Tag Archives: Book reviews

‘Sneaky Little Revolutions’ by Charmian Clift

Posted on June 28, 2025 | 1 comment
2022, 448p.

[Warning: discussion of suicide]

This book, edited by Clift’s biographer and former daughter-in-law Nadia Wheatley, is marketed as ‘selected essays’. More properly, they are a selection of 80 of her 225 newspaper columns published mainly in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s Herald between 1964 and 1969, when they came to an abrupt halt with her suicide.

The newspaper columnist was (is?) a curious beast. Although there are innumerable bloggers and sub-stack writers, there seemed to be something rather special about turning over the page of a print newspaper, and seeing an article by a regular columnist, in its accustomed place on the page. I used to enjoy the columns of Sharon Gray (who I see is actually Adele Hulse), Pamela Bone and Gillian Bouras who ended up living in Greece – all women- and Martin Flanagan in the Age. I know that Anne Deveson wrote a regular column, but I only know of her through her daughter Georgia Blain. The only physical newspapers that I still receive are the Saturday Paper and The Age on Saturdays and although they have a stable of staff writers and comment columns, the only one who comes close to my perception of the ‘newspaper columnist’ in the Charmian Clift mould is Margaret Simons with her gardening columns in the Saturday Paper, and perhaps Kate Halfpenny and Tony Wright in The Age. Somehow you feel as if you know them, and that you could plonk down beside them in a coffee shop and just take up talking with them.

Of course, it’s all artifice because despite the appearance of confidentiality and intimacy, columnists project a particular view of themselves, and one that is often quite removed from reality. This is the case with Charmian Clift whose columns brim with confidence and warmth, when instead she had lived, and was still living, a life that was far removed from the suburban Australian life of many of her readers. She and her husband, writer George Johnson, circulated in an artistic and intellectual milieu on the Greek island of Hydra that could simply not be found in Australia (barring, perhaps, the communal living at places like Heide in Bulleen). There’s little sign in her columns of the infidelities and arguments that wracked her marriage. She never mentioned her family members by name, and referred only obliquely to her husband’s long hospitalization with TB. The birth of an illegitimate, and relinquished, daughter when she was 18 years old was coded as “a wrong road…that led me to disaster”.

I could find only one mention of her alcoholism:

A whole human life of struggle, bravery, defeat, triumph, hope, and despair, might be remembered, finally, for one drunken escapade.

One can only read with hindsight her essay about her husband’s forthcoming semi-autobiographical second book Clean Straw for Nothing, which she had not dared read, for fear of what he might reveal about her through the character Cressida Morley

I do believe that novelists must be free to write what they like, in any way they liked to write it (and after all who but myself had urged and nagged him into it?), but the stuff of which Clean Straw for Nothing is made, is largely experience in which I, too, have shared and … have felt differently because I am a different person …

Indeed, several commentators have linked her apprehension about the publication of this book with her suicide in July 1969 at the age of 45- a suicide that seems so paradoxical with the fiesty, intelligent personae that she had curated through her columns.

Wheatley has titled this book ‘Sneaky Little Revolutions’, echoing a rather condescending but also self-effacing comment that Clift made about her own columns to her publisher in London:

I have been making my own sneaky little revolutions …writing essays for the weekly presses to be read by people who don’t know an essay from a form guide but absolutely love it….

Some of her essays are disarmingly suburban, but there are many others that are subversive and indeed, “little revolutions” for the mid-1960s, deep in the midst of the Menzies-era. She resisted the smugness of white-Australia that expected her gratitude for returning to comfortable Australia from a ‘foreign’ country; she supported the rights of women and decried their ‘second-class’ status; she said “sorry” some forty years before the Australian government did; and she revelled in young ‘protestants’ (i.e. protesters) who challenged the complacency of the 60s. In an essay that was not published at the time, she criticized the contingency and unfairness of the National Service draft, which left some men untouched and diverted the life course of others.

As a middle-aged (who am I kidding?) woman myself, I loved her essay ‘On Being Middle Aged’.

…the middle-aged drag time around with them like a long line of fetters, all the years that they cannot escape, the mistakes that can never be undone, the stupidities that can never be uncommitted now, the sames and humiliations and treacheries and betrayals as well as the prides and accomplishments and happinesses and brief moments of wonder…. I often think that middle-aged people have two lives, the one they’ve lived, and a parallel life, as it were, that walks around with them like a cast shadow and lies down with them when they go to sleep, and this is the life they might have lived if they had made different choices in that time when time was so abundant and the choices were so many.

There is a run of essays in the volume about her trip to central and northern Australia. At a time before cheap airfares and mass international travel, her beautiful writing brought to life a view of Australia from above- something that not all Australians had seen. In ‘The Centre’:

Pitted pores. Dried out capillaries of watercourses. Culture slides of viridian clotting thick creamy yellow. Wind ridges raised like old scars, and beyond them the even, arid serrations of the Simpson Desert, dead tissue, beyond regeneration. And yet, the tenderness of the pinks, the soft glow of the reds, the dulcet beige and violet seeping in.

