Booklog for Charlotte

Gilgamesh by Joan London

What a wonderful book.  I read it based on the recommendation of Tony's Book World, who lists it among his favorite Australian novels. 

Unlike several novels I've read recently, it has narrative arc, an intense and eventful one at that.  It is the story of a young woman who grows up on a farm in southwestern Australia.  Her family is visited by her English cousin Leopold and his Armenian friend Aram.  Leopold introduces her to his most beloved book, Gilgamesh, and Aram leaves her pregnant.  She makes her way to Armenia with her infant son to find Aram just as World War II is about to begin.  And of course she has no money.  She lands in Yerevan and spends the war years there and is rescued just in the nick of time by Leopold who takes her to Aleppo in Syria where she stays in an orphanage.  Along come some Australian soldiers at the end of the war, and she and Jim (her son) are repatriated.  Wherever she is, Edith meets the most amazing characters, manages to avoid catastrophe, and is able to endure hardship. 

The story is told in an understated way that I found gripping.  While the focus is on Edith, countless other vivid characters emerge.  I loved Tati, the elderly blind poet that Edith takes care of in Yerevan along with the wheelchair-bound musician Nevart who becomes the darling of the Russians occupying the city.  Miss Anoosh, the tiny Armenian woman who ran the orphanage in Aleppo, was the only survivor of the 1915 slaughter of the Armenians. 

Five Bells by Gail Jones

By far the most beloved character in this book is Sydney, with a focus on Circular Quay.  The descriptions by the four other characters, three of them newcomers to Sydney, of the wonders of that location were each beautiful in themselves.  Circular Quay is the spot in Sydney where the train comes to the harbor between the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House, where ferries take off for other beautiful locations on the harbor.  Besides two of the most beautiful structures on earth that humans have created, this spot affords views of that matchless body of water.  Gail Jones, who teaches at the University of Western Sydney, has written a real love letter to her city.

The story recounts the visits of each of the four characters to Circular Quay so that we learn each of their stories in the course of a day.  Each has a burden of sadness and each deals with that burden with varying success.  Each is a compelling character, but my favorite is a Chinese woman who has lived through the horror of the cultural revolution.  At one point she notes to herself that she is old, at another, that she is not old at all.  She comes to the Circular Quay to catch the ferry across the harbor each week; along the way she always exchanges a few words with her friend Aristos, an old fisherman who now sells ice cream and she always catches up with a homeless woman named Mary. 

On numerous occasions this sad book evokes great beauty and pleasingly smart insights.  As the characters reveal themselves to us, the complexity that exists in all of us is apparent.  In the course of this poignant day, the characters' varied life experiences are close to the surface. 

While other books by Gail Jones are available at the UVa library, this one is not.  It is a new book, but I was able to get it through Amazon at a very low cost.  I took the trouble to do so because of Reading Matters' enthusiasm for it and I'm so glad I did.

On a personal note, when Jim and I were in Sydney, we stayed in a hotel that was in walking distance of Circular Quay.  We were there countless times to see the opera house and bridge, to catch ferries, to people-watch, and to visit the library where wifi gave us access to family and friends.  It began to feel like home to us.

The Broken Shore by Peter Temple

I had low expectations for this police procedural, but found myself listening with growing enthusiasm.  It follows many of the usual dictates for novels of this type.  The detective is competent, unlike many of his fellows, is trying to quit his bad habits, and has alienated his wife.  In this case Joe Cashin is trying to quit smoking, is recovering from a terrible gunshot wound that has left him in constant pain, and wishes his ex-wife would let him see his son. 

Joe has two big unkempt poodles and they turn up regularly in the most appealing way.  At the very outset Joe is taking a walk  -- he has moved back to the countryside outside Melbourne where he grew up to work in a less stressful environment -- and he describes the dogs' take on the world this way:

When he was near the house, the dogs, black as licorice, came out of the trees, stopped, heads up, looked around as if seeing the land for the first time.  Explorers.  They turned their gaze on him for awhile, started down the slope.  He walked the last stretch as briskly as he could.  As he put his hand out to the gate they reached him, their curly black heads tried to nudge him aside, insisting on entering first, strong back legs pushing. 

The world Joe works in is truly awful; there's the casual racism, the murderous racism, the police corruption, the pedophelia, and the torture.  He does have a colleague, higher in the food chain, who is a good guy and a good friend.  He takes in a swagman, slang for itinerant worker, who helps bring a bit of order to Joe's life.  And a romantic interest develops with a woman he knew slightly as a teenager. 

A thoroughly satisfying book.

