Life After Truth | Ceridwen Dovey #AWW

 

I had the pleasure of hearing Ceridwen Dovey talk about her latest book, Life After Truth at a recent work event (the YouTube recording of the event can be found here). By the time she had finished speaking, I knew this would be my next read.

I'm not sure why I've found it so hard to write up my review for this book though. I thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend it as a great holiday read. So instead of talking about my journey with the book, I will focus on what I learnt from the author talk, which then informed how I read the story.

Ceridwen evoked a lovely reading memory for me when she talked about one of her inspirations for writing a story about a 15 year reunion at Harvard University. Like me, she had devoured Erich Segal's Harvard stories, The Class (1985) and Doctors (1988) way back when.

I read The Class in the early 1990's. I remember loving the huge rollicking epic nature of the story as we followed the fates and fortunes of five or six Harvard undergrads during their college days and into their adult lives. Back then, the chunkier the book, the better, was my motto! When I googled the book to refresh my memory, I was amazed at how simply seeing the names, Andrew Eliot, Jason Gilbert Jr, Theodore Lambros, Daniel Rossi and George Keller again, brought back so much of the story.

The second inspiration for Ceridwen was her very own 15 yr, class of 2003 reunion, in 2018. All her friends and class mates were approaching 40 and various mid-life crisis were on show -  emotional, hormonal, intellectual, financial and philosophical. 

The class of 2003 had some interesting graduates besides Dovey. Natalie Portman and Jared Kushner for starters. Mark Zuckerberg was in the following year.

Ceridwen stresses that none of her characters are based on real life people.  However, she was drawn to using the polar opposite characters, of a movie star and the son of a President in her story, as she found the contrast appealing. Thanks to her social anthropology background, she likes to write not so much what she knows, but towards what she wants to know. Which is, 'how do people make meaning from their daily lives.' Or how do live the second half of your life differently to the first half.

For anyone who has read Dovey's earlier books, it is noticeable that the voice is very different in this story. It was a deliberate choice, although, also slightly out of Ceridwen's hands, as she finds that writing in different voices and styles comes naturally to her. She considers Life After Truth to be some kind of self-help novel, written in a fog of insomnia. 

She tried submitting and getting one of her books published under a different name to reflect the different voice she had used. But the publishers were not keen for a pseudonym, and neither was Dovey, as she feels that what she does is closer to the literary concept of heteronyms. The publishers were even less keen to go with this idea!

Recently she got around this by creating a story for Audible Originals called Once More With Feeling. It was a story she wrote, in what she describes as a 'warmer more accessible voice', purely with how it would sound, read aloud, in mind. Apparently she has a whole linen cupboard full of such stories, written in different voices, that she doesn't know what to do with.

As for Life After Truth, Dovey considers this her attempt to document the post truth world we all now live in, as well as a little nod towards the Harvard motto, Veritas, and what life is like for it's students after graduation.

Epigraph: 

...the Love-god, golden-haired, stretches his charmed bow | with twin arrows, and is aimed at happiness, | the other at life's confusion.

Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 

First Line:

JOMO GÜNTER-RIEHL. Address: 200 Church Street, Apartment 7A, Tribeca, New York 10013. Occupation: Founder & Director of Gem Acquisitions, House of Riehl Luxury Jewelers. Gradutae Degrees: MBA, University of California, Berkeley '13.

Last time I wrote one of these updates it was to brag about my life. 

Facts:

• One of Dovey's favourite poets is Fernando Pessoa - famous for his use of heteronyms.
• She studied social anthropology at Harvard

My Reviews of her Other Works (so far):

• Only the Animals
• In the Garden of Fugitives

#AustralianWomenWriters

Kindred | Kirli Saunders #Poetry

 

2019 was the International Year of Indigenous Languages:

It is through language that we communicate with the world, define our identity, express our history and culture, learn, defend our human rights and participate in all aspects of society, to name but a few.

Through language, people preserve their community’s history, customs and traditions, memory, unique modes of thinking, meaning and expression. They also use it to construct their future. Language is pivotal in the areas of human rights protection, good governance, peace building, reconciliation, and sustainable development.

A person’s right to use his or her chosen language is a prerequisite for freedom of thought, opinion and expression, access to education and information, employment, building inclusive societies, and other values enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Many of us take it for granted that we can conduct our lives in our home languages without any constraints or prejudice. But this is not the case for everyone.

Part of the shameful role of colonial behaviour in Australia since 1788, is the conscious and unconscious effort to create a White Australia that only spoke English. This required new immigrants to forget their native language and assimilate by only speaking English, but more significantly, it completely denied Aboriginal Australians the dignity or right to speak their own languages. 

I grew up in an Australia that was almost empty of Aboriginal words.

Many rural towns and suburbs retained names derived from an Indigenous term to describe the local area and some of our plants and animals have a similar history. As a teenager, in particular, an Indigenous word would enter our language colloquially, but there was no systemic teaching, understanding or use of local languages.

Until recently.

Slowly, slowly, Indigenous languages are being revived, encouraged and celebrated. Dictionaries are being created, recordings are being made and Indigenous writers and artists are using their own words more often in their work.

Two of the poems in Saunders' collection, Kindred, caught my eye for this reason.

• My Apologies (written on Dharawal Country with Dharawal translations informed by Aunty Jodi Edwards) finishes with a list of English words, followed by their Dharawal counterparts.

as I recite a monologue | of apology | on behalf of anyone | that has ever branded you | with a name that isn't yours

• And Wirritjiribin: Lyrebird - The one who Remembers (written on Gundungurra Country with Gundungurra translations informed by Aunty Velma Mulcahy and Aunty Trish Levett) contains two stanzas that mirror each other. One is written in part English/part Gundungurra, the other is a full English translation.

arise wirritjiribin | tangara your truth

Saunders divides the book into three sections: Mother, Earth Child and Lover. Very delicately, she draws our attention to grief, loss and trauma new trees | old scars | there is trauma here

Nature and being on country is the healer. She reveals safe places, tender new growth and the journey back home. Home to country, home to culture, home to language.

Facts:

• Kirli Saunders is a proud Gunai woman, born on Gundungurra Country with ties to the Yuin, Biripi and Gadigal people.
• Interview for Kindred in the National Indigenous Times 27th May 2019.
• Saunders was made Gunai Woman NSW Aboriginal Woman of the Year 2020.
• She developed Poetry in First Languages project for Red Room Poetry.
• Inaugural winner Daisy Utemorrah Award 2019
• Winner University of Canberra ATSI Poetry prize 2019
• Shortlist ABIA Award Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year 2020

#AusReadingMonth2020

Writers on Writers: Josephine Rowe on Beverley Farmer #AWW

 

Writers on Writers

In the Writers on Writers series, leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and influenced them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.

Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.

Josephine Rowe on Beverley Farmer was my first foray into the Writers on Writers series. It was a very literary affair. A non-fiction novella if you like (and I do, which means this can also be part of Novellas in November!)

