Category Archives: Six Degrees

This month I have actually read Shuggie Bain the book that starts off this month’s Six Degrees of Separation meme. Look at the ‘rules’ for Six Degrees of Separation on Kate’s Books are my Favourite and Best website but essentially, Kate chooses a starting book, then you link other titles that spring to mind.

I know that Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize, but I found it reminding me a lot of Angela’s Ashes. I read Angela’s Ashes long before I started blogging and it was certainly a best-seller when it was published in 1996. It wasn’t eligible for the Booker Prize at the time because the author was American, and I don’t know if it would have won it if it were. However, it’s one of the few books that I have read twice, drawn in when flicking through the pages one day.

A similar book is Kevin Kearn’s Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History. In my review, I likened it to ‘Angela’s Ashes: The Documentary’ because many of the same themes emerge. There are some introductory chapters that explain the rise of the tenement and a chapter that encapsulates many of the themes that are repeated in the oral histories that follow. The book was a bit repetitive, but it was interesting social history.

Another social history/memoir is Lynsey Hanley’s Estates: An intimate history, written by a woman who grew up in the Birmingham housing estate at Chelmsley Wood in the 1960s and 1970s. Even though It is mainly a historical approach, interwoven with her own experience, with closing chapters that bring us up to the present day.

A more frightening aspect of living in an apartment tower is found in Karina Sainz Borgo’s It Would Be Night in Caracas. Set in present-day Venezuela, a young journalist who has returned to Caracas after her mother dies, finds her apartment taken over by a female-led gang. It is poignant and frightening to see a formerly-wealthy country spiralling into collapse and lawlessness.

At least the people in The Death of Vishnu by Mani Suri could leave their apartment building in Mumbai. But in doing so, they had to encounter their aging, alcoholic houseboy who lay dying on the steps. We move from apartment to apartment as the residents bicker over what to do with the dying Vishnu.

Now, could you get further away from a Mumbai apartment building than a grand old English house? (Well, actually, possibly the grand old English house was purchased with money made in India, as William Dalrymples The Anarchy shows us). But it’s not the building, but the idea of an old servant, Stevens, that makes me mentally link these two books. The book won the Booker Prize in 1989 and was made into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

I started with one Booker Prize winner, and finished with another. I’ve gone from Scotland to Ireland to England, to Caracas, to Mumbai, and back again to England. What an exhausting trip!

Once again, I have not read the book that starts off the Six Degrees of Separation meme on the first Saturday of each month. You can read the ‘rules’ for Six Degrees of Separation on Kate’s Books are my Favourite and Best website. This month the starting book was Anne Tyler’s Redhead by the Side of the Road.

I might not have read this particular Anne Tyler book but I have read several others. Before starting this blog I would have nominated her as one of my favourite authors, but I think that after a few books I had begun to tire of the Americanness and everyday-lifeness of her books (I don’t know if either of those words exist!) and I haven’t read anything of hers in the last ten years. I know that I really enjoyed Ladder of Years, where the middle-aged female main character decides to just walk out on her family, adopt a new identity and start a new, stripped-down life. Perhaps my enjoyment of this book says more about me as a middle-aged female reader, than the book.

Someone working as an undercover agent would be adopting new identities all the time, I should imagine. But what happens to the family they leave behind? Berta Isla by Javier Mariás explores the scenario of a wife whose husband disappears ‘on business’ for increasingly lengthy periods of time.

If you say “spy” to an Australian, probably the first names that will occur to them are those of Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov (in fact, there’s a good chance that the Petrovs will be the only names that most Australians will be familiar with). The image of Evdokia Petrov being manhandled along the tarmac to an aeroplane is one of the iconic images of the 1950s. Andrew Croome has fictionalized the Petrov Affair in his Document Z.

