Floodline - Kathryn Heyman

This is my first time reading Kathryn Heyman, and not to be my last.  I very much enjoyed the feeling of safety that comes from being in the hands of someone who is confident in what they're doing. This is Kathryn's fifth published novel, and it feels like it.

Which is good, because she tackles a few large subjects of biblical proportions - floods, like, and loss, and disasters and faith.  Different types of faith. 

There's the faith that sometimes comes easily and sometimes is lost just as easily.  It's a faith that looks like faith but sometimes it can really just be a cover for something else, or someone else, or for not acting.  And then there's the faith that is also lost easily - faith in life, in humanity.  It's easy in our everyday world to be cynical and think that that has entirely eroded.  People, after all, as a community, to turn to when you need them, can be very disappointing. They do not want to see your suffering.  We do not know, in our culture, how to handle another's suffering very well.  We do not know how to handle each other very well.

Horneville is flooded.  And the waters keep on rising around the hospital where Gina Donaldson works as a nurse.  She's a good one, too.  She is able to provide care for patients along with the requisite detachment that is required to stop you from burning out.  Gina's problem isn't detaching.  It's detaching too much.  And then really, Gina feels like she burned out years ago.

Mikey Brown has faith in spades.  Or at least she thought she did.  The host of the Shop for Jesus channel, Mikey's refuge has become NuDay, the megachurch began by her and her then-husband as a house church in their lounge room, but which sprung out into monolithic status by the vision of their pastor, Gary, who wanted to do big things for God.  The result is NuDay, a sprawling complex of thousands of members.

Mikey is lonely.  It's just hard to realise it.

With NuDay, you were never alone.  Each day was stretched full with work for the ministry; by the time Mikey had given her hours in the NuDay store, then worked on designs for the services, gathered together the children's worship resources, filmed Shop for Jesus - well, she didn't have a lot of time left over to feel alone.  Silence didn't come into it much, either - what with prayer and song and thankfulness and praise.  Without silence, it got pretty easy not to notice whether you were lonely.

Mikey was originally going to travel to Horneville to protest against the gay pride march occurring there, to make a stand.  But then when news of the flood came, her and Gary decided instead to use the care packages they had put together for overseas aid and use them instead in Horneville.  So Mikey and her two sons, Talent and Mustard, drive the packages down there.

What Mikey and Gina both find within this disaster zone, amongst awful death and suffering, is renewal, and hope.  

This version of the book came to Kathryn after she'd already written 60,000 words:

It dawned on Kathryn Heyman way too late that she had it all wrong. The novel she was writing about a woman called by God to take her sons on a road trip around Australia was unsparing in its portrait of certain absurdities of charismatic Christianity. But it lacked something. It lacked love. And there was another treacherous thought that, try as she might, she could not swat away.

 "In that earlier book, I had a lot about the church and about setting off - and the church dynamic was a much bigger story and, really, right towards the end, I had this tiny moment in the hospital,'' Heyman says.

''I had read a report about the events that happened in Memorial [Medical Centre] in New Orleans and I was haunted by it. It was a life-or-death situation where the medical staff had to make extreme ethical decisions. It was a horrible feeling; I got to the end of the draft and thought, 'That's the moment; that's where the novel is.' I've never done this before. I threw away 60,000 words.'' (excerpt from Linda Morris's interview in The Age).

That's the thing about criticising - it's hard to do it without ending up seeming somehow as shabby as the thing you're criticising.  It's easy, after all to stand against things, but just that much harder to actually stand for stuff.  And charismatic Christianity is surely an easy potshot.  So if Heyman needed to throw 60,000 words away to find a greater level of compassion, then it was worth it, because she doesn't come across as judgmental.  The brush strokes with which she paints Mikey are just as generous, well-rounded and compassionate as they are for the other characters in the book.

Book Review - My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

This year I am taking part in the Australian Women Writers Challenge, which encourages people to read (and optionally review) books written by Australian women.  The AWWC came about in response to the results of the 2011 VIDA count, which analyses gender ratios in publishing industries in the northern hemisphere.  It found that there is a glaring disparity in the ratio of women to men both reviewing books and having their books reviewed.  And so the AWWC came about as a way for more women's work to get out there.  And so here I am.