She has a distinctive voice, although one that is not completely unlike my own with her colons and lists and parentheses and made-up words. The genre of the newspaper column does impose a straitjacket of must-haves: an engaging introduction, a set word length, and a rounding-off last paragraph. I found myself longing for a longer essay than the requisite six pages in my e-book and something more thorny and less self-contained.

Is there any point to re-publishing seventy year old newspaper columns? Yes, I think there is in exceptional cases, and few newspaper columnists have that honour bestowed upon them. I think that it rescues some good thought, good thinking and prescience from the flow of ephemera and evokes a humility in us to remember that many others have held certain political positions and made similar observations in the past.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection

Sourced from: purchased e-book

1 Comment

Posted in Book Reviews 2025, Ivanhoe Reading Circle

Tagged , , , ,

‘My Brilliant Life’ by Ae-ran Kim

Posted on May 4, 2025 | Leave a comment
2021, 208 p.

SPOILER ALERT

I visited South Korea with my son and his family, so I thought that I’d embark on a bit of South Korean literature before I went. Other than Pachinko, which is partially set in Korea, I don’t believe that I’ve read any other books set in or about Korea.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but My Brilliant Life ended up being a completely different from what I thought it would be. As it turned out, I was reading it in Large Print edition (the only one I could find) which gave it an air of being a rather light, speedy read. It is narrated by sixteen year old Aerum, who is suffering from progeria, a rare inherited disease that causes premature aging. As his body gradually shuts down, he decides to write his family story, drawn together from what his parents have told him about their lives in a rural village, their meeting and early marriage and his childhood. He is a lonely child: he cannot attend school, and has no friends of his own age – for what indeed is his age in a body that is accelerating towards a premature death? The family is not rich, and the hospital bills are mounting up, and so he decides to make a paid appearance on a television show, which alleviates the financial pressure and launches him into a rather voyeuristic celebrity. Following the program, he receives many emails, and he begins corresponding with Seoha, who is suffering from cancer, and in the absence of other age-appropriate relationships, he becomes infatuated with her.

I will not divulge the end of the story. It is sad and inevitable. It’s a book about life, love and presence.

Although this is book was in Large Print format, it could possibly be an interesting Young Adult book- after all, there’s no shortage of books about teenagers dying of incurable diseases. I don’t know that I learned much about South Korea from it, but I did learn about progeria.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: it was set in South Korea.

Leave a comment

Posted in Book Reviews 2025

Tagged , , ,

‘What I Loved’ by Siri Hustvedt

Posted on April 11, 2025 | Leave a comment
2003, 367 p.

For the first time in over 20 years, I didn’t finish the book for my CAE bookgroup. Partly, it was because I forgot that we had changed the day of our meeting, bringing it forward. But also it was because at 367 small-print pages this is a far longer, denser book than I anticipated.

The story is narrated by an elderly professor, Leo Hertzberg about his life in New York between about 1975 and 2000. It is prompted by the discovery of five letters written to his neighbour and friend, the artist Bill Wechsler by Violet, the woman who was to become Bill’s second wife. They were to become neighbours, with Bill and his first, then second, wife living upstairs with their son Mark, and Leo and his wife Erica living on the floor below with their son Matt, who was of a similar age. Marriages disintegrate under the pressure of infidelity and tragedy. Leo finds himself acting as an indulgent-uncle type figure to his friend Bill’s son Mark, who proves himself unworthy of the love and indulgence extended to him as he disappears into the rave culture of New York and comes under the influence of the menacing artist Teddy Giles.

Leo is an art historian (one of the wankiest genres around, I reckon) and Bill is an artist and so there are long- far too long- descriptions of Bill’s contemporary artwork. Violet researches hysteria, anorexia and representations of the body and identity, and this is described at length too. Indeed, there is much in this book about representation and reality, and it all became rather precious and over-intellectualized.

The book starts off fairly slowly as a domestic narrative within a New York setting, but becomes far more urgent and fast-paced- dare I say, a thriller?- in the second half of the book. It really feels like a book of two halves. Leo is a gracious, self-deprecating first-person narrator, and so it felt comfortable to be in his company. The second half of the book was compelling enough that I continued to read it, even though our book group meeting came and went, but I found the descriptions of art and the self-conscious intellectualizing of the book rather tedious.

My rating: 6.5/10

Sourced from: A left-over book from the former Council of Adult Education

Read because: it was The Ladies Who Say Oooh (ex CAE) bookgroup selection.

Leave a comment

Posted in Book Reviews 2025, The ladies who say ooooh

Tagged , , , ,

‘Question 7’ by Richard Flanagan

Posted on March 4, 2025 | Leave a comment
2023, 288 P.

