Category Archives: Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

[Thursday 3pm #16] Film reviews : W and Last Ride

16 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in film review, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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W. – Oliver Stone’s latest film has just come out on DVD. It’s a biopic of George W. Bush, focusing on the family dynamics that – in this story at least – pushed him into wanting to be president and into invading Iraq. Stone’s take is that Bush was haunted by his early mess-ups, his drunkenness and occupational failures, and wanted to prove himself to his disproving father, who always preferred older brother Jeb. I found it interesting for its attempt to dramatise such recent history and the uncanny moments of resemblance to their real life counterparts in the different actors’ performances. But it lacks bite; it never touches the profound and never seems to resolve just what tone it is capturing or what it is trying to say. A good, watchable film, when I half expected something brilliant. 3/5

Last Ride – an Australian film currently showing in arthouse cinemas, it tells the story of a man on the run with his son somewhere between Port Augusta and Adelaide. The narrative tension is strong even as things move slowly, as pieces of their past are unfurled and the police close in. It is a visually interesting – at times beautiful – film with a good script and great performances. But it made me think that I like best films with articulate heroes and transcendence, not the inarticulate hero and bleak, full sun realism. 3.5/5

[Thursday 3pm #15] J.S. Battye : state librarian for life

09 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in history, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009), Western Australia

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JSBattyeI’m researching James Sykes Battye (1871-1954) for my novel. He was the first state librarian in Western Australia, establishing what was then called the Victoria Public Libary, now the State Library of Western Australia.

He was only 23 when he was appointed state librarian in 1894, and incredibly he was appointed for life. He stayed on in this role – also in control of the museum and art gallery – for more than half a century, dying on the job in 1954 at age 82.

At the time of his death, the state cabinet was trying to negotiate his retirement; he apparently wanted to stay on. In her thesis on him, Celia Chesney mentions intriguingly that the cabinet was prepared to let him live on in the house attached to the library after his retirement. I am fascinated by this image of an octogenarian librarian clinging to his position, living in the library itself, having ruled the library and the cultural life of the state for the first half of the century, through two world wars and a depression.

Born into a working class Victorian family, he worked his way up the ladder of society. He was heavily involved in the freemasons, an intriguing and disturbing – though commonplace – link for men in high places in Australian society in the early twentieth century. He is best remembered today because the collection of Westraliana in the state library is named after him and because of the cyclopedia of Western Australia he compiled. (I am fascinated by the polymathic nature of prominent people in the early twentieth century; this man having his finger in so many pies is something that’s going to inform one of my characters.)

The picture I’ve got of him from my reading is an ambitious man who started the library well, building an impressive collection and engaging the interest of the public. But a long decay set in as funding dropped during the Depression and the library atrophied. He came to obstinately cling to his position, unable to relinquish the role, unable to admit to himself that his time had passed.

There are two significant sources of information on him. Firstly, the entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, written by historian Fred Alexander. Alexander and Battye were not, apparently, always on good terms and one can see evidence of conflict in Alexander’s assessment of Battye’s contribution to UWA:

he rarely revealed constructive imagination and, despite a certain skill and finesse in negotiation, was no match for the subtler academic minds. Partly because of his relatively low public service standing, his achievements as ambassador for the university were limited.

Secondly, an unpublished thesis of 15000 words written for a diploma of history at UWA by Celia Chesney. Called “A man of progress : Dr James Sykes Battye”, it includes a helpful annotated bibliography and is available, of course, in the Battye Library.

[Thursday 3pm #14] The Christian novel : a brief history of falling short

02 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in lists, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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This is an extract from a paper I gave this week; you can find the whole paper on my other blog.

It might be much more appropriate to go off and write a novel (and not a ‘Christian’ novel where half the characters are Christians and all the other half become Christians on the last page) but a novel which grips people with the structure of Christian thought, and with Christian motivation set deep into the heart and structure of the narrative, so that people would read that and resonate with it and realize that that story can be my story.
– N.T. Wright, “How can the Bible be authoritative?”

The kingdom novel is an elusive, mythical creature. We’re not even sure if we have any living specimens. We do have some prescriptions for what it should look like, and numerous rumours of sightings.

One of the problems is that most evangelicals who write novels write inferior popular fiction, romance, science fiction or thriller, usually promulgating popular piety. It’s rare to find any fiction on the shelves of Koorong with profound spirituality or reflecting a thoughtful theology. I’m not a fan of secular popular fiction; evangelical fiction is much the same only with even worse writing and bad theology.

