Booklog for Charlotte

The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway

This 1989 autobiography tells the story of a truly rare person, a brilliant academic born in Australia who came to the US to study when she was 25. She was the first woman to be president of Smith College. This is the story of her childhood on the family's 32,000-acre sheep station in western New South Wales, her teenage years in Sydney, and college years at the University of Sydney. Her name came up by chance during a grocery-store chat with someone I worked with years ago. Shortly after that, I heard interviews with Terry Gross that were replayed after she died this spring.

Her parents acquired the property because her father was a veteran of the First World War; the two of them made a success of the enterprise through years of hard work, good decisions, and great privations. Jill is the third child and in the time of her childhood, their work was paying off. Then a multi-year drought combined with no access to transportation and a shortage of manpower during World War II resulted in the death of all the sheep. When she was 11, her father died, and she and her mother moved to Sydney. Though they never lived as a family again at Coorain, it became wildly successful, probably through her mother's knowledge and skill, even applied from a great distance.

As a student of history, she came to understand that the connection to Britain, the Australian vision of Britain as the homeland, was wrong-headed. Australia needed to see itself as a Southern Pacific nation and that economic ties to Britain were eroding. She began to see the ANZAC celebrations of the bravery of troops at Gallipoli differently, "Colonial troops had been sent on an ill-conceived and bungled mission by a callous British government which could afford to run the risk with troops whose parents, wives, and children were not voters at home." I was glad to see this, given my surprise at the take expressed by Alan Moorehead quoted in a book I read by Thornton McCamish.

In her early twenties she regularly drove from Sydney to Coorain, about 500 miles away. She passed through relatively lush countryside, and then through scrub that produced wheat successfully in good years, but only heartbreak in the dry years. Great Australian painting recorded the blazing sun, red dust, and broken hearts in the early years and she wondered why the fertile slopes were not celebrated. She noted defeated figures like Ned Kelly and poor farmers predominated in Australia rather than triumphant figures such as Daniel Boone or Buffalo Bill. She concluded it involved how the first settlers encountered the landscape. I would say that a bleak outlook was not unreasonable. Though American settlers had plenty of heartbreak, a much greater percentage of the land in North America supported subsistence farming from the outset. Australia as a dumping ground for city-dwelling criminals surely echoed through the generations, though the later Australians tried to suppress that memory. It seems to me the Ned Kelly story would resonate.

She and two men friends graduated at the top of their class at the University and the three of them applied for prestigious work in the foreign service in Canberra. The two men were accepted into the program while she was rejected for being "too good looking" and "too intellectually aggressive." She came to believe that to be successful she needed to leave Australia; she applied to graduate school at Harvard because many of the historians she most admired taught there.

I loved and admired this book and am looking forward to reading True North, the next in her autobiographical series.

Jill Ker Conway, The Road to Coorain, Knopf, 1989, 238 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott

Kim Scott won his first Miles Franklin Award in 2000 and was the first indigenous writer to win that prize. I listened to his winner of the 2011 Miles Franklin as an audiobook, then bought it for my kindle. And I was amply rewarded for each way of experiencing the book.

This is the story of interactions between the Noongar people and the early arrivals of Europeans in the area of Albany, Western Australia, in this story set beginning in the 1820s. The main character is the wonderful and talented Bobby Wabalanginy, born when many were dying of the disease brought by the Europeans. Dr. Cross, when his time as doctor for the English outpost ended, became a booster for settlement in that remote location, touting the good connections with the native population. Though he had a close connection to a man named Wunyeran and understood that grants from the European governor failed to recognize the native rights to land, he too saw the indigenous population in terms of their usefulness and ability to become more like the Europeans, "civilized." From the point of view of both the Europeans and the Noongars, this book observes the shift of the power differential as the Europeans no longer needed them to survive and came to outnumber them.

