Tag Archives: Novel

The book group has Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See

Posted on 3 Mar 2016 | 4 comments

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (Fourth Estate 2014)

0007548672.jpg Before the group: In short chapters that for the most part alternate between their two stories, this novel of the Second World War tells of a German orphan boy with a gift for radio technology (a geek before the word) and a blind French girl who flees Paris with her father when the Germans invade.

They finally meet in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of St Malo on the French coast in the last days of the war.  The two young people’s war experiences are vividly realised. The account of the making of dedicated Hitler Youth is chilling. The story telling is masterful, and motifs of light and darkness, touch and sound, snails and gems are woven intricately into the novel’s fabric.

But it didn’t really touch the sides. At the centre of the plot is a brilliant diamond with a fire at its heart, sought after by the Nazis and guarded unawares by the blind girl. Some readers may respond to the talk of curses and other magic that surround this jewel so that it resonates with rich symbolism, but for me it’s just a maguffin, and the novel as a whole a beautifully crafted, enjoyable diversion set in a period that has been done, and done, and done. If it has fire at its heart, the fire remained invisible to me. Soon there may well be a Spielberg movie, as flawless as Bridge of Spies.

Actually I just told a lie. There is one paragraph that snagged me. Young Werner is deeply into his work with the German armed forces when he hears on his radio receiver some music that he and his sister Jutta used to listen to back on the orphanage:

Now the piano makes a long, familiar run, the pianist playing different scales with each hand – what sounds like three hands, four – the harmonies like steadily thickening pearls on a strand, and Werner sees six-year-old Jutta lean toward him, Frau Elena kneading bread in the background, a crystal radio on his lap, the cords of his soul not yet severed.

That last phrase encapsulates brilliantly the long, corrosive years of Werner’s training to serve the Reich, and strikes a note of deep pathos. It made me glad I’d read the book.

At the meeting: Given that the book won a Pulitzer Prize and received extravagant critical praise, I was prepared to be a minority voice. But we had extraordinarily similar responses to it. Unusually though, we spent most of the evening – over a delicious tuna salad in a room with the walls folded back so we had full benefit of the warm autumn night – actually talking about the book. Spouses’ illnesses, the state of Sydney theatre, advice on how to approach local council all took a back seat.

One man had recently been to St Malo, and the book was a revelation – evidently the old town  has been restored and all signs of the WW2 devastation erased. Another had researched the school young Werner was sent to, and verified that there were many like it. Yet another wondered if the Nazis did search Europe’s natural history museums as well as its art museums. So it did stir our minds. We all agreed that the short chapters made it very easy to read, that with one or two exceptions the characters were well drawn and engaging, that the plot moved along. We all agreed that it was beautifully written: one chap said he reread some chapters just for the pleasure of it, ignoring the onward pull of the narrative. No one was keen on the fiery jewel – only one chap thought we were supposed to take its magical powers seriously.

So we kept coming back to the question: why, if it’s so good in so many ways, does it leave us largely untouched? Perhaps the short alternating chapters worked against immersion in the story. Perhaps telling the story from children’s point of view limited the possibilities for adult engagement. Perhaps the book is overworked, leaving no Leonard Cohenish cracks to let the light come in. Perhaps the relentless action means there’s too little breathing space where a reader could find an emotional way into the story? Perhaps it’s that there is no thesis, no moment where the story comes together in a revelation of some sort, or if there is it’s too subtle for us. Perhaps we’ve all just read too many novels set in the Second World War. All those possibilities were canvassed, none were agreed on.

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Pat Barker’s Noonday

Posted on 10 Feb 2016 | Leave a comment

Pat Barker, Noonday (Hamish Hamilton 2015)

noonday.jpgJust a short post on this:

Pat Barker’s Regeneration  trilogy is a magnificent work about World War One. Noonday is the final book in a different trilogy – one which began, in Life Class, before that war, and which takes its characters, those who survive, into the London of the Blitz.

I read Life Class too long ago – all I remember is the life drawing class that it opens with, in which the woman protagonist is dumped on by the instructor, and my blog entry about it explains why I didn’t go chasing after the second volume, Toby’s Room.