When I first heard about Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, I thought “But that’s just a rehash of everything he’s already written”. It’s true that there are flashes of his earlier work, almost as if he’s tipping his hat to it in passing. The Tasmanian section evokes The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Wanting and Gould’s Book of Fish, his mentions of his father’s wartime experience sparks memories of Narrow Road to the Deep North and his mother’s death was explored in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, and the final chapter brings to life Death of a River Guide. But this makes the book sound like a glorified ‘greatest hits’ and it’s much, much more than that. It’s brilliant.

The title is taken from a Chekhov story, where a question is posed in the form of those schoolroom maths questions that still give me a sinking feeling in my stomach:

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?”

Who, indeed. The real question is love, not the train or the timetable, and it’s a question that is unanswerable. So too, is the question of causality that brings each of us where we are.

Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Slizard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project, and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima, and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them. (p.237-8)

We meet all these contingencies and people in this book, written as a series of small shards within ten chapters: the Enola Gay pilot Thomas Ferebee, physicist Leo Slizard, the writers H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, his parents, his childhood in Roseberry, Tasmania, the Burma Railway and indigenous dispossession. Themes arise, drop and rise again, and parts of the book are an extended reflection on death and memory, encountered over and over. It’s hard to fit in into any one genre: it’s history, non-fiction, memoir and philosophy all rolled into one. The most compelling writing in the book comes at the end, when he tells his experience of nearly dying – indeed, did he die and is all this just a dream?- that he fictionalized in Death of a River Guide. My dinner was ready, and I was being summoned with increasing impatience, but I had to keep reading, even though I knew that clearly, he did, survive – and if it was a dream, then we’re all enmeshed in it too.

I have always loved Richard Flanagan’s right from Gould’s Book of Fish, which was the first of his books that I read. I’ve read interviews as part of the publicity for this book, where Flanagan said that he didn’t know if he’d write another book and I must admit that I closed it, feeling that he had written himself completely into the book, wondering how he could ever write anything else after this.

The best book that I have read in ages.

My rating: 11/10

Sourced from: borrowed for a friend (for far too long!)

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

‘Outrageous Fortunes’ by Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex

Posted on February 12, 2025 | 2 comments
2025, 288 p. & notes

If nominative determinism was a real thing, this book would be about a wealthy woman, her affluent son and their convention-shattering lives. Instead, Mary Fortune worked all her life as a writer and died in poverty, and her son George Fortune spent much of his adult life in jail.

However, ‘Mary Fortune’ is a wonderful name for a writer, even though she always wrote under many other pseudonyms, especially Waif Wanderer and W.W. Although many in literary bohemia knew her real name, it was not widely broadcast. Between 1855 and 1920 she wrote articles, serialized novels, poetry and short stories in various local periodicals, particularly the long-running and popular Australian Journal. From 1868 she contributed a column called ‘The Detective’s Album’, featuring a male detective Mark Sinclair, under the initials W.W. This eventually amounted to over 500 narratives and formed the basis of her book The Detective’s Album, published in 1871 and the first book of crime short stories published in Australia, and the first detective collection by a woman in the world. In her Ladies Page columns, writing variously as Mignon, Nemia, Nessuno and Sylphid, she was both journalist and flâneur (flâneuse) walking the streets and observing – an unusual thing for a woman- and she wrote lively descriptions of Melbourne life, similar to those being penned by Marcus Clarke at the same time, but from a woman’s perspective. She wrote a fictionalized memoir in the 1880s, Twenty Six Years Ago but there is little other personal correspondence. When you read her lively, whip-smart writing you find yourself wondering why you haven’t heard of her before.

She was born Mary Helena Wilson in Ireland, and emigrated with her father to Canada probably in the early years of the Great Famine. They were Protestant, and her father worked as an engineer. In 1851, aged 18 she married surveyor Joseph Fortune, who was to give her that very rather theatrical surname. When the gold rushes erupted in Australia in 1851, her father left, and in 1855 so did she, leaving her husband behind. She and her three year old son George, travelled to Scotland, then on to Australia to find her father, no easy feat in this raucous colonial colony where identities could be erased and redrawn easily. A woman leaving with her child, especially the only child of an only child in a fairly prosperous family, was unusual but she lived an unusual life. She had a second illegitimate child while living on the goldfields, and said nothing of her earlier marriage when she married policeman, Percy Rollo Brett, claiming widow status. The marriage did not last long and they separated, throwing Mary onto her own resources, first on the goldfields, and then in Melbourne.