But, Bobby, you fall in love with Bobby. He was loved and trusted by the Noongars and the Europeans. He was a quick learner and a wonderful performer. The Noongars were joined by some of the Europeans to see a dance:

...Bobby started playing. He did his shipboard dance:  the rise and fall. The boys caught on, bobbing like things floating in the water and the wave moving along them; and Bobby took little steps side to side, like on the deck of a ship. The men lay down, and Bobby walked across their moving bodies, like the boat in the harbor going from ship to shore. Walking on the waves, see? And then he was staggering side to side and mimed lifting a bottle to his lips: that dance the sailors do.

He improvised a dance that mimed Dr. Cross on his walks, picking flowers and feathers and turning pages of a book. Everyone laughed at his cheekiness and clever improvisations. At the time Bobby was very young and he trusted the "horizon people" for many years, but eventually that changed: 

My people and I (he winked) are not so good traders as we thought. We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar and tea and blankets that we'd lose everything of ours. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn't want to hear ours....

The descriptive language in this book is remarkable. Here are three separate instances:

Drops of water fell in clusters from the straggly trees and prickly shrubs with a sound like tiny footsteps rushing and dancing all around them.

In the afternoon, Dr. Cross and his friends took them to a piano in one of the huts, and the music rose and fell over them like a waterfall, like a wave that kept rising and yet fell so surprisingly gentle and made them feel fresh. The pianist's hands danced across black and white, and that hand-dance made the music and did not just follow the sound.

But the river on the rocks sounded like someone laughing softly. Chuckling. As rivers and people do. The same.

And the title That Deadman Dance? This was the dance that came after the invaders arrived with their guns.

Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance, originally Picador, 2010, 400 pages (I listened to the audiobook and read the kindle version). Available from Amazon, published by Bloomsbury USA.

First Person by Richard Flanagan

Early in his career the 2014 Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan ghost-wrote a book about Australia's greatest con man John Friedrich and this book is a fictional retelling of that experience. The narrator Kif is a long-time drinking buddy/friend of Ziggy Heidl's body guard Ray and through this connection he gets the job. He is in dire need of money to support his family, and accepts the terms of the job that require a completed manuscript prior to payment. Ziggy has perpetrated a $700 million fraud. He is on his way to jail and believes the bankers he defrauded plan to kill him.

Kif spends hours with Ziggy unable to get any facts that could be useful for writing the memoir that must be completed in six weeks. They meet in an office in the publisher's building and Ziggy is often on the phone, making a new deal or arranging to meet his attorneys. One day after Ziggy leaves the room, Kif checks the phone to see who Ziggy called last. It was a pizza joint, not someone he was making a deal with. His methods are described here:

At lunch he impressed on me that Cape York was a big project financed by a venture capital firm out of Seattle, while an hour later he said it was all a ridiculous media beat-up. By mid-afternoon it was the pet project of a Singapore media mogul whose anonymity he needed to protect.

He contradicted his own lies with fresh lies, and then he contradicted his contradictions....The necessarily incomplete nature of Heidl's stories, rather than denying their supposed truth, instead confirmed it. I am not saying Heidl consciously made sure his slow-drip stories never quite matched, and were often entirely opposed. But as an instinctive ruse it was more than effective. For the challenge to reconcile such outrageous lies lay not with him, but with you, the listener.

The short time that Kif spent with Ziggy was feverish and intense and Flanagan's frenetic writing reflects that. 

But I ignored it because the words were beginning to come. He was entering me and there were more and more words, and with each word somehow less and less of me. I was a man unmoored, once more adrift in a wild sea. Only this time, I did not know it. I had let him in. I did not know it, and all that time Heidl did.

As was the case with the non-fictional John Friedrich, Ziggy killed himself and the book was completed and published. Kif never recovered and though he became a successful reality TV producer, could never become the writer or the person he wanted to be.

Several times Flanagan refers to Mr. Moon, the entrance to Luna Park in Melbourne, similar to the park in Sydney that I photographed. Here's what Kif says

...I saw shaping out of the darkness and sheets of rain a great gaping mouth, a smile perhaps five meters high, framed within a giant white face, replete with staring, satanic blue eyes, above which red and yellow rays radiated into a vaguely oriental proscenium....There was something hellish about his vast, blood-red lips, the deeply etched lines of his cheeks, his odd arched plucked eyebrows--a grubby, grinning Mephisto.

