Category Archives: Book reviews

‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel

Posted on April 24, 2010 | 7 comments

2009, 650 p

I have been missing in action from blogging recently.  One reason is that I am actually writing real stuff complete with footnotes and headings as I should, and the other reason is that I’ve been back in King Henry’s London, thoroughly engrossed in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve read a book as insistent and attention-grabbing as this: I genuinely didn’t want to be anywhere else in my head other than Henry’s court.

The book, as probably everyone in the world knows, is about Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s adviser and fixer.  But I must admit, that’s as far as my knowledge went.  I’ve seen the BBC series, I’ve read my Phillipa Gregories (The Other Boleyn Girl), Margaret Georges (The Autobiography of Henry VIII)  Antonia Frasers (The Wives of Henry VIII) and my Alison Weirs (The Six Wives of Henry VIII)- I know all about Henry and Ann- how hard could this be?! I thought.  But as I ventured further in, I started to lose confidence in myself.  After all, I’ve never seen A Man for All Seasons, and I couldn’t really remember Thomas Cromwell in all those biographies and historical fictions I’d read.  And so about 100 pages in, after an abrupt event in Thomas’ life, I decided that perhaps I needed to do a bit of Wikipeding and just get my head around the bare bones of his life.  I had only read a few lines before I realized that I didn’t want to do it this way- I wanted Thomas’ life to unfurl with its uncertainties, ambiguities, shocks and plans, just as it did for him, and just as Hilary Mantel wanted it to for her readers.

The Thomas Cromwell that Hilary Mantel gives us is on one level very recognizable- we grieve with him as he both draws comfort from his memories of loved ones he has lost; we relax with him in the comfort of his home- he is a flesh-out, human being.  But there are  facets of him that we cannot know though- the nonchalance about torture, the cold pragmatism by which people are dispatched; the unquestioned acceptance of Henry’s embodied sovereignty.

Thomas Cromwell was of lowly birth and yet he became the most powerful man in Henry’s court. Mantel gives only hints of how he achieved this, not in the form of a linear narrative, but in the flashbacks and learned knowledge that all of us weave together as experience  as we move through our own life trajectory.  We learn, then, of a violent childhood, an escape to Europe,  working as a mercenary and in the mercantile sphere as well,  violence committed- sprinkled through the novel, hinted here and there.

Mantel herself has described her technique as putting the camera on the shoulder of her main character.  The whole narrative is told from Thomas’ perspective, and she refers to him as “he” throughout.  This was disconcerting at times when there were other “he”s as well, but if you had to re-read once or twice, it was a way of reminding us as readers where we have been placed- behind Cromwell’s eyes, seeing what he sees, processing information through Thomas’ memories and experience.  It is also written entirely in the present tense, which I always find rather uncomfortable and suffocating, but it gives an immediacy to the writing.

This is part of a two-book endeavour, and I’m really looking forward to the second book.  There’s a terrific podcast of a presentation given by Hilary Mantel and Sarah Dunant at Birkbeck institute about history, fiction and historical fiction.  You can listen to or download it here

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2009/06/talking-books-novel-history/

It’s obviously a very carefully researched book, and if you listen to the podcast you’ll hear about how she delineates the factual from the fictional.  But as well, she’s working through her own theories about events, agency, personality and historical forces, contingency and deliberation:

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms.  Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions.  This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater…

7 Comments

Posted in Book reviews

‘Convicts of the Port Phillip District’ by Keith M Clarke

Posted on April 20, 2010 | 2 comments

One of Port Phillip’s claims was that, unlike Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales,  it was not a penal colony.  It was opened up during the 1830s when emigration schemes were hitting their strides and there was much to be gained by distancing Port Phillip  from the degradation and corruption that was perceived to flow from contact with convicts.

But it was not as clear cut as this.  Right from the start, there were convicts in Port Phillip.  The earlier abandoned attempts at settlement at Sorrento and Western Port involved convicts, and had they been more successful, there would have been a permanent convict presence in the area.  As it turned out, Melbourne was established by, or at the behest of,  private pastoral and agricultural interests.  When these pastoralists, their sons and their agents moved in, especially from the Middle District around Sydney, they were able to bring their assigned servants with them.  John Hirst, in his book Convict Society and its Enemies notes the slippage in terminology that avoided the use of the term “convict” and instead used “assigned servant”.  He suggests that all sides were comfortable with this linguistic subterfuge:  emancipists and expirees were keen to expunge the moral connotations of ‘convict’, and for those who availed themselves of labour from the assignment system, the use of the term “servant” framed the contract as the more acceptable master-and-servant relationship that underpinned all labour exchange at the time.

Once they were here as assigned servants, there was no formal supervision at the local level.  In theory, assigned servants could only be transferred between owners with the permission of Governor Gipps, but this does not seem to have been strictly enforced. An advertisement for land of the Plenty River in May 1841 included “five government men” in the purchase, and according to Judge Willis,  at the height of the economic depression in 1842 there were two hundred assigned servants wandering at large because their masters could no longer afford to keep them.

