Month: October 2023

“For me writing is an act of the will.” (Elizabeth Jolley)

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I’ve been meaning to read Elizabeth Jolley for ages so I’m pleased to be finishing AusReading Month 2023 hosted by Brona at This Reading Life with one of her novellas.

Milk and Honey (1984) has quite a Gothic feel to it, so it’s worked out well with Hallowe’en too…

The story is narrated by Jacob, who at the beginning of the novella is an unhappy, unfulfilled door-to-door salesman with an injured hand.

“Sometimes, after my cup of real coffee in the Beach Hotel, I sat outside on the small, sandy cliffs, looking down onto the sea as it came up in long, slow waves to the rocks and sunk sighing back down the beach, and I felt the profound melancholy that all my life has come over me from time to time. It was the melancholy of dark trees standing alone and the quiet sadness of the colours of the land, dark greens and browns and the sand subdued. As I sat, the colours deepened, tawny, dun coloured blending beneath the low grey sky. And from somewhere hidden, the sun lit up the sea.”

We then go back in time to when Jacob was a teenager and sent by his father to live with the Heimbachs so he can be tutored in the cello by Leopold.  The widowed tutor adores Jacob, calling him ‘Prince’, but his sisters Tante Rosa and Aunt Heloise may be more ambivalent. Certainly Jacob’s lauded genius may not be as evident as Leopold proclaims. But Jacob does play with feeling:

“When I played the cello and the cello hesitated, poised on a single note so pure and restrained and lovely, I closed my eyes with an exquisite love of the cello. I was in love with the cello.”

Also in the house are Leopold’s children. His daughter Louise is a romantic interest for Jacob, and there is his son Waldemar who has unspecified disabilities. The household is insular and claustrophobic, but Jacob willingly relinquishes external experiences:

“I had no wish to be free. I preferred not to go to school, and, though the house and garden were open to the street, I never went out into the street. I read and studied and lived in the household which seemed to contain all in the way of books and musical instruments and teachers I could ever need.”

For the reader though, the household is deeply unsettling. We never really know what anyone’s motivations, views or plans are. Jacob is self-focussed and so as a narrator he doesn’t tell us. We piece together certain aspects of the wider life of the household – I guessed an unpleasant twist towards the end – but so much is left unspecified.

Conspiracies abound in this small household. A major decision is taken early in the novel that is traumatising for Jacob but we’re not completely sure why such action is taken. Jacob is having an affair but it seems entirely likely that everyone knows about it. A wedding ceremony is sprung on him, and yet everyone seems to think this is completely acceptable:

“But even after the surprise celebration of our engagement, on the day of my inheritance, the idea of marriage had seemed remote, something vague, talked about in laughter while eating apples and trying on rings made from human hair, something looked forward to from childhood but, like a disease experienced by adults, never reached.”

Milk and Honey is an odd novel and at times I wasn’t sure it was for me. There was so much that was unexplained that it could be entirely discombobulating, and Jacob was so oblivious and callow I wasn’t sure he could carry me through. I’m glad I persevered though, and I would definitely be interested to read more by Jolley. From this, I would say she writes about nature beautifully and is expert in creating an unsettling, memorable atmosphere.

You can read Lisa’s excellent review of Milk and Honey here.

To end, a bit of a departure from my usual 80s cheese – I always find Elgar’s cello concerto in E minor so moving (and this is with the City of Birmingham symphony orchestra, which was Elizabeth Jolley’s place of birth before she emigrated to Australia – see what I did there? 😀 ):

“Borderline, feels like I’m going to lose my mind.” (Madonna)

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Somehow I’ve accumulated several Janette Turner Hospital books in the TBR, without ever managing to get round to reading any of them. So thank goodness for AusReading Month 2023 hosted by Brona at This Reading Life which finally got me to pick one up!