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

Ned Kelly is a heroic figure for Australians.  He was not a founding father, not a great leader of the country, not a great inventor or thinker.  He was a bushranger, that is, an outlaw, in the 1870s.  Peter Carey wanted to explore what it is about Australians that makes them find Kelly a heroic figure.  Of course there was also a long letter that Kelly wrote to defend himself in 1879 reproduced here that inspired Peter Carey to recreate Kelly's life through his own voice as imagined by Carey.  A quick look will tell you why Carey was so taken with the letter.

The story is told through documents Carey imagined Ned Kelly would write to his daughter to help her understand his life and to defend his actions.  His daughter was very young when Kelly was hung and he never saw her.  One device that Carey uses to convey Ned Kelly is to replace crude language with "adjectival" or occasionally "effing."  So there's a lot of "Get your adjectival self out of here, before I adjectival kill you."  And this is to protect the daughter...

Ned Kelly was the son of an Irish convict sent to Australia; his mother's family members were often in trouble with the law.  The Irish were oppressed by the English in Australia and believed any effort to develop the land and live the farmer's life was made impossible by the hateful police.  This is basically Kelly's defense for actions he took to protect his mother (he was the oldest son), and later for robbing two banks and shooting policemen.  He was convinced his choices were limited.  I was not quite convinced.

As to why the Australians so revere Kelly, Peter Carey in an interview says he believes it can be traced to being a penal colony.  He spoke of an old friend from a wealthy background who had lived in Britain for years being able to summon up great anger at the way the police treated Kelly and others.  

This is a wonderfully rich and complex book and I could go on for ages, but I must mention just one or two other points.  First, the transvestism that crops up.  To the family's great shame, Kelly's father sometimes was seen wearing a dress.  Kelly finds the dress while the father is in prison and burns it.  It turns up again in a young man who eventually becomes a member of the gang.   Kelly's wife tells him that Irish rebels wore dresses as a disguise. 

In the end the Kelly gang was set upon by a huge number of police -- 30 men.  His defense involved homemade armor which left their legs exposed.  He was captured and stood trial for killing three policeman.  Another impetus for Carey to write this book was the work of Sidney Nolan.  His paintings of Ned Kelly in armor are pretty wonderful. 

Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville

The sequel to The Secret River (my blog entry here) is the story of Will Thornhill's daughter Sarah.  The story of her discovery of her father's part in the massacre of Aborigines that is central to that book is told here by her. It is a rich and complex story and includes appealing characters (except for the wicked stepmother).

Sarah was born in 1816, at the very end of The Secret River story; in her youth, the blacks were mostly absent from the white settlement in the Hawksbury River area.  She falls in love with her brother's friend Jack, whose father was a convict and his mother a black woman.  Turns out the family is ok with the friendships, but marriage to Jack is out of the question.  After her brother's death by shipwreck while hunting seals with Jack, the family learns that Will (the brother) had a Maori wife and daughter in New Zealand.  Jack agrees to bring the daughter to the family and ugliness erupts.

Sarah is fortunate to be taken out of the morass by a recent arrival to New South Wales, an Englishman who grew up in Ireland.  Sarah asks Daunt about the moral question of the English in Australia. 

I couldn't tell you, he said.  I think about it and I don't know.  But it does put me in mind of the tenants back home.  The Irish.  Once upon a time they owned the whole of Ireland.  Then the English came.  My lot.  Took it away, one acre at a time.  Now there's not an Irishman left hardly that owns his own land.  No doubt about him, Daunt was never a man to jump the way you thought he would.

This paragraph reveals both the pleasing and interesting characters in the book and the language which by design lacks Grenville's beautiful lyrical prose descriptions.  Nevertheless, this is wonderful novel that satisfies my requirements for excellence.  The characters seem real and complete and the moral questions clearly posed without a pat answer.

Fly Away Peter by David Malouf

This short novel is set in Queensland and opens a few years before World War I begins.  Jim's love of birds has resulted in a great change in his life, as Ashley, the young owner of the great estate, recognizes his gift and asked him to create a sanctuary.  Early on, we learn that Jim

... had a map of all this clearly in his head, as if in every moment of lying here flat on his belly watching some patch of it for a change of shape or colour that would be a small body portraying itself, he were also seeing it from high up, like the hawk, or that fellow in his flying-machine.  He moved always on these two levels, through these two worlds:  flat world of individual grassblades, seen so close up that they blurred, where the ground-feeders darted about striking at worms, and the long view in which all of this part of the country was laid out like a relief-map in the Shire Office -- surf, beach, swampland, wet paddocks, dry forested-hill-slopes, jagged blue peaks. 

Knowing that Jim could not avoid the contagion of war fever, I read this lovely section of the book slowly.  On a visit to Brisbane that coincided with the terrible news of the losses of Gallipoli, he begins to feel the tug and eventually joins up. 

Eventually we are taken to the horror of Flanders and to provide relief, I found locations of the battles on a map and read online the difference between an estaminet and a cafe (hard to say, really).  One unforgettable image Malouf gives us is the closeness of non-war life in the region to the trenches. 

