Tag Archives: Novel

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

Posted on 17 Mar 2024 | 11 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on 14 Mar 2024 | 2 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bookblog #65: The Book Group

Posted on 19 Feb 2024 | 4 comments

I originally posted the following to the original version of this blog on 22 April 2004. I’m resurrecting it nearly 20 years later because my book group is currently reading another Sebastian Barry novel.

Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way (Viking 2005)

Pasted Graphic

I missed the last meeting of my book group, where they discussed, among other things, Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope and Stephen Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken. I was saved from the embarrassment of admitting that I hadn’t read either of them by an invitation I couldn’t refuse: to see Zack Snyder’s Watchmen with my sons on the giant iMax screen. But I arrived at last night’s meeting with a clear conscience. I had struggled with the first third or so of A Long Long Way.

There’s a huge field out there of First World War novels, and I know some people can’t get enough of them, but the déjà vu was a bit much for me: from Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, which I read an awfully long time ago, to Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, they all tell the same monstrous story. The fact that the cover design of my library copy of A Long Long Way uses the same photograph as one of Pat Barker’s books only added to the turn-off. And then there was Sebastian Barry’s prose: not at all a transparent vehicle for the story, but calling attention to itself by its Irish musicality, asking to be read slowly, even aloud. Here’s a random paragraph from the early pages:

Willie Dunne’s father, in the privacy of his policeman’s quarters in Dublin Castle, was of the opinion that Redmond’s speech was the speech of a scoundrel. Willie’s father was in the Masons though he was a Catholic, and on top of that he was a member of the South Wicklow Lodge. It was King and Country he said a man should go and fight for, never thinking that his son Willie would go as soon as he did.

All that repetition and inversion and balance and general quirkiness is beautiful, but when you start reading a novel that’s written in such prose, on a subject you feel may have been done to death, you’re not necessarily enthusiastic.

Resistance proved futile. The subject, I confess, is huge enough to generate a potentially infinite number of novels, each with its own urgency and richness, its own take on things, its own ability to compel. The First World War may yet turn out to be the war to end wars if we can only learn its lessons. There’s a powerful story, well told here, in the situation of the Irish who fought for the King of England in Flanders while their compatriots were battling the forces of the same king in the streets of Dublin. Worse – and I trust completely that Sebastian Barry didn’t make this up – there were Irish recruits among the army units that fired on the Easter Uprising rebels in 1916. The novel tells the story of Willie Dunne, one of those recruits.

There was no controversy at the group. The book had touched us all. Someone said that books such as this were very important to counter the nationalistic garbage that comes at us in Australia as Anzac day approaches, obscuring the reality of modern wars. One guy arrived late, having read the wrong book, Birdsong by the wrong Sebastian, surname Faulks. Apart from giving rise to much merriment, this threw a different light on my déjà vu response: we would mention some detail from ‘our’ book, and he would exclaim, ‘That’s in this one too!’

As an added extra, someone had recently rediscovered a cache of his childhood reading, and gave each of us a comic from the early 1960s. Here’s mine:

war006

Different war, different propaganda.

Posted: Wed – April 22, 2009 at 08:01 AM

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Sigrid Nunez’ Vulnerables, page 76

Posted on 12 Feb 2024 | 10 comments

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books 2023)

I first heard the notion that there are two Americas articulated at a Sydney Ideas lecture in 2008. Canadian writer Ronald Wright expanded on the idea in his book What Is America? (link is to my blog post), but the simplified version I took away from his lecture is this: there are two competing versions of America, each insisting that it is the true one.

The idea seems to have come into its own in the era of MAGA.

The Vulnerables inhabits one side of the divide. It’s literate, self-aware, alert to issues of class, race and gender – and it’s kind, while just outside the pages of the book the Covid pandemic and forces of violent unreason rage.

The narrator, a woman writer of a certain age who may well be Sigrid Nunez, stays in Manhattan during the worst of the Covid epidemic. Iris, a writer whose publisher is the narrator’s friend, has been stranded in California by travel restrictions, and the narrator agrees to look after Eureka, Iris’s macaw, eventually moving into Iris’s luxurious apartment to do so, lending her own apartment to a respiratory physician friend who has come to New York to help with the pandemic.

Circumstances lead to her sharing Iris’s apartment with a troubled young man, whom she calls Vetch. The pair don’t exactly hit it off at first, but (of course) that changes.

The tragedies of Covid and Trump are always there in the background, manifesting in the immediate narrative mainly in the narrator’s inability to apply her mind to any substantial writing project.

That’s the story. Add in some terrific scenes with a group of long-term woman friends, a plethora of quotes about writers and writing, a couple of detailed synopses of other works, including Craig Foster’s My Octopus Teacher, and you’ve just about got it. Back to my point about the two Americas: it’s interesting that the narrator dwells on My Octopus Teacher rather than the TV show that got a lot of attention at that time, the odious Tiger King.

I couldn’t put it down. (I lost patience only once, when the narrator tells us about a writing exercise that non-writers can perform well, and then proceeds to do the exercise.)

