Tui T. Sutherland, The Lost Continent (Book Eleven of the Wings of Fire series, Scholastic Press 2019)
My granddaughter is an obsessive reader, possibly even more so that I was at her age. She reads a lot of comics, often called ‘graphic novels’ to claim a vague respectability, but mostly of a kind that I find hard to take or even fake an interest in: baby sitters, schoolgirl politics, etc. But one series that takes a lot of her time, reading and rereading, and then rereading in apparently random order, is Tui T. Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series. First the comic versions and then the original proper-novel versions of the ones that haven’t been made into comics yet.
I did read the first of the Wings of Fire graphic novels, The Dragonet Prophecy, eighteen months ago. Recently when my granddaughter spontaneously offered to lend me The Lost Continent, how could I say no? It’s the eleventh novel in the series but, she said, it is the first in a whole new story arc (not her exact words – she is after all only eight). When I’d finished it she told me that her reason for letting me read it was that she wanted someone to talk to about the world of the novels. My motive for accepting was to be a decent grandfather and provide her with some company in her reading life.
Virtuous motivation aside, I have to report that I loved this book and am tempted to sign up for the rest of the series. In a prologue, a dragon called Clearsight arrives on a continent that’s far from her home. Chapter One takes up the story two thousand years later when Clearsight is revered as a prophet who is responsible for all that is good in the society. There are three main tribes of dragons on this continent: SilkWings, HiveWings and LeafWings. There has been a huge war. According to the official account, the vicious LeafWings were wiped out by heroic HiveWings (with a red flag to readers of all ages: trees were also wiped out). The SilkWings, forever indebted to their saviours, are pretty much a slave species. Ruling the whole society is Queen Wasp.
Blue, the main character, is a young SilkWing whose wings haven’t come in yet. He believes that all is well. He accepts as simple facts of life that he and his kind have to pass through checkpoints constantly and must never meet the eyes of a HiveWing. But when his older sister Luna’s butterfly-like metamorphosis is brutally interrupted by HiveWing soldiers he has a rude awakening, the seeds of a revolutionary spirit are sown, and adventures ensue.
(Yes, there are words like metamorphosis. Also inexorable. This series doesn’t insult its readers’ intelligence.)
On page 79* Blue has hidden from a host of HiveWings and has met someone we know from the first moment will be the love of his life, a HiveWing named Cricket. Where all the others of her kind can be mind-controlled by Queen Wasp (who Blue now realises is not a benevolent ruler), Cricket somehow remains untouched, and she has helped him to hide in the hive’s library. At the start of this page she wakes him from an exhausted sleep.
What can I say about this? The story rattles along. We never forget that the characters are dragons (‘the sound of tramping talons’, ‘his tail seemed to be entirely in the way’, she ‘put one claw to her mouth in warning’). The queen’s mind-control is vividly, and creepily, conveyed in the image of eyes as ‘blank white pearls’.
As far as I can tell from a quick web search, the books have been extremely popular and, in spite of fostering discussion of subjects including vegetarianism, pacifism, slavery, authoritarian modes of government, internalised oppression, they don’t seem to have fallen foul of book-banners. Maybe it’s because it’s only dragons.
I don’t plan to go back to the previous 10 books, but my granddaughter has lent me the comic version of Darkstalker, a stand-alone that gives some of the back story. Both duty and desire urge me to read it.
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 the Eora Nation. 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.
Niall Williams, The Fall of Light (Picador 2001, Picador ebook 2010)
Before the meeting: The group has previously enjoyed three Niall Williams novels (my blog posts here, here, and here). This month’s chooser decided that we couldn’t have enough of this good thing.
The other novels have been set in the fictional Irish town of Faha. In so far as this one centres on a particular place, it is the real-life Scattery Island in the estuary of the Shannon River, though the action also wanders over three continents. According to a foreword, the novel is a family story that has passed down through generations, embellished on the way.
The story unfolds in 19th century Ireland. In the context of longstanding, brutal English occupation and the devastating potato famine, we follow the travails and adventures of the Foleys. First Emer the mother leaves. Then her husband Francis and their four sons set out across the width of Ireland, on what they see as an epic quest, seeking a new life in the West, in Galway. First Francis is swept away by a river in flood. Then the brothers are separated. Tomas the eldest falls catastrophically in love and flees for his life with his beloved. Of the next two brothers, twins, Finan finds his way to Africa, and Finbar becomes the leader of a community of Gypsies. The youngest brother, with the deeply Irish name Teige, has an uncanny facility with horses that opens possibilities for him. It’s all told in wonderfully musical prose with a touch of what you could call Celtic magic realism.
The family is dispersed – to Africa, to continental Europe, and to North America. The book is most vibrantly alive in the Irish sections. Finan’s life in Africa is told briefly at third hand. Finbar’s adventures with the Gypsies (probably not what they’d be called if the book were written now) left me unconvinced, though there are some wonderful moments, of which my favourite occurs when Finbar, who has waited outside the caravan where his partner was in labour, calls out, ‘How is my son?’ The midwife replies:
‘Your son has no penis.’ She watched as all the fathers’ heads came up and their eyes opened and their mouths dropped and there was a kind of moan that passed among them like a wind. ‘No penis! But two heads!’ she shouted, and bought her hands up to the sunken sides of her leathery face and leaned back and hooted a kind of hoo-hoo of owl-like laughter to the astonishment of all.
When I told a version of that to my grandchildren they were quick to guess that there were twin girls.
Two sons end up in North America. The westward trek in the USA, paralleling the one in Ireland, is a different kind of desolation – a solitary Meek’s Cutoff. But, like the Gypsy story, these sections lack the Irish sections’ vivid sense of place and I was always glad when the narrative returned to Ireland.
