Category Archives: book review

Louis and Hilda: Some thoughts on biographical method in Peter Fitzpatrick’s Pioneer Players

04 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in biographical method, biographies of writers, artists and musicians, book review, Katharine Susannah Prichard's associates and connections

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Peter Fitzpatrick, Pioneer Players: The Lives of Louis and Hilda Esson (Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Other times, she is a ghost in all the things I read: I know the people I’m reading about knew her. I know that if the “camera” panned just a little to the left or a little to the right, or if it moved back to take in the whole scene, Alice would be there.

Before I started writing a biography, I wrote a novel about biographers. (It’s how I do things – I imagine them, and then I become them.) I’m revising it at the moment, and I added those sentences to it the other day. I’m reminded of them reading Peter Fitzpatrick’s Pioneer Players: The Lives of Louis and Hilda Esson. Hilda was Katharine Susannah Prichard’s best friend; they lived next door to each other as children. The few surviving letters between them show an intimate friendship. Katharine is not exactly a ghost in this dual biography of Hilda and her first husband, Louis; rather, she is one of the major characters. But, naturally, she is out of focus. She is there to help us understand Louis and Hilda better. And I’m so glad for the existence of this and other works evoking the same world Katharine was moving through. Continue reading →

‘Existence – they had to call it something’: Marilynne Robinson’s Lila

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

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Each of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead trilogy has a different protagonist, but if there is one central character, it would be John Ames. He has spent his life in the town of Gilead, devoting himself as a minister to the people of the town. Robinson has a similar devotion to the town, insisting that in the small lives of the people of this non-descript Iowan town can be found much of what we can hope to know about existence. As well as beautiful literature. Robinson has created a landmark in American literature with this triptych, and it will be remembered in a century’s time.

Lila (2014) is the story of Ames’s eponymous much younger wife, an itinerant woman brought up on the road by an adopted mother, Dolly. She is haunted by her time in a prison-like brothel in St Louis. She is full of shame of her background, her ignorance, and her poverty. She is drawn to the lonely Ames, tending the graves of his wife and child, listening to his sermons, while always on the verge of running. She cannot let go of the shame; her past takes the form of the knife she carries everywhere, Dolly’s knife. Even after she is baptised by Ames and then married to him and carrying his child, the knife sits in the kitchen, and she wonders when she will need it again.

The novel is steeped in the Christian story. Like Gilead, it narrates grace, making plausible a world where a loving Creator can be glimpsed in sacramental moments. If some atheist readers will find this off-putting, it is still amazing that many (judging from reviews) do not.

One of Lila‘s great accomplishments is to sustain a novel so deeply concerned with the meaning of existence solely through the narrative voice of a woman with limited education and a narrow experience of the world.

She knew a little about existence. That was pretty well the only thing she knew about, and she had learned the word for it from him. It was like the United States of America – they had to call it something. The evening and the morning, sleeping and waking. Hunger and loneliness and weariness and still wanting more of it. Existence. Why do I bother? He couldn’t tell her that, either. But he knows, she could see it in him. Why does he want more of it, with his house so empty, his wife and child so long in the ground. The evening and the morning, the singing and the praying. The strangeness of it. (75)

Lila ponders what is life for, and the largely educated, elite readers of her story will find new clues and a new angle on existence for seeing these things through her eyes. And that is something the best fiction does.

 

Brutal and compassionate: Richard Flanagan’s Narrow Road to the Deep North

14 Friday Nov 2014

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Richard Flanagan’s Narrow Road to the Deep North has immense scope. Perhaps some readers will avoid it, thinking it a war novel, but it is actually a novel about all of life. At its centre – literally and metaphorically – is a lengthy account of the characters’ lives and deaths on the Burma Railway during World War Two, but it extends before and after that period to show the full impact of war. One of its significant achievements is to show how living and dying in a prisoner of war camp is an intensification of the drives and dilemmas all of us live with.

Appropriately, in telling of torture, starvation and cruelty, it’s a brutal novel. The novel’s brutality means it earns its kindnesses and moments of love so much more than other novels. One particular scene shines with love, and that is the generous hospitality of the Greek fish and chip shop owner; to describe it would give too much away, when I do hope you read it. In the world of this novel, it’s these moments of light which are the best one can hope for in life.

