Monthly Archives: October 2008

Walter M. Miller shot himself

29 Wednesday Oct 2008

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Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Lebowitz is one of my favourite novels. A strange and beautiful work, it spans centuries in telling of an order of monks in a post-apocalypse world who keep knowledge alive – in a way – by tediously copying the blueprints and shopping list of Saint Lebowitz, an engineer from before the nuclear war.

All his life it was the only novel he published; but then in 1997, soon after he died, a sequel appeared – Saint Lebowitz and the wild horse woman.  I don’t know why I failed to read it; I think someone I respected told me it would spoil the brilliance of the first in my mind. But I am going to read it now. How can I not?

I looked him up for some reason yesterday and found this interesting article by Terry Bisson – http://www.sff.net/people/tbisson/miller.html, who finished the novel for Walter Miller after he shot himself.

I was shocked by what I read about Miller in Bisson’s article. From Canticle and its gentle Catholicism, I imagined Miller to be a wise and peaceful religious man. Instead, Bisson paints a picture of a reclusive grump. What did Auden say? Something like, ‘Master of nuance and scruple / Forgive us writers whose words are in better taste than our lives’.

Thomas Hardy – Far from the madding crowd

28 Tuesday Oct 2008

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I have started a tradition I have kept up for two whole years of reading one Thomas Hardy novel a year. This year it was Far from the madding crowd, an early novel serialised then published in 1874.

Set in Hardy’s beloved Wessex, Bathsheba Everdene is pursued by three men. Gabriel Oak is a good hearted farmer who loses his farm and any chance of marrying her and becomes a shepherd on her farm.  Farmer Boldwood is a boring bachelor in his forties whose heart is brought to life by a Valentine Bathsheba sends as a joke. From thereon, she feels an obligation to him and it is tragic to see the trouble wrought by one careless action. Sergeant Troy is a dashing soldier who flatters and controls Bathsheba and makes her fall in love for the first time in her life.

It was the savage tragedy of Tess of the D’Ubervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure which drew me to Hardy. He writes tragedy better than anyone else I have read. Madding Crowd is a minor tragedy, diluted with pastoral comedy. The comic aspects are interesting mainly from a cultural perspective, the exchanges of the farm workers in the pub on religion and life giving a picture of everyday nineteenth century life through Hardy’s eyes. But the mix is an uneasy one and left me dissatisfied.

The depth of feeling of those favourite works of mine is not there. Hardy doesn’t seem to care or know these characters as well as those in his later works.

Yet it deserves its reputation as an important novel. Bathsheba is a fascinating, nuanced character, especially for a woman character in the nineteenth century. She is not typecast as either pure or evil, but instead as a complex human being with contradictory drives between desire and obligation.

A street called wall

24 Friday Oct 2008

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My wife Nicole has entered the ABC National Poetry Slam Competition. It’s an excellent political poem called ‘A street called wall’. You can view it online here: http://contribute.abc.net.au/kickapps/_A-street-called-wall/video/372060/32422.html .

I like the interweaving of so many texts in the poem – nursery rhymes, Lewis Carroll, the Beatles, Don McLean, advertisements. For me it captures the milieu of the moment. And I’m in admiration of her rhyme and rhythm.

But I’m biased; judge for yourself.

Don’t be like Donna Tartt

23 Thursday Oct 2008

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In 2004 when my first novel was published, a librarian I worked with said, “Just don’t be like Donna Tartt who took ten years to write her second.”

Donna Tartt, the New York author, who debuted with the brilliant The Secret History in 1992 and didn’t publish The Little Friend until 2002.

I might have laughed at the time, but this has been a fear which has animated me ever since. The fear that I could become one of those writers who just did not follow through.

Fear is a terrible motivation for a writer. And a little fame is a terrible thing too. It’s so easy to become sidetracked from the noble reasons to write and covet the spotlight, the spotlight which shifts away so suddenly. (I had attention for about fifteen months after The Fur, and then very little.)

So that is some of the backstory for the six years I’ve wrestled with my second novel. (I started in 2002 before The Fur was published.) House of Zealots has gone on and on and on through nine rewrites. (My poor long suffering wife.)

