Category Archives: writing

The Cruelty of the Game: David Ireland, ‘The Great Unknown’

11 Wednesday Apr 2012

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Writing is a cruel game. Whatever I can say about the years of unreward, about a promising start terminated, others, more established, have had crueller fates.

In The Weekend Australian Magazine on 7 April 2012 was the story of David Ireland, three-time winner of the Miles Franklin in the 1970s and now ‘The Great Unknown’. I’ve seen him on the list of Miles Franklin winners, tried to read his last published novel, and wondered what became of him. What became of him is that he can’t get published any longer: in the last two decades he has written seven novels that publishers will not publish. He has them in the drawer of his desk.

The article tries to explain his fate. Partly, he is out of fashion, his brutal, strange, working-class novels just not what publishers are looking for. His last published novel, The Chosen, was reviewed badly in 1997. And then there is his shocking unpublished torture-novel, “Desire” that ‘probably ended, or at least stalled, his career as a published author”.

Ireland is quoted as saying ‘I don’t live or die by whether things are published, I live or die by whether I want to keep writing’. He is a true writer, then. I have little motivation to go on writing without being published, without my words having an audience. It is a crippling fear, when one’s confidence is gone, and a voice says that the new project, all the years sunk into it, might also come to nothing.

Barbara Vine’s The Blood Doctor as a Biographer’s Tale and Some Narrative Analysis

17 Thursday Dec 2009

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Barbara Vine, The Blood Doctor (2002)

The Blood Doctor is a biographer’s tale. Martin Nanther is researching the life of his great-great grandfather, Lord Henry Nanther, specialist in haemophilia and personal physician to Queen Victoria.

The story is set in 1999, as Martin sits out the last days of his life as a hereditary peer in the House of Lords. A bill is going through to abolish hereditary peers and he sees the logic of it, as much as he is deeply sad to leave behind a world he has come to love. Vine’s treatment of this aspect of the novel is repetitious at times, although it is an interesting subplot, relating as it does to the peership bestowed upon Henry Nanther.

Toward the end of the novel, Martin is short of money and contemplates taking on a real job while exiled from his former home at the House of Lords. Vine provides a resolution to this by having the government offer him as a position as chief whip; he returns to his beloved House. She makes some effort to foreshadow this by having several characters comment on how well-liked Martin is and how they would like to see him stay on in the house. It still comes as something of a bolt out of the blue, the sort of event quite standard in real life, but not making particular narrative sense.

The other subplot is the fertility problem of Martin and his wife Jude. Martin has a son from his first marriage and doesn’t want another child – except for Jude’s sake; she desperately wants one and at 37, time is running out. She has already miscarried once, and the novel is punctuated by a couple more miscarriages. Again, we have something of a deus ex machina in the form of IVF treatment, giving Jude a healthy baby who won’t spontaneously abort. The resonance with the blood theme is apparent; I’m undecided whether it’s a satisfactory narrative solution.

But the main plotline is Martin’s research into the life of Henry Nanther. Certain problems confront the writer attempting to write the biographer’s tale. Firstly, the problem of two timelines: there is the action in the present day in which the biographer lives and discovers things about the figure of the past. And there is also the timeline of the past in which the subject of the biography lived and died. The problem is that it would seem much too contrived for the discoveries of the biographer in the present day to neatly follow the sequence of events in the life of the subject. Discoveries are going to come from different periods and have to be sorted chronologically by the biographer. This works against creating a coherent narrative.

Vine attempts to solve this problem by giving us an outline of what Martin already knows about Henry’s life early in the novel. This makes sense; the biographer starts out knowing something about the subject, and these facts are revealed over several chapters, some through exposition and some through convenient conversations. The gaps in the biographer’s knowledge are also revealed. In the case of The Blood Doctor, Martin’s ‘gap’ is the revelation that Henry had a mistress in a letter written by Martin’s great-aunt. The second ‘gap’ Vine leaves hidden until it comes up in a dinner party conversation – Henry was engaged to a woman who was thrown from a train and murdered. Soon after, he married the murdered woman’s sister.

Working from Henry’s diary and some other sources, Martin concludes that Henry engineered a meeting with the murdered fiancée by saving her father from an arranged mugging. The central mystery of the whole book hangs on why he was so obsessed with marrying into this unprestigious family. Martin begins to conclude that Henry had his first fiancée murdered. In the end, the murder proves to be a complicating coincidence, a red herring to throw us off Henry’s real crime – a possibly unsatisfying narrative outcome.

