Ford Madox Ford has not yet made it from the to-read list to my eyeballs, but from what I’ve heard, he’s magnificent. That’s one reason I’m excited about the BBC/HBO co-production of Parade’s End, based on Ford’s 1920s four-part novel about a complex relationship and the madness of war (and undoubtedly much more).

The second reason is that the show has been scripted by none other than Tom Stoppard, playwright (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead), screenwriter (including of one of my favourite films, Brazil), and complete legend. What’s even better is that he told us at The Wheeler Centre event last year he was enjoying the production of the show. ‘I don’t normally hang around [film sets] but in the case of this one I became very obsessed with it,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to be there.’

You probably don’t need any more reasons to tune in, but I’ll give you two more: Benedict Cumberbatch; and, obviously, a detailed period setting. I do love being immersed in the past. Oh, and the director is Susanna White (BBC’s Bleak House and Jane Eyre) and the show will feature a great cast of British actors.

The show is due at the end of the year. More at the Independent, here.

The picture above is the first one released by the BBC (via). If you see any more, tweet me!

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

I just raced through the first Phryne Fisher book, Cocaine Blues, by Kerry Greenwood, and it was a great deal of fun. The books (and the show) are set in Melbourne in the 1920s. Phryne is a wealthy, brassy and adventurous detective. She was born into poverty so she is not blinded by her wealth (though she has a fine time with it). There are plenty of interesting female characters, like her maid Dot, and Dr Macmillan (a Scot who wears trousers *gasp*).

The book had me looking up a lot of the locations and I’m excited to see how they’ll capture 1920s Melbourne. Not to mention the great costumes. Phryne is played by Essie Davis, who was recently in The Slap. I think she’s perfect for the role of Phryne.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries starts on ABC1 on Friday 24 Feb at 8:30. See the official Phryne Fisher website here for more details, and a preview of episode one. The books are readily available.

The Sea Bed, Marele Day
Allen & Unwin, 2009
9781741758412 (paperback, ebook)

The Sea Bed is set around an island with a tradition of ‘sea women’, who, for generations, have dived, dangerously and artfully, for abalone and other edible sea creatures. The novel is presumably set in Japan (though it is never stated), but sea women are present in other cultures too (ie. in Korea).

Chicken is a young woman working at Ocean World, posing for the tourists as a sea woman, carrying the weight of her family’s, and the community’s, past. Her sister Lilli could not bear the weight of secrets from the past (pressing like the sea on her lungs) and so left for the city as soon as she could. Arguably, the main character in this story, though, is the outsider: a monk who is on a mission to take the remains of a fellow monk to the sea. He also ends up at the island. Connections emerge, and coincidences occur, tying the monk’s mission to the women on the island.

This is a subtle, sweet story. Each of the characters faces the world and the past with a different face. The monk is curious but easily overwhelmed (after the structure of his days at the monastery); Chicken is committed, loyal and hopeful; and Lilli is a kind of dreamer and an opportunist, preferring gloss to reality. Day captures the importance of tradition for a community, and hints at the sadness (but the inevitability) of change. She does this  through settings like Ocean World, a sea folk museum, and through the sea festival. The festival is now a ‘re-enactment’ for the tourists, and the diving women are part of the spectacle. Despite this, the overall feeling is that the past does continue to echo through a place, often in surprising ways. And many of the characters do remain dutiful to the past, and to other people.

Day also captures a very subtle eroticism in regards to the sea women, and the sea in general: the underwater world, the kelp, the sea food. This is all tied in with danger and death: the sea bed, in which to create, and to finally rest. Again, a kind of inevitability. There is a touch of magic about it, too, or maybe it’s faith: in stories, in myth, and in coincidence, and in the power of collective and residual dreaming. All of it makes up the sediment of the sea bed, which remains—even if the abalone has been fished out.

The descriptions of the island, the diving costumes, sea life and sea food are quite exquisite. This is a quiet book that transports you for a while to another, tangible place, and leaves you feeling warm.

