Australian novels

“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 😀

“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:

Novella a Day in May 2022 No.10

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The Spare Room – Helen Garner (2008) 195 pages

The Spare Room was on my radar for a long time before I read it, as the themes are ones that mean a lot to me. I’ve spent nearly all my working life in cancer care and palliative care in one form or another, and so a novella about a friend caring for a dying person was always going to be of interest.

It also means I’m hard to please – anything vaguely sentimental or factually inaccurate is going to annoy me. I thought Helen Garner got everything spot-on.

The novel opens with Helen preparing her spare room for a friend to stay:

“I made it up nicely with a fresh fitted sheet, the pale pink one, since she had a famous feel for colour, and pink is flattering even to skin that has turned yellowish.”

She is still shocked by Nicola’s frail appearance when she picks her up. She knows her friend has terminal cancer and is with her in Melbourne to attend an alternative clinic. However, it quickly becomes clear that Helen will provide a more involved caring role than she anticipated.

An unspoken tension between the friends is that Helen is highly sceptical of the treatments Nicola is putting her faith in:

“ ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s the treatments causing the pain – that’s how I know they’re working. It’s just the toxins coming out.’

[…]

I held my peace. The ozone smelt delicious, very subtle and refreshing, like watermelon, or an ocean breeze. I sat on a chair in the corner and pulled the lid off my coffee.”

Garner brilliantly captures all the negotiations that take place, the bargaining between Helen and Nicola about what is acceptable and what will not change.Helen doesn’t try to talk her friend out of the treatments that she thinks are a total swizz, but she does try and get her to accept pain relief. Nicola flatly refuses to see the palliative care team – who would support Helen in such a physically and emotionally stressful situation – because she associates them with giving up.

“What was all this anger? I needed to be kinder to her. Dying was frightening. But it was easier to imagine being tender when I had a packet of slow-release morphine capsules in my bag.”

Nicola doesn’t recognise the immense pressure she puts on Helen, and on other friends, by expecting them to care for her as she refuses statutory care services. The story is compassionate to all involved, showing the immense love the women have for one another, and how this can sit alongside selfish actions. Neither Helen or Nicola are self-sacrificing angels, quietly enduring the unendurable. Instead they are kind, funny, angry, confused and scared – recognisably human.

“I longed to slip her shoes off, to draw a cotton blanket over her. But was scared to touch her. I was afraid of her weakness, afraid of her will. So I stepped out of the room and closed the door behind me.”

It’s such an impressive achievement by Garner to capture a complex emotional story without minimising it or retreating into cliché and sentiment. The Spare Room is a truly affecting exploration of death and dying. It shows how grief begins before the person dies, and the pain and joy that can exist alongside each other in such moments.

“Oh, I loved her for the way she made me laugh. She was the least self-important person I knew, the kindest, the least bitchy. I couldn’t imagine the world without her.”