Borderline is JTH’s third novel, published in 1985. The blurb on the back describes it as a metaphysical thriller, but I don’t think that’s a helpful description. There are thriller elements but what JTH is more concerned with is the unreliable narratives we tell ourselves and others; how we can love those who remain so unknown to us; and the unpredictability of all our lives that can change in an instant. These themes don’t lend themselves to definite resolutions, so those seeking a thriller will be disappointed.

However, if you’re happy to go along with an exploration of these ideas that ends without any neat answers, there’s a lot to enjoy in Borderline.

The narrator is Jean-Marc, a man who has always had a slightly Oedipal relationship with his father’s girlfriend, Felicity. Seymour aka Old Volcano, was an artist much older than Felicity, who was nearer in age to her stepson.

“When I was five, my father was already famous and my mother was mostly distraught. Later she escaped. She made a quantum leap into banality. Which is the true secret of happiness – a second marriage, a very ordinary life, other children. Naturally she does not care to see me, a revenant from that earlier bad time, and I do not blame her at all.”

Felicity and Seymour’s relationship inevitably ends, and Felicity becomes a successful art dealer. She is returning from a trip when, at a border crossing between the United States and Canada, she makes the impulsive decision to smuggle Dolores Marquez, a refugee from El Salvador, with the help of a man called Gus.

Gus’ full name is Augustine, he’s a salesman who is routinely unfaithful to his wife. Felicity calls Dolores La Magdalena after a painting. People in this novel have different names, different roles, splintered lives. They disappear and no-one knows where to begin looking for them.

Gus’ daughter Kathleen turns up at Jean-Marc’s house, and their relationship seems to almost transgress boundaries, but not quite. As they try and locate their loved ones, Jean-Marc acknowledges that he is filling in a lot of gaps with very little to go on:

“Her stories bombard me, they seem to have become my own memories, they writhe and change and regroup in the way true memories do. They are like photographs in her grandfather’s dresser, a deluge of the ever-present past.”

The plot of Borderline is enough to pull the reader along, but this is not the novel to read if you want a plot-driven story. Jean-Marc tracks Felicity as best he can, but she remains out of reach. The stories in Borderline are unclear in origin: what Jean-Marc has experienced, what he has been told, what he is making up.

“Her days are baroque, they curl into each other like acanthus leaves, she lives somewhere between now and then. She moves in and out of her life.”

“Still, I have to admit, there has always been a quality of absence about her; which is why her disappearance itself seems insubstantial, merely a figure of speech, or a trick of the light, a momentary thing.”

I would completely understand if someone experienced this novel as a frustrating and disappointing read. However, I felt Borderline was an effective exploration of how human beings try and make sense of themselves, each other and the world when so much remains unknown and chaotic. It has some truly breathtaking passages and JTH is absolutely a writer I’d like to explore further.

To end, let it never be said that I shy away from the obvious in my 80s song choices 😀

“Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing” (Giorgio Bassani)

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This is my final post for the 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, which has been running all week. It’s been a great event as always, and I’m really pleased it prompted me to pick the three I’ve read off the TBR pile at long last!

(Please note, despite the subject matter I’ve made a deliberate choice not to draw contemporary parallels. I think Lisa explained this decision really well in her blog post here.)

I adored Giorgio Bassani’s The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (1958) when I read it last year, so I had high expectations when I approached The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (transl. Jamie McKendrick, 2007), the third book in his Romanzo di Ferrara cycle. It fully lived up to those expectations.

The unnamed narrator tells us in the Prologue that he is looking back from 1957 to a time before World War II. However the tone is more elegiac than nostalgic, as he also tells us that those he recalls perished in concentration camps.

Before the war the Finzi-Continis were a prosperous family, but the conflict destroyed them and all they owned. The large house is now squatted in, and the titular space:

“All the broad-canopied trees, limes, elms, beeches, poplars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, pines, firs, larches, cedars of Lebanon, cypresses, oaks, holm oaks, and even the palm trees and eucalyptuses planted in their hundreds by Josette Artom during the last two years of the first world war, were cut down for firewood, and for some time the land had returned to the state it was in when Moisè Finzi-Contini acquired it”

So it is with this knowledge that we then meet the younger, somewhat callow narrator, and follow his developing friendship with the younger Finzi-Contini’s, Alberto and Micòl, son and daughter of Professor Ermanno and Signor Olga.

