Book Review - To the Islands by Randolph Stow

 To the Islands by Randolph Stow

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975 (first published 1958)     ISBN 0140700013

There can be little doubt that Randolph Stow is in the top tier of Australian novelists. His works are in turn spiritual, allusive and wonderfully descriptive. Tourmaline is one of the best Australian books I have ever read, and The Merry-go-Round in the Sea is universally recognised as a great coming-of-age novel. To the Islands is another remarkable book, and it's astonishing he wrote a novel with such insight into aging and the approach of death when he himself was only in his mid-twenties.

(Before I go any further I'll mention that Stow heavily revised his novel for the 1982 re-publication: this review is of the first version of this book, published by Penguin in the 1970s.)

Stow quickly sets the scene in this book: a remote mission settlement in the north of Western Australia, where the long-serving superintendent Heriot has lost his faith in the ability of the government or the church to improve the conditions of the native inhabitants. We learn that he lost his wife and pregnant daughter over the years, believing his daughter was killed by her husband Rex. We learn in the first pages that Rex has just returned to the mission for the first time since Heriot's daughter's death.

When Heriot hears of Rex's return, his bitterness and anger overflows, and in a fit of anger confronts Rex during a cyclone and leaves believing he has killed him. He flees the mission during the storm, but is followed by one of the natives, Justin. Heriot had intended to commit suicide, which Justin's presence prevents, and so they journey through the country together. The journey, for Heriot is physical, mental and spiritual. He by turns strips away the layers of his personality, his grief and his anger. He is assisted in the process by Justin's presence - Justin's purity of spirit and focus on what is important in life help Heriot to move to a place of peace, where he no longer is angry with what has happened to him, or at the petty injustices that occurred during his life. At the end, by the sea, almost in sight of the Islands (the mythical Islands that the dead travel to in the native beliefs of the area), he is ready to pass on, acknowledging that "my soul is a strange country."

Interspersed with Heriot's journey is the story of the search for him undertaken by staff and natives from the mission. It turns out that Heriot's attack had not killed Rex, who joins the search, reflecting on what he has done wrong and hoping for a reconciliation, which does occur after a fashion.

To the Islands is many things, one of which is a foray into and an examination of the ethics of white colonialism in Australia. As the narrative develops, we learn that Heriot originally joined the mission to expiate the racial guilt he felt over not being able to forestall a massacre of the local black population which occurred in the 1920s. Heriot was the first of a new generation of whites that entered the black story at that time, determined to help Aborigines rather than kill them, even if that help was paternalistic and ineffective. Now, at the time described in the book, Heriot is the last man standing of that generation, and dealing with the ascent of the next generation: moving from paternalism to a more partnership-based relationship. The Aboriginals too, embodied in the character of Rex, are becoming more assertive in that relationship, beginning to demand to be heard, and to have agency in their own lives.

Heriot has spent so long and put so much into the mission that it has hollowed him out - he cannot connect with the new generation of white residents, but because of the approach the mission took with the natives he has no true and meaningful friendships with them either, even though Stow makes it clear during Heriot's journey that Justin, with his uncomplicated loyalty and love, could have been such a friend.

Stow captures and describes many things in this book - the tragedy of the circumstances of the native peoples, the experience of a man losing his reason to live and suffering a complete breakdown, the feeling of despair that comes when there is nothing to be done. The simple depth of this story is wonderful - I emphasise that Stow was only about 23 when he wrote this, which takes my breath away.

Stow's skills in descriptive writing are immense - this is a big story in a short book, with description of the physical world and the mental world within concise, but with a limpid clarity that makes you go back to try and work out how he did it.

This is a marvellous book. Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated from the French by Robert Baldice

London: Penguin Books, 1990 (first published in French in 1938, this translation first published 1963)

ISBN 0140181806

My first foray into Sartre, and Sartre's first novel. A novel that I'll mull over for quite some time. A story of angst, a struggle to find the meaning of - or at least some meaning in - life. The claim on the back cover of the edition I read is that this is Sartre's first foray into the ideas and philosophy that became known as existentialism. The novel takes the form of a diary of Antoine Roquentin, who is temporarily residing in Bouville where he is undertaking research into a biography that his is writing of an aristocrat from the Revolutionary era.

Antoine is going through a crisis, through which he is stripping away the layers of his life one-by-one. As the diary moves on he becomes less and less sure of his place in the world, of his views about his fellow man and society more generally, and finally about the physical world itself.

He grapples with these questions via interactions with people in the town, in the cafes, the library and on the street, and with the physical buildings, parks and trees that surround him. What does it mean to be a person - if the present is the only thing that actually exists, how can a human life have a trajectory or meaning (we create ourselves and the world through storytelling).

But what is it that we are telling ourselves? How can we be sure of anything when the past doesn't exist or things are merely things and cannot hold other meanings? "Every existent is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance." The book, and Antoine, seem to be heading to the most nihilistic of endings - Antoine even moves beyond the idea of suicide, as to do the deed is just as meaningless as anything else.

The climax of the diary is Antoine meeting his former girlfriend Anny in Paris. She has come to the same conclusions about life as Antoine, and is resigned to "mere existence". Antoine hopes for some sort of reconciliation, as during the meeting he realises that he has in fact missed her presence, but their meeting concludes with Anny explaining how that part of their life is over. Having long since realised that his book is pointless, Antoine returns to Bouville one last time before moving to Paris, and, in what I see as a deliberate ironical twist, begins to think about writing a different sort of book, a book very similar to the one the reader is reading...

Nausea is, I think, both a product of its time and its author. Sartre's existentialism - Antoine's ennui and disaffection - spring from the trauma of World War One: what is meaning after such slaughter, what meaning can the past have and what does the future look like when the old certainties no longer hold? It is also a young man's book. Many of Antoine's insights are not revelatory to someone older, so I wonder if some of the dramatic impact of the thought in this novel was lost on me. I actually bought this for my eighteen year old son who has an interest in philosophy, so I will be interested in his reaction once he has read it.

As someone who has read quite a bit of modernist fiction, it is interesting that so many different people in Britain and Europe were working with fiction in a similar way at a similar time - it really does reflect a change in how people (middle-class people to be sure) viewed themselves, society, and the world at large. In my opinion Nausea fits into that tradition.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

 Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

London: Jonathan Cape, 1998              ISBN 0224051709

A novel that was not at all what I expected and perhaps an outlier in terms of winners of the Booker Prize. This is the first Ian McEwan book I have read, and for some reason I had in my mind that he was only a writer of serious, "worthy" and dense fiction. Thinking about that I wonder if that's because I formed an opinion entirely from looking at the covers of his books, not to mention the portentous (usually one-word) titles.

So to Amsterdam, with its image of nineteenth-century duellists on the cover of my (second) hardback edition. The first pages of the book, where four lovers of the same woman (Molly) attend her funeral, are indeed portentous. The lovers are: an editor of a London newspaper, a famous composer, the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom and Molly's husband, a publisher.

We soon learn that Vernon (the editor) and Clive (the composer) are friends even if they were rivals at one stage for Molly's affections. We learn that both of them loathe Julian (the Foreign Secretary) both for his politics and the fact that he took Molly away from them. Naturally they feel unkindly toward George (the husband) for officially "winning" Molly, and for refusing them permission to visit during the final days of her illness, which we learn was both physically and mentally degrading.

In the next section of the novel the reader discovers that Vernon is engaged in a battle with his staff to turn around his paper's fortunes - he intends to take it more "downmarket", to the disgust of much of the longstanding staff ("the Grammarians"). Clive meanwhile is working on a commission to write a symphony. Rocked by the manner of Molly's death, Clive asks Vernon if he would see Clive euthanized if he sunk to Molly's level. Vernon agrees, on the proviso that Clive would do the same for him.

