Monday musings on Australian literature: Making a start

/ Whispering Gums / 40 Comments

Whispering Gums is now 15 months old and I’m still playing with what I am doing here – but one thing I haven’t played with is my desire to help promote Australian literature. And so I’ve decided to formalise this a bit through a weekly post titled “Monday musings on Australian literature”. This is somewhat of an experiment for me. I haven’t fully worked out how I’ll proceed – or where I’ll ramble – but I do hope to entice the occasional guest blogger to share some aspect of their experience of Australian literature. Watch this space.

Dry creek bed, Kata Tjuta

From the dry (creek bed, Kata Tjuta in Central Australia)

How to start things going though? How about this?

5 random, and possibly little-known, facts about Australian literature

  1. Australia has only one Nobel Laureate in Literature: Patrick White in 1973
  2. Melbourne was the world’s second UNESCO City of Literature
  3. The first Australian-born woman to publish a novel in Australia was probably the pioneering botanist and  journalist, Louisa Atkinson, with her Gertrude: the emigrant (1857)
  4. David Unaipon (1872-1967) is generally regarded to be the first indigenous Australian writer and is commemorated on the Australian $50 note and by the the David Unaipon Award for Unpublished Indigenous Writers
  5. The most taught Australian text in 2010 (in Australia), according to the Teaching Australian Literature website, is Kate Grenville’s The secret river.
Thredbo River, Kosciuszko National Park

To the wet (Thredbo River, Kosciuszko National Park)

Well, there’s the start – brief though it is. I hope in future weeks to explore in more depth all sorts of writers, works and issues relating to literature in Australia. It will be rather serendipitous. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear from you about your favourite Aussie writers…

What is a classic: Guest post at DesertBookChick

/ Whispering Gums / 18 Comments

Those who read this blog may have come across DesertBookChick (DBC) before. She’s the one who doesn’t like Jane Austen! In fact, she admits that, despite being a PhD, she’s a bit anxious about classics in general. However, not one to shy away from a challenge, she has declared August Classics Month on her blog. She is running a range of activities for this, including guest posts. Today the guest blogger is me. Do go check out her blog. And, if you’ve come here from there, you are most welcome to check me out!

Anyhow, writing that post – and reading some of the comments already made on DBC’s blog this month – has made me think more on this whole classics business. And here is what I think…

They must speak to some universal truth

That is, what they say about human nature has to ring as true today as when they were written. There is a fascinating little paradox here though, because classics can come and go. Clearly there is something more going on – something, perhaps, commercial or political or academic, which brings me to …

They must stand the test of time (and place)

Little Black Dress

Little Black Dress, says Clker.com (Courtesy: Chika87 at Clker.com)

To know they ring as true today as when they were written, some time must have elapsed. Think classic fashion. A classic LBD (aka little black dress) is one which looks as smart (note, not trendy, not funky, but smart) today as it did 30 years ago. It may show its age around the edges – perhaps an older style fabric, or a slightly different length – but it still works beautifully.

The way I test this for literature is not by defining an arbitrary amount of time but by a more pragmatic rule-of-thumb. And that is multiple reprintings – not in the first flush of publication, but some years down the track. The more years down the track and the more reprintings, the more classic perhaps? Or, at least, the closer it gets to the pantheon of classics, like, say, Shakespeare and Jane Austen!

But it is not always quite this simple

Some books die and then are revived. Sometimes this is to do with “fashion” in academia as writers fall in and out of favour (but I’m not going to explore this one now). Sometimes though there is something more, shall we say, political going on. And here I’m referring to minorities, such as, oh, women! In the 1970s, with the revival of feminism, there appeared a number of publishers who fossicked out works by women that had been lost (the works that is, not the women!). Virago Press and The Women’s Press are two biggies, but there were (and still are) many others. They (re)introduced us (or me at least!) to writers like Elizabeth von Arnim. These presses revealed that, while the meaning of “classic” as expressing something universal may be a commonly agreed thing, what we get to read is a highly constructed thing.

I’d love to know what you think. What do you mean by classic (excluding the Greeks for the time being!)? Do you purposefully choose or not choose to read classics, or is the notion of making such a distinction irrelevant to you? What are your favourite classics?