Some theologians have used the novel form to get their message across, and we do at least get better theology from them. Brian McLaren wrote A New Kind of Christian and its two sequels; the theology is good, or at least I generally like it, but as a novel it’s appalling. It is dominated by slabs of dialogue which put ideas in characters’ mouths; the descriptive interruptions feel like filler. The plot, characterisation and prose are all uncompelling. It seems to work for a lot of people, at least for getting across some ideas in an accessible way, but it’s not the novel Wright is describing. Paul Wallis, who lives in Canberra, has done a better job in his recent publication, The New Monastic, which I’m reading at the moment.

There are some good literary novelists who have Christian faith, but they are usually much better writers than Christians. We might think of Graham Greene (1904-1991), whose work often reflected Christian concerns, but who struggled to even believe in God’s existence. He wrote what I regard as one of the great Christian novels, The Power and the Glory, following the fugitive whisky priest travelling illegally around a South American republic, administering the sacraments and comforting the people while trying to escape the police and struggling with his own sins. But Greene’s religious concerns faded from prominence the further he went into his career. A polemical biography (Michael Shelden’s The Man Within) I read paints his faith as a cynical veneer. Adultery seems to have been one of his lifelong hobbies and it’s also a preoccupation of his writing.

Adultery was also a preoccupation of the other great 20th century Christian novelist, John Updike (1932-2009). He wrote beautifully and his short story “The Christian Room-mates” is one of the best pieces of Christian literature I’ve read. He might best be described as a liberal Episcopalian who acknowledged the limits of theological liberalism and admired Barth and Kierkegaard. But his Christian themes, whether liberal or not, feel, in the end feel like the subset of a warm humanism. He is one of the greatest postwar American novelists, but he never wrote the sort of novel Wright was imagining.

Closer to home, we have Tim Winton (1960-), one of Australia’s most important novelists. He was brought up a fundamentalist in the Church of Christ, but as a teenager read John Yoder and Jim Wallis, who influenced him to a social justice faith. On the face of it, this is extremely promising. But if Yoder has shaped Winton’s writing, I struggle to find it in anything he’s published since 1992 when Cloudstreet came out. (I haven’t read his early work yet, which might be where I’m more likely to find it.)

Instead, faith in Winton’s writing is more of a subterranean mood. His writings are often described as ‘spiritual’ – the transformative experience of the boys surfing in Breath or the significance of the Swan River to the characters in Cloudstreet. In the Winter issue of Zadok Papers, Lisa Jacobson writes:

Winton’s writing is infused with his Christian faith, although he is not so much a Christian writer, as a Christian who writes. Dirt Music nevertheless reflects his spiritual worldview, and the novel is imbued with biblical language.

This ‘infusion’ is at the level of spirituality and symbolism, the suggestion of spiritual experience and perhaps even divine encounter in the consciousness of the individual. Jacobson goes on to say:

Winton’s work is steadfastly concerned with a faith swept clean of iconic paraphernalia. This aligns him closely with what Bonhoeffer has called a ‘religious imaginative life’ instead of any clear devotional theme. Rather it displays, as Vincent Buckley says of what constitutes religious writing, a ‘tremor undertow of feeling, indicating one pole toward which the temperament is driven by the facts of living.’

Perhaps in reaction to evangelical fiction, Jacobson and others seem glad that the Christianity in Winton’s fiction remains implicit and mystical. Winton’s achievements are significant, and we should be grateful that one of Australia’s greatest novelists writes out of a Christian orientation. Yet his writing only goes a little of the way toward what Wright is hoping for. What his work doesn’t have – or Updike’s or Greene’s – is a Christian community. I think the best kind of kingdom novel would depict a Christian community.

Appendix: Wright’s Great Christian novel: the best attempts I’ve read

1. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)
In 1954, told he is not long for this world, 74 year old Congregationalist pastor John Ames sets out to write a testament of his life for his seven year old son. Robinson’s prose is careful, precise, close to perfect even as she writes in the cadence and idiom of an old man fifty years ago. It is wise and grace-filled. It is Christian in many senses, but perhaps most importantly because its heart is grace: grace is embedded in the narrator and the novel. (I don’t think Christianity is or should be simply grace at its heart, but I think the novel and the novelist might contend so.) A novel Barrack Obama lists as one of his favourites.

2. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940); also The Heart of the Matter (1948)

3. Victor Hugo Les Miserables (1862)
No novel is quoted more often in sermons and with good reason; it’s one of the most beautiful stories of redemption written.

4. John Updike, “The Christian Room-mates” [short story] (1964)
The cultural Protestantism and mild faith of a college student is unsettled by the impassioned Christian pacifist he is forced to share a room with.

5. Tim Winton, Cloudstreet (1991)

6. Fydor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
The novel most quoted by theologians, at least its famous ‘Grand Inquisitor’ parable.

7. C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (1949-1954) and The Cosmic Trilogy (1938-1945)

8. Mike Riddell, The Insatiable Moon (1997)
The author is a New Zealand Baptist turned Catholic and his novel features a man who may be Jesus returned or may be crazy. Watch out for the new feature film based on it.

9. Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

10. Morris West, The Last Confession

Books I haven’t read but should have

1. Madelaine L’Engle A Wrinkle In Time

2. The works of Charles Williams – A theologian and novelist much admired by C.S. Lewis; I have tried unsuccessfully to read several of his works.

3. The works of Rudy Wiebe – the most famous Mennonite novelist; I haven’t been able to get into his rather dense prose.

4. The works of Annie Dillard

[Thursday 3pm #12] Art that never dies?

18 Thursday Jun 2009

Posted by in death, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009), writing

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I picture a different audience for this, my literary blog, than my theology blog. (Theology students, at least the ones at the library I work at, don’t read novels, except maybe Tolkien, to their great loss.) You, my imagined reader, are probably not a christian. In fact, you probably have a distaste for evangelicalism and for anyone who talks about the bible too much. There are good reasons for this. I am in sympathy with you. I have these two sides of me, that aren’t separate in my mind or soul, but are often separate socially – the literary world and the christian world.

But the two have to come together at the moment, because I’m writing a paper for the Newbigin Group (a theological discussion group) called ‘Beautiful Stories : writing novels for the kingdom’. In this paper, I have to use the framework for building for the kingdom laid out by Tom Wright in Surprised By Hope to talk about how my particular activity – writing – might be thought of as building for the kingdom.

Here’s a blurb on Wright’s book from the publisher:

Wright convincingly argues that what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death. For if God intends to renew the whole creation—and if this has already begun in Jesus’s resurrection—the church cannot stop at “saving souls” but must anticipate the eventual renewal by working for God’s kingdom in the wider world, bringing healing and hope in the present life.

While you, my intelligent reader, might be most suspicious of Christians who believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus, Wright uses the resurrection as the basis of Christian hope and action for justice, beauty and evangelism in the world. (You probably like the first two and not the third.) For Wright (and for me) God’s action in the world is not confined to the saving of some individual souls, whisked off to ‘heaven’ after death. Instead, God is at work redeeming, renewing the whole creation, which one day will culminate in an intervention when everything is finally set right.

You might remember weeks ago me quoting Julian Barnes piece on the fate of all writers:

For writers, the process of being forgotten isn’t clear-cut. ‘Is it better for a writer to die before he is forgotten, or to be forgotten before he dies?’ But ‘forgotten’ here is only a comparative term, meaning: fall out of fashion, be used up, seen through, superseded, judged too superficial – or, for that matter, too ponderous, too serious – for a later age. But truly forgotten, now that’s much more interesting. First, you fall out of print, consigned to the recesses of the secondhand bookshop and dealer’s website. Then a brief revival, if you’re lucky, with a title or two reprinted; then another fall, and a period when a few graduate students, pushed for a thesis topic, will wearily turn your pages and wonder why you wrote so much. Eventually, the publishing houses forget, academic interest recedes, society changes, and humanity evolves a little further, as evolution carries out its purposeless purpose of rendering us all the equivalent of bacteria and amoebae. This is inevitable. And at some point – it must logically happen – a writer will have a last reader. I am not asking for sympathy; this aspect of a writer’s living and dying is a given. At some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet, every writer will have his or her last reader. (Nothing to be frightened of : 225)

Yet the incredible claim that Wright makes is that not all art will pass away. For him, God has given us tasks to do here and now that are part of his/her ultimate plans. Part of the task artists have is to depict the beauty of creation – while taking seriously its woundedness and looking forward to its redemption. The picture he offers is of Christ’s resurrected body, still with the nail wounds in his hands – and not as something incidental to Christ, but as the means by which he is identified.

