21 Saturday Jul 2018
Posted in book review, Series: Saturday 10am
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Saturday 10am #8
Tracy Ryan’s fifth novel, We Are Not Most People (Transit Lounge, 2018), is a moving story of two misfits, Kurt and Terry, and their May-September marriage, set in Perth over the 1960s to the 1990s. Tracy is a friend, so I can’t pretend to write dispassionately, but I think it a superb novel. Continue reading
29 Monday Feb 2016
Posted in book review, poetry
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I like poetry collections with a strong thematic unity which hold together as a book. My friend Tracy Ryan’s latest collection Hoard (Whitmore Press, 2015) is a beautiful example, as she examines the Irish boglands and the hoards hiding within from different angles, different times, different voices.
The collection begins with “The changeling addresses Ireland,” a long poem which gives a sense of the patchwork of styles and voices which compose the book as a whole. Thematically, the poem is on a larger scale than the rest of the collection, situating bogs and hoards in the context of the poet as an Australian of Irish descent returning to a place of origin. A century ago, the relationship of Australians to Britain and Ireland was a pressing concern; even if this is no longer the case for most Australians, time has only complicated the dimmed ties:
diverged from your
conflicted historywhich even so tries
to persist in me
The perspective in the poems which follow shifts from that of “Hoard hider” to “Hoard finder” to the ‘experience’ of the hoard itself in “Orphaned hoard” – “wrenched out of context / finds itself split and separated”. All these people, all these objects connected across time and consciousness by this landscape. The narrator makes a welcome return, too, providing some sense of the quest through the boglands which are generating these poems in a couple of poems like “Bog conversation”:
I sip from a hot mug big as a chalice
and where we stop is arbitrary
because with bogs we are barely
ever more than scratching the surface
Searching for a comparison point in my limited knowledge of poetry, it’s one of my favourite poems, Auden’s “The Quest”, which comes to mind. The twenty parts of that poem offer a similarly shifting, multi-perspective view of the subject, adding up to a composite narrative that is different – and in certain ways superior – to the more consistent narratives fiction tends to demand. In this multiplicity of ways of looking at the bog and the hoard, the subject begins to turn into a lens for looking at the whole world anew, reimagining things like memory, the passage of time, legacy, belief, identity. It’s this sustained attention to one subject which allows Tracy to drag from it and hide in it so many treasures.
24 Sunday Aug 2014
Posted in book review, Western Australia
Tracy Ryan Claustrophobia (Transit Lounge, 2014)
My friend Tracy Ryan’s new novel, Claustrophobia, was published recently by Transit Lounge. Set in Perth, it’s a literary thriller about a woman’s obsession with her husband, Derrick’s ex-lover, Kathleen. The claustrophobia of the title is an apt description of the feel of the novel. We’re constrained within the narrative viewpoint of Pen and her narrow, obsessive world. Her marriage is claustrophobic, too, the jealousies and social isolation fueling her behavior. The clichés in which Pen talks and coats her world hint at a darker side constrained within, and it’s this side of her which is gradually revealed.
Pacing is important to the thriller, and in this novel it’s just right, building up tension slowly and, for the reader, unbearably, knowing something must break. The plot opens with an inciting incident of Pen uncovering an undelivered letter from Derrick to Kathleen, and deciding to open it and read it. From here, this initial decision to keep a secret in her marriage in retaliation snowballs expertly with each chapter.
I’m left at the end unsure of how to judge the characters; this ambiguity is probably part of the novel’s psychological accomplishment. Pen is an unsettling protagonist to live with for 240 pages. The positive spin on her provided by one of the other characters is that she’s intelligent and passionate, but crippled by low self-esteem. Yet as with people in real life, the characters around her don’t know the level of neurosis and obsession percolating behind her façade. Derrick, her husband, truly is too controlling, and can be seen to have helped cause Pen’s madness; yet he is a somewhat more balanced and grounded person than Pen. Kathleen is the most sympathetic of the major characters, an articulate and generous academic who lives life to the full—and yet has her own obsessiveness which emerges late in the novel.
The novel evokes Perth so very well, from suburban life in the hills, to the hallways and cafes of UWA, as well as the bush town of Pemberton. There are too few novels set in Perth, and this one is convincingly grounded in it. It’s possible to loosely associate it with the crime genre, and suggest that with the work of David Whish-Wilson and Felicity Young it begins to map out Perth as an increasingly plausible setting for crime fiction.
On the subject of genre, the characters discuss the novels of Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon, perhaps a case of the novel wearing its influences proudly. These are the right reference points for a contemporary novel in the tradition of these two writers, with the fresh setting of Perth.
20 Thursday Mar 2014
Posted in book review, death, poetry
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Tracy Ryan, Unearthed (Fremantle Press, 2013)
Margaret Atwood once said, “A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you.” I’ve always imagined this to be true, but my friend Tracy Ryan’s collection of poetry, Unearthed, depicts divorce not as an amputation but a haunting. In the first section of the collection, “Karlsruhe”, a series of connected poems follow a narrative of remembering. After fighting vivid dreams for two years, the narrator looks up her former husband only to discover he died two years ago. ‘You came like news on ships in former times / or like the stars’ far light, already out.’ (We know instantly when the famous die; but it is the unfamous people we were once close to who stop existing without us knowing, and that is a difficult thing.) The haunting, of course, is intensified.
A highlight to the book is the breadth of allusion and the appreciation of unusual words, an education for the reader worn lightly; I have learned new words like ‘aestivation’ (an animal’s state of dormancy) which illuminate love and loss in new ways.
The process of remembering and the sense of haunting is evoked not just by allusion to a wide range of literature, but also the new ways of relating to the past which technology brings. I like the poem “Dural Way” in which the narrator ‘stalks’ her own past on Google Street View and ‘what was unique, generic / into the garden once hidden / any browser may look / but hindsight is mine / alone.’
Then there are the memories around objects, something which has always fascinated me. In “Offertory”, there are ‘tomb objects’ which have survived the late lover, a hole-punch, a blue stapler, which are ‘small unexploded ordnance’. In “The Pawned Wedding Ring”, the narrator contemplates the fate of the eponymous ring, its history since.
Loss, of course, comes in many guises, and the section of the book is entitled “Other Elegy”, extending from elegy for lost friends to elegies for nature and finishing with a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Requiem for a Woman Friend”.
This is poetry that could draw in even those unaccustomed to poetry, accessible yet still with the density and surprises of language which makes poetry poetry.
03 Tuesday Jun 2008
Posted in book review
I recently finished Tracy Ryan’s Jazz Tango, a fascinating novel about what happens after the fairtytale wedding of a working class girl to her ‘prince’, a member of the elite Oxbridge set. What I liked best about Tracy’s novel was its capturing of the patterns of thought, the strayness and whimsy of our minds. We read everything Jas, the protagonist is thinking, from the banal to the profound, and it’s the juxtaposition of these which is so compelling. All our best thoughts are embedded in mundane situations, whether it’s social awkwardness in a cafe or being stuck in traffic. The novel deliberately invokes the spirit of the great women modernists, and carries on their tradition of stream of consciousness, something which makes me glad. (All these great movements of the past which are not fashionable any more… horrible thing, we could do with a few more attempts at Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses.)
Tracy and her husband John Kinsella have a fascinating blog called Mutually Said : Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist. John, like me, is a big fan of Philip K. Dick and has some fascinating comments on PKD in a recent post.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 