I confess that I did not know very much about Farmer prior to reading this book, and I'm not sure I know a whole lot more now. But I suspect, she was that kind of person. Very private. Extremely shy. But I am curious to know more.

"This far, and no further. A familiar refrain of Farmer's throughout her writing life."

As Rowe explains, 'her characters are outsiders, foreigners, fringe dwellers. Expats and exiles, those returning home after long absences...' much like Farmer (and Rowe) themselves. It certainly seemed that part of Rowe's fascination for Farmer, was for what Farmer's life and work could tell her about herself as well. 

Most of the essay consists of Rowe discussing the nature of writing (her own and Farmer's) and what it means to be a reader (especially of Farmer's work). She notes that the 'conditions from which we enter, and to which we return when we lift our attention from the page, have bearing on wherever we are taken from the time in between.’ 

Rowe reveals Farmer's habit of notebook journaling and her ability for close, sustained observation as well as her belief in the age-old advice about keep on writing until something poetic pops out. 

every encounter with a text is influenced by the circumstances in which we read.

Like Farmer and Rowe, I am drawn to wondering about the life not lived. The shadows in our past and our 'reckonings with the past' that can produce a longing for elsewhere that we have all, no doubt, felt at times. This longing, though, seemed to drive Farmer constantly - as a source of creativity and a way to fend off loneliness.

Across Farmer's works there has always been an attraction to those beings who occupy two worlds...Once one has lived elsewhere, lived differently, it doesn't matter whether she stays to forge a new life or turns back towards the old, or moves on once again; there will always be the shadow, the after-image, of the life not lived.

Farmer was also on a mission for authenticity, with a 'fastidious concern for accuracy... for the evolutions of language in all its slipperiness.' She concerned herself with the all the opportunities we have to misunderstand each other and for being misunderstood ourselves. The power she has given to words, makes me feel a little nervous about reading her work. What if I don't understand? Or misunderstand? How would I even know?

Rowe was finishing this book as coronavirus escalated from epidemic to pandemic. 'We speak of this time as an intermission, a hiatus.' It made me wonder if that is a position that those of us in Australia are privileged to hold. We have had some lockdowns and spikes over the past nine months, but we basically have the virus under control for now. Being an island state has given us the ability to quarantine any and all incoming visitors. Since we cannot travel overseas easily or safely, the Australian tourism industry is, subsequently, booming, simply because we're all holidaying at home. It's easy to feel that any suffering we have had has been 'an intermission, a hiatus', a time in which we could be creative, recharge our batteries and declutter our homes! But I'm sure there are many here and abroad who feel very differently. Maybe what we're both trying to say here, though, is that solitude, or hiatus, and the reason for that intermission, is just another one of the circumstances that can play on a reader and a writer in different ways.

I am curious to see what kind of Covid-Lit emerges from this time. At the moment it seems to mostly be a little aside at the end of the book, where the author reveals how far through the editing process they were when the virus changed all our lives. It's like a place marker. 

I'm sure, though, that as part of the hiatus, many writers are penning their next book, that may or may not be set in a Covid-normal world. Whatever choice they make, their future readers will also bring their own understandings - to compare experiences or to wonder why the author chose to ignore it completely. Interesting times makes for interesting reading, we hope.

Rowe is the author of the novel A Faithful, Loving Animal (longlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin) and three short story collections including Here Until August (shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize & QLD Literary Award).

Favourite Quote:

Our relationship with the past and those who populate it is constantly shifting, as is our awareness of the ways in which it has shaped us....In returning to our first stories, those most deeply etched, are we seeking the comfort of...the familiar arrangements and foretokenings a means of retelling the story ourselves so that we might reconcile ourselves to an ending? 

Facts:

• Beverley Farmer - born in Melbourne 7 February 1941 
• Died 16 April 2018
• Short story anthologies:
• Snake (1982)
• Milk (1983)
• Home Time (1985)
• Collected Stories (1987)
• This Water: Five Tales (2017)
Novellas:

• Alone (1980)
• The Seal Woman (1992)
• The House in the Light (1995)
Other:

• A Body of Water: A Year's Notebook (1990)
• The Bone House (2005)
• A Body of Water has just been republished by Giramondo Publishing.
• 1984 – NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for Milk
• 1996 – Miles Franklin Award shortlist for The House in the Light
• 2009 – Patrick White Award
• 2018 – The Stella Prize longlist for This Water
• Stan Grant on Thomas Keneally due May 2021.

#AusReadingMonth2020

#NovellasinNovember

#NonFictionNovember

#AustralianWomenWriters

Loner | Georgina Young #AWW

 

Oh, the existential angst!

Remember when you were 22 and you had no idea what you wanted to do or how you fitted into the big, wide world and it all seemed overwhelming, sometimes exciting, but mostly this big, huge, void of trying to be an adult, that you had no idea how to fill.

This is the story that Georgina Young has crafted in Loner. The title is a subtle play on our protagonist's name, Lona, and also sums up her beliefs about herself.

What I really liked about this story, is that Lona didn't have a big ah-ha moment or major crisis that suddenly dropped her into the adult world. It was far more real than that. Lona made some errors of judgement, nothing drastic, said no when she probably should have said yes, said yes when she probably should have said no, bumbled her way through moving out of home, caring for her sick grandfather, going out on dates, dropping out of uni because the art classes were leaving her feeling dead inside, alienating her best friend and working a couple of shit jobs.

Lona's voice was authentic and endearing, yet she was aimless, insecure and full of so much uncertainty that it made my heart ache!

One of my younger colleagues (closer in age to Lona than myself) also had a strong reaction to reading this book. She felt that she was still in the middle of Lona's angst, struggling to find meaning and purpose and confused about what it takes to become a fully fledged adult. 

I think we do ourselves (and our young people) a huge disservice, by not talking more about the journey we all go on to become an adult. It's not something that happens overnight on a certain birthday. Or when you move out of home for the first time, or get your first full-time job, or buy your first car. In fact, it's a lifelong journey that evolves with every decade and with each life experience. 

Having said that, though, there does seem to be a point in most people's mid-to-late twenties where things start to click into place. Maybe it's when you finally realise that this whole adulting thing is a lifelong journey after all and you finally feel significantly different to how you felt at 18 or 19 or 20. Or perhaps it's when everything stops being a 'first'.

Lona at 22 isn't there yet. Like the rest of us, she experienced no miraculous revelation or epiphany. There was no big character change or psychological growth. She didn't suddenly 'come of age' or work everything out. Lona simply clocked up some more life experience.

Facts:

• Winner of the Text Prize 2019
• Set in Melbourne, Victoria
• Kill Your Darlings interview with Georgina Young | 13th Aug 2020

#AusReadingMonth2020

Elizabeth and Her German Garden | Elizabeth Von Armin #NovinNov

It would be very easy to read this lovely novella about a woman called Elizabeth and her love of gardens, as an autobiography in disguise. At least, it was very easy for me to be led down this particular garden path for quite some time. 

