Booklog for Charlotte

The Shark Net by Robert Drewe

It is nice to have read coming of age memoirs by literary figures of roughly the same era from opposite coasts of Australia; Clive James was born in 1939 and grew up in Sydney, Robert Drewe was born in 1943 and moved from Melbourne to Perth at a young age.  I hadn't realized the importance of shoes to teenage boys until I read these two books.  Clive James bought shoes called "brothel creepers" as soon as he could and Robert Drewe longed for desert boots, regarded by his parents as shoes worn by disreputable boys.  Of course there is our friends' son Graham, immortalized by his friends for his odd behavior of repairing his sneakers with duct tape by naming their band, Sparky's Flaw, for him.

Drewe's father was a company man for Dunlop and the family would have eaten the products if that was possible.  He paints a convincing picture of the conventional 1950s and the unforgiving social code.  He married his pregnant girlfriend at 18 and was ostracized by friends and estranged from family.  His mother died unexpectedly just after the baby was born; sometime later the family doctor took it upon himself to tell Drewe that it was not necessarily his bad behavior that had killed his mother.

An important part of the story was the figure who loomed large in Perth, the Nedlands Monster, who killed 22 people over the course of five years.  Eric Cooke had worked at Dunlop and been at the Drewe family house once on business; he was later fired for petty theft.  One of the people he killed was a high school friend of Drewe.  The killings varied from a gruesome one with a hatchet to shooting strangers in their sleep; the police had reason to assume this was not the work of one individual.  Perth changed from a big small town to a frightened city during those years.  Cloudstreet by Tim Winton also refers to the Nedlands Monster.

Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor

Audiobook.  This audiobook, read by the mother and daughter authors, was loaned to me by Mary Susan.  I had read Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees years ago and liked it.  And this one was quite pleasing too.  It begins with a trip to Greece the two took together just as Ann was finishing college and continues through Sue's decision to begin writing fiction, a trip to France they took together, Ann's realization that she wants to write as well, and her wedding.  The book came to fruition after Sue finished two novels and Ann had a child. 

Their trip to Greece brought them together as grown-up-daughter and mother-turning-50.  Ann was struggling to find her life's work, and Sue was tuned in to find newly meaningful spiritual connections.  Demeter and her daughter Persephone figured large in their travels and in their thinking.  The pomegranates of the title are important in that Persephone was tricked by Hades into eating four pomegranate seeds, thus insuring that she must continue to live in the underworld.  Because Zeus couldn't allow Demeter's mourning to kill all green things on earth, he worked it out so that she only mourns for four months a year; thus we have winter.

The subsequent trip to France was a tour led by Sue and some friends to celebrate various important female religious icons.  Some were in Paris, and some were in intriguingly obscure places.  One that was important in their travels was the Black Virgin at Rocamadour.  Jim and I spent a night there while hiking in the region and their description of the chapel brought back pleasant memories.  Sue's research for the group on the reason for a Black Virgin discounted what I had read, that is, the virgin was dark because of the discoloring smoke.  She believes the Black Mary is a legacy of ancient black goddesses and for her novel, the Black Madonna was a symbol for freedom and consolation.

I also thought of a Black Virgin I saw in the early 1990s on a bike trip in Greece at Mega Spelaion in the mountains near Kalavrita.  I first found my description of it with no mention of the color, then found a booklet about it which also didn't mention the color, but I was gratified to see the picture of the icon.  It is said to be the first icon made by Luke which he presented to Mary.  Tradition has it that three saints found it in the cave in 362.  According to the booklet, the icon has miraculously escaped five disasterous fires of the monastery, the last of which was set by the Nazis after they threw the men of the monastery off the cliff to their death.

Books to Read

Paul Auster's Invisible.  The NYT reviewer thinks it's his best.

Richard Flanigan.  An Australian writer, a favorite of Reading Matters.

Karen Armstrong's The Case for God.

The Perfect Heresy:  The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars by Stephen O'Shea.  Described In the further reading section of A Castle in the Backyard as a short, readable history of the sect and the crusades against it.

The Cave Artists by Ann Sieveking.  Also from the further reading section of A Castle in the Backyard.

Archie and Amelie:  Love and Madness in the Gilded Age by Donna Lucey

Victorian Internet:  The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage

The Spare Room by Helen Garner

Another wonderful book reviewed in Reading Matters.  It was sad to read about a woman of very nearly my own age who deals with a situation that confronts us all.  The narrator (Helen) takes in her old friend Nicola who is dying of cancer.  Nicola has run the course of all the conventional treatments and now has come to Melbourne for a useless, very debilitating and quacky sort of treatment as part of her denial of the circumstances.  She resists taking pain medication, declaring she will be fit as ever after the treatment.

Helen has tried to prepare herself to cope with the stress, hard work, and sleeplessness for the three weeks of the treatment, but finds the denial almost unbearable.

...death will not be denied.  To try is grandiose.  It drives madness into the soul.  It leaches out virtue.  It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

Helen finds herself in a state of incoherent rage when she confronts the doctor who runs the quack clinic.  She goes out on her veranda and catches sight of a neighbor's guinea pig and muses on their moronic nibbling and their pointless busyness, and calls them lumps with fur. 

What was the matter with me?  How could I hate a creature for leading its tiny, inoffensive life in the corner of somebody's yard?

And she quotes from King Lear,

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all?