Racial laws are coming into effect in Italy in the late 1930s, and this sees the narrator invited into the walled estate, as Jewish people are banned from places such as the local tennis club.

“They entirely left aside the existence of a far greater intimacy, a secret one, to be valued only by those who shared it, which derived from the fact that our two families, not by choice, but by virtue of a tradition more ancient than any possible memory, belonged to the same religious observance, or more accurately to the same ’School’”

Despite the growing pressures of the outside world, within the Finzi-Continis walls the narrator remembers a time where:

“The weather remained perfect, held in that state of magical suspension, of glassy, luminous, soft immobility which is the special gift of some of our autumns. In the garden it was hot, just slightly less than if it was summer.”

In this enchanted space the narrator falls for Micòl, but their relationship never develops, characterised by misunderstandings and ambiguity that they are too young to resolve. Being too young for what life throws at you is also shown through the political conversations with Giampi Malnate, an older Christian friend of Alberto, as well as an experience of terminal illness.

What I thought was so subtle and clever from Bassani is that nothing overly dramatic happens. Rather, things fade out. The huge events that we know are looming take place outside of the novel, and instead we are shown how we can take for granted the moments that seemingly have no wider ramifications. Except of course, they do. This is a formative time for the narrator.  

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is not a plot-driven novel. It is a beautifully written evocation of a time before unimagined horrors. It is reflective and elegiac in tone without ever letting sentimentality lessen the portrait of a family obliterated by the Holocaust. It’s a truly devastating read.

The novel was adapted into a film in 1970, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar that year. Has anyone seen it? It looks pretty faithful to the book so I’m interested to watch it:

“Writing’s not always a pleasure to me, but if I’m not writing every other pleasure loses its savour.” (John Braine)

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This is my second contribution to the 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, which is running all week. Do check out all the wonderful posts!

I picked up Life at the Top by John Braine because it is the sequel to Room at the Top (1957) which I really rated, with its depiction of the postwar north of England and Joe Lampton’s determination to leave his working -class life behind, whilst juggling complex sexual relationships. Life at the Top I didn’t find as compelling, but there was still a lot to enjoy.

Set ten years after Room at the Top, the novel follows Joe as he lives the life he thought he always wanted. Even if you’ve not read the first novel, take a guess as to how that’s working out for him 😀

“The truth was that I actually wanted a drink now, I wanted something to blur things slightly, to put a haze between me and the pink wallpaper and the pink cupboards and the white refrigerator and the electric oven and the mixing machine and the pink wall table and the pink covered stool; it was too bright and shiny and hygienic at eight o’clock on a March morning with Harling Crescent quiet under the weight of Sunday, it reminded me rather too coldly that I was thirty-five and a father of two children and at least ten pounds overweight.”

Joe adores his young daughter Barbara but feels alienated from his son Harry, who has been sent away to a school of his grandfather’s choosing. He and his wife Susan still sexually desire one another, but there seems to be little intimacy. Working at the family firm (Susan’s family), Joe is frustrated:

“I had stopped wanting things. I wanted power, power to put through my own ideas; I wanted to be taken seriously, I wanted to be something more than the boss’s son-in-law.”

He is going to become a local councillor, but that doesn’t suggest fulfilment to him (nor should it, bloomin’ Tory! 😀 )

“The prosperous middle-aged grumblers, the solid sensible citizens; I would sit here or in the committee room listening to them; taking great care not to offend them, and without my realising it, I would become exactly like them. Waiting my turn to grumble, waiting my turn for thrombosis, waiting my turn for death.”