And, if you are interested in what some others are saying on this, do pop over to DesertBookChick. While there, you could always help me in my project of changing her mind about Jane Austen!

Helen Garner, Cosmo cosmolino

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

When I returned to seriously reading Australian writers back in the 1980s, there were four women writers who caught my attention, and I have loved them ever since. They were Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007), Thea Astley (1925-2004), Olga Masters (1919-1986) and Helen Garner (b. 1942). Garner, the youngest by a couple of decades, is the only one still here, still writing novels, short stories, non-fiction and journal articles. I say I love her, but I can’t say I always agree with her. In fact, sometimes she makes me mad – but I admire her honesty and love her writing.

Cosmo cosmolino is not her most recent work. It was published in 1992 and has been on my TBR pile since my brother gave it to me in 1995. How embarrassing! But it finally managed to scramble to the top and I’m glad it did. It’s an intriguing book: it looks like two short stories (“Recording angel” and “Vigil”) and a novella (“Cosmo cosmolino”), but nowhere on the cover or the title page does it say “a collection of short stories”. This means, I think, that we are meant to see it as a novel.

So, how does it work as a novel? Each story would, I’m sure, stand perfectly well alone, but the two short stories also work as back stories to the novella. The tricky thing though is that the connections between these three are only obvious if you are an attentive reader – or, if you re-read it. For me it was a bit of both. I got some of the connections first time around, and others when I flicked through it to prepare this review. This is not a big problem but there is more depth if you have “got” the back stories when you read the final story.

And so, what are the three stories?

  • “Recording angel”. A recently separated woman (who is clearly Janet in the final story) visits an old friend and his wife in Sydney. This friend is seriously ill with brain cancer. He has not only been an important support and rescuer for her but the one who has “recorded” her life. And, he is never backward about telling her his view of what that is. She doesn’t always like or agree with this view, but she nonetheless fears the possibility that in sickness he will “forget everything” and that she will thereby lose an important connection with herself. There is a brief mention in this story of Ursula, who is the mother of the girl in the second story.
  • “Vigil”. A young woman, who is clearly “out of it” and waiting for her father to rescue her, has a boyfriend Ray(mond), who appears to be there more for the “good times” than for a mutually supportive relationship. When things go wrong, he’s not there for the count. This, we discover in the final story, is something he’s been trying to rectify ever since.
  • “Cosmo Cosmolino”. Three rather lonely people – the aforementioned Janet and Ray plus the rather fey artist, Maxine – find themselves sharing Janet’s house. It’s an uneasy grouping.  Ray is waiting for his big brother Alby (who once lived in Janet’s house) to arrive and take him away; Maxine would like a baby but is running out of time; and Janet is recovering from a broken marriage and doesn’t really know what she wants.

These are not strongly plot-driven stories. However, quite a bit happens on the emotional front, and this is Garner’s real subject.

Which brings us to the themes

Taken together, these stories are about the muddles people get into, particularly regarding their relationships with each other. Poor decisions, missed opportunities and the never-ending seeking for meaningful connection are the stuff of her fiction. But there is a departure in this book: the introduction of a spiritual (and at times magical) element, often involving some sense of “visitation”.

Angel Wings

Angel wings(Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

In the first story, the distraught woman is visited at the end by “a small, serious, stone-eyed angel of mercy”. In the second story Ray is dragged into a rather ghoulish underworld-like scene, after which he is told “You’ll be right … Things’ll be different now”. And in the final story there are all sorts of hints of spiritual happenings, including the “dark column” that shadows Janet, and Maxine’s “magical realist” flight “into the blinding upper sky” where “nameless souls and sacraments outrageously disport themselves”.

It all feels very un-Garner-like. She is usually firmly grounded in the real world of messy relationships where people struggle to connect and find meaning. But I should have been prepared: the novel’s epigraph from Rilke reads “Every angel is terrible”. “Terrible”, of course, has two meanings, and I suspect Garner is playing on both here – on the fear angels engender and the awe. As this paradox implies, there is no suggestion here of easy answers but more of possibilities. Here is Janet at the end:

Our minds are not hopeful, thought Janet; but our nerves are made of optimistic stuff.