The writing is clear, unhurried, compassionate, and though the narrator ruminates on literary issues (as on page 277 – ‘Growing consensus: The traditional novel has lost its place as the major genre of our time’), it doesn’t go anywhere near disappearing into its own navel.

At page 76 (that’s still my age) the narrator has agreed to look out for Eureka, but hasn’t yet moved into Iris’s apartment. Pausing on this page, it turns out, highlights some interesting qualities of the book.

First it sets up the situation: the apartment block is empty, and the narrator is to visit for several hours a day. (I recently spent a week looking after a friend’s cat in her apartment with a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean. Though Jennifer the cat didn’t raise any of the social/ethical issue that Eureka the macaw does, I identified strongly with the narrator.) Up to now, there have been stories of the writing life, childhood would-be boyfriends, a recently deceased friend’s love life, and a sense that Covid is narrowing the narrator’s world. Here we have a substantial, tangible narrowing: she must spend several hours a day in this one place. It’s a turning point in the narrative.

Then the page’s main work is to introduce Eureka as a character – first in Iris’s account of his needs and personality:

He does need daily physical and mental exercise – and a whole lot of admiration. He really likes to strut his stuff. He’s seen himself in the mirror, and he knows how gorgeous he is.

Then in the narrator’s physical description:

His name was Eureka, and he was a miniature breed, only about half the length of most full-sized macaws. All green except for a dab of scarlet on each shoulder and white patches around his eyes. A shade of green so bright and lush it was refreshing to look at, like a clump of tropical flora. One of those breeds famous for being able to mimic speech …

That’s Eureka, made graphically present.

We also learn something about Iris’s character. She remains offstage throughout, and although she feels real enough, in her absence she comes to represent a certain way of life: she writes books about design, and her apartment is beautifully designed, including a whole room painted like a tropical rainforest to make Eureka feel at home. There’s no doubt about where she sits in terms of the two Americas. There’s this, immediately after the last bit quoted above:

… but, according to Iris, not much of a talker.

We were never really into that, she said, the way so many other parrot owners are. All those people who get such a kick out of teaching their birds to swear. We love looking at him and playing with him and of course we talk to him, but we never tried to train him to repeat after us.

Paraphrase: we are not part of the vulgar crowd.

Later, Vetch is scathing about this: Iris and her husband think they are being enlightened in their treatment of the bird, but it’s still an imprisoned wild thing that they see as a possession. The narrator doesn’t endorse his high moral tone (he comes from a privileged background), but here she makes a similar point – as urbane, elliptical mockery, but still making it. (As I write this I’m reminded of the Renoir movie, La règle du jeu, whose aristocrats are so charming and loveable that you almost don’t notice that the film despises them.)

There are two more things on this page that weave it into the fabric of the novel. First, the little comment in brackets after Iris says Eureka knows how gorgeous he is:

(That parrot is a peacock.)

This loops back to a playful moment much earlier. The narrator has been trying to identify the colour of certain breeds of hydrangea – lavender, perhaps, or lilac:

But, because lilac and lavender are also kinds of flowers, you can’t say, The hydrangea is lilac, or The hydrangea is lavender. It would be like saying, That cat is sick as a dog, or His eyes are his Achilles’ heel. (I did not make those up, I read them somewhere.) … That hog farm is a pigsty. He uses his wheelchair as a crutch.

(Pages 22 and 25)

This running joke is a deft way of keeping front and centre the narrator’s identity as a writer.

Second, the first para on the page is a wry social observation:

Though the residents were gone for now, the building staff had been designated essential workers and were showing up every day. Just one of countless bizarreries of lockdown life: an entire luxury boutique building and a full staff, all for one little old bird and me.

This is a reminder that the official response to Covid has a class dimension. Elsewhere the narrator quotes a social media meme: ‘What lockdown? It’s just the middle class going into hiding while the working class wait on them.’ She doesn’t endorse the stridency of that, but nor does she disagree with it. She reminds us every now and then that she is a woman of colour and comes from a relatively disadvantaged background. She doesn’t make big deal of it, but it’s an undercurrent, a constant unease that occasionally surfaces, most clearly when she digs out statistics of the elementary school she attended and sees that, among other things, 93% of students were ‘Eligible for free lunch’.

As I notice these elements of the book, I’m reminded of Edward Said’s brilliant essay on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism (1995). He points out that when Sir Thomas is absent, leaving a space for the young adults to indulge in scandalous theatrical activities, he is in fact visiting his plantation in the West Indies: his authoritarian behaviour on his return is a shadowy reflection of what we can assume he has been doing as a slaver. Patricia Rozema’s 1999 movie makes the connection explicit by having the heroine Fanny Price discover a portfolio of horrific charcoal drawings of African heritage people in distress. Perhaps a movie of The Vulnerables would have the camera linger on tent hospitals and ‘essential workers’ living dangerously.

