J. M. Dalgliesh, Divided House and Blacklight (both independently published 2018), 2019 audiobook narrated by Greg Patmore
On long car trips, I used to read while the not-yet–Emerging Artist drove. Now, my vocal cords have lost stamina, we have fallen back on audiobooks. For our recent trip to Brisbane, we picked the first instalment of the Dark Yorkshire series – three novels in all. We managed to listen to two of them. We were under the vague impression that we were about to listen to some P. D. James novels featuring her detective Adam Dalgleish. We were wrong.
J. M. (not Adam) Dalgliesh is evidently one of the top ten best-selling authors on Amazon, and Dark Yorkshire was his first, extremely popular series.
In the first book, Divided House, Detective Inspector Nathaniel Caslin has to deal with dead bodies, a cyber-pornography set-up, corrupt colleagues, distrust from his superiors based on past honourable rule-bending, a curmudgeonly inability to deal with digital media (which makes it a surprise to learn he is only in his thirties), a marriage that is falling apart, and all the tropes of a good crime thriller.
This is the kind of storytelling that is consumed rather than engaged with in any reciprocal way. These days I consume it almost exclusively on screen, and mostly the small screen.
The plot is a bit too convoluted for my travel-weary attention span. Award-winning narrator Greg Patmore does a fine job for the most part, though I would have preferred that he didn’t try so hard to give each of the many characters a different voice, especially the women. It seemed that he was focusing on the women characters’ femininity at the expense of other qualities, by speaking in almost-falsetto. I occasionally had to remind myself that the woman character Caslin finds himself attracted to isn’t written as trans – she just sounds that way.
Caslin is also the hero of the second book, Blacklight. This time he’s dealing with a serial killer, and/or MI5. Not my favourite story type. But he does have a female partner, and once I accepted Greg Patmore’s version of a woman policeman’s voice, her bristly relationship with Caslin added some humour to proceedings.
J. M. Dalgliesh’s website has this to say about his books:
Penned in the style of crime thrillers with a touch of Scandinavian noir, readers who enjoy dark atmospheric mysteries will find his books a must-read.
If you can ignore the image of penned readers conjured up by the syntax of that quote, then these books may be for you.
David Malouf died on Wednesday. You can read a lot about him elsewhere. The Guardian, for instance, has an excellent obituary by Jennifer King, and a personal reflection from Christos Szoltas. In blogland, Lisa at ANZ Litlovers Litblog has posted an overview of his work. This post is a much more partial thing.
My mind is buzzing with memories of the man. I can’t claim him as a friend, but I first met him more than 50 years ago and have had memorable encounters with him over the years. I want to write about some of them before numbing grief sets in.
I was an EngLit student at Sydney University in the late 1960s when David came back to Australia after some years in the UK. He was a wonderful lecturer who communicated his enthusiasm and love for the writers he was discussing. I remember the delight and awe with which he described Norman Mailer’s sentences – long, looping, sometimes going on for more than a page. I remember him discussing images of food in one of the Jacobean playwrights, bringing out the horror beneath the comedy of the characters’ greed: I don’t think he used the words capitalism or colonialism but he made us feel them – or at least he made me feel them, because he told me after the lecture that he’d seen me looking more and more nauseated as he spoke.
At poetry readings, I remember feeling his translations of Horace as a gift. They spoke of morning light glinting off milk churns beside a country road. I’d studied Latin for years, and loved Virgil and Catullus, but it hadn’t occurred to me until then that the Roman poets wrote about experiences very like ours – mine.
In my two years as a postgrad student I saw more of him. I loved the way he used four-letter words, with the same precise enunciation as he used with all language. I loved his glee when he told an anecdote about Philip Roth, then notorious for the novel Portnoy’s Complaint: a woman who was introduced to Roth at a cocktail party shuddered when he offered to shake hands, and said she’d rather not. And I loved this erudite man’s childlike hilarity when he told us about coming out of a movie and seeing that an academic colleague friend had spilled chocolate ice cream all down his white shirt front.
When he was living in Tuscany and I was planning a trip there, in early 1979, somehow I had a conversation with him. He said that if I went to Campagnatico and asked for il professore Australiano, someone would show me the way to his door. (While I may have been bold enough to propose a visit, I didn’t have the gall to actually knock on his door.)
