Ordinary People by Diana Evans

Ordinary People by Diana Evans found its way onto my TBR pile thanks to its shortlisting in this year's Women's Prize.

Evan's is quite magnificent in describing the daily grind of marital malaise for thirty-something's. We see two couples who have settled down with the one they happened to be sleeping with in their late twenties. They had lots of giddy love feels, hot sex and lots of fun and decided to have babies and/or get married.

However to those of us (the readers), looking in from the outside, we're not so sure this will work out. We're not so sure that the great sex and all that love/lust will translate into actual likes and a lifetime of compromise and working stuff out together. We're not so sure they share enough in common including parenting styles and interests. Like most young people, they actually haven't thought about what it might be like to really get old together.

The angst is real. They're pulled in different directions by different desires and beliefs. So many of these beliefs and desires come from external sources - movies, social media, advertising - that tells them they should be living a certain type of life, and loving it all the time. They love their kids, but it doesn't feel like enough.

Part of being in one's thirties is about coming to terms with the disconnect between the imagined or the social media show and the real world we actually live in. The compromises we all have to make, the ordinariness of real life, the drudgery that defines so much of adulthood with kids. Until we have that ah-ha moment.

For some of us it's a sudden, decisive change that often catches us by surprise; and for some its a more gradual, dawning realisation. However it comes to you, it's the sign that you've matured into the next phase of adulthood. And it's such a relief when you get there.

This is a story about four people on the edge of that moment.

I can see why this story was shortlisted for the Women's Prize but I can also see why it didn't win. The beginning was tremendous, extraordinary even. Evans explored the emotional lives of her four protagonists in a believable, sympathetic manner. But the ending veered off into a weird group holiday to Spain, with some gothic ghost story elements thrown in for good measure. I thought this was going to lead to a post-natal depression discussion, but it just fizzled out into nothing in the end. There was also a rather long bow drawn between the nearby decaying Crystal Palace and human relationships. And all that Michael Jackson reverence at the end was just weird given the turn his real life story took in recent times. Perhaps she was trying to say that even black heroes can fail the human decency test?

The bonus play script at the end, was a fun look at urban myths, what is real and what is fake. But by this point I was quite confused about Evans' message or purpose and felt that she had tried to include too many things all at once.

The very London setting with all its multi-layered socio-economic and political undercurrents was superbly realised. I loved the naturalness & ordinariness of reading about black middle class families.   I see by reading a few other reviews, that not everyone was as disappointed with the end as I was, so don’t take my word for it; read it yourself and make up your own mind.

Favourite Character: All the adults were pretty annoying by the end and I just wanted to shake them (in that same way that I'm sure my parents wanted to shake me at the same age)! Young Ria, however, was delightful with her curiosity, innocence and independence.

Favourite Quote: favourite by default - it was the only sentence I underlined in the whole book,

Sometimes in the lives of ordinary people, there is a great halt, a revelation, a moment of change. It occurs under low mental skies, never when one is happy.

Favourite or Forget: I enjoyed this enough to pass on to Mr Books to have a go at too.

Facts:

• Spotify playlist created by Evans available to listen to as you read. Highly recommended.
• One of the New Yorker best books of the year 2018.
• Shortlisted for the Women's Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Book 21 of 20 Books of Summer Winter

Sisters by Ada Cambridge

Happy Birthday Ada Cambridge!

My copy of Sisters by Ada Cambridge (21st November 1844 - 19th July 1926) was a fairly recent find in a second hand book shop. It's a 1989 Penguin Australian Women's Library edition which was apparently the first time this glorious 1904 book had ever been reprinted.

With wealth and good birth behind them the four Pennycuik sisters expected to marry well and live happily ever after, but Ada Cambridge, in this turn-of-the-century novel, dispenses with conventional romantic notions about marriage. 

Deborah Pennycuik refuses three proposals in one day; Mary invents one to last her whole life; Rose marries for love and into poverty; while Francie marries for money. 

Whatever the motive and how ever careful the choice, marriage is no guarantee of happiness. Instead, Ada Cambridge presents a cutting satire on the institution of marriage.

The title appealed immediately as I am also, one of four girls.

According to the brief bio in the front of the book, many of Cambridge's 25 novels were serialised in the Australiasian and The Age and she was one of Australia's most successful and best known writers at the time. Really?