One last question: who are the vulnerables? The short answer is, Everyone:

  • The narrator and her friends, as women of a certain age
  • Iris, who has a baby in California
  • Vetch, a young man whose wealthy parents are a case study in how to eff up a child
  • Eureka, of course, emblematic of all those pets abandoned during and after Covid
  • the essential workers
  • the narrator’s doctor friend, who (not a spoiler really) does get Covid
  • the boys who took the risk of declaring their love of the narrator when she was a ruthless child

The list could go on.

This book was lent to me by a kind friend as part of a care package when I had a positive RAT. My symptoms were mild, and back then my lockdowns were mild as well, but reading the book in these circumstances made me particularly receptive to it.

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Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, page 76

Posted on 19 Dec 2023 | 10 comments

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (University of Queensland Press 2023)

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Edenglassie, a portmanteau of Edinburgh and Glasgow, was briefly the name for part of what is now Brisbane, and this book is a historical fiction set there in the 1850s, when First Nations people outnumbered settlers along the Brisbane River, a time of armed resistance to colonisation, and a time of genocidal atrocities including those committed by the notorious Native Police.

My blogging practice of focusing on page 76 (my age) comes up with a passage that at first seems a long way from that subject. For a start it’s set in Brisbane in 2024, the bicentenary of John Oxley’s sail up the Brisbane River, and begins with a genial picture of a weekend market that could be in any western city:

Winona weaved a path through the many bodies at the market. The young and the elderly; the able-bodied and the infirm; the slender hipsters; the defiantly fat, the tattooed, the pierced, the dull suburban middle-class and the fabulously wealthy. All these met in the mecca of the inner south, held there in the tight Kurilpa loop of the river which, having embraced you, was mighty slow to let you go.

The market is complex and inclusive, or at least tolerant. ‘Kurilpa’ tells you, if you have a web browser handy, that the city is Brisbane: the Kurilpa precinct borders on South Bank, and what was once the Tank Street Bridge is now the Kurilpa Bridge. The way the narrator uses the word suggests that it is more than a simple place-name, hinting at an Indigenous perspective: the river has agency, embracing and slow to let go.

As the paragraph continues, a character moves through the scene:

Winona wasn’t much interested in the crowd; she’d been caught instead by a steady pulse, thrumming from afar. She followed the sound of the didgeridoo dragging her to the far edge of the park, eager to see if she knew the fella playing, and discover what other Blak mob were around. Hopefully, Winona thought, she’d find a little oasis of Goories there to replenish her spirit, weakened from the hours she’d spent lately in the soul-sucking hospital.

‘Blak’ and ‘Goorie’ make it clear where we are, though readers from outside Australia may need their pocket browser here too. ‘Blak’ is a self-description currently used by many urban First Nations people as a way of ‘taking on the colonisers’ language and flipping it on its head’ (the quote is from an article on artist Destiny Deacon, at this link). Winona is a young, politically aware Indigenous woman. The narrative cleaves mostly to her point of view, but it’s interesting to notice that here they part ways briefly: the narrator sees and enjoys the crowd, and virtually tells us in so many words that the ancient Kurilpa embraces that various crowd as well; Winona is committed to an ‘us and them’ perspective. The non-Indigenous crowd is like a desert to her.

I won’t quote the rest of the page. Suffice to say that when she finds the didgeridoo player, he’s a white hippy who claims to be Indigenous – a coloniser, a thieving dagai, as Winona sees it – and her violent outrage lasts for several richly comic pages.

Once I got past my initial sense that this page wasn’t from the interesting, historical narrative, I realised that many of the novel’s key themes are suggested in it.

Winona is the central character in the near future part of the novel, where the main narrative thread is her budding romance with Doctor Johnny, a man of questionable indigeneity (though less questionable than the didge player’s). Her grandmother, whom she has been visiting in hospital, is leveraging her claim to be Queensland’s oldest Aboriginal to secure a major role in Brisbane’s bicentenary celebrations – and an apartment. So there’s romcom tension, trickster play, and a generally comic tone. At the same time, the narrative is firmly embedded in an Indigenous perspective – or perspectives, really, as Grannie Eddie and her ancient friends see things differently from the militant Winona, and Johnny, a child of the stolen generations, brings yet another point of view. Winona’s rage at the hippy didge player is a contrast to her almost flirtatious hostility to Johnny. Her indifference to the complex everyday crowd plays off against Granny Eddie’s generously inclusive concept of Aboriginal sovereignty.

It’s especially interesting to note the way these paragraphs are linked to the historical story. Words that in 2024 feel like cultural reclamation or perhaps remnants of lost language – dagai, Kurilpa – are part of ordinary speech in 1854. Just as the hippy claims an Indigenous identity, a white man back then – Tom Petrie, grandson of a pre-eminent settler in Brisbane, and in the process of taking on a sheep property in his own right – claims the status of an initiated man: it’s not an exact parallel, as Tom’s claim, like that of the real-life Tom Petrie, has the approval of elders. But as he invites his ‘brothers’ to work for him a tremendous unease develops: certainly I spent a good deal of the book dreading that he would betray his close friends, his initiated ‘brothers’. It would be spoiling to tell you if he does.