One day in 2015, I was walking up Broadway in Sydney’s inner west when I saw a man in a grey tracksuit coming towarsds me. He looked like David Malouf, but I had never seen him other than impeccably turned out. Indeed it was him, and the first thing he said was that he had realised he was running late for a poetry reading at Gleebooks and didn’t have time to change into decent clothes. I may be conflating two meetings on Broadway, but I’m pretty sure that that is also the occasion when he showed me his right hand covered in blood. He had been holding a bleeding spot on his left arm. Alarmed, I produced a handkerchief, but it had obviously been used for other purposes and he politely declined the offer. ‘It’s not a big deal,’ he said. ‘when you’re old, you bleed easily.’ He was 81. I’m now 79 and I can confirm that he was right. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘if I go home to Chippendale with blood on my hands like this, it might be good for my reputation. They’ll think I’ve murdered someone.’ And then, even as he was bleeding and embarrassed to be seen in public in tracky-daks, he chatted appreciatively and illuminatingly about the poetry he’d just heard, some of which couldn’t have been further from the kind of things he wrote himself.
Four or five years ago I was on holiday on Magnetic Island and caught the ferry across to Townsville to go to a reading by David at the Mary Who? bookshop. He read beautifully, as always. In question time, a woman wearing a ‘No More Coal’ t-shirt commented, with more than a touch of reproach, that there were surely more important things to write about than memories of childhood. ‘What,’ she asked, ‘do you think are the important things poetry should be addressing.’ Without missing a beat, he said, ‘I think the most interesting thing in the world is a three year old child.’ At that age, he said, a person is just looking out at the world and putting together their own model of what’s there, and it’s fascinating to witness.
A poem that I’m pretty sure he read on that occasion, and that I heard him read many times over about two decades, is ‘Seven last words of the emperor Hadrian’. He always presented it almost as a technical exercise: the full meaning of the Latin couldn’t be captured in a single translation, so he had seven goes at it. What I didn’t hear him say is that the poem struck a deep chord for him as his own mortality made itself felt. I’ve just listened to a recording of him reading it on the University of Queensland website. Have a listen at this link.
David wrote Quarterly Essay number 41, The Happy Life. I happened to run into him soon after the correspondence on it was published in the subsequent issue. I remarked that it was interesting that all the correspondents wrote about how beloved he is. ‘Yes,’ he said, deflecting effortlessly, ‘it wasn’t the kind of essay they’re used to and they didn’t quite know what to do with it.’
Now I, and you if you want, can say how much we have loved him, and he can’t deflect any more.
No longer the Premier’s Literary Awards, the NSW Literary Awards shortlist has been announced. As usual, I’ve read or seen very few of them (I’ve included images of those)and have a couple more on my TBR shelf. The State Library of NSW website is a little unwieldy – here’s the list in more accessible form. All the links are to the library’s site, including the judges’ comments.
I’m sad to have finished my daily reading of Seamus Heaney. Though very few if any of the letters in this 800 pages were written with publication in mind, Christopher Reid has gathered them into a wonderful book.
In his last years, Heaney is still apologising for the lateness of his replies to other people’s letters or gifts of books. His excuses are generally wonderful – lists of lectures and readings given, honours received, holidays taken with his wife Marie. Sometimes he encloses a poem. In his final years he complains that he hasn’t been able to write any poetry. He seems cheerfully resigned to having to ‘stand on his hind legs’ and be a famous poet. More than once he explains that he won’t attend an event where a friend is being honoured because he has found that – because of ‘the N word’ – his presence tends to steal the limelight. (Do I need to explain that in this case N is for Nobel?)
He replies generously to graduate students asking him if they’re on the right track. His letters to translators are fascinating. He does a spectacular job of refusing requests without giving offence. He is a wonderful model of how to respond to other people’s writing. He struggles to protect his privacy and that of his family, to avoid the commodification of his personal life that must seem inevitable to many people who become famous. He is reluctant to give interviews about his book Human Chain, because some of its poems are more intensely personal than previous ones: he knows the interview will ask about these personal things, and he won’t go there.
As the decades pass, he increasingly types his letter on a laptop, sometimes offering the excuse that his handwriting has gone all wobbly as a result of a stroke. But he doesn’t use email. I think I’m right that there is only one electronic communication in the book, which is the text he sent to Marie when he was being wheeled into the operating theatre, just before he died:
Noli timere
Reid gives the translation, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ and tells us that the text went viral. But he leaves the reader to savour the way this final message epitomises so much of the book. It feels like a biblical quote – the first thing Jesus said after his resurrection was ‘Noli me tangere’. And though Heaney was no longer a practising Catholic, the language, imagery and stories of his Catholic childhood were still at the heart of his creativity, and often turn up in his correspondence. Latin was part of that, and important in its own right: he would often write ‘Gaudens gaudeo’ in a letter when there was reason to celebrate, and he translated Book 6 of the Aeneid in his last years.
