Simon Armitage’s The odyssey

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Mostly when we travel we listen to the radio or music, but on our recent trip we listened to a 3-CD dramatisation of Homer’s The odyssey. The set was lent to us; the dramatisation was done by poet Simon Armitage for BBC-4. As my friend who lent it to us said, you need to get used to the British accents telling an ancient Greek story in modern idiom, but once you get used to that…well, this is a pretty good way of familiarising yourself with (or reminding yourself of) Homer’s work.

Odysseus and Penelope

Odysseus' return (Courtesy: OCAL @ clker.com)

The odyssey of course is Homer’s (ignoring here discussions of authorship) telling of Odysseus’ long journey home to Ithaca from the Battle of Troy. Armitage’s version begins with Zeus and Athena arguing over Odysseus’ fate and these two link the different phases of the story as we progress through them. This version essentially follows the sequence of the original but is pretty fast and furious, focusing mostly on the action and drama of the story…and that did, I must admit, get a little tedious for  a while around the middle of the production.

In other words, not much time is given for dwelling on the nuances or underlying themes…and there are many themes to explore in this work, including cunning and courage, fidelity and trust, the power of the Gods (in ancient Greek life), loyalty and greed. Some of the “truths” ring a little strange to our ears. Not only do we (most of us anyhow) no longer believe that our lives are at the mercy of the Gods, but there is also the old double standard: Penelope remained faithful while Odysseus had his flings. But other “truths” – the role of cunning, courage and loyalty in survival, and the vice of greed and gluttony, for instance – still work today, albeit in different settings.

I was intrigued though by Armitage’s allusions, such as the Bible’s “stranger in a strange land” (The Book of Exodus, King James’ version) and Shakespeare’s “screw your courage to the sticking-place” (Macbeth). But then, I guess literary allusions are as valid in adaptations as they are in original works?

There’s not much more I want to say about the adaptation: it’s fun, it’s well performed and it usefully and entertainingly recounts a classic tale. I’d recommend it on those counts.

The odyssey – Homer (Audio)
Adapted by Simon Armitage for full-cast dramatisation
BBC Audiobooks, 2004
3 hours running time

POSTSCRIPT: In the interests of maintaining synchronicities, a month or so ago I reviewed Arnold Zable’s Sea of many returns which focuses on Ithaca, and its literal and mythological contexts of “home”.

Hedonistic hiking

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Dead Horse Gap, Kosciuszko National Park

Above the treeline, Dead Horse Gap, Kosciuszko National Park

“Hedonistic hiking” is the title of an article in a glossy little (“free at selected tourist outlets in Australia” but otherwise  $24.95pa) magazine I picked up in Melbourne a couple of months ago. The mag is called essentials magazine: culture, culinary, adventure. Can you tell me how the word “culinary” fits in there syntactically? The issue I picked up (free at some selected outlet obviously) was its – and I quote – “issue 15 mid-spring ‘Chrissy issue’ 2009” edition. What is that? Who is this magazine geared to? Anyhow, the article is essentially (ha!) a promo for gourmet hiking tours in Europe. It caught my eye though because it’s a term that could apply to our annual Thredbo sojourn. We are not campers – and we don’t eat gourmet food on our walks. Rather, we love to bushwalk and then go out and eat (well). Thredbo caters for this predilection of ours in a setting that is both beautiful and compact. We arrive, park our car, check into our lovely studio apartment with its view of the mountains, and then walk and eat to our heart’s delight.

But of course, there is more to this area than hedonism and hiking. Thredbo is in the Snowy Mountains of Australia, the mountains famous for AB Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” and Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby series of books to name just two cultural icons from the region. Nearby is the town of Jindabyne, the setting for the rather gut-wrenching Australian film of the same name. It was loosely adapted from a Raymond Carver story titled “So much water so close to home”. As lovely as the mountains are, wireless connection here is iffy so I shall sign off, sit back and sip my Chardonnay while I enjoy the sun setting on Crackenback.

POSTSCRIPT: And there are nods to the cultural heritage here, such as Banjo Drive and the Silver Brumby Lodge in Thredbo, and the Man from Snowy River Hotel in Perisher. It’s rather subtle though – the hints are there but it’s not overdone. And there’s nothing wrong with that in a place that wears its commercial side rather lightly too.

On outdated books

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Most readers at some time or other confront the issue of “datedness” in literature. This book is “dated”, we say. The funny thing is that what seems dated to one person is often not so to another. So, what do we mean when we say a book is dated?

