Tag Archives: Novel

Omar Musa’s Here Come the Dogs and the Book Group

Posted on 20 May 2015 | 8 comments

Omar Musa, Here Come the Dogs (Hamish Hamilton 2014)

1hcdAt the last meeting: Someone said he wanted us to choose a book that would blow our minds. By the usual apparently random process, we picked Here Come the Dogs. Would it provide the desired explosion?

Before this meeting: The novel follows the lives of three men in their 20s who live in the Town, which is a bus ride away from the City – as Queanbeyan is from Canberra. Solomon and Jimmy are half brothers. Solomon is Samoan, a former basketball player whose career and university scholarship were cut short by injury. Jimmy, whose ‘eyes cut left to right, / paranoid and grim’ – well, his father was a bit of a fabulist, and no one knowns the truth of his ethnicity.Macedonian-born Aleks, their friend and neighbour since childhood, has connections with organised crime. The friends live in hip-hop culture, tagging and rapping, tending their tattoos, ingesting a range of mood-altering substances, fighting when need or impulse calls for it.

A character describes Solomon as bilingual because he can talk to university students in their own language (‘I guess I have to check my privilege. My bad.’). By that token, Omar Musa is multilingual. The novel’s back-and-forth movement from verse to prose is only part of the rich variation in the language: street argot, delicate descriptive prose, fine dramatic scenes, an occasional voice from the mainstream – all are there without any apparent strain. I’ll leave it to someone else to comment on the accuracy of hip-hop language and references – of the hundreds of names dropped I recognised maybe three. But Musa evokes the milieu with tremendous energy. Likewise the tagging/bombing references: it’s something of a miracle that, without any obvious signposting, an outsider like me is rarely left wondering what they mean.

The first chapter, which is laid out as verse, introduces the three main characters. They’re on a night out, as ‘the only ethnics at the dog races’ and then wandering, partying, getting into fights, and one of them into a sexual encounter. It’s smoke-filled, drug-inflected, and definitely not to be read aloud in a vicarage, but it works beautifully as a sequence of poems. The form allows moments like this, a one line poem and its title:

Wish we had a white person with us
Ten empty cabs have passed us by

In the morning-after prose that begins the second chapter, there’s an abrupt change of tone as we find Aleks meticulously cleaning his kitchen and getting his little daughter ready for school. The book keeps on springing similar surprises: just as you expect one thing, it gives you another. An act of criminal violence is performed with genuine compassion; a relationship that looks set to be central to the plot ends with some blunt name-calling; what looks like a major catastrophe turns out to be just another incident in a character’s near-chaotic life; a prison sequence is convincingly real while standing prison-story conventions on their heads; moral choices faced by the characters are deeply complex.

I loved the book. It has a lot in common with fiction that’s been coming from Western Sydney lately, evoking the knockabout world of marginalised people who struggle to live with integrity. And like that other fiction, it burns with passion for that world.

The meeting: It was a big turn-up for lasagna and cheesecake. Everyone had read the book, an almost unprecedented occurrence, and though some were keener than others, we had all enjoyed it. Some found it hard to get past the swagger of the opening chapter. Some found the ending unsatisfactory – partly because there is no real climax, and partly because of a manufactured feel to what climax there is. (I didn’t see either of these as problems.)

One chap said that as novels are mostly read by middle class people, it’s possible to read a lot of this one as intended to challenge middle-class readers. The C-bomb that’s the fourth word of the first chapter is a message in code: You’re not in polite politically-correct land any more. On the other hand, while agreeing that the lives of these characters was very different from our mostly comfortable, educated and secure lives, I think we mostly felt that as readers we weren’t observing them as examples, but finding a lot to identify with.

This led to an interesting discussion about young men and violence – we compared stories of teenage years in suburban London, small-town New South Wales, suburban Sydney. The book’s arson episode drew out arson-related memories. In one episode a character drives his car with his eyes shut, guided only by a voice that may be on his phone or perhaps is just in his head: is it magical realism, or was the young man just very lucky? Someone confessed to once driving with his eyes shut when young, just to see what it would be like to be blind. Like the character, he opened his eyes not far from disaster.

