Tag Archives: Novel

Emily Maguire’s Rapture

Posted on 27 Jun 2025 | 11 comments

Emily Maguire, Rapture (Allen & Unwin 2024)

Rapture is a historical fiction set in the 9th century of the current era. An English former priest living in Germany teaches his motherless daughter to read and encourages her to think for herself. After his death, with the connivance of Randulf, a worldly a young monk who fancies her, she dresses in men’s clothing and joins the Benedictine order.

If you’ve heard almost anything about this book, you already know where the story leads. It must have received the least spoiler-careful reception of any novel. Ever.

Though I may be being over careful, you won’t get the Big Spoiler from me. I’ll just say that as one who was raised in pre–Vatican Two Catholicism, I found the subject irresistible, and the telling wonderful.

You can read excellent reviews by Heather Nielson in the Australian Book Review (link here, spoiler already in the url), Ann Skea in the Newtown Review of Books (link here), and in the blogosphere, intelligent as always, at Reading Matters, ANZ LitLovers, Theresa Smith Writes and This Reading Life. I’m keeping to my resolve and sticking with page 78*.

As it happens, possibly because of shortsightedness, it took me three attempts to land on page 78.

First I looked at page 76, where Randulf and Agnes get their story straight: Randulf has discovered a beggar-boy who was proficient in Latin and theology and will propose that he be accepted to train as a monk in his abbey. If accepted, Randulf says, there will be no trouble with the story. Among monks, he says, ‘It is not done to exchange histories or probe for intimacies.’

Realising I had the wrong page I turned, inadvertently, to page 80, where Agnes hears Randulf pissing and ‘hot panic grips her’ – but he reassures her that the monks wash rarely, sleep fully clothed, and have latrines where privacy ensures they never glimpse even an ankle of another: ‘Your modesty would not be better preserved were you empress of the realm.’

Page 78, when I finally got there, wasn’t less pointed.

Agnes, disguised as a boy but not yet a monk, is travelling with Randulf to the Princely Abbey of Fulda (a real place, you can see a photo of the building, now a cathedral, at this link). They see some people with a mule coming their way on the open road. ‘Fellow travellers,’ Randulf says cheerfully, but his hand moves towards his concealed dagger. Agnes is terrified:

It’s an unexceptional encounter, a non-event. But it speaks to character and to the texture of the world Emily Maguire has created, and it foreshadows later events.

‘Randulf.’
‘All is well, Agnes. All is well.’

The relationship between these two characters is one of the joys of the book. Agnes is still a teenager. Randulf is older, but still a young man. He has won her trust and confidence by his genuine appreciation of her as a thinking person when he came to visit her father. They have had one sexual encounter – not exactly rape, but not a good experience for her, and in her piety and her abhorrence of childbirth she has made it clear that it is never to happen again. (Spoiler: it does, only better!) These two lines of dialogue evoke their current relationship: she looks to him for protection; as a man of he world he can reassure her.

Close enough now to see the eyes of the travellers, weary and wary. Three men of middle years and a boy her own age level with the animal. A man as old as her father and a woman older still moving behind. Their clothing long since covered by road dust. Their faces and hands too. Like they’ve crawled out of their graves and not had time to wash. Even the mule appears dragged from the tallow pit and loaded with sagging, filth-covered sacks.

There’s a Candide element to Agnes’ story. She has had a protected life, and is about to enter a differently protected life in the monastery. This is her first glimpse of the hardship endured by people who do not enjoy the protection of the Church or a prince. On the next page Randulf explains that it is not lack of godliness that makes life hard for people from further north, but economics – the further from big churches people live the greater their poverty, as they share less in the wealth accumulated by the Church.

‘Good day,’ Randulf says.
Agnes stays a step behind, eyes focused on the ground, praying her hood conceals her face and that she will not be called on to speak.
‘Good day,’ says one of the men. ‘We do not wish any trouble, sirs.’
‘You will find none with us. We are Brothers of Fulda and go always in peace.’
‘We wish you fair travels, brothers.’

This is wonderful use of dialogue to evoke the dangers of that world. We also see that at this stage Agnes is not confident in her disguise. With the passage of time, though she identifies completely as female (this is not a novel about gender fluidity) she becomes more confident that her disguise will work (until, not a spoiler, it doesn’t!).

‘Harmless, as most are,’ Randulf says when the mule’s clop has faded.

This is an adept piece of foreshadowing. The pair are to go on another journey years later when Agnes is fully Brother John. Again Randulf will be protective, but plague and war have made the environment infinitely more dangerous and hostile. The horror-movie quality to some of the description on page 78 – ‘crawled out of their graves’ and ‘dragged from the tallow pit’ – prepares the reader at a subliminal level for a pivotal moment on that later journey where Randulf and Agnes are horrified by a spectacle that is described only in a couple of disjointed phrases many pages later, but which the reader pretty much has to imagine.

That’s just one page: sadly it doesn’t contain any of the steamy sex, or the equally enthralling theological argumentation. It conveys only a little of the constant dread that hangs over Agnes/John, which for me is the most powerful element of the book. She is doomed, but not before some magnificent achievements and for me the way she meets her doom is both devastating and narratively satisfying.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where a kookaburra flew right in front of me as I was walking this morning. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this beautiful country, never ceded.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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We Do Not Part with Han Kang at the Book Club

Posted on 15 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

Han Kang, We Do Not Part (2021, translated e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris, Hamish Hamilton 2025)

Before the Book Club meeting: Han Kang was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, so her most recent book to be translated into English seemed a good choice for the Book Club.

The book falls into at least three parts. (Spoilers ahead.)

Part One: The narrator, who is experiencing suicidal depression, receives an urgent request from a friend, Inseon, to come to her in hospital. When she arrives, she finds Inseon has done a terrible injury to her hand and is receiving frequent, excruciatingly painful treatment, graphic descriptions of which are interspersed with a history of their friendship and their artistic collaborations. Inseon asks the narrator to go to her house on the remote island of P– and feed her pet bird, who will otherwise die.

Pat Two: The narrator makes the arduous journey to Inseon’s house, the final stage of it on foot through a blizzard. When she arrives, the bird is dead. Though she herself has barely survived her ordeal, she immediately buries the bird out in the snow.

Part Three: While the ghost of the bird casts flittering shadows around the walls, Inseon turns up, with an uninjured hand. Evidently she is some kind of supernatural projection of the living person still back there in the hospital, though the narrator suspects at one stage that both she and Inseon are actually dead. Anyhow, Inseon guides the narrator through a number of documents that record a terrible massacre committed during the Korean War, apparently with US connivance, and the decades-long attempt by surviving relatives to have the massacre acknowledged.