Noonday is worth reading for its evocation of London during the blitz. These days when the slogan’Keep Calm and Carry on’ and its parodies adorn a million mugs and tea towels, and the movie of Dad’s Army approaches with its no doubt charming and hilarious ragtag segment of the land army (not that there’s anything wrong with either phenomenon), it’s good to have this vivid reminder that it was a time of great suffering and great heroism.

But the main characters, three artists with varying degrees of success, aren’t all that interesting. Two of them are married at the start and not at the end, and it’s never very clear what happened. There’s adultery, which seems to be a big deal, at least for one of them, but I kept thinking of Bogart’s line in Casablanca: ‘It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.’

Then there’s a weird subplot involving a grossly overweight woman who is both a charlatan claiming to give the bereaved messages from their dead loved ones, and a genuine psychic. I didn’t know what to make of that, and in the end didn’t care.

So, at the risk of sounding as if I’m ten years old, I’d say read it for the account of London during the Blitz, but skim the talky-talky lovey-dovey bits.

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Andrea Levy’s Small Island

Posted on 23 Dec 2015 | 5 comments

Andrea Levy, Small Island (Review 2004)

0755325656This is a completely wonderful book. The main action takes  place in London in 1948. The city is suffering the aftermath of war. Men are still returning from the conflict, and everyone is adjusting to new realities. In particular, men from the Caribbean who have volunteered to defend the ‘Mother Country’ now decide, some of them, to make new lives in England. The story centres on one of them, Gilbert, and his new wife, Hortense, as they come up against what in this book is clearly a shocking betrayal of the promises of the British Empire – white racism.

The other main characters are Queenie, a white woman who befriends Gilbert, and her husband Bernard, who is obnoxiously insular, pompous, racist and sexist. Each chapter is narrated by one of these characters, either in 1948 or ‘Before’: so we get childhood stories from Jamaica and rural England, and war experiences in many part of the globe, all told with a brilliant ear for different englishes. One of the many wonders of the book is that when, well past the half way point, Bernard finally has a series of chapters, we come to sympathise with him: not to like him, except possibly for one moment of unexpected generosity, but at least to feel for him.

Circumstances meant that I read most of Small Island in short bursts. This meant I could notice that while the story, or stories, did keep moving along, there was something to delight on every page. I was reminded of a piece of advice to young writers I read somewhere: Give the reader cool stuff now, and then more cool stuff later. That is to say, it’s no good having a fabulous surprise twist if everything leading up to it is dull. Well, nothing here is dull. Even dull Bernard’s story is gripping. A lot of it is very funny. The Jamaicans encounter racism but it does not define them. Brilliant humour made from the  differences between US and British brands of racism, and in the climactic moments Gilbert delivers a brilliant speech naming the idiocy of white supremacist attitudes.

The final pages are guaranteed to wrench any heart.

About the title: one of the Jamaicans refers disparagingly at one point to the West Indians who come from small islands. Then he realises that Jamaica itself is a small island. And I don’t know if it’s ever made explicit, but there’s a strong implication that Britain is also one, its people as insular in their ways, as resistant to change and outside influence as anyone from St Kitts or Martinique.

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Doris Lessing’s Ben, in the World and Sonnet #2

Posted on 4 Nov 2015 | 2 comments

Doris Lessing, Ben, in the World (Flamingo 2000)

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I read quite a lot of Doris Lessing in my late twenties and early 30s. I guess I was reading what Wikipedia calls her Communist phase (the Martha Quest books), with maybe a bit of her psychological phase in The Golden Notebook (of which my main memory is a long passage where the main character mediates on the meaning of tears). I haven’t read any of her science fictional writing – until now.

Ben, in the World defies categorisation. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t even matter that it’s a sequel to another book (The Fifth Child, 1988). It starts from a ‘what if?’ premise: what if a genetic throwback to an earlier species of human was to arrive in our times? how would we cope with this person? and how would the person cope with us?

What Doris Lessing does with these questions is brilliant. Ben, the main character, is physically powerful and capable of inflicting great harm. He is eighteen years old, estranged from his family of origin, and has learned to control his violent impulses, but his weird appearance and different thought processes make him dreadfully vulnerable. When he can earn money he is cheated or robbed. His sexuality makes him simultaneously a subject of pity and terror, and I’m weirdly grateful to feminist Doris Lessing for giving him one woman who understands and doesn’t drive him away.