And of course, the conversation ranged: James Turrell in Canberra, Marina Abramovic’s coming visit to Sydney, the merits of the GP that a number of us go to, things we learn from our children, travel tales, movies, theatre …

Thanks, Omar.

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Pamela Hart’s Soldier’s Wife

Posted on 7 May 2015 | 6 comments

Pamela Hart, The Soldier’s Wife (Hachette Australia 2015)

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Romance novels really aren’t my thing, but Pamela Hart, as Pamela Freeman, has written a number of magnificent books in other genres, so I stepped out of my comfort zone to read her first venture into the world of historical romance. Also, it’s the centenary of the landing at Gallipoli, and in our house the schmaltzy, revisionist jingoism in the media has made it close to impossible to attend to the occasion. James Kent’s movie of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth was a big crack in that frozen wall. The Soldier’s Wife promised another.

The book  delivers on both fronts: as a story of the WWI home front, and as a all stops out romance.

Ruby has had a blissful honeymoon week with her tall handsome husband Jimmy, and then one last day in town before he is shipped off to Gallipoli, where they know he is going into harm’s way. (If I was being true to the period and to the book, I’d call her Mrs Hawkins, but after all I’ve been though with her, she’s Ruby to me.) Hailing from Burke, Ruby lodges with the friend of a friend in Annandale, a Sydney suburb, and gets a job as bookkeeper in a timber yard – the boss of the yard has a son who is an officer in the same battalion as Jimmy, which accounts for his willingness to take on a woman.

And it goes from there: Ruby lives in constant terror that the next telegram to be delivered will bring news of Jimmy’s death; she negotiates the perils of the all male workplace, where she fends off sexual predation and high-toned disapproval; having so briefly enjoyed married life and then left, she is strongly drawn to the handsome, muscular foreman of the yard; bit by bit she takes on more responsibility in the workplace and her relationship with her landlady becomes more solid.

I was surprised by some of the plot twists, and though in retrospect they were completely logical I don’t want to spoil them for you. I’ll just say that we are not spared the harrowing experience of learning of a loved one’s injury and death in battle; and the changing balance in power relationships between men and women that was brought about by the war is made painfully real, along with the ghastly difficulty in communication between those who went off to the unreal nightmare world of war and those who stayed behind in the all too real struggles at home.

The main characters are all Catholic – attending St Brendan’s in Annandale, where I have been myself more than once – and the moral world of the book is that of early 20th century Australian Irish Catholicism. I love this, because so much historical fiction shies away from such religious dimension, yet it is so important to an understanding of the times. It also adds a particular kind of intensity to Ruby’s temptations with the foreman – and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that I desperately wanted her to yield to temptation, and that the matter stayed unresolved until almost the last page.

The Soldier’s Wife is being promoted as an ideal Mother’s Day gift. I think my mother would have liked it, though she might have been unsettled by some of the discreetly worded but nevertheless explicit sexual references. I doubt if my father would have read it, but he would have enjoyed it too. It’s a good yarn. You care about the characters. And there’s the blessed relief of being able to think about Gallipoli through the experience of life-sized, complex people without the background noise of rascally patriotism.

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The Soldier’s Wife is the ninth book I’ve read for the 2015 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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Richard Powers’ Orfeo

Posted on 29 Apr 2015 | Leave a comment

Richard Powers, Orfeo (Atlantic Books 2014)

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Margaret Atwood, no less, is quoted on the cover of this book as saying, ‘If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century he’d probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big.’ That’s probably taken out of context, and it’s a wee bit over the top, but, you know, only a wee bit. If Melville had been writing about the music scene rather than the whaling industry, he might have written this book. The digressions are just about as long as the ones in Moby-Dick, and for my money at least as interesting; the quest at the centre of the story is as doomed and self-destructive; the frame of reference as global.

