Category Archives: Australian literature

2009, 249 p.

I’m not a great short-story reader, especially when they are in a collection like this.  If they are truly short short-stories, then do you read them one at a time over an extended period, or do you pop them in, one after the other, like a bag of lollies?  I don’t like being jerked around from one situation to another in a single reading.  I tend to remember short stories better when I hear them read aloud, rather than when I read them myself.  With the exception of Nam Le’s The Boat, I  tend to find a volume of short stories to be a bit of a curate’s egg.  But is it realistic to expect every story in a collection to blow you out of your reading-chair, or is a hit-rate of a couple of memorable stories within one volume sufficient?  Is a short story MEANT to be memorable? If so, then I am a miserably failed short-story reader.

Karen Hitchcock is being hailed as a “bold new voice in contemporary fiction”.  Certainly, the first couple of stories in this book were very good, especially the first rather lengthy story about a doctor swotting to pass her specialist examinations.  There are a couple of stories about body image; a couple about the study involved in becoming a psychiatrist- the first of which seemed to form a good counterpart to the opening story about studying to become a specialist from the other partner’s perspective.  But the middle of the book seemed to sag with stories that seemed more like baggy and rather nebulous reminiscences, and too many stories  seemed to pick up on the same themes from a different perspective.  The last story, which gives the collection its title, was good, as I rather hoped it would be.

Perhaps there is an overarching structure to this book that I couldn’t detect.  Certainly it deals with “women’s iss-ews” like body image, medicine,  the limits of male and female friendship, professional life and identity etc.   But I felt as if the same narrative voice was telling all these stories- an educated, Australian, mid-30s, often childless, professional voice, or in the case of the reminiscences,  the voice of someone who would grow up to be this person.  Did the author have a vision for this collection of stories as a whole that contributed to this sameness? or is the author not ready or unwilling to move beyond this?

I will read other stories written by Karen Hitchcock.  Perhaps I would have enjoyed her more in a collection with other writers where she shares the stage with others, rather than a solo performance- I see that several of these stories have previously appeared in Meanjin and The Sleepers Almanac, and were picked up in Best Australian Short Stories in 2006, 2007 and 2008.   Or perhaps I just need to find a way to read short stories differently.

2000, 271 p

Ruth Cracknell was a much-loved Australian actor- sharp, eloquent, funny, rather patrician in an ‘older woman’ sort of way. Although, of course, her character Maggie Beare in ‘Mother and Son’ (where she plays the devious elderly mother whose hapless adult son returns to live with her)  was none of these things!

I had to keep flicking to her picture at the back of the book to remind me that she was the author, because her celebrity is almost inconsequential to this story.   It’s not so much Ruth Cracknell here, but Mrs. Ruth Phillips, mourning the death of her husband Eric.  It’s as woman and widow, mother and grandmother that we meet her, not as a ‘star’.

This is a beautifully constructed memoir.  The preface starts with Eric’s funeral,  written in italicized third person, as if she is watching herself going through the ritual.  She then moves back in time to their arrival in Venice for a holiday together and the pace of the narrative moves to a slow sort of travelogue, overshadowed by the certain knowledge that death  is hovering over them like an unseen, malevolent force.  This sense of foreboding permeates the book, even when Eric is finally well enough to fly home to Melbourne where cancer is diagnosed.  The title is well chosen: I kept thinking of Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’, but Eric does not die there. He recovers sufficiently to be medi-evacuated back to Australia, has two precious trips back to the family home for Sunday lunch, and some weeks later dies of the cancer, not the bleeding that initially threatened his life.  And so, by the end of the book, we return to the funeral and we, too, grieve.

While waiting in Venice for him to recover sufficiently for the trip home, the tourists leave as the summer season ends, the deeper water laps at the floor of her ground floor flat, and Ruth becomes aware of the sheer inconvenience of living (as distinct from visiting) Venice.  That holiday, so eagerly anticipated, so richly enjoyed for the first few days becomes instead a stark, lonely, bewildering exile.