Most movingly, this final text is addressed to Marie. She has been a constant presence, through marriage, parenthood, illness striking both of them, her occasionally mentioned creative endeavours. When the letters mention holidays, ceremonial occasions, social events, it’s often ‘Marie and I’. He quotes her opinions. She is intimately part of who is is. And this is the only time in the book that he speaks to her.
I’m going to miss my daily contact with this lovely mind.
I have written this blog post, punctuated by a walk by the beach in a windy darkness, face pricked by flying sand particles, on Awabakal country. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
The subtitle of this Quarterly Essay seems even more relevant now than it did three months ago when it was published, as our Labor governments make mealy mouthed statements of concern about the ongoing genocide in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric emanating from the White House and the Pentagon, give the go-ahead to climate vandalism by fossil-fuel companies, follow right-wing advisers in responding to the horrific killing of Jews in Bondi last year, come down hard on protest – oh, you name it!
But I was glad that the essay was more than a prolonged wail about Anthony Albanese et al‘s timidity or worse, perfidy. Instead, it’s a thoughtful essay in the original sense of the word, an attempt – Kelly starts out with a question that he doesn’t know the answer to, and he still doesn’t have a definite answer by the end. And my practice of holding off on reading Quarterly Essays until I can read the correspondence in the following issue paid off beautifully.
Kelly is a Labor man, adviser to former Labor Prime Ministers. Like Anthony Albanese he had a working class Catholic childhood. He tells us briefly that he knows Albanese, and likes him – enough to refrain from the fake-familiarity of nicknames. He frames his discussion as the inevitable tension between ideals (call them beliefs) and pragmatism (things you have to do to stay in government). He argues convincingly that it’s a mistake to adopt a strategy of going slowly with reforms in order to hold onto government long enough to make substantial change. The Whitlam government moved fast, he points out, and came a cropper, but it changed Australia society. Albanese’s assertion that he wants Labor to be the natural party of government, that he wants it to represent all interests, sounds good, but it’s largely a formula for futility.
There is an interesting discussion of the decline of the two-party system. The current impressive degree of unity in the ALP, Kelly argues, is not a good thing. Vigorous debate is a way of refining policy, and the ALP has outsourced the arguments from the left to the Greens, where they can be dismissed as hostility. The current disarray in the Coalition is not useful either – if a good part of Labor’s raison d’être is in ‘fighting Tories’, to use Albanese’s phrase, where do you go when the Tories are doing it for you?
Page 47* quotes Graham Freudenberg, legendary speechwriter for Labor leaders including Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke. He described the ALP as ‘a collective memory in action’. Kelly comments:
That collective memory, driven by emotion, has inevitably harked back to Labor’s longest period in government: a period in which Labor won the approval of the Australian people at five successive elections, and for which it has since garnered much praise, including from its usual critics.
He is talking about the Hawke-Keating government. The current Labor government, he argues, is striding away from what it sees as the failures of its most recent predecessors and moving towards the ‘glittering memory’ of those years:
Hawke and Keating are both Labor heroes for good reason. Their government introduced Medicare, saved the Franklin River, acted on the High Court’s land rights judgment.
But, he goes on, they also deregulated the economy in ways that the right would have been proud of, and this is what they are mostly remembered for. On page 80, he laments:
The remarkable fact is that Labor, which has historically been so good at mythologising its past, has in this case effectively allowed the right to choose what will dominate its collective memory.
Keating’s personal boldness haunts this essay. Kelly quotes him in his final pages saying that ‘great political leaders have the instincts of artists’:
I always believe in leadership there are only two ingredients: imagination and courage.
This idea should be taken seriously, Kelly says:
I think it should be taken particularly seriously because of the way we have more lately come to think of politicians as technocrats, types of elevated bureaucrats.
We can sense artistic heat in Albanese, he says, but he doesn’t say – he doesn’t have to say – that Albanese is more commonly seen as fitting the technocrat, elevated-bureaucrat description. Then, with an almost Montaigne-like swerve, he discusses the writer Ella Ferrante’s creative process, ending the essay with this paragraph:
After establishing a consistent tone, she breaks out of her calmness. There is, she admits, a risk: that the calm will not be able to be recovered. or that the readers will no longer believe in that calm. But it is that risk that gives her writing life.
Correspondence in Quarterly Essay 101 (Blind Spot by Michael Wesley) is well worth reading. The learned correspondents correct Kelly on a number of facts. The one that stands out for me is Judith Brett, whose contribution is in effect a brief and enlightening essay on the word ‘socialism’:
What socialism has meant in Australian political debate has not been opposition to capitalism but belief in the creative and ameliorative capacities of the state to reduce inequality and advance the common good.