Despite its brutality, it’s also a novel of compassion, and an important source of this are the convincing chapters from the point of view of Japanese officers and a Korean guard who were overseeing the camp. Flanagan performs a remarkable feat of empathy to make their worldview and behaviour explicable, to give us a sense of what it might have been like to have been inside their minds, and in this to re-humanise them and remind us that we may not have been as heroic as we think in the same circumstances.

It is a narrative unusually driven by co-incidence. I think it works; it reinforces the novel’s random universe. While the co-incidences often drive the plot forward, it’s not in a convenient way. Instead, the co-incidences make the characters think there must be some meaning when there is not. Dorrigo happens to run into Amy in the bookshop, before he knows that she’s the new wife of his uncle. It helps draw them into an affair this time, but the next time he runs into her by chance, giving an opportunity to resolve so much, nothing is resolved. Instead, the cruelty of life is reinforced.

It’s a powerful novel, and I found it compulsive, if not brilliant. Why do I feel it falls short of brilliance? Perhaps it takes on more than it can accomplish in its length, and its attempt to convey the whole course of so many characters’ lives means none of them are conveyed fully enough. Even with Dorrigo Evans, I felt I was only beginning to see him fully painted when the novel ended. But that’s an initial judgement – I may need to let the dust settle on this one.

Imagining dispossession: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River

31 Friday Oct 2014

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Spoiler alert

I’ve come late to Kate Grenville’s acclaimed 2006 novel, The Secret River, but just ahead of the renewed attention which will accompany the screening of ABC’s two-part mini-series adaptation next year.

William Thornhill, the protagonist, struggles in grinding poverty in the London at the turn of the nineteenth century, working as a boatman on the Thames and sometimes stealing cargo to make ends meet. Transported as a convict to New South Wales with his wife Sal, he gains his freedom and carves out a new life, obsessed with owning and cultivating his own patch of land on the Hawkesbury River. His desire for that land contends against Sal’s competing desire to return to England and the presence of the Aborigines, semi-dispossessed, but refusing to leave.  The logic of plot demands that if he is to get what he wants, he must pay a price. The tension with the Aborigines culminates in a massacre by the whites of the men, women and children of the Aboriginal camp. One white pays with his life, but the price for Thornhill is different. His price is the nagging guilt he must live with for the rest of his life, and the loss of relationship with his son, his old friend, and the surviving Aborigine he once had an uneasy understanding with. He becomes a rich, successful man in the aftermath of the massacre and builds a great house over the cave paintings. “Sometimes, sitting in the parlour in the red velvet armchair, Thornhill thought of it underneath him, clear and sharp on the rock. He knew it was there, and his children might remember, but his children’s children would walk about on the floorboards and never know what was beneath their feet.” (316)

Of course, the irony is that even though his children’s children became good at forgetting, we who are several more generations down the line are finally remembering the price, the secret history of our colonisation, our acts of dispossessing and murder. The Secret River is a very intentional act of remembering, or imagining where there are gaps in memory. It made me see colonisation in a newly vivid light, no longer in abstractions or statistics. It is a worthy, important novel for that reason, but perhaps it’s also part of what prevents it from being a masterpiece, it being too consciously a moral novel, constrained by what it is trying to say.

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

  • The early section in London had me feeling the desired sympathy for the terrible of the working class in that time; but later a nagging question as to whether it was as unrelentingly impossible for most people as that – in this case, there are a Dickensian number of tragedies which befall them.
  • A compelling aspect of the novel is the way the Thornhills, having been oppressed, seize the opportunity to become oppressors, lording it over convict labourers and, ultimately, being willing to kill Aborigines.
  • There are patches of startling, beautiful prose, and yet only patches; from (my hazy, nine-year old) memory her earlier novel Idea of Perfection, was more consistently beautifully written.
  • The showdown between Sal’s desire to return to London and Thornhill’s desire to stay is built up expertly, yet its resolution is unconvincing. She just drops it, in the end, after hearing the Aborigines “won’t be a problem” any longer – yet the presence of Aborigines wasn’t the driving force.