Often, as Jim later discovered, you entered the war through an ordinary gap in a hedge.  One minute you were in a ploughed field, with snowy troughs between ridges that marked old furrows and peasants off at the edge of it digging turnips or winter greens, and the next you were through the hedge and on duckboards, and although you could look back and still see farmers at work, or sullenly watching as the soldiers passed over their land and went slowly below ground, there was all the difference in the world between your state and theirs.

And it's one devastating image after another.  The idea of the mechanization of war that occurred with this war is not an unfamiliar idea, but Malouf's poetry makes it real again.  After Jim has been at this for some time,

Packed again into a cattletruck, pushed in hard against the wall, in the smell of what he now understood, Jim had a fearful vision.  It would go on forever.  The war, or something like it with a different name, would go on growing out from here till the whole earth was involved; the immense and murderous machine that was in operation up ahead would require more and more men to work it, more and more blood to keep it running; it was no longer in control.

Drylands by Thea Astley

Audiobook.  Drylands is a shrinking village well inland from the coast in the Brisbane area that has been suffering a drought for some years.  Perhaps it is the lack of water that makes the men so hateful toward women and the women so inclined to inertia until they have no choice but to act. 

The village is revealed to us through individual stories of inhabitants who appear in each others' stories.  There's Janet, a widow who keeps the newspaper shop and hopes someday someone will buy one of the books she has stocked.  She spends her free time trying to write.  And there's Lannie who, having calculated the number of lunches she has fixed for her husband and 6 sons, drives off and finds she can rebuild her life.  The pub is the Legless Lizard, owned by an American man from New Orleans and his wife who grew up in Brisbane.  Two thugs take an interest in the wife so that she must flee to a nearby town where they eventually find her.  The violence or oppression is sometimes focused on the women or Aborigines and sometimes is nearly random. 

A more pitiless landscape could hardly be imagined, but Drylands is a compelling and beautifully written read.  The kind acts of the sympathetic characters alleviates the grim and lonely life.

My Brother Jack by George Johnston

The autobiographical nature of My Brother Jack is apparent from the outset.  The narrator David, born before World War I in a lower class suburb of Melbourne tells about his parents who both served in the war overseas.  When the parents returned, the house became a haven for men his mother brought home from the hospital and was litered for years with crutches, artificial legs, and men blind or missing limbs.  His father was never very successful and became an angry violent man, who beat his sons on Sunday evenings just for good measure.  His older brother Jack put a stop to his beatings by the strength of his own will; David's stopped when the doctor had to be called for his injuries. 

David was apprenticed at age 14 to a lithography firm, a setting he describes with affection for the men he worked with.  He began leaving home an hour earlier in the morning to roam the wharf area.

...I could go wandering around the waking wharves, and for the first time in my life I came to be aware of the existence of true beauty, of an opalescent world of infinite promise that had nothing whatever to do with the shabby suburbs that had engulfed me since my birth. 

He began to write pieces about the beauty of the ships he secretly sends to the newspaper under the pseudonym Stunsail.  Eventually he became a "golden boy" at the newspaper and by the time World War II arrives, he is valued as an asset to the war effort and chose to write about the war rather than become a soldier.

He drifts into marriage with a perfectly turned-out woman who installs them in a new, treeless suburb that contrasts sharply with the chaotic shabby household where he grew up.  Before long David is bored with her, the shallow cocktail party conversation she so enjoys and the sterile house where he lives.  He is actually nostalgic about the his boyhood and seems to forget why he worked to escape it.

His beloved brother Jack was the quintessential Australian man, patriotic, confident with women at an early age, a man of action, always ready to dive into the fray, sure of his choices.  David defines himself in contrast to Jack and while he admires his brother, he just would not be that man.  His views are nuanced, he is self-critical, and he is not always decisive. The contrast between the two is brought sharply into focus through their experiences of World War II.  Not surprisingly, Jack enlists as soon as war is declared while David is secretly relieved to find he will be writing for the newspaper rather than fighting.  During his training, Jack is hurt in a freak accident and is never able to serve overseas.  David, on the other hand, travels all over the world and becomes a well-known beloved war correspondent.  David seems pained to find himself the hero, and his Jack stuck at home.

I enjoyed this little commentary on Australian-speak that rang true from my reading:

It was then, and to a large degree still is, an inviolate Australian practice to make contractions of all personal names longer than one syllable and to expand those that are monosyllabic.  So that, for example, while John almost invariable became "Johnno" and Jack "Jackie," names like Minnie, David, Gertrude, Emma, and Elizabeth were only used in their shortened forms of Min, Dave, Gert, Em, and Lizzie.

