Great Expectations

“It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window as a pocket handkerchief. Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spider's webs; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade. On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy; and the marsh-mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village — a direction which they never accepted, for they never came there — was invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom devoting me to the Hulks.”


This passage is near the beginning of Great Expectations. Isn’t it fabulous! I don’t normally think of Dickens as a landscape artist but this novel is full of vivid descriptions of both the outer and the inner world. Here’s another one much later in the novel:

“We got ashore among some slippery stones while we ate and drank what we had with us, and looked about. It was like my own marsh country, flat and monotonous, and with a dim horizon; while the winding river turned and turned, and the great floating buoys upon it turned and turned, and everything else seemed stranded and still. For, now, the last of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles, stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.” It’s J.M.W Turner in print isn’t it. Turner died about ten years prior to the publication of Great Expectations – but you can see that both men had been in the same terrain.

I first read this novel in 1963 when I was fourteen. It’s fair to say that I did not like it. At all. So it was with unexpected pleasure that I came to read it again many years later. I think the reason I found it going when I was 14 was because of the main character, the first person narrator, Pip. In an era that predates Freud and Jung, Pip really seems, for much of the novel, to embody our shadow side (and given the physical shadows and mists on the marshes, this seems appropriate). All our shame and guilt is writ large in his behaviour and feelings about himself. Written by an older man as a reflection of his younger self, it is unsparing and merciless. I think I found Pip’s false ideas, his desire for social mobility, his churlish treatment of Joe Gargery, and his hopeless unrequited love for Estella almost unbearable. It’s very hard for the main character to bear this kind of burden; he behaves very badly for at least half the novel. G K Chesterton, who wrote a lot about Dickens, described this novel as “A novel without a hero … it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing that the hero is unheroic.” He also said: “It is a study in human weakness and the slow human surrender.”

A lot of it is about shame. Here’s Pip reflecting on this: “It is a most miserable thing to be ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude on the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but, that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.”

It’s also about unrequited love. Here’s a lovely, evocative piece: “I said to Biddy that we would walk a little further and we did so, and the summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbor by candlelight in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do, and stick to it and make the best if it.

I asked myself the question whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself "Pip, what a fool you are!" As Pip says at one stage - "so throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of people that we most despise." I think my teenage self knew this to be true but wanted to run a mile from its grim view of human behaviour.
As with all Dickens, there is a thousand small phrases that add colour and vigour to the writing. “I sat silent, recalling what a drudge she had been until Mr Wopsle's great aunt successfully overcame that bad habit of living.” You have to love this. Dickens described this novel as atragi-comedy and it’s easy to let the dark side dominate but there are many great comic touches: the unctuous and ingratiating Pumblechook, Mr Wemmick with his postbox of a mouth and his castle and drawbridge and the Aged P, and the slipperiness of Trabb’s boy.

Chesterton again: “Great Expectations, which was written in the afternoon of Dickens's life and fame, has a quality of serene irony and even sadness, which puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time could Dickens possibly be called cynical, he had too much vitality; but relatively to the other books this book is cynical; but it has the soft and gentle cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth.”

The most recent edition of the novel that I’ve seen has an image of convict leg-irons on the cover. In some ways I think that is the most apt metaphor for the whole novel. Most of the characters are imprisoned by something or someone. All the women are literally almost house-bound (Ms Havisham through madness, Mrs Joe after her accident, Estella growing up in a lonely house captive to a delusional woman), Pip sees his life as circumscribed by his social class and education, until his fate changes, Jaggers is a lonely workaholic who sees emotions as having the potential to derail him.

The great joy in the novel is as Pip finds his moral centre and begins to appreciate the qualities that we see in Herbert Pocket, in Joe, in Magwich and in Wemmick. It’s ultimately a story of redemption; that it is possible to live differently; to live a good and kind life. I think it’s a great book.

Reading crime. Norway v Australia

I’m an erratic reader of crime fiction. Mostly, I like to read it at Christmas – where I suspect it works at sublimating my desire to murder my family. Right now I’m in the middle of a Norwegian crime spree courtesy of Jo Nesbo. What I like about his books is what I like about most detective novels – the character of the sleuth or anti-hero detective. In many ways, the plot is less relevant though I like things to make sense, to add up. I like to think about “whodunit” but this is secondary to the anti-hero’s journey.


In The Leopard, Harry Hole (pronounced ‘Hooler’), the detective, is holed up in Hong Kong at the beginning of the story. He’s in a bad way; bashed up by a triad over gambling debts and a cosy little relationship with an opium pipe. In a way, I wanted him to stay there. Kowloon is vivid in my head, after my recent visit there and it seemed like the perfect destination for a man like Hole – so rife with possibilities. But he is bundled onto a plane by a young Norwegian female detective who inevitably provides some other ‘rife with possibilities’ moments.


The novel actually begins with a torture scene. I was thinking quite a lot of things while reading it. How often this genre starts with this kind of scene – the reader is placed immediately in a scene of great danger – portrayed either exclusively through the panicked eyes of the victim, or the paranoid nastiness of the killer. The scene is often so strange and disconnected from the subsequent narrative, which usually defaults to something way more domestic, that I usually forget that I have read it. It’s never my favourite part of the book, even though I suspect that the writer will have laboured over making it gripping. The opening scene of this novel is graphic and horrible. I felt voyeuristic reading it (as I did with a couple of other violent scenes in the novel). In searching for a novel kind of torture, I think that Nesbo has stretched too far. It’s likely that the whole thriller/detective genre has run out of realistically gruesome new ways to die. One reviewer, Patrick Anderson, wrote of this scene:

“The novel opens with a four-page exercise in horror. A young woman — captive, confused, desperate — is in the grip of a fiendish instrument of torture. As we watch, this device inflicts a terrible death on her. This is a brilliant scene, in its way, but it’s also stunningly sadistic, both in terms of what the killer is doing to the woman and what the author is doing to the reader.”

However much of the novel is devoted to Harry and his struggle with officialdom, with the politics operating between two institutions fighting for jurisdiction over murders in Norway. These, for me, are the most satisfying parts of the novel, just as, in a drama series like The Wire, the political machinations, treachery and power plays provide the gripping underpinning of the drama. The parts that I don’t like are the most dramatic: an avalanche, a volcano, a trip into Colonel Kurtz territory in the darkest Congo. I just don’t buy the melodrama of these events. But I’ll wear them because I’m a Harry fan and I do like a good murder. Anderson, the aforementioned reviewer, was not as kind, but I did enjoy the way he described The Leopard:

“Now, alas, I must report that ‘The Leopard’ is a bloated, near-total disaster. Reading it, I came to imagine myself trapped in a vast, fetid swamp from which I might never emerge."

The reviewer in The Independent, Paul Binding, writes about the ways in which family genes and upbringing become a theme in ‘The Leopard’.

“Nesbø's insight into inherited conflict – of which this novel affords a disturbing double instance – must emanate from his own declared family background. His father fought for the Germans in the Second World War, his mother for the Resistance, this duality being the emotional foundation of The Redbreast.


