Category Archives: Ivanhoe Reading Circle

There’s a particular frisson of delight when you’re reading a novel set in your own town. You recognize the streets and you have a mental landscape painting of the setting, even if it is set 160 years earlier. Jane Sullivan, herself now a Melbourne resident after emigrating from England decades ago, takes us to post-Gold Rush Melbourne, and in a way not unlike Kerry Greenwood with her Phrynne Fisher novels, introduces us to a feisty, intelligent amateur detective who is less sidekick and more spur to her co-investigator Magnus Scott, a journalist who styles himself as ‘The Walking Gentleman’.

The novel starts in a bedroom, as a doctor tries to revive a beautiful young actress Marie St Denis from what appears to be, and is later characterized as, an accidental laudanum overdose. Her closest friend, aspiring actress Lola Sanchez, is not satisfied by such a neat explanation, and she enlists the help of journalist Magnus Scott, one of the few people who wrote a sympathetic obituary for Miss Dennis, to investigate. Fired up by the techniques and success of the detectives in the penny-dreadful crime literature she enjoys, Lola undertakes some amateur sleuthing to uncover multiple footprints in Miss Dennis’ room- but to whom do they belong? Lola devises a list of possible suspects, many of whom belong to the highest echelons of Melbourne society, and disguising herself as a young boy, breaks into houses and sneaks around bedrooms looking for clues. In the meantime, Magnus himself is on a rollercoaster of financial events, and it seems that indeed, there are shadowy forces at work, who may or may not be the same men that Lola is suspecting.

I was thinking about 19th and early 20th century crime fiction, and its reliance on plot, coincidence and red herrings, especially compared with the detective stories of the 21st century and their emphasis on the character and motivations of the detective, just as much as of the perpetrator. This book is truly in the former category, complete with cliff-hangers and diversions that at times strain credulity.

For the historian of Melbourne, it is gratifying to see that Sullivan has done her research, and acknowledges the assistance and friendship of writers like Lucy Sussex, whose recent Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-writer, and Her Criminal Son George is dealing with a similar time-span and genre. I found myself thinking of Barbara Minchinton’s work on Madame Brussells and The Women of Little Lon, although these both look at a later date. A couple of times I found myself raising a sceptical eyebrow, only to find that Sullivan was right: cold cream in 1868? ( Yes, and before then too), the Menzies Hotel? (Yes, opened in 1867) and so, yes, Sullivan has done her work.

I enjoyed Sullivan’s playful tweaking of real-life characters in creating her own Lola Sanchez and Magnus Scott. The name Lola Sanchez of course evokes the Gold-Rush performer Lola Montez, and Magnus Scott as ‘The Wandering Gentleman’ and editor of the New Bohemian bears more than a passing resemblance to Marcus Clarke. She integrates historical figures as well, most notably the enigmatic Redmond Barry, patriarch of Melbourne’s cultural scene but with his own domestic ambiguities, and Dr Nield, the coroner. She takes us to Redmond Barry’s house in Rathdowne St Carlton that later became integrated into the Royal Childrens Hospital, the Theatre Royal, Chinatown and the eponymous Punch Lane, running between the current-day Exhibition and Spring Streets. And as Sullivan explained in a talk that she gave to the Ivanhoe Reading Circle in April, there was indeed an actress Marie St Denis who died of laudanum poisoning, and the story sprang from historical events, with equally heavy doses of research and imagination.

I wonder if this is the first in a series? There’s scope, and plenty of other Melbourne murders to explore…

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Purchased e-book

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle Open Meeting

Spoiler-ish

Had I been watching this on television, I would have thrown the remote at the television when the closing credits scrolled down the screen. As I read it in its a lengthy book form, I found myself beseeching Charles Dickens to come back and show how to tie up a complex story with a definite ending (send the main characters to Australia, drown them, send the car over the cliff- anything that finishes the story off!)

I had heard that this book was about a car-yard closing down, which did not seem a particularly promising premise for a book. Indeed, it is about a family-owned car-yard closing down, but it’s also about the implications on the family – Dickie, Imelda, Cass and PJ- as their financial situation tightens.