Then there were convicts sent down from Sydney.  Some of these were highly qualified “specials”, who were sent to fulfill particular roles.  For example Phillip Harvey, who had been transported after pleading guilty to a charge of forging and altering two Bills of Exchange, was sent down from Sydney after being instructed by Mr Dunlop the Astronomer on the keeping of meteorological journals.  Another convict worked as a writing clerk at the Police Office and Judge Willis strenuously protested him being left in charge of prisoners on remand because he was  “not fit to have charge of free persons, who coming out to this colony were entitled to all the privileges of British subjects.”   The distinction between government and domestic employment was not clearcut: a letter to the Port Phillip Herald complained that Dr Shaw of Geelong had been using men assigned to the customs service to fetch wood and move furniture.

Then there were the public works gangs sent down to work on roads and other constructions.  They were a highly visible presence, although they do not seem to have worked in irons.  Just as one could imagine today, the “shockjocks” of the press at the time became highly exercised at the sight of convict gangs fiddling around on their spades in fine weather, and when unemployment rose in 1842, it was felt that government work should be provided to emigrants rather than convict work-gangs.

Added to this were convicts who had gained tickets-of-leave (for example, the Port Phillip Herald of 12 April 1842 has an advertisement of a ticket-of-leave belonging to Martin Brennan that had been found), and those whose sentences had expired.  A large number of people coming across from Van Diemens Land fell into this category.

So, we should perhaps raise a sceptical eyebrow at all the “free” rhetoric coming from the Port Phillip boosters.

A book that deals with the convict presence in Port Phillip in more detail is Keith M Clarke’s Convicts of the Port Phillip District.  Self-published in 1999, it is a large, illustrated paperback book of 370 pages, much of which is made up of appendices giving names, shipping details, and sentencing data and comments for the different waves of convict settlement (Sorrento, Western Port, Port Phillip and later the exiles sent between 1844-1849).

It is from this book (p.100)  that we learn that, of the population of 12, 994 in Port Phillip during the 1841 Census, there were 2,762 who had been transported to the colonies- i.e. 21% of the Port Phillip population at the time.   Although the numbers are rubbery, there were 338 holding tickets-of-leave, 185 on Government Service, 637 on private assignment and 1455 “other free” men and 147 “other free” women.  “Other free” was a catch-all category that included emancipists, those free by servitude, and those holding conditional pardons.

We can also see from his compilation of Supreme Court data that many of these assigned servants were under the control of prominent Port Phillip personalities that we have met before: William Verner (Judge Willis’ good friend), Porter, Carrington, Thomas Wills, Dr Thomson, Ebden, Lonsdale,  Peter Snodgrass.  It is significant that Judge Willis himself did not have assigned servants, and in this he was true to his word in 1839:

For my own part, I have ever  considered the provisions of His Majesty’s order in Council, in 1831, for reconstructing the Supreme Courts of Judicature in certain crown colonies, when negro slavery unhappily existed, to be most wise in prohibiting the Judges from being owners of, or in any wise interested in slaves, or their labour. Believing the same principle to be as applicable to the bondsmen of Australia, as to the negroes of Guiana, Trinidad, and St Lucia, I have abstained, and ever will abstain, so long as I remain on this bench, from being the assignee of convict service. I will never permit the possibility of insinuation that my private interest can in anywise interfere with the honest discharge of my judicial duties.  I will always endeavour to keep myself beyond all reach of vulgar suspicion.

A large part of this book involves a retelling of the different settlements in Port Phillip, albeit with particular attention to convicts.  It is a largely narrative approach, and while the bibliography cites the body of academic work on this era, it does not engage with the literature in an academic sense.   It starts with a description of the parish system in England and the changes to Poor Law legislation during the Industrial Revolution.  The second chapter describes changes to the penal code in England during these years and the global nature of transportation to penal settlements worldwide.  The third chapter involves the establishment of the Botany Bay scheme and explorations of the Port Phillip Area.  Chapter 4 involves Sorrento (Sullivans Bay); Chapter 5 Westernport, and in Chapter 6 the coming of sealers, the Hentys, Batman and Fawkner.  Chapter 7 describes the appointment of William Lonsdale and the convict workforce under his supervision.  Chapter 8 covers the La Trobe years, including the pressure to accept exiles under the revamped transportation-that-dare-not-speak-its-name system.

The heart of the book is the 200 pages of appendices with names and details.  These are set out in spreadsheet format and give you the little jolt of recognition that these are real individuals, who each have their own life story.  In this regard, the book would be a useful addition to a family history resource centre, where family historians would no doubt fill in the gaps between the statistics.

References

Keith M Clarke Convicts of the Port Phillip District, Waramanga, KM & G Clarke, 1999.

