I really wanted to love this book, hard. The main idea of it really tickled my fancy. Rachel Hudson dies of cystic fibrosis at 27. What she leaves behind in her will, from the very small estate she accumulated over her small collection of working years, is money transferred into instructions for her mother, Beth, and her brother, Matthew. Rachel was a spirited type, the antithesis of her anxious mum, who uses her faith to hide from life, and her disconnected brother, who hasn't found his place.
<blockquote>Despite her disease, Rachel had not resisted the travel bug; instead she had packed her illness into her luggage like a bulky and inappropriate souvenir bought too early in one's journey. Her medication and her portable vaporiser packed deep into her backpack, she had set off to Europe, Asia. The postcards that had accumulated on the fridge, Beth had, upon their arrival, placed carefully in a shoebox under her bed. Beth had wondered if this shoebox might one day be some tangible object that she might need to caress, in the absence of her wild daughter, found dead and raped in some horrendous city on the other side of the world.</blockquote)
Brian, the family's father and husband and the focus of the prologue, has disappeared years ago, the aftershocks from the Vietnam War untethering him from the ground that would have kept him in the place he wanted to be.
Each character was reasonably drawn. I got a feel for each one that they were real, whole people, except perhaps for Beth's faith, which seems to be somewhat of a caricature.
But it's the language and the grammar that broke this for me. I lose concentration when a sentence does not have an end enclosing comma separating a phrase. I lose concentration when those commas are then placed in other spots they're not meant to go. There was a repetitive use of the characters names that with a little work could have been smoothed.
Which is a shame, because this book could have been something special. I would love to have seen this book given extra airing time, laid aside for a few months until that last hard edit. There were glimpses of possibility here and there, in a turn of phrase ("She had called upon her faith to hold her. It was a rope she could latch on to. A thread. She could weave herself in to it, and settle in the twine") and a turn of plot, and in the drawings of the Pilbara, but these were overridden by clunky phrasing and a particularly implausible plot twist towards the end.
Not all novels have to be literary. (And I guess if I had to define what I read it's the stuff that verges closer to the literary than mainstream). Not everything has to be literary. But everything has to be as good as it can be.
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Caramel tastes best with salt. And this book is nothing like boring. It's the way fairytales are meant to be, with light, with a bit of dirt, with high-note sweet, midline vanilla, and a few bottom notes of aching grief.
Reservoir Dad isn't a fairytale or a fable, though. It's a life. Five of them, joined together. Clint Greagen lives in Reservoir, in Melbourne's slightly-inner north. (When he asked what Reservoir was like as a place to live, the real estate agent told him, "It's getting better." Reservoir was once the sort of place that if you called it Reservoir, using the French pronunciation, you'd be laughed off for being a wanker. Melbourne house prices being what they are, though, these days old-school Reservoorians have migrated out further, to Craigieburn).
Clint and his wife, Tania, have bought their first house. Then, along comes Archie. Then Lewis. Then Tyson. And then Maki. Not long after Archie is born, they make the decision for Tania to return to her job as a physiotherapist and part-time lecturer and for Clint to take on the role as a stay-at-home dad. This book is the story of those days.
How refreshing that he recounts it with such honesty. And it's a delight, reading a book on family life, and the love of children, from a man's perspective. It made me wonder, in broadly speaking terms (this caveat needs insertion when about to talk about gender), that if Clint was a woman whether he would have deleted more of the times he's going nuts, the times he's losing it. Or, would he hang onto the guilt of those memories, for as long as I suspect many women would? I know I'm generalising here, but these are some of the thoughts I wondered while reading Reservoir Dad.