Gold Fever: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Roaring Nineties

24 Friday Oct 2014

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The Roaring Nineties (1946) is the first volume of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s magnum opus, her goldfields trilogy. She spent a decade on the trilogy, regarding it as her finest achievement, and was deeply hurt by the mixed reception she received from critics (especially for the third volume, Winged Seeds). The trilogy is an epic telling the story of the Western Australian goldfields from the discovery of gold and spanning the decades which followed.

The novel is haunted by the presence of displaced and mistreated Aborigines, and begins with a short, violent story of an abduction of two Aboriginal women by prospectors before gold had even been discovered. It is Prichard at her finest, writing in spare and evocative prose. It is a remarkable reorientation of her novel, throwing off-balance this story of whites and their gold; today it would almost be expected, but in 1946 it shows historical insight ahead of its time. From here, the novel tells of the initial gold rush in the 1890s and the establishment of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie Boulder. Prichard brings the dust, tents, excitement, and desperation alive in a way that historical studies cannot do. She researched this novel thoroughly and it shows; sometimes to the detriment of narrative, but mostly to help her create an authentic story. The historical background is never far from the story, forming a spine which moves the story along through a series of incidents, with a large cast of characters moving on and off the stage. It is Sally Gough who is closest to a protagonist, as she makes a living running a boarding house to compensate for her ineffectual aristocratic gambler of a husband, Morrie. The struggle between them is an ongoing aspect of the plot, as he gradually accepts her egalitarian ethos, both in class and gender terms. Sally’s insistence that she and Morrie should not elevate themselves above the others contrasts with Alf and Laura’s move up the class rankings, as mining becomes commercialised and Alf betrays his prospector roots to become a mine manager. The class struggle of the alluvial prospectors against the mining companies and the political establishment occupies much of the last third of book, and is the least engaging, often losing sight of the characters.

The novel is, rather loosely, a frame narrative, with the whole novel presented as the yarns of prospector Dinny Quinn about the early days of the goldfields. This device is used frequently in the early chapters, peters out, and is then revived toward the end of the book. Dinny is rarely central to the action, more an observer who knows all the characters.

Having read about some of the reception history of The Roaring Nineties, and the critical preoccupation of the time with rating it against and comparing it with her earlier work, what surprised me most about the novel is how very typically Prichardian it is. This novel has elements of almost all of her previous novels; it seems far less of a departure than Coonardoo or Intimate Strangers were. The foundation and growth of a community echoes The Pioneers. The depiction of the prospectors with their strong code of ethics (such as “roll ups” where disputes are settled) and their struggle against big companies is similar to the concerns of Black Opal. The mistreatment of Aboriginal women as temporary sexual partners brings Coonardoo to mind. The struggle of Sally Gough for her right to earn money and define herself apart from her husband echoes Haxby’s Circus and Intimate Strangers.

Waiting to Die: Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites

29 Monday Sep 2014

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Hannah Kent / Burial Rites (2013)

How does someone live, knowing they are to die? In Iceland in 1829, Agnes has been sentenced to death; the date has not been fixed and while she waits, she is sent to live with the family of the district officer on their farm. The story of the murder which led to her sentence is drawn out in stages by the priest and the district officer’s wife, as well as sections narrated directly to us by Agnes. My interest was in the tension of living in the shadow of execution, and carrying on with everyday life, working at chores each day and finding some comfort in relationships. Because, as extreme and foreshortened as Agnes’s situation is, we are all under a death sentence. We just have the luxury of not dying at others’ hands while we are still healthy. Kent conveys the drama of mortality well, with an assurance and insight beyond that of most first-time novelists.

As a narrative, the dual strands work well: the clock ticking down to her execution as we move through Agnes’s narration of the past as well. It is probably the best way to narrate it. But I was conscious in this novel of how neat most retellings within narratives are. The story of the past unfolds chronologically in the present. I’ve been watching True Detective at the same time – same technique, with the protagonists telling their story ‘right from the beginning’. I’m doing the same thing in my new novel. Readers probably don’t mind, but I understand the desire of some writers to disrupt the chronology – say DeLillo in Underworld. There’s better examples, I’m sure; just can’t think of them right now. In life, you get bits of the stories in chunks, usually, mixed up and random. But that’s the whole process of narrativisation, I suppose. Giving shape to life.

