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Indelible Ink – Fiona McGregor (2011)

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To kick off this year of Australian women writers, we open with Fiona McGregor’s much-talked-about Indelible Ink. This novel serves up a living, breathing slice of Sydney as it is right now. If you don’t know Sydney, you will know it by the end of this novel! And if you do know Sydney, you’ll recognise how photo-realistic McGregor’s depictions are. She gets it so right – the humidity of a Sydney summer, that faint rotting tropical smell always in the air, the dramatic difference between leafy, harbour shore homes, rundown (but increasingly gentrified) Aboriginal Redfern and seedy Kings Cross, the cool incense-y insides of St Mary’s Cathedral and the bats of Hyde Park next door… McGregor really knows her place and it shows.

She makes clear what she is mapping here:

The cellular structure of society, like a hive, cheek by jowl the wealthy lawyer, the tattoo artist, the housing commission Aborigine.

This is the reality of Sydney: wealthy and poor, exclusive and public, outsider and mainstream, all crowded upon each other, overlapping and more than occasionally coming into conflict.

Her characters seem to grow organically out of this hot humid setting, not least of all Marie, the novel’s protagonist, a middle-aged recently-divorced ‘North Shore lady’ – except she’s not… We sense from the outset that Marie is much more interesting than that: there’s something untamed inside her, that’s timed to burst out at any moment to horrify her matronly friends. Sure enough, Marie’s new direction starts with a spur-of-the-moment decision to get a single rose tattoo…

All this occurs during Sydney’s recent drought – a drought which causes much consternation for North Shore matrons as they worry for their water-hungry gardens (the North Shore of Sydney = Toorak in Melbourne = Upper East Side in New York, etc..). McGregor’s vibrant botanical descriptions are a large part of the narrative’s delights. I only wish, not having much gardening knowledge myself, that there were some sort of application whereby I could just hover my finger over a plant name to make a picture and description pop up! (Maybe on the next generation of e-readers?)

The drought seems to also foreshadow an ongoing environmental crisis for Sydney’s usually tropically-lush slopes:

The indigenous people said that Sydney had six seasons but now it felt like neither six nor four, but one: summer.

Human beings in this setting appear less the rational creatures they’re supposed to be and more just another form of natural life, struggling in the harsh conditions. This interweaving of two forms of life is made concrete in the repeated application of tattooed images that unfold their tendrils and ‘grow’ slowly all over Marie’s body. First discreetly, then boldly, the tattoos take over but it seems less a covering than a revealing, as Marie’s true self emerges and her false friends fall away… One of the lovely subtleties of this story is the surprise element in which of her old friends stay faithful to Marie and which reject her as she radicalises herself.

As this novel unfurls towards its genuinely moving climax, it just gets better and better… what starts out as a gently gossipy newly divorced matron saga (done well, but done before) turns into a creative and fresh treatment of the sunset of a woman’s life. McGregor somehow manages to be tough-minded and tender at the same time: sentiment is balanced with a strong realism and acceptance of the body’s deterioration and decay. As this highly particular and localised drama draws to a close, Marie emerges as an Everywoman, demonstrating the shared fragility of plant and human life.

Verdict: A moving and picture-perfect account of facing middle age in contemporary Sydney.

Watch out for: Contemporary references abound! From soaring real estate prices to recent television shows (remember The Chaser’s shenanigans in Sydney?) to famous Australian television ads, prepare for many jolts of recognition!

 

Freedom – Jonathan Franzen (2010)

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Reading a Jonathan Franzen novel is exhausting! This major novel is every bit as big, complicated and long as The Corrections before it.  Its premise is rather promising: the teenage son of a committed Democrat couple (Patty and Walter) decides to move in with the Republican family next door. The reasons for this are slowly revealed, but really this event fades into the background as the novel’s trajectory veers off to include rape, corruption, adultery, nepotism, war, depression and a maybe-murder – all against a background of impending environmental doom. Are you sure you want to keep reading?

