Category Archives: Page 7x/47/7

Journal Catch-up 23

Posted on 23 May 2024 | Leave a comment

Two more journals in my endless attempt to keep up to date!

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 252 (Spring 2023)
(Some of the content is online at the Overland website – I’ve included links)

This Overland‘s editorial describes itself as a ‘second run’. The first run had reflected on the Voice referendum, but as publication came closer – in October last year – ‘the temptation to linger on the politics of symbolic recognition and constitutional reform seems a luxury in the face of escalating violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank’. With feet and throats sore from a solidarity march, the editors draw attention to an essay by Palestinian-Australian writer and historian Micaela Sahhar, ‘which reminds [them] of Overland‘s historic role in indexing Palestine’s survival and resistance’.

Quite apart from its serendipitous relevance, the essay, ‘An idiosyncratic archive: Overland 169 & the Wolstonecroft years‘, is a joy to read, as Sahhar revisits two copies of Overland she acquired in 2002 and 2004. She compares her reading of them then and now, talks of her relationships to people who appeared in them, and generally takes us on a journey into her mind. I love this passage – and so, I assume, do the editors:

As a journal at odds with the mainstream, Overland offered a younger version of me an intellectual place where radical thinking could reside, and a dawning awareness of a community I could take a place in. In this sense, Overland was the tangible expression of a counter to the indifference and invisibility of a young Palestinian woman, the significance of whose identity was rewritten just as she came of age at the time of a catastrophic intellectual nadir represented in 9/11; and a place of refusal against socio-political disengagement and apathy which have been the horsemen of these neo-liberal times.

The other stand-out essay is ‘The Disappearance of a.k.a. Victor Mature‘ by Vivian Blaxell, which ranges far and wide, high and low, into memoir and poetry appreciation, circling the subject of beauty. It’s a great read, from which I can’t resist quoting what may be the silliest paragraph, but one that made me laugh:

Australian English is wanton with beautiful. Beauty pops up in not the usual beautiful places there, thereby revealing the radical contingency of beauty itself, probably unintentionally: beautiful, Australians might say of a pork sausage, which seems a surprise at first until you realise that beauty does not exist before we say it exists, for beauty relies entirely on disclosure for its existence. That lucky sausage.

Other essays are a discussion by Peter D Mathews of Sophie Cunningham’s 2004 novel Geography and an idiosyncratic but fascinating essay by πO on concrete poetry in Australia and related matters.

There are five pieces of fiction and nine poems.

Of the poetry, ‘Balloch’ by Eileen Chong stands out for me. An apparently simple poem about a visit to a Scottish loch, it leaves an uncanny aftertaste that only gets richer with further readings.

The fiction covers a wide range, from a celebration of Rotuman culture (I had to look it up) by Dorell Ben to a fantasy of a catastrophic world post climate emergency by Jodie How, with a little social realism by Chloe Hillary and other pieces in between.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 12 (Giramondo 2023)

This may be my last issue of Heat before my subscription expires. Despite having a selection of poems from Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, a book I’m looking forward to, the journal is a bit of a fizzer for me, though the dominating US presence I’ve complained of in earlier issues is absent, and only one member of Heat‘s editorial advisory board gets a guernsey.

  • You can read Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘Redundant‘ on the Heat website. It’s an experimental prose piece in which the experiment seems to consist of not finishing sentences. See what you think.
  • Jordi Infeld’s ‘Poet’s Pocket’ would and indeed does pass for a short essay on sewing and related matters – just a footnote identifying one of its otherwise unremarkable phrases as a quote from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons suggests deeper undercurrents.
  • ‘The Phoenix Apartment’ by Bella Li feels to me like notes towards a larger project.

Items from beyond the Anglosphere are ‘We Shall Be Monsters’, a meditation on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Argentinian writer Esther Cross, translated by Alice Whitmore, and six terrific short poems by Iranian Maryam Nazarian, translated by Malaysia-based Arash Kohshsafa. Here’s the first and shortest of the poems, which does wonderful things with an echo of William Carlos Williams’s poem about the plums:

One
I've set the breakfast, the kisses, and the keys on the table.
Please, forgive me
if I find freedom more pleasant than your love.

The most interesting piece is Stephanie Radok’s ‘Inventory 2020’, an impressionistic chronicle of a working artist’s life, made up of mostly very short entries. It reminded me of the late Antigone Kefala’s journals in the way it combined observations of the passing moment with considered reflections and descriptions of the artist’s process. As 2020 was a year when the even tenor of our lives was disrupted by Covid, a narrative emerges. Here’s the entry for 23 February, on page 77*:

23. What you thought was passing/casual was your life. And a particular red purple near a blue hillside that seemed to reflect you.

As for Nam Le’s poems, they seem to be part of a larger whole. I’ll wait for the book.

* My blogging practice for some time has been to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book or journal that coincides with my age.

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William Gibson’s Peripheral

Posted on 20 May 2024 | Leave a comment

William Gibson, The Peripheral (Berkly 2014)

I picked up The Peripheral in a street library soon after I finished reading and blogging about its sequel, Agency, nearly four years ago. Since then, it has been my TBR shelf as a treat for a rainy day. Its time has now come.

There’s a peculiar challenge in writing about it. Possibly the main thing I enjoyed about it is that a lot of the time the reader has no idea what’s actually happening. You’re not even sure what some words mean, or what the characters are not saying. Explanations do come, eventually, but there’s a delicious disorientation as AI devices and other technical marvels multiply, we only half-see crucial incidents, cultural events are described from the point of view of someone who knows a lot more about the background than the reader does. The action takes place in two unspecified future time periods that interpenetrate in often unclear ways. However serious the issues may be – and there’s a plausible version of how the global emergency will develop – there’s a pervasive sense of play. If I summarise the plot, or even the set-up, I’ll be depriving you of that experience.

My first idea was to write about first two short chapters – all the chapters are short – but then I thought, oh what the heck, I’ll skip straight to page 77* to give you a taste, and let the spoilers fall where they will.

Lev had told the polt that he needed to speak with the polt’s sister, but the polt had wanted to hear a figure, a specific sum of money. Lev had offered ten million, a bit more than the fee for the supposed murder contract. The polt had said that that was too much for his cousin to receive by something called Hefty Pal.
Lev had explained that they could arrange for the cousin to win that amount in their state’s next lottery. The payment would be entirely legitimate.

Gibson has a gift for coining terms. ‘Cyberspace’ is his invention. Of The Peripheral‘s many coinages, three appear in this short passage: ‘polt’, ‘Hefty Pal’ and ‘stub’. They each have the virtue of suggesting their origins if not their precise meanings. A polt, derived from poltergeist, is a person who is bodily in one place and/or time, but is somehow seeing and acting in another time. (A peripheral is a human-looking artefact, that can be the host to a polt.) Hefty is a mega corporation of which Hefty Pal, as in PayPal, is a subsidiary. A ‘stub’, known more formally as a ‘continuum’, is a key invention of the book, something that readers and half the characters come to understand only gradually. All I’ll say here is that it is something that results from people going back to an earlier time and changing that time’s future.

There are three characters in this scene: Lev, the son of a fabulously wealthy Russian gangster capitalist, whose hobby involves mucking about with the past (stubs/continua are his playthings); Ash, a tech wiz who makes it happen for him (among other distinguishing features, she has tattoos of animals that move around on her skin, often glimpsed running for cover when someone tries to look at them); and Wilf Netterton, put-upon publicist, from whose point of view the story is told in alternate chapters. Page 77 is at the end of a Wilf chapter.