The three weeks and the treatment do come to an end, and Nicola goes back to Sydney where other friends, as well as Helen, take turns caring for her in a much better setting.  Helen, along with others, is essentially successful in getting Nicola to confront her mortality in a more realistic way.

There are some lighthearted moments in the book, including some characterizations of Helen's granddaughter who lives next door.  Bessie wants to go to the airport with Helen to pick up Nicola; "I want to tell Nicola I'm five and a half.  I think she'll be very surprised."

And I loved this phrase:  as Helen waits for Nicola at a hospital she says she "refreshed my expertise in the scandalous lives of celebrities."

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

This work of fiction is based on recorded events; William Dawes was a lieutenant on the ships which brought the first convicts to Australia.  He was a scientist, knowledgeable about astronomy, mathematics and languages who left a record of the language of the indigenous people of the Sydney area.  The point of land just to the west of the Harbor Bridge is named Dawes Point and it is near that point that there remains an observatory.  He reluctantly participated in an effort to punish the tribe that mortally wounded one of the gamekeepers of the First Fleet.  He regretted his decision and told the governor he would refuse any such orders in the future; he would have been court martialled if that had been possible and instead was returned to Britain.  He never returned to Australia but worked for the abolition of slavery for the rest of his life.

The fictional character, Daniel Rooke, isolates himself from the settlement, living in a small shelter on the point, recording readings using the telescope set up in a tent.  He eventually becomes friends with some Aboriginal people, especially children who come to visit him.  The beginnings of understanding between himself and Tagaran, a 10 year old girl who is especially bright and becomes his friend, are wonderfully told.  She reminds him of his younger sister, his closest friend in the world, and he eventually comes to believe Tagaran showed him the existence of the man he could be.

He grows from being a soldier with no choices to a man willing to make difficult choices.  He realizes,

It was the simplest thing in the world.  If an action was wrong, it did not matter whether it succeeded or not, or how many clever steps you took to make sure it failed.  If you were part of such an act, you were part of its wrong.  You did not have to take up the hatchet or even to walk along with the expedition.

I'm not sure how often we encounter circumstances that are "the simplest thing in the world," but we clearly fail to consider those moral questions as we should.  Seeing the disciplined world of the British soldier through the eyes of an indigenous person affected Rooke's outlook.  In one harrowing scene, a friendly Aboriginal man is invited to attend an event which to his horror turns out to be the flogging of a man who stole food.  There's nothing that could explain to him the necessity for such an action. 

Rooke's love of the natural world and his new perspective (being in the southern hemisphere) are well expressed.  I was especially taken with this passage near the end of the book.

He could see it now as he had never seen it before:  one body of water encircling the globe, the continents nothing more than insignificant obstacles around which it effortlessly flowed.  The land, much less the people on it, was irrelevant to this enormous breathing being.

For me this is one of the top five books for 2009.

A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark is the author of an audiobook I thoroughly enjoyed for its light touch and great humor, called Memento Mori, as well as her best known book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  The latter is heavy on the message (as I remember from the film) and is a great contrast to Memento Mori.   This one is in the middle of these two.  In the midst of loving memories of the whacky folks who peopled the publishing business in London in the mid-fifties, the narrator tells the story of a very bad guy who stops at nothing to get revenge on the narrator because she called him a pisseur de copie.  Well, he was a bad writer. 

The narrator also brings to life the odd collection of folks who lived in her rooming house and neighborhood.  There's Basil and Eva, from whose apartment not a sound emanates, Wanda the Polish dressmaker, Kate the nurse who was a clean freak, and the Cypriot next door who had horrendous fights with his wife until she moved out and was replaced by her sister.

The other piece of this story is the evolution of Mrs. Hawkins, the narrator, who moves from being the very fat war widow that everyone instantly trusts, likes and respects, to being the moderate size wife of a doctor.  She marries one of the residents of the Kensington house who was a medical student at the beginning of the story.  It wasn't so much that they fell in love as that they fell into bed together and that seemed to be a permanent arrangement.

Breath by Tim Winton

Audiobook.  This is one of those books that you are sad to have finished.  The story is told by Bruce Pike, looking back on his adolescence in a small town in Western Australia.  He is befriended by a daredevil kid called Loonie (an accurate name) who introduces him to the thrill of danger.  They take up surfing, and eventually are taken under the wing of an older surfer named Bill Sanderson.  Sando takes them into ever more dangerous territory.  The first of these was to a secret place for surfing he calls Barneys.  Barney is the shark that inhabits these waters, and in describing him to the boys, Sando says, he has a grin like "Richard fuckin' Nixon."  Asked why he is called Barney, he says, "I named him after Eva's old man.  He thinks I'm a waste of skin.  He won't eat me up, right, the father-in-law, but he likes to show the ivories every now and then, just to remind me who's boss." 

Essentially Sando is a kindly guide who loves danger, but is not crazy, unlike Loonie.  Nevertheless, eventually Bruce is abandoned by Sando in favor of Loonie.  Bruce falls in with Eva, Sando's American wife, who, it turns out is quite troubled herself.  It takes Bruce years to overcome the trauma of her method of thrill-seeking. 

All this seems awfully dark, but it was a pure pleasure to listen to.  There are lots of funny bits and then there's Winton's elegant descriptions of surfing and his love of the water.  I won't forget the image he creates with the phrase, "men dancing on water."