Meanwhile George, who happens to have a financial interest in the paper Vernon runs, shows Vernon some pictures Molly had taken, of Julian in drag, which as it turns out is his secret vice.. Vernon realises this is his chance to destroy Julian personally and politically. He goes to Clive for advice and they have a blazing argument - Clive cannot see Julian's point of view at all.

Clive goes to the Lake District to try and get inspiration to finish his symphony all the time brooding over his row with Vernon. While walking, Clive witnesses a man attacking a woman at the very moment he receives the inspiration he needs to finish his symphony. Instead of helping the woman, he chooses to write down his thoughts.

Vernon goes ahead with the plan to publish the photos of Julian, and the pre-publicity begins to turn around the paper's fortunes. A junior staffer comes to him to let him know that much of the staff is in fact behind him but too fearful of the Grammarians to speak out, which fortifies Vernon. However, the day before publication Julian's wife holds a press conference where she reveals the photographs and stands by her husband. Julian has been out-manoeuvred by his junior staff who takes over the paper. Clive sees the paper and is disgusted in Vernon and sends him a postcard stating he should be sacked.

Meanwhile, thinking back to a conversation with Clive about his trip, Vernon realises that Clive had witnessed an attack from a serial rapist, and rings Clive to tell him to go to the police. Clive refuses because he is in the middle of finishing his symphony. Another argument ensues, and Vernon rings the police to let them know Clive was a witness.

These actions destroy the friendship, with both Clive and Vernon (illogically) feeling that the other had sabotaged their careers. It's here the story turns to farce. They both independently determine that the other had gone mad, and so under the terms of their pact it was their duty to euthanize the other.

They meet in Amsterdam, where Clive is rehearsing his symphony (which is a failure because Vernon had sent the police around just as Clive was inspired for a grand finale to the piece, which he never got to complete). Both of them have employed dodgy euthanasia doctors to do each other in, which is duly what happens.

The novel ends with Julian and George escorting the bodies home. While riding out the photograph scandal and staying in parliament, Julian's dreams of becoming Prime Minister are dashed. George has the final lines, relishing his "victory" over the other lovers, and contemplating a memorial service for Molly where his relationship with her takes centre stage.

The story is clearly absurd, yet it is compulsively readable. It starts very much as a novel of middle-class manners and morals, populated by the sort of people you might meet in a book by Le Carre. McEwan has indulged in his love of music and the countryside with the character of Clive - we are treated to many pages of description of composing, and walking through the Lake Country, which well convey the deep sense of joy that can come from those activities. McEwan also has a fine grasp of the particularities of middle-class England which he describes well.

Is there deeper meaning in this book? It's a short book with a strong narrative drive, but it does delve into the meaning of friendship, the moral choices we make, and how we have an endless capacity to deceive ourselves. Vernon thinks he's outsmarting everyone while he's being outsmarted by his junior, Clive starts to think that he is a genius, only for the reader to be told at the end of the novel that his symphony was a pastiche.

The fragility of friendship and our failure to grasp other's point of view are also on display, coming from an impossibility to truly know one another - "[w]e lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white." Ultimately the book centres around the moral choices the characters make - while he takes all this to absurd lengths, he makes his points with sharp painful jabs - the choices make the reader gasp at times.

All that being written, I'm not sure how to take this novel - is it a comment on middle-class morals, is it a comment on being wary of judging other's choices, or is it just a good, darkly humorous, story? It's definitely a page-turner but perhaps, for a Booker winner, a little too lightweight. A good novel, but not a great one.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

 Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

London: Fourth Estate, 2010 (first published 2009)     ISBN 9780007230204

Of course I had heard of Wolf Hall before I had read it, after all, who hasn't? It's my contrarian nature rather than anything else that has led to fifteen years elapsing between the publication of this book and my reading of it. To my detriment, I have an irrational reluctance to read prize-winning novels. As is often the case, it was my wife who led me to read this book, and as is usual I'm glad she did because it's a magnificent book (and dare I say a worthy prize-winner...).

Wolf Hall takes as its subject Thomas Cromwell, his rise to power and his machinations in the Court of Henry the Eighth. Specifically, the book covers the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, the annulment of Kathryn of Aragon's marriage to Henry, the rise of Anne Boleyn, and all that this meant for those in the Henrician Court.

The difficulty that arises when a novelist takes on a historical subject is for them to successfully straddle the lines between historical fact, literary necessity, and narrative flow. In some senses Thomas Cromwell is an excellent subject for such treatment. We know what he did when he was in power, just enough about his early life to weave a good tale, but little enough about his character to enable a good writer to go to town.

And Hilary Mantel is a good writer. I haven't read any of her other works, but if they are all this good I will read them all. She deftly creates a believable milieu for the court not only of Henry, but also of Wolsey, and of Cromwell himself. Her use of language is not too old-fashioned, but nor is it jarringly modern. She can evoke a scene or a character in a few words, or if needed spend pages creating the tension required to move the plot forward. Most of all she creates believable characters not only of Cromwell and those around him, but also of Wolsey, More, Kathryn, Anne and Henry himself.

Cromwell is the "hero" of the book, and is by no means portrayed as the heartless reformer that historical legend has given us to believe. He is a man of much experience, and excellent reader of his fellow man (although perhaps not so much of women), not afraid to send men to their death if required, but preferring to take the path of mercy and pragmatism when he can. He is, in this book, a complete and complex man. Mantel delineates all her characters well, giving the reader an understanding of why they have turned into who they are. Anne Boleyn is a creation of her class-climbing and grasping family; Mary Boleyn is a victim of the same family, used as a tool against her wishes. Henry is a creation not only of his family history, but has also been enabled by Wolsey. Wolsey thought he could control Henry to his own advantage, right up until the moment he couldn't. Cromwell was intelligent and ruthless enough to step in and enable Henry's wishes when no-one else could.

Of course we the reader know the outcome of this saga, but Mantel is adept at portraying the story and history on the move with many possible outcomes, not just the one that came to pass.

Wolf Hall really is a wonderful book on every level. Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

- some quotes from the book that made it into my commonplace book are listed below -

"Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's uncollected sins."

"There it is: if you are so lenient with yourself as to insist on living with a woman, then for the sake of your soul you should make it a woman you really don't like."

"At some point he must have slept. When daylight came, the room felt so empty it was empty even of him."

"He doesn't believe that the dead come back; but that doesn't stop him feeling the brush af their fingertips, wing tips, against his shoulder."

"Flint-face and keen-eyed, he is lean as a gnawed bone and as cold as an axe head."

"His eyes are drawn unwillingly to the cheese; it is pitted and wobbling, like the face of a stable boy after a night out."

"But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to complain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frighten people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires."

"... it's all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it's no good at all if you don't have a plan for tomorrow."

"If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy;"

Book Review - Not After Midnight: Five Long Stories by Daphne du Maurier

 Not After Midnight: Five Long Stories by Daphne du Maurier

London: Victor Gollancz Limited, 1971              ISBN 0575007656

I know my mother was a big fan of Daphne du Maurier's books when I was a child, but as an author she passed me by as I came to adult fiction. She continued to pass me by, until my wife recommend that I read this book, which she enjoyed very much.

A collection of five stories which are too long to be short stories but too short to be novellas, there is a touch of the Tales of the Unexpected about these stories. Du Maurier uses the idea of psychic abilities in a few of the tales, which add to the eeriness and mystery.

The stories are set in various places (Venice, Crete, Ireland, Jerusalem and England), but the protagonists are always middle-class English of the post-war period, with the mannerisms and expectations that come with that.