Like its predecessor, Freedom is what is usually called a ‘sprawling’ family saga. Like The Corrections¸ there is some wild and slightly unlikely international intrigue and all sorts of politics (family, national and international). Like The Corrections it is an easy read in the sense that it pulls you in quickly and keeps you reading till you arrive (somewhat breathless) at the final resolution.

Now for the differences: Freedom has not even one – not one! – likeable character.  I can believe the bundle of neuroses and complaints that forms each personality, but somehow the sum is less than the parts… Take Patty, our alleged heroine (or anti-heroine?): early in the novel, as a teenager, something terrible happens to her and this initially engages our sympathy, yet Patty herself is somehow still closed off: her emotions and thoughts are described in great detail, yet she remains rather a cold fish. Why this appearance of coldness and distance when we are given so many thousands of words about her? I think in the end, although intended as a somewhat ‘scattered’ character, she is just too scattered – there’s no central core that the reader can get a hold of and say, “Oh, so that’s Patty”.

Patty’s husband Walter is a Democrats-supporting birdwatching nature-loving environmentalist who seriously loves Patty. He loves her so much, in fact, he is willing to temporarily suspend his passionate anti-population beliefs in order to have two children with her! The struggle between political loves and human loves forms much of the tensions of the rest of the narrative, as all characters assert their need to be loved in the face of overwhelming global calamities that require nun-like devotion and seem to leave no time for personal relationships.

Walter is the voice of Nature, but ironically in order to protect Nature he has to become a particularly frenetic, disconnected, un-natural human being. Machiavellian machinations and political wheeling and dealing partly appeal to him and yet underneath it all the motivation for this dubious activity is the simplicity of the natural world itself – especially the birds! He looks longingly to nature for relief from his own dehumanising lifestyle:

He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat.  And then to take wing, to know the air’s buoyancy even for an hour…

It’s easy to know what freedom is for a bird – the freedom to fly around, to not be in a cage – but how to explain the complexity of human freedom? While cleverly displacing his preachiness onto the fanatical Walter, Franzen reveals both the problem of human freedom and the urgent environmental one, along with the depressing unlikelihood of finding a solution to either in the near future.

The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished negative and positive ideas of freedom – ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. All the characters in Franzen’s novel desperately pursue a ‘freedom from’ their particular demons and eventually achieve it. What happens when they achieve these freedoms is when the novel gets really interesting: they were so quick at escaping their constraints that they hadn’t stopped to consider what positive things they might value. An allegory for American politics? Perhaps.

Franzon also explores how one person’s ‘freedom’ may impinge on another’s – an issue at the centre of contemporary American society in particular:

People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to…

Freedom here becomes a kind of compensatory wealth which many people value even if it kills them. Franzen seems particularly interested in understanding the more loony end of politics in the United States: the defence of guns, of prison rates, of the death penalty and the question of why so many ‘freedoms’ fought for in America are so often purely negative.

In the end, Freedom is a very sad book – sadder than The Corrections – and possibly angrier. Its conclusion doesn’t really resolve anything, but at the very least Franzen has gone on record as indicating, from a global point of view, his concern for the world’s intractable environmental problems, and, from a human point of view, his belief that love solves nothing but is somehow equally inevitable.

Verdict: Rollicking but depressing family saga with the now-expected Franzonian mixture of humour and pathos. Not always fun to read, but definitely rewarding.

Read more: Read an interview with Franzen about Freedom and how he doesn’t believe in the ‘Great American novel’ here:

 

 

 

A challenge! Australian Women Writers in 2012…

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Yes, I’ve taken up a challenge!  Leading up to the inaugural Stella Prize, the aim of the Australian Women Writers Challenge is to raise awareness of the depth and breadth of Austalian women’s writing.  I’ve signed up for the ‘Miles’ challenge level – to read at least 6 and review at least 3 books by AWWs this year!  You can also choose what range of genres you would like to read in – I’ve chosen to be a ’Dabbler’ (more than one genre).  ‘Dabbling’ sounds like not too much pressure, no?