How is it then, that a review by Ali @Heavenali a few years ago, was the very first time I had ever heard of this extraordinary Australian writer?

Where did she go? Why did she fall out of favour? How did she fall out of favour?

And who was she?

Cambridge's online biography says:

Ada Cambridge (1844-1926), writer, was born on 21 November 1844 at St Germans, Norfolk, England, daughter of Henry Cambridge, gentleman farmer, and his wife Thomasina, née Emmerson, a doctor's daughter. She grew up in Downham, Norfolk.

On 25 April 1870 at Holy Trinity, Ely, she married George Frederick Cross, a curate committed to colonial service; on 19 August they landed in Melbourne. 

In the following years pastoral work took them to Wangaratta (1870), Yackandandah (1872), Ballan (1875), Coleraine (1877), Bendigo (1883), Beechworth (1885) and Williamstown (1893).

Ada was centred on but not confined by home and family in those decades and the busy life of their different parishes gave her a wide range of colonial experience which she later recalled in the engaging and valuable Thirty Years in Australia (1903). 

This and her childhood reminiscences, The Retrospect (1912), inspired by a return visit to England in 1908, show to what extent she drew upon personal experience and private dream-world for her novels. 

She herself emerges as frail and charming, never robust after a carriage accident in the 1870s; her ideas were considered a little daring and even improper for a clergyman's wife.

She sounds utterly fascinating. As does her very pragmatic, class-conscious story about marriage.

Ada Cambridge, c. 1920, by Spencer Shier

Sisters is the story of four young women coming of age on a rural property in northern Victoria. But it is also the story of Guthrie Carey, a young sailor whose life crosses paths with the sisters at various points.

The perils and pitfalls of love and marriage dominate the story. It would seem that Cambridge had a pretty cynical view and very low expectations for happiness within the confines of marriage.

Poor Mary married in a fit of madness, an older man beneath her in every way, even though he was a man of the cloth. Her marriage was one of quiet desperation; her only joy an ungrateful son and the eventual death of her husband.

'I am happy. For Debbie...I'm clean now - I never thought to be again - to know anything so exquisitely sweet, either in earth or heaven - I'm clean, body and soul, day and night, inside and outside, at last.'

Ouch!

Rose, also married beneath her - way beneath her - a draper no less, but she married for love. To the modern reader, it seems like she has a pretty happy marriage. There's enough money to live very comfortably, they appreciate and feel grateful for their good fortune and they have eleven healthy, adoring children! Rose doesn't miss the society life of her childhood, but her sisters still judge her and deem her marriage unsatisfactory due to the taint of 'new money'.

Such a sordidly domestic person she was!...Love - great, solemn, immortal Love, passionate and suffering - was a thing unknown to comfortable, commonplace Rose....Was it come to this - that marriage and family were synonymous terms?

Frances, pretty and wilful, the baby of the family, shockingly marries a much older man for his money. They quickly head off to the Continent to live the society life deemed necessary back then. Just as quickly, she begins an affair with an old family friend.

Poor Francie! she was born at a disadvantage, with that fascinating face of hers set on the foundation of so light a character. 

Deb, the beauty, stayed defiantly single for most of her life, until she succumbed to the charms of her very first lover in his dotage. She is lonely for children, but consoles herself with some kind of high-minded ideals about pure love. But basically she's left nursing a grumpy, old man!

Young Carey's first wife tragically dies in a boating accident after five weeks of married life together. Lily's ghost and their brief marriage becomes his ideal. He falls for the beauty of both Deb and Frances and nearly gets ensnarled in a romantic fantasy gone wrong with Mary. Eventually he marries an English country cousin, after finally attaining everything he ever dreamed of, yet still idealising his love for Lily, instead of being grateful for what he has.

Lily in the retrospect was the faultless woman - the ideal wife and love's young dream in one...'Whatever is lacking now, I have known the fullness of love and bliss - that there is such a thing as a perfect union between man and woman, rare as it may be.' It will be remembered that he was married to her, actually, for a period not exceeding five weeks in all.

Cambridge finishes her tale about love and marriage with Jim, the station manager, who has secretly pined after Debbie all his life, listening outside the window to her play the piano to her slumbering husband.

He did not know what a highly favoured mortal he really was, in that his beautiful love-story was never to be spoiled by a happy ending.

