Australian Women Writers: Gail Jones’ Sorry

This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012

It may seem a big ask but every Australian should read Gail Jones’ novel Sorry.

Set in Western Australia, it covers the depression and war years from 1930 to 1945. Anthropologist and Great War veteran Nicholas Keene takes his wife Stella to the Kimberley near Broome to study “the natives’. Their daughter Perdita is born there and increasingly relies on local aboriginal people for the care that her dysfunctional parents are unable to give her.

It’s a story about relationships: family, friends, and community. It is fundamentally about the lives of outsiders: the dispossessed, the isolates, those who live on the fringes of society, the unseen and the unheard.

If sorry is just a word as some politicians have argued, words are central to this narrative. Language is at its heart: written, spoken and signed. Books are central. Nicholas is a great book collector. Perdita and her aboriginal friend Mary are “hidden in the valley of pages”. Ironically, Mary reads about Captain Cook as Perdita follows Dickens’ ill-treated child David Copperfield.

The girls are not just linked through their love of literature. They become sisters within the aboriginal skin system, establishing relationships and obligations that continue to be important throughout the story.

Despite her difficulty understanding Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s classic holds a special place for Perdita. It has numerous parallels to Sorry: the isolation; the treatment of the indigenous people; the horror within and between individuals.

The bard and his “big questions” strut across this antipodean stage throughout. Stella retreats further and further into Shakespeare as her own mental state collapses: Hamlet, Lear, Othello and the MacBeths. Fittingly, Perdita’s name comes from The Winter’s Tale.

Mary has a literary theory that “when people read the same words they were imperceptibly knitted”. They share “ imperceptible continuities and inspiring revelations”. One of her favourite books is the Lives of the Saints, a Catholic tome intended to both inspire and frighten its young readers. Later it helps to knit the girls together when they are separated. However, Perdita is not won over by the nuns’ quest to save her “immortal soul”.

Despite all Stella’s soliloquies, Sorry is steeped in silence. Perdita’s other friend Billy is a “deaf mute”. She is condemned to her own form of invisibility by a severe stutter that starts dramatically when she is ten.

Perdita explores her own theories. She questions whether reading is “a channel, somehow, between author and reader, an indefinable intimacy, a secret pact?”

Gail Jones establishes much of her intimacy through the use of Perdita’s first-person passages that are far more revealing of her inner life than the more matter-of-fact third person narrative.

Gail’s use of language is unusual. Her vocabulary would be familiar to readers in the 1930s but she brings an original style that sometimes demands a lot of her audience:

“In the smaller community of three, taut with conjugal unhappiness and the burden of an unacceptable child…”

“Stella’s words still carried sensuous violence. She performed virtual murders as other women did gossip, and she had been seduced not by the comedies, but by the horrors of the tragedies; not by the love sonnets, melliferous and sweet, but by those that dealt with the morbid erosions of time. Unmaking obsessed her, and the making of nonentity.”

“Afraid of slumbery agitations…”

Dreams and memories are a vitally important part of these agitations. While Stella dreams of snow falling in the desert, Nicholas' nocturnal wandering takes him on a very unsatisfactory visit to an aboriginal campfire. In fact snow is the final image of Perdita’s recollections.

In her concluding A NOTE ON ‘SORRY’, Gail explains the significance of the word for indigenous people in Australia. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s historic apology to the stolen generations did not come for another year. The novel has many messages but these are channelled through the personal rather than the didactic. It is “a story told in a whisper”.

Coincidentally, I read Gail’s account of the 1942 Japanese bombing of Broome on 3 March, the 70th anniversary of the attack. Sixteen flying boats were sunk with dozens killed, including many Dutch civilians. The remains of the planes can be visited during very low tides, as we did a few times when living in Broome in 2007.

In another coincidence, the last chapter begins with the words of the title of the last novel I reviewed What Remains. There is a note of hope to finish - "something venerable and illustrious beneath such waste" beyond the horror. The final word is “peace”.