It's a bloody funny read. Highlights of the Minutes of the first Northern Dads' Group to be held at the Gregen home:
11:20 - I make and transport fresh coffee to every Dad and listen in. The topics being covered by each group are as follows: Jack and Ben: global warming, backyard maintenance and sex; Dan and Joe: hangovers, kids, cricket, immunisations and sex; Kelvin and Simon: children's pop-up books, how great kids are and sexThere's some interesting stuff in here about the politics of stay-at-home dadding. Of those who speak down to him. Of how trailing around after your partner is home from work raving for 30 minutes straight is not so much a gender issue as it's a need-adult-convo-now issue.
12:00 - A child poos. All Dads present sniff their child's bum. Eventually the culprit is located and excluded from the group until the proper corrections have been made.
12:30 - The children and Dads all gather around Ekko to pat him and learn proper pet-handling behaviour. In his excitement the dog rolls over and, along with its belly, exposes a long lipstick-shaped penis. Ben's son reaches for it immediately. All the Dads freeze on the spot and scream in horror which, thankfully, shocks the dog back into an upright position.
12:45 - A hotly fought competition ensues between the three Dads and their children to see who can leap from the porch and land the furthest from the rose bushes.
12:46 - One hamstring says ping
On the stress and feeling of complete uselessness during Tania's labour to bring Archie into the world, and the appearance of the anaesthetist:
He wore blue pants and a blue shirt, just like the rest of the employees in the hospital, and in another building he may have even passed as an inmate in a low-security prison. But I'll always remember him as the man who entered the room standing atop two pure white draught horses, whose clip-clopping sent the message of hope down the halls and into every room of the birthing ward. He was wearing the purple and gold robes of kingly eminence. The dull, off-white walls around us sparkled with the magnificence of his crown. I rubbed the weariness from the muscular buttocks of his steeds and fed them the finest muesli as he honoured us both by slaying the monster I had only been able to wail at. As he took his leave from our lives I fell to one knee and whispered, 'My Liege.'
And on change-table Archie:
He defecates like a startled duck. He wees straight into the air almost every time I change his nappy, which is freaky to say the least, although I was surprisingly nonchalant when he jet-forced a sample taste - mid-stream strength - directly into my mouth.Self-deprecation and hyperbole are a delicious combination. Intersperse them with moments of pure, aching love and that very human emotion of wishing for things to last forever and this book has some heart-punching moments. On a bedtime conversation with Tyson, four:
He has a bulbous pot belly - a direct inheritance from Tania's dad - with light blue veins running over it like patterns on an ancient Greek milk jug, and when I combine that with the wide-open eyes rolling and jolting about in their mad search for focus, I am unable to stop my mind from playing random image association games ... here comes E.T. and Fat Albert on his spindly little legs saying, 'Hey hey hey!'
I assumed he was mostly asleep and so I whispered, 'Luv ya, mate.'
From my vantage point behind him I saw his cheek rising with a smile.
'Why?' he said.
I was immediately overwhelmed by a sense of wonder and longing. In this dark room, on the bottom bunk, with the likelihood of another sleep-interrupted night ahead, came the prospector's pan rising above the surface of the stream, the glint of gold already visible.
It was the expectation I heard in his voice, I think, and his smile that made me aware of the opportunity to affirm something that would last a long time for the both of us - maybe forever. 'Just because I love you, mate,' I answered. 'And because you make us all laugh. And because you're such a great dancer ... especially to Gangnam Style. And because you jump so high. And because you use snappy crocodile fingers when you draw. And, do you know, when you're away at kinder I miss you so much and can't wait to see you again.'
And that was enough. As I watched him wriggle his head back and forth to reach further into the comfort of the pillow I was fully aware of how little time I had left. All the rooms Tania and I have filled will one day be empty. The beds of our children - those I often groan with exhaustion to climb into - will be gone.
Greagen has lovely-honed observation and poignancy. On Archie as a new baby:
His tongue creeps out past his lips, then draws back inside, then creeps out again, and I get a little glimpse of who he might be because it seems to ignite some curiosity. He holds still at first, enthralled by the slimy sensations firing around the edges of his mouth but when his tongue retreats he starts panting in his excitement to feel it again and harnesses the energy in his limbs just enough to make his elbows shudder like wings buffetted by a steady breeze. All the effort causes him to vomit a little, and as I wipe it away I panic: What if Tania and I are killed in an accident?
