Founded in 1940, Meanjin is one of Australia’s oldest literary journals. The University of Queensland library has copies back to 1977, as well as an anthology of selected works from the first fifty years, Temperament of Generations. What a pleasure, on a chill afternoon in August, to pull down the boxes and sit on the floor between the stacks. For a certain, determinedly unfashionable type of person – the same type of person who reads literary periodicals – the age of digital content has only increased the book’s appeal as a physical object. Most editions of Meanjin are well over 200 pages, and in the library they’re bound in hardcover, four to a volume. The boxes are heavy, you have to be careful pulling them down from the high shelves. You smell the dusty pages and examine the split binding and, weighing the book in your hands, feel a residual stirring of what Walter Benjamin called art’s “aura.”
Such an afternoon may seem the height of ivory tower indulgence, but it’s also a journey into some of the most hotly contested cultural terrain in Australia. Meanjin’s founding editor Clem Christesen wanted to reflect ‘the connection between literature and politics’ (2). Skimming the archives it’s striking just how intimate this connection has often been, from suspicions of Communist bias in the early days, through the Ern Malley affair, and a later emphasis on Indigenous issues. I expect to find more politics and less literature as the years go by, but erratic indexes mean it’s hard to tell whether the level of topical material has increased. What is readily observable is a new emphasis on the visual, as text-heavy covers give way to photos of artists and politicians. Ian Britain’s arrival in 2001 brings a new emphasis on Life-writing and other forms of creative non-fiction. In the 2000s, for the first time, we also see fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs and reviews, broken into discrete sections and labeled on the contents page.
Meanjin’s eighth editor Sophie Cunningham has kept the sections, but abandoned themes for each issue. Like her predecessors, she took over pledging to stay true to the magazine’s heritage, but also make some changes. The ability to take risks, to publish challenging new material, is often said to be small magazines’ greatest asset. ‘The ideal reader of a literary journal,’ John Freedman wrote recently in The Australian ‘is one who yearns for the lash of the new, the way a boxer needs to be hit’ (18). In Meanjin’s case, however, novelty needed to balanced with a sensitivity to tradition, innovation with continuity. Since Cunningham took over in 2008, Meanjin has published a series of essays on arts funding in Australia. The journal has replaced cover photos with “a more illustrative look,”(2) and begun to include serialised work, while maintaining the traditional arts/politics focus.
The winter editorial draws Leonard Cohen’s recent Australian tour against the backdrop of the Victorian bushfires, the economic crisis, and changes to Australian copyright law. Cunningham interweaves these strands with considerable skill; the only problem is the bright blue text which is hard on the eyes. Thankfully, this soon gives way to plain black in the “newsreel” section, where Tom Davis discusses Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd’s use of social networking sites. While conscious this may be ‘a simple oiling of wheels of political campaigning,’ Davis hopes Web 2.0 might ‘tentatively hold out promise of a reformed democracy’ (21). Anson Cameron emphatically debunks the myth that booze and drugs fuel literary inspiration: ‘It’s a room and a desk and a keyboard and a screen and the fear and the desperation’ (14). The endangered apostrophe, literary rejections, and digitisation of content at the National Library also feature. All this is fine, but no more rigorous than the writing you find in Australian broadsheet supplements each weekend. Serious long form reportage of the kind found in Granta or The Guardian is nowhere to be seen.
The brief “In Colour” section combines images and the written word to good effect. Rachel Buchanan gives us an illustrated account of the work of New Zealand avant-garde artist Len Lye, while Toni Jordan’s photos and essay reveal how Obamamania has spread to Kenya. Few would argue with her conclusion that Kenyans, like Americans, ‘deserve better leaders’ (33), but it’s a rather pat note on which to finish.
Then it’s back to basics with 90 pages of solid text. Marcus Westbury’s CAL/Meanjin essay is highly critical of the art’s funding status quo in Australia. He argues convincingly that our cultural agencies have fallen behind the culture itself. Funding bodies favour large organisations involved with traditional elite arts over smaller more innovative projects, he says, not because orchestras, opera and galleries are popular with audiences, but because such money is easier for bureaucrats to administer. The irony that Meanjin relies on many of the organisations Westbury criticises for financial support is not lost on the author, and in no way detracts from his argument that Australia needs a coherent cultural policy at the national level (38).
Ross Gibson’s piece on William Dawes is the other highlight among the essays. Dawes, a surveyor and astronomer with the first fleet, was the first European to learn an Indigenous Australian language. Since his notebooks were discovered in the early 70s, he has fascinated novelists and documentary makers, most recently Kate Grenville. Gibson doesn’t want to ban novelists from re-imagining history, but believes ‘a well-made novel must obscure the most puzzling and provocative elements in the notebooks’ (92). The essay form, in contrast, allows him to speculate about the nature of the relationship between Dawes and Patyegarang, the Indigenous woman who taught him her language, without cleaving to a specific historical interpretation. His account of the complex “event grammar” that structures Eora language is both sophisticated and readable, his call for a national conversation about what Dawes learned, timely and important.
Kate Fielding and Ben Foxes’s graphic novel “Their Hooks Find Hold Deep in Our Flesh” is a less successful and more didactic meditation on the European invasion of Australia.
After an interesting extended discussion of “The Slap” with Christos Tsiolkas, we finally arrive at the fiction and poetry. Occupying only 73 of this month’s 229 pages, it feels like something of an afterthought. More worrying is the relatively narrow range of fiction on offer. All of these pieces are less than fifteen pages in length, set in contemporary Australia and, aside from Caroline Lee’s serialised novel, “Stripped,” sit more or less comfortably within the genre of the modern short story. It’s great to hear vernacular Australian voices in fiction: ‘he looked like shit that was still sliding down the side of a dunny bowl’ (191), but not to the exclusion of other registers of language. Although the stories by Bruce Pascoe, Chris Womersley, Mark O’Flynn, and Paul Mitchell are competently written there’s a sameness to the fiction collected here that underestimates readers. What about flash fiction, fictocriticism, or the novella? What about cosmopolitan writing that reflects Australia’s connection with other places and cultures? Writing that like the fiction of Christina Stead, or Peter Carey, or Nam Le refuses to accept that an author’s place of birth should dictate their material? Here, perhaps, is the downside to Meanjin’s long history, a lingering trace of the old cultural nationalism. When it comes to fiction, Ivor Indyk’s Heat – a newer journal, carrying no nation building baggage – is more innovative and less insular.
No such problem in the selection of poetry, which boldly crosses historical periods, geographic locations, and literary styles. Jean Kent writes of old Paris crumbling, but her work speaks eloquently to an Australian audience. Indeed, it distils a problem facing Meanjin itself, that of how to modernise and maintain tradition simultaneously. With the rise of Ebooks and the Internet, will little magazines like this one continue to be printed? One of Sophie Cunningham’s key reforms as editor has been to revamp the magazine’s website so that it includes more digital content and greater interactivity. Nevertheless, it’s to be hoped paper editions do not disappear any time soon. The boxes of back issues in the university library are precious. Hard copies not only preserve the sensuous experience of reading, they also ensure work published together stays together. This makes it easier for later researchers to locate trends, and common concerns linked to a particular era, and so to trace our nation’s intellectual life back across the decades. Unlike digital journals, which all too often feel as if they exist outside of time, these old volumes carry a sense history in their dog-eared pages and marginalia. Computer monitors will never replicate the stealthy pleasure of running a hand over sixty years of aged spines and encountering the latest slim blue edition of Meanjin.
Meanjin Volume 68 Number 2
(2009)
Sophie Cunningham (ed)
Melbourne University Press
ISBN 978-0-522-85626
229pp
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
BODIES CHANG’D TO VARIOUS FORMS
Tom Cho
LOOK WHO’S MORPHING
Giramondo, AUS $29.95, 180pp, ISBN: 978-1-920882-54-9
One year at the Melbourne Writers Festival, literary provocateur Tom Cho distributed a parody program. The guest list? ‘Barry, Ethel, Publishers, Token Ethnic Writer A, Token Young Writer.’ A description of the emerging writers’ panel followed: ‘They’re young. They’re hip. They’re even writers. Grunge drugs sex risk-taking behaviour those young scally wags youth of today no respect for their elders.’ Given Cho’s past cheekiness toward his seniors, it isn’t surprising some of them have been hostile toward his debut short story collection.