Three more characters are referred to. ‘The polt’ is Burton, a battered veteran in Netterton’s past / our future (though that way of describing things isn’t quite accurate). ‘The polt’s sister’ is Flynne, a gamer in a small US town who is the focus of the non-Wilf chapters. Burton and – on one fateful occasion – Flynne have been employed as polts by Lev under the impression they were testing a computer game. The main narrative is set in motion by Flynne’s witnessing what may be a murder. ‘The cousin’ is Leon, one of their tribe of loyal family members.

At that, Netherton had been unable to resist looking at Ash again.
‘You don’t think that that lottery business casts the whole thing as a Faustian bargain?’ Netherton had asked, when the call was done.
‘Faustian?’ Lev looked blank.
‘As if you have powers one would associate with Lucifer,’ said Ash.
‘Oh. Well, yes, I see what you mean. But it’s something a friend stumbled across, in his stub. I have detailed instructions for it. I’d been meaning to bring it up with you.’

Tiny moments like this give the book its rich texture. There’s the complicity between WIlf and Ash, two underlings who have cultural memories, unlike their rich and powerful employer. (Similarly in the earlier paragraph, it’s fun that Hefty Pal is something in the reader’s future and Flynne’s present that has been forgotten in Wilf’s time.) Like the implied reference to poltergeists, the mention of Faust reminds us that even though the narrative is presented as a tale of high tech, AI and nanotechnology, it often has the feel of demonic possession and fairytale magic. (If you’ve read Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy – Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) – you’ll remember the prominence there of the legba of Voodoo.)

And that had been that, really, except that now he was sitting there, waiting for the polt’s sister to call

That’s the first hint of the almost-romance that is to almost-blossom between these characters who can only spend time together by means of weird time travel mediated by a peripheral in one direction and an odd little children’s toy in the other.

Now I’m tempted to reread Agency. I remember that it was also gleefully inventive and similarly had two interrelating times. I’m pretty sure that some of the distant future characters are in both books, but my memory is dim. William Gibson is anything but dim.

I wrote this blog post on the unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, not far from where what we now call the Cooks River has been cared for by Elders for many millennia. The weather has just turned cold, but spider webs are still proliferating.

* My blogging practice is to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 77. For The Peripheral, I’ve included a little from page 76 as well.

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Ivy Ireland’s Tide

Posted on 7 May 2024 | Leave a comment

Ivy Ireland, Tide (Flying Island Books 2024)

Tide may seem like a quietly generic title for a book, especially one that has a number of poems about the sea, but a laconic note on sources suggests a dark subtext:

The title of this book, Tide, and the title of the poem, ‘A Shallow Boat’, are both taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1832) with the necessary reverence.

I decided to read the Tennyson poem. I’m pretty sure I hadn’t read it before, but many of its lines (‘the mirror cracked from side to side’, ‘The curse is come upon me’) were familiar, probably from young Dorothy Hewett’s romanticism as recorded in her autobiography, Wild Card. Certainly Ivy Ireland’s compressed, science-related poems, with close observations of the real world, are not at all like Tennyson’s flowery, relentlessly rhyming lines. The word ‘tide’ occurs only once:

For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
       The Lady of Shalott.

The note on sources, then, leads one to expect something death-related: the tide is metaphorical, bearing us inexorably away. The book only partly meets that expectation. There’s a lot of life here, and not much death.

The book is divided into four sections of unequal length named for tidal phases: ‘Ebb’, ‘Low’, ‘Flood’, and ‘High’. If I had to pick favourites, I’d say I enjoyed the poems in ‘Low’ most: in ‘Lake Poet’, in the context of the climate emergency (not explicitly named, but definitely there in my mind) the lake is less a thing of sublime beauty than a place that will hold the poet to account, as opposed to the city, where ‘nobody has to answer for anything; in ‘Cane Toad’, the poet and her young daughter encounter some teenagers on Valentine’s Day:

She asks me,
of all people,
if they are going to marry,
those beatified ones,
out decking each other in posies
in the quiet toilet paper aisle.

‘Killing Plovers’ is a yarn about family life that takes on a fable-like quality about humans’ relations to other animals; ‘The Birth of the Universe’ is a wonderful poem about a) the Big Bang and b) giving birth.

The section ‘Flood’ comprises six prose poems, including ‘I Am John Is Dead’, long enough to be called a short story, about a young woman’s encounter with a New Age guru in the outback, which accurately describes itself as ‘like a Jim Jarmusch film’.

Page 47* is the title page for the book’s final section, ‘High’. The section includes just one poem, ‘A Shallow Boat’, in which the narrator with one other person goes sailing off the Queensland coast. Since the note on sources mentions this poem, I looked at the Tennyson poem again, and found:

In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
       Over tower'd Camelot;
Outside the isle a shallow boat
Beneath a willow lay afloat,
Below the carven stern she wrote,
       The Lady of Shalott.

This is the boat on which the Lady of Shalott floated to her doom.

Happily, the speaker of Ivy Ireland’s sailing excursion survives, having had a very nice time, even if it is sometimes scary and perhaps humiliating as she feels her incompetence.

Here’s the first of the poem’s 12 parts, from page 48:

A Shallow Boat

1.

Out on the water, 
wind shocks with volume.
Waves whip-crack me to sleep, 
hustle me awake at all hours.
The boat screams in joyous bells 
beyond twelve knots.
I lack words to remark on 
the changeability of air and temper, 
the tang on my tongue
as words are taken from my mouth 
as sharp as the smack of cormorants 
hitting water 
in free-fall.

All I really want to say about this is that I love it. I have no desire to go sailing. I breathe a guilty sigh of relief when I realise that the Emerging Artist gets seasick very easily, so is unlikely to be urging me to do it. But I love it as evoked in this poem.

The poem is almost a sonnet. The first six lines describe the wind, the waves, the sounds of the boat. Then there’s a turn, and in the next five lines the poet tries and fails to articulate a response. Then there’s a three-line equivalent to a sonnet’s final couplet – rather than a witty encapsulation of what has gone before, here it’s the cormorants, ostensibly a metaphor for the poet’s speechlessness but actually just there, smacking the water.

Every verb, every adjective, every noun is carrying its share of the meaning-load, and the sound design is wonderful. The echoing Ws bind the lines together, with a little respite for Ts (‘temper’, ‘tang’, ‘tongue’, ‘taken’, and then ‘cormorants’) in lines 8 to 11. Back to W and then the Fs in the last line introduce a new, final sound.

The Tennysonian hints of doom may be realised in later parts of the poem, as in these chillingly succinct lines from part viii:

There's a point 
where climate emergency, 
once witnessed, 
ticks over from 
possible to inevitable;
anything else is inconceivable.

But that’s context rather than substance. The joy in this poem, as in the whole book, is in celebrating engagement with the natural world, vulnerable, dangerous, fragile, awesome, beautiful, breathtaking (sometimes literally). From section ix:

Orange shifts over the horizon, and here we are: 
alive, while countless others are not.
Who am I to deserve daybreak. This happening here, 
sea eagle fishing beside the boat,
sea turtle snorting to the surface. What's it for, 
to be so honoured.

I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I’m posting it on a day that has shifted from bright blue sky to heavy downpour within hours. From my window I can see wet gum leaves reflecting the afternoon sunlight as they have been witnessed by First nations peoples here for tens of thousands of years.

* My blogging practice for some time has been to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age. A focus on just one page seems to me to be almost necessary with books of poetry, where the parts are so often greater than the whole. As Tide has fewer than 77 pages, so I’m focusing instead on my birth year, ’47.