I have my eye on some Charlotte Wood novels (I read The Submerged Cathedral and loved it), Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink, and I’m currently reading Janine Burke’s The Heart Garden - non-fiction about Melbourne artist patron Sunday Bailleu and the Heide set, and enjoying it very much.

So stay tuned this year for discovering some new/old Australian writers of the female persuasion… As always, reading recommendations welcome!

Travels With My Aunt – Graham Greene (1969)

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Hello!  Welcome back and happy new year!  There have been some pretty serious tomes piling up on the Window Seat lately, so it’s high time we had a spot of comedy.  Travels with my Aunt is the best of Greene’s lighter works.  He has a way of capturing English eccentricity so as to expose its funniness to the world and yet somehow maintain sympathy for his crazy characters – even the unpleasant ones.

Our (anti-)hero is Henry Pulling, a quiet, retired little man who has worked in a bank all his life.  He has never married and seems likely to see out his limited life without ever having experienced passion of any sort.  Things start to look up, however, when he first makes the acquaintance of his aunt (intimidatingly named ‘Aunt Augusta’) at his mother’s funeral.  From her first remark to him (‘I was present once at a premature cremation’), we know that this is no ordinary aunt.  Moreover, she has something important to tell Henry about the circumstances of his birth – namely, that he is not technically his mother’s child.  Once Henry recovers from this shock, he is naturally drawn to find out more about the identity of his biological mother.  This quest fuels the ensuing travel narrative, as Aunt Augusta convinces Henry (who really has nothing better to do since his retirement) to accompany her on her energetic globetrotting. 

The reader is taken along for a ride with Henry, sharing in his curiosity to find out more about this unusual woman.  Aunt Augusta is well into her seventies yet still travelling with gusto around the world, has a (much younger) black boyfriend and seems to be attracting some unhealthy attention from police officials in several countries…

Aunt Augusta is up there with Lady Bracknell as one of the funniest women characters of English literature.  Poor Henry is rather scandalised at her frankness, lust for life (and men) and her neverending series of unsavoury stories of an adventurous and clearly misspent youth.  What exactly Aunt Augusta did to make a living in her youth is never spelled out, but the reader is led to some pretty startling conclusions by the end of the rollercoaster ride that is this entertaining novel.

Greene was an avid traveller all his life and this led him to look upon England and his countrymen with a critical eye.  His portrayal of English eccentricity is sometimes sharp to the point of political satire – he points a finger at the xenophobia, insularity and timidity which characterised provincial English life.  He is quick to highlight humorous eccentricities of other nationalities as well, but it’s clear that in a comparison of rival eccentricities he will always prefer the outlandlishness of, say, South America than that of his native land.  His travel writing is superb – whether describing the streets of Istanbul, the disappointment when a famous landmark does not live up to your expectations (Hagia Sophia, if you must know!), or the quiet fragrant beauty of an unmaintained Paraguayan village, Greene knows how to put the reader there.  Travels With My Aunt really demonstrates that sometimes armchair travel can be as good as the real thing – especially in the company of ladies like Aunt Augusta.

Verdict:  Travel and comedy in equal measure – English eccentricity at its best!

Read more:  Greene’s short story collection May We Borrow Your Husband? (subtitled And Other Comedies of the Sexual Life) also contains its fair share of barmy English people doing strange things in exotic locations – read a review here. 

 

 

The Winter Vault – Anne Michaels (2009)

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Anne Michaels is a poet as well as a novelist and has written, unsurprisingly, a very poetic novel.  Its poetry is both its great strength and its weakness: is it a poetic novel or an epic poem?  I’m still not sure…

I enjoyed the poetry of Michaels’ storytelling – she has an ear for the perfect phrase, the delicate description, the minute, exquisite detail.  Naturally, this is slow-going, but the saving grace of this unusual novel is its characters – it’s actually by holding back, by not giving us a lot of detail of the psychology of her characters, that Michaels retains our interest. 

