Category Archives: Australian Women’s Writing

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.

1984, 96p.

Don Anderson, in reviewing Helen Garner’s book The Children’s Bach wrote:

There are four perfect short novel in the English language.  They are, in chronological order, Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier,  Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,  Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach.

Boy- where do you go after that???!!

I think that brevity is an intrinsic feature of this book.  Like a small Bach piece, it is short and self contained, simple and yet complex.  It takes a slice of life in 1980s Melbourne, and in this regard, Garner’s keen observations almost provide an ethnographic (and now historical!) artefact.  Athena and Dexter are 1980s people who feel like people you’ve known and  their house and lifestyle is so well-depicted that you feel you could recognize it if you walked in the door.  As a northern suburbs gal myself, I can recognize many landmarks and events that she mentions almost in passing.  In fact, I reckon you could plot a pilgrimage walk of the book!

The relationship between Athena and Dexter lies at the heart of the novel.  They have two children- an autistic son, Billy, and a bright articulate son called Arthur.  The summary on the back of my edition, and the recent rendering of the novel into an opera both make more of Billy’s autism than I was aware of in the book, where Billy is a stolid presence, but not particularly the focal point of the family dynamics.  It’s not just the strain of Billy that drags at Athena, drawing her to abandon it all: it’s also her husband’s exuberance and obliviousness to her own personhood and the dream of being someone else in another more exciting world than hers.

I’ve read this book three times now, which is easy to do as it’s so short and it tumbles over you like a conversation overheard.  It’s a book to grow up with. As I’ve grown older, I see different things in it, as if I’m revisiting my own young-motherhood at much this same time.  I sense that in Garner’s most recent book, The Spare Room, she’s also revisiting the sort of characters in The Children’s Bach, grown older.

This is not the stuff of crashing drama: it’s lived-in life, with fallible and flawed human people, mess, and making do.  Taking liberties with the final sentence, life as depicted in The Children’s Bach is the steady rocking beat of love and family in the left hand, and the flying arpeggios of “what if’s” and “maybes” in the right.