I was intrigued by the use of “nerves” rather than “souls” or “spirits” given what had gone before, but I rather like her use of that word. It’s effectively ambiguous.

Finally, the style

The thing that marks Garner out for me is her expressive language. Her books are rarely long. This isn’t because she doesn’t have much to say but because she doesn’t waste words. Read this:

… The heart of the house was broken. It ought to have been blown up and scraped off the surface of the earth.

But houses as well as their owners must soldier on …

and this:

… and the architraves had lost their grip on the walls, and slouched this way and that …

and, finally, this:

The room contracted around Ray again, fitting itself tightly to the shape of him, squeezing …

I love the atmosphere and emotion conveyed by language like this.  Garner uses a lot of imagery and symbolism – but never simply. Birds, for example, can augur wonder and hope, or, particularly when “the failure bird” appears, something completely different. There are also biblical allusions, such as when Ray denies three times that he knew his girlfriend. No wonder he’s dragged into the underworld for a bit of shock therapy! From beginning to tend, the language never sways from conveying a sense of things being awry because the characters’ lives are so.

Cosmo Cosmolino is one of those books that is both accessible and challenging – and that is just the sort of book I like to read.

Helen Garner
Cosmo cosmolino
Ringwood, Vic: McPhee Gribble, 1992
221pp.
ISBN: 0869142844

Howard Zinn, Finishing school for pickets

/ Whispering Gums / 11 Comments
Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn, 2009 (Courtesy: B-Fest at Athens Indymedia, using CC-BY-SA 2.0, via Wikipedia)

I have been remiss lately with my Library of America reading. Busy-ness has taken its toll, but it just so happened that this week I was (briefly) between books and the LOA offering looked right up my alley, so I decided to read it over breakfast. “Finishing school for pickets” was published in 1960, making it the most recently written of the LOA items I’ve read to date. It was written by Howard Zinn (1922-2010), an American writer, historian, activist and all-round intellectual. You can read the essay yourself, online, at the Library of America site.

However, before I discuss this essay, a little background. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. She wasn’t the first to take such action but it was this particular occasion which sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott whose aim was to end segregation on the city’s public transport. The battle was finally won in a Supreme Court ruling in late 1956. But, more importantly, it played a pivotal role in the fledgling Civil Rights Movement in the USA. Now, jump a few years and over the border to Atlanta, Georgia, and we are in the time and place of Zinn’s essay.

In 1960, Howard Zinn was chair of the history department at Spelman College, America’s oldest “black college for women” (Wikipedia). This college was well-known as, more or less, “a finishing school” for young black women. They were encouraged to “be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike”, to “not speak loudly” and not “get into trouble”. As Zinn says, “if intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, by-products”. Here is the opening para of the essay:

One quiet afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below”. (Let’s not worry here about the “attractive, tawny-skinned” descriptor as Zinn’s heart was clearly in the right place).

Zinn goes on to chronicle various subversive actions being undertaken by the “still ‘nice'” but politically aware students. He says: “They are well-mannered, but this is somewhat tempered by a recent declaration that they will use every method short of violence to end segregation”. And so what do they do in the cause of desegregation? They sit in the front (aka white) area of buses; they occupy the white section of the Georgia Legislature’s gallery “in a pioneering show of non-violent resistance”; they show up “at the main Atlanta library in sufficient numbers to worry [my emphasis] the city administration into a decision to admit Negroes there” (what the? the librarian in me asks), and so on. Zinn writes that:

Spelman girls, more sheltered than women at the other colleges, were among the first to leave the island and to begin causing little flurries of alarm in the segregated outside world.

These activities, he says, may have bewildered the conservative matriarchy of Spelman, but they infuriated the “officialdom of the State of Georgia”. However, this did not stop the students of Spelman (and the other colleges of the Atlanta University Center) who continued their campaign even though, as Zinn describes it, many of them came from “the deep South … the Faulknerian small towns of traditional Negro submissiveness”.