By the way Sorry is also a bit of a murder mystery. Enjoy!

Australian Women Writers: Denise Leith's What Remains

This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012

Denise Leith’s novel What Remains is first and foremost a love story. Its final chapters are a moving account of the realisation of a friendship that smoulders throughout the novel.

It is also a war story, set in many of the worst conflicts of the last twenty years. It begins and ends with Iraq: Bush Senior’s Gulf War and W’s shock and awe invasion and occupation. It takes us to the darkest corners of human behaviour in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Rwanda especially.

We are not spared the horror. The church in Nyarubuye will haunt the reader as it does journalist and narrator, Kate Price. Denise’s exploration of the nature of evil is very confronting. How can anyone machete or rape a child?

At the same time she examines the forces that attract correspondents and photojournalists to cover the barbarism we call war. For photographer Peter McDermott, “This is who I am. This is where it begins and ends for me.” Terms like Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome can never do justice to the prices they pay for this deadliest of careers. Her earlier Bearing Witness: The Lives of Correspondents and Photojournalists is a non-fiction analysis of this phenomenon.

I am reminded of Australian combat cameraman Neil Davis who received worldwide acclaim for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia during the Indochina war. It was a fatal addiction - he was killed in Bangkok in 1985 filming an attempted coup.

It is Denise’s first novel. Her lean, economical style is reminiscent of that other witness to war – Ernest Hemingway. You won’t find many adjectives or adverbs or transitional words. Although it sometimes lacks the polish of a practiced professional storyteller, its rawness creates much of its power. She concentrates on small details of people and places to create the big pictures of a world gone crazy. Photographs and pictorial memories are key elements. In addition, the first-person narrative is well suited to its emotional purposes – self examination and self discovery.

The novel is old-fashioned in several ways. It’s easy to read and often hard to put down. Denise creates intimacy through the subtle use of the senses rather than bedroom gymnastics. She doesn’t do hot sex scenes.

On the other hand, it is very modern. It begins and ends with email.

The climax is not unexpected. It is foreshadowed throughout the book. What remains? A day after reading, it is the people who wake each day in places the places and situations that most of us could not even imagine.

PS Yesterday we had the opportunity to hear and meet Denise Leith at a Beaumaris Books’ evening event at one of the local cafés Malt. Her thought-provoking talk helped to inform this review.

Australian Women Writers: Amanda Lohrey's The Philosopher's Doll

This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012:

[Warning: As they say in cinema reviews, this post may contain spoilers.]

It may have been a mistake to follow Marion Halligan’s Valley of Grace with another novel that has a philosopher who doesn't want to have children, and a tense encounter with confit de canard.

In fact the first part of Amanda Lohrey's The Philosopher's Doll is entitled 'Duck'. Despite the weak pun, it is the most satisfying section of a book that has a split personality. It has strong echoes of some of Philip Roth's better writing.

Melbourne academic Lindsay Eynon is not ready to commit to parenthood. Not even his besotted student Sonia can distract him from his speculations about the meaning of reality and existence. Through his teaching we encounter Descartes' and La Mettrie's attempts to unravel the same puzzles. Rumours of René's mechanical doll resurrect the Enlightenment disputes between science and religion. Are we humans just machines that bleed? The theories of his compatriot and follower, La Mettrie, sow questions about the animal soul.

Appropriately named, the next section 'Dog' explores communication breakdown, as husband and wife secretly pursue their separate agenda. Lindsay takes a bizarre detour down the Great Ocean Road to doggy breeding land. His disturbing experiences there should have been an omen. Yet like a Thomas Hardy character who has seemingly lost both commonsense and freewill, he can't help himself.

At the same time Lohrey constructs a pregnancy testing manual, as Kirsten turns to medical science as a substitute for sharing or ethical decision-making. Perhaps her work at what used to called a home for juvenile delinquents clouds her judgment a tad.