Wright doesn’t know how God will use art (or anything else) in his/her renewed heavens and earth. We have to do our bit, without yet seeing the masterplan. When the time comes, it will fit into place somehow.

A wonderful, comforting idea. But I can’t help thinking of the practicalities. It’s okay for me, writing literary fiction with claims to seriousness and meaningfulness. What about the genre writer writing another crime novel? Does their novel get forgotten or remembered?

Are novels transformed and redeemed themselves? Do they become what they should have been? Does God take their potential and fulfill it? (What would a novel look like edited by God? If the Bible is the book we have from him/her, God seems less interested in perfection and tidiness than we might expect.)

And who reads them? What form do they take? I hope it’s not anything like Borges’ Library of Babel, where very possible book, every combination of letters has been written; that is a kind of hell.

If you want to hear my paper, you’re welcome to come listen at Vose Seminary, 20 Hayman Rd Bentley on Monday 29 June at 7:30pm. Alternatively, stick around and I will be posting it here and on An Anabaptist in Perth.

[Thursday 3pm #11] My thunder stolen : a sequel to the Catcher in the Rye

11 Thursday Jun 2009

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Having turned 90 in January, J.D. Salinger is in the news, suing an author who calls himself J.D. California to prevent him publishing a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye called ’60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye’.

The novel already appears for pre-sale on Amazon. The publisher is of dubious reputation, and the buzz around the book itself is not positive. If anyone was going to try to pull this off, it would have to be brilliant. As the title suggests, this sequel starts with Holden at 76, apparently losing his marbles and revisiting New York City.

In 2004 on my old blog (which was lost forever when the modblog servers went down permanently back in 2006) I wrote a creative post about a sequel to the The Catcher in the Rye called Holden Rides Again. In my post, I had obtained the manuscript from a girl who was romantically linked with J.D. Salinger’s son, Matty (star of an infamously bad telemovie version of Captain America – I’m not joking, this much is true). I gave a plot outline for the manuscript and was pleased when one person left a comment saying they couldn’t wait for it to be published for real.

J.D. Salinger has said that Holden exists only in the covers of the book; that there’s no more to tell. But for so many fans, myself included, that’s not true. I would love for him to have come alive for longer, to have read more of his adventures, to have found out how such a distraught youth might live the rest of his life.

In The Library of Babel, my new novel, the new draft actually starts with Tom finding a manuscript copy of J.D. Salinger’s sequel to Catcher in the Rye in the rare book room of the library. It’s a move that I’m in two minds about; I don’t want to dwell forever in the shadow of Catcher (characters reference it in my first novel; and originally in my second, one of the characters was named after Jane Gallagher, but this is gone now). But the point was something else – the sequel is about what happens when the angsty sixteen year old has to grow up. What comes next? What comes after deciding everyone’s a phony?

I wanted to situate my novel as an exploration of these themes. I have consciously left behind themes of adolescence and want to write about the mid to late twenties, and the challenges of living at peace with the world, while still trying to be authentic.

I may have to rethink using the sequel to Catcher in the Rye at all. In case it gets edited out, and in light of J.D. California’s hype, here’s my sequel to Catcher in the Rye, in the form of chapter four of the Library of Babel:

Holden rides again

Have a read and then vote in the poll, just like reality TV:

[Thursday 3pm #10] Amateur writers

04 Thursday Jun 2009

Posted by in Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009), writing

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I have this feeling that writing is one of the most difficult things for amateurs. The problem is this: few amateur writers are interesting to read. Despite years of writing, most amateur writers remain boring, cliched, inept. (If you are an amateur writer, I’m not talking about you.) Yet you take music, painting or even more obviously pottery, crafts, woodwork, and an amateur can usually produce things that others can enjoy. (Or if I knew anything about music would the jam sessions of amateurs be horrid to my ears? Possibly.)

One of the problems might be the type of people who are attracted to writing. Is there a disproportionate number of amateur writers who are self centred and have emotional problems? (I’m possibly guilty on two counts.) Not that emotional problems necessarily make for bad writing, but I think good writing nearly always comes out of strong empathy. And self-centred wallowing – which makes up too much amateur writing – is boring.

