Monthly Archives: February 2009

The book shop : like the immense bar code of some key to all mythologies

26 Thursday Feb 2009

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Halfway through, I  am entranced by Gail Jones’s Dreams of Speaking. Take this passage about a bookshop:

Arriving at the bookshop, Alice browsed without pleasure. The books conveyed both intimidation and overabundant presence. They lined up like the immense bar code of some key to all mythologies. There were new novels, in hardback, with expressionistic covers and virtuosic claims, and colourful paperbacks, each announcing a superior, unmatched talent. Tables sagged under so many new-minted words. So many leaves of meaning, so many sentences, strung together, in immoderately shiny covers. After slow deliberation, Alice bought a volume of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Although she had read it before, she felt it was a choice-against-disappointment…
(p. 81)

Strangely enough, I abandoned Henry James’s The Ambassadors for her book. One day perhaps I’ll have the patience, the sharpness of mind to untangle James, to keep him afloat in my mind. I do not in any way deny his genius.

Back to Jones’s passage. I find the weight of new books published overwhelming (the pressure to keep up? I don’t even pretend). And this passage captures some of that experience for me. And then there’s that experience of going back to a book I know when I’m in a bad reading patch.

Between you and me : a review

26 Thursday Feb 2009

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Between you and me / By Amber Fresh (2009)

Let me tell you a secret: the last six years I’ve found it hard to enjoy poetry. Something changed in my brain sometime around 2003. But then there’s collections like this one that remind me how good poetry can be.

Amber is a Perth poet and this small collection evokes a certain scene in Perth so well, of poetry readings, of enduring a session at the Ocean Beach Hotel, of twenty and thirtysomething parties, of Coles carparks and of the inner suburbs.

Her poems have a casual, insightful humour which manages, paradoxically, to also be passionate and intense. Thus in ‘Casual as’:

While you were at the bar
trying to organise some
casual sex
I was in my room
writing a melancholy song for you
and drawing a comic about how we met

…

But that’s because
I didn’t know then
that you were at a bar
making other arrangements

That phrase ‘making other arrangements’ gets me every time I read it – such a brilliant piece of sarcasm and so terribly sad, using that rather old fashioned phrase to devastating effect.

These poems show an ability to express states of mind and stray, strange thoughts that I believed no-one else knew about it. Thus in ‘Did you do it’:

i hit myself in the face
to see what it would feel like

it felt like

did you do it?

Two poems deal in a fascinating way with faith; in “1 Corinthians 6:18”, the Holy Spirit is compared to ‘an X-men girl/ who turns boys to dust/ with a touch of her hand’. It’s an earnest, distinctive take on evangelical experience. In “Jesus is my homeboy”, the poet hears God tells her to take her doona to some people who will need it ‘on the corner of aberdeen and station street’. It’s a poem of quiet faith that doesn’t lose its sense of humour just because it’s talking about God.

The collection hangs together so well. I was left at the end feeling like I’d read a short novel, that I’d experienced a season in the poet’s life. It was a season that felt a bit like the film You and me and everyone we know, with that same quirky take on big questions, a bit like Leunig’s cartoons, and a bit like (I’m not sure why this came into my head) Leonard Cohen’s novel Favourite Game.

You can buy the book at Oxford Books in Leederville (I’m told it’s on the counter) or from Amber herself – amberinparis@hotmail.com. It costs around $15 plus postage.

House of Zealots

06 Friday Feb 2009

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I’ve finally got round to uploading the new version of The House of Zealots. I rewrote it three times last year, and this is the version I submitted to the publisher in October 2008. Or the first 42 pages, anyway. You can find out more about the novel on the page I’ve set up about it. But if you just want the extract, click below:

House of Zealots chapters 1-6 Oct 2008

I wonder about showing drafts of things. I love getting feedback, but I also sense that by the time this book finally gets published, everyone near to me who’s expressed interest in it is going to be suffering fatigue and won’t be able to read it. The best reader is my friend with a bad memory for whom it’s totally fresh each time.