Running alongside the AWWC is the Stella Prize, a literary award begun in partial response to the VIDA count of 2010.  It is ironically named after Miles Franklin - full name Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin - whose novel My Brilliant Career was published in Australia in 1901 when she was 21 years old.  Stella provided in her will for an annual literary award recognising Australian writers, and the Miles Franklin Award is now considered to be Australia's most prestigious literary award.  The Stella Prize began, irony of ironies, in response to the bias found in Australia not only within the publishing industry but in the Miles Franklin Award itself, where in its 55-year history only 10 women have won the prize.

So I decided that I would go back to the crux of those two awesome enterprises and read My Brilliant Career itself.  All I really knew about the book was that it had been made into a film starring Judy Davis.  The irony of the title was lost on me - it was originally titled with a question mark, which the publishers removed, much to Stella's chagrin, and so for years I had this strange idea that this book was about some woman who managed to get herself an awesome job back in the times when women often didn't have one.

The history of this book reads like a bit of a dream - it was Stella's first published book, at 21, after she sent the manuscript to Henry Lawson.  The book's popularity in Australia led to her withdrawing it from circulation until after her death because of the distress she felt when people assumed certain characters in the book to be like her real-life family and friends.  A bit of an occupational hazard when so much of the story obviously is autobiographical, but very understandable for her to feel distress that those close to her, like her parents, were likened to those in her story.

If you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, you should sometimes also not judge it by its opening paragraph.  The first chapter begins with:

'Boo hoo!  Ow, ow; Oh!  Me'll die.  Book, hoo.  The pain, the pain!  Boo, hoo!'

Not the most compelling hook into the book, and surely not a very accurate depiction of a three-year old Sybylla, but it gets better.  Because while the opening paragraph doesn't do a very good job of foreshadowing its contents, the teenage narrator does a very good job at depicting herself, a character who apparently shared many autobiographical traits with her creator.  A feisty feminist, and an atheist to boot, Sybylla knows her own mind when many of those around her insist that a woman knowing her own mind is a sacreligious act.

The curse of Eve being upon my poor mother in those days, she was unable to follow her husband [into town to pick him up from the pub, where he'd been drinking his woes and the family's money away for a couple of days].  Pride forbade her appealing to her neighbours, so on me devolved the duty of tracking my father from one pub to another and bringing him home.

Had I done justice to my mother's training I would have honoured my paternal parent in spite of all this, but I am an individual ever doing things I oughtn't at the time I shouldn't.

Sybylla yearns for that which lies not only beyond the realm in which she finds herself, a penniless daughter of a squattocracy family fallen, but also beyond the realm of her society.  Though women were to achieve the vote in 1902, a year after the book was published, they were still front and square considered by society on the whole to be helpmeets for men. 

I controlled myself instantly and waited expectantly.  What would she say?  Surely not that tame old yarn anent this world being merely a place of probation, wherein we were allowed time to fit ourselves for a beautiful world to come.  That old tune may be all very well for old codgers tottering on the brink of the graves, but to young persons with youth and romance and good health surging through their veins, it is most boresome.  Would she preach that it was flying in the face of providence to moan about my appearance? it being one of the greatest blessings I had, as it would save me from countless temptations to which pretty girls are born.  That was another piece of old croaking of the Job's comforter order, of which I was sick unto death, as I am sure there is not an ugly person in the world who thinks her lack of beauty a blessing to her.  

So much of Sybylla's striving is against the restrictions of the day upon her wild soul, and her desire for romance in all its forms is hindered in the man stakes by her corresponding repulsion at the thought of being kept by a man like a cow.  Though Harold Beacham is a catch in the district, he does not ever manage to catch Sybylla.  Almost, but no cigar.

Sybylla's desires for more from life come at a time when such a desire is considered to be a striving above your station.  So much of the cultural imperative to be ever busy and productive and to know your place back then was fuelled by moral directives driven by cultural Christianity (and by necessity in Sybylla's family's case); 110 years later it's the god of economics that still drives us all like slaves to the status quo. Some things never change, they only change their outward appearance.