But this week I sent it off. It’s highly possible it will come back again, but for the moment, it’s in the publisher’s court. And despite all the sidetracks and times of wrong motivation and stress about not getting enough time to write, I think it’s finally come out okay. I’m just embarrassed I was showing people the first draft four years ago, when it wasn’t okay. 😦

Gen Y literary blog, Angela Myers

21 Tuesday Oct 2008

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A new blog I’m following is Literary Minded, Angela Myers’ excellent blog of all things literary from an Australian perspective at http://blogs.crikey.com.au/literaryminded/. I’m overwhelmed by her energy and prolificy, and feel appropriately old and tired. She’s keeping up with everything!

She describes herself as a Gen Y writer and I realise I’m not sure I can call myself this. Not that it wouldn’t be good to be the voice of a generation (until Gen Z comes along and you’re yesterday’s news). But that I feel a perpetual outsider status to be necessary to my sense of self. I guess I’m disloyal to my generation. There’s a lot I don’t like about it.  (But I don’t think it’s as bad or as monolothic as commercial media makes out, either.) Maybe I need to find more of a sense of generation as part of my identity.

(Part of the problem is that I’m on the cusp of Gen Y and Gen X and so I don’t belong in either. )

Forgive them for they do not know what literary fiction is

21 Tuesday Oct 2008

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A common question people ask when I tell them I write novels is, ‘What genre?’. Okay, so maybe they don’t use the word genre, but that’s often the gist of the second question. (Sometimes people ask what a novel is, but not every time, or even half the time. But way too many times.)

I usually tell them ‘literary fiction’, but I’m beginning to think that hardly anyone knows what I mean. ‘Like fantasy?’ someone said today.

I don’t mind calling literary fiction a genre. When I was a science fiction nut at sixteen and seventeen, I remember reading an impassioned article in Aurealis, perhaps by Van Ikin, about how literary fiction is just as generic as science fiction. The literary stories he analysed had a number of common features – a journey, introspection, the suggestion of illicit sex and some other things I can’t remember. Maybe not true of everything published as ‘literary fiction’, but the argument has validity.

What I can’t do is explain easily to people what literary fiction is without sounding elitist.

‘It’s a type of fiction which pushes boundaries… it could be about anything… but it explores the experience and meaning of life… often… sometimes… it’s read by highbrow people with English degrees… or just people with better taste… oh dear, I didn’t actually mean that…’

Because let’s face it, us literary fiction readers do look down on the rest of you. At least a little. Sorry.

Anyway, I feel this gulf between me and people who have no clue what literary fiction is. I guess it’s the problem everyone faces who has gone deeper into their field. I mean, I’m not going to appreciate the finer points of distinction between different types of motorbike racing or knitting, am I?

The reckless pessimism of youth

08 Wednesday Oct 2008

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Two quotes I’ve come across in recent weeks sum up something I’ve been trying to capture about youth in House of Zealots. It’s a particular sense of aliveness I thought all of life would have, but which I now fear dries up. I was writing about something I was experiencing when I started the book in 2002, but now I have to look back and write about it from a distance. Ian McEwan said this in an interview on the Book Show regarding the difference between his early writing and mature writing:

I was young, reckless, I had a kind of reckless pessimism which I think you can afford first of all when you’re young and before you’ve had children. You don’t care what happens to the world, you just want to stir it up. You don’t mind a revolution. I wouldn’t even have minded much a nuclear war. I really wanted things to shake up.

He’s exactly right; it’s how I felt for a time. Anything to make a dent in the world. It’s what Leo in House of Zealots wants to do.

And there’s a slightly different mood, but a related one, that Don DeLillo beautifully describes at the end of Underworld:

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did thing slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

Nick, the character talking, becomes a middle-class, middle-aged man with sadness in his heart, but none of the anger, the readiness and the danger. In a sense the novel is an archaeological dig, taking us back from his present self to the youth that lay behind, as the chapters go circuitously backward in time. How did the boy who shot a man become a manager of a waste disposal company? How do any of us who once were young become what we are now?