The Library of Babel

06 Friday Feb 2009

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While I’m waiting to hear about my second novel, House of Zealots, I’m working hard on number three – The Library of Babel. I’m doing it as part of an MA at UWA, under the supervision of Dr Van Ikin.

Here’s how I describe the novel in my initial proposal:

The creative work I am proposing for my MA is a novel called “The Library of Babel”, its title borrowed from the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, with reference back to the biblical story of human striving and hubris. It is a magic realist work influenced by Geoff Nicholson and Paul Auster, intertwining the themes of mortality, success and the idea of the library.

The novel is set in a Perth with an alternate history. Early in the twentieth century, a wealthy industrialist named Benjamin Abel builds the world’s largest library in Perth. As part of Abel’s quest for immortality, it sets out to collect everything ever published and preserve everything it can, especially things to do with Abel’s life. By the present day, it dominates Perth, controlling media and publishing, but is mired in decay and inefficiency. It is the Kafkaesque bureaucracy glimpsed in The Castle, only fleshed out.

The protagonist, Henry, enters the library as a cadet. His secret mission is to write a biography of Abel exposing the truth about the man – now a super-centenarian – and his control of the state, his obsession with immortality and his suppression of dissent. For Henry, it is an opportunity to achieve the success which eluded him in the poor reception of his first novel. Yet surrounded by millions of books by forgotten authors, his whole quest is relativised. His predicament is worsened as he realises chasing success threatens both his marriage (as books become more important than his wife) and his integrity (as Abel befriends and tempts him).

The novel is also about the beauty and wonders of this strange library and its treasures, including lost manuscripts of sequels to books like The Catcher in the Rye and heads of celebrities kept in preserving jars hidden in the storerooms of the library.

I had a short story from it published in Studio: a journal of christians writing recently; it’s called “A Week in the Library of Babel” and you can download it either below or on my ‘stories’ page:

a-week-in-the-library-of-babel

Christianity as grace and mystery : Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

06 Friday Feb 2009

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Gilead / Marilynne Robinson (2004)

In 1954, told he is not long for this world, 74 year old Congregationalist pastor John Ames sets out to write a testament of his life for his seven year old son. Ames has lived in the Iowan town of Gilead all his life. It is a digressive testament, journal-like, added to day by day. It starts out in the past, focusing on the conflict between his pacifist father and his abolitionist grandfather, both ministers of the same church he now pastors. The second half focuses on the present return of his prodigal grandson, Jack Boughton, and Ames struggle to love Jack. In the end, love wins out and Jack confides his secret to Ames.

Robinson’s prose is careful, precise, close to perfect even as she writes in the cadence and idiom of an old man fifty years ago. It was twenty-four years since her previous novel and it feels like the sort of novel a writer might spend decades on.

It is wise and grace-filled. It is Christian in many senses, but perhaps most importantly because its heart is grace: grace is embedded in the narrator and the novel. (I don’t think Christianity is or should be simply grace at its heart, but I think the novel and the novelist might contend so.) It is a novel which shows a lot of love for people and the world, even in their ugliness and brokenness.

Ames’ grace contrasts with his grandfather’s ‘activism’ and his father’s ‘holiness’. Robinson is contrasting three streams of Christianity – what Richard Foster would call in Streams of Living Water the social justice, holiness and incarnational streams. For Ames’ grandfather, Christianity means justice at any cost, and he steals and shoots to achieve it. For Ames’ father, having no part in evil is what counts, and he leaves the church for a time during the war to sit with the pacifist Quakers.

Robinson privileges Ames’ type of Christianity – a moderate, grace-filled faith of small things. There’s less certainty and more mystery.

There are few novels that are both so Christian and so accomplished. There are evangelicals writing consciously Christian novels which are Christianised popular fiction. There are great writers (Updike and Greene, both now deceased; Winton) with Christian tendenancies or some measure of faith writing novels which have some Christian themes. But there are few writers writing great literature that are so drenched in a Christian worldview.