It’s a highly readable essay, with light-handed use of various rhetorical devices to progress his argument, but it does not conclude on any great triumphs. After all, in 1960, there was (and, some would say, there still is) a long way to go in the cause of true racial equity. Zinn’s goal was, I assume, to raise some awareness amongst the white readers of The Nation. I can only hope he did so. As for him, he was fired from Spelman in 1963 “for insubordination” (his words), that is, for siding with his students in their fight for desegregation.

Zinn died earlier this year. Not long before he died he said that he would like to be remembered “for introducing a different way of thinking about the world, about war, about human rights, about equality,” and “for getting more people to realize that the power which rests so far in the hands of people with wealth and guns, that the power ultimately rests in people themselves and that they can use it. At certain points in history, they have used it. Black people in the South used it. People in the women’s movement used it. People in the anti-war movement used it. People in other countries who have overthrown tyrannies have used it.” (Wikipedia).

This essay is clearly just one tiny example of how he went about achieving this lifelong passion. I am indebted to the Library of America for making it available to us.

South Solitary (Movie)

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments
Tacking Point Lighthouse

Not on an island, not to the south, but an Aussie lighthouse - Tacking Point

What is it about lighthouses? They conjure up such a romantic notion of life in the wild, of communing with and/or battling the elements. They excite us with their extremes of remoteness and loneliness which can push people to their limits. And they paradoxically symbolise both life (light) and danger (warning). All of these are present to some degree in Shirley Barrett’s latest film, South Solitary, which is set on a remote lighthouse in the southern seas off Australia, in the late 1920s. Barrett says she chose this time period because it was before radio communications, and thus enabled her to explore how humans behave under extreme isolation.

The basic plot is that George Wadsworth (Barry Otto) and his niece, Meredith Appleton (Miranda Otto) arrive at an island lighthouse where George is to be head keeper. Already on the island are assistant lighthouse keeper Harry (Rohan Nichol) and his family, and the war damaged Mr. Fleet (Marton Csokas). These characters are all recognisable and the story is pretty predictable. Meredith is single, having lost her almost-fiancé in the first world war. Her uncle is the tough and somewhat unbending keeper of the old school. Harry is the “never-let-a-chance-go-by” womaniser, and Fleet the broody, awkward silent type. It’s generally realistic – Barrett doesn’t push the drama much  beyond the limits of our belief (though there are a couple of debatable points) – but it is also rather archetypal, and so nothing in the story really surprises.

For these reasons, I found it to be an enjoyable – though not great – movie. The things I particularly enjoyed were:

  • the cast, particularly Miranda Otto who perfectly juggles her fragile, rather too naive but also a little coquettish character; Rohan Nicol who plays the “cad” to perfection; Annie Martin who plays a knowing and unsentimental 10-year old; and Marton Csokas who, despite his almost clichéd stiff gruffness, has a voice to die for;
  • the setting – the way the island and the sea are filmed to convey, at different times, beauty, freedom and terror;
  • the social history of lighthouse living – such as the use of carrier pigeons and semaphore flags for “comms” (as we’d call it today).

Overall, this film is just a little too predictable to match the power of Beautiful Kate or Samson and Delilah or Animal Kingdom, but, it is an eminently watchable movie, primarily because of the cast and the setting. I’m not at all sorry I saw it – I could watch Miranda Otto, in particular, forever – but I’m not sure how long I’ll remember it.

Ian McEwan, Solar

/ Whispering Gums / 37 Comments
Ian McEwan Solar bookcover

Bookcover (Used by permission of the Random House Group Ltd)

I don’t know whether I believe your story, but I’ve enjoyed it.

So says McEwan’s latest creation, Michael Beard, to a character he has “done wrong”. This more or less sums up my feelings about Solar, the novel in which this statement appears. I am a McEwan fan and have greatly liked most of the 5 or 6 of his books that I’ve read but, while I found this one readable, I’m not convinced that it completely comes together into a coherent whole. This may have something to do with the fact that McEwan has tried for something lighter here and hasn’t quite pulled it off.