At the level of narrative, I didn’t understand the book. When the exhausted narrator goes back out into the snow to bury the bird without even putting on warm clothes, I nearly stopped reading, and from then on my disbelief remained unsuspended. But as the story of the massacres emerged from the piles of documents, I was glad to be learning about a part of history I’d been completely ignorant of. On the other hand, given that the information is embedded in an unabashedly unrealistic narrative, I’m left not knowing how much of the massacre story is itself fiction. In effect, then, the book is a signpost pointing its readers to the need for further research.

WIkipedia has a minimalist entry about the Sancheong–Hamyang massacre of 7 February 1951, in which 705 civilians were killed, 85% of them women, children and elderly people. The files concerning the massacre, Wikipedia confirms, were not found until February 2006. That is the emotional heart of this novel: I have no idea how the story of the injury, the blizzard and the dead bird fit together with it.

The meeting:

I wasn’t the only one perplexed by this book. We were pretty well unanimous that we wouldn’t recommend it to friends, even though there is some beautiful writing in it. We were divided on the question of whether we would want to read anything else by Han Kang,

The narrator’s ordeal in the blizzard, we all agreed, is compelling.

One valiant soul found rich metaphor in the account of Inseon’s injury and treatment: her severed fingers represent the divided state of Korea and the painful injection every three minutes suggests that the process of reunion will involve sustained, painful work. My literal-mindedness at first rebelled at such a reading, but maybe it’s there for readers with a Korean cultural background, who I expect are also better equipped for the ghost-not-ghost parts of the narrative.

I wasn’t the only one who had done some research into the history that is the subject of the book’s final movement. Whereas I had looked up a single Wikipedia entry, S– had read a number of articles on the Korean War – but, she said, she ended up more confused than when she started

We discussed this book along with Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits. Both books build fictions around historical events, but no one felt compelled by Glorious Exploits to study up on the Peloponnesian War.

The Book Club met on Gadigal land. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land where just now the sun is shining from a cloudless sky and the wind has died down. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

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Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave

Posted on 16 May 2025 | 3 comments

Claire G. Coleman, Enclave (Hachette Australia 2023)

This is the first book I’ve read by Noongar writer Claire G. Coleman. Her first novel, Terra Nullius, won prestigious prizes and her poetry and essays appear regularly in journals I read. (If you want to plough through my earlier posts to see what I’ve managed to say about those earlier encounters, here’s a link.) So I was happy when I got hold of a copy of Enclave, her third novel. I enjoy science fiction, so the fact that it’s a dystopian genre novel was an extra cause for joyful anticipation.

The book delivered on both fronts – filling the spot in my heart reserved for intelligent speculative fiction, and expanding my acquaintance with Claire G. Coleman’s writing. If you want to read a proper review, I recommend Magdalena Ball at Compulsive Reader (here’s a link), Maggie Nolan on The Conversation (link), Bill Holloway at The Australian Legend (link)or all three.I’ll stick to my resolve of focusing on page 78*. As often happens, this arbitrarily chosen page reveals a lot about the book, and hints at a lot more.

We are at about the one-quarter point of the narrative. Christine is the protagonist, a young white woman from an affluent family living in the walled city of Safetytown. Her father has bought her a new apartment as a reward for her success at university, and on this page her parents are taking her to ‘the homemaker centre’ to buy furniture, along with her younger brother, Brandon.

The building was huge. A great big windowless box, the outside grey-painted steel, as tall as their house. Christine wanted to see if she could see the Wall from the top but could see no way to get up there.
Their car roared underground. The car park was the size of the building, painted a nauseating colour, something between souring cream and pus-green, lit by fluorescent tubes, blue-white, as bright as day. Something about the colour, the cold light, cut into Christine’s brain like a hangover.
She had always hated this place.

The citizens of Safetytown are constantly being told how fortunate they are, how safe. Yet the adjectives here tell a different story: ‘windowless’, ‘grey-painted’, ‘nauseating’, souring’, ‘pus-green’. Even more significant is the ever-present Wall. It’s a powerful image, inevitably reminding us of Trump, Berlin and Israel–Palestine. Christine has always been told that beyond it is nothing but predatory violence, misery and chaos. In the otherwise sharply visual elements of this page, it is present to Christine as an object of curiosity even though it’s out of sight. She is beginning to suspect that she has been lied to: she is clear that she has always hated the homemaker centre, but a deeper discontent is brewing.

The next paragraph goes further into the reasons for her discontent:

Security’s cars could not have been more obvious if they tried. Hatchbacks, sedans and vans, all black. Their windows were tinted; on their bodies, and on their bumpers, were patches of a different texture of black – tinted glass panels hiding cameras.
Around the car park on every pillar, on seemingly arbitrary sections of roof, were conventional video cameras. The cameras were obvious and Christine wondered why she had never noticed that before.
Or had she noticed but forgotten? The thought was slippery; she could not hold on to it.

This first part of the novel is about Christine’s awakening. Here she’s noticing things she has never noticed before, in particular the ominously ubiquitous surveillance and enforcement. Not on this page, but part of the same process, she has noticed that one of the anonymous brown ‘servants’ is extraordinarily beautiful. These uniformed servants, all people of colour, are bussed in each day from beyond the wall and then out again in the evening. They ensure that the citizens don’t have to lift a finger to tend to the necessities of life. No one asks how they live on the other side, and in the early chapters they might as well be invisible, but like the women in the movie Conclave they are very present to the reader. Christine’s attraction to the woman servant is so outside the realm of what is considered possible that, like her ‘slippery’ thought about the cameras, it only fitfully enters her consciousness.

They exited the car, one of the doors slamming with a dull echoing thump; deafening, startling. Father turned to the sound, the anger on his face uncharacteristic; he normally hid it better. When he saw Brandon, staring into his face defiantly, daring him to react, Father smiled indulgently. Christine fumed in silence.

So much of what is to unfold is hinted at here. The benevolent father bestowing a brand new flat and furnishings on his daughter is suddenly enraged: not that he’s usually calm, but that he normally hides his rage. When he sees that it’s his son who has made the noise, he is pacified. It will come as no surprise, a few pages later, when the rage is unleashed against his daughter, while the son remains firmly in favour.

So Safetytown is authoritarian, sexist and – we know from earlier and will soon learn – intensely racist and homophobic. Christine is noticing at least some of it, and fuming.

