“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.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
A Bitter Harvest
A Bitter Harvest
By Peter Yeldham
“All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies,” argues Zadie Smith in “Two Paths for the Novel,” a recent essay in the New York Review of Books. Reviewing two recent works, Joseph Oneill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Smith explores the collision of two literary traditions, and outlines two quite distinct roads forward for contemporary fiction. On the one hand we have new “lyrical realism” like Netherland. Such fiction supplements the 19th century European novel with a certain modern self-awareness, without fundamentally altering the framework of Flaubert, Balzac, Austen, and Eliot. On the other side of the street, leering evilly and rolling up their sleeves, we find Tom McCarthy and his predecessors William Burroughs, J.G Ballard, Robbe-Grillet and many of the key figures of contemporary theory. The avant-garde has long rejected the certainties of realism, its confident assertions about what constitutes a human subject, about how we making meaning, how memory operates, how we experience time. And yet, as Smith points out “most practitioners of lyrical realism blithely continue on their merry road, with not a metaphysical care in the world” (1). Lyrical realism sells, it wins literary awards, it goes on book tours where it speaks wittily and signs its name on the inside flap. Unlike in the visual arts, Smith argues, modernism and postmodernism have failed to fundamentally alter the dominant form of the Anglophone novel. Nobody could continue painting landscapes after Duchamp’s urinal, but plenty of realism lies in Finnegan’s Wake.
Smith’s essay is one of the most thoughtful works of criticism by a contemporary novelist I’ve read in a long time, but I think that she’s overlooked a third road, one not usually discussed in the polite pages of the literary supplements. Running parallel to lyrical realism’s genteel country lane and the gritty back alley of the avant-garde novel, is a six lane freeway fringed with fast food joints and strip malls. It is called genre fiction, and Peter Yeldham’s A Bitter Harvest is a prime example.
A glance at the cover of the new paperback edition tells you what to expect: a pastoral scene of the Barossa Valley and a review from The Daily Telegraph proclaiming the author, “The master of the Australian historical blockbuster.” The novel is a family saga that crosses three generations in the lives of the Pattersons, a well-heeled Sydney family with a dirty secret. One dark and stormy night in 1886, the patriarch William Patterson flees Broken Hill with a load of stolen silver, swindling his way to respectability. He wouldn’t be the protagonist if he was all bad, of course, and we soon learn that his ambition stems from his tender feelings for his young daughter Elizabeth “the raison d’être for the risks he had taken” (53). Patterson’s struggle for reconciliation with Elizabeth after she elopes to South Australia with a German migrant drives the first half of this nearly 600 page rags to riches tome. A Bitter Harvest looks, feels and reads like genre fiction, but if we are to avoid simplistic and elitist value judgements – literary fiction is timeless and eternal, genre fiction ephemeral – we need to be clear on what the terms mean and where they come from. What characterises the kind of fiction that Yeldham writes at sentence level and how does it differ from Smith’s lyrical realism?
We are in the past tense, with a third person omniscient narrator: “William stood at the window as the carriage with the crested emblem of the State Premier entered the gates and stopped in front of the house” (13). Although dialogue occasionally imitates characters’ accents or distinctive speech (those with Scottish accents all seem to be up to no good), there is very little of what Guardian critic James Wood calls “free-indirect style,” that is, where the third person narrator and the character speak with a “dual voice.” Here is Wood’s example from How Fiction Works: “Ted watched the orchestra through stupid tears,” (10). The adjective “stupid” is clearly somebody’s judgement, but it is unclear whether it is the narrator or Ted’s choice of words. Wood contends that free indirect style has been one of the hallmarks of modern prose since Flaubert (modern prose for Wood means something like lyrical realism). The almost total absence of free indirect discourse in Yeldham’s writing suggests his mode of storytelling is more closely related to cinema and popular theatre than the tradition of the literary novel. Many of these short, dynamic sentences would not be out of place in a film script: “He resumed his seat” (146), “He laughed” (207). It is not surprising, then, to learn that the author established himself writing for television in the UK, and since he returned to Australia in the mid 1970s has continued to write screenplays.
Characters in A Bitter Harvest are observed from the exterior, like characters onscreen. Though we are sometimes told how they feel: “he was unhappy and homesick” (22), we are rarely told how the feeling feels. How is homesickness experienced in the body? How is the homesickness of a penniless German nineteen-year-old on the boat to Australia in the 1890s different to the homesickness we might have felt? If literary fiction is interested in the particularity of experience, genre fiction perhaps appeals to a set of commonly held assumptions. So while literary fiction asks “Have you ever really considered what homesickness feels like?” genre fiction baldly states “We all know what homesickness is like.” Flaubert once wrote “there is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown” (in Wood 59). This seems to me as a good a summation of literary fiction and genre fiction’s distinct “ways of seeing” as any.
