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
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
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.
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
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Heat 18: The Library of Fire
The latest edition of Heat may be the only piece of printed matter produced in the closing months of 2008 that makes no mention of the global financial crisis. Unlike fellow stalwart of the Oz literary scene, Meanjin, which has recently commissioned a series of essays on current affairs and politics, editor Ivor Indyk’s journal remains determinedly aesthetic in focus. Readers looking for feature stories can go to the broadsheets; if it’s thoughtful extended reflection on Kevin, the intervention, Israel and Obama you want, The Monthly, Quarterly Essay and Griffith Review will do the job; but for poetry, fiction and criticism, Heat is the place to go. The journal plays an important role in the maintenance of Australian literary culture by publishing challenging, sometimes experimental new work.
This issue takes its title from John Hughes’ “The Book of Libraries,” a not entirely successful attempt at Borgesian essay-fiction. Also borrowing heavily from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Hughes gives us a compendium of imaginary places, in this instance a catalogue of “lost libraries” supposedly found in the ruins of the Library of Babel (a direct reference to the Borges story of the same name). Our narrator, an anonymous literary scholar, claims to have rediscovered the mysterious list in a Saint Petersburg library and translated it into English. Character, plot and setting, are deliberately dispensed with here, replaced with dry but erudite reflection on the nature of reading, and the preservation of knowledge across time. There’s a static quality to the writing, brought on by the absence of dynamic verbs and the repeated construction, “I think.” Each of the 11 libraries is an opportunity for us to watch the narrator think. There is some striking image making: the Library of Translation, for example, stands beside a lake where its image is reflected upside down. The Incomplete Library also offers a moment’s illumination. The building’s completion, like an anxious Phd student’s thesis, is infinitely delayed “so that it’s destruction cannot begin” (57). Over the course of twenty plus pages, however, we tire of such conceits and long for some sign of human presence or passion. Borges had the good grace to keep his literary hoaxes to ten or fifteen pages. His best stories like “El Aleph,” and “El Sur” also had a self-ironising element that his Anglophone admirers seem to miss.
Sydney writer Felicity Castagna takes a less cerebral, but ultimately more affecting approach to experimental fiction. Her piece imaginatively recreates the inner life of Kathleen Folbigg, a Newcastle woman convicted of murdering her four children. “Kathy” demonstrates that breaking storytelling conventions doesn’t mean sacrificing narrative all together. There’s still plenty of literary sleight of hand going on here: present tense third person narration, iterative symbolism, prolepsis “none of her children have been born yet. None of them have died” (159). The difference is that we also have a real character, alive in her fleshy selfhood: “she kneads her thighs with her fingers hoping that the extra weight will just melt away like butter” (162). A keen sense of place also imbues the story as we see pregnant Kathy’s morbid fantasies overlap with industrial Newcastle. “She can feel the coldness of the iron against her skin as it thicken around her belly and pierces through her belly button. She is pumped full of iron ore” (161). In a handful of pages, Castagna evokes a troubled individual, a complex set of family relations, a cultural milieu, and a terrible tragedy. The piece could easily be expanded to novella length and marks its author as a talent to watch.
The editorial decision to include an essay about Brian Castro by his partner Jennifer Rutherford alongside an essay by Castro himself is an odd one. Rutherford begins her essay on The Garden Book by positioning the novel as a refutation of the anti-intellectual cultural climate of the Howard years. Fair enough, but one suspects that the inclusion of her essay would only reinforce the right-wing commentariat’s view of the so called cultural elite. Doubling up on Castro gives the collection an air of cliquishness and solipsism, a too-obvious sense it’s participating in the canonization of one of its contributors. There’s nothing wrong with the scholarship in the Rutherford essay – she gives an interesting account of echoes of Flaubert in Castro – but perhaps it would have been better held over for a later issue.
Despite this, Castro’s offering, “In Camera: Arrested Motion and Future Mourning,” is deeply impressive. One of our best respected novelists and now professor of Creative Writing at Adelaide University, Castro is also a gifted literary scholar. His essay considers how melancholy came to be associated with creativity in fourteenth century Italy. The modern notion of melancholy as a productive aspect of the artistic temperament, he argues, developed in this period, using Giovanni Bocaccio’s “The Decameron” as an illustrative work. He concludes memorably that for the contemporary creative writer melancholy is both medicine and poison: “We write because we love our symptom” (53).