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The Book Group & Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, page 77

Posted on 2 May 2024 | 24 comments

Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (Knopf 2023)

Before the meeting: Richard Flanagan is a giant of Australian literature. His non-fiction work has been transformative. He has won the Booker Prize and many other awards.

Before this year, I had read one and a half of his novels and had no desire to read any more. My blog posts on The Unknown Terrorist and Wanting speak for themselves.

So, bidden by the Book Group, I came to Question 7 bristling with prejudice.

I was not encouraged by this passage on the second page:

Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings – why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why.
But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.
And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion.

Oh really? Other opinions are available, but this struck me as the kind of thing Les Murray meant when he described another of Richard Flanagan’s books as ‘superficial, showy and pretentious’ (link here)?

But what the Book Group wants, the Book Group gets … I read on.

I found a lot to dislike. The whole Question 7 schtick struck me as ‘superficial, showy and pretentious’ (more about that later). There are a couple of pages that could have been written by a self-righteous teenager, denouncing Oxford holus bolus as misogynist, racist and imperialist; a sneer often hovers at the edge of Flanagan’s descriptions of other writers; there’s a muddled insistence that all time is now – a kind of mix-up of Kurt Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan and co-opted Indigenous notions. Regularly, out of the blue, there will be a bit of ‘philosophising’ about the uselessness of words, or a portentous one-line paragraph: Chekhov’s non-sequitur, ‘Who loves longest?’ or the sub-Vonnegut refrain, ‘That’s life.’

It could have been an engrossing book. There are powerful portraits of his grandmother, his mother and his father, and a gruelling, operatic account of near-death as a young adult. Above all, there’s the way Flanagan sets out to explore his own origins in the context of world history.

His father was a prisoner of the Japanese in 1945 and would have died in the camp if not for the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – Flanagan owes his existence to that massively destructive act.

The book comes at that painful paradox from a number of angles: his father’s reminiscences of the camp; his own visit to its site, including an encounter with a former guard; stories about H. G. Wells, who coined the phrase ‘atom bomb’; the life of Leo Szilard, the scientist who first conceived of a chain reaction and after 1945 became a tireless campaigner for nuclear disarmament. It’s a fascinating tapestry of interlacing lives, thoughts and actions.

Flanagan is a Tasmanian, so he also owes his existence to the genocidal dispossession of the First Nations of luwitja. (In one of the recurrences that the book delights in, H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds was inspired that history.) There are powerful passages about colonisation, which (to my mind) he undermines by describing the term settler colonial society as lazy thinking because it hides the inequalities on which what he calls ‘the new Martian world’ was built. His point is that many of the first non-Indigenous arrivals were convicts, suffering terribly under the British system – and among them he counts his forebears. IMHO, settler colonial society is a fine term: patriarchy doesn’t hide inequalities among men; capitalist society doesn’t hide inequalities in our current world. The fact that you suffer doesn’t change the fact that you play an oppressive role. Not that Flanagan denies that, but he want to make it clear that his people were primarily victims rather than perpetrators.

But I’m getting irritated again.

Page 77* does not show the book in its best light. It falls in the midst of an excursion into historical fiction involving H. G. Wells.

The much younger Rebecca West has come into Wells’s life, and they are mutually entranced. After a first passionate kiss, he withdraws – not so much because he already has a wife and a mistress as because, according to Flanagan, she is too much his equal.

All that is evidently true to the known facts. West and Wells’s relationship was to endure. She had a son with him and they remained friends until his death. But at page 77 that’s all in the future, and she is struggling with his rejection of her:

Rebecca West, though, was not for defeat. For her, love and victory were synonyms. And she was not one for losing. She coupled audacity and ambition with an idea of stability she would forever after mistake older men as offering. She held herself to a high standard. She had written only a few months earlier how unrequited love was pathetic and undignified, adding as proof her contention that Christianity lacked dignity – and by implication was pathetic – not because Christ was crucified, but because his love for the world was unrequited. ‘A passion that fails to inspire passion,’ she wrote, ‘is defeated in the main object of its being.’

Having dispensed with God, she wrote to Wells that she was going to kill herself after being rejected by him, that all she could do was love. She had tried to hack the overwhelming love she felt for him back to the little thing he seemed to want. But even that, she realised, was too much for him.

Does that feel to you like a real person? Is it respectful of the historical Rebecca West? Does it use its sources fairly or even accurately? On the latter point, I looked up the essay it quotes (in The Freewoman, July 2012). It’s a brilliantly witty takedown of a book of literary history, in which the reference to Christ is cheeky, but not dismissive and not meant to prove anything. Flanagan is being snide, and not pretending otherwise. His Rebecca West is basically a comic character.

But what is she doing in this book at all? Maybe she’s there to establish that Wells was a truly complex, flawed human being (‘flawed’, to be specific, means physically ugly and using high-sounding ideals of free love to justify his promiscuity). It also serves the purpose of having a strong female presence in the historical part of the novel, which is otherwise full of men. This particular passage may owe something to her reference to Jesus echoing a repeated line in Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist: ‘the innocent heart of Jesus could never have enough of human love.’

The West–Wells story also, confusingly I think, seems to relate to the book’s title. That title is a riff on an early Chekhov short story, ‘Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician’, an absurd parody of a mathematics quiz. The seventh quiz item starts with trains leaving stations at various times and ends with the non-sequitur question, ‘Who loves longer, a man or a woman?’ Because it’s posed as a question about gender, the Wells–West story (the only romance in the book) seems to hark back to it, but I think now probably not, as the version of the question that pops like a refrain, is simply, ‘Who loves longer?’ (Incidentally, the only version of Chekhov’s story I could find online, at this link, translates the question as, ‘Who is capable of loving?’ I’d be interested to know if the gendered version of the question is more a product of the gendered nature of the Russian language than of Chekhov’s intention.)

In the rest of the page, we follow the West-resistant Wells to Switzerland:

Wells arrived at his mistress’s magnificent Swiss retreat with his two sons and half a suitcase of scientific reprints concerning the recent discoveries about radium – discoveries that, he told Little e, as he called the diminutive Elizabeth, pleasantly took his mind as far away as laudanum once had Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and which would form the basis of the novel he would write – the story of man summoning a power equivalent to the sun.

Wells runs from West to write the novel that is his reason for being in this book. It’s The World Set Free, in which he will coin the term ‘atom bomb’ and imagine with amazing accuracy the devastation such a bomb was to create. (I’m depending on Flanagan’s description. The novel is available at Project Gutenberg for the truly dedicated.)

Presumably the real-life Wells is being cited here, but what sense does it make to say that his lifelong interest in science was like a drug? In the immediate context, the implication seems to be that his interest in radioactivity is a distraction from the emotional turmoil associated with with Rebecca West. Am I wrong to read this as a sneer?

So, I look forward to having the virtues of the book made clear to me by people who have not been blinded by their own grumpiness.

After the meeting: After a wonderfully eclectic dinner over which we had exchanged important information about dumplings and life in general, we had one of the most interesting and spirited Book Group discussions ever.

Evidently it’s a love-it-or-hate-it book, and we were fairly evenly divided.

One man had hated the Wells-West thread so much that he re-read the book leaving it out, only to discover that he still hated the book, and spent days trying to figure out why. As I understand it, he realised that he regularly came up against a closing off of possibilities – just as Flanagan proclaimed he was opening up to complexity he would shut things down with a piece of certainty.

Another, on the contrary, read the book as an anti-narrative. Those shutting-down moments were a way of frustrating our quest for simple answers in an impossibly complex world. It’s important that Question 7 is about love, because all through the book there’s a dreadful intertwining of love and brutality.