Do I need to describe the plot? It’s been reviewed so much by now that I presume most readers here already know it. However, to be on the safe side, here goes. It’s all about Nobel Laureate physicist, Michael Beard, who at the start of the book is 53 years old, 15lbs overweight and at the end of his 5th marriage (due to his incurable, it seems, womanising). On top of this he is struggling to keep his career alive: he is surviving, mostly on speaking engagements, while he waits, hopes, for a new inspiration. This is the set up. And, as is typical of McEwan, a little way into the book an event occurs that will be life-changing. In Beard’s case it will kickstart his career. How that occurs – and its eventual fallout – forms the rest of the book.

The novel is divided into three parts, labelled simply 2000, 2005 and 2009. If Beard was 15lbs overweight in 2000, in 2005 he is 35lbs overweight and by 2009 that has increased to 65lbs. This might tell you something about him: he is out of control in every aspect of his life – physically, emotionally, intellectually and morally. He is not, as you might gather from this, a likable man, but it is mainly through his eyes – told third person – that we experience the novel.

As the title suggests, the book’s subject matter is solar energy and climate change. And some of the best parts are those in which McEwan satirises the politics of climate change. In an amusing sequence, Beard is invited to the arctic along with a number of artists (making him the proverbial sore thumb) to experience climate change first hand. While he is there he observes the increasing chaos in the “bootroom” where the outdoor clothing is kept. From day one, the “bootroom” doesn’t work as people take items from pegs that are not their own resulting by the end of the week in no-one wearing a complete outfit that fits them. This works pretty well as a metaphor for the chaos and disorganisation in the climate change community. Add to this scenes like the idealistic climate-changers scooting about the ice in their gas-guzzling skidoos and you get a rather funny, and pointed, episode in the book.

The tone of the book is, in fact, comic-satiric which is a bit of a departure for McEwan who has tended to write books that are more dramatic, many with a “thriller” component. Here, though, there are even moments of slap-stick, such as when Beard early in the book pretends that he has a woman in the house in an attempt to make his wife jealous – all to no effect, but in terms of the novel’s plot it results in a deeply ironic statement:

Clearly he had been in no state to take decisions or to devise schemes and from now on he must take into account his unreliable mental state and act conservatively, passively, honestly, and break no rules, do nothing extreme.

Not long after this episode he does the complete opposite. Some of the members of my reading group found the book very funny but for me it fell a little flat. I saw the satire and thought it was clever at times, but it was sometimes more pathetic than highly comic, and at other times a little heavy-handed. Here, for example, is Beard on the bootroom:

How were they to save the earth – assuming it needed saving, which he doubted – when it was so much larger than the bootroom?

Now, most readers would already have got the point. I’m not sure that we needed to have it hammered home like this.

The focus of the book, as you will have gathered by now, is Beard and we spend a lot of time in his head. This is not a problem in itself, except that he never seems to change. He’s a gluttonous, arrogant, self-centred womaniser at the beginning and is the same at the end. He is also morally bankrupt – something you will discover soon enough if you read the book. Does a character have to change for a book to work? Not necessarily – think Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume – but we do have to stay interested in the character and Beard, for me, became a little boring. There was too much of the same – too much womanising, too much alcohol and fatty, fast food, too much self-aggrandisement – that I started to think “enough already”.

The key question to ask, then, is why has McEwan chosen such a character? The answer seems to be that McEwan wanted to express his fear – cynicism even – about 21st century humankind’s ability to enforce change. Early in the novel is this:

Beard was not wholly sceptical about climate change. It was one of a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it and expected governments to meet and take action … but he himself had other things to think about …

Himself, basically. Is McEwan saying Beard is us, is Everyman? If so, I can’t help thinking he’s got a point, but I’m not sure he’s written the book – like, say, Animal farm – that sustains the trope well enough to last the distance.

Oh dear, I fear now that I have been more critical than I meant to, because I did find the book readable. I did want to know what happened. I liked a lot of the language. And I did enjoy many of the observations McEwan makes throughout the book – about reason and logic versus idealism, about feminism, and of course about politics. Take for example the following, which is very apposite given that we downunder are in the middle of a Federal election campaign:

He was aggressively apolitical – to the fingertips, he liked to say. He disliked the overheated non-arguments, the efforts each side made to misunderstand and misrepresent the other, the amnesia that spooled behind each ‘issue’ as it arose.

