Category Archives: books

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.

Underclass Meets Metaworld: Review of ‘A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists’

24 Sunday Aug 2014

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A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists / Jane Rawson (Transit Lounge, 2013)

Wrong Turn is set on the streets of a semi-post-apocalyptic Melbourne in 2030. Climate change has displaced many and made life difficult for those eking out an existence under the glare of the sun in a world with little water and many ways to die. The main character is Caddy, a thirty-three year old aspiring writer who does what she can (including casual prostitution) to eat and drink. The early chapters of her wheeling and dealing in errands and squabbles over five dollars as she sits in a hot bar sparring with the bartender reminded me of the feel of Thomas Disch’s 334 and some of Philip K. Dick’s work (besides the mindbending which everyone focuses on, PKD was a chronicler of the little person surviving the future). Rawson has brought to life the underclass of the near future, with its mix of boredom and menace.

To do this as successfully as she has would have been plenty enough to accomplish in a novel, but Rawson attempts much, much more. Without losing its tethering in this ruined Melbourne, the focus begins to turn to the characters Caddy is writing about, two orphaned teenagers attempting to travel through every twenty-five foot square of the USA, a task that will take them ninety years at their current pace. (I love a quixotic project like this; there is a whole other novel worthy of Paul Auster or George Perec here.) Without giving away too many of the twists, the novel shifts into the territory of writer-meets-characters and the Gap, a meta-realm which could have come from a Stephen King novel. For my taste, it’s territory which has already been overexplored, but Rawson’s take on it is quite fresh.

Wrong Turn is a distinctly Australian novel, compelling as a portrait of life as climate change hits and of the petty concerns, dreams, losses and consolations that make up the fabric of existence, as through the eyes of Caddy, a winsome character. The author blogs here; you can read her reflections on the writing life, including her work-in-progress, a non-fiction guide to surviving climate change.

Haxby’s Circus: a review

27 Sunday Jul 2014

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Spoiler Alert

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s seventh novel, Haxby’s Circus: The Lightest, Brightest Little Show on Earth (1930), is a portrait of a circus family across a couple of decades and the transformation of the central character, Gina Haxby, from an agile, innocent acrobat to a world-weary and overweight middle-aged clown.

The circus wanders around Australia, right up and down the eastern states, into the small inland towns as well as the cities, and even across to Perth and then Geraldton. The narrative itself wanders as well, and any particular direction it has taken is often veered away from or even completely doubled back on. This is no weakness, but comes to be part of the novel’s charm. An example: in the first half of the novel, the antagonist is Dan Haxby himself, the patriarchal head of the family and circus. He seems too hard and too cruel, driving his wife and children to extremes. Gina breaks her back in a fall, and resolves to save her mother and her younger siblings from Dan. When she succeeds in escaping with her pregnant mother, they live in hiding to bring up the child, Maxine (Max), whose life will not be ruined by the circus. Yet years later, Dan comes to the same town and the family are reunited, the circus reformed and Gina’s resolve wavers. Over the rest of the novel, Gina’s relationship with her father softens, and he becomes slightly more reasonable; Max becomes an acrobat and it seems Gina’s fears and determination may even have been unwarranted. In this subtlety of character, it rings true with life for me. (Interestingly, the transformation from tyrant to a somewhat gentler man is the opposite of Hugh in Coonardoo, the novel KSP was writing in the same period.)

John Hay astutely calls the novel ‘episodically tragic’, but judges it the lesser work next to Coonardoo, and notes that it received little critical acclaim. Coonardoo is a more concentrated tragedy, with a smaller cast of characters and the profundity of tackling race relations in a more progressive way than contemporaries. Yet Haxby has the most powerful scenes I’ve yet encountered in KSP’s work, scenes of beauty, darkness and insight. The most profound is in the final chapter as Jack confronts Gina, asking why she is ‘running amuck’, hitting the drink and sleeping around. Gina responds ‘I want to know if there’s anything in this business of living, I think.’ She goes on to remember what Billy had said years earlier:

‘Billy was right after all. He said to me once: “Life’s a three volume novel, Gina. The first’s the book of ideals and illusions ; the second’s the book of realities and noble resolutions; the third’s the book of the senses and breakdown of the will.” I think he was right, Jack. It’s the third book I’m up to now.’ (312)

This cannot be KSP’s own philosophy; she lived her whole life in the book of ideals, perhaps with some noble resolutions from the second volume. Jack’s response is more in line with how KSP lived her life; it echoes a similar line in the autobiographical Wild Oats of Han: ‘I’d like to crock up and run off the rails. It’d be a relief somehow; but I won’t let life beat me that way. I’ve got to stand up to it, somehow.’ (314) Out of this existential scene, Gina finds the will to live meaningfully again; but, perversely, it’s by transforming herself into a clown, restoring the circus by humiliating herself.