The stories - apart from the last one, which I'll get to - are very well written, with the reader not knowing what's happening until the end. The characters, in this shorter format sketched rather than fully-formed, are believable and mostly of a type that one recognises quickly. Du Maurier definitely had a skill in mapping out a scenario quickly without it seeming forced.

The only caveat I have about the book is the last story. The premise is too hard to swallow, and the writing seems less.... revised? The characters seem less real, and as a reader you are aware of the structure and machinery of the story much more than when reading the other stories.

All told though, Not After Midnight is very good.

Descriptions of each individual story below -

Don't Look Now

An English couple are on holiday in Venice, trying to recover their equilibrium after the death of their daughter. They run into a couple of old Scottish women, one who is blind and has psychic abilities, who tells the wife that she can see her daughter with them, looking happy. The husband worries that the old women are somehow trying to scam them, as they re-appear in the evening at their restaurant, where they tell the wife that her husband is also psychic, and must not spend another night in Venice. On leaving the restaurant, they get lost and the husband sees what he assumes to be a child running away from an apartment from which they had both heard screaming

The couple return to their hotel where they receive a message that their son, back in England at school, has appendicitis and needs an operation. The wife arranges to fly back to England, while the husband will pick up their car and return via train.

As the husband travels up the Grand Canal on a vaporetto, he sees his wife with the two women on a vaporetto going the other way. Confused, he returns to his hotel, assuming that his wife had missed the plane. She is not there, so the husband goes to the police with his suspicions and initiates a search. While waiting at the police station he overhears that the police are chasing a murderer.

When he rings England to check on his son, he is surprised to hear that his wife is there, and he speaks to her. He then returns to the Police, who have found the Scottish women. The husband apologises profusely, and walks the women back to their pension. On the way they explain that what he had seen in the Vaporetto was a vision of the future.

On his way back to his hotel, which he has booked because he can't make the train, he sees the child, apparently fleeing from a man chasing her. He follows her into a room, where he realises it is not a child but a dwarf, and that the man banging on the locked door is a policeman. As the dwarf throws the knife that pierces his throat, he thinks "what a bloody silly way to die".

Not After Midnight

Our protagonist, a schoolteacher and keen amateur painter, has booked a holiday in Crete to spend time painting. He books a chalet at a seaside resort, finding out that the previous resident of the chalet drowned. He is disgusted by an American couple, the Stolls. Mr. Stoll is a rude drunk, and his wife silent and deaf. He notes that they head off from their chalet every day to go fishing. 

As he travels around the island painting, he notices the Stoll's boat off the coast. As he gets closer he sees that Mrs. Stoll is diving and bringing items up from the seabed, while Mr. Stoll, naked on the shore, engages in a kind of weird dance. After the Stolls leave on the boat, our protagonist goes down to the beach to investigate the hut that Mr. Stoll had been dancing next too - inside he finds empty bottles, and pottery sherds covered in barnacles. The Stolls return, and notice him

Mr. Stoll then contacts our protagonist, and accuses him of being a spy, as was the previous resident of his chalet, which leads our protagonist to wonder what indeed happened to him. Stoll explains that they are diving on a wreck, and offers a relic in exchange for silence. Our protagonist refuses.

Later that night he sees Mrs. Stoll snorkelling outside his chalet. He hides inside, and when he ascertains that she's gone, he goes outside to find she's left him a package, containing a rhyton (a Greek drinking vessel), with an image of "Silenos, earth-born satyr, half-horse, half-man, who unable to distinguish trught from falsehood, reared Dionysys, god of intoxication, as a girl in a Cretan cave, then became his drunken tutor and companion."

Our protagonist has a night filled with nightmares, and in the morning determines to return the rhyton to the Stolls, only to find that they have left the hotel. He determines to return to the site of the shipwreck. Feeling dehydrated, he drinks some barley water he found from the rhyton, and rows out to the shipwreck site, where he sees Mr. Stoll drowned and held down by the anchor of the ship. He looks up and sees Mrs. Stoll and their Greek companion watching him from the cliffs. He realises then that Mr. Stoll was Silenos, and now Mrs. Stoll has decided that our protagonist is to be the new Silenos.

A Border-Line Case

Shelagh Money is in her father's sick-room, when he suddenly calls out to her in horror and dies. She can't understand what it was about her that horrified him so much. During the days that follow, the reader understands that Shelagh is an actress, she doesn't get on with her mother (an attention seeker, Shelagh can't understand what her father saw in her), and truly loved her father.

Going through some old photographs, she focusses on the best man at her father's wedding, Nick, whom she knew her father had a falling out with over him not recommending Nick for a promotion when both were in the Navy. Her father had regretted the loss of contact, and Shelagh determines to find him and see if she can have a post-mortem rapprochement for the sake of her father.

She determines that Nick is now a recluse in Ireland, after suffering a car accident in which he lost an eye. She travels to a remote village, where she discovers that Nick is living on an island in the local Lough. As she explores the area, she is kidnapped by two men and taken to the island. Fearing what might become of her, she invents a story that she is a journalist who has been sent to interview him as a retired naval officer. While in his study she sees her parent's wedding photo, but altered to show Nick as the Husband and her father as the best man, which gets her quite worried. Nick thinks she looks familiar.

Meanwhile, Nick has arranged for her luggage at the local hotel to be transported to the island, where she is forced to stay. The next day Nick shows her an excavation he is undertaking of an ancient Irish burial - he is a recognised expert on them. He takes her for a boat trip on the lake, and Shelagh feels herself falling for him.

When they get back to the island she is left alone while Nick and his workers are having a meeting. After a time he calls her in and confronts her with the fact that he knows she isn't a journalist, and he knows that she had a list of dates that concerned Nick (which she had found in her father's effects). Shelagh changes her story to make it seem she was trying to win a bet.

Nick, with his cronies, then force her to go with them on a boat ride, and then in a van. When they arrive at their destination she is shown explosions in the distance and she realises that Nick is an operative for the IRA. She gets him to talk about her father, and finds out that he was not upset at being passed over for promotion, and that he had a one-night stand with Shelagh's mother. Shelagh is by now hopelessly in love, and is devastated when Nick drops her back at the hotel and leaves.

Shelagh heads back to London, and to her acting, hoping (but failing) to hear from Nick until her opening night as Viola/Cesario, when she gets a letter from him letting her know he's going to America for a time, and asking her to look at the photo enclosed, which solved for Nick the reason why she seemed familiar. It is a photo of Nick playing Viola/Cesario in his youth, and Shelagh realises with horror that not only is she Nick's daughter, but that it was that realisation that killed her father.

The Way of the Cross

We follow a tour group through a night and a day in Jerusalem. Organised by a parish priest who becomes incapacitated and can't go with them - his place taken by another priest, Babcock.

We are introduced to the members of the party one-by-one. Lady Althea and her husband Colonel Mason (who served in Jerusalem with the British Army in 1948) are travelling with their precocious nine year old grandson Robin. The Fosters, a middle-class slightly gauche couple, the Smiths, on their honeymoon, and Miss Dean, an elderly lady of the parish who dotes on her priest and is upset that he can't make the pilgrimage owing to his illness.

Babcock does not want or feels able to guide this group around Jerusalem. At their dinner in the hotel Robin mentions that it is the eve of Passover, and suggests a night-time walk to the Garden of Gethsemane. During the walk Mr. Foster and Mrs. Smith have a dalliance, the Colonel overhears his wife mention that he was not only not fit for promotion in the army, but that he's not much use at anything. Miss Dean overhears that her beloved priest can't stand her attentions. Mr. Smith confides in Babcock that he feels his marriage was a mistake.