Though I infinitely prefer to read books in hard copy, I had to content myself this time with an ebook from the library. Where page 79* falls depends on your settings, but in my reading it occurs at about the one-third point. Francis and Teige, father and son, have been reunited against all odds. (You might have guessed that the shape of the story is separation and then arduously achieved, partial reunion.) After some time together Teige tells Francis that he has done what they all set out to do in the first place – he has seen the sea, and gone into it, even though he was afraid of its wildness. The father says he was ‘right to try it and keep well out of it’:
Another pause, then Teige added: ‘I didn’t though.’ ‘You didn’t?’ The pony flicked her head. Her tail swished. The boy looked at her a moment and felt his father’s eyes upon him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I still went in, three times.’ The father said nothing then. He sat there and the emotions he held made his lips quiver. He blinked. Dark clouds moved across the sky. The night fell and the stars came and went and wheeled above them and each lay down to the slender hope of their dreams.
This kind of interplay between understated dialogue, big emotions and romantic descriptions, all framed in a mild mockery, is one of the joys of the book. ‘The father said nothing then.’ We have followed Francis’s narrow escape from drowning, so know what lies behind his quivering lips and blink. Maybe the dark clouds and the stars are there to mark the passage of time, but they are also a way of showing the thing that can’t be said by these inarticulate characters: for Francis, the realisation that his son has dared to go into the ocean marks a great shift in his own emotional state. It lends strength to ‘the slender hope’ of his dreams.
You might wonder what that pony is doing there, flicking her head and swishing her tail. Teige has calmed her down and ridden her in a race for the Gypsies, after which she has become his steadfast companion. He is forever moving close to nervous horses, stroking them and speaking to them in language that isn’t quite words, calming them and coaxing them to do what their owners require. It’s an almost magical power that places him at the emotional heart of the book.
This stage of the narrative is a journey. Francis is looking for what will come to be known as Scattery Island – monks who saved him from drowning have given him directions. Both he and Teige are seeking the other sons and their mother.
Still on page 79:
The following day when they were passing a cottage a cry stopped them. The cottage was not unlike others, a small building of dark stone with crooked windows and a door open to the road even in that February. The cry was that of a woman, it came from the garden beyond. The Foleys stopped, the pony flicked her ears. Then Francis called out. There was no response and Francis looked to Teige who slid down the pony. Together they walked in around the cottage and found in a small garden a woman of fifty years trying to pull up from the earthen ridges the fallen body of her husband.
The landscape they travel through is full of suffering and death. Mostly there’s a generosity of spirit among the sufferers. Here Francis and Teige don’t hesitate before they stop to help, and in the nature of fairy tales – or family stories that have been polished and decorated by generations of telling – when they help this couple and their children they gain information that leads them forward dramatically in their quest.
I’ve mentioned Scattery Island a couple of times. The real-life island at the mouth of the Shannon River is better known as Inis Cathaigh (the link is to its Wikipedia page). It became a place of safety for a community of pilots during the Great Famine. How Francis and the other Foleys relate to that actual history is a beautiful invention.
The meeting: We met, unusually, in a pub. It was a beautiful space, though noisy, which made it hard to maintain a single conversation, even with the music turned down. we displaced a women’s baseball team (‘We don’t usually come to the pub on a Tuesday night in our uniforms’) and were displaced in turn by a group of young women toting laptops.
We had a terrific discussion of the book.
A number of us confessed that they had come to the book reluctantly. We’ve read three of his books already. Do we have to read one more? For some, it came alive when the famine appeared. For others, it was the language from the very beginning. I don’t think anyone wasn’t won over completely.
To generalise, we were all willing to forgive its faults because the story rattles along brilliantly, and the writing is wonderful. We differed on what the faults were. One man couldn’t bear the unrealistic elements of the romance between Teige and a wealthy Englishwoman – others (me included) were charmed by its improbabilities. Some loved the sequence where all the Gypsy women give birth on the same day, whereas other (me included) were irritated by the artifice. We were all, I think, unenthusiastic about the North American sections, and even more so by the almost perfunctory treatment of the brother who goes to Africa.
Someone pointed out that it’s a book about men, that the women aren’t fully developed characters. (This observation case an interesting light on the midwife’s joke I quoted above – the character’s assumption that a baby will be male reflects an awareness of the male-centred nature of the narrative in general.)
At the end of the book, the narrator reveals that Tiege is his ancestor. Some of us took this to be an authorial statement – and an explanation for why the narrative is less ‘tight’ than other Williams novels: this is a version of his own family story, so was obliged to go where the actual history had gone, even if fancifully. I’m inclined to think the narrator is separate from the author.
Someone observed that the book is suffused with love, especially love among the Foley men. we agreed that this is true of the book, an it led to a number of us telling stories about their siblings, mainly brothers. There was a theme of connections being lost or broken and re-established after a period. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this was an astonishing echo of the book’s shape.
One question remained unresolved. How =do you pronounce ‘Teige’. Everyone except me rhyme it with ‘intrigue’. I hear it as ‘tyke’ but with a soft end. Opinions welcome in the comments.
The Book Group members are all men of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.
* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 79.
Since 1972, Pam Brown has published 23 books of poetry and almost as many chapbooks (chapbooks are tiny books of poetry, mostly too small to be given an ISBN). She has won major prizes, been an editor including for Jacket and Overland, and is a generous reader of other people’s books.