Nesbø's imaginative preoccupation with division, above all in the individual, makes him a distinctively Norwegian writer. His mentors – Ibsen, Hamsun - have magisterially contrasted the wild with the harmonious, the lover or explorer with the conscientious citizen, the stern moralist with the easy-going hedonist. This distinguishes him from the Swedes Mankell and Larsson, to whom he is so often compared.”

Finally, the other thing that the opening scene made me think about was the absence of torture from Australian detective novels. I need to say that I have not read really widely of the entire genre but within my experience, we kill quite quickly and efficiently for reasons other than straight-out sadism (I’m recalling a quite bizarre and stupid scene from Peter Temple’s otherwise very fine novel The Broken Shore as an exception.) Perhaps I am wrong – happy to be corrected. Our sadistic murderers tend to be more of the Wolf Creek mode – their place is in the outback or Bangalo State Forest. Our detectives are slightly less anti-hero – Cliff Hardy, Murray Whelan, Jack Irish – more Diver Dan than Harry Hole. If Paul Binding is right, that Nesbo is preoccupied with ‘division’ in the individual; that is a trait less obvious in Australian protagonists – who tend to be outsiders, but intact outsiders without the self-destructive aspects of a character like Hole. I will keep thinking about this.

What is right?

Joseph Kony is flavour of the Twittergeist at present along with controversy about how we manage bad things in Africa. And who is “we” and what should be the extent of “our” influence. And is it OK to buy wristbands for moral causes when you’re not sure just how moral they might be? Or is it OK to buy wristbands (assuming that the bulk of the money goes to a good cause) just because it’s trendy if you don’t actually care about the cause. And are we seeing the rise of “Slacktavism” as opposed to “slacktivity”? Weighty questions for a Tuesday.


They fit well with the latest “novel” I’ve read titled What is the What. Written by Dave Eggers, it states that it is “a soulful account of my life” – the life of a young Sudanese man variously named Achak, Valentino, Dominic or Gone Far. There are two things of interest in respect of this novel. The content, and the politics of the way it is written. Let me start with the content.


Achak is about six when Muslin murahaleen sweep into his village, destroy houses, kill some of the inhabitants and carry off children, women and livestock. He survives this attack and eventually sets out to walk to a safer location in Ethiopia. It is an epic walk of young boys who become known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. Horrible things happen to Achak and those around him. I can’t do them justice here but am glad I read the book – I know more about this period of recent history now and that’s a good thing. Death, hunger, abuse, the ambiguities and cruelties of the liberation soldiers (SPLA), the loss of family – these are just a few of the elements of the book. He spends many years in two refugee camps, the one in Ethiopia and then one in Kenya. No plot spoilers here – we first meet Achak in the United States so we know he survives.


Survives is a good word for what happens to him in America as well. This is the part of the book which worked best for me. I kept thinking of the Sudanese who live in my local neighbourhood of Footscray. (See the Footscray Food Blog for a taste of this.) It must be radically different living here. From 2001, 3,800 Sudanese were allowed to settle in the USA. Most of these were young men. Achak ends up in Atlanta in the States. He arrives just after 9/11. He has high expectations of his ability to prosper quickly; to go to college and emerge with a good job and good prospects. It does not play that way despite his determination and clear intelligence. He is looked after by some people and harassed by others. At one stage he is working for $8.50 an hour as a storeman. It takes him three changes of bus to get to his workplace. Some young Americans stop him, harass him and tell him to go back to Africa. He says:
Through Eggers we experience the increasing cynicism and disconnection of Achak in his new home. It’s a powerful thing to read about, falling as it does on top of the truly horrible experiences of his previous time as a lost boy. Actually he is a lost boy in both countries…

“When I first came to this country, I would tell silent stories. I would tell them to people who had wronged me. If someone cut in front of me in line, ignored me, bumped me, or pushed me, I would glare at them, staring, silently hissing a story to them. You do not understand, I would tell them. You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen.”

A little of the comparison.

“Some sociologists, liberal ones, might take issue with the notion that one society is behind another, that there is a first world, a third. But southern Sudan is not of any of these worlds. Sudan is something else, and I cannot find apt comparisons. There are few cars in southern Sudan. You can travel for hundreds of miles without seeing a vehicle of any kind. There are only a handful of paved roads; I saw none while I lived there. One could fly a straight east-west line across the country and never pass over a home built of anything but grass and dirt. It is a primitive land and I say that without any sense of shame. I suspect that within the next ten years, if the peace holds, the region will make the sort of progress that might bring us to the standards of other East African nations. I do not know anyone who wishes southern Sudan to remain the way it is.”

The title? Achak is from the Dinka people of southern Sudan. Dave Eggers is quoted in The Guardian as saying: gifts, and were using this What to inflict unending pain upon the southern Sudanese.”

“We had agreed that we would include in the book an ancient creation myth known in southern Sudan. In the story, God, pleased with his greatest creation, offers the first Dinka man a choice of gifts: on the one hand, the cattle, visible and known, an animal that can feed and clothe him and last forever; on the other hand, the What. The man asks God, "What is the What?", but God will not reveal the answer. The What was unknown; the What could be everything or nothing. The Dinka man does not hesitate for long. He chooses the cattle, and for thousands of years Dinka lore held that he had chosen correctly; the cow is thus sacred in southern Sudanese culture, the measure of a family's wealth and the giver of life. It was not until the torment of the southern Sudanese in the 20th century that the Dinka began to question this choice. What was the What, they wondered, and speculation about the answer abounded: was it technology? Education? Sophisticated weapons? Whatever the answer, it was assumed that the Arabs of the north - who, legend had it, had received the What - might have got the greatest of God's

The controversy? Eggers was asked to help Achak write the book and recorded many interviews with him. At first I think they intended some kind of factual account of the style of ‘They poured fire on us from the sky’ but that book emerged first and Eggers felt that they could not add to that narrative. He also ran into some issues with recreating the story using just the fragments of Achak’s memory. It’s the usual issue – how do you recreate conversations with people where someone may only remember the intent or outcome, not the actual words. So he eventually decided to tell it as a novel but to use the first person voice of Achak as the narrator. IN doing this, he has got himself into trouble. I wasn’t too bothered by it because I think the story itself is really important – but here’s some of the criticism:


Lee Seigel’s review, titled The Niceness Racket says:

“The generation of people who survived the Holocaust and Stalin's vast network of camps is disappearing, but the number of novels about modern genocide has increased, and most of them are written by people who have no firsthand experience of their subject on which to draw. This presents a curious problem. Bearing witness, even in fictionalizing form, to extreme historical events that you have experienced is one thing. It is quite a different thing to try to recreate extreme historical events that you have not experienced, and then to try to imagine what it would be like to think and feel your way through them. This is hardly an illegitimate endeavor -- the imagination has an obligation to wrestle with even the most unimaginable experiences; but it is an intensely demanding endeavor, with moral and aesthetic pitfalls all around.”