There’s quite a bit more, all worth reading, but it’s tangential to Kelly’s central argument. That is, he may be wrong when he says that Albanese has abandoned Labor’s socialist objective by catering to business interests, but his concern stands, and in his reply to correspondents he has interesting things to say about Albanese in relation to that formulation.
The other correspondents include a number of Labor insiders, but it rises well above the inside-baseball dangers of such discussions. They have interesting things to say about the history, about Kelly’s philosophical questions, and about the special dangers of the present moment.
I’ll give the last word to Kelly, whose final question, sadly, suggests an answer in the negative:
The correspondents agreed this was a strange time. I think so too. But it is possible that all of us are wrong: that this is not a special moment, but another moment of change and turmoil in an endless series. We think our era is unique, but we are – like most of those before us – wrong. In that case, Albanese Labor will be graded the way most Labor governments are: did it contribute to the improvement of Australian society in ways that are permanent and important?
I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of teh Eora Nation, where the nights are lasting longer but the days are still warm. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79. When, as in this Quarterly Essay, there is no page 79, I revert to ’47, my birth year.
This book must be a classic work on translating poetry. Readers of this blog will know that occasionally I nerd out about translation. Well, Eliot Weinberger does it in spades, only he’s wittier, more erudite and generally much more illuminating.
The book looks at nearly 30 attempts to translate one four-line poem by the classic Chinese poet Wang Wei (c 700–761 CE), mostly into English. The poem is generally but not always, such is the nature of translation, known as ‘The Deer Park’.
Before looking at any of the attempts, there are three short sections presenting and discussing: the original, in Chinese characters, just five on each line; a transliteration into modern pinyin; and a character-by-character translation onto English. To give you some idea of the challenge facing the translator, here is the first line of the character-by-character translation:
Empty_ mountain(s)/hill(s) (negative)_ to see _ person/people
You can see that the possibilities are vast – and in discussing the different solutions, Weinberger has a lot of fun and at the same time gives an impressionistic account of the influence of Chinese and Japanese poetry on English language poetry in the last 100 years. He doesn’t mind taking on the Chinese language specialists who may know about the language but have no ear for poetry, and he doesn’t hold back with either praise or displeasure.
I’d written to this point when I remembered that I blogged about J. P. Seaton’s Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry almost exactly 16 years ago, and did my own timid, partial, uneducated attempt at comparing versions – of a slightly longer poem by Li Po (701–762). If you’re interested, it’s at this link.
In short, I loved this book, and if you’re interested in Chinese poetry and /or translation in general, you will too. I’m very grateful to John Levy for mentioning it in the comments (at this link).
I’ll give the last word to Weinberger. At the end of the original essay – before Octavio Paz had contributed his learned Afterword, and before Weinberger’s account of a Furious Professor’s response – he writes:
The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different – not merely another – reading. The same poem cannot be read twice.
I am an Australian-born man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nationa. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.
Before the meeting: I heard Ian McEwan talking about this novel on David Runciman’s Past Present Future podcast a while back (at this link). Well, not so much about this novel as about what it’s like to be contemplating one’s own death at a time when the future of the world as we know it is in doubt. How will the people of the future regard us who were alive at this critical moment in human history? That question, he said, was the genesis of the novel.
What We Can Know is set in Britain long after our time, which is known in that future as the Derangement. In 2042 there has been an Inundation caused by the melting ice caps, and a nuclear winter created by international war has put an end to global warming. Britain is now an archipelago. North America is the domain of lawless warlords. Nigeria has become the preserver of electronic connectivity. Life is simpler and more difficult, but there are still academics, and there is a vast trove of records preserved from our time.
The central characters of the novel specialise in the literature of a period that overlaps our present moment. Their students revolt, seeing such studies as irrelevant to the needs of the times, and regarding literature produced by the generations who allowed such catastrophic events as beneath contempt.
That all works well. The physical environment is always interesting, even for a reader like me who has little knowledge of British geography, and so can’t appreciate the specifics of boat trips from island to island. However, I was far from engrossed by the central narrative thread, which concerns the main character’s search for a long lost poem, written in 2014 but never published. He hunts through the vast reservoir of data, and pieces together a picture of the dinner party when a distinguished poet read the poem aloud and presented it to his wife on a vellum scroll tied up with a bow. The story is told and retold from many points of view, becoming in my experience increasingly tedious, until there is a final telling that may amount to a revelation, but by that time I was well beyond caring.
Page 79*, taken in isolation, isn’t much to write home about, though it’s a nice example of the novel’s intertextuality. It’s a summary of part of an actual book published in 1985, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes, which has a minimalist Wikipedia page at this link.