He's a bloody funhouse mirror, Ray said. Look at Heidl long enough and all you can see is yourself.

 

Perhaps Richard Flanagan had reason to write about this other than the 2016 US election, but Ziggy sure does have a familiar look. And then there's this:

If he had just jogged along until the new century he might have brought whole countries down rather than just his own business and a few investment banks.

This book rings distressingly true to to me as I have watched horror show of the Republicans and all those others who benefitted from the rise of a grotesque showman in our country.

The last chapter is Kif's coda and has a lovely memory of his youth in Tasmania. 

When Ray and I were young we had often walked and sometimes run up remote tracks to the mountain top. Run! It was inconceivable now. The joy, the wonder of it all. The beauty that was our gaze. Everything we saw sparkled in its glory. The loveliness of it, the sweetness of it. We could not believe that such beauty was ours. We had nothing and we had this. It was beyond explanation. We did not know the beauty was us.

I appreciated that high note. It is an intense and wonderful book and now I want to think about someone with more consciousness of their Buddha nature.

 Richard Flanagan, First Person, Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, 352 pages (I read the kindle version). Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

Our Man Elsewhere: In Search of Alan Moorehead by Thornton McCamish

This unconventional ramble through the life of the author of two popular history books that I dearly loved (The White Nile and The Blue Nile) was a pleasant walk indeed. It was a few months before our trip to Australia that I read another of his books, Cooper's Creek, about the ill-fated exploration of the interior of Australia.

He was an ambitious journalist who left Australia as soon as he could for the more exciting Europe. In 1937 he was posted to Gibraltar and began sending dispatches about the Spanish Civil War. He got his wish for more excitement and fame when the war began. He became famous for his stories of the war in North Africa, one of the most famous journalists of the period. He was known for bringing the war to life and having read his popular histories, I can imagine that. After the war, he turned his hand to novel-writing and by all accounts was pretty bad at it. 

His fortunes rose again in 1956 with the publication of his book Gallipoli, about that dreadful massacre of Australian soldiers in Turkey during World War I. My admittedly uninformed understanding of this battle is that Churchill was willing to put Australian but not British soldiers on the line in this dubious undertaking. But McCamish quotes Moorehead's book:

'No matter how often the story is retold there is still an actuality about it, a feeling of suspense and incompleteness,' Moorehead wrote. ' Although nearly half a century has gone by, nothing yet seems fated about the day's events, a hundred questions remain unanswered, and in a curious way one feels that the battle might still lie before us in the future; that there is still time to make other plans and bring it to a different ending.' 

Critics loved the book, but there was a dissent by Norman Podhoretz in The New Yorker, who accused Moorehead of pandering to a wrong-headed British sentimentality about the glory of sacrifice. (Even a neocon is right twice a day.) The Duff Cooper Memorial Prize was presented to Moorehead by Winston Churchill. I hardly know what to say.

McCamish puts himself into the story; he was a dedicated fan and made pilgrimages to the places important in Moorehead's life, hoping to feel his presence. Moorehead was an amazing figure:  he came to know countless famous figures, he worked very hard at researching and writing, and he was an inveterate traveler. One question that comes up is why he disappeared from consciousness. His great talent was tapping into the issues of the moment and the moment does pass. 

Thornton McCamish, Our Man Elsewhere:  In Search of Alan Moorehead, Schwartz Publish Pty Ltd, 2016, 336 pages (I read the Kindle version). Available from Amazon.

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes

I have had in mind to read this weighty book (600 pages) about the arrival of Europeans in Australia written by an art historian for a long time. 

Between the original landing of Captain Cook in Botany Bay in 1770 and the arrival of the first wave of transported convicts in 1788, no British ships came to the area. The Botany Bay area would not have supported them; if Captain Phillip hadn't gone north and found Sydney Harbor, they would have perished. As it was, they barely survived. 