And yet having said that, I didn’t connect to the novel as much as I wanted to. I think it just comes down to my personal aesthetics of writing, that this isn’t the kind of book I like to read best. Perhaps it’s the lack of particular kind of narrative drive I miss. Perhaps I like less saintly narrators with more ambition and sin to their name.

Last year, Robinson published a follow-up novel from the perspective of Jack. I’m looking forward to reading it.


Honour and dishonour: the fate of two contemporaries, Cormac McCarthy and John Updike

04 Wednesday Feb 2009

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The contrast between the fates of two great American novelists, Cormac McCarthy (1933-) and John Updike (1932-2009) is a picture of the ironies of fame and writing.

McCarthy was for years a cult figure, a reclusive, difficult writer who some writers and critics proclaimed as a dark genius but who the public stayed away from. He was named at one stage as ‘the best undiscovered novelist of his generation’. For me, his masterpiece Blood Meridian and his brilliant Border Trilogy were secret countries I was so proud to have visited when the world at large knew nothing of them.

When he finally published another novel in 2005, No Country For Old Men, one reviewer stated that at 72, it was probably the last we would hear from him. But he came straight back with the post-apocalyptic novel The Road in 2006, and, far from the swansong of an obscure writer, Oprah Winfrey picked it up for her book club. Suddenly middle aged ladies across the USA and Australia were reading the dark Texan master and discussing him over glasses of champagne.

Things didn’t stop there; the Coen brothers made one of their most critically acclaimed films ever from No Country and when the film of The Road finishes production, McCarthy hype will be at fever pitch.  All this from a man who writes of a cruel world which wipes out hope from the bravest men and knows no happy endings. McCarthy’s success is incongruous; he is meant to be the writer’s writer, the test of a reader’s pedigree. But what a perfect late career he has had. I think any writer would choose a path like his, as against what happened to poor Updike.

Updike achieved fame and critical success early; Rabbit, Run was published when he was just 28 and was the first of his brilliant Rabbit quartet. The world was amazed by the brilliance of his prose and no-one through the sixties and seventies depicted upper-middle America with such elegance and warmth.

Yet it must be nearly impossible to stay on the right side of the critics and also be prolific. Who has ever managed? The critics seem to like the enigmatic writer releasing the occasional novel after years of silence; much more exciting than the steady prolificy of an Updike, a new novel year after year. It became a requirement that critics accuse him of being tired or tiresome, of never breaking new ground, of being all beautiful prose and no substance. There’s something to the accusations; he did write about adultery a little too much, but he was also constantly experimenting with very different genres, from his own attempt at science-fiction – Toward the End of Time – to Terrorist. He didn’t just write about adultery in New England!

So after the praise heaped on his masterpiece, Rabbit at Rest (1991), it was all downhill for Updike. It was as if he had died with Rabbit. He kept on writing, he kept on publishing, he kept up his good humour and warmth for the world and for upper-middle America, but it didn’t reward him back. And then, ignominy of ignominies, after the lukewarm reviews of his final (humous) novel, The Widows of Eastwick, the last award he received was a lifetime achievement award for writing the world’s worst sex scenes. Unjustified, when even if he wrote too much about sex, he wrote about it with originality, beauty and humour.

Which writer, on the balance, would want to be in Updike’s shoes? Lauded early and gently scorned late, always compared unfavourably to earlier works. Poor Updike; he believed in the goodness of the world; he had a gently humorous touch even as he wrote of his fear of death and the mundane struggles of middle class life. And unlike McCarthy, he didn’t get a happy ending to his career.

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Paul Auster’s Moon Palace : an overview

03 Tuesday Feb 2009

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(Moon Palace is my second favourite novel of all time. I just finished reading it for the third time and I wanted to write an outline of the novel for future reference and to help my own understanding. I hope to write another post exploring why it is so important to me.)