Among its many treasures is an account of a journey on foot the eighteen-year-old Holmes took in the Cévennes, southern France, tracking the same route taken by his hero, his ‘friend’, Robert Louis Stevenson a hundred years before. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was Holmes’s bible. He stopped in the same villages as Stevenson, tried to keep to his exact route on the old country tracks and slept like him in the open, ‘à la belle étoile‘. As he walked, he constantly referred to his copy of Stevenson’s book. In the early 1960s, the last remnants of the ancient French peasantry hung on in the rural fastness of La France Profonde.
And so on. I was interested enough in the description of Holmes’s book because I’d enjoyed the 2020 film Antoinette dans les Cévennes, which also traces the route taken by the young Robert Louis Stevenson in the 1870s.
You won’t be surprised to learn that the passage’s context makes it something more than a schoolboy summary. The narrator had come across Holmes’s book when he was a 22 year old student who hadn’t yet settled on a subject for his doctorate. He had ‘eased the hundred-year-old hardback from its shelf’ as a delicate remnant from a past era, and tells us about it now because it contains one of the ‘most exquisitely evoked descriptions’ of a longing for ‘what was never known and is lost’ – the emotion that is the central driver of his academic research and of his quest as narrated in the first half of this book. The world before one was born in what was never known, and its loss is intensified for those who live after the Inundation
Most of page 79 leads up to that ‘exquisitely evoked description’. Then, at the bottom of the page, Holmes is standing at a bridge in the village of Langogne in a semi-hallucinatory state hoping that Stevenson, long dead, would soon be arriving:
Then he saw, fifty yards downstream, picked out against the fading gleam of the western sky, the old ruined bridge into town, the one his dear Stevenson would have crossed. Holmes was bereft, close to tears. ‘There was no way of following him, no way of meeting him. His bridge was down. It was beyond my reach over time, and this ruin was the true, sad sign.’
The narrator draws out the meaning of this:
The collapsed bridge downstream and the man crossing it a hundred years before represent the past from which I too am excluded, the past that from here seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved.
But, though Stevenson’s bridge was down, the country he had walked was substantially unchanged in Holmes’s time. In the narrator’s present time, all that land is lost, under water.
And that is the chord that vibrates through the novel. I the reader am living in the time that the character sees as ‘whole and precious’. Logically I can see that the book should have me on an edge – a prolonged moment of appreciating the world I live in, preemptively mourning its loss, and resolving to do what I can to protect and defend it. Whether the failure is mine or the novel’s, it didn’t have that effect on me.
When – spoiler alert – the second half of the novel has a different narrator, in a different time period, that driving emotion fades into a distant background, and the book, in my opinion, becomes a much more commonplace affair.
The meeting: We read What We Can Know in tandem with Carys Davies’s Clear. Like that book, it evoked widely divergent responses. In this case I was the Most Negative, and she who had been Most Negative for Clear enjoyed this one as a satisfying holiday read.
For some the world-building amounted to thinly disguised lecturing about climate change. Others felt there wasn’t enough of it – and I guess I’m in that camp: I would happily have stayed in that future, wandering beyond the confines of university scholarly life. Where my engagement as a reader was fading by the end of the first part and died irretrievably when the narrator and time frame changed, that was where others felt the book finally came alive. I think there were two people (out of five) who were there for both parts. (My interest had died to such an extent that I had to be reminded of the key revelation in the second part.)
I think the key thing that worked for others and not for me is announced in the book’s title. Appropriately enough, the title is hard to remember: I keep misremembering it as ‘All We Can Know’ or ‘All That You Know’ and I keep thinking of Keats – ‘That is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.’ So What We Can Know: the book is about knowledge, specifically historical knowledge. The academics of the future can sift through the mountains of detailed electronic and other documentation of our times but what goes unrecorded will remain unknown, and if the records of significant truth aren’t found then that truth remains unknown.
I’m sailing very close to spoilerish now, but the book’s central search for a lost poem, reputedly a masterpiece, turns out to be wrong-headed. A different document, found thanks to ingenious deciphering of clues in the archive, transforms the meaning of events as they were known up to that point. For some readers, perhaps for most, this is deeply satisfying. It might, I concede ruefully, be a matter of attention span.
The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. Our combined ages add up to many more years than have passed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British Crown. We met on Gadigal land, and I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nationa. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.