Interesting, this connection with The Holocaust. Having just read The Street Sweeper, I had thought about this a lot. Seigel goes on to say:

“Deng's attitudes are tyrannically refracted through Eggers's reshaping of them. Deng does not represent himself. Eggers represents him. You never know whether the startling self-pity that Deng occasionally displays -- when two other boys are eaten by lions, Deng laments his unluckiness -- is his own or not. In Deng's own voice, these flashes from the underside of his ego might have been extenuated by irony or self-awareness. The same goes for Deng's hostile, suspicious, sometimes contemptuous attitudes toward American blacks. They might have been somehow vindicated in the full-throated revelation of his personality. Or maybe not. We will never know. In Eggers's hands, the survivor's voice does not survive.”

To some extent, I think Seigel is right but Achak has read and endorsed the book – he labels it his “soulful account” so do we take his own words at face value? Does it undermine his power and agency as a person to say that he is not capable of judging and addressing the ways in which Eggers has represented him? Is this just as patronising? I’m not sure.


Seigel goes on:

“And Eggers's book is also another unsettling thing. I never thought I would reach for this vocabulary, but What Is the What's innocent expropriation of another man's identity is a post-colonial arrogance -- the most socially acceptable instance of Orientalism you are likely to encounter. Perhaps this is the next stage of American memoir. Perhaps, having run out of marketable stories to tell about ourselves, we will now travel the world in search of desperate people willing to rent out their lives, the way indigent people in some desolate places give up their children. Perhaps we have picked our psyches clean, and now we need other people's stories the way we need other people's oil.”

I selected What is the What to read because I’d read Eggers’ Zeitoun and thought it very impressive. It’s a later book – about a Muslim man and his family who are victims of some truly appalling events post-Hurricane Katrina. It’s written in the third person – it’s very clear that the author is not the person experiencing the events. But vivid and compelling all the same.


I like Eggers – he is a good man. You can read about the things that he and Achak do in Sudan after the book is written, to try to improve the lives of the villagers where Achak is born. (See the article in The Guardian.) He wants to make a difference. He, like Eliot Perlman in The Street Sweeper, is driven by the need to have the story heard. I think this justifies what he does in telling it.

800 pages

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/229432.The_Pickwick_Papers">The Pickwick Papers by http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/239579.Charles_Dickens">Charles Dickens

Let me quote you just a taste from The Pickwick Papers (which at the height of its popularity sold 40,000 copies a month and catapulted the 24 year old Dickens to fame):

"Down they sat to breakfast, but it was evident, notwithstanding the
boasting of Mr. Peter Magnus, that he laboured under a very considerable degree
of nervousness [he was about to propose], of which loss of appetite, a
propensity to upset the tea-things, a spectral attempt at drollery, and an
irresistible inclination to look at the clock, every other second, were among
the principal symptoms."

I came to this novel reluctantly – it’s 800 pages and if my calculations are correct I think I only have capacity in my life (all things going well) to read another 1,000 books. Should the first novel of Dickens be one of these? Well, I came to enjoy him very much. It’s a footy trip novel. Four blokes go away on jaunts. They fit into some neat stereotypes that never quite get exploded. There’s the old benign fat guy, the young romantic, the failed hapless sportsman and the poet. About a quarter of the way through, he introduces The Fixer, Sam Weller, who gets the boys out of trouble – in a charming and understated way. The novel is full of quirky incidents and odd encounters, peppered with these strange tales (they are the kind of tall stories or ghost stories that people tell when they are sitting around drinking) that interrupt the main narrative and give it a dark undertone.
The other thing that gives the novel a serious and dark underpinning is Pickwick’s encounters with the legal system. When Dickens was about 12, his father went to debtor’s prison and he, Dickens, had to go out to work to support the family. This gave him a deep cynicism about the justice system as well as direct insights into the prison environment – both of these themes are explored in this novel.
At first glance, it seems a slight affair – if you could say that about a novel of such length, but a couple of reviewers have cast it in an interesting light. One reviewer writes of how marriages are perceived (mostly unhappy or unwanted) – the writing was commenced the year that Dickens married. He writes of how the book is “characterized by a kind of largesse” embodied by the significant number of overweight characters. He describes how the law is accompanied by images of dirt and filth and that the pivotal trial scene prefigures the later work of Kafka, Hitchcock and Camus. I had never thought of Dickens and Kafka in the same space but it’s a very appropriate connection – the absurdist, black machinations of the justice systems in each writer’s work. It’s worth my including this quote from his review:

“The humour aside, the situation takes on the character of a nightmare in which
every insignificant detail of daily life is presented as evidence for a crime
Pickwick doesn’t even know he has committed: not only is the breach of promise
unproved, but the promise itself has never even been made or intended. The
texture of everyday life is on trial, and the innocence of the quotidian is
turned around and made sinister by the law:
…letters that must be
viewed with a cautious and suspicious eye—letters that were evidently intended
at the time, by Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose
hands they might fall. Let me read the first: “Garraways, twelve o’clock. Dear
Mrs. B.—Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.””

You probably need to had read the novel to understand just how absurd and Kafka-esque the words in italics are!
Another keen Dickens man is http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka...G K Chesterton who wrote a biography of Dickens. His chapter on Pickwick is really interesting. I will not be able to stop quoting him:

“In Pickwick, and, indeed, in Dickens, generally it is in the details that the author is creative, it is in the details that he is vast. The power of the book lies in the perpetual torrent of ingenious and inventive treatment; the theme (at least at the beginning) simply does not exist.”

He describes Dickens as a river, pouring out things in an unstoppable torrent. He goes on to say:

“But as a whole, this should be firmly grasped, that the units of Dickens, the primary elements, are not the stories, but the characters who affect the stories -- or, more often still, the characters who do not affect the stories. This is a plain matter; but, unless it be stated and felt, Dickens may be greatly misunderstood and greatly underrated. For not only is his whole machinery directed to facilitating the self-display of certain characters, but something more deep and more unmodern still is also true of him. It is also true that all the moving machinery exists only to display entirely static character. Things in the Dickens story shift and change only in order to give us glimpses of great characters that do not change at all.”

I haven’t read enough Dickens recently to respond to this claim – I’m now determined to go back and read something else – a much later novel to see if this is true.

Chesterton goes on to say that Dickens is not so much a novelist as a mythologist. He says that the characters live in a “perpetual summer of being themselves’ just as gods do. Of Pickwick himself, he writes:

“Dickens has caught, in a manner at once wild and convincing, this queer innocence of the afternoon of life. The round, moonlike face, the round, moon-like spectacles of Samuel Pickwick move through the tale as emblems of a certain spherical simplicity. They are fixed in that grave surprise that may be seen in babies; that grave surprise which is the only real happiness that is possible to man. Pickwick's round face is like a round and honourable mirror, in which are reflected all the fantasies of earthly existence; for surprise is, strictly speaking, the only kind of reflection” I love the phrase “this queer innocence of the afternoon of life”.