At every turn, Elizabeth and Her German Garden felt biographical. From the diary entry dates, to the very personal, confessional tone.

Eventually, though, I had to confront the facts, that the lovely, audacious Elizabeth, had written a very modern story that combined facts and fiction, in a very fast and loose fashion. Just when you thought you had hold of a certain fact, she would skip away down a different path, throwing your certainty back in your face, with what sometimes felt like unseemly joy!

At first I felt a little cheated.

The facts known about the real Mary Annette (May) von Armin née Beauchamp are pretty basic and it can be very, very tempting to read more of her into her stories that actually exists. For a little while, I believed I had made discoveries about the real May that no previous biographer had ever discovered!

That was when I knew I had completely fallen for the charms and wiles of one Elizabeth von Armin.

Elizabeth, the writer, protected the identity and private life of May, yet happily trawled her feelings and
memories for scenes and vignettes that could be woven into her stories. She wrote about what she knew, and happily made up the rest.

For the second half of the book, I sat back and let myself be thoroughly entertained. I gave up all pretence at trying to tease out the fact from the fiction, the bio from the make believe, and I let the magic of Elizabeth's garden wash over me.

Nassenheide, Pomerania c. 1860

The specific garden she wrote about was the von Armin estate, Nassenheide in Pomerania, where Elizabeth lived and wrote from 1896 until 1908 (they had to sell the estate in 1910 to alleviate the Count's financial problems). In 1911, a recently widowed Elizabeth, moved to Switzerland and the newly built, Chalet Soleil. In 1930 she resettled to Mougins in the south of France, in a house she renamed Mas des Roses. At the beginning of WWII in 1939, she moved to the US, to be closer to her daughter, Liebet. She died in 1941 in Charleston, South Carolina. 

Elizabeth obviously loved her garden and the freedom she felt there. There was a wistful, wishful air to many of the passages and a search for belonging.

The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter, not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances, servants to exhort and admonish, furniture, and meals; but out there blessings crowd round me at every step-- it is there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse than they feel; it is there that all my sins and silliness are forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and every flower and weed is a friend and every tree a lover.

A nostalgia for a more innocent, carefree childhood appeared at times. Was she remembering her childhood years in Sydney, Australia?

Why should I not go and see the place where I was born, and where I lived so long; the place where I was so magnificently happy, so exquisitely wretched, so close to heaven, so near to hell, always either up on a cloud of glory, or down in the depths with the waters of despair closing over my head? Cousins live in it now, distant cousins, loved with the exact measure of love usually bestowed on cousins who reign in one's stead; cousins of practical views, who have dug up the flower-beds and planted cabbages where roses grew; and though through all the years since my father's death I have held my head so high that it hurt, and loftily refused to listen to their repeated suggestions that I should revisit my old home, something in the sad listlessness of the November days sent my spirit back to old times with a persistency that would not be set aside, and I woke from my musings surprised to find myself sick with longing.

I went from entranced, to cheated, to utterly delighted in less than a hundred pages. I wanted the story to be completely true, a proper biography. I wanted to think of Elizabeth rambling around her garden, chasing after her April, May and June babies, and rolling her eyes at the Man of Wrath and his conservative ways.

The people round about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly
eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook.

As one would expect from a novella, Elizabeth and Her German Garden is a story with one simple central theme and very little character development. There is no crisis to be resolved or problem to be solved. It's simply a diary of one woman and her love of nature.

I don't love things that will only bear the garden for three or four months in the year and require coaxing and petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full of strong, healthy creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismally giving in and dying. I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty, either in plants or women.

Elizabeth was also very funny, at times sarcastic and a feminist in the making. She obviously baulked at the Prussian way of doing things and found the strict gender roles expected in Germany to be restrictive. (These references in her book may be why she chose not to have the book translated into German!) Yet, it's her lively, playful character that makes this story so captivating, even more so than her descriptions of the garden.

What nonsense it is to talk about the equality of the sexes when the women have the babies!  

"Quite so, my dear," replied the Man of Wrath, smiling condescendingly. 

"You have got to the very root of the matter. Nature, while imposing this agreeable duty on the woman, weakens her and disables her for any serious competition with man. How can a person who is constantly losing a year of the best part of her life compete with a young man who never loses any time at all? He has the brute force, and his last word on any subject could always be his fist."

Elizabeth Jane Howard, in her introduction to the 1985 edition of the book, wrote that while the novella, 'appears to be an ode to nature; within that ode is a determined rebellion.' EvA wanted to do physical work in the garden, she wanted to control the money her writing produced and she wanted to be free from society's desire (as well as her husband's) to produce an heir to the estate.

I wish with all my heart I were a man, for of course the first thing I should do would be to buy a spade and go and garden, and then I should have the delight of doing everything for my flowers with my own hands and need not waste time explaining what I want done to somebody else.

 

I can imagine nothing more uncomfortable than a son-in-law, and besides, I don't think a husband is at all a good thing for a girl to have.

I loved every minute with Elizabeth in her garden.

Three early childhood years does not necessarily make you an Australian (whatever that means) with Australian sensibilities (whatever that means). But Elizabeth and her older siblings were all born in Sydney. As siblings do, they would have constantly retold and shared stories about their Sydney childhood years. The older ones would have talked about their Australian memories over family dinners and in front of their Swiss fire. 

As Gabrielle Carey said in her memoir, Only Happiness Here,

I am not certain that Elizabeth remembered her Australian beginnings but neither am I convinced that she had forgotten them altogether. 

The comments that evolved from that post had a number of bloggers wondering if we could really claim EvA as an Australian and did she even want to be remembered as being Australian. To my mind, she is as Australian, as say, Germaine Greer, Madeleine St John, and Clive James. Their particular feelings about their childhood in Australia are complex and complicated, as are their reasons for leaving, although 'cultural backwater' is a phrase that springs to mind. Elizabeth is also as Australian as J. M. Coetzee, who we now claim as Aussie, since he moved here from South Africa in 2002 (becoming an Australian citizen in 2006). They are all part of the 'Australian, maybe?' team.

Keeping secrets and protecting her privacy was something EvA was well-known for. It would seem that one of her very first secrets was about her place of birth. Perhaps it was this need to keep quiet about her early years in Australia that turned EvA into such a private adult?

Whenever I've travelled overseas (remember when we used to do that?), plaques stating that so-and-so was born here, lived here, died here were everywhere, celebrating their local writers and artists. Australia is not so good at doing this. Even the Sydney Writers Walk around Circular Quay has some rather dubious Sydney connections with the likes of James A Michiner, Charles Darwin and Anthony Trollope, simply because they visited once or wrote a passage in a book about Australia, but no Elizabeth. Why not?

I'm drawing some long bows, when all I really had to do was follow the wikipedia line, that Elizabeth von Armin was an Australian born, British novelist who married a Prussian Count.

My edition of Elizabeth and Her Garden was produced as a Project Gutenberg Australia anniversary edition in 1998.