Like the 21st century story, the historical narrative centres on a romance between two First Nations people with very different relationships to traditional culture. Mulanyin is a traditionally raised young man who is in Kurilpa as a guest of an established family. In the early parts of the book, he goes naked around town – he only starts wearing trousers to protect his fertility when he starts riding horses. Nita has been taken as a servant to the prestigious Petrie family, who are relatively decent in their relationships to the local people. Nita is a Christian, always modestly dressed, and attuned to her employers’ desires and expectations.

The river is a powerful presence in both stories. The apparent throwaway line about how ‘having embraced you, [it] was mighty slow to let you go’ rings a lot of bells. It’s crossed by bridges and features the bicentennial celebrations in 2025; it’s a source of food and site of dramatic events in 1854. It remains the same river.

As I write this, I’ve read about half of David Marr’s Killing for Country, an unsparing account of frontier violence in eastern Australia, focusing in part on the Native Police and quoting extensively from breathtakingly brutal contemporary settler writing. The Native Police are a threatening presence in Edenglassie, and there’s devastating genocidal violence, but it happens offstage. Even a scene where Mulanyin intervenes in the humiliation of another man is reported by a character rather than told to us directly by the narrator. Where David Marr conveys the horror of our history, Melissa Lucashenko does the herculean task of imagining what it was to live with a strong connection to country, tradition and community while the horrors were multiplying all around, and up close.

We discussed this book along with Debra Dank’s We Come With This Place at my Other Book Club – the one that used to be just for swapping books with minimal discussion. Not everyone was as moved by it as I was. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I can’t tell you how the unimpressed readers saw it because I’m so dazzled by its achievements.

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Lauren Groff’s Vaster Wilds

Posted on 8 Dec 2023 | 7 comments

Laurn Groff, The Vaster Wilds (Hutchinson Heinemann 2023)

If you picked this book up in a shop or the library and turned to page 76, these are the first two paragraphs you’d see:

By now, the twilight had begun to thicken, however; and she had to find some shelter before thick night came on full of its roving predators. She sensed that it would be a very cold night as well.
When she stood, she found she had a hard time moving swiftly; she was so stiff and sore from her long walk.

You might gather that this was a story about a woman alone in a wilderness. You might notice a couple of quirks in the language: ‘twilight had begun to thicken’ with its awkward echo of Lady Macbeth’s ‘Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood’; the slightly archaic feel of ‘roving predators’ and ‘swiftly’. You might surmise that the action of the novel takes place in the not very recent past.

By the end of the page, the character has found shelter, ‘a little black space carved out of the rock wall of a ridge’. The cave exhales ‘a strange and musty warmth’:

Something in her said to her that she must be cautious, and she made herself go slowly and silently. But soon the coldness of the night oncoming frightened her more than the cave with all its menacing unknowns. She ducked low into the black space and felt instantly that it would be warm enough and out of the melting wet at least. It smelled dank and thick in there. The darkness welled and seemed to pulse at the back of the cave.

More of the archaic feeling in the language, not so much in the vocabulary as in the cadence and word order: ‘Something in her said to her’, ‘the night oncoming’, ‘the melting wet’. And the surmised threat of roving predators of the first paragraph has become more immediate, though still intangible, in the dank, thick, pulsing darkness. On the strength of this page you might expect something like a novel equivalent of the TV series Alone. And you’d be mostly right.

The novel begins with a character, known only as ‘the girl’ for the first hundred pages or so, running through forest in what we come to understand is the North American continent in the late sixteenth century. She has been brought from england (the book spells all places and nationalities without initial capital letters) as a servant, and we learn that she has committed some great crime and is running to escape retribution.

A number of questions are raised early: what was the girl’s crime? will she escape her pursuers and avoid whatever attackers, human and otherwise, she might encounter (see cave above)? what are we to make of her assumption that the ‘people of this place’ are savages to be feared? will her Christian world view be affected by her experiences in the wilderness? will she find the safety, even the ‘saviour’, she hopes for? These questions create a forward impetus, and the girl’s gradually revealed back story fleshes out her character, but it’s the narration’s attention to the detail of her life in the wild that most engaged my attention.

It took me maybe a hundred pages to get over my irritation with the olde worlde language: I was going to say there are too many untos, then realised there was probably only one, but that is too many. Your mileage may vary. I was uneasy with the treatment of the Native Americans on the periphery of the narrative, but that unease was elegantly dealt with, first with humour when in a rare departure from the girl’s point of view a couple of Native children see her and fall abut laughing at her incompetence in their environment; and more sombrely in the final movement as she reflects on her possible misunderstanding of near-encounters.

I’m not a fan of the individual-against-the-wilderness genre, so I’m not really part of this book’s intended readership. I did finish it, partly because I was reading it for my Book Club and felt obliged. I can see that it’s a very good book, and I especially appreciate the way it uses the genre to probe at the roots of the genocidal encounters of colonisation, without having the heroine be adopted by a Native tribe. We’ve come a long way since Booran by M J Unwin, which I studied at school in 1962, or Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves.

The Book Club I read it for is the one that formerly banned any book-discussion that lasted more than 30 seconds, but has now become more conventional. It was paired with Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie. We had animated discussion of both books.