Many factors led the British to think this rash act was a good idea. Some of those factors:

• There was an epidemic of lawlessness in Georgian England and there was no law enforcement in evidence until Sir Robert Peel established a police force in 1827.  
• At night the highwaymen were in control of the countryside, gin was consumed in great quantities, and the population growth in London resulted in widespread poverty and crime.
• There was no system of penitentiaries in Britain. The punishment choices were limited to hanging or transportation.
• Beginning around 1717 over the course of 60 years 40,000 felons were sent to America or the Caribbean by contracting with shippers who then sold their labor for seven or fourteen years to colonists. American independence ended this practice and the British needed someplace to send these folks.

I was surprised that Transportation lasted from 1788 to 1868. Transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840, but continued in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) and Western Australia.  The heaviest time was 1831-35. A total of 164,300 prisoners were transported.

Ireland was in nearly open rebellion against Britain during the period and though relatively few political prisoners were transported, the hatred between the British and Irish in Australia as evidenced in literature is not surprising.

Australia was built with convict labor. They built infrastructure for the government (clearing land, building roads, putting up buildings) or were assigned to settlers to work for them. The settlers were required to house, feed, and attend to their health in return for their labor for the period of assignment. The labor of the convicts created the economic base that made free emigrants want to go to Australia and made it possible for those who completed their sentences to succeed. 

"Bushrangers" was one of the terms for escaped convicts who roamed the countryside. The gangs became romanticized in the public imagination as early as 1814. The death of Ned Kelly in 1880 marks the end of the era. Kelly remains an iconic figure in Australia, partly as an emblem of the oppressive treatment of the Irish by the British. The parallels between the bushrangers of Australia and the gangs of the Wild West in the US are remarkable.

I had thought of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, in charge from 1810 to 1821, as the fellow who spread his name thickly around the city and countryside, but he was much more. He was the first to act on the assumption that this undertaking was more than punishment for the wicked. As Hughes put it, he began the "conversion of a jail into a colony." Britain was not ready for that and wanted Australia to be "an Object of real Terror," so his reforms were limited.  

Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk Island were places of horror for the prisoners convicted of crimes in New South Wales. As word of the practices there made its way back to England, from 1835 on, opinion began to change and revulsion against the system of transportation grew among upper classes. At the same time "the opinion of the lower classes keep drifting the other way. The belief, or hope, that a convict could make his or her fortune in Australia (or at least, a better living than could be scratched from England) had become fixed in the popular imagination." These two trends made the whole enterprise less viable.

It was awful to read about the sadistic torture that occurred on the two islands; with a brief exception of the reformer Alexander Maconochie of Norfolk Island, each one is described as worse than the last. I noted in particular the story of the Arctic explorer John Franklin, told in Richard Flanagan's Wanting. His (and his wife's) role in the death of all Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land is described. 

In his Introduction Hughes says one impetus for writing the book was that the convict history of Australia was ignored in schools and given short shrift in universities. He says, "The idea that whether or not England should feel ashamed of creating the System, Australians certainly had cause to be proud of surviving it and of creating their own values despite it, was rarely heard." A reasonable criticism of the book is that Hughes' descriptions of the horrors on the islands used for secondary punishments overshadowed the success of the rehabilitation of so many felons by the assignment system. Though he writes about the success of those who came to New South Wales, it is the torture that one remembers. 

Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, 603 pages. Available in the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

Mr. Hogarth's Will by Catherine Helen Spence

Thanks to Lisa at ANZ LitLovers I have spent a happy week reading a book with the writing style of Jane Austen and the political sensibility of Ezra Klein. Remarkable, given that Catherine Helen Spence wrote the book in 1865. Financial difficulties caused her family emigrate to Australia from Scotland when she was 14; her father died a few years after their arrival and she had to support the family. She became very successful in her endeavors as a novelist, public speaker, and journalist, according to the introduction to the book.