J. B. Hirst Convict Society and its enemies


2 Comments

Posted in Australian history, Book reviews, Judge Willis, Port Phillip history

‘Revolutionary Road’ by Richard Yates

Posted on April 5, 2010 | 1 comment

1961, 337 p

I haven’t seen the film of Revolutionary Road, and indeed had not even heard of the book or the writer until I heard a Radio National Book show program before its release.  But when I saw it in the catalogue for my face-to-face bookgroup (as distinct from my online bookgroup/s) I chose it as my selection for the year.  Ah- the responsibility!  Our discussions generally start “Who chose THIS book?” which is rather intimidating,  before one of us  sheepishly admits  “Umm…I did”.

Well, I did choose this book, and I’d glad I did.  It’s written with that bragging American smart-aleccy tone that unsuccessfully disguises a deep insecurity.  It reminded me of Carson McCullers’ Member of the Wedding, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye– all American books, all quite short, all edgy and anxious books.   Common to these books is the disjunction between dream and reality; a dissonance that is tossed off with a insouciance that is pathetic and heartbreaking.

The book is set in 1950’s suburban Connecticut and it is shot through with anxiety about exposure and failure.  Frank and April Wheeler are a young couple, with two young children, who pride themselves on being superior to the suburban lifestyle that they find themselves in. Their neighbours may be petty, suburban and blinkered, but Frank and April see themselves as quite unlike them.  In their own minds, they are just passing through and going through the motions before breaking out into the lives that they really want to live.  There’s lots of alcohol and drunken conversations, railing against modern life and conformity, but there is a basic, underlying dishonesty about their mundane backgrounds and the banality of their day to day life.  The book is unflinching in its gaze: you feel discomfited for them; you experience that hot prickle of embarrassment that you feel when you can see when someone you love is trying desperately, and failing, to maintain their dignity.

It’s a beautifully written book.  Yates writes in long sentences but never loses control of them. They flow, almost conversationally, and he interweaves effortlessly what is said with what is thought, but not said.   There is much of this double-vision throughout the book-  people plan conversations  but do not voice them;  Frank and April are self-consciously aware of the image that they are projecting, and  every one of the characters has ulterior motives that are poorly disguised.

The 1950s are far away enough now to feel as if, indeed, it is  a foreign country where things are done differently.  The book feels like a retro time-piece, with martinis before dinner and patios, green lawns and Home Beautiful houses.  But it was written in the early 60s, almost about events and people who were contemporary at the time,  and you can sense the waters shifting; you can feel Bob Dylan and Betty Friedan and 1968 forming under the surface.  It’s edgy and painful and well worth reading.

1 Comment

Posted in Book reviews

‘A Woman in Berlin’ by Anonymous

Posted on April 3, 2010 | 2 comments

2002 (originally 1954), 311 p

What is it they say about scams- that’s if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is?  That’s the way that I felt when I first starting reading this diary that starts on 20 April 1945 as Berlin falls. The diary ends, rather inconclusively some eight weeks later in 22 June 1945.  Obviously I wasn’t alone in my scepticism, borne just as much of admiration for the anonymous author and her writing, as the feeling that it was almost too good, too observational, too aware as a historical source.  The historian Antony Beevor, felt the same way too:

It was perhaps inevitable that doubts would be raised about this book, especially after the scandal over the fake Hitler Diaries.  And the great bestseller of the 1950s, ‘Last Letters from Stalingrad’ was found to be fictitious over forty years after its first appearance.  On reading  the earlier edition of this diary for the first time in 1999, I instinctively compared my reactions to the Stalingrad letters, which I had read five years before.  I had become uneasy about the supposed Stalingrad letters quite quickly.  They were too good to be true…As soon as I was able to compare the published collection with genuine last letters from Stalingrad in the German and Russian archives, I was certain they were false.  Yet any suspicions I felt obliged to raise about ‘A Woman in Berlin’ were soon discarded.  The truth lay in the mass of closely observed detail.  The then anonymous diarist possessed an eye which was so consistent and original that even the most imaginative novelist would never have been able to reproduce her vision of events.  Just as importantly, other accounts, both written and oral, which I accumulated during my own research into the events in Berlin, certainly seemed to indicate that there were no false notes.  Of course, it is possible that some rewriting took place after the event, but that is true of almost every published diary.  (p. 5)

And this is what I needed to hear: a reputable, informed historian making the call about the authenticity of what I was reading.  The diary certainly is well written.   Some of the entries are unrolled out over the length of a day, written a couple of hours apart; others are written a day or two later.  The diary opens as Berlin experiences the first bombings, like the roll of distant thunder that draws closer.  Women and children mainly cower in basements, hearing the explosions coming closer and aware of the rumours of the mass rapes that would sweep along with defeat.   The tension is like the rumble of bombs: insistent, breath-holding fear.

When it comes, as you know it must, she says little. For me, this was one of the hallmarks of authenticity- that she distanced herself from the physicality of it, except for one (of several) Russian soldier who slowly, deliberately, opened her mouth and spat into it.  The universality of the raping is horrific: “how many times?” is a commonplace, matter-of-fact question as friends and acquaintances meet again on the other side of the nightmare.