So what does Joe do? Talk honestly with his nearest and dearest? Seek out a life of authenticity? Reflect honestly on the deep-rooted cause of his dissatisfaction and what he can do to make his life more fulfilling? No, of course not. He starts an affair with an attractive young journalist named Norah Hauxley and runs away to London.  The shadow of his former lover (from Room at the Top) still looms large, and I felt Alice was really the only woman Joe had loved:

“She was grown up. I hadn’t met a grown up woman in ten years, and for ten years I hadn’t felt the need to be with one. And Alice, even Alice, had been broken somewhere, she had lost the habit of happiness.”

Joe is not likable. He takes decisions that hurt others. He behaves selfishly. He’s a bit of a misogynist.But still I found myself staying alongside him as narrator, because he’s so honest. He doesn’t ask the reader to like him, because he doesn’t much like himself. I thought Braine did a brilliant job of presenting a man so of his time, and so completely believable.

Life at the Top doesn’t have a huge amount of plot, but I found it a compelling read in its honesty, particularly around flawed human relationships.

“I looked at her in surprise; I had not felt so close to her since we were first married. But I made no move to comfort her.”

Life at the Top is a short read, and I may not have stuck with it had it been longer. But as it was it was well-judged, and there are some developments in Joe’s familial relationships toward the end that I found truly moving. I’m glad the 1962 Club prompted me to finally pick this one up after it had been languishing in the TBR for many a year.

Life at the Top was adapted into a film in 1965, with the magnetic Laurence Harvey, who also starred in Room at the Top. Unfortunately the director changed from the first excellent film, and although I tried to watch the sequel, I found it so heavy-handed and unsubtle compared to the book that I gave up. But it did make me appreciate the book more!

So rather than a trailer for the film, here’s a 1962 song about rain, which the West Yorkshire town of Warley would be no stranger to:

“I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village.” (John Lennon)

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The 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, starts today and is running all week which I am very excited about 😊 The Club weeks are always great and I’m really looking forward to seeing the posts. This is the first of  what I hope will be three contributions, but as I never blog as much as I mean to, failure is almost inevitable!

The Golden Spur was Dawn Powell’s last novel, and it’s a humorous look at the bohemian arts scene of late 1950s New York, specifically Greenwich Village. This was a world Powell was very much a part of and my edition features an effusive introduction from Gore Vidal who was one of her close friends.

We are introduced to the artists and writers – both up and coming, and those very much faded and failing – their hangers-on and their varied associates through the outsider view of Jonathan Jaimison. He is in his late twenties and recently discovered that his father isn’t the domineering tyrant he grew up with, but someone from this scene, back when his mother was hanging out with Prohibition-era flappers.

So Jonathan leaves his Ohio home and soon makes his way to the titular bar, at the start of his quest to find his biological father:

“Through a gap in the plum velvet cafe curtains he could see the bar … He breathed deep of the heady New York air, that delirious narcotic of ancient sewer dust, gasoline fumes, roasting coffee beans, and the harsh smell of the sea that intoxicates inland nostrils. Then he pushed open the door.”

He’s quickly adopted by Lize and Darcy, two frenemies who sleep with the same male artists, although it’s not entirely clear why, as they seem to have no great fondness for men or for art:

“The girls never asked questions about a man’s private interests or listened when he tried to tell them. For them it was enough that he was a man and that he was there. Who needs a talking man?”

“That his newest canvas was gone should have told her something, but she wasn’t sure which was the new one because all his pictures looked alike to Lize. Great lozenges of red and white (‘I love blood,’ he always said), black and grey squares (‘I love chess,’ he’d say), long green spikes (‘I love asparagus’). All Lize had learned about art from her life with painters was that the big pictures were for museums and the little ones for art.”

As Jonathan makes his way in New York, he moves between two generations: the young artists and the fading interwar generation. There is a nostalgia for the Prohibition period and what New York was then which is beautifully evoked, alongside a recognition that New York is a city that continually makes itself and its inhabitants anew:

“Jonathan recognised New York as home. His whole appearance changed overnight, shoulders broadened, apologetic skulk became swagger; he looked strangers in the eye and found friendship wherever he turned. With the blight of Jaimison heritage removed, his future became marvellously incalculable, the city seemed born fresh for his delight. He took for granted that his mother’s little world, into which he had dropped, was the city’s very heart.”