KSP wears her politics more lightly in this novel. There are no Communist characters who turn up to challenge the system. Interestingly, when Gina inherits a fortune and finances the expansion of of the circus, she tells Dan ‘it must make a profit’. Yet all the family now have a share in the circus, and it’s this communal ownership which gives a taste of KSP’s politics. The other taste comes in the fact that again in this novel she successfully depicts a community, something few other novelists have done as well. There is a sense of the dignity of all the characters, and the goal Gina is striving for is not her own personal freedom or benefit, but the benefit of all in her circus community.

Haxby is in print in the Angus and Robertson Classics series, available both in print and as an ebook. I was fortunate enough to find a 1932 edition in the Florin Books series by Jonathan Cape at Robert Muir Books in Nedlands; Florin Books are, the ad says ‘the right size for all times and the right price for these times’ – at two shillings, that is. I liked my copy so much I didn’t write in it, and thus I have no annotations.

Reviews of biographies: downplaying biography and the biographer

13 Sunday Jul 2014

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There’s a review of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike in this weekend’s Australian. It’s a biography which I felt relied far too heavily on Updike’s stories for insight into his life, unpicking the fictionalisation of each piece Updike wrote in an exhaustive and unilluminating way.

Yet, typically, in this review we get so little engagement with the biography itself. Instead, in this case as in many others, a review of a literary biography is a chance for the reviewer to reassess or recap the significance of the biographical subject. A review will draw on the portrait offered in the biography, and give some quick assessment on how good a biography it is, but it will not tend to properly discuss the book as biography. The concept of biography as a literary form is short-changed, and the significance of the biographer downplayed.

It’s understandable why this happens; it reflects the status of biography. Yet reviewing biographies as biography could be a major step forward in the development and recognition of the riches and potential of the genre.

Louisa: the limits of biography

17 Tuesday Jun 2014

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Brian Matthews, Louisa (Melbourne: McPhee, 1987)

Louisa is both an anguished reflection on biography and its problems and the story of the life of Louisa Lawson, mother of the more famous Henry, but a significant Australian literary figure herself, as editor of a woman’s journal, Dawn, and as poet and suffragette.

Frustrated not only by the gaps in the record but also by the inherent limits of biography as a genre, Matthews interrupts what is often a conventional (but good) biographical narrative with an alternative text, the reflections of ‘Owen Stevens’, Matthews’ alternative self:

Owen Stevens, the biographer’s untrammelled self, will say, do, essay and gainsay all those things that formal scholarship cannot condone and which life, unrounded by a style-sheet, uncompleted and unexplained by footnotes, is teeming.

The ‘alternative text’ also contains experiments in form, such as a short story imagining a woman from the 1970s returning to Louisa’s past, and a music-hall drama to convey Louisa in ways conventional biography would not allow.

I have no doubt Matthews expected or even courted controversy, and he did get it. The book sits as the new far end of a spectrum. It has not been taken up as the new way of writing biography, nor was it expected to. But it does demand fruitful reflection from biographers, scholars and readers on just what is permissible and what is desirable in biography.

In a sense, it is a book which wears its postmodernism loudly and, although it has aged well, it still feels to belong to the milieu when the postmodern was still shiny, exciting and the way forward. Today, nearly thirty years on, my feeling is that the biographer is able to wear the influence of postmodern more quietly. Some of the question and objections ‘Owen Stevens’ raises, some of his speculations, could be integrated with the primary narrative – they don’t need to be exiled and, by extension, highlighted.

The relegation of consideration of sources to some brief notes at the end is a strange move. Surely the whole point of the alternative text is to draw some attention to the scaffolding, to the process of arriving at the settled narrative of a biography. Footnotes are a good place to provide the reader with some awareness of the process.

In How to do Biography (Harvard University Press, 2008), Nigel Hamilton argues that it is only when there is an authoritative biography of a subject already published that a biographer is free to be experimental. Louisa Lawson did not have such a biography in 1987, as far as I know, and no doubt this added to some of the criticism Matthews received. On the other hand, the biography was praised as well, and for good reasons.