Prime Minister Robert Menzies was able to take advantage of the Petrov Affair during the 1954 election campaign- a timing which many thought was too convenient. I grew up during the 1960s believing that Robert Menzies was the only possible Prime Minister: a bit like the Queen, he just was. Judith Brett wrote an excellent biography of Menzies and the middle class in the post-war years in Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, which I read prior to staring this blog.

Another historian who captured twentieth century Melbourne middle class life very well is Janet McCalman in Journeyings: The Biography of a Middle Class Generation 1920-1990. She takes as her narrative vehicle (literally) the No. 69 tram travelling from Carlisle St St Kilda to Cotham Road Kew, picking up the students of four private schools: Scotch, Trinity, Genazzano and MLC (Methodist Ladies College) and traces the experience of middle class, Melbourne life in the suburbs through which the No. 69 travels.

The other major denominational rival to MLC was Presbyterian Ladies College, whose most famous alumni is Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, better known by her nom-de-plume Henry Handel Richardson. She famously wrote about her school days in The Getting of Wisdom, but I much preferred her wonderful three-part work The Fortunes of Richard Mahony which is probably one of my favourite Australian novels.

Hah! Four Australian books this time- and three of them by women!

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is described at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest . There is a starting book (for January 2021 it’s Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet), then you think of other books that you have read that are somehow and usually tenuously connected. In this case, I start off with Shakespeare’s son and end up with Dante Rossetti’s muse. As is often the case, I haven’t read the starting book but I have downloaded it, which is half-way to reading it (isn’t it?).

Shakespeare- such a famous surname for a writer- and so I jump to Nicholas Shakespeare, a recent immigrant to Australia, who writes about his search for two ancestors from his family tree in his book In Tasmania (2004). One was the army officer and merchant Anthony Fenn Kemp, and the other Petre Hordern, an alcoholic from a wealthy family who drags his family into poverty.

As part of his search for Kemp descendants, he visits a newly-found Kemp cousin who brings out a shell necklace supposedly owned by Truganini, supposedly “the last full-blood Aborigine” (or so we were told at school back in the 1960s). Cassandra Pybus gives a much more rounded view of Truganini, and her agency across the British colonies of Van Diemens Land and the Port Phillip District of New South Wales in Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse. (2020)

One of my favourite books about Tasmania -indeed, one of my favourite Australian books full stop – is Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) , a beautifully illustrated and imaginative, magical realist book, based on the life of convict artist William Buelow Gould but going far beyond the historical character. I read this book before I started blogging. Flanagan has written many wonderful books since, but this is my favourite.

Speaking of fishing, Vicki Hastrich spends quite a bit of time messing about in boats in her Night Fishing (2019), a collection of essay-length memoir pieces tied together with the theme of boats and fishing, but with reflections on other things as well.

A boat – or rather a merchant schooner called ‘The Ibis’ runs through Amitov Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy starting with Sea of Poppies (2008). Within the 468 pages of this book, first we have the arrival of a boat, its provisioning and then its slow movement down the river towards the open sea, collecting characters along the way. There’s no sign of it here, but the trilogy is going to end up embroiled in the Opium Wars as part of the economic model underpinning British imperialism.

At the other end of the opium trade were the British users, although in this case the opium was marketed as laudanum. Elizabeth Siddal, model for artists from the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood and lover of Dante Rossetti, eventually succumbed to her laudanum addiction in Lucinda Hawksley’s Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (2004).

Well, that turned rather dark, didn’t it?- both the title characters, loved by famous writers, end up dead. On a lighter note, I’m pleased that I’ve been able to include some ‘older’ back-catalogue books, with a good sprinkling of Australian authors.

How could the start of the month come round so quickly? The December Six Degrees of Separation meme (see Books are My Favourite and Best for an explanation) starts off with Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s me, Margaret. I was a little too old for Judy Blume’s Young Adult books, which started off in the mid 1970s, and the whole Judy Blume phenomenon passed me by. But it did start me thinking about the book that I loved most as an adolescent, and how that book has been reflected in my later adult reading.