Sybylla escapes for a time the monotony of a subsistence life in Possum Gully cleaning the hearth and polishing the saucepans when she is farmed out to live with her aunt and grandmother for a time in the big smoke of Sydney.  It is here that she finds time and space for the things that she craves - conversation that's not about farming, music, literature.  The world of ideas and intelligence, and of beauty and romance too:

I was decked in my first evening dress, as it was a great occasion.  It was only on the rarest occasion that we donned full war-paint at Caddagat.  I think that evening dress is one of the prettiest and most idiotic customs extant.  What can be more foolish than to endanger one's health by exposing at night the chest and arms - two of the most vital spots of the body - which have been covered all day? 

There is so much that is endearing about Sybylla, and so much that still speaks to me today.  How different my life is from hers, in so many ways.  In some instances I feel more constrained than she did, which seems ridiculous upon first thought, but perhaps it's simply an effect of living under a panopticon eye in an uber-monitored world.  I don't know.

Sybylla is the ultimate duck out of water, and is good reading even now, in an era so vastly different from hers, and which has made so many gains in some ways, for those who feel themselves ducks out of water in their own times and who seek for more beauty beyond what has been ordained by the powers that be.

Oh, how I envied them their ignorant contentment!  They were as ducks on a duck-pond;  but I was as a duck forced for ever to live in a desert, ever wildly longing for water, but never reaching it outside of dreams.

Whatever systemic and social changes differ between Sybylla and me, the beauty and space and time that Sybylla yearns for in which to think, to write and to be her own person remain my own.  That fight, to claim the space that is your self, whether fuelled by internal or external forces, goes on.

Sybylla's youthful tenacity and guts was revivifying for this young crone. 

Tantony - Ananda Braxton-Smith

I could only think about my brother from a distance.  From a distance he could be an idiot or a son-of-the-moon;  from a distance but a different angle he could be a prophet and a Venerable.  Right up close to him, though, he was just a mess of whittering and birdshit - and with my face, too.

He'd taken our face to town, into the market and the harbour, and he'd done and said such things as made folk stare at me slip-eyed and mutter.  I'd learned to sit dumb as rock and deaf as bugs.

After a while longer I'd learned to hurl my mind-eye away.

Faraway.  Into the clouds and out to where the sea and sky meet.  Out there I could snug into the skytowers, see only my feet dangling, hear only the winds rushing.  Faraway, there was only the blue water spreading far below, my legs swinging above, between them just clouds and seabirds.

Tantony by Ananda Braxton-Smith makes me yearn for somewhere I've never been and which doesn't exist, but whose scent nevertheless comes in on the occasional breeze.  Her writing is so densely layered, like a decades-old compost heap, rich and earthy.  I read books too greedily, consuming them like a Westerner, eager for the next sentence so that while my racing mind thinks, "I didn't quite get all of the gristle out of that last para; I should go back and read it again,"  by then I'm already halfway through the next, swallowed by the too-small seconds of life, eating the words whole without chewing.  Ananda's writing is so lush that I actually want to go back again, just to roll the words round in my mouth one more time, to be a little startled by what I see upon second chewing.  No mean feat.

Characters feel defined and at the same time mysterious and shifting.  Boson Quirk is half in this world and half in the next.  His increasingly bizarre behaviour (bipolar psychosis we would probably call it today) put them on the outside with the townsfolk, and now his twin sister Fermion has begun hearing the voices that haunted her brother before the bog swallowed him whole.  Dreams and visions versus mental illness;  a desire to understand the real beyond the superstition, to find that which she can stand on through the harshness of the world, swirl around Fermion as she sets out on a journey of her own to try to find some answers about her brother, herself, her family, and how to keep them from falling apart.  The setting is dreamy, where everything blends into one so that your footing in the story feels sometimes as precarious as the bog upon which the fictional Carrick stands.  Ananda's writing shines different lights from different angles so that I suspect she would achieve fresh-seeing and poetry and otherworldliness via a novel set in contemporary times.  I would really love to read that.