Coonardoo: preliminary thoughts on its place in Prichard’s work and life

07 Saturday Jun 2014

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Coonardoo (1929) is the novel Katharine Susannah Prichard is best remembered for, a tragedy of the thwarted love between a station owner, Hugh, and an Aboriginal woman, Coonardoo, set in the Pilbara of Western Australia. It was ahead of its time in its depiction of race relations in Australia, and surely confronted Australians with some of the ugliness of their racism at its time; inevitably, by today’s standards, some aspects of the book itself seem somewhat racist, with talk of evolution of races and the ‘primitive’ charm of Aboriginality.

In this novel, Prichard’s narrative voice has shifted significantly from that of Working Bullocks, Black Opal and The Pioneers, all of which are more similar to each other than to this novel. To me, those earlier three novels all have a nineteenth century sensibility and tone, while Coonardoo is decidedly modern. The precedent in Prichard’s own work is The Wild Oats of Han, which appeared the year before Coonardoo, despite being written right back in 1907. Unlike the others, Han is a personal and autobiographical work, and my favourite of her novels so far. But like Coonardoo, its tone is less sentimental and the voice feels more direct; the narrator is further back, without the same sense of presence and control.

One way in which Coonardoo connects to Bullocks, Opal and Pioneers is that each presents a community with at least the capacity to be a kind of paradise, under threat by forces of fate and characters who do not understand the paradise. The paradise could be an opal town where everyone is their own boss, threatened by capitalists, or a timber community threatened by the greed of the sawmill. In Coonardoo, the ‘paradise’ is Wytaliba Station, with its harmonious relationships between the whites and blacks, as set up by Hugh’s mother, Mrs Bessie. The characters who ‘understand’ the paradise love the harsh isolation of the station life and treat the Aborigines with respect; Hugh’s wife, Mollie, does neither. A cardinal rule of the paradise is for the white men not to take the ‘gins’ as a harem, as Sam Geary on the neighboring station has done; it’s partly borne out of rejecting exploitation but also partly out of anti-miscegenation. The community is threatened and ultimately destroyed by both the forces of nature – drought – and Hugh’s inability to cope with this cardinal rule. Before she died, his mother set up an impossible dynamic in entrusting Coonardoo (the character) with the duty to look after Hugh, while also requiring that Hugh not take her as his partner. And so it is that this paradise is doomed, while the previous three hold out against the forces of fate and evil and carry on, albeit transformed, and the hope resting in the next generation. (Of course, we might see a note of hope in Hugh’s daughter, Phyllis, carrying on the station life, albeit on the neighbouring station.)

The novel developed as a genre of the self, the individual; one of Prichard’s achievements is the rare feat of depicting communities convincingly in novels. She is always interested in many different characters, switching rather democratically between viewpoints, and representing the web of interrelations in a community. Most importantly of all, she strives to capture the essence of a community, its ethos and spirit, the values which hold it together.

Like most of Prichard’s novels, Coonardoo resists a biographical reading. She researched the novel in the 1920s, spending time on a station in the North-West, just as she researched opal mining, the timber industry and the circus for other novels. Some biographical questions still presented themselves to me as I read. What significance are we to give her naming the protagonist ‘Hugh’, when her own husband’s name was ‘Hugo’ (admittedly, everyone called him ‘Jim’)? Both are paragons of Australianness; and perhaps like the character Hugh, Hugo/Jim was troubled by demons he didn’t articulate. It would be interesting to discover if Prichard saw herself reflected in Phyllis, who arrives at the station in a ‘borrowed’ car in chapter 23, escaping an affair gone wrong in Perth, and sets out challenging the gender stereotypes of the station, starting with the wearing of trousers. It would not surprise me if these chapters echoed most closely Prichard’s own time on the station. Like Prichard, Phyllis seems determined not to marry, only to find herself charmed by a suitor; the wooing of Phyllis feels a little like Prichard’s description of her own experience in Child of the Hurricane. And finally, speaking of the ‘child of the hurricane’, Prichard’s designation for herself, born in the middle of a Fijian cyclone – Coonardoo and Hugh’s child is referred to as the ‘son of the whirlwind’. Perhaps Prichard enjoyed the resonance between her own origin story and the Aboriginal understanding of whirlwinds giving a child its spirit; or perhaps her own personal mythology even developed in response to this.