Ben makes a kind of life for himself thanks to the kindness of people on society’s fringes, people who can understand to some extent his profound difference. But there’s never any doubt that he’s heading for disaster. It’s a miracle of story-telling that when the inevitable happens it’s deeply satisfying, and preceded by an unexpected moment of exhilaration. What might sound from my synopsis like a cerebral exercise becomes a rich tangential celebration of what it is to be human.

And now, because it’s November:

Sonnet 2: After reading Doris Lessing’s
Ben, in the World
‘Just a little bit of finger
bone,’ he said, ‘ can tell the whole
of what a person’s been.’ Let’s linger
on that thought: it’s not the soul,
a spirit that outlives the body
it ignores. No, what that shoddy
view of science cannot own
is: no one can exist alone.
That finger bone stripped by the condors
touched when alive what cheeks, what lips,
or pointed, waggled at what quips,
or painted on a wall what wonders?
The finger’s owner wept what tears
and heard the music of what spheres?

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Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound in the Book Group

Posted on 29 Oct 2015 | 3 comments

Eka Kurniawan, Beauty is a Wound (2002, translation by Annie Tucker, Text Publishing 2015)

9781925240238A while back, we agreed that the Book Group would stick with short books. So we read Of Mice and Men. Then somehow we settled on Beauty Is a Wound, which weighs in at just short of 500 pages.

Not that I’m complaining. The book more than fills the promise implied in its epigraph from Cervantes [note to self: read Don Quixote]:

Having cleaned his armour and made a full helmet out of a simple headpiece, and having given a name to his horse and decided on one for himself, he realised that the only thing left for him to do was to find a lady to love, for the knight errant without a lady-love was a tree without leaves or fruit, a body without a soul.

The book gives us three quarters of a century of Indonesian history seen largely from the perspective of the ‘lady-loves’ of its variously idealistic (or not) warriors. A multitude of stories involving Dutch colonisers, Japanese invaders, guerrilla resistance, nationalists, Communists, anti-Communists, capitalist thugs – all revolve around the central figure of Dewi Ayu, the most famous whore of the fictional city of Halimunda, and her three beautiful daughters. Tender love, passionate mutual obsession, brutal rape, prostitution, high romance, fraternal and intergenerational incest, borderline necrophilia: these are all there, with World War Two, Indonesian Independence, the 1965 massacre of leftists and the 1975 invasion of East Timor as context. More than once the streets of Halimunda are filled with corpses, and then with the unappeased ghosts of the slaughtered.

Eka Kurniawan has been called Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s successor. The latter’s Buru Quartet was also a panoramic account of recent Indonesian history seen through the lens of one man’s life, but as far as my memory goes those earlier novels were strictly realistic and unsensational – the story of their being written without pen and paper while the author was in prison is much more thrilling than the novels themselves. Beauty Is a Wound, on the other hand, is unlikely to land its author in prison,even though writers about the 1965 massacres were banned from this yeas Ubud Writers Festival, but it provokes a visceral response to the history it treats.

The book’s web of relationships is extraordinarily complex. For my own peace of mind, I attempted a diagram showing the main ones. The diagram doesn’t show the revelations of the final chapter which manages the improbable feat of pulling the many threads together into thematic consistency, but it does contain one or two spoilers if you look at it closely. But here it is, small but embiggable, for anyone who’s interested (dotted lines represent anything from concubinage to one-off rape, while deep unfulfilled love is indicated by a dotted line with a cross):

Beauty Is a Wound Chart

Annie Tucker, the translator, has done an awesome job, creating the sense that we are in a world not quite like ours. Partly, I mean by that, we know we are in a non-Western cultural setting. Some words remain untranslated but explained – such as moksa (in Indian philosophy, freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth) or jailangkung (a Javanese game in which the spirits of the dead are summoned). But more interestingly, the translation allows us to feel that we are not just in a different culture, but in a different reality. When characters return from the dead or avoid death altogether, when there are curses, prophetic insights or hauntings, we feel that we are in a weird waking dream of our own rather than listening in with an ethnographer’s ear.