Noel King’s interview with Brent Cunningham of Small Press Distributor’s in Berkeley, California, is an instructive if slightly overextended discussion of the poetry publishing environment in the US. It is part of a larger project on small and independent presses in the English speaking world. SPD’s philosophy is that although most poetry will never sell enough to interest a for-profit distributor, much of it is of cultural value and ought to be accessible to the public. “There’s plenty of historical evidence that some book of poems that sold ten copies in its first three years could well be by the person that we all read today from a particular era” (202). Even in the much larger US market, however, there are apparently only 50 to 75 bookstores that stock small press poetry. Perhaps the future of poetry is online.
Among the poet’s there’s an intriguing mix of the distinguished and the indecipherable. Part of the enduring value of a journal like Heat is its role in supporting new talent. It is always a pleasure to read unknown writers beside their more established peers and find that they measure up splendidly. Kate Llewellyn sends us postcards in verse from South America where she tells us “It is raining in Patagonia. And Bruce Chatwin is dead” (30). Michael Farell’s three poems create splendid sounding nonsense through repetition, puns and experimental punctuation. My favourite poem in this edition, however, was “The Bones” by the relatively little known Kay Rozynski. When we tire of raking through the dismal columns of the daily news, it is important we have a place to turn, somewhere to find writing that makes no concessions to the everyday grind, and where we can take comfort in the lines of an unknown poet:
We ride our bicycles down because it’s faster
And to feel the air move in shoals, to feel
That it’s alright that we speak of transcendence still (19).
Heat 18: The Library of Fire
(2008)
Ivor Indyk (ed.)
Giramondo
ISBN: 978-1-920882-51-8
224pp AUD $30
This issue takes its title from John Hughes’ “The Book of Libraries,” a not entirely successful attempt at Borgesian essay-fiction. Also borrowing heavily from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Hughes gives us a compendium of imaginary places, in this instance a catalogue of “lost libraries” supposedly found in the ruins of the Library of Babel (a direct reference to the Borges story of the same name). Our narrator, an anonymous literary scholar, claims to have rediscovered the mysterious list in a Saint Petersburg library and translated it into English. Character, plot and setting, are deliberately dispensed with here, replaced with dry but erudite reflection on the nature of reading, and the preservation of knowledge across time. There’s a static quality to the writing, brought on by the absence of dynamic verbs and the repeated construction, “I think.” Each of the 11 libraries is an opportunity for us to watch the narrator think. There is some striking image making: the Library of Translation, for example, stands beside a lake where its image is reflected upside down. The Incomplete Library also offers a moment’s illumination. The building’s completion, like an anxious Phd student’s thesis, is infinitely delayed “so that it’s destruction cannot begin” (57). Over the course of twenty plus pages, however, we tire of such conceits and long for some sign of human presence or passion. Borges had the good grace to keep his literary hoaxes to ten or fifteen pages. His best stories like “El Aleph,” and “El Sur” also had a self-ironising element that his Anglophone admirers seem to miss.
Sydney writer Felicity Castagna takes a less cerebral, but ultimately more affecting approach to experimental fiction. Her piece imaginatively recreates the inner life of Kathleen Folbigg, a Newcastle woman convicted of murdering her four children. “Kathy” demonstrates that breaking storytelling conventions doesn’t mean sacrificing narrative all together. There’s still plenty of literary sleight of hand going on here: present tense third person narration, iterative symbolism, prolepsis “none of her children have been born yet. None of them have died” (159). The difference is that we also have a real character, alive in her fleshy selfhood: “she kneads her thighs with her fingers hoping that the extra weight will just melt away like butter” (162). A keen sense of place also imbues the story as we see pregnant Kathy’s morbid fantasies overlap with industrial Newcastle. “She can feel the coldness of the iron against her skin as it thicken around her belly and pierces through her belly button. She is pumped full of iron ore” (161). In a handful of pages, Castagna evokes a troubled individual, a complex set of family relations, a cultural milieu, and a terrible tragedy. The piece could easily be expanded to novella length and marks its author as a talent to watch.