This story of how Marco Stanley Fogg’s life ‘began’ is told in first person; at one point he specifies that he’s writing in 1986, fifteen years after the narrative ends. We don’t learn anything of these intervening years save a single scene; it’s the first twenty-three years of M.S. Fogg’s life we learn about.

M.S. tells his childhood quickly, giving us summaries and a few brief incidents. When his mother is killed in a traffic accident, he is adopted by his Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor is a member of a band called the Moonmen and has a big influence on the young M.S.. He gets him thinking, gets him reading and teaches him that names have a power; they aren’t just co-incidental – the baseball player Glen Hobbie will never make it big, because his name implies amateurism; M.S.’s name itself carries much better significances – the explorers Marco Polo, Stanley Livingstone, Phileas Fogg. M.S. himself goes on to reflect on the initials M.S. which become his name and the idea of his life as a manuscript, a narrative in progress. When he heads to Columbia University, his uncle gives him his collection of 1492 books. The boxes form the furniture of M.S.’s apartment.

M.S. hasn’t finished university when news reaches him of his uncle’s death. Money was always going to be tight, but by the time he’s paid off Victor’s debts, he knows he is living on limited time, that he has to do something or he will not have the money to finish. And yet in an irrational act of quixotism, a kind of bravery or solitude or stubbornness, he decides to do nothing, to see what will happen to him.

His concession to his situation is to sell off his uncle’s books, but he reads each one before he sells it. Since the books were stacked chronologically, the sequence of titles resembles the sequence in which his uncle read them – except that the boxes themselves are not in order – and in doing so, he feels he relives his uncle’s life. (This might seem a small point, but it is the touches like this that are part of the brilliance of the novel for me.)

When he runs out of money, he goes to visit his friend David Zimmer (who, of course, reappears in Auster’s The Book of Illusions). Zimmer has moved on, but he bursts into a breakfast party held by the new tenants. They feed him; he eats ravenously and meets his ‘twin’ – Kitty Wu, who is wearing the same t-shirt as him.

Soon he is kicked out of his apartment. He goes to live in Central Park. He gets sick, holes up in a cave and is on the verge of death when Kitty and Zimmer finally find him. Kitty has been looking for him for some time; she never felt so sorry for anyone in her life, she tells him, than when she met him that one time at breakfast.

He recovers in Zimmer’s apartment for several months and is rejected for the Vietnam draft. Zimmer urges him to go and pursue Kitty; she’s in love with him and she’s waiting for him to make the next move. Kitty and M.S. become lovers, discovering in each other true soulmates.

M.S. needs money; he answers an advertisement and becomes a companion to one Thomas Effing, an elderly bad tempered man who is either blind or pretending to be blind. M.S. moves in to Effing’s house, leaving Zimmer behind. At this point Zimmer disappears from the narrative and M.S.’s life, which seems extraordinary – why didn’t Kitty and M.S. keep up with him, at least? In the only flash-forward, M.S. tells us that the only time he’s seen Zimmer since was four years ago, in 1982, when he saw him, his wife and kids walking down the street and stops and talks to him for twenty minutes.

(We don’t read about this incident in The Book of Illusions; the only link to M.S. we learn about in that novel is that one of Zimmer’s sons – who die soon after in a plane crash – is named Marco. Surely Zimmer would have told M.S.? I don’t think Auster had realised he was going to do this when he wrote Moon Palace; if only he could go back and adjust it.)

After some space devoted to the great love between M.S. and Kitty, Kitty moves out of focus for a chapter as M.S.’s adventures with Thomas Effing come to the fore. I make the mistake of picturing Effing as the Big Lebowski, the one in the wheel-chair, from the Coen brothers’ film, but this is wrong. Both are grumpy and insane, but Effing is a tragic figure as much as a comic one.