The next day they begin to tour the historical sites. The Colonel, at the site where Christ was scourged, is reminded of a boy he tortured in 1948. Mr. Foster has a nasty turn in a crowd, Mrs. Smith is ashamed of what she did the previous night and can't bring herself to go into the churches. Miss Dean falls into the Pool of Bethesda trying to collect some of the water thinking how much her priest would like the gesture.

Lady Althea, a frightful snob, arranges to meet some aristocratic friends who happened to be in Jerusalem, and is desperate to get away from the rest of the group. Eating some bread, she loses both her front teeth just as they turned up - destroying her pride.

Meanwhile Babcock is drawn along by the crowd into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where owing to food poisoning he soils himself. Going to help him, Mr. Smith is separated from Robin.

Robin has a theory of where the true Golgotha was, and navigates himself to that site, unaware that the Smiths had joined forces to search for him.

Eventually all the group are reunited: the Colonel looking after his wife, Mrs. Foster looking after Miss Dean, the Smiths reconciled, and Babcock pondering his shame, reflecting the shaming of Christ during his crucifixion. 

The Breakthrough

Steven is seconded to a mysterious research facility. Gradually he understands that the leader of the group, Mac, is intending to capture life force of someone as they die. He has built several computers that enable him to do so.

He has already tapped into the life force of the living, being able to communicate with a dog, and a retarded girl Niki, who is a surviving twin (so her life force is doubled). He has linked her hypnotically to Ken, who has leukemia and is the guinea pig who's life force will be collected when he dies - Mac hopes that Niki will be able to communicate with the life force of Ken after her goes.

Mac succeeds in capture Ken's life force as he dies, but disturbingly Niki has a very bad reaction, and keeps asking Mac to "let me go". At the same time some government inspectors turn up, tipped off that something funny was going on. Mac decides to pull the pin and release Ken's life force.

Steve is left wondering what might have been.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A Sicilian Man by Caroline Moorehead

 A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy's Soul

by Caroline Moorehead    London: Chatto & Windus, 2026      ISBN 9781784745042

I have read a few books by Sciascia, and have found his allusive and cryptic style very appealing. His fictional chronicling of the truths of a Sicily dominated by the Mafia led him to become in some senses the conscience of decent Italians, in opposition to the forces that led the country into financial, political and moral corruption.

In this easy to read and well-written book, Caroline Moorehead traces Sciascia's life, both public and private, along with the development, growth and exposure - via the activities of some brave people - of the Mafia in Sicily and beyond.

Sciascia was a man of Sicily and so not only understood the Mafia mindset, but shared in it. A quiet and observant child, Sciascia closely watched the world around him in Racalmuto: listening to the gossip of his aunts, observing how residents interacted with each other, and the glaring inequality that was exacerbated by the control the Mafia had over society.

Moorehead explains how Sciascia's left-wing views were formed by these early experiences, as well as through the anti-fascist views of his family, and witnessing at first hand the lives of the sulphur miners of his local area both as a teacher of their children and through his father's work as a mine accountant.

Sciascia's time as a teacher was hard for him. He tried but mostly failed to instil a love of literature and the Enlightenment into his pupils, many of whom were going hungry because their parents could not afford to feed and clothe their children. Sciascia had always had the desire to be a writer, and his first major foray into literature, The Day of the Owl, set the tone for his early career. A story where a "man alone" works against society and the State in the pursuit of justice, only to be thwarted.

Sciascia's stories exposed the rotten heart of the Italian State, where corruption ruled, and nothing positive was ever achieved for the people of the country. Sciascia spent some time in political office, both in Sicily and in Rome, and on both occasions his terms ended with him fearing that Italy in many respects was a failed state, with the apparatus of government only there to support those with their snouts in the trough, whether that was the politicians themselves, businessmen, or the all-pervasive Mafia.

Sciascia, through his fiction, came to be seen as an expert on the Mafia. He became a kind of Twentieth Century Italian Cassandra: all of his predictions came true, but no-one ever believed his prophecies. Moorehead tracks the public Sciascia's feuds and polemics, mostly run and delivered through newspaper articles - she does this well, with enough information to put them in context for the English  language reader.

She does likewise with her tale of the Mafia through Sciascia's life. From the crackdown during the Fascist years, to the accommodation with the Americans during the War, also explaining how it managed to intertwine itself with the government and the Christian Democrats, Moorehead lays out how the Mafia did everything Sciascia said it would do, how it, rather than the government, police or judiciary became the "truth" in Sicily.

She tracks Sciascia's views of the progression of the Maxi-trial, which finished just before his death, and how the aftermath fulfilled the prophecies of a man who by the end of his life had become very pessimistic about whether Sicily could ever drag itself out of it's predicament. As he famously stated he could neither live in Sicily or outside of it.

About Sciascia's personal life, Moorehead does not say much - perhaps because there is not much to say. He was happily married with two daughters, and a wife who was his helpmate and to whom he was devoted. He was a great friend and a great enemy in that true Sicilian way - if he felt betrayed by any of his friends he cut them off completely. For someone who was famously taciturn he was much valued as a friend to spend time with, enjoying wandering through art galleries or antiquarian booksellers, or sitting around a table at a publishers or newspaper office. Many of his best friends were artists - he seemed to enjoy their company more than his fellow novelists.

The idea behind Moorehead's book is a clever one: a slightly different take on the Mafia to many, and a decent biography of one of the best Italian writers of the Twentieth Century. It didn't quite reach the heights for which I was hoping, but it is informative and interesting.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A Dream More Luminous than Love by Rodney Hall

 A Dream More Luminous than Love by Rodney Hall

Sydney: Picador Australia, 1994                                   ISBN 0330274910

(The Second Bridegroom first published 1991, The Grisly Wife first published 1993, Captivity Captive first published 1988)

Every time I read Rodney Hall I am reminded how good a writer he is - whether it's his poetry, or the novels I've read over the years, his descriptive power and skilful narrative style has sucked me into a different and challenging world, that stays with me long after I've put down the text.

A Dream More Luminous than Love is a collection of three novels (The Second Bridegroom, The Grisly Wife, and Captivity Captive) that cover over a hundred years of white settlement at the fictional Yandilli, on the South Coast of New South Wales. While each novel is of a piece (in fact Hall wrote the third part of the trilogy before the first, and the second after the other two), as a collective they trace the settlement of Australia, the dispossession of the natives, and the development of a particular type of Australian character, born from the origins of the settlers and the vicissitudes of the country they found themselves in.

Which brings me to the issue of reviewing this work - three separate stories, yet linked through time, and more especially, place. I've decided to write some general comments on the trilogy, and then append separate reviews of each book at the end of the general comments.

Taken as a whole, I think A Dream More Luminous than Love looks at a few themes. The (changing) European reaction to Australia runs through each book. Escaping into the bush in The Second Bridegroom, the forger takes the country and the indigenous inhabitants as they come, adapting himself as far as possible to the country, rather than trying to adapt the country to himself, as the Atholls are attempting. In The Grisly Wife we see the land and Aboriginals becoming more peripheral to the story - Muley, Catherine and the disciples arrive determined to make a mark on society with their beliefs, but instead turn inward, owing to the noticeable "Australian" culture that was beginning to form in the 1800s. While the naked bush is still feared, the "naked savage" is more a curiosity than a threat. In Captivity Captive, it is clear that the general thought is that the land is there to be won for human use (although Nature in the form of drought still has something to say about that), the original inhabitants are now merely stock background for fairground photographs and completely excluded from life, which has become an Australian shadow of Europe's clans and religions.

