Both novellas depend on the reader’s being alert to subtle character shifts and inner lives, insofar are they are intimated, and both films, each set in Ireland, have found their own ways of dealing with those inner reflections. Neither novella and neither film depends on a conventional cause-and-effect narrative leading to a predictable conclusion. I came to the later book and film before the earlier ones, and will stick to this order as it probably influenced my response to them.

Small Things evokes a small Irish town, New Ross, and the kind of life in which the key figure, Bill Furlong, works and enjoys his happy marriage and family. Though he reflects on life’s other possibilities, Bill is clearly aware of and grateful for what he has. His mother died when he was young; he was subsequently looked after by Mrs Wilson, the well-to-do owner of the property on which his mother had worked as a maid. He has never known his father. Keegan creates a wholly credible sense of his marriage to Eileen and of their five children; he and his wife don’t agree about everything but this marriage clearly works.

A major moment in the novella’s plot — and in Bill’s life — occurs when he delivers coal to the local convent, a training school for girls that houses an abusive Magdalene laundry in which the girls are cruelly treated. In the coal shed he finds one girl, Sarah, who has been locked away as a punishment and tells Bill she wants to drown. When he talks to Sister Mary, the “Mother” of the convent, she smilingly bribes him with money as a Christmas present for his family. When he comes across Sarah again he must make a significant decision about how to respond.

Neither his action nor the possible identifying of his father is the object of melodramatic flourish or sentimentality in the book or in the film. Instead, they convey a feeling that these issues, however personally important, may be treated as “small things” in the scope of the larger world and its ongoing difficulties and beliefs.

The film, directed by Tim Mielants from Enda Walsh’s screenplay, pursues the same narrative course as the novella but finds its own way of rendering the recurring sense of inner reflection the text creates using Bill’s responses to events. Whereas Keegan’s prose does so immaculately, one of the triumphs of the film lies in Cillian Murphy’s performance as Bill Furlong, with his quiet changes of facial expression and subtly conveyed shifts of awareness.

As played by Eileen Walsh, Furlong’s wife Eileen is humanly companionable but capable of moments of sharpness. As mother of five children, she has plenty to occupy her, and she suggests appropriate affection as well as individuality. As Sister Mary, the ever-reliable Emily Watson endows a seemingly benign surface with a much chillier, more rigorous viewpoint.

The controlled tone of the film’s final moments is perfect. In a Hollywood version, there would have to be a group hug at very least — possibly joined by Bill’s father, whose identity remains unknown in the film as in the novella.

Having used the words “immaculate” and “perfect” in relation to aspects of Small Things, and being tempted use them again in relation to The Quiet Girl, the film version of Keegan’s Foster, I might appear to readers to be raving, and this may well be the case.

“Plot” scarcely seems the right word to describe what happens in Foster. Once the initial action has been made clear, it feels more like a life simply going on from day to day. It begins with the girl (unnamed) being driven by her father to stay with her godparents, the Kinsellas, because her mother is pregnant. When the father drives off with the girl’s belongings still in the car, Seán Kinsella tells her not to worry: “We’ll have you togged in no time,” and this proves symptomatic of how kindly the girl will be treated in the months ahead.

She has no idea of how long she will be there, but she will experience a kind of love her home and her parents never seemed to offer. Quite early on, she says (and the whole story is told in her words): “I wish this place without shame or secrets could be my home.” She helps Edna Kinsella with cooking and other jobs and is happy to do so. Seán teaches her to read and, for fun, regularly times her run for the mail in the post-box on their farming property. And so on. The ongoing warmth and affection she is shown leads her to think of “the difference between my life at home and the one I have here.”

None of this becomes a subject of easy pathos; rather, it is a means of exploring how, in this very different environment, the girl’s responses to life are changing. As we shall see, the film version, The Quiet Girl, will have a different way of articulating these responses, but with no less eloquence. Keegan creates some variance in how the girl is drawn to the two “foster” parents and they in turn show affection for her. The same cannot be said for her actual parents after Seán drives her home once her mother has given birth to a son.

The film captures the tone of Keegan’s story seemlessly transmuted into the new medium — with never a superfluous moment. In fact, Colm Bairéad’s telling (he is both director and screenwriter) renders a gentle change in life with a perfection for which it is hard to think of many competitors.

The Quiet Girl begins with a long shot of a hayfield in which a girl is calling out to her sister Cáit (Catherine Clinch), who is hiding in the hay, that “Mum’s looking” for her. Back home, Mum reprimands her for having mud on her shoes. This is part of the coldness of Cáit’s life at home, a matter not ameliorated by her father’s alcoholic tendencies, and there is no sense of family farewell as she leaves to stay with her mother’s cousins, the Kinsellas.

Her father (Michael Patric) is driving, but she sits in the back seat and he doesn’t talk to her. She is warmly welcomed by Mrs Kinsella, Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley), who hasn’t seen Cáit since she was a baby. The father leaves without a kiss for his daughter or thanks for the gift of rhubarb Eibhlín has given him. These and other details establish the environment Cáit is leaving and the one she is arriving at.

From there, events closely follow those of Keegan’s story, showing the viewer the immediate and continuing kindness Cáit receives from Eibhlín and the slower-to-start but equal warmth of feeling she experiences from Seán (Andrew Bennett), and how this is registered in Clinch’s performance as Cáit. In fact, “performance” seems almost too conventional term to describe how Clinch renders so many of her reactions to her changing circumstances in subtle shifts in facial expression as she gradually warms to affection so at odds with her own family.

She is pleased to help both Seán and Eibhlín in their daily work and is far from excited when she has to return home after her mother has given birth to a baby boy. “You’ve grown” is the nearest her mother can say (or do) in the way of welcome. When the Kinsellas drive off, Cáit races after to catch up with them in an emotionally charged moment that, like Small Things, never reeks of sentimentality.

Two beautiful Irish novellas have been adapted into two beautiful Irish films to which I hope that I’ve done justice. •

From the archive: Brian McFarlane on screen adaptations of Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina and Great Expectations

The post Transmutations appeared first on Inside Story.

A Taiwanese writer of Chinese heritage, Yang has an ambivalent relationship with the language in which she writes: the language of the People’s Republic of China, the “them” against which the “us” of Taiwan is defined. In contemporary Taiwanese television and movies, it is common now to hear Taiwanese (Hokkien) spoken. Yang Shuang-zi seeks to evoke in writing what on the screen is readily projected: an imagined community for Taiwan, with a history and cultural references that belong to it alone. In Taiwan Travelogue this is not a linguistically bound community, but language is effectively deployed to show it struggling to come into existence. Most obviously, Taiwan is a place that has to be translated to be understood. The entire novel is in fact one long translation process.

The novel is imaginatively framed, with an informative introduction at the beginning and a series of afterwords revealing the afterlife of the text that constitutes the main narrative. This introduction should not be skipped: it is part of the novel. The purported writer, Hiyoshi Sagako, Taiwan-born of Japanese ethnicity, is a fictional character, and her account of the novel’s various editions a 1954 Japanese original translated into Chinese (in abridged form) in 1977 and then again, with elisions restored, in 2020  is also fictional. The only translation that a reader has to believe in is the one into English by Lin King, first published in the United States by Graywolf Press in 2024, from a Chinese-language original published in 2020.

From the introduction, we learn that the fictional Japanese original is a first-person narrative by literary celebrity Aoyama Chizukyu, who arrives in Taiwan in 1938 on an official visit organised by the Japanese Government-General. By then, Taiwan had been under Japanese control since 1895. Aoyama encounters a complex society, with Japanese “mainlanders” like herself in the top stratum. A second stratum consists of Japanese locals like Hiyoshai Sagako, who in the introduction discusses the ambiguous status of Taiwanese-born Japanese. Aoyama’s first allocated guide, Mishima, belongs to this stratum.

The third stratum is composed of ethnically Han (Chinese) locals like Aoyama’s main guide and companion, Ông Tshian-hóh, known as O Chizuru in Japanese but referred to in the novel by Aoyama’s affectionate nickname for her, Chi-Chan. The Han population is itself diverse, as Aoyama learns. At one point Chi-Chan introduces Aoyama to a barely explored bottom layer, Taiwan’s First Peoples, impressing Aoyama with her erudition by talking about them as “indigenous” (yuanzhu zhongzu, as opposed to tuzhu, or “natives,” for example).

Aoyama, the reader soon learns, is taller than most Japanese men. Her towering presence in the novel is a metaphor for the overweening presence of a colonial power. Chi-Chan is tiny by comparison — comparable in height to the sparrow-like schoolgirl Tân Thsiok-bi, who like herself is the love object of a robustly built Japanese. Since Taiwanese were on average taller than Japanese in this period, the metaphor is slightly strained but the author, writing for a Taiwanese readership, can probably depend for credibility on historical impressions of Japanese power.

The novel is a love story of sorts, with the developing romance between Aoyama and Chi-Chan tenderly evoked. The two women share a consciousness of the restraints placed on women by a society that doesn’t allow them to casually eat by the roadside or drink in a bar, and in which heterosexual marriage is an expectation that they will have to meet. Physical contact between them is never more than tentative.

As a story about attraction between women and linked issues of living in a patriarchal society where women are fated to be married off to men, this novel is worth comparing with its shortlisted competitor, Bulgarian writer Rene Karabash’s debut novel She Who Remains. Karabash takes up the baton from Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural International Prize in 2005, with a story set, like Kadare’s Broken April, among blood-feuding families of Albania’s Accursed Mountains. There is a love story in the novel, again between two women, but it is fleeting. The main protagonist, a “sworn virgin” who has adopted a male persona in accordance with the grim Kanun code, embodies the problem of the socio-sexual regime of which not only she but also her male family members are victims. It is plainly a novel about patriarchy.

Taiwan Travelogue, by contrast, is unmistakably a novel about colonialism. The love story is foregrounded but the main theme could easily have been developed with a heterosexual relationship at its core. Writing the love story is a way of writing, critically, about power extended by the “mainland” (neidi, in this case Japan) over Taiwanese. For Karabash, the national context is immaterial. She is not interested in Albania per se; the Accursed Mountains are merely an opportune setting. Yang Shuang-zi, on the other hand, is undoubtedly writing about Taiwan. Hers is not a story that could easily be transposed.

Aoyama herself is not a conscious agent of Japanese imperialism. She has never been a fan of the Imperial Japan’s Great Southward Expansion and resists being caught up in the propaganda war supporting it. She is critical of an imperial project that threatens to destroy the existing ways of life of the colonised peoples. At the same time, she is an intellectual who assumes the right to know, love and explain the colonised territory, simultaneously seeking to know, love and explain Chi-Chan. She is the Japanese “Orientalist” par excellence.

The journey is a gastronomical one. Aoyama has a gargantuan appetite, voraciously consuming every meal or snack that comes her way, generally because it is provided by Chi-Chan. A metaphor for colonialism is again evident. The book’s chapters are organised by foodstuff or dish, beginning with the simplest of local foods, melon seeds, and working up to the most complex, the twelve-dish full menu and its distillation in a “leftover soup.” Food is a teacher and a mediator.

By the fifth chapter, when Aoyama is introduced to braised minced pork in its different iterations, northern and southern, she has begun to think about cultural erasure as a problem in Japanese colonialism. In the eighth chapter, she accommodates Chi-Chan’s food preferences by making Japanese sukiyaki with pork instead of the customary beef. Cultural accommodation is underway, although it is not evenly balanced. In the same chapter Chi-Chan wears a kimono to please Aoyama, but she wears it under sufferance.

In the course of her travels Aoyama is presented with a dizzying array of dishes and ingredients, which even in a world of fusion cooking will probably be lost on most readers of the translation but must be deeply meaningful to Taiwanese readers. In a place where the difference between being Chinese and being Taiwanese is a work in progress, food has become a touchpoint of difference. Yang Shuang-zi exploits this trope to the full. Not every dish or ingredient she mentions is peculiar to Taiwan, but taken as a whole, the cuisine has its own grammar. A local argot of food terms is one means Yang has found for writing Taiwan into the inflexibly Chinese text.

The narrative proper concludes on poignant note with a single bowl of fruit and jelly ice shared by Aoyoma and Chi-Chan. By this time, Aoyama has been helped to a deeper understanding of her relationship with Taiwan and with Chi-Chan by her original guide, the ethnically Japanese Mishima, in an unexpected and wonderfully timed turn in the novel as it approaches its conclusion.

After the war, Taiwan passed from Japanese to Chinese hands. The Japanese mainland (neidi) was replaced by a Chinese mainland (dalu). By using the term “mainland” in her translation, Lin King keeps the parallel in the reader’s mind. The difference between these two mainlands is the difference between past and present. Taiwan has come to terms with its Japanese colonial past and accepts its Japanese legacy. China, by contrast, is a present threat.

Taiwan Travelogue deals with this time gap by shifting the entire framework back in history. Just as the Japanese legacy is plain in contemporary Taiwan, so too was the Chinese cultural legacy in Japanese Taiwan in the 1930s. Chi-Chan loves classical Chinese literature. She owns to a Chinese ethnicity by wearing a qipao (or cheongsam). It is the Japanese present she finds challenging.

But just in case anyone thinks a Chinese legacy too obviously entitles the People’s Republic of China to some sort of prior ownership of Taiwan, King sedulously avoids the terms China and Chinese in the text. For the name of the country, she employs the Japanese term “Shina,” expressed in characters deployed for their sound, not their meaning. For the word Chinese in a literary sense she uses the term han, a synonym for the English term “Chinese” in many contexts.

In a note at the end of the book, King explains her decisions about translating in a way that sustains the illusion of a Japanese urtext and supports the historical context of the story. The strategies she adopts are true to the tenor of Yang Shuang-zi’s writing. They are consistent, too, with a Taiwanese nationalist historiographical trend towards identifying “China” as the modern state that emerged in the twentieth century as the Republic of China, following an historical trajectory completely separate from Taiwan’s own.

There are costs to clarity for an English-language readership. Decisions about the rendering of names and terms have yielded a cluttered text that is more difficult to read in translation than in the original. The original has footnotes built in as part of the fiction of translation from the Japanese, and many more footnotes again have been added to the English translation. Japanese names with diacritical marks sit alongside Mandarin terms with tones superimposed, with Taiwanese (Hokkien) words in italics. English-language readers are presented with orthographically complex terms they cannot begin to understand unless they are well versed in the histories, languages and romanisation systems of three different East Asian territories.

Historical context apart, persuasive translation into English is rendered challenging by differences in literary conventions and cultural dispositions. It takes a while to get used to a character who “dimples” as much as Chi-Chan does. “Dimples” is not a word easily deployed in serious fiction. Rosamond in Jane Eyre has dimples, but Rosamund is definitely not the woman with whom Rochester falls in love. Yet King had limited translation choices here. Chi-Chan was endowed with dimples by the author. There are no synonyms for dimples.

Particularities of time, place, and language complicate the text but don’t impede enjoyment of it. Aoyama’s journey of discovery never ceases to be interesting. Dialogue between Aoyama and Chi-Chan carries it along lightly. From melon seeds to jelly ice, the story follows a compelling narrative arc. Not unexpectedly, Taiwan Travelogue proves to be a book for its time, a work of historical fiction set on an island with a difficult past and an uncertain future, a country that is recognised by no great power but that is refusing simply to go away. •

Taiwan Travelogue
By Yang Shuang-zi | Translated by Lin King | Scribe | $32.99 | 320 pages

The post Journey to an interior appeared first on Inside Story.

Berlin Shuffle, Boschwitz’s first novel, was originally published in 1937 in a Swedish translation. It did not appear in German until 2019, and this translation by Philip Boehm is the first in English. Boschwitz’s second novel was published in translation in Britain and the United States in 1939 and 1940 respectively, and first appeared in German in 2018; a new translation into English (also by Boehm) was published in 2021, under the title The Passenger.

Berlin Shuffle is set in Berlin, sometime in the final years of the Weimar Republic. The action lasts perhaps thirty-six hours, beginning in the afternoon and ending in the early morning two days later. As is emphasised by the novel’s German title — Menschen neben der Zeit, which translates literally as “People Next To Time,” with the neben suggesting that the people are disconnected from their time — almost all the characters are marginalised in some way.

There is the beggar Sonnenberg, a blind war veteran married to a former prostitute named Elsi. Sonnenberg is acquainted with the unemployed Grissmann, and with another beggar named Fundholz, and Fundholz looks after Tönnchen, a man who was traumatised during childhood to the point of imbecility. Two further female characters are Minchen Lindner, the daughter of an ex-convict and the mistress of the aristocratic Herr von Sulm, and Frau Fliebusch, who is unable to cope psychologically with the loss of her husband Wilhelm in the Great War and of her assets in the hyperinflation, and who lives under the delusion that Wilhelm will return one day and restore them to the bourgeois security they enjoyed in 1914.

These characters are introduced at various points in the first half of the narrative, and they come together in an extended episode that takes up the second half, when they all go to a pub called The Jolly Huntsman. Sonnenberg and Elsi go because he earns money by playing the accordion there, and also wants to drink. Grissmann goes because he plans to lure Elsi away from Sonnenberg, Fundholz goes because he too wants to drink, and Tönnchen goes because he follows Fundholz almost everywhere. Minchen goes there to meet her father, and Frau Fliebusch goes because — having misunderstood when she overheard Sonnenberg talking about a pimp known as “Handsome Wilhelm” who frequents the pub — she thinks that her husband will be there.

When the novel concludes in the early morning, Sonnenberg has been fatally stabbed by Grissmann, Grissmann has been detained by bystanders, Elsi is facing a return to prostitution, Fundholz and Tönnchen leave to avoid the police, Minchen goes off with “Handsome Wilhelm,” and Frau Fliebusch departs to continue her search for her husband.

Although the publisher’s blurb says that Berlin Shuffle displays Boschwitz’s “extraordinary talent for capturing Germany’s self-destruction,” I believe that any reader who turns to the novel wishing to discover something about the politics, society or culture of the Weimar Republic will be disappointed.

First, there is little or nothing of substance to be gleaned from the characters’ back stories. Sonnenberg is presented without much elaboration as a blind war veteran, and while Grissmann’s problems began when he was dismissed from his job as a tram conductor, the immediate cause of his dismissal was the suspicion that he had stolen money collected as fares. Elsi turns to prostitution and then marriage, and Minchen turns to prostitution, because they can find no other way of supporting themselves, and Willi becomes a pimp for the same reason. Fundholz has no back story other than a few vague references to how a bourgeois life lay more than ten years behind him, and how his impoverishment was the fault of his ex-wife. Tönnchen appears as a finished product of a trauma which he suffered before the war, and Frau Fliebusch as a finished product of bereavement and poverty.

Of course, all the characters apart from Tönnchen and Frau Fliebusch would be able think about their various social positions in systematic terms, but they are largely preoccupied with satisfying their immediate material needs. Equally, the third-person narrative could generalise from the characters’ experiences but very rarely does so. For example, apart from a handful of minor exceptions, there is no reference to any political party, politician, economic theory, event of public interest, cultural work, cultural practitioner, or any other organisation, person, idea or phenomenon which would give the reader a point of reference from which to analyse the society in which the novel is set.