We are introduced to a young couple, Jean and Avery, from Canada and Britain respectively.  It’s the 1960s and Avery is destined to work on a monumental engineering project in Egypt, one that will change many lives, including their own.  Both characters are closed, mysterious, with heavy war-affected histories: the ghost of the war hangs over everyone.  One of Michaels’ achievements in this novel is to make real for the reader how global World War II was – from Poland to Canada to Egypt… Through a few well-chosen characters, artefacts and places, Michaels weaves together the global and individual grieving experience underlying the huge technological progresses that were being instigated post-war.

Michaels employs at times a style of detailed writing decried by some literary critics: basically, this style involves the delivery of an enormous amount of detail about mundane processes / industries / histories.  It requires much research and is impressive in an academic way, but is it… literature?  That’s the big question.  Michaels’ huge lists of intricate processes deliver an enormous volume of technical detail. The problem is that sometimes pages and pages of minute detail about, say, Egyptian engineering techniques, stops ‘reading’ as a story and starts to sound like a long essay. 

On the other hand, Michaels does write the most exquisite lists – and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the majority of the novel consists of lists: historical, beautiful, statistical… it’s her inventory of history, of migration and the randomness of people’s meetings and partings.  Not surprisingly, given her fondness for lists, Michaels references John Masefield’s famous poem ‘Cargoes’.  This is a poem that consists mainly of lists: lists of cargoes, from history to the present, starting with an unrivalled description of the exotic and mysterious: 

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine…

 And here is Michaels describing the human debris sold at a post-war Egyptian market:

Spanners, handkerchiefs, pencil crayons, steam irons, Soviet cigarettes and old newspapers, years out of date, from all over Europe.  Shellac, perfume, machine oil, tissue-thin blue airmail paper edged with mucilage…

 Her heroine, Jean, reflects upon this cargo:

The anonymous loss, the hardship or death that brought this ivory comb or this watch engraved ‘from your loving father’ to a stall in Wadi Halfa oppressed her: the memories she imagined these objects carried, the sadness of things…

‘The sadness of things’ really sums up the essence of this novel: so many people lost in the War and what’s left?  Just haphazard objects,  which become memorials to the dead. 

Perhaps Michaels’ list-making style is the clue to the meaning of the novel: that she is trying to present an account of war and its aftermath as carefully measured and calculated as any bookkeeping.  On the one side, human suffering; on the other side, great loves; on the one side, death; on the other side, survival into peace.  One of the most moving passages in the book is her recounting of Polish refugees who have both escaped the war and are still living it every day – a band of musicians who always changes their practice date at the last moment, carried over from the days when it was vital to never turn up where you were meant to be, lest the secret police find you…

There are themes of environmental and human destruction, masked as ‘progress’, of the excitement of building things versus the human cost.  Michaels is an extremely thoughtful writer who tries to encompass the human dimension and the global at the same time.  Overall, I think she achieves her ambition, although sometimes excessive detail detracts from the force of the work as a whole.

Verdict: Impressive, poetically detailed account of post-war love and loss.  For the poetry-lovers!

Read more:   Michaels’ first novel was the acclaimed Fugitive Pieces (1996).  You can read an interview with the reclusive author here. 

 

A Single Man – Christopher Isherwood (1964)

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This is a novel that had to wait for censorship to be lifted before it could be shared with the world.  Isherwood had been writing since the 1920s but only in the 1960s could he finally publish a totally frank story about love between men.  A short book but an intense one, Isherwood unleashes what must have been many years of pent-up frustration in the form of his disgruntled protagonist, George, a grieving English professor going through the motions at a Californian university.