This is, instead, a journey from Venice, not to it, and in the weeks they have together, they fall in love again- a different sort of love, suffused with the knowledge that it is all they have left.  They truly do live “in the moment”: the sharing of a blood orange is a sensuous joy, and she sees and loves anew the stripped down, solid core of the man she has been married to for over 40 years.

It was interesting to read this book after recently finishing Caroline Jones’ book about her father’s death.  This is a much more grounded, sane and adult book, and one that gives much more comfort.  It is beautifully written and constructed, and it shares the poise, groundedness and authenticity of its author.

2009, 342p.

Rich and Sandy are 40-something leftovers from the 1980s, still stuck in the victory of the Franklin River blockade that they look back to as the high point of their lives.  They met on the campaign and shifted to a small hippy country town together but their relationship broke up while their daughter Sophie was very young.  Sandy immersed herself in the companionship of her earth-mother friends, while Rich headed off around the world as a photojournalist.  Neither has moved on at all from their dreams of the early eighties: Sandy’s dreamcatchers and pottery are now tatty, dated and twee, while Rich’s career in photojournalism finds him washed up in the dead-end of editing  infotainment  segments for morning television.  The story opens as Rich re-establishes contact with his moody, anorexic, goth 15 year old daughter Sophie, and suggests a bushwalk to Cradle Mountain as a new start to their relationship.

Sandy is reluctant to let him back in to their lives; Sophie is curious and at first attracted by his footloose approach to life, especially compared with Sandy’s smothering neediness and flakiness.  But Rich, in his own way, is just as stuck in the 1980s as Sandy is,  just as blind to Sophie’s anorexia and just as flawed as a parent, whatever his initial attractiveness.  When he encourages Sophie to go for a walk off the tourist trail, they get lost and Sophie loses her illusions about him.

These are very human characters, and Kennedy teeters of the verge of parody, especially with Sandy.  She hones in on Sandy’s ineffectual, rather vacuous new-age, earthmother persona and Rich’s self-deception, cynicism and lack of commitment.  Sophie is a sullen, sneering adolescent, cocooned in her technology and affected world-weariness.  But there’s a recognizability about them all too, and an element of send-up that lacks the venom of  Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap, to which this book has been compared.

This gently-skewering parody is acutely done, but after a while it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. But the second half of the book picks up pace and it becomes a real page-turner: I was literally sitting up in bed, wanting to finish it but despairing at how late it was becoming as I kept reading.

There are some fantastic interviews with the author: one on the Radio National Book Show and another at The Ember, and good blog posts by Lisa at ANZLitlovers and Kerryn Goldsworthy at Australian Literature Diary.  I must admit that, particularly after reading the interviews, I found nuances and depths in the book that I hadn’t picked up on at first reading.   I’m not sure why this is- I was aware of the references and paradoxes in the book, but almost needed to listen (or read) someone talking it over for them to coalesce for me.  I’m not sure whether this reflects a weakness in the book, or in me as a reader, or whether this is the sort of book that is best shared with others and talked about as much as read.

This is a good book.  I wonder if its references to MySpace and ipods will date it, but the observations of character and the wonderful descriptions of landscape will sustain it even when Sophie is just as dated and twee with her early-21st century technology as Sandy and Rich are with their 1980s idealism.

I have to admit to not being a fan of Elizabeth Jolley.  I know that she’s highly thought of:  a good reading friend whose reading judgement I trust  (and who is probably reading this post!) very much likes her. So why do I find her so off-putting?

I’ve really tried: I’ve read several of her books but find myself being repelled by the mustiness and acidity of her female characters.  They’re like a prickly heavy British overcoat: they’re like Hetty Wainthrop and Hyacinth Bucket; like a whiskery old Aunt.  Even in the books set in present time (given that she stopped writing about ten years ago), there’s a dissonance about these characters, as if they are out of time.   Her novels are often set in Australia, but there seems to be an innate Britishness about them.