Admittedly, unemployment or the difficulty of obtaining work are important factors in several characters’ problems, but the causes of the late Weimar Republic’s mass unemployment are discussed only in a single (if lengthy) passage about economic rationalisation, and the numerous prescriptions for restoring employment that were current at the time receive no mention. Similarly, the only person in the novel who talks about politics is an unemployed locksmith called Müller who accosts Tönnchen while he is sitting on a park bench, delivers a diatribe which parodies Nazi conspiracy theories — about how the Jews and Freemasons want to destroy Germany, and how even national heroes such as Goethe and Hindenburg are Freemasons too — and then departs, having elicited no response from Tönnchen, and never to be seen again.

The only time the novel offers something approaching a coherent worldview is in its description of the fight between Sonnenberg and Grissmann, who are characterised as “two men caught under the wheels of life. They were crushed and crippled, physically or mentally. But the wheels lay outside their grasp and beyond their control. Their lives were what they were, and they could do nothing to change that.”

The narrative then declares that the two men fall upon each other “[j]ust as two nations suddenly attack each other for no good reason and let themselves be drawn into a war that only serves the interests of people unknown and unnamed,” before raising the symbolic stakes to the maximum:

To date, the World War and the Inquisition have achieved the greatest success when it comes to large-scale eradication of humanity. It is to be expected that in the coming years, we will experience entirely new episodes of annihilation.

Sonnenberg and Grissmann have undoubtedly been abandoned by their society, and wars are often fought for the benefit of the powerful. And the narrative’s vision of “entirely new episodes of annihilation” is chilling in the light of what Boschwitz knew had happened in Germany in the few years before he wrote the novel, and especially of what we know happened afterwards. But I consider Boschwitz’s suggestion that Sonnenberg and Grissmann — and, by analogy and extension, everyone in the world — can “do nothing to change” their fate to be superficial and alarmingly defeatist.

Many of the German-language novels written about Weimar Germany and Weimar Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s are available in English. For a nuanced description of the Berlin underworld, readers can turn to Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. For a complex story of political disillusionment, Erich Kästner’s Fabian. For a confronting account of the damage caused to society by the Great War and the hyperinflation, Hans Fallada’s Iron Gustav. For a brilliant psycho-sociological study of a young woman who survives by attaching herself to more affluent men, Irmgard Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl. With these works — and others such as Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel and Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin — in mind, I found Boschwitz’s Berlin Shuffle rather uninteresting, and rather unrewarding. •

Berlin Shuffle
By Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz | Translated by Philip Boehm | Pushkin Press | $34.99 | 256 pages

The post On the margins appeared first on Inside Story.

Cape Fever is set, so the blurb tells us, in “a small unnamed city in a colonial empire.” J.M. Coetzee in his endorsement links it unilaterally with Cape Town, as anyone familiar with that city would. It’s all there, from the District (Six), the (Malay) Quarter, even to the cannon shot fired at noon from Signal Hill. The novel is set in the 1920s, but there are occasional references to other periods, notably the 1948 election that brought the Afrikaner Nationalists to power. Nadia Davids demonstrates how thoroughly a racially stratified society was already firmly in place before the Nationalists codified and extended it as apartheid.

(Indeed, much of it is still in place — at least in attitudes. Ten years or so ago a black girl in a swank private school classroom sang a Xhosa song. “Thank you Vuyiswa,” responded the teacher, “for singing such a charming foreign song.”)

The novel is centred on the relationship between Mrs Hattingh, a white widow, and Soraya, her Cape Malay maid. Mrs Hattingh lives alone (the maid in a bungalow out the back); the house is old, grand, and approaching dilapidation. Mrs Hattingh and her circle of friends sustain themselves by meeting in each others’ houses. (It could be termed the Gertie circuit.) Implicitly pining for England, they discuss various charitable causes. Mrs Hattingh looks forward to the day — repeatedly postponed — when her son, Master Timothy, will return from London.

Soraya is eighteen, and Davids tells the story in the first person. The edgy nature of the relationship is made clear from the very first sentence: “I come highly recommended to Mrs Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.” A necessary duplicity, creating a margin in which Soraya can manoeuvre to make her life as a domestic more tolerable. “Always keep something back,” her mother had told her, “there is no need for them to know what you are truly thinking.”

She is treated with an exacting condescension, muffled by occasional kindness. Soraya had applied for a job as cook and cleaner — but that now carries a live-in requirement (since Madam is lonely). At first she is permitted to visit her family once a fortnight, but even that is nibbled away. We must rally for Master Timothy’s return…

Soon there is an insidious intrusion; Mrs Hattingh decides that, since she believes Soraya cannot write, she will — at Soraya’s dictation — write letters to her young man, Nour, for her. Soraya’s letters are transformed by Madam into something more “poetic.” But as she isn’t shown them, (“illiterate”) Soraya doesn’t know that gradually Mrs Hattingh inserts herself, as it were, into her maid’s body to write explicit letters. (She is never given the chance to see or hear Nour’s replies. They are kept under lock and key.)

What Soraya doesn’t know is that this is the second fantasy correspondence Mrs Hattingh is engaged in. She’s heard rumours about the son in England carrying disfiguring war injuries, but of course never brings up the matter. Mrs Hattingh is writing into the void: the arriving letters that so excite her are official ones, rather than from the adored son. All this works towards an explosive ending.

“In this city,” Davids writes, “none of us really knows the truth of the ground we stand upon.” One thing can flip into another. Soraya, leaving the house for the first time after a week, has her bag searched by Mrs Hattingh; she then passes the auction square where black people stood on a block, mouths pulled open, teeth tugged, arms checked for muscle. Spirits hover; magical realism enables Soraya to converse with them. (Even the Gertie circuit indulges in a séance.)

All this underlines, from Prospero and Caliban on, the seemingly immutable nature of black–white relations. But that, too, is ultimately delusional. Delusional/delirium. Cape Fever. “Let it break,” runs the last sentence of the book. “Ya Rab! Let it break!”

Konrad Muller’s My Heart At Evening is an entirely different novel, exploring a particular incident in the past. That past is still omnipresent in Tasmania. It is said that half the population has a convict somewhere in their ancestry, so that when Martin Bryant opened up on twenty-nine people at Port Arthur he struck Tasmania on the funny bone. (Once I was in a pub, a group of tradies at a nearby table. Suddenly there was a touch of the quiets. Only one of them was speaking, softly. About Port Arthur.)

The plot involves real historical characters involved in running the Van Diemen’s Land Company establishment at Circular Head (Stanley), on the island’s northwest coast. The VDL Company was that rare thing in Australia, a British chartered company, which meant that it had complete control of a designated area with full exploitation rights. Henry Hellyer, whose death (in 1832) is central to the novel, was the company surveyor, and explored much of the northwest of the island. That country, some of it almost impenetrable, gives rise to some lyrical descriptive passages.

The first-person narrator is a Dane who had been a convict but, given his worldly experience, is chosen by the governor, George Arthur, to investigate the suicide of Henry Hellyer — all the more puzzling as he was about to move to Hobart to take up a senior position in the Survey Department. In an afterword Konrad Muller explains that his Dane is none other than Jorgen Jorgensen, an adventurer still well-known in Tasmania. His experiences ranged from being present at the foundation of Hobart, to being a Regency blade imprisoned for debt, and — after locking up the Danish governor — Protector of Iceland (for a month).

Hellyer was a solitary figure, refined, affable and kindly. But he was felled by the taunts of the mess, and the scuttlebutt that he had had sex with a young convict lad. The night he decided to end it all, he had fled the mess hut. Governor Arthur, in the well-drawn scene when the Dane reports back to him, got near to what may have been the truth of the matter: Hellyer may have been gay by temperament, but repressed it, he thought totally. All the crueller then that he would be spoken of as if he’d crossed the line: something that might always follow him. “I thought men like that shot themselves,” George V would famously remark. A century earlier, this one did.

There is already a book on Hellyer’s suicide, but a novel can seamlessly move from established fact to probability statement. Muller is respectful of the facts, and follows them as far as he can. (Jorgensen had already been sent to Circular Head, as a convict, and was sent by Arthur as a Special Agent to investigate the building of the Ross Bridge. No great improbability then in fusing the two.) An afterword explains the sources and the moves he has made. The suicide note is Hellyer’s own, complete with cross-outs.

As a novelist, Muller can fill in the gaps. Particularly successful is the scene where the Danish investigator tracks down and talks to the boy who is at the heart of the matter. It turns out that the real villain of the piece is the older convict who compelled the lad to spread the baseless story. Like Claggart in Melville’s Billy Budd, he fancied a pretty youth, and in this case completely dominated and may have abused him.

But to return to Hellyer, who had noted the black cockatoos. A feather serves as a leitmotiv throughout the novel — and is a launching pad for the conclusion. A flight of black cockatoos are perched near Hellyer’s grave when the narrator visits, and they rise together in affirmation — carrying his spirit away, as Hellyer had been told was the belief of the Aborigines. A fine note to end an outstanding novel: the story as much one of place, and elemental continuities, as a yarn spun around a remote corner of Van Diemen’s Land. •

Cape Fever
By Nadia Davids | Scribner | $29.99 | 228 pages.

My Heart at Evening
By Konrad Muller | Evercreech Editions | $37.99 | 209 pages

The post Backwash of empire appeared first on Inside Story.

I don’t wish to participate in this dispute, express indignation at the censorship displayed by it, or give my opinion about the issues it raises. But I do wish to take the opportunity to mention what may seem a relatively insignificant matter, one I hope to show is germane.

This is the fact that literary events such as AWW give central importance to writers, in person, in sessions where they are interviewed and then answer audience questions. The point of the format is to provoke discussion, and these events are used by the publishers for marketing purposes. “The author” is well and truly alive in Australian literary culture.

When Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author he was not referring to the mass demise of real-life writers, but to The Author as the central organising principle of French academic literary history. This discipline, its curricula, its textbooks and its journals, produced a chronological account of the national literary tradition, the intentions and motivations of writers, and writers’ lives, literary influences and significance. Barthes’s concern was to refocus attention from the singularity of a text’s purported origin in the person onto the text itself and its dispersal in the ongoing cultural practices of its reading.

I do wish that the writers’ festivals held around this country were called “Festivals of (recent, interesting, significant…) writing” rather than “Writers festivals,” and their organisational protocols focused primarily on divergent ways of reading a well-curated selection of books. My small contribution to imagining such a change is to review Randa Abdel-Fattah’s recent novel rather than talk about the controversy surrounding its author.

Discipline is set in a community of Palestinian Australians in the early days of the current conflict in Gaza. All the characters are professionals whose careers are more or less precarious. As do many members of diaspora communities, they live between two worlds, each occupying a position on a rough spectrum from least to most problematic. The narrative consists of episodes illustrating these problems.

Ashraf’s wife has left him in order to live an exclusively Islamic life: she represents a refusal of the diasporic life. Ashraf, on the other hand, while having not entirely moved into the secular world, is the most accommodating of the characters to its demands. He is an academic, modestly successful on the usual criteria, but his career is threatened by the requirement that his work have greater impact in the society beyond academia. He gets a break, and undertakes to work on a government-funded project aimed at deflecting young people away from radicalisation and towards creative ways of expressing their identity and its conflicts.

Ashraf has a PhD student named Jamal with whom he has a trusting relationship. Jamal, however, is something of a hot-head, taking various kinds of “risks” — writing unwelcome open letters to the staff of the university, signing his online posts with his university affiliation, associating his with Ashraf’s signature, and posting apparent support for Hamas that implies condemnation of Zionism. He is instructed to take the posts down to avoid implicating his supervisor or the university at large in his opinions.

Ashraf takes a mentoring role with Jamal: “Your job is to bring people to your side,” he tells him, teaching him to “operate strategically” and encouraging him to “play the long game” so that no solitary individual has to carry the “burden of representation.”

Jamal is married to Hannah, a journalist on a mainstream newspaper. She is caught between the discursive norms of the paper and trying to write stories unshackled by these norms. Most of the book’s episodes that concern her recounting versions of this conflict, as an ever-angrier Hannah confronts senior editors who either “kill” her stories, rewrite them, or take over responsibility for the by-line.

Fayza, the sister of Ashraf’s estranged wife, is as disappointed as he is by her decision. She is the principal of an Islamic school, one of whose students has been arrested for brandishing a Hamas flag at a protest rally, bringing unwelcome media attention to the school. Though self-assured and confident in her role, she is worried about her pupils and unsettled by the potential for the attention to compromise the school’s reputation. In this, her situation echoes that of the senior management of the university.

This, then, is a very tight knit group of people, the more so as each is drawn into the others’ stories. But tight knit though it might be, the exchanges among its members are not private: they are relentlessly, publicly, conducted on social media. We read that they are “consumed by their phones.” This is the proximate cause of the problems they encounter, and it should be said that this is the source of the turmoil engulfing the author of this book. It is Abdel-Fattah’s posts, not her novel, that have disturbed the Adelaide Festival board and whoever lobbied it against her. The same was true for Antoinette Latouf and Jason Gillham.

Of course, there would be no point in arguing against the predominance of online communication in present circumstances. Its reach is such that the writers cannot calculate their discourse for specific audiences. So pace Stan Grant, who writes that we have lost the art of language, it is more pointed to say that what we have lost is the arts of rhetoric. Rhetoric taught us to do just that — calculate the relation of our communications with their recipients.

This is what the authority figures in this novel require of their juniors, Ashraf, Jamal and Hannah, yet their only way of imposing this requirement establishes a binary opposition between anger and self-restraint, the latter being characterised variously as “liberal bullshit,” “the politics of respectability,” “impartiality and neutrality,” the policing of “tone,” the language of “equivocation and obfuscation” and “point zero language.” Whereas Ashraf is advised by his dean to produce work with greater social impact, he and the others are rebuked precisely for the social impact of their posts.

This suggests Abdel-Fattah’s reasons for choosing the novel form: I assume she hoped it would reach a different audience from that of her posts. But it is a novel whose energy is devoted to purveying a message: Palestinian Australians are having an awful time. They are suffering from the fear and grief occasioned by the conflict in Gaza, and they are also, the fiction tells us, suffering from the oppression of discursive norms that cannot accommodate the intensity of those emotions. This tells us that “having a voice” is not enough: getting people to listen to it is the real issue. And this is what is dramatised in most of the episodes of the narrative.

This is an interesting and important issue, and I for one — being someone who has long taken for granted those very discursive norms — find it salutary to attend to. But I sought, and failed to find, the qualities of an effective or engaging novel. I have no doubt its message is true; what I want to know is what purpose the fiction plays. This is fiction that merely disguises its referent by inventing names for its characters and institutions; it is not an imaginative exploration of the depth of the experiences it depicts. The characters are two dimensional, having little emotional, let alone psychological, complexity — they simply have emotions. Susan Sontag said of great novels that they extend the emotional range of the reader, but the mere naming of emotions cannot achieve this.

Furthermore, Discipline has no plot: good plotting relies on a structure in which an initial situation is disturbed by a complicating event, this complication or disturbance being thereafter resolved by the intervention of some action or other factor. The complication is a knot, its resolution a dénouement (this French term means an “unknotting”). This novel consists of a string of episodes that demonstrate a repeating situation.

There is, however, a candidate for an ending:  Jamal and Hannah decide to “fight” in less direct, more creative ways. We don’t see this in action, so it remains programmatic. An alternative reading would be that this ending represents the author’s own decision to write a novel. I would like to be able to conclude that as a novel it is a successful intervention into the situation she describes, or indeed into the literary field; but I cannot. I need it to engage me, to leave me with emotions and understandings that I didn’t have before reading it; I need to care what happens to the characters and to think about how I would respond to the difficulties they face. I want to admire its writing — to be surprised by its insights — I want to be carried by its rhythms. But I was not.

I can only speculate about what impelled the decision to invite Randa Abdel-Fattah to AWW, but I suspect that it was to perform the (kind of) controversy she depicts. The fact that she was cancelled made it all come true. Unfortunately, there is no sense of an ending. Next week in Adelaide is to be held a rebel gathering of writers. We can expect it to stage a further episode of the same sorry drama. •

Discipline
By Randa Abdel-Fattah | University of Queensland Press | $34.99 | 256 pages

The post Reading “Discipline” appeared first on Inside Story.

Free is charmingly told from the perspective of a child reared by society to venerate communism, Stalin and most of all “Uncle Enver” Hoxha, Albania’s communist dictator. Hoxha’s death in 1985 marked the beginning of the end of communist rule, and when it finally collapsed in 1990–91 teenaged Ypi was forced to reckon with shattered illusions, family truths and the onset of capitalism, all alongside the usual adolescent torments. Until then her family — and most of all, her beloved French-speaking paternal grandmother Leman, whom she calls Nini — had protected her from what was really going on.

Ypi’s award-winning memoir has since been translated into more than thirty languages and a friend who not long ago visited Albania’s capital Tirana reports that Free is prominently displayed all over town, clearly pitched at tourists as the book to help them comprehend the country they are visiting.

Inside Albania and across the Albanian diaspora, Ypi’s reputation as an authority on the country she left as a young woman is — not surprisingly — mixed. To at least one critic, she’s an apologist for communism and a denigrator of capitalism who has turned her own critique into a commodity. Here I’m paraphrasing an online response to a long-lost photograph not of Ypi, but of her grandparents Leman and Asllan. The photo came to her attention after a stranger shared it on social media.

Ypi had never seen the photo before, but from her grandmother’s stories she knew it showed the couple on their honeymoon in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Italian Alps, where her grandmother “felt the happiest woman alive.” The year was 1941 and war was engulfing Europe. Yet this “young, glamorous couple,” the woman clad in a “long white fur coat,” are “relaxing on sun lounges in front of a luxury hotel.” A pair of skis is propped behind them.

As she tells us in the prologue of her ambitious new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined, Ypi was soon absorbed by the question of “what it meant to feel the happiest person alive in the winter of 1941.” Further unsettled by another commentator’s suggestion that Leman was “a communist spy” and “before that, a fascist collaborator,” Ypi set out to defend her late grandmother’s dignity and to find out more. Well aware that these are possibly irreconcilable motivations, Ypi presents her quest in two different registers.

In the first person, in a recognisable present-day, Ypi visits archives in Albania and Greece and ponders historical silences and archival gatekeepers. Some of her reflections are banal — for instance, as historians tell her, the “best kept secret about archives” is that “it’s more about what you don’t find rather than what you do.” Elsewhere, her frustrations are vividly presented: “I am lost in my grandmother’s files as if in a labyrinth of sophisms.”

Selected historical documents are interspersed throughout, inviting contemplation of which histories can and cannot be told through archival traces. A historical timeline commences with the Ottoman colonisation of the Balkan peninsula, which began in Albania in 1468, swiftly covers the pertinent Ottoman-related events of the nineteenth century, and devotes most attention to the twentieth century up to 1946 and the beginning of communism in Albania. The entangled histories of Turkey, Greece and Albania are foregrounded, as is Albania’s second world war, when it fell under fascist then Nazi control.