David Messers of the Sydney Morning Herald, slammed Look Who’s Morphing for its use of ‘modernist gimmickry that had lost both its shock value and intellectual allure long before the end of last century’ (39). The author, who is Chinese-Australian, struck back against his ‘unadventurous’ reviewer online, suggesting Messers was guilty of pigeonholing ethnic writers. This clash, I’d argue, reflects broader differences in aesthetic taste separating Ozlit’s baby boomer gatekeepers and the young scallywags who’d like to replace them.
An important element of this generational divide is Gen X/Y’s very particular relationship with popular culture, especially that of the 1980s. In these 18 stories 80s pop becomes a sign of generational difference, a marker of a distinctive Gen X/Y sensibility that simultaneously sees through and celebrates commercialism and kitsch. Cho’s characters aren’t nostalgic about their youth the way their parents tend to be about the 60s and 70s. Only heavy irony can make the age of Margaret Thatcher and Motley Crue charming.
Opener ‘Dirty Dancing’ is a good example of this aesthetic, the literature of the knowing smirk. Here the classic coming of age flick of the title is rewritten with a 34-year-old Chinese-Australian short story writer named Tom Cho as protagonist. After a transformative holiday fling with his dance instructor, he can no longer accept his parents calling him ‘baby.’ By telling them, ‘nobody puts baby in the corner’ and inviting them to join him in ‘a big raunchy dance number,’ Cho finally forces his mother and father to accept him as an adult (8). In this piece pop playfulness defeats conservatism. But across the collection intergenerational conflict is not so easily overcome. The protagonist continually struggles to connect with older relatives: ‘I am not that close to Auntie Wei’ (17). ‘Uncle Wang and I do not have any long and personal conversations’ (38).
Perhaps the fictional Cho has no time for family bonding because he’s busy fantasising about further cameos in ‘The Sound of Music,’ ‘Dr Phil,’ and ‘The Bodyguard.’ His self-insertion into these pop texts disrupts classic heterosexual Anglo narratives, asking readers to re-examine their own identification with popular culture. To note the author is particularly sharp when dissecting the special East Asian affection for western kitsch, is not to typecast him as an ethnic writer, or to suggest he confine himself to this material. More often his stories involve fantastic transformations – becoming a cyborg, a Ford Bronco 4x4, a fifty-five metre tall cock rock guitarist – with the theme of migration as metamorphosis a subtle presence in the background. Echoes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses can also be detected; like Cho, the enfant terrible of ancient Rome wrote of ‘bodies chang’d to various forms.’
Above all, these stories are concerned with the forces that shape contemporary selfhood. Cho may occasionally resort to ‘gimmickry’ as Messers suggests, but he is certainly no modernist. Gone is the concern with interiority, the struggle to forge identity through opposition to both tradition and mass culture. Like figures in an Andy Warhol silkscreen his characters are all surface, gleefully surrendering any stable sense of self to the seductive play of images. ‘Aren’t we all composites of various entities in our lives, family members, friends, lovers, certain people we watch on TV?’ (48). Only in the anthology’s best piece, the prose poem ‘Chinese Whispers,’ is there a hint of critique. Here Cho juxtaposes a racist American pop song ‘Nagasaki’ from 1928 with the dropping of the atom bomb, reminding us pop culture has long been one of empire’s most effective weapons.
Mostly, however, the tone is one of deadpan zaniness. While this works for a satirical Writers Festival program, it doesn’t necessarily hold us over a 180 page work of prose fiction. Passages of the weaker stories read like poststructuralist literary theory paraphrased by a celebrity impersonator with a taste for ribald asides. Nevertheless, for this Gen Y reader, Look Who’s Morphing is finally redeemed by its daring and inventive language. Pop culture may be the 21st century lingua franca, but these literary short stories – as prone to experimental shape-shifting as Cho’s eponymous protagonist – succeed in making it strange for us once more. If older writers want to know where fiction is going they best become fluent in this language. If young writers want their elders’ respect they will have to do something even more difficult – learn to escape it.
LOOK WHO’S MORPHING
Giramondo, AUS $29.95, 180pp, ISBN: 978-1-920882-54-9
One year at the Melbourne Writers Festival, literary provocateur Tom Cho distributed a parody program. The guest list? ‘Barry, Ethel, Publishers, Token Ethnic Writer A, Token Young Writer.’ A description of the emerging writers’ panel followed: ‘They’re young. They’re hip. They’re even writers. Grunge drugs sex risk-taking behaviour those young scally wags youth of today no respect for their elders.’ Given Cho’s past cheekiness toward his seniors, it isn’t surprising some of them have been hostile toward his debut short story collection.
David Messers of the Sydney Morning Herald, slammed Look Who’s Morphing for its use of ‘modernist gimmickry that had lost both its shock value and intellectual allure long before the end of last century’ (39). The author, who is Chinese-Australian, struck back against his ‘unadventurous’ reviewer online, suggesting Messers was guilty of pigeonholing ethnic writers. This clash, I’d argue, reflects broader differences in aesthetic taste separating Ozlit’s baby boomer gatekeepers and the young scallywags who’d like to replace them.
An important element of this generational divide is Gen X/Y’s very particular relationship with popular culture, especially that of the 1980s. In these 18 stories 80s pop becomes a sign of generational difference, a marker of a distinctive Gen X/Y sensibility that simultaneously sees through and celebrates commercialism and kitsch. Cho’s characters aren’t nostalgic about their youth the way their parents tend to be about the 60s and 70s. Only heavy irony can make the age of Margaret Thatcher and Motley Crue charming.
Opener ‘Dirty Dancing’ is a good example of this aesthetic, the literature of the knowing smirk. Here the classic coming of age flick of the title is rewritten with a 34-year-old Chinese-Australian short story writer named Tom Cho as protagonist. After a transformative holiday fling with his dance instructor, he can no longer accept his parents calling him ‘baby.’ By telling them, ‘nobody puts baby in the corner’ and inviting them to join him in ‘a big raunchy dance number,’ Cho finally forces his mother and father to accept him as an adult (8). In this piece pop playfulness defeats conservatism. But across the collection intergenerational conflict is not so easily overcome. The protagonist continually struggles to connect with older relatives: ‘I am not that close to Auntie Wei’ (17). ‘Uncle Wang and I do not have any long and personal conversations’ (38).
Perhaps the fictional Cho has no time for family bonding because he’s busy fantasising about further cameos in ‘The Sound of Music,’ ‘Dr Phil,’ and ‘The Bodyguard.’ His self-insertion into these pop texts disrupts classic heterosexual Anglo narratives, asking readers to re-examine their own identification with popular culture. To note the author is particularly sharp when dissecting the special East Asian affection for western kitsch, is not to typecast him as an ethnic writer, or to suggest he confine himself to this material. More often his stories involve fantastic transformations – becoming a cyborg, a Ford Bronco 4x4, a fifty-five metre tall cock rock guitarist – with the theme of migration as metamorphosis a subtle presence in the background. Echoes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses can also be detected; like Cho, the enfant terrible of ancient Rome wrote of ‘bodies chang’d to various forms.’
Above all, these stories are concerned with the forces that shape contemporary selfhood. Cho may occasionally resort to ‘gimmickry’ as Messers suggests, but he is certainly no modernist. Gone is the concern with interiority, the struggle to forge identity through opposition to both tradition and mass culture. Like figures in an Andy Warhol silkscreen his characters are all surface, gleefully surrendering any stable sense of self to the seductive play of images. ‘Aren’t we all composites of various entities in our lives, family members, friends, lovers, certain people we watch on TV?’ (48). Only in the anthology’s best piece, the prose poem ‘Chinese Whispers,’ is there a hint of critique. Here Cho juxtaposes a racist American pop song ‘Nagasaki’ from 1928 with the dropping of the atom bomb, reminding us pop culture has long been one of empire’s most effective weapons.