A rather twisted version of the 'it's better to have loved than lost, than never to have loved at all' idea perhaps? We have an unhappy marriage with a power imbalance, a domestic goddess whose life is taken up with child bearing and child rearing, an adultress, a nursemaid, a man still in love with his former wife's ghost and a lonely old, man dreaming of a love that will never be!

I'm certainly very curious to know more about Cambridge's own marriage now.

If Sisters is a fair example of her work, then I will certainly be seeking out more. She doesn't write with the same breadth and depth as Henry Handel Richardson, but she does tackle women's issues and class consciousness head-on in a time when this was not really the done thing in literature.

Sisters features some fabulous dialogue and memorable descriptions. Debbie and Carey in particular, are fully realised characters that will live with me for a long time to come.

Bill @The Australian Legend is planning an Australian Women Writers Gen 1 Week. Cambridge is considered to be Gen 1 writer according to Bill's list of generations. Pop over to his page to join in the discussion or to check the list for your own reading pleasure. The idea is to read and link up Gen 1 AWW on his post that will go live on the 15th Jan 2018, to create a fabulous online resource for all of us.

Bill's post alerted me to the fact that the AWW Gen 1 women, including Cambridge were dismissed by the (mostly male, Sydney-centric) Gen 2 writers. In much the same way that many men still try to dismiss Jane Austen as a romance writer for women, it appears that Cambridge was relegated to the status of being nothing more than a writer for women, writing about female domestic concerns. And therefore not worthy of male attention.

Have you ever read any books by Ada Cambridge?
#AusReadingMonth
#AustralianWomenWritersChallenge

I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck

I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck was a bit of an impulse read one grey, rainy work day. It's slim form meant it could slip inside my coat pocket and come along to lunch with me.

I quickly realised that having happiness in the title was a misnomer as this was yet another book about death and loss and grief. 

I have read so many books about dying and sorrow in the past year or so. I'm not sure if it's just me and where my interests are leading me right now, or if it's a wider bookworld theme. 

Considering that I Married You For Happiness was first published in 2011, I have to assume it's me seeking out/being attracted to this theme at the moment. 

A quotation from Blaise Pascal acts as epigraph for the story,

We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us…

Which sets the scene for this bitter sweet story beautifully.

Philip and Nina's history is told over the course of one night.
It's the night that Philip has died in his sleep after having a little lie down after work and just before dinner. Nina sits, shocked, with Philip's body, and throughout the long night, she remembers some of the moments that made their marriage what it was - their first meeting in Paris, the birth of their daughter, Philip's career as a mathematician, the flirtations, arguments and counselling, the jealousy, the secrets and, of course, their love, that endured it all.

Philip was a mathematician, so quite a lot of probability and philosophy was thrown into the mix. His rational nature often clashed with Nina's more artistic soul and their marriage, like most, I guess, became a compromise and dance around each other's emotional abilities and needs.

Tuck throws in the occasional harsh reality check - like Nina suddenly remembering a story about an elderly local woman who was brutally raped when her home was broken into, who subsequently died, not so much from the pain, but the shame.

This is where Tuck excelled. She showed us the complicated and sometimes random nature of grief. Weird trivial thoughts and practical matters often interrupted and intruded on Nina's ability to process what had happened. The reality of her loss would hit her anew, as another memory led her back to this present moment. And then off again.

Tuck used a fragmentary style of writing which suited the in and out, to and fro nature of Nina's thoughts. The writing was sparse yet delicate as Tuck explored the age-old tragedy of how one partner will eventually predecease the other in any marriage. And that even though we all know this harsh fact right from the start, it still catches us by surprise when it actually happens.

Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Caravaggio

The only really weird moment for me, the reader, was the ending. Was it all a dream? Or did Nina create a fantasy to sustain herself in her grief? Given that her favourite painting was Caravaggio's Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the reference to an angel with black wings is perhaps not so surprising, and could be seen as a sign of comfort and solace seeking in her time of need.

Seeking comfort is one of the essential strategies we all need to develop to distract ourselves from our grief. We will never erase or forget our emotional memories, and closure is a myth, but we can plan for and soothe ourselves when those intense emotions and memories are triggered.

Perhaps that's what Tuck was trying to tell us all along - that we all have the ability to comfort ourselves when the time comes.

If you enjoyed Kent Haruf's Our Souls At Night, Tinkers by Paul Harding or Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan you might also enjoy this.