M.S. takes Effing for walks, and must describe the world to him, quickly and precisely, noticing all the details he has taken for granted. Then one day Effing declares he is going to die in two months and it’s time to get started on his obituary. Effing tells his life story, a story which parallels and resonates with M.S.’s. Effing was born Julian Barber in a wealthy family. He was a painter and disliked his ‘frigid’ wife. He sets off into the Utah wilderness with the heir of another rich family to paint the unique light. Their guide is unscrupulous and when the young heir falls down a ravine and is fatally injured, the guide refuses to stay with him or to take him back. Effing stays with him as he dies and then wonders what to do.

Fearing his name will be mud because of the death of the heir but perhaps also sensing the opportunity, Effing decides to not return, to stay out there in the wilderness. Just on the point of death, he finds a murdered hermit in a cave. He decides to take over the hermit’s life, and paints his best paintings ever, knowing that no-one will ever see them, painting them only for himself. He learns that the hermit was murdered by a gang of robbers and that the robbers will be back. When they return, he’s waiting for them, killing all three and taking their loot. Rich again, he heads back to civilisation, exiled from everyone he once knew and living under his new identity of ‘Thomas Effing’.

In time, he learns that he actually fathered a son the night before he left for Utah and he observes the man’s life from afar. His son’s name is Solomon Barber and he is a history academic.

His time nearly up, Effing wants to give away the original amount of money he took from the robbers. Despite his bad health, he forces M.S. to take him into the streets where they give away the money. On the last night, it’s pouring with rain but Effing insists on continuing and M.S. realises he is determined to die. Sure enough, he catches pneumonia and holds onto life only until two minutes past midnight on the day he had nominated as his day of death.

Effing leaves M.S. a sum of money and for a time Kitty and M.S. enjoy a blissful, carefree existence living together. M.S., meanwhile, writes to Solomon Barber, who is keen to meet M.S..

Sol realises as soon as he meets M.S. that M.S. is the son he didn’t know he had. While a professor he slept with M.S.’s mother – his nineteen year old student – in the morning they were discovered in bed together and the scandal caused Sol to be dismissed. She went back to her hometown and refused to speak to Sol again. Sol doesn’t tell M.S. any of this, figuring there is lots of time, that the right moment will come. He does, however, move to New York and become friends with M.S. and Kitty.

In the meantime, the bliss of M.S. and Kitty’s love is destroyed. Kitty gets pregnant; she wants an abortion and M.S. desperately wants the baby. M.S. frames it as his mistake, that he was foolish to be upset about her wanting the abortion. When he gives in and she has the abortion, something breaks in his heart. He can’t bear to be with her; he moves in with Sol for a ‘break’. Sol tries to get them back together; Kitty waits for M.S. to return – but he cannot.

(One can only speculate on Paul Auster behind the text here. And as much as I shouldn’t, I will. Perhaps like M.S., as an American liberal, he believes in his head that abortion is a necessary choice, not something to mourn. Yet perhaps he had an experience like M.S. where his heart felt it was a terrible thing and wouldn’t match his head.)

Sol hatches a plan to get M.S. out of his funk. They are going to find the cave in Utah where Effing lived for a time and hid his paintings. On the way, they stop to visit M.S.’s mother’s grave. Sol starts sobbing at the grave and reveals the truth to M.S.. M.S.’s first reaction is anger and Sol blinded by tears stumbles away, straight into an open grave. His back is broken and he spends weeks dying in the hospital, attended by M.S. day and night.

When Sol dies, M.S. rings Kitty; she’s the only one who might understand. She listens, and is sorry for him, but she won’t have him back. She has someone else; she says he nearly killed her and she’s had to harden her heart to survive. (As much as one might understand this, it’s actually only been three months since M.S. moved out; I can’t help thinking that the truest love would have waited longer than that.)

Having lost everyone, M.S. tries to find Effing’s cave. He finally discovers the area was flooded; all he can do is hire a boat and ride over the lake, knowing he is as close as he will get. When he returns, his car with his inheritance has been stolen. With just his wallet in his pocket, he starts walking. He walks all the way to the west coast, and when he gets there he stands in the Pacific Ocean watching the moon rise. And that’s the end of the story.