22 Wednesday Apr 2015
Posted in book review
I no longer call Ian McEwan my second favourite novelist as I did from about 2006 to 2009, not after Solar, not after falling out of love with Saturday. But even if On Chesil Beach is his last masterpiece, I will probably keep reading every novel he publishes. Continue reading
16 Thursday Apr 2015
Posted in biographical method, book review
Claire Tomalin is a master literary biographer who makes the genre more compelling and interesting than any other writer I know. I’m two-thirds through her 2002 book on the 17th century diarist and naval administrator, Samuel Pepys. I offer some notes on her biographical method. Continue reading
24 Tuesday Mar 2015
It’s with some sadness I’ve finished reading Katharine Susannah Prichard’s final novel, Subtle Flame (1967). I still have to go back and read two earlier, obscure novels (Windlestraws and The Moon of Desire) in the rare book room of the library, but, chronologically, I’ve come to the end of the line in my long running reading project. Continue reading
16 Monday Mar 2015
Posted in book review, creative nonfiction
John Sutherland, Jumbo: The Unauthorised Biography of a Victorian Sensation (Aurum Press, 2014)
Such was my ignorance I didn’t even realise Jumbo was a particular late-nineteenth century elephant, the world’s most famous elephant. The story of the life and death of Jumbo as he is captured in Africa and exhibited – and mistreated – in Paris, London, and the USA is a fascinating one. It offers a cross-section of the era in the most incredible way – colonialism, emerging technology, sexual mores, exhibits. This was an elephant with links to both Queen Victoria and P. T. Barnum, the great American showman. Continue reading
28 Saturday Feb 2015
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It pained me to think of all those years when I simply devoured whatever fell into my hands, whatever struck my fancy at the local library or on my parents’ bookshelf: best sellers from the 1930s and 1940s, the names on the spines long forgotten; the comedic writers beloved by my father; and all those Agatha Christie and Stephen King novels, all that pulp. There had been good stuff, too, much of it by accident rather than design: Flannery O’Connor, Shakespeare, whose collected works I’d read in both Lamb précis and true form, the Brontës, Chekhov, and contemporary writers pulled from the “New Releases” shelf at the library, purely because I liked the titles or the covers. But when I thought about all the hours I’d spent lying on my bed or my parents’ couch or our lawn or in the backs of cars on family vacations, all those hours that could have allowed me the collected works of Dickens, into which I’d barely delved, or Trollope, or Dostoyevsky. Or Proust. The list went on and on, all that I hadn’t read, all that I didn’t know.
– Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year, p. 112.
This passage resonated with me, because I sometimes feel exactly the same, particularly when I’m confronted with all the great writers I haven’t read. Continue reading
27 Friday Feb 2015
Adam Cullen (1965-2012) was a controversial Australian artist who destroyed himself with alcohol and drugs. Six years ago, Cullen asked nineteen year-old journalist Erik Jensen to live with him for a year to write his biography. Last year, the book appeared – Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen, a story in which life and death do seem to have equal weight. Continue reading
23 Monday Feb 2015
Posted in book review, memoirs
On Saturday, I heard Joanna Rakoff talking on a panel at the Perth Writers’ Festival called “No Limits” with Hannie Rayson and Ros Thomas. Ostensibly, they were discussing the question “when it comes to writing about yourself, are some things off limits?”. Yet the compere declared at the beginning he wouldn’t ask the authors what they had left out of their books, as obviously they wouldn’t want to tell us. Continue reading
13 Tuesday Jan 2015
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Spoiler Alert
The third novel in Katharine Susannah Prichard’s goldfields trilogy, Winged Seeds (1950) sees her writing about a war which was only just over. It begins brightly in 1936, with vivacious twins turning up on the doorstep of the trilogy’s hero, the aging Sally Gough. Pat and Pam are twenty years old and the stepdaughters of Sally’s arch-enemy, Sir Paddy Cavan. Their visit gives Prichard an opportunity to show us the state of the goldfields at the time. Their flirtatious ways set tongues wagging in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, and a barometer of the sexual mores of the time. Yet the twins are not as easy as they seem; Pam is faithful to her fiancee fighting in the Spanish Civil War and Pat is in love with Sally’s grandson, Bill. They are fiercely anti-fascist, but cannot reveal their true sympathies until they turn twenty-one and inherit their father’s fortune, currently held by their wicked stepfather. Bill is the communist hero of this installment, taking on the mantle from his uncle, Tom, who dies early in the novel, his lungs destroyed by the mine. Bill is torn between his dedication to the cause and his desire for the “siren” Pat.