The author is an educated woman, a journalist who has travelled widely, and she speaks Russian.  She consciously decides that she will use her Russian to gain the protection of an educated, high-ranking officer and what follows is a strained, strange, conflicted relationship, compromised to its core by issues of power and consent (or the lack thereof).

As the Russians sweep through and life starts to take on a different normality, German men start reappearing from their hiding places  and their own relationships with their women are distorted through shame, impotence and disgust.  The women themselves speak about the rapes, even indulge in a form of gallows humour about it, as a way of mental survival.  The men are appalled by this response.  Along with the re-establishment of the water supply, the intermittent running of public transport, the issuing of inadequate food rations and the first shoots of entrepreneurism, much of the camaraderie and communalism of the women starts to break down.

We do not know what happens next- the anonymous author is obviously about to move onto a new phase because old relationships have been severed in this strange new world, and choices need to be made.  And that, for me, pointed to its authenticity as well:  a grinding, hard reality and ‘normalcy’ creeps over the last part of the book; there is no great climax and no resolution either.

I see that they have made a film of this book but I hadn’t heard of it. In fact, I hadn’t heard of the book at all until I read Kimbofo’s review of it.   Part of me wanted to look away out of discomfort and shame; the other part of me wanted to keep reading out of curiosity and admiration.  It’s very good.

2 Comments

Posted in Book reviews

‘The Bee Hut’ by Dorothy Porter

Posted on March 27, 2010 | 1 comment

2009, 139 p.

I wasn’t going to write this post. I was going to write about my own experience of poetry as a reader, the frustrations of reading a collection of poetry in an online environment etc. etc. But I’ve just been crying as I turn the page on the last poem in The Bee Hut, the collection of Dorothy Porter’s poetry that was completed just before she died in December 2008.  I feel so very sad at the thought that this is, literally, the last poem. I’ve been thinking, too, of my friend Dot Mac (everyone knew her that way)- another Dot, my Dot-  who also died of breast cancer a few years ago, at much the same age.  I still can’t quite believe that my life goes on, day after day, and yet she is not here.

While I was reading this book, I found myself wondering about the interweaving of the poet’s life and her poetry. It seemed to me that the whole book was pervaded by a clearness of vision- a close, intense, way of looking- that had been sharpened by her cancer and confrontation with death. In the final poems there is a closing around and a drawing inwards that I think even someone unaware of Dorothy Porter’s own biography would detect.

The book itself is divided into sections, almost like the acts of a play. In this way, it has its own narrative thread, as a collection.  There are travel poems- dust-laden poems about Egypt, cold green poems about London; there are theatrical poems written as lyrics for stage performance.  There’s a section of poems about illness, reflecting the first bout of cancer years earlier, then there are the final, quiet poems at the end. There’s a sense of movement through the poems as a whole, rather than just one self-contained poem after another.

I read this book as part of an online book group that I’m in that focuses on Australian literature-http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AustralianLiterature if you’re interested in joining us. We read and discuss (rather desultorily I must admit) one book a month. This was the first poetry book we have read, and I found it hard to actually comment on it during the process of reading, beyond saying “I liked this bit….” and quoting particular phrases and stanzas.  But there’s an artificiality about reading a book over a month like this, and I don’t think it serves poetry well.   I think that poetry has to be purchased, rather than borrowed; I think that you need to have it at hand for dipping into, rather than reading straight from cover to cover.  I think it needs to be read out loud, rather than read through. It stands on its own two feet: anything that I could add is superfluous.

I really didn’t think that I’d be in tears at the end of it.  The opening poem has been well chosen: the first words you encounter are:

The most powerful presence/is absence.

And what a powerful presence this is.

1 Comment

Posted in Australian literature, Australian Women's Writing, Book reviews

‘This Errant Lady’ by Penny Russell

Posted on March 21, 2010 | 6 comments

2002, 207p.& notes

Now here’s a way to decide which book to read next-  what goes well with your decor?  It gave me great pleasure to see Penny Russell’s This Errant Lady lying on my bed, matching so well with my doona cover!  Martha Stewart, eat your heart out!

I was drawn to read this after finishing Ken McGoogan’s Lady Franklin’s Revenge recently.  I’d forgotten that Jane Franklin visited Port Phillip and Sydney in 1839 and I was interested to see what she said about Port Phillip in particular, even though Judge Willis, the Resident Judge of Port Phillip had not arrived at this stage.  I’ve been writing a chapter the last few weeks on Judge Willis’ involvement in colonial politics, which has taken me back to his relationships with Sydney colonists, and as a member of the government elite (albeit of a neighbouring colony), Jane Franklin was well-placed to comment on political events and personalities in Sydney.