Although The Golden Spur is described as a comic novel, I didn’t find it laugh-out-loud funny. Rather I’d describe it as affectionately satirical. It ribs the 1950s arts scene and the vacuous people drawn to it, but it never has a bitter or nasty tone:

“Anybody with a tube of paint and a board was an artist. But writers were not writers unless decently unpublished or forever muffled by a Foundation placebo.”

“‘I just want to be overestimated,’ Earl shouted, ‘like everybody else, goddammit.’”

Despite the overarching plot being Jonathan’s search, this really isn’t a plot-driven novel. Rather, the question of his paternity is a device to introduce the various characters and their world. It’s a novel to read for the evocation of the city, of a particular society found within it, and for the characterisation and the wit. In the way that Tales of the City was serialised in the San Franciso Chronicle, I felt The Golden Spur could have worked similarly in The Village Voice. It’s almost a series of sketches, albeit well realised ones.

I can’t say I loved this quite as much as Gore Vidal clearly did, but then he probably recognised a lot of the characters and situations within the novel. I still found a great deal to enjoy, and Powell certainly has a way with words:

“She was making more and more passes at the wrong men, then trying to recoup with stately cultural pronouncements in her refined Carolina accent, which she kept polished up like her grandfather’s shotgun, ready to bring recalcitrant suitors into line.”

To end, I was going to go with the song Little Lize because that’s the only other time I’ve come across the name. I thought it would be easy to get a good quality version as the massively successful Fisherman’s Friends have recorded it. But I couldn’t find a decent one so here they are instead singing about never leaving home. New York isn’t for everyone…

“You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.” (Samuel Beckett)

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This is my third read for AusReading Month 2023 hosted by Brona at This Reading Life and so far I’ve been very lucky with my choices from the TBR, they’ve all been striking and compelling reads. I’m grateful this month-long event has finally prompted me to get to them.

I was immediately taken with the premise of Claire Thomas’ The Performance when it was published in 2021, as it is set in one of my favourite places to be: the theatre. Also I’m shallow and I really liked the cover too, with flames licking through the seats.

Set during a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days in a Melbourne theatre, the novel follows the thoughts of three women in the audience.

Margot is a professor nearing unwanted retirement:

“Margot refuses to be patronised by sudoku puzzles or the cryptic crossword – lifting a pen towards one of those activities announces you as a gullible geriatric – and she has instead embarked on this careful consideration of her past.”

Ivy is a rich patron of the theatre, who has recently had a child many years after the death of her first, and has been a huge Beckett fan since her student days:

“Ivy pulled down her SB picture after a further year of tertiary education bloated with critical theory, once the idea of idolising a dead white man had become too embarrassing to have on public display.”

And Summer is a young usher who doesn’t know key facts about her past and is trying to manage her anxiety about the future:

“Summer wishes that she were more even-tempered. She wishes she noticed less and worried less and cared less. She knows there are better ways to live a functional life. Well, she hopes that there might be better ways to live a functional life and she just hasn’t worked them out yet.”

Like Winnie on the stage, trapped in earth up to her waist (then up to her neck in the second half), the three women are rendered immobile by the conventions of theatre-going. As they sit in the auditorium, there are bushfires edging ever closer…

“Everyone seems engrossed. The performance is working on them. Perhaps they are immune to what is going on outside this cold bubble of culture. Maybe they already felt safe in their city or their suburbs, buffered from the threat of the distant, unpredictable flames.”

Thomas balances all the elements of the story so well. The three women are all fully realised and believable individuals and the performance they are watching intrudes enough to give a sense of the play without being jarring or gimmicky.

Speaking of which… the interval is written in playscript style which is clearly marked in the book with grey-edged pages, so I knew it was coming and wasn’t convinced. But on reading it in context I thought it was well-justified. It gave a sense of the change of environment and pace for the characters in a clever way, without losing sight of what had gone before or would come after. I can be a bit grumpy about such techniques but really can’t complain here 😀

I thought the themes regarding the roles of women and environmental crisis were so deftly handled too. Happy Days lends itself to these really well and provided a constant background reverberation, alongside the threat of encroaching fires.