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Thrity Umrigar’s Space Between Us

Posted on 31 Oct 2023 | 7 comments

Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us (©2005, Harper Perennial 2007)

Bhima is a domestic servant in Mumbai – or Bombay, as she calls it. She has been with the same Parsi family for decades. She can’t sit on the family’s furniture, and physical contact is avoided, but she and the woman of the house – Sera, whom Bhima cannot think of without the respectful suffix ‘-bai’ – have formed close bonds. Bhima is the only person in whom Sera has been able to confide about her husband’s violence, and Sera has paid for the education of Bhima’s granddaughter, Maya.

When the novel opens, Bhima is living with teenage Maya in a hut in the slums. We gradually learn that Maya’s parents died of AIDS when she was seven years old, that Bhima’s husband left her decades ago in tragic circumstances, that Sera’s husband has recently died. In the present, Sera’s daughter is pregnant and her relationship with her charming husband is a bright spot in everyone’s lives. To Bhima’s shame and fury, Maya is also pregnant, and the action in the novel’s present revolves around the father’s identity.

It’s Thrity Umrigar’s tribute to ‘the real Bhima’, who was a servant in her wealthy Parsi childhood home in Mumbai. But having established the bonds of affection and mutuality between the two families, the book turns, and becomes a brilliant study of the way relationships can be close and strong but in the end tragically vulnerable to social norms and structures.

I read this book after The Secrets Between Us, a sequel published 13 years later. This isn’t something I’d recommend. On the one hand it was interesting to see passing mention of Parvati, a major character in the second book, to have the stories of Bhima’s husband and daughter dramatically realised, and to come to a fuller understanding of the ending of the second novel. But the major thunderclap reveal of the identity of the man who got Maya pregnant comes as no surprise, and it was odd to know better than all the characters when there was very little foreshadowing.

A strong point in both books is the way they enact the fine detail of changing culture. Sera, like Thrity Umrigar, is Parsi, and the book’s version of traditional Parsi culture probably didn’t win it any friends among older Parsis. In one of the book’s many flashbacks, soon after Sera marries, she and her new husband move in with his parents, and what follows is a classic mother-in-law nightmare. Banu Dubash, the mother-in-law, insists on traditional Parsi practices, specifically those built around the idea that a woman is impure when he has her periods. Reluctantly, Sera accepts that she must eat meals in her room until her periods are over. Although she is Parsi herself, she has no idea of the extent of her assumed impurity, and walks through the room where Banu is praying, provoking a deafening shriek and a torrent of abuse. Freddy, Sera’s kindly father-in-law, comes running in from the dining room. This is on page 76:

‘Oh, Freddy, thank God you are here,’ Banu said dramatically. ‘help me, darling, help me.’
Freddy looked distraught. ‘Banu, what is it, will you speak? Is it your heart?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. Just that this whole house will have to be purified now. Sera walked across the room while I was praying and she is having her monthly cycle, you see. Still, without any consideration, she interfered with my prayers.’
Sera blushed. Before she could speak, Freddy raised his voice. ‘You and your superstitious vhems and dhakharas. Crazy woman, you are. Harassing this poor child, scaring her for no good reason.’ He grew even more angry. ‘And worst of all, you’ve ruined my enjoyment of my music. A new Mozart record I’d just bought, and now your hysterical faras has made me miss the best part.’ He flung a sympathetic look at Sera and then stomped out of the room.
Banu narrowed her eyes and flashed Sera a look that made her heart stop. ‘See what you’ve done, getting my Freddy all upset?’ she said, careful to lower her voice so that it didn’t carry into the next room. ‘Is that why you entered my house, to create friction between my husband and me?’
Sera felt dizzy, as if she had drunk four beers one after the other. She took a step toward Banu and reached out to touch her hand. ‘Banu mamma, I don’t know what happened–’
‘She touched me,’ Banu screamed. ‘Deliberately, on purpose, she touched me with her impure hands. ‘Oh, God, what kind of daakan has entered my house, to make me miserable in my old age?’
This time, Gulab, the Dubashes’ servant, came into the living room. She took one look at the situation and pushed Sera toward her bedroom. ‘Baby, you go in your room for a while,’ she said authoritatively. ‘Go on, I will calm Mummy down.’

I love the way the non-English words are given without italics or explanation. I couldn’t find ‘vhem’, ‘dhakara’ or ‘faras’ with a quick web search, and I’m happy to have them be untranslatable – or rather to be left to make my own rough translations: ‘panics’, ‘idiocies’ and ‘ruckus’, perhaps? And I love the way that each of the four people in this scene are in a different relationship to traditional religious practice. The pragmatic Gulab is probably, like Bhima, Hindu. Freddy is European in his musical tastes. Sera is part of the modern world and completely unprepared for Banu’s fanatical attachment to – in her understanding – antiquated practices. But mostly what I love is the vividly realised drama of the moment, the brilliant use of dialogue.