Mostly, however, the tone is one of deadpan zaniness. While this works for a satirical Writers Festival program, it doesn’t necessarily hold us over a 180 page work of prose fiction. Passages of the weaker stories read like poststructuralist literary theory paraphrased by a celebrity impersonator with a taste for ribald asides. Nevertheless, for this Gen Y reader, Look Who’s Morphing is finally redeemed by its daring and inventive language. Pop culture may be the 21st century lingua franca, but these literary short stories – as prone to experimental shape-shifting as Cho’s eponymous protagonist – succeed in making it strange for us once more. If older writers want to know where fiction is going they best become fluent in this language. If young writers want their elders’ respect they will have to do something even more difficult – learn to escape it.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
La Invencion de Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares
Morel’s Invention is a classic Argentine Science Fiction novel from the 1940s. Written in spare, elegant Spanish, it is accessible to the intermediate student of the language. Adolfo Bioy Casares is a well known figure in the Hispanic world, but not widely read in English. An author of novels and short stories, his prose is in many ways more readable than that of his famous contemporary Jorge Luis Borges (whose poetry is seen as his main legacy in Latin America). The two were close friends, writing and publishing literary detective stories together under a pseudonym. Bioy Casares wrote the definitive Spanish language biography of Borges, a tome of over 1000 pages, while the blind master penned as a prologue to his colleagues’s best known work: “It does not strike me as imprecision or hyperbole to classify it as perfect” (11). Often remembered for its anticipation of holograms and hypereality, Morel’s Invention is also one of the twentieth centuries strangest and most haunting love stories.
A nameless Venezuelan fugitive arrives on a deserted and inhospitable island, where he finds a swimming pool, a chapel and a museum with a basement full of mysterious machinery. Soon afterwards a group of strangers arrives on the island and he is forced to hide in the swamps “between the aquatic plants, and the indignity of mosquitoes, with filthy water to the waist” (13). Everywhere we are given hints that our narrator’s perceptions are not be trusted. “You would think from their inexplicable appearance that they were effects of last night’s heat on my brain” (16). And yet he insists “ these are no hallucinations or images, these are real men, at least as real as I.” He watches from a distance as they proceed to sunbathe, listening to the phonograph and bathe in the pool full of frogs and vipers, as though on summer holiday. Have they come to capture him and bring him to justice, or for some other, stranger purpose?
The narrator becomes captivated by the beautiful Faustine, a gypsy woman who watches the sunset from the cliffs every evening. He is aware that his feelings may be little more than “the affection of accumulated solitude” (39), but tries to woo her anyway, leaving a message written in wildflowers, “The timid homage of an admirer” (53). When his advances are ignored, he begins to suspect that the strangers can neither see nor hear him. Their appearances coincide with the periodic flooding of his swamp refuge at high tide. Could there possibly be some connection to the machines in the basement? They appear to be repeating the same gestures and conversations endlessly.
It won’t spoil the novel too much to reveal that our protagonist has, in fact, fallen in love with a hologram. His rival Morel, the inventor of the device, has produced three dimensional images of his friends through “a new kind of photography” (106). The concept is charged with philosophical possibility. Do the reproductions have souls? Is it possible to feel love for a being without a soul? Many cultures, the narrator reminds us, fear that when a photograph is taken, the soul may pass to the image and the person die. And what of ethics? As is so often the case in Science Fiction, technology is a source of potential corruption. In pursuing his “sentimental fantasy” of an eternally recurring beach holiday (108), Morel may have exposed his friends to dangerous radiation.
Bioy Casares’s extremely knowing text is itself, of course, a kind of literary hologram, a replica of any number of previous desert island narratives, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, Coral Island, Treasure Island and Moreau’s Island to name just a few. But while the island was traditionally a site of conflict between humans and nature, here the struggle is between humans and machines. In the nuclear age there is no corner of the earth beyond the threatening reach of technology, no human relationship that is not mediated by it to some degree. The true prescience of Morel’s Invention, then, lies not in its anticipation of specific scientific innovations, but in its awareness of technology’s consequences for the human soul. Family dinners before the television screen, bus loads of commuters with headphones, huddled millions seeking sex through their computer monitors; these are all symptoms of the modern ache. It is technology’s potential to isolate as well as connect that the novel anticipates. The most enduringly remote island, it suggests, is the estranged individual, who may never be able to cross the unbridgeable gulf between self and other. “To be in love with an image is worse than to be in love with a ghost,” concludes our protagonist, before adding ambiguously, “perhaps we have always wanted the one we love to have the existence of a ghost” (121). His final desperate strategy to capture his beloved, like the conclusion to all great stories, is both unforeseen and inevitable, recalling a Borges verse from The Self and the Other:
“In the clear glass of a dream, I have glimpsed
The Heaven and Hell that lies in wait for us…
A sleeping face, faithful, still, unchangeable
(the face of the one you love, or, perhaps, your own)
And the sheer contemplation of that face…
Will be for the rejected, an Inferno,
And for the elected, Paradise.” (151)
A nameless Venezuelan fugitive arrives on a deserted and inhospitable island, where he finds a swimming pool, a chapel and a museum with a basement full of mysterious machinery. Soon afterwards a group of strangers arrives on the island and he is forced to hide in the swamps “between the aquatic plants, and the indignity of mosquitoes, with filthy water to the waist” (13). Everywhere we are given hints that our narrator’s perceptions are not be trusted. “You would think from their inexplicable appearance that they were effects of last night’s heat on my brain” (16). And yet he insists “ these are no hallucinations or images, these are real men, at least as real as I.” He watches from a distance as they proceed to sunbathe, listening to the phonograph and bathe in the pool full of frogs and vipers, as though on summer holiday. Have they come to capture him and bring him to justice, or for some other, stranger purpose?
The narrator becomes captivated by the beautiful Faustine, a gypsy woman who watches the sunset from the cliffs every evening. He is aware that his feelings may be little more than “the affection of accumulated solitude” (39), but tries to woo her anyway, leaving a message written in wildflowers, “The timid homage of an admirer” (53). When his advances are ignored, he begins to suspect that the strangers can neither see nor hear him. Their appearances coincide with the periodic flooding of his swamp refuge at high tide. Could there possibly be some connection to the machines in the basement? They appear to be repeating the same gestures and conversations endlessly.
It won’t spoil the novel too much to reveal that our protagonist has, in fact, fallen in love with a hologram. His rival Morel, the inventor of the device, has produced three dimensional images of his friends through “a new kind of photography” (106). The concept is charged with philosophical possibility. Do the reproductions have souls? Is it possible to feel love for a being without a soul? Many cultures, the narrator reminds us, fear that when a photograph is taken, the soul may pass to the image and the person die. And what of ethics? As is so often the case in Science Fiction, technology is a source of potential corruption. In pursuing his “sentimental fantasy” of an eternally recurring beach holiday (108), Morel may have exposed his friends to dangerous radiation.
Bioy Casares’s extremely knowing text is itself, of course, a kind of literary hologram, a replica of any number of previous desert island narratives, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, Coral Island, Treasure Island and Moreau’s Island to name just a few. But while the island was traditionally a site of conflict between humans and nature, here the struggle is between humans and machines. In the nuclear age there is no corner of the earth beyond the threatening reach of technology, no human relationship that is not mediated by it to some degree. The true prescience of Morel’s Invention, then, lies not in its anticipation of specific scientific innovations, but in its awareness of technology’s consequences for the human soul. Family dinners before the television screen, bus loads of commuters with headphones, huddled millions seeking sex through their computer monitors; these are all symptoms of the modern ache. It is technology’s potential to isolate as well as connect that the novel anticipates. The most enduringly remote island, it suggests, is the estranged individual, who may never be able to cross the unbridgeable gulf between self and other. “To be in love with an image is worse than to be in love with a ghost,” concludes our protagonist, before adding ambiguously, “perhaps we have always wanted the one we love to have the existence of a ghost” (121). His final desperate strategy to capture his beloved, like the conclusion to all great stories, is both unforeseen and inevitable, recalling a Borges verse from The Self and the Other:
“In the clear glass of a dream, I have glimpsed
The Heaven and Hell that lies in wait for us…
A sleeping face, faithful, still, unchangeable
(the face of the one you love, or, perhaps, your own)
And the sheer contemplation of that face…
Will be for the rejected, an Inferno,
And for the elected, Paradise.” (151)
Confessions of an Economic Hitman
John Perkin’s 2004 autobiography was written in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The book details the author’s participation in some of America’s more dubious foreign policy adventures of the 1960s and 1970s, during his decade as a self described “economic hitman.” Written as a kind of state of the nation address, Confessions deliberately sets up its author as a representative figure, a corrupted New Hampshire innocent who must declare his guilt in order to be redeemed. It speaks to a collective North American “us,” still reeling from the terrorist attacks, and suggests implicitly that if one man can change from agent of empire to critic of imperialism, America may yet reconnect with its founding values.