It’s an interesting interpretation because we think of Dickens as a realist, a man anxious to catch the social and political calumnies of the day and bring them to public light but The Pickwick Papers is more of a jaunt despite the chapters that land Pickwick in contact with the legal system. I need to include a long quote to help the argument along:

“As our world advances through history towards its present epoch, it becomes more specialist, less democratic, and folklore turns gradually into fiction. But it is only slowly that the old elfin fire fades into the light of common realism. For ages after our characters have dressed up in the clothes of mortals they betray the blood of the gods. Even our phraseology is full of relics of this. When a modern novel is devoted to the bewilderments of a weak young clerk who cannot decide which woman he wants to marry, or which new religion he believes in, we still give this knock-kneed cad the name of "the hero" -- the name which is the crown of Achilles. The popular preference for a story with "a happy ending" is not, or at least was not, a mere sweet-stuff optimism; it is the remains of the old idea of the triumph of the dragon-slayer, the ultimate apotheosis of the man beloved of heaven.

But there is another and more intangible trace of this fading supernaturalism -- a trace very vivid to the reader, but very elusive to the critic. It is a certain air of endlessness in the episodes, even in the shortest episodes -- a sense that, although we leave them, they still go on. Our modern attraction to short stories is not an accident of form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility; it means that existence is only an impression, and, perhaps, only an illusion. A short story of to-day has the air of a dream; it has the irrevocable beauty of a falsehood; we get a glimpse of grey streets of London or red plains of India, as in an opium vision; we see people -- arresting people with fiery and appealing faces. But when the story is ended, the people are ended. We have
no instinct of anything ultimate and enduring behind the episodes. The moderns, in a word, describe life in short stories because they are possessed with the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly short story, and perhaps not a true one. But in this elder literature, even in the comic literature (indeed, especially in the comic literature), the reverse is true. The characters are felt to be fixed things of which we have fleeting glimpses; that is, they are felt to be divine.”

The last thing I want to discuss is the place of the odd little tales that intersperse the main narrative. Here are some of the titles: ‘A Tale told by a Bagman’, ‘The Story of Goblins who Stole a Sexton’, ‘Version of the legend of Prince Bladud’ and ‘The Bagman’s Uncle’. They touch on the grotesque, violent domestic abuse, the supernatural and wickedness. While I was reading I thought that he’d put them in to spice up the narrative – that because episodes were going out in instalments, they were a way of generating a different kind of interest in the narrative. But reviewer http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/ind...'>Frenkl had another perspective. He aligns it with Freudian thinking (though Dickens was writing ahead of this) and says:

“Rather, "day" is normal life -- the ongoing story, as rendered by CD's comic sensibility. "Night" refers to the interpolated tales which, though they can be humorous, are usually anything but; they feature poverty, disease, murder, horrific deaths....

Why does this "day/night" approach have such a powerful effect? First of all, the tales are wonderful in their own right. And then, these tales give a "rhythm" to the book that heightens interest. (This rhythm is lost in the long Debtor's-Prison section where the tales are suspended.) But most of all, "day/night" is powerful because it captures a vision of life that I think corresponds to how we see things in our present-day, Freud-influenced world. To the "day" belongs rational, ongoing life ... but a life in which we often see people and events in a humorous, shallow, even cartoonish way. The "night" is the world of dreams and nightmares, of irrationality, disconnectedness ... where violence and horror can abound ... where the aspects of life we gloss over in our daytime existence comes back to haunt us.”

I’m not sure what a younger audience would make of this novel or on what grounds I could recommend it. I thoroughly enjoyed it – but also had large swathes of time to lose myself in it. Not for everyone I think. Maybe Jane Smiley, a writer whose work I have enjoyed recently says it better than me:

"The Pickwick Papers is not a book that holds much appeal for the modern reader. Episodic sporting adventures, however, were quite popular at the time, and a large part of their appeal was in the accompanying illustrations. The "novel" has the looseness and digressiveness of many eighteenth-century works like Tom
Jones and Tristram Shandy, both of which Dickens admired. Dickens had not at that point developed his particular social vision, especially the darker, angrier parts of it, and his style, though already distinct, does not have the incandescent and concentrated ironic power that he achieved in later works. What he does have, full grown, and what readers noticed almost at once, is that facility in drawing characters that are not only entertaining but unique."

Horror of adolescence

Little Star – a horror story or a deeper book about adolescence? Or both those things. I first accessed the novelist Lindqvist’s work with the film Let the Right One in - also a horror narrative which is also about adolescence.

In Little Star, Lindqvist traces the lives of two girls – both outsiders in Swedish society. Theres, abandoned as a baby, is a very fine singer with some developmental issues. Theresa is an overweight, lonely, bullied child. The novel explores what they do with their feelings of alienation and to say more about the plot would be wrong. I think the writer is extremely good at getting inside the head of these disaffected girls. He says that he thinks that the main flaw in many horror films is that he can’t identify with the main characters. Lindqvist ensures that we empathise with the character of Theresa, and to a lesser extent Theres, at the same time as being disturbed and alienated by what they do. He said that he tries “to combine both those things, that the child is the protagonist, the one we are following, the one that drives the tale forward, and at the same time being the one that you have to watch out for.”

What he delivers is not new or unique but it is interesting. This novel doesn’t work as well for me as the film of 'Let the Right One in' did, but it was a great thing to read in the bright light of a summer Christmas at the beach. A few brooding teenagers around at Waratah Bay but none with obvious homicidal urges.

It’s worth reading a little of what the writer had to say about his work in an interview on the Constructing Horror website:
“But then I think that many horror films and horror storytellers dig deep into the hole that is their own childhood to reach a more original fear. A fear that is nameless. As an adult we can rationalize out thoughts. This is that, and that scares me where that doesn’t. But as a child the stuff out there in the dark or that strange noise under the bed could be anything. If I want to conjure up something that is really scary, an image of something really horrible, then I almost always have to go back to my early years to find a description of that fear. And I think these are emotions and fears that many who write, or work with horror use in their work.”

Interestingly, what I think he really nails are the real and practical fears of childhood and adolescence (regardless of those that linger under the bed) – the question of fitting in, of friendships and of connection – or lack of it. This is the real horror of that period of life.



all my reviews

Bad girl, good boy?

Patti Smith begins Just Kids with a formal old-fashioned kind of language. The voice unsettles – it’s not what I expected. Soon after she departs Chicago for New York, that voice disappears and what replaces it is a frank and honest contemporary feel. Her story is beguiling – she leaves badly paid factory work and the shame of having a child out of wedlock in search of something more akin with who she is – a potential artist of some kind. Her mother – who thinks she will probably end up waitressing, gives her a pristine new waitress uniform and a pair of white waitress shoes which Smith abandons after a couple of hours of this kind of work. She’s not a snob about what she does though – the book has a humble tone.

Smith arrives in New York and almost immediately meets Robert Mapplethorpe. They connect as fellow ingénues and wanna-be artists. Actually Mapplethorpe is probably not an ingénue – but she initially presents him as a gentle beautiful artistic boy. She says: "We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl ¬trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad."

They arrive in New York at a very dynamic time – 1967 (is there not a dynamic time in this city?) and gradually began to move in the same circles as a whole lot of artists and musicians. For the first half of the book, there is no mention of her being a practising musician though she certainly loves music and references artists like Dylan. Staying at the Chelsea Hotel for a while, she mentions contact with Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin and wrote poems/ songs for some of these people. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the relationship that she has with Mapplethorpe - their struggle to make art, the fun they had, and the beginning of a clash in values as Mapplethorpe begins to work his way through the social set in New York.