*

I will be chairing two panels with Marele Day, award-winning author of Lambs of God and Mrs Cook, at Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival. They are:

‘An Australian in Paris: Setting Fiction Overseas’, with Kirsten Tranter and Alan Gould, at 11:40am on  Sunday 25 March, and ‘The Power of the Story’ (on short fiction) with Robert Drewe and Charlotte Wood, at 2:15pm that afternoon. Find out more about the festival here.

This post will be added to my tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.

Picador, February 2012

A version of this article was published in The Big Issue No. 399

Carrie Tiffany’s debut novel Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living was published in 2005 to high praise. Now, her second novel Mateship with Birds—a compelling and elegant meditation on family, desire and country life—confirms the author’s attraction to the past and the land.

There is a particular sense of place in the writing of Yorkshire-born, Melbourne-based Carrie Tiffany. She has set both her novels in Victorian country towns, in areas she visited through her work as an agricultural journalist.

‘I just get these kind of passions for particular country towns,’ Tiffany tells me. ‘With Everyman’s [which was set in the interwar period] I was doing some work in the Mallee [northwestern Victoria] and there was just something about Wycheproof. The train does actually run down the main street and the whole town stops if the train driver decides he wants to have lunch. He stops this huge grain train in the middle of the street, and goes to get a hamburger in the milkbar, and nobody can cross to the other side!’

With Mateship, set in the 1950s, Tiffany was doing some work around Cohuna, just south of the Murray River. There was ‘something about the place’, and she decided to write a story set there. Tiffany narrowed her setting down, mainly, to two adjoining properties: Harry’s dairy farm and the house of Betty and her two children. Michael, Betty’s eldest, is in the nascent stages of sexual awakening, and ‘Little Hazel’ is also learning some (welcome and unwelcome) facts about nature.

As part of her research, Tiffany spent time at the local museum looking at photographs of people on dairy farms and in town in the 1950s. ‘I was really taken by them. I would drive around a lot and sometimes just sit in my car on the side of the road next to a paddock full of dairy cows and look at them and think about them.’

Tiffany was also inspired by a poetic and unscientific old volume about birds she found in an op-shop, written by Alec Chisholm in 1922 (from which she also borrowed the book’s title). The unabashed delight of books like this, Tiffany thought, can ‘actually bring you closer in some ways to nature than scientific knowledge, which is only held by a few people anyway’.

The descriptions of the dairy farm and Harry milking his ‘girls’, with their unique personalities, are surprisingly beautiful. Harry imagines the cows as a troupe of dancers, and he their manager. From the book: ‘They are on some sort of vague world tour where they are much acclaimed for their talent and beauty. Harry is a dedicated but exasperated manager, worn down by attending to all of their feminine needs and foibles’. Harry treats animals and birds with interest, humour and affection.  He also writes about a family of kookaburras that live on his property. Regarding the symbolism of this kookaburra family in the narrative, Tiffany said: ‘I think I’m trying to say something in there about what the nature of a family might be and the different bonds and ways we come together.’

For much of the book, tension is created through Betty and Harry, who hold an obvious affection for one another. This tension is the book’s main narrative drive, and part of what makes its small world so compelling. The tension is heightened by other explorations of desire—emotional, burgeoning, even deviant—including a series of letters Harry writes to educate young Michael about the facts of life.

‘I hate books where you have two characters and something is happening between them and they get together, kiss, then the curtains close and in the next chapter it’s the next morning. I think that the way we are sexually says so much about us as people,’ Tiffany says. ‘It’s one of the really critical ways that we come together.’ Tiffany also believes desire is interesting when you’re writing about a rural area, as sex, she insists, ‘is just one of those parts of life which is perhaps more covered over in the city, even though everything seems terribly sexualised—it’s sexualised in a faux kind of way. We think that rural people are very conservative, but there’s something about the bonds within some of those rural communities that can stretch to encompass all kinds of desire.’

Indeed, Tiffany sees desire—the fear of its loss, the desire to be desired—as a driving force. ‘Desire is in all of us. It’s in the old men in Betty’s nursing home and it’s in children… I don’t think about writing about it, I don’t think I could not write about it.’