Just as the story approaches what should be its climax, there is an abrupt change of voice. Sonia emerges from nowhere to give us not one but two coda (should that be codas or code?). The abrupt jump from third to first person narrative challenges our understanding of earlier realities, especially Lindsay's point of view. This literary device is both intriguing and annoying.

This final third of the novel recounts Sonia's attempts to reconcile her obsessive youth. In 'Dildo' the reader does not get the hoped-for climax. At the very least, we learn that old dogs can be taught new tricks and younger ones old. The writing and style fall off, though this may be caused by the change of voice.

Nevertheless, we don't actually find out about the dog's fate until the actual coda, 'Torque'. Amanda's metaphors take a final twist as precision flying is used as another literary stunt. Sonia seems incapable of taking cardiologist and pilot David Goodman's advice: "...if you rely on your instincts you'll crash". La Mettrie's fatal dish of pheasant morphs into the latest pregnancy as "Headlong we began our descent." It's a soft but unsatisfactory landing.

If only the dog could speak. Latro ergo sum.

Whether you remember this novel fondly or not, will probably depend on your reactions to its concluding sections. Unfortunately you can't choose your own adventure and discover an alternative resolution. Don't be deterred - give it a go. Amanda's writing is very readable, original and thought provoking.

Australian Women Writers: Marion Halligan’s Valley of Grace

This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012:

Marion Halligan’s Valley of Grace (Allen & Unwin 2009) is a tender and warm treatment of many of life’s challenging aspects: love, relationships, procreation, care of children, religious belief, personal and cultural legacy. To name just some of her major themes.

The novel is set in France, a marked contrast to some earlier works such as The Point that take place in Australia. Its history, culture and architecture occupy much of the story. The presence of a celebrity academic philosopher in the story is emblematic of this context. 

The French fixation with Louis XIV, the Revolution and the German occupation is never far away. The present is still haunted by the ghosts of partisans and collaborators alike.

Interaction with the built environment is also a key element, whether it be homes, renovations or public buildings. So are books and art. It wouldn’t be France without an Art exhibition even if the paintings of flowers fails to inspire. The bookshop, Le Vieux Latin, has a more authentic flavour.

Yet it is the personal that most absorbs Marion. She explores the nature of relationships: love, partnership, monogamy, brief encounters, infidelity. These include single gender partners, both gay and lesbian. The influence of parents is also an essential part of the lives of many of her characters.

Begetting and care of children is a central theme. Whether planned, accidental or unwanted, procreation is pervasive. Whether it is love child or wild child, the flotsam and jetsam of human desire wash up at regular intervals. We encounter sexual exploitation, shocking amorality and complex moral dilemmas. Marion is not afraid to explore the dark side. The treatment of children damaged by disease or by those who should protect them is a disturbing aspect of the narrative.

Religion is never far from the surface. The title comes from the Val de Grace, a Paris church built by Anne of Austria to commemorate the birth of her son Louis XIV after twenty-three years of marriage. The mummified hearts of the royals were apparently used in paint mixture for Art works during the revolution. It’s a metaphor that doesn’t quite gel. A trip to Lourdes for a son and ailing mother brings a strange encounter but no revelations.

Given Halligan’s interest in cuisine, it is surprising that food does not bring more joy in this French setting. The culinary fare is disappointing: unappetising lunch at an upmarket restaurant; a housewarming offering of sushi; steak and chips chosen over “excellent tripe sausages” at a corner bistro. It seems that fois gras and confit of duck cause indigestion for the expectant mother. The best eating happens on a honeymoon in Turkey. (A portion of Louis’ heart is also supposed to have been eaten but this bizarre gastronomic incident is not mentioned).

Two other aspects of the novel were annoying. Firstly, it has too many characters that are often just loosely connected. Secondly, just too much happens. In some ways Valley of Grace is more a series of vignettes than a coherent novel. Less in greater depth would have been more satisfying. But don't be put off. Her intimate but fluid style makes for a good read.

For all the human failings she presents, Marion Halligan leaves us with hope, hope for “happy beginnings… when a child is born.” Hope to build on.