The editorial decision to include an essay about Brian Castro by his partner Jennifer Rutherford alongside an essay by Castro himself is an odd one. Rutherford begins her essay on The Garden Book by positioning the novel as a refutation of the anti-intellectual cultural climate of the Howard years. Fair enough, but one suspects that the inclusion of her essay would only reinforce the right-wing commentariat’s view of the so called cultural elite. Doubling up on Castro gives the collection an air of cliquishness and solipsism, a too-obvious sense it’s participating in the canonization of one of its contributors. There’s nothing wrong with the scholarship in the Rutherford essay – she gives an interesting account of echoes of Flaubert in Castro – but perhaps it would have been better held over for a later issue.
Despite this, Castro’s offering, “In Camera: Arrested Motion and Future Mourning,” is deeply impressive. One of our best respected novelists and now professor of Creative Writing at Adelaide University, Castro is also a gifted literary scholar. His essay considers how melancholy came to be associated with creativity in fourteenth century Italy. The modern notion of melancholy as a productive aspect of the artistic temperament, he argues, developed in this period, using Giovanni Bocaccio’s “The Decameron” as an illustrative work. He concludes memorably that for the contemporary creative writer melancholy is both medicine and poison: “We write because we love our symptom” (53).
Noel King’s interview with Brent Cunningham of Small Press Distributor’s in Berkeley, California, is an instructive if slightly overextended discussion of the poetry publishing environment in the US. It is part of a larger project on small and independent presses in the English speaking world. SPD’s philosophy is that although most poetry will never sell enough to interest a for-profit distributor, much of it is of cultural value and ought to be accessible to the public. “There’s plenty of historical evidence that some book of poems that sold ten copies in its first three years could well be by the person that we all read today from a particular era” (202). Even in the much larger US market, however, there are apparently only 50 to 75 bookstores that stock small press poetry. Perhaps the future of poetry is online.
Among the poet’s there’s an intriguing mix of the distinguished and the indecipherable. Part of the enduring value of a journal like Heat is its role in supporting new talent. It is always a pleasure to read unknown writers beside their more established peers and find that they measure up splendidly. Kate Llewellyn sends us postcards in verse from South America where she tells us “It is raining in Patagonia. And Bruce Chatwin is dead” (30). Michael Farell’s three poems create splendid sounding nonsense through repetition, puns and experimental punctuation. My favourite poem in this edition, however, was “The Bones” by the relatively little known Kay Rozynski. When we tire of raking through the dismal columns of the daily news, it is important we have a place to turn, somewhere to find writing that makes no concessions to the everyday grind, and where we can take comfort in the lines of an unknown poet:
We ride our bicycles down because it’s faster
And to feel the air move in shoals, to feel
That it’s alright that we speak of transcendence still (19).
Heat 18: The Library of Fire
(2008)
Ivor Indyk (ed.)
Giramondo
ISBN: 978-1-920882-51-8
224pp AUD $30
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Spain by Jan Morris
The original 1964 edition of this classic of postwar travel writing was published by James Humphrey Morris. A successful journalist for the Times, Morris was at that time undergoing hormone therapy and would later undergo a sex change. By the time the book was republished in the late 1970s, there was a new name on the cover. Not a word of this is mentioned in the 2008 reissue, but with writing of this quality the author’s gender matters not.
Morris has a reputation as one of the finest British travel writers of her generation; before Winchester or Chatwin she was the epitome of the cosmopolitan traveler, someone who had been everywhere, seen everything and knew how to set it down in cracking prose. She came to prominence as a journalist, famously reporting on Hillary’s ascent of Everest in 1953, but later turned to travel writing.