I came across these books thanks to the Emerging Artist’s practice of plucking books with non-Anglo author names from the shelves of our local library. It’s a life-enriching practice

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Thrity Umrigar’s Secrets Between Us and the Book Club

Posted on 24 Oct 2023 | 8 comments

For years, I’ve been part of a Book Club where no one can spend more than 30 seconds talking about any book. We would eat, return books borrowed at previous meetings, each offer three books which we describe and score out of 10, then – in an order determined by a card draw – borrow up to three books each.

Over time, as most of the Club’s six members made the move to electronic books, the original idea of lending books we had enjoyed got muddied. We struggled on, meeting less frequently, two thirds of us buying books specifically so as to offer them at the Book Club.

At last we bit the bullet and agreed to try all reading the same book and discussing it. Our first title is:

Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us (HarperCollins 2018)

Thrity Umrigar emigrated from India to the USA when she was 21 years old. Since then, among other things, she has written a number of novels in English. The Secrets Between Us revisits characters from her second novel, The Space Between Us, which was published 12 years earlier, in 2006. I’m writing this without having read more than a couple of pages of the earlier novel (I managed to get hold of a copy, but it arrived too late for the meeting). Though the second novel makes frequent reference to events from the first, I didn’t feel I was missing anything.

Before the meeting: Other demands on my time mean that this has to be brief.

It’s a terrific novel set mainly in the slums of Mumbai, featuring a brilliant gallery of women characters. It begins with Bhima, who is living with her granddaughter in a hovel in the slums. For many years she was employed in a Parsi household, virtually a member of the family, but expelled when she, correctly and necessarily, accused one of the family members of wrongdoing. She has been abandoned by her husband, and her daughter and son-in-law have died of AIDS. She makes a precarious living and enables her granddaughter to attend college by finding domestic work with a number of wealthy women.

In the course of the novel, Bhima’s life is transformed by two unlikely friendships. One is with Parvati, a woman who is even poorer than she is, who was sold into prostitution as a girl but now, as an old woman, is hideously disfigured by a growth under her chin and survives by buying and selling half a dozen shrivelled heads of cauliflower each day and sleeping on a mat outside a nephew’s apartment door, for which she pays rent. The other is with Chitra, a young Australian woman, the lover of one of Bhima’s employers, who was born in India but cheerfully disregards the rigid requirements class, caste and heteronormativity.

At the risk of reducing the book to a single paragraph, the significance of the title is spelled out in an exchange between Bhima and Pavarti. Bhima was initially shocked when she realised that Chitra and her lover aren’t just good friends, but as she comes to know them and appreciate Chitra’s generosity of spirit, she is then shocked when neighbours call them ‘a very bad name’. Here’s a quote from the conversation that happens after Bhima learns about Parvati’s background as a sexual slave, and meets her former employer who tells her how she suffers from lying about Bhima’s revelations. The lump that’s mentioned is the unsightly growth under Parvati’s chin:

‘Why do we aIl walk around like this, hiding from one another?’
Parvati’s thumb circles the lump in a fast motion as she ponders the question. ‘It isn’t the words we speak that make us who we are. Or even the deeds we do. It is the secrets buried in our hearts.’ She looks sharply at Bhima. ‘People think that the ocean is made up of waves and things that float on top. But they forget – the ocean is also what lies at the bottom, all the broken things stuck in the sand. That, too, is the ocean.’

(page 243)

The book’s story could be seen as a process of bringing those broken things to the light, and at least sometimes making them whole again.

After the meeting: We were a bit tentative about the Book Club’s new MO. We ate a pleasant dinner first, with barely a mention of the book until we moved to comfortable chairs. Conversation started out a little stiffly. Someone actually read out the questions for book groups at the back of her e-book, but we realised we absolutely didn’t want to go down that route.

The main question that got tossed around was how seriously to take the pair of books. The second book (which is the one I’ve read) has some extremely improbable benign elements, including – spoiler alert – a happy ending which may be the set-up for a third book, or not. The relative ease with which characters transcend the rigid barriers of class and custom, one person felt strongly, moves the book into the genre of fantasy, or perhaps mark it as prettified for the US mass market.

Not everyone agreed. Sure, things happen that are extremely unlikely, but they are within the realms of possibility, and the good fortune of the main characters allows the situation from which they (or at least some of them) escape to be seen more clearly by contrast. There’s no pretence, for example, that Lesbians are universally embraced by Hindu society, or that there is any kind of safety net for the poor.

Whether it’s an airport novel or a serious work of art, we all enjoyed it. All except me had read and enjoyed both books. I’m now well under way with the first one, and it’s a curious experience reading some of the harsh judgements expressed in its opening scenes, knowing that they’re based on wrong assumptions.

We agreed to carry on as a Book Discussion Club.

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Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees at the Book Group

Posted on 19 Oct 2023 | 3 comments

Andrey Kurkov, Grey Bees (2018, translation by Boris Dralyuk, MacLehose Press 2020, 2022)

Before the meeting: I hadn’t heard of Andrey Kurkov before this book was nominated for the Book Group. He’s a Ukrainian novelist, children’s writer, essayist and broadcaster. In an interview on PBS early last year he said that, though he is ethnically Russian and writes in the Russian language, Putin’s invasion has made him ashamed to be Russian, and he is now considering writing only in Ukrainian. He finds it impossible to write fiction in the current situation, but he continues to write and broadcast about the war – his series of broadcasts for the BBC, ‘Letter from Ukraine’, is available online.