At the meeting: This was not one of those times when we all had similar responses to the book. We had such an engrossing conversation over  soup and salad that we barely got to discuss the removal of Tony Abbott or his embarrassing Lady Thatcher address.

There were eight of us, though one was only there between dropping his daughter off at soccer training and picking her up – the driving time meant he had just about 40 minutes to eat, drink and opine (all of which he did most elegantly). One hadn’t read the book at all. Another ‘declared at tea’ – reading on the Kindle so couldn’t say what page. One pointed to the fact that he’d read the whole book to prove that he didn’t hate it, though he was, well, flamboyant in his account of it as tediously ‘factual’ in its prose and intolerably sexist in its treatment of the women characters (who are there for purposes of sex and nothing much else)

A number of us had grappled with the possibility that there was some kind of allegorical account of Indonesian history at work. One chap, who had been struck by the fact that the central characters, Dewi Ayu and her daughters. were mainly very passive, suggested a reading in which they represented the soul or the spirit or ‘the people’ of Indonesia, and the treatment that had roused the other chap’s ire signified the damage done to the country by each of the groups that their various rapists, and exploiters belonged to. That made a lot of sense to me.  And the prose style has the matter-of-factness of folktale, which fits that reading.

Someone told us that a number of speakers had been banned from the Ubud Writers Festival yesterday because they were scheduled to speak about the 1965 massacre of leftists. I don’t think Eka Kurniawan was one of them, but the news did shed an interesting light on the book’s unflinching account of the massacre.

Oh, and my chart of the relationships was widely admired, possibly with a slight edge of irony.

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Qiu Xiaolong’s Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

Posted on 10 Aug 2015 | 3 comments

Qiu Xiaolong, Don’t Cry, Tai Lake (Minotaur Books 2012)

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I’ve pretty much stopped reading detective novels. Inspector Chen, Chinese poet-detective tempted me back into the genre. There was a promise of insight into the workings of contemporary China, and Chinese poetry ancient and modern, all floating on a light whodunnit froth.

I should have known better. The whodunnit element is flimsy. The poetry feels inserted (though it’s a nice touch that Chen quotes Matthew Arnold as well as verse from ancient dynasties). And any issue of Asia Literary Review offers more insight.

I might still have enjoyed it but, perhaps because had just read Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, my internal blue pencil was on the alert, and this book’s copy editor let far too much go by: not anything gross, but far too much tautology of the ‘There was something eerily familiar about the peddler, Chen noticed, thinking he might have seen him somewhere’ kind, and enough examples of words that don’t mean what they’re meant to mean, as in the book’s very last sentence, ‘He wondered if he would be able to take a nap on the train, feeling the onslaught of a splitting headache.’ A decent copy editor would surely have suggested ‘onset’ because who can wonder about naps in the middle of any kind of onslaught?

I reached for a collection of essays by the impeccable David Malouf.

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Leila Yusaf Chung’s Chasing Shadows 

Posted on 28 Jul 2015 | 3 comments

Leila Yusaf Chung, Chasing Shadows (Vintage Books Australia, 2014)

1csIn August 2001, John w Howard kept the press away from the asylum seekers who had been rescued by captain Arne Rinnan of the Norwegian ship Tampa. It was crucial to Howard’s strategy of depicting the would-be refugees as ‘illegals’ and ‘queue-jumpers’ that Australians not see them as individual men, women and children. His famous utterance, ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,’ could not have sounded like a defiant assertion of sovereignty if its hearers knew the wretched terror and misery – not to mention courage and determination – of those who were being ‘decided’ against.

Short of meeting asylum seekers in person, and so far I haven’t bestirred myself to do that, fiction has to be a good way of engaging imaginatively with this class of people who are still being relentlessly disparaged and dehumanised in our media. I bought a copy of Leila Yusaf Chung’s novel with those considerations in mind after hearing her speak, beautifully, at the Sydney Writers Festival about the importance of women in refugee communities.