But the birds (in the novel, as in life) are oblivious to all this human tension. ‘There’s the land—and we’re land-lubbers and land-dwelling and we just live in this strata—but above that there’s all this other strata of the air, where there are all these other things happening… and we’re quite irrelevant. There’s something pretty fantastic about that.’

This post will be added to my tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.

Allen & Unwin

I picked up this novel one morning from somewhere in the pile and was instantly drawn into its strange, contained world. The story is about the island of Rollrock, and the sea witch Misskaella who can draw forth human beings from seals. The novel is divided into several smaller stories from different points of view, which are all skilfully woven together. The longest stories include the story of Misskaella herself—how she came upon her powers as a child and what it means for the community—and the story of Daniel Mallet, son of a sea ‘mam’.

Lanagan has drawn on the mythology of the Selkies (from Icelandic, Faroese, Irish and Scottish folklore), but the novel has its own internal logic. Misskaella has a strong reason to draw forth the sea-wives, and to ensure that, slowly, the whole island will be rid of real ‘red’ women (or will it?). The language is delightful: phrases old-fashioned and imagined. Mums and babies are mams and babs, for example. And small details—like the blankets that the sea-wives make out of kelp, for comfort; the sea hearts that they eat (and the way they eat them); and the place where the seal ‘coats’ are kept—all help to make this a fleshy, well-realised world.

The story is addictive, too, due to the tone Lanagan sets, a mix of delight, dread and yearning. And there are moments of pure joy, like when Daniel Mallet gets a chance to ‘fly’. There is plenty of drama; the plot contains aspects of alienation, hunger and revenge, and the spiralling effects of these. By the end the reader feels quite haunted by the years they’ve spent on the island.

Sea Hearts is a young adult novel, but is definitely enjoyable for adults. It gave me a hankering for some more fantasy. Luckily, I picked up a copy of Lanagan’s Tender Morsels a few days after I finished Sea Hearts.

This post will be added to my tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.

You might also like to read ‘A Letter to Charles Dickens on his 200th Birthday‘ by Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin.

I’ve also loved pottering about lately on Dickens Journals Online which I was introduced to by Whispering Gums, who reviewed Margaret Mendelawitz’s selected essays (from the Household Words journals).

I was at Varuna Writers House in 2008, as a recipient of Peter Bishop’s Pathways to Publication Masterclass (a program that no longer exists, I believe) for a previous manuscript. It’s such a wonderful place, in the Blue Mountains. If you’re a writer, you should apply for one of their programs. You can also pay to stay there if you just need a writing getaway.

My friend and colleague Mark Welker made a cool little video at Varuna, too, which brings back many memories.

When there are enough writer-a-day extracts, Varuna will be turning the project into an app.

Picador, 2004
9780330483216 (paperback, ebook)

I was going to refer to Nick, the protagonist of The Line of Beauty, as unambitious. But when I think about it, it’s just that his ambitions are not professional. They are romantic, aesthetic, and social. Another skill he has is taking in the pleasure of the moment, and even turning the moment in his favour. He’s quite an innocent when we first meet him, fresh out of Oxford and living with the Feddens in Notting Hill, swept-up and trusting in their world. He was at school with Toby and harbours a secret crush on him, but he becomes close to Toby’s sister Catherine – who suffers from manias and depression. Gerald is the head of the house, a Tory MP, and Rachael is his wife. Nick is a virgin, and his first giddy encounters with Leo, an older, BMX-riding black guy, reveal some of the power-plays and prejudices within the conservative Fedden family, and hint at Nick’s possibly odd place within them.

But he stays, for many years. To tell more of the plot would be to rob you of the pleasure of its unfolding. The novel is so rich, from Nick’s observations of where good taste turns to vulgarity (borrowed partly from Henry James), to the close context of 1980s Thatcherism (the PM even makes an appearance) and the many, oft ambiguous and intriguing interplays between the characters. This small world is seen through an aesthete’s eye – the men, architecture, food, cocaine, alcohol, antiques, gardens, music and staircases are all vivid, and significant.