Biblio File:

• Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898)
• The Solitary Summer (1899)
• April Baby’s Book of Tunes (1900)
• The Benefactress (1901)
• The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen (1904)
• Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight (1905)
• Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907)
• The Caravaners (1909)
• The Pastor’s Wife (1914)
• Christine (1917) (published as Alice Cholmondeley)
• Christopher and Columbus (1919)
• In the Mountains (1920)
• Vera (1921)
• The Enchanted April (1922)
• Love (1925)
• Introduction to Sally (1926)
• Expiation (1929)
• Father (1931)
• The Jasmine Farm (1934)
• All the Dogs of My Life (1936)
• Mr. Skeffington (1940)

#AusReadingMonth2020

#NovellasinNovember

The Spare Room | Helen Garner #AWW

I find reading Helen Garner a curious affair. There's a real push me/pull me effect, that intrigues me and wow's me, then repels me all in the same sentence.

I'm intrigued and wowed by her writing, the turn of phrase that captures a moment brilliantly. There's a candour and earthiness that seems grounded in her strong sense of self. Then there's the confronting intimacy about herself and her friends and family. Such awkward, uncomfortable personal details that make me flinch with their rawness, that seem to suggest someone not so sure of their place in the world.

Over the years, I've been impressed with Garner's habit of tackling difficult topics, especially in her non-fiction, like a father killing his own children after an access visit in This House of Grief. These books seem to suggest, that like me, she is on a constant journey to understand human nature. Why do human beings do the things they do? What are our motivations? What stories do we tell ourselves to make the truth, the hard facts palatable? How do we live with ourselves when we do something bad? Questions to make us confront our own biases and preconceptions.

Last year, I attempted to read her Diaries Vol I, but I had to stop. It felt too voyeuristic, like I was trespassing where I didn't belong. I didn't understand Garner's purpose in revealing such private details. Yes, the names were disguised with initials, but if that letter happened to belong to you, it would be easy to feel betrayed and exposed.

I am friendly with someone who will be an initial in Vol II of Garner's Diaries. She said enough water had passed under the bridge since then, but she does not feel the need to revisit the pain by reading about it. I'm beginning to understand why Garner writes so often of falling out with friends. One person's open frankness is often another persons hurtful loss of trust wrapped up in a sense of disloyalty.

Which brings me to The Spare Room. 

I've been hearing about this novella for quite some time now, and it has been lingering on my TBR pile for almost as long. I assumed it was a memoir from everything I had heard - Helen writing about the three weeks she nursed a dying friend from Sydney, who had decided to try some alternative treatments that had no scientific backing whatsoever in Melbourne.

Yet, The Spare Room is clearly and determinedly classified as a novel (or a novella). The name of the dying friend has been changed and no doubt, the timeline of events has been fictionalised to fit the constraints of the size of the book, but she is still Helen, living next door to her daughter's family in Melbourne. 

I read another fictionalised memoir earlier in the year, Homeland Elegies. I got completely caught up in trying to work out what was fact and what was fiction. I quickly established that a number of the details had been significantly changed from the author's wikipedia bio, but it became too difficult for me to tease it all out. In the end, I stopped worrying about it and sat back to enjoy the story for what it was.

I found myself applying the same approach to The Spare Room.

As a novella, it ticked all of the boxes. It was under 200 pages - just. There was one central theme or conflict with just one, Helen's, point of view. There was very little backstory, and a continuous timeline. The majority of the book was set in Melbourne, with a brief trip to Sydney at the very end. It would be possible to read this is one sitting, if one had 2-3 hrs in which to do so. But thanks to the subject matter, I was happier reading it over three nights, to fully digest the story and absorb the emotional impact.

The Spare Room is one of the books discussed in The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies by Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin. Under 'cancer, caring for someone with', this book is discussed along with Alberto Barrera Tyszka's The Sickness and A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. They talk about the carer's agonising and the patient's denial. The rage that escalates to self-hatred and the 'bitter humour' that evolves. They finish by saying that this is,

a novel for those inclined to beat themselves up when they struggle to care for their patient 24/7....It's also a reminder that, however serious things are, it helps to laugh.

I came away from the story with a deep disgust for those people who work away in their shoddy rooms, milking sick and dying people of their money, with their bizarre, unverified treatments. 

Epigraph:

'It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.' Elizabeth Jolley

First Lines:

First, in my spare room, I swivelled the bed on to a north-south axis. Isn't that supposed to align the sleeper with the planet's positive energy flow, or something? She would think so.

Favourite Quote:

'What am I supposed to do?'

He put his hand on the dog's head and drew back its ears so that its eyes turned to high slits. 'Maybe that's why she's coming to stay. Maybe she wants you to be the one.'

'What one?'

'The one to tell her she's going to die.'  

Facts:

• Winner, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction
• Winner, Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction
• Winner, Barbara Jefferis Award
• Shortlisted, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
• Shortlisted, Australian Literary Society Gold Medal
• Shortlisted, Colin Roderick Award
• Shortlisted, WA Premier’s Awards
• Shortlisted, NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction

More Reviews:

• Cathy @746 Books
• Bill @The Australian Legend
• Lisa @ANZLit Lovers

#AusReadingMonth2020

#NovellasinNovember

The Last Migration | Charlotte McConaghy #AUSfiction

 

Charlotte McConaghy has written an intense, emotional story about the effects of mass extinction in The Last Migration. I don't normally quote the back blurb of the book, but in this case it so aptly describes the book, I'm really not sure I can top it.

The Last Migration is a wild, gripping and deeply moving novel from a brilliant young writer. From the west coast of Ireland to Australia and remote Greenland, through crashing Atlantic swells to the bottom of the world, this is an ode to the wild places and creatures now threatened, and an epic story of the possibility of hope against all odds.

Our protagonist, Franny Stone, clearly has some major issues going on her personal life, and we can see that she is using this search/hunt/journey to run away from her problems of perhaps find closure. However, McConaghy slowly reveals that her personal issues are actually interwoven into the plight of the migrating birds.

The story is quite angst-ridden and there were times when I wanted to shake Franny into a more sensible, rational frame of mind as she crashed from one scene to the next in her search for personal redemption. But then, I guess it can be hard to be sensible and rational when faced with the reality of a mass extinction of an entire species and the existential loneliness that this climate crisis implies for all of us!

There was a dreamy quality or an otherworldly aspect to this high seas adventure that held the urgency and dramatic tension of the sea voyage at bay. For this reader, they were a welcome relief from the harsh descriptions of life on a small boat in a big sea!

McConaghy references several other authors and poets throughout her book. They are books her characters have read or quote from. I'm always fascinated by this occasional tendency of authors and I like to make a list for future reference. 

Here we Colm Toibin, Mary Oliver (and her poem on geese), Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Margaret Atwood, and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I love the ending of Mary Oliver | Wild Geese in particular and share it below.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The other thing that fascinates me is covers and titles. 

Above I have the Australian title and cover.

Below are the cover and title for the USA, a proof copy and Germany. All three of which I prefer way more than the Australian cover. I don't know why so many Aussie covers insist on using a human figure. They turn me off for some reason. 

As an aside, I had been feeling very negative about the new Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. Partly thanks to my experience with his previous book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, but also in part to the submerged face of a woman on the cover! However, when I finally picked it up, I discovered that underneath the off-putting face dust jacket is a gorgeous leaf-textured hardcover book and inside is a story that has me completely engaged. Needless to say, I have discarded the dust jacket.

But back to The Last Migration.

I feel the Australian title best describes the story as Migrations suggests that there is more than one migration, when clearly the story is highlighting the very last migration of the Arctic terns. Although now I think about, it could be a plural to allude to the migration or journey taken by our protagonist as well. Hmmm, interesting.

US cover and title

US proof cover?

German cover and title

Eco-dystopian (environmental end of the world as we know it stories) or climate fiction are not everyone's cup of tea, but I have become a bit of a fan, if you can call a mere handful of titles, a fan. The Overstory by Richard Powers is an absorbing, epic climate fiction novel well worth your time, while The Rain Heron and Flames, both by Robbie Arnott are eco-dystopian and also firm favourites of mine. Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy is also eco-dystopian as well. 

Epigraph: Rumi

Forget safety.

Live where you fear to live.

The entire passage reads: “Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.”

Opening Line: 

The animals are all dying. Soon we will be alone here.

Favourite Quote:

there is meaning, and it lives in nurturing, in making life sweeter for ourselves, and for those around us.

#AusReadingMonth
#Australian Women Writers

Our Shadows | Gail Jones #AUSfiction

One gets to a time and place when one HAS to be done thinking about a book and what review to write for it. I have reached this point with Our Shadows by Gail Jones. 

I have done everything I can to put together some coherent, clever thoughts, from attending two zoom author talks with Avid Reader Bookshop in Brisbane and a week later with Gleebooks in Sydney, to reading other reviews and talking about the book with a friend who abandoned it half way through.

I really enjoyed Jones' previous book, The Death of Noah Glass, although it was not easy. So I felt prepared for Jones' themes of loss and grief wrapped in layers of art and ideas. However, I never really felt fully engaged with her characters or her purpose. Noah Glass got under my skin, but sisters Nell and Frances failed to become fully-fleshed characters in my mind.

About a third of the way through, I decided to engage with the book in a different way to help me get through (it was around this point my friend abandoned ship). I had noticed the number of times the word 'shadow' was being used by Jones, so I decided to list them.

• mud and shadow make him appear older.
• Let us say he is a man perpetually shadowed. He will always be in shadow.
• Frances began to accept that she lived in Nell's shadow
• their shadows were huge on the tunnel wall, they were monsters, not men
• dying in their shadows
• When Paddy saw their shadows walking alongside them, they were conglomerate creatures, lumpish and inhuman
• he felt himself splotched in shadow.
• ill-fated and shadowed.
• his lungs have been checked. No shadows.
• it was the shadow of wings passing over her
• the women trudged back, pulling their long shadows
• He was all shadows
• the story that hung shadowy

In discussion with Krissy Kneen (Avid Reader) and then with Bernadette Brennan (Gleebooks) I learnt that Jones set up the novel with a specific spatial logic whereby the scenes shadowed each other. The modern story of the sisters being followed by a chapter about their grandparent's history in a process described by Jones as the 'layers of life in your childhood that you spend the rest of your life excavating'.

The loss of the girls' parents also highlighted the shadow between generations. This family had an aching, missing step between grandparents and grandchildren, that caused a discontinuity in history and memory. Jones described it as 'looking forwards as memory leads us back'.

She used the mining processes of Kalgoorlie, WA to explore themes of darkness, what lies underground and beneath the surface. Through mining she explored different levels of knowing and interiority (a word she used several times to describe her writing).

Jones is also interested in scale and how a smaller, intimate story fits within the bigger narrative of history. In this story we glimpse the Irish potato famine, the gold rush/early settler life in Australia, the mining industry in WA and an Indigenous perspective. 

The importance and use of language is another device that Jones plays with here. The importance of naming things and naming them correctly, the act of translation and language making and what it means when we lose language through cultural appropriation or dementia. When the absence of language becomes like a shadowy presence, leaving a space or void waiting to be filled, yet full of expectation, anticipation, memory and loss. It's something that feels very close, within reach, yet impossibly far away, unable to be grasped. Which is probably a pretty good description of my reading experience!

I learnt that Australian POW's (& British, Dutch, US, Czech & Norwegian) were in Nagasaki (or nearby at least in Omuta) at the Fukuoka #17 Branch POW Camp (and other camps) when Nagasaki was bombed at the end of WWII. How had I never heard about this before? Most of the British, Dutch and Australian POW's were also survivors of the Burma railway.

I was moved by Fred's description of the pipeline and the country around Kalgoorlie:

He was surprised to realise how much he loved this landscape - the gimlets and casuarinas, the sweeping hawks and the streaking crows, the high shine of the cloudless, metallic sky. he loved the stiff grasses and the saltbush and the tiny tough flowers. The wind moving through them, and the scent of the red earth, baking. Alongside, the white pipeline stretched all the way from Perth. He loved it too. Water in the desert. And the story of how the pipeline was built.

Image source

And, for the first time I heard about the Lake Ballard statues, 'Inside Australia', by Antony Gormley. I first came across Gormley's work when it was referenced by Heather Rose in The Museum of Modern Love. So I was prepared for the eerie, startling nature of his statues, I just had no idea we had some in Australia.

They climbed a neat hill that reminded Frances of the cover of  The Little Prince, a hemisphere, like half a planet, in the middle of nowhere. From the top they stood in the salty wind and looked afar. Before them, beneath the white glaze of the sunlight, lay asterisk on asterisk of fanning trails, the footprinted patterns of earlier visitors who had tracked between the statues.

Image: Merlyn Cantwell

I'm not sure I can say that I enjoyed this novel, although I didn't dislike it either. Maybe the use of so many absences and shadows was a device to leave us feeling empty and unfulfilled on purpose.

It is now a month since I read Our Shadows, and very little has stayed with me about the story. I enjoyed researching things like the POW's in Nagasaki and looking at all the images available on Instagram for Gormley's statues, but I did not engage at an emotional level with the characters. I love a good intellectual exercise, but sometimes the storytelling can get overwhelmed in the process. Judging by the experience of the two readers I have to hand right now, I fear that is what has happened here. 

 Epigraph: 

Strange how things in the offing, once they're sensed,
Convert to things foreknown;
And how what's come upon is manifest

Only in light of what has been gone through.

Seamus Heaney
(Squarings xlviii)

Opening Line (in an untitled prologue): 

• So who is this girl, dreaming awake, of an entombed miner?