Place is protagonist in Spain, there is no extended narrative, no chronological account of Morris’s journey, no talk of lining up for bus and train tickets, and very little explicit mention of the writer’s presence at all. The famous travel writer’s “I” is replaced by the inclusive first person plural: ‘We are in the Spanish south,’ and by the second person “you.” Morris often writes as though she were physically leading her reader by the hand, pointing out sights along the way. ‘There lies the first of her villages…with a fine old bridge to take you there…In you go, down the whitewash cobbled streets’ (68-69). But although the author is a peripheral physical presence, her intellectual interests are everywhere: architecture, painting, music, history, religion, contemporary politics, literature, bridge building. There is very little that Morris is not interested in, and she seems to command specialist language across all of these disciplines, whether it be the “turrets, conical towers and troubadour windows,” of medieval Spanish architecture or the “birretta,” “pederasts,” and “preceptors,” of Catholic ritual. She is particularly fond of musical metaphors, and the book itself is structured rather like a piece of music, broken into a series of movements with motifs that reoccur throughout, allowing for trills and flurries around familiar themes. Morris will observe some characteristic of the culture, say Spain’s ‘fatal weakness for the past’ and pursue its implications across a variety of field. In architecture: ‘When the French were building in the Gothic style, she was still building Romanesque. When they moved into the Renaissance, she was still building Gothic’ (26); in music ‘no Beethoven symphony was performed in Madrid until 1866; and in observation of social norms ‘a Victorian propriety and formality, too makes the stranger feel that his passage through the mountains has been a passage in time.’
The old-fashionedness of Spain is particularly appealing to Morris because, with her courtly British manners and enthusiasms, she’s an anachronistic figure herself. For the most part she is quick to acknowledge diversity and complexity. Spain, we are told, is ‘the kingdom of exceptions.’ Occasionally, however, she falls back into the objectionable imperial custom of making generalizations in the singular: ‘The Spaniard likes to be sure,’ ‘The Spaniard revels in the minutiae’ (48). If this mode of travel writing has a weakness, it is that we encounter a limited spread of local voices. Cervantes, Phillip II and Franco speak to us from beyond the grave, but the “simple people of the thatched huts” are never heard. Specific conversations or encounters never make it into the text, perhaps because Morris is so concerned with minimising her own presence. This determination means she privileges habitual detail, (what Spain is usually like), over dynamic detail (what Spain was like the day I was there) and, while this makes for stylish prose the price is a certain aloofness, a sense that she writes of human beings in the same way she might describe a canvass by Goya.
This isn’t to say Morris has no interest in the Spanish people or their politics. As the new introduction points out, this is a book about “a particular Spanish time,” the transition to democracy after Franco. If Morris is particularly drawn to pre-modern Spain: the country’s old sayings and folk traditions, its cathedrals and relics, the traces of Paganism in many of its religious practices, it is only because she realises that it is all going to disappear. Morris was writing at the end of Spain’s long isolation from the rest of Europe and was acutely aware that rapid change was at hand, not all of it positive. ‘Already as pastoral Spain retreats before the assaults of our material civilization, you may see the corrosion set in.’ Given that the original text has been supplemented several times, perhaps Faber and Faber, should have dated the new introduction, the prologue and afterword in this version, to make the chronology clear.
A great deal has changed in Spain since this book was written, with the nation now a stable democracy and a member of the European Union. Morris’s misgivings about the future of Spanish civilian government have proved unfounded. These doubts never dampened Morris’s enthusiasm for the country much. She writes of its idiosyncrasies with clear-sightedness and compression, noting ‘the small humped bridges of Spain,’ and its many ‘huge and awful figures of Christ.’ She has a taste for precise enumeration of people and things, the ‘84 benedictine monks of the establishment,’ and the ‘seven arrows in a yoke that formed the crest of Isabel and Ferdinand’ (38). She also has a gift for illustrative anecdote, for finding the perfect case to back up a general observation. The prologue is virtuoso stuff, a whirlwind tour through Spanish history that could have sounded like a textbook, but in Morris’ hands is utterly compelling. Spanish cathedrals, we learn, are built around a coro, ‘a dark, carved boxlike structure that…provides an intellectual focus for the whole building.’ If the nation’s fortune were mapped on an elevation graph, she tells us, they would form an upside down U shape: a long ascent until the 16th century and then a steady decline. At the peak of the curve would be the Escorial; for Morris, this church and palace, built by Phillip II in the Guadarrama Mountains at the height of Spain’s imperial power, is the coro in ‘the great cathedral that is Spain herself’ (9). The building stands for the nation’s ‘taste for the grandiose’ its ‘tragedy’ and ‘lack of fulfillment.’ This intricate opening maneuver, superbly executed, provides us with an image and an atmosphere, so that we do not realise until afterwards that we have just had a history lesson.