Yeldham’s second hand vision becomes most apparent in the bedroom. William’s mistress Hannah Lockwood, comforts him in Elizabeth’s absence, and although their lovemaking is not described graphically, it is frequent, gratuitous and crushingly awful to read. “She matched his movements with her own movements, and cried aloud with delight as they climaxed (21).” “After they had made love, and reached a blissful climax, Hannah rested her head on his chest (52).” This is bad writing because it achieves exactly the opposite effect to the one it is aiming for. Rather than enlivening the narrative or illuminating the relationship between these two characters, the sex seems mechanical, repetitive and predictable. More disturbingly, when we eventually catch up with the still teenage Elizabeth and her young seducer Stefan, halfway across the continent, they seem to experience sex in exactly the same way as her middle-aged father and his lover back in Sydney. “The wild climaxes that came in waves almost frightened her” (72). Someone really ought to round up all those climaxes and give them their own appendix.
Yeldham is much better at broad brush-stroke historical narrative than romance (one suspects he sells more to dads than mums). His account of the persecution of the German community of the Barossa Valley under the War Precautions Act during the 1914-1918 conflict, is lively, plausible and engaging. Yeldham skilfully weaves the political into his character’s personal stories. Elizabeth must campaign for the release of her German husband who has been detained without charge on Langley Island. Meanwhile her oldest son Heinrich/Henry, who has struggled to accommodate his bi-cultural identity during wartime, winds up at the front fighting the Germans. Writing in the age of Guantanamo, of secret rendition and torture, Yeldham draws our attention to a shameful episode in our own country’s past that many of us know little about, providing a note of urgent relevance in an otherwise sunny and unchallenging work of fiction.
If, as Beth Driscoll writes in the latest edition of Heat, “The forces of prestige and popularity still pull in opposite directions in the literary field” (190), does it even make sense to judge literary fiction and popular fiction by the same criteria? Surely the objectives are different? Surely a work ought to be judged by how successfully it achieves what it sets out to do? If this is the case then it has to be said that, for all its clunky sex and sentimentality, A Bitter Harvest is a provisional success. The historical material holds nostalgic appeal, William Patterson’s journey from rogue to hero has a comforting symmetry, and most importantly in a novel of this kind, the plot, that ceaseless refrain of “and then and then and then” pulls us impatiently through the pages. This is not lyrical realism and it is certainly not the avant-garde, but it is indisputably a timeworn path for novel, one that many writers will continue to follow.
A Bitter Harvest
(2009)
By Peter Yeldham
Penguin
ISBN:978-0-14-301038-8
578pp AUD $24.95
By Peter Yeldham
“All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies,” argues Zadie Smith in “Two Paths for the Novel,” a recent essay in the New York Review of Books. Reviewing two recent works, Joseph Oneill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Smith explores the collision of two literary traditions, and outlines two quite distinct roads forward for contemporary fiction. On the one hand we have new “lyrical realism” like Netherland. Such fiction supplements the 19th century European novel with a certain modern self-awareness, without fundamentally altering the framework of Flaubert, Balzac, Austen, and Eliot. On the other side of the street, leering evilly and rolling up their sleeves, we find Tom McCarthy and his predecessors William Burroughs, J.G Ballard, Robbe-Grillet and many of the key figures of contemporary theory. The avant-garde has long rejected the certainties of realism, its confident assertions about what constitutes a human subject, about how we making meaning, how memory operates, how we experience time. And yet, as Smith points out “most practitioners of lyrical realism blithely continue on their merry road, with not a metaphysical care in the world” (1). Lyrical realism sells, it wins literary awards, it goes on book tours where it speaks wittily and signs its name on the inside flap. Unlike in the visual arts, Smith argues, modernism and postmodernism have failed to fundamentally alter the dominant form of the Anglophone novel. Nobody could continue painting landscapes after Duchamp’s urinal, but plenty of realism lies in Finnegan’s Wake.
Smith’s essay is one of the most thoughtful works of criticism by a contemporary novelist I’ve read in a long time, but I think that she’s overlooked a third road, one not usually discussed in the polite pages of the literary supplements. Running parallel to lyrical realism’s genteel country lane and the gritty back alley of the avant-garde novel, is a six lane freeway fringed with fast food joints and strip malls. It is called genre fiction, and Peter Yeldham’s A Bitter Harvest is a prime example.
A glance at the cover of the new paperback edition tells you what to expect: a pastoral scene of the Barossa Valley and a review from The Daily Telegraph proclaiming the author, “The master of the Australian historical blockbuster.” The novel is a family saga that crosses three generations in the lives of the Pattersons, a well-heeled Sydney family with a dirty secret. One dark and stormy night in 1886, the patriarch William Patterson flees Broken Hill with a load of stolen silver, swindling his way to respectability. He wouldn’t be the protagonist if he was all bad, of course, and we soon learn that his ambition stems from his tender feelings for his young daughter Elizabeth “the raison d’être for the risks he had taken” (53). Patterson’s struggle for reconciliation with Elizabeth after she elopes to South Australia with a German migrant drives the first half of this nearly 600 page rags to riches tome. A Bitter Harvest looks, feels and reads like genre fiction, but if we are to avoid simplistic and elitist value judgements – literary fiction is timeless and eternal, genre fiction ephemeral – we need to be clear on what the terms mean and where they come from. What characterises the kind of fiction that Yeldham writes at sentence level and how does it differ from Smith’s lyrical realism?