The overall shape of the narrative is strongly implied on this page. Christine will incur her father’s wrath. Somehow she will find herself on the other side of the wall. Will she finally discover she has been lied to all her life? (Anyone who’s read any dystopian fiction would be astonished if the answer to that was no.) Will she escape or be exiled to the other side of the Wall? (See previous parenthesis.) Will she find a better world out there? (Likewise, you’d be pretty astonished at a no answer.) Will she find happiness with the beautiful brown servant woman, and will that woman have a name? (See previous parenthesis.) Will she play a role in bring Safetytown down? (One would certainly hope so, but that would mean she’d have to make giant strides out of her complacent self-absorption.) Perhaps most importantly for the success of the novel: are there any surprises? (No spoiler alert, but yes.) Does it get preposterous? (Yes – in many ways, but mainly in a delightful sequence that could only have been imagined by someone who lives in Naarm/Melbourne and loves it with a passion.)

Bill Holloway at The Australian Legend enjoyed this book less than Claire G. Coleman’s two previous novels, Terra Nullius (Hachette Australia 2017) and The Old Lie (Hachette Australia 2019). I take that as encouragement to go looking for them.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country, never ceded.

* It’s my current age.

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The Granddaughter by Bernhard Schlink

Posted on 29 Apr 2025 | 2 comments

Bernhard Schlink, The Granddaughter (©2021, translation by Charlotte Collins, Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2024)

When I decided a couple of years ago to focus on just one page of a book when blogging about it, I intended it to be a way of cutting down on the time I spend on the blog, while still managing to have fun and hopefully say something interesting. It hasn’t always worked out that way. Too often, I’ve gone on at length about a book and then tacked on a discussion of page 76, 77, 78, 47 or, occasionally, 7.

I’m turning over a new leaf, starting with The Granddaughter.

If, like me, you’d read a couple of books by Bernhard Schlink – in my case The Reader (read before blogging), Guilt About the Past and The Weekend – you might pick this up in a bookshop expecting a novel in powerfully simple prose about Germany coming to terms with its past. You’d be right. If you knew nothing, and turned for a taste of the writing to an arbitrary page, say page 78, you’d find some writing that pulls you in, possibly enough to make you buy the book:

Two young women friends are spending time in a dacha in a forest in East Germany. One of them, the narrator, is pregnant. The other, who want to be a nurse, will assist at the birth. The narrator, who I can tell you is named Birgit, dreams of escaping to the West, with or without a man named Kaspar. At the same time, she is having a blissful time, finding happiness in the moment. This is clearly a period of respite:

I listened to the rain on the roof, the initial drops, the furious pelting of a rainstorm, the soft rustle of steady rain, the last drops falling from the branches above the dacha. Sometimes Paula and I just slipped on dresses and walked through the warm rain till the wet dresses stuck to us and we laughed as we helped each other take them off again and jumped off the jetty into the water.

I learnt to love the forest. My mother never took her daughters to the forest. When we went on trips into the forest with the Young Pioneers and the FDJ, there were instructions to be followed and assignments to be completed, and we did everything busily and noisily. The forest around the lagoon was quiet.

The FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend/Free German Youth) was the official youth wing of the German Democratic Republic and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

Returning to this page having read the whole book, I’m in awe at its place in the whole. Most of the book is told from Klaus’s perspective, but this is in the middle of 60 pages in Birgit’s voice, a document written by her decades after the time in the forest and found by her husband – Klaus – after her death. He learns for the first time of her pregnancy, and gains some understanding of the long term emotional toll of her escape to the West to be with him. It’s not a spoiler to say that Brigid ends up filled with alcoholic despair – that’s how the book starts. And here, on page 78, in spare, unsentimental prose, in what seems like just a pause in the narrative, Schlink gives us a glimpse of the deep attachment to place that was to be ruptured by her move, as important perhaps as the haunting presence of the baby she decided to leave.

After reading the manuscript Klaus, now a bookseller, decides to go in search of the daughter. She turns out, after a troubled childhood and adolescence, to have joined a right-wing, Holocaust-denying, white-supremacist völkisch community. The main relationship in the book is between Klaus, good liberal Westerner, and Birgit’s granddaughter, who has taken on her parents’ ideology with the absolutism of childhood. Birgit’s tiny moment on page 78 of learning to love the forest, which transcends the political demands of her society, finds a kind of correlative in her granddaughter’s love of music, which Klaus seeks to foster. It’s also echoed in a perverse way in the völkisch elevation of ‘blood and soil’.

Bernhard Schlink is a lawyer and a retired academic. In each of his novels that I have read, individuals try to find their way with integrity in complex moral and political terrain. Complicity in the Holocaust in The Reader, left-wing guerrilla activity / terrorism in The Weekend. And here, unresolved issues from German ‘unification’ and the rise of neo-Nazi sentiment and activity. Like his hero Klaus with his granddaughter, Schlink refrains from lecturing, and approaches the people with whom he disagrees with respect, struggling to understand. Birgit’s joy in the warm rain and the silent forest ad quietly and eloquently to that struggle.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this beautiful country, never ceded. I also acknowledge the Elders past and present of the Ma:Mu nation, custodians of the land where I spent my first 13 years.

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Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool at the Book Club

Posted on 28 Apr 2025 | 4 comments

Richard Russo, Everybody’s Fool (Allen & Unwin 2017)

Before the meeting: This is the second book in Richard Russo’s trilogy set in the dead-end town of North Bath in rural New York: it was preceded by Nobody’s Fool (1993) and followed by Somebody’s Fool (2023). I read it as a stand-alone. At about page 80 I went to Wikipedia for a synopsis of Nobody’s Fool, and really I needn’t have. (I also watched a trailer for Robert Benton’s 1994 movie, which was probably a mistake, as the image of Paul Newman as the character Sully was seriously different from the one I’d built up for myself, even allowing for the fact that Sully has aged 20 years since the first book.)

All the same, even for those who haven’t read about the characters’ earlier lives, it’s clear that they are living in various aftermaths. It begins with a burial and returns to the cemetery again and again. One man has been given a year to live, another is stuck in grief for his wife who died in the act of leaving him, a third has been released from jail and proclaims unconvincingly that he has turned over a new leaf. One couple remain affectionate though their affair is long since over, another deal with a long history of mental illness. Friendships endure in spite of mutual irritation, enmities are maintained in spite of deep-seated fellow-feeling. It’s complex, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes wretchedly painful, abounding in situational ironies. There are two violent deaths that we don’t witness, and one shockingly violent scene that we do. There are two villains, three if you count the out-of-town dealer in snakes and drugs. There’s a disgustingly incontinent dog. A couple of characters from the first book make cameo appearances, for no obvious reason apart from letting longterm readers know what they’re up to.