Of course, Nick’s place in the bosom of the family is an oddity and the third act of The Line of Beauty is dramatic and dark. The extent of Nick’s innocence and trust, his hope and wonder, and his ignorance, are all revealed. But it is all the characters who eventually suffer. I feel I’d normally get annoyed at a character who is so idle and indulgent, but Nick’s pursuit of pleasure, acceptance and beauty is compelling. The themes reminded me a little of Michael Cunningham‘s. Though Hollinghurst and Cunningham write quite differently, their books would make good companions. Hollinghurst is an artful writer. His sentences are immaculate. You almost feel spoilt, reading it, as though you were drinking the finest scotch whisky.

Here’s an example of a small, insightful segment, on the possibility of getting a crush:

‘He wondered if he could have a crush on this waiter too – it only needed a couple of sightings, the current mood of frustration, and a single half-conscious decision, and then the boy’s shape would be stamped on his mind and make his pulse race whenever he appeared.’

I enjoyed this Man Booker Prize-winner more than The Swimming-Pool Library (though that was excellent) simply because it had more contrasts, and more scope. I’m now also reading The Stranger’s Child – his latest – which I was very happy to see was (at least partly) set in the 1910s, as I’ve recently been enjoying some Downton Abbey.

A version of this review was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Spectrum magazine on the weekend of 7-8 January.

In Amanda Curtin’s atmospheric debut novel The Sinkings, as in her new collection, the past seeps into the present. In Inherited, each stunning story contains multiple layers of meaning.

Curtin has been a professional editor for more than 20 years and not a word is wasted in these stories: they surprise, delight and move the reader. Each opening line is inventive, compelling; each conclusion satisfies. The narratives are tightly woven, with mystery in all the right places. The stories are also subtly unified. Different species of plants and birds populate them, hinting at something precious and lasting outside the human drama. And there is that respect for history: its visible and invisible effects and its seductive quality. In ‘Renovation’, someone inspects a house they are buying – its stains, its outer buildings – and, at the same time, the reader gets a glimpse of the house at different times in history. These reflections are partly about loss but they’re also about what is gained by this knowledge, and acknowledgement, of the past.

‘On a blue morning, she turns violet. For all the good it does.’ These are the irresistible opening lines of ‘Paris Bled into the Indian Ocean’. The woman of this story is heartbroken. The coloured sand she finds on the beach seeps into her skin. A sub-story is then recalled about impressionist painter Kathleen O’Connor: when she returned from Paris to Fremantle, instead of paying the duty on all of her paintings, she threw many of them into the Indian Ocean. There is an aesthetic link between past and present – colour bleeding into the ocean, soaking into skin. But as with all the stories, there are more subtle movements. The colours recall memories of the protagonist’s relationship. She is holding on, trying to figure out what went wrong. There are links between her and the artist – women who are beginning over. The closing paragraphs are both aesthetically and emotionally vivid, joyfully so.

While there is joy, the bulk of these stories are exquisitely melancholic. Curtin has divided them up into seven sections: Keeping, Wanting, Surviving, Remembering, Breaking, Leaving and Returning. In ‘Hamburger Moon’ the protagonist, Alice, has fooled the clinic and her family into believing she has beaten her bulimia. The author somehow gets the reader on side with the illness.

‘The Prospect of Grace’ links different suicides in history, and hints at the effects on people left behind.

In one of the strongest stories in the collection, ‘Dove’, a woman is ‘treated’ to a holiday by her children. It is in an unstated place – possibly Bali or Thailand – and the woman attempts to relax but is distracted by possible perceptions of herself and other Western tourists. She is dismayed by the selection of music her driver offers her: Neil Diamond, Michael Buble. She thinks: ‘My God. It’s come to this. This is what she looks like through other people’s eyes.’ She is reading The Slap on holiday but often leaves it in her room as she cannot find kindness in it, or compassion. This story could just be about Westernness, or ageing, but it’s so much more. The protagonist wonders about being a good person: ‘Maybe being a good person is just a shallow, middle-class concept as meaningless as Tupperware.’ All the while, in her empty house, a dove is trapped, panicked and dying.

There are real threats, there are ones we imagine, and ones we inherit. This book acknowledges our need to want and keep, to survive and remember, to return; and the inevitability of our breaking and leaving. It is graceful and compelling.

This review will be added to my tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.