Only Happiness Here | Gabrielle Carey #AWW

 

Gabrielle Carey, with this book about Elizabeth von Armin, had the honour of being the very first author event by zoom, that I participated in during this Covid year. Also in attendance was Lisa from ANZLitLovers, who had alerted me to the event in the first place. It was lovely to be able to wave hello to someone I knew before proceedings started proper. For a thorough account of the author talk, please read Lisa's post here.

I had not read Only Happiness Here prior to the event, but it was high on my list for AusReading Month possibilities. By the end of the discussion, though, with Jessica White, it had moved up to be next on the pile! As had my desire to read Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

Only Happiness Here refers to the sign that Elizabeth von Armin had over the door of her Swiss chalet. As Carey states in her book, Elizabeth may have been one of the 'earliest proponents of positive psychology.' It was this approach to happiness that attracted Carey. Enough so for her to reread all twenty-one of von Armin's books before embarking on a trip to the British Library to read her letters and diaries as well.

This is very firmly in the camp of biblio-memoir or bio-memoir. Carey is very much a part of the story, as she rereads the books and interprets what she finds there. It is also her personal search for happiness and peace of mind, as she delves into von Armin's life, looking for clues or signs on how to be happy. 

My quest was about how to understand Elizabeth's temperament and her way of seeing things, how she maintained such buoyancy, such apparent relish of daily living.

She eventually hits upon nine Principles of Happiness According to Elizabeth von Armin - freedom, privacy, detachment, nature & gardens, physical exercise, a kindred spirit, sunlight, leisure and finally, creativity. 

Carey developed each principle into a chapter or section that interspersed von Armin's writing with known facts about her life. Of which, there are not as many as a biographer would usually like. This was all part of von Armin's desire to remain very private, and happy. Towards the end of her life, she burned a large number of her 'notes and diaries in what she referred to as "the holocaust"'. Which, naturally, leads the rest of us to surmising stuff about how she felt and thought via the actions and words of her characters. 

So the first fact many of you may not know about Elizabeth is that she was born in Australia. In the prestigious suburb of Kirribilli in Sydney, to be precise, on the 31st August, 1866. She was christened Mary Annette Beauchamp, and known as May by her family and friends. Her home for the first three years of her life was most likely Beulah House (converted into an apartment block in 1908 and now only remembered by the name of nearby Beulah St and wharf). I've said it before, but Australians are hopeless at commemorating the birth places and homes of our well-known authors.

Her father, Henry Heron Beauchamp, came from an artistic, well-to-do family in London. He emigrated to Australia in 1850 to set up a business as a shipping merchant. His business thrived and in 1855 he married Elizabeth Weiss Lassetter (known as Louey). All six of the Beauchamp children were born in Sydney.

One of Henry's brothers, Arthur, moved with his young family to New Zealand in 1869. His son Harold is the father of Katherine Mansfield, making May and Katherine first cousins once removed. Katherine's last letter, before her untimely death, was to her cousin May.

In 1870, Henry and his Lassetter brother-in-law, decided to move their families back to the Continent. Enjoying three years in Switzerland together, before settling in London.

As May got older, she kept her Australian heritage very quiet. Any odd accent or 'twang' that people noticed in her voice, she would put down to 'Irish connections'.

Being a 'colonial' in class-conscious England was not much fun and could often be a hindrance to making one's way into good society. Curiously, this slur of the 'convict stain' still loomed large in the imagination of many of the Brits that I got to know in the year I lived in London (1991). I imagine that the 'good-natured' ribbing I received was a watered down version of attitudes a hundred years prior.

Carey wonders if May's 'awareness of her Australianness (was) just another one of Elizabeth's deep secrets?'

She married Count Henning August von Armin-Schlagenthin on the 6th February, 1891, effectively becoming a Prussian Countess overnight. She had three daughters in quick succession - Eva (1891), Elisabeth (1893) and Beatrix (1894), after which, the Count was apparently banished from her bedroom...until 1899 when Felicitas was born, then Henning-Bernd in 1902.

At the beginning of 1898, she sent her first manuscript, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, off to the publishers. It was published in September of that year under the pen-name, Elizabeth. After an initial celebratory remark in her diary, the following days were scrawled angrily with 'rows with H'. May never provided any detail about these rows, which leaves the reader to look for clues in her novels.

If happiness was something she often enjoyed privately, depression was also something she believed should be borne individually....Elizabeth believed that sharing misery only increased the gloom and risked infecting others. 

We know some of the basic facts about the less happy times in Elizabeth's life - the Count's arrest for embezzlement, the death of Felicitas as a teenager, her fear of ageing, the loss of their family home in Pomerania and Henning's sudden death in 1910 - but not how May felt about them. Once again, the only clues are in her books when her characters go through similar experiences.

Despite times of depression and sadness, May continued to find joy and solace in nature, especially gardens and appreciating beauty.

The rest of her books where published with the tag 'by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden' causing a lifetime of supposition and speculation in literary circles, although her friends, like E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, were well aware of her writing.

I finished Carey's book with a very strong desire to get to know May better. I will try to source her two more recent biographies, but in the meantime, I will start at the beginning of EvA's oeuvre with Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which will have the happy coincidence of counting for an #AusReadingMonth title as well as the #NovNov challenge.

Did Carey also find happiness in the end?

Like the rest of us, and like May, the answer is yes and no.

The trick, it seems, is to focus on the happy.

Not long after, the lockdown was announced and during the weeks of working from home, I took to having lunch under the frangipani tree. Oftentimes, following my salad and cheese and seeded bread, I stretched out on the picnic blanket, and as the world turned in turmoil, I lay in the dappled sunlight pretending I was Elizabeth von Armin.

Facts:

• The International Society Devoted to Scholarship on Elizabeth von Armin has some amazing articles and essays, including the one that led me to them, Family Life on Kirribilli Point in the 1860's: The Enigma of Elizabeth's Birthplace (Jennifer Walker, posted October 27. 2019). This piece includes a copy of G W Peacock's Government House ca 1850, which when blown up to expose the background, we can clearly see Beulah House and its gardens.
• There is a 1958 biography by one of her daughters, Elizabeth of the German Garden.
• Another in 1986 by Karen Usborne, Elizabeth the Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden.
• And again in 2013 with Jennifer Walker's, Elizabeth of the German Garden - A Literary Journey.

Elizabeth von Arnim Monument in Buk, Poland

#AusReadingMonth2020

Stone Sky Gold Mountain | Mirandi Riwoe #AWW

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started Stone Sky Gold Mountain by Mirandi Riwoe. A gold rush story set on the Palmer River in Queensland (an area I did not realise even had a gold rush!) through the eyes of Chinese settlers, sounded intriguing. However, I struggle with blokey books about blokey men doing blokey stuff in the wild - which gold rush/pioneer books can often be - so I tempered my intrigue.

In a number of interviews, Riwoe mentions that she writes of things that move her. 

Naturally, they end up moving her readers too. In fact, her characters get under your skin and become a part of your daily life. You feel like you have inhabited their world. You think about them between reading sessions. You fear for their safety and sanity. You feel their pain and trepidation. You feel their disconnection and isolation. 