Though I didn't want to leave here.  This is the second book in the Secrets of Carrick series.  The protagonist of Merrow, the first book in the series, Neen, lives in the village of the island of Carrick while in Tantony the Quirks live on the outskirts in the bog.  All three books in the series are stand-alone stories, occurring over one summer in the fictional Middle Ages island of Carrick.

Fermion's poetic tongue that gives an otherworldly feel to the prose.  Braxton-Smith's sentences drip beauty and dreamy, and have that "once upon a time" feel of the fairytale where time is both nowhere and somewhere, inside and outside.  Not everybody's cup of tea I'm sure, but it's what makes this book so beautiful to me, a meditative slow-down. 

Having said all of that, it always amazes me how it has to be the right time for you and a story to come together and alchemise.  When I first read Merrow last year something fell flat for me in its reading.  Whether digestive, hormonal, seasonal or mental I can't rightly say.  But with Tantony, I was there.

This book is categorised for ages 13-19 years but it defies that categorisation.  I'm 42 and I can't wait for the next installment. It doesn't feel just like a book for young adults.  It feels ageless.  If there are any adults who are resisting reading fiction that is categorised as young adult, there are a lot of wonderful books you are missing out on.   This is one of them.

Part of the Australian Women
Writers Challenge 2013

At the expense of digression I must say that I knew Ananda in another life.  But still I would praise this book even if her, Peggy Hailstone and I were not fellow students together at Deakin Uni in the late 1990's, a triumvirate of mature-aged Creative Writing students in a mass of young 'uns.  I live in the same area now as she did when I sat in her kitchen eating homemade basil pesto and pasta, and I have a horrid, horrid feeling swirling in the pit of my guts that the person I saw smiling at me outside the supermarket one day a year or so ago was Ananda.  But (a) I was having a bad, bad day and (b) I am awful with memory, faces and names and (c) I'm vague as to be almost useless.  On that day I was feeling weird and depressed and paranoid, and I made the snap assumption that the woman smiling at me was either (i) mad or (ii) mistaking me for someone else and so (rather strange behaviour for me) I put my head down and walked into the supermarket.  It took two weeks for me to link the face with my bog-crap memory so that one day, driving down the road, Ananda's name swirled to me out of the mists of the late 90's.  Now, looking at her photo in this interview, I am rather perturbed that it was in fact her.  And so I just want to take the opportunity to say that if that was you, Ananda, I apologise, from the midsts of my premenopause and pyroluria to say sorry for being such a weird, rude ole cow :)

Eat, Pray, Love? Or Drink, Smoke, Pass Out

Drink Smoke Pass Out by Judith Lucy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If self-deprecation wasn't Judith Lucy's stock in trade, I'd understand her employing it for this book.  After all, she is talking about things which require ironical quotes around them - things like "soul," "energy," "consciousness."  Things that can make you feel like a right dickhead talking about them, especially (and still) in Australia.

Apart from pretty stuff we might post on Facebook, it's not like we have very easily recognised cultural containers for easy discussion about the spiritual aspect to life.  Like so many things it has been commodified, flattened out to be just one more ... thing.  One more choice for a flaky selection of the community.

Still, I love to try to talk about it.  But my blog provides ample posts as evidence for the difficulty of pulling it off without sounding like a bit of a nong.  And so I really understand Judith Lucy's desire to write around this area and the angst it must have caused her in doing so.  Every time I go back and read anything I've written that tries to name a spiritual experience, I cringe.  I feel pulled in two directions because I identify again with what I've tried to describe about that beautiful and mysterious space, while at the same time part of me is desperate to hit the delete key so nobody else reads this totally sappy drivel.  There is never a writing space that you can feel as vulnerable with as this - or as easily misunderstood.

Spirituality is a little like being in love.  When you're in it, you're swimming in it and it's the world.  And those people who are looking in on your pool thinking you're deluded - well, they're just jealous because their skin's dry, right?  And yet when you're out of that space and in a more mundane one - an hour later while you're cooking dinner or sitting in traffic - it's quite easy to believe that that space is really just a dumb and wanky mirage.