Foal’s Bread, Gillian Mears, Allen & Unwin, 9781742376295 (paperback, ebook)

A slow read – but think ‘slow’ as in that positive movement of slow food, slow travel – picked up each morning over breakfast. Set in Northern NSW, quite near where I grew up (and author Gillian Mears grew up) in the interwar and WWII period, it’s about a couple of young horse high-jumpers who come together and make a family. They have big dreams of shows and success, but lightning strikes (literally and metaphorically). In fact, they are struck down again and again. The earliest scene, where Noah, a 13-year-old girl, gives birth to her uncle’s child (alone, in the river), sets the tone. It’s sad, it’s highly dramatic, but there is also warmth. Noah was, complexly, very fond of the uncle who ‘took advantage’.

Further relationships are given depth through different kinds of desires, loyalties, and physical limitations. The novel is full of small symbols and tokens: mainly the foal’s bread, and I won’t ruin for you what that is; animals, and heart shapes. Symbols to seek when in need, to look to, to hold, to share and pass on. The characters live frustrated lives but make grand gestures. Noah is my favourite character: full of fire, toughness, cruelty and kindness. Her secret losses and her repressed desires eat her up. I also enjoyed the descriptions of life on the farm: all the types of weather, the birds and trees, gingernut biscuits (family traditions) and hidden money and grog. Every event is significant to all of their lives, from a storm to the local dance. And the way it moves through to the next generation is handled so well – especially the pull between mother and daughter. I do recommend taking Foal’s Bread in bit by bit, unless you’re in the mood to be devastated and overwhelmed (which, sometimes, we are).

I’m counting this mini-review toward my tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.

White Noise, Don DeLillo, Picador, 9780330291088 (paperback, first published 1984)

One of the best books I’ve read and one that really struck a chord. Death, distraction and comfort. Infiltration (of danger, of advertising). Wanting to embrace something and it ends up being the line at the supermarket, because everything else is false. Wanting to learn and know small, graspable things like how to sit and stand, how to eat properly, because so much cannot be grasped.

I read this quote by Boyd on Nabokov the other day: some readers ‘miss altogether his positive irony, his attempt to encompass all the negatives, as he suspects life itself does, and reverse their direction in the mirror of death’ (p. 5). I thought this about DeLillo, too (with this book).

The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst, Vintage, 9780099268130 (paperback, ebook, first published 1988)

The first thing I noticed about this book was how the protagonist, William Beckwith, seemed to view the world through his penis. It’s actually fascinating. You never know whether all the men in the showers at the ‘Corry’ (a gym, in London) are getting hard-ons or whether that’s just the way he wants it to be. His gaydar is finely tuned, he picks up men everywhere and seems to treat them with equal parts coldness and rapture. William’s affections fade in and out like his erections. He saves an old man, Lord Nantwich, from dying at the urinals one day and then becomes acquainted with him. Nantwich even asks the privileged, drifting youth if he might write his biography. They find they have similarities: wealth, a taste for black men, a somewhat cruel nature… They are both ambiguous in many ways, and ambiguity creates much of the intrigue in this novel. The reader never quite knows when a character is being genuine. There are glorious, descriptive passages of gay crushes, loves and hardcore sexual encounters. There’s a whole passage carefully describing what each of the different men’s penises resemble, in the showers at the Corry. Here’s a sample:

‘Here was the long, listless penis, there the curt, athletic knob or innocent rosebud of someone scarcely out of school. Carlos’s Amerindian giant swung alongside the compact form of a Chinese youth whose tiny brown willy was almost concealed in his wet pubic hair, like an exotic mushroom in a dish of seaweed.’

Women are absent, but that’s because they are peripheral to William’s radar, and Lord Nantwich’s, too. There are sometimes threats to William’s lifestyle (acts and hints of intolerance and violence) but mainly it is a life of decadent pleasure – in his body, his imagination and in the air. One violent act seems to be there just to acknowledge the existence of intolerance, though generally William’s gay world permeates the everyday one, on multiple levels. And we have a historical view, too, through Lord Nantwich and his diaries. No one is particularly likeable in this novel but they are intriguing. The language itself is seductive and delicious.