I enjoy her poetry, but I’m perplexed when it comes to writing about it. Before sitting down to write about Text Thing, approximately her eighteenth book, I looked back over my blog to see what I’d already written. It turns out there’s quite a lot, much revealing the extent of my ignorance about contemporary poetry. If the spirit moves you to read them, here are links to my encounters with Selected Poems 1972–1981, True Thoughts (2008), Home by Dark (2013), Missing Up (2016) and Stasis Shuffle (2021).
There are plenty of places you can go for illuminating accounts of Brown’s poetry. I especially like her 2003 interview with John Kinsella in Jacket2 where he memorably suggests that she has created her own subculture. Among many interesting things in that interview, she says something that’s relevant to page 79* of this book. Referring to the way her poems often include the names of friends without explanation, Brown says:
The … thing is that they’re signifiers. And somehow it’s also a call for community. That sounds corny and old-fashioned but poetry is a marginal art and we’re like the black market of culture — it lends a freedom to do that… include real people, names…
The poem that begins on page 79 is ‘The Night’:
And there are three lines over the page:
nothing cosy about you.
(curses!)
This poem is uncharacteristically straightforward. Including the title, it consists of a single sentence whose syntax is almost simple enough to meet a primary schoolteacher’s specifications, followed by a one word exclamation. The poem’s speaker eats a pickled onion and is reminded of a friend (or perhaps a frenemy or a former lover?). She indulges in a little rant addressed to that person.
It makes me laugh and I’m not exactly sure how.
Maybe the poem invites me to imagine it being read by the person it’s addressed to. Would she/they (I’m assuming it’s not a man) be amused? Defensive? Dismissive? Retaliate in a poem of her own?
Having now read it a number of times, I realise that there’s quite a lot going on.
The night Denis bought Ken's painting of a barcode I ate a pickled onion
This opening clause sets the scene. I imagine the opening night of an art exhibition in a small gallery. Art is on sale and there are snacks, including pickled onions. ‘Ken’ is almost certainly Ken Bolton, poet and painter, named on the imprint page as the publisher of this book artist Ken Searle [see comment from Ken Bolton] . ‘Denis’ is probably a real person too, but his identity doesn’t matter, any more than that of the poem’s ‘you’ does. What does matter is that all four people in the poem – ‘I’, ‘you’, Ken and Denis – are on first-name terms, and seem to belong to some kind of creative community – perhaps Brown’s ‘black market of culture’. Only when I read the poem out loud (to the long-suffering Emerging Artist) did I realise that there’s a lovely contrast between the briefly mentioned masculine, transactional world of buying and selling where even the artwork is an emblem of commerce, and the feminine, relational world of the rest of the poem.
I ate a pickled onion & thought of you you sourpuss
Is it ridiculous of me to compare Brown’s pickled onion to Proust’s madeleine? Probably. But the taste of this pickled onion, like the smell of the madeleine, transports the poem’s speaker from the external world to the internal one of emotion-charged memory. The word ‘sourpuss’ explains the connection. Then there’s something disarming in the string of qualities, each introduced by an ampersand, with the attention-grabbing words ‘squeam’ (which Merriam-Webster says is a back formation from ‘squeamish’) and ‘demotics’ (which in this context I take to mean the adoption of working-class manners and language, like a recent Australian Prime Minister giving himself an Aussie-sounding nickname). There’s a nice comedy in the transition from criticising an off-putting quest for power and calculated manner to a silly schoolyard insult:
& your squeam-inducing quest for power & your fake demotics & your too big plastic hairpin which doesn't suit you
You almost expect that to go ‘which doesn’t / suit you / anyway‘ with a teenage emphasis. The first two insults carry the ring of truth. The third reflects back on the speaker.
Learned people refer to Pam Brown’s gift for sprezzatura, a casual appearance that conceals the work that went into it. The veering off in the next line – the fifth to start with an ampersand – is a nice example. I can’t read the opening ‘& also’ without thinking of an angry teenager. Brown’s world of allusion is almost certainly more sophisticated than mine – but I think of Mary-Anne Fahy’s gum-chewing Kylie Mole from the 1990s. (Come to think of it, this book was published in 2002, so Kylie Mole may well have been in Brown’s mind.) So it feels like an easy, natural follow-on from the big plastic hairpin. Then, as if it’s a perfectly natural next step, the poem turns into an intimate attack:
& also you don't know how to warm eggs on the outside
Well, maybe it’s not explicitly intimate, but the lines do suggest a shared domesticity in the past. I’m not sure what it means to ‘warm eggs / on the outside’. This conjured in my mind in image of hands holding eggs gently, imparting body heat to them. Why anyone would want to do that, or why not knowing how to do it was a moral failure wasn’t immediately clear. Then I reflected that if you’re baking a cake, a pavlova, or even an omelette, it’s a good idea to let the eggs warm up for a while ‘on the outside’ of the fridge: so there’s a practical meaning. But – for me at least – the image of motherly, protective, feminine warmth persists. And that justifies the final twist of the knife:
because there's nothing cosy about you.
I’m not usually one to notice perfectly conventional punctuation, but I love that full stop at the end. Back in 2002, Millennials probably weren’t yet expressing horror at Boomers’ ending text messages with a full stop, which they saw as unreasonably aggressive. This one fits their reading perfectly.
The full stop may the end of the rant, but it’s not the end of the poem:
(curses!)
The exclamation is a response to everything that has gone before. I love how many ways it can be read: ‘(Did I really just say that?)’, ‘(Do I still have all these feelings about her?)’, ‘(I was having such a nice time before I bit that pickled onion!)’, ‘Why did I ever let her into my life?)’. Or: ‘(And now I hurl curses in your direction!)’, ‘(I’ll sum it all up in the one word!)’. Given that Pam Brown often quotes from other poets and popular culture, or even odd bits of graffiti or commercial copy, it doesn’t seem wrong to hear an echo of comics like Popeye here. No time at all on Google gave me an example.