The writer Fran Lebowitz is very clear about what she means by it. In a short documentary titled The divine Jane:  Reflections on Jane Austen that was produced last year for The Morgan Library and Museum’s exhibition A woman’s wit: Jane Austen’s life and legacy, she says:

Any artist who has that quality of timelessness has that quality because they tell the truth. Jane Austen’s perceptions don’t date because they are correct, and they will remain that way until human beings improve themselves intrinsically, and this will not happen.

She argues that those works which date do so because “their ideas are wrong” not because the details date. All details date she says. This has got me pondering. How often do we argue that a book is dated because of the “details” – because of their language, or lifestyles, or values?

Old books

Old books (Courtesy: OCAL @ clker.com)

It’s easy with non-fiction to identify datedness: look at this blog with its “hilariously outdated books of the week” posts. With non-fiction it really is mostly a case of the details – in some way – being wrong. The website, Education World, discusses outdated books and reports on one librarian’s “shelf of shame”. This librarian, and others, would rather have no books than outdated books. “Outdated books”, they say, “give children misinformation … we betray children when we put outdated information on our shelves”. “Outdated books keep stereotypes alive”, they say. All this is largely true, but – and here is the rub – they also say:

If you don’t have nice new books that kids want to read, they won’t read. We’re trying to get children to read more.

This feeds into other notions of being outdated, doesn’t it? Today’s children for example may not want to read my old version of The lion, the witch and the wardrobe because it “looks” old, it doesn’t accord with modern book design. They will however read a new edition, one that looks like books of their generation. I wonder if it was always thus? Once upon a time books were so precious, people read whatever version/edition that was available. But, perhaps, these people were readers anyhow, perhaps back then there were many who didn’t read and these are the people today’s librarians are trying to reach?

Enough digression, back to Lebowitz. I think about CJ Dennis’ The moods of Ginger Mick which I recently reviewed. I was initially not very keen to read it because it has, I admit it, always seemed old-fashioned, dated, to me. Its language is certainly dated – in the way that slang quickly becomes so – and the life it chronicles is certainly dated. Some of its values are too – its style of blokiness, its general attitude to race and gender – and yet despite all this it is I think also timeless. It’s timeless because it deals with humanity – with fear and bravery, with our misconceptions about each other based on superficial things (such as class) and our realisation that underneath these superficialities is what really makes a person worth knowing (such as loyalty and “grit”), with, in fact, our discovery of self. As Ginger Mick says in one of the poems:

Sometimes a bloke gits glimpses uv the truth.

Isn’t this why most of us read?

So, what do others think about datedness in literature? Is it enough to “tell the truth” as Lebowitz says – or can a truth-telling book be dated?

Top non-fiction of 2009

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Is it cheating to do separate lists for fiction and non-fiction? Some people list their top books regardless of form or genre, while others created separate lists. I’m going to do the latter because – well, because I get to choose more books for a start. Actually, I didn’t read a lot of non-fiction this year so my top non-fiction titles will almost be all the non-fiction I read. As with my top fiction, I am listing them in the order I read them.

I didn’t nominate a top fiction for the year, but I’m going to here – and it is the one I read before I started blogging: Chloe Hooper’s The tall man and so I’ll do a little mini-review of it now.

Chloe Hooper’s The tall man

In a nutshell the book, which is best described as “true crime”,  chronicles the fallout that results from the death in custody on Palm Island of indigenous man Cameron Doomadgee, fallout which includes the autopsy report and ensuing riots, and the homicide trial of policeman Chris Hurley. Hooper explores the awful disconnect between people in the communities involved, between white and black, and within the white and black communities. She shows how women (particularly those on Palm Island) are caught in the middle. They believed the policeman killed Doomadgee but, when the riot occurred, they didn’t want the police gone because “who will protect us from the men”.

Throughout the book, Hooper manages to bring what is a very complex situation into rather clear focus…showing, not surprisingly, that in the end it’s the whites who have the power. For example, she attends a police rally organised to support Hurley and notes how they, the police, were fashioning themselves as victim. She comments that “measured against two hundred years of dispossession and abuse, the idea is fantastic, but no-one in that hall was thinking about historical relativities”! This point regarding “historical relativities” is well-made: this is not simply a case of white devil versus black angel, but we know where the real “victimhood” lies. The book also touches on the notion of power corrupting – or, questions at least how police officers are chosen and trained in the first place.

Hooper manages to walk a fine line. You know where her sympathies lie (particularly as the book progresses and she teases out the evidence) but she takes an analytical approach encouraging her readers to also do so. This begs comparison with Helen Garner who takes a far more heart-on-sleeve approach to her subjects in her books, The first stone and Joe Cinque’s consolation.