As the subtitle suggests, however, most of Indignity unfolds like a novel, with Ypi “reimagining” her grandmother’s life from her childhood in the Greek city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki), where she lived with her extended family in privileged exile. In 1936, with war threatening, Leman — the Albanian who had never been to Albania — moved there just after her eighteenth birthday. While she could easily have followed school friends to France, Italy or Austria, in the “disjuncture between what the country was called by foreigners (Albania) and how its own people referred to it (Shqipëria),” she “hoped to find the truth about herself.”

In a queue, Leman meets earnest idealist Asllan Ypi, a cousin of her best friend Cocotte, who is keen to fight fascism and distinguish himself from his hard-headed politician father, Xhafer Ypi. From here, the narrative accelerates, the couple’s lives entangled with the march of history. On Friday nights at the Café Kursal, they drink and gossip with the city’s intelligentsia, among them Enver Hoxha, an acquaintance of Asllan’s from their student days in Paris at the Lycée. Hoxha smells of onion and lavender and pours scorn on Asllan’s faith in democratic elections.

Leman and Asllan attend the bizarre wedding of Albania’s self-appointed monarch King Zog and the much younger Geraldine, a “destitute Catholic Hungarian-American countess.” Here, Ypi the first-person narrator interrupts with family lore. At the wedding — in the midst of discussing “the King’s relations with Italy and Hitler’s annexation of Austria and whether it would change Europe” and Asllan asking Leman whether she’d come across “an interesting book called The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes” (she hadn’t) — her grandmother proposed to her grandfather.

The honeymoon glimpsed in the photograph comes not long after Mussolini’s invasion of Albania and the violent death of Asllan’s father. Jolted by the proximity of these events to their marriage, Ypi is struck by the “apprehension on their faces” and how “Asllan looked especially sad.” She wonders who is behind the camera. Perhaps it was the French-speaking Englishman Vandeleur Robinson, who next travelled to Albania to “take part in a secret operation to support Balkan antifascist resistance.”

After an “excruciating” thirty-hour labour, as the Nazis occupation of Albania begins, Leman gives birth to her son Xhafer, or Zafo for short, who is destined to be Lea Ypi’s father. For a while “the alternative time zone of motherhood” eclipses the war outside. But when Hoxha’s Albanian Communist Party breaks away from the rest of the Albanian resistance movement and assumes power, Asllan is arrested, charged with espionage, and sentenced to twenty years in prison with hard labour.

With Indignity, Ypi once again succeeds in making Albania palpable, this time from the perspective of a fallen elite, among them her paternal grandparents. Whether or not her grandmother felt the “happiest person alive” on their honeymoon is a question she inevitably cannot answer. Once the honeymoon passes, the “life re-imagined” begins to run out of steam, despite the tragic events that unfold. The grandmother to whom she was so close while she was alive is sometimes elusive and inert on the page, despite Ypi’s admirable and rather dogged attempt to access her interiority and understand her motivations.

One of the most powerful scenes in the book is Ypi’s “reimagining” of the arrival of her family doctor Elias Levy, fatally ill, from Salonica, where he had been detained for despatching to a Nazi concentration camp. Seeking out the Jewish cemetery in present-day Thessaloniki, Ypi is guided by Dimitrios, who turns out to be Albanian, real name Denis. He reflects on the fact that “Albania was the only European country with more Jews at the end of the second world war than it had before.” When Ypi the scholar suggests it was because Albanians were mostly illiterate and did not read antisemitic literature, Denis counters with another explanation: “the old tradition of besa, the oath of hospitality.” When they stop to read the memorial plaques, their conversation tapers to silence.

As they part, Denis, undertaking a history PhD, gives Ypi some advice about the archives: don’t waste time asking about her mother specifically, instead ask about the men in her family. “I gave up researching women. Women and archives. Good luck with that. You’re better off writing a novel.”

Indignity, though, is not a novel, even when it presents as an approximation of one. It comes most alive when Ypi is writing as herself, when she opens out to contemplate what we owe the dead, and to our own shifting investments in the past. In a passage that recalls the warmth and intimacy of Free, Ypi recounts the time when her grandmother, inspired by an episode of the American soap opera The Bold and The Beautiful, asked Ypi to speak at her funeral. When Leman died in 2006, Ypi went through the grief-struck motions as requested. Twenty years later, she writes, “I am still trying to correct my mistakes, to find the right words, to mark her passing in the right way.” •

Indignity: A Life Reimagined
By Lea Ypi | Allen Lane | $36.99 | 368 pages

The post Finding the right words appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s not that it was necessarily wrong for the streaming giant to ferret out what’s arguably the best intellectual property Italy has on offer — after all, there’s a limit to how many adaptations of Pinocchio audiences can tolerate. Nor should The Leopard purists object to the addition of new material that fleshes out elements glossed over or not explored in the novel. That’s all par for the Netflix course.

What Sicilians would be entitled to resent is the mischaracterisation the main character: don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina. The novel is built around Salina’s worldview; if you get that wrong, nothing else makes much sense in the story’s world.

Despite the novel’s famous and often misunderstood refrain, “If we want everything to remain as it is, everything has to change,” Lampedusa’s Salina has already come to terms with the unstoppable rise of the new mafia-tinged middle class that now holds the money and, with it, the power. He has already surrendered to history. As the Italian expression goes, he’s pulled the oars back on the boat. He’s allowing the current to take him wherever it wants. He has given up.

In the six-part Netflix series, which includes both a padded-out version of the novel’s events and an imagined sequel, Salina is a tough guy desperate to push back. We seem him humiliating the local mafia middleman for stealing baskets of fruit from his properties and then making him an offer he can’t refuse. He appears surprised to discover that power has shifted towards don Calogero Sedara, the corrupt mayor of Donnafugata, the location of the Salinas’ summer estate.

Even the prince’s strong-arm tactics in dealing with the invading garibaldini — the red-shirted soldiers sent by the Turin-based Kingdom of Sardinia to unify Italy — appear to misunderstand the book’s key theme. Lampedusa made clear that Salina saw the unification of Italy simply as political theatre in which Sicilians would know how to play their part. It’s for that reason that Salina doesn’t feel the need to reschedule when the soldiers are advancing on Palermo: his regular visit to the prostitute Mariannina goes ahead.

The message is clear: despite the histrionics of the northern forces, this isn’t a real invasion. The unification of Italy is merely the replacement of one foreign ruler, the Naples-based Bourbon King Francis II, with another, the Piedmontese Victor Emmanuel II. There’s no way Sicily’s nobility would have its routines interrupted while the stagehands change the backdrop.

The Salina of the novel would be the last to know if his employees were pilfering fruit. He’s a man of letters and science, usually holed up in his observatory talking astronomy with his sparring partner, Father Pirrone. He’s already reconciled to the fact that he’s bleeding money to cashed-up commoners, and he has decided not to fight back. As the prince explains, the very sensuality that Sicilians take pride in is nothing but a desire for oblivion — a long, macabre dance with death.

Lampedusa’s Salina tells the reader that the descendants of his Norman ancestors may have been around for centuries but now the game is over. What money they have will be lost within a few generations — namely, the very generation of the book’s author, who preferred to watch his family home crumble around him during the mid twentieth century than suffer the indignity of getting a real job. You can’t write books sipping coffee in Palermo’s Bar Mazzara, around the corner from the magnificent Teatro Massimo, if you need a nine-to-five just to pay for the kids’ tennis lessons.

In the Netflix universe, though, Salina is resisting the nobility’s fading into oblivion. He finds himself wrangling with the new Italian administration for a permit that would let his family spend the summer in Donnafugata. He acts like a bigshot throwing a tantrum rather than a man of letters presiding over his family’s descent into penury. In the horse-trading with the new administration his final and successful gambit is to allow an Italian administrator to get to know his daughter Concetta in return for a pass allowing the family to leave Palermo. The vulgarity of Salina pimping out a family member is unworthy of Lampedusa’s literary creation.

It’s not just that all of this makes little sense. It’s also a profound misreading of what is arguably the most significant Italian novel of the last century.

Another bold Netflix decision is to depict Tancredi, the beloved nephew of Salina, as somehow at odds with his uncle over how to manage the family’s move to history’s next act. In the novel, however, they both know they’ll need a lot more money to maintain their status in the Italian state than Salina can offer. The entire household may be appalled by Tancredi’s marriage to Sedara’s beautiful daughter Angelica, whose maternal grandfather had been so poor he was known in town simply as Pepe Shit, but Salina and Tancredi are on the same page.

For his part, Sedara needs the Salina name as a veneer of respectability, to enable him to continue to acquire land, money and power and become another puppet master in the new Italian state. Yet there’s never any doubt that this is how things must play out. For the first time since their Norman ancestors invaded Sicily in the year 1000, the Salina family is opening its doors to a commoner.

Netflix also offers a backstory for Concetta, a relatively minor character in the novel, and develops her relationship with Tancredi. Readers of the novel know that Concetta’s feelings for Tancredi were never reciprocated — probably not a bad thing, considering they were first cousins. On the small screen, it’s a full-blown story of unrequited love, in which Tancredi opts for Angelica over Concetta out of expedience rather than love.

You can’t blame the writers for wanting to add a modern, feminist twist to the story. They turn the novel’s petulant, plain Concetta into an attractive, erudite and smart on-screen character — the message being that, in a less sexist era and place, she is the only one who could whip the failing family business into shape. Nor should we worry too much when Tancredi’s marriage to Angelica starts to unravel after they head to Turin, the capital of the new Italy, where Salina’s nephew will take on a role in the new administration. We had got a sense of where things were heading in the novel: “A year of passion and thirty years of ashes.”

The series gives the same treatment to Mariannina, the prince’s go-to Palermo prostitute (the title of “prince” is just a noble honorific like any other — it doesn’t suggest Salina is the heir to a throne). In the novel, Mariannina utters just a single word: principone! (“big prince!”). In the Netflix universe, we get her backstory and follow what appears to be a conversion — although it’s hard to imagine a worse fate than the nunnery she appears set to join.

Again, if you’re going to build stories on the margins of the Leopard universe, it may as well be these two characters. The problem is that it’s all a bit clunky and obvious — what the Italians would call telefonato. There’s none of the book’s subtlety. When don Calogero Sedara has had enough of Salina’s condescension, Lampedusa subtly implies the tension; in the series we get an angry confrontation. When Sedara wears black-tie to a function where a dinner suit was required, it’s noted in the novel but not commented on; in the series the prince sends him home to change.

And, of course, Salina in the novel isn’t referred to as “the Leopard.” It’s not a nickname. The title of the book, Il Gattopardo, is a reference to the serval, or leopard, of the family’s coat of arms, and the animal is name-checked in one of the prince’s most famous interior monologues. “We were the leopards, the lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and all of us — leopards, jackals and sheep — we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.” In the series, everyone refers to Salina as “the leopard,” like he was a bejewelled rapper with an aka.

In fairness to the screenplay’s writers, the novel’s subtlety is a hard one problem to solve. Most of the prince’s outlook is delivered through interior monologue, which on screen needs to somehow be put into spoken words. Luchino Visconti’s much-admired 1963 film adaptation had the same problem, with the prince — the American actor Burt Lancaster dubbed with a thick Sicilian accent — having to ham it up to hammer home the novel’s main themes.

When don Calogero Sedara, the prince’s soon-to-be in-law, tells the novel’s Salina that he has “authenticated papers in the drawer” proving he too has noble origins, the prince takes it all in with “repressed laughter.” In Visconti’s film, there’s nothing repressed about the prince’s response — how else could you express to the audience the contempt he has for the suggestion that Salina’s origins could be anything other than that of a peasant. Where the depth of the prince’s social compromise in allowing his nephew to marry a commoner is dealt with in his internal monologue, those having to put the story on the screen need big gestures to explain.

All of this is understandable. Bringing a book so culturally specific to a broader audience requires some fancy footwork and the Netflix series does what’s needed to get the viewer from A to B. But there can be no compromise on the Lampedusa’s broader and far more controversial, almost mystical, vision of Sicily. For him, this is a land impervious to change, ruled by the mafia and other power structures that date back to before the Norman conquest. To skimp on this theme of the novel or, even worse, to counteract it with Salina’s aggressive drive to shape his family’s position in the nascent Italian state, forces us to suspend the disbelief that’s key to understanding and enjoying Lampedusa’s fictional account of one of his ancestors.

The mystical view of Sicily that underpins the novel is also what has made it so controversial. Leonardo Sciascia, whose writing has come to define the island, argued that The Leopard’s description of a society immobilised by its inability to accept change fails to grapple with the real impact of the Risorgimento — the political movement that brought about the unification of Italy.

Today, there’s no shortage of Sicilian writers and thinkers who would agree with that assessment of The Leopard’s deep conservatism. They argue that there’s nothing cultural about, say, the proliferation of organised crime in Sicily, and there’s no genetic predisposition that causes Sicilians to reject change. What the island has lacked, they say, is the presence of strong institutions, adequate law enforcement and economic policies required to draw it in to a modern Italian state. Sicily’s challenges are based in governance shortcomings, not culture.

But to believe this is to reject the very premise of The Leopard, which can only be read as a depiction of a society in which no ruler and no state authority can bring about change. And this is where the Netflix series falters. It’s fine to develop minor characters and examine Concetta’s love life. Even a sequel in which the prince visits Turin doesn’t inherently conflict with the material. What’s truly challenging is to juggle a story based on a premise that nothing changes with a format that requires plot development and characters with their own narrative arcs.

In fact, you could argue that Netflix deserves kudos for giving it a go. Lampedusa’s The Leopard may well be a novel that simply can’t be adapted to the small screen. •

The post How The Leopard changed its spots appeared first on Inside Story.

For some, Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce (1959) is a masterpiece, a worthy recipient of the National Book Prize for non-fiction in 1960 and, for its second edition, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1982. For others, it is a tombstone looming over Joyce and his work. The late Gabrielle Carey, for example — whose own life of Joyce came out posthumously in 2023 — regarded Ellmann’s biography as impenetrable and intimidating. That may be because it is almost impossible to write about James Joyce without sensing Ellmann’s shadow.

But Ellmann’s book is also highly regarded in own right. “The greatest literary biography of the twentieth century,” Anthony Burgess called it. When I was writing my PhD, one of my supervisors insisted I read it to see why. Its scholarship is detailed. Its approach is humane. The prose is clear and elegant. Its depth is considerable. And the Joyce created in its pages is funny, absurd, ambitious, grating, sentimental: a man and an artist who unifies contradictions without reconciling them.

Zachary Leader, an American literary scholar and biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow, is another admirer of Ellmann’s big book. “An extraordinary achievement,” he calls it. Now, in Ellmann’s Joyce, an account of the biographer’s life and the making of the biography, he seeks to explain why.

A little over two decades ago, Adam Sisman wrote an acute and often comic account of James Boswell’s efforts to produce his biography of Samuel Johnson. Among the many qualities of Boswell’s Presumptuous Task (2002) was its portrayal of Boswell’s determination to present both the attractive and unattractive facets of his subject, and the consternation that this caused on publication. As Sisman pointed out, this empathetic but generally candid approach is one of the reasons why Boswell’s biography has endured. It also became the standard to which all biographers should try to aspire.

Leader identifies a similar critical novelty in Ellmann’s work and career. For his PhD at Yale in 1941, Ellmann had to seek special approval to write about W.B. Yeats (1865–1939). It was an audacious subject: at the time, literary scholars regarded contemporary subjects as unsuitable for serious study. But Ellmann got the go-ahead. Why? Partly because Yeats was dead, partly because Ellmann had already been approved as a doctoral candidate, and partly because he was at least not proposing to study the very-much-alive Auden, Eliot or Pound. The approval meant that Ellmann would produce the first dissertation at Yale on a twentieth-century poet; it was also a sign that Joyce, who had died only a few months earlier, would soon be an appropriate subject for study.

By then Ellmann had developed an outlook that would become key to his approach to biography. Born in 1918 to what Leader calls a “comfortably upper-middle-class” Jewish family in Michigan, Ellmann grew up with a strong love of literature and learning his mother had inculcated with poetry recitations and readings of authors including Dumas, Dickens, Hugo, Kipling and Twain. Ellmann also developed an early fascination with organising documents. His father, a lawyer, would bring home portfolios that Ellmann would fondle and arrange: “He was in his glory when he was up to his chin in important papers,” said his mother.

He became a confident young man, willing to be candid but also to propitiate. Hearing of his parents’ displeasure when his elder brother married a gentile, he wrote directly to rebuke them: “You will forgive my speaking so strongly but it seems to me that this persecution of my brother should stop, whether you think it’s for his own good or not.” Ellmann too married a gentile, Mary, in 1949, but he was so conscious of his parents’ likely disapproval that he and Mary eloped to Paris, from where he wrote to plead their forgiveness.

By then, many of the factors that would push him to work on Joyce were in place. When his study of Yeats was interrupted by the war, he served in the US Navy and the Office of Strategic Services. Stationed in Europe, he improved his paper-handling and organisational skills and also had the opportunity to meet Yeats’s widow, Georgie Hyde-Lees. She confirmed to Ellmann that a much-fabled 1902 meeting between Yeats and Joyce had actually taken place. Yeats, then a well-established poet, failed to impress Joyce, who was just a student at the time: “You are too old for me to help you,” Joyce said.

Memory of the remark — the arrogance of which delighted Ellmann — recurred when, having published his Yeats dissertation in 1948, Ellmann began considering a new project. A friend urged him toward Joyce and pointed to the contacts and expertise Ellmann had built in Ireland: “You can do it, [and] not many other people could.”

A lawyer with a collection of Joyce material — first editions, periodicals, critical works, biographical material — was willing to let Ellmann see it. Moreover, Ellmann had become critical of the only existing biography of Joyce, by Herbert Gormann, published in 1939. Taking note of the restrictions Gormann had worked under — the gaps in the material, the lack of detail — Ellmann recalled thinking: “I could do better than this.”

What follows in Ellmann’s Joyce is a fascinating account of the sleuthing, diplomacy, energy, patience, curiosity, luck and — perhaps most of all — the sheer unadorned time necessary to write a good biography. This may sound like a niche theme, but for anyone who’s written a book the dilemmas will be familiar and the ways Ellmann navigated them instructive.

Ellmann contended with touchy relatives. He encountered dead ends. He heard repeatedly of long-discarded papers and vital sources long in the grave. “I should have done this ten years ago,” he despaired privately. Rivals were keen to stake out territory, prospective interviewees were reluctant or guarded, enormous gaps in Joyce’s life needed filling. Letters and manuscripts had to be tracked down. An ever-burgeoning amount of critical material needed fossicking for gems.

“You could probably do it in about ten years on a full job,” a friend told Ellmann. “You could probably do it in five, but not sooner… What information there is is scattered all over. Just yanking together the presently known material is a two-year job, and even then there would be great yawning gaps, serious enough to impair any picture you might form of the man.”

Slowly but surely, Ellmann did the work. He overcame the reluctance of his interviewees by sending them his books to show his credentials and by using other names as references and authorities for his making contact. He flattered sources, made shows of inconveniencing himself for them, and refused to accept no as a final answer.