That’s just one poem. If I were to find a way that it’s representative of the whole book, I’d say it’s something about interruption. The cover illustration, attributed to Kurt Brereton, is of graffiti that reads ‘wile you are reeding th’. The book is full of interruptions, asides, distractions. ‘The Night’ can be read as being about one more distraction. But such a rich one!
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 the Eora Nation. 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.
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.
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.
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (Flamingo 1997)
Before the meeting: After Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me gave us so much pleasure last month, this month’s Chooser met with general approval when he picked the novel that made her famous.
I first read The God of Small Things before I started blogging. Apart from a general sense of having enjoyed it, I retained just one image, of a group of policemen marching in long grass. It turns out that the image comes towards the end of the book, on page 304:
A posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal river, sluggish and swollen with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, the clink of handcuffs in someone’s heavy pocket. Their wide khaki shorts were rigid with starch, and bobbed over the tall grass like a row of stiff skirts, quite independent of the limbs that moved inside them.
There’s so much of the book in those two sentences. The starched shorts, so vividly present and so rich with metaphorical meaning; the initial capitals ‘Touchable Policemen’ marking a childlike personification of key concepts; the river, the undergrowth and the tall grass as part of the physical environment that is such a force in the book. Above all, the complex tone is characteristic: the soldiers are almost comic, puppet-like, yet the reader knows that they are about to do terrible things.
The rest of the book was fresh and new to me. It’s the story of twins Estha and Rahel, their mother Ammu (whose divorced status was scandalous in the mid 1960s, in the Syrian Christian community of their small village in Kerala), and their extended family: Ammu’s brother Chacko, her blind mother Mammachi, and Baby Kochamma. (The text is scattered with Malayalam words, only sometimes translated. I understood ‘Kochamma’ to mean ‘Auntie’, and a quick websearch just now gave ‘a woman who is to be respected like a mother’.) In spite of her cuddly name, Baby Kochamma is a nasty piece of work, disappointed in love by a priest when she was young, and now bitter, moralistic and vindictive. Chacko’s divorced wife, an Englishwoman, comes to visit with her daughter Sophie Mol (‘Mol’ means something like ‘daughter’), who is about the same age as Estha and Rahel.
We know from the beginning that there is to be a disaster. The narrative takes place in at least three time frames: before the disaster, the disaster, and a couple of decades after the disaster. We see Sophie Mol’s funeral before we know who she is, and there are plenty of hints of the other terrible incident – which isn’t revealed until the final pages, just after the scene with the starched shorts.
There’s another moment that has idiosyncratic resonance for me. There are a three or four guava trees on streets near my home. I recently went scrounging and picked from the trees and from the footpaths enough ripe and slightly bruised fruit to make a delicious jar of jam. The unusable fruit on the ground, and there was a lot of it, was a disgusting mess. So it was a personal pleasure when a day or so later, on page 205, Rahel and Estha approach the hut of Velutha, a servant whom they love:
Velutha wasn’t home. <snip> But someone was. A man’s voice floated out from inside and echoed around the clearing, making him sound lonely. The voice shouted the same thing, over and over again, and each time it climbed into a higher, more hysterical register. lt was an appeal to an over-ripe guava threatening to fall from its tree and make a mess on the ground.
Pa pera-pera-pera-perakka (Mr gugga-gug-gug-guava), Ende parambil thooralley (Don’t shit here in my compound). Chetende parambil thoorikko (You can shit next door in my brother’s compound), Pa pera-pera-pera-perakka (Mr gugga-gug-gug-guava.)
Exactly what I want to sing to the guavas of Enmore.
This is a book that cries out for quotation. You can feel Arundhati Roy’s glee as she comes up with similes, malapropisms and mondegreens, little asides, big digressions, wonderful descriptions of people. Page 79* is a good example. As it happens, it starts with Velutha and moves on to Baby Kochamma.
The family are driving to the nearest sizeable town, Cochin, to see The Sound of Music. It’s a long drive, interspersed with flashbacks, flashforwards and songs from the show. At page 78, already running late, they are held up by a demonstration – the street is full of workers, possibly including some Naxalites (the ‘extremists’ who Arundhati Roy was to spend time with in the jungle some decades later), carrying the red flag of Communism. The adults in the car have complex responses. Baby Kochamma is unequivocally on the side of capitalism; Chacko, though he effectively owns a pickle factory, identifies as a Marxist and theoretically is on the side of the workers; the twins’ mother says nothing, but later we realise that she has fellow feeling with the demonstrators. Rahel thinks she sees Velutha – as a former Untouchable, he usually goes shirtless, but the man Rahel sees is wearing a white shirt and waves a red flag.
Though we have met Velutha previously in stories of Ammu’s childhood, it’s here that we learn who he is from the twins’ point of view:
They would sit with him for hours, on their haunches – hunched punctuation marks in a pool of wood shavings – and wonder how he always seemed to know what smooth shapes waited inside the wood for him. They loved the way wood, in Velutha’s hands, seemed to soften and become as pliable as Plasticine. He was teaching them to use a planer. His house (on a good day) smelled of fresh wood shavings and the sun. Of red fish curry cooked with black tamarind. The best fish curry, according to Estha, in the whole world. It was Velutha who made Rahel her luckiest ever fishing rod and taught her and Estha to fish. And on that skyblue December day, it was him that she saw through her red sunglasses, marching with a red flag at the level crossing outside Cochin.