I can relate to that …

Finally, there is a sly bit of self-deprecation running through the book about stories, imagination and the arts. I had to laugh at Beard’s comment that:

People who kept on about narrative tended to have a squiffy view of reality, believing all versions of it to have equal value.

I’ll leave you to decide what you think of McEwan’s version here.

Ian McEwan
Solar
London: Jonathan Cape, 2010
283pp.
ISBN: 9780224090506

Evening with a Nobel Laureate

/ Whispering Gums / 11 Comments
Chen Ning Yang

Chen Ning Yang, 2005 (Courtesy: Alanmak, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

And now for something completely different! Tonight I was way out of my comfort zone, mixing as I was with physicists and mathematicians at an event involving staff, students, alumni (pas moi, but Mr Gums) of the Research School of Physics and Engineering at the Australian National University (ANU). The event involved a reception followed by a lecture given by Nobel Laureate in Physics, Chen Ning Yang. I would of course have been more excited had the Laureate been Patrick White but that would have been a bit weird given he died in 1990 and, anyhow, a Nobel Laureate is a Nobel Laureate, n’est-ce pas? The gobsmacking thing was that Professor Yang was born in October 1922. Yes, he’s nearly 88, and in the introduction we were told he’s about to move back to Stony Brook University in the USA because there are some exciting things going on there!

The topic of the lecture was, wait for it:

How mathematics and physics got together again!

I’ll spare you the details – not of course because I couldn’t understand all the “beautiful” formulae for exciting things like gauge theory but because I would want to bore you! I will say, though, that the lecture ended with the statement that maths and physics got together again in the second half of the 20th century when the two disciplines realised they both used F.F and F.F tilde (the tilde is supposed to be above the F but I can’t find that in my PopChar list). If you can understand what all that F-stuff means, you’re ahead of me.

The funny thing is, though, that I rather enjoyed the lecture. Sure, it was peppered with many incomprehensible (to me) formulae, but he was absolutely charming and there was, in fact, an engaging story amongst it all. For the rest of the audience it may have been an inspiring science lecture, but for me it was more like a wonderful fable (you know, like “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse”). Each to her own, I say …

Is there a reason for all this, do I hear you ask, beyond an esoteric intellectual exercise? Well, apparently there is and it has to do with money. Physics has always been closely tied to the real, that is, physical world, but Mathematics has not. By reconnecting with Physics and thereby the physical world, Professor Yang somewhat cheekily said, Mathematics finds itself in a better position to attract funding. In other words, our world, as many of we humanities-focused people know only too well, is much happier when there is some practical application to intellectual pursuit!

POSTSCRIPT: I am, funnily enough, in the middle of writing my post on Ian McEwan’s Solar, which is about a Nobel Laureate physicist. In the book, the physicist refers to the Dirac equation and says “a thing of pure beauty, that equation…”. If you look at the article on it in Wikipedia you will see the sorts (though not the same) of equations I refer to in this post.

ALS Gold Medal, 2009 (announced 2010)

/ Whispering Gums / 18 Comments

Since many book bloggers are posting the Booker longlist, I don’t think I need to do so here. I don’t expect to read many of them, not so much due to a lack of interest as to the fact that I’ve a pretty full reading schedule in front of me without adding these to it! I have read and reviewed Christos Tsiolkas’s The slap, and expect to read in the next few months Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. There are a couple of others I would like to read, but time will probably defeat me.

David Malouf Ransom
UK edition cover (Used by permission of the Random House Group)

However, I will instead announce – because it gets such little publicity – that David Malouf has won this year’s ALS Gold Medal for Literature with his novel, Ransom. As I wrote in my earlier post on this award, it does not come with a monetary prize and so tends to be overlooked by the media. Nonetheless it is an award well worthwhile watching (how’s that for some alliteration!) because its winners do tend to be among our more notable authors and books.