I’ve seen her described as “disturbing” and perhaps this is what I’m alluding to, but I’m never really quite sure whether Jolley’s writing is deliberately subversive and edgy.  I think her dialogue is often wooden- or does that reflect the awkwardness of the characters she’s describing?  I think that her books seem to jerk around without a strong narrative thread- or is she being very clever and post-modern?  Is it bad writing?  Or good writing?  I really don’t know.

That said, I’ve enjoyed My Father’s Moon more than the other works I’ve read.  It is set in London during WW II, and for me this gives the book a unity and integrity that I can’t find in her other books.  The characters act, and feel, like 1940s characters in 1940s times.  The book is written in a number of first-person, self-contained chapters but there’s not a clear narrative arc in the way they are placed:  events happen and the reader works on making the causal and chronological links, because Jolley doesn’t.   Again- is this clever writing, or lazy?

I often sense steel in Jolley’s writing, but there’s a vulnerability in the writing in My Father’s Moon.   There’s an unresolved yearning to touch and be touched by other female friendships, and a sense of distance and apartness.  Perhaps these same qualities are there in her other books as well, because there’s a strong autobiographical element repeated in many of her works.  But I think I find it less repellent in a younger woman, coming of age in a time further back,  in a British world of London streets and air raids and prickly woollen overcoats.

Grace Lisa Vandenburg is an unemployed teacher on sick leave after a breakdown triggered by a young boy’s accident in the schoolyard.  But Grace’s problems lie deeper than this: she counts obsessively and incessantly, as a way of trying to control her world and all around her.  Into this ordered and tense life comes Seamus, who is attracted to her humour and quickness, and steers her towards therapy and medication as a way of overcoming her obsessiveness.  We lose our perky, wisecracking, passionate and controlled narrator as the medication submerges her into a slow, passive inertia. Will she lose the medication or lose her man? Or both?

This is all the stuff of good chick-lit, in this case bolstered by clever use of narrative to reveal the personality change that Grace undergoes as a result of her medication.  In this regard, it reminded me of Daniel Keye’s short story Flowers for Algernon, which was picked up as the film ‘Charly’.  I think that this use of narrative voice to denote change is one of the real strengths of the book, along with a main character who is not just sassy but also sees the world quite differently.  The book also introduced me to Nikola Tesla, a Croatian engineer who was likewise driven by the need to count, but for him it ended in madness.  The book explores the often narrow line between habit and obsession;  routine and ritual; self control and control of others; passivity and strength; eccentricity and madness.  In these regards, it steps out of the chicklit genre into something more complex.

But Toni Jordan has not been served well by her publishers, methinks.  There are several versions of the front cover, and none really does justice to a book that is more than just chick-lit.

Here’s the American version.  Who the hell is Emily Giffen? Thank you Wikipedia-  Emily Giffen is obviously the Queen of Chicklit. Her insightful blurb  calls it “A delight”. I hope that no-one offered their first-born child in exchange for such a glowing endorsement.  I wonder if her books are so nuanced?  And in case you think it’s a primary school textbook- a not unreasonable assumption really-  the cover helpfully labels it as ‘A novel’.

The English version has a little pun – “A comedy that counts”.  The lemon tart is nice and cheerful- but surely it should be a flourless orange cake sprinkled with poppy seeds- if you’ve read the book, you’ll know why.

There’s a second UK cover that sticks with the pun on counting: this time “Some people count more than others”.

One of the covers available in Australia resembles this British one, but with a sassier girl who looks more like a model and less like a schoolgirl.  The blurb cites The Age’s recommendation:  “A winning love story”.

Then finally, there’s one that perhaps gets closer to the tone of the book.  Sigrid Thornton (much loved of Sea Change) endorses it as “A stylish, witty and moving love story”.   But as the Resident Husband commented “Since when has Sigrid Thornton been a book reviewer?”  Maybe I should keep an eye on my toothbrush, lest it also get up to shenanigans.

There is a happy ending in this feel-good, romantic fiction book, and it’s good fun, engaging and heartwarming.  I gobbled it up, and shut the book with a smile.  I think we can all do with a bit of this, in small doses.  And, of course, only as part of a well-rounded reading diet.