On a quickie with the wife:
... I've lain there afterwards, used and glowing, comparing her attitude and approach to that of a black widow spider, except that instead of eating me once she's finished she can just make a sandwich or open a packet of Cruskits.Some funny moments comes from the eight months the family spend living with Tania's parents while they have their house rebuilt. Sexual frustration, the stress that comes with living in your in-laws house exacerbated by your now-four children taking over? Leads to paranoia. And murderous intent. Living in close quarters with someone, everything grates. When it's your mother-in-law, tripled that. This is why you put her tongs in the dishwasher - you know it will drive her crazy and keep you sane. It's only right when she insists on stirring her early-morning coffee so that it "sounds like she's pushed a woodpecker's head into the cup and shoved a finger up its arse."
Clint never shies away from the stress and mind-boggling craziness and the relentless, boring grind of raising kids ... or the way the love pours in and melts his heart all over again. The way the love is so strong that it holds back the desire to do harm, to go bonkers. It's refreshing. Surely every person on that crazy morning run must desire to "stay home and watch DVDs and eat Vegemite scrolls and maybe start growing some marijuana plants as the first step to raising four career criminals."
This book came from the crazily-popular blog of the same name, which Clint started writing as a way of processing his stuff. Every crazy person knows that writing helps make you at least a little saner, right?
So how do you represent sweetness and the everydayness of raising kids? How do you do it honour, so that it doesn't smarm or bore? Just have a dad hopelessly in love with his wife and his kids write to tell you about it direct. None of that 1970's distant dad disconnected from his emotions here. Clint loves his kids and loves being a dad and he'll warm your heart telling you about it, and about how vulnerable it makes him feel. ('This feels illegal,' he says to Tania as they leave the hospital with newly-born Archie). He'll also lay it out on a red satin pillow of self-deprecation, hyperbole, honesty, a little bit of tragedy, a decent nod to the haunting moments of our lives, and a wicked sense of humour and that's why it works so well. It reminds you again of how normal bringing up children is and how damn awesome everyone who does it at least nominally well is. Even if your taste in 80's music is outright cruddy.
Published by Random House, July 2014
Meg is a thirtysomething writer who's stuck within her own novel, the one she's kept rewriting and rewriting and deleting until it's where it is now, back at a measly 43 pages. She's also stuck in a relationship that's sinking fast, is contemplating entering another, and she's broke.
She also has rather interesting friends who have wonderful intellectual discussions. If this is the sort of dinner table conversation you like, then perhaps we should have dinner:
"Aquinas wondered what would happen if God wanted to achieve universal resurrection. In other words, bringing everybody who had ever lived back to life at the same time. What would happen to cannibals, and the people they ate? You couldn't bring them all back at the same time, because the cannibals are made of the people they have eaten. You could have one but not the other. Ha." I looked at Rowan. "That's a good example of a paradox."Depending on whether you think this sort of thing is pointless intellectual masturbation or it stimulates your imagination will determine whether you find this book a pain in the bum or a rollicking good ride.
... "This is aninteresting conundrum," Conrad said eventually. Aquinas focuses this problem on the cannibal, but in reality everything is made of everything else. Every boat I build used to be a tree, several trees in fact, and perhaps meteorites, iron ore, plants and so on. You can't eat your cake and have it too. I think this is where the paradox comes from."