Finally, she makes an important point when she describes Hurley’s trial as “a false battleground”. Truth and justice – those universal concerns – do need to come out, but the trial is not going to solve the underlying problems. The tall man is a highly readable book about some significant concerns (for Australia at least)…and, in my mind, well deserves the awards it has won. I have only one quibble with it: I wish it had an index!

POSTSCRIPT: Thea Astley also dealt with troubles on Palm Island in her novel The multiple effects of rainshadow. It deals with the event which occurred on Palm Island in 1930 when the supervisor at the time ran amok and killed his children, something which Hooper refers to in the book when she provides a little rundown of Palm Island’s history.

Chloe Hooper
The tall man: Death and life on Palm Island
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2008
276pp.
ISBN: 9780241015377

C.J. Dennis, The moods of Ginger Mick

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Sometimes a bloke gits glimpses uv the truth
(“In Spadger’s Lane”)

I wasn’t sure, really, that I wanted to read CJ Dennis’ verse novel, The moods of Ginger Mick, which I received as a review copy from the Sydney University Press as part of their Australian Classics Library – but have surprised myself. I rather enjoyed reading it and am glad that I had this little push to do so!

The moods of Ginger Mick
The moods of Ginger Mick cover (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

The moods of Ginger Mick was published in 1916 just weeks before the big Conscription Referendum, according to Philip Butters who wrote the new introduction to this edition. It does not however buy into that debate. The book comprises 15 poems “written” by Dennis’ other character, The Sentimental Bloke, at whose wedding Mick was best man. The poems introduce us to Mick and his larrikin life before the Great War and then go on to chronicle his life as a soldier.

Dennis writes his poems in broad Australian slang (but there is a glossary at the end). Most are 6-line stanzas with an ababcc rhyme (the same as Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”!) but every now and then there is a different rhyme scheme which mixes it up a little. The sweet poem “The singing soldiers”, for example, has a sing-song aab(with an internal rhyme)acc, while the poignant “Sari Bair” about the eponymous battle has 4-line stanzas with a simple aabb rhyme.

I enjoyed reading the poems, not only for their evocative language but also for their subject matter. While their setting and language make them very much of a particular time and place, their concerns have some universality. They are about egalitarianism vs class difference, and about what it means to be a man (a “bloke” as it were). Mick starts off as a bit of a larrikin – one who cares not for the “toffs” and for whom the “toffs” care not! As he says in an early poem:

But I’m not keen to fight so toffs kin dine
On pickled olives …
(“War”)

What sends him to war in the end is “The call uv stoush” but, when he gets there, he starts to discover that in uniform all men are equal, that

… snobbery is down an’ out fer keeps,
It’s grit an’ reel good fellership that gits yeh friends in ‘eaps.
(“The push”)

This poem, “The push”, provides a wonderfully colourful roll call of the sorts of men who enlisted. Other poems cover the support of women at home, hopes for work when they return home now they’ve proved themselves (after all the “‘earty cheerin’ … per’aps  we might be arstin’ fer a job”) and the sense that Australia has grown up as a nation (“But we ‘av seen it’s up to us to lay our toys aside”). There is ironic humour (as in “Rabbits”) and pathos (as in “To the boys who took the count” and “The game” in which Ginger Mick finally realises that he’s found his metier). There’s also some racism that was, unfortunately, typical of the time. And of course there is patriotism, with some rather lovely descriptions of the Australian landscape. I just have to mention here some references to gums:

An’ they’re singin’, still they’re singin’, to the sound uv guns an’ drums.
As they sung one golden Springtime underneath the wavin’ gums.
(“The singing soldiers”)

An’ we’re ‘opin’ as we ‘ear ’em, that, when the next Springtime comes,
You’ll be wiv us ‘ere to listen to that bird tork in the gums
(“A letter to the front”)

As a group, the poems offer an interesting insight into Australia’s experience of the First World War, particularly given their mix of realism and romanticism that belies perhaps the recent glorification that’s developed around our ANZAC heritage. If you are interested in Australia’s cultural and literary heritage, it is well worth giving this short little book a look.