In the introductory chapter, the authors write:

When the search behind this biography began, little was known beyond her name: Mrs Fortune. To find her meant following her lead as a detective writer, seeking the clues hidden in her vast bibliography. A process of literary detection began. Her game was to drop self-referential fragments- names and events from her life- into her writing. Reading an author through their work can be a trap: the biographical fallacy- the assumption that writing always derives from life. Such was not true in Mary Fortune’s case, for she had a wild imagination. She could write as vividly of a vampire or a vengeful Roma sorceress as of the Victorian goldfields. Yet even at her most sensational her default mode was realist, fed by a tenacious memory. She held grudges interminably and rehashed them in print. Details repeat through the decades of her work, and – thanks for the increasingly digitised world of archives and newspapers- they can be investigated and explained. (p. 4)

Despite the availability of her work in digital form, few readers are likely to immerse themselves in Mary Fortune’s prolific output, and thus to a certain extent we have to take on trust that Mary’s writing does throw light onto her biography. I, for one, think that the authors have identified sufficient parallels and repetitions between Mary’s life and her literary output to validate this as a way of proceeding. That said, though, without Mary’s writing, it would have been a rather thin biography.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this biography, and one which the authors bring out really well, is the paradox that Mary Fortune built her literary reputation (albeit under a nom-de-plume) on criminal activity through her ‘Detective’s Album’ columns, while her only son was completely enmeshed in the criminal system as perpetrator and prisoner. George Fortune’s life, from the age of fourteen was a series of arrests and imprisonments, starting with his arrest for stealing a hat in July 1871. From here he was committed to industrial schools, farm placements, youth imprisonment at Pentridge and eventually long stints in jail in both Victoria and Tasmania. There was no glamour in his criminal history of crime and recidivism.

Mary Fortune had been married to a policeman, and in many ways she mined this connection for the rest of her life. She may have herself been a ‘fizgig’, a police informant. The ambiguous relationship between law and crime lies at the heart of any number of detective series, and it is given an extra frisson in relationships between police and informants, especially women informants. However, her literary career and her son’s criminality came into collision when she published a column in the Ladies Pages of the Herald, where she wrote as ‘Nemia’, that described her visit to Pentridge jail in Melbourne to visit a young, unnamed man. Soon after, for fear that ‘Nemia’ would be linked to the prisoner George Fortune, Mary was sacked from the Herald. She would not return to the newspaper for several years, and then only with fiction.

Mary Fortune lived in the ambiguous space between ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ Bohemia. Other writers knew her, and she conducted a long rivalry with Marcus Clarke whose Peripatetic Philosopher columns were a masculine version of own columns. She would ever only be a contributor, and an anonymous one at that, while her rival Clarke became ‘conductor’ of the Australian Journal in 1871, and as a result her presence in the journal declined. But she was a denizen of ‘lower’ Bohemia as well, with constant money worries, arrests for drunkenness, and a stint in the Benevolent Asylum in North Melbourne before shifting as a lodger between various charitable women. Her son predeceased her, dying in jail in Tasmania, and she died penniless and for many years forgotten.

But not by Lucy Sussex, who had first encountered Mary Fortune when she was working as a researcher for Professor Stephen Knight at Melbourne University, who was researching the history of Australian crime fiction. She wrote her PhD and a subsequent book on the Mothers of Crime Fiction, and a novel based on her search for Fortune called The Scarlet Rider. She edited and published a selection of Mary’s memoirs and journalism in 1989 as The Fortunes of Mary Fortune. Megan Brown completed her PhD on Mary Fortune, and they have co-presented at various conferences. In a closing chapter, Sussex describes an academic joust with another historian whom she dubs ‘Rival Researcher’ who took a rather malicious glee in obscuring her sources, and interactions with Melbourne historian Judith Brett, a descendant of Mary’s policeman ‘husband’, who helped her to start to look at Mary’s son George as a narrative thread in piecing together Mary’s life.

I’m always interested by books that are a collaborative venture because, to me, writing seems such an individual and personal endeavour. The authors only present separately in their closing chapter, yet I wonder if the seams between the authors can still be detected (the book has infected me, now I’m playing detective too!) The introduction frames the authors’ search as a game of literary detection and certainly the conclusion, which evokes the academic rivalry of A. S. Byatt’s Possession, returns to this topic. This theme of literary detection runs subtly through the narrative, reappearing when the authors interview current-day detectives and undertake computer-based forensic linguistic testing of Mary’s writing style to clarify her authorship of individual stories. While cautioning against the perils of applying modern day diagnoses to peoples’ behaviour in the past, they do so nonetheless, suggesting that George Fortune today might be diagnosed with Anti Social Personality Disorder. The reference to Nicola Gobbo as police informer was instructive for me as a Melburnian, but it will date the text and soon be irrelevant. I wonder if these eruptions of current-day commentary reflect the preferences of one of the two authors, or whether they both saw these present-day parallels. Likewise, the introduction of subheadings on just three occasions seemed to jar a little from what was otherwise a flowing narrative, and perhaps reflects the joint authorship- but I don’t know.

Mary Fortune’s good fortune was to have two biographers in Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown who have worked hard over so long to bring her name, and her full-rounded life story before 21st century readers. Their biography is deeply researched, readable and imbued with admiration and sympathy for a trail-blazing woman writer, whose writing is still brisk and lively today.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Review copy from Black Inc., with thanks

2 Comments

Posted in Book Reviews 2025

Tagged , , , ,

‘Wifedom’ by Anna Funder

Posted on November 30, 2024 | 1 comment
2023, 384 p.