Hazel Rowley’s Christina Stead

27 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in biographers, biographies of writers, artists and musicians, book review

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Christina-Stead

I probably read about the death of biographer Hazel Rowley in 2011, shortly before she was due to appear at the Perth Writers’ Festival, but I’d forgotten. She was still very alive to me, looking out from the back of her book on Christina Stead (1902-1983) as I followed her through Stead’s life. Being a biographer gives an illusion of immortality; the biographer sees a whole life before them, even the subject’s death. Rowley was only 59 when she died, and surely had many more important books to write.

This one is recognised as one of the great Australian literary biographies, and lives up to its reputation. Rowley writes engagingly, and gets the level of detail right, slowing down sometimes to describe particular days, summarising other periods. It’s a 500 page book, but Stead’s life was long and eventful enough to justify it. Rowley tends to use sections of a page or two divided with marks; it’s an effective way to move between incidents or topics within a time period.

Stead comes across as a writer who sacrificed everything for her art. After some moderate early successes, she lived in poverty for decades, blacklisted in America as a Communist and out of fashion as a writer. She and her life companion, William Blake, wrote incessantly, trying to make ends meet, as they wandered like nomads between the USA, London, and Europe. Blake is a fascinating character, sounding something of a genius himself, a man with a photographic memory and endless interests, who could write on anything at will, knocking out entire encyclopedias as well as historical novels and political analysis. Stead’s own work is intense, difficult and significant. She had a late season of recognition when she returned to Australia in the 1970s, after nearly fifty years away, but even this period was a time of loneliness and rootlessness. In Rowley’s account, she lived her whole life wounded by her father, who valued beauty and saw her as ugly.

Katharine Susannah Prichard is listed twice as a point of comparison, but there is no mention of them knowing each other; it’s a line of inquiry I will follow at some stage. There is a generation between them, but both were Australian Communist women writers who moved abroad to launch their careers. Prichard moved back and stayed put, and perhaps it saved her some of the misery Stead was to endure; Prichard also just seems a more optimistic, less difficult personality. It’s been a decade since I read Stead’s masterpiece, The Man Who Loved Children, but she is a very different writer to Prichard, far more experimental, far less Romantic and sentimental, far less plot-driven.

Lisa Hill on ANZ LitLovers has a good review of the biography, summarising Stead’s life and work.

Passion and timber: a review of KSP’s Working Bullocks

06 Tuesday May 2014

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Working Bullocks (1926) was Katharine Susannah Prichard’s fourth published novel, and her first set in Western Australia, where she’d been living since 1919. Set in the karri forests of the south-west, it uses the fictional towns of Karri Creek and Marritown as stand-ins for places around Pemberton as she tells of romance, struggle and strike in the lives of timber workers.

It take some time to establish itself. The first third is concerned with detailed descriptions of the work of the bullock teams carting logs, and of the protagonist, Red, catching a wild brumby. Prichard is determined to achieve verismilitude (as she did with her observations of opal miners in her previous novel, Black Opal), but perhaps it comes at the expense of readability. Of course, the same passages which bogged me down would have probably been met with delight by contemporaneous readers looking for an experience of the bush.

We know from the start that her hero, Red, is a fascinating character, and he begins to hit his stride about Chapter XI. He is a tormented loner, a man of principles fighting against setbacks; his brothers thought him dead in the war and sold off his fine team of bullocks to the butchers (7). (Strangely, Prichard never returns to Red’s time in the war, a glaring omission in her characterisation.) After his best friend, Chris, dies in a timber accident, Red goes bush for a year, only to return to civilisation when he captures the finest brumby, Boss. He loses Tessa, the girl he had been seeing, but falls passionately for Chris’s sister, the far more suitable and down-to-earth Deb. Deb’s mother challenges him to regain a bullock team to prove he has the means to keep a wife. Having earlier referenced Jacob from Genesis, who worked seven years to earn his wife (48), it seemed to me that the novel had settled into a natural plotline: the trials of Red as he overcomes the odds to rebuild his bullock team. Yet what follows instead is a series of sharp twists in the plot.

There is to be a race between Red’s brumby Boss, and the horse of Tessa’s successful suitor, Leslie Gaze. Yet Tessa comes to him as the race is starting and says he must let Leslie win, because only then will he marry her, and if he does not marry her, she will ‘die’, bringing down both Leslie and Red with her. Red is pushed to his  moral limits, facing a dilemma without a solution, but its terms are not clear enough, at least to this reader; could it be the censor, or at least Prichard’s concern for the censor? It seems Tessa is pregnant and will claim Red to be the father if he will not co-operate. Red throws the race, admits guilt, and walks away from his hope of marrying Deb, having covered himself in shame. He hits the bottle and turns into a harsh leader for the rest of the bullock team.