With various other subplots, there is already plenty enough to sustain an interesting narrative, but as in several other novels of Prichard’s, she unpicks her own set up. The twins leave suddenly; Bill goes off to fight World War Two. The protagonists of the first half only put in guest appearances for the rest of the novel, as the focus returns to Sally, as she struggles with what to make of World War Two, swayed and confused by debates around it, as well as re-living the grief of the Great War in which she lost one son and a second from its after-effects. Bill returns home from Greece injured, only to recover and be sent to New Guinea, where he goes missing, presumed killed by the Japanese. Pat drifts away from her commitment to progressive politics, marrying an American officer. What was the novel building toward in its first half if not for Bill and the twins to do something extraordinary for the cause of communism? There is poignancy, though, in Sally trying to make sense of Bill’s death, and to find transcendence in the midst of death and disappointment.
The trilogy finishes wearily, with the two survivors, Sally and Dinny, burying Kalgoorla, the Aboriginal woman who they have known from the beginning, and finding hope in the winged seeds blown out from the kalgoorluh plant. Sally’s sons were dead, her grandson Billy was dead, but the ideas they lived for were immortal:
The life force strives towards perfection. What other imperative is there in living? The struggle had gone on through the ages. The vital germ in a seed attained its fine flowering and full fruit. How then could the great ideas and ideals of human progress be denied and annihilated? They could not. That was what Bill had believed , and what he tried to make people understand. (379)
Sandra Burchill comments that “… the optimistic vision for the future is not supported by any event in the novel and exists as a contradiction of what the trilogy has defined as a worsening situation both locally and internationally…” (364) The Cold War was a difficult period for Prichard to be writing in. She was a survivor like Sally, and had lived long enough to see more deaths and disappointments than most could bear.
At times the novel shimmers with the intensity and beauty of Prichard at her best. The scene in which Sally confronts her cheating lover, Frisco Jo, is particularly vivid. However, these passages are surrounded by long sections of “reportage”, the broader picture of the conditions of the goldfields conveyed through a session of “yarning” in which characters become mouthpieces for the information (Burchill, 313-314). It is a bold attempt to achieve a bigger canvas, but it is a significant reason why the trilogy was not as well regarded as Prichard hoped.
It is in print with Allen and Unwin, including in digital form; you can also pick up a secondhand first edition for not much more.
Work Cited
31 Wednesday Dec 2014
Some book bloggers complain how they only managed to read seventy books this year, rather than their usual one hundred. I read thirty-nine, which is still more than I have managed the last few years. I’m the tortoise of book bloggers.
Most of my reading has been related to biography and/or Katharine Susannah Prichard (the subject of my PhD), and it’s harder to judge these books which I have to read in a somewhat task-orientated way. But I had such a delightful year of books. It brings me pleasure remembering the highlights.
Honourable mentions: A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists / Jane Briony Rawson (my review); Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life / Brenda Walker; Secret River / Kate Grenville.
23 Tuesday Dec 2014
Posted in book review, fiction
It turns out my favourite novel of the year is the last one I will read in 2014, Christopher R. Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder? (2012). (Imagine if your entire life worked out like that, and your greatest reading experience was on your deathbed? You would give new meaning to that cliche of not wanting to finish it, because once it was finished, you would be finished.)
It is the story of a talented writer in her twenties, Sophie Wilder, told by her lover, Charlie Blakeman. It creates a curious and often beautiful effect when a novel is narrated by the secondary character – think of Ford’s The Good Soldier – and this novel does it so well in trying to answer the question posed by the title. Sophie is a tragic character to break a reader’s heart – and Charlie’s; she is a mystery to everyone, and untameable. She lives by her own code of authenticity, a dedicated and brilliant writer through her college years, only to make an unexpected conversion to Catholicism which comes to define her life. She comes in and out of Charlie’s life, forming him as a writer in their college years, only to leave him and marry another.
I have been trying to find the right set of comparisons to situate it as a novel. I thought of the elegant tale of a similar milieu in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I thought of Paul Auster’s world of orphans who make similarly mysterious lives for themselves. And finally, after I finished, I realised the most important point of comparison was Graham Greene, particularly The Heart of the Matter. It is a religious novel in the same way Greene wrote religious novels – with tragic religious dilemmas at their heart. This one occurs with Sophie taking on the care of her dying father-in-law. To contrast another religious writer, Marilynne Robinson would have written about this with a sense of grace triumphing even through tragedy. Not Beha; like Greene, the Catholicism of his novel is bleakly beautiful and tastes, ultimately, of death.
(Thank you to Simon Cox for putting me onto this novel, which I probably wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.)
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 