Sometimes a writer takes on a task, knowing that it is risky. Funder did, and in a way, Orwell himself made her do it. After the age of 30, he writes, people almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all, and live for others or are smothered under drudgery. Not writers, however, who belong to a minority class of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end. Was this true of Funder herself? An award-winning Australian writer and historian, she knew that despite intending to share the responsibilities of life and parenthood with her husband Craig, she had been doing the lion’s share. As a writer and a wife, she found herself envying the titantic male writers for the

…unpaid, invisible work of a woman [to create] the time and -neat, warmed and cushion-plumped- space for their work….To benefit from the work of someone who is invisible and unpaid and whom it is not necessary to thank because it is their inescapable purpose in life to attend to you, is to be able to imagine that you accomplished what you did alone and unaided…Invisible workers require no pay or gratitude, beyond perhaps an entire, heartfelt sentence in a preface, thanking ‘my wife’. ..As a writer, the unseen work of a great writer’s wife fascinates me, as I say- out of envy. I would like a wife like Eileen, I think, and then I realise that to think like a writer is to think like a man…But as a woman and a wife her life terrifies me. (p. 53, p.55)

When she read a piece that Orwell had written in his private notebook, close to his final illness, she recoiled from the misogyny and repugnance that he showed towards his wife: that same wife who had made his writing possible. She turned her attention from Orwell to his wife Eileen. She had thought of fictionalizing her picture of their marriage, but the publication of Sylvia Topp’s Eileen: The Making of George Orwell in 2005 and the recent discovery of six letters from Eileen to her friend Norah caused her to change her mind. Eileen’s voice had been suppressed for so long, and she didn’t want these six, so rare, letters to be swallowed up into the maw of source material. And so she writes this book as a ‘counter-fiction’, marking out Eileen’s words in italics so that they keep their own integrity and distinctiveness, but fictionalizing the context in which they are written as she traces their marriage from 1935 and their first meeting through to Orwell’s death in January 1950.

A long-time admirer of George Orwell’s work, Anna Funder had immersed herself in Orwell scholarship, reveling in his essays, combing through his six biographies, doing the Orwell Pilgrimage to Catalonia and Jura, and revisiting his books. She is aware of the risk she is running, in these ‘cancel culture’ times

…Orwell’s work is precious to me. I didn’t want to take it, or him, down in any way. I worried he might risk being ‘cancelled’ by the story I’m telling. Though she, of course, has been cancelled already- by patriarchy. I needed to find a way to hold them all- work, man and wife- in a constellation in my mind, each part keeping the other in place. (p. 23)

There is a lot going on in this book. She mounts a feminist attack against patriarchy; she reflects on the writing process and the needs of writers; she combines Orwell’s biography and her own autobiography; she trails Orwell and Eileen through their marriage chronologically, and she takes Orwell’s other (male) biographers to task for their unthinking acceptance of the minor role of “my wife”. Is there too much going on here? Perhaps, although by drawing on her own reflections on the writing process and the role of her partner in a prize-winning, internationally recognized writing career is to provide a new perspective on this other writing career of a largely-ignored writer nearly one hundred years ago.

As it happens, I read this book immediately after reading Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. I had been disconcerted by Orwell’s erasure of Eileen through the sparing references to “my wife”, but having now read Funder’s account of their time in Spain, I feel angry that his account stands unchallenged. All those passive sentences of how urgently-needed supplies miraculously appeared or arrangements were made, suddenly made sense. Even the scene in which Eileen appears in the hotel lobby to warn Blair that he was in danger elides completely the fact that she had been waiting literally days for him and downplays the very real peril that Eileen herself was facing. That self-deprecating humour and false humility is all a charade.

Like Funder, I am angered too by the manipulation of quotes and shuffling of facts by his earlier biographers in lionizing the man and expunging Eileen. Funder has obviously read these biographies with one finger holding open the footnotes page, and she has followed up each one.

From a 21st century perspective, in the light of ‘me too’ and awareness of ‘coercive control’, Orwell does not come out of her analysis well. As his late-life reflection on the “incorrigible dirtiness” and “terrible, devouring sexuality” of women (p.11) shows, he had a deeply embedded repugnance for women. He was constantly unfaithful, and by immuring themselves away in a dishevelled cottage in the country – at his insistence- far from the city, he separated her from her friends and their milieu. He thought nothing of going off to follow his own desires and interests: over to Spain to report on the Civil War, off to Europe while Eileen is dying, absent again when she was facing court to gain custody of their adopted son. She was his typist, his editor, his sounding board; she cooked, she gave up her comforts for his. She pandered to his ‘bronchitis’ while he largely ignored her pain from cancer. He was jealous of their friend Georges’ infatuation with her, yet he revelled in the ‘permission’ she granted for him to have affairs – a permission harangued and co-erced from her, or freely given? He pursues her friends (because they are her friends?) and “pounces” on women, after her death, in order replace her and the day-to-day burdens she had carried, as quickly as possible.