The launching point of the novel is the death of Mr. Hogarth, thus unleashing his unexpected will upon his heirs. He had kindly raised his two nieces, Jane and Elsie, and lavished an expensive, but unique education on them. They had a tutor and later studied in Edinburgh as if they were boys, so they did not learn the skills that young women could use to be a governess. They learned accounting, various sciences, skills useful in management. Mr. Hogarth had a son by a disreputable woman that he had separated from her. Francis was also well educated, but had never met Mr. Hogarth. The will left everything to Francis and stipulated that if he aided his cousins, the estate would be withdrawn from him and given to five charities.

The sisters were unable to find work because very few opportunities were open to them. Jane, the more capable sister, spent a few days in Edinburgh trying to find work and was told by employers that they could not hire a woman, no matter how qualified she might be. Francis tried to help Jane find work and as they become friends, Jane inspired Francis to use his inheritance in a wise and kindly way. He improves the housing for the workers on his estate and makes land available to those who would become successful developing it. After two years, his estate was worth more than it had been when he received it. With Jane's encouragement, Francis enters politics and becomes a respected member of Parliament.

Meanwhile Jane and her sister receive help from a few independent women who are far from their social set. They live with Peggy Walker, a washer-woman who had returned to Scotland from a more successful life in Australia to care for her orphaned nieces and nephews. Through Peggy they get to know others who have returned to Britain after making their fortune in Australia and the sisters find employment with one of those families. The story unfolds in a Jane Austen kind of way, and you don't mind that the good are so good, and the evil are even more evil than you thought. And everyone ends up in Australia.

The author makes the case for feminism, a more inclusive political system (as late as 1884 60% of the male population of the UK could not vote because of property requirements), and the more egalitarian life in the colonies that allowed for social mobility. 

Catherine Helen Spence, Mr. Hogarth's Will, Penguin Books Australia, 1988, 439 pages (originally published in 1865). Available at the UVa library and through Amazon. Apparently it's free on kindle, but only shows up if you search by author.

A Hundred Small Lessons by Ashley Hay

This is my (and her) third novel and what a satisfying experience it was to listen to it. 

It centers on a modest house in Brisbane and the two families that lived in it sequentially. First was Elsie, Clem, and their twins. After the twins were grown, had children of their own, and Clem had been dead for nearly 40 years, Elsie was moved into a facility a short walk away. The house was bought by a couple, Ben and Lucy, who had a one-year-old boy, Tom. After years of roving for Ben's journalism career, they settled in his hometown.

The joy of this book is the revelations of these rather ordinary lives and the interactions within each of the families, made most appealing by the long arc of Elsie and her family's time in the house.  Though she had not met her, Lucy was sensitive to Elsie's presence in the house. She found Elsie's teacup, left behind by her children when they cleared the house. Ben wondered why Lucy took up drinking tea in Brisbane when she hadn't before, even when they lived in London.

The answer was behind the beveled glass of one of the kitchen cabinets. A teacup, saucerless, a slightly fluted queen cup with a big blue floral blaze. "Peonies," thought Lucy, "and something like a fuschia." She'd found it forgotten at the back edge of the deck, the sludgy mud rim of its last cup of tea still coating its bottom For a few days, washing it with every load of dishes, she thought of returning it to Elsie, ringing the estate agent or looking up the address on the settlement papers. Then on a whim she'd taken it from the kitchen bench and made herself a cup of tea....She could tell it was the drink the house was used to.

In her new apartment Elsie wonders what became of her favorite teacup.

Elsie and her family's life in the house, beginning in the early 1940s, reflect the times. Elsie lived the life she always wanted:  beloved wife, mother, grandmother. An interlude with a neighbor who asked Elsie to sit for her as a subject for her painting briefly revealed a different life to Elsie. Her daughter was never happy to follow Elsie's path, and was angry with her mother for not helping her move in a different direction. 

When Clem was dying, Elsie read to him. We learn only that it is a classic of Australian literature and mentions the character Stan Parker. It was easy enough to discover that it was Patrick White's Tree of Life.

Though Lucy had always found her way in the various places they had lived, she was having trouble settling into this new situation:  motherhood and the less sophisticated Brisbane. She took comfort in Elsie as she imagined her, but worried about various difficulties she encountered. When she needed to, she turned to the mother of her childhood friend and found the help she needed.  