Meanwhile, the three women are trying to work out which parts of their many roles feel performative and which feel authentic:

“Summer is not effortlessly cool. She is not effortlessly anything. Performing in the right way each day is exhausting her.”

“Ivy suspects that feeling confused about whether one is being ironic is a key indicator of approaching middle age.”

“So [Margot] imagined being someone without a professorial chair. Someone who had not written several books. Someone who had not won many prestigious awards and grants for her work […] and those erasures were only momentarily tolerable before she felt panicked and bereft.”

As the quote about Ivy shows, there is a dry humour running through The Performance that keeps it engaging. Like Beckett, Thomas uses humour to keep explorations of existential crisis becoming utterly overwhelming for the reader/audience.

This is the first work I’ve read by Melbourne-based Claire Thomas and I’ll definitely seek out more. Apparently she’s currently working on her third novel and I’d be interested to read her first, Fugitive Blue.  

“This is what’s so special about theatre, Ivy thinks. This forced intimacy between strangers. This shared experience of watching or not watching other people performing right now in this delicate moment. Anything could happen beside me or in front of me, but here I am, sitting here, just doing this play.”

To end, a brief interview with Judith Lucy who played Winnie in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Happy Days earlier this year:

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” (Margaret Atwood)

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This is my second contribution to  AusReading Month 2023 hosted by Brona at This Reading Life.

Trigger warning: mentions physical and psychogical violence; domestic violence and gaslighting.

I absolutely loved Evie Wyld’s first two novels, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice (which was set in Queensland) and All the Birds, Singing (which was set in Scotland and Australia and won the Miles Franklin Award). Despite this I was slow to pick up her third novel The Bass Rock (2020) which won the Stella Prize in 2021, so I’m really glad this reading event finally prompted me to get to it. Evie Wyld was born in London and lives there now, after growing up on her grandparents’ farm in New South Wales; her wiki entry describes her as an Anglo-Australian author.

The Bass Rock is mainly set in North Berwick in Scotland, the titular rock being in Firth of Forth (there’s a great picture of the Bass Rock accompanying this Guardian review here), and across three different timelines. My heart always sinks at multiple timeline novels – usually one of the strands is far more compelling than the rest and I find myself whizzing through sections to get back to the one I’m enjoying most. But Wyld balanced all her elements expertly: formally through structure, and informally as they echoed one another while maintaining coherent yet distinct voices.

The contemporary strand is told in the first person by Viv. She is feeling entirely adrift after the death of her father and has had to spend some time as an inpatient being treated for her mental health. Now she is occupied trying to catalogue the possessions of her grandmother and great-aunt, with limited success.

“If I eat the cruciferous vegetables and cream the disgusting leg I would feel better and I would look better and I would be better. I scratch my leg through my tights until I feel the satisfactory glow of broken skin.”

In the second strand, we meet Ruth who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, has married Patrick. He is a widower with two young sons, Michael and Christopher, and has moved Ruth .to North Berwick. She is trying to find her place there, somewhat hindered by the fact that Patrick is barely ever at home. Instead, Ruth’s mainstay is her housekeeper Betty.

Finally, there is a strand told in the first person from the point of view of an eighteenth-century young man, about a woman called Sarah fleeing towards North Berwick after she is accused of witchcraft. This I thought was the least compelling narrative, but I think that was a deliberate choice. The Bass Rock is not about what men think. It is about what they do, and how too often that can involve violence towards women.

The Bass Rock really got under my skin. Its themes are domestic violence, societal violence, gaslighting and abuse. Through the different stories of these women across the ages, Wyld demonstrates how society both implicitly and explicitly condones and perpetrates this.

As Betty summarises to Ruth: “‘Men do these things and then they take on with their lives as though it’s all part and parcel.’ She placed the knife back on the table, laced her small fingers together and caged them over her knee.”