Where some felt Flanagan was arrogant and withheld, others read him as exposing his own vulnerability. One loved the Rebecca West story; another loathed it. One read out a passage he particularly loved eliciting sympathetic nods from some and groans from others. Some felt that the book spoke directly to their own experience as colonial settlers, others not so much. I had to admit that I had got fixated on the things that annoyed me, and disregarded things that otherwise would have fed my soul.

None of us had previously heard of Leo Szilard. One of us said he now has Family Matters, by Flanagan’s brother Martin, on his to-be-read list, as a supplement to Richard’s account of his parents.

It was amazing! I don’t think anyone left feeling bruised. For myself, I intend to reread the book. But not for a while.

* My blogging practice for some time has been to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age. Surprisingly, this page often reveals interesting things about the book as a whole.

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Alan Kohler’s Great Divide

Posted on 30 Apr 2024 | 2 comments

Alan Kohler, The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It (Quarterly Essay 92, 2023) – plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 93

Alan Kohler appears regularly on the ABC News, the genial presenter of largely incomprehensible finance updates. He usually flashes up a chart or two, giving the impression he’s doing it for his own amusement as much as our enlightenment, and then signs off, ‘And that’s finance.’

This Quarterly Essay has some of that trademark geniality, and it has graphs, but it’s a long way from incomprehensible. As someone who is near-illiterate about economics, I found it wonderfully instructive about the background and causes of the current housing crisis, and while his proposed solutions seem unlikely to be implemented I could follow their logic.

The key issue is probably obvious, but it’s a joy to see it named so clearly:

The houses we live in the places we call home and bring up our families in, have been turned into speculative investment assets by fifty years of government policy failure. (Page 3)

The notion of a home as investment goes back further than 50 years, as the essay describes, but as with so many of the ills of contemporary Australia, it got a big boost under the prime ministership of John Howard. Then, around the turn of the century, three main things pushed up demand for housing and consequently the price:

A sharp life in immigration that increased the number of people needing a place to live; capital ganis tax breaks and negative gearing, which represent a $96 billion per year subsidy for buying houses;and federal first home buyer grants, which represent a $1.5 billion direct addition to house prices each year. (Page 7)

Add into the mix the conflicting concerns of the three different levels of government, particularly the stalemate that results when state governments push for medium density housing in areas where local governments insist on restrictive zoning regulations.

On the reluctance of politicians to do something about the cost of housing, Alan Kohler quotes John Howard’s bon mot (or mauvais mot if you like): ‘No one came up to me to complain about the increase in the value of their home.’ A sizeable portion of the electorate – home owners and many aspiring home owners – have a vested interest in having prices continue to increase.

Kohler expands lucidly on all these matters, and goes on to propose solutions: of course, to increase the supply of housing, for which he makes a number of suggesrtions; ‘a big investment in trains designed to at least double, preferably triple, the commutable distance from the capital cities and industrial inner suburbs where people work’; ‘reducing demand by restricting negative gearing and increasing capital gains tax’, which ‘should happen, but probably won’t; ‘increasing the supply of medium density in existing suburbs through better zoning and planning’ (which is ‘still more talk than action’); and more abstractly, for government to set an ‘affordability target’, to reduce the ratio of house prices to wages.

On page 77*, Kohler expands on that last proposal:

House prices need to stay put for a while and allow incomes to catch up. Average weekly earnings are currently rising at about 4 per cent a year. For the national median house price [at time of writing the essay] of $740,668 to be 3.5 times income, the average wage would have to be $210,000, more than double what it is now. At 4 per cent growth in incomes per year, that would take about eighteen years.
The only time house prices remained unchanged for that long was from 1930 to 1949 – that is, during the Great Depression and the period of price controls in the war. Even after the recessions of 1982 and 1991, it took less than half that long for prices to start rising again.
So fifteen to twenty years of static house prices would be unprecedented, but that sort of time frame might also get Australians out of the habit of thinking that house prices always rise and that housing is the best way to build wealth. And if housing affordability is to be properly dealt with, we have to change that mindset, because house prices won’t stop rising at twice the rate of incomes unless we stop expecting them to.

Alan Kohler’s 86-page essay generated more than 50 pages of correspondence in the next Quarterly Essay (Lech Blaine’s Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics). The correspondents range from qualified approval, such as Joseph Walker’s description of the essay as ‘sober, necessary and broadly correct in its conclusions’ to this scathing ‘stay-in-your-lane’ dismissal by Peter Tulip, chief economist at the Liberal-Party aligned Centre for Independent Studies:

Public discussion of housing policy suffers from undisciplined eclecticism. Too many commentators provide long, unstructured lists of multiple causes or conclude that the truth lies between competing explanations. This muddle reflects an inability or an unwillingness to distinguish the important from the unimportant. Alan Kohler’s Great Divide and the accompanying media coverage are examples.

There’s a lot of robust discussion, which (did I mention that I’m ignorant about economics) I can only watch in dismay. Everyone agrees that there is a problem – that, as Kohler says in the essay, ‘the high price of housing is undermining social cohesion and the proper functioning of the economy and the nation.’ And it’s heartening to see so many people who have invested so much thinking and action in the issue. I’ll give Alan Kohler the last word (it is the last paragraph of his gracious Response to Correspondence):

The process of researching this subject and then engaging with responses to my essay has confirmed that this is a subject about which a lot of people have been thinking deeply and expertly for a long time, and Australia is well served by them. It’s just a pity they are not listened to more. We are less well served by the politicians and bureaucrats whose job it is to do something about it.

* My fairly arbitrary blogging practice is to focus on the page of a book that coincides with my age. This page often reveals interesting things about the book as a whole.

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Robbie Coburn’s Ghost Poetry

Posted on 16 Apr 2024 | 2 comments

Robbie Coburn, Ghost Poetry (Upswell Press 2024)

Ghost Poetry‘s back cover blurb includes a discreet trigger warning:

Always vulnerable, and often confronting and harrowing, Ghost Poetry is a beautifully crafted and important work that will scar the reader.

I agree that these poems are beautifully crafted and confronting, but I wouldn’t say I was actually scarred by them. They do deal with tough subjects – self harm, addiction, the mental health system, suicidal ideation, miscarriage, abortion, rape and more. But there are also horses, a love-poetry thread, and always the sense that the poetry is doing much more than giving vent to pain and suffering, and not at all playing for shocks.

Some of the poems are presented as accounts of dreams, of nightmares really, and many others have a dreamlike quality. Perhaps more accurately, in many of the poems the border between waking and dreaming is blurred so that the emotional intensity and weird logic of nightmare suffuses the daylight world. Sometimes the speaker seems to be a ghost.

A partial list of the titles in ‘Blood Ritual’, the first of the book’s three sections, gives an idea of what I mean: ‘Dream of Human Sacrifice’, ‘Oblivion’, ‘Dream of Scarification’, ‘Cutter’, ‘Dream of Suicide’, ‘Bloodletting’, ‘Dream of Abortion’, ‘I Dreamed I Saw You on a Bridge’, ‘Asylum’. I’m not being entirely flippant when I say it was a relief to read the opening lines of ‘Poetry’, the final poem in the section:

I am tired of these poems;

you can only write your own death
so many times before
you begin to plan for its arrival.

The second section, ‘Wreck’, is filled with horses, and love poems. Again, there is a lot of pain, but also moments of delight as in ‘Foals’, where the poem’s speaker addresses a loved one. You don’t need to have been around newborn foals or calves to be moved by the poem’s final lines, though you may need to have been in love:

as I followed you
your gumboots making a space
for our feet in the wet grass

like two newborn foals
teaching one another
how to walk.

If I had to name a single subject (always a bit of a mug’s game) of the third section, ‘Straw Horses’, I’d say it was love for someone in pain:

I want to touch your tortured bones 
as if my hands were gauze.

But my practice of looking at page 77 demonstrates that it’s not just the loved one who is in pain. ‘Love Poem to a Razorblade’ is not the only one that deals with flesh being cut, in other poems mostly by knives, in dreams, and the flesh not necessarily that of the speaker. Here the subject is definitely self-harm:

It’s a hard poem to write about. As I was drafting this blog post, an article by Rose Cartwright in the Guardian Online threw me a lifeline. It included this:

‘What happened here?’ a colleague asked innocently on set, pointing to the scars on my arm.
‘I used to cut myself,’ I said. I didn’t tell her how recently.
She glanced around. No one nearby to rescue us. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ I said with a reassuring smile.
There was an awkward silence, which I didn’t fill, since the explanation I would have once filled it with – ‘I was mentally ill’ – no longer felt right.

I was the poster girl for OCD, Guardian 13 April 2024

This poem sets out to bridge that awkward silence. You will read it differently depending on the experience you bring to it. For myself, I’ve never had a compulsion to self-harm, at least not of the cutting kind, and my relevant experience is limited to conversations with parents of young ‘cutters’. One of the main things I’ve gleaned is that communication is problematic: the young person can’t talk about what’s happening and/or the person wanting to help can’t bear to hear what they’re trying to say. That difficulty is at the heart of this poem.

I don’t know if Robbie Coburn is writing from his own lived experience, or as an extraordinary act of empathetic imagination. Either way, the poem calls on the reader to attend to a voice that is rarely heard.

Love Poem to a Razorblade

Anyone who has ever been addicted to anything harmful – cigarettes, ultra-processed foods, chocolate – recognises the paradox. If, as a person with high blood pressure, I were to write ‘Love Poem to a Fried Dim Sim’, the tone would be different: despite the best efforts of nutritionists, a fried dim sim habit is only mildly stigmatised, certainly not seen as ‘mental illness’. But the paradox is similar. The behaviour is doing me no good, but I am drawn to it. It’s not too much of a stretch to call that love.

The first lines are full of possibilities:

As a child I knew
I could keep you hidden.

I turned away from the past 
and saw your mouth open 
and cover me.

First there’s secretiveness. This isn’t about guilt. It’s not ‘should’, but ‘could’ – there’s a kind of power there. But the question hovers: ‘Hidden from whom?’ From someone who would punish or shame the young one, probably. The next line provokes an allied question, ‘What happened in the past that I had to turn away from it?’ As I read it, the speaker had an (unspecified) unbearable experience as a child and, unable to turn to a human for comfort, somehow turned to the razor blade, to self harm.

I struggle to visualise a contemporary razor blade with an open mouth, but those from my childhood, and I’m guessing from the much younger Robbie Coburn’s, could be flexed so that the opening along the middle would open out. All the same, it’s impossible to visualise this ‘mouth’ covering someone. The lines are after an emotional truth rather than a visual image – the possibilities of the blade enclosed the young person in a protective cover against whatever he was turning away from.

you told me love wasn't a word 
to be spoken
but a scar cut into the surface 
of the body.

anybody you love in this world
will mark you.

A human comforter would have said something (‘It’s all right, ‘You’re OK,’ ‘This will pass’ …). The razor blade’s ‘mouth’ had no words, its message is conveyed, recorded, imprinted, by action.

But there’s more to these lines than that. They don’t dwell on the act of cutting – the welling blood, the pain, etc – which happens in the moment, like a word. The message is in the aftermath, the enduring scar, in the surface of the body but also in the mind, an expectation that love will involve damage. But not necessarily damage! In another context that last couplet could have a completely benign meaning: isn’t it true, and interesting, that if you love somebody they have an effect on you, leave a mark on you? Here, though, ‘mark’ carries a strong negative meaning.

I believed you;
each promise immovable, 
every moment between us 
carved into permanence.

The message from the razor blade is that those effects and marks are solid, scarlike, immovable, permanent. If there’s grief or humiliation in a relationship, you will remain grief-stricken or humiliated forever. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. It’s not just self-harm that lodges such messages in the mind, of course. Don’t we all have moments in our childhood that have created templates for how we expect the world to always be?

even when you were taken 
you have never left me –

It’s childhood experience that has been described so far. ‘When you were taken’ implies an intervention that stopped the self-harm, possibly at an early age. But the effect of those moments persists. 

the blood was ours, 
every night we were alone, 
silently holding you in secret.

In this last triplet, having reflected on the long term effects of cutting, the speaker can at last look at the moment itself. Only now, can he name the blood, and evoke the (creepy) romance of the moment. I think of the song from Calamity Jane, ‘Once I had a secret love‘, and though I can’t articulate it I know that I’ve been taken somewhere.

While writing this, I have had to walk away from the computer every now and then and breathe for a while. You can feel the poet’s steely will as he holds his mind to this subject, honouring its complexity.

It’s a gruelling book, but rewarding.

I am grateful to Robbie Coburn for my copy of Ghost Poetry.

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Romaine Moreton, Post Me to the Prime Minister, page 77

Posted on 9 Apr 2024 | 3 comments

Romaine Moreton, Post Me to the Prime Minister (jukurrpa books, 2004)

Romaine Moreton is Goenpul Yagera of Minjerribah (aka Stradbroke Island) and Bundjulung of northern New South Wales. She is a poet, spoken word performer, philosopher and filmmaker. A brief showreel from the transmedia work One Billion Beats (2016), which she co-wrote and co-directed with Alanna Valentine, gives a powerful glimpse of her stage and screen presence, as well as her incisive writing (link here). Also on Vimeo is a profound lecture she gave about that work (link here), which discusses the colonial gaze and dissects colonial cinematic representations of Indigenous people.

Post Me to the Prime Minister, a collection of poems published in 2004, 12 years before that formidable work, also deals with issues faced by First Nations people. As I was reading it, I kept wishing I could see Romaine Moreton perform them. I’ve just been told that she opened for Sweet Honey in the Rock at the Sydney Opera House on one of their visits to Australia, which makes complete sense. The short film she made with Erica Glynn, A Walk with Words: The Poetry of Romaine Moreton (2024), ends with her performing the book’s final poem, ‘I will surprise you by my will’ (you can rent or purchase the whole film at this link). The poem is in the film’s trailer:

we are here and we are many,
and we shall surprise you by our will,
we wll rise from this place where you expect 
to keep us down,
and we shall surprise you by our will.

There are so many riches in this collection, but I’ll stick to my arbitrary practice of singling out page 77. It’s the second page of a long poem, ‘Once upon a patriarchy’. Here’s a pic of pages 76 and 77:

The book’s title comes from the poem’s opening lines:

truth be known,
you would very much prefer it 
if I were male

oh yes you would wrap me in glad tidings 
and post me to the prime minister and say 
how proud we are

___ our son

Things have moved a long way since the moment in the 1972 movie Ningla A-Na when Indigenous women argued vehemently that sexism was a white women’s issue, that Indigenous women needed to support Indigenous men and not challenge their sexist behaviour. More than 30 years later, this poem’s speaker doesn’t have to be defensive about the ‘colonial gaze’; it’s not written with a non-Indigenous reader foremost in mind. The strength of First Nations communities no longer depends on papering over the cracks of lateral oppression.

It’s not easy to tell who ‘you’ is in this poem. At first it may be the speaker’s parents, or perhaps a part of the First Nations population that has a parent-like relationship to her. But it shifts, and by the start of page 77 it is a First Nations man, ‘our son‘, who is being addressed. He’s a man who wishes ‘to walk as the colonial / hallowed one’. I don’t think it’s too fanciful to see him as similar to the would-be assimilationist Tomahawk in Alexis Wright’s great novel Praiseworthy (2023), or perhaps as a member of Chelsea Watego’s ’emerging tribe’ of self-appointed leaders (see the essay ‘ambiguously Indigenous’ in Another Day in the Colony, also published in 2023).

for while you vie 
for the passenger seat
the cattle truck is loaded for market
you have left me golden hallowed son

dragging 
in
the never-never

This is beautifully complicated. There’s sibling rivalry – ‘golden hallowed son’ is a variant on ‘golden-haired boy’, the favoured sibling, favoured partly because he’s male. But it’s not just that. He has decided to be part of the action, be up front in the cattle truck, join in the extractive farming of the land. He’s not in the driver’s seat, not in charge of his own destiny, but has attached himself to the power. To reinforce the farm metaphor, the poem brings in the Australian colonial ‘classic’, Mrs Aeneas (Jeannie) Gunn’s We of the Never Never (1908). I haven’t read that book, but I’m pretty sure its account of Mangarayi and Yungman who were displaced by the Elsey cattle station, and worked on it, fits the tone of these lines – a place to be left dragging.

The next lines continue to reproach, and to remind the ‘son’ of the loyalty shown by Black women. (See the scene in Ningla A-Na mentioned above.)

and while I never ever forget you 
you gladly allow me – the black female
to rot

like the wife of Lot 
though I have never 
turned
I captured you to my breast 
always remembered 
what is best

for my people 
for my people

Whatever else is going on with the ‘son’ his maleness is key, as is the speaker’s femaleness. The reference to Lot’s wife (who looked back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 and was turned into a pillar of salt as punishment) broadens the picture: women have always been punished. In this case, though, there’s not even the pretext of he having done something wrong.

If you weren’t noticing the music of the poem previously, you can’t help but hear it here. These lines, with the rhyming of ‘rot’ and ‘Lot’, introduce a new rhythm that builds, with the rhyme of ‘breast’ and rest’, to the lovely repetition of ‘for my people’. When performing some of her poems, Romaine Moreton moves from spoken word to song. These lines cry out for that treatment.

One of my favourite words in poetry is ‘but’. And here it comes:

but you
golden hallowed blackened son 
more despised there is none

The ‘son’ is not just ‘golden hallowed’, but ‘golden hallowed blackened’: sitting in the passenger’s seat doesn’t make him immune from racism. ‘Blackened’ is an interesting word here: it signifies First Nations identity, but also colonial attitudes. He may think of himself as the golden son, but his Black identity will be imposed on him and he will be seen accordingly through a colonial lens: ‘none more despised’. That’s something that the man on the receiving end of racism would readily agree to. And then the killer lines:

except one

which is me

That’s not the end of the poem, it does move on interestingly, but it’s all I’m looking at here.

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Hisham Matar, My Friends, the book club, page 77

Posted on 18 Mar 2024 | 6 comments

Hisham Matar, My Friends (Viking 2024)

Before the meeting: Hisham Matar was a guest at the 2017 Sydney Writers’ Festival. On a panel titled ‘Resist!’ which was mainly concerned with the recent election of Donald Trump as President of the USA, he enriched the conversation by referring back to his own childhood in Qaddafi’s Libya, where he wondered who was more sculpted by the regime, those who actively served its interests or those who dedicated themselves to resisting it. He argued powerfully for the importance of complexity, of remaining true to one’s own authentic self. (My blog post here.)

In My Friends, when the narrator, Khaled, is a teenager in Benghazi, he and his family hear a short story read over the BBC. It’s a kind Kafkaesque version of Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, in which the word ‘no’ has tremendous power. Nobody spells it out, but we understand that it’s a heavily coded advocacy for non-compliance with the Qaddafi regime. (By the end of the book, we understand it could equally refer to refusal to take up arms.) The young narrator, partly inspired by the story, leaves Libya to study at Edinburgh University.

In 1984, he and his friend Mustafa evade the surveillance of their fellow Libyan students and travel to London to join a demonstration outside the Libyan embassy. When the crowd is fired on from inside the embassy (this really happened), they are seriously injured. Unknown to them, the writer of the short story – Hosam – is also at the demonstration, but walks away uninjured. All three of them are now exiles.

The novel traces the way the lives of these three men intertwine, how their friendships grow, how each of them deals with the pain of separation from family and country, and how each responds to the changing political news from home. The Arab Spring of 2010 brings things to a head: the question is now whether to return to join the revolt against Qaddafi, or to continue with the lives they have built away from home, however insubstantial.

On page 77, Khaled is walking the streets of London, remembering when he and Mustafa first came there for the demonstration which would radically alter the course of their lives. His memories leap forward to the period years later when he and Hosam were walking those same streets, with Hosam enthusing about literary history attached to those places. Both the anecdotes on this page touch on major themes of the book.

At the start of the page Hosam has just relayed gossip that when Karl Marx is said to have been ‘sweating it out’ in the British Library, he was actually visiting his mistress in Soho:

‘I like imagining him shuttling back and forth between the two lives. And, anyway, doesn’t his prose hint at this? I don’t mean that it’s duplicitous necessarily, but that it endlessly sidesteps one thing so as to reach for another … ?’

Regarding characters, this is Hosam, six years older than Khaled, showing off his sophistication. Thematically, his description of Marx’s prose could equally be describing Khaled’s approach to life: it never quite commits himself to a clear position. Even in these early pages when he describes his participation in the demonstration, he oscillates between saying he waas led there by Mustafa and taking responsibility for his own decision.

It strikes me that I could draw up a list of all the writers and works mentioned in the early pages of this book and have a reading schedule for a year. There’s not just Marx, and further on this page Conrad, and much of the western canon (including Montaigne, my current early-morning read), but a whole world of Arabic writing including, for example, the Sudanese poet Nizar Qabbani, the Lebanese novelist Salim el Lozi, and Khaled’s father’s favourite poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri. Conrad, who wrote in English away from his native Poland, crops up a lot.

As we were walking down Beak Street, he said, ‘Have I shown you this yet?’ and shot down a narrow alleyway barely wide enough for a man to lie down. It had the unsuitable name of Kingly Street.
‘It’s here,’ he said and crossed to the other side. ‘No, here, yes, this is it, where one night, very late in the hour, Joseph Conrad, believing himself to be pursued by a Russian spy, took out his pocketknife and hid, waiting. As soon as his pursuer appeared, Conrad sneaked up behind him and slit his throat.’
The story was so farfetched that it did not deserve any attention, but what I remember most was the strange excitement that came over Hosam then.
‘It was probably why,’ he went on to say, ‘soon after this, Conrad, despite all the friends he had in London and his burning literary ambition, moved to the country, where he could look out of his window and be able to see from afar if an enemy were approaching.’

I’ve got no idea if this anecdote is Hisham Matar’s invention – a web search found nothing – but Hosam’s excitement in telling it signals a parallel with his own trajectory. By the time he tells it, he has abandoned his writing career, and like all three of the friends, he is intensely aware that he has enemies in Qaddafi’s regime.

Hosam never explains in so many words why he no longer writes, and is unmoved by his friends’ urgings. It’s through moments like this remembered anecdote that we are able to glean what is going on: Conrad’s withdrawal after killing the suspected agent is parallel to Hosam’s fear of detection and shame at his own silence after the 1984 demo.

The book’s opening words point to a feature of the narrative that this passage exemplifies:

It is, of course, impossible to be certain of what is contained in anyone’s chest, least of all one’s own or those we know well, perhaps especially those we know best

I don’t think we ever know what is going on in Khaled’s heart. For instance, when Qaddafi is being overthrown, he sits up all night listening to news and reading text messages from back home, but at work the next day he mumbles that he doesn’t pay much attention to the news. He is more forthcoming with the reader, but a stubborn silence remains.

There’s a lot more to say, but I’m out of time. There’s one wonderful scene I must mention. When after many years his family come to London to visit him, Khaled finally tells his father the real reason that he hasn’t come home, his participation in the 1984 demonstration and the wound he sustained. What happens next between father and son is profound. Here’s how it starts, as Khaled indicates the location of the scar:

‘Here,’ I said and pointed to my chest.
His manic fingers were all over me, trying to unbutton my shirt and pull it off at the same time. I gave him my back and did it myself. He took hold of my vest, and the child I once had been surrendered his arms. What happened next broke a crack through me.
My father, the tallest man I know, bowed and began to trace his fingers along my scar, reading it, turning around me as he followed its line, tears streaming down his face.
‘My boy, my boy,’ he whispered to himself.

(page 242)

Now I really am out of time.

After the meeting: The five of us discussed this book along with Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren (blog post here). This one generated much more interesting conversation. Among other things, two of us had been to Libya when Qaddafi was still in power – for them, the descriptions of life in Benghazi stirred rich memories.

Most if not all of us had read at least one other book by Hisham Matar, The Return (my blog post here), Others had read either In the Country of Men (which I read with my other Book Group, blog post here) or A Month in Siena.

The one who had read A Month in Siena had been irritated by it because ‘nothing happened’. She had a similar complaint abut My Friends. Having enjoyed it up to the point of the demonstration, she was frustrated that instead of telling a story about Libyan politics, the narrative stalled and Khaled in particular settled for a boring uneventful life for most of the book. For others of us, that was the point – it’s a story of exile, and Khaled is stuck, caught between the yearning for home and the impossibility of going there. Yet another challenged the assertion that Khaled was stuck: he had a job teaching English literature, which was the great love of his life – what’s wrong with that? And as the narrator of this book, he is the one who gets to see the whole picture.

Speaking vaguely so as to avoid spoilers, there was some disagreement on how successfully the narrative placed its characters at key events in Libyan history. I thought it was audacious; others thought it was a weakness, a clumsy welding act.

We didn’t come to blows. Even the least enthusiastic among us enjoyed the book, and I think it’s true to say that we all learned a lot about, or were at least reminded of, recent Libyan history.

Also, we had a pleasant meal and heard epic tales of bathroom renovation.

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Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren, the book club, page 77

Posted on 17 Mar 2024 | 11 comments

Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren (Jonathan Cape 2023)

Before the meeting: Carmel and Nell are mother and daughter. They have a complex relationship with each other, and terrible relationships with men: Carmel’s father Phil, a middlingly successful, womanising poet; Nell’s coercive, rapey on-and-off boyfriend Felim; an endlessly boring man who comes into Carmel’s life for a time; and so on. It seems that Phil’s long shadow is responsible for their misery. Tess writes online copy for an influencer.

The first couple of pages of The Wren, the Wren had me enthralled as the narrator describes a psychological experiment conducted by Russell T Hurlburt, a real person (here’s a link). The experiment deals with the fact that we can never know what is happening in another person’s mind. Sadly, I hadn’t read much further when I realised I had no idea what was in Anne Enright’s mind when she wrote the book. I couldn’t tell what mattered to her about the story, and it gave me no reason to keep reading.

I did read on, motivated pretty much entirely by the need to avoid being scolded at Book Club like the people who hadn’t read Killing for Country at our last meeting.

Nell and Carmel have alternating chapters, except for one chapter narrated by Phil. As far as I could tell, Phil’s chapter is there for the purpose of including some hideous animal cruelty that neither of the women could have witnessed. The book is punctuated by his (in my opinion) tedious poems.

Anne Enright’s style is smooth and there are moments that give joy: Nell’s state of mind after the first time she has sex with Felim (the only time she enjoys it); some nice reflections on the naming of birds in Australia; conversations between Nell and Carmel that capture a fine balance between love and irritated mutual incomprehension. But as a whole, this is one of the least engaging books I’ve read. It may be that this is my internalised patriarchal attitudes taking over my reading mind. If so, please put me right in the comments.

Meanwhile:

Page 77 is part of the description of Phil’s funeral. Though he was accustomed to slagging off his native town in USA talk shows, he had expressed a sentimental desire to be buried there. I suppose this page is darkly funny if you’re not as jaded with the book as I was. To me it just reads as cliché.

First there’s a bit of gratuitous dangerous-driving humour as Carmel is in a car following the hearse from Dublin airport where the body has been received:

The hearse went slowly for a while and then, at some secret moment, started belting along the road. It took the bends so fast, Carmel became a little fixated on the square end of the box disappearing up ahead. This chase went on for three hours, then the hearse slammed on the brakes and they were right on top of it again.

Then a bit of yokel humour. Or it may be a moment of pathos that segues into yokel humour. It’s a choose-your-own-tone paragraph:

People turned to stare. A man took off his hat and nodded right at her, through the glass. A woman stood at a garden wall with her children lined up in a row, and they each made the sign of the cross as the cars crawled past. In the centre of Tullamore, shopkeepers stood in front of half-shuttered windows, pedestrians blessed themselves and, when she looked behind, Carmel saw these people step down off the kerb to follow the cortège, like zombies.
That is what she said later to Aedemar Grant, it was Night of the Living Dead Culchie.

Then some joyless satire about the hypocrisy of public mourning ceremonies:

When they took their place at the top of the church, there was a man in military uniform in the other front pew; absurdly handsome and looped at the shoulder with fancy braid. The president of Ireland had sent him, apparently.
He came over to shake their hands and to give a smart, heart-turning salute, and Carmel wanted to ask him if he thought Phil was any good, as a poet. Because no one her age thought he was any good, he was just an example of something. Also, this whole scene was an example of something. There were a few women in headscarves and about 400 middle-aged men, many of whom had started enjoying themselves right there in the church.

That final sentence is probably a ‘comic’ invocation of the idea that the rural Irish are a mob of drunks.

I haven’t read anything else by Anne Enright*. On the strength of this book I’m unlikely to.

The meeting: In this Book Club, we discuss two books, possibly because if we just choose one it could turn out to be a dud. The Wren, the Wren was paired with My Friends by Hisham Matar. Both books start out with the notion that it’s impossible to know what’s going on in another person’s head. Both have a lot to do with fathers, and – as someone pointed out at the club meeting – both have protagonists who are lost.

No one told me I was completely wrong about The Wren, The Wren. There was general agreement that Carmel was more interesting than Nell, and no one cared for the book as a whole. We were all bemused by the praise heap[ed on it elsewhere, including its being included on the long list for the Booker. Two people had heard Anne Enright talk at the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week. Evidently she was delightful, speaking a lot about the importance of poets and family in Irish society and not that much about the book. A friend of one of us had said it was a wonderful book: we surmised that this was because of its portrayal of coercive control – which I at least thought was as ordinary as Phil’s poetry.

My Friends is a much more interesting book and generated much more interesting conversation. I’ll write about it separately.

* Or so I thought. A couple of hours after pressing ‘Publish’, I discovered that I read The Green Road only a year ago, and to judge by my blog post (here) I loved it.

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Sebastian Barrry’s Old God’s Time at the book group, page 77

Posted on 14 Mar 2024 | 2 comments

Sebastian Barry, Old God’s Time (Faber and Faber 2023)

Before the meeting: Tom Kettle is a nine-months retired Irish policeman, living quietly suicidal in an annexe of a castle in Dalkey, on the coast outside Dublin. Two young coppers from his old unit come knocking on his door with a request that he read the file of an old case he is particularly suited to help with. The conversation is oblique, but we understand that the case has to do with child sexual abuse by Catholic priests.

It’s the set-up for a Cincinnatus story: the hero is summoned out of retirement to do battle with the forces of evil. The reader settles down for a yarn whose shape is familiar, and whose subject is also, horribly, familiar: the terrible history of sexual abuse of children by Irish clergy.

From the beginning, however, Sebastian Barry is in no great hurry to get that story under way. Tom gives the young coppers shelter from a storm overnight, but barely looks at their file. He is still grieving the death of his wife some years earlier, and is missing his two adult children. The visit from the young men and then a couple of days later from their boss, his own former boss, stirs up memories of his terrible childhood in an institution, and the sexual abuse inflicted on his wife by a priest when she was a child in another institution. This is no longer a straightforward police procedural featuring a heroic retired copper. It becomes something much more elusive than that: part ghost story, part psychological thriller, part fictional misery memoir, part dramatisation of the long tail of child abuse, part revenge tragedy. And part, perhaps, a portrait of a mind in the early stages of dementia.

Bit by bit a tale of horror emerges. At times it seems that only Sebastian Barry’s brilliantly musical prose and the presence of the land, sea and town are all that stand between us and the abyss. At the same time, it is a deeply humane book that features a gallery of odd characters (odd in the sense of interesting and surprising), and wonderfully memorable dialogue.

There are so many twists that I’m reluctant to say more about the plot. I was gripped, and I trusted the truthfulness of the story, though (no spoilers) I was not completely convinced by the main event of the final act: too much hinges on ‘an expression of pure depravity‘, italics in the original.

The emotional spine of the novel is Tom’s love for his wife, June. They gave each other the possibility of decent lives after the desolation of their childhoods. On page 77, he is remembering their early days together.

Here’s the paragraph that fills the page –’those things’ in the first sentence is the June’s childhood spent in an orphanage (no details), and the only other things that may need explaining are that June is working as a waitress in a Wimpy bar, and that she has been fostered by a prim and moralistic woman, Mrs Carr:

For so long she was quiet and never spoke about those things. They’d been going out for a whole month, him fairly killing himself to get out on the bus or the train to her, from his lousy digs in Glasnevin, or his work in Harcourt Street. He tried to see her every day. If only the old train station there had still been open, oh bejesus, but he had to gallop all the way across Dublin, through the Green, down Grafton Street, skirt the college, stampede up Abbey Street and onto Talbot, and go like the clappers to Connolly station for the 5.30 to Bray. He was younger then and fit but it was summer all the same and he was obliged to change into a spare shirt in the tiny jacks as noisy as a drumkit, and wash the sweat off his chest and arms into the bargain. After a month of this he might have qualified for the Irish team at the Olympics. A whole month, a fortune in train fares. Couples might be expected to talk through their life stories the first night – not June. She liked to tell him all that had happened that day at the café, maybe in just a little too much detail, but he could bear it. He liked her in the aftermath of her work, weary but not bone-weary, her feet aching. She’d have thrown on her jeans and grabbed a jacket. Her lovely denim jacket, the very height of hippy fashion. The jeans she had worn into the bath as instructed by the label, and let shrink on her legs, skin-tight. She would never meet him in her digs, of course, because it was some kind of religious gaff for the protection of Catholic girls – Mrs goddamn Carr lived in Stillorgan, far away from the Wimpy. Not that he even knew about Mrs Carr then. He knew nothing. She loved to natter on but she never talked. He supposed that was it, that was how she was. In a way he was relieved she didn’t go serious on him, because he was the guardian of his own silences, had been all his life.

It’s so alive, carrying the reader along with sheer vitality – the vivid evocation of first love remembered in old age, and details like the tiny jacks (that’s a toilet to non-Irish speakers, not the only one in the book), the word-map of Dublin. Then, after a little joke about the Olympics and a wry complaint about the expense, the paragraph turns to June: her work, her fashionable clothes, her chattiness, her home, and, crucially, her silence about her past. Then the key sentence, so deftly placed that you might almost miss it, ‘She loved to natter on but she never talked,’ and his version of himself as ‘the guardian of his own silences.’

Is it a particularly Irish thing, this ability to ‘natter on’ without talking? It certainly feels familiar to me from my own Irish-heritage background. Almost all the conversations in this novel are elliptical, from the first visit of the young gardaí to the climactic revelations about June’s death – we can mostly guess at what isn’t being said, but we have to work at it.

After the meeting:
There were seven of us, excellent food, a friendly dog under the table who one suspected was more interested in the food than in us, glass walls open to a garden on a gorgeous early-autumn Sydney night. Once we had sat down to eat, and a number of book-group-relevant announcements had been made – the long aftermath of an injury sustained at a much earlier meeting, the imminent sale of the ouse where we were meeting, my own modest act of self-publication – the evening took an unaccustomed turn. One man decided to take on a smilingly stern facilitator role and proposed that we each take an initial turn of two minutes to give a quick first response to the book, and then stomped cheerfully on anyone who attempted to speak out of turn. This is probably standard practice in other book groups, and if so I can see why. That first round was rich. Here are some highlights (as they survive in my poor memory):

  • L– loved the Irishness of it: the way the dead were still present, the oddities of the community, the evocation of the country
  • G– was keen on the book but felt that the final movement piled things on too much
  • I– said it was a beautifully written Irish novel, but he wasn’t sure the world needed any more beautifully written irish novels. He thought it wasn’t as good as the other Sebastian Barry book we’ve read, A Long Long Way (link to my blog post)
  • D– found the prose irritating, and didn’t enjoy the experience of being inside the meandering mind of an old man – he got quite enough of that already, thanks very much (someone pointed out, later when allowed by the facilitator, that Tom is 66, a good bit younger than D– and most of the rest of us)
  • J– (that is, me) said something passable, and mentioned the, um, glibness of that ‘expression of depravity‘
  • S– said he loved and hated the book. When he started he thought, ‘Not another novel abut child sex abuse, and not another novel about the Catholic Church,’ but he read on and was often delighted and moved. He understood something very early that others of us took half the book to realise (I’m carefully avoiding spoilers).
  • N– thought that the oddities of Tom’s memory weren’t so much about cognitive decline as the way traumatic experiences can be remembered as if they happened to someone else. He reminded us of the pivotal moment when Tom, having been unsure whether some of the stories in his head were June’s experiences or his own, realises with a shock that something he had remembered as something he witnessed had actually happened to him.

Others shared my reaction to the word ‘depravity’ and the way it suggests a lack of imaginative commitment to the big events near the end. But, as often happens, we disagreed about the very ending, which I don’t think is ambiguous at all. What I hadn’t realised until the meeting is how that ending – however you interpret it – echoes key elements of the opening pages. It would be far too spoilerish to say more.

The consensus was that this was an excellent book, but something a little more cheerful might be called for next time.

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