One source staved Ellmann off for a time by saying he was working on a memoir, then grudgingly granted a less-than-forthcoming interview. When he dropped dead six months later and his papers were deposited in the National Library of Ireland, Ellmann showed up immediately to consult them. Another source, who had known the young Joyce in Ireland, came to Ellmann’s attention via a letter Ellmann found in some Joyce family papers in Paris. With perseverance, intuition and luck, Ellmann enlisted a colleague who tracked the source down to an Indian reservation some hundred miles north of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where she was living under an entirely different name. “She made it possible,” Ellmann wrote later, “for me to feel that I had got back to the years immediately after Joyce’s birth.”

Ellmann had plenty of places to tread warily. He argued with Joyce’s son, Giorgio, over whether Joyce had carried on an affair. Proof hinged on the use of an epsilon, e, in several letters, in lieu of the letter “e.” Giorgio denied that his father had ever written this way and contended the letters were fakes. Ellmann went to Ulysses to point out that Leopold Bloom uses the epsilon to disguise himself when writing letters to a pen-pal named Martha — who shared a first name with the woman Ellmann was suggesting Joyce had had an affair with.

Then there were the letters that had been secreted in a Paris apartment since the German occupation. Exchanged by Joyce and his wife Nora, these were smutty and frank in a way that is still astonishing eighty-five years later. Ellmann was desperate to ensure that Giorgio didn’t get his hands on them — even as he conceded that the letters were rightfully his. He convinced the woman possessing the letters to let him draw on them, and only just in time: when Giorgio took possession of the letters in 1955 he locked them away.

Considerable tact was also required in dealing with Joyce’s brother Stanislaus. Ellmann won him over by encouraging his work on an autobiography and by offering to help place his writing with publishers. When Stanislaus died in 1955, the autobiography unfinished, Ellmann not only helped to edit it but was also given access by Stanislaus’s widow to a cellar full of papers. “From the point of view of a biographer,” he wrote, “I had tumbled into King Tut’s tomb.”

Travelling repeatedly through Ireland and Europe, Ellmann was exhilarated and excited — less by scandalous revelations than by “illuminating details which seemed to come together into a fairly coherent image.” At other times he was nervous. Having signed a contract with Oxford University Press in 1953 to deliver the manuscript within two years — a date he knew he would not meet — Ellmann became worried that competitors might scoop him. Should he produce a short “biographical study” instead? His publishers dissuaded him, but by 1956 Ellmann was wondering whether to make it two volumes instead. His motivation was to use the material from King Tut’s tomb before it could be sold to an institution — a sale Ellmann was helping to orchestrate, mind you — and accessed by a rival scholar. Again, the publishers dissuaded Ellmann. Anxieties about competitors prompted Ellmann nonetheless to publish essays that could claim ownership of discoveries archival and critical.

Foremost was the Ellmann’s exploration of the relationship between Joyce’s writing and his life, made possible, says Leader, by Ellmann’s biographical legwork. Over and over again, in those articles and in James Joyce, he was able to point to real-life models, to borrowings and adaptations, that placed Joyce in context and illuminated his working methods, or what Ellmann called Joyce’s “imaginative absorption of stray material.” He argued that Joyce “built his art upon a rock, and the rock was reality.” Repeatedly, Joyce transposed and recomposed the particulars of that reality for his fiction, augmenting them with imagination, giving them shadow and light.

This argument — which occasioned criticism that continues to this day — was one way of validating Ellmann’s biographical endeavours. Where literary biography has been dismissed as unnecessary for understanding a literary work or criticised for reducing the artistry of making literature, Ellmann believed his endeavours increased the understanding of the scale of that artistry. “To trace the materials of Ulysses,” he wrote, “is to discover a fuller admiration for the hand that changed them or, with equal mastery, let them alone.”

It is an assessment that has endured. Vivien Igoe’s The Real People of Joyce’s Ulysses (2016), which presents some six hundred biographies of people who appear, in various forms and disguises, in the novel, may be counted as one measure of how enduring Ellmann’s assessment was. Yet it is also one that those who have followed Ellmann continue to debate and argue against. As one of Ellmann’s friends told him, the resort to Joyce’s fiction to find congruencies or discrepancies was fraught with problems: “You are weaving both the works and the non-works into a single, supposedly factual, fabric.” Those problems were aggravated by the potential licence Ellmann was affording for later biographers to do the same. And they were all the more troublesome for coming in prose that was stylish, clear, seamless.

One of the more elegiac parts of Leader’s account is the snapshot it gives of an academic lifestyle and conditions now long gone. Every three years, as a professor at Northwestern University, Ellmann enjoyed a year’s paid leave that allowed him to travel repeatedly throughout Europe and Ireland, retracing Joyce’s steps, consulting archives and libraries, and conducting interviews. The resources required were enormous: “Like some gigantic financial operation conducted over about eight countries,” Ellmann wrote of it. As it turned out, that operation would span thirteen countries, involve more than 300 interviewees, and take seven years.

Funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Northwestern University and Oxford University Press made it possible, as did the saintly forbearance and sacrifice of Ellmann’s wife, Mary. A notable literary scholar in her own right, she was consigned to the role of mother for much of the time Ellmann was researching and writing James Joyce, steering their three children — two of them born during the making of the book — and bearing the domestic load during his numerous absences. As one of her letters runs:

Maudie flooded bathroom again, great flood down through light fixture but this time not put on blink. Pierre [the dog] had back leg trouble yesterday, better today without vet. Couldn’t get to vet, car on blink, so money saved. Obviously we have entered a new phase of catastrophes confronted and stared down. Rather exhilarating.

The same may be said of Ellmann’s Joyce. Perhaps it is a peculiar kind, but to read an expansive account of how scholarship is done, how new work builds on old work, and how one of the monumental biographies of the twentieth centuries came to be is, oddly enough, exhilarating. Those Joyceans may be onto something. •

Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker
Zachary Leader | Belknap Press of Harvard University Press | US$35 | 464 pages

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Richard Ellmann’s extraordinary achievement appeared first on Inside Story.

Kehlmann depicts choices made in the grimmest of circumstances, sometimes in the name of art. His central figure is G.W. (Georg Wilhelm) Pabst, the Austrian-born filmmaker probably best known for Pandora’s Box, the remarkable 1929 silent movie starring Louise Brooks as a wilful object of desire who brings chaos and destruction in her wake.

Pabst was an innovator and artist with a particular gift for working with actors. Kehlmann’s focus is a disconcerting trajectory in the life of a filmmaker — once known as “Red Pabst” because of his approach to social issues — who left Germany because of Hitler’s rise. Yet he returned just before the outbreak of war and ended up making films funded by the Reich. What happened?

When Kehlmann introduces Pabst he is adrift in 1930s Hollywood, hampered by his limited grasp of English. He is overlooked or patronised, constantly confused with other German directors and their films, congratulated on having made Lang’s Metropolis or Murnau’s Nosferatu. His only job in the United States had been directing a circus drama, A Modern Hero (1934), and it was a miserable experience. He had no real control over the creative process, and the film was a critical and commercial failure.

Kehlmann allows himself a few liberties. In a note at the end of the book he says that “although this novel is largely inspired by the life stories of the historical G.W. Pabst and his family, it is a work of fiction.” He notes that he invented the character of Pabst’s adolescent son, Jakob (although Pabst had two sons, born in 1924 and 1941).

Pabst returned to Austria in 1939 ostensibly for family reasons. Then, unable to leave, he tried initially to resist suggestions that he put his talents to work for the state. Kehlmann depicts a gradual process of accommodation, an accumulation of quotidian compromises. At first, there is a degree of awkward self-awareness in Pabst’s perception of what is happening around him. “Three times he saw parades: drums and brown uniforms and sharp marching in lockstep. Passersby stopped and raised their right hand, and Pabst, not wanting to attract attention, hesitantly did the same — just for a second, with a jerk of his shoulder, after which he felt soiled to the core.”

He is hardly alone. With bleak clarity, The Director shows how every part of society is implicated in one way or another. Sometimes there is enthusiastic cooperation: the caretaker at Pabst’s family home in Austria is an early convert to Nazi values; the adolescent Jakob is enrolled in a high school that eagerly embraces every aspect of Nazi ideology.

In a chapter called “German Literature” Pabst’s hapless wife, Trude, joins a reading group, hoping for some social contact. Its members, mostly wives of influential men, turn out to be cheerleaders for a Reich-approved author called Alfred Karrasch, and they have a ruthless attitude towards dissent or difference. Trude, who has a better grasp than her husband of their situation, soon realises that she must conceal her true opinion of the author’s latest (to her mind insipid) work. A woman is abruptly booted from the group because she can’t help mentioning incidents and people the others would prefer to forget.

The narrative of The Director is mostly in the third person. It is framed, however, by two first-person sequences that take place much later. A befuddled elderly man is transported from a sanatorium for a television interview about working with filmmakers like Pabst. His denial of the existence of a particular work sets the scene, intriguingly, for much of what it is to come. It becomes apparent in the final chapter that he holds the key to a central mystery of the film, even if he is unable or doesn’t wish to remember it.

Another first-person sequence is narrated by an unnamed figure who can only be the author P.G. Wodehouse. Once again, Kehlmann imaginatively engages with real events. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, was living in France when Germany invaded in 1940. He was moved from one internment camp to another, then put up in a five-star hotel and asked to do radio broadcasts about his time in the Reich. He agreed, seemingly oblivious to the implications of his actions. It is through his eyes that we see the premiere of the second feature Pabst makes under the aegis of the state.

Wodehouse is one of many secondary characters or supporting cast-members effortlessly and entertainingly woven or projected into the narrative. Often they are real-life figures, sometimes they are imaginative creations. Among them are Louise Brooks and Greta Garbo: although Pabst played a vital part in their careers, both reject him in their different, distinctive ways when he appeals for their help.

An unnamed Goebbels makes an unnervingly over-the-top appearance to threaten and flatter the filmmaker, and Leni Riefenstahl turns up on a couple of occasions. Pabst had already worked with Riefenstahl as an actress on a silent film he co-directed; by the time they meet again, she has made Triumph of the Will and established her credentials with the Reich. She prevails on Pabst to assist her with her first fiction feature, Lowlands, a work she directs and stars in. It is an unsettling experience for him, but it also foreshadows a decision he makes about a film of his own.

Kehlmann brings to his subject particular insights from his own experience. His father, a director of film and television, was a school student during the second world war and spent several months in a labour camp. His mother was an actor. And recently Kehlmann himself has been a screenwriter for film and television. He is able to create convincing, entertaining accounts of the filmmaking process; he can also imbue certain passages with cinematic qualities and reference points.

The most sustained imaginative engagement in The Director concerns the making of a film called The Molander Case, based on a novel by Karrasch, the author espoused by Trude’s reading group. It is a genuine Pabst work, shot in Prague in 1945, under chaotic circumstances and now regarded as missing. Its production and fate lend themselves to speculation, and Kehlmann does a great deal with this. The movie becomes, in his account, a distillation of all the absurdities, compromises and haunting questions around Pabst and his activities at a time when he was seemingly given the creative control Hollywood would not allow him. The director thinks he can work against the grain, perhaps even create a masterpiece.

Kehlmann has already shown us Pabst’s habit of viewing the world as if setting up a shot, or imagining life in cinematic terms as an unfolding of scenes he can direct. With The Molander Case, it is as if Pabst believes that his creative powers can transcend not only the banality of the source material but also the circumstances of its creation.

The production marks Pabst’s most grim capitulation, but its fate is also the stuff of comedy and irony, with a succession of twists and turns. In its exploration of self-deception, complicity and surrender, The Director is a heady mixture of the compassionate and the unsparing, the tightly organised and the expansively imagined. •

The Director
By Daniel Kehlmann | Translated by Ross Benjamin | Quercus | $34.99 | 333 pagesFunding from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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In the first, an unnamed man in an unidentified but snowy place is unwillingly caught in a state of utter desolation at the sudden death of his family. The second shows a woman found on Wilyakali country, just outside Broken Hill, deeply traumatised, without voice and seemingly without self-knowledge or history. Her life, Jones writes, “was a puzzle waiting to be solved.”

Social media weighs in, speculating on the woman’s identity, and Angie’s childhood friend, Bev Calder, a policewoman, is put in charge of the investigation. Angie is not immune to the puzzle. Although she is suspicious of the true crime genre, with its “wannabe solvers of dodgy whodunnits” — the kind of thing her schoolteacher husband Sam watches on television and reads at night — she quickly resolves to write a story about “Jane,” as the unknown woman comes to be known.

Despite Bev’s somewhat underhanded help, the story never gets published. Instead, Angie, and the novel, are redirected to the projections and hopes of people who share with her the stories of their own female relatives who have never been found.

The Name of the Sister creates and occupies the state of suspension in which these relatives live: the space between loss and discovery that its opening scene establishes. Not a lot happens for much of the novel, at least in terms of plot-driven action. Instead, Angie is given to reflecting movingly on her sometimes distressing past and her love of Egyptian mythology while she faces a disintegrating marriage in the present.

These are not the kinds of emotional ebbs and flows associated with thrillers, the genre some readers would have been expecting — helped along by the book’s blurb: “This is how the story of the Unknown Woman begins. Angie, a freelance journalist, joins her childhood friend Bev, the police officer in charge of the case, try to solve the mystery.”

Bev works towards what she calls “good results.” She also carries the promise of the book-as-thriller, with the narrative focus shifting from uncovering an identity — shown to be far from straightforward — to her work as a criminal investigator, which unexpectedly pulls in her friend.

For the most part, the novel gets no closer to solving the woman’s mystery, largely because it shares the lessons of Angie’s initial induction into the unknowability of others, which the snow man represents. And Angie’s acknowledgement that “The story had fizzled” is not so much a lamentation as an invitation to attend to how the puzzle of the woman is nested among other questions, contemplations and ways of knowing.

This call is suggested by the epigraph to The Name of the Sister. Three lines from Louise Glück’s lyric poem, “October” (2004) are offered as the book’s frame of reference: “you are not alone, / the poem said, / in the dark tunnel.” Glück’s poem turns on an unnameable catastrophe, “an allegory of waste,” and wonders at its own capacity to realise the promise of connection it makes “as though it were the artist’s duty to create / hope, but out of what? what?”

Towards its conclusion, The Name of the Sister makes material Glück’s dark tunnel and confirms female companionship and solidarity in the face of gendered violence. And throughout its pages, it shares Glück’s creative questioning.

Jones gives this querying role to her novel’s protagonist, who in welcoming stories from the loved ones of the disappeared finds herself repeatedly telling them, “I am only a journalist, I cannot help you.” Yet she also intuits the world as would a poet. “She saw the rhymes and connections between unlike things,” much as the novel itself does.

References to music and poetry pattern the narrative, as do avian images. The ibis is rescued from its derogatory status as a “bin chicken” and brought into proximity with Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing, and the bronze-wing creator pigeon, Marnpi, of Wilyakali lore. Bev draws clear lines: “Crime isn’t like literature,” she tells Angie. At one point Angie agrees, admitting that “For all the deadly fun of plotted drama, this was not her genre.” While by no means dismissive of either character, many knowledges meet in this novel.

In this way, The Name of the Sister reflects the preoccupations that travel across Jones’s writing. Some reviewers have cast the novel as a departure, with its foray into the thriller genre, and yet her earlier works anticipate some of its preoccupations.

It is not too much of a stretch to say that many of Jones’s novels have taken more than a passing interest in the thriller. The Death of Noah Glass (2018) begins as what that novel’s title seems to promise — but deliberately doesn’t deliver — a murderous art heist plot. In Five Bells (2011) a young girl disappears. Sorry (2007) begins with the memory of man’s death and a young Indigenous woman falsely accused of murder, an injustice made apparent as the original scene is reshaped and brought into a traumatic focus through fragments and repetitions. (Sorry also features a character obsessed with Shakespeare; Sam, Angie’s husband, teaches Shakespeare passionately but unthinkingly.) A Guide to Berlin (2015) starts with a scene of proleptic mourning that the last part of the novel addresses when it purposefully shifts genres and moves towards the thriller.

The Name of the Sister is the least overtly experimental of these novels but, like them, it is interrogative of narrative form, rearranging and disrupting the reassuring predictability of genre and plot to allow for irresolution and unknowingness. It also shares with many of Jones’s other novels a female writer-protagonist who is somewhat self-contained and anachronistic. Angie sees herself as never really fitting in, much like Anna Griffin, the biographer in Black Mirror (2002), Alice Black in Dreams of Speaking (2006), who is working on a book on modernity, Cass Turner in A Guide to Berlin, who is meant to be writing a book but spends little time doing so, and Helen Ross in One Another (2024), who is researching a thesis on Joseph Conrad.

Jones’s latest novel also returns to a mining town, a site that makes an appearance in earlier novels. Our Shadow (2020) was interested in three generations living in Kalgoorlie. In Black Mirror, the personal histories of Anna Griffin and her biographical subject, Victoria Morell, are yoked to a mining town that is also the scene of Indigenous displacement and reclamation. In The Name of the Sister, Broken Hill is meaningfully overdetermined by horror cinema and its representations of “the Australian outback,” as the textual presence of the Mad Max 2 museum suggests.

Existent with these shared features, and going some way towards understanding Jones’s return to them, is a common querying that is possibly unresolvable. Grief is an abiding force within Jones’s writing, and her stories wonder at what might emerge from it.

In the near conclusion of The Name of the Sister hope is said to be lost. But the prospect of significance is also offered in the form of patterns and music, and can be read as a tentative, affirmative response to Glück’s probing question: “what?” As such, The Name of the Sister is Jones’s latest eloquent exploration, in its specificities as well as in conversation with her previous novels, of the role of art and the experience of loss. •

The Name of the Sister
By Gail Jones | Text | $34.99 | 208 pages

The post Not alone in the dark tunnel appeared first on Inside Story.

At this point we might ask fruitful for whom, but we’d be jumping ahead of ourselves. The obstacle at that first encounter was Gabriële’s passion to become a composer. She’d secured a place dedicated to avant-garde music in the Schola Cantorum, and progressed from there to Berlin, where she played in bistros and orchestras to earn her keep while she drank in the pleasures of the city and unleashed the creativity of her mind.

She enrolled in courses conducted by one of the city’s modernist composers, who urged his students to “explore abstract sonorities” while paying due attention to aesthetic developments in other artforms. Gabriële was a staunch modernist and Francis, whose imitative, Sisley-inspired, neo-Impressionist canvasses were being shown in all the top Parisian galleries, seemed to have little to recommend him.

For Gabriële Buffet was the classic bluestocking. The future she had mapped for herself precluded marriage and motherhood, and at twenty-seven she was still happily a virgin. Nor was she what a casual observer might call fetching.

“There’s nothing sweet about Gabriële Buffet’s face,” write Anne Berest and Claire Berest in Gabriële. “Her chin, especially, is too large. Her forehead, too. Her eyes are narrowed in perpetual thought, like two coal-black slits beneath strongly marked brows that obscure the colour of her irises.” Yet, they continue, “This woman, neither beautiful nor ugly, is something else.”

And Francis Picabia? “Small, slim” with “smouldering dark eyes,” even then he was a notorious womaniser known for the huge amounts of money he wasted on cars. I’d venture that their improbable union was the attraction of opposites, yet to do so is to make a travesty of that truism. But whatever it was, their story, as the Bisset sisters craft it, raises all kinds of questions. What do we really know about sex, love, ego, parenthood, feminism — and, not the least of it, art?

