Author Archives: Nathan Hobby

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, second reflections

15 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by in books, quotes

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

I don’t re-read many novels, but I felt compelled to re-read Gilead after reading its companion novel, Home. I gave it 8/10 in January last year, but this time, I have recorded it as a 10/10. (Marilynne may wish to put this on the back cover of future reprints, but given she has every second reviewer around the world saying it is a masterpiece, she may not need my commendation.) And indeed, I don’t feel able to add to the wonderful reviewing and criticism already written about Gilead. It is a beautiful novel about living, dying, race and America. And faith. Here are some quotes I took from it.

“When this old sanctuary is full of silence and prayer, every book Karl Barth will ever write would not be a feather in the scales against it from the point of view of profundity, and I would not believe in Barth’s own authenticity if I did not also believe he would know and recognize the truth of that, and honor it, too.” (p.197)

You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end. (p.236)

But the fact is that his mind came from one set of books as surely as mine has come from another set of books. But that can’t be true. While I was at seminary I read every book he had ever mentioned and every book I thought he might have read, if I could put my hand on it and it wasn’t in German… Who knows where any mind comes from. It’s all mystery. (p.142)
– I found this particularly interesting. He’s reflecting on how his brother became an atheist while he carried on his father and grandfather’s business of being a preacher. Where does faith come from? Where does a worldview come from? To what extent is it a product of the books you read?

I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time…. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. (p.104)

[Book Review] Home: Slow-burning and Wise

16 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by in book review

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

HomeHome by Marilynne Robinson (2008)

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Home is a novel about what happens after the prodigal son returns to his father’s house. The setting is the small American town of Gilead and the year is 1956. The father is the frail old Reverend Boughton and his prodigal son is Jack, the alcoholic youngest son who abandoned a girl with a baby in his youth and hasn’t been home in twenty years. The jealous older brother of Jesus’ parable is transformed into the youngest daughter of the family, Glory. She is not jealous, either, but loving to her troubled brother, having returned home after being used for money by a no good ‘fiance’ for years.

It is a slow moving, unadorned novel, and the impatient reader won’t enjoy it or even finish it. Its pleasures are subtle ones, exact prose and slow burning, wise drama as Jack and Glory look warily and wearily for redemption in their own ways and as their father’s health deteriorates.

The characters have a sense of space in their lives, and this gives me another strange pleasure. Jack and Glory find themselves in a quiet town, in a quiet home with no particular commitments anywhere. They live in a kind of long school holiday, filling in their time with gardening, board-games and cooking. They aren’t particularly happy, yet I find myself slightly envying them.

The novel’s relationship to Robinson’s previous novel, Gilead (2004), is significant. Gilead is set in the same town at the same time, narrated by Boughton’s oldest friend, the Reverend John Ames. Gilead is a tale of generations, as Ames looks back on his father and grandfather and forward to his young son. Home is also about family, but is horizontal – a single nuclear family and its aftermath, rather than generations. The overlapping of characters and events between the novels is fascinating. I’m going straight back to re-read Gilead while it’s all fresh in my head.

View all my reviews >>

I hate advertising

17 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

I hate advertising. A horrendous billboard has just gone up above the cinema near my house proclaiming ‘Pack More Into Your Mornings: Botica’s Bunch, Mix 94.5FM’. It has a photo of the bunch in question, a predictably middle-of-the-road threesome guaranteed to appeal to the broadest possible number of people.

But that phrase ‘pack more into your mornings’ irks me. What the hell does it mean? Pack more inane banter? Pack more lousy jokes? Pack more jokes about the differences between the sexes, about whose football team won, about celebrities? I don’t know, I haven’t listened, but I can imagine. If you really wanted to pack more into your mornings, you’d listen to Radio National, and be treated to in depth analysis of every political development over the past twenty-four hours. (A bit much for me, yet I keep doing it.) Imagine if there were billboards promoting Radio National instead of Mix FM?

Or imagine if instead of billboards and bus shelter ads trying to convince me to switch brands or spend more money, there was public art? Imagine every place you see advertising there was something meaningful or beautiful or both? Why the hell are we living like this?

Our culture is built around all these false dichotomies between almost identical options. Listen to 96FM or listen to 94.5FM. Watch the Today show or Sunrise, both with news, weather, celebrities, Hollywood gossip, quirky stories, live crosses. Watch Channel 7 News or watch Channel 9 news, Today Tonight or A Current Affair. Barrack for the Eagles or the Dockers… how can people seriously have arguments about football? Do they really think there is something intrinsically different about their football team in these days of nationalisation, of player trading and corporate sport, largely disconnected from place and community? Choose Hoyts or choose EVENT cinemas; when you get there choose the generic action movie or chickflick or comedy or drama of your choice, depending on the negotiation between you and your partner, because of course women like one sort of film and men like another type of film. Vote for Liberal, or vote for Labor, depending on whose hairstyle you like the best, according to who the media’s told you is better.