At the university level, I think the output of undergraduate creative writing classes would tend to be abysmal if it could be compared to that of fine art and music undergraduate classes. My friend commented that this is because you need to audition for fine art and music whereas the university can make a lot of money out of the slackers or talentless who want to take creative writing.

It comes down to the sad thought that whereas someone who devotes themselves to learning the piano can probably entertain family and friends as well as enjoy the act of playing, someone who devotes themselves to writing will probably not entertain many people at all with the story they print out and hand around. Especially if it’s the start of another fantasy saga.

*

I was in a writing workshop recently and I noticed something concerning. If you’ve ever been in a writing workshop, you’ll notice such restrained politeness in discussing other people’s work. The knives are rarely out; there is rarely too much honesty. I always thought I wanted people to be more honest, but maybe that’s not too good either. Because in this workshop we were actually critiquing the work of an amateur writer who wasn’t in the room and who no-one knew. And I was shocked at how vicious everyone was with it. I thought it had some good points, but no-one picked up on these at all; perhaps because they knew the co-ordinator had held it up as a piece with problems.

I would hate to think the restrained politeness is a mask for viciousness. I think I prefer generous honesty whether the person’s there or not. It makes me fear that underneath everyone is jealously tearing down each other’s work while being polite about it; I hope that’s not the case. (But then you’ve probably witnessed me rip into a few published works on this blog; should the rules change or am I a hypocrite?)

[Thursday 3pm #9] This week I make the radio ratings

28 Thursday May 2009

Posted by in media, politics and current affairs, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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This week, I am one of the lucky Australians to be surveyed for official radio ratings. I have to place a cross in every fifteen minute slot I listen to, and then another as to where I am listening. My participation will explain the sudden massive surge in Radio National’s ratings.

I get angry about commercial radio. For this reason, as much as I have been tempted to check what song is playing on one of those dreadful stations during some particularly dull moment of PM, I have avoided it, because I would hate for them to get one extra official listener.

Does commercial radio accurately reflect the tastes and demeanour of the majority of Australians? Do most Australians really want more chances to win every hour? Do they really want to listen to hours of commercials every week, propaganda that incites discontent and more spending?

Well, yes, probably.

I keep seeing a billboard for 94.5 FM with the slogan “Pack more into your morning with Bodega’s Bunch”. And every time I ask, pack more what? Insipid banter? Prizes?

And yet I must confess that I feel addicted to Radio National in a way that isn’t altogether healthy either. I find myself needing to listen to it even when I don’t want to. There’s some need to hear the voices, to learn something more.

I wish I wasn’t driving home so often at the time PM goes to air. I always feel like I need to listen to it, but it’ s never satisfying. Always the new surfaces of current affairs, the latest political developments. All this surface is so draining. I could listen to news and current affairs programs for the next twenty years and get no closer to an understanding of the situations described, the long history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, say.

I think as a society we need less news and more history. That’s why many of the other programs Radio National produces are so invaluable, reaching beyond the surface to history, analysis, ideas. In Perth, you’ll find it at 810AM. (Do not confuse it with 720AM ABC local radio; 720 is like commercial radio without the commercials.)

[Thursday 3pm #8] The Names

21 Thursday May 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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As a child, one of my prized books was a book of baby names and their meanings. Not because I was planning names for my own children, but because I found it fascinating to discover what people’s names ‘really meant’. I thought it gave me insight into their true character. It also gave me a certain type of power, coming to school and announcing to other children what their names meant.

My name is of Hebrew origin and means ‘Gift of God’; I tried to read as much as I could into that. I told James at school he had a very bad name, as his name means ‘Deceiver’. I wondered how anyone could call their child James, knowing this.

And then there was Matthew C., whose name was Greek for ‘Gift of God’. I always wanted to be his best friend, and I thought this linked us in some special way. I told him this theory, but he was not entirely convinced. When he moved to Iceland, he didn’t reply to the letter I sent him.

Perhaps I have disabused myself of some of the primitive notions I had about names as a child, but not entirely. Instinctually, I still feel that other ‘Nathans’ should (a) be friendly to me and (b) have some trait of Nathanness to them. Time has proven neither of these things to be true.

Just as important as the ‘meaning’ of names has been the antecedents for names. I have always loved the tension present in my given names – Nathan David – from the Old Testament figures with those names. Nathan is the brave prophet who rebuked the poet king for adultery and murder. David is my father’s name; that irony interests me too.