The writing describing their activities is lovely – aesthetes who value the visual, who try to add beauty to the spartan rooms they inhabit, who express part of their identity through what they choose to wear. The image of the book released in the America is worth looking at (It's the one shown here) – Mapplethorpe and Smith dressed up for an excursion to Coney Island. Also worth looking up the very beautiful image that Mapplethorpe took of Smith for her first album, Horses - speaks for the essence of the book and their relationship - and the times.

One reviewer describes the book at embodying the spirit of Smith’s song Elegie written for Jimi Hendrix and that it was written “in a strong, true voice unencumbered by the polarizing mannerisms of her poetry.” True. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with her. And him.






View all my reviews

The best handjob in literature...

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9817.Ten_Days_in_the_Hills">Ten Days in the Hills by http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1339.Jane_Smiley">Jane Smiley
My rating: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/248716399">3 of 5 stars

Copies of this novel sold out at the Melbourne Writers Festival after a session with Jane Smiley in conversation with David Francis. He described this novel as having the best headjob (or was it hand job) in literature. As it turns out, I think it was hand job. There is a little sex in this large novel - generous easy sex between a range of consenting adults. The opening is lovely - two of the main characters in bed musing on whether they should make a film about being in bed together along the lines of My Dinner with Andre. I felt lulled into something promising in terms of a range of interesting conflicts, some stuff about relationships and a real go at unpacking American reactions to their country's foreign policy.

The story is set against the backdrop of the beginning of the second Gulf War, although the characters are in Hollywood rather than Baghdad. The war is a springboard for debate along with the shifting values and ambitions of people who occupy the large house temporarily (for part of the ten days). Smiley says that she was inspired to write the book by The Decameron, which I have not read. It is described in A O Scotts review of Ten Days in The Hills: "In that book, 10 privileged Florentines — seven women and three men — took refuge from their plague-ravaged city in the accursed year 1348 and passed the time telling stories, a hundred in all." This review, titled 'Kiss Kiss, Talk, Talk' accurately captures the ways in which this large novel runs out of steam - I wanted it to be so much better than it is.

The dimunition of conflict over the course of the novel is in stark contrast to the faint news of the Iraq War that filters occasionally into the lives of these characters, reminding us of how privileged, middle class and languid they (we) are. Ultimately, not the most interesting thing to read about.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5403283-jillwilson">View all my reviews

What kind of Melbourne would you write about?

What would any Melbournite wish to write (or read) about Melbourne? What would the reading experience be if you were not from Melbourne? Sophie Cunningham's book is one of a series about different Australian capital cities - Delia Falconer wrote a similar book about Sydney, for example.

It is a beautiful book to handle - a small hardback with rough-cut old style creamy pages and a silky finish to the cover shot of a murky Melbourne laneway. And this book is SO laneway.I felt like I was in a very small club (of people) reading in a very small and hidden Melbourne bar. You will know if you are in the club if you open the book. Its about (and for?) people who live on the map which is printed on the inside cover. Like me - middle class, university educated, inner-city bleeding heart liberal (lower case).

So it was a book of confirmation, rather than surprises. I liked it but found it faintly irritating for that reason. There was nothing new in it for me. So that's why I'm wondering who the predicted audience is for this book. I read a lot of Kristin Otto's book 'Capital' last year and found it a whole lot more interesting - it is a different beast of course as it's about time when Melbourne was the capital of Australia.

If you want to see if you're in the club or not - make a list of the five writers most likely to be referenced in a book about Melbourne, about the top five topics that would be covered (the 'action' of the book takes place over a year in 2009), of ten iconic leisure activities....
I'll start you off - Garner, Tsiolkas, Flanagan, Brunettis, Crystal Ballroom, Skyhooks, MIFF, the G, Paul Kelly - need I go on? (Apropos of nothing I had a taxi driver yesterday who needed directions to the MCG. He shyly confided at the end of the trip that it was his first day. "Yeah, I gathered that mate," I said).

I like Sophie Cunningham's writing - I enjoyed Geography when it came out. I like the club I'm in - but probably don't need to read about it.

It's tribal

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6974785-the-children">The Children by http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/342188.Charlotte_Wood">Charlotte Wood
My rating: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/241291991">4 of 5 stars

Last night at my women's group we talked about the impact of being in a tribe - in my case a large and close family. We talked about the sense of security it gives you. There is a layer of confidence that you have in going out to meet the world, beacuse your tribe is strong, you are loved, there are people that will care for you and opportunities for intimacy. It provides a kind of resilient backbone.

The Children is about siblings in a family. It might not be very interesting if it was about a tribe as secure as mine is. This tribe is a little dysfunctional - brought together after an accident and forced to spend unaccustomed time togther. As well as the depiction of these relationships, the novel presents a very fine and accurate picture of life in a NSW country town. It thrusts life in this small town up against the experiences of one of the main characters, Mandy, who has become a foreign correspondent and lived through some extremely traumatic events. Small towns can produce their own forms of trauma hoever, and these play out subtly in the novel. There is one faintly jarring plot line that runs through the novel unnecessarily but the rest of it was just fine and a pleasure to read.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5403283-jillwilson">View all my reviews

The post 'Marriage Plot' world

I read this novel because of an article I read about the writer and this novel titled 'How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write ‘The Marriage Plot’'. I really liked the article and thought the book sounded good.
The article quotes from the actual text of the book:

"In Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter who Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean anything anymore, and neither did the novel."

Who wouldn't want to read a book playing around with what was possible in a post-marriage plot world? It's set largely in about 1982 in north eastern America and it's about a triangle relationship - Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell. Because I was young then (1982) and just out of uni, the novel draws in aspects of my cultural world - vey nostalgically appealing. It might not work so well with another demographic. As I drew towards the end, I was intrigued to think about how Eugenides would end it - it seemed to me to be VERY difficult to find a satisfying end - but he really manages this part well. I loved reading about the advent of post-structuralism and the impact it made at this time. He also writes well about manic depression. It's made me want to read more of his books.

Tony, Susan, Arnold, Edward and Jill

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I think this is a three and a half starred book. Interesting, but it falls away in the last third. What I did like about it is that this is a book about the porous boundaries of reading. Susan receives an unpublished book in the mail from her first husband, Edward - whom she hasn't seen in 20 years (his second wife sends her an Xmas card each year). Susan had an affair with the man who became her second husband. Things ended badly between Susan and Edward. Things aren't so great with her new husband Arnold, who is away at a conference.

As the reader, we experience Susan reading Edward's narrative - which is a thriller, along with her thoughts about their relationship, her thoughts about her current marriage, and the impending arrival of Edward in her home town. So there's layers on layers here - which is what makes the book interesting. I was reading, being consious of my own life, my readerly reactions, Susan's life, and then the very lively plot within a plot. As the Guardian reviewer says: "Wright, like David Lynch, has the knack of beginning in wrongness then piling on the tension from there." He also said "if Tony & Susan can be said to be about anything other than its exploration of form, it is about the failure to be an agent in your own life."

This review also provides a description of the author, now deceased "He was a professor at the University of Cincinnati for 23 years and was obsessed by the interconnection of real and invented worlds and believing that at least in some sense the reader writes the book. His daughter Katharine told the Daily Telegraph recently that his last words to her were: "You. Are. Invented." "

The book went out of print but was resuscitated by a publisher who thought it had been neglected. It has been billed as "the most astounding lost masterpiece of American fiction since Revolutionary Road" but it's not in the same league as Revolutionary Road in my view. You might be interested in this less than complimentary view of Tony & Susan - in which the reviewer reveals the worst sentence in the book - a funny sentence about Arnold's penis and the trouble it causes.

I liked the layered stories and the sense of anxiety the writer creates as we wait for Susan's current husband to return home, for resolution of the internal story which has a kidnap and revenge as its focus and whether Edward will step beyond his writing into Susan's story. Is his narrative a form of revenge?



View all my reviews

The burbs

The burbs – it’s a naff term isn’t it. Been thinking about the nature of suburban living lately – prompted by The Slap and by the film My Year Without Sex. “Suburban” – it’s onomatopoeic, I think. I read The Slap a few months ago and then my bookclub discussed it. It was interesting for what it brought up for most of us – there was common view that the characters were awful, they were indicative of the changing times but did not reflect the characteristics of the people that we hang round with. I sat there feeling middle aged – it’s the kind of spin I would have despised when I was younger but have to watch it coming off my tongue so readily. Is The Slap about generational change or class? Or ethnicity? Or gender? I thought it began with great promise but lost some of the gloss about half way through. The women characters seemed like a pastiche of the glossy women you sometimes see in The Age, women in their late 30s with hair extensions and a permanent diet. Not quite real. The men on the other hand seemed entirely believable. And pretty awful with the exception of Ritchie and the indigenous man who seems to be there to fill up the ethnic diversity numbers in the book. An indigenous Muslim. Tick two boxes.

What I connected with was the setting. These characters come from the middle ring of suburbs: Northcote, Hampton. People who’ve done OK materially and are aiming to hang on to every bit of it. The kind of people that my sister hangs out with. They have pools and undisclosed sources of wealth. We joke about these coming from drugs but the sources are more likely to be more banal. It makes my sister envious. These people are competitive and use their children as shining little examples of their upward mobility. They attend private schools and toddler yoga. There’s a brittleness to this kind of existence. And in Tsiolkas’ book, a meanness of spirit. The text is a hugely energetic rampage through the suburbs and through this meanness. I don’t see it in the circle of people I know and maybe that means that I live in a bubble. One of the bookclub members, a woman who has a lot to do with schools, said she was at a meeting of principals a couple of years ago and their main issue was that students are coming to school “under-parented” (to quote her). Their parents are giving them fewer boundaries , spending more time working, and want to be friend rather than adult. Her take was that they were relying on schools to do the tough love. This isn’t necessarily what I see amongst my friends though the extended independent/dependent relationship that kids have into their 20s might be indicative of this.

I could write more about The Slap (the sex they are having doesn’t sound like the sex that a lot of my married friends are having) but I might go to My Year Without Sex, a film which is also set in Melbourne suburbia; albeit a slightly less middle class suburbia. It’s a quirky little film, a lighter take than Watts’ previous film Look Both Ways. Funny. Light. Unsubstantial.

Three things about it. The best scene happens early. The main character Natalie (Sascha Horler) is in hospital hovering in and out of a coma. While she is likely to live, it’s a tense bedside scene, the whole family around her. Her son is transfixed by the television screen. We see him with the earphones on, his face tense; he’s watching the Western Bulldogs at the 30 minute mark of a tight game. He’s holding his breath. I’ve been there – in that moment, forgetting to breathe, everything hinging round a kick at goal. Life or death. For him, like his mother – both in life or death moments. Nicely done. Ordinary but utterly important.

They have so much stuff. In a more heavy handed way, this film is a critique of suburban materialism. They exist in family squalor; made more pronounced by the crappy quality of everything they own. They are swamped by toys, clothes, furniture, accoutrements of modern life. It contrasts with the minimalism of the more wealthy extended family that they hang out with – if you’re richer, your stuff is not as overwhelming.

There’s a fascinating spiritual question embedded in this film. It’s prompted me to ask all my religious mates whether they expect to see me once we are both dead. Clearly some of them haven’t thought of this before which is interesting in itself. Worth seeing for the gentle conversation about the need (or not) for spirituality in the suburbs.

My Year Without Sex is about decent people trying to have a go. Like the latest film I’ve seen, Sunshine Cleaning. Not a lot to say about that film. I liked it. Quirky. Good characters trying to make a go of it. Unlike any of the characters in The Slap apart from the teenagers and the Muslims. Does it matter if you don’t like any of the people in a text? I don’t think so but it clearly matters to some; for most of the people who’ve hated The Slap, I think this has been their primary reason. They feel infected by the meanness. Maybe that means that it is a successful novel?

Treacherous ground, the relationship

“The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large.” I wish so much that I had written this sentence but it was that mighty writer Colm Toibin, commenting on Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach. Toibin goes on to say “Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’)”, This London Review of Books review is well worth a read just for the extended riff about the penis.

It wasn’t the penis that got my attention in the novel (funnily enough). This is a novel which pivots on the first night of a marriage. Set in 1962, it's about Florence and Edward. “They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. “ What interested me was Florence’s lack of interest in sex. Not just lack of interest but a feeling of revulsion; when Edward starts to kiss her, she contemplates throwing up.

I know that it’s possible to go for extended times without sex and without thinking of sex. (Only one of these characteristics applies to me.) Libido is a rare topic of conversation with my friends but sometimes we talk about it. Usually in an embarrassed way; no one really knows what is “normal”. Do you like sex? Is it good with your partner? Are there things you’d like to do? Have done to you? Does the other person want it more or less than you do? How do you manage the imbalance? Who do you lust after? What turns you on? For a theme that is explored at such length in the media, it is really hard to talk about. (And hard often to talk about with your lover or partner too but that's probably a whole other piece of writing.)

Florence finds it hard to talk about. She feels abnormal. I found it strange to read about; its not something I can imagine easily – the extreme distaste she has for sex. I wanted to read more, to find out why, and this provides some of the dramatic tension of the novel. At first I thought the writing was a little coy. Mark Mordue, writing in the SMH, reframes the coyness: “Initially, McEwan's writing is restrained and formal, a quintessentially British tone befitting the time in which it is set. One thinks of old BBC radio plays and "hears" the story being told. It would be easy to mistake this as tame fare indeed but for a sly humour and confidence percolating beneath McEwan's voice: “This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time except visitors from abroad. The formal meal began, as so many did then, with a slice of melon decorated by a glazed cherry… It would not have crossed Edward’s mind to have ordered a red.”” The coy tone is deliberate; it reflects the times, the characters and the seriousness with which they are about to embark on sex, and on intimacy.

Because this is what I think the book is really about – not so much sex as marriage and what it means to make this commitment. What might be lost in the process as well as gained. There is a really graphic description of being kissed; “With his lips clamped firmly on hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved round inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anaesthesia. This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private, imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her that another tongue should be able to go there too. It was the hard tapering tip of this alien muscle, quiveringly alive, that repelled her.” (p29) Of course this is about sex but I think it’s also about the process of marrying someone and living with them. Florence is a very controlling, independent personality who has not experienced the joys of intimacy (her family has not provided warmth or contact). The idea of intimacy, and perhaps losing something of herself in the process, scares Florence as much as the physicalities of sex. And the ending bears this out; you have to allow people into the hidden gaps to truly make contact. It’s a risk but the consequence of avoiding risk is borne out in what happens to both Edward and Florence.

What makes me think that McEwen wanted to go beyond sex is the title. He is fond of the single, life-changing incident (almost all his novels pivot round a single incident) but this novel has a very deliberate title which I think takes us further than the single failed sexual encounter of E and F. I googled the beach after I’d finished the book; it’s a really striking piece of coastline. A long narrow spit (18 miles?) with a lagoon on the land side and the sea on the other. Rocky. Treacherous. McEwen said that he kept some rocks from the beach on his desk while he was writing it (and protests after he admitted this meant that he took them back!) Chesil Beach is a storm beach developed by gravel ridges being driven onshore. It was described like this by one poet:
“Twern't a sea - not a bit of it -
twer the great sea hisself rose up level like
and come on right over the ridge and all,
like nothing in this world"

I think McEwen is thinking about the beach as a metaphor for being in a relationship. One reviewer described the spit as being the line between post-war, conservative Britain (the land and lagoon) and the tempestuous changes of the 60’s (the sea) and while its true that this is a strong theme in the book, it’s a bit lumpen as a metaphor. (And if I was being really crude, you could read this bit of verse and look at how McEwen describes Edward’s premature ejaculation – a great piece of writing). However, I think he chose the landscape deliberately to make a point; it could have been set in Torquay or a host of less interesting locations.

A lot of the writing is very fine and that makes the book worth reading, whatever you think it's about: “The garden vegetation rose up, sensuous and tropical in its profusion, an effect heightened by the grey, soft light and a delicate mist drifting in from the sea, whose steady motion of advance and withdrawal made sounds of gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles.” And finally, worth a comparison – Philip Larkin’s poem, Annus Mirabilus.

The toy soldiers of our emotional armoury

I liked this description of childhood by novelist Craig Sherbourne. He was writing about Sonya Hartnett's new book. I once upset her at a Writers Forum by suggesting that she should write for adults; that she was in some way limiting what she was capable of by doing the YA thing. I didn't express myself very well and she took umbrage on behalf of all teenagers. I think she has now found her adult voice – I really like her writing. This is what Craig said.

“If we didn’t have childhoods we’d be much better people. We’d start out as grown-ups innocent as lambs. We wouldn’t have behind us all those early years of practising vices: greed, duplicity, cruelty, bullying, indolence, vandalism, bullshitting, cronyism, hypocrisy, selfishness, violence. Childhood is where we hone these skills. If by age 14 we haven’t learned how to manipulate our loved ones, we’re backward and doomed to live at the mercy of others. Parents, siblings, schoolmates, schoolteachers – there’s always one we’ve got a crush on and torture with flirting – are the toy soldiers with which we practise emotional warfare.”

Bleak hey? You can read more in The Monthly. My friend Jane and I spent part of yesterday talking about how lucky we were to have the childhoods we have. We both reckon we have less baggage than lots of others because we were much loved and quite well parented… Better tell Dad before I kill him – he is tormenting me at present…

Craig said some other interesting things about Sonya - he reckons she is a hedgehog style writer "Many books, same story", every novel is the "unpeeling of every layer of that vision". I think he's right - wonder how Sonya will respond...

The Slap

The empty suburbs
propel them in a fruitless
quest for connection.

Yes, the demon haiku strikes again. Maybe it's better than the "reflection demon" which lurked the other morning - I caught sight of a middle-aged woman with fat arms, wearing my shirt, in the window of the train. Aaargh!

More of The Slap later, but it's definitely part of the zeitgeist. Let if be recorded that I didn't love it but I found the first two thirds quite engrossing...

What if?

You only had a few minutes to pack your bags and escape some horror. When I went overseas for the first time, I stored my first quilt and some photos with my friend Jane but I've become blase now and don't bother doing this when I travel. However, I would be upset if my jewellery, my photos and Dora's paintings went astray.

I've been thinking that one of the reasons I like reading history is that wondering about how I would've coped. Would I have been one of the first to die in the Holocaust or would I have been one of the SonderKommando? I think I would have been pathetic. I've been thinking about how people surrvive as I start Kokoda, a big fat book about WW11 and what happened just north of us.

It begins with the Reverend Nelson, a Christian missionary who, in the face of the Japanese anchoring just off shore, collects together his watch, tobacco, a notebook, pemcil, some hamkies and a compass. I like the inclusion of the hankies, I go into slight panic attack mode if I have no hanky. He is accompanied by 2 women; one of whom is called Mavis Parkinson who says "Scrummy! A real naval battle and we are here watching it. I do wish we knew if they are our troops." (They weren't!) Her colleague, May May Hayman collected up some cans of food in preparation for escape. Mavis took a change of clothes and Rev Benson also threw in some mosquito nest, old blankets and intriguingly, a square of calico. Mayber he was a closet quilter.

In contrast the Japanese troops had a big bag of rice, some bullets, 2 hand grenades, a steel helmet and a toothbrush. They were instructed that if they were thrown in the water, they were to sing songs until help came!

The locals were best prepared for any contingency. Some of the tribes had only just given up head-hunting but still had traditions of "living food", of keeping people alive and just slicing off a bit of leg or buttock when things got tough. I have no stomach for this sort of survival...

Rabbit

Returning to the haiku tradition for Rabbit Redux:

"Suck it and see" is what
Rabbit might have thought
If he thought at all.

Just finished Rabbit is Rich which I loved. Will post some more about this novel which is now almost 30 years old.

Rabbit again

I don’t remember reading Rabbit Redux when I was young and there is no copy at home. My 2008 copy has an image of a hand holding a chipped mug of coffee on the cover. The fingers are stained with printer’s ink but they look too small to be the hands of a former successful basketballer, as Harry was. Maybe they are the hands of his father who is a small but important character in the book. The image is kind of at odds with the drama of the book; the comforting domesticity of this working class image gives nothing away in terms of a story about the massive changes happening in American socitey, the shifts in the tectonic plates embodied in Harry's drift into experiments with drugs, new sexual partners and black consciousness. All this in Penn Villas, a new housing development on the edge of Brewer, Pennsylvania. (For some alternative covers, go here, here and here. I particularly like the Hangman cover.)

I stopped half way through the novel for a while. Harry spends much of the middle part of the story in a kind of loose vacuum. Like the first novel he is strikingly without agency; he floats into things without making real conscious decisions. Or if he is decisive, it’s quite short–term; should he have sex with Peggy Fosnacht that night? Actually it's not even that far ahead - it's more like should he have sex with Peggy Fosnacht, she has just unzipped her dress? Anatole Broyard, writing in 1971 when the novel was published says:

“He went back to Rabbit because he knew that it was too easy to have an intellectual or an artist as a hero. There is always a temptation to talk or think things out -- but with a guy like Rabbit, you have to act them out all the way, show what's happening to him, nakedly, without off-stage intellection or interpretation. The thought must be made flesh; the flesh, as in sex, made metaphor; the man in the street tormented into irony. Where Rabbit once ran away, he's now standing his ground, letting the world flow over and around him while he tries to keep his head above water.”

This is a fabulous description of what Updike is about in working with Rabbit.

I think, for a while, I found the drifting hard to read about. And I got sick of the black guy Skeeter. I think Updike wanted this effect but maybe he doesn’t want people to stop reading. I decided to have a break from reading Rabbit then really enjoyed it when I went back to it. Broyard reckons that Harry is climbing out on a limb (any limb, every limb) and swinging – trying to find something in the shifting morass that America is in. and trying to find traction for his own 36 year old self, fast wilting into middle age.

The three defining descriptors of American life in this book are the Vietnam War, the rise of black consciousness and the successful Apollo mission. (Interesting comparison the Space War and the Vietnam War)Other aspects also prevail like the ways in which middle class kids went searching for something different than their parent’s lives. Broyard has a nice way of describing this aspect of the book – Harry hooks up with a barely adult girl for a while: “In Jill, Updike explores the incompleteness -- in them and in ourselves -- that, like a vacuum, draws us toward very young girls.” Aaarrgh so scarily accurate, I think, about men.

I want to include a paragraph about sex so will edit this entry later; he writes so well about this business. What he also does well is the domestic; the fraught ties between Harry and his parents, the guilt and love, the depiction of both his parents is really exquisite. Then at the end, Stage Left: Mim, the sister, living the life not lived. Vivid, in-your-face Updike…

In deep waters

Been reading Tim Winton's early novel Shallows. Been wondering about the impact of being a copper's son - how it affects your childhood and how much it has impacted the content of his writing.

In terms of Shallows - I tried this haiku about it:

Tim is deeply suspicious
of small towns, especially
Ones where men hunt whales.

More later.

Netherland Part 11

Spring is coming to Melbourne and with it the great treat it is to sit outside in the sun and read for a few hours. On Friday I finished Netherland in the back garden with the jasmine about to go gangbusters and the cat lurking, a bit scared of the new crop of stray cats that have suddenly appeared with the warmer weather.

As I said in an earlier post, I loved going to bed to read this book. It’s set in the context of 9/11 in New York and a lot of reviewers have fixated on this but it seems to me that the novel is as much or more about the micro – about narrator Hans van den Broek and the wake up call that occurs in his life. In that way, 9/11 is a kind of large metaphor. How it works is this; after 9/11. Hans’ wife Rachel takes herself and their baby back to her country of birth, England. It has freaked her out; she doesn’t feel safe. Hans is left behind, renting an expensive apartment in the famous old Chelsea Hotel. “Over half the rooms were occupied by longterm residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I’d kept as a child.” It’s appropriate for him to be living in this sort of zoo; he is totally disconnected from his environment, family and sense of what is important.

I think women love stories about hapless men like this. Hans does futures predictions for the money market so even his job is totally disconnected from any sort of reality. I just wanted him to get himself sorted. In reality, I am not attracted to haplessness at all – I seem to like competent men who can do practical things. Hans would be extremely annoying.

He is the archetypal outsider. He is Dutch but has lived in London and now New York. He has no living family. He plays cricket which has got to be an outsider’s game in the Netherlands as it is America. His presence in the novel is matched by another outsider, Chuck Ramkissoon who is from Trinidad. He is a businessman who dabbles in dodgy deals as well as providing kosher sushi to the residents of Long Island. Chuck subscribes to the American dream – If you build it, they will come. He’s full of schemes. And subscribes to the mythology of cricket – we meet him when he intervenes when a gun is brandished at a cricket match with a lecture about the civilising impact of cricket.

And while the novel spends some time on cricket, it is really about family and identity. One of the most moving scenes in the novel is when Hans stalks his far-away son and wife via Google Earth, tracking down to the roof line of their house, searching for signs of life; signs that he was part of their life and signs of their abandonment of him. We can be increasingly in pixilated contact with anyone but how do we really make contact or have intimacy? Which is the real story of the book. For the greater part of the book, Hans has more contact with Chuck than with anyone else in his life. It’s a novel about a man finding out what is important. Let me give an example of how he writes about this:

“…our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessman. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but its the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgemental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy. This chronic and I think, peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection which bonds so many of us, but such affection depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I; neither pressed the other on delicate subjects.” (p158)

The novel is also about identity. The title reminds us that this area of the United States was originally called New Netherland. Wikipedia says that “New Netherland has left a profoundly enduring legacy on both American cultural and political life. Perhaps most significant was the impact of cultural and religious tolerance which led to a wealth of diversity in New Amsterdam.” The attack on 9/11 is partly about the politics of identity, about demonisation, about marginalisation. About being outsiders. Young disconnected men.

Hans is a global citizen; the anchors of family are gone, he can work anywhere. Information and culture have been globalised. In an interview, the author, who has Irish and Turkish heritage, who grew up in the Netherlands and Britain, who works in New York said that half way through writing it, he realised that the plot is the same as The Great Gatsby. He said that it’s about “...saying goodbye to Gatsby, Gatsby lived in an America which no longer exists”. It pays homage to the great tradition in American novels and political life – the dream. And thinking about the language used around the current US elections, the notion of the American dream is still so potent. If it were a tag cloud, it would be huge. For both Obama and McCain. Its worth looking at the American cover of the book - a pastoral idyll and comparing it with the one I bought. They tell very different stories. On my cover, there is a cropped image of someone, probably male, skating. It may be on thin ice or it may reference the more nostalgic parts of Hans' childhood. It's edgy and energetic in a way that the US cover is not.

Finally the writing. Dwight Garner, writing for the International Herald Tribune says that O’Neill is “incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought,...(e.g.)he's writing about dating ("We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically")”. Like me he really loved the book but O'Neill's style won’t be for everyone. “But here's what "Netherland" surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”

Another columnist, Sean O'Hagen, has written an interesting article about the novel and its fascination with cricket - it's worth reading it just for his list of great novels which are about sport. He says it recalls "John Updike's paeans to basketball that run like an elegy for lost youth, and lost Americal innocence, through his epic series of Rabbit novels." It made me remember the great passsages in Couples; the Sunday afternoon basketball matches where everything seems to be at stake in a way that it NEVER would be for Hans. Where is his testosterone?

For me, it’s about the desolation of life, of relationship, of work which has no meaning or value. Desolation in Nether nether land…

And finally, to amuse myself before I went to sleep, I made a haiku - seems a bit naff to include it here but hey - it's my blog.

Post 9/11

Hans foolishly substituted

Cricket for marriage.