These are not true choices. We’re stuck on the surface, and I blame that damned billboard looming above the Windsor Cinema on Stirling Highway.

Persecution of the Bogan

28 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

An intelligent discussion about the vilificaiton of the bogan appeared on Fairfax news sites today. It argues that bogans are the one group it’s considered acceptable to sneer at, and discusses jealousy as part of the motivation. I feel slightly mortified, but I’m not going to stop reading Things Bogans Like. Sneering is wrong but the fact is that crassness dominates Australia, and I don’t think it’s a good thing. The bogans may be vilified by the ‘cultural elite’, but boganism is regrettably dominant in our society. It is right to identify and discuss boganism because it is the mainstream, it is the assumed values of suburbia, it is commerical tv.

[Book Review] Howards End

21 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by in book review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

In volume one of his published journals, as an opinionated undergraduate, the great British novelist John Fowles comments on reading E.M. Forster’s Howards End that it’s as if reading a book by a passionless, fussy rabbit. I’m not sure quite what he meant by that; if I was going to find literary ancestors for John Fowles, E.M. Forster would surely be one.  Howards End is about three families representing three different classes – the intelligentsia, the business class and the working class – and the terribly complicated mess of a love-triangle they get themselves into. Well, it’s not exactly a ‘love triangle’; it’s way too complicated for that. But Forster is writing about Britain and about authenticity in 1910, just as Fowles was writing about these same things in Britain in 1960s. I see them both as such representatively British writers.

Howards End was consistently surprising, the narrator would suddenly veer up to a state of omniscience and pass interesting comments on the state of the country or the nature of someone’s soul. Or to say that what happened next was too full of boring details to relate. It’s an interventionist narrator of an interesting sort, with thoughtful things to contribute. I don’t think too many novels are written like this any more (maybe not enough in any era?), which dare to ask what’s it all about, and not even from a narrowly existential angle, but from a wide angle social perspective.

But I find myself battling to know what else to write about the book, and I wonder if that’s part of what Fowles was talking about. I wasn’t compelled, as much as I was interested and impressed.

I’ve never seen the film from the 1990s and I’m looking forward to checking it out.

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel

12 Saturday Jun 2010

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Once a decade, Franzen (author of The Corrections, which I love) publishes a novel, and you can be sure it’s going to be worth paying attention. A whole year ago the New Yorker published a lengthy extract from the new one to be published late this year, and I didn’t even know. I’m looking forward to reading it.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/06/08/090608fi_fiction_franzen?printable=true

RIP Randolph Stow

31 Monday May 2010

Posted by in authors, R.I.P.

≈ 4 Comments

I just read the sad news of the death of one of WA’s finest novelists, Randolph Stow. He was 74 and living in England.

I’ve often wondered what happened to Stow, why he stopped writing (or at least publishing). His career served as a kind of parable for me – it didn’t matter how well you did, things might still not work out right. He had published several award winning novels by the age of thirty and seemed unstoppable. And yet he published nothing in the last twenty-six years of his life. I tried several times to get into his final novel, The Suburbs of Hell, but I couldn’t, for some reason. Sorry, Randolph.

Over the last few years, I have kept on meaning to read more of his work. Merry-Go-Round In the Sea is surely one of the best Australian novels ever written, one of the great novels about childhood.

I have an obscure connection to Randolph: family legend has it that his mother boarded with my great-grandmother for a time in the 1960s. I don’t even know why, and I don’t know if it’s true.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/mp/7317959/wa-author-dies-in-england/

[Book Review] Lionel Shriver’s Take on Death and Money

24 Monday May 2010

Posted by in book review

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

So Much For That, Lionel Shriver (2010)

Lionel Shriver’s new novel is getting mixed reviews. It will inevitably be compared unfavourably with her most successful novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, a comparison she’ll be living down for the rest of her life.

I finished it on Saturday, and think it’s a flawed, overly long and harrowing read, but also compelling and insightful. The main character is Shep Knacker, who sold off his business ten years ago with the intention of moving to a third world country and living cheaply off the proceeds for the rest of his life. Right when he decides to make an ultimatum to his wife Glynis – come with me or I’ll go by myself – she reveals she has mesothelioma. Shep is a good man, and abandons his hope of his ‘Afterlife’ to care for his wife. Her treatment absorbs all his money, even with the health insurance provided by the job he hates.

Until its rather dissonant, almost comic ending, it is an unrelentingly bleak novel, the sort of story to make you wonder what the point of life is. Not only is the treatment futile and awful, but the supporting characters are Shep’s best friend Jackson and his wife Helen with their daughter who has a rare degenerative disease which makes her life a constant miserable trial. Shriver constantly indulges Jackson’s rants about the state of America. They become repetitive and spin the novel out a long way, and they’re also a little annoying – he is not as articulate as Shriver writing in her own voice in her very interesting newspaper columns and doesn’t hold as nuanced opinions. Yet it is also a book filled with insights into money, work, marriage and conduct of life.

In Lionel’s apparent act of revenge against her Presbyterian theologian father, Shep’s Presbyterian minister father loses his faith in God at the end of his life. I hate to think what Donald Shriver thinks of that. Or maybe he and Lionel can laugh about it. (I doubt it.) It stung me reading that; imagine losing one’s faith in the face of death? It would make a lot of your life feel wasted, particularly in his – or my – case.

There are too many secondary characters who are too nasty or too selfish – Shep’s boss, his sister, ‘s family. Subtley is really important in dealing with such heavy subjects, and this novel has very little subtlety. But it does have a compulsive narrative – I wanted to know what was going to happen and I cared about the characters, even and especially as the book enveloped me in the dread-filled fog of death.

[Film Review] The Concert

02 Sunday May 2010

Posted by in film review

≈ 1 Comment

The Concert, a French-Russian production, opened at Paradiso this week. It will probably become a minor middlebrow hit for cinema goers who don’t like multiplexes, don’t mind subtitles but aren’t overly critical in their watching – generous filmgoers, rather than demanding ones. It’s a feel-good film about music and redemption, set in Moscow and Paris; what more could you ask?

The problem is, it feels like two rather different films messily welded together. The first film is a madcap comedy, the sort that I never love but done well enough, as a Russian conductor demoted to a cleaner twenty-nine years ago for harbouring Jews in his orchestra steals a fax and pretends to be back in charge of the orchestra for a major show in Paris. He and his oddball friends have to patch together an entire orchestra in a couple of weeks and face various obstacles and some funny moments.

The full back-story is hinted at in the first half but takes over the film in the last half, centring on a beautiful French violinist who is twenty-nine years old and who the conductor insists on having as his soloist for the concert. The film becomes a drama of redemption, an inferior As It Is In Heaven. The uneasy meld of comedy and drama is shown in the final sequence, the actual concert, as ‘comic’ images like the no-good cellist having been bound and gagged and two Frenchmen deciding to kiss each other passionately play next to emotional flashbacks from the conductor’s past. Laugh or cry? I can’t do both! My wife was insulted at the idea that a ragtag orchestra who don’t even rehearse once can come together at the last minute with a violinist who has never before performed Tchaikovsky and produce stunning music designed to bring tears to our eyes.

Having said all this, it is an entertaining film with quite a number of funny scenes, interesting characters and amusing dialogue. Many people will love it.

6/10

Looking Through Other People’s Houses

26 Monday Apr 2010

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

I’ve spent countless weekends now looking through other people’s houses. I think it will go on forever; I can’t imagine finding a house that is just right for both of us.

The world of home opens is a strange and usually unnerving one for me.

So many people come through the house because they live on the same street and have always longed for a stickybeak. But have no interest in getting to know the occupants. Just their house. This seems like a significant social failure on the part of our modern suburban living. And I tend to dislike these people.

Lookers don’t greet other lookers. They walk past them as if they’re passing them on a busy street. It’s a horrid unfriendliness. The real estate books, I’m told, instruct you to project a confident buying vibe. I AM GOING TO BUY THIS HOUSE AND YOU CAN’T HAVE IT.

I feel for the occupants’ vulnerability in having their home open, especially when they’re renters. These strangers come through and pass judgement on their stuff. So I try not to pass judgement, but I still find myself thinking, this person has such bogan taste; or, my goodness they have bad taste in books. (I’m yet to go through any house with more than a single bookshelf of books. Every time there are books, they are recent bestsellers. This surprises me, somehow. Do people read only bestsellers? Do they need everyone else’s excitement about a book to ignite theirs? I MUST NOT JUDGE, at least not when I’m looking through their house.)

You get, inevitably, sucked into the myth and lie of real estate. You start checking real estate listings on the internet too often. It becomes a pastime, a game, an obsession, one that leads a bad taste in your mouth. Because these agents, they want prices to keep going up forever. These people looking, they want to be millionaires, they want to climb up the ladder quicker than everyone else. They want to make their fortune, they want to make a killing. Greed is in the air.

Everyone should just want a house to live in for their own sake. There shouldn’t be all this scheming.