Class is ever-present. Most of the book’s characters know they have been excluded from the good things of life. They’re rough with each other, but there’s also kindness and integrity and a strong sense of belonging. At one point Sully, who has the strongest claim to be the main character, reflects that he has made sure ‘that his destination at the end of the day was a barstool among men who had chosen to be faithful to what they took to be their own natures, when instead they might have been faithful to their families or to convention or even to their own early promise’ (page 448). It’s an attitude that elsewhere might be called quiet despair, but here it includes an assertion of connection.

I enjoyed it a lot. It deals with serious themes, but it’s a lot of fun in all sorts of ways.

On page 78*, nobody is being nice to anyone, but nobody’s going anywhere. The scene is Harriet’s diner, one of the three eating and drinking establishments in the town. The characters are Ruth, owner of Harriet’s; her daughter Janey who has just come in complaining about a scene in her bathroom; Carl, a failing developer whose post-prostate-surgery incontinence (which everyone knows about) is responsibe for the bathroom scene; Roy, Janey’s violent ex-husband, fresh out of jail and claiming to have turned over a new leaf, who has just left; and Sully, one-time lover of Ruth, who now hangs around every day to be generally helpful and has just picked a fight with Roy. Ruth is speaking to Janey:

‘Sorry about the bathroom,’ she said, ‘but Carl had an accident.’ She emphasised the name ever so slightly. Remember? she seemed to be saying. What I told you about Carl?
‘Oh, right.’ Janey shrugged. ‘I guess that makes it okay.’
‘That was my thought,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m glad you agree.’
Janey rolled her eyes to show that she most certainly did not agree but wasn’t going to go to the mat over it, either. ‘Was that my idiot ex-husband’s voice I heard earlier?’ Ruth apparently took this to be a rhetorical question, because she didn’t bother answering. ‘He’s taking that restraining order real serious.’
… ‘He hasn’t caused any trouble so far, or even tried to,’ Ruth said, glancing at Sully. ‘Unlike some people.’
‘That’s the thing about Roy,’ Janey said, putting her now-empty mug into a plastic busing tub. ‘He won’t, until he does. But when he does, it’ll be my jaw that gets broke, like always.’
‘He breaks your jaw because you’re always mouthing off.’
‘No, he breaks it because he enjoys breaking it.’
‘Like you enjoy mouthing off,’ Ruth said as Janey brushed past her.
‘Well, jeez,’ Janey mused, pausing in the doorway to her apartment. ‘Let’s think a minute. Where the fuck do I get that from?’

I could probably have picked any page in the book and found similarly alive dialogue, and a similar complexity of relationships. Notice that Sully doesn’t say a word. Ruth’s glance in his direction comes from a woman you don’t want to cross. Likewise, we know that Janey is right about her ‘idiot ex-husband’, but Ruth isn’t gong to back down meekly. It’s no spoiler to say that Ruth’s attributing Roy’s violence to Janey’s mouthiness is rich with narrative irony: what she says in the heat of mother-daughter irritation is a standard blame-shifting rationale used by perpetrators of family violence. That irony goes deep in the light of events yet to come, but my lips are sealed.

After the meeting: We read this along with Christine Dwyer Hicks’s The Narrow Land (yesterday’s blog post here).

They’re very different books, and though I tried in my post on The Narrow Land to note things they had in common, no one else was much interested in such attempts. I’d say that a couple of us enjoyed this book much more than the other, but others not so much. One got to about 20 percent (this is how Kindle readers talk) and then went no further, another read about four percent. The first, probably being polite to those of us who enjoyed it, said that while she could see that the writing was very good, she had no desire to spend any more time in the depressing world of the novel.

Two of us talked about the human warmth and humour. I fond myself laughing helplessly as I recounted one of the more macabre episodes. Others remained stony-faced. The other person who found the book funny said it was like Carl Hiaasen’s work (‘Without alligators,’ I agreed). She also made a cogent argument for the book’s acknowledgement of class in a way that isn’t common in novels from the USA. Similarly civil but unconvinced response.

When I said I could imagine a movie adaptation directed by the Cohen brothers that seemed to bridge the chasm a little.

As I’m about to hit ‘Publish’, I realise that nowhere in my ‘Before the meeting’ section did I mention the wonderful comedic energy of the writing: the book opens with a bravura description of the North Bar cemetery; the town doesn’t have alligators, but it is terrorised by a king cobra; there are terrible smells; a building collapses like something out of a Buster Keaton movie. All of this seems to have passed most of the other club members by. Maybe you have to have to temporarily suspend solemn empathy as well as disbelief.

The Book Club on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land as rain poured down. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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The Book Club at Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Narrow Land

Posted on 27 Apr 2025 | 10 comments

Christine Dwyer Hickey, The Narrow Land (Atlantic 2019)

The cover of The Narrow Land features Edward Hopper’s painting Sea Watchers (1952). The back cover tells us the book is about a ten-year-old boy who forms an unlikely friendship with ‘the artists Jo and Edward Hopper’. But nowhere in the narrative itself are we told the names of the two artists, even though many of the man’s paintings are lovingly described and even a reader as ignorant about US art as I am could recognise some of them (admittedly with help from Duck Duck Go) as Hoppers. Nor is there an afterword or acknowledgement to clarify the story’s relationship to historical fact.

I don’t know what to make of that, since it looks as if a significant dimension of the book is a fictional depiction of Hopper’s practice and the Hopper marriage. In particular, to judge from Josephine Hopper’s Wikipedia entry, it’s likely that the narrative draws on her copious journals recording her bitterness and their stormy quarrels. The character’s journals are mentioned, but Josephine Hopper’s are not.

The Hoppers-not-Hoppers, she in her sixties and he quite a bit older, have a terrible relationship. They are at their Cape Cod house for the summer in the early 1950s. He is stuck, searching for inspiration. She lives in his shadow, resents his failure to support her work, nags at him to get on with his own, is hyper-alert to possibilities that he will be attracted to other women, and relentlessly picks fights with him. He is relentless right back at her. They’re not people you want to be around.

Ten-year-old Michael comes into their lives. He is a German war orphan, possibly Jewish, brought to the US and adopted by a working-class couple in New York, spending the summer with a benefactor who is the artists’ neighbour.

Relationships develop among these characters, including Michael’s complex host family. The narrow land of the title refers literally to Cape Cod, as in this map. It also refers, I think, to the narrowness of a non-combatant USer’s world-view: Michael’s hosts are unable to imagine the magnitude of what he has endured (which he experiences now as nightmarish flashes of memory). The narrowness is also there in the constrictions that society places on the artist, and the claustrophobia that ‘Mrs Aitch’ rails against in her marriage. Perhaps it refers also to the limits imposed on people’s lives in the wake of the Second World War – partners, parents and siblings are still being mourned, and returned soldiers wander through the narrative like wraiths.