Revelations to Ben and Lucy at the end of the book by Elsie's granddaughter are satisfying to both of them. And of course to me. I love this book and miss having Elsie, Lucy, and the others with me.

 Ashley Hay, A Hundred Small Lessons, Atria Books, 2017, 304 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the public library and from Amazon.

Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

I do like books with multiple storylines and setting them in different centuries is appealing. A woman working in a London museum of clocks and other mechanisms learns her long-time lover died suddenly. Catherine must grieve secretly as he was married and had children. Her boss who knows the secret finds a project for her that will isolate her from colleagues as she recovers.

The project comes with volumes of notebooks written 150 years previously that purport to describe how her current project came about. The British man who wrote them, Henry, travels to Germany with plans for a mechanical duck (the Vaucanson Duck you may want to read about). He is willing to do what it takes to have the creature created for the amusement of his tubercular two-year-old son. He is immediately at sea in Karlsruhe and then things take a turn and he is spirited away to Furtwangen and then I'm at sea. I realize now I read much of this book while I was feverish with the flu and I was comfortable reading along.

By today, however, though I am still sick, the fever is gone and the book has made me feel quite queasy. I finished it and find myself uncertain just what it is I've read. It turns out that I am not alone in that situation. I will say the duck turned out to be a swan and there is a mechanical swan in the Bowes Museum in England. 

For a couple of views of this book, here's Tony's take on it and Lisa's review.

Peter Carey, Chemistry of Tears, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, 229 pages. Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

The Boy Behind the Curtain by Tim Winton

I found this audiobook of essays written and read by Tim Winton so heartening that when I finished it, I listened to it again immediately. I have never done that before, either listening or reading a book, so what is different about this one?

First he writes so beautifully, using such a literate vocabulary with the bonus of the vernacular of Australia, perhaps in particular, working class Australians of a certain age. The subjects of the essays vary widely from his (and other Australians') connections to guns, the effect of his family's evangelical religious bent, his work in the environmental movement, class divisions as he observes it, and running throughout, his love of living near the sea and surfing.

Church loomed large in his family life and Sundays were exhausting so that Monday seemed a day of rest. He tells about one poignant story of his experience:

When I was six, I approached an older gentleman called George Smith to ask him about the size of my soul. I sidled up to him after church one morning and stood at his side until he registered my presence. He was younger then than I am now, but to me he had a wise and ancient mien. Maybe it was the specs. I don't remember why, at that age, I required soul dimensions, all I know is that my need was urgent. Mr. Smith took off his glasses, gave 'em a bit of a buff. Eventually he took my hand, closed it and pressed it against my chest. He told me he'd never actually seen a human soul but his best guess was that mine was about the size of my fist. I considered this skeptically; I may have only been six, but I wasn't stupid. Then I thought how sometimes my spirit ached like the aftermath of a sucker punch, burning right there, where old George Smith had his hand in mine like a thump in the chest whose afterglow left a feel and shape of a fist. And so his answer rang true. In the years since, my satisfaction with it has only deepened not because it convinces me in the literal sense it once did, but because there's such humanity and imagination in the image. What moves me most is that he bothered to answer my question at all.

It's a pleasure to read personal essays by someone who is so unconventional in that he doesn't fit any stereotypes. He makes me think of my father's assessment of my sister in 1967; in trying to puzzle out what she might be up to in college, he concluded she was too weird to be a hippie. Winton is a Christian, but not in any predictable sense. He doesn't own any guns, but has a complicated connection with them. He is a brilliant writer, but seems uneasy in any literary establishment sense.

I was unnerved to realize that it took a second listening to recognize that an experience in my own life was surprisingly similar to one in his. When he was six years old, his father was in an accident that nearly cost his life and required a long convalescence and later surgeries. He tells how much this affected his life and shook his sense of safety.