Having now read her journal of her overland trip to Port Phillip and Sydney in 1839, I can now see why Ken McGoogan wrote the biography he did, quite apart from any other propensities that a writer on arctic exploration might have.  Jane Franklin’s journals are travel diaries in the true sense of the word- lots of information about routes taken, facts gleaned, people met etc. but not much about her own inner world.  I share the frustration of Penny Russell the editor in her preface:

In recording this epic adventure, Jane Franklin treated her diary essentially as a notebook, producing a compendium of often unrelated scraps of information.  This was in keeping with her general habit in travel writing.  Despite her enthusiasm for knowledge, Jane Franklin rarely ventured to express her opinions, speculations, or interpretations in writing.  The judgments offered in this, as in all her diaries, are generally borrowed from guidebooks, histories or local inhabitants.  Whether she agreed with them or not, she did not see her diary as a space for formulating her own opinions.  She confined her attention to the external, the observable- to what could be ‘fixed’ on the page (p. 16). … Her opinions, her thoughts, her own personality must be deduced as much from what is unwritten as from what is written- her character sketched in the space left vacant in her accounts. (p. 17)

This utilitarian approach can be partly explained by the fiction by which her trip was justified, both to her husband and to Tasmanians generally- that it was a research trip into a sister-colony that would be of use to her husband Sir John Franklin, Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, and would be a form of diplomatic representation of VDL at a governor-to-governor level.  The reality was that she was restless and curious and liked nothing better than getting away from her husband and the scrutiny of a small colonial society.  Mind you, she liked her comforts too- the iron bedstead came on this trip, just as it did on all her journeys.  But she revels in ‘roughing it’ and escaping amongst people who were only vaguely aware of who she was, and you sense the increasing tightening of protocol and deference as she moves from the outlying areas into the more settled districts surrounding Sydney.

The editor, Penny Russell, has excluded much of  the weight of detail that shackled Ken McGoogan’s biography, but she has tried to keep enough in

to preserve the rich texture of Jane Franklin’s portrayal of a colony arrested at a particular moment of development: a moment of optimism for the future, in a society still built on convict labour and pastoral expansion, in which progress rested upon the sufferings of the chain gangs and the brutually dispossessed Aborigines…But the catastrophic pastoral depression that would destroy the hopes of so many in the early 1840s had not yet made its mark, and the grandeur of half built churches and suburban villas, the growing concern over education, and the diversity of experiments in agriculture and industry all suggest an overall confidence. (p. 16-7)

Russell  has also worked hard, though, to preserve the human aspects of Jane Franklin’s interactions with the people she met.  Her trip was a long one- from April to July 1839- and she was quite devious in her excuses to cut it short as Sir John wished her to do.  But she probably should have come home earlier: it was quite clear by July that she had outstayed her welcome with the Gipps’, and it is her discomfort at this knowledge that makes her more likeable.  We have the intimacy of her coming into Mrs Gipps’ bedroom for a chat, thinking that she was alone, and finding Governor Gipps stretched out on the bed; we have the cringing, walking-on-eggshells  embarrassment when Gipps was furious that she had allowed his carriage to become soaked while she was using it.

For me- and I admit that this is probably an acquired taste- I enjoyed finding characters from “my” Port Phillip and Sydney strolling onto the stage.  So we meet Mr Verner (who was to become Judge Willis’ good friend and neighbour) bowling along in his carriage with two friends;  there’s a ship with Protector Robinson’s Van Diemen’s Land aborigines on board (some of whom were to be sentenced to death by Judge Willis two years later);  Captain Lonsdale (who was to become one of Judge Willis’ targets) taking them to a corroboree but arriving late so that it was all over by the time they arrived; there’s Chief Justice Dowling and his wife, and Justice Alfred Stephen (Judge Willis’ brother judges with whom he was anything but ‘brotherly’).  In fact- and this is important for my purposes- conspicuously absent is Judge Willis and his good lady from the balls and levees and receptions that were laid out for Lady Jane Franklin.

And so, eventually Jane headed for home. What a trip that was!  As with all journeys, once you’ve decided that yes, you’re ready to go home, it seemed to take an age.  But in this case it did-  five weeks from leaving the heads to their arrival back in Hobart (a trip that can take about 3-4 days for the Sydney to Hobart yacht race today).  Buffeted by storms, and with food and water supplies running low, their ship bobbed around; once almost glimpsing the coast of Tasmania before being swept out into the seas again over towards New Zealand.   Relieved, no doubt to be back, you still sense Hobart society swallowing her up again, with criticisms of her recklessness in even embarking on the trip and sniffy comments about petticoat government.

Penny Russell has intervened quite a bit in this book.  She has, by her own admission

emphasised particular stories, bringing into bolder relief images that are blurred, tangled or broken in Jane Franklin’s original. (p.17)

From the original transcript, retrieved and recorded by Roger Millis (who wrote the huge tome on Waterloo Creek), she has favoured people over trees or buildings, but not reproduced “the exhaustive and inexhaustible coverage of the original”, she has omitted hearsay information, and trimmed wordiness and detail “to give them greater narrative cohesion and more dramatic immediacy.”  She has supplemented the text with lengthy footnotes, giving a biographical sketch of the people Franklin mentions in passing, and interspersed Jane Franklin’s own text with clearly marked corroborating information from letters and other people’s diaries.  The book is given a clearer structure by its division into chronological chapters, many of which are prefaced by an italicized introduction.  You are aware, and Russell makes no secret of the fact, that you are reading a mediated text.   Which is probably a good thing: as the back cover blurb notes:

An intrepid traveller, Jane Franklin was consumed by an unquenchable curiosity. She looked, questioned, listened and wrote- pages and pages of minuscule notes on every topic that came to hand.  This edition, carefully abridged and introduced by Penny Russell, makes the diary available for the first time to general readers.

