact, she was a prolific writer. And so, when last week’s Library of America story turned out to be one of hers, I decided to read it.

“A journey” was written, according the brief introductory notes, in the 1890s when Wharton was in her late 20s to early 30s. It was written during the time when she was married – unhappily – to Edward Wharton, from whom she was eventually divorced in 1913. The notes say that three of the stories written during the 1890s explore marital misery, and that the journey in this story “becomes a metaphor for an unhappy marriage”.

That could be so, but let’s get to the story. It describes a train journey in which a young woman is accompanying her terminally ill husband back to their home in the East after having spent some time, under doctor’s orders, in Colorado. The story starts with:

As she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the  rush of wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles of wakeful lucidity. The sleeping car had sunk into its night silence. Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long stretches of hurrying blackness …

The next paragraph briefly chronicles their short marriage and the sudden disparity between them as his health collapses:

a year ago their pulses had beat to one robust measure; both had the same prodigal confidence in an exhaustless future. Now their energies no longer kept step …

And then here is the entire third paragraph:

When they married, she had such arrears of living to make up: her days had been as bare as the white-washed school-room where she forced innutritious facts upon reluctant children. His coming had broken in on the slumber of circumstance, widening the present till it became the encloser of remotest chances. But imperceptibly the horizon narrowed. Life had a grudge against her: she was never to be allowed to spread her wings.

Oh dear … methinks the note-makers at the Library of America are right. It’s not what is said so much as what is not said and how what is said is said. What is not said is anything about true love and empathy (though we are told in the fourth paragraph that “she still loved him of course”). In other words, there is no sense of the looming tragedy of the loss of a soul-mate. As for how it is all said, the language is heavy and gloomy. It’s clearly raining, and there are “shadows” and the “hurrying blackness” (a metaphor, presumably, for his coming death, as well as being a literal description of night). The paragraph describing his appearance in her life and their marriage is not exactly joyful either. The focus here is more on where she’d been, so the language is negative (“arrears”, “slumber”). And even the description of the possibilities opening up to her through marriage – “the encloser of remotest chances” – is not what you’d call expansive. No wonder she thinks life has a “grudge against her”. I would too.

The rest of the story is about a rather self-focused young woman. She goes through the motions of caring for her husband – and occasionally “warm gushes of pity [not “sympathy” or “love”, note!] swept away her instinctive resentment of his condition” – but her thoughts are all for herself. Here is her reaction to being in Colorado:

Nobody knew about her, or cared about her; there was no one to wonder at the good match she had made, or to envy the new dresses  …

This is early Wharton. The hallmarks of her writing style are here – the careful choice of words to convey meaning that may be opposite to what’s expected, the development of character through those words, the build up of atmosphere and tension through a well-sustained tone – but it doesn’t quite have the tightness and singularity of purpose of her later works. We don’t get to understand the young woman well enough to be able to respond to her on anything more than a superficial level. I suspect that Wharton would want us to extend her some sympathy but I think we are more likely to see her as a little pathetic, and we really know almost nothing about the husband (except that he had been “strong, active, gently masterful”) so our reaction to his predicament is more intellectual than emotional.

As the journey proceeds, our heroine is faced with a moral dilemma, but she doesn’t take full responsibility for what is happening: “it seemed to be life that was sweeping her on with headlong inexorable force – sweeping her into darkness and terror”. The story, in fact, takes on some elements of horror fiction but that is not its intent and it doesn’t develop along those lines.

I particularly like Wharton when she tackles the intersection between societal expectations and character. This story has glimmers of that – but it’s not really elaborated. Nonetheless, it’s a good story that grabs you from the start with its oppressive atmosphere and foreboding tone. Even early Wharton, I’ve found, has much to offer her readers.

Edith Wharton
“A journey”
The Library of America
Originally published in a collection in 1899?
Available: Online

Note: Stef at So many books has recently reviewed Hermione Lee‘s biography of Wharton, and Kevin at Interpolations has extensively reviewed some of her novels.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest post by Lisa from ANZLitLovers

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

When I started this Monday musings series, I said that I’d have the occasional guest post. The first one, I decided then, had to be Lisa at ANZLitLovers. Not only did she give me a lot of encouragement when I started blogging (thanks Lisa!) but she is one of our most committed bloggers on Australian literature. In her day life she is a primary school librarian, and so she decided to do her Guest Post on a subject dear to her heart. Read on …

How do we raise the next generation of booklovers?

In recent weeks there’s been a lot of chat in the blogosphere about the impact of eBooks in the marketplace, but I think reading is under more pressure from the diversity of entertainment choices that are available now, than it is from the method used to deliver the book.  I grew up without TV, so weekly visits to the library with my father were an essential component of my life from the time I first learned to read, and I’ve never lost that reading habit. Children now have so many choices, it can be hard for them to find time for a book.

So how do we raise the next generation of booklovers?  If you’re a booklover yourself, it’s important to you that your kids are too, but it’s important for all of us because reading books makes better people of us.  The world needs better people, right?

As a booklover myself I think children are deprived if they don’t have access to lovely books, so all the children in my life get books for presents until they turn into sulky teenagers, and then they’re on their own.  But getting books for presents doesn’t necessarily turn a child into one who loves books…

Remember little Scout, in To Kill A Mockingbird, when her foolish teacher forbids her to read with her father anymore? Scout is appalled.  ‘Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.’  She learned to read not with pretty picture books but by reading the most boring of texts over her father’s shoulder.  She loved to do it because she was with him.  However that was in a different age, and there’s nothing to tell us that Scout went on voraciously reading books into adulthood.