I’m happy to report that the book filled the brief I had given it. Set mainly in Israel and Lebanon from the 1940s to the 1980s, it has real people who suffer real losses, confront real mysteries, and make their ways through the violence and indifference they meet at every turn. The form of the book mirrors the complexity of Middle Eastern politics, to the extent that plot summaries either misrepresent the book or are close to impossible to unravel. A character who seems to be the main driver of the plot becomes marginal to the point that when he dies we hardly notice; sympathetic characters do terrible things, and a shift in perspective reveals what looked like – and was – abuse to be an act of love; an early scene narrated from an uncomprehending child’s point of view turns out to contain a mystery that is central to the story; there are many false starts, many shifts of location and allegiance.

The book has a Zelig quality – characters find themselves on the spot just in time to be on the wrong side of a disastrous event: a Polish Jew living in Israel converts to Islam just before the naqba, so that he and his new family are among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from their homes by the Israeli army into apparently permanent exile; a young Palestinian woman is persuaded to marry an Iranian official, only to arrive in Tehran the day of the 1979 revolution and be gaoled along with hundreds of women who don’t meet the requirements of Ayatollah Khomeini’s new regime; characters are caught up in the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Identity is fluid, and sometimes a  pragmatic choice: the Jew Lavi becomes the Muslim Abu Fadi in order to marry a young Muslim woman; his Arab daughter poses as a Christian Armenian to give her infant daughter a safe environment to grow up in; another daughter finds a source of strength in strict Islam. Nothing is simple.

I recommend the book. If you read it I’d love to hear your response in the comments.

aww-badge-2015

Chasing Shadows is the twelfth book I’ve read for the 2015 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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Of Mice and Men and the Book Group

Posted on 16 Jul 2015 | 7 comments

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937)

ommEvery now and then the Book Group reads a classic. As one of us is currently performing in the play of Of Mice and Men, it seemed like an obviously good idea to read the book and see the play together.

Before the meeting: This is one of those books that you feel you don’t actually need to read. Like the photos of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, it’s a solid part of our understanding of the US in the 1930s. A little skinny guy and a lumbering giant with intellectual disability team up in rural USA during the Great Depression. The big man is a gentle soul, but doesn’t know his own strength and bad things happen.

Predictably, the book turned out to offer any number of surprises. First was the lyricism of the opening. I vaguely knew that Elmore Leonard’s disparagement of ‘hooptedoodle‘, the descriptive bits that readers tend to skip, cited Steinbeck as an authority. It was a surprise, then, to meet an opening paragraph that describes a pool over which arch the ‘recumbent limbs and branches’ of sycamores, and to which water ‘has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight’. That ‘twinkling’ challenged my assumptions mightily.

But then the humans appear, and there’s no more twinkling or recumbent arches until the final chapter, where ‘row on row of tiny wind waves flowed up the pool’s green surface’. The return to that pool carries a huge emotional thwack. Steinbeck knew a little hooptedoodle goes a long way, but he knew how to do it well. In this case, it’s the equivalent of a theatrical backdrop.

The story unfolds in six scenes, each of which observes the classical unities of time, place and action – that is, we see only what happens in a given place, and we see everything that happens there in sequence. The settings, described briefly at the start of each scene, are: an idyllic clearing on the bank of the Salinas river on a Thursday evening; a ranch bunkhouse the next morning; the bunkhouse again that evening; the harness room, which is also the bedroom of Crooks, the stable buck, on Saturday night; the barn, Sunday afternoon; the pool again, still Sunday.

Almost everything is conveyed by dialogue and action. It’s a short book, just about 100 pages – it could have been twice as long in the hands of a writer who wanted to tell us what his characters were thinking, rather than trusting us to get it.

There’s another passage of ‘fine writing’ that stands out. Unlike the other characters – the old man Candy, Crooks, Curley – who reveal themselves by their words and actions, Slim first appears in a long descriptive passage. Here’s the end of that passage:

There was a gravity in his manner and a quiet so profound that all talk stopped when he spoke. His authority was so great that his word was taken on any subject, be it politics or love. This was Slim, the jerkline skinner. His hatchet face was ageless. He might have been thirty-five or fifty. His ear heard more than was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought. His hands, large and lean, were as delicate in their action as those of a temple dancer.