Before the meeting: On a remote island to the north of Scotland, the population has shrunk to just one man, plus a cow and a number of domestic animals. The man, Ivar, is the sole surviving speaker of the island’s language. The island is owned by a wealthy mainlander, and this is 1843, during the time of the Clearances, when tenants all over Scotland were evicted to make way for more profitable sheep. An idealistic clergyman, John Ferguson, an impoverished member of the newly formed Free Scottish Church, agrees to take on the errand of travelling to Ivar’s island to prepare him for his removal. The errand turns out not to be all that simple: John Ferguson (he is always referred to by both names) has a near-fatal fall, Ivar tends him, and as he recovers they learn to speak each other’s language.
I love this book. It’s a story well told, with genuine suspense (what will become of the gun that John Ferguson brings with him to the island?) and an implausible final twist that I found delightful. What I especially love is its resonance with Australian history. As the relationship between the two men develops and Ivar shares his knowledge of knowledge of language and place with John Ferguson, I am reminded insistently of the relationship in the early settlement of Sydney between Lieutenant Dawes and the young Cammeraygal women Patyegarang – as fictionalised by Kate Grenville in The Lieutenant and explored by Ross Gibson in 26 Views of the Starburst World (links are to my blog posts – if you’ve got time to spare I recommend the comments on the second one for some splendidly irrelevant Canadian humour). There is a similar sense of a small piece of light against the gathering gloom of genocide and language extinction.
It’s a short novel, and page 78* comes just after the halfway mark. Perhaps it marks a turning point:
It’s two weeks since John Ferguson has been dropped off on the island and fallen from some rocks. He is recovering well in Ivar’s hut and the language lessons are well under way:
John Ferguson mimed what it was he wanted to know, and Ivar acted out what he was trying to describe, and between them they inched towards the right words for, say, knitting and spinning and carding the wool; for eating quietly and for eating noisily; for walking quickly and for walking slowly; for shouting and for whispering; for jumping and for shivering; for coughing and sneezing; for crouching by the fire and for shooing away the hens.
In the next paragraph, the reader is drawn into the process, as words from Ivar’s language are incorporated into the text:
Still heavily padded with English, the whole thing was an excited mixture of speech and gestures in which John Ferguson told him how he’d been down to the o to wash his socks, or that he’d stayed inside because it was gruggy out, or that he’d filled the lamp from the bunki and cleaned out the greut; that he’d a quick flinter around, swept up the flogs of snyag and brought in the skerpin, or that he’d picked some snori he’d found growing in the for, scalded the flodreks and drained them and saved the flingaso to make soup, and for a little while now had been sitting in the tur, going through everything he’d written down so far on the pages of his glossary.
I so appreciate Carys Davies’ good judgement in not giving us footnotes. They are absolutely not necessary – we are allowed to have a faint taste of learning the language by immersion. An interested reader, as I definitely am, can turn to the Author’s Note to find that, unsurprisingly, Ivar’s language is not Carys Davies’ invention. It is a version of Norn, now extinct but once spoken on the islands of Orkney and Shetland – and on Ivar’s fictional island which lies further north than either of those. The Author’s Note includes a glossary, including all the words in italics/purple on page 78 – flodreks, for example, are ‘limpets’ and flingaso is ‘water in which limpets have been scalded’.
Beneath this excited learning to communicate, and in the process learning about Ivar’s solitary way of life, there is a dark undercurrent. Over this idyllic scene there lies the shadow of John Ferguson’s mission. John Ferguson has allowed himself to forget about it for now, and Ivar is blissfully unaware of it. John Ferguson has been warned that Ivar, generally ‘placid and obedient’, was also large and strong and might not take kindly to being uprooted.
Perhaps anyone on the receiving end of so much lively enthusiasm would have begun to feel that they were in some way the object of it all, and surely Ivar could not be blamed for starting to think, at around this time, that John Ferguson might be beginning to return his feelings.
Just as, with genocide looming in Sydney, Lieutenant Dawes and Patyegarang developed an intimate relationship, so here Ivar has a growing emotional attachment to the messenger of his eviction. And at this point in the novel who can say if he’s right about John Ferguson returning his feelings? Certainly not the oblivious clergyman.
After the meeting: Astonishingly, while everyone agreed that the writing was excellent there were sharply divergent views about this book. The most negative version was that the book is completely silly. Nothing made sense: why did the owners need Ivar off the island, why had he stayed there in the first place, how unlikely is it that a clergyman would have taken on such an errand, how boring is all that stuff about language, how ho-hum is the inexorable movement towards the two men having sex, how implausible is the sex when it finally happens, and above all who would ever buy the final resolution? All of these questions could be answered satisfactorily by those of us who enjoyed the book, but our answers cut very little mustard. Mind you, I don’t think anyone saw the final resolution as completely realistic (see how careful I’m being about spoilers!): the difference is that some of us didn’t mind, and even enjoyed the improbability.