As it happened, Gabriële and Francis did spend that night together. But it was not the easy sexual adventure Picabia had expected. Instead, they spent the hours talking. He, the authors’ great-grandfather, had never come across a woman like their great-grandmother. He had reached an impasse in his art, he confided to her, but was tied down by exhibitions and contracts. To this she replied: “What you paint should be purely a creation of the mind conceptualising it.” It was the bold remark that gave him the courage he needed.

Gabriële’s intelligence thrilled him more than any sexual conquest could. “Encirclement” is what the Bisset sisters call it. From that moment, her mind became both his inspiration and his treasure. She gave up music to embrace, “without apparent frustration, a career as a maieutic, that is, a sort of muse for the creative processes of others.”

This most madcap of madcap unions was possible, it should be said, by their both being beneficiaries of family fortunes. Picabia sold off his old canvasses and exhibited new ones inspired by Gabriële. Then they dashed off to Spain, where “capricious fate knits [them] together.” As Gabriële herself wrote, “I note these details of our time in Spain… because once we’d returned to Paris, they served for years to inspire the themes of compositions by Picabia that were nonetheless entirely abstract.”

Back home, Picabia threw himself into painting, his fading eyesight propelling him further into the new aesthetic. His breakthrough was Rubber, a completely non-representative canvas:

With Rubber, the fruit of Gabriële’s musician’s mind, Francis Picabia paints one of the very first “abstract” paintings — if not, according to some historians, “the first abstract work in the history of art.” Without knowing it, and certainly without ever claiming it, Gabriële has established herself as a “figure at the forefront of the artistic movement.”

Picabia’s reputation was consolidated in 1913 at New York’s groundbreaking Armory exhibition, which introduced America to Cubism. Revelling in the newfound fame, he stayed on for most of the war years. Fuelled by opium, addictive sex and what today would be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, his output was as enormous as his prodigality. Gabriële, meanwhile, gave birth to the first of their four children. The youngest, Vincent (conceived just before their divorce in 1930, and dead by his own hand at just twenty-seven), was the grandfather the Bissets never knew.

Such was the Picabia–Buffet partnership that divorce never entirely succeeded in breaking their hold on each other. If the mind, as has been said, is the most powerful sexual organ, it could hardly be more so than in this coupling.

The book their great-grand-daughters have given us encompasses their contributions to twentieth-century art and includes a cast of equally intriguing characters, Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Arp, Tristan Tzara and Pablo Picasso among them. They both lived long lives, Picabia to seventy-four and Gabriële to 104.

As well as her copious writing on art and her intellectual midwifery to so many artists, Gabriële played a documented part in the French Resistance. There was so much to this woman, it is scarcely possible to touch on it in the space I have here. So it’s not at all surprising to learn that the Bisset sisters will be bringing out another volume to cover the latter years of their truly remarkable forebear.

But there’s something else to consider. Like its eponymous subject, a novel written by two sisters is, in its way, groundbreaking. But is it really a novel? When I started writing them, novels were prescribed as long, linear, fictional works portraying the intertwined stories of a set of imagined characters. Now, thankfully, we have novels that blithely dismantle that narrative arc. There are novels as well about historical figures, and some that mix real people with imagined ones.

In Gabriële, though, the authors also break into their story to tell the readers the difficulties they’ve had in writing it. And if all the characters, including the authors, are real, isn’t this more a biography than a novel, especially with a long bibliography at the end? And does any of this matter if the story engages us? To the French anyway, Gabriële is a roman vrai.

Claire Berest has published five other novels, including Rien n’est Noir, which featured the artist Frida Kahlo. Anne Berest’s widely acclaimed sixth book, La Carte Postale, published in English as The Postcard, is based on the sisters’ Jewish grandmother, the daughter of the fourth child of Gabriële and Francis Picaria. Both The Postcard and Gabriële were inspired by the authors’ search for their origins, The Postcard’s protagonist being their grandmother Myriam Rabinovitiz, a Holocaust survivor.

Part of my interest in these works comes from my own impulse in writing two novels based on what I could learn about my mother’s family. The second also involved the arrival of a mysterious postcard. Encountering the same difficulties as the Berest sisters have, I chose to call that book a novel, changing my relatives’ names and inventing a host of other characters. But again — what does any of this matter? What matters are the stories, and in Gabriële Buffet-Picaria’s case, what a richly rewarding story it is.

For all that, what her great-granddaughters have told me so far about Gabriële Buffet’s life has left me wondering. How could a woman with such gifts and dedication to her art give up everything to foster the career of an exasperating wastrel, however handsome and charming? Just toss it away — not even in her case in a fog of hormones — to a talent arguably far less than hers?

To pose the question might simply mean I’m overlooking the impact misogyny had in her day, even on a spirit such as hers. Or am I guilty of minimising the contribution she made in using her prodigious intellect to formulate in words what the arts have in common, how they fertilise each other and, in the last analysis, their tremendous gift of depth and meaning to so many of our lives. •

Gabriële
By Anne Berest and Claire Berest | Translated by Tina Kover | Europa Editions | $34.99 | 350 pages

The post Something else appeared first on Inside Story.

The film adaptation, written by Enda Walsh and directed by Tim Mielants, treats its source with respect and care, keeping close to the chronology and tone of the novella. There are slight variations and additions and inevitable contractions, but the film never resorts to the temptation of voiceover or expository dialogue. It trusts the viewer to pay attention and make connections, to watch and to wait.

It understands too what cinema can achieve. Cillian Murphy’s performance in the lead role is a beautifully judged, deliberately recessive one; the supporting cast are pitch perfect. One way Mielants heightens our sense of proximity to Bill — and suggests the interiority of the novella — is through the use of sound, above all a sense of his breathing: sighs, exhalations, sharp intakes of breath, indications of exertion and emotion.

Small Things Like These takes place in a small town in County Wexford, Ireland, in the mid-1980s, with Christmas approaching. Bill is a man of routine who works six days at his coal delivery business and comes home every evening to his wife and five daughters. Mielants repeats the ritual of the early morning start, of loading sacks onto a truck, driving, delivering, returning home in the evening, and scrubbing the coal dust off his hands with particular vigour.

At home with his wife and daughters, there is a feeling of warmth and affectionate familiarity. Mielants also gives us moments of Bill’s early life through flashbacks, childhood memories that rise to the surface at key moments. Talk of Christmas presents with his girls triggers a memory from years ago; we discover that what happened then was a little different from the story he tells his daughters. Bill is played as a child by Louis Kirwan, and in these scenes we learn about how he grew up as the child of a single mother. It was an unusual situation in which he experienced support and kindness but also bewilderment, uncertainty and loss.

These days Bill keeps his head down, literally and metaphorically, and rarely looks people in the eye. But there are some things he cannot avoid seeing or remembering. He seems particularly conscious of the vulnerability of the young. Out on the road, he stops to offer a lift to a boy collecting sticks for firewood. He is protective of his teenage daughter, who helps out at the office, worried about how she is treated by the men she has to deal with.

Then, standing unnoticed in a doorway as he is making a delivery to the local convent, he sees a teenage girl struggling and distressed as she is pushed and pulled inside the building. Something within him shifts; it is the beginning of a realignment, of an inability to look away and do nothing.

The convent houses an institution where girls and young women are confined. The Magdalene laundries were run by convents and the state; over decades, thousands of girls and young women, sometimes pregnant, often kept under duress, carried out household tasks and worked in a laundry service that operated at all hours.

That first glimpse of that distressed girl at the convent soon becomes something impossible for him to overlook. He sees first-hand the desperation of Sarah (Zara Devlin), whose impact on him is heightened by the fact that she shares his mother’s name. A subsequent encounter with the convent’s Mother Superior (Emily Watson) makes clear how much he is up against. She is a formidable, unnerving figure with a practised public face. On the surface, she is expressing kindness and concern, making a gesture of generosity, but in fact she is delivering a warning and a threat. She makes it clear to Bill that she holds much of his life in her hands, above all the lives of his daughters, students at the school next door to the convent.

Bill talks things over with his wife, Eileen (played by Eileen Walsh, who appeared as an inmate of a  similar institution in Peter Mullan’s 2002 drama, The Magdalene Sisters). These scenes underline the bond between the couple, but also the gulf.

What follows is explored with delicacy and clarity. The openness of Keegan’s ending is preserved on screen, although it is presented in a different way, and has, perhaps, a different resonance. It is an echo of a scene we have seen several times before, but from another angle. In the final moments, using both sound and silence, Mielants leaves things in a suspended state — yet a transformation has taken place, and nothing will be the same. •

The post Small mercies appeared first on Inside Story.

Biographies are ineligible for the award. Fair enough, yes? A biography is not a work of fiction. Yet anyone who has tried writing biography, or thought about biography as form, will know that a biography (or an autobiography) is only ever a representation, or a re-performance, of a life, not the life as it was lived. If there are gaps and silences in the life of the subject, or if the subject has left a deliberate trail of evasion or deception, or if the story has become confused by many previous biographies, the biographer must manage as best they might. Those are the challenges.

There is an extensive literature (here’s a recent Australian example) on how infinitely changeable, malleable and fluid biography is, drawing as it does on literary, historical and journalistic traditions. In 1994, American journalist Janet Malcolm asserted in her book about the “afterlife” of Sylvia Plath that the entire biographical enterprise is little more than an exercise in “voyeurism and busybodyism.” Yet even she kept writing biographically for years after that.

Miles Franklin is a tempting biographical subject, even though she has already been “done” by Jill Roe in her 700-page biography, published in 2008. Franklin wrote versions of herself many times in her novels, beginning in 1901 with her most famous work, My Brilliant Career. The twenty-one-year-old author had insisted on a question mark in the title — “My Brilliant (?) Career” — and was annoyed when her publisher took it out. But the irony is too deeply embedded in the story for anyone to miss. The rags-to-riches-to-rags tale led many early readers to conclude that Sybylla Melvyn, the heroine, was one and the same as Miles Franklin, the author.

Something else to attract a Franklin biographer are her extensive papers at the State Library of New South Wales, and this is where Kerrie Davies, a media academic and former journalist, found inspiration for her new book Miles Franklin Undercover: The Little-Known Years When She Created Her Own Brilliant Career.

In an author’s note Davies tells us that she was especially drawn to two brown leather-bound volumes titled “When I Was Mary Anne, a Slavey,” which are a record of a year in 1903–04 when Franklin went “undercover” as a domestic servant in Sydney and Melbourne. (“Mary Anne” was a common term for any female servant.) Franklin hoped to publish a book from her experiences and thus prevent her literary career from, in her words, going “bung.” However, it was knocked back by a publisher (Davies believes it was Angus & Robertson) because the publisher feared Franklin’s former employers would recognise themselves, and would sue.

At first Davies hoped to edit it for publication, but then she realised that what she had in front of her, which may not have been the fair copy submitted to the publisher, was too messy and ill-formed to craft into a single narrative. Moreover it is replete with social attitudes, to “sex workers, tradies and First Nations Australians,” as Davies’ puts it, that are “jarringly” of their time. A scholarly editor would deal with this in additional contextual commentary, but Davies decided to go in a different direction.

Her book is a “slice-of-life” biography (her term) covering the years from 1901 to 1915.  Davies wants this critical part of Franklin’s life to “fully breathe” in her book, and it does. In chapter one we discover Miles at home on the family property at Stillwater, near Goulburn, walking out in the baking heat to the kerosene tin nailed to a fence that serves as a letterbox to collect a parcel covered in English stamps. Revealed: her six copies of My Brilliant Career, just published.

Each postal run, the Franklin mail tin is “stuffed from end to end” with letters from readers. This post-publication experience is beautifully evoked, because for all her boundless energy and ambition Franklin was a very young woman with only an average education, living in rural poverty, and nothing could have prepared her for overnight literary acclaim, or the incomprehension and anger from members of her family and community at how they had been used as characters in Franklin’s book (or so they believed).

With the failure of the Mary Anne project, Franklin packs that and several other rejected manuscripts and heads overseas. We accompany her to San Francisco (she arrives a fortnight after the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906) and Chicago, where we witness her mixed fortunes as she struggles to make a living while establishing herself among feminist networks. She continues to disappoint her family with her determined rejection of matrimony. (“Have you found anyone you like better than yourself?” her grandmother once asked her.) She never stops writing.

The end of the “slice” is Franklin’s decision in 1915 to leave Chicago for London, a city which for her is the “ultimate test of fame for any writer.” Readers are left to wonder if she is to make a success of it, but we have watched her confront and overcome many disappointments and have reason to hope that the self-knowledge, determination and resilience she has gained will carry her through.

Like a character in a Künstlerroman — a novel based around a female writer’s development into a mature artist — Miles Franklin has grown and changed in these fourteen years. The book’s narrative arc traces her early success, her subsequent struggle with rejection and tragedy, and her triumph as “a single woman embarking on a life that few women of her era contemplated alone.”

Davies tells us explicitly that her book is not a work of fiction, although, she adds, “it might read as such.” We should think of it as “a literary lacework of Edwardian sources, stitched together to create Miles’ life and her world.” She eschews the “dispassionate” voice of a historian and biographer, turning instead to creative non-fiction to show how Franklin defied the status quo for Edwardian women.

Let’s consider the lace metaphor. Historical research involves identifying and analysing the available sources and deciding what to do with the inevitable gaps and absences. So there are stitches — the historical sources — and there are holes. Lace design is all about arranging the holes into a pleasing pattern, and this is what Davies has done. At the back of her book she thoroughly documents, chapter by chapter, every source she has used to create her narrative, thereby showing us not just the final piece of lacey fabric but the pattern instructions as well.

Enormous skill and patience went into crafting the narrative out of a wide range of material including Franklin’s published and unpublished fiction and journalism, letters, diaries, contemporary newspapers and magazines, and secondary sources. Jill Roe’s book acts as Davies’s “map” through all this. At a few points Davies acknowledges that she is speculating.

Does the book look like a biography? With its sixteen pages of glossy photographs and fifty-six pages of references and bibliography, yes it does. But only occasionally does the narrative voice of an omniscient biographer step up to explain things and impart information to the reader. Indeed, significant creative license is sometimes deployed, as here, for example, during a moment in Chicago in 1907:

The warmth of the summer was beckoning. On the ride home from work in the city’s streetcars she squeezes among burly men and tired women. She wrinkles her nose at their tobacco breathe. The days are longer now, her chest does not hurt from seasonal flu, and she can walk along the lake without shivering.

This is from a five-page chapter referenced with nineteen citations, but there is no citation for the passage just quoted, and it is not noted as speculation. It must therefore be a “hole” among the stitches that the author has filled with her imagination.

Does the book read like fiction? Most certainly. The physical scene-setting is absorbing and satisfying, though I found the narrative flat and the emotional register narrow. Miles goes here, she goes there, she meets Banjo Paterson one day and Rose Scott another day, she receives a letter from her sister, she sends a postcard to her mother. And so on. There is plenty of action, and many characters: Miles herself, of course, and her circle, and some vaguely evoked historical personages who drift about like extras in a film. But seldom do I feel moved by the characters, or curious about them.

Often there is a sense that something momentous is about to happen, that the piled-on period detail and the comings and goings of various characters are leading somewhere. But then they don’t. The rejection of the Mary Anne manuscript must have been a crisis for Franklin after a year of wearisome labour (in which she was burned when a faulty gas stove ignited in her face) and the disapproval of her family. But Davies deals with Franklin’s reaction to the news in just a single paragraph. Miles sulks and curls up, dejected, in her room. Without further ado the reader is bustled on to the next thing.

The death of her sister Linda in 1907 was one of the few times in the book when Miles stood out to me not just as an active person but also as a feeling person. In her grief she became seriously depressed and unwell, and at last I caught a glimpse into Miles Franklin’s heart. Linda, unlike Miles, had done everything expected of a loving sister, daughter, wife and mother. And yet she died. This tragedy reached out from the past and touched something in me as a reader in the present.

From the safety of the archive Davies makes little dashes into the unknown because she badly wants to enter the consciousness of her characters. But with her self-imposed adherence to history, she cannot quite grant herself the freedom that a novelist would take as their due.

By the end of the book I was certainly convinced that Miles Franklin was an extraordinary woman. But then, I knew that already. •

Miles Franklin Undercover: The Little-Known Years When She Created Her Own Brilliant Career
By Kerrie Davies | Allen & Unwin | $34.95 | 384 pages

The post Stitches and holes appeared first on Inside Story.

The writer Paul Bowles was among the reasons I wanted to visit this city on the northern tip of Morocco. Writers flocked to Tangier following the Second World War, when it was capital of the evocatively named International Zone. Bowles was at the centre of an eclectic literary cast that included William S. Burroughs, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Patricia Highsmith, Allen Ginsberg and Gore Vidal. Each mined the scenes around them in their works.

There was certainly plenty of material. The Tangier of those days was an anything-goes place ruled loosely by European powers and populated with a cast of barons, bounders, boulevardiers, black sheep, desperadoes, exoticists, spies, sensualists and assorted flotsam and jetsam. After reading so much of their writing in anticipation of the trip, these literary ghosts seemed so alive to me in this mahogany old cafe that some of them could have been sipping mint tea at nearby tables. Hisham said he was delighted to show me some of their haunts, a deviation from his staple work of taking roly-poly tourists from cruise ships on food tours. At least that was the story he told me.

I first came to know of Bowles when I was told he’d named the ill-omened male character of The Sheltering Sky, his first and most remembered novel, after a city I knew all too well. The man’s name, somewhat preposterously, was Port Moresby, a nod to a city Bowles had never visited but intuited as being an epitome for existential desolation. Moresby, his wife Kit and their acquaintance Tunner make up the tangled and doomed triangle at the book’s centre. Side characters include a callow young Australian, Eric, and a ghastly woman introduced as his travel writer mother, it being entirely ambiguous to the reader throughout as to what their relationship is.

Many elements of The Sheltering Sky were autobiographical. Kit had many of the characteristics of Bowles’s wife Jane; Eric and his mother were thinly fictionalised versions of figures Bowles wrote after encounters on his travels. There was a gossamer thinness between his fiction and nonfiction, phrases and scenes from one form popping up in the other.

I’d finished rereading this strange, sad, haunting novel in a bar in Tarifa, the Spanish port town from where the ferries depart for Tangier. Perhaps it was the immediacy of the words, but the bar itself seemed populated by characters with similar attributes, the most obvious of which was a middle-aged American woman in multicolour kaftan feeding cheese to her dog while monologuing tales from her miserable childhood to a bored young man who looked sure to be her unhappy lover.

Nothing good awaits any of the characters in The Sheltering Sky as they fan across the Sahara. One dies, another is willingly imprisoned as a concubine; throughout, characters cogitate about their inconsequential place in the universe, “how fragile we are” under the sheltering sky of the title.

But the novel is positively upbeat compared to some of Bowles’s short stories. A fiction-writing friend of mine had urged me to read “A Distant Episode” as part of pre-trip reading but warned I would find it hard going. I did. The story is about a trusting linguistics professor who returns to the site of his fieldwork somewhere in the Moroccan hinterland. Expecting acclaim, the hapless don instead finds himself tortured by relatives of his former informants who mock him for not understanding their dialect. Tennessee Williams — another member of the city’s rotating cast — told Bowles to spike another of his short stories lest readers think him an outright monster.

Bowles’s writings are certainly much easier to admire than adore. Yet I have always been drawn to them and his ruminations about travel, place and our place in the world; I’ve probably read him as deeply as any writer. Many of his stories serve as cautionary tales, speaking to a fear that travel doesn’t so much enable discovery so much as to reveal personal flaws and insecurities. No matter how much outsiders strive to understand another place, they will remain largely deaf and dumb to both the place itself and, in many ways, their own motivations. As someone who has lived a lot of his life overseas and tried to understand places far from my own, Bowles’s observations pointed to a melancholy conclusion that was uncomfortable yet necessary to ruminate on.

I was also in Tangier as a halfway stop to Australia after years in the United States, reckoning with a return I was at best ambivalent about. We were in Morocco the week before a new president would be inaugurated in Washington and the world seemed frozen in purgatorial uncertainty about what would come next. To put it another way, I was in a profoundly Bowlesian mood, a disposition enhanced still further by the presence in my backpack of a dogeared and often read copy of Travels, his collection of non-fiction pieces.

I asked Hisham if people still come to Tangier seeking to make it as writers. “Not really,” he replied. “Everyone wants to be a YouTuber and a Tiktoker nowadays.” My own children aspire in similar directions; their dreams seem faintly ludicrous but no sillier than my own dream from adolescence of trying to make it as a writer.

And maybe they are onto something. There were probably a hundred people in the Gran Café de Paris. One person was reading a newspaper, another a magazine, a few chatting among themselves and the remainder watching their phones impassively. Just hanging on in the city are bookstores dating from Bowles’s time, including the Librairie des Colonnes, a place he seldom visited because he said he feared the djinn (ghosts) that haunted it. It was Sunday when we went on our walking tour and the bookshop was closed, but I peered in the window and noticed relatively few volumes on the stands. I started to feel ever more like I’d chosen the wrong dream to chase.

Hisham had a couple of stops planned out for us, the first being Bowles’s old apartment well outside the gates that marked the International Zone. Bowles spent sixty years in Tangier and forty of them, up to his death in 1999, in that apartment. Photos I’d seen the day before in a small exhibit at the American legation in Tangier — the building that housed the United States’s first overseas mission — hinted at Bowles’s affectations and peccadillos as well as revealing brutally the ravages of time.

In the first photo he is a young blonde dandy in a Liberace style dressing-gown complete with unfeasibly long cigarette holder, a man consciously aware he is at a literary height. In the next he is typing purposefully on his typewriter. Another photo shows the apogee of the lurid Orientalist fantasia that by many accounts the libertine Bowles indulged lustily: a now grey-haired man, imperious in a three-piece suit, flanked by a phalanx of robed striplings, extras in the production of Salome whose music he scored.

But the most affecting photos are from Bowles’s final days, sitting up in the bed where he did all his writing. He is emaciated, jacket pulled tightly over shrunken shoulders. He was already close to becoming a ghost writer.

On our way, we passed by an unremarkable shoe shop, above which Hisham said the singer James Brown once played. We talked about whether Tangier’s lurid mystique constituted a blessing or a curse. I was travelling with my family, and an Anthony Bourdain documentary about the city I’d watched with my eldest son had perturbed him no end. Bourdain depicted Tangier as depraved, dark, dangerous and drug-addled (for Bourdain these were all attractive attributes of course). We had girded ourselves to hurtle straight into a dystopia, a concern exacerbated by listening in to the conversations of supposed experts giving unsolicited advice to jejune newbies like us in the passport queue about how every Moroccan was primed to gouge the unwary traveller.

The reality was anything but. Expecting braying hordes of touts and peddlers, we instead met a polite man in a brown desert robe (evoking an Obi-Wan presence) who directed us into an airconditioned taxi that charged a price ten times less the figure the doomsayers in the queue had warned us about.

We’d been walking for twenty minutes now when we reached what we thought was the approximate location of Bowles’s apartment. While Hisham had taken a group here before, he couldn’t quite remember in which of the samey yellowish housing complexes it was located. Asking around didn’t help much either. Even though he probably would have served him in the decades prior, the elderly grocer had never heard of Bowles. Nor had the young man in the Paris St Germain shirt watching a football match on his phone.

Eventually a stooped woman directed us to a gloomy entranceway. A stone plaque with Arabic and English lettering at the foot of the stairs read: “Paul Bowles, American Writer & Composer lived here.” A family bustled up the stairs with their shopping and another came down the stairs as we took a bunch of pictures. A quote from another writer I admire, W.G. Sebald, came to mind: “to set one’s name to a work gives no one a right to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace.” The apartment is supposedly occupied now by his last houseboy, who would now himself be an old man. We lingered for a time, too embarrassed to knock on the door.

On the way back to the old city and our next destination, we passed by the sprawling palm-fronded Spanish consulate, a place where acquiring a visa, Hisham told us, could take up to three months for Moroccan citizens like him. “The process gets harder and harder,” he lamented. Many of those who did make it over found the cost of living in Spain overwhelming but were too ashamed to admit it and return. Hisham shelved their reports of glittering lives in Europe in the part of his brain marked “fiction.”

For all that, getting to Europe remained the dream of many, including Tangier’s newest residents, who stand out today as much as the dandy writers did of old. These are the sub-Saharan Africans, many of them selling laughably phoney wares, such as T-shirts I saw bearing the combined logos of North Face, Versace and Nike.

Many of these new Tangerines see the city as a way-station to elsewhere, a stopoff to acquire a smuggled passage to a Spanish beach in dead of night. “Who takes them,” I asked. People connected with the drivers of the ostentatious Mercedes and BMWs cruising Tangier’s streets, Hisham told me. This closet African city to Europe retains the air of a smugglers’ paradise.

We talked about Bowles’s complicated life and legacy. He fell out with, and was eventually disowned by, many of the Moroccan writers whose work he translated. The causes were familiar to anyone who has been involved in a joint writing project: disagreements about the pulling of weight, attendant spats involving credit, status and bruised pride.

Other stuff was darker. The writer Michelle Green writes about how Bowles devised a scheme as dark and sinister as any of his fictions that preyed on the insecurities of an upstart American writer and drove the man further into madness. The Guardian obituarist wrote a dark tales reminiscent of a Bowles story about how he’d repressed a memory of waking wearing a djellaba robe one morning in the writer’s apartment after an evening of enthusiastic hashish piping, his clothes strewn at the foot of the bed.

There was much poignancy too. Jane spent much of their marriage rotating between psychiatric institutions, flamboyant and costly affairs and Tangier barstools where she would run up huge bills and lament how unfulfilled had been her literary career. When Paul Theroux visited Bowles at his home near the end of his life, he found the old writer shivering in a thin blanket, largely forgotten by a literary world that once renowned him. The man who wrote cautionary tales had become one himself.

We passed the el-Minzah, still one of Tangier’s most storied hotels and a hangout for Bowles on the infrequent occasions when he had money. Another peril of being acclaimed as a “writers’ writer” is the rare and small royalties. A better remunerated writer, Ian Fleming, spent a month a year there writing James Bond novels. We peeked inside its stately courtyard, its walls festooned with pictures of visitors from yesteryear: European royalty, movie stars from my grandparents’ era; John Malkovich, who played Port Moresby in the film version of The Sheltering Sky; and somewhat incongruously the former Australian soap star Melissa George.

Several stars downscale from the el-Minzah is the whitewashed El Muniria hotel, nestled inside a warren of streets in the old city. The El Muniria is a basic, no frills, no ensuite type of place. There are much better hotels in Tangier but none had as many literary ghosts for guests to séance with.

Old sepia photographs of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Bowles hung here and there but the more prominent person staring from the walls was a sinister-looking fellow with dark glasses and a porkpie hat. He was William S. Burroughs, a man who made even the most outré residents of the International Zone seem placid by comparison. He had arrived in Tangier after killing his wife in a William Tell–style escapade in South America; his life in Tangier was only marginally more sedate. His hotel room was pocked with bullet holes, a stove burned inside for his hashish candy and the floor was carpeted with discarded pages of a novel Jack Kerouac would ultimately pick up and organise into Burrough’s most celebrated work, Naked Lunch, a fever dream of a book revolving around an opioid-addicted man who lives in a city called Interzone.

While I found Bowles’s writing can’t-look-away absorbing, I struggled through Naked Lunch, flailing because of its absence of obvious structure. Burroughs had written the book in such a way that it could supposedly be picked up at any page and read from there. I found it easier to put it down.

The hotel was excellent for people watching. I typed into my phone some of the novelistic characters we saw as we puttered around. A man with an English accent, Tudor yeoman face and Arab robes speaking loudly on his phone; two blonde men with identical leather jackets and handlebar moustaches speaking German and holding hands. On the roof, a young man was speaking to a phone perched on a tripod; scrolling around the internet a few weeks later, I found him enthusing in a brash video with crazed graphics that the hotel rooftop is one of the “must do sites” in Tangier. My initial thought was to scoff until I realised that if they were around now, those literary swaggerers and experimenters with form might well have been doing the same.

We headed back to the Gran Café de Paris to meet my family and embark for the afternoon, entirely without irony, on one of Hisham’s food tours, which culminated in the purchasing an assuredly counterfeit soccer shirt in the red and green colours of the Moroccan national team. Very excellent the tour was too.

Readers can get a sense of what a place is like only if they know its effects upon the writer, Bowles wrote. What had I learned from my few days in Tangier? Obviously, the city was very different from the dark image of my imagination. On its surface, it exuded an easy PG-13 charm and affirmed to me that always the best way to get a true sense of a place is not rely on the others but to go and see.

We called back to the El-Minzah later that afternoon for drinks. Hisham met his next client, an elderly Frenchman who wanted to see one last moon rise in the desert, and my family and I had drinks in the beautiful cool courtyard. My children could not identify a single person on the wall, their legacies faded already. They had lemonade and my wife and I had a Casablanca lager while we tried to tell them about people like Richard Harris and Rex Harrison.

I remember thinking that this was a perfect moment, something I remembered existential Bowles said was one of the things that made life worth living. It was from his novel The Spiders House, set during the anything-goes years the International Zone. I winkled out the full quote later: “the only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it’s having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.”

While I wasn’t at all sure what the future would be for me, I had a happy family. Perhaps that was as much certainty and surety as one was going to get afforded in this mad world.

My wife and I could happily have stayed for another drink, but the perfect moment was already fading. Why is it that kids just don’t seem to enjoy kicking back in bars as much as their parents? We headed up the stairs once more to hail what would turn out to be another reasonably priced taxi. The door opened into us and the burly Englishman in the Arab robes from the el-Muniria swaggered purposefully in the direction of the bar. We stepped out, once more under the uncertainties of the sheltering sky. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Ghost writers appeared first on Inside Story.

She is an “indie phenomenon,” according to Christine Larson in Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, a scholarly analysis of the community of writers, readers and other fans that Force’s career exemplifies. Known inside and out as “Romancelandia,” this community has been a pioneer and standout success in the era of digital publishing, says Larson, generating new stories, writers, books, readers and money.

Larson is especially interested in the ethos and methods that romance writers developed in the predigital world. Their ways of writing stories, improving their skills and supporting each other, she argues, adapted brilliantly to electronic publishing, marketing and distribution and the gig economy.

Larson’s research focuses mainly on the United States and the membership organisation there, Romance Writers of America. But the boom in romance fiction has been much wider. In Australia between 2019 and 2023, measured sales of the genre more than trebled, from $18 million to $63 million, according to Books From Australia. Australia has its own RWA too, Romance Writers of Australia, a membership organisation founded in 1991.

The highest-selling author by value in any genre in Australia in 2022 and 2023 was Colleen Hoover, an American author of romance and young adult fiction. She had four titles in the top ten in 2022, including the No 1 seller It Ends With Us, and sold 878,000 books worth $13.4 million in 2023. In 2024, four of the top ten selling titles were romance fiction, led by a new film-tie-in edition of It Ends with Us.

The boom has been going even longer, depending on what counts as romance, who is counting and where. Georgette Heyer published a “Regency” or other romance almost every year from the 1920s to the 1960s (and often a detective story as well). Literary reviewers ignored them but they usually sold hundreds of thousands of copies in paperback after large print runs in hardback. Many are still in print, reliably providing, for the Guardian’s Rachel Cooke, “just about the best fun it is possible to have between soft covers.”

Mills & Boon’s reputation as a supplier of “wholesome romantic fiction” to Britain’s circulating libraries was set by the time the Second World War broke out. In the 1950s it began cross-publishing titles with Harlequin in Canada. The two companies merged in 1971 and were selling “in the region of 250 million books worldwide” by the mid 1980s, according to the publisher’s website. Conventional bestseller lists don’t capture the scale of Mills & Boon’s unusual subscription-plus-limited-retail business model: News Corporation noticed and added Harlequin to the HarperCollins stable in 2014.

In Larson’s analysis, the really big boom came in the early 2010s, “The Time of Self-Publishing,” when three events turned major publishers’ “vague curiosity” about indie romance authors into serious commercial interest. St Martin’s Press signed a $2 million, four-book deal in 2011 with Amanda Hocking, who had posted online “a few unpublished, paranormal, young adult manuscripts” the previous year. E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, which had started life as a fan fiction series, e-book and print-on-demand title, was picked up and re-released under the Vintage imprint. Nearly three million physical copies were sold in Australia in 2012 alone, and a further 750,000 as ebooks, according to the publisher, (now) Penguin Random House. A decade later, more than 100 million copies have been sold worldwide. Finally, in 2014, book distributor Ingram began distributing indie author Barbara Freethy’s self-published romance novels to bookstores without the involvement of a traditional publisher.

To mainstream publishers, big books were not unusual. Less familiar were Romancelandia’s distinctive features. Larson says there has long been an unusual depth of connection between the readers and authors of romance fiction, generating a distinctive kind of fandom. Reading romance was often a communal activity, not a solitary engagement of the kind revered in literary imagination.

Writing romance, too, was cooperative. The network of romance writers fostered by Romance Writers of America was “radically open,” with information about deals, fees, costs, people and relationships shared much more openly than by established authors in the secretive publishing world. (So close was the level of co-operation among RWA members that it attracted the attention of the competition regulator.)

Especially unusual was the “open-elite” structure of the network. Successful, published authors and unpublished aspirants shared information, “creating upward mobility for newcomers and bringing fresh ideas to incumbents.” Louise Merrington noted the same phenomenon about indie authors generally some years ago in Inside Story: “[I]ndies across the board are really nice. Even those who’ve had enormous success seem to see value in giving back to the community.”

Writing and reading romance were things done mainly by women. That meant Romancelandia was “shaped by historic patterns of feminised labour ― unstable work, insecure pay, juggling of multiple jobs, and family labour.” It became “a unique female-dominated business enclave.” Larson says this community embodied “an ethic of care” (her italics), that emphasised care for others as a fundamental human value. “[H]uman life is above all interdependent, rather than individualised.”

This ethic of care was a vital social and political characteristic imported by romance writers into the gig economy once online digital connectivity enabled it. Having lived out “side hustles” before the term was invented, romance writers entered the network age already skilled and willing to help each other to become “entrepreneurial engineers of their own success.”

Romance writing continued to ascend but the golden age of Romance Writers of America didn’t last. Larson’s penultimate chapter, “#RWAShitShow,” describes the crisis that engulfed the organisation in 2019.

In essence, RWA “failed to institute identity-aware care to effectively promote diversity, inclusion and equity, and to find ways to maintain trust.” Perhaps, she ponders, it collapsed “simply because structural and institutional racism are insidiously, notoriously, perhaps impossibly, difficult to combat.” But the job of repair was particularly difficult in a culture nearing the end of a divisive president’s first term, amid plunging levels of trust in institutions and the “mixed blessings of new communication modes… which amplified both calls for equity and the swift cancellation of dissenting views.” It’s a warning, Larson says, about “how quickly supportive structures and culture can collapse when they fail to address their own internal contradictions.”

Love in the Time of Self-Publishing ends by speculating about what might come next, sketching three scenarios for American Romancelandia: a smaller RWA with a much stronger awareness of identity; a “network of networks” with many smaller organisations serving specialised interests and locations working together when their needs overlap; and “Writers Unite,” a future from the past, created by romance writers joining the Authors Guild, the traditional voice of US writers.

None of these provides a neat return to the shared ethos Larson celebrated in the first incarnation of RWA. Still, she remains a believer in the “transformative power” of Romancelandia’s originally distinctive elements and the possibility of their restoration. The writers and readers of romance, she says “have always been derided for their rose-coloured glasses. They’ve been derided for complicity with the status quo while also scolded for pushing the boundaries of propriety.”

Her faith need not be naive, for romance writing and reading have spread and diversified much more widely and deeply than the organisation Romance Writers of America. Its struggles might not signal failure but success, an inevitable fracturing of the field whose expansion and variegation Larson documents so well. •

Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success
By Christine Larson | Princeton University Press | $54.99 | 273 pages

The post In Romancelandia appeared first on Inside Story.

Defoe’s masterpiece remains a classic, its eponymous narrator a totem of inventive endurance. Its opening line — “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull” — introduced to an increasingly literate public a narrator anchored in contemporary reality, a blunt, resilient everyman. With Crusoe, the novel in English had arrived. Three centuries on, he speaks to us still.

As so often in the early modern period, though, the Spanish got there ahead of the English. Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) appeared more than a century before Crusoe, when Shakespeare was still fashioning King Lear. Cervantes gave the world a character to stand with Shakespeare’s greatest figures. Although Don Quixote the character was a throwback to a romantic age already gone, Don Quixote the novel placed him in a realistic world where windmills were windmills.

More generally, the new literary form was concerned less with the deeds of monarchs and dynasties than with adventures and misadventures of the emerging bourgeoisie. Where Shakespeare’s Richard II wants to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings, novelists such as Samuel Richardson (Clarissa, 1748) and Henry Fielding (Tom Jones, 1749) vividly represented and sometimes vigorously criticised changing moral norms and increasing social mobility.

The novel was also flexible enough to depict tragic figures and grand circumstances. Great Russian novels of the nineteenth century like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) presented social, historical and psychological portraits of profound depth and sweep. English novelists like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and George Eliot portrayed the social and cultural life of nineteenth century English life with such acuity and artfulness that most of us still understand that world primarily through their depictions of it. The realist novel that flourished in that century gave readers extended and vivid access to their own world and to other people, places and times.

Then, Edwin Frank argues in Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, things changed. Not in the twentieth century, but in 1864, when the Civil War raged in the United States and British and Irish convicts were still being transported to Australia. In that year, Frank declares, Fyodor Dostoevsky was “writing the first twentieth-century novel,” Notes From Underground. Frank considers this “an unclassifiable work — neither novel or novella, at once confession and caricature.”

This intentionally provocative choice is in line with the sort of dislocating manoeuvres Frank sees as central to some of the twentieth-century’s great novels. Where earlier novels presented reality in illuminating detail and length, the novels of the twentieth century questioned reality itself, as well as the characters who inhabited that reality, and indeed the novel’s capacity to portray reality. “In Notes from Underground,” Frank asserts,

the writing explodes and implodes and all the time the writer is trapped inside it, not only unable to get out, but unable to see what he has gotten himself into, an inside that is all inside out, just as his squalid living space, his hole, the hole he is in, is indistinguishable from the space of itself.

Dostoevsky’s unclassifiable work, Frank argues, announces “the voice of the twentieth century novel.” It is a voice that is “supremely equivocal and not just unreliable, radically unreliable. But real.” You need not agree with this take on the twentieth-century novel in general, but it makes you think about what might be an alternative.

The same is true of the specific novels and novelists Frank considers. Is Ulysses, as he claims, really a “book born of the [First World] war”? Is D.H. Lawrence “nothing if not working class”? I would disagree with both these propositions. Frank makes scores of bold and contestable assertions throughout. His study is a sort of cerebral bootcamp, fast-paced and mentally strenuous, but ultimately rewarding. You feel intellectually fitter for having read it, even if, perhaps especially if, you disagree.

Potential sign-ups for this workout might be encouraged that Stranger Than Fiction is not an academic study. While it does have “Notes” and an impressive bibliography, it is largely jargon-free (the term “modernism” is noted and quickly set aside). Frank reads for a profession, working as editorial director of New York Review Books, the publishing division of the New York Review of Books. This has made him formidably well-read but not clotted his opinions. He writes with insight and flair, commenting for example that Jean Rhys’s works are “unassimilable to feminism” or other twentieth-century -isms, “(apart from alcoholism, perhaps),” and that “without Hemingway, no Bogart.”

His own book, as he notes in the acknowledgements, was fifteen years in the making, the result of wide and deep reading of novels from many parts of the globe, though most of the examples originally appeared in English. He confesses that while looking at more than thirty authors at length he necessarily leaves a great many out, namechecking Rabindranath Tagore, Willa Cather, Mikhail Sholokhov, John Dos Passos, Marguerite Duras, Joseph Conrad and a dozen others. For all the panoramic sweep of this study, there are gaps.

Frank’s method is refreshingly simple. He gives biographical sketches of his chosen writers, linking their lives and circumstances to the works they create, declaring that “by tracking a novel’s turns of events and turns of phrase, its varied voices and points of view one begins to discern how it goes about making sense and how it might matter and continue to matter.”

But this reference of “novel” in the singular undersells what he goes on to do, sometimes considering two or writers in the same chapter and more than one work by a specific writer. This occasionally leads to a certain unevenness, so that Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (a short story collection, as Frank admits) gets most of a chapter to itself, while James Joyce’s Ulysses and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time share their allotted space. Admittedly, that chapter is twice the length of the Hemingway piece — but, still.

Chapters are set within a framework that organises what is largely an historically sequential argument into three major parts: “Breaking the Vessel,” “A Scattering of Sparks,” and “The Withdrawal.” In the first of these, perhaps surprisingly, Franks takes H.G. Wells as the writer who represents the view that “the new century demands a new vision of humanity and a new novel to go with it.” Where you might assume that The Time Machine would be that novel, Franks concentrates on Wells’s far less successful if unnerving novel The Island of Dr Moreau, a tough read that deals with vivisection and the splicing of humans and animals. It presents, Frank rightly notes, a world more generally of “terrifying excitement,” the shape of monsters to come.

The rest of this first section covers an impressive amount of territory, from André Gide to Alfred Kubin; Franz Kafka, Colette and Kipling; Gertrude Stein, Machado de Assis and Natsume Sōseki; and three heavy-hitters: Thomas Mann, Proust and Joyce. It is full of sharp questions raised by the books themselves, such as “Are you the kind of reader who recognises just how hackneyed, how uninteresting that kind of authorial bid for the reader’s attention is?” And it shimmers with observations by Frank himself — that the major works of Joyce, Proust and Mann (The Magic Mountain) “are not war books, yet they might be described… as having been written by war.” As ever, there is room for dissent.

The second section, “A Scattering of Sparks,” deals with the interwar years, which for Franks is when the twentieth century proper comes into being. His subjects include Virginia Woolf and Robert Musil, Hemingway, Italo Svevo and Jean Rhys. These writers test out the new possibilities opened by the Joyces and Steins and Prousts, while creating new ways of seeing and depicting the troubling world emerging.

In Mrs Dalloway, for example, Frank sees Woolf exploring without the use of an identifiable narrator “how it feels, moment by moment, but also year after year, to be alive,” how past and present, the inner and outer worlds of a range of characters intersect or remain discrete, are acknowledged or ignored. Accepting Eliot’s view that Ulysses had no single style, Woolf made sure that her “style, her voice, her vision is everywhere unmistakable in Mrs Dalloway.” Her book manifested in literary terms her dislike of Ulysses.

Questions of style are also critical in Hemingway’s In Our Time. Drawing lessons from Stein, Hemingway avoids “plot and character, those building blocks of the nineteenth-century novel” to write, as his alter ego Nick Adams wants to write, “like Cezanne painted.” The exploration of how, or indeed if, the novel can represent the grave new interwar world and its inhabitants finds insistent form in Musil’s monstrous, incomplete The Man Without Qualities, which for Frank is “an exercise and an ongoing emergency, the question of what kind of book that it is and if it will ever end being more central to the book that it is.” We are close to Dostoevsky and a long way from the world of Jane Austen.

The same can be said about the short 1920s and 1930s novels of Jean Rhys. These deal with financially vulnerable women living off their wits and fading looks in a cruelly unsentimental metropolitan Europe. As Frank appreciates, these brilliant works are “very much not the vision that Mrs Dalloway presents at the end of Woolf’s novel — ‘for there she was’ — of a woman realised.”

With their joyless sex, often a form of financial bartering, Rhys’s novels are also not the vision of the subsequent novelist Frank deals with, D.H. Lawrence. The Rainbow and Sons and Lovers, Frank argues, exemplify Lawrence’s view that “sex is the lived centre of human experience, a supremely ambiguous power that both defines and defies everything we are,” something “comparable to a certain mystical picture of God.” We are a long way from the world of Virginia Woolf.

Part III, “The Withdrawal,” looks at how novelists after the First World War continue to experiment with form and voice and perspective. They also try “to reckon with the scandal of the century’s history” in its global complexity and uncertainty. Some of Frank’s choices, such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, are unsurprising, although, as with his interpretation of earlier novels, he has plenty of interesting things to say about them. Other choices are slightly left-field, including Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the latter creating a scandal rather than reckoning with history. That book does allow him to quip that none of Nabokov’s precursors “wrote sentences or composed novels of such consciously licked finish.”

What Nabokov does do is to write about the exile so prevalent in twentieth century literature, a figure captured in V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. Frank sees this semi-autobiographical novel as circling around itself, “a book about how the author came to write just this novel.” But in addition to being about the processes of writing and being a writer, it is also about the historical collapse of empire and of displacement. In England, the unnamed narrator (like Naipaul, of Indian descent and Trinidadian upbringing) is “a lonely man, living in a place where he is not at home, and with no home to go back to.” How far are we from the world of Daniel Defoe?

In David Lodge’s 1975 campus novel Changing Places the members of the English department play a game called Humiliation in which they are required to admit honestly to not having read a classic they assume all their colleagues have read. They get a point from each person who has read that classic. The winner is the one willing to admit to not having read a classic every other player has read. Hence the name of the game, which plays on the general fear lecturers have of being exposed as less than omniscient.

One lecturer who misunderstands the underlying principle of Humiliation puts forward extremely obscure classics that he has not read to signal his otherwise encyclopaedic reading. But because no one else has read these works, he gets no points from his colleagues. He then susses out what he needs to do to win the game and admits to never having read the text of Hamlet, only ever seeing Olivier’s film version of it. This wins him points from all his colleagues. Subsequently, though, he misses out on tenure, the suspicion being that his university could not give a permanent position to someone who had publicly admitted to not having read Hamlet.

We might guess that Frank’s omnivorous reading would mean he would not do well at Humiliation. He has read both wisely and well. In addition to the books he considers and those he admits he would have loved to include, Frank also provides an appendix titled “Other Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.” Another fifty writers are listed, each with a representative work or two. Again, provocatively, the list begins even before Notes from Underground, with Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847). The only Australian entry is Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (1980). Frank describes this list as “an acknowledgement of omissions.” Perhaps there will be a follow-up.

As it stands, Stranger Than Fiction offers readers interpretations of individual novels and a way of stepping back and considering the process of reading itself. It asks us to consider not only what we read, but why we read, and how we read, the patterns and themes, tendencies and techniques we discern that necessarily require thinking beyond individual novels or novelists. As he admits in the introduction, “the selection is personal,” adding that “I have written about books that move me.” His book encourages us to come up with a different argument, one that speaks to the uniqueness of our own reading experiences. Indeed, the examples noted in “Other Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel” suggest that Frank himself might have come up with a substantially different book had he followed this list.

The book is energised and enhanced by this personal approach, but it is not without its dangers. Although it is broken up into three largely chronological sections, the overarching connections are not overly strong. One effect of this is that the book’s timeline is sometimes wonky. So, for example, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) and The Rainbow (1915) are dealt with in the interwar section next to Rhys’s novels of the twenties and thirties. Lawrence’s works belong chronologically in the opening section, and in fact were published well before the masterpieces of Joyce and Proust considered in Part I.

We might think that Frank organises his chapters this way to contrast Lawrence’s treatment of sex with that of Jean Rhys. But while the examination of Lawrence immediately follows that of Rhys, Franks develops no connection. This absence of connective tissue happens more than once, so that while the book is packed with informed comments and brilliant expositions, the larger argument is harder to discern. Sometimes it feels that this study is a brilliant set of short stories rather than a coherent narrative. Which may be the point.

Stranger Than Fiction will activate a lively and possibly confrontational discussion with each of its readers. Offering us a peculiarly informed person’s personal history of twentieth-century novels, it simultaneously encourages and requires us to come up with a better argument. Or at least a different one. It is less an academic lecture than a lively and extended conversation with an eloquent and highly intelligent reader. I finished it with a list of writers and works I feel compelled to read. I won’t tell you which ones. That would be humiliating. •

Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
By Edwin Frank | Vintage | $36.99 | 480 pages

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Only a month before, in May 1934, modernist poet Osip Mandelstam had been detained by the Soviet secret police. He had recently recited to friends, including Pasternak, a poem crudely satirising Stalin. Pasternak admired Mandelstam but rejected this piece of political invective as not only extremely dangerous for its author and those who heard it but also unproductive in this early stage of building socialism.

“We’re different, Comrade Stalin,” a surprised and intimidated Pasternak responded. Was he afraid of the consequences of admitting to his friendship with Mandelstam? Did he simply not want to judge a fellow poet so different in style? Or were there other factors at work? Whatever it was, Stalin didn’t consider Pasternak’s reply to be satisfactory.

“Is that all?,” he barked. “So much for your loyalty to a friend.” Then he hung up. Pasternak tried to call back to explain himself, but the line was dead.

This three-minute phone call is the subject of A Dictator Calls, the last novel by the leading Albanian writer, intellectual and multiple nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ismail Kadare, who died in July last year. In multiple versions of the brief conversation, Kadare expands those three minutes into a riveting study of the relationship between dictator and poet.

Mandelstam had revealed under interrogation, or perhaps torture, the names of friends who knew of the poem. But none of his friends knew whom he had named. Stalin was less intent on condemning Mandelstam at this point than testing Pasternak’s loyalties and checking his network. His call to Pasternak was recorded by the secret police.

Thanks to the hot-house atmosphere of the Moscow literary world, many different retellings of the conversation exist. Pasternak himself mentioned it in his memoirs. Mandelstam’s wife Nadezhda, poet and friend Anna Akhmatova, and the leading socialist realist novelist Ilya Ehrenburg all wrote up differing accounts. The Russian-born British intellectual Isaiah Berlin records the incident in his “Conversations with Russian Writers” of 1956. Recent Russian historians have traced thirteen retellings of the event. For Akhmatova and many others, Pasternak had simply abandoned his friend.

This all happened at a time of upheaval and change, when figures with pre-revolutionary bourgeois origins — including Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam and Mayakovsky — became pawns in the literary and ideological battles to establish Soviet socialist realism.

Many years later, in 1958, the ageing Pasternak was himself under attack. His deeply non-socialist novel, Doctor Zhivago, had been refused publication in the Soviet Union and Pasternak had been tried behind closed doors by the official writers’ union. When the novel was published in Italy and then throughout the West, critics reminded him of his earlier abandonment of Mandelstam. The authorities’ hostility deepened when Pasternak was awarded that year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The young Kadare, a student in Moscow at the time, retained the memory of those events through his writing life.

Despite the generational difference, similarities existed between Kadare’s Albania and Pasternak’s Soviet Union. Albania under dictator Enver Hoxha remained resolutely Stalinist; no post-totalitarian reforms took place after the break with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. Hoxha rejected Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation program, repatriated all Albanian students from eastern bloc nations and closed his nation off from the world.

This background is the key to Kadare’s late interest in the momentous phone call that brought writer and dictator onto a collision course. In Kadare’s allegory, Pasternak is the writer per se and Stalin the dictator. But this is not a clichéd tale of oppression of the humanist imagination. Kadare remained obdurately opposed to such readings of dissent in Stalinist Albania.

Kadare’s novel begins with a dream: the narrator is back in the Moscow of his student days, reliving the horrors of the harassment campaign against Pasternak. Doctor Zhivago has appeared in Italy, Pasternak has been awarded the Nobel Prize and is dying in his dacha in Peredelkino, the Communist Party is howling for the writer’s blood. But in the dream it is not Pasternak, but he, Kadare, who is the object of their fury.

Kadare wakes up back at work in the Writers’ Union offices in Tirana, but history is in danger of repeating itself. Only weeks before, the Albanian dictator had called to congratulate him on a poem he had written. What did the dictator really want? How would he have answered? Kadare had already been named as a potential Nobel laureate. What if he were to win?

In A Dictator Calls, Kadare meditates on the deepest questions of his life, career and reputation in his home country. What was he doing writing works of fiction and poetry under the most oppressive of the communist dictatorships? What is the truth of the opposition between writer and dictator? And how had it affected him on a personal level?

“The poet and the tyrant should never have been put together,” he writes:

But an authoritative voice ensured that it happened. Whether they wished it or not, they were together, two manifestations of the same thing: power. Slave of each other in the same circle of Dante. Torturing each other, each the other’s downfall, whether for three minutes or for as many centuries or millennia was of no importance.

That this battle damaged him as a person is a brutal truth he had recognised already in Albanian Spring, his 1990 reflections on the fall of the regime. There the clash was imagined as the battle of two wild beasts, each inflicting different kinds of wounds. Those dealt by the dictator are immediate and terrible; those inflicted by the writer have a delayed effect, but they never heal.

Throughout his life, Kadare focused on the strength and power of the writer and the weakness of the dictator. In turn, Hoxha found in Kadare someone as cunning, as tenacious and even duplicitous as himself. A writer’s wounds may take longer to have an effect, but the word persists and the damage that it causes can be even greater than the executioner’s blade.

Those who know Kadare’s work will recognise that ambiguity lies at the heart of his imagination. Ambiguity cannot be allowed to exist in the dictator’s universe. But in the writer’s, it is the key to resilience and survival.

Part two of A Dictator Calls takes us decades away from Stalin and Pasternak. It is 2015 and the writer still can’t rid himself of the fascination with that fateful conversation. Kadare revisits Stalin’s call in what becomes a summation of a life’s opposition to tyranny.

Writer and dictator both have weaknesses as well as strengths, and both are dependent on each other in the bizarre dynamic in which words channel power. Each of Kadare’s versions of the phone call throws up new facts, new questions, new interpretations, new interventions by actors and phantasms. A Dictator Calls demonstrates the impossibility — and the undesirability — of single, unitary meaning.

In the thirteenth version, which makes up the epilogue to this fascinating exercise in memoir and fiction, the forgotten central figure, Mandelstam, is remembered. Dictators like Hoxha will die and be forgotten; Mandelstam “and those like him” are never “finished.” They die, even at the hands of the dictator, but they are not forgotten. They are “without end.”

Born in the southern provincial town of Gjirokaster in 1936, the young Kadare was sent to study literature and writing at the famous Gorky Institute in Moscow. There, he was to be trained as an “engineer of the (Albanian) soul” in the practice of socialist realism. The ferment of the thirties was over and socialist realism was enshrined as the sole mode of Soviet literature and art.

Doctor Zhivago had been circulated in handwritten samizdat form within the Soviet Union, the form in which Kadare came to read it. When it arrived at the height of the cold war, Pasternak’s Nobel Prize was seen as a major literary-diplomatic provocation by the Soviet authorities. By this time old and infirm in his late sixties, Pasternak was hounded into an early grave.

In his classes at the Gorky Institute, Kadare learned the fundamentals of socialist realism. As a viewer of Pasternak’s humiliation, however, he learned deeper truths about the role and fate of the writer under communism. He recounts the story of this time in Moscow in one of his most accessible autobiographical novels, The Twilight of the Gods of the Steppe and his reflections on the education of the communist writer reappear in A Dictator Calls.

Kadare returned to his native land in 1960. He found himself back in Tirana both as a journalist and writer — a privileged member of the Albanian intelligentsia — and a writer of ironic and subversive works in an environment where dissent was dangerous. He missed the cosmopolitanism of the Soviet capital.

He had little choice: he knew that he could not survive as an Albanian writer outside his native land. But the experience of the Pasternak affair was decisive and he was resolved to resist. He had begun as a precocious adolescent in a communist Albania that was full of hope after a devastating war. After returning from Moscow he evolved into a bitter critic.

Unbeknown to him, he had a wildcard in the form of the dictator himself. Hoxha was a ruthless operator, but he wanted recognition in his own right, outside Albania and especially in France, as a writer and intellectual. Especially in the early days of his regime, when communism was bringing about improvements in a war-torn and backward land, he saw in Kadare a means of proving himself to the world.

Hoxha wrote his own political and theoretical works, adding up to many volumes, and employing bilingual aristocrat and political prisoner Jusuf Vrioni to translate them into French. For his own reasons, he also sided with the younger generation of writers.

When Vrioni discovered Kadare’s writing and began spending his own time making translations, a lifeline was created for the novelist. The General of the Dead Army was published to international acclaim in Paris in 1970. Now known in the West, Kadare could not simply be dispensed with by a disappointed dictator.

For a decade the relationship between Kadare and Hoxha was a sophisticated game of cat-and-mouse, the dictator emulating Kadare, the writer leading the dictator on, each thinking he had the other under control. Kadare survived thanks to cunning and resilience… and that unspoken competition for the voice of Albania.

Kadare would remain an Albanian writer in his communist homeland, marking a different time to that of the regime. Many of his works have an allegorical setting — the arrival of the Ottomans in the late fourteenth century, for example, in the Three Arched Bridge, or Istanbul in the 1870s in The Palace of Dreams, which describes in its opening pages the central square of Tirana. But the point of reference is always contemporary Albania. Again and again he pushed the boundaries of what could be written. His masterpiece of 1982, The Palace of Dreams, stands alongside Kafka’s The Trial and Orwell’s 1984 as a twentieth-century century masterpiece of political terror.