This is a tragic story that starts rather than ends with a tragedy.  George is officially, as most homosexuals of the time, considered to be ‘a single man’, but he really is single since his partner died in a car accident not long ago – George was not even allowed to attend the funeral.  Naturally, George gets angry from time to time and when he does he wants to obliterate most of the human race, he wants to torture them, he wants them to suffer the consequences of their own stupidity…

The first part of A Single Man is raw grief so hot and new that it’s hard to read: George swings between vicious anger and utter despair.  His one friend is Charlotte, a heart-of-gold but utterly selfish alcohol-soaked older woman – she is what I imagine Holly Golightly would be if she were 20 years older (and, after all, in Capote’s novella, unlike in the movie, Golightly’s friend ‘Fred’ is homosexual).  A sense of doom hangs over most of the novel: it really seems that after George’s personal tragedy there can be nowhere to go but further down.  As readers, we hold our breath and wait for George’s undoing of himself… 

To tell more would be to give this fine story away, but I must mention a wonderful scene in this novel: one in which all the symbolism of the sea – redemption / cleansing / drowning / saving, etc is invoked to great effect and we witness the emergence of hope beyond hopelessness.  Isherwood captures so many elements in this scene: the adventure of the surf, of being overwhelmed by the immensity of the sea, and the sheer joy that nature can evoke in even the most despairing humans. 

This novel is devastating to read but refuses to end on a tragic note.  Isherwood takes the reader to the depths and then up again: to read it is to be half-drowned but rescued at the last moment.  It’s an amazing book, which must have been all the more amazing when it first burst upon the scene in the censorship-loosening of the 1960s.  It still makes an impact today.

Verdict:  Moving story of love, death and hope from the perspective of a 1960s gay man.  Short, beautiful and devastating.

Read more:  Isherwood is known chiefly for his much-loved novel Goodbye to Berlin, set in the Weimar Republic, and inspiration for the also much-loved musical Cabaret.  Continuing the tradition, A Single Man has recently been made into a good film of the same name, with Colin Firth and Julianne Moore – well worth seeing, but it can’t quite convey the full power and fury of the book.

 

Geography – Sophie Cunningham (2004)

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We recently looked at Sophie Cunningham’s non-fiction work, Melbourne, and this week I’m delving into her first fiction work, Geography.  This is a travel narrative on two levels: a physical journey from Australia to Los Angeles to India and back again and an emotional journey of a woman coming to grips with an obsessive love.

The narrator, Catherine, begins her story in the present, chatting in India with a newfound travelling friend, Ruby.  Just upon the point of telling her life story, Catherine begins to doubt the worth of telling such a potentially clichéd tale at all:

People are bored with stories of obsession.  With women in their late thirties who are single, the reasons they might be so…

‘I like stories,’ Ruby says.  ‘It’s one of the fun things about travelling – hearing people’s stories.’

Yes, it is, and Cunningham proceeds to intersperse the narrative of her re-discovery of India with flashbacks to her obsessive LA-based love.  As she flags, people do sometimes get bored with obsessive love stories – perhaps because these tend to involve a lot of repetition – ‘she loves him / she hates him / she loves him again’, etc… Obsessive love narratives can make you want to slap the hopeless heroine and tell her to get a grip.

Well, I did occasionally feel the urge to slap coming on, but this is just testimony to Cunningham’s skill at communicating the depth of the obsession.  As usual, the object of the obsession is hardly worth all that angst – the reader can clearly see he is arrogant, uncaring and untrustworthy.  However, we are also given entry to Catherine’s headspace and we see that, from her point of view, her love interest, Michael,  is endlessly intriguing and promises to open up new avenues of experience.  The excitement of being with him is tied up with that exciting feeling of ‘being overseas’ , wherein every little action – opening the door to a new hotel room, driving past a famous house, is experienced at a kind of heightened level of reality.  Being in love with this man, Cunningham implies, is at some level being in love with exotica and otherness and unknown-ness – all the things that are part of travelling to new places.  The connection between physical and emotional geography is made explicit through Catherine’s quoting of the metaphysical poet John Donne:

Licence my roving hands to go

Behind, before, above, between, below

Oh my America, my new found land…

Can such love survive the transfer to the more ordinary turf of her home country?  The obsession seems likely to falter under less cosmopolitan conditions…

For those inclined to dismiss Los Angeles as shallow, materialistic and crowded with fake overly-tanned airheads, Cunningham persuasively mounts a case for it being Not Such a Bad Town After All.  Catherine enjoys the scenery, the old art deco architecture, the exotic feeling of starring in your own movie.  Cunningham has a particular skill for capturing the joy of travel and she makes LA seem fresh and interesting, despite its overexposure on bad TV shows for so many years.