It’s set in Ireland, but it took me quite a while to shake off the sense that it was an American story instead. Certainly, there are mentions of the Magdalen convent in the middle of the town that nobody talks about, and the weather is often wet, but I still didn’t have a strong sense of its Irishness. Perhaps the car-yard, which seems a particularly American phenomenon, led me astray.

Dickie and Imelda married about 20 years ago, largely on the rebound from the death of Dickie’s brother, the local football hero Frank. Frank and Imelda had been engaged to be married, and after his death, Dickie and Imelda both sought solace from grief in each other’s arms. Dickie had long been slated to take over the family car-sales yard from his father Maurice, after completing a degree at Trinity College in Dublin. But other events had intervened, and so we find Dickie and Imelda, living in what had been the large family home on a large tract of land, deeply indebted and with the car yard in trouble. Their daughter, Cass, is in her final year of school, trying to work out her place with her friend Eileen and her own sexuality as she, too, goes to Trinity College. Their son PJ spends much of his time online, where he is being taken beyond his depth.

The story moves around, concentrating on different characters in turn, some written by a detached narrator, others told as a stream-of-consciousness where thoughts and verbal utterances are intertwined. As with all families, there are the family stories but here they are unpacked and challenged as the spotlight shifts from person to person, and through flashbacks and back-story. Each of the characters is being lured by a different way of being, and there is an underlying pessimism about the outside world with its physical and emotional violence. Sex in the book is largely sordid, either physically or emotionally, and there are many near misses as events could have taken an even more calamitous turn.

The book is fairly heavy-handed in its preaching on climate change and societal collapse, although it does play a part in the plot. It does add to the ‘going to hell in a handbasket’ vibe of the whole book.

The action speeds up at the end of the book, with increasingly short chapters told from different characters’ perspectives until the narrative is a series of short paragraphs, as all the characters converge on one spot. But what happened? I think that perhaps, there was no near-miss here.

I enjoyed the book, although particularly in the first third I felt an oppressive sense of dread and doom every time I picked it up again. Despite the underlying pessimism of the book, and the unrelieved bleakness, Murray had filled out his characters enough for you to care about them as fellow humans, with whom we share vulnerabilities and thwarted dreams. My son said that it was the best book he read last year: I wouldn’t go that far, but I could barely put it down the further into it I went. So for me, not the best, but pretty damned good.

My rating: 8.5/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection- and then I couldn’t attend the meeting because of COVID!!

Sourced from: Ladyhawke Books, Ivanhoe.

I didn’t read Far From the Madding Crowd at school, even though many people of my age did. It seemed to be a perennial of the Year 12 (HSC) English reading list. I hadn’t read any Hardy at all until I read Tess of the D’Urbervilles at university, which I remember enjoying although now, having read Far From the Madding Crowd, I wonder whether I would still do so.

Like Hardy’s other Wessex novels, Far From the Madding Crowd is set in rural England, harking back to an agricultural past and village life that had been largely eclipsed by the time the book was written in 1874. Although the novel is peopled with stock characters from tales of rural life- the chortling peasants in the local pub, the perfidious army officer, the worthy but stodgy landowner next door- the two main characters, Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak are of a more complicated economic and social milieu. When we first meet Bathsheba, she is a young, well-educated, independent but young woman without her own financial resources, confident enough in her own opinions to reject the marriage proposal of the hard-working and earnest Gabriel Oak. By the next time we meet her, she has inherited property from her aunt and is determined to manage the farm by herself, without the assistance of a bailiff. Gabriel Oak suffers a reversal in fortune and is now forced to work on Bathsheba’s farm, undertaking the tasks of a bailiff without the title.

Clever but impetuous Bathsheba sends a Valentine to her older, rather stodgy neighbour Mr Boldwood, daring him to ‘Marry Me’. He takes Bathsheba at her word, and tries to woo her but Bathsheba, who wants more passion in a relationship than she could ever feel with Mr Boldwood, rebuffs him. Gabriel, aware of the hopelessness of his love, continues to care for Bathsheba. He tries to warn Bathsheba against the perfidious Sgt. Troy, but she plunges into a hasty marriage with him anyway, only to find that he is gambling away all her inheritance. When Troy disappears after his illicit relationship with servant-girl Fanny becomes public, Bathsheba is in a holding pattern, still legally married to Troy and having to bat away Mr Boldwood’s renewed wooing. It is only after Troy is finally killed, and Mr Boldwood taken away as his murderer, that Bathsheba and Gabriel are free to marry. Unusually for Hardy, there is a happily-ever-after-ending.

I grant that Hardy’s depiction of Bathsheba is nuanced and complex. In some ways she is an air-head, toying with men and their emotions, self-centred and wilful. However, she is also independent and principled, although she is exposed to almost intolerable emotional coercion by both Troy and Boldwood. The timeless theme of a woman surrounded by eager suitors, of differing degrees of integrity and suitability, reappears in different guises throughout film and literature.

But each time the book got bogged down in yet another pub-scene or drowned the reader in its lush descriptions of sunrises and fields, I found myself thinking “How on earth would you interest a Year 12 boy in THIS?” I was relieved to hear in the discussion at the Ivanhoe Reading Circle that this book is no longer on reading lists for secondary students, and thank God for that. I may roll my eyes at yet the recently-published but ultimately forgettable fiction books drenched in current politics and sensibilities that are assigned to students today, but some “classics” are too heavily freighted with the politics, sensibilities and stylistics of their own earlier time to become virtually unreadable without a strong reason for doing so.

My rating: 6/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle July selection.

2023, 423 p.

Silly me. Here I was assuming that this book, with a title referencing Macbeth, would be an updated telling of the Macbeth story – but any connections with Macbeth are rather tangential. You may remember that in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he took comfort in his security as King from the prediction that “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him”. Assuring himself that trees could not move, he later realized the true meaning of the prediction when his enemy and his army advanced on Macbeth’s castle under the protection of the tree branches they carried, thus appearing to be a forest moving up the hill.

‘Birnham Wood’ was the name that a gardening co-operative adopted for themselves as they engaged in organic ‘guerilla gardening’ on unattended plots and spaces, living on the food grown as they squatted on disused sites, using water if it was available, carting their own if it was not. There’s elements of humour in Catton’s book, and this is one of them: in a world of terrorists and rogue militias, guerrilla gardening seems rather incongruous. [Having said that, the son of one of my distant relatives is a hard-core forager and dumpster-diver, and his parents have found it very difficult to cope with his subversion of all of their expectations for his career and future in his outright rejection of the capitalist economy.]

Acting as a collective, there are nonetheless power differentials between the members of Birnam Wood. The group was founded by 29 year old Mira Bunting who is approached by Robert Lemoine, a shadowy multi-millionaire attracted to New Zealand as part of the wave of ultra-rich Westerners looking for a bolt-hole in the event of nuclear war. His true intent is the surreptitious mining of rare-earth minerals in a remote national park, carried out under the cover of his pest-eradication drone company. He offers the Birnam Wood collective the opportunity to farm on his property and funding, and takes on the ‘conquest’ of Mira as a personal challenge. At the meeting of the collective to decide whether to accept Lemoine’s offer, Mira is confronted by Tony, with whom she had had a drunken sexual encounter before Tony left for overseas, four years earlier. He has now returned to the collective and rejects Lemoine’s offer as blood money. When his objection is voted down, he leaves, suspicious – correctly as it turns out- that there is more to Lemoine’s proposal to the group. The group meeting to decide the matter evoked brilliantly the interminable earnest university meetings I remember, overlaid with a 21st century patina of political correctness. In the meeting, Mira was backed up by her best friend Shelley, who was actually thinking of leaving the collective.

The book is quintessentially New Zealand, with its ‘pure’ image, green and fertile national parks, and propensity for earthquakes and landslips that has rendered the wider Christchurch area largely inaccessible after the main highway is cut. There is something slightly ‘woolly jumper’ about the collective which includes sincere and rather unworldly workers, inspired by ideas of conservation, ecology and rejection of capitalism.

Against this bucolic background, Robert Lemoine stands out as a 21st century James Bond villian/ Egon Musk type caricature. His sheer evilness is made more believable by his control over the electronic communications channels of mobile phone and internet and his surveillance of the members of the collective, which keeps him one step ahead of Mira, Shelley and Tony as they each think that they are acting autonomously, competing to come out on top in dealing with Lemoine.

The satire drops away and the book ramps up in the second half to become a page-turning, cat-and-mouse thriller, something I would have thought impossible in a story about an idealistic group of guerilla gardeners (of all things!). It’s to Catton’s credit that she’s able to carry this off at all. I won’t give away the ending, except to say that the ending probably had more to do with Macbeth than anything else in the book.

I read this book with the Ivanhoe Reading Circle as their June selection. Many of the members were disappointed with the ending: I was perhaps less critical, seeing any other possible ending as a cop-out, and spying a few loose ends that Catton may left dangling that could presage a different outcome.

Most of all with this book, I was so impressed with Catton’s ability to switch so skillfully into a completely different genre to that of the historical fiction The Luminaries, the only other Catton book that I have read. So many writers ‘stick to their lane’ after having a book as successful as The Luminaries was, but Catton has upended these expectations completely. It is a book that surprised with its completely modern setting and its morphing from a somewhat prickly social satire into a page-turning thriller. Eleanor Catton is completely in charge of her narrative, and has the flexibility of a very skilled writer with decades of writing ahead of her!

My rating: 8.5/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection.

Before I read this book I already knew that Barbara Kingsolver wrote it as a homage and 21st century take on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Kingsolver’s book at 548 pages is certainly seen as a ‘big baggy monster’ by today’s standards, but because I am a complete glutton for punishment I read the original David Copperfield as well, and you can see my review here.

I’m so pleased that I read the original before I read Demon Copperfield because, even though Kingsolver’s book stands on its own two feet perfectly well, I enjoyed seeing parallels between the two books, and how she gave the events of the original book a 21st century twist. Quite amazingly, I think, these allusions to the original (which would only be obviously to readers who had read it) did not propel the modern book into farce or melodrama, which a homage to a 19th century, somewhat dated, book could easily do. Instead, they made perfect sense within a modern context.

In Dickens’ time, child labour blighted the childhoods of children. In the 21st century, drug addiction blights the children of users, who often end up using themselves. Vicious and avaricious stepfathers and childbirth deaths could orphan a child in the past: now it is overdoses, particularly of prescription drugs like Oxycontin which spring from, and in turn, corrupt the medical/pharmaceutical/crime network that have made them the scourge they are in America. (Thank God and successive Australian Governments for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and drug detection schemes that have prevented the same thing happening in Australia). The original David Copperfield was left to the mercy of unscrupulous employers: Demon Copperhead was the plaything of a welfare bureaucracy that worked more to the interests of unscrupulous ‘care’-givers playing the system for profit. Sport and his ability to draw became Demon’s means of escape.

The Wikipedia page for Demon Copperhead shows the pairing of original characters with Kingsolver’s characters. The names have resonances, but the judgements you make of them as a reader do differ. Dori (Dickens’ Dora) is addicted to Oxycontin, and although she is passive and in thrall to her addiction, she is not the airhead that Dora was. Mr Micawber in Dickens’ book was a larger-than-life, loveable perennial optimist: Mr and Mrs McCobb are grifters and schemers, just as reprehensible as Mr Creakle who fosters boys as a cheap labour source and in order to get their welfare payments. U-Haul does not have the same sinuous oiliness of Dickens’ original Uriah Heep, who made so much of his purported ‘umbleness – there is no 21st century equivalent of ‘humility’ as a virtue- and he seems to play a less important role in Kingsolver’s plot. Dickens is coy about Steerforth’s corruption of Emily: Kingsolver is upfront about the prostitution and sex trafficking into which Sterling Ford drags Emmy, Demon’s childhood friend.

In Dickens’ books, London and the large Victorian cities provide a backdrop to the plot. Kingsolver, who is from Appalachia herself, sets her book in the southern Appalachian mountains of Virginia. She knows these places (as did indeed Dickens know London and England), and both writers use their books as a critique of their own society. I did find myself thinking of Shuggie Bain or J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and there has been some critique of Demon Copperhead as being ‘poverty porn’. I didn’t see it that way. I was driven to finish the book, fearful that Kingsolver would do something very smart-alecky and postmodern to the ending. Did she? You’ll have to read it to find out.

This book garnered many prizes including the Pulitzer and the Women’s Prize for fiction. It well deserved them. It was a brilliant re-telling of David Copperfield, with many winks and nudges for those familiar with the original, and a perfectly independent story on its own terms.

My rating: 10/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle March selection.