This eloquent prose telegraphs Slim’s function as moral touchstone: we know that his judgement is to be trusted, that his point of view is as close as we’ll get to the author’s. Then the prose snaps back to normal, not so much undercutting the hoptedoodle as saving it from itself, when Slim speaks:

‘It’s brighter’n a bitch outside,’ he said gently. ‘Can’t hardly see nothin’ in here.’

As I was reading this book, Barack Obama made headlines for using the N word. (As someone said, he is the first US President to use that word without referring to someone he claimed to own.) Given the extreme sensitivity to that word in the US today, it’s gratifying that Steinbeck’s use of it hasn’t been bowdlerised, at least not in the edition I read. The characters’ casual use of it to refer to Crooks, the only African American character, is very uneasy-making. Then there’s a scene where the woman addresses him by the vile term, and reminds him that she could have him ‘strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny’. Steinbeck and Obama would agree that racism is not just a matter of it not being polite to use some words in public.

After the meeting: We didn’t have a group meeting as such, as we spent two and a half hours at the Sport for Jove production of Steinbeck’s play, directed by Iain Sinclair, with an all-round excellent cast. All good intentions of joining our actor-member after the show evaporated at the final curtain, and we all made our way home to warm mid-week beds.

It was interesting to see the play so soon after reading the novel. Maybe Steinbeck had the play in mind when he wrote the novel, because it really did feel largely as if as if the book had been magically transmogrified into flesh and blood. Maybe George wasn’t as wiry as I’d imagined, and Curley’s wife (her lack of a name much more noticeable in the play) was less sexy; the scene in Crooks’ bunk felt truncated; the dog was cuter and more alert than the book’s smelly wreck. But these were minor variations. The novel was walking and talking in front of our eyes. But no twinkling water or recumbent sycamore branches.

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Richard McHugh’s Charlie Anderson’s General Theory of Lying at the Book Group

Posted on 26 Jun 2015 | 11 comments

Richard McHugh, Charlie Anderson’s General Theory of Lying (Viking 2015)

1cagtolBefore the meeting: This book made me realise how little of my reading is just for the fun of it. It’s a comedy of manners set in the world of business consultants, bank executives and corporate CEOs after the financial crisis. The first chapter introduces Charlie Anderson, a brilliant consultant whose life is just as he’d want it: a wife who is the love of his life, three wonderful daughters, a girlfriend with no strings attached, and a belief in cheerful deceit that keeps it all working. We just know things are going to go terribly wrong. And they do.

Charlie runs foul of every one of these women, plus a couple more, to excellent comic effect. The domestic relationships are beautifully evoked: in particular, I feel as if I know each of the three daughters (and am glad I only have sons!). It’s quite an achievement that even though we are made privy to the long and not terribly profound meditations of Charlie and his wife the story zings along. None of the narrative threads lead to anything much: we never find out what happened in a crucial offstage incident; a situation that looks as if it’s going to lead to major catastrophe evaporates without explanation; some actions taken with a great sense of jeopardy have no consequences at all. Maybe the point is that self-deceivers like Charlie get off scot-free, but it felt to me that, apart from a single stinging wordless moment at the end of the chapter before the epilogue, there’s just no pay-off: like a detective story where foreshadowed crimes don’t happen, and confession to real crimes go unpunished.

It’s an enjoyable ride all the same.

The meeting: Richard McHugh  came to our meeting – he’s a friend of one of us. He arrived late, which, as someone said, gave us a chance to get all our slagging-off out of the way so we could be civil to the man himself. In the event, there wasn’t any slagging off as such, and the conversation wasn’t painfully civil. We all had a good time, including Richard. He said the three weeks doing publicity since the book was published had been hard work, and it was a pleasure to sit with a group of men who’d actually read the book, especially given that the general wisdom is that it’s mostly women who read fiction. (We were silent about the man in the room who had only reached the halfway point.) I had a list of questions, which I’ll put in white so as not to foist spoilers on you:

  1. Did Anna know about Charlie’s philandering?
  2. What actually happened at the barbecue?
  3. Why didn’t anything come of Charlie’s confession to the police?