Peter Els, a 70 year old composer who has had very little popular or critical success, calls 911 when his dog dies. The police who come to his door have their security-threat detectors set off when they see that he is a DIY biochemist, and soon he is on the run with the full might of Homeland Security behind him. The story of his flight, which becomes a kind of Thelma-and-Louise flavoured 12-steps amends-making pilgrimage, is told in counterpoint with his back story. Folded into one story is the world of Homeland Security vigilance about real and imagined terrorist threats, media panics and the surveillance state; and into the other the history of 20th century US cutting-edge music in its broader world political context.

It’s a gauge of how well Powers writes that just as Els’s flight is reaching a critical moment, he stops off to give a lecture in an old people’s residence, and everything stops while we are told the story of the composition and first performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time – and it’s so interesting that 17 pages later, when we return to the main narrative (‘That was the story Els told his eleventh-hour pupils … ) we do so as if waking up from a vivid, satisfying dream. There are other, shorter digressions, in which Els listens to a piece of music, and we are taken through it moment by moment: this is a book to be read, not just with Google on hand to chase up interesting references, but with access to a music library to listen along with Els to Mahler, George Rochberg, John Cage, Harry Partch, and on and on. And yet it has the pace and suspense of a thriller.

I scored (no pun) Orfeo at my book-swappng club. Since I’d had Powers’ Galatea 2.2 on my TBR pile for some years, I decided to read it first. If the creative and life crises depicted in the earlier book when author and character, both called Richard Powers and in their mid 30s, were based in reality, it seems that they passed. Six novels and 19 years later, I don’t know that Orfeo is any more cheerful than Galatea 2.2 but if Galatea 2.2 contemplated the abyss, then Orfeo is gloriously, operatically, romantically over the cliff.

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Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2

Posted on 19 Apr 2015 | 3 comments

Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (©1995, Harper Perennial 1996)

0060976926The narrator of Galatea 2.2 is a 35 year old ‘humanist in residence’ at a massive, cutting-edge scientific research centre somewhere in the USA. Recently returned from years in The Netherlands, he is still hurting from the end of his first great love relationship. When an odd, misanthropic scientist invites him to collaborate in a project to develop an artificial entity capable of producing literary commentary that will pass for human, he accepts the challenge. They are doing it for a bet, and start out thinking of it as an elaborate scam. The novel’s reference to the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with his statue Galatea, which then came to life, sets up clear enough expectations.

A complicating factor is that the narrator’s name is Richard Powers, and as he tells the story of his past in a second, retrospective narrative strand, a good bit of that story (Powers’ previous four novels, the places he lived, a passing mention of time spent in south-east Asia as a child) is verifiably the same as that of the author Richard Powers. This narrative tells of Richard’s falling in love and the gradual deterioration of the relationship even as his career as a novelist flourishes: the love story may or not be drawn from life.

It’s a teasing mixture of memoir and speculative fiction. Add to the mix extended accounts of cognitive science and artificial intelligence debates, and a sometimes overwhelmingly dense play of literary allusion (Powers is educating the machine in the great canon of literature in English, and he and some of the other human characters can quote great slabs from that canon from memory), and you’ve got a very rich mix. Here’s a relatively straightforward literary bit when the machine, now called Helen, is well advanced in its/her ‘education’:

She wanted to know whether a person could die by spontaneous combustion. The odds against a letter slipped under the door slipping under the carpet as well. Ishmael’s real name. Who this ‘Reader’ was and why he rated knowing who married whom. Whether single men with fortunes really needed wives. what home would be without Plumtree’s Potted Meats. How long would it take to compile a key to all mythologies. What the son of a fish looked like. Where Uncle Toby was wounded. Why anyone wanted to imagine unquiet slumbers for sleepers in quiet earth. Whether Conrad was a racist. Why Huck Finn was taken out of libraries. Which end of an egg to break. Why people read. Why they stopped reading. What it meant to be ‘only a novel’. What use half a locket was to anyone. Why it would be a mistake not to live all you can.

I get quite a few of those references, and I expect you do too. It’s a Trivial Pursuit kind of  fun. You can imagine someone reading the novel with one hand and holding a googling machine in the other.

