Persecution of the Bogan

28 Monday Jun 2010

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An intelligent discussion about the vilificaiton of the bogan appeared on Fairfax news sites today. It argues that bogans are the one group it’s considered acceptable to sneer at, and discusses jealousy as part of the motivation. I feel slightly mortified, but I’m not going to stop reading Things Bogans Like. Sneering is wrong but the fact is that crassness dominates Australia, and I don’t think it’s a good thing. The bogans may be vilified by the ‘cultural elite’, but boganism is regrettably dominant in our society. It is right to identify and discuss boganism because it is the mainstream, it is the assumed values of suburbia, it is commerical tv.

[Book Review] Howards End

21 Monday Jun 2010

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In volume one of his published journals, as an opinionated undergraduate, the great British novelist John Fowles comments on reading E.M. Forster’s Howards End that it’s as if reading a book by a passionless, fussy rabbit. I’m not sure quite what he meant by that; if I was going to find literary ancestors for John Fowles, E.M. Forster would surely be one.  Howards End is about three families representing three different classes – the intelligentsia, the business class and the working class – and the terribly complicated mess of a love-triangle they get themselves into. Well, it’s not exactly a ‘love triangle’; it’s way too complicated for that. But Forster is writing about Britain and about authenticity in 1910, just as Fowles was writing about these same things in Britain in 1960s. I see them both as such representatively British writers.

Howards End was consistently surprising, the narrator would suddenly veer up to a state of omniscience and pass interesting comments on the state of the country or the nature of someone’s soul. Or to say that what happened next was too full of boring details to relate. It’s an interventionist narrator of an interesting sort, with thoughtful things to contribute. I don’t think too many novels are written like this any more (maybe not enough in any era?), which dare to ask what’s it all about, and not even from a narrowly existential angle, but from a wide angle social perspective.

But I find myself battling to know what else to write about the book, and I wonder if that’s part of what Fowles was talking about. I wasn’t compelled, as much as I was interested and impressed.

I’ve never seen the film from the 1990s and I’m looking forward to checking it out.

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel

12 Saturday Jun 2010

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Once a decade, Franzen (author of The Corrections, which I love) publishes a novel, and you can be sure it’s going to be worth paying attention. A whole year ago the New Yorker published a lengthy extract from the new one to be published late this year, and I didn’t even know. I’m looking forward to reading it.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/06/08/090608fi_fiction_franzen?printable=true

RIP Randolph Stow

31 Monday May 2010

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I just read the sad news of the death of one of WA’s finest novelists, Randolph Stow. He was 74 and living in England.

I’ve often wondered what happened to Stow, why he stopped writing (or at least publishing). His career served as a kind of parable for me – it didn’t matter how well you did, things might still not work out right. He had published several award winning novels by the age of thirty and seemed unstoppable. And yet he published nothing in the last twenty-six years of his life. I tried several times to get into his final novel, The Suburbs of Hell, but I couldn’t, for some reason. Sorry, Randolph.

Over the last few years, I have kept on meaning to read more of his work. Merry-Go-Round In the Sea is surely one of the best Australian novels ever written, one of the great novels about childhood.

I have an obscure connection to Randolph: family legend has it that his mother boarded with my great-grandmother for a time in the 1960s. I don’t even know why, and I don’t know if it’s true.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/mp/7317959/wa-author-dies-in-england/

[Book Review] Lionel Shriver’s Take on Death and Money

24 Monday May 2010

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So Much For That, Lionel Shriver (2010)

Lionel Shriver’s new novel is getting mixed reviews. It will inevitably be compared unfavourably with her most successful novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, a comparison she’ll be living down for the rest of her life.

I finished it on Saturday, and think it’s a flawed, overly long and harrowing read, but also compelling and insightful. The main character is Shep Knacker, who sold off his business ten years ago with the intention of moving to a third world country and living cheaply off the proceeds for the rest of his life. Right when he decides to make an ultimatum to his wife Glynis – come with me or I’ll go by myself – she reveals she has mesothelioma. Shep is a good man, and abandons his hope of his ‘Afterlife’ to care for his wife. Her treatment absorbs all his money, even with the health insurance provided by the job he hates.

Until its rather dissonant, almost comic ending, it is an unrelentingly bleak novel, the sort of story to make you wonder what the point of life is. Not only is the treatment futile and awful, but the supporting characters are Shep’s best friend Jackson and his wife Helen with their daughter who has a rare degenerative disease which makes her life a constant miserable trial. Shriver constantly indulges Jackson’s rants about the state of America. They become repetitive and spin the novel out a long way, and they’re also a little annoying – he is not as articulate as Shriver writing in her own voice in her very interesting newspaper columns and doesn’t hold as nuanced opinions. Yet it is also a book filled with insights into money, work, marriage and conduct of life.