Then there’s a characteristic switch in perspective. The omniscient narrator steps in with a premonition. Rahel’s red-tinted glasses fill the world with the colour of danger. Birds of prey wheel above the demonstration, and Velutha’s black back with its distinctive leaf-shaped birthmark becomes a potential target:
Rahel could see pieces of red sky. And in the red sky, hot red kites wheeled, looking for rats. In their hooded yellow eyes there was a road and red flags marching. And a white shirt over a black back with a birthmark. Marching.
Then the point of view comes right down to a close-up, and some characteristically tactile description. Where Rahel sees a friendly figure in the crows, Baby sees a threat:
Terror, sweat and talcum powder blended into a mauve paste between Baby Kochamma’s rings of neckfat. Spit coagulated into little white gobs at the corners of her mouth. She imagined she saw a man in the procession who looked like the photograph in the newspapers of the Naxalite called Rajan, who was rumoured to have moved south from Palghat. She imagined he had looked straight at her.
I love the final paragraph on the page. Rahel the child is aware that the man with ‘a face like a knot’ means to be unkind, but her preoccupations seize on his unintended normalising of her family.
A man with a red flag and a face like a knot opened Rahel’s door because it wasn’t locked. The doorway was full of men who’d stopped to stare. ‘Feeling hot, baby?’ the man like a knot asked Rahel kindly in Malayalam. Then unkindly, ‘Ask your daddy to buy you an Air Condition!’ and he hooted with delight at his own wit and timing. Rahel smiled back at him, pleased to have Chacko mistaken for her father. Like a normal family
I can’t say I know a lot about India. I’ve never been to Kerala. But at a railway station in Rajasthan, men did stop to stare unblinkingly at the young women in our group. It didn’t feel particularly aggressive or even deliberately impolite. We put it down to cultural difference. That experience helps me to visualise what Arundhati Roy is describing here, and to understand why Rahel isn’t particularly disturbed.
On the next page, the man with the flag turns his attention to Baby Kochamma and speaks to her in English, justifying her terror. But that’s another story, of the many told in this marvellous book.
The meeting: There were seven of us and as always we ate well and enjoyed each other’s company. We spoke as little as possible about Donald Trump, Iran, Israel, fuel and the tendency among younger generations to identify with self-diagnosed mental illness or neurodivergence. We gave passing glances to recent theatre and film pleasures, and to bodily pains, including severe side effects from statins that two of us have experienced, and the satisfaction of a third who convinced his specialist not to prescribe them for him.
One person had said on the WhatsApp group that he’d reach the halfway point of the book and was going to give up. I replied on the group that I loved the book and was looking forward to an interesting conversation – but it turned out that he had read the wrong Arundhati Roy book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. He said at the meeting that there are some wonderful passages in it, but he found it very hard going.
Another person had read the right book in the 1990s and hadn’t been inclined to reread it. I don’t think this was from active dislike. As the single parent of a teenager, and the only one at the meeting still in full-time employment, I imagine he doesn’t have a lot of time for reading, let alone rereading.
One person was about halfway through the book, but intending to read the rest and not touchy about spoilers. I’m starting to think it would be good to have a designated non-finisher for every meeting. The non-finisher could then ask questions that lead the rest of the group to think about how things fit together. In this case, there’s a scene where Estha, the boy twin, is sexually molested. Our non-finisher wanted to know if this had a lasting effect on him as it seemed at the time that life just carried on. I replied blithely that it was a bit of a red herring – we were tempted to read this incident as explaining why the Estha we see many years later has become an alienated mute, but the real cause is the much worse incident that happens at the book’s climax. I was gently corrected: Estha’s terror of the incident being repeated set off a chain of events that leads to the climactic incident.
Of the other four, one had read the book reluctantly – feeling that he might have had enough Indian novels for a while (cue a brief digression as we enthused that Amitav Ghosh is scheduled to come to the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May), and it took a while but after the halfway point, once all the characters had been introduced and the plot got moving, the book won him over completely. We generally agreed that it was a bit of a struggle in the first half to keep track of the complex set of relationships. The time shifts, especially in the first half, were often confusing. It’s a book, someone said, that needs to be read in reasonably long sessions – not ten minutes at a time before you go to sleep at night. Nods all round.
Someone else said that when he was struggling with the language he read a passage out to his partner to see if she could make head or tail of it. When he heard the words aloud he realised they were crystal clear. From then on, he slowed down, letting the language play on his inner ear, and enjoyed the experience. (Sadly, he couldn’t find the passage to read it to us.) Conversation hovered around this: not universally seen as a virtue, the book is peppered with writerly quirks, turns of phrase or eccentric punctuation that draw attention to themselves and pull the reader out of the story for a moment. A young writer flexing her muscles, I think someone said. And why not? someone may have said back.
We left our host with the washing up and dispersed into a clear, warm, early Autumn night.
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 Group met on Gadigal land. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal, where yesterday’s sudden downpours show no sign of recurring today. I acknowledge 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.
Evelyn Araluen, The Rot (University of Queensland Press 2025)
This is a brilliant follow-up to Evelyn Araluen’s first book, Dropbear. It’s passionately raw, intellectually challenging, and full of rabbit-holes. Araluen says in her acknowledgements, ‘In most ways this is a book for girls.’ She goes on to say, ‘A girl is so many things. Everything, really.’ It’s pretty safe to say that I’m not a girl. But as an oldish man of settler heritage I was swept away.
Alison Croggon in the Guardian (at this link) called it ‘a hurricane of a book’ and says (among other things):
The Rot is an experiential plunge into the nightmare of the present moment, as seen through two centuries of colonisation on this continent. Dark though it is – as dark as our times – it is not hopeless. The book is dedicated to ‘my girls, and the world you will make’: Araluen looks to the ‘Long Future’, a term coined by the Unangax̂ scholar Professor Eve Tuck, for what can be imagined for those who survive colonisation – contingent and elusive as that future might be. At the core of this collection’s bitter truths beats a sublime tenderness.