The second problem facing the writer of a biographer’s tale is the limits of biography itself. A novel lets us – usually – into the hearts and minds of its characters. A historical biography is a reconstruction, limited by the available evidence, the sources that the biographer finds. In Possession, A.S. Byatt makes this task easier by supplying passionately written letters between the subjects and poetry. But Henry Nanther was no poet and it may have been out of place to make him a good writer, in touch with his feelings. So what we are left with is Martin Nanther’s speculations based on Henry’s emotionless and scant journal entries and notebook.

Vine further handicaps herself by creating a second notebook which Martin manages to trace to a distant relative. Only he’s too late; his cousin’s senile father accidentally threw out the notebook with the recycling – the notebook in which Henry finally tells the truth about what he has done, why he was obsessed with marrying one of the Robinson sisters. Thankfully, the senile father remembers the gist of it, which he feebly relates to Martin. It’s rather unsatisfactory and unnecessary; if it was a postmodern novel, it might be telling us of the transmissions of texts or reveling in the uncertainty. But it’s not; it’s a psychological thriller which doesn’t evoke its own psychology enough.

Blood Doctor is an interesting novel to read for me; it highlights the narrative challenges of its subject and gives me some clues about strategies good and bad. But if you’re reading for pleasure, I would suggest Barbara Vine’s earlier novel, The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy. I would say that at her best Barbara Vine is a wonderful guilty pleasure for litfiction readers.

[Thursday 3pm #26] The Book of Life

24 Thursday Sep 2009

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

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An extract from The Library of Babel

I was on the bus after work to visit Grandad when my mobile started vibrating in my pocket. Its urgency disturbed me: phones were always for bad news in my mind. This time I was right – it was Dad and he was calling to say Grandad had died a few minutes ago.

My voice turned to a whisper. I didn’t want these strangers on the bus knowing my business. I asked Dad if he was coping okay, a stupid question, but I didn’t know what else to say. He said he was okay. I told him I was nearly at the hospice.

The book I’d been reading sat forgotten on my lap. I felt cheated that I’d nearly got there, that I could have seen him one last time and I hadn’t. I looked all around me on the bus, and then I couldn’t get my eyes off the stupid advertisements on the inside walls. There was nowhere I could go without people trying to sell me stuff.

I wanted someone with me but I couldn’t bear to ring Anita. I didn’t want to say Grandad was dead. Spreading the news would make it seem more real. The best thing would be to tell no-one, and then, as far as the world was concerned, he would go on living.

I suddenly realised I had no grandparents left, then I reproached myself. I was being so selfish. The person I should be thinking about was Grandad. I wanted to think precisely of what had just happened to him, to get past the words to the event itself. His consciousness had been extinguished. As far as his body was concerned, he no longer existed.

Everyone always said how sad it was for the people left behind, but I was thinking how the real tragedy was for dead person. How could it be possible to die? For your mind to be thinking thoughts one moment, and then not thinking thoughts the next? How could it be possible to have a final thought?

He had a final thought, and no-one will ever even know what it was. Let alone what came next for him. I wondered if he had last words. No-one even cared about last words these days. People used to care about last words; they probably used to rehearse them, to make sure they had them right. Your last words were the culmination of your life.

I went a few stops past the hospice. It wasn’t like I was thinking very straight. Stepping off the bus into the dusk, I had to walk back along the highway. Bus shelter ads, fast food litter on the uneven slabs of the footpath and all the cars rushing past with such violence. The sun was gone and chill of the night was setting in. I needed to ring Anita, I still couldn’t bear to. This could be an ordinary Tuesday night, I could be going to a pub – not that I ever did, but wouldn’t it be such a comforting, ordinary thing to do tonight? – or going to see a cheap movie at the cinema. But these weren’t options tonight.

An innocuous blue sign pointed down a sidestreet to the hospice. It was a residential street, lined with trees. None of these people in their houses knew that a long had just ended in their street. It happened daily, people’s long life stories coming to an end in beds inside a building on their streets. Did they know how much was being lost around them?

Dad, Uncle Graham, Aunty Pat were gathered in the room where he had died. His body had already been taken away. The bed was empty and unmade. I gave everyone subdued hugs.

Dad asked in a low voice if I wanted to see his body. I said no. Even seeing the empty bed was too much. I hadn’t seen a dead body this far in my life and I didn’t want to start today.

On the beside table was an old paperback. I picked it up; a bookmark from his local library was stuck between pages 190 and 191. He only had a few chapters to go. While everyone was talking, I slipped the book into my bag.

That night, I sat in the lounge room until one a.m. reading the old paperback. It was A.J. Cronin’s autobiography, Adventure in Two Worlds. Uncle Graham had probably grabbed it from Grandad’s shelf. I wondered if Grandad had read it before, or if it had been one of those books he had bought at a garage sale and been meaning to get to for the last twenty years.