The book that I loved most in early secondary school was Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. It’s a story of a young girl and her older sister living in a racketty old Big House, with their author father suffering from writer’s block. In my own family, we never bought books, and so I reborrowed this book from the school library again and again. Now that I actually do buy books, I have not one but two copies on my bookshelves, but I’m a little apprehensive about re-reading it in case it doesn’t live up to my memories. It was the start of my love of Big House books, which is the ‘degree of separation’ that joins all my books.

I read L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between when I was in H.S.C. (i.e. Year 12). I just loved the summer 1900 setting of this book where a young boy, sent for the summer to a friend’s Big House, becomes an intermediary in an illicit love affair between his friend’s sister and a nearby tenant farmer. There’s a similar feeling of a young adolescent out of his depth emotionally, entangled in other people’s affairs and the feeling of impending doom.

These same themes came up in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which was made into a lush film starring Keira Knightley. Again, we have a young girl in another Big House, and another illicit love affair. The same feelings of summer, emotional immaturity and guilt come through in this book, too. This book, though, has three separate time periods, although the implications of an innocent but erroneous childhood action reverberate through a lifetime.

There are a number of similar books that I have read since writing this blog. Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday is only small, at 132 pages, and dealing with just one day – Mothering Sunday – when the hired help in post WWI Big Houses are allowed to go home to visit their families. But housemaid Jane is orphaned, and so spends the day with her lover, Paul, the son of a neighbouring Big House family. It’s a perfectly formed, tightly told little story.

Big Houses, tied as they are to the arcane inheritance arrangements of the aristocracy tend to elicit manipulative relationships and long-held grudges on the part of the disinherited. Clare Clark’s We That are Left is set in a postWWI Big House, once again with the outsider child brought into the midst of messy upper class family arrangements. We learn in the opening pages that the outsider child ends up owning the Big House and the narrative thread of the novel is just how he achieved it.

For me, Big House novels are inevitably set in England, although there are probably plenty of Big Houses in other countries too (all of a sudden Gone With the Wind or The Leopard spring to mind). What about Australian Big House novels? The houses may not be so big, and certainly not of similar antiquity, but Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm is set in a Big Enough House, where two adult children return to their mother’s affluent house, intent on putting her into a nursing home so that their inheritance is not gobbled up by her in-home-care nursing arrangements. I really don’t know if I even understood this book, which is often the way with me with Patrick White.

And so, I find myself laughing at the idea of starting off with Judy Blume and ending up with Patrick White. Could any two authors possibly be more different from each other?

The first Saturday of the month seems to come around very quickly! We are usually given a starting book by Kate, who hosts the Six Degrees of Separation meme on her blog Books Are My Favourite and Best. But this time, she instructed us to start from the last book on last month’s chain, which for me, was Marie Munkara’s Every Secret Thing.

So, thinking of ‘secrets’, there’s Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, set in Ireland, where during the process of deinstitutionalization, a woman is discovered who has been incarcerated in an asylum for 60 years. The book explores how, and by whom, she came to be placed in the asylum- but I didn’t like the ending at all (and after 12 years, I have no memory at all of what the ending even was!)

But I do remember the ending of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, which is a book about secrets too. Roth’s books are often swaggering, male and very American, and this is no exception, telling the story of Coleman Silk, a successful, white Jewish professor who is accused of using a racist term in his classes. Narrated by Nathan Zuckerberg, who appears in several of Roth’s novels, it’s infuriatingly conservative but also incisive about sex, race, and Americanism.

Speaking of stains, there’s some really gruesome stains in Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner, the biography of Sandra Pankhurst, who runs an agency that does cleanups after a crime scene, a death or where hoarding has become perilous. Sandra Pankhurst, born Peter, has her own story of abuse and emotional deprivation before her gender reassignment surgery. It’s a fantastic book.

David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl explores the marriage of two artists, Einar Wegerer and his American wife Greta Waud in the 1920s and 30s.  It was at Greta’s suggestion that Einar first cross-dressed within their marriage, and his increasing excursions as ‘Lily Elba’ culminated in the world’s first sex-change surgery.

Also set in Denmark is Johanna Adorjan’s An Exclusive Love, the story of the author’s Jewish grandparents who had emigrated from Hungary to Denmark after their terrible experiences during WWII. We learn in the opening sentences that they decided to commit suicide together in 1991, and in this book their granddaughter reconstructs the lives that they rarely spoke about later.

Thinking of grandparents and great-grandparents and aunts and great-aunts brings to mind The Eighth Life (For Brilka) by Nino Haratischvili. This was one of the big fat books I read during COVID lockdown and it was wonderful: a family saga, set in Georgia (near Russia, not in America) during the 20th century with various branches of the family tree sprouting off in all directions, but with such well-defined characters that you didn’t need a genealogical chart.

So look at that- all fiction this month!- and set in Australia, Ireland, America, Denmark and Georgia. Who said we couldn’t travel during these coronavirus days?

Well, another book that I haven’t read to start off this month’s Six Degrees of Separation. For the rules of the game, see here. On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

The first book is Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham. I don’t know anything about this book except that it’s a fictionalized story of Hilary Clinton. Of course, Hilary never got to be President, but someone who did get to be Prime Minister was Julia Gillard which leads me to…

The Gillard Project (2015) was written by her speechwriter, Michael Cooney. I really intended to read Julia Gillard’s own autobiography – which I even purchased and even now is still sitting in its paper bag unopened- but I picked this up while waiting for books to be delivered at the State Library. It’s interesting that Julia Gillard is best known for her misogyny speech (“I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man”) which was delivered off the cuff, and not written by a speechwriter at all.

One of the best known recent prime ministerial speechwriters is Don Watson, whose Recollections of a Bleeding Heart I loved, but did not review in this blog. However, Don Watson was originally a historian and Caledonia Australis was a very early book, first published in 1984 and republished in 1997 and 2009. It is about the Scots emigration to Australia, starting back with the Highland Clearances, then hones in on Angus Macmillan, the so-called ‘Father’ of Gippsland. Although lionized as a ‘pioneer’ in times gone past, Angus Macmillan bears a more ambiguous reputation today – and indeed, his statue was recently targeted as part of the Black Lives Matter Campaign (although it still stands – for now).

Don Watson wrote about Gippsland, to the east of Melbourne, but Margaret Kiddle wrote about the Western Districts in her Men of Yesterday, which was written in 1961. It’s a rather unfashionable and blinkered book today, with its blithe dismissal of the dispossession of the indigenous people on the lands that her forebears “took up”. But it is beautifully written, and I wish that I had blogged about it in more detail (and in fact, I’ve included it in a Six Degrees previously, so it certainly made an impression).

Clang! Here I go off onto a digression. “Yesterday” surely evokes the Beatles, rousing all my baby boomer enthusiasms. Looking Through You: Rare and Unseen Photographs from the Beatles Book Archive is a collection of photographs of the Fab Four taken by photographer Leslie Bryce. They were originally published in a small A5 booklet format called The Beatles Monthly Book. They’re beautifully clear photographs, many of which I hadn’t seen before.

The Beatles came from Liverpool of course, and Liverpool is one of the settings in Peter Behren’s The Law of Dreams (2006), which awarded the Canadian Governor-Generals Literary Award for Fiction. It reminded me of a Canadian version of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, because both books are written about one of the author’s forebears and their journey to a British settler colony. In this case young Fergus, orphaned by the Irish Potato Famine, ends up in Liverpool working on railway construction, before heading for America.

And here I’m feeling very smug at ending up with Barak Obama’s Dreams from My Father (1995), which of course leads me right back to where I began with the American presidency (although, of course, Obama actually won). A beautifully written book, penned years before the Presidency, which makes you miss him even more and despair at what replaced him.