It may be Richard’s first published novel, but he wasn’t naive enough to answer the questions outright. He replied to all of them with ‘What do you think?’, but then spoke interestingly. In particular, it turned out that one of the questions had been explicitly answered in an earlier version of the book. He told us what had  been cut, and I think we all agreed that the novel worked better with those parts removed, but we were still glad to know the answer. Our own surmises had all been less interesting.

While I still feel the lack of pay-off is a frustrating element, my sense of the ending has changed. I had bought into the central character’s smug belief that he had come though the events of the novel unscathed, seeing the faint rumblings of disquiet around the edges as relatively insignificant. Now I think of it as more like the pleasant family gathering at the end of The Sopranos, where we know that men with machine guns are going to come out of the restaurant toilet and kill them all as soon as the show is over. Charlie doesn’t get his come-uppance in the novel, but the writing is on the wall.

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Lisa Gorton’s Life of Houses

Posted on 2 Jun 2015 | 4 comments

Lisa Gorton, The Life of Houses (Giramondo 2015)

9781922146809

Lisa Gorton is a an award-winning poet. I’m using that journalist’s phrase because I haven’t read enough of her poetry to have any real sense of it. I have read some of her criticism and been intensely grateful for the insights she shares. Her first novel, Cloudland, was for young readers. The Life of Houses is her first novel for a general readership.

The action of the novel unfolds over about a week. Anna manages a Melbourne art gallery. While her husband is visiting his family in England, she sends their teenaged daughter Kit to stay with her estranged parents in a tiny seaside town a couple of hours’ train journey away. Anna has to prepare for an exhibition opening during school holidays, but her real reason for packing Kit off is so she can spend time with a lover, who is pressing her to leave her husband.

While Anna wrestles with her ambivalence about her love life, Kit encounters the miasma of unresolved emotion in her mother’s childhood home – her grandparents’ not-really-unspoken resentment of their daughter who left them with barely a backward glance, and the small-mindedness of small-town life beyond the family.

Not a lot happens. A teenage boy has died, probably by suicide, probably because he was gay, and Scott, an artist who was Anna’s childhood friend, falls under suspicion because he had spent time with the boy. There’s something needy and a bit creepy about Scott, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say we never learn anything about his sexuality, and that the suspicion is purely a symptom of small town thinking. He befriends Kit, and is the only person who has an inkling of what she is experiencing.

There’s another death, but external events are much less important in this novel than internal processes. Kit begins to think of her mother differently, and her sense of herself has grown. Anna’s attitude to her family softens, and her ambivalence about the lover deepens. Scott almost decides to leave the town. Everyone has a take on the building that is the family home: its history, its ghosts, who will inherit it, its emotional meanings and (in passing, but ominously) its market value. Absolutely nothing is neatly resolved.

Lisa Gorton and the editorial team at Giramondo aren’t afraid of hard-working adjectives or busy punctuation. For example:

The whole scene lay open before her: heat shimmering off scrub out where the road was, mile after mile of flat, low, secretive country. She found a sort of elation in it: a loneliness answering her mood. Sharp, scattering sounds drew her eyes to where the bird was lifting wing-beat by wing-beat up from the surface of the lake, its legs trailing in the water. She watched holding her breath; it seemed so unlikely the bird would rise.

That’s two colons and a semicolon in four sentences. More than once, a single sentence matches that. Here’s one from when Kit is listening in on a conversation between her aunt and Scott soon after she arrives in the town:

Their way of ignoring so much made Kit notice more: the creaking sound of some loose join in the decking; and that lasting roar: it was the wind, not the sea, she could hear.

The frequent use of sentence structures that call for this kind of punctuation has the effect of blocking the flow of the narrative. What is happening is almost always less important than the process of observing it. And often it feels as if things are there because they have been observed, even though they add nothing to the narrative or our understanding of character. Anyone reading to find out what happens next may be disappointed. The pleasures of this book lie elsewhere.

I received my review copy of the book from Giramondo.

aww-badge-2015

The Life of Houses is the tenth book I’ve read for the 2015 Australian Women Writers Challenge. I’ve now finished the challenge – but I don’t expect I’ll stop reading relevant books.

Lisa Gorton recently gave a fascinating interview about The Life of Houses to Fiona Gruber on the ABC’s Books and Arts.

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