Parallel to the central love story, is the gentle unfolding of Catherine’s travelling friendship with Ruby.  Much younger but perhaps wiser, Ruby is a breath of fresh air compared to the stifling atmosphere of Catherine’s romantic obsession.  As they travel on more deeply into the heart of India and into its spiritual history (beautifully described by Cunningham), the possibility starts to present itself that the friendship could deepen into something more…

What starts out as a contemporary travel story turns into a quite philosophical meditation upon the nature of obsession vs love, and destiny vs choice.  Cunningham brings the reader to some thoughtful conclusions about women and personal responsibility.  What is satisfying about this novel is the willingness to go ‘deeper’, to ask thoughtful questions about the choices of the protagonists and the meaning of the emotions involved.

One of the criticisms of this book when it first came out was that it was too adolescently autobiographical – a criticism which is unfair and patronising.  Women’s writing is often criticised for being ‘too’ autobiographical, even though it is clear this style of writing is present in men’s books as well.  What is implied in this criticism is that the details of women’s lives are simply not of interest to the reading public.  Skilled writers like Cunningham demonstrate the falsity of this assumption and hopefully clear the way for more appreciation of women’s stories by readers of either gender.  (Cunningham herself has been instrumental in supporting the recognition of women’s writing – see note below.)

A note of warning: Cunningham chooses to use the c-word to refer to her anatomy, being one of the women who thinks this word can be reclaimed and stripped of its women-hating connotations.  I happen to disagree.  Parallel to similar discussions about racist language, it may be less offensive for a woman to use this word, but that fact does not thereby strip it of its problematic history.  If you are squeamish about this, you may find some parts of this book a little hard to take.

Verdict: Thoughtful travelogue / love story with a deeper reflection upon the nature of obsession vs authentic love and some evocative travel scenes.  Will make you want to hop on a plane!

Watch out for:  Cunningham has recently been involved in setting up a prize for women’s writing, the Stella Prize.   Expect to discover some excellent new writing through this award… I can’t wait to see who will be the first winner!

 

The Slap – in your house this Thursday!

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Community Service Reminder! 

The TV series of Christos Tsiolkas’ Melbourne novel The Slap (reviewed here) is starting this Thursday 8.30pm (Australian Eastern time) on the ABC.  I just found out that one of the scriptwriters is the actor/author Brendan Cowell!  Yes, he who wrote for and starred in Love My Way and who recently published his first novel, How it Feels.  (He even appears as a minor character in the series… watch out for him!) 

And here is Tsiolkas, who was an associate producer for the series, talking about the cast:

My first time on set happened to be at the Alphington house where the slap happens, so all the cast were there, and to suddenly have the experience of suddenly seeing these fictional characters from my imagination, in flesh and blood, was truly humbling and truly awe-inspiring and it felt like the perfect cast. I can’t imagine the characters without seeing the faces of the actors and there isn’t a wrong note at all.

Sounds pretty happy with it, doesn’t he?  You can read the rest of his interview here.   And watch a preview here.  

I’m thinking this could be good…

The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing (1950)

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Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing is a murder mystery, but an unusual one, because we already know who the murderer is.  It’s not so much a ‘whodunit’ as a ‘why was it done?’.  Set amid the racial tensions of 1940s Rhodesia, the story opens with this intriguing little newspaper snippet:

                  MURDER MYSTERY

              By Special Correspondent

Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning.  The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime.  No motive has been discovered.  It was thought he was in search of valuables.