Soon after this, in chapter XXI, Mark Smith enters the narrative, in an interesting but somewhat unintegrated subplot. He works as Red’s offsider and becomes the closest he has to a friend. But most significantly, he is a communist, an agitator and he channels the workers’ anger at conditions into a strike after Deb’s other brother, Billy, is killed in the sawmill. Prichard paints the picture of a strike well, and it’s fascinating to watch Deb’s mother become a conscientious comrade to the cause during the strike. Yet the subplot is not anticipated; the workers’ conditions have not been foreshadowed as a problem, and the connection to the central plot is not well made.

The strike dies down and Red leaves town after he and Deb fall half in love. The rest of the novel settles into a romantic musical chairs, as Deb and Red must find their way back to each other through the obstacles of Niel the log chopper and the freshly widowed Tessa, back to snare Deb. (In one of the more innovative chapters, XXXI, Deb and Tessa are sharing a room and the narrative point of view switches back and forth between them.)

The sections of the novel told through Deb’s point of view are a highlight of the novel, and none more so than those describing her mystical communion with trees; ‘she had always gone to the trees when she was in trouble’ (273):

The trees were like people she knew who suddenly had become beautiful beyond anything earthly. Their stand and poise, long arms outflung, bodies tall and straight, crooked or gnomish, living flesh with the glamour of ivory, sloughing their bark, dark shapes wrapped in fibre. Deb swung to them in a fury of worship and admiration. The invocation, passion and lamentation of the trees swayed her. (275)

Deb and Red embody a simplicity and purity of life, two characters connected to their environment, work and appetites.

We should be grateful for Working Bullocks. It captures everyday working life in the Western Australian timber industry ninety years ago, yet balances that with a passionate, romantic sensibility. It was the novel which made her reputation on publication, and is usually regarded as one of her seminal works, yet while five or six of her other novels are in print today, I do not think Working Bullocks has been reprinted since 1991.

Claire Tomalin’s Biography of Katherine Mansfield

27 Sunday Apr 2014

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One of my concerns about biography is my failure to yet read a biography I found entirely satisfactory. Veteran literary biographer Claire Tomalin’s portrait of Thomas Hardy came close, and I hoped her biography of Katherine Mansfield (1987) would get even closer. I’ve just finished it, and it was very good, but it still left me with the dry feeling in my mouth of a failure to solve some of the tedium of biography.

I know nothing of Mansfield beyond what I’ve read in this biography, so I cannot judge what must be a somewhat controversial depiction of her. As a biography, it works best when Tomalin dares to make judgements and observe patterns across Mansfield’s life. It works least well for me when it is caught in the tedium of Mansfield’s to-ing and fro-ing with her husband Murry, as they endlessly try to find the perfect place to live and work and resolve their unusual relationship. Yet this is what life is like; it has none of the neatness of a novel – so how to convey it in a biography? Would it be acceptable to summarise slabs of time, and not relate each trip to the Continent? Probably, depending how it was done.

I was interested by the parallels with Katharine Susannah Prichard – beyond their first names being within a letter of each other, they were both born in the 1880s to Australian parents, Mansfield in New Zealand; Prichard in Fiji. Both sought fame and fortune in pre-war London and were there during the war itself. Both wrote across many genres, although Mansfield never finished a novel, KSP’s main genre. They had associates in common; I do not yet know if they ever met. Their writing was very different – Mansfield a modernist aesthete driven by art as an end in itself, and (from the biography) a desire for transgression and attention; KSP both a social realist and a romantic, and driven by her political concerns. It’s ironic that general readers are often confusing the two.

Tomalin writes in the foreword that she began researching the book in the mid-1970s, laying it aside partially because two other biographies of Mansfield appeared soon after this. Yet she decided her take on Mansfield was different to both of these and worth adding; the biography finally appeared in 1987. The extra sources she has to draw on are the recently published (as of 1987) letters of Mansfield and also of D.H. Lawrence, to whom Tomalin shows Mansfield had a more significant relationship than is usually credited. It surprised me to see many chapters with quotes only from published sources like this, rather than archival materials; perhaps there were access restrictions, or just nothing to be found in the archives. The original sources Tomalin uses are largely interviews conducted by her or on her behalf with people who knew Mansfield as a child. It’s amazing so many of them were alive, even in the 1970s; longevity seems to have been on the biographer’s side, with one woman who knew her intensely as a young woman living on to over one hundred. Why, though, weren’t there more comparable interviews with people who knew her in her twenties and thirties? One reason may simply be that most of them are dead, but I feel sure there could have been some more material gathered here.