The Most Negative didn’t feel, as others of us did, an underlying dread: as the two men are building mutual trust and affection, we know that the moment will come when John Ferguson will have to reveal his true mission. And we know there is a concealed gun. Ivar has a secret ass well, so the elements were in place for an explosive climax. The book delivers that climax, but clearly not in ways that satisfied all readers.
I was pretty much alone in having loved the language lessons. But I think the world of the island felt real and substantial to us all, was in fact the book’s saving grace, even for the MN.
We read this book along with Ian MacEwan’s What We Can Know, which also prompted very different responses. Both books have islands and difficult sea voyages in small vessels.
I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time that has elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. The book club met on Gadigal land, and I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where the nights are lasting longer and small lizards seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of all those clans and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, which was 78 when I wrote that part of this blog post.
According to the book’s extensive glossary of Māori terms, Auē means ‘to cry, howl, wail’. Alternatively it is an ‘interjection showing distress’. This novel can be read as one long cry of distress for people, both Māori and Pākehā, male and female, young and old, in marginalised communities in New Zealand/Aotearoa. It’s a cry that has been heard around the world. According to Wikipedia, the first edition, published by independent publisher Mākaro Press in 2019, had a print run of 500 copies. It went on to win a number of prizes, was a best seller in New Zealand, and has been translated into several languages. The 2022 Scribe edition, which is what I have read, is published in the UK, the US and Australia.
Like many contemporary novels, Auē has a number of story lines with no obvious connection. It begins with young Ārama (Ari), who has recently lost his parents in an event whose specifics are revealed only in the last pages. Abandoned by his older brother who sets off on a quest of his own, he is left in the care of an aunt and her violently abusive white husband. The glimmer of hope in his new life is the friendship of a girl neighbour, Beth, whose farmer father Tom Aitken is a benevolent adult presence.
In a separate narrative strand, in chapters mainly labelled ‘Jade and Toko’, two young adult Māori women are caught up with thuggish men. Under cover of attending family funeral commitments, they escape to have fun together and have moments of romance – Jade with Toko, a gorgeous, guitar-playing man who is courageous, kind and protective. Things go well for a time, but there’s a terrible violent turn.
As the relationship between the two narratives is revealed, a complex picture emerges of family tragedy. There’s something of the feel of a quality TV series to the book, though it is much better written than that might seem to imply.
Page 79* is in one of Ārama’s chapters. A sleepover at the dairy has been planned.
[For those who don’t know, in New Zealand a dairy is what in Australia would be called a milk bar – a shop that sells sweets and ice creams among other things. Short rant: When I worked in children’s literature it was often remarked that US publishers of Australian and New Zealand books would routinely ask for terms to be Americanised, as if US children had to be protected from knowing that elsewhere people named the world differently. One of the charms of this book is that local idioms have not been removed. There are many Māori words, most of which are included in the glossary at the back of the book, but words like ‘dairy’ and ‘pottle’ are allowed to stand without explanation, and I rejoice. End of rant.]
Aunt Kath has cancelled the sleepover after being beaten by Uncle Stu, her husband. Ari has overheard the violence and is terrified. On page 79 Tom Aitken is stepping into the breach and having Ari at his place for the night.
Without my rule of 79, I wouldn’t have chosen this page to illustrate what is most compelling about the book. It’s an uneventful scene of a man and two children having a meal together. All the same it gives an idea of some of the qualities of the writing. In context it’s an oasis of normality, where Beth can be a little bit cheeky, and a little bit self-assertive without bringing disaster on themselves. The only violence here is against a cooked chicken:
Tom Aiken took out the chicken then stabbed it with a knife. ‘Done,’ he said. Beth made cola with the Sodastream. Tom Aiken said, ‘Now this night is going to be better than a sleepover at a dairy.’ ‘Because of chicken?’ Beth said. ‘I said going to be.’ ‘Keep talking’ ‘Ice cream.’ ‘Whoop-dee-doo.’ ‘Movie and junk food.’ ‘Not bad. But not exactly better than sleeping over at a place with all the junk food ever.’
The wider themes are suggested by what Ari glimpses in the DVD cupboard – perhaps, it’s subliminally suggested, this book has something in common with violent Hollywood.
In the lounge after dinner Tom Aiken went into the DVD cupboard. I saw inside. I saw the pile to the side, away from the others, but not well hidden. Django Unchained, Kill Bill, Lucky Number Slevin, Blood Diamond, Snow White and the Huntsman.