But without wanting to excuse him- who knows what goes on in a marriage? The story goes that Orwell instantly declared on meeting her “Eileen O’Shaughnessy is the girl I want to marry”. Conversely, Eileen told her friend “I told myself that when I was thirty, I would accept the first man who asked me to marry him.” What was her attraction to him? She had won a scholarship to Oxford where she read English alongside Auden, Spender and MacNeice, but failed to get a first (no women were given firsts in 1927, the year she graduated), and she relinquished her own writing. She was undertaking a Master Of Psychology at University College London, but this too was sublimated to Orwell’s demands for quiet, food, the country lifestyle. She seemed heedless to her own safety during the Blitz, and opted for the cheapest treatment of her cancer, a treatment that killed her. People and relationships are complex.

I enjoyed this book a great deal. I appreciated Funder’s rigour in interrogating Orwell’s biographies and biographers, I liked the respect with which she treated Eileen’s own words in the letters. Once you move beyond a slavish chronology, all biographies are an argument, and Funder’s argument is right there on the cover with the title “Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life”. I could have had a little less of Funder’s 21st century writerly angst, but it comes from a place of knowledge and identification. Reading it immediately after Homage to Catalonia convinced me completely of Funder’s thesis: that “my wife” was a real, living, intelligent woman who was a fundamental, and completely obscured, part of one of the most lionized literary marriages.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle September selection. It was an open meeting, and the paper presented by Meredith Churchyard was excellent.

Sourced from: purchased.

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged ,

‘The Erratics’ by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

Posted on November 19, 2024 | Leave a comment
2019, 224 p.

I confess that I started this book warily. “Mad as a Meat Axe” write two daughters on their mother’s medical chart at the end of the bed, sniggering at the thought that the initials MMA might prompt some medical profession to treat their mother for MMA and kill her. The two daughters, who are never named, are visiting their mother in rehab for a broken hip, even though their mother denies their existence, and has had nothing to do with them for eighteen years. I would not want these daughters.

Obviously much has gone on in this family, but we are never told. Our narrator tells us that, for her:

My past is not merely faded, or camouflaged under the dust of years. It’s not there, and I know a blessing in disguise when I see one. I have managed to shake free and flee to far-flung places where I feel reasonably safe because I do not carry a lot of my past. (p.140)

And yet, after 18 years, this Canadian academic returns home to see her father, whom her mother has announced “doesn’t have long”, and her mother whose hip has disintegrated. Along with her sister, who has remained in Canada despite the 18 long years of estrangement from her parents, they arrange (conspire?) for their mother to be moved into some form of care, so that their father can escape from her clutches. Her mother has long since given power of attorney to someone else, and she announces that her daughters are only after her money. Are they? Who is mad as a meat axe here?

It took a while for me to shake my suspicion of the narrator. I wonder if this book is some sort of Rorschach test: I have been the child left (albeit in a completely different situation) and so perhaps I read it differently. As older sister, the narrator has fled to Australia and established a marriage and career there, while her younger sister, just by virtue of being in Canada, carries the memories, the hurt and responsibility. The narrator knows this, but this does not change her actions:

…However different we are and however badly she judges me, whatever gulf already separates us, she is my sister. I do not want the gulf to fill with the seething resentment she will feel because she is doing it all, but I know this will happen. I am telling her that I know this will happen. I know she will feel violent annoyance with me when I suggest something because I’m not there and I don’t know, and I’m not the one doing it and I, on my far away island continent, will sit quietly, gnawed by guilt. (p. 157)

We never learn what has happened in this marriage and family. We have little back-story for her parents, beyond the fact that her father made money through the oil industry and that he fought in WWII. We have no images of a courtship, a marriage or a family life with young children. Everything is refracted through the narrator’s rage- which oddly enough, she deflects onto her sister.

No, I see rage here. A rage expressed by staying on the other side of the world, and by allowing her younger sister to carry this burden. A justified rage, from the snippets that we received, but rage nonetheless, despite protestations of guilt.

This is a memoir, and as such the author has ultimate freedom and responsibility to shape the narrative however she wishes. The memoir starts with a preface, describing the Erratics, huge boulders deposited by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet as it moved through Alberta and Montana. The Erratic that sits in the Canadian town of Okotoks, where the memoir is set, has cracked and fallen in on itself, posing danger to anyone approaching it. On the final pages, we revisit this image of the Okotoks Erratic with the spirit of her mother sitting atop it, beside Napi the Trickster.

To be honest, I’m still not sure who the Erratic is here: mother or daughter. But either way, it feels as if there is some sort of space here for release.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: purchased e-book

Leave a comment

Posted in Book reviews, Book Reviews 2024

Tagged , ,

‘The Tenderness of Wolves’ by Stef Penney

Posted on October 24, 2024 | 5 comments
2007, 496 p.

I’ve read Big House mysteries; I’ve read Outback Solitary Aussie Bloke mysteries; I’ve read London-based mysteries. But I don’t think that I’ve ever read an Upper Canada mystery before, especially one set in 1867 which is relatively familiar territory for me because my Judge Willis (the real Resident Judge of this blog) served there in the late 1820s. It is rather strange -and rather amazing, given how vividly she writes- that the author Stef Penney has never visited Canada. The snow and isolation and colonial machinations that she describes in this book all spring from her desk research alone.

Set in the last days of the fur trade, Mrs Ross, a local resident, discovers a brutal murder in the small hut occupied by Laurent Jammet, a French trapper. Suspicion falls on her adopted 17 year-old son, Francis, who was friends with the trapper, and his disappearance from the village only heightens speculation that he is the killer. Donald Moody, an accountant with the Hudson Bay Company, is sent out to investigate the murder, along with Mackinley, the sarcastic and bullying Company Factor from Fort Edgar. They are accompanied by Jacob, Moody’s self-appointed native American protector. They arrest half-Indian William Parker, who was apprehended searching Jammet’s hut after the murder. After Parker is ‘roughed up’ by Mackinley and Scott, the wealthy storekeeper in whose shed Parker is confined, Parker and Mrs Ross go off in search of Francis. There is someone else who is eager to search Jammet’s hut as well: Thomas Sturrock, who believes that a bone tablet which may be of archeological significance is in Jammet’s possession. He has been to the small settlement of Dove River before, having been there years earlier in search of the twon local Seton girls, who disappeared in the forest, never to be found.

And so, we have various people all heading off into the frozen wastes: Francis in search of the man he thinks is the murderer; followed by Mrs Ross and William Parker who are in search of Francis; and then Mackinley and the love-sick Moody who are in search of William Parker. The only nearby settlement is a Lutheran Norwegian community in Himmelvanger, and they take in all of these groups as they stumble in from the snow and icy marshland. Attention then turns to the nearby Hanover House, the company Trading Post, administered by James Stewart. As in the best Mystery Novel tradition, there are many red-herrings and subplots.

The book starts with Mrs Ross’ first person account, and it alternates with other present-tense chapters told by an omnipotent writer, who knows all the characters’ thoughts and backstories. There are rather a lot of characters, and because the book is written in very short chapters without chapter numbers, I found myself getting a bit lost with all the Mr. This and Mr. Thats.

I’m rather mystified by the title, though. There are certainly wolves in this story, surrounding the various groups as they trudge through the snow, and the colonists are all frightened of them. They keep their distance though, and the closest they come is when they sniff around one of the tents at night, breathing over the sleepers and leaving paw-prints. The wolves are certainly less violent than the trappers.

Most impressive of all, though, is Penney’s depiction of the bitter cold and isolation. The landscape, along with the short chapters, makes it a very filmic novel and I wasn’t surprised to find out that she is, in fact, a screenwriter. The book won a Costa Book of the Year in 2007

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Council of Adult Education

Read because: CAE selection

5 Comments

Posted in Book Reviews 2024, CAE Bookgroup 2024, Upper Canada

Tagged

‘Long Island’ by Colm Toíbín

Posted on October 1, 2024 | 6 comments

Spoilers below:

2024, 288 p.

Good grief. Have we become so Netflixed that we can´t have a definitive ending any more? Is everything written with an eye to the next installment in the series? In a video prepared for Oprah’s Book Club, Toíbín speaks of a writer’s pact with the reader not to spell out everything, but to allow the characters to have a life after the events of the book come to a close. Not this reader, Mr Toíbín. I felt cheated by the ending and as if I had been toyed with. I have read the ending several times, and I’m still no clearer on what happens.

I very much enjoyed Brooklyn, which Toíbín claims was not written with a second book in mind. Reading back on my own review, I obviously enjoyed it more than my book group ladies, but I think that I enjoyed it even more after seeing the movie, which left me in floods of tears and which was perhaps more explicit in the ending than the book was. With Long Island (rather oddly named, as most of the action does not occur there) we take up with Eilis more than twenty years after Brooklyn. She returned to marry Tony, and now has two adolescent children. On the surface, everything is just as Brooklyn presaged: the family did build four adjacent houses and the brothers and parents live close to each other in a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst on Long Island; Tony is still a plumber and Eilis has not returned to Ireland since she left so abruptly, leaving behind the other option of marriage with Jim Farrell. Then a man turns up on her doorstep – no spoiler here: it’s in the blurb- furious that Tony has impregnated his wife and insisting that he will take no responsibility for the child, which he will leave on her doorstep.

I wasn’t completely convinced by Eilis’ response. She is furious that Tony has brought this problem into her life, and insists that she will not allow the baby under her roof. I can certainly understand that, but it seems odd to me that she does not seem to feel hurt, or betrayed. I acknowledge that, with age, the desire for continuity and comfort can quash flashes of wounded pride or anger (although Eilis is not that old). Is it because she has always felt superior to Tony? Is that why her response is more “You stupid boy” rather than one of hurt at Tony’s disloyalty and faithlessness?

She certainly feels betrayed by the rest of the family. She thinks that they don’t know, but she soon discovers that they do, and that Tony and his mother have cooked up a scheme by which her mother-in-law will care for the child in the house next door, and that Tony will eventually adopt it. The Italian family ‘closeness’ has become suffocating, and there is no room here for her own opinions and preferences. She has not, for some time, attended the regular Sunday lunches where the conversation level grows higher and higher, and where she is firmly put down when expressing thoughts contrary to the family. And so she packs up and leaves for Ireland, ostensibly to attend her mother’s 80th birthday, which her children will come across later to attend.

In a repetition of Brooklyn, she arrives back in Enniscorthy, marked out by her Americanness and her glamour. Enniscorthy is just as suffocating as Long Island is, abounding in intrusive eyes and vicious tongues, and with everyone knowing everyone else’s business, . Her mother is as manipulative and dreary as she ever was, living in a house barely touched by the second half of the 20th century without refrigeration or laundry appliances. Jim Farrell, who had been blindsided by Eilis’ sudden departure twenty years earlier, has not married although he is in a private relationship with Nancy, Eilis’ erstwhile best friend. Nancy and Jim are moving towards making their relationship publicly know… and their Eilis arrives.

And so, as a reader you find yourself back where you were while reading Brooklyn: aware that someone is going to get badly hurt, able to see and sympathize with all sides, and despairing that it is all such a bloody mess. This is what I loved most about Brooklyn, and it’s what I loved about Long Island as well, but the lack of definition in the ending made me feel that the book is trafficking in this emotional turmoil.

How would I rate it? I just relaxed into picking up on Eilis’ life once more, and Toíbín has drawn his characters so clearly that you feel as if you are watching a real life. I was both discomfited and intrigued by the situation in which they had all found themselves and how it was going to be resolved. But- oh- the ending! Toíbín would go down in my estimation if I thought that he left it just so that he could squeeze out a third novel- I think, I trust, that he is a better writer than that. I know that real life doesn’t have definitive endings either (beyond the ultimate definitive ending) but the scope (responsibility?) of the author to create an ending is part of the pact with a reader, too. Otherwise, it’s just soap opera.

My rating: Who knows. 9 for the enjoyment? Or 6 for the ending??

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I loved Brooklyn so much.

6 Comments

Posted in Book Reviews 2024

Tagged ,

Six degrees of separation: from ‘The Great Fire’ to…

Posted on February 3, 2024 | 7 comments

This month the Six Degrees of Separation meme run by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest is a bit different. Instead of her choosing the starting book, she has invited us to start with a book that we have just finished, or read in the last month.

Well, the last book I read was Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and even though I know that some people love it and have read it multiple times, I wasn’t particularly impressed. But I haven’t posted my review yet, so you’ll just have to wait to find out why.

But, my disappointment in the book notwithstanding, where did it take me?

Despite the title, Hazzard’s book is not about the Great Fire of London at all- instead it’s set in Japan, Hong Kong and China in 1947 as the victorious Western powers occupy the territory. But Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self does deal the Great Fire of London because diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about it. In her biography, Tomalin gives us a rounded view of this 17th century Londoner and although many others have written about Pepys, I don’t think that anyone else could do it better than she has. My review is here.

John Lanchester’s Capital is set in Pepys Road South London in December 2007, just before the Global Financial Crisis. The book follows the little dramas of the inhabitants of Pepys Road in short chapters of just a couple of pages each. Somehow Lanchester filled over 500 pages largely about ordinary lives where nothing much happens and yet left me wanting more. I just loved it, and my review is here.

While we we’re in London, who else should we turn to but Peter Ackroyd, who has written several books about the city. London Under is atmospheric and erudite, steeped in literature and popular culture, especially that of the nineteenth century as he explores the river systems and infrastructure existing like a network under London Streets. The language flows seductively and smoothly in a very easy, beguiling read. My review is here.

Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness is set underground as well, but this time amongst the men tunneling under the Hudson River for the subway system in 1919. I read it before I start blogging, but I really enjoyed it.

And thinking about New York leads me to Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn. I enjoyed the book enough the first time, but I absolutely loved the movie, and I went back and enjoyed the novel much more on a second reading. There is no back story; small events are told simply and in detail; every little act is described by a narrator who seems to be hovering up in the corner of the room, watching everything. It’s about a young girl who emigrates from Ireland to Brooklyn, and I felt that he described homesickness so well . My review is here.

The main character in Brooklyn left Ireland, while Claire Keegan’s books are firmly set there. They are only short- they’re novellas really- but they’re so beautifully crafted. She wrote the short-story, expanded into a novella that became The Quiet Girl movie which I howled the whole way through. Small Things Like These is set in 1985 as Bill Furlong, a fuel merchant with five children who has lived in his small village all his life, becomes aware of the convent and its power over the children in its ‘care’ and the complicity of the village in turning a blind eye. My review is here.

So, although I might have been less than enamoured with The Great Fire, it has certainly taken me all around the globe!

7 Comments

Posted in Six Degrees

Tagged , ,