[In case you need a footnote: Unangax̂ are the Indigenous people of the Aleutian islands. Some of the most powerful moments in Rot come when Araluen wrestles with the implications of Eve Tuck’s thinking. You don’t have to go down this tempting rabbit-hole to feel the full force of the poems.]
Araluen was recently interviewed by Sian Cain for the Guardian (at this link) when she won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Here’s a snippet:
She worked on The Rot ‘after work, after dinner, in the bath’ for months, though she now admits that such prolonged focus on such a traumatic subject was ‘irresponsible of me’. ‘I do not recommend drinking wine in the bath and listening to Mitski and crying and calling that a writing practice,’ she added. The Rot reflects ‘a really panicked, distressed window of a time that I hope we all look back on with horror and despair and a real sense of regret,’ Araluen said.
[Mitski, another of the book’s many potential rabbit-holes, is a Japanese-American singer whose music has been described as a ‘wry running commentary on twentysomething angst, raw desire, and often unrequited love’ (link to Wikipedia article here).]
These quotes give an idea of the book’s tone and its scope, though there’s a lot that they don’t mention. For instance, the genocide in Gaza is a pervasive presence. I recommend that you read both the review and the article in full – and then I hope you’ll decide to read the book.
There’s so much to take in, so much to say, such complexity and intensity to untangle, so many rabbit-holes to be profitably explored. I’ll just offer a small note, keeping to my resolve to focus on one page.
Page 78* is the beginning of ‘What You Can Do with Your Hands’:
Before looking at the poem itself, it’s worth considering it in context. It’s title suggests that it is a direct response to an earlier poem. ‘You’ (page 25) ends:
no less human than yourself. Around us the world sways, sometimes crumbles. It's not that you think you can change this, but you need something to do with your hands.
The hands motif turns up again in ‘Analysis Act Three’ (page 76), which launches itself with a quote from J H Prynne (from his 2022 lecture ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work‘, another potential rabbit-hole).
Prynne: no poet has or can have clean hands, because clean hands are themselves a fundamental contradiction. Clean hands do no worthwhile work.
Sections viii and ix have this: (Apologies, but my WordPress theme doesn’t allow me to include section numbers as they ought to appear.)
Every day I ask myself what the machine doesn't want me to know. Every tomorrow will be the day I find a way to learn it. Every night I read poetry just to give my hands something to do.
Refusal, resistance, disavowal and survivance are tenors of a liveable life. In action they are compromised, bloody-handed, in the world and of it.
The book is full of theory, grief and rage. But the motif of hands beings it down to earth: thinking and feeling are not enough. We need to work, to engage. Reading poetry can be work. So are ‘refusal, resistance, disavowal and survivance’.
‘What You Can Do with Your Hands’ responds in the form of an instructional poem in 15 sections’. Page 78 has just the first two instructions:
First, verify. Count the fingers, the sharpness of the lines, check for smudges or extra limbs. Is there a blur? A hollow aura where the wrong light strikes? What shadows loom from an open door? Wear eucalyptus on your wrist, invoke that old verse. Don't swallow the fruit. Don't make deals with their kind.
Temple, brows, slide index fingers down the nasal canal, swipe thumbs under the eye. Push harder than you think you should. Swallow. It will hurt until it won't.
A quick and dirty summary of these sections would be something like: first, pay attention to your actual hands, and second, use them to become aware of yourself as physically present.
But this is poetry. The words matter. And they introduce an element of the uncanny, something that disturbs the prose meaning. ‘Check for smudges,’ Ok. I can do that, and it is an injunction to self-reflection: smudges – of ink, dirt, foodstuff – will show what I’ve been doing. But ‘check for extra limbs’? The mind goes wandering, and who knows where? Then the questions about light and shade ask the reader to notice their actual context, recognise that they are in a place, in relationship to whatever creates a looming shadow. (In my case right now, the shadows on my hands are cast by light from an open window.)
‘Wear eucalyptus’: fair enough. But what is the old verse we are to invoke? I lay that aside as another of the book’s potential rabbit-holes. If you have an idea, please say in the comments.
‘Don’t swallow the fruit’: I read this as referring to the tale where a person taken to a fairy land must not eat anything if they want to avoid being trapped there forever. That and the final sentence, ‘Don’t make deals with their kind,’ are warnings to keep one’s own integrity against the tide of disinformation and distraction that we live in – ‘Don’t drink the kool aid.’ Already the poem has moved quite a way from literal hands.
The second section comes back to the literal. It insists that the reader notice they are a body: that they push hard to make contact with their own physical existence.
I won’t discuss the rest in detail – the remaining sections cover how to acknowledge place; how to repair; how to cook; how to throw soil into a grave. They cover self-defence, self-care, first-aid, violence, tenderness, and finally connection. Section by section, the instruction form opens up possibilities, creates small and large riddles, resonates. Even Section 12, the shortest, ‘Pick up your fucking litter,’ repays a moment’s attention: the tone shifts and the speaker of the poem becomes for a moment an irritable Auntie. But the comic irritation doesn’t detract from the importance of the advice. Section 14, the second shortest section, is, among other things, a gloss on Section 2: ‘Remove your grip from your own throat.’ It’s one thing to push hard with your thumbs under your eyes until it hurts; it’s a different thing altogether to do violence against yourself, to stifle your own voice. I love Section 15, but it’s against my religion to quote the final line of a poem.
Do read the book if you get a chance.
I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower (1966. Text Classics 1996)
Before the meeting: I’m sticking to my resolve to write only about page 78*.