The scientific palaver offers a different kind of pleasure:

It struck me. Every neuron formed a middle term in a continuous, elaborate, brain-wide pun. With a rash of dendrite inputs and handfuls of axon cuts, each cell served as enharmonic point in countless constellations, shifting configurations of light, each circuit standing in for some new sense. To fire or not meant different things, depending on how the registers aligned at a given instant and which other alignments read the standing sum. Each node was an entire computer, a comprehensive comparison. And the way they fit together was a cupola itself.
Those weird parallaxes of framing must be why the mind opened out on meaning at all.

I leave it to cognitive scientist readers to decided whether this is Doctor Who-ish ‘timey-wimey stuff’ or something more substantial. Either way, it – and many passages like it – serves to impress on us how complicated the science is. And, though the going becomes tough at times for readers like me who don’t like to skip the technical paragraphs, a believable narrative emerges of a machine capable of increasingly complex responses.

The love story isn’t completely convincing, and some minor characters tend to fall just short of being prompts for reflection on the nature of intelligence: one character has a wife with advanced dementia, another has a son with Down syndrome, and a postgrad literature student for whom Richard conceives an infatuation is conveniently imbued with Theory. Oddly enough, the parts of the book that I found most convincing were the descriptions of life in a Dutch village, in which the author’s love of the Netherlands is almost palpable, and the narrator’s ups and downs as he learns Dutch ring completely, joyously true.

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Emily Bitto’s Strays

Posted on 16 Apr 2015 | 11 comments

Emily Bitto, The Strays (Affirm Press 2014)

1straysThis is a novel about a fictional artist’s colony in Victoria in the 1930s. Though the colony bears some resemblance to the Heide group, and a couple of historical figures, notably Bert Evatt, are mentioned or make brief appearances, it would be a mistake to read it as a roman à clef. At least, I hope so – if not, Heide was quite a bit nastier than I’ve heard.

The narrator, Lily, looks back in middle age to her girlhood friendship with Eva, whose father, Evan Trentham, is a modernist painter and a towering figure in the Australian art scene, and to the years in which she became a virtual member of Eva’s family – one of a number of ‘strays’, of whom the others were young modernist artists. From a deeply conventional family herself, young Lily is fascinated by the bohemian life of the Trentham household: adults who are so engaged in their own pursuits that they leave children to fend for themselves, earnest talk, ‘reefer’ and opium seeds, erotic art, casual nudity, and the smells and sights of a group of working artists and their models.

Of course, all is not well in Bohemia. Eva and Lily, friends since they were eight, drift apart in their early teenage years in ways neither of them can acknowledge, and when calamity strikes the household, it brings the death of their intense intimacy as well.

The book is beautifully written. The characters are vividly realised: Evan the alpha male; Helena his wife and presiding goddess of the household; their three daughters – Bea the responsible eldest, bold Eva and deeply resentful Heloise; and the young adult members of the colony – including Jerome, the young artist who will eclipse his mentor and whose transgressions undo the community.

For all its manifest virtues, though, I couldn’t get excited about the book. It’s not that I was bored, and there are some wonderful things: there are moments when the intensely physical intertwining of young Lily and Eva comes brilliantly alive, so that the distance between them when they meet again as adults is devastating. But over all I couldn’t tell why any of it should matter to me, or actually why it mattered to the author. Interestingly, it’s as if the novel knows that concern needs to be addressed. In the over-long, loose-thread-tying section in which the main events of the novel are in the distant past, Lily tells Helena and Eva that she is thinking of writing a memoir about her days with the family. Helena asks the question that had been playing in my mind for 200 pages: why write it? The question leads in the short term to a tense exchange of blame and counter-blame. But later, Lily reflects (omitting spoilers):

The events of the Trenthams and their strays have long since been recorded in the pages of art history.  … Always, … the artist himself was at the centre, with Helena, Eva, Heloise at the distant peripheries. They were cast as ‘events’ that accounted for the prevalence of particular themes, detailed in the same manner as the influence of the war on Jerome. Heloise’s life a footnote explaining Jerome’s brilliant work.

So the narrator’s motive for writing is clear – it’s a feminist redress of the dominant patriarchal narrative. And we can extrapolate that as the novelist’s motive as well. But any passion behind that motivation didn’t make it to the page, or at least didn’t communicate from the page to me. Perhaps the book’s beginnings as part of a PhD left a subliminal sense that it was being written for an examiner’s eye. Perhaps it’s that I read The Strays after the Biff Ward’s grimly real In My Mother’s Hands, and was unconvinced by Emily Bitto’s inventions. Or maybe I’ve finally reached the predicted old-man condition of not liking fiction much any more. Certainly my lukewarmness seems to be a minority response.

aww-badge-2015This is the seventh book I’ve read for the 2015 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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Tim Winton’s That Eye, the Sky at the Book Group

Posted on 2 Apr 2015 | 5 comments

Tim Winton, That Eye, the Sky (McPhee Gribble 1986)

1TETSBefore the Meeting: That Eye, the Sky isn’t an obvious choice to discuss at a book club close to 30 years after it was published. It’s even less obvious, given that one or two of our members have disparaged Winton’s work (apart from Cloudstreet) fairly comprehensively. But we were looking for a film–book pairing and a couple of us – at least, I hope it wasn’t only me – remembered being moved by John Ruane’s movie based on this book. And it’s short.

I have mixed feelings about Tim Winton’s work. I loved The Turning, felt that the slow bits of Dirt Country were adequately compensated by other elements, especially the ending, and found The Riders close to pointless. His chapter in Big Surf, last year’s  essay on class  and his Palm Sunday oration about asylum seeker policy are all marvellous. Generally, I love his sentences. So, though I had loved the film (apart from a dimly remembered unease about the Peter Coyote character), I approached That Eye, the Sky with cautious optimism.

The narrator, Ort (short for Morton), is the 12 year old son of ex-hippies, living poor on the outskirts of a Western Australian city. His father has a car accident which leaves him in a coma then pretty much vegetative until the very last pages. Henry Warburton, a man Ort and his angry older sister Tegwyn have seen living rough under a nearby bridge, turns up and helps the family, bathing the incapacitated father and doing odd jobs. Henry, it turns out, is a bit of a loose cannon, but before his looseness becomes completely apparent he converts Ort and his mother to his peculiar brand of Christianity. Meanwhile, Ort is the only one who sees a strange light that hovers over their little house – possibly an after-effect of Ort having been comatose and died, twice, when he was little and had meningitis; or possibly Ort’s contact with a reality beyond this one.

The complex web of relationships is beautifully done, including Ort’s belligerent friendship with the boy from across the road, but I wasn’t convinced by the magic realism, if that’s what it is, and there were whole swathes where it felt awfully as if Tim Winton was wanting to tell us about the Bible. I was reminded of what someone said about Rob Reiner’s movie Stand by Me: there’s a lot of swearing and other stuff that lets the movie get away with its moments of tenderness. Well, Ort’s matter-of-fact description of bodily functions, and the final revelation of Henry’s moral dubiousness aren’t enough for this book to get away with its spiritual message. Not that there’s anything wrong with non-institutional Christianity – I just don’t believe in it in this book. The device of the uncomprehending child narrator – ‘What Ort Knew’ if you like – becomes annoying as one feels the ventriloquist author behind him:

The forest moves quiet tonight. Jarrahs move a long way up and out of sight. Now and then I hear little animal noises. All these trees are dying, and all these little animals will have nowhere to live. One day the whole world will die and we’ll die too. My back hurts and my bum stings and the backs of my legs too. I’ve got no clothes on out here in the forest. Prickles and burrs and twigs stick in me all over. I rub them in, squirm and shake around. It hurts a lot. I’m hurting myself. I want to hurt myself. I want to.

It made me yearn for the easy flow of Winton’s own unmediated prose.

The meeting: We couldn’t find a copy of the film anywhere. So what we had was dinner, each other and the book!

(That much was uploaded prematurely. Here’s a bit more about the meeting.) Perhaps because two of the six of us arrived late, the discussion of the book kept up for most of the evening. Each new arrival would be asked for an opinion and that opinion would set us all off again.

My impression is that we were all uneasy about the book’s supernatural/ religious/ spiritual elements , which just weren’t integrated into the story. On the other hand, when I singled out as implausible the passage where Ort summarises the Bible, someone said that a childhood friend of his had told him about this fantastic story of a bloke who gets nailed to a tree. So not so implausible.

Interestingly enough, the book triggered a spate of reminiscences: of country childhoods, of vengeful boyhood impulses involving urination, of helplessly witnessing someone’s life spiralling towards disaster.

As someone said, irritating but compelling.

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Favel Parrett’s When the Night Comes

Posted on 24 Mar 2015 | 2 comments

Favel Parrett, When the Night Comes (Hachette Australia 2014)

wncFavel Parrett’s first novel, Past the Shallows, published in 2011, was a hard act to follow. In When the Night Comes, her second, she moves to a bigger world, out past Tasmanian waters to Antarctica and Scandinavia, and into a delicate, tender relationship between an adult man and a girl just entering her teens.

I’m tempted to say that it’s actually two novels.

First there’s the one described in the author’s endnote. This is a celebration of the Norwegian ship, Nella Dan, a real ship whose history is sketched in the note, along with affectionate quotes from a number of people who sailed in ‘the little red ship’. If such a celebration had been written by, say, Neal Stephenson, it might have included bravura passages dramatising the ship’s inner workings – the heat and noise of the engine room, the pinging wheelhouse, the compartmentalisation of the hull. But this is not that kind of celebration. Here the engine is background noise that helps the sailors sleep; we spend time in the ship’s kitchen, but no ink is spilled on describing the stoves; if the size of the crew may be mentioned I don’t remember it. In fact, apart from its bright red paint and its size – sometimes surprisingly small, sometimes surprisingly big – we don’t have much sense of the ship as a physical thing at all. What we do have is the way all the characters respond to it, to her, as a dependable almost-maternal, almost-comradely, presence. Almost those things, because Nella Dan never really emerges as a character in her own right.

The other novel is the one I read, and was moved by. In it, the Nella Dan is an interesting setting for part of human story. This story moves between two points of view. The first is that of Isla, 12 or 13 years old, who has recently moved to Hobart with her mother and her younger brother (never known as anything other than ‘my brother’) after their parents’ marriage break-up. A Danish sailor named Bo becomes a regular part of the family. As Isla is completely uninterested in the world of adult relationships, we pretty much have to deduce that Bo and Isla get to spend time together because Bo and Isla’s mother are having a fling, a romance, a domestic relationship of some sort.  Bo’s is the other point of view, and we travel with him on the Nella Dan into Antarctic waters.

Dramatic things do happen: each of the main characters has to deal with the violent accidental death of a close friend, for example, and the Nella Dan runs into the perils of the Southern Ocean. But the strength of the book lies in it depiction of the delicate connection between these two people that allows Isla to imagine herself in a much bigger world, and Bo to find sweet companionship. It feels easy, but when you consider we live in a climate where closeness between an adult male and a child not his own is often looked on with deep suspicion, I can only say I’m deeply impressed – and grateful – for what the book offers.

Sadly, my copy was on loan and has been reclaimed by its owner, so I can’t quote anything. Trust me. Favel Parrett writes lucid, supple prose. The book is full of pleasures.

aww-badge-2015This is the third book I’ve read for the Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2015.

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Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Posted on 5 Mar 2015 | 1 comment

Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (2014)

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If this hadn’t been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize I wouldn’t have lasted more than 30 pages. The narrator is a dentist who has a gift for clever sounding banality. He goes on about US baseball teams, his dental hygienist’s Catholicism (he’s an atheist himself, of Protestant background), Jews (one of whom has described him as philosemitic), the internet and of course himself – his sorry history with women and, obliquely, his miserable childhood. When on page 96 he uses the phrase ‘the chronic affliction of my self-obsession’, I felt strongly that it was the readers who were afflicted. 

Take this, from page 120:

While standing in line to buy cigarettes …, I noticed a headline on the cover of a celebrity magazine. ‘Daughn and Taylor Back Together?’ it read on big print, and my mind returned to it later in the day while I worked on a patient. I didn’t know that Daughn and Taylor had gotten together, to mention nothing of them breaking up, and now, possibly getting back together again. More troubling still, I didn’t know who Daughn and Taylor were. Daughn and Taylor … I thought to myself. Daughn and Taylor … who are Daughn and Taylor? It was clear that I should know them, given the significant real estate their debatable reconciliation had commanded on the cover of one of the more reputable celebrity magazines. But I didn’t know them, and not knowing them, I realised I was once again out of touch. I would be in touch for a while, and then a headline like ‘Daughn and Taylor Back Together Again?’ would come along to let me know that I was out of touch again.

And he ruminates for another page and a half until he finally asks his office manager/ex-wife who Daughn and Taylor are.

Some readers might be riveted. The plot, to that point, is very slight. Someone has set up a web site in his name advertising his practice, and there is an odd quote that could be from the Bible in his website bio.

I told myself that if the Man Booker judges liked the book enough to prefer it to Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, then something interesting must be lurking over the page. I read on.

The second half of the book is much more interesting than the first. It turns into a kind of Da Vinci Code or Foucault’s Pendulum, only written in decent prose and without exhausting historical research. It explores similar territory to  Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, with added fantasy. It even becomes fun. As a non US-er, I’m glad to have known a Red Sox fan and witnessed her joy when they won a 2004 baseball competition – it turns out that the narrator’s regular rants about the Red  Sox have an excellent pay-off (as the many rants like the one about Daughn and Co don’t – they just don’t).

So my recommendation, in short: speed read the first five chapters (as literary judges, being busy people, may well have done) and you might end up loving this book.

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Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer

Posted on 26 Feb 2015 | 1 comment

Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer (Atlantic Books 2014)

0857897195After Howard’s End was published, E M Forster began another novel named Arctic Summer, but never finished it. Damon Galgut has co-opted the title for this novel about Forster, appropriately enough given that the book is suffused with a sense of unfulfilled desire and unachieved goals.

Forster is homosexual (his term is ‘minorite’), which for a middle-class Englishman just a few decades after Oscar Wilde’s trial is terrifyingly illegal and paralysingly shameful. A central powerful thread of the novel follows Forster’s agonised path towards an active sexual life and the closely allied quest for intimacy. He has two great loves, neither of them ‘minorites’, and neither of them Englishmen. One, the Indian Masood, rejects his physical advances; the other, Egyptian Mohammed, accommodates what he calls his ‘foolishness’. Forster has other, more compliant sexual partners, but it is with these two men that he forms abiding emotional connections, as each of them reciprocates his love in deeply un-English, heartfelt ways.

The novel is also a story of artistic triumph, an imagining of how Forster came to write his greatest novel, A Passage to India. If I didn’t have other more pressing demands on my time I would now be rereading that novel, which must surely have been changed – enriched, I would guess – by the light shed on it by this one. Damon Galgut inspires trust, partly because he has obviously researched his subject meticulously, and partly because his protagonist’s inner life is so powerfully realised. The story he tells, persuasively, is that Forster’s cross-cultural relationships, with the men he loved and with others in India and Egypt, provided the emotional and dramatic heart of his novel. 

It’s interesting how much this book is in dialogue with others. There are Forster’s books, of course: phrases from and references to A Passage to India  are scattered though it, apparent even to someone whose memory of the book is as vague as mine; Howard’s End and Room with a View crop up, though they’re not named; Forster writes Maurice pretty much as wish fulfilment and shows the manuscript to friends; he has a couple of collections of short pieces published. The richly evocative dedication of Galgut’s novel, ‘To Riyaz Ahmad Mir and to the fourteen years of our friendship’, echoes that of A Passage to India, ‘To Syed Ross Masood and to the seventeen years of our friendship’, surely as elegant an indication of an author’s relationship to his subject as you’re likely to find anywhere.

Forster has significant conversations with other writers: Leonard and Virginia Woolf (the former wanting to publish him, the latter agreeing, not unkindly, when he says he’s not a novelist); Lytton Strachey (who loves Maurice and wants its title changed to Lytton); Edward Carpenter (who gives him a vision of relaxed homosexual intimacy); D H Lawrence (hilariously, dogmatically voluble, and totally heteronormative); and Cavafy (who reads his poems to Forster in Alexandria). Even the raffish character who in the first pages shows Forster some explicit erotic writing (a neat way of showing that Forster’s problem is not simply prudishness) turns out, according to the acknowledgements pages, to be historical.

As well as the intertextuality implied in these encounters, I wanted to put  Arctic Summer on a shelf between Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and a DVD of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: the three of them could have an interesting chat about the Raj, with Galgut’s novel forming some kind of bridge between the horrors portrayed by Ghosh and the movie’s golden-glowing nostalgia. I’d also like to eavesdrop on this book in conversation with Robert Dessaix’s Arabesques: where I found it hard to read Dessaix’s accounts of Oscar Wilde and André Gide’s erotic adventures with much younger men of colour as anything other than sex tourism, Galgut’s version of Forster’s superficially similar experiences reads as complex cross-cultural encounters.

At the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Fair on Sunday there was a Police Department stall in the middle of all the glitter. That evening I went to Belvoir Street to see the supremely silly and sexy The Blue Wizard – billed as ‘the gayest one-man show ever’. I had this book in my bag at both events.

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Ali Smith’s How to Be Both

Posted on 27 Jan 2015 | Leave a comment

Ali Smith, How to Be Both (Penguin 2014)

024114521XThe Art Student gave up on this book after a very few pages. But, well, I’d heard people rave about it, so I decided to brave those first pages of what looked like sub-modernist gobbledygook and give it a go anyhow.

Sure the opening pages are tough going. (The book is in two parts. In different copies, the parts, both labelled ‘One’, are in a different order, so my introductory pages may be your transitional ones, and the problem may not exist for you.) It turns out that the narrator is a 15th century Italian artist re-emerging from oblivion into temporary ghostly existence in 2013. At first, the artist’s grasp on language is rusty, but within 10 pages or so the narrative settles down. The artist, Francescho del Cossa (who really existed, generally known as Francesco), tells his own story in fragments as they come back to mind, and tells what he observes of a young woman in modern England who has been instrumental in his return to the world. That’s not quite accurate, but if I fixed it I’d be getting into spoiler territory, so it will have to do.

It’s an ingenious book. One part (the first in my copy) is Francescho’s narration. The other tells the story of George, the modern young woman. Each sees parts of the other’s story from the outside, only partly understanding it, but the reader doesn’t understand the whole of either story until you’ve read both: Francescho’s modern narrative begins where George’s leaves off; George gives us details of at least one painting that in effect completes Francescho’s story.

It’s an interesting and amusing read, and the writing is generally elegant and lucid. There’s an interesting and plausible take on gender as perceived in 15th century Italy: not exactly 21st-century inner-city gender fluidity, but not a rock-solid binary neither. A lot of time is spent on Francescho’s art, the making of it in the first part, the viewing of it in the second. This is all lively and intelligent; it moves the plot forward, and sends the reader off to look for the paintings (which all exist, beautifully, in the real world); but maybe some of it could have been saved for the DVD extras, and there is a climactic revelation about a painting that only works if you don’t actually use Duck Duck Go to see the painting for yourself. The modern story, dealing with bereavement and adolescent stirrings, also has its bits that might have been better as DVD extras, particularly mother–daughter arguments about History, and sessions with the school counsellor (all good, but repetitive and surely not all necessary). And at times both narrators seem almost coy about telling their stories: was George’s mother having an affair? was she the subject of surveillance? how did she die? who was the older woman who gave George cups of tea? why? what do the painted eyes mean? Is it all just pretty patterns formed by events with no actual connection? We’ll never know.

So I’m not about to tell the Art Student and other people who were deterred by the first pages that they’ve made the biggest mistake of their lives, but it’s a book that keeps you on your toes, and I’m not sorry I read it.

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