The first important information we learn is that nobody likes Mary Turner – even in death, she scares people.  Why does everyone hate her so much?  The course of the novel is, in a way, an attempt to answer that question.  Mary’s life is a hard one, but it wasn’t always that way.  She has led a somewhat charmed existence, living in one of those big hostel-type houses with a host of other ‘girls’ (Mary is 30!).  We find out that she has lived here for a long time and that her development has been somewhat arrested: she’s never really grown up.  Although life is hard for many women in Rhodesia, she has been one of the lucky ones: she has a ‘career’ (i.e. is a secretary, which is pretty good for those days), she has money, lots of friends and the occasional boyfriend.  She is happy, although clearly lacks any self-awareness.  She avoids all black people.

Into this insular existence comes an upsetting incident: Mary hears an unpleasant remark made by her friends about her when they think she’s not listening.  This event both jolts Mary out of her dreamlike state and acts as a catalyst for the massive change in her circumstances, not the least of which is her marriage to the unfortunate Richard… 

Lessing takes us deep into the troubles of 1940s Rhodesia and its white farming population.  Although some farmers do well, Mary’s husband Richard is not one of them.  Every year is another disappointment and Mary finds herself isolated, dirty, hot and slowly losing her mind. 

Lessing pulls the readers’ sympathy in opposite directions: whenever we start to feel sympathy for Mary, Lessing turns our attention to the more extreme suffering of the black workers, whose problems make all white-people problems seem trivial in comparison.  Mary is irritated with and unkind to the black workers under her supervision – and on one occasion, her unkindness develops into downright cruelty.  And yet… with the arrival of a new house servant, Moses, there seems potential for at least one human relationship to form across Mary’s self-imposed racial divide .  Is there hope for her yet?

The sheer complexity of Lessing’s characters and setting are a tribute to her skill.  We know enough about Mary’s hapless background to understand why she is the way she is and yet… how could we not sympathise with the plight of the black families being used as slave labour?  Racism is the central concern of this novel, but feminist considerations jostle for our attention as well.  Women at the time were expected to drop everything and submit completely to their husband’s life plan, however misguided.  For Mary, this means leaving the girls’ hostel where she felt so comfortable and roughing it in a depressing  and hopeless farm setting that resists her pitiful attempts at improvements.   

The usual colonialists’ plight emerges, of British people who choose to live in Africa without ever developing an understanding of or affinity for the place.  They hate the sun, they hate the bush and most of all they hate (and fear) the black population.  This is the irony of colonialism: that the people who think they are most fit to ‘run’ a country (more fit than its native inhabitants)  are the people who hate it most.  Lessing gives us the beginnings of a psychoanalysis of the relationships between the white population and the bush (particularly the farmers, who farm the land but fail to understand it), the white women and the black men, and the fraught sexual relations within the poor white farming community, with the endless pressures upon ill-prepared wives.

Lessing is an inelegant writer, and I mean that as a compliment.  She has a terse, unadorned style which suits her grim subject matter. She achieves the perfect balance between analysis and plot, so while her novel is a psychological drama with many political and ethical questions being tossed about, it is also a well-paced narrative, which keeps the reader turning its pages until its dramatic climax.  Lessing is too intelligent a writer to hand over a perfectly packaged conclusion to the mystery, so readers will have to make up their own minds as to who, or what, in the final analysis is really to blame.

Verdict: Dark and unrelenting narrative of racial and sexual tensions in 1940s Africa.  An intelligent page-turner.

Watch out for: The quote from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land on the preface page: it’s the inspiration for the novel’s title.  And check out a lovely website dedicated to Lessing’s Nobel-Prize-winning work here.  

 

Melbourne – Sophie Cunningham (2011)

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How better to end this Month of Melbourne than with Sophie Cunningham’s hot-off-the-presses cultural history?  I had a surreal moment while reading this book recently: I was riding the No. 19 tram up Royal Parade when I came to the following passage:

When I was a child my dad used to take my brother and me to watch Carlton play at Princes Park.  My most vivid memory of those years is of my three-year-old brother, Saul, strapped into a baby car seat that was then tied to the wire fence at the back of the outer so he could get a good view…

As I glanced up from the page for a moment and looked out the tram window, there was Princes Park itself – a very Melbourne moment, you might say!