If you want a brief, thoughtful discussion of this book and its place in Elizabeth Harrower’s life work, there are plenty around. I recommend Kerryn Goldsworthy’s review, published in the Australian Book Review in 2012 (at this link). I particularly like this:
It is an accomplished and sophisticated novel of great power and intensity, but, as with most good psychological realism, the reader approaches the final pages with a sensation of exhausted, bruised relief.
It turns out that focusing on page 78 means paying attention to something I saw as of secondary interest on first reading.
This page features the book’s villain, Felix Shaw. (Sadly Elizabeth Harrower seems to have it in for Shaw men: a number of her villains have our family name.) For most of the book its main characters, Laura and Clare Vaizey, abandoned by their mother, live under Felix’s thrall, Laura as his much younger wife and Clare initially as a teenage girl in his care. There’s no romance, no love, and Felix is a misogynist in the full sense of the word – he actually hates women, and constantly torments, abuses and emotionally manipulates the two under his control.
Most of the book focuses on the sisters’ wretched servitude and isolation, but the moments when we see Felix apart from them, like this one, are interesting to revisit. Here he is giving a lift in his battered old car to a former business partner, Peter Trotter, one of a string of younger men whom Felix befriends, entering into financial dealings that invariably end up with him losing money and them leaving him in their dust as their enterprises flourish.
Felix has just explained that he is moving his office from his factory to his home. At least part of his reason, we know, is to intensify what we would now call his coercive control over his young wife. After a bit of bluster, typical rationalisation of a self-destructive action motivated by weird spite, he asks Peter Trotter’s opinion. There is a minutely observed moment of the kind Elizabeth Harrower is celebrated for.
Expressionless, Peter Trotter gave him a shilling to pay the bridge toll.
‘Expressionless’ does so much work there. Even while Felix is pretending that all is well, there is this wordless abject moment when he accepts the other man’s contemptuous financial help. Then Peter offers what the reader knows is a sensible perspective, but which falls on resolutely deaf ears, while illustrating Elizabeth Harrower’s gift for vernacular dialogue:
‘I say it’s a lousy idea. You save a few quid subletting the office at the factory (incidentally, I’ll be your tenant) and drop a packet.’ ‘How do you make that out? Drop a packet!’ ‘If you can’t see it – In your shoes, I’d be branching out, not closing down.’ ‘Oh, would you? Who’s closing down?’ Peter Trotter shrugged. His indifference was bottomless. Pennies and dimes. Pennies and dimes. Why was he persecuted by the natterings of small-time no-hopers like Felix Shaw with his paltry manoeuvres, when he had real plans cooking? Tiredly, he made Felix a further donation of his opinions. ‘That’s how it gets round. “Shaw’s doing the paperwork at home. Can’t afford a two-by-four office.” I’m not saying it’s a fact. Only how it looks to the trade.’ Thickly, defiant, Felix said, ‘So what? Who cares what the trade thinks? Mr Shaw’s not too worried about them.’ ‘Yeah. Well. This is where I get off. See you.’
And that is the end of a relationship.
This page repays a close look. Felix’s reference to himself in the third person makes me realise that Harrower’s depiction of a self-involved, wildly irrational man with bombastic self-belief and demand for absolute loyalty from those he sees as his subjects is alarmingly relevant to the mid 2020s. But it also, surprisingly to me, evokes the reader’s pity for Felix: this man we experience mainly as a controlling monster is, from another perspective, a small time no-hoper with paltry manoeuvres. This pity is dangerous: though she doesn’t use such terms, Laura, terribly abused and exploited, also sees that Felix is a small-time no-hoper, a man whose sometimes alcohol-fuelled violence is born out of deep self-hatred and lack of self-confidence, and her pity for him (she does use that word) is part of what binds her to stay with him.
None of Felix’s attempts to manipulate young men into dependency succeed because on the whole men aren’t vulnerable economically and socially the way young women are in that era. Towards the end of the book, a young male employee named Bernard collapses at work and Felix ‘kindly’ takes him into his home. At last, a vulnerable man to join his toxic household! He deploys the same emotional blackmail and bewildering switches of mood to exert control over Bernard as he has used successfully on Laura, and through Laura on Clare. There’s genuine, chilling suspense: will Bernard succumb or will he escape, taking one or both of the women with him to freedom?
Evidently publicity for the first edition used the word ‘homosexual’. I didn’t pick up any hint that Felix’s yearning for young men was knowingly sexual. But there is something forlorn in the way Felix yearns for friendship with them and in his violent rages at home when they go their indifferent way.
After the meeting: There were five of us. Three had read the whole book, one had reached the 57 percent mark on her kindle, and the fifth – who was the only one to read Joan London’s introduction to the Text Classics edition – hadn’t got that far. None of us found it a pleasant read, but the conversation was interesting.
S– saw Felix as a cipher for coercive control, and admired the way the novel was an early describer of that phenomenon, about which we know so much more now. She hadn’t read Susan Wyndham’s biography of Elizabeth Harrower, which was also prescribed reading for this meeting, and was curious to know how much the book reflected Harrower’s lived experience – it was hard to believe that she didn’t have first-hand knowledge. (A couple of us were able to satisfy her curiosity.) I would have agreed about Felix as cipher if I hadn’t lingered on page 78. I think there was more to him than that, but it’s true that the narration never takes us inside Felix’s consciousness – we see mainly the chaotic vindictiveness of his behaviour.
K– thought the book was not only painful to read but was badly written. (Gasps all round!) In her view, Elizabeth Harrower’s reputation as a great Australian novelist came mainly from her friendships with members of the Australian literary pantheon – Kylie Tennant, Judah Waten, Shirley Hazzard, Christina Stead, Patrick White. (But that’s getting ahead to the discussion of the biography.)