Unlike many biographies, this one is a pleasure to read, written with a keen sense of both narrative structure and detail, putting us into the company of an interesting and difficult woman.

KSP’s autobiography, Child of the Hurricane: a polite rebel in dinner party mode

27 Sunday Apr 2014

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Katharine Susannah Prichard takes the name of her autobiography from the circumstances of her birth, born in the fury of a hurricane in Fiji in 1883. The epithet echoes through this account of her early life to a moderate extent, as an image of her rejection of the ‘normal’ way to live, disavowing religion at a young age, marrying late, and finally embracing communism. Yet KSP comes across in this book not as a furious rebel, but an intelligent, singular woman, determined to rather politely live life her own way. It was published in 1964, but only traces her life until 1932.

Her childhood took her from Fiji to Tasmania to Melbourne, following the unstable fortunes of her father, Thomas Henry Prichard, a journalist. She becomes a journalist herself, determined to be married to her career, and sets off for London in 1907 and then again during the war. Along the way, her political and artistic development is lightly suggested.

The book offers moments of insight into her life, but she shows us what she wants us to know and no more.  It is not confessional nor particularly emotional. Instead, chapters are commonly structured around an encounter with a particular interesting person. Even in this period of her life, she is acquainted with many people of note, including Aleister Crowley, Alfred Deakin, and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Sometimes it reads a little too much like a structured sequence of dinner party anecdotes, but anecdotes from the most interesting of dinner party guests.

For me, one of the most interesting sections of the book is the description of a family reunion in 1902 of many of the eighty-five descendants of Grandfather and Grandmother Prichard on the fiftieth anniversary of their landing in Australia. All the original Prichard brothers and sisters were still alive at this point. It is an elegaic picture of what is already a distant memory for her, describing it in the 1960s.  She reflects that it’s now hundred years after their landing, and the descendants are too numerous to count. She writes:

I seem to be the only rebel among them. What would he say to me, I wonder, that grandfather whose name will live on the books I have written, and who made his bold venture into the unknown? Would he understand that  I am seeking to find as he did, a new and good life, though not only for the members of my own family, but for the families of mankind?

Curiously, Child of the Hurricane gives little insight into Katharine’s writing. She doesn’t write much about her motivations for writing, nor the process. She does describe, briefly, locking herself in her room for months to write her first novel, The Pioneers, and later gives some detail of a research trip for her novel Black Opal. (This research trip is given the quality of anecdote by its structure – she reports how the dray driver wouldn’t talk to her as he drove her out to the remote town; it’s only at the end of the story that she discovers he assumed she was a ‘city who’er’ and was trying to retain his respectability.) I wonder whether my expectations of her writing about writing reflect more recent expectations of writers’ autobiographies; perhaps we are more curious about the occupation of writing these days.

She writes briefly but compellingly of her great attraction for ‘Jim’, the war hero Hugo Throssell who was to become her husband. Yet their marriage and the whole years of her life 1918 to 1932 are given just one short chapter of eight pages, and much of this is taken up with stories about the horses they owned. We know from her son’s biography how hard it was to even write that Jim took his own life, and no doubt she could not bear to reveal any more than she did.  The book’s real focus is her early life, from 1883 to 1918 with the chapter on her marriage more a postscript.

Suicide haunted Katharine’s life; she herself seems a resilient and mentally healthy person, but even in the course of the book, she must narrate the suicide of her father and her husband. There are also deaths by suicide of two of her acquaintances. She admired Rachel, Countess of Dudley greatly, interviewing her as a young journalist; perhaps she knows more than the standard accounts of Rachel’s accidental death by drowning, because she wonders what ‘crisis in her own life caused her to walk out into the lake’ (137). Katharine also writes approvingly of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s decision to end her life when faced with incurable cancer (191); a case of euthanasia.

I’m grateful that we have this account of her life from Katharine. It doesn’t live up to her own literary potential, but it is an important record of her fascinating life and times, albeit a partial one.