For the most part, this isn’t a pleasant read. I found Mrs Aitch especially painful – like Pansy in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, her bitterness is unremitting, but she lacks Pansy’s biting wit. Unlike Pansy though, she finds temporary relief in connection with children – Michael and his obnoxious host Richie – where we get to see her in a more positive light. Also unlike Pansy, she has a moment when her intolerant discontent saves the day.

Having just described Richie as obnoxious, I feel obliged to say that even though almost all of the characters are unlikeable, most of them have moments when we see an underlying pain. We come to see Richie in particular as tragic.

Page 78* turns out to be a good example of my pervasive frustration. It’s near the start of the novel’s second section, titled ‘Venus’, in which we realise that ‘he’ – Hopper-not-Hopper – is searching for a woman he glimpsed the previous summer, as he feels that she will inspire him now. (Spoilerish note: he does find her, but it doesn’t work.) On this page he remembers the day that he found her:

She was standing in the doorway of a house, a man standing on the threshold, maybe leaving or maybe hoping to get inside.
He’d driven by and pulled in further along the street. Then he walked back past the house. There had been a bush by the gate, tangled and dried up from the heat, a lawn, yellowed by neglect and the ravages of a long summer.

There’s a description of her clothes and a snippet of overheard conversation, then:

He had walked on for a couple of minutes. then crossed the road to return on the opposite side, his head tilted as if he were searching for the number of a door. As he came closer to the house, he saw her lift her hands and put them under her hair, which was a whiter shade of blonde. Then she flipped it all up, holding it for a few seconds to the back of her head. He could see the damp patches of sweat stamped into her armpits and the outline of her long neck, the soft curve where it joined her shoulders. She dropped her hair and her face lifted upwards. The blue blouse. The light on her face. He couldn’t figure out if it was pouring into her or pouring out of her. He thought she looked sanctified. Then he thought she looked the opposite.

He rushes home and drags out his easel:

He laid it down: the street, the house, the figure of the girl in the doorway, the figure of the man alongside it with one foot on the step, the lawn, the gate, the tangled bush.

This is emphatically an account of a particular artist’s creative process. It’s as if the novelist sets out to imagine for us how Edward Hopper created one of his paintings, but then – for legal reasons, perhaps, or from simple respect for the unknowability of the real man – pulls back from acknowledging that that’s what she’s doing. The understated eroticism here plays nicely into the portrait of the artist’s marriage: his wife (never named) realises that she is not the model for the woman in the painting, and is furious.

On the way to the meeting: We read The Narrow Land along with Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool. Just before the meeting I’m noting some things the books have in common:

  • they both have dogs that make a mess of cars – the disgustingly incontinent Rub in Everybody’s Fool, and Buster in this book who leaves a car ‘looking like a feathered nest’
  • characters read books: Sully in Everybody’s Fool remembers as a boy reading the beginning of a book we recognise as David Copperfield (Dickens), and discarding it; Michael in this book reads The Red Pony (Steinbeck) and Tom Sawyer (Twain) and takes them in his stride
  • Class looms large: when Michael’s working-class foster parents turn up we suddenly feel grounded in honest relationships; when Sully’s son turns up in the other book, we’re away with the abstractions of middle-class life.

After the meeting: The books had to compete with the pope’s funeral on the TV, but we still had an interesting conversation.

I think we were all a bit perplexed by A Narrow Land – not quite sure where its focus is. The person who had first proposed it, an artist herself, kicked the conversation off by saying that she was disappointed the book had so little to say about Hopper’s process, and in a way we circled around that central absence for the rest of our conversation.

One other person shared my unease about the relationship between the fictional characters and the historical persons. Others had no problem with it, and I still find it hard to say precisely what my problem is. Our host produced a hefty volume of Hopper’s work and we tried to pin down the paintings he works on in the book. No one claimed to have enjoyed the book unreservedly, though I think we all found some joy, or at least pleasure, in it. No one was much interested in trying to compare the two books.

We met on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

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Listening to the Twits, Cold as Hell

Posted on 23 Apr 2025 | Leave a comment

Roald Dahl, The Twits (1980)
Lilja  Sigurðardóttir, translator Quentin Bates, Cold as Hell (2022)

I spent the Easter weekend with family at Bawley Point on the south coast of New South Wales. The Emerging Artist and I drove there from Sydney with two grandchildren aged 4 and 7, and came home alone. On the way down we had a great time playing Car Bingo on sheets designed by the EA, and when the excitement of seeing the umpteenth cow had waned we listened on Audible to The Twits. On the way back, without grandchildren, we listened to the rest of Cold as Hell, which we had begun on a previous trip.

When I was first interviewed for a job at The School Magazine, Australia’s venerable literary journal for children, I was asked to name some children’s books that I enjoyed. Among others, I mentioned The Twits and The BFG, both by Roald Dahl. Kath Hawke, the magazine’s editor, raised a belligerent eyebrow. ‘Oh, you like them, do you?’ she asked, and went on to talk about the relish with which both books describe people humiliating and physically hurting each other. I scoffed at such concerns, identified with the relish, and didn’t get the job. (I was, however, placed on an eligibility list and eventually spent nearly two decades working there.)

Hearing The Twits again 40 decades later, I sympathise more with Kath’s view. Two repulsive individuals play mean tricks on each other and torment birds and animals in their power. The animals and birds take an appropriate revenge. End of story. It was refreshing once, and maybe still is for young people, especially those for whom ‘poo poo’ is a dependably witty response to almost anything. Maybe I’m just being all 21st century, but while I find the description of Mr Twit gleefully disgusting, I wonder if that of Mrs Twit isn’t marred by an extra layer of visceral misogyny.

According to an online bookseller juggernaut Cold as Hell is the first book in ‘an addictive, nerve-shattering new series’.

Áróra Jónsdóttir, a twenty-something freelance financial investigator, flies to her native Iceland to check on her sister Ísafold. Ísafold has been in an abusive relationship and the two sisters have recently fallen out. Áróra soon realises that Ísafold hasn’t just been avoiding her, but has disappeared.

What can I say? Iceland is cold. Áróra uncovers some financial skulduggery when on a break from searching for Ísafold. There’s a weird character called Grimur (I think), an African refugee named Omar, a police detective who is some kind of uncle to Áróra. Áróra’s mother flies in from London to share the anxiety. There’s a little bit of sex and a little bit of violence. It all turns out pretty much as you’d expect, with a slight twist, as you’d expect.