This memoir of the city of Melbourne (part of a series commissioned by UNSW Press to celebrate Australia’s capital cities) is not a piece of hardline investigative journalism, nor a scandalous tell-all biography: this is a loving memoir told by a person who never tries to pretend that she could be objective about the place she grew up in.  Cunningham, a respected novelist and publisher, is clearly a supporter of her city, yet she is not sentimental.  She doesn’t neglect to point out its faults, yet clearly loves the place, for all its imperfections.

The memoir is divided into seasonal chapters: we begin in Summer 2009 and we end in the following summer, having followed Cunningham in her personal journey through the culture, geography and history of the city she loves.  This division seems appropriate, somehow, since Melbourne is a place where its changeable weather really affects people – what we wear, how we travel, how we feel.   (I completely agree with her frank description of Melbourne winters as ‘long, unpleasantly clammy and one is inevitably depressed by the end of them’.) 

All sorts of geographies and topographies are explored – social, artistic, sporting, architectural… Cunningham’s life experience has allowed her to live at all these levels and her knowledge of the many layers of Melbourne’s story is impressive. Cunningham grew up in the middle of the ‘Carlton Push’ (a version of its Sydney sister?) – a group of 1970s writers and thespians who oscillated between producing great art and being professional ratbags, and Cunningham is honest about the tensions within this volatile group.  Her arts upbringing and subsequent publishing work brought her into contact with Melbourne’s arts royalty and she draws upon these connections (and many fascinating Meanjin articles) to tell her story.

Cunningham wryly expounds upon the big split in Melbourne’s inner-city social geography, defined by its famous Yarra river which cuts it into North and South.  She offers up the following email exchange from between her friends as representative of the way Melbournians like to poke fun at this geographical and moral divide:

Email 1: …I should warn my North Fitzroy friends that both trams will take you OVER THE RIVER.  This is meant to happen, just act normal…

Email 2: Wait, what? Hold on – you mean if you keep heading south there’s a RIVER?!

Email 3:…I’m all up for journeys to far-flung climes.  As long as I can bring my cynical North-of-the-river sneer and sense of intellectual superiority and be sneered at in turn by those with an inflated sense of their own prettiness and of their importance to the city’s arts…

And so on…  Cunningham herself is embedded within these tribal divides and yet is able to rise above them when necessary to communicate a broader picture of Melbourne’s culture. 

Melbourne is the birthplace of Australian Rules football, of which Cunningham is an avid supporter (she barracks passionately for Geelong), hence there is rather more football-talk than this non-sporty reader might have wanted.  However it’s to Cunningham’s credit that these passages are still fascinating to read – the history of this unique game is interesting and the emotions that it provokes are well captured by her lucid writing.  She explains the city-stopping nature of the September Grand Final:

You wouldn’t (I didn’t) auction a house in the last weekend of September you wouldn’t call an election, and even having friends over to dinner involves endless emails that go something like this… ‘Could we book in Friday September 10? I doubt if Geelong would be playing that night but if they are we can change.’

Well, Geelong did play that night, Cunningham tells us, so of course the dinner was cancelled.

Cunningham is skilled at showcasing the general in the particular, the history in the moment, the public in the personal.  It’s the personal nature of this book, I think, that is its great strength, because its human scale allows the reader to feel involved and engaged, even in the more obscure details of Melbourne’s quirky cultural histories (for instance, the history of Melbourne’s drain-dwelling tribes!).  This is not a long book – only about 280 (small) pages, but it captures the heart of Melbourne beautifully.  I was sad to come to the end of it.

Verdict:  Loving, personal memoir of a cultured city – well-researched and a pleasure to read.

Read more: Cunningham is also a talented fiction writer –  you can read extracts from her two novels here.