Far North Queensland becomes a character too. You could feel the heat, the humidity, the dust and dirt, the unrelenting nature of nature.

During Riwoe's research for this novel, she discovered that Cooktown and the Palmer River area, during the goldrush era, actually had a population that was significantly more Chinese than Anglo. Yet our settler narrative only ever talks about white people exploring and moving into the area. This was the trigger for her story.

The initial inspiration for my work is probably to do with what is of personal interest to me – being Eurasian, I like to write of those who are culturally hybridized or marginalized, and I also like to write of women and feminist issues. AsiaLink: University of Melbourne

From there it was only natural to weave in a story about a brother and a sister fleeing poverty in China, to find their fortunes in the goldrush of Australia. The sister could not safely stay on the goldfields as a woman, so she disguised herself as a boy. The only other women in Maytown were prostitutes or the wives of merchants. (Incidentally, Maytown is also the setting for Thea Astley's story It's Raining in Mango).

Some of the scenes are tough to read, especially the treatment of the Indigenous population by both the whites and the Chinese characters. The women don't always fair much better. The pecking order is clearly described and belies our belief that Australia is a classless society. The British and Chinese early settlers, all brought their own prejudices to bear on their new country; prejudices we are still trying to live down.

Many of the Chinese came to Australia with the sole intention of plundering the gold, making their fortune, then returning home as soon as possible. Getting to know Australia, or fitting in, was not part of the plan. When making a fortune didn't pan out as expected, staying in Australia became caught up in a sense of failure and exile. Australia was not a welcoming place, neither did it feel like home. That sense of disconnect and alienation became a daily lived experience. The isolation could send you mad or into the seedy rooms of the local opium den. The Australian landscape and society never lived up to their memories of China. Yet, as one of the characters made their way home again at the end, they realised how much personal freedom they were giving up by doing so.

Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, was in the back of mind as I read Riwoe's goldrush story. Both stories reveal the harshness of this way of life, the sense of discrimination and displacement, the degradation of character and environment, regardless of your country of origin. The dream of striking it rich and the sense of adventure that started such a journey, inevitably ended in heartache and madness. The gold fields were an unforgiving place, full of broken dreams.

Stone Sky Gold Mountain first came to my attention when it was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Award earlier in the year. I'm glad I tracked it down. It was a fascinating peek into another point of view of early Australia colonialism complete with ghosts, hardship and lawlessness. The violence and injustice was tempered by the tenderness of friendship in unexpected places. Riwoe is an elegant storyteller and she takes you on an unforgettable journey. 

Epigraphs:

• To search for gold was like trying to catch the moon at the bottom of the sea. Taam Sze Pui
• Taam Sze Pui (or Tom See Poy) was a Chinese Australian shopkeeper in Innisfail, Queensland. He spent five (unsuccessful) years panning for gold on the Palmer River goldfields, before working in market gardens and banana plantations, eventually setting up a shop in 1883.
• I wish to inform you that they are only strangers in this land themselves. Many of them have only been here a few moons, and none for more than one of two generations. Jan Chin from a letter to his father in Shanghai, The SMH, 1858

Opening Line:

• Ying dreams of her little brother, Lai Cheng.

Facts:

• Winner 2020 Queensland Literary Award – Fiction Book Award
• Winner of the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize 2020.

#AusReadingMonth 2020

Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang | Miles Franklin #1956club

The first draft of Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang was written in 1928 by Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (1879 - 1954) upon her return to Australia to care for her ageing parents. However it wasn't published until after her death in 1956. 

You may have also noticed that the name on the book is not that of Miles Franklin. After writing her well-known first novel, My Brilliant Career, her literary and commercial success was very up and down. And from everything I've read (which is not much really), mostly down. In an attempt to move away from those poor reviews, she wrote under a number of pseudonyms, including Brent of Bin Bin: a colonial gentleman.

She wrote six books under this name including Up the country (1928); Ten Creeks Run (1930); Back to Bool Bool (1931); Prelude to waking (1950); Cockatoos (1954); and Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang (1956).

Bill @The Australian Legend has a much more comprehensive understanding of this period of Australian literature and I urge you to read his post for this book to get more of the background information.

This was my first attempt at a Brent book, having read My Brilliant Career way back when in my university days. I wasn't particularly inspired by MBC into trying any more of her books. I found Sybylla tedious. A drama queen, annoying from start to finish. 

I didn't know what to expect from Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang, so I was rather surprised to realise I was reading an Australian rural romance, set in the beautiful Snowy Mountains region of Monaro. An area that Franklin knew well, as Talbingo, her home town, is part of this region.

Bernice Gaylord, our protagonist, was an Australian woman who had a natural ability to paint. Her family sent her to Europe to learn more. While there she unlearns her old school realism technique, developed Continental tastes, took a lover and eventually comes a cropper.

As a little thing of four or five Bernice had been wont to lie on her stomach and draw men and animals of action and character. When still in her teens, and sent abroad by public subscription because of her promise, she met other budding geniuses contemptuous of her ability to catch resemblance: merely photographic, they said. She had succumbed to the fashion of portraying things seen in terms of things imagined—many of them evidently in nightmares or licentious orgies. She had for a time been infected with "modern" ideas, which had at least shaken her out of mere convention and the frustrations of an inartistic and middle-class environment.

After her lover dumps her, she returns to Australia heart sore and unable to paint any more. Her father arranges for her to visit her godfather, Sylvester Labosseer, who runs a sheep farm on the Monaro. The aim is to relax in the bush, far from journalists and city life and recover her health (the reason given to the public for her sudden return to Australia).

In the peace and quiet of the Snowy Mountain region, surrounded by natural beauty and majestic mountain peaks, Bernice slowly rediscovers her creative urge. She begins by drawing portraits of the Cook, and the working dogs, until the wider picture captures her imagination,

this scene was marvellously captured by Bernice later. The setting was the snow-gum in her bridal bloom and her powdered grey-blue trunk and Alice-blue twigs beside the grey of the men's hut, with the grindstone in one corner and kookaburras above.

The gentlemen of the title, are all the men who work at the Gyang Gyang Plains station (so named because of the cockatoos that inhabited the area). Naturally, there are two particular gentlemen who come to her romantic attention. 

The same men returned to him year after year. He had a picked squad of shearers that shore on all his places. The married men brought their sons to him as soon as they could handle axe or shears. He inspired in the berated native working men, who never thought of addressing him as "sir", a voluntary loyalty approaching that of feudal retainers shaped by generations of servitude.

This is one of the few references to Aboriginal workers in this book. White Australians of this time may have started to appreciate the country they had grown up in, no longer longing for Mother England, like their parents, but the Indigenous population was not necessarily included in this newfound love of country. But that's another story.

The gentlemanly romance is naturally complicated by an unsuccessful suitor, jealous local women and misunderstandings and secrets aplenty.