‘Nathan’ used to be a fairly rare given name, of which I was very proud. ‘Hobby’ is uncommon too, and it was strange when another family of Hobbys moved to our country town when I was eleven. We didn’t think they were related; years later we discovered they were second cousins, separated from our awareness by family secrets.

One of these Hobbys was called Joshua, and was about the same age as my brother Joshua. I didn’t know what to make of this idea – would it be like having a twin brother to have someone with the same name? Or did it make a person un-unique, did it compromise their specialness, their distinctiveness in the world? I leaned toward the latter interpretation, and thought it a terrible cruelty to be a Smith, or even worse a John Smith.

In the year below me at high school, there were two Laura Smiths. Different years were never known beyond vague rumours, and it took me a long time to work out they were talking about two different Laura Smiths. One of them I knew by sight; the other I didn’t. A year after I graduated, one of them died in a car accident. I wondered if it was the one I knew by sight, or the one I didn’t, and tried not to think of it as sadder if it was the one I knew by sight. I wondered what the surviving Laura felt, if it seemed a close call.

And then, finally, last year I met, in a manner of speaking, the only other Nathan Hobby I know of in the world. I found him on facebook. He’s younger than me and into football, from what I can gather about him. I thought there would have to be something essentially similar about us. But of course, there didn’t have to be. I still get a shock on my facebook feed when I read statements like ‘Nathan Hobby is no longer in a relationship’.

But then perhaps the more remarkable twin, an almost Borgesian one, is my literary twin, Nathaniel Hobbie. When I was working in a public library in 2004, his book arrived about the same time as my book came out. It was called ‘Priscilla and the Pink Planet’ and it’s about a little girl obsessed with pink. His career has been more successful than mine so far; he’s followed up with four other books about Priscilla.

It sounds like a Vonnegutian alter ego for me; I even started a novel called Lazarus the Pacifist Superhero with Nathaniel Hobbie as the main character. It makes it seem there must be some power to names and that out in the world are variations on each person.

Do you have a twin out there in the world?

[Thursday 3pm #7] Youth and age : a review of Tolstoy’s War and Peace

14 Thursday May 2009

Posted by in book review, history, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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War and Peace / Leo Tolstoy (1865-8; translated by Rosemary Edmonds 1958)

It’s common to hear that War and Peace contains all of life, depicting the full range of human experiences. As a reader, it also evoked the full range of reading experiences for me, from the exhiliration of acute insight that resonated with my experience of life, to boring pages I wanted to flick over; from thrilling narrative drive to moments of narrative listlessness.

I have spent so long reading it – five weeks – that I have begun to feel that I was never going to read another novel, that this was the novel which would last me the rest of my life.

My dad asked me to sum up the plot. I couldn’t do that. How about this: it’s about three Russian families in the time of the wars against Napoleon’s army between 1804 and 1812, with an epilogue set several years later?

Percy Lubbock thinks ‘War and Peace’ is a bad title and I agree. (Even though it captures the epic nature of the work and has become a cliche in itself.) Or it’s not a bad title, but it focuses attention on one half of the novel, and the less interesting part to my mind – war and peace are the backdrop for an exploration of ‘Youth and Age’. Has a ring to it, I think. Better than its insights into war are the insights into the impetuousness of youth, the mad zeal which would drive young men to throw their lives away for the sake of glory; or the dive into marriages ranging at first from the unsatisfying to the miserable; and the insights into the quiet wisdom of age, or the fastidious fussiness of it; or just the depiction of characters – particularly Pierre and Natasha – moving from youth and into age.

In the first half, as possible ideas for this review ran through my head, I was going to write how remarkable it is that Tolstoy avoids the intrusiveness of so much nineteenth century writing; he doesn’t intervene with pages of boring exposition about history or culture but lets the story tell itself. And yet in the second half, Tolstoy becomes very interventionist, hammering home several key points that are worthy in themselves but are belaboured and out of place.

A lot of the problem seems to come about because Tolstoy spends so much time debating the historians of his age. He wants to rehibiliate the reputation of the commander of the Russian army, Kutuzov, who Tolstoy saw as a hero and not a fool for abandoning Moscow and refusing to directly engage the retreating French army.

He wants to prove that Napoleon was no genius.