The other awards made by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature for the year are:

Congratulations to David Malouf – and the rest of the awardees. What a shame there hasn’t been a little more fanfare…

Introducing the Griffyn Ensemble

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Griffin from Throne Room, Knossos

A painted Griffin, Knossos (Courtesy: Paginazero, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

The Griffyn Ensemble is an exciting chamber music ensemble based right here in our (that is downunder’s) national capital. The ensemble is named, in a fun wordplay, after Walter Burley Griffin, Canberra’s designer, and the mythical beast (the griffin, gryffin, or gryphon).

The group  was founded in December 2006 and its members are mostly, I believe, graduates of the ANU’s School of Music. It has had various make-ups over time including violin, viola and cello, but it currently comprises:

  • Kiri Sollis – Flute
  • Matthew O’Keeffe – Clarinet
  • Carly Brown – Horn
  • Laura Tanata – Harp
  • Wyana Etherington – Percussion
  • Susan Ellis – Soprano
  • Michael Sollis – Musical director and composer

Fascinating line-up eh? And the result is that they play some rather fascinating music – which focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries. The music, for those of us who have not had a lot of exposure to more contemporary classical music, can be a little obscure. But that’s fine with me, because I like to be introduced to more modern works as well as hear the old favourites, just as I love to read classic novels alongside the latest literary release.

Tales from Heaven and Hell

We’ve heard members of the ensemble a couple of times before, but on Saturday night we went to a concert performed by the current full ensemble at the lovely, new-ish Belconnen Arts Centre. It was a challenging but also enthralling program*:

  • Madrigals Book III (1969), by George Crumb (Soprano, harp, percussion)
  • Perelandra Piccolo Concerto (2010), by Michael Sollis (the full ensemble, with Kiri Sollis featuring on piccolo)
  • A Dybbuk Suite (1995), by The Klezmatics (the full ensemble)
  • Good Night (1989), by Henryk Mikolaj Górecki (Soprano, alto flute, harp, three tam tams)

I was intrigued by Crumb’s Madrigals which comprises three very short accompanied (though that word doesn’t do justice to the harp and percussion) vocal pieces of a style that was unlike anything I’ve heard before. The lyrics are drawn from Federico Garcia Lorca. All I can say is that it was a nicely controlled and expressive performance by the three musicians involved. Sollis’ Perelandra Piccolo Concerto is a 4-movement piece inspired by CS Lewis‘ novel Perelandra – and featured, of course, the piccolo. The novel, which I haven’t read, tells the story of Elwin Ransom, who is sent to Perelandra (Venus) to prevent the Fall of a new Adam and Eve. The piece includes spoken text, effectively read by soprano Ellis. I must say that the piccolo is not my favourite instrument – particularly as a major solo instrument – as I tend to like something a little more mellow (like, say, the alto-flute in the last piece) but Kiri Sollis (the composer’s wife) did play it with both verve and skill. All in all a work that made you think while entertaining you at the same time.

However, it was probably the second half of the concert that moved me the most. I think this is because the first half had a more intellectual appeal – my brain had to work to enjoy it – while the second half appealed more to the emotions. A Dybbuk Suite contains all that paradoxical joy and melancholy that you tend to find in klezmer music and I found my foot tapping at times. Lovely. Good Night, on the other hand, mostly comprises a mystical, moody dialogue between harp and alto-flute with some voice and percussion near the end. It was quite mesmerising: Kiri Sollis and Laura Tanata seemed perfectly attuned to each other and played the piece at a controlled and measured pace. It quietly but gorgeously concluded what was a truly delightful concert.

(*This is not a formal music review – that is not my skill as I’ve said before – but simply my lay music-goer’s response to the concert)

M.J. Hyland, This is how

/ Whispering Gums / 18 Comments

Bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

If you want to read a book that is quick (and seemingly simple) to read and yet satisfyingly complex, then MJ Hyland’s This is how is for you. I’ve been wanting to read Hyland for a while and, having now done so, this won’t be the last.

So where to start? The novel is a first person story told by a young, somewhat disengaged 23-year-old man, Patrick Oxtoby. It is set in the late 1960s, perhaps early 1970s, but the setting and period barely matter really, as this is very much a book about character (and, humanity in general).