In Lionel’s apparent act of revenge against her Presbyterian theologian father, Shep’s Presbyterian minister father loses his faith in God at the end of his life. I hate to think what Donald Shriver thinks of that. Or maybe he and Lionel can laugh about it. (I doubt it.) It stung me reading that; imagine losing one’s faith in the face of death? It would make a lot of your life feel wasted, particularly in his – or my – case.

There are too many secondary characters who are too nasty or too selfish – Shep’s boss, his sister, ‘s family. Subtley is really important in dealing with such heavy subjects, and this novel has very little subtlety. But it does have a compulsive narrative – I wanted to know what was going to happen and I cared about the characters, even and especially as the book enveloped me in the dread-filled fog of death.

[Film Review] The Concert

02 Sunday May 2010

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The Concert, a French-Russian production, opened at Paradiso this week. It will probably become a minor middlebrow hit for cinema goers who don’t like multiplexes, don’t mind subtitles but aren’t overly critical in their watching – generous filmgoers, rather than demanding ones. It’s a feel-good film about music and redemption, set in Moscow and Paris; what more could you ask?

The problem is, it feels like two rather different films messily welded together. The first film is a madcap comedy, the sort that I never love but done well enough, as a Russian conductor demoted to a cleaner twenty-nine years ago for harbouring Jews in his orchestra steals a fax and pretends to be back in charge of the orchestra for a major show in Paris. He and his oddball friends have to patch together an entire orchestra in a couple of weeks and face various obstacles and some funny moments.

The full back-story is hinted at in the first half but takes over the film in the last half, centring on a beautiful French violinist who is twenty-nine years old and who the conductor insists on having as his soloist for the concert. The film becomes a drama of redemption, an inferior As It Is In Heaven. The uneasy meld of comedy and drama is shown in the final sequence, the actual concert, as ‘comic’ images like the no-good cellist having been bound and gagged and two Frenchmen deciding to kiss each other passionately play next to emotional flashbacks from the conductor’s past. Laugh or cry? I can’t do both! My wife was insulted at the idea that a ragtag orchestra who don’t even rehearse once can come together at the last minute with a violinist who has never before performed Tchaikovsky and produce stunning music designed to bring tears to our eyes.

Having said all this, it is an entertaining film with quite a number of funny scenes, interesting characters and amusing dialogue. Many people will love it.

6/10

Looking Through Other People’s Houses

26 Monday Apr 2010

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I’ve spent countless weekends now looking through other people’s houses. I think it will go on forever; I can’t imagine finding a house that is just right for both of us.

The world of home opens is a strange and usually unnerving one for me.

So many people come through the house because they live on the same street and have always longed for a stickybeak. But have no interest in getting to know the occupants. Just their house. This seems like a significant social failure on the part of our modern suburban living. And I tend to dislike these people.

Lookers don’t greet other lookers. They walk past them as if they’re passing them on a busy street. It’s a horrid unfriendliness. The real estate books, I’m told, instruct you to project a confident buying vibe. I AM GOING TO BUY THIS HOUSE AND YOU CAN’T HAVE IT.

I feel for the occupants’ vulnerability in having their home open, especially when they’re renters. These strangers come through and pass judgement on their stuff. So I try not to pass judgement, but I still find myself thinking, this person has such bogan taste; or, my goodness they have bad taste in books. (I’m yet to go through any house with more than a single bookshelf of books. Every time there are books, they are recent bestsellers. This surprises me, somehow. Do people read only bestsellers? Do they need everyone else’s excitement about a book to ignite theirs? I MUST NOT JUDGE, at least not when I’m looking through their house.)

You get, inevitably, sucked into the myth and lie of real estate. You start checking real estate listings on the internet too often. It becomes a pastime, a game, an obsession, one that leads a bad taste in your mouth. Because these agents, they want prices to keep going up forever. These people looking, they want to be millionaires, they want to climb up the ladder quicker than everyone else. They want to make their fortune, they want to make a killing. Greed is in the air.

Everyone should just want a house to live in for their own sake. There shouldn’t be all this scheming.

[Book review] Never Let Me Go: the Illusions of an Enchanted Childhood

16 Friday Apr 2010

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Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) is about the illusions of the strange, enchanted world of childhood and the loss of innocence that growing up involves. It’s also a love triangle. The backdrop is an alternative present where science and ethics took a different turn, but it could mislead readers to label it science fiction. The novel it reminds me of most is Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale; both are subtle, emotionally engaging literary dystopias, and in both the world of the narrator is only gradually revealed.