Anguished Portrait of Marriage: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Intimate Strangers

25 Thursday Sep 2014

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When Katharine Susannah Prichard set off from Perth for London and then a tour of the Soviet Union in May 1933, she left the manuscript of Intimate Strangers behind. It is the story of the troubled marriage of Elodie and Greg Blackwood, set in Perth during the Depression. The manuscript she left behind finished with the suicide of Greg after he has gambled their house away, and presumably before Elodie even has a chance to tell him she’s leaving him for the adventurous Jerome Hartog. While Prichard was somewhere in Sibera, war-damaged Hugo Throssell shot himself, having piled up huge debts from a failed ‘dude ranch’ venture at their home. She later expressed niggling doubt to her son, Ric, that perhaps part of his state of mind had been caused by reading the ending of the novel. Before publication in 1937, she altered the ending to set up a reconciliation between Greg and Elodie. The novel and the suicide will always be associated, and the issue has resurfaced often in the years since, including when the novel was turned into an ABC mini-series in 1981 and a magazine ran a sensationalised headline. In the introduction to the 1990 edition, Ric acknowledged parallels between Greg and Elodie and Katharine and Hugo, but emphasised the differences and the creative alchemy that amalgamates and transforms people and events beyond simple equivalencies; ‘the unknowable truth remains unknown.’

Intimate Strangers is a portrait of marriage as a concept and institution more than a portrait of a particular marriage. Elodie and Greg’s problems in their marriage of fifteen years are set against the troubled relationships of those around them, especially virginal tomboy, Dirk, who holds a line of suitors in her sway, not wanting to marry any of them, but eventually yielding to one for money. On the beaches of Calatta and then back in the suburbs of Perth, Elodie contemplates running away with Jerome as Greg continues his dalliances and fails as a provider. Over and over, the novel circles around the questions of finding sexual and personal fulfillment in marriage and out of it, with sexual attraction pulling people away from commitment. There is no clear message; the appeal and the problems of adultery are both presented. The resolution has Elodie and Greg recommit themselves to each other at the same time as they applaud Dirk’s escape from her marriage. In the moral world of the novel, Dirk’s escape is permissible because the marriage’s oppression mirrored that of the capitalist oppression of workers; as part of that, her husband Ted was violent, leaving her bruised. Greg is not as bad as Ted, but by today’s standards at least, he rapes Elodie in Chapter 6.

Intimate Strangers is distinct among Prichard’s novels. Most of her novels are researched, taking place among a particular occupation group – opal miners, timber workers, circus workers, station workers. Intimate Strangers is closer to the middle-class, urban world Prichard moved in. The urban setting is unusual for her, although as Throssell points out in the introduction, two of her lesser-known works, Windlestraws (1916) and Subtle Flame (1967) are also set in cities. Her other novels are also much more plotted; more than any other her other works, Intimate Strangers occurs within the characters’ consciousness, their inner conversations and impressions. However, just in case you were in doubt that you were really reading Prichard, in chapter 19 Dirk and Elodie turn up to a rally of unemployed workers in Fremantle to hear Tony speak, and the speeches of a number of the unemployed are reported. The tumult of the Great Depression is not foregrounded, but intrudes most here and when Greg loses his job in the downturn.

The novel is drenched in seawater and sand, lovingly evoking Perth beaches in the amalgam place of Calatta, part Rockingham, part Cottesloe. The characters begin on holiday there for the first half of the book, and return a couple of times, including for the final resolution. All the characters live to swim or sunbake or walk along the beach or fish. It is a valuable picture of Western Australian beach culture in the 1930s, sitting alongside J. M. Harcourt’s descriptions in Upsurge! (1934).

The novel enjoyed a brief renaissance in July 1981 with the broadcast of the two part mini-series adaptation. A review for the mini-series by Cul Cullen in The Women’s Weekly is one of the most hyperbolic hatchet jobs I’ve come across, describing it as ‘the silliest thing to flicker, unwatched, across our screens’; ‘aimless, stitled and utterly without relevance to a contemporary audience.’ Surely it couldn’t have been that bad; but the only way to know today is to watch the only copy I can see listed in the world at the National Archives. (In his introduction, Ric Throssell writes that it was also The Women’s Weekly which published the article at this time blaming the novel for his father’s suicide. However, The Women’s Weekly is now fully digitized for that year, and there is no trace of the article. It may have been a different magazine.)

While avoiding simplistic autobiographical readings of Intimate Strangers, it is an anguished book from an anguished period in Prichard’s life. The characters’ ponderings on how to find happiness and satisfaction in life and particularly marriage are themes which resonate today as well, even if the novel reads as a product of its age. It is not the Prichard novel I’d recommend readers start with, but it is a significant work in her corpus, demonstrating her versatility, and shedding light on its context.

Review of a Forgotten Novel: Thomas Henry Prichard’s Retaliation

12 Friday Sep 2014

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‘Should he continue in the wide field of literature he will assuredly become one of our first writers of romance,’ wrote Launceston’s Daily Telegraph, reviewing journalist Thomas Prichard’s novel, Retaliation: An Early Tale of Melbourne (1891). It was not to be. This is the only novel Prichard was to publish before his death by suicide in 1907; in addition to his journalism, the rest of his oeuvre is filled out with two known short stories in The Bulletin and two serial Christmas stories in newspapers, as well as poems and some works of non-fiction. Retaliation was published in a cheap paperback edition with a green cover and sold for a shilling. Trove, the combined catalogue of libraries across Australia, lists six copies held in Australia; there may be several more in libraries not listed, and a few in private hands, but essentially, Prichard’s novel and his literary career have been forgotten. Retaliation is a popular fiction of its day, and while competent and representative, is not especially memorable. It does, however, read as a fascinating document of its time, especially in relation to the work of Prichard’s famous daughter, Katharine Susannah. Continue reading →

A Long Trudge: Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens

01 Monday Sep 2014

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There is, perhaps, little new to say about Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens (1990). Heavily promoted on release (along the lines of the ‘the great living novelist on the great novelist’), it was widely reviewed and polarising. It is often referenced as a landmark in biography, and yet it is now out of print. Or the original 1200 page volume is out of print; more recently Ackroyd released a new, abridged edition, as well as other books on Dickens. The original serves as the source of some streams still flowing out to us today.

As many lengthy tomes have done, the book took me through the gamut of reading experiences, from moments of insight and exhilaration to long trudges of boredom. That almost seems par for the course for biography, which in conveying the scope of a life, can’t help but bring in some of the drudgery – would be neglectful not to, perhaps. James Kincaid, reviewing it for the New York Times, writes, ‘Worst of all is that he won’t go away, droning on for so long that the reader may start to root for death to come to Dickens just to get it over with.’

The biography begins with a prologue describing Dickens’ corpse and the reaction to his death, but for the rest is conventionally chronological, taking us through each year and, indeed, most months of Dickens’ life, including the circumstances of the writing of all his novels and the ways the themes interacted with and reflected his life. Perhaps the harshest and most thorough critique of Ackroyd’s take on Dickens, that of John Sutherland in the London Review of Books, takes the issue of the opening of biographies as a fruitful point of contrast between Ackroyd’s approach and that of ‘real’ literary biographers—that is to say, academics. Kaplan’s biography of Dickens opens with Dickens burning all his letters, a scene which helps us realise that, ‘We may speculate, but we will never know the inner Dickens which those burned papers would have revealed. The biographer must remain for ever fenced-off.’ Ackroyd’s mistake or hubris, according to Sutherland, is to ignore that fence and claim to know Dickens as one genius to another. Sutherland finds some key examples of Ackroyd overreaching and doing just this, as well as a telling passage in which Ackroyd is disparaging of academic conventions like footnotes. Ironically, Ackroyd is hardly speculative by the standard of popular biography, with its psychologising and mind-reading. It is also a well-researched biography by comparison to these. Ackroyd seems to have made two mistakes—writing a biography that resembles academic biography enough to invite judgement by academic standards (Kincaid writes that ‘the work seems unsure of its audience’); and to have overreached with some Dickensian flourishes (such as the descriptions in the prologue as well as the quaint interludes), when the substance of the book is not as ‘hubristic’ as these flourishes might suggest.