The Forger, Muley and his disciples, and the Malone family are all outsiders in the societies they inhabit. All of them learn to rely on their own devices to make their way in the world. While the forger is mostly alone, the group dynamics of both the disciples and the Malones are investigated fully, and Hall comes to some disturbing conclusions about how we humans exercise control over others, and use what powers we have to wound our brothers and sisters. While there is little that is truly evil in these novels, there is precious little that is good, and those who are thoughtful and introspective are the ones that are in the most danger from the others, especially because perceptions of others can be wrong.

The dangers of love run through each book as well - driving people mad, driving them to murder, and consuming lives, misguided love destroys every protagonist in these books - the forger, Catherine Byrne and Patrick Malone all have their lives destroyed by loving when they shouldn't. It is not good to be alive in these times, whether it be as a convict on the run in the early 1800s, part of a religious cult in the mid 1800s, or the son of a harsh father on a small selection in the late 1800s. Australia may have been a land of opportunity, but it was not for those people that populate these novels.

A Dream More Luminous than Love, taken as a whole, is a wonderfully well-written trilogy of novels about time, place, and human desire - well worth reading.

Reviews of each part  follow -

______________________________________________________________________

The Second Bridegroom (part 1 of the Yandilli trilogy), deals with the early settlement of New South Wales. We follow the story of a convict (a forger from the Isle of Man) who is assigned to Mr. Atholl and shipped to southern New South Wales to assist in carving out a selection from the virgin bush. The forger, taking his chance, escapes, only to by "captured" by the local Aboriginals, who treat him as some sort of king or god - waiting on him hand and foot, but not allowing him freedom. We are given descriptions of the country, and memories from the forger's youth -  his father's execution for smuggling, the history of the Isle of Man, especially the Celtic legend of the Queen who took a summer bridegroom (a horse) and a Winter bridegroom (a goat), one having to kill the other to take on the mantle.

Eventually our forger is brought back by the Clan to the (now much improved) settlement. He breaks a tribal taboo by seeing one of the women, so she must be killed. That night the Aboriginals attack the settlement and burn it to the ground, spearing Mr. Atholl who in the melee attacks and tries to kill the forger, but he escapes back to the bush.

Here he runs into another convict Dean, whom the forger thought he had killed on the boat journey from Sydney to Yandilli, and who now seems to have some sort of brain damage owing to the forger's attempt to suffocate him for being overly brutal. Dean leads him back to the settlement where the forger is locked into a storeroom. It is then we realise that the story we have been reading is because the forger spends his time while locked in that room writing a series of letters to Mrs. Atholl, whom he is convinced orchestrated the attack on the settlement, shot and killed her husband so that the forger and her can be together (he sees himself as the second bridegroom of the legend).

The final pages of the novel consist of a letter from Mrs. Atholl to the newly installed Governer Gipps asking for troops to be sent down from Sydney to find the forger, who has once more escaped. In the course of the letter we realise that, far from being the romantic figure the forger perceives her to be, Mrs. Atholl is a stern taskmistress, driven to succeed, and a far harder person than her husband ever was. She wishes the forger to be caught and hanged, and if the Aboriginal tribe that harboured him is "taught a lesson" in the process, so much the better. 

Hall uses the forger's story to meditate on what is genuine and who gets the right to decide in the world, and can things actually be "discovered" in the sense that was used in the early 1800s, as well as brilliantly exposing the dislocation felt by the early white settlers to this country.

____________________________________________________________________

The Grisly Wife (part 2 of the Yandilli trilogy) sees Hall move the date forward, but the place remains the same. The Grisly Wife is not a story of convicts and first contact, but more a story of belief, power, and trying to adapt to a foreign land.

This book was written to connect the two part of the trilogy that Hall had already written, and so there are some slight plot twists to ensure the connections are made which don't detract from the story.

And the story if of Catherine Byrne, daughter of a vicar in Stroud, who get married to a bootmaker and iterant preacher: they, with their "disciples" (all women), sail to Australia and make their way to Yandilli, where Catherine was hoping they would begin to convert the heathen natives to Christianity. Her husband, who has taken the name Muley Moloch in penitence for his sins, has different ideas. Catherine and the rest of the women see Muley as a prophet (Catherine firmly believes she saw him levitate on the day she met him) and he takes firm control of the group via the standard cultish methods of self and group criticism sessions, and blaming any setbacks on the sin of the members. After a short time in Yandilli itself (where they are shunned, and we learn incidentally that Mrs. Atholl did indeed murder her husband, and was hanged for it), Catherine drives Muley to purchase land in the bush where they can set up a commune.

Catherine suffers from Tuberculosis but recovers, unlike most of the other women, who die in turn through the course of the novel. While Muley is away finalizing the purchase of their land Catherine realises she is pregnant, but doesn't understand how it happened. She wishes for Muley to die so she doesn't have to confront him with this inconvenient fact, and indeed the steamer he returns on is wrecked just off Yandilli, but Muley survives, and seemingly brings a young woman back to life after she had drowned - another miracle? This woman, Louisa, turns out to be a new disciple. She names Catherine "the grisly wife" in an attempt to get Muley to shun her.

Catherine reveals her pregnancy, only to have the sect decide that she is carrying the returning Saviour. Muley arranges for the birth to be photographed. Immanuel, the child that ensues is unruly, and eventually flees the compound. In their search for him, Muley shoots and kills the forger from The Second Bridegroom, whom Immanuel was living with in the bush. Immanuel flees again (eventually writing to his mother from England, where he has connected with her family).

In the washup from this tragedy, Muley reveals that he had in fact raped his wife when she was insensible during her illness so the child is mortal after all, and Muley is merely John Heaps, bootmaker. The commune dies with this revelation, and over time the only members left are Catherine and Louisa, who have made peace with each other, and John, having returned from "exile" as their manservant.

As the story moves along, the reader understands that not only is Catherine narrating this story to a listener, but that listener is in fact the local police sergeant, who is investigating a murder. Catherine has assumed that he has found out about the death of the forger, but the police are looking for clues to help solve the murders that form the heart of the story for the third book of this trilogy.

The Grisly Wife moves the story of settlement on from The Second Bridegroom: the characters arrived in Australia by choice, not as over-awed by finding themselves in an alien land, and determined to live their own life rather than have their life dictated by the country (Muley's determination to have a lawn being the evidence of that). The Atholls and their kind have won - the forger is defeated, the natives have retreated and are only peripheral to the activities of the settlers, and convicts are fading from history as well.

This is more a story of love, jealousy, belief and disappointment. Hardship is a given - although not presented as such in the novel, the degradation of the women from genteel lives in England to hard scrabble in the dirt of New South Wales comes through in each page. The "disciples" distinctions of class and feeling rapidly become meaningless when faced with the realities of living and dying in the Australia of the mid 1800s

The thought of Yandilli being a cursed place is one that begins to form in the reader's mind as well reading the books back-to-back, a thought that will only become stronger as we move onto the last book of the trilogy.

____________________________________________________________________

Captivity Captive (part 3 of the Yandilli Trilogy) is a book I have read before. It uses as its base a real historical event, the Gatton Murders, which Hall has moved to Yandilli and tampered with to fit his fictional requirements. It is in part detective story, family saga, disquisition on life and love, but mostly a tale of increasing horror at what man is capable of.

Like the other books in the trilogy, this is a tale told through the eyes of one man - Patrick Malone - one of ten children who live at "Paradise" outside Yandilli, a small holding cut out of the bush by Patrick's  grandfather and enlarged by his father, a huge dominant man who accepts no rivals to his power over the family, beating Patrick's brother William so hard that he damaged his brain.

The book revolves around the murder of two of Patrick's sisters, Norah and Ellen, and one of his brothers, Michael. They are found beaten to death, with the girls also having been raped, and no one was ever charged with the deaths.

The book begins with a death-bed confession of Barney Barnett to the murders, which is not credible. Patrick, William and Jeremiah - the surviving Malones - are at his deathbed, and so Patrick decides to write the story of what really happened, fifty years after the events, himself an old man. 

The story is strange and brutal. Each of the ten Malone children is different. William was beaten because he wanted to get away. Michael is beaten because he wants to have fun. Norah is mother hen to the rest of the children. Ellen is the amoral watcher of everything. Jeremiah is inheritor of his father's world.... each of them live in fear of both their father and mother, who dominate them physically and mentally. They are outsiders from society, not mixing with others, and proud of their self-sufficiency. Their world is one of work, a private world only understood by other members of the family.

In The Grisly Wife the Protestant "disciples" felt the wrath of the mainly Catholic population of Yandilli, but in Captivity Captive we are drawn into the world of Irish Catholicism in Australia, the clannishness and connection to Irish nationalism being a more dominant feeling than any particular feeling of being "Australian". The story is set during the time when Australia was moving toward Federation, but that is clearly of no importance to the protagonists.

Morality is key to this novel. Christian morality certainly, but Malone morality particularly. With no real interactions with the outside world, the residents of "Paradise" interact with each other, and grow close - too close in the case of Patrick, Michael, Norah and Ellen.

Patrick and Michael think it is love, and on that tragic night they consummated it. In a dream-like narrative nothing is fully clear, but it seems that Norah particularly doesn't see it that way. She shoots Michael - Barney, while not guilty of the whole tragedy, bludgeons Ellen to death, having witnessed his fiance with Michael. William, who has witnessed the whole thing, bludgeons Norah, after she explains she has been raped by Patrick. William initially was looking to kill Patrick, but, in his simple-minded way understood that it was Norah who wished death, even though Patrick voiced his own wish to die.

Patrick cleans up the site, so that Norah can die blameless for the murder of Michael. He and William continue to live on at Paradise, with the ghost of their father, keeping the history to themselves, until Patrick decides to set it down.

This a short book, but the themes are complex - belief, control, love, belonging - the meaning of life in fact. 

A great book!

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Wings of the Kite-Hawk by Nicolas Rothwell

 Wings of the Kite-Hawk: a Journey into the Heart of Australia by Nicolas Rothwell

Melbourne: Black Inc., 2009* (first published 2003)               ISBN 9781863954457

Recently, in a book of essays by Tim Parks, I read of his contention that all great literature is trying to come to terms with death, and that all great writers tend to return to one great over-arching theme throughout their works, however varied they may seem to be on the surface.

If that is the case, then Wings of the Kite-Hawk is great literature, and Nicolas Rothwell is a great writer. Many years ago I read his book Quicksilver and felt I didn't really grasp what he was getting at, but after reading Wings of the Kite-Hawk I feel that I have moved closer to what Rothwell is trying to express in his writing.

Rothwell enters the desert country of Australia on a search for meaning: "... the desert always gives those who search in its emptiness the dream, at least, of their desires." Rothwell's dream is to reconcile his life with the never changing rhythms of the desert. He wishes the desert to enter him (as all those who have spent time there wish).

Particularly, as an emigrant to Australia, he tries to find his way into the country through his fellow emigrants, the explorers. Through long meditations on the lives and explorations of Leichhardt, Sturt, Strehlow and Giles, Rothwell muses on life, on dreams of success and the reality of failure, and on the certainty of death - "[y]ou're much closer to death out here than in the city; you can feel it bending humanity to its will." 

The four explorers Rothwell chooses to focus on had a desire for death haunting their lives: Leichhardt, that strange visionary who has haunted the minds of white Australia for over a century and a half, actually did meet his demise in the back country - a demise that one feels he was actively seeking.

Sturt's voyage to the Inland Sea - a romantic folly that ennobled those that undertook it - was a doomed voyage that seemed made for the times. What was Sturt seeking? It surely wasn't an actual sea, which it seems he knew wasn't there: in leaving his wife and child, what was he doing? Rothwell speculates - "[w]here was he bound? Like every noble or beautiful thing, to the kingdom of death - that kingdom he longed to see with his own eyes, to endure, and to return from, with golden words upon his lips." He of course did return, unsuccessful, and with no golden words for recompense.

Strehlow was an explorer of culture rather than land, famously working his way through the traditions of the Aranda people. He eventually saw himself as the keeper of their traditions and (in)famously collected and photographed many sacred objects and events. He spent his life amongst the Aranda, but in the end completely failed to understand the culture he felt he was a part of. Rothwell describes in his recollection of the sale of the Strehlow Collection how Strehlow's efforts to preserve a people and their culture led only to fracture and decay. 

Rothwell himself as represented in Wings of the Kite-Hawk mainly interacts with white residents of the Outback, all the while understanding that it is the Aboriginal people who fully understand the country and its dreaming. In the cast of characters that cross his path, it is those who have absorbed some of the ancient learning that connect most with the spirit of the country which, for Rothwell, is embodied in the Kite-Hawk.

These birds permeate the story of Rothwell's journey: from being a sign of good fortune to a presager of death when his colleague Esterline hits and kills a Kite-Hawk with his car and bewails the bird's and his own demise (when he perished in the desert soon after killing the bird).

I think it is in the story of Giles that Rothwell finds a character most in tune with his own quest. Late to the country, Giles never gets to make a discovery that others would recognise as great or useful "...for in its last phases exploration, like life, becomes a retreat, a silence, a turning in."

In the end, despite his hopes, Rothwell does not find the answer to his quest in the lives and deaths of the explorers as he had hoped. Like him, they traversed across the country rather than into it. It is rather the encounters that Rothwell has on his journeys with those that have embedded themselves into the desert that show him the way. Enlightenment and peace will come if you let them, but not if you chase them.

A deservedly praised book: history, philosophy and a life-lesson. Highly recommended.

* The 2009 edition of this book has new foreword by Pico Iyer and preface by Rothwell that both shed light on what Rothwell was hoping to achieve with this book

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A Woman of the Future by David Ireland

 A Woman of the Future by David Ireland

Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books Australia, 1980 (1984 printing) (first published in USA 1979)

ISBN 0140056572

What a strange book. A bildungsroman with a difference for sure. I've been meaning to read some David Ireland for a while - I have had this book, as well as The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and The Chosen floating around my house for years , but when the urge to read Ireland finally overwhelmed me, it was A Woman of the Future that first came to hand.

A Woman of the Future is the story of Alethea Hunt, told by herself through a collection of notes, poems and anecdotes which she collected before her disappearance (this is explained in an "editor's note" at the beginning of the book).

This collection describes Alethea's life in an Australia set in the future, where most things are familiar, but some things are decidedly strange. For example some people have things growing out of their bodies - sheets of paper, a cannon, a coffin, flowers, etc. If this happens  it means the person is ineligible to join the class of Servants - those who have jobs, run society, and see themselves as superior to the Free, who don't have to work, but if they do it is at menial tasks. The Servants refer to the Free colloquially as "Ids" - short for idiots.

Alethea seems destined for greatness - that's what everyone around her thinks. As she progresses through her schooling she is consistently good at everything, and enjoys her superiority. She is particularly pleased to be better than the males she encounters, either physically or mentally.

Which brings me to a big paradox in this book - Alethea succumbing to the ubiquitous sexual exploitation that occurs throughout. She is raped, bought and sold by boys, and seems to have sex with anyone who desires her (which is everyone). She does this initially to see what sex is: what it is in that contact that gives men the power to control women and society in general. She soon realises that the act is more a release for the man rather than the women (except occasionally), and that it is women who have power over men in the sexual sphere. Alethea eventually develops a kind of disgust toward men, yet still submits to their desires.