Grey Bees, originally written in Russian, was first published in 2018. Russia had annexed Crimea, and there was armed conflict with Russian separatists in two breakaway ‘people’s republics’ in the Donbas region in the eastern part of Ukraine. The novel is set in a time when the front between those forces stretched for about 450 kilometres (it’s now closer to three thousand). The area between the fronts is known as the ‘grey zone’. In his useful Preface to the 2020 English edition, the author explains:

Most of the inhabitants of the villages and towns in the grey zone left at the very start of the conflict, abandoning their flats and houses, their orchards and farms. Some fled to Russia, others moved to the peaceful part of Ukraine, and others still joined the separatists. But here and there, a few stubborn residents refused to budge. … No one knows exactly how many people remain in the grey zone, inside the war. Their only visitors are Ukrainian soldiers and militant separatists, who enter either in search of the enemy, or simply out of curiosity – to check whether anyone’s still alive. And the locals, whose chief aim is to survive, treat both sides with the highest degree of diplomacy and humble bonhomie.

(Page 12–13)

Sergey Sergeyich, the hero of Grey Bees, lives in a tiny village in the grey zone, one of two cantankerous old men who have refused to leave. The electricity has been cut off. He has to trek to the next village to buy food. He depends on a charity’s annual delivery of coal for heating through the savage winter. He is a beekeeper, whose emotional life focuses on the wellbeing of the beehives that spend the winter in his garden shed. His wife and daughter are long gone, and he has never really got along with Pashka, the other remainer.

The opening scenes reminded me of Czech comedies in the 1960s like The Firemen’s Ball. There, people’s lives were miserable under the Soviet regime and the comedy was subversive as well as desperately funny. Here the enemy is the war itself, and the quiet desperation of the characters is made tolerable to the reader by their comic focus on tiny issues – like the way the two men hide from each other whatever good food they’ve managed to get hold of (where good food can include a block of lard!), or Sergey’s decision to swap the street signs so he no longer lives in Lenin Street. There’s a touch of Waiting for Godot: how can anything happen so long as they are trapped in this place?

Then, as the days warm up and the buzzing of his bees becomes more demanding, Sergey decides to take them to a place that hasn’t been laid waste by the war, and we follow him on a journey south, to environments that are more friendly to him as well as his bees. He meets with kindness, and is kind in return. He sets out to visit a Tatar beekeeper he met at a conference years before, and arrives in a tiny village in Crimea that is occupied by the Russians. In the process of getting there he has to pass through Russian checkpoints, and he is looked at with suspicion on all sides: coming from Donbas, is he a separatist or a loyal Ukrainian? He’s attacked on suspicion of being one and harassed when he is assumed to be the other. An Orthodox man, he falls foul of the Russian authorities when he befriends a Muslim family.

Though terrible things happen, what shines through is Sergey’s unassuming human kindness. The background buzzing of the bees is warmly reassuring: they go about their work, and can be counted on to produce honey, which is universally welcomed.

Towards the end, when the Russian authorities meddle with one of the hives, Sergey has dreams that the bees of that hive have turned monstrously grey, and the allegorical role of the bees, which is a quiet undercurrent for most of the book, comes front and centre in some splendidly surrealistic passages.

To give you a taste of the writing, here’s a little from page 76, when Sergey is still in the village. Spring is on the way:

The sun had spread even more of its yellowness through the yard. The trampled snow had turned yellow, as had the fence, and the grey walls of the shed and the garage.
It wasn’t that Sergeyich didn’t like it – on the contrary. But he felt that the sun’s unexpected playfulness, as appealing as it may be, disrupted the usual order of things. And so, in his thoughts, he reproached the celestial object, as if it could, like a person, acknowledge that it had acted improperly.
The artillery was whooping somewhere far, far away. Sergeyich could only hear it if he wished to hear it. And as soon as he went back to his thoughts, turning into Michurin Lane, its whooping melted away, blending into the silence.

In his preface to the 2020 edition, Andrey Kurkov says that on his visits to the grey zone he ‘witnessed the population’s fear of war and possibly death gradually transform into apathy’. Sergey’s dislike of disruption, even by warmth and playfulness, and the way he can be deaf to the whoops of the artillery, are ways of showing that apathy. It’s a terrific achievement of this book that it brings tremendous energy and compassion to bear on the person lost in apathy, and never loses sight of his enduring humanity.

After the meeting: It turned out this was an excellent choice for the group – someone awarded the Chooser two gold koalas, which must come from a children’s show I’ve missed out on.

