Booklog for Charlotte

January has been Australian Literature Month

 

Reading Matters designated January as Australian Literature Month and has read and reviewed Australian books.   The weekly "round-ups" have links to all who have sent their own reviews of Australian books, as well as links to interviews, book give-aways, and more.  It was Reading Matters' Top Ten Australian novels that I consulted before a trip to Australia where I discovered Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda. And that was the beginning....

This month I've been trying to figure out what it is about Australian literature that makes it so different.  Perhaps it's the combination of vibrant plots about people that include an exploration of moral issues, like Tim Winton's Cloudstreet, Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant, and David Malouf's Remembering Babylon.  I love the presence of the strange history of Australia itself in novels like Kate Grenville's The Secret River and from another era George Johnston's My Brother Jack.  But of course that's just scratches the surface.

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.    

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

Audiobook.  A very smart story centered on Katey who came to Manhattan from Brooklyn to make her way in the mid 1930s.  She becomes friends with Eve who left her family's money behind in Indiana.  They met the perfectly attired Tinker who treats them to the wonders of high-end Manhattan.  The descriptions of what you can do with money in 1938 in Manhattan is like having a very good martini with 2 big olives or perhaps a sidecar made with fresh lemon in a glass rimmed with sugar.  Katey tells the story of their times together from the vantage point of her very successful life in 1966.

The description by Katey of the outfit Eve chose for a night at the Restaurant 21 is masterful:

Her last minute dress was a red silk number with a scooped neckline and she had apparently traded up to her best support bra because the tops of her breasts could be seen from 50 feet in a fog.  She had been careful not to spoil the impression with jewelry.  In a small red lacquered box she kept a pair of graduation day diamonds.  On her ears the studs provided a nice little sparkle that complemented her dimples when she smiled.  But she knew better than to wear them to a place like this where one had nothing to gain from formality and everything to lose by comparison. 

Later Katey, in describing an encounter she is about to have with Tinker, says

As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion whether they are triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment, if the next thing you are going to say makes you feel better, then it's probably the wrong thing to say.  This is one of the finer maxims that I have discovered in life, and you can have it, since it's been of no use to me. 

I rarely have strong feelings about the readers of audiobooks, which is as it should be.  But Rebecca Lowman was exceptional and I wondered if she was just perfect for this book or if she's always so good.

The title Rules of Civility refers to the list of 110 rules that George Washington recorded as a young man, presumably as he considered how to become a successful person.  They appear as an appendix to this book.

I found the book to be a treat from beginning to end.

 

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. 

Montana, 1948 by Larry Watson

I read this based on the enthusiasm of KevinfromCanada's blog; he used a word he rarely uses to describe it:  exquisite.  The confounding thing about this book is that I can't quite figure out what makes it exquisite.  How is it that the author ratchets up the intensity?  I'm not sure I will find the answer to that question.

The story is set in a part of the country I've never been in (I've gotten as far as South Dakota and it is a region that draws me in) and the time is 1948 when I was only 3 years old.  But so much of the life he describes felt like the one I experienced in the 1950s in the countryside of Virginia.  So I loved the book because the place and time feel so real to me. 

The narrator is a man in his 50s remembering events that occurred when he was 12.  In the Prologue, we learn that the events are traumatic and will split his family, the most powerful family in town, apart.  The narrator's father is the lawyer-turned-sheriff, his choices having been dictated by his father.  The dreadful events result in the sheriff having to make untenable choices, Greek myth type of choices.  We learn about the anguish in the decision-making process through the 12 year old's overheard conversations.  The process by which the sheriff came to his decision was admirable; he was a deliberate and conflicted hero, not an instinctive one.  I guess the unlikely hero is the most appealing one.

Perhaps this is the heart of the wonder of this book; the ordinary man whose decency trumps all.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

One of the most striking images used by Julian Barnes in this book about memory is the Severn Bore.  This phenomenon is a wave that occurs in the tidal basin of the Severn River when the river runs upstream because of a tide.  The largest bores occur in the spring when the water is at the highest levels.  Here's a link to a website about the Severn Bore.

Tony Webster, now in his 60s, tells the story of a group of his school friends, followed by a brief survey of his own life.  His review of their friendship and his life was occasioned by a bequest made by the mother of a girlfriend with whom he had a brief and stormy relationship.  Ultimately he receives a copy of a letter he sent to the ex-girlfriend and his friend with whom she had taken up.  He is shocked by his own cruelty and is forced to reconsider his view of himself and his relationship to loved ones.  This evidence of a forgotten self is as dramatic as a river running backwards.

Throughout the book are hints and references to a more accurate view of an event that in truth may be unknowable.  Here are a few passages I highlighted as I read the book.

Old Joe Hunt said when arguing with Adrian:  that mental states can be inferred from actions.  That's in history -- Henry VIII and all that.  Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true:  that you can infer past actions from current mental states.

And later:

...he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought.  Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite:  we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it.  And call the result common sense.

I love this one:

What was the line Adrian used to quote?  "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."

And this:

Veronica's account of her parents' deaths--yes, even her father's--had touched me more than I would have thought possible.  I felt a new sympathy for them--and her.  Then, not long afterwards, I began remembering forgotten things.  I don't know if there's a scientific explanation for this--to do with new affective states reopening blocked-off neural pathways.  All I can say is that it happened, and that it astonished me.

I could go on, but will resist.  It's hard to avoid being conscious of the implications for one's self and thinking uncomfortable thoughts.  Man Booker Prize winner for 2011.

Here it is near the end of August and I find I must add to this post, prompted by Annette's question about the ending of this book.  Before I read the book, I saw comments in John Self's post on the book in The Asylum that explained the mysterious end.  I'm not sure I should use the word "explain" for the discussion in those comments as I found the explanations far-fetched, but have none of my own.  I was impressed with those explanations, but ultimately I think we are meant to remain in the dark about what happened and that this state is not uncommon in the goings-on among humans.  I myself am often mystified by what people say and do.