It felt like a novel equivalent of Nordic Noir TV, and given that The Áróra Investigations is a series, it may turn up soon on content-hungry streaming. It passed the time pleasantly enough, but my nerves weren’t shattered and I’m not addicted.

We listened to these books while travelling through Dharawal country. I have written the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I gratefully acknowledge Elders past and present, and thank them for their custodianship of these lands over millennia.

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V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night

Posted on 4 Mar 2025 | 2 comments

V. V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night (Penguin 2024)

The main character and narrator of Brotherless Night, Sashi to her friends, is a young Tamil woman who is studying to become a doctor in the city of Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka. She lives through the beginnings of the civil war in the 1980s. Her beloved eldest brother is killed in the anti-Tamil riots of 1983 – the riots that are made so vividly present in S. Shakthidharan’s play Counting and Cracking. Two more brothers join the Tamil Tigers (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), and K, a man she has loved since childhood, becomes a celebrated hero and martyr among the Tigers.

Sashi herself is caught between an oppressive government army and a ‘liberation’ force that ruthlessly kills many of the people they claim to be defending. Sashi deplores the tactics of the Tigers, but she works for them in a secret clinic, patching up wounded cadres and civilian casualties, and she can never renounce her love for her brothers and K.

In a pivotal sequence, K comes out of hiding to ask Sashi for her support in a dangerous undertaking: to do so will align her publicly with ‘the movement’, which would grievously misrepresent her sympathies, but not to do it would be to betray a childhood friend. I think of E. M. Forster’s much quoted line: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ But Sashi’s choice is not as simple as that.

As she ponders the dilemma, there’s this line (on page 238):

Before there was a movement there were six children on a lane.

It is her loyalty to the vision of themselves as children that is at the heart of the book – that is, her loyalty to a basic shared humanity, and to telling the truth from that place.

It’s a terrific story. I was invested in the characters and sorry to put the book down. Part of its strength is the way it reaches out from its fictional world to highlight elements of actual reality. I can think of three ways.

First, other texts are referred to and integrated into the narrative. The books that Sashi and her brothers read might make an interesting reading list, but most strikingly Sashi and her Anatomy professor start a book group for woman at the university, and at their first meeting they discuss Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, a real book by Sri Lankan author Kumari Jayawardena. In lesser hands this might have felt like analysis being shoehorned into the narrative, but we share the young women’s intellectual excitement, and their sense of peril as no one can be sure things won’t be reported back to the Tigers, with potentially dire consequences.

Second, there are elements of roman à clef. The salient features of K’s life and especially death, for instance, align closely with those of Tiger leader Theelipan.(Don’t look up this link if you want to avoid spoilers.) One of the book’s epigraphs – ‘There is no life for me apart from my people.’ – signals another real-life equivalent. It’s from Rajani Thiranagama (Wikipedia page here), a human rights activist who was once a member of the Tigers but became critical of them and was eventually believed to be murdered by them. She is the model for Sashi’s Anatomy professor, and the last third of the book features a fictional version of her real-life project of gathering evidence of atrocities committed by Tigers, Indians and Sri Lankan military.

The third way may be peculiar to me.

A young woman has been viciously assaulted by an Indian soldier – nominally there as part of a peace-keeping force. Sashi treats her injuries, and she returns later in a different, devastatingly vengeful role. This young woman’s name, Priya, rang a bell for me, and for no reason I could pinpoint I felt a particular investment in her story. Then I remembered the source of the bell: Priya Nadesalingam, the subject of a huge amount of press in Australia in 2023 (here’s one link in case you need reminding). That Priya, who had sought asylum in Australia with her husband Nades Murugappan and their two daughters, had become part of the community in the tiny Queensland town of Biloela. After a dawn raid, they came close to being deported and sent back to Sri Lanka. There was a huge public outcry and, long story short, the family are now living in Biloela on permanent visas.

The two Priyas have very different stories, but the coincidence of names brings home to me with tremendous force the horrific broader reality behind the bloodless statements about refugees made by politicians in Australia (and I assume elsewhere in the West).

The book doesn’t preach or lecture, but it brings a deeper understanding, not only of the struggle for Tamil independence in Sri Lanka, but of resistance movements generally. It makes me want to be a better person living in a kinder country with broader horizons.

I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and gratefully acknowledge their care for this land for millennia, as well as the generosity I have personally experienced from First Nations people all my life.

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The Book Club, Alan Hollinghurst and Our Evenings

Posted on 23 Feb 2025 | 9 comments

Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings (Picador 2024)

Before the meeting: About five decades ago I had to write an Eng Lit essay on Gerard Manly Hopkins’s sonnet ‘Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves’. It’s a poem that cries out to be read aloud, and on a weekend away at a beach house with friends, I found an out-of-the-way spot where I could perform the poem over and over for my own ears. It turned out that my secluded corner was actually an amplifying booth, and my sonorous renditions were heard by everyone in the house. Someone finally came and pleaded with me to stop. Embarrassment aside, I still love the poem.

So I took it as a personal gift to me when the poem is being recited, unannounced and unexplained, at the start of Chapter 15 of Our Evenings:

‘Earnest,’ I said, ‘earthless … equal … attuneable …’ Stella peered at me, tongue on lip, daring me.
‘… vaulty …’ she said.
… vaulty, voluminous … stupendous Evening strains to be time’s vast –’ (now we chanted it together) ‘womb-of-all – home-of-all – hearse-of-all NIGHT!’
‘I bet you can’t go on.’

If I hadn’t been loving the book before then, I would have been hooked.

As it happens, I was enjoying the book. The hero-narrator David Win, son of an English mother and a Burmese father he has never known, was given a scholarship to attend a prestigious boarding school, and at the start of Chapter 15 he’s studying at Oxford. The novel traces his development into a successful actor, his crushes, affairs and finally marriage with men, and his arrival at a reasonably contented late middle age (as we in our late 70s refer to the 60s).

The phrase that gives the novel its title occurs when David is in his last year at the boarding school. He is taken under the wing of Mr Hudson, his English teacher. They listen to classical music together late in the evening. These quiet times have an intimate, erotic charge, but though other boys leap to crude conclusions, ‘nothing ever “happened”, as they say’. Among the pieces they listen to is the first movement of Janáček’s ‘On an Overgrown Path’, which has its own title, ‘Our Evenings’. (You can hear it played by Rudolf Firkusny in 1986 at this link.)