At one point in the novel, Kathy, the narrator, explains how she and the other children growing up in Hailsham, a special boarding school, are told things without being told things. Their teachers mention words and concepts about the children’s fate – ‘donations’ ‘completions’ ‘carers’ – a year or two before they explain them. By the time the teachers explain these things a little more – and nothing is ever explained clearly – the children have already normalised the words, so they feel they already know what they’re being told.

This goes some way to explaining why the children don’t fight against their fate; it also explains Ishiguro’s narrative method. Our realisations as readers come in a similar way to the children’s knowledge – the strange euphemisms for what is going on begin to play at our minds, until we’re not surprised when the horrific truths do become apparent. It kept me turning pages and tense, and also frustrated – ‘I just want to know what’s going on!’. Of course, that’s probably exactly how Ishiguro wanted me to feel.

It is a poignant novel told in Kathy’s vulnerable voice, looking back at her life at age 31, and, in particular, her best friends Tommy and Ruth. Ishiguro could have made her bitter and angry or determined to escape her fate. Instead, her grateful, sentimental tone makes the novel a brilliant one: it is so unsettling. We the readers are horrified at the injustice she faces, while she is quite calm about it.

As much as anything, it is a novel about mortality: the plight of Kathy and her friends and the way they live in the face of death is a kind of parable for our lives. You might come away from the novel wanting to appreciate your life more, and if you do Ishiguro has achieved something important.

9/10

[Book Review] Ian McEwan’s Solar

07 Wednesday Apr 2010

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I wonder if Ian McEwan has done his twelfth novel a disservice by calling it a ‘climate change novel’? It raises the stakes too high, creates the expectation of some startling insight into climate change itself – when it’s unlikely a novel can do such a thing.

I read Solar more as an amusing drama, a better version of his worst novel, Amsterdam. It’s the story of the downfall of Nobel Prize winning scientist, Michael Beard, who has done very little since he won his prize. We get three snapshots of his life in 2000, 2005 and 2009 and it’s McEwan’s skill to capture the passage of years, the shifts in time and world events. Beard is incapable of fidelity and in 2000 his fifth marriage is breaking up. In one of those McEwanian moments, a random and fatal accident suffered by one of Beard’s colleagues gives him a chance at revenge, cover-up and the stealing of valuable scientific secrets, that by the end of the novel he is developing into a lucrative alternative form of solar power.

Michael Beard is an anti-hero who reminds of Rabbit Angstrom, John Updike’s character. John Updike is one of McEwan’s favourite writers, and like Rabbit, Michael can’t control his appetite for food or women or his pettiness. In the vein of the Rabbit books, Beard gives the pulse of the time at spaced intervals; the main difference between them is that Rabbit is a car salesman while Beard is a scientist who was at least once something of a genius.

For me the novel had many moments of McEwan’s strength – startling insight into the moods and thinking of a person. I read the climate change aspect as simply a background for the exploration of an unlikeable but believable and engaging man’s downfall. Yet then on last night’s Bookclub show on ABC, Jennifer Byrne pointed out the obvious reading that I missed. It is a climate change novel because Beard represents us all, too greedy and carnal to prevent the disaster looming over us. Climate change is not just a background; it’s built allegorically into the novel.

A lot of critics have reviewed Solar poorly, but as a McEwan fan, I enjoyed it. 7.5/10.

A is for Apple

29 Monday Mar 2010

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I wrote a story about apples once. It was the theme of the literary competition for the Donnybrook Apple Festival. I was sixteen. I came second, and I got $50.

The story I wrote kept growing. Or maybe it started out bigger and I cut it down for the competition, which only allowed 750 words. Out of all the stories I wrote, it was one of my favourites. It was called ‘The Souring’. It was set in a time in the future when Earth is at war with another planet. The aliens have sent a sickness to Earth; the humans discovered a vaccine derived from apples. The problem with the vaccine is that it makes apples taste sour. Humans stop eating apples. A small price to pay, except for one devout and crazy Swedenborgian who refuses to take the vaccine so he can keep eating apples.

It was more complicated than that. It was very complicated, but mainly it was a love story. I was going to turn it into a novel. I wasn’t able to.

I wrote that story at a time when ideas for stories used to pour out of me and success came regularly. Everyone applauds a sixteen year old showing some promise, so potent and full of passion. So sure he can get to the heart of the matter.