I talked about two moments that produced a frisson in me. The first was the chilling moment when Laura, the older sister and wife of Felix, transitions from being Clare’s ally in victimhood to being his agent in cajoling/coercing her to bend to his will. I thought this was a richly complex turn in the narrative. Others just didn’t buy it. The second was when (possible spoiler alert), starting the book’s final movement, Clare decides to give up the week escape she had been planning in order to care for the ailing Bernard. The profound ambiguity of this moment made the book come alive for me: Clare sees herself as being able for the first time to make a difference to someone else’s life, and is decides to do it with a sense of elation; but the reader sees that for years she has been coerced into putting her own needs aside to attend to Felix’s whims, and it’s simply impossible to tell whether what she sees as her new dignity isn’t a variation on the servitude she has been enduring. In my reading the remaining pages are animated by that ambiguity, and the resolution (no spoilers this time) is perfect. S– thought there was no ambiguity at all: she was just falling into the same trap with a new man.
The conversation moved on to Susan Wyndham’s Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower, about which I will blog next.
The Book Club met on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land sheltering from unusual summer heat. 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 78.
A couple of years ago, in an attempt to limit the way this blog ate into my time, I decided that when I was writing about a book, I would focus arbitrarily on the page that corresponded to my age. No attempt at a proper review, no selection of the most quotable bits, just a look at one page.
It didn’t work out to be a time-saver. As often as not, the discussion of page 77, then page 78, became an added extra to a general discussion of the book.
I hereby resolve to stick rigorously to page 78 (and soon to page 79), and assume that my readers can go elsewhere for proper, thoughtful reviews.
The Mushroom Tapes is a good book to start my new policy. Few Australians won’t know about Erin Patterson’s trial last year for murder involving a Beef Wellington made with deadly mushrooms served up to her in-laws. If you really know nothing about it, here’s a Wikipedia link. Almost as few readers won’t know who Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein are. (I’ve linked their names to lists of my blog posts where they appear.)
This book was originally conceived as a podcast in which three writers who have covered criminal trials chatted about this one. The podcast came to nothing, and they made a book from the tapes. I come close to being its ideal reader because I managed to pay very little attention to the trial as it was happening, so I didn’t come to it suffering from mushroom-overload.
Page 78 is one of the pages that records the writers/tapers’ conversation while driving around. It occurs in Part II, ‘The Church and the House’. They have visited the church where Erin Patterson and her in-laws worshipped, and then her house. Sarah Krasnostein, the only one among them who is an actual lawyer, has just given a little lecture about the pros and cons of a guilty plea. Helen, always the one to draw attention to details of the environment, has asked what some black cattle all spread out on a hill ‘in a lovely way’ are called. Chloe has a stab at an answer:
It turns out the page gives a good sense of the flavour of the conversations generally. There’s not a lot of rambling. Having raised the subject of the cows, Helen abruptly shuts it down: ‘We don’t even really care – about cows!’ And they’re away trading insights and observations – about the jury, and for most of this page about the journalists following the case.
Sarah’s comment on the jury is the kind of thing that all three of the women contribute. They don’t all manage to get into the courtroom at every session, so each of them has a brief to observe as fully and acutely as they can and report back. What emerges is a number of verbal sketches of Erin Patterson herself in the dock, and of other players – jury member, witnesses, lawyers, and perhaps especially Ian Wilkinson, the Pattersons’ pastor sitting in dignified silence in the back row. Sarah’s comment on this page, ‘We don’t know what they’re thinking,’ is again typical. Though they occasionally agonise over whether they are just a part of the media circus / witch hunt that surrounds the case, and though much of the book feels like chat among friends, at heart these are three serious observers. None of them wanted to take on the slog and heartache of writing a book about the case, but each of them takes her role as witness seriously. As this page exemplifies, all three bring feminist perspectives to the task: here they are talking about the lot of young female journalists, but elsewhere they also bring an unsettling degree of sympathy to a woman who would kill her in-laws.
People who still see Helen Garner as the ogre who was mean about younger women in The First Stone (some of the most vocal of whom haven’t actually read the book ‘on principle’) might find fuel for their fires here: her astonishment at a journalist’s ingenious theory of Erin Patterson’s innocence pretty much leaps off the page, and she expresses amazement at the ‘makeup and hair action’ among the young women journalists. (On page 79, she sticks to her guns: ‘Everybody should smile less, especially women, in public. Every advertisement or commercial is full of people smiling with unnatural vehemence, and it drives me insane.’) I read this grumpiness less as critical of the young woman than decrying the pressure on them to look the part.
Chloe, a couple of decades younger than curmudgeonly Helen, is more sympathetic. She sees the young woman’s theory as bizarre, but recognises the story-telling impulse: ‘She’s thinking like a script-writer.’ Mind you, her image of the attractive young reporters as being ‘like Red Riding Hood with the wolf’s carnage behind her’ shows that she also has a script-writer’s eye. (Which is the kind of thing that makes this book very readable.)
Sarah, who may be a decade or so younger than Chloe, has even less distance. I don’t want to say that she’s humourless, but she tends to be the one who supplies facts in the conversation: facts about the law, and also for instance about toxic mushrooms. Here she reminds the others, and us, of the exigencies of the young female journalists’ worklives. (I remember hearing somewhere that a female television journalist’s hair is an important tool of her trade.) On the top of the next page, it’s Chloe who amplifies the point: ‘Whereas the male crime-journalists look grizzled and broken.’
That’s it. So much more to say about the book. You can read about it all over the place.
I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
Me fail? I fly! 