Her search for greater truth leads her to contemplate her country. The absurdity of people worshipping 200 year-old artefacts in a country with tens of thousands of years of human habitation. The abiding mystery at the "dead heart" of the continent. The sneering of Europeans at the lack of culture in Australia when, as Alethea points out, European culture doesn't extend much beyond great cities even in Europe.

As she matures she begins to realise that what she is seeking is not only greatness, but love - to love and be loved. Her sexual adventures become a search for love, but all she finds in men is lust and possessiveness, except for her father, the one sympathetic figure in the book. He loves Alethea fully and unconditionally, as he does Alethea's mother, his wife.

Alethea's mother is a figure aloof, watchful, always writing notes (for what purpose we are not told). In the characters of Alethea's parents, the message that it is women that are superior seems to be reinforced, even though it is Alethea's father who does all the work in the family, both financial and domestic. He often questions his life choices, but always encourages Alethea to achieve the greatness that he believes she has.

As the book progresses, the time of the examination which decides whether one is a Servant or Free approaches. Alethea wonders how those that "fail" reconcile themselves to that fact, even though she strongly believes that the intelligent should be superior to the average (the fact that there are awards for sports and music but none for academic achievement is often an irritant for Alethea as she is growing up).

In the last few pages, Alethea realises that she is changing: not like others, but fully transforming. She leaves home, and the last page of the book (another "editor's note") informs us that she has disappeared, possibly transformed into a leopard.

As I stated at the beginning of this review, this is a very strange book, and while there are definite themes, I'm not sure I've grasped them all or fully understood those that I have recognised. One of the main themes is the relationship between men and women. The graphic nature of the sex scenes certainly has shock value, but I think it goes to show that this thing which seems to have such power is nothing more than a messy effluxion of fluids that is at heart meaningless. The power women have over men, emotionally and spiritually, and their failure to use that power, is noticeable throughout the novel. Alethea discovers her power, and it's not only sexual in her case: but she can't bring herself to exercise it. In the end she finds that she can't be bother with males at all.

Love is at the heart of the novel. Alethea is constantly dissecting her parent's affection for her and each other. She accepts her father's love as a given, and wonders whether her mother has lost the ability to love. Alethea wonders whether she can love - her sexual exploits are an attempt to find love as she tries to decipher whether boy's professions of love are more than mere attempts to gain sexual favours. She develops a theory that women only love men after the men have professed love for them. By the end of the book she is coming to the realization  that she would trade greatness for love - is that the weakness of women, when men think they can have both?

A Women of the Future won both the Miles Franklin and Age Book of the Year awards when it was published (despite one of the Miles Franklin judges describing the book as "literary sewage"). I did wonder if this book was written with prize-winning in mind: it has a sniff at times of confected-ness in its shock value and literary depth.

It is worth spending a little more space on the style Ireland has used. As mentioned earlier, the book is constructed in a series of short (mostly less than a page) vignettes: either notes, extracts from school assignments, or poems. The "editor's note" mentions that they may not be in chronological order, but the story begins at Alethea's birth, which she describes as if she can remember it, as she does her earlier years; but all written in the same style (no indication in the writing of a developing intellect - she has emerged fully-formed).

The episodic nature of the writing means the reader takes a while to piece together Alethea's world and the strange-but-familiar world of Ireland's future Australia, but once the reader enters and orients themself, they get carried along with the flow of Alethea's experiences and thoughts, joining her in trying to decipher the world and people around her.

I'm still deciding whether I actually enjoyed A Woman of the Future. Self-consciously not a "standard" novel, I'm not sure whether the style chosen is as effective as it could be. David Ireland was seen as a major Australian novelist in the 1970s, mentioned in the same breath as Patrick White. He has since faded from the scene, and it's not clear that his works will last in the long term (although Text Classics re-published his major works 10-15 years ago). It's also not clear to me  whether, based on my experience reading A Woman of the Future, I will read any more David Ireland.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Pen in Hand by Tim Parks

 Pen in Hand: Reading, Rereading and other Mysteries by Tim Parks

Richmond, UK: Alma Books, 2019                  ISBN 9781846884573

I've always enjoyed the writing of Tim Parks - I first ran into his work in The New York Review of Books, so I have read a couple of the essays in this collection before. Worth re-reading.

Divided into a few thematically-based sections, Parks covers how one should read, what makes good writing, what makes literature genuine, and why translation is important.

Parks treats literature seriously, and expects others to do the same, which comes out in many of these essays. Yes we are all different and will have different reactions to a particular book, but we should read attentively, and think about why we read.

Authors too need to think clearly about not only what they are writing, but why they are writing.

Translators need to think carefully about the context of their translation - words and style.

These are just a few of the points made in this collection.

See below for notes on each individual essay.

Foreword - Read with pen-in-hand. Don't be afraid of annotation, good or bad. Go back to your annotations and re-annotate - you then can track your changing views.

Section 1. - How Could you Like that Book?

How could you like that book? - Musing on how we are so different in which books we like - not surprising because we are all different and so we should like different books. Reactions to books are individual, writing is individual, and that's fine. 

"It's curious, for example, that the pious rhetoric gusting around literature always promotes the writing and reading habit as a powerful communication tool, an instrument for breaking down barriers, promoting understanding - and yet it is exactly over my reaction to books that I tend to discover how completely out of sync with others I am."

Reading is forgetting - Takes issue with Nabokov and Flaubert's view that one needs to re-read to fully understand a book. Posits that re-reading is reading a different book, as a different person. 

"Does this throw any light on the business of reading? Well, one has to wonder about Nabokov's enthusiasm for re-reading. Is it really a gradual and always positive accumulation of greater and greater control and retention, or is it rather a precarious process in which each new engagement with the text cancels and alters earlier ones?"

"The purpose of reading is not to pass some final judgement on the text, but to engage with what it has to offer to me now."

The key to re-reading - Continuing to engage with Nabokov's views and Manzotti, discusses the "key" that unlocks a book, how a reader needs to "learn" how to do that, especially with modernist writes such as Woolf. Finishes with Beckett's Watt, which goes to what perception or understanding even means.

Why read new books? - Why would we read new books when we don't know if they are good? That's the point perhaps - no received body of opinion. Also we can react because we are in the same point of history. Modern novels reflect our lives. Bags The Leopard as a pastiche.

The pleasures of pessimism - Why do we like pessimistic books? Pessimism is perhaps the only logical response to the world. Difference between bad endings due to circumstance in the story vs. the fact that life itself is pessimistic. Can't stage it. Cioran, Beckett.

Stories we can't see - Discusses Peter Mendelsund's book. What we see when we read Mendelsund posits that reading is done via images. Parks argues that anything visual is constructed by words - the words connect our experience to the work of the author. Words are what creates any image, and words can evoke an image much better than they can smells or sounds.

The books we don't understand - Why we don't "get" books - we don't understand where the author is coming from. Perhaps these books can open our eyes to something we didn't fully understand previously - which is why we can go back to a book and enjoy it after not liking it first time. 

"Could the book that initially seems plain wrong to us be precisely the one that allows us to understand something new about other people?"

Bob Dylan: the music travels, the poetry stays home - Dig at Nobel Prize - how can a group of Swedes understand different cultures. Sadness of writers trying to win. Bob Dylan - all the world knows his music but who gets the full meaning of his words? Ultimately a work of art is tied to its culture and setting, and it's very hard for others to fully grasp its significance.

"...a poem in translation is not, or only rarely, the real thing. More a shadow, a pointer, a savouring of impossibility."

Italy: writing to belong - Question - does writing reflect a place? Example - Italy, where belonging to a group is a very important part of life (faction, family etc.). Do writers reflect this? Parks makes an interesting point that many Italian writers have been exiles from their groups. Successful writers very much tend to align themselves politically with a group - write for newspapers etc. Exile and exclusion are a punishment. Ginzburg, Morante and Pavese as examples of using group dynamics in their work. Dante and Machiavelli as examples of exiles trying to use their writing to return to their groups.