Jan Morris teaches as she entertains, giving a masterclass not just on Spain, but on travelling and writing well. Nearly all travel writers espouse the virtues of learning languages, reading voraciously while travelling, and of sharp but sympathetic observation; few are able to focus on the character of a place without ultimately writing about their own ego and idiosyncracies. James/Jan Morris can. We emerge from her book competely unenlightened about the author's sexually ambiguity, but we learn a great deal about Spain.
Morris has a reputation as one of the finest British travel writers of her generation; before Winchester or Chatwin she was the epitome of the cosmopolitan traveler, someone who had been everywhere, seen everything and knew how to set it down in cracking prose. She came to prominence as a journalist, famously reporting on Hillary’s ascent of Everest in 1953, but later turned to travel writing.
Place is protagonist in Spain, there is no extended narrative, no chronological account of Morris’s journey, no talk of lining up for bus and train tickets, and very little explicit mention of the writer’s presence at all. The famous travel writer’s “I” is replaced by the inclusive first person plural: ‘We are in the Spanish south,’ and by the second person “you.” Morris often writes as though she were physically leading her reader by the hand, pointing out sights along the way. ‘There lies the first of her villages…with a fine old bridge to take you there…In you go, down the whitewash cobbled streets’ (68-69). But although the author is a peripheral physical presence, her intellectual interests are everywhere: architecture, painting, music, history, religion, contemporary politics, literature, bridge building. There is very little that Morris is not interested in, and she seems to command specialist language across all of these disciplines, whether it be the “turrets, conical towers and troubadour windows,” of medieval Spanish architecture or the “birretta,” “pederasts,” and “preceptors,” of Catholic ritual. She is particularly fond of musical metaphors, and the book itself is structured rather like a piece of music, broken into a series of movements with motifs that reoccur throughout, allowing for trills and flurries around familiar themes. Morris will observe some characteristic of the culture, say Spain’s ‘fatal weakness for the past’ and pursue its implications across a variety of field. In architecture: ‘When the French were building in the Gothic style, she was still building Romanesque. When they moved into the Renaissance, she was still building Gothic’ (26); in music ‘no Beethoven symphony was performed in Madrid until 1866; and in observation of social norms ‘a Victorian propriety and formality, too makes the stranger feel that his passage through the mountains has been a passage in time.’
The old-fashionedness of Spain is particularly appealing to Morris because, with her courtly British manners and enthusiasms, she’s an anachronistic figure herself. For the most part she is quick to acknowledge diversity and complexity. Spain, we are told, is ‘the kingdom of exceptions.’ Occasionally, however, she falls back into the objectionable imperial custom of making generalizations in the singular: ‘The Spaniard likes to be sure,’ ‘The Spaniard revels in the minutiae’ (48). If this mode of travel writing has a weakness, it is that we encounter a limited spread of local voices. Cervantes, Phillip II and Franco speak to us from beyond the grave, but the “simple people of the thatched huts” are never heard. Specific conversations or encounters never make it into the text, perhaps because Morris is so concerned with minimising her own presence. This determination means she privileges habitual detail, (what Spain is usually like), over dynamic detail (what Spain was like the day I was there) and, while this makes for stylish prose the price is a certain aloofness, a sense that she writes of human beings in the same way she might describe a canvass by Goya.
This isn’t to say Morris has no interest in the Spanish people or their politics. As the new introduction points out, this is a book about “a particular Spanish time,” the transition to democracy after Franco. If Morris is particularly drawn to pre-modern Spain: the country’s old sayings and folk traditions, its cathedrals and relics, the traces of Paganism in many of its religious practices, it is only because she realises that it is all going to disappear. Morris was writing at the end of Spain’s long isolation from the rest of Europe and was acutely aware that rapid change was at hand, not all of it positive. ‘Already as pastoral Spain retreats before the assaults of our material civilization, you may see the corrosion set in.’ Given that the original text has been supplemented several times, perhaps Faber and Faber, should have dated the new introduction, the prologue and afterword in this version, to make the chronology clear.