It was a cheap paperback edition from the 1960s, the cover declaring it an international bestseller. I disliked bestsellers, but I had sympathy for the forgotten bestsellers of the past. Their obsolescence was touching, as was their misplaced self-confidence. They encapsulated their time and its passing.

Grandad liked to read old paperbacks. Whether it was chosen for him or he chose it, it was a fitting book for his last read. It was a life story imbued with the same old-fashioned notion of common sense that Grandad lived by, and the same refusal to be subversive, crude or despairing. It starts out in typical autobiographical fashion, full of the young doctor’s struggles to succeed in the world. But as the doctor becomes a best-selling writer, the narrative becomes more and more choked with anecdotes until it seizes up altogether in sermons.

I got to Grandad’s bookmark and powered on past it, reading what he had never got to read and thinking how he would have loved the end of the book, as Cronin at the height of his powers looks back on a successful life in a self-congratulatory tone I found difficult.

I got to the last word and shut the book. The book was finished, Cronin was at the height of his powers and Grandad was dead. But Cronin wasn’t really at the height of his powers. I got onto the internet and looked him up. He’d died in 1981, twenty-nine years after he wrote the story of his life. The year I was born. His narrative had started in 1917 when he was 18, the year Grandad was born. The coincidences didn’t lead anywhere, were all vague, but they gave me a sense of appropriateness. The book was finished, the book was out of print, Grandad was dead but Cronin was dead too.

There should be a book for people to read on their deathbed which explains everything. So that you’ve got something to look forward to. The last book you read should be the one which makes sense of life. But what if you lived on too long, finished that book, and then had to start something else? What were the odds of dying at the right time, when you’ve just finished a book? It wasn’t good to leave a book unfinished when you died. Poor Grandad. At least I’d read it for him, that had to count for something.

I had thought that when I finished the book I would want to sleep, but I still felt dissatisfied. I wished I could write in my diary and capture the feelings and thoughts of the day, but I didn’t feel able to. I wanted to listen to the radio, but there was never anything good on that late and it would wake up Anita. She stirred as I came to bed and asked me if I was okay. I told her I was probably more okay than Dad and I was definitely more okay than Grandad.

[Thursday 3pm # 19] Journal writing : a quote

06 Thursday Aug 2009

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Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. it proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

– E.L. Doctorow Ragtime, p. 63

[Thursday 3pm #17] Good writing : a quote

23 Thursday Jul 2009

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Good writing, surely, occurs when we somehow make ourselves as open as possible to intense, half-conscious impulses, even though the expression of them will make us uncomfortable because they matter so much. Revision is learning to read our work as if someone else had written it, paying attention to our confusions, lapses of interest, our disbelief or failure to care.

– Mattison, A. (2004). “Coincidence in Stories : An Essay Against Craft.” Writer’s Chronicle 36(6): 10.

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

18 Thursday Jun 2009

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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.

Buttering the toast : DeLillo capturing the everyday

09 Tuesday Jun 2009

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In my writing, I want to find beauty in everyday life. I don’t manage this very often. Don DeLillo does it very well. I was smiling to myself reading the first few pages of Libra, smiling with private delight in the wonder of his pages, the intricacies, defamilarisations, astute observations.

Mary Frances watched him butter the toast. He held the edges of the slice in his left hand, moved the knife in systematic strokes, over and over. Was he trying to distribute the butter evenly? Or were there other, deeper requirements? It was sad to see him lost in small business, eternally buttering, turning routine into empty compulsion. (16)

I haven’t put flesh like this on the scenes I’m writing at the moment. They’re bare bones skeletons, they don’t live and breathe, they haven’t been called into being with deep acts of imagination.

[Thursday 3pm #10] Amateur writers

04 Thursday Jun 2009

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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?)

“I was here too”

26 Thursday Mar 2009

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I have tried in the past to express what Julian Barnes expresses so well in this quote from his memoir Nothing to be frightened of. (I’m reading it at the moment, a healthy way to deal with my fear of death – reading about the fear of death.)

Those proud lines of Gautier’s I was once so attached to – everything passes except art in its robustness; kings die, but sovereign poetry lasts longer than bronze – now read as adolescent consolation. Tastes change; truth become cliches; whole art forms disappear. Even the greatest art’s triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers – two or three if lucky – which may feel like a scorning of death; but it’s really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too.
(205)

Adding vanity to folly

12 Thursday Mar 2009

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No-one has to see your failures unless you add vanity to folly and exhibit them. Genius consists not only of the power to create expressive beats and scenes, but of the taste, judgement, and will to weed out and destroy banalities, conceits, false notes and lies.

– Robert McKee, Story, 78.

I don’t think Robert McKee would have a blog. Or show anyone his drafts.