I had heard about this book during the COVID pandemic, and no wonder. Published in 2014, some six years before the world locked down, it describes a world where 21st century Western industrialization has collapsed in the wake of a virulent influenza that has wiped out 90% of the population. What cheering reading during a pandemic!
However, reading it ten years later and with those COVID years behind us, does Station Eleven stand on its own two feet? I think it does. Right from its opening chapter, which starts with a Shakespearean actor, Arthur Leander playing King Lear, collapsing on stage, I was hooked.
As Arthur falls to the floor, a member of the audience, Jeevan Chaudhary, a trainee paramedic rushes to give him CPR, watched by a little girl Kirsten Raymonde who stands in the wings. Returning home, he takes a phonecall from a friend who is a doctor, who warns him that the Georgia flu is rampant, and to take his girlfriend Laura and his brother, and to get out of town.
The narrative then jumps ahead twenty years and takes up again with Kirsten, now an adult, with only scattered memories of that night at the theatre, before everything changed. She is now part of the Travelling Symphony, a rag-tag group of actors and musicians, who move from settlement to settlement to perform music and plays. Electricity, gasoline, the internet and all the things enabled by these had ceased, and in the first years after the pandemic, life had reverted to a light-governed, subsistence struggle against other frightened groups, who were themselves fighting for existence. After twenty years, things had stabilized, albeit at a stagnant level, but a level of menace had been recently introduced by the rise of the Prophet, drawing on a mixture of messianic religion and violence to consolidate his power.
If this sounds at bit like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it is. I certainly had the same feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach as I read. But unlike The Road, there is not the same relentless hopelessness. This is a world that is trying to hold onto the best in music and literature, and trying to collect as many artefacts from the old world as possible so that the ‘before’ world is not completely lost. The world still looks for beauty. The book’s ending, while ambiguous, is hopeful.
It is beautifully written with strong control of the narrative, as Mandel slips back and forward between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ worlds, moving from one character to another. How prescient she was, and how chilling it must have been to pick up this book in the early days of COVID. But as a piece of writing, it doesn’t need the experience of the last few years to give it strength: it’s a very human, well-crafted book that celebrates creativity and the best of being human, giving hope without sentimentality.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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
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.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 