A week before my seventh birthday my mother drove her car into the path of a train where there was no crossing arm. I remember the moment we were told and my father was whisked away. My teenage older sister took charge and assured me everything would be fine. My mother was terribly injured:  her broken neck alone made it seem unlikely that she would survive. But she did and though she was a different person, she eventually recovered to manage our household. The community, particularly the church community, stepped in and cared for us in countless ways. I grew up feeling the great kindness of all those people and always loved that church family even through my teenage years when I had lost my faith. That accident made me conscious my family was different from others as my mother was so marked physically by it. 

This is a wonderful book that I will return to for comfort and relief in the face of the trials that continue to come our way in this country.

Tim Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain, Picador, 2017 (I listened to the audiobook). Only available from third party sellers through Amazon.

The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hay

This 2010 book was the author's first; it was recently published in the US and reviewed in the New York Times, perhaps because of the acclaim her second novel (The Railwayman's Wife) has received. I want to rely on that review for capturing the wonder of this novel so beautifully while I record some tangential bits that I want to remember. 

Three stories are set in different centuries, all focused on Sydney. One story was based on the historical figure William Dawes who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788; he made astronomical observations, mapped the area, and recorded the language of some of the aboriginal people living in the area. The second story is about a teenager named Ted who dreams of working on the Sydney harbor bridge in the late 1920s. He gets work on the ground and is taken in by Joe Brown and his wife Joy. Joe works up on the arch and Joy loves the bridge. The 20th century character is a banker we meet in London where he has lived for 10 years. His girlfriend Caro notes he lives in London as a tourist, doesn't really know the city, and yet has never returned to Sydney for a visit. These stories are connected in various ways.

William Dawes lived separately on a point that still bears his name and is the location of the southern end of the harbor bridge. It was a teenage girl who taught him her aboriginal language. The fictional Dawes learns from her that while bones are buried in the graveyard, bodies are in the clouds and spirits are free to fly between. Later this idea is elaborated on by Dan the banker's friend Charlie who explains, "The indigenous people who were here before the British, before us I guess, they believed that you come from the clouds when you are born and that when you die, your bones stay in the ground, but your body goes back up. It was one of the first things the British learned from them when they arrived:  the bones in the ground, the body in the cloud." 

Ted Parker never worked up on the arch, but one night while Joe Brown was away, he and Joy climbed the bridge at great peril, but were transformed by the beauty of the moment. Later while both Joe and Ted are at work, the seventh man fell from the bridge, the first to survive the fall. Ted's story continues with the magical connecting of the two halves of the arch and to the completion of the bridge.

Dan Kopek, the London banker, always means to call his mother in Sydney or return for a visit with his friend from childhood, a woman  named Charlie and her grandfather. Because of World War II deaths Dan, his mother, Charlie, and Gramps became a family. He loved Gramps' stories of working on the bridge and being the one who fell from the bridge and survived. Though Dan seemed unmoored in London, he was close to Caro, his girlfriend of five years.

Charlie and Dan remember how Gramps interested them as children in exploring the city for its past:  he had them imagine the area around the bridge's big footprints, then back further when there were tents and trees when the British arrived, and then before that. Gramps told them that a stream that brought the British to the city was now buried and where they were walking now would have been in the air for the first convicts, about the level of their ears.

Watkin Tench, a historical character who arrived with the First Fleet reflects on the strange things they encounter. He would find an alligator comforting in that at least an alligator is something found somewhere else. " 'I heard one of your birds laugh at me for the entire duration of my shave this morning,' said Tench, 'And a creature that laughs is a disconcerting thing. I'm still not clear on how kangaroos might be put together and why they jump, and I don't even want to think about the size of the creatures that make those hisses out in the darkness every night.'

Reflections on the beauty of the bridge by various characters made me remember with pleasure seeing the bridge from a ferry as we went under it on the way to visit Luna Park.

Near the end of the book come revelations about just who Gramps was. This twist was foreshadowed, so it was not unexpected. 

I must stop here because apparently I am only able to ramble on incoherently about this book that gave me such great pleasure.

Ashley Hay, The Body in the Clouds, Washington Square Press, 2017, 320 pages, originally published in 2010 in Australia (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the UVa, public library, and from Amazon.