Or as Ruth’s sister Alice pragmatically observes: “’And in order to be able to enjoy your life there are certain things that one has to accept. It’s not being deluded, I won’t have that – it’s seeing things for what they really are, and buggering on until eventually the penny drops and you find yourself living a very fruitful life partly with them but partly with yourself. And the great thing is, they almost always die first.’”

Undoubtedly this novel is a tough read. I think what Wyld did brilliantly was show the insidious, everyday nature of so much abuse and how it is sustained. There is a particularly terrifying scene – ordinary, familial – demonstrating how ‘reasonable’ abusive men collude together to protect their own interests as part of the power structures that serve them so well, and fail women and children.

Wyld makes a great case for trusting your gut: Viv and her sister are on a train, pursued by a violent ex, they know they need to do something – move, pull the cord – but somehow remain frozen. Ruth knows Patrick is gaslighting her but somehow is persuaded to ignore what she fundamentally feels, both about her own situation and that of her step-sons.

But there is humour here too, mainly through Viv:

“I’m a little embarrassed by the assortment of snacks I bought during the day – honeyed almonds and wasabi peas. They are in bowls and I think it looks like I’m throwing some do, rather than persuading a homeless sex worker to stay with me because there might be a ghost.”

Yes, there is a supernatural element to The Bass Rock but it is a constant background murmur, rather than direct plot point, so don’t let that put you off if you are not keen on ghost stories. Looking on goodreads, those who came to The Bass Rock for a gothic tale were disappointed, and I do think it’s poor marketing to label it as such. There are gothic elements, and a tv adaptation could definitely choose to shoot it in such a way, but I would argue it’s not a thoroughly gothic novel. The ghost – if there is one – forms part of the wider theme of going with what you know rather than with what others try to persuade you to believe.

The Bass Rock is incredibly accomplished and I didn’t feel its themes ever overwhelmed story or characterisation. Recently I read a short story by one of my favourite writers on a similar subject, and was disappointed. In that instance I felt the characters were only there to enact the wider argument – both they and the plot felt flimsy. But here I found the characters and the plot compelling, with the wider themes making it an immensely powerful read.

There’s a five minute interview with Evie Wyld talking about The Bass Rock and visiting the location here

“As they crossed the June and reached the peak, the bay became visible, with the Bass Rock looming behind it. On clear days with the low tide it appeared so close that it might have beached itself on the sand, as if it were unmoored and went where it pleased.”

To end, an 80s song as usual, and I thought I’d choose rock with a heavy bass, because I have no shame when it comes to silly puns 😀 Classic song though…

“We owe it to our children to be better stewards of the environment. The alternative? – a world without whales. It’s too terrible to imagine.” (Pierce Brosnan)

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Last year I only just managed a post for AusReadingMonth and in fact the month had already ended in Australia, so I was determined to do better this year, for AusReading Month 2023 hosted by Brona at This Reading Life. So I’m pleased to be posting on the first day of October, and I’m hoping to get a couple more reads in before the end of the month – a three hour train journey to Newcastle this week should help me on my way…

Now, I am definitely not in the market for a novel about whaling, but I remember Rush Oh! by Shirley Barrett getting a lot of love in the blogosphere when it came out in 2015, so I was persuaded to give it a try. Barrett was born in Melbourne and lived in Sydney, she was a filmmaker as well as an author and Rush Oh! was her first novel.

Rush Oh! is loosely based on a famous New South Wales whaling family, but Barrett explains in an Author’s Note at the end that she made a lot of changes and it is a work of fiction. There were a few passages I had to skip and one particular scene, but generally I found not too traumatic a read. It’s told from the point of view of nineteen-year-old Mary Davidson, the eldest daughter of a famous whaler, George ‘Fearless’ Davidson.