The piece seemed simple and songlike, but the modulations in it made you wonder, and an agitated figure broke in higher up and then, like the scratch on the record, disappeared and left you with the song in a further change of mood, which didn’t quite replace the first one but seemed to cast the shadow of experience over it – what, I couldn’t say, but I felt it. I had no idea what we were listening to or how long it was going on – there was a very quiet passage when the agitated figure came back, but subdued and dreamlike, a trance of sadness and beauty, and soon after that the piece ended without any fuss. I glanced at Mr Hudson, but he was staring at the fire too, and then he jumped up and said, ‘Shall we hear it again?’

Apart from being an instance of the way other works – plays, poems, pieces of music – move the narrative along, this passage is a nice example of the way David as narrator shows rather than tells. ‘I couldn’t say, but I felt it.’ He never says in so many words that he has a crush on Mr Hudson, or that he believes it to be reciprocated, but in little moments like this – in Mr Hudson jumping up and suggesting a replay – readers can draw their own conclusions.

The description of Janáček’s music could be applied to the novel itself: ‘subdued and dreamlike, a trance of sadness and beauty’ occasionally interrupted by an ‘agitated figure’. The prose is elegant and unruffled, and most of the terrible things that happen – AIDS, Brexit, Covid – are offstage. David as boy, adolescent and man is unfailingly polite and helpful – we are usually left to imagine what feelings he is covering up, even perhaps from himself. He regularly encounters ‘agitated figures’ in the form of racism, but mostly it’s of the raised eyebrow or muttered phrase, micro-aggressive variety. An African-heritage lover says, ‘You’re not even Black!’ Likewise the homophobia he encounters is subtle – when he comes out to his mother and her female friend, their response is more or less, ‘Well, that’s been obvious for a long time!’ Class plays a role –  David’s patrons, whom he loves to the end – are like Proust’s aristocrats in their unfailing graciousness and generosity, and the sense that nothing really touches them. The mystery of his father remains a mystery, though late in life he receives some vague information. As in real life, many mysteries remain mysterious.

I suppose sex itself might count as an ‘agitated figure’. There’s quite a lot of it but, though it’s not coy, very little is explicit. I remember only two moments when sexual body parts are named, one involving a kind rejection, the other the beginning of a solid relationship. Neither is the slightest bit prurient.

The last 10 pages depart from the mainly ‘subdued and dreamlike’ narrative in a way that came as a surprise to me, and casts a brilliant light back over the preceding pages.

After the meeting: At the Book Club, we usually have two books under discussion at each meeting. This time, there was just the one, but everyone had to report on the book they’d scored in our Kris Kringle at last meeting. So our discussion, which followed and preceded convivial conversation about other things, began with enticing rundowns of books by Bernhard Schlink, Jock Serong, Robbie Arnott and Niamh Mulvey, and an unenticing rundown of one other.

Of Our Evenings, we had a very interesting discussion. I probably liked the book most, but no one hated it. The only strong difference was about the last ten pages, which I felt gave shape and significance to the whole thing and most others experienced as a lame and unnecessary framing device. It would be too spoilerish to present the arguments here. I’ll just state the obvious: they’re entitled to their opinions, but they’re wrong.

One person had an interesting take on the title. It captured the way the book, for her, is like a series of conversations you might have in a quiet evening at home: meandering, pleasant, amiable recollections and reflections, without drama or much significance. (If that’s so, I hope I said at the time, there’s always an awareness of terrible things happening in the outside world, of which many of the tiny things that come up in those conversations are micro-effects.)

David Win as narrator and hero provoked interesting conversation, which I’ll try to summarise. He is an outsider because of racism, class and sexuality, not necessarily in that order. As an outsider, his main way of being in the world is to aim to fill other people’s expectations – to act out the scripts he is given. It’s not insignificant that he’s an actor. He rarely takes the initiative, and there’s a way he doesn’t seem to know who he is. Not just as narrator, but also as character, he doesn’t have access to his own inner life. The narrative restraint about sex, which is not so in Hollinghurst’s other books that people had read, may be part of this. I read out the only passage in the book that mentions hard-ons, and people laughed (but not at all derisively). It’s as if in this book explicit sex is a relief from always having to decode what is being communicated in tight-lipped upper-class British dialogue (see Mr Hudson’s ‘Shall we hear it again?’ above).

We discussed other characters that I didn’t mention in the first part of this blog, especially a Boris Johnsonesque blustering bully, .

Less centrally, some took an almost anthropological interest in the portrayal of Gay male relationships – and it’s true that Hollinghurst gives meticulous detail on how people make their desires known. One person felt that (minor spoiler alert) having the David’s mother become a Lesbian was just laying on the Gayness too thick. Another, on the contrary, was impressed and delighted by the nuanced portrayal of middle-class, middle-aged, post-heterosexual-marriage Lesbianism.

We didn’t discuss the Hopkins poem, the Janáček music, or the plays – notably by Racine and Ben Jonson – that turn up in the narration.

Mint-flavoured Turkish delight was on offer. Only two of us tried it. I was the only one to finish my piece. I don’t recommend it. I do recommend the book.

Our Book Club met on unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge the Elders past and present. I hope that our conversation was in some way in continuity with yarns that have been happening on this land for tens of thousands of years.

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Niall Williams’s Time of the Child and the book group

Posted on 19 Feb 2025 | 14 comments

Niall Williams, Time of the Child (Bloomsbury 2024)

Before the meeting: As I was reading the first couple of chapters of this book, I had ringing in my ears something that a Book Group member had said about a different book, perhaps one of Niall Williams’s earlier novels, A History of the Rain or This Is Happiness: ‘It’s a beautifully written Irish novel, but I’m not sure the world needs yet another beautifully written Irish novel.’

The first chapters, in fact almost the first half of the book, are brilliant descriptions of life in 1962 in the fictional West Ireland village of Faha, the village we know from those previous books. The rain is still incessant and the village still slowly sinking into the river. The heart broken in This Is Happiness is still broken. Life is still dominated by the Catholic Church. Gossip is still the lifeblood of the community. Most houses now have electricity.

The first chapter begins with a wonderful setpiece, a parish Mass where the beloved parish priest stalls mid-sermon in the first major sign of dementia. Things are seen from the point of view of Jack Troy, the village’s general practitioner whose face and manner give away nothing of his inner feelings as his role in the community means he must always be available, including to people who will never ask for a doctor’s attention on their own behalf. After Sunday Mass he is regularly approached by people who indicate with a nod and a wink that his services are needed at such and such a house.

The second chapter revolves around another magnificent setpiece: the Christmas fair in which farmers bring their cattle to town to sell, and hawkers and traders come from elsewhere. Here, twelve-year-old Jude Quinlan, son of a drunkard farmer, carries the narrative burden.

Through both of these chapters, we are teased by hints that something big is going to happen. It’s as if the narrator is saying to his readers, ‘Yes yes, I know you’re here for a story, but first let me tell you about the place it happened in and the people who live there.’ At the end of the second chapter, more than a third of the way into the narrative, there’s this:

But it was here, at the back wall of the church in the village of Faha, on the night of the Christmas Fair 1962, that Jude Quinlan found the child.

Ah! The titular child has arrived! Then the third chapter continues to tease us. It takes us back a couple of days in the life of Ronnie Troy, Jack’s long-suffering dutiful daughter. After 16 pages in which we come to know and (speaking at least for myself) love her, she responds to a late-night knock on the door and at last the story begins.

Given that it happens so late in the book, I’m reluctant to say much more about it, except that though my Group member may be right that the world doesn’t need another book like this, I certainly do. Maybe it’s because I spent my 1950s childhood as part of the Irish diaspora in north Queensland, and I respond with little gasps of recognition to little throwaway lines about the Sacred Heart, the ‘Hail Holy Queen’, the smiling pope, or to the way the priest says Mass with his back to the church while the congregation’s more or less devout members goes about their own business. That is to say, maybe there’s a hefty dose of nostalgia in my response to the book. But if so, that nostalgia serves a serious purpose.

This is a time and place when the Church dominated Irish society. It was the time of the Magdalen laundries, covered-up clerical sexual abuse of children, pitiless laws against abortion and condemnation of most forms of birth control. None of this is foregrounded in the book, but oppressive Church–State authority looms large, mostly unspoken, over the second half of the book. On the one hand, a handful of people sinking to their knees to say the Rosary can be an exhilarating manifestation of something fine beyond words (though Niall Williams finds the words); on the other a priest with a form letter mouths deadly phrases like ‘For his own good’ and ‘Preserving his dignity’.

Just as much as, say, Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time or Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, this book is about decent humanity – individuals and communities – resisting the monolithic, repressive authority of Church and State. Like them, it revels in musical language. More than them it’s funny. I did cry, twice, but I laughed a lot.

Page 77* includes a micro example of the resistance. In the absence of a fairground, Faha’s monthly fair is a chaotic mess, and the church gates, ‘with their splayed look of welcome in the centre of the village’, are a main centre of trade. The curate, Father Coffey, representing the Church’s authority, asks the farmers not to stand their cattle there:

As it happened, the curate’s appeal fell on deaf ears, but he took some satisfaction when he was able to negotiate a treaty whereby Mick Lynch promised a rope corridor to let the daily Mass-goers through. As a goodwill gesture, Lynch said, the farmers would take their dung with them when they left, which Father Coffey reported back to the Canon, unaware it was a joke until the older priest put the hand across his laugh to stop his teeth flying.

With such jokes, in which the older priest colludes, the people of Faha keep the authority of the Church in its place.

Most of page 77 is taken up wth one of Niall Williams’s bravura character sketches:

Mick Lynch had the walk of a man who owned his own bull. Short and broad, he carried a blackthorn, wore a frieze coat and low hat with red feather in the band. That hat never came off his head outside of church. He wore it at the counter in Ryan’s, in the spartan confines of his iron bed, and when he went to wring the necks of geese. From victories in cards or trade, Lynch took a deal of pleasure. With a contrary nature, his cheeks were where the most of his hair grew, furred sideburns made key-shaped by the shaving of his chin which gave him a jailor’s look. Lynch had the reputation of being what Faha called a right cool man, a designation that pre-dated refrigeration, meant he could not be hurried or ruffled, and once, when asked by a dealer, ‘What are you looking for in a horse, boss?’ had delivered the incontestable answer, ‘Leg in each corner.’ He had not married. For women he hadn’t the handbook, he said, and children nothing but hosts to headlice and worms.

Remember, nothing has really happened in this book so far. That is, we’re a quarter of the way into it but we haven’t yet had what the movies call the inciting incident. But the narrator refuses to be hurried. There is too much to enjoy at any moment in the life of Faha, so though this is Mick Lynch’s only appearance, we’re going to take a moment, just for the fun of it, to savour him. I especially like that ‘outside of church’: whatever else he may be or do, it wouldn’t occur to Mick Lynch to defy the custom of men going bare-headed in church.

After the meeting: Unusually, this book was the subject of quite a lot of WhatsApp discussion before the meeting, mainly from people who couldn’t make it on the night. A number of us had wept, prompting one to ask whether we were ‘silly old men getting emotional about a baby and family relationships’. He who had made the remark about beautifully written Irish novels confounded my expectations by loving tis one, and wrote a thoughtful email on the theme of ‘the soul’. Another sounded a mildly dissenting note, having read only 80 percent and found it slow going; he reacted against the religion’s hold on people, and used the word ‘silly’ about a main character’s attempt to take charge of the situation (all of which are completely reasonable responses). Yet another quoted a number of favourite passages, and said he loved the way Catholicism co-existed with pishogues, which he noted was an excellent new word to him (as it is to me – definition at this link if you’re interested).

On the night there were just five of us. Among other things, we ate baked potatoes. Almost as soon as we arrived, those of us with Catholic backgrounds – a slim majority – were reminiscing about, of all things, our Confirmations. Not directly on topic, but certainly book-adjacent. We had an animated discussion. More than one said that the book took its own sweet time to get to the point – one said he almost stopped reading, but others (me included) thought it was a feature rather than a bug. Someone quoted a passage to the effect that Irish story-telling never goes in a straight line.

Someone said, on WhatsApp and then again on the night, that the book was an Irish Catholic equivalent to Marilynne Robinson’s Home. I don’t quite see that, though it’s an interesting thought. I had a go at articulating some of what I see the book as saying about Catholicism in Ireland then and now – which I won’t go into here because it would be spoilerish.

Interestingly, no one thought to say out loud that this is a Christmas story, even a kind of second-coming story. And, though someone had looked up Niall Williams on the internet, no one wondered aloud if he became a grandfather somewhere on the way to writing this book.

As for the rest of the conversation, I can’t do better than quote (with permission) from one chap’s report on WhatsApp. Conversation ranged, he wrote:

from John Cage and the Necks to motor bike accidents, playing golf, Parkinson’s disease and then the realities of being Bilbo Baggins.

I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I was born in MaMu country, though as a small child I was confused about whether I lived there or in ‘Erin’s green valleys’. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of both countries, never ceded.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 77.

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