There’s a knowingness as if the author is talking to us over Ari’s shoulder. I confess that while reading this book I thought often about K, a member of my Book Group, who says he dislikes narratives that simulate a child’s voice. Auē is definitely not a book for child readers, but the Ārama chapters are narrated by the 11 years old boy at the heart of the story, and the faux-naïf voice had me understanding irritates K. (I’ve recently reread The God of Small Things, much of which is from the point of view of the girl Rahel, and the contrast couldn’t be starker: children aren’t just adults with less complex syntax.) Ari and Beth are wonderful characters, who play at being Django and Doc from the Tarantino movie. But their complexity doesn’t carry over to Ari’s narrative voice.
Beth went into the cupboard and pulled out Hunt for the Wilderpeople. ‘This,’ she said, and gave it to her dad. Hunt for the Wilderpeople was sad. Ricky Baker had no parents, and when he finally decided he liked his foster mum, she died and she was the best. And I thought, how bad was his luck, how unlucky do you have to be? Ricky Baker wrote haikus. His haiku about maggots was cool, and his one about Kingi who was a wanker and how Ricky Baker wanted him to die. In pain. Which I thought was a pretty bad thing to admit to.
Ari’s simple declarative statements about the movie are other examples of the kind of simplified language I mean. There’s a little more talking over Ari’s shoulder. Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople isn’t a random choice of a movie for the three of them to watch. It has a slightly laborious meta function – the novel is naming a work that it can be linked to.
Ricky Baker’s haiku in the movie give rise to a nice moment on the next page where elements of the plot are condensed into two haiku. The first, by Beth:
Stu-art John-son you are the ug-li-est farm-er hope cows shit on you
After that has evoked pretend disapproval from her father, it’s Ari’s turn:
Tau-ki-ri wrote me a let-ter and it said he's on his way home-home.
At this point of the novel, about the one-quarter mark, that’s the two points of suspense: will the little family be reunited? and will violence against women and children be brought to an end? And you know, I wasn’t any doubt about the answers.
I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time that has elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal, where the nights are lating longer and small lizards seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.
I cancelled my subscription to Heat a while back (after Series 3 Number 12), mainly because the handful of journals I subscribe to was getting to be quite a handful. Last September I received a complimentary copy of Number 21 with a note from the new editor Anna Thwaites inviting me to resubscribe. I am grateful for the gift, but since Southerly has revived and Meanjin will soon come back from the dead, I’m unlikely to take up the offer.
Mind you, if you want a conveniently sized literary journal that will introduce you to a diverse range of writers from Australia and elsewhere, including some in translation, you won’t find anything that suits you better than Heat.
This issue has two piece in translation. There’s a fable by Swiss writer Peter Stamm, translated by US-based Michael Hofmann, and a chillingly dystopian short story by Hong Kong author Hon Lai Chu translated by Jacqueline Leung. Heat seems to have a policy of not naming the original language of translated pieces – I’m guessing that these pieces were originally in German and Cantonese respectively. Hon Lai Chu’s story ‘Scrap‘ is available on the Heat website.
There’s an essay by Heat‘s founder and national treasure Ivor Indyk. Always interesting, he offers insights into the writing of Les Murray, Gerald Murnane and Alexis Wright. There’s a short story by the late Elizabeth Harrower, possibly her ‘last “new” piece of fiction … to reach readers’, as her biographer Susan Wyndham says in a brief introduction. Alongside these venerable and renowned contributors, Catherine Kaixin Yu, who grew up in Shanghai, has her first published essay, a richly elegiac account of visiting the dying village of her ancestors.
All that, plus poems by Londoner Alex Wong makes a good reading experience. What gave me most pleasure was a pair of poems by Melburnian Amy Crutchfield. In the first, ‘Nausicaa’, the poem’s speaker is a traveller on Corfu and visits Palaiokastritsa, traditionally the place where Odysseus met the nymph Nausicaa. The poem, in five short parts, is full of good things. I smiled a lot.. I’ll just mention an example of how line breaks can be important in poetry.
Section 4, ‘Taverna’ is quoted n the back cover of Heat, just the first three lines:
In the taverna we choose the wrong foods and sweat
That makes sense as a traveller’s tale. We chose something too spicy for our tastebuds. But the poem itself continues after the line break and turns out to be saying something quite different:
In the taverna we choose the wrong foods and sweat over our one chance to be typical.
It’s not about physical discomfort after all, but about the travellers’ awkward sense of standing out as odd. Or both!
Thanks you, Anna Thwaites.
I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time that has elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal, and crows are kicking up a fuss outside my window. I acknowledge Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog
Me fail? I fly! 