A great deal has changed in Spain since this book was written, with the nation now a stable democracy and a member of the European Union. Morris’s misgivings about the future of Spanish civilian government have proved unfounded. These doubts never dampened Morris’s enthusiasm for the country much. She writes of its idiosyncrasies with clear-sightedness and compression, noting ‘the small humped bridges of Spain,’ and its many ‘huge and awful figures of Christ.’ She has a taste for precise enumeration of people and things, the ‘84 benedictine monks of the establishment,’ and the ‘seven arrows in a yoke that formed the crest of Isabel and Ferdinand’ (38). She also has a gift for illustrative anecdote, for finding the perfect case to back up a general observation. The prologue is virtuoso stuff, a whirlwind tour through Spanish history that could have sounded like a textbook, but in Morris’ hands is utterly compelling. Spanish cathedrals, we learn, are built around a coro, ‘a dark, carved boxlike structure that…provides an intellectual focus for the whole building.’ If the nation’s fortune were mapped on an elevation graph, she tells us, they would form an upside down U shape: a long ascent until the 16th century and then a steady decline. At the peak of the curve would be the Escorial; for Morris, this church and palace, built by Phillip II in the Guadarrama Mountains at the height of Spain’s imperial power, is the coro in ‘the great cathedral that is Spain herself’ (9). The building stands for the nation’s ‘taste for the grandiose’ its ‘tragedy’ and ‘lack of fulfillment.’ This intricate opening maneuver, superbly executed, provides us with an image and an atmosphere, so that we do not realise until afterwards that we have just had a history lesson.
Jan Morris teaches as she entertains, giving a masterclass not just on Spain, but on travelling and writing well. Nearly all travel writers espouse the virtues of learning languages, reading voraciously while travelling, and of sharp but sympathetic observation; few are able to focus on the character of a place without ultimately writing about their own ego and idiosyncracies. James/Jan Morris can. We emerge from her book competely unenlightened about the author's sexually ambiguity, but we learn a great deal about Spain.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Song For Night by Chris Abani
Nigerian-born novelist Chris Abani’s fifth work, Song For Night, is one of several recent novels dealing with child soldiers in Africa. Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, Dave Egger’s What is the What? and Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone all tackle the topic with varying degrees of subtlety and success. Clearly an appetite exists for these stories in the west. With press reports of genocide in Sudan, systematic sexual abuse of women in Congo hyperinflation and cholera in Zimbabwe, many in the rich world continue to see Africa, like Conrad, as a place of darkness. Can socially engaged literature, then, help us understand the human dimension of this troubled continent without reinforcing stereotypes, or becoming voyeuristic?
Abani argues emphatically that it can. In an impressive address at the 2008 Brisbane Writer’s festival entitled “Ethics and Narrative: The Human and the Other,” he called on novelists “to conjure all of our darkness and all of our light simultaneously” and to recognise “we all stand on the edge of the same abyss.” Words that might sound trite coming from the mouth of a lesser figure carry real weight from Abani. The writer was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured in his home country both for publishing work that was not to the tastes of the ruling dictatorship and for his political activism. He speaks at human rights functions and was recently awarded the PEN/Beyond Margins award. In this novel, however, some of his creative decisions make it difficult for us to fully connect with his protagonist.
The novel’s central figure is My Luck, a fifteen-year-old minesweeper in the Nigerian civil war whose vocal chords have been cut. The same grisly treatment has been meted out to his entire platoon in order to prevent them crying out and disturbing others from their work. Song For Night explore the problem of voicelessness, a nightmarish prose-fiction exploration of the same topic of “Can the Subaltern speak?” Cultural critic Gayatri Spivak’s 1983 essay famously problematised the position of post colonial intellectuals, arguing that their “priviledge is their loss” and that they quickly shift from speaking of the oppressed to speaking for them. Abani, who now lives in the US and teaches creative writing at the University of California is only too aware of this danger. “What you hear is not my voice,” the novel begins self-consciously and then ties itself in knots trying to justify the narrative voice. “You will say I sound too old for my age,’ My Luck tells us, then tries to persuade us otherwise. “ The interiority of the head, he says, “makes you deep beyond your years.” But we never quite believe him and this mars our ability to connect with him for the entire novel. A close third person narrator may have resolved some of these issues, but would have detracted from the novel’s immediacy and visceral punch.
What then of style? The novella, Abani has said in interviews, was written in just three months of feverish late night toil. It reads like it was written quickly, and, at its best this lends the prose a relentlessness and rhythmic intensity:
“I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in the words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it [sic], and I hide and am grateful for my smell, crouched like an animal in that dark hot space (25).” Here the run on sentences conveys the intensity of the experience and the protagonist’s heightened sensory impressions. It is marred by sloppy editing, unfortunately, as are many passages in the book. At one point we find three similes with “like” on a single page: “like a field of cut corn,” “like a loose cotton shift,” “guts like sausages.” In a book of only a little over 150 pages there are 35 very short chapters and all too often section endings are rushed and perfunctory: “I climb a tree and doze,” or “A mosquito bites me. It is getting dark.” The fragmented effect caused by the brief episodes is deliberate, but does it reflect the character’s exhaustion or that of the author, keen to move on to the next chapter while short of ideas on how to conclude this one?
For a story set in a war zone there is a curious lack of urgency to Song For Night. It sounds like a quest narrative: My Luck wanders the bombed out landscape in search of his lost platoon, but because this is literary fiction, the novel is more interested in showing us its character thinking than showing him acting. Thus sensory perception in the present, the smell of food cooking, the sound of gulls and the taste of fish, invariably lead to remembrance of things past. “Every time I eat fish, I remember grandfather’s story of the lake in the middle of the world and the fish that live there.” Every time? Or just this time because the story requires it? It is the choice of first person present tense narration, perhaps, that makes these frequent slippages in time rather awkward.
It is unfortunate that the transitions into the past jar this way because the story of My Luck’s life before the war is vital and interesting. Indeed, it is when Abani leaves the generic post-apocalyptic landscape of the war behind that he begins to teach us something about Nigeria. My Luck’s family, like the country is divided along religious lines, however it is not with his Muslim father or Catholic mother that the boy feels most deeply connected, but with his grandfather whose mythological tales put him in contact with a spiritual tradition that predates either of the imported religions. This is significant given that the civil war springs from a north/south Muslim/Christian conflict. The grandfather’s traditional African values are privileged over those of My Luck’s parent’s generation, and this is as close as the novel comes to a political solution to the bitter religious and ethnic division behind the war.
At least within the context of his family we begin to see the protagonist as someone recognisably human. Abani, however, is determined not to give us any false redemption; rather he wants to show how the human disintegrates in extreme situations. “My art demands a complete ruthlessness from me,” he said in Ethics and Narrative, “and I have to destroy every character that I make.’ In the final third of the novel, as this disintegration takes place, we move from the concrete world of political conflict to a dreamscape: ghosts on the battlefield, a cloud of flies in the shape of a black-winged angel. The suggestion that My Luck is dead or dying allows a lot of hoary old narrative archetypes to be trotted out. He must cross a river, with the help of a guide named Peter and meet a mysterious mother figure.
Does Song for Night succeed, finally, in giving voice to the subaltern? Only in a deeply ambiguous and evasive way. But if we are not fully persuaded by his ventriloquism here, Abani remains a forthright and persuasive spokesman for human rights. This may be a minor work by a major talent, but its ambition and intensity are to be applauded. It makes most contemporary fiction look limp.
Abani argues emphatically that it can. In an impressive address at the 2008 Brisbane Writer’s festival entitled “Ethics and Narrative: The Human and the Other,” he called on novelists “to conjure all of our darkness and all of our light simultaneously” and to recognise “we all stand on the edge of the same abyss.” Words that might sound trite coming from the mouth of a lesser figure carry real weight from Abani. The writer was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured in his home country both for publishing work that was not to the tastes of the ruling dictatorship and for his political activism. He speaks at human rights functions and was recently awarded the PEN/Beyond Margins award. In this novel, however, some of his creative decisions make it difficult for us to fully connect with his protagonist.