Which is why I so enjoyed Judith's book and the way she pokes fun at spirituality and at herself.  There's something about her self-deprecation that makes the book even more lovely.

I'm very grateful to my mind.  It's helped me put on pants and write the odd joke, but it can also be a bit like Mickey Rourke's face - an inexplicable, disturbing mess.

It's Judith's crazy monkey-mind, the death of her parents and the refusal of career, relationships, the bottle and the bong to provide fulfilling answers that set her to wondering about some of those bigger questions.

As part of Judith Lucy's Spiritual Journey she went on a Buddhist meditation retreat.  The schedule makes you gulp - 10 hours of meditation for 10 days, no talking, reading, writing, yoga or music.

Day four was a nightmare.  It was like all my negative thoughts got together and had a huge party.  I knew I had some self-loathing issues, but this was like watching my mental dialogue under a microscope, while stoned on some hydroponic grass. It was so relentless that I remember thinking it was futile to even imagine I could change my life.  Why not just go back to wiping myself out, if this was the alternative?  It was just my usual string of personal abuse (you're stupid, you're ugly and - one of my father's favourite lines - why can't you be more like Tina Arena?), but I had nothing to distract me from these thoughts and it made me feel completely helpless.  If my negative mind and I had been engaged in some sort of battle, it had definitely won.  I really couldn't see how things would ever improve, and yet the next day was completely different.  The thoughts were still there but they didn't bother me anymore.  I could sit back and watch them come and go and not get involved, and I actually started to experience tiny breaks in the relentless flow.

The title of this book is a parody of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, a book that graces my bookshelves, and some of which I loved, some of which was awfully tedious and not a little pretentious, the author having my own same tendency to sometimes take herself just a little bit too seriously.  But what I got from Eat, Pray, Love is ultimately what I got from Drink, Smoke, Pass Out, and with a hell of a lot more fun, only a little less sugary sweet, with a shitload more swear words and references to dicks and brutal, blatant honesty, all in Judith's particularly endearing and irreverent style.  This book is fun.

The piece of this book that I loved the most was at the end, and I hesitate to include it here because it was so lovely coming upon it myself.  Judith hesitated to include it because she didn't want you to think she was a crackpot or tripping on acid, but it sums up what I loved most about this book - the fact that we are all mental in rather more than one way, struggling to hold our shit together, making it up as we go along.  The culture in which we are forced to live cast us in the harshest light one to another.  We are pitted like enemies against each other and against ourselves but still, despite all of that, there is this space that we all experience at times, when we are totally here, and maybe even feel like we're bumping up against something else, a space which I think cultures previous to ours and closer to the ground knew more intimately than we:

"... it probably lasted about two hours.  I was completely there.  It felt like my senses were all on overdrive - I could feel every little breeze, hear every tiny noise and I was simply drunk on what my eyes were seeing.  Every plant or flower, every ray of light that bounced off a surface was just amazing.  I felt like I was moving in slow motion.  At one point, I passed through a street market and felt completely connected to every person there.  Some classical music was playing and it felt like everyone was engaged in some giant choreographed number, where we were all doing exactly what we were meant to be doing.  That feeling continued when I saw people walking in the park and when I picked up a ball to hand it back to a father who was playing with his little girl.  Everything felt exactly right.  We were all part of something much larger, and it was perfect.  I've never felt such a feeling of wellbeing.  I've never felt such pure happiness.  It did feel like a drug, and towards the end of it, I panicked ...  It was so different from anything that I'd felt before and I think I worried that if it didn't end, I would somehow not get back to my old life.  It's nuts, but it was like I thought I'd be locked in the Narnia wardrobe forever.  I haven't experienced anything like it since and I still can't really explain it.  Okay, now someone can call an ambulance."

What I love about this book is she is so real.  There's no ethereal sitting up in the skies having your shit together.  As Judith says herself:

I'm not living in a cave in the Himalayas, I'm single and I still drink (sometimes I still drink a lot).  But I am less fucked up, and I thought, why not share a story that's sort of about spirituality, but doesn't take itself too seriously, and has no eating, less praying and loving, and a lot more drinking, smoking and passing out, because if my tale didn't have those elements, it would just be a pamphlet.