Personally, I love books where the protagonist spends time pondering the reality of perception of her dog, Bess:
B gave me a look that I anthropomorphised into 'What on earth are we doing now?', so I explained to her that we were going to go and rescue Josh and then drive home to Dartmouth, and we might see some squirrels on the Lanes and when we got back it would definitely be time for her dinner. She cocked her head sharply each times he recognised a word: Josh, home, squirrels, dinner. I wondered if I could communicate with B more efficiently by using only nouns and then stringing them in the rough order that they were going to happen. Was that what the world was to B? Was it all just nouns on a timeline? There had to be a bit more to it than that: she was visibly thrilled at the idea of squirrels, even though, as I'd said to Libby, she didn't chase them any more. She did look a bit baffled, however, that the squirrels could come between home and dinner, so I changed the order to Josh, squirrels, home, dinner. This time she whimpered slightly as I said each word. I reckoned I could probably write a book on dog psychology myself after all these years of study.Others have commented that Scarlett Thomas is too smart for her own good, that she draws attention to herself with "Look at me, look how smart I am" intellectual cartwheel-turning. Of course, on one level that's exactly what she's doing, considering this novel plays with metafiction and the idea (strange to modern Wasterners) of the storyless story. However, I found the exploration of ideas to be so satisfying that for me this all panned out as playful fun rather than egotistical masturbation. Perhaps that says something about me, I'm not sure.
"One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it." I bit my lip. "Of all the theories of the universe I've come across, [yours] is probably the best one. Honestly. But I can't accept theories of the universe. I think it's too big to theorise."Questions and answers. The wonderful thing about loving both questions and answers is that when you get tired of the lack of answers, you can retreat backwards into living loving the questions. Which, paradoxically, is a much bigger and more exhilarating space in which to live, leaving entire empty rooms for mystery, and for playfulness.
"But isn't the point of being alive to try to answer the big questions?"
I shook my head. "For me it's about trying to work out what the questions are."
The ideas played around with in this novel mean that nothing is resolved in the traditional fashion, with ends all neatly tied up. And while that annoys the hell out of me, it also makes me smile a little because, well, it's always a little fun to be fucked with ... before you go on to the next book that will probably have some neat resolutions and a bow on top. I find it interesting that while I'm quite happy with open-endedness, I did notice a vague sense of dissatisfaction on finishing this book that I couldn't put my finger on until I considered it here.
Perhaps I want bows more than I realise.
"Everything changes, Jo thought, as the current carried her mentally upriver to the fresh water, but not at random. There's a deep system and order to it, because everything is forever turning into its own opposite. Swimming fish becoming flying hawk. Swift hawk dying and decaying into solid earth. Earth reaching skyward as trees, turning to fruits and honey and flowers, falling back down again as leaves. Everything in the world was shapeshifting around her, every moment of every day. Nothing remained as it was."
I loved this book. Melissa Lucashenko wrote it as an "ode to country." While she was writing the manuscript, fellow indigenous writer Alexis Wright told her it should be a "hymn to the ancestors" (see Radio National's Books and Arts Daily review from early 2013). The feel of both of those sentiments runs like water throughout this novel for me.As a whitey, reading a novel set in Queensland, a few thousand k's away from me both geographically and otherwise, I feel a rather keen sense of jealousy, running alongside a feeling of kinship, alongside a conscious need to check my romanticism. I also feel a sense of defensiveness. Don't lump me in with those who don't give a shit, because while the songlines are not mine, on wilder whimsy days I fancy I can feel the echo of them through suburban concrete, even if I wouldn't understand them. Or at least perhaps I'd just like to think so, grasping for some sense of place and solidarity in a country that's seeped itself into my bones in my 43 travels round the sun, but which is not of my extended heritage. I still feel that disconnect.
I have the requisite collection of a couple of ancestors transported here for stealing meat to feed their starving brothers and sisters, along with a gaggle of settlers, but go back five generations and all of my roots dig down into UK and Guernsey Islands soils. Places I haven't even visited. Australia is my home, though this book reminds me that so much of it is still alien and not-yet-known to me in comparison to the ancestors of those who can lay claim to hundreds of thousands of years of custodianship.