C.J. Dennis
The moods of Ginger Mick
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009 (orig. pub. 1916)
87pp.
ISBN: 9781920898984

(Review copy supplied by the Sydney University Press)

Top 12 fiction of 2009

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I think, pedant that I am, I can now post my Top 12 fiction books of the year, since the book I’m currently reading (interesting though it is) won’t be on it, and I won’t be finishing another one before January 1 comes around. I am listing 12 because Tom at A Common Reader said I could! Picking 12 is about as subjective as I’m going to get and so I am going to list them in the order I read them rather than in any further order of quality:

Sleeping Reader

Why I didn't read enough classics (Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

There are some interesting (to me, anyhow) observations to make about this list:

  • two are short story collections;
  • six (ie half) are by Australian authors;
  • only 3 are by women authors;
  • three are works in translation by European (that includes Turkish!) authors;
  • two thirds were published this century; and
  • there are no classics (not because none made it to the Top 12 but because for some rather odd reason I didn’t read any this year – well, except for Maria Edgeworth’s delightful little novella, Castle Rackrent, which nearly made this list)

Like most statistics, these only tell part of the truth. They show my increasing interest in short stories (collections and individual), my continued commitment to Australian literature, and my desire to extend beyond anglo-literature. They don’t show, however, my longstanding commitment to reading works by women and my love of “the classics” (however you define that term). Maybe my 2010 resolution – cos I do like, for fun, to make one – will be to redress this imbalance!

Sherlock Holmes (the movie)

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This will neither a book nor a film review be – since I’ve never read a Sherlock Holmes book, and I don’t really feel inspired to review Guy Ritchie’s new film, Sherlock Holmes. That’s not to say I (in fact we) didn’t enjoy the film, we did well enough. It’s just that it didn’t fully captivate us. It’s very stylish, and the cast, particularly Robert Downey Junior, not only did a convincing job but they were great to look at too!

Pipe

Smoke Pipe (Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

Chacun à son goût, as they say. I’ve now seen Bright Star twice. And, I could probably see it again. Some others though find it a little slow. I, on the other hand, felt there was just a little too much “adventure” and skulking round in Sherlock Holmes. It’s pretty predictable…good triumphs over evil, the little twists provide no real shock…but it is fun, and it is nicely made. I would recommend it on that basis – and if you are a Ritchie or Holmes fan, I expect you’ll like it a lot.

I am one of those people who like to sit through the credits. Not only do I like to see the list of music used (and this is always near the end) and the locations, but you never know what you might discover. Sometimes just a name you know, sometimes you are given some extra information, and sometimes the credits are an art-form or entertainment in themselves. Sherlock Holmes falls into this last category. The credits were gorgeous to look at … and I had to laugh when the Costume Designers’ names came up. The image shown alongside their names (Jenny Beavan and Melissa Meister) was the one scene in which Downey (as Holmes) wore nothing but a cushion! For a stylishly recreated period movie, that has to have been intended…and is one of those little jokes that rewards we who sit through the credits.

Best unread books of the decade

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One of my favourite internet bookgroup friends – the one who gave me the Jane Austen diary – has just posted, on a listserv we belong to, a link to The Guardian’s list of books that got away over the last decade. Now, that’s a new take on lists isn’t it?

Spare Room

The spare room cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

They asked people like publishers, literary agents and translators to nominate books that didn’t make, but they think should have, “best of best” lists. I’ve only read one of the books nominated, Helen Garner’s The spare room. It was nominated by Jamie Byng, the Managing Director of Canongate which published it! Fair enough. I’m sure they published many other books that didn’t make the “best of the best” lists either so his selection has some credibility. I think he hits the nail on the head when he says  it is “deceptively slight”. It does seem pretty simple but Garner is a great writer, and an unflinchingly honest one too. Put these together and the result is a compelling book, even though Lisa at ANZLitlovers doesn’t quite agree. Actually, both of us disagree with much of the way Garner views her world but I admire her nonetheless. Read this:

The one thing I was sure of, as I lay pole-axed on my bed that afternoon … was that if I did not get Nicola out of my house tomorrow I would slide into a lime-pit of rage that would scorch the flesh off me, leaving nothing but a strew of pale bones on a landscape of sand.

Sometimes Garner fills me with a similar rage, but when she presents me with writing and imagery as powerful and as fresh as this I can’t help but love her at the same time…and agree that Jamie Byng has a bit of a point.

(NB. The funny thing, though, is that The spare room won a few awards in Australia so I’m wondering how valid a selection it really is in this particular list.)

Helen Garner
The spare room
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2008
195pp
ISBN: 9781921351396

Andrew Croome, Document Z

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Truth, according to the dictionary, can mean several things including:

  • the state of being the case, fact or actuality; and
  • a transcendent or spiritual reality.

Document Z bookcover

Document Z cover image (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Truth in all its variety and slipperiness is, I think, the fundamental theme of Andrew Croome’s Document Z which won the 2008 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. This book, which chronicles the famous-in-Australia Petrov Affair about the defection of Vladimir (familiarly, Volodya) and Evdokia Petrov in 1954, began as a PhD Creative Writing thesis. Who needs a PhD in Creative Writing, though, when you have a publication offer instead?

At the end of the novel is a reference to an oral history that was conducted with Evdokia by the National Library:

This historian’s questions give her the space to betray Volodya, to admit his faults, to commit herself finally, to the truth. She doesn’t. The record is no all-important thing, and what exactly would be the point?

What indeed? After all, duplicity is what the book is about. Vladimir and Evdokia are MVD agents at the Soviet Embassy. This is their secret role, in addition to their formal embassy roles, and it puts them in conflict with the ambassador since, in effect, they work for two masters, the ambassador and the MVD headquarters in Moscow. Not an easy position to be in, particularly in a regime that thrived on suspicion.

Croome nicely structures the book, commencing with the dramatic attempt on 19 April 1954 by the Soviet authorities to return Evdokia to Russia. The book’s narrative form is multiple third person subjective, and this opening scene is viewed through Evdokia’s eyes: “Evdokia knew this crowd was for her. They were hunting her…”. She was wrong though. The crowd was with her and were “hunting” those who seemed to be taking her away. This opening chapter ends with the words, “Everything he had betrayed”. The scene is set to tell their story, and the book flips back to 1951 and their arrival in Canberra. From this point on the story is told through several eyes, particularly Evdokia’s, Vladimir/Volodya’s (who, Moscow thought, “could be well and truly trusted [my stress]”) and Dr Bialoguski’s (the man who worked for ASIO and who, through cultivating Petrov’s friendship, engineered the defection).

I enjoyed the book – partly because it was set in familiar territory, which is a bit of a rarity for we Canberrans, and partly because I was interested in the Petrov Affair. Croome seems, to the best of my knowledge, to have captured the era well. I loved the description of the Soviet Embassy wives going shopping…and he nicely evokes the polarisation of views between East and West/Communism and Capitalism that characterised the Cold War period. However, the book was a little unsatisfying too. I think it’s because Croome focusses a little too much on plot machinations for me – and yet the plot is not dramatic enough to support this. He does try to get “into” the characters but, for all his sound characterisation of the Petrovs, they are, at the end, pretty much as shadowy in terms of their “true” natures/desires/motivations as they were at the beginning. In the end, there’s not much drama in either the political or the personal story. It feels, almost, as though they were victims of circumstance – and perhaps they largely were.

And what were these circumstances? Well, they were largely the duplicitous – and fear-ridden – situation they lived and worked in. I had to laugh, early in the book, at the description of the embassy’s secret (MVD) section: “Somewhere, the roof leaked“. The book has many little ironies and paradoxes mostly playing on notions of secrets, lies, deception and betrayals, playing, that is, on a world in which truth is treated with rather careless abandon. By the end of the book we are, I think, no nearer the truth. We perhaps know some of the “facts” (albeit this is fiction!), but we do not “really” know the “spiritual reality” of these two people whose marriage seemed weak and who apparently lived a pretty sad life in exile.

I’d certainly recommend the book … it’s well written, and is a genuinely interesting portrayal of the case. But if you are looking for insights into the affair, I’m not sure you’ll find them here.

Andrew Croome
Document Z
Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2008
350pp.
ISBN: 9781741757439

Smoking chair?

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Arm chair

Arm chair, c. 1930

…and now for something completely different. Recently I was offered, and gratefully accepted, two chairs which had belonged to my grandparents and which date back to around 1930. They no longer suited my aunt’s needs, and my father, keen to see them stay in the family if they were wanted, offered them to me (with refurbishment thrown in). Not an offer to refuse – particularly when I too had a sentimental attachment to the chairs. After all, I remember them from my grandparents’ home and I do love to have around me things that have some meaning. Readers of this blog know that I love gums and so will not be surprised that the fabric I chose for the new upholstery is called Gumleaf. I am thrilled with it – it’s soft but distinctive – and adds another layer of meaning to the chairs for me!

My father remembers sitting in these chairs and smoking a fat cigar with his dad (some many years after 1930 I hasten to add) – and I think chairs like this were sometimes called smoking chairs. I’m not quite sure what “like this” means other than perhaps that such chairs are very comfortable to sit and relax in. These ones can even be reclined.

You may wonder, though, why I am writing all this? Well, it’s because while some might see them as smoking chairs, I reckon others could very well see them as reading chairs. Not only is this one comfortable, but it has nice wide armrests for that cup of coffee (or whatever takes our fancy) that we like to imbibe while reading. But, more importantly, though you can’t see this easily in the photo, under the armrests are deep open pockets in which it is possible to stow a few books from the TBR pile. They were only delivered last week and, with Christmas around the corner, I have little time to read but, come the new year, I think I will have a new favourite place to read…