View all my reviews

Past the Shallows - Favel Parrett

The term "Wintonesque" was woven more than once through the reviews at the front of this first published novel by Aussie female writer Favel Parrett.  It's not just the parallels in writing style and content - the surf, the beautiful, redemptive surf - but it's also in the narrator's eye.  There's a kindly benevolence in both writers, a certain compassion.

There's a childlikeness about compassion.  But in an age of stiff egos and parasitic capitalism anything childlike can easily be mistaken for weakness and taken advantage of.  But compassion is like the sway in the bridge - its weakness is its strength.

Contrast that with the small turning circle that is the emotional life of the boys' father.  He is one of those people who is there even when he's not, permeating the air with the threat of the violence that's borne out of desperation, betrayal and lack of vision.  Joe, the oldest son, is almost gone from this isolated part of southern Tasmania, in the boat it's taken him years to build.  Joe is going before he gets stuck here forever.

Miles, the middle son, is only 13 but he can feel himself getting stuck here already.  Being forced to go out on the boat to keep an eye out while his Dad fishes for illegal abalone, Miles is alternately solidifying into the earth like concrete, and drowning in the sea.  Except for when he's surfing.  That's the only time he feels free.

He sat back behind the break, looked back towards the beach.  Joe was only just coming down the track, but he was strong.  He paddled quick and he'd be out in no time.  Miles turned his head to the horizon and grinned.  A good-sized line, maybe a four-footer, hit the reef and began to peel.  Sometimes you didn't have to move an inch.  The shoulder of the wave lifted his board;  he looked down the clean face and took the drop.  Miles felt his bones.  He carved along the wave nice and loose, flicked up with sharp cutbacks every so often to bring him back up onto the shoulder.  He heard Joe hooting from the beach and he knew he was charging.

The sea flows right through this book - its dangers and its depths, about those who are sucked under and who suck others under in turn, and about the beauty you feel when you know how to ride the waves, .


The heart of this story though is Harry.  Seven year old Harry.  But you'll find that out for yourself.

Amazon link.

Australian Women Writers Challenge

I have signed up this year for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.  The challenge is to commit to reading - and preferably reviewing - a certain amount of Australian women writers over the year.  Elizabeth Luedge began the challenge last year in response to the fact that male writers are more likely to be reviewed than female writers around the world, including this country.

And so here is the mixed bag of books I am planning on reading and reviewing for the year (mostly adult fiction, but also some YA, children's, fantasy and non-fiction):

• Anna Funder - All That I Am
• Helen Garner - The Children's Bach (a reread, seeing last time I read it I was chronically fatigued and now, years later, my memory is so bad that I can't even remember it)
• Margo Lanagan - Sea Hearts
• Geraldine Brooks - People of the Book
• MJ Hyland - How the Light Gets In
• Leanne Hall - This is Shyness
• Alice Pung - Her Father's Daughter
• Chardi Christian - The Selkie and the Fisherman
• Enza Gandolfo - Swimming
• Elizabeth Harrower - The Watch Tower
• Simmone Howell - Notes from the Teenage Underground
• Kylie Ladd - After the Fall
• Favel Parrett - Past the Shallows
• Ananda Braxton-Smith - Tantony

Lists can be deceiving, can't they.  You would think by looking at mine that I'm a connoisseur of Australian women's writers.  The reality is that I don't recognise many of these writers' names, let alone would know whether they are Australian.  I certainly wouldn't know any of them if I accidentally fell over them in the street.  (Well, except for Helen Garner, of course, and I would, like, totally, like, be so embarrassed if I fell on Helen Garner in the street 'cause, like, I would squeal a lot.  And I would probably recognise Ananda Braxton-Smith, because I went to uni with her back in the late '90s.  But it was a while ago now, and I have such a bad memory that maybe I wouldn't recognise her either).

So while I'm a bit self-conscious about my measly ability to be able to name Australian women writers, I am very happy that when I consulted my ongoing and regularly updated Books to Read list that there happened to be so many Aussie women writers on there.