He wants to elucidate his own theory of history and of war, that it is not made by Great Men but by inscrutable forces, the sum of millions of individual decisions which no one person can particularly influence one way or the other. A theory that sits well with contemporary views of history, but that he shows so well in his novel he doesn’t even need to explain.

In short, Tolstoy addresses the concerns of his day, the debates around the Napoleonic Wars that were going on fifty years after the event but which matter very little to most readers of War and Peace today. If only he knew that he would one day be as famous as Napolean and that readers would be more interested in the brilliance of his psychological depictions of his characters than in his contribution to historical debates.

My favourite character is Pierre. He has an ineffectual idealism; he stumbles into life. The illegitimate son of a rich prince, he receives a massive inheritance thanks to an older woman’s political acumen. He goes from being treated as a shabby, uncouth zealot to a desirable bachelor. He marries the wrong woman because she charms him; he lets himself be robbed and mistreated over and over. Stuck in a carriage with a freemason, he joins that movement with high ideals, only to find that the other members don’t share them, that the movement can’t live up to its own claims.

Perhaps the most fascinating, almost Dostoeveskian passage, involves him staying behind in Moscow as the French army invades and getting in his head the idea that he is the chosen one destined to assasinate Napoleon. Being Pierre, it doesn’t turn out right and he is captured as a prisoner of war while rescuing a baby from a fire. Perhaps I should have known that there had to be a happy ending for him; after being set free, he finally marries the woman who was meant for him all along.

Tolstoy finishes with two epilogues; the second is regrettable, a long meditation on war and history not at home in a novel at all. But the first is fascinating, a glimpse into the lives of the characters years later, as the surviving ones come together, now with children, another generation arising, and yet so many of the old quirks and problems remaining. It gives the novel an even bigger sense of expanse, a glimpse that this could keep on going on forever if only Tolstoy had more pages.

[Thursday 3pm #6] All the houses you ever lived in

07 Thursday May 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 6 Comments

After attending a party, we found ourselves near the house we lived in when we were first married. Both being so sentimental, we drove past it.

‘Wouldn’t you love,’ she said, ‘to buy all the houses you ever lived in? So you could have them forever.’

And I felt excited she said this, because it was one of those times when someone articulates something in my head that I thought unarticulatable or simply too unformed or silly to say.

Sometimes it’s an unbearable thought, all the houses I ever lived in still existing in their own ways, inhabited by someone else who now has more claim on them than me. But it’s less unbearable than the thought of the houses no longer existing, of their being chewed up by bulldozers and a different buildilng existing in the same space. On a long enough timescale, I suppose this is the fate of all the houses I ever lived in. If I could imagine a future for them or for the Earth one million, one billion years hence. But in human timescale, at least one of them will, in all likelihood, outlast me.

The two families that merged to form me – the Winnings and the Hobbys – are wanderers. My parents each lived in maybe ten houses over their childhood. Perhaps this made them want stability when they had their own children; and thus I lived at Lot 105 Railway Parade in Allanson for thirteen years.

In my dreams, this house is always home. I haven’t lived in it since 1996, but I keep returning to it. It sits at the top of a hill on three acres with a gravel driveway which seemed so very long as a child. The brown donkey shed, the rainwater tank, the trees which I knew so well. But usually it’s the inside of it I dream about. I wonder how I know that it’s this house when I wake up? Perhaps I see the orange kitchen. (A childhood friend, reading my novel The Fur remarked that she noticed the kitchen she remembered so well too.) But it’s more than colours or a physical geography, it’s a spiritual knowledge that it’s the same house.

I once started a writing project where I intended to decribe, exhaustively, each room of that house and the memories associated with them. I started with the laundry, of all places, and its first aid cabinet full of icecream containers of aging treatments, expired ointments.

Since that house, I have lived in fourteen houses, returning to the wandering roots of my family tree. Now I’m exiled from each one; I can only hope to drive past and see what it has become from the outside. And being so pathologically fearful of what people might think, hating to think of them saying, ‘What’s that car doing out there,’ I’m scared to stop.

My wife’s family is good at staying put; I visited the house her mum grew up in a few years ago, still in the family. I could feel all the memories and family history in that house, it was the pantina of so many decades.

I felt sad hearing this year that, just weeks after its sale, the new owners demolished it. Such disregard for the beauty of a house, the years of life poured into each one.

What about you? Do you long to own all the houses you ever lived in? Do you drive past when you find yourself in the area?