Now let me try to say why I loved this book so much:  there is the coming of age story, the complicated relationship of brothers, the revelation of a different world (Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s), the masterful storytelling, the appreciation of beauty in the most unusual places.  Perhaps the best part for me was George Johnston's ability to look at himself and his life critically and write about it with blazing honesty.  Or perhaps I most loved the fondness he showed as he brought to life an era in Melbourne that had ended.   

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

This mysterious and atmospheric story begins with the careful preparations for a picnic for the students of a posh girls' boarding school located in the countryside near Melbourne in 1900.  After a meal at the picnic grounds of a local rock formation called Hanging Rock, four girls begin to climb to the rocks with admonitions to return within the hour.  Three of the girls are the smartest, most beloved, most beautiful girls, while the other is described as the college dunce.  Much later, Edith, the dunce, returns hysterical and unable to say what happened to the others.  At some unknown point, one of the two teachers along on the trip also disappeared. 

A week later Irma, the richest and most beautiful of the girls, was recovered through the efforts of a young man visiting his uncle who lives in the area, along with his pal, who looks after the uncle's horses.  She is unaccountably missing her corset, and while her hands are scratched and bleeding, her bare feet are untouched.  And like Edith, she does not remember anything that happened after the girls began climbing toward the rocks.

Although great efforts are made to find the others, not a trace is discovered.  The papers are full of the story and the school implodes in short order; the innocent as well as the meanest members of the school community suffer alike.

The book was made into the well-known movie in 1975 by Peter Weir that is credited with kick-starting the Australian film industry.  It is the eerie and haunting nature of the story that makes it so appealing.  The story is told as if it happened, and people began to believe it did.  Interest in the location grew significantly. 

And then there's the last chapter of the book that was left out at the suggestion of the publisher.  They believed that it took the mystery out of the story and that if it had been included, the film would not have been made.  Apparently Lindsay had misgivings about removing the chapter, and gave it to her literary agent John Taylor to publish after her death.  Well, fortunately for me, the university library had a copy of this chapter.  Rather than ruining the mystery, it hinted at ways to think about how people might vanish into thin air.  I found it a satisfying way to end a wonderful read.    

The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville

I had a very hard time becoming accustomed to the tone of this book.  The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville is one of my favorite books and I was quite surprised by some of the strange awkwardness of this one.   I thought at one point the book must be a writing exercise of some sort, the assignment being to write ludicrous internal monologue to convey unrealistic characters and at the same time to use italics on almost every page.  The italics denote a concept that tells the reader this is a concept. 

I did keep reading and by the end I got over the characters' big ugly ears and unraveling tee shirt.  And I find that I long to go back to the bush town of Karakarook with its bridge bent by a past flood, its corrugated iron rooftops, and the blistering heat.  And there's the flirtatious Chinese butcher who has dripping in his display window.  Yes, dripping is what you might think, fat for cooking made from unusable parts of the animal.  I found it has made a comeback if you have confidence in the Meat Trade News Daily.

Felicity is perhaps the most ludicrous character. The wife of Hugh the bank manager, she takes up projects to exercise her "idea of perfection" and over the years these have included pottery, learning French, quilting, putting away her unused quilting fabrics in the proper categories, and having a child.   But the best “interest” turned out to be herself.  She spends hours using crèmes, lotions, and "the bruised oatmeal face-pack program."  She figures out which facial expressions are the most likely to cause lines which eventually become wrinkles.  This results in her decision to limit the number of smiles for Hugh to two a night and necessitaties a quick trip to the bathroom for a moment to smooth moisturizer around the corners of the mouth after each smile.

One of the main characters is Douglas Cheeseman, a bridge engineer with vertigo who has come from Sydney to tear down and replace the unsafe bridge.  He's constantly second-guessing himself and has no confidence, as this passage from an early visit to the site with locals who will do the work shows:

He seemed a part of the circle of men, but he was not, not really.  He sat on his share of the log they had rolled over near the fire and smiled uneasily when he was not dealing with the curried egg and lettuce.  They talked among themselves, jerking out the words too quickly for him to catch, getting rid of them as if they were hot.  They had no problems understanding each other, but to Douglas it was like a foreign language of which he could catch the odd phrase.  That is piss-poor, he heard.  My word.

Another visitor from Sydney is Harley Savage, in town to help set up a heritage museum.  She, of the unraveling tee shirt, is equally uncertain of herself, and covers all the mirrors in the house where she's staying.  People go by different rules in Karakarook, she observes:

You did not just pick out the best bits of life.  You took the whole lot, the good and the bad.  You forgave people for being who they were, and you hoped they would be able to forgive you.  Now and again you were rewarded with the small pleasure of being able to laugh, not uproariously but genuinely, at a small witticism offered by someone who was usually a bore.

The awkward Harley and Douglas literally bump into each other more than once and, as the reader has guessed, things develop.  And the town learns to love them both.