Clearing of ambiguity - Why does fiction get praise for being ambiguous? Other things in life demand clarity. Ambiguity is part of life. Bateson's view that art strives to escape the rational and activate other parts of the brain. Lawrence states that the novelist tries to encapsulate all, and therefore ambiguity. Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity discusses how it is used - some use it out of laziness, so it behoves the critic to avoid using the term perfunctorily, but to be precise about ambiguity's nature and implications.

The writer's shadow - We can get a sense of what a writer is like if we read closely enough. Parks tries to tell what an author is like from what is important in their fiction. J.M. Coetzee an example - Parks found him to be just like he imagined.

Too many books? - How do we know what to read in a sea of print? Not a new problem. Alexander Pope commented on it. When paper was scarce and works had to be copied people wrote for prosperity rather than fame, and anonymously was OK because there was no money in it. 1710 Queen Anne introduced first copyright and enabled the infrastructure of today (critics, translators et. al.). Authors looking for a best-seller. How to respond? "With cheerful scepticism."

Reality fiction - Fiction reveals concerns of those writing it - vide Dickens. A way of writing about taboo subjects in the past. Now the taboos have fallen away, people can be more directly personal - vide Coetzee. More fiction about real people - Lodge and others. Is fiction changing?

6 chairs in search of an audience - The avant-garde in theatre. Can leave a film or a book easily, it's a personal thing - leaving a performance much bigger statement as actors are aware of you leaving.

Looking for Primo Levi - Investigation of Levi's life - his books weren't all that they seemed. How to reconcile his life with his works.

Section 2. - Reading and Writing

How I read - Using examples - what is important to the author - what is his relation to the characters and to the reader. Is the premise valid, or has it been constructed just to produce literature?

In search of authenticity - How can we tell if an author's work is authentic? They tend toward the same themes - "This is how I construe authenticity: however many ways the author reworks his material, it is recognisably his."

Do flashbacks work in literature? - Colm Toibin at Hay-on-Wye saying flashbacks are lazy. Parks working on his own novel and "needs" a flashback. What purpose do they serve and how that purpose can be achieved in other ways.

Reading - the struggle - Modern tech incursions on reading time - harder to engage in "old-school" literary fiction therefore style will change.

"I will go out on a limb with a prediction: the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take some time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declaiming rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable."

Reading upward - The trope "at least they are reading something" - does that lead to an interest in literature? Probably not - they scratch different itches. Example of Auden and detective fiction. Does it matter? Probably not.

How Italy improved my English - Personal on living in Italy writing English - how living in another language focusses your attention on your own - catching sensibilities and turning them into words.

How best to read auto-fiction - Parks accused of auto-fiction. Using Roth and Tolstoy, explores the issue. Use of self, but self doing things the "real" self wouldn't do. Not a problem - many great writers do that. Don't need to know the biography to enjoy the fiction.

Why write in English? - Why do writers change language? Can be forced, can be for money - some change to more common language because they want their message to be more widely heard but that often fails - tied to culture.

Section 3. Malpractice

A novel kind of conformity - A combination of copyright, the internet and obsession with sales drives conformity and lack of risk in writing. Trying to repeat success. How to avoid the trap? Have another source of income. Don't show your work until completed.

Pretty violence - Book War is Beautiful excoriating NYT for glamorizing war via photos. Essay about how literature has always done that even when trying to deprecate it - Charge of the Light Brigade. Started with Homer - as Malaparte "suggests in his masterpiece Kaputt, the very intensity of war, the emotions it arouses and the acts of cruelty and self-sacrifice it prompts make it impossible for us not to find art in it."

Leave novelist out of fiction - The danger of writing a book about a novelist: comparison to the original, reader getting lost if they don't know the subject's works. Jo Baker's novel about Beckett - bad idea, poorly handled - no real insight into his mind or work. 

"We should read our great authors, not mythologize them."

The limits of satire - Looking at Charlie Hebdo - what is the definition of satire? In a global world can satire work? One man's satire is another's taboo - if it doesn't serve a purpose what's the point? Swift's Modest Proposal as an example.

Stifled by success - Success changes the writer - tries to repeat the formula or consciously rejects and tries something new.

"But whatever the exact psychology of the process, the present has a way of contaminating the past."

The books we talk about (and those we don't) - Why does a book get talked about? Dealing with an issue of interest. Early times serialized therefore most read it and became a topic of discussion. That has dwindled with the choices we have now (TV, Film etc.). Luck is possibly a factor.

References, please - A gripe about having to spend three days preparing footnotes in this age of Google search.

Raise your hand if you've read Knausgaard - Conflation of sales with merit - but over-hyping actual sales. Lines blurred between literary and non-literary writing therefore sales becoming the only metric cared about. A plea to make sales figures more transparent.

My life, their archive - Literary archives. Authors now getting offers before they die. How does that change the way they correspond?

Book fair hype - Musings on being invited to a book fair - globalization of themes, loses specificity of place. Global debate on issues, not about writing per se. Only writers engaging with current Liberal world project get a seat at the table.

After Brexit - Parks invited with other writers to discuss effect of Brexit on British Literature. Question of why assumption is that it would be bad. Goes on to talk about conflict actually driving literature.

"Like the jackal, the writer feeds on corpses."

God's smuggler - Compulsion of writers to adopt political stances. 

"Coetzee complained that novelists were 'a tribe threatened with colonization' by those who would have them 'address what are called problems and issues.' "

Section 4. Gained and Lost in Translation

In the tumult of translation - Looks at Woolf's translation of Levi and discusses choices made. Difficulty of getting the timbre right.

A long way from Primo Levi - Contrasts translations of sections of If This is a Man - Woolf, Goldstein, and Parks. Uses it to explain how a good translator needs to "live and think" in the language. Need to revise and have a good editor.

The translation paradox - Works of Primo Levi and Leopardi - group of translators, ranging from good to bad. Translators generally praised because original work is popular - best translators often work on more obscure dense works. Do people know if they have a good translation? Do they care?

Raw and cooked - Investigation of Man Booker International Prize and Han Kang's The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith. When you don't know the original language, how can you judge the translation? Are all the infelicities in this book the author's or the translator's? Parks wonders if it won because it fits all the tropes of what an international prize should be.

When not to translate - Updated translations are sometimes good, but sometimes not an improvement on what went before. Parks declined an offer to translate The Decameron because he couldn't add anything to past efforts. Important to find "the right translator for the first translation of a literary work, one who has a genuine affinity for the style of the original."

A no-nonsense Machiavelli - Parks turned down The Decameron but did translate The Prince. Why? Because he could bring it up to date, and reveal more of Machiavelli by removing some of the pre-judice from earlier translations as well as clearing up the meaning.

The expendable translator - Discusses whether a translator is a "co-author" and should get royalties. Translation is a skill, but works with a known, unlike an author, who creates from nothing. Issue of royalties - mixed bag because of popularity of original work, which is not necessarily tied to the translation. Parks' view that author, publisher and translator meet to determine a fair recompense.

Gained in translation - What sensibilities should be brought to translation of literature? The words, but also the style. Therefore the translator has to be aware of the words and the style of the original text, and their knowledge and experience of culture of both languages.

Does literature help us live? - What is the purpose of literature - struggling self or selves..."Works of [literary] genius" Leopardi observed "have this intrinsic quality, that even when they capture exactly the nothingness of things, or vividly reveal and make us feel life's inevitable unhappiness, or express the most acute hopelessness... they are always a source of consolation and renewed enthusiasm."

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell