Australian writers

Jeremy Chambers, The vintage and the gleaning

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Jeremy Chambers, The vintage and the gleaning Bookcover

Bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

There’s something I haven’t had an opportunity to share with you, until now that is – and that is that I love to visit wine regions. Not just because I like wine but also because I like the areas in which wine is made. The landscape is often beautiful, the wineries themselves vary so much in architecture and cellar-style, and, because of the culture that usually attends wine, there is often good dining and, if you’re lucky, some great music too. I was consequently very happy to read The vintage and the gleaning by the new Australian writer, Jeremy Chambers. It is set in in a winemaking town on the Murray River in northeast Victoria, an area I have visited and enjoyed many times – and so I was ready to sit back and enjoy.

And, enjoy it I did. However, there is very little – in fact, I’d go so far as to say none – of the glamour of the wine industry in this book. That this is so is clearly intended by Chambers. As one of the vineyard labourers says near the end, after a night of some violence:

I thought we was meant to be the civilised ones, he says. Winemaking town.

The irony, then, is keenly felt!

So, what is the book about? It doesn’t have a strong plot. Its first person narrator is Smithy, a man who would be in his 60s. He’s now a vineyard labourer, after having been a shearer for 47 years. He’s also now sober, necessitated by poor health from  years of heavy drinking. The story takes place over two weeks – starting on Monday and ending two Mondays later –  and the novel is structured by the days of this fortnight. Most “chapters” (unnumbered and unnamed) commence with the name of the day, and many are followed by “Spit doesn’t show”: “Tuesday, Spit doesn’t show and Lucy catches a snake”. Spit, we discover, is Smithy’s rather recalcitrant adult son, but the story is not about him. Rather, his chronic absence is symptomatic of the pretty dysfunctional masculinity that is the “stuff” of this novel.

Civilised Northeast Victoria - Sunday Creek Bridge, Pfeiffer's Winery

Smithy is a quietly engaging character. Through his inner reflections and discussions with others, particularly the publican’s wife, we learn that drink has been his ruin:

Can’t hardly remember me own life. Because I drank it all away, you understand.

And that

Nowadays I’m doing all the thinking I should have done when I was young … When I could have done things right. But all I got now is memories and regrets. And there’s not a thing in the world I can do about it. That’s it. That’s me life. Gone. Can’t change a thing. Can’t put it right.

Paralleling this is the story of Charlotte, the young woman whom he had found one night on the railway track after she’d been severely beaten by her husband, Brett. In the second half of the novel, just as Brett is being released from jail for this beating, Charlotte (in her mid 30s) stays with Smithy and tells her story. She also sees her life as having “gone”:

I just can’t make a new start … I just can’t. I don’t have it in me anymore. I feel like everything’s over, like it’s already ended …

Chambers gives a lot of time to Charlotte’s story – we learn that she was a “horrible private school bitch” who married Brett, already prone to violence, against her parents’ wishes. She’s inclined to blame others for her troubles – her father who indulged her and Brett for obvious reasons – though she does have the occasional flash of recognition of her own part in her life’s trajectory. And yet, unlike Smithy, who says his life is over but is quietly trying to change, she seems incapable of acting upon the little self-knowledge she has achieved, saying that her life is “not something I can change”. To tell more, however, would give away the plot, such as it is … so we shall leave Smithy and Charlotte here.

While the novel has some awkwardness – Charlotte’s story for example is a little drawn out – my only real reservation relates to the scattered references to Aboriginal Australians, and particularly to the institutionalisation of Aboriginal children. I understand where Chambers’ heart is coming from, but can’t quite connect it all with the rest of the story. It’s perhaps a case of the first-time novelist trying to include too much.

There’s a lot to like about the book. It is carefully structured but not slavishly so. The language evokes the rhythms and atmosphere of the place and its people: birds, insects, the sun, and the ever-present gum trees backdrop the story well and are made to serve the book’s resigned, if not downright foreboding, tone. The dialogue captures what I would describe as “laconic Australian”: terse but with the occasional touch of dry humour. The title is lovely: vintage refers of course to winemaking, but also evokes age in general (and thus Smithy); gleaning is an agricultural term and therefore appropriate, but also implies the gathering of knowledge (such as Smithy does through the course of his life).

This is a very new book, but it has also been reviewed by Lisa at ANZlitLovers. She believes Chambers is a writer to watch, and I can only agree.

Jeremy Chambers
The vintage and the gleaning
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010
264pp.
ISBN: 9781921656507

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Peter Temple, Truth

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I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader (Stephen King, On writing)

Peter Temple, Truth

Truth bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

As I was reading Peter Temple‘s Truth I wondered whether I was Temple’s “ideal reader”. Somehow I think not. I am not a crime novel reader, but I did read and greatly like Temple’s previous book, The broken shore, so why did I feel less enthusiastic about Truth?

Part of the reason might be expectations. This novel won the Miles Franklin award this year. I don’t, theoretically, have a problem with a so-called genre novel winning literary awards but I did expect that if such a book won it would be out of the ordinary, and by that I mean that it would break the mould of its genre in some way. Well, I don’t think Truth does that. Of course, the Miles Franklin doesn’t explicitly say the work has to be innovative; it just says the work must be “of the highest literary merit” and present “Australian life in any of its phases”.

Another reason, related to the above, is that I found it to be a little too stereotypical. While I don’t read crime fiction as a matter of course, I do watch a lot of crime television, particularly those based on the writings of Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and the like. I didn’t find Temple’s detective here, Steve Villani (who at one point talks of “the full stupidity of his life”), particularly different from many of the other contemporary angst-ridden middle-aged detectives I’ve seen. I didn’t find the plot, which deals with corruption (in the police force, politics and business) to be particularly different either.

So, did I like anything about it? Well, yes. But not for what Val McDermid would expect. She has said that:

As literary fiction became more hermetic, more concerned with literary theory and less concerned with narrative, crime writers assumed the mantle of turning the spotlight on the world we live in and doing it in a form where narrative was still of paramount importance.

Oh dear. I have to say this narrative bored and, at times, confused me. I was not interested in the plot – in remembering who all the characters were and guessing whether this one or that one might have “done it”. I just didn’t care. But, I was interested in Villani and his relationships with people – his father and brothers, his family, his old (now deceased) boss Singo, and his colleagues, particularly the indigenous policeman, Dove, who appeared in The broken shore. It was all a bit typical really – the workaholic cop with the troubled background and failing marriage – but Temple did manage to engage me in this character. He did this largely by telling the story through Villani’s eyes – through a third person limited point of view (or “first person in the third person” as he told Ramona Koval on the Bookshow). We are right there with Villani through one pretty hellish week in his life: horrific murders, bushfire threatening his father’s property, and a runaway daughter, alongside the odd bit of pressure to drop one of the cases because it was “just” a prostitute who’s not worth rocking the boat over.

Peter Temple is well-known for his writing. Ramona Koval describes this book as having “beautifully written ugly scenes”. I suppose they are. There is a lot of staccato dialogue, though Temple does little to explain the language used by the cops. If you don’t know the lingo, you are expected to pick it up as you go. (American readers, however, will apparently get a glossary!). There are a few motifs which run through the book. Smells are important – they convey the corruption and the social disintegration in the city and they play a practical role in solving a crime; and trees are also significant, conveying Villani’s connection with nature and his father, with, that is, something far more healthy than his homicide-driven life:

Below them a forest, wide and deep and dark, big trees more than thirty years old. Planted by hand, every last one, thousands of trees – alpine ash, mountain swamp gum, red stringybark, peppermints, mountain gum, spotted gum, snow gum, southern mahogany, sugar gum, silvertop ash. And the oaks, about four thousand, grown from acorns collected in two autumns from  every russet Avenue of Honour Bob Villani [father] drove down, from every botanical garden he passed.

Lists like this are a feature of the writing and they are effective in building up pictures in the fast moving, rather clipped world of this novel. Rhythm is in fact a significant aspect of the style. As you would expect, the story is mostly grim, but there is the odd bit of humour. I did love this one:

“Say police as caringly as possible. Like a blessing.”
“Jeez, that’s a big ask.”

The title seems to come from a horse which is mentioned only once in the novel:

…the first horse Bob raced, the best horse he ever had had, the lovely little grey horse called Truth who won at her second start, won three from twelve, always game, never gave up. She sickened and died in hours, buckled and lay, her sweet eyes forgave them their stupid inability to save her.

There’s a message in there somewhere – mostly ironic. I kinda like that.

So, my overall reaction? I don’t usually read reviews before I post, but I do when I’m preparing for my bookgroup. One of the reviews I read was Edmund Gordon’s in The Guardian. I like his conclusion that it’s an accomplished book but doesn’t escape the bounds of its genre. I was, I realise, hoping it would – and that means I’m not Peter Temple’s “ideal reader”. You, however, may be.

Peter Temple
Truth
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009
387pp.
ISBN: 9781921520716

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some Australian expat novelists

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Australia is the only country I have come across that divides its writers into residents and those who have dared to live elsewhere. Can one imagine Americans writing of Ernest Hemingway, or the Brits of Auden, thus? (Carmen Callil, Australian-born founder of Virago Press)

That answers one of my questions: that is, whether other nations talk about “expats” the way we do. Apparently they don’t. Is it the oft-quoted Australian cultural cringe? Is it envy? Perhaps I’ll just skirt the issue and say that Australians have a bit of a reputation for wanderlust, so I’m not surprised that we have our share of novelists who have gone overseas and stayed. One of those is Kate Jennings whose “fragmented autobiography”, Trouble, I reviewed last week. Kate Jennings went to New York in 1979, and has not returned (except for regular visits). In her book, she includes interviews with three other expat Aussie writers, Sumner Locke Elliott and Ray Mathew (both now deceased), and Shirley Hazzard. I thought it might be interesting to talk a little about some of our still-living novelists who reside in the USA.

But first, Ray Mathew, the least known of Jennings’ three interviewees. I hadn’t heard of him until a few years ago when he was the subject of one of the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) gorgeous little “A Celebration” books, using funds bequeathed in his name by his American friend and patron, Eva Kollsmann. The Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsmann Trust is a significant bequest which funds a number of initiatives at the NLA. One of these is the annual Ray Mathew Lecture which is to be given by “an Australian living abroad”. The first lecture was given in 2009 by Geraldine Brooks, and the second, this year, by Kate Jennings.

Shirley Hazzard

Hazzard, 2007 (Courtesy: Christopher Peterson, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

For brevity’s sake – and because I’ve read each of these writers – I’ll just focus in this post on five Australian expat novelists based in the USA. Some of them are very well known internationally, moreso than many of our home-based writers. This is not surprising I guess: if you live in the USA and get published there your market potential is far greater than it would be at home. That said, the lure of increased fame and fortune is not the reason these writers moved overseas:

  • Geraldine Brooks: moved to New York in 1983 to study, met and married American journalist (Tony Horwitz), and now splits her time between Australia and the USA. Geraldine Brooks titled her Ray Mathew lecture, “The opportunity of distance”. She’s the youngest of these five and, perhaps, has the most uncomplicated view of her relationship with home. She has travelled widely and discussed in that lecture all the benefits that have resulted, but her final point is:

For all its opportunities, distance can still feel like a tyrant, sometimes, when a partner’s work or a kid’s schooling means we must spend more time there than here. The oscillation stalls, the roots start to dry out. It’s like a high stakes game of musical chairs. Round the world you go, and then the music stops and you have to sit down somewhere, but it’s not quite the chair you were aiming for.

  • Peter Carey: moved in 1990/91 to New York with his wife to work in their respective careers, and has remained there. Peter Carey, not surprisingly given his status, is often asked about his expat status. Here is what he said in an interview for the Paris Review:

Of course, there is a specially reserved position in Australian culture for the expatriate. The prime expatriates—people like Clive James, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes—belong to an earlier generation than mine. When these people return to Australia, they are asked, What do you think of us? How are we doing? The expatriate is occasionally lauded and occasionally fiercely criticized for daring to come back and judge. I try to stay away from that as much as humanly possible. I don’t feel at all like an expatriate….

  • Shirley Hazzard: moved to Hong Kong with her parents in 1947 when she was 16 years old, ending up in New York in 1951 where she has been mostly based since, though does spend time regularly in Capri, Italy. A webpage on Shirley Hazzard summarises her expat status in this way:

Hazzard does not reject her designation as an Australian writer but insists her temperament is not national. She only took out United States citizenship twenty-five years after she began living in New York, on the resignation of Richard Nixon. Eschewing nationalistic identifications, she does not consider herself as an expatriate, and emphasized that “to be at home in more than one place” (Gordan and Pasca). However, her novels are full of displaced Anglos in Hong Kong and Italy, or displaced Australians in London and New York.

  • Janette Turner Hospital: moved to Boston in the mid 1960s with her husband, and has lived in Canada and the USA. She now splits her time between these two countries and her home state of Queensland. In an early Griffith Review, Hospital commented on the impact of modern technology on being physically displaced, and wrote:

Place is unequivocal. But virtual communities and diaspora organizations suggest that you don’t always need to be somewhere to be a part of something. You can check the surf report, vote, play scrabble, watch the evening news, buy a car or be connected to country from the other side of the world. This new reality reflects an age-old truth: that home is where the heart is. It offers a new kind of citizenship. One we’re defining as we go.

  • Kate Jennings: as described above. She bookends Brooks nicely: not only because they gave the first two Ray Mathew lectures but because they both value travel highly but offer almost opposing conclusions. Here is Jennings from her lecture:

I have lived now in New York nearly as long as I lived in Australia. Heretical as it might seem, Australia is neither my country nor my home, as it is for Geraldine. It’s the place I started from, to paraphrase TS Eliot slightly. It shaped me, but so have my 30 years in New York city. I have, as Robert Dixon put it, ‘overlapping allegiances and multiple affiliations’.

Well, that lot provides enough to think about I reckon. I was going to talk a little about these writers’ works but I’ve taken up enough of your time for this Monday. More anon… Meanwhile, if you’ve lived away from “home” for any period of time, what do you think about all this?

Kate Jennings, Trouble: Evolution of a radical

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Kate Jennings, Trouble, bookcover

Bookcover (Courtesy: Black Inc)

I’m not going to beat about the bush but tell it like it is: I absolutely gobbled up Kate Jennings’ Trouble: Evolution of a radical: Selected writings 1970-2010. It took me a fortnight to read it, partly because I’ve been pretty busy but also because there was so much to savour and take in that I did a lot of stopping and thinking. That said, I do have one whinge, so I’ll get it over with now: it has no index. The book is described as an “unconventional” or “fragmented” autobiography and it is chock full of content. She mentions people, she discusses books and genres, she talks about politics, economics and feminism, not to mention all sorts of enthusiasms including, would you believe, swimming pools and shopping! I can see myself wanting to refer to it again and again but each time I’ll have to flip through it to find the idea or topic that I want to explore. Just as well I’m a marginalia person is all I can say!

So, who is Kate Jennings (b. 1948)? She is an Australian-born writer (poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist) and feminist, who stunned Australia with her Front Lawn speech in 1970, confronting progressive men, in particular, with their sexism. She moved to New York at the end of the 1970s and, in one of her iterations, worked as a speechwriter for a couple of large Wall Street firms in the 1990s. Somehow, she seems to have managed to do that without losing her critical eye. I have not yet read her novels, but will (finally, and rather coincidentally) be reading Snake in the next month or so.

Why did I like the book? This is how Jennings describes it in her preface:

This book, then, is a stand-in memoir. I’ve assembled pieces  – essays, speeches and poems, along with short stories and passages from my novels that actually happened – so that a reader might have a narrative of sorts.

On reading this you could be forgiven for fearing a mish-mash but fortunately that’s not what you get. The book is divided into 9 parts, each introduced by Jennings with a current reflection on the aspect of her life and career covered by that part. These parts move more or less chronologically through her life, though the readings themselves jump around a bit. This is because, like most of us really, she revisits some parts of her life many years after they occur, while others are documented at the time of their occurrence. The press release which came with my copy describes it in the following terms: “no-holds-barred” and “pull-no-punches”. What’s that, you say? They’re clichés! They are, but they describe the book perfectly, because this is a fiercely honest book written by a rather formidable woman. How else to describe someone who defiantly affirms, in almost one breath, her commitment to feminism and Jimmy Choo shoes, who calls herself a pragmatist but also argues passionately that “these are times of moral poverty”.

I think at this point I will just dot-point the parts to give you a sense of what she covers, because I fully intend to explore many of her ideas in more detail in the coming weeks/months.

  • Presumption: the making of her intellect, covering the years from 1970 to the late 1980s.
  • A child of grace, a landscape of progress: her childhood in the Riverina area of New South Wales, told mainly through excerpts from her novels and poems.
  • Cause and not symptom: her youth, focusing particularly on her introduction to alcohol (and subsequent joining of AA).
  • You don’t understand! What do you know! You don’t live here!: the life of an Australian expat in the USA explored mostly through her interviews with three other expat writers: Sumner Locke Elliott, Shirley Hazzard and Ray Mathew.
  • Catching a man, Eating him: her romantic life, which, with some self-mockery, she views through the songs of Dusty Springfield.
  • Crazed, delinquent fabulousness: an eye-opening sampler of her essays from 1990 to 2009 showing what a hard woman she is to pin down!
  • A bright, guilty world: more essays, these ones about her life as a speechwriter on Wall Street during the 1990s, including the full text of her Quarterly Essay 32, titled “American revolution: The fall of Wall Street and the rise of Barack Obama“. She has much to say about the GFC.
  • Irrelevance is deadly: how literature has (or hasn’t) dealt with the issue of business and finance.
  • Cut the shit: two no-holds-barred (yep, bring on the cliché!) essays which, she says, bring us back full circle to her main themes: “The first, a foray into my dusty childhood and Aussie alcoholism and masculinity through the re-release of the movie Wake in Fright, and the second, into poetry and the reasons I forsook it – or it, me – and a pet peeve: closed minds”.

I know it’s a bit of a copout, but I feel I can’t do justice to this book without writing my own Quarterly Essay and so, as I’ve already said above, I will return to it in future posts. In the meantime, the question to ask is: How does it work as an autobiography or “stand-in memoir”. I say very well. It does the things I look for: it tells me the main facts of her life, it shows me her interests, beliefs and values, and it gives me a sense of her personality (which is intelligent, opinionated, fearless and principled). Fragmented it might be in structure, but coherent it is in portraying a life.

In one of the poems she includes in the book, she writes:

… Saying simple things

well or complicated things simply is an art
that is fast disappearing …

Fortunately it is an art that Kate Jennings has not lost.

Kate Jennings
Trouble: Evolution of a radical: Selected writings 1970-2010
Melbourne: Black Inc, 2010
319pp.
ISBN: 9781863954679

(Review copy supplied by Black Inc.)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Indigenous writers

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Tara June Winch

Tara June Winch (Courtesy: Friend of subject, via Wikipedia, under CC-BY-SA 3.0)

It’s important I think that my third post be on our indigenous writers. Again it’s going to be pretty idiosyncratic as my reading in this area has been scattered, not for lack of interest so much as the old “so many books” issue that we all know only too well. I was first introduced to indigenous writing at high school where I had two inspirational teachers who encouraged us to think seriously about human rights. It was then that I bought Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s (or Kath Walker as she was then) book of poetry, My people.

In my first Monday Musings post, I mentioned David Unaipon who is generally recognised as the first published indigenous Australian author. However, it was Oodgeroo Noonuccal, with her book of poetry, We are going (1964), who heralded contemporary indigenous Australian writing. So let’s start with her.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal My people (1970, poetry)

Noonuccal’s poetry is largely political. She wrote to right the wrongs which indigenous Australians confronted every day: the racism, the white-colonial-slanted history, the lack of land rights, and so on. Much of her poetry is therefore strong but accessible “protest” poetry. My people collects poems from her first two books and includes new works as well. Here are just a few lines to give you a sense of what she was about:

… Do not ask of us
To be deserters, to disown our mother,
To change the unchangeable.
The gum cannot be trained into an oak.
(from “Assimilaton – No!”)

Gumtree in the city street,
Hard bitumen around your feet,
Rather you should be
In the cool world of leafy forest walls
And wild bird calls.
(from “Municipal gum”)

I love the way she uses gums to represent her people – who they are, where they should be. Some of the poems are angry, some are conciliatory, and others celebrate her culture. I loved the book then, and I still value it now.

Sally Morgan My place (1987, memoir)

The next book in my collection, chronologically speaking, is Sally Morgan’s memoir My place. Sally Morgan is primarily an artist but her memoir became a best seller when it was first published. In it she chronicles how she discovered at the age of 15 years old that her colour did not come from an Indian but  an Aboriginal background, and her subsequent investigations into her family’s rather controversial story. I don’t want to go into the controversy here. Rather, the point I’d like to make is her story-telling: it is warm, funny, and thoroughly engaging.

Women of the centre (1990, short life-stories); Black chicks talking (2002, short life-stories produced in film, book, theatre and art)

Telling stories is an intrinsic part of indigenous Australian culture. It’s how traditions have been passed on for 40,000 years or more. It’s probably simplistic to draw parallels between traditional story-telling and the telling of stories in general. After all, we all love stories. Nonetheless it is certainly clear from the little experience I’ve had and the reading I’ve done, that story-telling is an intrinsic part of indigenous Australian culture and is becoming an important way of sharing their experience with the rest of us. This was powerfully done in Bringing them home: The stolen generation report of 1997 which contained not only the history of the separation of children from their parents and recommendations for the future, but many many first person stories which drove the drier points home.

Two books that I’ve read which contain personal stories by indigenous women are Women of the centre and Black chicks talking. The introduction to the former states that its aim is to help we non-Aboriginal Australian readers to understand lives that are so different from our own and “to provide personal written histories for the descendants of the women involved”. This latter is becoming an urgent issue in indigenous communities today – the capturing of story before more is lost. In Black chicks talking Leah Purcell interviews nine Aboriginal woman – some urban, some rural, some well-known, some not – about their lives. Another wonderful read.

Life stories/memoirs represent, in fact, a significant component of indigenous literature. Another work worth mentioning, though I’ve only seen the film and not read the book (shame on me!), is Doris Pilkington’s “stolen generation” story of her mother’s capture and subsequent escape involving an astonishing trek home, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence.

Alexis Wright Carpentaria (2006, fiction); Tara June Winch Swallow the air (2006, fiction); Marie Munkara Every secret thing (2009, novel)

Finally, a brief mention of three recent fictional works, two of which I’m ashamed to say are still in my TBR pile. These are the two David Unaipon Award winners by Tara June Winch and Marie Munkara. If you are interested in the latter, please check Musings of a Literary Dilettante’s review.

I have though read Alexis Wright’s Miles Franklin Award-winning Carpentaria. It’s set in a fictitious place, tellingly called Desperance, in northern Australia. Its focus is colonialism (ie European invasion of the land), and conflict within black communities about how to respond. To explore these, Wright touches on lot of ground, including land rights, deaths in custody, mining rights, boat people, and petrol sniffing to name just a few. She flips between the real and the magical, she uses language that is image-rich and often playful, and she tells some very funny stories. It’s a big, wild and rather complex read that manages in the end to be hopeful despite itself.

This is just a small introduction to the wealth of Australia’s indigenous literature. It won’t be the last time I write about it. I will also in the future post on white Australians who have written about Aboriginal Australians, writers like Thomas Keneally who wrote The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith but who now says he wouldn’t presume to write in the voice of an indigenous Australian. A vexed question really. I believe there should be no “rules” for writers of fiction and yet, sometimes perhaps, it is best not to appropriate voices not your own. But that is a question for another day…

Meanwhile, back to Alexis Wright – and stories:

Old stories circulating around the Pricklebush were full of the utmost intrigues concerning the world. Legends of the sea were told in instalments every time you walked in the door of some old person’s house. Stories lasted months on end, and if you did not visit often, you would never know how the story ended. (Carpentaria, p. 479)

Helen Garner, Cosmo cosmolino

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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

Eva Hornung, Dog boy

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Eva Hornung, Dogboy

Dog boy cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

I first read Eva Hornung when she was writing as Eva Sallis. It was her second novel The city of sealions, which is a pretty passionate and evocatively written exploration of cultural alienation and dislocation brought about primarily by migration.

In some ways Dog boy explores similar concerns, but its alienation is played out in a different way – through that fascinating archetype of the feral or wild child. In the novel, Hornung refers to a few modern examples of feral children, such as Oksana from the Ukraine; in an interview on the Literary Minded blog she says that the novel was inspired by a news story about a child living with dogs in Moscow. Guess where this book is set? You got it – Moscow! This intrigued me somewhat. Why would an Australian novelist read about a feral child in Moscow, go there to research and then write a novel? But Eva Hornung seems to be no ordinary novelist. She did her PhD in the Yemen and her settings – even if not her overriding theme – range rather widely.

And so to Dog boy. At the beginning of the novel Romochka, 4 years old, is alone in an apartment. He hasn’t seen his mother for a week or more and suddenly his uncle does not return. He senses the apartment building is being emptied and so after a couple of days being alone he heads out, and manages to get himself adopted by a dog, Mamochka, who lives with her four young puppies and two older offspring. How and why he is left alone is not the concern of this novel (which reminded me a little of Cormac McCarthy’s The road in which the cause of the devastation is also not the point). The novel tells the story of his life with the dogs and of what happens when he, four years later, comes to the attention of humans, specifically two scientists/doctors working in a children’s rehabilitation centre.

[WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS]

The story is told chronologically, and is divided into 5 parts. The first two parts cover Romochka’s first two years in the lair and how he gradually learns “to be a dog”. In the third part, Mamochka introduces a baby to the pack – to provide human company for Romochka. The baby is, ironically, called Puppy (by Romochka). Without giving any important plot points away, the final two parts deal with the boys’ renewed contact with the human world. It’s told in 3rd person but the perspective does shift, particularly in the last two parts where we see what’s happening through different eyes – the two scientists, Dmitry and Natalya, and Romochka himself. But even before this, we occasionally move between Romochka’s and the author’s perspective. It’s a technique that encourages us to understand, if not empathise with, the various experiences as they play out.

As I read this book, I felt I was in the hands of someone who knew what she was doing – even though at times I wondered exactly why she was telling this story. Not only does she viscerally describe Romochka’s gradual acceptance into the dog clan, his learning to hunt and his slow rise to dominance, but she starts to introduce humans at a time when our interest in an ongoing dog story would start to pall. This shift starts with Romochka’s increasing interest in people and builds up to the more or less inevitable conclusion – but that conclusion is not simple and is open-ended.

The language is evocative – sometimes beautiful but more often earthy and confronting to our senses. Hornung evokes Romochka’s life with the dogs with such attention to detail that it is entirely believable. She describes his animality, without being heavy-handed – he moves in “a wide lope”, uses his “paws”, and carries with him a horrible “stench” – but also shows his ability to use human logic and reasoning. At the time of his first capture, Romochka’s inner dog-human conflict is obvious:

Romochka wished bitterly … for true doghood. Were he really a dog, he would understand only their bodies, and not their words. Were he really a dog, he wouldn’t know their names, and their kids’ names. He wouldn’t … be paralysed by these lives that stretched before and after the station: he would know only their smell, only their aggression and torments; and what they ate.

The fight went out of him altogether. He stared dumbly, balefully without growling or snapping, unresistant even when he was pushed around. He was no longer sure that hiding his human side would get him released, but he remained a dog …

The big question to ask is, Why did Hornung choose to tell such a story? There is the obvious reason, that of our ongoing fascination with the wild child phenomenon and what it might tell us about what it means to be human. But there is also Hornung’s ongoing interest in alienation and, related to that, the abuse of humans by other humans (particularly where there is social disintegration). For all our horror at the way Romochka lives, we also see that he is not only safe but well nurtured in his life with the dogs. Was this boy, Natalya and Dmitry ponder, “better off living with dogs than with humans”. This question, that comes towards the end, represents a big shift from Dmitry’s earlier “proper awareness of the philosophic and scientific divide between man and animal”. The second part of the novel, in fact, explores this question at some depth. How big is the divide really? And to what extent is man a beast? All this is explored with more than just a little skepticism about scientific research and the tension between nice neat theory (and the chance it offers for professional glory) and messy reality. There is a lot in this book for keen readers to consider. It’s one that I will remember for some time.

Dog boy is Sallis aka Hornung’s 6th novel. She has won or been nominated for awards for many of her novels and yet she is not particularly well-known. Her change of name may have contributed to this but, whatever the reason, I think it’s a shame. Her writing is clear, accessible and evocative – and yet has a depth and passion that is worthy of the prizes she wins. May we see more of her.

Eva Hornung
Dogboy
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009
293pp.
ISBN: 9781921656378

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Herz Bergner, Between sky and sea

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Hans Bergner, Between sea and sky
Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

Do you read introductions to novels? And, if you do, do you read them before or after you read the novel itself? I read them, but always afterwards because I like to come to  novels as objectively as I can. And so, this is what I did with Herz Bergner’s  Between sky and sea which won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal for Book of the Year in 1948. I’d never heard of it. (Well, I wasn’t around then, but still …!) However, this year Text Publishing has republished it, which is a pretty savvy decision because, as Arnold Zable suggests in the introduction, it has some resonances for contemporary Australia – but more on that anon. Zable also tells us that while Bergner, a Polish Jew who emigrated to Australia in 1938, wrote the book in Yiddish, it was first published in English, having been translated by another Australian Jewish novelist, Judah Waten.

The novel has a straightforward plot. It tells the story of a group of Jewish refugees from the Nazi invasion of Poland who are passengers on an old Greek freighter bound for Australia where they hope for a new life. (Australians, at least, will see the contemporary resonances now. Think SIEV X, for example). There is, though, an older resonance which Bergner presumably knew – that of the MS St Louis which tried to find a home for Jewish refugees in 1939 after they were turned away from Cuba (and which later inspired the book Voyage of the damned, so titled because, as many of you know I’m sure, they continued to be turned away as they went from port to port). These resonances and more are all referred to in the Introduction. Knowing readers will pick many of them up, but isn’t that the fun of reading? To pick them up yourself? So, read the book, I say, and then the rather fine Introduction.

Anyhow, back to the book. As I was reading it, I couldn’t help also thinking of that allegorical boat trip, the Ship of Fools. This is not that allegory – they are not fools, and the boat does have a captain, but as I read the novel I felt that awful sense of a world out of control that the allegory represents.

If this book were a film, it would be described as having an ensemble cast, because it has no identifiable heroes or heroines, no real anti-heroes either. Rather, it has a bunch of people who are thrown together by circumstance but who have little in common other than that they are Jewish refugees. Their backgrounds are diverse and they vary in their practice of Judaism (if they practise it at all). They include Nathan and Ida (who lost their respective spouses and children while escaping the invasion), the know-it-all Fabyash and his family, the flirty but mostly kind-hearted Bronya and her stolid overweight husband Marcus, Mrs Hudess and her two daughters (whose only remaining possession is one doll), and several others. As you might expect with such a set up, the novel explores the increasing tensions – the arguments, the pettinesses alongside the kindnesses – that occur as supplies of food and water dwindle and people get sick, while the journey goes on and on without an end in sight:

They were ashamed to lift their heads, to look each other in the face, and for two reasons. Because Fabyash had sunk so low that he had stolen food from a child, and because Mrs Hudess, who was regarded as such a refined person, had burst forth with the language of the coarsest market vendor. To what depths suffering can bring a person.

The strength of the novel is, in fact, its characterisation. Despite its almost non-existent plot (though there is a climax that I won’t give away), the novel maintains our interest because its characters are real in the way they relate to each other and their circumstances. We know these people, we are these people. In this regard it is a little different from those Holocaust novels – many of which also deal with “ordinary” people – that work on a larger-than-life heroism-betrayal scale.

Towards the end of his introduction, Zable quotes Waten regarding the translation. Waten apparently translated it with Bergner by his side, and says that Bergner was “very odd because he wanted every word translated, and if the number of words came out fewer in English he wasn’t very happy. He never really mastered the English language”. This makes a bit of sense because there are times when the novel feels a little – well – wordy. This never becomes a big problem, however, because Bergner’s imagery (mostly simile and analogy) tends to be fresh and is often two-edged:

A soft haze shimmered in the summer air, caressing their faces like spider webs. [on Nathan and Ida’s escape from Warsaw]

and

For a moment the moon shone through, glittering like a lance, and then it was quickly hidden again.

and

… at midday when the sun was ripe and full like a great golden pear that hung heavily from the centre of the sky.

I enjoy writing like this that contains layers of meaning that make you think a little before you move on. The language is not particularly complex, but Bergner has a habit of inserting a word or phrase that undercuts your expectation and keeps you reading.

The themes are both particular and universal – particular because they specifically depict the anti-Semitism that was rife during World War 2 (to the extent that even the crew on the boat treat the passengers as less than human), and universal because they explore the various ways humans behave under stress. The overriding theme – the biggie, in fact – is the way we continue to turn away other. The irony is that even when we are the other – such as the Jews on this boat – we find otherness amongst ourselves to turn away (until a bigger calamity forces us to reconnect). Will we ever change? I fear not. In fact, that’s what makes the universal, universal, isn’t it?

It is encouraging to see publishers like Sydney University Press and Text Publishing – not to mention of course Penguin –  reissuing long out-of-print Australian classics. I hope it pays off, not only because I like to see forgotten Australian classics brought to life again but because, as in this book, the messages conveyed by these classics can be as valid today as they were when they were first written.

Herz Bergner (trans. by Judah Waten)
Between sky and sea
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010 (first ed. 1946)
215pp.
ISBN: 9781921656316

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Andrea Goldsmith, Reunion

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Andrea Goldsmith, Reunion bookcover
Reunion bookcover (Courtesy: HarperCollins Australia)

I wanted to love Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion. And I expected to, as I remember enjoying the last book of hers that I read. But, somehow, I found it a bit of chore to read, though it did pick up towards the end. I think I understand why it was not listed for the 2010 Miles Franklin Award.

Friendships become swaddled in invisible protective layers and nothing short of a cataclysmic blow can break through to the inevitable stress points beneath.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Four university friends (three students, borderline baby-boomers and now in their mid-40s, and a lecturer, now around 60) find themselves all living in Melbourne again after some 20 years apart. All four had met in Melbourne, had moved together to England to continue studies and work, but had then gone their separate ways. At the beginning of the novel Jack, an academic and Islamic expert, is single and still in love with Ava; Ava, a novelist, is married to the unpopular Harry; Helen, a scientist, is a single parent; and Connie/Conrad, a philosophy lecturer, is on his third marriage but still philandering. Harry, who met them in England, is on the outer, but it is he who has engineered the reunion under the auspices of an organisation he has created, NOGA (Network of Global Australians).

The novel, then, is about this time of reunion: it explores who they are now, and the state of their relationships with each other. Sounds like the sort of thing that would interest me – Melbourne setting, characters with whom I would expect some level of identification, themes exploring love and friendship, and a writer whom I’ve enjoyed before. None of these, I should add, are essential for my reading enjoyment – I also like books set in exotic places and about very different characters – but familiarity often appeals too (doesn’t it?).

And yet, for me the book fell a little flat. It just didn’t feel quite original enough – in either ideas or language. It felt a little same-old-same-old. That said*, I found the characters interesting and convincing, although only one, Jack, changed in any significant way as the novel progressed. The narrative mode is multiple 3rd person subjective, with Jack’s perspective starting and ending it. It is told, chronologically, but with flashbacks to fill in the past. All this is well controlled and keeps the story moving nicely.

Goldsmith ranges across a lot of themes – love and friendship (of course); truth and fiction; secrets and memory; passion and obsession; modern communications; revenge and forgiveness; and science, ethics and politics. It is probably here that the novel palled most for me because many of these themes seem to go nowhere. Take the truth and fiction one. Those of you who read my blog know that I enjoy seeing this issue explored, but in this novel it’s raised, often with a nice level of irony, but is not really developed. For Ava, the novel writer, “there was no better vehicle for truth” than fiction, whereas for the scientist, Helen, “Ava’s work is only fiction – none of it is true”. Well, I thought, Goldsmith will unpack the ironies contained in these, but she doesn’t really. Perhaps that’s OK, perhaps it’s enough for us to notice them, but I wanted more.

At other times, the themes seem more like the author’s soapbox than ideas fully integrated into the story, albeit that the characters are her mouthpieces. Here, for example, is Jack expressing a rather stereotyped view of modern communication:

Whenever Jack looked back to his university experience and compared it with today’s university student life, so much seemed to have changed – even friendship itself. Without computers and mobile phones, face-to-face communication ruled the day.

The implication is that modern friendships are somehow less meaningful, but what does he really know and, further, what does the novel show us about it? Nothing really. Similarly, Helen rages about political interference in science, but the issue, while valid enough, seems a little fabricated in the context of the novel.

There are some funny set pieces, such as the young television make-up artist trying to hide Connie’s aging neck. Goldsmith does irony well – something I, as a Jane Austen aficionado, rather enjoy – and she peppers the novel with a lot of effective literary allusions – to Waugh, Wharton, James, and others. Moreover, there are some lovely descriptions, such as this one on Ava’s discomfort during her first weeks in England: “It was like being stranded on a sheet of clear glass with nothing but blackness underneath”. I’m not sure why I like this, but I do.

I’ve struggled to write this review, really, because there are things to like about this book. I decided to do a quick review of reviews out there and what I mostly found were positive reviews that each had some little reservation: “despite that minor misgiving”, “a rich and at times frustrating novel”, “despite a few stylistic glitches”, and “the novel was marred but not spoiled for me by …”. None though explored these reservations in any depth.

And so, rather than labour any more, I will close with the words of Helen’s teenage son, Luke. He says, in that simple, direct way that the young can do:

The truth can hurt. But that doesn’t make it less right.

The final irony is that Harry is hurt by a truth – but the truth he is hurt by and the real truth of the matter are two quite different things. And that, in the end, made the novel an interesting if not totally engaging read.

For a more positive perspective on this novel, check out Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers.

Andrea Goldsmith
Reunion
London: Fourth Estate, 2009
414pp.
ISBN: 9780732287832

*See my previous post on words to avoid!

Shaun Tan, Eric

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Shaun Tan, Eric cover

Eric bookcover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

When I bought Eric on a whim the other day (as you do!), I didn’t realise that it had been excerpted from Shaun Tan’s Tales from outer suburbia which I haven’t yet read, but have given to others. That’s okay though, because it means  that I’ve finally read a little of Shaun Tan, something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

Shaun Tan is an Australian multi-award-winning artist-writer (or is it writer-artist?) who has published books, worked in theatre and film, and had his work adapted by such luminaries as the Australian Chamber Orchestra. He is one versatile man! His best known works include The arrival (a wordless graphic novel about migrants) and Tales from outer suburbia (an anthology of 15 short illustrated stories about all sorts of strange things that happen in suburbia).

Eric picks up on what I believe is one of Tan’s common themes, that of being different or strange, an outsider. It is about a foreign exchange student who comes to stay with a family in – yes – suburbia, and how they all get along.

Tan’s is not a negative presentation – at least, not here. The mostly monochromatic drawings are whimsical and all focus on Eric, the visiting student, while the text is in the voice of a child of the house. The story is about tolerance and acceptance of what you don’t understand. It’s also about expectations that aren’t met – but accepting the things that happen instead. As Mum says in the book, “It must be a cultural thing”. Overall, it’s about the fact that other can reside with other – and yet it also allows discomfort and incomprehension to be an acceptable feeling.

This sounds like a simple book, and in some ways it is, but it’s not simplistic. Producing it as a gift-edition like this is a lovely idea. It will, I hope, introduce more people to Shaun Tan and his rather unique view on the world. It has certainly whetted my appetite.

Shaun Tan
Eric
Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010
[48pp.]
ISBN: 9781742372921