Ackroyd chose to eschew not only subheadings but chapter titles, only numbering chapters. Perhaps the desired effect is to make the biography appear more like a novel. The irony is that novelists, when writing anything approaching a fictional biography, will tend to at least borrow this apparatus from biographers and give the chapters titles. Biography is more difficult to give form to than a novel—it’s less focused, is far less plotted. With all its inevitable detours and somewhat loose ends, chapter titles and subheadings give readers some structure to make better sense of their reading experience. The details and chapters blur into one another so much more without this, and I think it a significant shortcoming for this biography—especially considering Ackroyd seems clear in his own mind about which period and topics each chapter covers. It is a very closely structured work, and yet Ackroyd doesn’t wish to give too much away by letting readers see the map of the long journey he is taking them on. (On a similar note, Kincaid’s review mentions how infrequently Ackroyd even informs us which year he is talking about.)

The seven fictional interludes are notorious and receive a lot of critical attention. Dickens appears as a fictional character in these short passages, talking to the biographer or to other literary figures. Perhaps they seemed transgressive or innovative in their time; they speak, of course, of the limits of the conventional biography form and the biographer’s attempt to bridge the gaps into the past. Yet for me, there are not enough of them to make the technique feel whole-hearted as part of the project.

This biography has its great fans and great detractors. I am neither. While seeing some of its merit, I’m disappointed by it as literature; for me, it didn’t soar or enchant.

 

Obsession in suburban Perth: Tracy Ryan’s ‘Claustrophobia’

24 Sunday Aug 2014

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Tracy Ryan Claustrophobia (Transit Lounge, 2014)

My friend Tracy Ryan’s new novel, Claustrophobia, was published recently by Transit Lounge. Set in Perth, it’s a literary thriller about a woman’s obsession with her husband, Derrick’s ex-lover, Kathleen. The claustrophobia of the title is an apt description of the feel of the novel. We’re constrained within the narrative viewpoint of Pen and her narrow, obsessive world. Her marriage is claustrophobic, too, the jealousies and social isolation fueling her behavior. The clichés in which Pen talks and coats her world hint at a darker side constrained within, and it’s this side of her which is gradually revealed.

Pacing is important to the thriller, and in this novel it’s just right, building up tension slowly and, for the reader, unbearably, knowing something must break. The plot opens with an inciting incident of Pen uncovering an undelivered letter from Derrick to Kathleen, and deciding to open it and read it. From here, this initial decision to keep a secret in her marriage in retaliation snowballs expertly with each chapter.

I’m left at the end unsure of how to judge the characters; this ambiguity is probably part of the novel’s psychological accomplishment. Pen is an unsettling protagonist to live with for 240 pages. The positive spin on her provided by one of the other characters is that she’s intelligent and passionate, but crippled by low self-esteem. Yet as with people in real life, the characters around her don’t know the level of neurosis and obsession percolating behind her façade. Derrick, her husband, truly is too controlling, and can be seen to have helped cause Pen’s madness; yet he is a somewhat more balanced and grounded person than Pen. Kathleen is the most sympathetic of the major characters, an articulate and generous academic who lives life to the full—and yet has her own obsessiveness which emerges late in the novel.

The novel evokes Perth so very well, from suburban life in the hills, to the hallways and cafes of UWA, as well as the bush town of Pemberton. There are too few novels set in Perth, and this one is convincingly grounded in it. It’s possible to loosely associate it with the crime genre, and suggest that with the work of David Whish-Wilson and Felicity Young it begins to map out Perth as an increasingly plausible setting for crime fiction.

On the subject of genre, the characters discuss the novels of Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon, perhaps a case of the novel wearing its influences proudly. These are the right reference points for a contemporary novel in the tradition of these two writers, with the fresh setting of Perth.