Bill Gammage, in his book The Biggest Estate on Earth, opened my eyes up to a little of that a couple of years ago. He spells out in detail the intricacies of the land that were known to those original custodians. How early settlers described the land as akin to the parkland of a manor house, it was that well-ordered. That the land and its inhabitants were understood and managed to such a degree that fire-sensitive trees and shrubs lived next door to fire-retardant ones, that fire management practices were ongoing, structured and complex, not written down in books or on websites, but passed along via generation-to-generation knowledge.
For the first time in her life, the novel's protagonist, Jo Breen, owns the land she lives on. After a messy and traumatic divorce, she buys 20 acres of farmland 20 k's inland from Byron Bay on New South Wales's North Coast. She's moved to Bundjalung land, the land of her ancestors, from Brisbane with her 13 year old daughter, Ellen.
Then Jo meets Twoboy, a looker with dreads who takes her fancy the first time she sees him raunch out of a bookstore with a book under his arm. Not only a spunk, but Bunjalung, smart as, who's moved back here with his brother up from where he's been studying law in Melbourne. They're going for a Native Title claim and are about to learn a little more about the cost of reclaiming what's been lost and how some bodies carry that cost in themselves.
Lucashenko is so deft with language and in Jo she creates such a likeable character who is both down to earth but smart and sassy: "She gazed out over the saltwater, where a distant late-season whale was spouting. A crow perched in the nearby lemon-scented gums, directly above a plaque proclaiming that somebody Devine had discovered this place. Jo would normally have been delighted to see that the crow had crapped purple fig-seeded bullshit all over this spurious claim."
This book is about dualities. About the ways language is used as a tool, as a proof of identity. About barbed wire spaced throughout land once stolen, fences which keep out or keep in. It is about misconceptions, on both sides of the black and white divide, and about generosity. It is about a familiar Australia and a foreign one. The dugais (whites) Jo meets out on the roads are dim and stupid and disconnected. A woman with a camera stops to take an unasked photo of Jo on her horse and then speeds off, without even the consideration of showing her what she's taken. Idiots driving around in Hummers with "Support our Troops" stickers.
If I wax a little romantic about this book, then forgive me my perceived weakness. It's only because in the Australia of my currency, spirituality - even if it's earth-based - is still something of an embarrassment, to be kept private, an internal state unrelated to the outer world. But Jo hangs easy with an unabashed earthy spirituality that is all about the land that is alive, that speaks back, and it makes me sink in. Like it's safe to see the land in this way, even while I look over my shoulder, waiting for snide remarks about my floweriness. The cynicism and alienation of 21st century Westerners hangs around my head like Fukushima.
Here, on the one hand DJ's child learns to count using ugari (shellfish) shells "which the full moon had left in its wake" while on the other Humbug is locked up and belted in the cells for D&D. Here, I smell a scent of people who are a little closer than mine to remembering that they belong to the earth. People who rather than "go out" with a bang or anything else, "go in" when they die.
And yet this isn't a modern "noble savage" kind of story by any means. Lucashenko's characters are layered and contradictory and judgmental, sometimes believing caricatures, not always what they seem, sometimes surprising and sometimes plain batshit annoying, regardless of their heritage.
Of course, the bitter irony is that I am jealous of the belonging of a people to land which for many of them is something they're relearning themselves, putting together pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, vast patches of songlines still unknown or lost forever. Some people don't understand why January 26 is being made political by some. This is the reason for me.
When you sign up you're given the option to nominate how many books you're going write and/or review. This year I have opted for the very lovely option of However Many I End Up Reading, seeing I fell short last year and my Inner Perfectionist took the opportunity to point out that I failed to achieve what I had set out to do.
Which may well mean I'll end up reading more than I did last year :)
This year's reads and/or reviews:
Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko
All That I Am by Anna Funder
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.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.
"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).
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.
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.
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.
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| Part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013 |
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.
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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.
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