The novel’s central figure is My Luck, a fifteen-year-old minesweeper in the Nigerian civil war whose vocal chords have been cut. The same grisly treatment has been meted out to his entire platoon in order to prevent them crying out and disturbing others from their work. Song For Night explore the problem of voicelessness, a nightmarish prose-fiction exploration of the same topic of “Can the Subaltern speak?” Cultural critic Gayatri Spivak’s 1983 essay famously problematised the position of post colonial intellectuals, arguing that their “priviledge is their loss” and that they quickly shift from speaking of the oppressed to speaking for them. Abani, who now lives in the US and teaches creative writing at the University of California is only too aware of this danger. “What you hear is not my voice,” the novel begins self-consciously and then ties itself in knots trying to justify the narrative voice. “You will say I sound too old for my age,’ My Luck tells us, then tries to persuade us otherwise. “ The interiority of the head, he says, “makes you deep beyond your years.” But we never quite believe him and this mars our ability to connect with him for the entire novel. A close third person narrator may have resolved some of these issues, but would have detracted from the novel’s immediacy and visceral punch.
What then of style? The novella, Abani has said in interviews, was written in just three months of feverish late night toil. It reads like it was written quickly, and, at its best this lends the prose a relentlessness and rhythmic intensity:
“I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in the words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it [sic], and I hide and am grateful for my smell, crouched like an animal in that dark hot space (25).” Here the run on sentences conveys the intensity of the experience and the protagonist’s heightened sensory impressions. It is marred by sloppy editing, unfortunately, as are many passages in the book. At one point we find three similes with “like” on a single page: “like a field of cut corn,” “like a loose cotton shift,” “guts like sausages.” In a book of only a little over 150 pages there are 35 very short chapters and all too often section endings are rushed and perfunctory: “I climb a tree and doze,” or “A mosquito bites me. It is getting dark.” The fragmented effect caused by the brief episodes is deliberate, but does it reflect the character’s exhaustion or that of the author, keen to move on to the next chapter while short of ideas on how to conclude this one?
For a story set in a war zone there is a curious lack of urgency to Song For Night. It sounds like a quest narrative: My Luck wanders the bombed out landscape in search of his lost platoon, but because this is literary fiction, the novel is more interested in showing us its character thinking than showing him acting. Thus sensory perception in the present, the smell of food cooking, the sound of gulls and the taste of fish, invariably lead to remembrance of things past. “Every time I eat fish, I remember grandfather’s story of the lake in the middle of the world and the fish that live there.” Every time? Or just this time because the story requires it? It is the choice of first person present tense narration, perhaps, that makes these frequent slippages in time rather awkward.
It is unfortunate that the transitions into the past jar this way because the story of My Luck’s life before the war is vital and interesting. Indeed, it is when Abani leaves the generic post-apocalyptic landscape of the war behind that he begins to teach us something about Nigeria. My Luck’s family, like the country is divided along religious lines, however it is not with his Muslim father or Catholic mother that the boy feels most deeply connected, but with his grandfather whose mythological tales put him in contact with a spiritual tradition that predates either of the imported religions. This is significant given that the civil war springs from a north/south Muslim/Christian conflict. The grandfather’s traditional African values are privileged over those of My Luck’s parent’s generation, and this is as close as the novel comes to a political solution to the bitter religious and ethnic division behind the war.
At least within the context of his family we begin to see the protagonist as someone recognisably human. Abani, however, is determined not to give us any false redemption; rather he wants to show how the human disintegrates in extreme situations. “My art demands a complete ruthlessness from me,” he said in Ethics and Narrative, “and I have to destroy every character that I make.’ In the final third of the novel, as this disintegration takes place, we move from the concrete world of political conflict to a dreamscape: ghosts on the battlefield, a cloud of flies in the shape of a black-winged angel. The suggestion that My Luck is dead or dying allows a lot of hoary old narrative archetypes to be trotted out. He must cross a river, with the help of a guide named Peter and meet a mysterious mother figure.
Does Song for Night succeed, finally, in giving voice to the subaltern? Only in a deeply ambiguous and evasive way. But if we are not fully persuaded by his ventriloquism here, Abani remains a forthright and persuasive spokesman for human rights. This may be a minor work by a major talent, but its ambition and intensity are to be applauded. It makes most contemporary fiction look limp.
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