And while it’s probably not exactly a ripping yarn,  we general readers (and more specialized ones too)  should be glad that she has.

6 Comments

Posted in Australian Women's Writing, Book reviews, Colonial biography, Women in Port Phillip

‘Lady Franklin’s Revenge’ by Ken McGoogan

Posted on March 10, 2010 | 7 comments

2006, 435p & notes

The author of this book has written several biographies related to arctic exploration and one senses that he came to this biography almost grudgingly.  His other biographies focus on Arctic heroes- John Rae, Samuel Hearne and Elisha Kent Kane.  Amongst these male explorers, Lady Jane Franklin must have seemed an obsessed, vindictive, indulged woman, intent on pushing forward her husband’s reputation to the expense of others’.   Perhaps McGoogan still feels that way, but it seems that he found much more in Jane Franklin than he expected to.

Well educated and well-to-do, Jane Griffin did not marry John Franklin the Arctic explorer until she was thirty-seven years old.  He was a fleshy, dull man and she was driven and ambitious and she used her connections to procure a position for him on the Mediterranean, and later as Governor of Van Diemen’s Land.  She was an inveterate traveller, heading off for months and sometimes years at a time, accompanied by her iron bedstead which she insisted on having assembled for her on her travels.

The author is Canadian, with a readership no doubt attuned to Arctic themes.  But as an Australian, Lady Jane Franklin is far more familiar to us as the Governor’s wife; we see her in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting; we know of the Franklin River, and her diaries while travelling to Melbourne and Sydney have been well-mined. In fact, there seems to have been quite a Lady Jane Franklin revival recently.

McGoogan captures well the limitations of women’s financial position and influence in Victorian Britain.  He describes well the small-colony political machinations surrounding the dismissal of the VDL Colonial Secretary Montagu, and the lumbering, stiff style of Colonial Office politics and communications.  Lady Jane Franklin has money in her purse to bankroll numerous expeditions in search of her husband when he disappears into the Arctic white and she uses her connections with Dickens, the media, the American government and the Admiralty well.

There is much detail in this book- rather too much, I thought.  He does rise above the mass of detail to make informed and informative observations about gender, patronage, love, women’s position, memory and memorialization, but sometimes it is engulfed by too much information. Of course, Jane Franklin is a generous source: she diarized her life extensively; there is a wealth of communication; the Colonial Office and British bureaucracy built their edifice on paper and she used the public sphere to her advantage.  It is an embarrassment of riches- oh to have that as a problem! but I can see that sometimes you just have to say ‘enough’.

7 Comments

Posted in Australian literature, Book reviews, Colonial biography, Reading

‘The Europeans in Australia A History Vol 2: Democracy’ by Alan Atkinson

Posted on March 8, 2010 | 3 comments

2004 , 339 p. & notes.

I’d been looking forward to reading this book for some time.  I bought Volume 1: The Beginning some time ago at an incredibly cheap price, courtesy no doubt of some intricate global book industry policy structure, and was instantly engrossed by such a different way of telling.  So- what to do?  Relish the series and honour its author’s vision by reading it in its intended order starting with Volume 1?  Or jump ahead into Volume 2, which after all, is the period that I am more interested in, and go back to Volume 1 later? In the end the exigencies of library renewal periods and the imperative to actually write this section of my thesis (as distinct from doodling around reading it)  won out, and so Volume 2 it was.

I was reassured in reading the Foreword that perhaps I would not be too hampered by not having read Volume 1.  He reprises some of the main themes, and speaks of how he is going to pick them up and introduce new themes in this second volume. The series, he says, is meant as “a history of common imagination in Australia” (p.xii)- not identity, but imagination- not just through the views of powerful individual men, but the imagination of large numbers of people considered together.  The change over the decades 1820s-1870 was in part generational, and also a product of the revolutions in communications, literacy and ‘systems thinking’.   He identifies the broad argument of the book and how the chapters contribute to its larger themes.

Which is a good thing, because I have to admit that during the reading of the book, I kept berating myself for not “getting it”.  Despite the title, which suggests a political text, this is a book about imagination, experience and ideas- all intangible entities that are best seen through their expression in individuals’ actions.  I enjoyed his vignettes and careful interweaving of the experiences of men and women, convicts and intellectuals, but I kept feeling as if the bigger themes were running through my fingers like sand.  In a review of the book, Ged Martin observes that

The reviewer too must soar to catch the author’s winged heels: this is a pointillist history…Atkinson’s meaning flows subliminally and is not easily pinned down. As he enigmatically puts it: ‘ vivid things are to be glimpsed merely on their passing our window.’ (p. 286)

I’m relieved to read this: I was beginning to think that perhaps I was being particularly thick. Within the parameters of his large, important themes, the detail is written almost as a stream of consciousness that meanders between ideas.  An example- Chapter 13 Railway Dreaming, which was perhaps my favourite chapter.  I’m not alone in focussing on this chapter- other reviewers (see below) seem to have been attracted to this chapter too.  Why, I wonder? Is it because, like me, they shook themselves and sat up straight and ordered themselves to “Start concentrating!”?  Or was it because, over half way through, suddenly you become aware of how Atkinson is working through his argument?  Is it the writing, or the reader?  He starts this chapter speaking of the democratic settlement- a three sided concept with politics on one side, commerce and enterprise on the other, and the way government worked as the third section.  He talks about systems, which are exemplified by gynaecology as a form of objective tenderness, and studies of inner-urban slum life and disease where disease was  often caused by water supply. Australia was now a richer place; chemistry and consumerism led to the development of glass bottles; glass and iron was used in London’s Crystal Palace and also in railways- Dickens wrote of ‘railway dreaming’ and the Moonians.  Railway dreaming in Australia included ideas of federal co-operation; there was thrill and terror in train-travelling; and Australia’s first serious train accident occured in 1858.  Mrs de Courcey, a travelling piano-teacher was injured in it.  She needed to work because her husband was ‘deranged’, and she said that she herself became ‘deranged, almost, for a time’ from the injuries she sustained.  Lunatic asylums were developed; a leading physician was Frederick Norton Manning, who was an apostle among the lunatics of Queensland. Queensland itself was a kind of hallucination; and then follows a potted history of the development of Queensland.

I found myself just letting go,  swept along by this assured and insistent whirlpool of ideas, but often found myself gasping for air, wondering where on earth I was going. It was with almost a sense of relief that at I turned to the Afterword and discovered that, really, I had understood the direction after all.  Turning back to the Foreword at the start of the book again, I  found that, yes,  he had done all that he had promised and more and that yes, there was an argument there had I had followed, almost without realizing it.

This series is written after Atkinson has spent thirty years reading, study and talking.  The period of time covered in this book (from about 1820s to about 1870s) is very much Atkinson’s ‘patch’, given his work on Push from the Bush which accompanied the 1838 volume of the Australians series. It has been likened to Manning Clark’s opus in its vision, and as with Clark  it is a creative,  idiosyncratic and personalised sweep that tells much, but certainly doesn’t give you “what happened and when”.  It is not a book for novices.

The book itself is divided into three sections, each prefaced by a description of insects in Australia to highlight a theme:  a locust swarm “Still they Kept Coming”;  the noise of cicadas “Their Method of Utterance”; and the disturbance of tightly packed insects in a decayed log of wood “The Masses Unpacked.”  The final image of the book is of a log that contained two ant nests: the first forming a thick crust, which when broken open revealed a complex labyrinth of ant-architecture.

The two ant-nests, old and new, might be taken to stand for the two generations that are described in this volume- the generation that coloured life around the 1830s and that of the goldrush years and after.  The notion of an intricate way of life given over and replaced by something new certainly matches what I say here.  At length, the habits of earlier days seemed to be, in the minds of the young, as dried up and useless as Moore’s “great city”. The Europeans in Australia made for themselves another mental habitation, like the ants.  Like the ants, moreover, they were gatherers from the world beyond, living by traffic and communication.  In rehousing themselves they drew their main materials, all that coloured glass, all those entrancing ideas, from Britain and the United States. (p. 339)

The poetry of his narrative, the bravery of his history-writing, the aurality of his perspective (because this is a ‘noisy’ history) are all breath-taking in their novelty and audacity.  I did enjoy the book once I reached the end of it, a bit like reaching the end of a water slide.  It was a long climb up; I wondered on the way down whether I was going to go over the edge; and probably- probably- I’d like to climb up and do it again.

Some other reviews:

Ged Martin review-  I can’t get the link to work but it’s a PDF document that should download at  http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/ras/article/download/288/346

Marion Snell’s review at Politicalreviewnet at

http://www.politicalreviewnet.com/polrev/reviews/AJPH/R_0004_9522_323_1007582.asp

Paul Pickering http://www.api-network.com/main/index.php?apply=reviews&webpage=api_reviews&flexedit=&flex_password=&menu_label=&menuID=&menubox=&Review=4493

3 Comments

Posted in Australian history, Book reviews

‘Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress’ by Dai Sijie

Posted on March 5, 2010 | 5 comments

No, I’m not the last person in the world to read this book.  I read it for a second time, for my Council of Adult Education bookgroup a.k.a “the ladies who say ooooh”, so named by my daughter for our loud ejaculations and bursts of laughter.

So I already knew that it was the story of two young men, the sons of  so-called ‘intellectuals” who were sent to a remote and primitive Chinese village as part of the process of re-education following the Cultural Revolution. After deviously coming into possession of a suitcase of translations of largely 19th century French novels, they decide to share them with the tailor’s daughter, the Little Seamstress, with whom both boys are in love, as their own form of ‘re-education’.

I’m always a little wary of books written by expatriates: not dismissive by any means, but aware that the act of leaving springs from disillusionment and opportunity, and that the narrative may not be untouched by the need to justify the departure.  But this book, although probably somewhat autobiographical given the history of the author, does not dwell on the hardships of their exile.  The poverty and the grinding labour they are put to is not where their real life is.  Instead it is in their resistance and subversion of the situation in which they are placed.

On re-reading it, I appreciated it anew as a bitter-sweet coming-of-age novel, as all good coming-of-age novels are, and as a variation on the Pygmalion story which, like the the original, does not end as the ‘re-educator’ intends it to end.

I haven’t seen the film, but “the ladies” assure me that it is beautifully done.

5 Comments

Posted in Book reviews, The ladies who say ooooh

‘Sidetracks’ by Richard Holmes

Posted on March 3, 2010 | 5 comments

2000, 410 p.

As you know, I’ve become enamored recently of the writings of the biographer Richard Holmes- in particular his autobiographical works ‘Footsteps’ and now ‘Sidetracks’.  He’s been a prolific biographer over the last 30 years and in the prologue to Sidetracks he lists his major biographical subjects and the outcomes of his work:

1969-70 : Chatterton (an essay, no biography)

1971-74: Shelley (a biography Shelley, the Pursuit)

1973-79: A Gothic Victorian (many sketches, no biography)

1975-79:  Gautier and Nerval (sketches, translations, unpublished biography)

1979-80: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (a single sketch)

1980-85: A Romantic Traveller (sketches, finally Footsteps)

1986-87: William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (an essay, no biography)

1982-89: Coleridge (half a biography, Coleridge: Early Visions)

1990-94: Johnson (a fragment of biography, Dr Johnson & Mr Savage)

1994-98: Coleridge (second half of a biography, Coleridge: Darker Reflections)

1999… A Runaway Life (but, as he says “that could go anywhere”)

His book Sidetracks consists mainly of essays that have been published elsewhere (particularly The Times), with 2 radio plays- the one on Nerval I wrote about here, and a second play “To the Tempest Given” about the death of Shelley.  The short-ish essays in this book, as the title of the collection suggests, follow up on peripheral characters and suggestions that he passed by while working on his “main” topics.  As they have been written as stand-alone newspaper articles, they are engaging works that quickly familiarize the reader with sufficient contextual information to make sense of the story- often framed as a single event or problem- that he lays out and then explores, sometimes via a meandering route, with us.

My favourites were the two radio plays on Nerval and Shelley, and a real historian’s delight- the essay ‘Lord Lisle and the Tudor Nixon Tapes’, written in 1982.  This essay describes the cache of over three thousand letters written to and by Lord Lisle, Henry VIII’s civilian governor who served in Calais, the last English outpost on the continent. His correspondence was seized when he was placed under house arrest as part of the machinations of the Tudor state machine.  It is said that he ended up in the Tower, where, as a privileged prisoner he was exercising on the ‘leads’ of the tower and spied the King’s barge floating down the wintry Thames.  He called hoarsely to the King for mercy: the King heard him and pardoned him.  The letters have been compared with Pepys’ diaries as a source of “eavesdropping” on history, and after surviving fire, flood, and the Blitz, they came into the hands of Muriel St Clare Byrne, who worked on them for fifty years, culminating in a six-volume publication of nearly 4,000 pages and close to two million words.

The essays in this book are loosely grouped, tied together by a theme of place (e.g. France and Paris) or tangentially related to one or another of his major biographical characters (e.g. Shelley; Boswell; Gothic authors).  Each part is prefaced by his own statement about the essays that is interwoven with a reflection on his growth as a biographer.  I found myself laughing out loud at his description of watching someone reading one of his newspaper essays on a train.

It was a salutary experience.  Over several minutes an expression of lively interest steadily faded to one of judicial blankness, soon followed by deep and blameless sleep. (p. 136)

He verbalizes one of the biographer’s (and indeed, the historian’s) ongoing anxieties:

This question of how the biographer achieves authenticity, now began to trouble me.  How much is constructed from broken evidence, a scattered bundle of letters, the chance survival of a diary? How much is lost, forgotten, changed beyond recognition? What secret thoughts are never recorded, what movements of the heart are never put into words? And more than this, by the very act of biographical empathy, how much does the biographer create the fiction of a past life, the projection of his- or her- own personality into a story which is dramatically convincing, even historically correct, but simply not the human truth as it happened? (p. 197)

He speaks of biography as a human exchange: “a handshake across time”, an “act of human solidarity, and in its own way an act of recognition and of love.” (p. 198)

There is love in this book; and  so, I found myself going all goo-ey inside when he reveals his relationship with the writer Rose Tremain, with whom he spent four months in Paris, “looking for some literary expression of the passionate understanding which had brought us, so late and so unexpectedly, together” (p. 319).

In fact, I think I’m a little in love with him myself.

5 Comments

Posted in Biography, Book reviews