Conversation looped around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to other terrible events of recent days in the local and international scenes, sometimes becoming heated, but not acrimonious, and kept coming back to the book. I think it was Kurkov’s insistence on keeping close to the humanity of his characters, especially Sergey, focusing on what could be benign between people, even while not mitigating the horrors of the war. The father of one group member was Ukrainian, but always identified as Russian. He himself has never learned either language but he could speak a little of how the book stirred memories of his father. The rest of us lacked such a direct connection, but I think the general feel was that we came away from the book with a much more solid grasp of the depth and reach of the current war, and the centuries of Ukraine–Russia relations that preceded it.

I got blank stares when I mentioned The Firemen’s Ball.

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Winter reads 5: Nicholson Baker’s Anthologist, page 76

Posted on 4 Aug 2023 | 4 comments

This is my fifth post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76. Most of the books have been physically tiny books of poetry. This is the second novel.

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster 2009)

One of the men from my Book Group handed a copy of The Anthologist to me with a knowing look. ‘You’ll love this,’ he said.

He was right.

Paul Chowder is a minor US poet. He has had poems in The New Yorker and is on nodding terms with eminent literary figures. When the book opens he’s running spectacularly late with his introduction to an anthology he has edited, of rhyming poetry. His girlfriend, Roz, has found his procrastination unbearable and moved out. Over the next couple of weeks and almost 250 pages, he ruminates on what he wants to say in the introduction, does a half-hearted clean-up of his house and workspace, makes feeble attempts to win Roz back, and reflects on his own failings as a poet and a human being.

That’s it. It’s not exactly nail-biting stuff. I loved it.

The guts of the book is Chowder’s mind playing over the things he wants to say in the introduction. He has theories about metre that fly in the face of standard accounts, but are far from ridiculous. He spells them out in detail, with many examples. He considers the last century or so of ‘free verse’ to have been a mistake, though he admits some excellent poems have been written without rhyme. He detests enjambment. He dishes the goss about great poets of the past, and has plenty to say about key poets – especially Swinburne (too much of a good thing), Marinetti (bad), Elizabeth Bishop (good), Ezra Pound (very bad). He takes several pages to rip into Pound – the man himself and those who protect his legacy. His opening salvo gives you the general gist:

Pound … was by nature a blustering bigot – a humourless jokester – a talentless pasticheur – a confidence man.

(Page 92)

This may make it sound like a series of lit-crit essays strung together on a flimsy narrative. But that’s not so at all. It really feels that we are spending time inside the hand of a man almost totally preoccupied with matters poetical. If we learn something, that’s a side benefit. If we disagree with him, all the better. You may have to be interested in poetry to be interested in Paul Chowder: there’s no exuberant sex as in Alejandro’s Zambra’s The Chilean Poet, another excellent novel about poetry. The stakes are pretty low – will he get back with Roz, will he ever write his introduction, will he ever write a poem he thinks is any good? But I for one enjoyed it from cover to cover.

Spending a little time on page 76, I realise that we learn a lot more about Paul than I have indicated so far. The page begins with memories of his father, who used to recite two poems ‘with his fists clenched’ – ‘John Masefield’s “Cargoes” and E. E. Cummings’s poem about the watersmooth silver stallion. I had to look the latter poem up (it’s here if you’re interested): Paul Chowder’s father was more sophisticated than my parents, who sang ‘The Rose of Tralee’ and recited part of ‘The Hound of Heaven’ respectively; my older brother used to recite E. E. Cummings’s poem with ‘mudluscious’ in it.

He says in passing that he misses his parents every day – a note that is struck a number of times without further elaboration. Then his mind moves on, first to Tennyson:

Tennyson’s father was a beast. He was a violent alcoholic and an epileptic, and he was horrible to his sons. From the age of twelve on, Alfred Tennyson was home-schooled by his fierce, crazy father. When Tennyson Senior was drunk, he threatened to stab people in the jugular vein with a knife. And to shoot them. And he retreated to his room with a gun. A bad man. And eventually he died. Tennyson was liberated, and he began writing stupendous poems.

Characteristically, having made a huge value judgement, he pulls back from it:

Were they stupendous? Or were they only good? Or were they in fact not good at all? I’m not sure.

None of this may make it into the Introduction, but a constant process of drafting and redrafting is under way.

But his mind won’t stay there for long:

Last night I watched two episodes of Dirty Jobs and then went upstairs to bed after thinking that my poetry was not for shit, frankly. If I may be pardoned the expression. I got in bed, and I realised that what I wanted was to have some Mary Oliver next to me. If I had some Mary Oliver I would be saved

Now, the second most visited post on my blog is about a book by Mary Oliver, so whether by calculation or otherwise, Paul’s wanting her book next to him will strike a chord with many readers (it does with me). She was alive when the book was written, and I hope she would have been chuffed that he turned to her for salvation, even though she doesn’t use rhyme or strict metre.

If you picked up The Anthologist in a bookshop and flipped to page 76, you’d get a fair idea of what the book is: a kind of stream of consciousness of a man who is steeped in poetry and feels himself to be part of a great community of poets living and dead – a poet himself, a passionate reader, a teacher of sorts, a mind that’s alive.

I hear that Nicholson Baker has written a second book about Paul Chowder. I can’t imagine it.

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