I ended up enjoying Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang far more than I thought I was going to at the start. Many of the descriptions were too over-blown for my taste, but there was no denying Franklin's love of country.

After dinner the men engaged in a game of five hundred. Bernice retired to her bed on the veranda to be guarded by the blackbutts and snow-gums, fairy-like in their perfumed blossom in the dim light of the stars, and the Southern Cross so near and kind that it seemed as if it could be plucked from the sky.

 

"Thank God for the kookaburras and magpies, for the sun and trees and whole world of blossom, and especially for the tea-tree and the creek, and all this wide and heavenly country with no awful people to drive one to distraction."

The city versus country trope, following in the tradition of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, was regularly used by Franklin. Obviously, the city folk came off worse.  

A few months of days in the surf or at the zoo, the moving pictures or the theatre, and Burberry's soul wilted like frost-bitten pumpkin-vines under the realization that he was of no importance in Sydney and had nothing to do.

 

"Good lord! I was like a cockatoo in a cage," he explained to Labosseer. "There isn't a blasted thing to do in those beastly suburbs. Nothing but that infernal idleness that rots a man, and among a crowd of bally imbeciles who don't know a gummy ewe from a two-tooth wether hogget, or a heifer from a cow, or a store beast from a fat, when they see it."

Franklin also explored women's issues. 

Bernice was an independent woman who preferred to work on her paintings than marry and raise a tribe of kids. Bernice has to work hard to convince the gentlemen to see her painting as proper work, and not just something she was filling in her time with until she got married.

Mr Ced Spires: "You can't live by work alone."

Miss Bernice Gaylord: "My work is the most important thing in the world to me."

Mr Spires: "But they all say that love is the most important thing in life to a woman."

Miss Gaylord: "Men have made up that yarn because they want it to be so."

After Franklin's death, her will stipulated the establishment of a literary prize to be awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The first prize was awarded in 1957. The Miles Franklin Award is now Australia's most well-known literary prize.

Franklin's desire to celebrate Australian life in all its phases, was articulated in her novel. Clearly her ideas on establishing art and culture, by Australians, for Australians, was something she felt passionate about for most of her life.

The need was for painters and novelists, as well as the ungifted, to break out of the established rut. A way must be found to suggest this different atmosphere both in picture and story—a fresh contribution must be made to technique.

 

"It's high time that scenes that foreigners and English know nothing about were recorded for a change."

I suspect this was one of the reasons why her work was not widely appreciated at the time. Europeans (and many Australians) considered Australia a cultural back-water, cringe-worthy and incapable of any kind of unique creativity. Some still do.

 

Finally, I was struck by the same-old, age-old debate about money, fiscal responsibility and financial bubbles. 

As far as I can estimate, Australian life—and I suppose it's the same all over the world—rests on inflated values, and can't last....Fellows I've had here for the summer have stayed in the winter and made ten or fifteen pounds, even twenty pounds a week. And do they save that money to better themselves? Not a bit of it!

 

Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang was rather fun in the end. Like Franklin, I love our country's unique beauty and I appreciated her efforts to bring this to light in a literary way. I will certainly have a go at her other Brent of Bin Bin books.

A gang-gang cockatoo

Read for Simon & Kaggsy's 1956 Club.

The Dictionary of Lost Words | Pip Williams #AUSfiction

 

Many years ago, the year 2000 to be precise [I know this because], I read and loved Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words. Curiously and more sensationally, it was retitled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary for the US and Canadian market. Either way it was an utterly absorbing story about the chief editor of the first Oxford English Dictionary, John Murray and one his more colourful contributors, a US army surgeon imprisoned in the lunatic asylum in Crowthorne, Berkshire.

At the time I didn't think about how male dominated the story was. What else could one expect from a story written about the period of time from 1879 - 1915 (the years that Murray worked on the OED before his death on the 26th July)?

Thankfully Pip Williams didn't leave it at that!

One of the main consultants and contributors to the OED was historian Edith Thompson (1848-1929), originally brought in because for her knowledge of historical terms. However, by the C and D volumes she was also proofreading and sub-editing, providing thousands of quotations, along with her sister, Elizabeth Thompson.

Edith, or Ditte, is one of the real characters in Williams fictional story of the early days of the OED. Ditte is the godmother of our fictional protagonist, Esme. Williams weaves Esme's childhood habit of sitting under the sorting table in the Scriptorium, while her father worked above, into an explanation for how and why the word 'bondmaid' came to be missing from the first real-life edition of the OED.

I spent ages searching the internet for more information or a photo of Edith Thompson, but except for a few small notes on the OED contributors page, there was nothing but this one slip in her handwriting. 

These postcard-sized slips, devised by Murray, were used to collect, collate and organise all the words that came in from contributors all around the world. Pigeon holes lined the walls of the Scriptorium (the rather fancy name given to the shed at the bottom of his garden where he worked) where all the slips were sorted in alphabetical order. Every word and quotation was checked and double-checked for relevance, historical accuracy and usage. Many words instigated long debates between the three main editors as they disagreed over what was colloquial, crude or jargon. 

Many words were left out of the dictionary. Each word had to have a history of use and written quotes to back it up. If a word was in daily use, but had no written record it did not get used. Therefore the OED became a dictionary of the words that educated, literate men (and a few women) used and wrote throughout English history.

William's story turns the lens back around to the everyday words that women and the working classes used, as we watch Esme gather and collate her own dictionary of the words not included in the OED. 

Given the time frame spanned in this story, the women's suffrage movement and the effects of WWI also feature throughout. We experience both through the eyes of Esme. Both events provide her with even more opportunities to collect words that might otherwise be lost.

The Dictionary of Lost Words is a wonderful, rich historical fiction that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I'm grateful that my book club gave me a good reason to finally pick this book up. My only quibble is that I failed to feel a deep emotional bond to any of the characters. I was completely absorbed by the story and the ideas, but I was curiously unmoved by the drama of their daily lives. First person narratives can do that to me sometimes, especially when the narrator is so reserved and quiet.

This book has left me with a thirst to know more about James Murray and his family. All of his eleven children helped work on the dictionary at various times, especially, his fourth daughter, Rosfrith, who spent most of her life working on the dictionary. I'm very grateful to Williams for highlighting the lives and work of the women who were involved in the creation of the OED. 

I'd also be keen to read more about Edith Thompson and her sister. Please let me know if you know of any such books, articles, texts.

Favourite Quote: 

The Kaurna are the Aboriginal people who called this land home before this great hall was built, and before English was ever spoken in this country. We are on their land, yet we do not speak their language. 

Favourite or Forget:

• Definitely a favourite read right now, but I suspect it won't stick in my mind by the time I come to compile my favourite reads of 2020.
• Why?
• Not enough emotional impact.
• But I will ALWAYS be fascinated by the origin story of the OED.
• The various titbits about how the Scriptorium worked will stay with me a long time.
• If I ever get to England again, a trip to 78 Banbury Rd, Oxford, will be on the cards.