Now, my problem is what to say about the plot without spoiling the first third of the novel, so I think I’ll say nothing except what the back cover tells us. It says that “it is a novel about crime; though not a crime novel” and that “it has an almost stately pace and yet it’s thrilling”. These, together with my opening comment that it is simple but complex, should convey what a rather paradoxical read this is. The novel opens with the following:

I put my bags down on the doorstep and knock three times. I don’t bang hard like a copper, but it’s not as though I’m ashamed to be knocking either.

Who is this? Why does he describe his knocking in such terms? Well, we soon learn that Patrick, newly jilted by his fiancée, has come to this little seaside town to start a new job as a mechanic. He’s intelligent – though dropped out of university – and comes with good recommendations as a mechanic from his previous employer. But he is a very singular person, one who is not totally comfortable in his own skin. This is apparent from the beginning: here is more from the first page:

‘I thought you’d be here hours ago.’
It’s after ten and I was due at six. My mouth’s gone dry, but I smile, friendly as I can.
‘I missed the connection,’ I say.
I’ve not meant the lie, but she’s forced me.

Hmm, now I really was wondering who this is and, given the suggestion that the novel is about a crime, I wondered whether he is the criminal and whether he had already committed a crime? I also started to wonder as I continued to read the first few pages whether he was an unreliable narrator. But no, he is essentially reliable; he is, in fact, very much himself – but himself is a complex (aren’t we all) human being who carries quite a bit of baggage. I’m not quite sure how Hyland does it but throughout the novel she manages to unsettle her readers and keep us that way: at times we empathise with Patrick and feel sympathy for him and then suddenly he distresses if not horrifies us – and we wonder anew, Who is this man?

MJ Hyland

MJ Hyland, London, 2008 (Courtesy: MJ Hyland via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

In my opening para I said it was a quick and seemingly simple read. This is because the style is simple and direct. Patrick tells his story in present tense, with just the occasional flashback. Sentences are mostly short and simple, and the paragraphs tend to be short too. There is quite a lot of dialogue and not a lot of description. And what description there is tends to be short, sharp and vivid (“This blow is like a dose of poison in my veins, a hot sharp shot through my legs and arms, through my bowels and bladder”). Patrick is introspective at times but he doesn’t wallow in it. All this gives us a picture of a pretty simple character, which he is – and isn’t at the same time. There is, we are aware, quite a gap between what he says and thinks (most of the time) which could make him seem coldly manipulative. Yet, he’s not that. It’s more that he’s a somewhat damaged soul trying to survive in a world that doesn’t seem to go the way he would like – and it is this that leads to his trouble.

He likes to be in control (“I wanted her to go, and now she’s gone it’s like rejection, feels like it was her idea and not mine”) but he doesn’t try to bend others to his will. He has an uncomfortable relationship with the truth (“She put her hand on her heart and gives me a big smile and I’m reminded of when I told the girl in the theatre foyer that I was nervous and how the truth got a good reaction out of her as well”) but it’s more to do with self-protection than with any specific desire to deceive others. He has a complicated relationship with his family and they with him, but most of what we know is from his perspective so it is difficult to know the “truth” (if  a simple “truth” there can be in families). As he says:

I’m not sure if the truth will make any sense. The truth is, I thought I was rejecting my mother when I left home … But it turns out she was the one doing the rejecting and it’s just the same with my father.

The “real” truth, though, is probably somewhere in between.

Does he* grow throughout the novel and is there a resolution? To some extent he does get to know himself better but the resolution seems to be more that he learns to live with his situation (“life’s shrinking to a size that suits me more”) rather than grow as a person. But maybe that’s what maturity/development is really about?

Whatever the case, this is one of those truly original creations – a character who, as the back blurb says, “is fully himself and yet stands for all of us”. I haven’t been so intrigued by and engrossed in a character for a long time. The plot is slim but I barely noticed. I’ll definitely be reading more Hyland.

MJ Hyland
This is how
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009
376pp.
ISBN: 9781921656484

Review copy supplied by Text Publishing.

* An aside. I couldn’t help wondering at times whether Patrick, with his social awkwardness and slightly obsessive behaviour, might be autistic to some level, but this never comes out and I am uncomfortable ascribing a pathology to a character when the author hasn’t done so.