It’s hard to find much trace of Virginia Smith’s The Carradine Diary online. It was her second novel, published in 2004 by Diva Books in London soon after her death in a car crash. Trove lists just one copy in Australian libraries, in the St Kilda Public Library. I picked up a secondhand copy spending a gift voucher at Elizabeth’s Books. I bought it guessing from its blurb that it was a good example of the biographical quest genre I’m researching.

Indeed, The Carradine Diary is a ‘textbook’ example. The British narrator, Abby, travels to Canada to illustrate the biography of a famed (and fictional) early twentieth century children’s novelist, Lucy Pritchard, creator of the children’s character, Hector Price. The biographer is Mo, an old friend of Gayle, Abby’s partner. Abby sets off on a car trip to the places Lucy lived so she can draw key landmarks for the book. She finds herself attracted to a tourguide named Elise at the old schoolhouse where Lucy taught for a year; a year in which, supposedly, very little happened in Lucy’s life. When Abby’s car breaks down, Elise asks her to stay with her, in the same house where Lucy boarded a century earlier. Elise’s family is in conflict over a diary written by Lucy and only recently discovered. Elise’s mother attempts to stop Abby reading the diary, but Abby manages to read it in stages at the same time as struggling to make up her mind about what to do about her intense attraction to Elise. Her own forbidden love echoes the passionate affair Lucy writes about a century earlier with one of Elise’s ancestors.

There are further twists – probably too many of them – and far too much vacillation in the final chapters, as Abby keeps changing her mind over her dilemmas. I suspect this would have been smoothed out had Smith lived. She writes well, and it is an interesting novel.

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“Virginia Smith” was her married name; but we read in the editor’s introduction that Virginia had left her husband a few years earlier and was in a committed relationship with a woman. A posthumous collection of poems was published under her maiden name “Virginia Warbey”. It was a sad and fascinating piece of web-bioquesting for me to come across this anonymous comment under a review for the poetry collection:

Its very interesting how people assume so much.
Virginia wasnt planning a new poetry collection at all – she felt she had gone beyond poetry and had moved on to other things….
She had also left the writers group because she felt she didnt really get out of it what she should have gotten out of it.
Her new novel, that remains unfinished, by her own admission, was her best work by far.
And, in all honesty and hindsight, Virginia is probably cringing at Ratified.

It seems her legacy is contested by someone who knew her very well. If this was a bioquest novel, a committed biographer would unearth the truth about her life, echoing a crisis in the biographer’s own life. But this is as far as I, at least, will get.

An annual poetry competition is run in her name.

Swann: A Mystery / Carol Shields (1987)

I’m writing a dissertation on aspects of the biographical quest, and so everything I’ve been reading has had to relate to that lately. In the biographical quest (bioquest) novel, a genre identified by Jon Thiem, a quester goes in search of the life of someone from the past, doing detective-like work through archives, documents and old haunts to come to grips with the secrets of the subject and in the process, being changed themselves.  The prototypical example is A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance, published three years after Carol Shields’ Swann. Swann is not a typical example of the genre, but it stands in interesting overlap with it.

I’ve read three of Shields’ novels now, and in all three I have found her tone ambiguous – elusive, maddening and clever. She writes with a satirical edge, and yet it is not only satire, she follows enough realist conventions and has enough depth of representation to ensure that. Swann makes contemporary literary critics out to be ridiculous – but it doesn’t only do that. The first ever symposium devoted to the poet Mary Swann is being held, and we see events leading up to it through the eyes of each of the main players, before the symposium itself is presented as a movie script in the final part (a choice which did not make sense to me). The critics are busy reading all sorts of things into her work, detecting influences and praising her brilliance; a biographer is writing the story of her life. Yet the part-time librarian of the rural area where Swann lived and died knows better about the truth of her life – she was a poor, uneducated farmer’s wife who invested no deeper meanings in her work; when she wrote of the desire for a well, she wanted a well, not baptism, for example. She was murdered by her husband hours after delivering her manuscript to a journalist who ran a small press publishing rural poets in his spare time. The publisher’s wife accidentally used the original manuscript to wrap fishbones; many of the lines were scrambled and the two reconstructed the work the best they could, inevitably ‘improving’ it along the way.

In the bioquest, the secrets of the past are (imperfectly) revealed – there is optimism about the recoverability of facts and of the value of scholarship and the work of the biographer. The absence of this is what places Swann outside the genre, in my opinion. It is inevitably a continuum – gaps and silences are a feature of the genre; Swann is mainly about the gaps and silences.

I found it an engaging read, in that maddening way I mentioned. Shields has a lot of insight into people, even when she’s skewering them.

The Ghost Writer (2004) begins in regional South Australia in the 1970s, as the narrator Gerard grows up lonely in an isolated town with a protective mother, Phyllis. Phyllis is protecting secrets, and the day Gerard snoops through her locked drawer to find an old magazine and a photograph is the last time his mother even speaks of her English childhood in a country house called Staplefield. Around the same time, Gerard receives a letter from a penfriend club and begins a passionate exchange of letters with an orphaned, paralysed English girl named Alice Jessup.

Gerard takes another chance and finds the old magazine still in the drawer; inside the magazine is a ghost story by his great-grandmother, Viola, reproduced in full in the novel. Gerard keeps pouring his heart out to Alice, his ‘invisible lover’; he saves up to visit her in England as a surprise, only to hear nothing from her when he gets there. She was sick in hospital, she tells him later, and we jump forward years, to find Gerard in his thirties, still living unhappily with his mother, and still hanging on the hope that an operation will allow Alice to walk, the condition she has placed on them being able to meet in person.

After his mother dies, Gerard makes another trip to England, this time advertising for anyone who knew of his mother or great-grandmother while he waits for Alice to be ready to see him. An elderly lady writes to him and he begins to uncover the family secrets which might explain his mother’s unhappiness. At the same time, he uncovers more of Viola’s secrets, which eerily presage events in the life of Phyllis and the sister Gerard didn’t even know she had.  The prophetic stories, the family secrets and the mysterious Alice finally all come together.

The Ghost Writer is suitably haunting, carrying in it the sadnesses and disappointments which span across generations, paralleled in and engulfed by the strange world of Viola’s stories. Gerard is a likeable if self-occupied loner and his voice is clear yet affecting. This novel moved me and mystified me.