Although Perkins is much less rhetorically gifted than Barrack Obama, it’s easy to imagine those who made his book a New York Times bestseller also buying the “yes we can” message. Indeed, both Obama and Perkins sometimes evoke the older tradition of the puritan jeremiad, the critique delivered to strengthen resolve in a time of hardship.
This mode of address can sound messianic to those of us outside the US, especially in Australia with our preference for side of the mouth understatement. In his acceptance speech, Obama at least made a point of reaching out to “those beyond our shores.” Perkins displays no such capacity for nuance: “Let this book, then, be the start of our salvation” (iv), he writes his the introduction. His story, thankfully, is interesting enough that we are inclined to overlook such hyperbole.
From 1971 to 1981 Perkins worked as an economist for US consultancy firm Chas. T Main. He was sent to developing countries “to encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes US commercial interests” (xi). In practice, this meant encouraging the political classes of countries like Ecuador, Indonesia, Panama and Saudi Arabia to take out massive loans that they often struggled to pay back. These were necessary to fund ambitious infrastructure projects, usually built by US construction firms. The book combines travel memoir and a broad brush overview of American foreign policy during the Cold War, but it is Perkin’s ethical struggle that drives the narrative forward.
How does one become an economic hit man? “It began innocently enough” (3). Perkins, it seems, was not recruited on the basis of any particular aptitude for the dismal science, but because he’d worked for the Peacecorp in the Amazon and personality tests showed he was of weak character, pliable and eager to please. Claudine Martin, an attractive senior colleague, who it is coyly implied slept with him during training, gives him some rudimentary preparation and tells him that he is “in for life” (12).
Soon this American Adam finds himself deliberately distorting economic growth figures in Indonesia (54), providing a Saudi Prince with a live in American mistress (93-94), and accepting a substantial bribe not to publish an earlier version of his memoirs (171). His account of MAIN’s organizational structure is significant. “As an EHM I never drew a penny directly from the NSA or any other government agency; MAIN paid my salary. I was a private citizen, employed by a private corporation” (180). Here we see the outsourcing of dirty work that would later characterize the Bush administration’s approach to the War on Terror.
Perkins’s most serious accusations against the US are that it masterminded the suspicious deaths of Ecuadorian president Jaime Roldos and Panamanian President Omar Torrijos in the 1980s. These crimes are not attributed to MAIN, but to forces within the shadowy alliance of US political, business and intelligence interests referred to in the book as the “corporatocracy” (an updated version of Eisenhower’s military industrial complex). The “New Hampshire Prep School on the hill” where Perkins studied, becomes a motif for lost innocence, hinting that the light on the hill that traditionally stood for American promise has dimmed.
While Perkins has great material, he is not a writer. Describing a chance encounter with Graham Greene in a Panama coffee shop, he refers to the British novelist’s famous work “The Pride and the Glory,” (sic) an error which suggests he probably hasn’t read it. He goes to some length to assure us of the veracity of his tale. “This is not a fiction this is the true story of my life” (x). But we automatically mistrust people who are too insistent they are telling a true story, especially when their writing fails to convince. He plants long implausible passages of expository dialogue in characters’ mouths: “The Shah of Saudi Arabia is your only really ally in the Middle East, and the industrial world rotates on the axle of oil that is the Middle East” (114). He will not allow for the inherent messiness of living, identifying too many neat narrative turning points, and often exaggerating their significance, “It was a night I will never forget, and one that has influenced the rest of my life” (43). He make clumsy use of leitmotifs, “staring into the water of that putrid canal, I once again saw images of the New Hampshire prep school on the hill” (32). The facts may be objectively true, but they do not feel true. Good writing can give the most fanciful nonsense verisimilitude; here the opposite occurs, compelling real life events are made to seem stagy and vaguely manipulative.
The final quarter of the book deals with Perkin’s post-MAIN career as CEO of an alternative energy company, and with his long struggle to write and publish his tell all account. Like a cross between a self-help guru and a vacuum cleaner salesman, Perkins assumes that those who forked out $25 for his memoirs will be irrevocably changed by the experience, “you are ready to leave the book behind and pounce on the world” (225). While few of us are likely to be swayed to this extent, Perkin’s story is an important one and does have something tell us about the nature of the world’s first global empire, even if the lessons we learn are not necessarily those the author intended. Confessions of an Economic Hitman’s amalgam of idealism and virulent self-promotion, is as deeply American as Dreams from My Father, and just as deeply of our historical moment.
Although Perkins is much less rhetorically gifted than Barrack Obama, it’s easy to imagine those who made his book a New York Times bestseller also buying the “yes we can” message. Indeed, both Obama and Perkins sometimes evoke the older tradition of the puritan jeremiad, the critique delivered to strengthen resolve in a time of hardship.
This mode of address can sound messianic to those of us outside the US, especially in Australia with our preference for side of the mouth understatement. In his acceptance speech, Obama at least made a point of reaching out to “those beyond our shores.” Perkins displays no such capacity for nuance: “Let this book, then, be the start of our salvation” (iv), he writes his the introduction. His story, thankfully, is interesting enough that we are inclined to overlook such hyperbole.
From 1971 to 1981 Perkins worked as an economist for US consultancy firm Chas. T Main. He was sent to developing countries “to encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes US commercial interests” (xi). In practice, this meant encouraging the political classes of countries like Ecuador, Indonesia, Panama and Saudi Arabia to take out massive loans that they often struggled to pay back. These were necessary to fund ambitious infrastructure projects, usually built by US construction firms. The book combines travel memoir and a broad brush overview of American foreign policy during the Cold War, but it is Perkin’s ethical struggle that drives the narrative forward.
How does one become an economic hit man? “It began innocently enough” (3). Perkins, it seems, was not recruited on the basis of any particular aptitude for the dismal science, but because he’d worked for the Peacecorp in the Amazon and personality tests showed he was of weak character, pliable and eager to please. Claudine Martin, an attractive senior colleague, who it is coyly implied slept with him during training, gives him some rudimentary preparation and tells him that he is “in for life” (12).
Soon this American Adam finds himself deliberately distorting economic growth figures in Indonesia (54), providing a Saudi Prince with a live in American mistress (93-94), and accepting a substantial bribe not to publish an earlier version of his memoirs (171). His account of MAIN’s organizational structure is significant. “As an EHM I never drew a penny directly from the NSA or any other government agency; MAIN paid my salary. I was a private citizen, employed by a private corporation” (180). Here we see the outsourcing of dirty work that would later characterize the Bush administration’s approach to the War on Terror.
Perkins’s most serious accusations against the US are that it masterminded the suspicious deaths of Ecuadorian president Jaime Roldos and Panamanian President Omar Torrijos in the 1980s. These crimes are not attributed to MAIN, but to forces within the shadowy alliance of US political, business and intelligence interests referred to in the book as the “corporatocracy” (an updated version of Eisenhower’s military industrial complex). The “New Hampshire Prep School on the hill” where Perkins studied, becomes a motif for lost innocence, hinting that the light on the hill that traditionally stood for American promise has dimmed.
While Perkins has great material, he is not a writer. Describing a chance encounter with Graham Greene in a Panama coffee shop, he refers to the British novelist’s famous work “The Pride and the Glory,” (sic) an error which suggests he probably hasn’t read it. He goes to some length to assure us of the veracity of his tale. “This is not a fiction this is the true story of my life” (x). But we automatically mistrust people who are too insistent they are telling a true story, especially when their writing fails to convince. He plants long implausible passages of expository dialogue in characters’ mouths: “The Shah of Saudi Arabia is your only really ally in the Middle East, and the industrial world rotates on the axle of oil that is the Middle East” (114). He will not allow for the inherent messiness of living, identifying too many neat narrative turning points, and often exaggerating their significance, “It was a night I will never forget, and one that has influenced the rest of my life” (43). He make clumsy use of leitmotifs, “staring into the water of that putrid canal, I once again saw images of the New Hampshire prep school on the hill” (32). The facts may be objectively true, but they do not feel true. Good writing can give the most fanciful nonsense verisimilitude; here the opposite occurs, compelling real life events are made to seem stagy and vaguely manipulative.
The final quarter of the book deals with Perkin’s post-MAIN career as CEO of an alternative energy company, and with his long struggle to write and publish his tell all account. Like a cross between a self-help guru and a vacuum cleaner salesman, Perkins assumes that those who forked out $25 for his memoirs will be irrevocably changed by the experience, “you are ready to leave the book behind and pounce on the world” (225). While few of us are likely to be swayed to this extent, Perkin’s story is an important one and does have something tell us about the nature of the world’s first global empire, even if the lessons we learn are not necessarily those the author intended. Confessions of an Economic Hitman’s amalgam of idealism and virulent self-promotion, is as deeply American as Dreams from My Father, and just as deeply of our historical moment.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Deception by Michael Meehan
The protagonist of Melbourne novelist Michael Meehan’s third book, Deception, is, like his creator, a lawyer with an intensely creative side.
“Someone once told me that I’m a lawyer and a dreamer, and that it’s an awkward mix,’ Nicholas Lethbridge informs us. “The dreamer opens gaps where no one else can see them. The lawyer goes in search of all that’s needed, to close them down again” (47). This is one of several passages in the novel reflecting on how narrative operates in law, history and fiction. Deception, with its tendency to ask expansive universalising questions in the first person plural would like to make us think about the nature of storytelling.
“But just how much, beyond the range of touch and sight, and memory, can we really hope to recover?” (96). Many readers will tire of these gnomic pronouncements, but thankfully the novel leavens its epistemological brow-furrowing with a lively historical detective story.
Nicholas, a young Australian law graduate and scholar arrives in Paris in 1968 during the student protests and strikes against the De Gaulle government. The great-grandson of Paul Duvernois, a French activist banished to Australia after the 1971 Paris commune, Nick wants to learn more of his family history. He also carries with him a mysterious set of papers that have come down to him through his grandmother. Supposedly written by Sebastian Rouvel, another communard exiled to the Antipodes, the documents bring him into contact with an erratic but beautiful young Rouvel researcher, Julia Dussol, who becomes determined to decode their secret meaning. Nicholas also gains the confidence of his three elderly French great-aunts, who gradually reveal more about their upbringing in exile in the shadow of Mount Deception, South Australia. The two young historians slowly come to understand the dark truth connecting the two French émigrés that Nick’s relatives would prefer remained unknown.
If this sounds rather involved, that’s because it is, with Meehan spending the first two thirds of the book setting up a multitude of teasing questions. Do Rouvel’s obscure Australian poems mean something or are they the work of a madman? Why did he finally ride off to die in the desert alone? What was his relationship with Nick’s great-grandmother Marie-Josephe? The denouement in the book’s final third is rather less convincingly, as though Meehan shares the “old professional habit” of his lawyer character, Monsieur Jalabert: ‘a love of neat endings, with all the pieces tied together’ (88). Nevertheless, the novel’s command of historical material is impressive, its familiar quest narrative perfectly serviceable. It’s also refreshing to read a work of Australian historical fiction that is not about settling the bush, or either of the world wars. All of these topics deserve treatment, but Meehan is to be admired for taking on an essentially European story and drawing out its little known Australian connection.
While it succeeds as a sort of high-brow thriller, Deception would also like to teach us something about history and how it is written, and it is here that things begin to go awry. At first glance the two historians, Julia and Nicholas, have a great deal in common. Both are solitary young intellectuals drawn to the study of the past out of a need for personal understanding (Julia also has a family link to the Paris commune, claiming to be Rouvel’s great-great niece), as well as professional ambition. In their understanding of history, however, they’re diametrically opposed. While Julia exhibits a swaggering confidence about her ability to read patterns in the evidence and accurately render history through “informed conjecture” (72), Nicholas is a skeptic, tending to dwell on gaps and silences that suggest the past is finally unknowable.
“Trust the mystery, Julia,” he tells his sometimes-lover sometimes-nemesis. “It keeps you closer to the truth than your coherence ever will’ (228). Given that Nick is a round character, sympathetically portrayed, and Julia a type, you might expect the novel to endorse his point of view. However, the book’s own insistence on conclusively answering all of the questions it poses, would appear to undermine its protagonist’s position.
A few stylistic tics mar this otherwise elegantly written work. Meehan has a habit of heavily flagging significant events:
“Then it was that something happened” (2) “It was then perhaps that she first saw him” (36). Neither of these empty constructions communicate anything at all and the prose would sound more assured if the reader were trusted to distinguish key events from supplementary ones, narrative kernels from satellites. Our first person narrator’s long reveries peppered with the phrase “I thought” are also off-putting. Sometimes these refer back to the 19th century, as in “I thought then of Paul, and of his years labouring in Sydney” and “I thought of how he looked for her on his return from the wharves” (161). On other occasions endlessly thoughtful Nic muses about characters and events in 1968:
“I thought about what Lucien told me” (171), “I thought of the ferment in the streets below” (206).
This is more than repetitiousness, what we have here is a problem with the management of narrative time. “Chrono-logic” is the term Seymour Chatman uses to describe narrative’s dual sense of time, the way past tense stories seems to pre-exist their own telling. In Deception our narrator is doubly removed from the story he tells, separated from it first by 100 years and a host of uncommunicative French-speaking aunties, and then by the thirty further years it apparently took him to write it all down. For this reason, Nick spends a great deal of the book remembering himself remembering things three decades earlier. Would a man looking back on his first trip to Paris from such a distance truly remember what he thought at any precise moment? Probably not, and in this repeated “I thought” we sense a faint grinding of narrative gears, the author struggling to corral all the necessary exposition of historical back story into the over-burdened mind of his protagonist.
The novel sets out to tell two stories, one of the 1870s, one of a man researching this period in the 1960s, but Meehan appears far more interested in the 19th century than the 20th. Contrast the vivid and lyrical description of South Australia in the 1880s from the novel’s opening scene with the rather perfunctory description of a protest march in 1968 that appears later:
He wrote of stones. Sebastien Rouvel. In one fragment after another he wrote of stones drawn deeply from a country of felled walls and scattered rocks. He wrote of how he walked hand in hand with another across fields of broken stones and fresh growths of crumbling rock, stooping now and then to break bright flowers from fragile stems (1-2).
As we crossed the périphérique and drew closer to the centre, the signs of unrest were increasing, with large crowds of shouting protesters carrying banners, pouring from the metros and moving along the streets spilling out across the roads (169).
In Deception history is a palimpsest in which the present is written over the past. The novel juxtaposes two historical settings in order to posit a relationship between them. But Nick’s recollections of the disorder in the streets in 1968 are too hastily sketched to provide an effective frame, indeed the riots oddly generic and repetitive, always a long way off. On page 43 we hear sirens and glass breaking, on page 121 there’s more glass breaking, and on page 177 the sound of sirens and breaking glass again. The novel is consciously playing with the figure of the clueless young intellectural here, fully aware of the irony of a man so fascinated by a 100-year-old revolution that he’s oblivious to one taking place right under his nose – but that doesn’t excuse poor editing.
Deception, then, for all its cleverness ultimately emerges as an entertainment periodically studded with insight, rather than the work of enduring wisdom it would like to be. “It is important that the telling match the happening” (35), one character sagely observes. In this sophisticated and impressively-researched work of fiction, full of fascinating happenings, we never quite feel that the telling matches up.
Deception
(2008)
Michael Meehan
Allen and Unwin
ISBN: 978-1-74175-458-2
284pp AUS $32.95
“Someone once told me that I’m a lawyer and a dreamer, and that it’s an awkward mix,’ Nicholas Lethbridge informs us. “The dreamer opens gaps where no one else can see them. The lawyer goes in search of all that’s needed, to close them down again” (47). This is one of several passages in the novel reflecting on how narrative operates in law, history and fiction. Deception, with its tendency to ask expansive universalising questions in the first person plural would like to make us think about the nature of storytelling.
“But just how much, beyond the range of touch and sight, and memory, can we really hope to recover?” (96). Many readers will tire of these gnomic pronouncements, but thankfully the novel leavens its epistemological brow-furrowing with a lively historical detective story.
Nicholas, a young Australian law graduate and scholar arrives in Paris in 1968 during the student protests and strikes against the De Gaulle government. The great-grandson of Paul Duvernois, a French activist banished to Australia after the 1971 Paris commune, Nick wants to learn more of his family history. He also carries with him a mysterious set of papers that have come down to him through his grandmother. Supposedly written by Sebastian Rouvel, another communard exiled to the Antipodes, the documents bring him into contact with an erratic but beautiful young Rouvel researcher, Julia Dussol, who becomes determined to decode their secret meaning. Nicholas also gains the confidence of his three elderly French great-aunts, who gradually reveal more about their upbringing in exile in the shadow of Mount Deception, South Australia. The two young historians slowly come to understand the dark truth connecting the two French émigrés that Nick’s relatives would prefer remained unknown.
If this sounds rather involved, that’s because it is, with Meehan spending the first two thirds of the book setting up a multitude of teasing questions. Do Rouvel’s obscure Australian poems mean something or are they the work of a madman? Why did he finally ride off to die in the desert alone? What was his relationship with Nick’s great-grandmother Marie-Josephe? The denouement in the book’s final third is rather less convincingly, as though Meehan shares the “old professional habit” of his lawyer character, Monsieur Jalabert: ‘a love of neat endings, with all the pieces tied together’ (88). Nevertheless, the novel’s command of historical material is impressive, its familiar quest narrative perfectly serviceable. It’s also refreshing to read a work of Australian historical fiction that is not about settling the bush, or either of the world wars. All of these topics deserve treatment, but Meehan is to be admired for taking on an essentially European story and drawing out its little known Australian connection.
While it succeeds as a sort of high-brow thriller, Deception would also like to teach us something about history and how it is written, and it is here that things begin to go awry. At first glance the two historians, Julia and Nicholas, have a great deal in common. Both are solitary young intellectuals drawn to the study of the past out of a need for personal understanding (Julia also has a family link to the Paris commune, claiming to be Rouvel’s great-great niece), as well as professional ambition. In their understanding of history, however, they’re diametrically opposed. While Julia exhibits a swaggering confidence about her ability to read patterns in the evidence and accurately render history through “informed conjecture” (72), Nicholas is a skeptic, tending to dwell on gaps and silences that suggest the past is finally unknowable.
“Trust the mystery, Julia,” he tells his sometimes-lover sometimes-nemesis. “It keeps you closer to the truth than your coherence ever will’ (228). Given that Nick is a round character, sympathetically portrayed, and Julia a type, you might expect the novel to endorse his point of view. However, the book’s own insistence on conclusively answering all of the questions it poses, would appear to undermine its protagonist’s position.
A few stylistic tics mar this otherwise elegantly written work. Meehan has a habit of heavily flagging significant events:
“Then it was that something happened” (2) “It was then perhaps that she first saw him” (36). Neither of these empty constructions communicate anything at all and the prose would sound more assured if the reader were trusted to distinguish key events from supplementary ones, narrative kernels from satellites. Our first person narrator’s long reveries peppered with the phrase “I thought” are also off-putting. Sometimes these refer back to the 19th century, as in “I thought then of Paul, and of his years labouring in Sydney” and “I thought of how he looked for her on his return from the wharves” (161). On other occasions endlessly thoughtful Nic muses about characters and events in 1968:
“I thought about what Lucien told me” (171), “I thought of the ferment in the streets below” (206).
This is more than repetitiousness, what we have here is a problem with the management of narrative time. “Chrono-logic” is the term Seymour Chatman uses to describe narrative’s dual sense of time, the way past tense stories seems to pre-exist their own telling. In Deception our narrator is doubly removed from the story he tells, separated from it first by 100 years and a host of uncommunicative French-speaking aunties, and then by the thirty further years it apparently took him to write it all down. For this reason, Nick spends a great deal of the book remembering himself remembering things three decades earlier. Would a man looking back on his first trip to Paris from such a distance truly remember what he thought at any precise moment? Probably not, and in this repeated “I thought” we sense a faint grinding of narrative gears, the author struggling to corral all the necessary exposition of historical back story into the over-burdened mind of his protagonist.
The novel sets out to tell two stories, one of the 1870s, one of a man researching this period in the 1960s, but Meehan appears far more interested in the 19th century than the 20th. Contrast the vivid and lyrical description of South Australia in the 1880s from the novel’s opening scene with the rather perfunctory description of a protest march in 1968 that appears later:
He wrote of stones. Sebastien Rouvel. In one fragment after another he wrote of stones drawn deeply from a country of felled walls and scattered rocks. He wrote of how he walked hand in hand with another across fields of broken stones and fresh growths of crumbling rock, stooping now and then to break bright flowers from fragile stems (1-2).
As we crossed the périphérique and drew closer to the centre, the signs of unrest were increasing, with large crowds of shouting protesters carrying banners, pouring from the metros and moving along the streets spilling out across the roads (169).
In Deception history is a palimpsest in which the present is written over the past. The novel juxtaposes two historical settings in order to posit a relationship between them. But Nick’s recollections of the disorder in the streets in 1968 are too hastily sketched to provide an effective frame, indeed the riots oddly generic and repetitive, always a long way off. On page 43 we hear sirens and glass breaking, on page 121 there’s more glass breaking, and on page 177 the sound of sirens and breaking glass again. The novel is consciously playing with the figure of the clueless young intellectural here, fully aware of the irony of a man so fascinated by a 100-year-old revolution that he’s oblivious to one taking place right under his nose – but that doesn’t excuse poor editing.
Deception, then, for all its cleverness ultimately emerges as an entertainment periodically studded with insight, rather than the work of enduring wisdom it would like to be. “It is important that the telling match the happening” (35), one character sagely observes. In this sophisticated and impressively-researched work of fiction, full of fascinating happenings, we never quite feel that the telling matches up.
Deception
(2008)
Michael Meehan
Allen and Unwin
ISBN: 978-1-74175-458-2
284pp AUS $32.95
Monday, March 2, 2009
Tamarisk Row by Gerald Murnane
Widely studied in Australian literature departments in the late 1970s and 1980s, Gerald Murnane was touted as an important new voice in our national literature, perhaps even someone with the right highbrow credentials to one day win the country’s second Nobel prize. This early success never broadened into popular appeal or international recognition, and by the late 1990s most of his books were out of print. Recently, however, there’s been a resurgence of interest in his work. In 2008 he won two major literary awards for his service to Australian letters, and his first novel, Tamarisk Row, which had not been in shops for nearly twenty years, was reissued by Giramondo. The press like to depict the now 69-years-old Murnane as “obsessive” and “eccentric,” focusing on his unusual habits: collecting marbles, studying Hungarian (although he has never left Australia) and maintaining a vast archive of his private writing and artwork. But it is precisely this obsessive quality that gives his work its thematic unity. Included somewhere in the juvenilia section of Murnane’s archive is a 10,000 word list of “poetic topics,” composed when he was 16 or 17:
‘Really it’s just a summary of what I’ve written about in the last 50 years,’ Murnane told Ramona Koval on the Radio National book show last year. ‘Landscapes and geography, looking at things from a distance, desiring objects of love from far off.’ He is a writer, then, who returns to and inventively reexamines the same preoccupations, rather than one who constantly moves onto new material. Nobody would expect a 9/11 novel from Murnane, or a reflection on Australia’s refugee policy.
‘The things I write about tend to be private matters’ he says (Koval 1). This disinterest in topical material may be one the factors that has hampered his commercial appeal, even as it has given his work a certain timelessness. He has always been a determinedly personal writer, fixated on questions of time, memory, and the self. At times Murnane, like the Borges character Funes, seems incapable of forgetting anything at all. In a short, uncharacteristically misanthropic memoir on his school days for The Age in 2007, he wrote ‘I was taught by 31 persons, each of whom I remember clearly… a good number of them were grossly incompetent.’ In his fiction Murnane’s unerring memory serves him well.
His first novel, Tamarisk Row, is a story of a Catholic boyhood in small town Victoria in the 1940s. It begins with a typically precise image:
‘On one of the last days of December 1947, a nine-year-old boy named Clement Killeaton and his father, Augustine, look up for the first time at a calendar published by St Columban’s Missionary Society.’ (3). This calendar, which depicts the holy family on the road from Palestine to Egypt, provides both an overview of the plot – the Killeatons are forced into exile by Augustine’s gambling debts – and a condensed vision of some of the novel’s central preoccupations: families, the Catholic faith, but above all time and perception. It is at this moment that young Clement becomes explicitly aware of what Paul Eakin refers to in Storied Selves as “the extended self,” that is, the self in time, the self capable of narrating its experiences.
‘Each of the squares is a day all over the plains of northern Victoria and over the city of Basset where Clement and his parents set out’ (3). The moment when Clement and his parents flee Basset, is also the moment in the boy’s development when he gains the perceptiveness that will later allow him to retell the story.
It does not seem to have been easy for Murnane to tell it. Originally published in 1974, Tamarisk Row took ten years to complete. In the foreword to the new edition, the author discusses this process:
‘I sometimes thought about myself as dithering or as needlessly agonizing over a task that I ought to have set about long before. Today, however, I feel somewhat proud of my younger self, he who might have borrowed his way of writing from any of the authors then fashionable but who would not – could not do so’ (ix). The result is a masterpiece, indebted to Joyce, and many of the other masters of high modernism, but with a down to earth charm, and idiosyncratic voice all of its own. In this 1940s Australian Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as in the original, form and content are perfectly matched. Memorable descriptions of horse racing canter across the page in long breathless sentences. Although the third person is used, the narrator totally inhabits the child protagonist’s point of view; the novel’s short, dreamlike chapters in the present simple tense sliding constantly between the ‘real world’ and that of Clement’s feverish imagination. Tamarisk Row’s great achievement is to plausibly recreate the lost world of a child’s consciousness, and to do so from the inside and outside simultaneously:
‘The boy buys groceries for his mother and then asks politely may he look at Mr Wallace’s aviary…Behind the wire the dense shrubs and trees are planted in the shape of landscapes from every part of Australia. Hidden among the grasslands and scrub and forests and swamps and deserts are the nests of nearly every species of Australian bird. Somewhere past the dangling black and yellow of regent honey-eaters and the elusive crimson and turquoise of paradise parrots Margaret Wallace, a girl no older than Clement, is building a bower like the satin bowerbirds” (4-5).
Imre Salusinszky, arguably Murnane’s canonical critic and the author of the only book length study of his work, argues that the author’s oeuvre as a whole can be read as an exploration of “the adventure of consciousness” (2), concerned with what is inside and what is outside the mind. Tamarisk Row is clearly interested in such questions, but it remains an accessible novel, a moving portrait of a family in distress. The relationship between Clement and his father provides a strong emotional core and ensures it never veers too far into philosophical abstraction. Although Murnane insists that he does not do melodrama: ‘I don’t write books where people shout at each other’ (Koval 3), he can be quietly devastating. Aware that his father cannot acknowledge his gambling debts in front of horse racing friends, Clement is in the habit of asking for money to buy sweets every time they come around. When Clement’s elaborate horse racing games are discovered, the depth of his obsession apparent, his father snaps ‘I’m sick to death of hearing you talk about racing as though I’d never taught you anything else’ (168). But of course it is Augustine’s own fixation on the sport, his frequent absence at track meetings, and Clement’s need for closeness with his father, that drives the lonely boy to such play in the first place.
Not the least of Tamarisk Row’s virtues is its claim to one of the greatest closing sentences in Australian writing, a stirring unpunctuated three and a half page summation of the entire novel that reads like Molly Bloom calling the trots. Here all Clement’s imaginary horses compete to win the Gold Cup and the infinitely protracted race, drawn out over the course of the nearly 300 pages, seems finally to be drawing towards its close. Will it be Lost Streamlet, Passage of North Winds, Hills of Idaho? Or will Tamarisk Row, the little known horse at the back of the pack, who in classic Aussie battler style always leaves his run until too late, storm home when its all over? You’ll need to read this classic Australian novel to find out. It is a rich and serious work of literature that deserves the attention of a new generation of readers.
Tamarisk Row
(2008)
Gerald Murnane
Giramondo
ISBN: 978-1-920882-39-6
286pp AUS $27.95
‘Really it’s just a summary of what I’ve written about in the last 50 years,’ Murnane told Ramona Koval on the Radio National book show last year. ‘Landscapes and geography, looking at things from a distance, desiring objects of love from far off.’ He is a writer, then, who returns to and inventively reexamines the same preoccupations, rather than one who constantly moves onto new material. Nobody would expect a 9/11 novel from Murnane, or a reflection on Australia’s refugee policy.
‘The things I write about tend to be private matters’ he says (Koval 1). This disinterest in topical material may be one the factors that has hampered his commercial appeal, even as it has given his work a certain timelessness. He has always been a determinedly personal writer, fixated on questions of time, memory, and the self. At times Murnane, like the Borges character Funes, seems incapable of forgetting anything at all. In a short, uncharacteristically misanthropic memoir on his school days for The Age in 2007, he wrote ‘I was taught by 31 persons, each of whom I remember clearly… a good number of them were grossly incompetent.’ In his fiction Murnane’s unerring memory serves him well.
His first novel, Tamarisk Row, is a story of a Catholic boyhood in small town Victoria in the 1940s. It begins with a typically precise image:
‘On one of the last days of December 1947, a nine-year-old boy named Clement Killeaton and his father, Augustine, look up for the first time at a calendar published by St Columban’s Missionary Society.’ (3). This calendar, which depicts the holy family on the road from Palestine to Egypt, provides both an overview of the plot – the Killeatons are forced into exile by Augustine’s gambling debts – and a condensed vision of some of the novel’s central preoccupations: families, the Catholic faith, but above all time and perception. It is at this moment that young Clement becomes explicitly aware of what Paul Eakin refers to in Storied Selves as “the extended self,” that is, the self in time, the self capable of narrating its experiences.
‘Each of the squares is a day all over the plains of northern Victoria and over the city of Basset where Clement and his parents set out’ (3). The moment when Clement and his parents flee Basset, is also the moment in the boy’s development when he gains the perceptiveness that will later allow him to retell the story.
It does not seem to have been easy for Murnane to tell it. Originally published in 1974, Tamarisk Row took ten years to complete. In the foreword to the new edition, the author discusses this process:
‘I sometimes thought about myself as dithering or as needlessly agonizing over a task that I ought to have set about long before. Today, however, I feel somewhat proud of my younger self, he who might have borrowed his way of writing from any of the authors then fashionable but who would not – could not do so’ (ix). The result is a masterpiece, indebted to Joyce, and many of the other masters of high modernism, but with a down to earth charm, and idiosyncratic voice all of its own. In this 1940s Australian Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as in the original, form and content are perfectly matched. Memorable descriptions of horse racing canter across the page in long breathless sentences. Although the third person is used, the narrator totally inhabits the child protagonist’s point of view; the novel’s short, dreamlike chapters in the present simple tense sliding constantly between the ‘real world’ and that of Clement’s feverish imagination. Tamarisk Row’s great achievement is to plausibly recreate the lost world of a child’s consciousness, and to do so from the inside and outside simultaneously:
‘The boy buys groceries for his mother and then asks politely may he look at Mr Wallace’s aviary…Behind the wire the dense shrubs and trees are planted in the shape of landscapes from every part of Australia. Hidden among the grasslands and scrub and forests and swamps and deserts are the nests of nearly every species of Australian bird. Somewhere past the dangling black and yellow of regent honey-eaters and the elusive crimson and turquoise of paradise parrots Margaret Wallace, a girl no older than Clement, is building a bower like the satin bowerbirds” (4-5).
Imre Salusinszky, arguably Murnane’s canonical critic and the author of the only book length study of his work, argues that the author’s oeuvre as a whole can be read as an exploration of “the adventure of consciousness” (2), concerned with what is inside and what is outside the mind. Tamarisk Row is clearly interested in such questions, but it remains an accessible novel, a moving portrait of a family in distress. The relationship between Clement and his father provides a strong emotional core and ensures it never veers too far into philosophical abstraction. Although Murnane insists that he does not do melodrama: ‘I don’t write books where people shout at each other’ (Koval 3), he can be quietly devastating. Aware that his father cannot acknowledge his gambling debts in front of horse racing friends, Clement is in the habit of asking for money to buy sweets every time they come around. When Clement’s elaborate horse racing games are discovered, the depth of his obsession apparent, his father snaps ‘I’m sick to death of hearing you talk about racing as though I’d never taught you anything else’ (168). But of course it is Augustine’s own fixation on the sport, his frequent absence at track meetings, and Clement’s need for closeness with his father, that drives the lonely boy to such play in the first place.
Not the least of Tamarisk Row’s virtues is its claim to one of the greatest closing sentences in Australian writing, a stirring unpunctuated three and a half page summation of the entire novel that reads like Molly Bloom calling the trots. Here all Clement’s imaginary horses compete to win the Gold Cup and the infinitely protracted race, drawn out over the course of the nearly 300 pages, seems finally to be drawing towards its close. Will it be Lost Streamlet, Passage of North Winds, Hills of Idaho? Or will Tamarisk Row, the little known horse at the back of the pack, who in classic Aussie battler style always leaves his run until too late, storm home when its all over? You’ll need to read this classic Australian novel to find out. It is a rich and serious work of literature that deserves the attention of a new generation of readers.
Tamarisk Row
(2008)
Gerald Murnane
Giramondo
ISBN: 978-1-920882-39-6
286pp AUS $27.95
Monday, February 2, 2009
Thomas More’s Utopia
“For everywhere one may hear of ravenous dogs and wolves, and cruel man eaters; but it is not so easy to find states that are well and wisely governed,” says the Portugese sailor.
Raphael tells of a distant kingdom where he lived five years, an island carved from the continent by its Greek conquerors, fortified nearly two millennia now by the sea, with Amaurot the chief of its 54 cities at the peninsula’s centre. In this land all is ordered by the Law.
Citizens elect their representatives, the Sygrophants, who in turn select the Prince. Although the monarch reigns for life, he wears no special costume, distinguishing himself only by carrying a sheath of corn.
Shipwrecked Romans left some useful knowledge of technology on the island, however, agriculture remains the primary concern. Even those from the city are sent to the fields to learn the labour it takes to feed them, where they labour six hours a day clad in white linen. The zealous modern who cannot help judging the past by the values of the present may see echoes of Mao Zedong and the cultural revolution here. The idle nobility and those like gold- smiths and bankers whose professions are of no real service to society – do not exist, and other forms of society where they do are “a conspiracy of the rich.” While the granaries of the wealthy are full, the poor must not go hungry, goes the Utopian creed.
Money is unknown on the island. They value that which is useful above what is rare of beautiful, so that iron is a precious commodity while gold and silver are used to make chamber pots and chains for the slaves (don’t get squeamish remember we are reading a work of the 16th century).
Slaves are those who have broken the Law, and those who reoffend may be publicly executed as a warning to others. Strange that the Portuguese does not object to this as he earlier argued capital punishment gives preference to human over divine law and is therefore unjust (142).
Hierarchy persists in Utopia, then, despite the absence of property. Women serve their husbands, the young serve the old, and slaves serve everybody.
Since displays of wealth are scorned, clothing and houses are identical. Nevertheless, competition is not completely eradicated, as citizens like to outdo each other with lavish gardens full of vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers (166).
War, the extreme expression of this atavistic instinct, is inglorious to the Utopians, but when threatened they do not hesitate to hire mercenaries from among the ferocious warriors of the neighbouring Zapolets. Since the commonwealth produces all that it needs and has no commerce with other kingdoms it has no expansionist ambitions, and resorts to armed combat only in self defense.
Religious conflict is unheard of as tolerance of all faiths is an ancient law in Utopia. The only banned cult is that which believes souls die with their bodies and the world is governed by chance (intolerable heresy to 16th century sensibilities even in fantasy land). All legal religious sects worship the Mithras, the divine essence. They are on such good terms that they perform their devotions at the same temple, under the watchful gaze of priests with rather ridiculous sounding many-coloured feather vestiments.
The Utopians pray – and here their desire coincides with the didactic purpose of the Portuguese sailor – that the Supreme Being will bring the rest of the world to their mode of government and religion (227).
For Raphael, Utopia is the only commonwealth in the world that deserves the name. More, on the other hand, keeps a certain skeptical distance, confiding that he finds much of what has been described absurd, perhaps even impossible. “There are many things in the commonwealth of Utopia that I rather wish, than hope to see followed in our governments,” (232). This tension between wishing and hoping, between ou-topos “no place” and eu-topos “good place,” between the ideal and its realisation, has characterised all subsequent Utopian thought.
Raphael tells of a distant kingdom where he lived five years, an island carved from the continent by its Greek conquerors, fortified nearly two millennia now by the sea, with Amaurot the chief of its 54 cities at the peninsula’s centre. In this land all is ordered by the Law.
Citizens elect their representatives, the Sygrophants, who in turn select the Prince. Although the monarch reigns for life, he wears no special costume, distinguishing himself only by carrying a sheath of corn.
Shipwrecked Romans left some useful knowledge of technology on the island, however, agriculture remains the primary concern. Even those from the city are sent to the fields to learn the labour it takes to feed them, where they labour six hours a day clad in white linen. The zealous modern who cannot help judging the past by the values of the present may see echoes of Mao Zedong and the cultural revolution here. The idle nobility and those like gold- smiths and bankers whose professions are of no real service to society – do not exist, and other forms of society where they do are “a conspiracy of the rich.” While the granaries of the wealthy are full, the poor must not go hungry, goes the Utopian creed.
Money is unknown on the island. They value that which is useful above what is rare of beautiful, so that iron is a precious commodity while gold and silver are used to make chamber pots and chains for the slaves (don’t get squeamish remember we are reading a work of the 16th century).
Slaves are those who have broken the Law, and those who reoffend may be publicly executed as a warning to others. Strange that the Portuguese does not object to this as he earlier argued capital punishment gives preference to human over divine law and is therefore unjust (142).
Hierarchy persists in Utopia, then, despite the absence of property. Women serve their husbands, the young serve the old, and slaves serve everybody.
Since displays of wealth are scorned, clothing and houses are identical. Nevertheless, competition is not completely eradicated, as citizens like to outdo each other with lavish gardens full of vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers (166).
War, the extreme expression of this atavistic instinct, is inglorious to the Utopians, but when threatened they do not hesitate to hire mercenaries from among the ferocious warriors of the neighbouring Zapolets. Since the commonwealth produces all that it needs and has no commerce with other kingdoms it has no expansionist ambitions, and resorts to armed combat only in self defense.
Religious conflict is unheard of as tolerance of all faiths is an ancient law in Utopia. The only banned cult is that which believes souls die with their bodies and the world is governed by chance (intolerable heresy to 16th century sensibilities even in fantasy land). All legal religious sects worship the Mithras, the divine essence. They are on such good terms that they perform their devotions at the same temple, under the watchful gaze of priests with rather ridiculous sounding many-coloured feather vestiments.
The Utopians pray – and here their desire coincides with the didactic purpose of the Portuguese sailor – that the Supreme Being will bring the rest of the world to their mode of government and religion (227).
For Raphael, Utopia is the only commonwealth in the world that deserves the name. More, on the other hand, keeps a certain skeptical distance, confiding that he finds much of what has been described absurd, perhaps even impossible. “There are many things in the commonwealth of Utopia that I rather wish, than hope to see followed in our governments,” (232). This tension between wishing and hoping, between ou-topos “no place” and eu-topos “good place,” between the ideal and its realisation, has characterised all subsequent Utopian thought.
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