As a teacher-librarian, it’s my job to share books with children.  Primary librarians don’t just manage library acquisitions and book processing, or guide students with their book borrowing and research.  We teach as well.  I have 17 classes for an hour each week.  I’m supposed to teach them research skills, and I do, but I think the literature part of my curriculum is much more important.  The kids I teach might not remember how to takes notes for a project but they will always remember the meaning of the word ‘perfidy’ – and the moral issues that lie behind it – because I read them Kate DiCamillo’s Tale of Despereaux.  They’ll also remember joining in that pleasurable gasp of woe at the end of the lesson because they have to wait till the following week to find out what will happen next.  Suspense is good!

Our definition of literature is ‘those books that you always remember, forever and ever’. What are the ones that they apply this definition to? Here are some of them:

Dragon Keeper book cover
Cover image from Black Dog Books

 

DragonKeeper by Carole Wilkinson is a compelling fantasy/adventure series about a nameless slave girl in Ancient China whose job it is to feed the dragons.  Most boys past a certain age won’t put up with female central characters, but they sit still and listen for this one.  When the evil dragon hunter turns up to kill the last dragon for its body parts, she flees with it on an epic journey to protect a mysterious stone.  The book won the CBCA (Children’s Book Council of Australia) Book of the Year and took out a host of other awards, and my students and I went on to become keen fans of this wonderful Melbourne author. The sequel, Garden of the Purple Dragon, was shortlisted everywhere in 2006, Dragon Moon won the CBCA Award in 2008, and now there is a prequel – Dragon Dawn – which shows us Danzi as a young dragon, a mere 1000 years old.  A great favourite.

Sticking with dragons for the time being, I always read Lily Quench and the Dragon of Ashby by Natalie Prior to lure Years 3 and 4 students to reading.  Once again there is a female hero plagued by self-doubt, but she rises to the occasion (literally) when Queen Dragon lands in the grey, miserable town of Ashby and challenges the evil Black Count who has taken over everything and rules with an iron fist.  This one is rich in opportunities for discussion too, but it also features droll humour which eight and nine year old students can appreciate.  This is one of a series of seven, so the other six books are whisked off the shelves by borrowers before I’ve got to the end of chapter two…

The Deltora Quest by Emily Rodda series is a blockbuster.   Three trusty companions travel across Deltora to retrieve magic artefacts and defeat the evil Shadow Lord.  It’s a particular favourite with kids who play computer games involving collecting artefacts to fight off the Bad Guys.  No matter how many of these books I buy there are never enough, and I’ve given up trying to shelve them where they belong on the R shelf.  They have a tub of their own where the kids can riffle through looking for the title they want. (There are 15 in the series).

Another favourite is Truck Dogs, A Novel in Four Bites by Graeme Base.  He’s a picture book author and first editions of this book have full colour artwork, showing the bizarre creatures featured in this SF adventure.  It takes place at some time in the future in outback Australia when dogs have mutated into hybrid vehicles, part canine-part machine.  The hero, Sparky, (a Jack Russell/ute cross) is a scamp forever in trouble, but when a gang of Rottweilers come into town to steal all the town’s petrol, he leads the Mongrel Pack street gang to defeat Mr Big, (a Chihuahua/BMW cross) and save the day.  It’s an exciting romp with tongue-in-cheek humour and kids love it.

Do-Wrong Ron by Steven Herrick is completely different.  It’s a novel in free verse, and it tells the story of Ron who is good-hearted but manages to do almost everything wrong.  He tries to help Isabella’s grandmother who is too sad and lonely to go out of her house, and as usual things go wrong – but turn out right.  This is a great book for those under-confident kids who think they’re never going to belong, and the gentle humour is lovely.

Billy Mack’s War by James Roy is a great antidote to boys’ enthusiasm for war.   It’s set in 1945 and it tells the story of how shamefully the POWs were treated when they were evacuated back to Australia from Japan.  Billy doesn’t know his father, and he’s embarrassed and his loyalties are tested when he hears people talk about the POWs ‘sitting out the war’ while others fought.  His father’s experienced such horrors that he’s not coping with freedom very well. Not a book for under 11s, but a book that will intrigue older readers around Anzac Day…

Finally, although it’s British, I can’t resist including my favourite, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, retold brilliantly by Michael Morpurgo, Britain’s Children’s Laureate.  This ancient tale from the 14th century takes place in Camelot, where on New Year’s Eve the feasting is interrupted by a strange green man who confronts the reputation of King Arthur’s knights with a fearsome challenge.  It is Sir Gawain who has to prove that he has courage, determination and honour, and it is this one that has my students pleading for me to read the finale even after the bell is long gone for them to go out to play.  We talk about the seven knightly virtues, and whether they still apply today; we talk about why Gawain says his life is less important than his king’s, and we talk about why flirting with your best mate’s girl is so wrong.  I read Michael Morpurgo’s version of Beowulf to Years 5 & 6 too and they love that as well (especially the gory bits), but it is Sir Gawain and his quest to do the right thing when tempted not to, who speaks to them across the centuries.

While nearly all my students love listening to stories in the library each week, I know that they don’t all turn into booklovers.  However some kids, who never used to borrow, now do so regularly and they’re in the library before school pestering me to buy new books as well.  I wish I knew the secret that makes this happen for more of them…

Back to Sue … Thanks Lisa for this inspired and inspiring guest post. Now, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the issue …