We are in the past tense, with a third person omniscient narrator: “William stood at the window as the carriage with the crested emblem of the State Premier entered the gates and stopped in front of the house” (13). Although dialogue occasionally imitates characters’ accents or distinctive speech (those with Scottish accents all seem to be up to no good), there is very little of what Guardian critic James Wood calls “free-indirect style,” that is, where the third person narrator and the character speak with a “dual voice.” Here is Wood’s example from How Fiction Works: “Ted watched the orchestra through stupid tears,” (10). The adjective “stupid” is clearly somebody’s judgement, but it is unclear whether it is the narrator or Ted’s choice of words. Wood contends that free indirect style has been one of the hallmarks of modern prose since Flaubert (modern prose for Wood means something like lyrical realism). The almost total absence of free indirect discourse in Yeldham’s writing suggests his mode of storytelling is more closely related to cinema and popular theatre than the tradition of the literary novel. Many of these short, dynamic sentences would not be out of place in a film script: “He resumed his seat” (146), “He laughed” (207). It is not surprising, then, to learn that the author established himself writing for television in the UK, and since he returned to Australia in the mid 1970s has continued to write screenplays.
Characters in A Bitter Harvest are observed from the exterior, like characters onscreen. Though we are sometimes told how they feel: “he was unhappy and homesick” (22), we are rarely told how the feeling feels. How is homesickness experienced in the body? How is the homesickness of a penniless German nineteen-year-old on the boat to Australia in the 1890s different to the homesickness we might have felt? If literary fiction is interested in the particularity of experience, genre fiction perhaps appeals to a set of commonly held assumptions. So while literary fiction asks “Have you ever really considered what homesickness feels like?” genre fiction baldly states “We all know what homesickness is like.” Flaubert once wrote “there is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown” (in Wood 59). This seems to me as a good a summation of literary fiction and genre fiction’s distinct “ways of seeing” as any.
Yeldham’s second hand vision becomes most apparent in the bedroom. William’s mistress Hannah Lockwood, comforts him in Elizabeth’s absence, and although their lovemaking is not described graphically, it is frequent, gratuitous and crushingly awful to read. “She matched his movements with her own movements, and cried aloud with delight as they climaxed (21).” “After they had made love, and reached a blissful climax, Hannah rested her head on his chest (52).” This is bad writing because it achieves exactly the opposite effect to the one it is aiming for. Rather than enlivening the narrative or illuminating the relationship between these two characters, the sex seems mechanical, repetitive and predictable. More disturbingly, when we eventually catch up with the still teenage Elizabeth and her young seducer Stefan, halfway across the continent, they seem to experience sex in exactly the same way as her middle-aged father and his lover back in Sydney. “The wild climaxes that came in waves almost frightened her” (72). Someone really ought to round up all those climaxes and give them their own appendix.
Yeldham is much better at broad brush-stroke historical narrative than romance (one suspects he sells more to dads than mums). His account of the persecution of the German community of the Barossa Valley under the War Precautions Act during the 1914-1918 conflict, is lively, plausible and engaging. Yeldham skilfully weaves the political into his character’s personal stories. Elizabeth must campaign for the release of her German husband who has been detained without charge on Langley Island. Meanwhile her oldest son Heinrich/Henry, who has struggled to accommodate his bi-cultural identity during wartime, winds up at the front fighting the Germans. Writing in the age of Guantanamo, of secret rendition and torture, Yeldham draws our attention to a shameful episode in our own country’s past that many of us know little about, providing a note of urgent relevance in an otherwise sunny and unchallenging work of fiction.
If, as Beth Driscoll writes in the latest edition of Heat, “The forces of prestige and popularity still pull in opposite directions in the literary field” (190), does it even make sense to judge literary fiction and popular fiction by the same criteria? Surely the objectives are different? Surely a work ought to be judged by how successfully it achieves what it sets out to do? If this is the case then it has to be said that, for all its clunky sex and sentimentality, A Bitter Harvest is a provisional success. The historical material holds nostalgic appeal, William Patterson’s journey from rogue to hero has a comforting symmetry, and most importantly in a novel of this kind, the plot, that ceaseless refrain of “and then and then and then” pulls us impatiently through the pages. This is not lyrical realism and it is certainly not the avant-garde, but it is indisputably a timeworn path for novel, one that many writers will continue to follow.
A Bitter Harvest
(2009)
By Peter Yeldham
Penguin
ISBN:978-0-14-301038-8
578pp AUD $24.95
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