As Mary isn’t a whaler, and the season of 1908 is a particularly bad one, there isn’t much whale slaughter. When it does occur, Mary and her sister Louisa are horrified at “the ghastly brutality” they witness, Louisa refusing to speak to her father. Many years later, when George harpoons a whale without the need to bring it in for earning money, Mary finds this entirely unconscionable as killing for its own sake. Rush Oh! remains well-balanced and I didn’t feel Barrett was putting modern sensibilities into a historical figure.

The Davidson’s live in Eden and George sails from Twofold Bay with his crew which includes five Aboriginal men. They are helped in their work by a “gentlemen’s agreement” with a pod of Orcas, who herd Humpback and Sperm whales into the bay, knowing they will get a share of the spoils.

“I awoke suddenly to hear a distant but determined smack! It was a Killer whale flop-tailing, surely? Smack! There it was again, and no doubt about it this time. I jumped out of bed and hurried out to the veranda – my father was running stiff-legged down to the sleeping huts, shouting, ‘Rush oh! Get up, boys! Rush oh!’”

The Orcas are well-known to the family, who give them names: Hooky, Humpy, Typee, Jackson, led by Tom:

“In spite of his distinguished years, his demeanour was ever that of a cheeky schoolboy, the sort that might steal your apples or throw rocks at you from across the street, but nonetheless a good boy in his heart and loved by all who knew him. As well as his duties as Chief Scallywag and Rouseabout, it was Tom who would generally take it upon himself to alert my father and his men whenever he and his companions had herded a whale into the bay.”

For the Aboriginal crew members, the Orcas are recognised as ancestors.

Into this world arrives handsome John Beck, an ex-Methodist-minister. Mary falls hard for him, but as her mother has died and she has a fractious relationship with her sister, she turns to novels and etiquette articles for advice on how to talk to men:

“I had often notice to certain archness deployed by the heroines when addressing members of the opposite sex and I strived to emulate this tone whenever the opportunity arose, which was infrequently. […] In desperation, I had even attempted to engage my uncle Aleck in repartee, but it was difficult to sparkle when constantly having to repeat things in a louder voice.”

Poor Mary. She is awkward and surrounded by older fisherman and her relatives, trying to eke out paltry food supplies to feed them all. She is looking back on this time from 30 years hence, and there is no bitterness in her tone. Rather there is a gentle humour and acceptance of who she was then and who she is now.

Her youth and naivete are also demonstrated in the style of the tale, with little sketches throughout (Matt Canning was the illustrator) and sometimes tying herself in knots with her syntax:

“I fear it will only invite comparisons with Mr Melville that will not be flattering. (I mean, they will not be flattering to me; they will be perfectly flattering to Mr Melville).”

But she is intelligent and funny and she cares for her family; I found her believable and charmingly honest.  The humour could be gently mocking at times:

“The age at which Uncle Aleck started whaling was a variable thing, but it was consistent in the fact that it was always younger than anybody else’s.”

But really it was fond more than anything, such as the fishermen’s reaction to John Beck’s sermonising:

“‘Father, since you asked, I have not been buffeted by temptation in a long time,’ said Uncle Aleck.

‘Me neither,’ admitted Arthur Ashby.

‘I would very much like to be buffeted by temptation, but sadly no one is buffeting me,’ said Salty.

‘I wonder if we could get onto the business of praying for a whale,’ said my father.”

Rush Oh! doesn’t fall into the info-dump trap of some historical fiction and wears its research lightly, evoking the setting beautifully and not losing sight of the story at all. My only reservation was that the point of view varies without stating so: Mary describes scenes she wasn’t present for. Although she states at one point this is because she heard about it from John Beck, it didn’t quite work for me.

But this is a minor quibble about an original and engaging tale with a clear-voiced narrator. The ending was left somewhat open on a couple of storylines and while I know that could irritate some readers I thought it worked really well in terms of allowing Mary a life beyond the story without everything tied off neatly.

Shirley Barrett wrote one other novel before she died in 2022. I understand The Bus on Thursday is very different to Rush Oh! but the strength of this novel has made me keen to read it.

To end, I do try and shoehorn in an 80s pop video where I can, and this one seemed apt: