Bleak...

Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I started this novel because I’ve just been to Tasmania where it’s set but was immediately filled with a sense of bleakness and found it hard to come to the novel willingly. You know, from the very first pages, that what the characters face is grim and that there may be no redemption or hope. And I won’t spoil the plot to say more about this. What I want to stress about the novel is how good it is.
It’s a debut novel, it’s slight in length and sparingly told. It reminded me of the outset of Cormac McCarthy, because it is about men and boys, but more importantly because it takes no prisoners. Ultimately I couldn’t put it down though I wanted to look away at times. The story revolves around three brothers and their dysfunctional father, a fisherman in the southernmost part of Tassie. In my recent travels there we went on a boat eco tour along the coast – from Adventure Bay down to the seals at the base of the south island. If you go south from there, there’s very little between you and the Antarctic. The water is deep and wild, with big kelp forests, mile long swells, seals and as many albatross as I have ever seen. Bruny Island, along with the Tasmanian mainland, is the setting for this novel and very beautifully described too. We were lucky enough to see it when it was calm, and when it was angry.
The environment is significant to the novel but so are hidden secrets of this small community that emerge during the narrative. I was scared reading it – the father is violent and it reminded me of things that have happened in my own extended family. Of how scary men can be when they drink and are out of control. The writer manages to build our connection with the two young boys who live with their father, even though the prose is sparse. (A minor quibble; I thought the surfing scenes were a little gushy and over lyrical, but I am not a surfer and the writer is. I preferred the way that Malcolm Know wrote about surfing in his recent novel ‘The Life’.) I hope to read more from her.


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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."

A crying shame?

What have these two films got in common – The Burning Man and A Single Man? Two things. The actor Matthew Goode and the theme – grief. (I don’t want to spoil the plot of The Burning Man for you so I will try to avoid saying much more about it here but it may be hard to be totally oblique so don’t read any more if you plan on seeing it.)

About half way through The Burning Man I started to think about the best films about grief and A Single Man was the first film that entered my head. It’s in the acting; Firth manages to convey grief and anger with a look or slow movement of the body or delivery of a sentence and in the degree to which it explores his character and that of the female lead in the film (we care about them, dysfunctional as they are). Both films are also highly stylised but this stylisation works in one film but not in the other. I thought about the reasons for quite a while after watching The Burning Man.

I am the person in the dark in the cinema who reaches first for the hankie. I am often embarrassed at how easily I cry (I find it difficult to watch any of the Olympics without tearing up. The ABC news can be an emotional whirlpool.) So why no tears over this one? The Burning Man opens with a series of fragmented scenes. We see chef Tom (Matthew Goode) in road rage, in his restaurant, running down the corridor of a hospital yelling, being escorted by two men in security uniforms. He is a man filled with rage. (And libido – the opening scene is of his bottom quivering as he masturbates.) The reasons for the rage are not clear – the film moves back and forward in time forcing the viewer to really concentrate.

Rage is an unattractive thing – unless we can empathise with it – (The “I’m Mad as Hell and not going to take it any more” scene, almost any early Jack Nicholson, George Kostanza on a good day). So there’s a man, out of control with anger. When he’s not being angry, the camera gazes soulfully at him. I use that phrase deliberately – the camera person (or maybe the editor) is in love with this actor and the gaze of the camera lingers often and unnecessarily on Goode, who is very good looking in a tragic wild man careful one-day growth kind of way. He’s sad, he’s angry, he’s dysfunctional. Interestingly (for what it says about me), I empathised with the main character Tom only three times in the film – and most strongly when he runs amok at a picnic of strangers and throws their food all over the park. I should have felt more for this character but was unable to.

There was something missing from the film and I think, oddly, that the element is tension. Where a film is an “emotional journey”, as this one is, there is usually an element of tension, of waiting for an outcome or for something to emerge. The first part of the film has this – as we strain to make sense of the fragments. But once the storyline is clear, there is almost nothing there. What happens is predictable. Typing this makes me feel like I’m not doing the film justice but the main character is not interesting or conveyed in enough depth to pull the story along. We don’t see enough of pre-angry Tom and his life to feel the contrast. There are anodyne scenes with his wife/ girlfriend where they go mussel hunting which look a little like Tourism NSW ads, they are not particularly interesting or convincing. His pre-angry life is annoyingly good looking and bland. I would have preferred Goode to be a little more haggard as well; his looks and the lingering gaze of the camera distracted from whatever emotion he was trying to convey. Many shots were very self-conscious, look at me, look at the art kind of shots. This film maker needs to go look at some Kelly Reichart and Koreada films to learn how to tell an emotional story minimally.

A lot of reviews have talked about the initial non-linear mode of story telling (popular this year – Jane Eyre, We Need To Talk About Kevin); Leigh Paatsch, a reviewer said: "It might be an unfair comparison, but another new release this week, We Need to Talk About Kevin, delivers a virtual masterclass in non-linear storytelling." Paatsch is right about this; the Kevin film works very effectively fragmenting the plot to build tension and to delay the ‘money shot’ of that film (which incidently is also about grief and anger and where Tilda Swinton looks completely frumpy and undone by these emotions). The director of The Burning Man Jonathan Teplitzky said that he wanted the fragments to resemble the kind of chaos that might plague someone like Tom. In this way it is effective although Paatsch also says “Burning Man features an audacious structure that makes it seem more interesting than it is.” The director says, in an interview with The Australian, "I wanted the film to be visceral and emotional over a heavily plotted film," he says. "I was very conscious of writing like that because I wanted the structure of the film to tell as much as anything else about the emotional and psychological state of the character." Visceral, this film isn’t, despite the actual offal that plays a bit role in the film.

In summary, I agree with this assessment from FilmInk: "Unfortunately, he's (Goode) undone somewhat by the film itself, which is over directed, too proud of itself, and utterly enamoured with its main character's destructive personality." It's a shame - I wanted to like it more.

The Bad Cunt ambition

Like Samson and Delilah, Toomelah opens with a “waking up” shot. I’m beginning to feel like it’s a bit of a cliché in these kinds of low socio-economic contexts (also used in Blessed). It enables the cinematographer to pan around the home surroundings and give the viewer quite a lot of additional information before any of the action begins. The camera pans over cheap trophies won by a boxer (Daniel’s father), tracks along the cracked plasterboard and the rumpled bodies sleeping in the house. We see 10 year old Daniel wake up slowly and begin his day searching fruitlessly for money in his mother’s wallet. Toomelah is a real Aboriginal community on the border of NSW and Qld. The mother of the film-maker, Ivan Sen, grew up there so he had good links back into this community and it shows.

I wanted to see this film because I thought it might fit into the neo-neo realism genre. Relevant examples of this genre include Treeless Mountain (Korea) and Nobody Knows (Japan). Both of these films are concerned with the idea of children who have been abandoned by their parents. In both films, the children have a “problem” to solve that ensures that the audience is drawn into the film. A lot of the dramatic tension is in their management of the problem – surviving without appropriate adult support.

There is not the same sense of urgency in Toomelah, though Daniel is at risk because of the remoteness of his mother and the incapacities of his father who is an alcoholic. In almost all ways, he is more at risk than the children in those other films because his immediate environment is filled with trouble. He is disconnected from school, the elder in his family who is capable of providing support (his Gran) has other family business occupying her head space, and the most welcoming ‘family’ in town is a group of small-time drug dealers. Constantly in the film Daniel is asked “Where you goin’ bro?” “Nowhere.” Correct. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. The urgency of those other two films cannot be sustained in this aimless, deprived backwater. (And yet the question of deprivation is problematised – the school is modern and appears caring and other children appear with protective adults.)

As with the other neo-neo realist films, the camera lingers over landscape and character. Nothing happens fast – we can soak up the ennui of the day. Daniel was not a professional actor but manages to fill the screen with his personality – a withdrawn but feisty mix of bravado and deprivation. He wants to be a “bad cunt” but also yearns for contact. Reviewers have compared this to Samson and Delilah (this film is much better in my view because, as this reviewer says, “Toomelah has issues that Sen can tick off, "from deaths in custody to education to cultural extinction, unemployment, substance abuse, stolen generations". But although these are all woven into the fabric of the film, Sen has no interest in setting an agenda. "I wanted to make a film that was truthful to a little boy's experience of his world." (Read more) That lack of an agenda makes this a better film. It has a documentary-like quality that is deepened through the use of many non-professional actors.

Paul Byrnes, writing in The Age, said “The more recent films by Aboriginal filmmakers such as Here I Am (Beck Cole) and Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton) are noticeably internal. They do not look for outsiders to blame. There's a subtle reduction in the politics of victimhood that many black films used to carry as freight, unintentionally or not. There is more humour too, at least some of the time. Toomelah is like that. It offers us glimpses of a world most of us can never enter. That's the kind of thing that only film can do.” The school library has a large pin-up board with photographs of indigenous people through the history of the town and the mission which preceded it. Daniel’s gaze lingers on the men, proud looking men with shields and hunting materials or men loaded into a truck, clearly on the way to work somewhere. It is unclear what the modern context has to offer Daniel, except life as a bad cunt.

There is no sentimentality or manipulation in this film; things are what they are. The outcomes for Daniel are unclear. But for a short time, we’ve lived in his space.