But the dictator’s protection was growing thinner as the seventies wore on. He was subjected to a trial — this one in public — of the kind Pasternak had faced in Moscow almost thirty years before. By the early eighties it looked as though he might pay for his independent thinking with his life.

Kadare’s output was prodigious and he continued until the end to write fiction and to comment, often bitterly and controversially, on his nation’s post-communist present. Released from the dictatorship’s control after 1990, he spoke his mind fearlessly and often harshly.

In contemporary Western realist fiction, the dividing line between fact and imagination often seems very clear. In Kadare’s world reality is never what it seems; phantasms appear alongside figures from real life.

His works take us to the point where power and language intersect. Their theme is the impossibility of self-knowledge in an environment in which words and meaning are contaminated, even defiled and corrupted. Kafka is Kadare’s forerunner, the voice of Central European existential doubt. Throughout his oeuvre, both under and after communism, Kadare’s novels charted the ongoing deformations of lives shaped by dictatorship. Their sinister and bizarre plots are outpaced by reality alone.

Kadare’s works make clear how oppression disfigures and damages everyone, victims and tyrants, alike. In his novel from the late communist period, The Shadow (1984), smuggled in manuscript form to Paris, he gives anguished expression to the sense of sacrifice demanded of the writer living under a dictatorial regime.

Kadare’s post-communist oeuvre represents a powerful literary coming-to-terms with the past in a country that has struggled desperately to overcome the economic and social deprivations of the communist years. In Spiritus (1996) ghosts from the communist period revisit their lives after the fall of the regime; in The Life, Game and Death of Lul Mazrek (2003), a disfigured corpse is wheeled around the towns of southern Albania to dissuade would-be escapees from trying to swim across the narrow Strait of Corfu; The Accident (2008) tells the story of an obsessive love affair that replicates in the post-communist context the dependencies, humiliations and tenebrous dishonesties of relations under the defunct dictatorship. The old certainties of dogma and oppression are gone but no guidelines have emerged for the present or the future.

Kadare shows how these victims of a despised totalitarianism are unable to escape its deformations even in their most intimate moments years after the fall of the regime. More than ever before, the political is the personal. A Dictator Calls was his final reflection on the battle between tyranny and freedom, political power and literature, reality and the imagination.

There were other sides to Kadare’s work. In novels such as City of Stone (about the Gjirokaster of his childhood and the war years), The Twilight of the Eastern Gods (retelling his time in Moscow) and The Doll (his late evocation of his mother) he looks back over his own life and formative influences, revealing the dynamics of personal and national history. His allegories of Ottoman occupation of the Balkans, The Three-Arched Bridge, The Palace of Dreams and The Niche of Shame, describe the effects of Ottoman imperialism on pre-Islamic, medieval Christian Albania, a country perched until the 1390s between the Eastern and Western churches and with its own folk religions and beliefs. In The General of the Dead Army and The File on H. he allows postwar East and West to confront and engage with each other to tragic and comic effect. In a country where subjective authenticity was a bourgeois falsification, Kadare trod the fine line between the regime’s truth and his own.

By the end of the twentieth century it looked as though dictatorship had had its day. After the fall of the Berlin Wall the literature of Eastern European socialism dropped from view as the world scrabbled for capitalist prosperity. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Milan Kundera and a host of less-known writers disappeared from booksellers’ shelves. Few managed to survive beyond the nineties; some, such as Kundera, tried with limited success to refashion themselves.

But dictatorships are making a comeback, albeit in different guises. Now is the time to rediscover Kadare and the other great dissident writers of European socialism.

In the past Kadare’s novels suffered in the transition to English because of a lack of Albanian translators. Most were translations from Jusuf Vrioni’s French translations rather than the Albanian originals. Thankfully British translator John Hodgson has devoted himself to translating Kadare’s oeuvre from its original Albanian. A Dictator Calls adds to his magnificent record of crisp and accurate English renditions.

Enver Hoxha died in early 1985 at the age of seventy-six. His nemesis, Ismail Kadare, died at eighty-eight, more than thirty years after the fall of the regime. He was the last great witness of twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorship and existential terror. His passing marks the end of an era. No modern writer has better chronicled the complexities of human psychology and political oppression. •

A Dictator Calls
By Ismail Kadare | Vintage | $22.99 | 224 pages

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Recognising the Stranger began as a lecture Hammad delivered at Columbia University just days before Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. It opens with a homage to Edward Said, the renowned Palestinian writer and academic for whom the lecture is named. With its focus on narrative fiction, this is a necessarily literary essay; yet, like Said’s writing, it is also steely in resolve. Said wrote that texts are worldly events, as are “the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.” For many, that made him as much a political as a literary inspiration.

While constructing her talk, Hammad revisited Said’s 1974 book, Beginnings, a foundational text of his critical work. On rereading it, she found that she was drawn more to the middle of texts than to their opening passages. On the basis of this realisation she went on to re-examine examples of Aristotle’s anagnorisis, that point in a narrative that functions as the clarifying moment for a character: the gestalt or Eureka instant that suddenly illuminates the fulcrum on which the plot swings. Hammad’s aim was to pinpoint these points as they related to “the shifting narrative shape of the Palestinian struggle in its global context.”

The narratives she focuses on are Sophocles’s play Oedipus Rex, said to have been first performed in 429 BCE, and Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa, a novel published in 1970. In both, the anagnorisis is the protagonist’s sudden recognition that the person thought to be a stranger is actually a family member. In Oedipus’s case, he discovered that his wife was, as the prophecy held, his own mother. In Kanafani’s novel it is the revelation, among other things, that one’s enemy is one’s own brother.

The story of Oedipus Rex, upon which Sophocles based his play, is one of the Western world’s most powerful myths. Most of us know of it through the Oedipus complex, the name Sigmund Freud gave to the boy child’s erotic fixation on the parent of the opposite sex — a stage of infancy that males may never grow out of, lingering in their unconscious and blighting their emotional lives until analysis frees them. Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas haven’t the hold on us they once had, yet the Oedipus myth still retains its power.

In Sophocles’s play it is in the plague-ravaged city of Thebes that Oedipus discovers he has murdered his own father and that his wife is his mother. Sophocles appears to have used poetic licence here, substituting the Theban plague for Sparta’s siege of Athens. The myth, then, may be rooted in historical reality, in this case the Peloponnesian war. But there are other such instances in which children were the foundlings of crises. The Lebensborn, for example, were the Jewish babies given to German couples during the Shoah; many of the children of the disappeared in Chile and Argentina were adopted by military parents. My own novel West Block deals with Australians rushing to adopt Vietnamese babies during the collapse of Saigon, and of course there are our own stolen generations.

And so it is with the Kanafani novel, which draws on the real-life Palestinian babies who ended up in Jewish families after the Nakba. For Hammad, this a resonating metaphor for Palestine’s own story. “Palestinians are familiar with such scenes in real life,” she writes: “apparent blindness followed by staggering realisation.”

But recognising doesn’t necessarily mean redemption, in literature let alone in life. These pivotal “knowing-again” moments can be tricky. Ghassan Kanafani, a left-aligned Palestinian refugee, was a well-known journalist and writer. In Return to Haifa, published two years before Kanafani was assassinated by Mossad agents, the Palestinian infant left behind after the Nakba has no desire to relinquish his adoptive parents or his Israeli persona — even after the 1967 occupation, when borders are momentarily opened and his birth parents are able to locate him.

Born Khaldun, Dov has grown into a proud, loyal Israeli. His Palestinian brother Khalid, meanwhile, is prey to a paralysing nostalgia brought on by the Nakba’s trauma and the Pan-Arabic nationalism of the time, when irridentist hopes for Palestine had all but evaporated. The motive of the novel, then, is the existentialist one — that the call of blood is negligible compared with acquiring a cause for living, even if it’s the meretricious patriotism Khaldun/Dov represents.

The situation has changed since 1967. Fifty-seven years of brutal occupation later, Palestinians today have a cause, and the watching world, finally, a dawning recognition of their terrible plight. What, then, could be more of an anagnorisis than that fateful October morning in 2023? Unsurprisingly, Recognising the Stranger has an afterword, written in January 2024, by which time Israel had killed 25,000 Palestinians in Gaza. While the lecture itself does occasionally venture into the political realities consequent on the Nakba and the ongoing occupation, it is in the afterword that literary exegeses are swept aside, leaving the pain of the author’s Palestinian heritage nakedly exposed.

The seventh of October 2023, Hammad writes, “resembled an incredibly violent jailbreak.” It also signified “a paradigm shift,” similar to the kind alluded to in the lecture, and here she states unequivocally that “a system in which one population is afforded rights that the other population is denied will be safe for neither.”

Referring to Israel’s grossly disproportionate retribution and the escalating condemnation by various instrumentalities of international law and governance, she is moved to ask what Edward Said might say if he had witnessed it all and seen charges of anti-Semitism used to close down any criticism of Israel, any questioning of its “right of defence.” What would he have said about the draconian measures taken against protesters at Columbia University, where he had spent the better part of his exile?

It is here that I’m reminded how Hammad ends her essay by turning to “Freud and the Non-European,” a lecture of Said’s that became his last book. There he examined Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which raised questions in his mind about the response of the founder of psychoanalysis to Zionism’s ethno-nationalism. Like other prominent twentieth-century Jews — Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, for instance — Freud was suspicious of Zionism, and Said took comfort from that very non-Zionist Jewishness — its “irremediably diasporic, unhoused character” — and the importance of what it bequeathed to the world.

Thus the lecture Hammad delivered in his honour ends with these thought-provoking words:

Palestinianism was for Said a condition of chronic exile, exile as agony but also as ethical position. To remain aloof from the group while honouring one’s organic ties to it; to exist between loneliness and alignment, remaining always a bit of a stranger; to resist the resolution of the narrative, the closing of the circle; to keep looking, to not feel too at home.

Needless to say, I have often thought that about myself. After all, the word “cosmopolitan” was once a dog-whistling reference to Jews (though it hasn’t been applied in that way, as far as I’m aware, to Palestinians).

If she wasn’t specifically writing about being Palestinian, Hammad might have been thinking about what it is that makes us writers. Or, more importantly, what makes a human being — what we Jews of the diaspora still call a mensch. Able to stand back, and then go forward, recognising that the stranger is as human as oneself — is an imperative for states as well as individuals. That we haven’t got there yet is the great tragedy of our time. •

Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative
By Isabella Hammad | Fern Press/Penguin | $22.99 | 84 pages

The post Resisting resolution appeared first on Inside Story.

The original — a classic piece of cinematic minimalism — managed to shock in an indelibly memorable way by running counter to all the stock-in-trade elements of the violent thriller scene. In a clinically exact sequence, the Jackal walks out into open countryside to test his new custom-made rifle. His target, the melon, is suspended from a branch in a string bag.

At the requisite distance he secures the rifle butt to another tree to ensure steadiness and takes aim. Unsatisfied, he uses a cheap screwdriver — shown in close-up — to adjust a dial on the barrel. Then he takes aim again and fires three shots. The first two puncture the melon, but with the third it explodes in a spray of pink and crimson tatters.

Zimmerman’s approach derived from Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel which, with its clean lines of action, concentrated suspense and enigmatic central figure, lent itself readily to dramatisation. The plot is framed by historical events Forsyth witnessed during his time as a young Paris-based Reuters journalist in the early 1960s reporting on the political turmoil surrounding French president Charles De Gaulle.

De Gaulle, having switch his response to Algerian rebels from a hardline military crackdown to negotiation and compromise, had become “the Judas of the Elysée Palace” to sections of the French Foreign legion. A secret organisation, OAS, was formed to plot his assassination. The novel opens with the execution by firing squad of one failed hitman. Every failure, and this only the latest, compounds the difficulty of the next attempt; security ramps up and the organisation is penetrated by government agents scanning for signs of a new plan.

Colonel Mark Rodin of the OAS sets about using the principles and techniques Forsyth applied to the novel. The killer is profiled in advance — “a type of man he did not know existed” — and in negative terms. He cannot be French; there must be nothing distinctive about his appearance; he must be able to appear and disappear without trace; he must have no motivation other than the fee.

Into this empty space, Forsyth conjures the figure of the Jackal, a lanky pale-faced Englishman with an uncanny calm about him and “no expression at all” in his eyes. He asks few questions, for it appears his own researches have pre-empted all the briefing the plotters planned to give him. And, of course, he speaks perfect French, the art of which, according to Forsyth, is to forget the grammar books and the dictionaries and focus on three things: accent, idiom and body language. Essentially the skills of an actor, these contribute to the most distinctive aspect of his genius: he is a chameleon of personae.

The Jackal’s transition from page to screen was surely inevitable, and when Edward Fox stepped into the role, it was a case of impeccable casting. The pallid colouring, light voice and acid charm were all that was required, together with the intelligence and discipline to know how to avoid adding anything else.

Taking on the role in the new television adaptation, Eddie Redmayne scores highly on a checklist of these qualities, though he doesn’t quite have Fox’s natural arrogance, which is the key to an implacable demeanour and chilling sense of authority. Preserving the enigma is the real challenge when the story is transposed to the present and spun out across ten fifty-minute episodes, developing social and political complexities along the way. Icy charm will only get you so far, and the impression of psychological vacancy is unsustainable.

Ingenious as they may be in incorporating sly allusions to Zimmerman’s masterpiece, the production team inevitably lose the clean lines of the plot and the concentrated dramatic focus afforded by a single, charismatic target. De Gaulle is replaced by a figure of more nuanced political significance: a tech mogul who threatens the interests of his peers by developing software that will track the flow of dark money.

The Jackal’s game plan hits some obstacles and quite literally veers off course in ways that involve kidnaps, maniacal car chases and numerous collateral victims. And to keep the story arcs in play, he has a private life, with a beautiful wife (Úrsula Corberó) and a child in a grand villa in the Spanish countryside. Apparently he is genuinely besotted with her. Really? Sceptics will have to wait for the final episodes to find out.

Replacing the dogged and meticulous deputy commissioner Lebel (Michael Lonsdale) as the Jackal’s nemesis is Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch), an MI6 firearms expert who is just as ruthless as her quarry in pursuit of her objective.

Ultimately the series works on its own terms, as it has to, and sets itself up for the inevitable comparisons with enough quality ingredients to justify the allure of its title. But those of us whose recollections of the original aren’t sidelined may continue to miss its austerity and laser-like focus.

If your taste runs to political thrillers, there are some fine alternatives on offer, most notably the second season of The Diplomat, with a stellar cast that includes Keri Russell as the US ambassador Kate Wyler and Rufus Sewell as her consort Hal, Ali Ahn as CIA station chief, David Gyasi as the British foreign secretary and Rory Kinnear as prime minister.

The second season extends the plotlines of the first with a cohesive intensity sustained by its focus on one major incident. The suspense structure is the reverse of Forsyth’s: instead of tracking the lead-up to a sensational event, its narrative lines are woven from the fallout. Aspects of a whodunnit are enhanced with some witty lateral thinking from showrunner Debora Cahn as screeds of rhetoric are delivered by a succession of high-profile claimants to the inside story.

In season one a British aircraft carrier was attacked in the Persian Gulf and all forty-one crew killed. As geopolitical tensions threatened to explode, Wyler was posted to London to hose things down. But there was no defusing British PM Nicol Trowbridge, who declared he’d rain hellfire on Iran but then turned the finger of blame towards Russia. When he demanded — and got — US approval for Russian targets, pre-emptive moves were made in the enemy camp.

The cliff hanger season ended with several of the leading characters, including Wyler’s husband Hal, caught in a car bomb explosion. As the plot thickens at the start of season two, there are growing suspicions that the original terrorist attack may be a false flag operation initiated by Trowbridge himself.

Given the trend for celebrities from the entertainment world to take on leading political roles, I’m waiting for Rory Kinnear to become Britain’s next prime minister. He’ll ace it. Fast-talking, fast-thinking, witty, reckless and unpredictable, he’ll give the political media a run for their money. No campaign manager or strategic fixer will be able to keep up with him.

Kinnear has played the part before, as a PM caught up in a particularly nasty blackmail affair in the first episode of Black Mirror and as Churchill in the recently released film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. This time, though, he is up against formidable challenges to his scene-stealing capacities, especially with the arrival of vice-president Grace Penn, portrayed with stunning authority by Allison Janney (unforgettable as White House press secretary C.J. Cregg in The West Wing).

It’s a play-off between actors as well as characters. In an attempt to test Kinnear’s reputation for never needing a second take, Janney improvised, coolly throwing grapes at him as he delivered an extended tirade. He didn’t miss a beat, even catching one or two in his mouth without missing a line. Who gets the upper hand in a rhetorical showdown is every bit as compelling as the question of who or what is at the heart of a terrorist incident that promises to take on a second life as a devastating political scandal. •

The post Clean plotting appeared first on Inside Story.

The other constriction was the stifling respectability of his parents. His father came from a line of engineers and was determined that Louis (as Stevenson was habitually called) should enter the family business. He was propelled into studying engineering, and as a default position law, but the lure of taverns and the shady world he had been segregated from came to count for more. Perhaps, in the double life he was leading, lay the seedbed of one of his best novels, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Part of the originality of Camille Peri’s double biography, A Wilder Shore, is that it starts with the story of Fanny and not Louis: she has been fully wheeled into position when they meet at an artists’ colony in France. And while there have been at least four biographies of Fanny alone, none of them, claims Peri, “has captured the complex and dynamic woman she was, or the passion, companionship and creative energy that became the life force of the Stevenson marriage.”

It seems it was love at first sight, and remained passionate. Truly it was an attraction of opposites. She was small, a bundle of energy, pretty, with an olive complexion, enhanced by extravagant jewellery; he extraordinarily thin, likened to a stork — when he pointed it was as if he was throwing his arm away, someone said. As often as not a cigarette would be dangling from the end of it. Quite early Stevenson settled on what would become his bohemian uniform: velvet jacket (always from the same tailors), straw hat and — at a time when men preferred beards — straggly long hair. In Sydney, at the height of his fame, he would be ejected from a posh hotel.

Fanny brought with her two children from a previous marriage, and was a writer herself. Immediately she fell under Stevenson’s spell — repeatedly people commented on his charm, his extraordinary eyes, the rich voice as he freely conversed. Fanny, marked by the recent loss of a five year-old son to tuberculosis, saw that in a way she could make good by caring for Louis. True, she was eleven years older than him, but that followed the pattern of Louis’s attachment to his nurse. She saw, correctly, that in partnership each would be energised, have larger lives. Both were rebels and adventurers. Owing to complications involving Fanny’s first husband, they would not marry for some time. Once Louis had described marriage as “a sort of friendship recognised by the police.” But Fanny was something else: his “teacher, tender, comrade, wife.”

The worldly Fanny — whose short stories would appear in the best American magazines — appreciated Louis’s greater talent. When they met he had only published essays: it was she who prodded him to follow his natural inclination and write fiction. (And to finish what he began.) But her contribution was much greater than that. Louis came to place his work each day by her bedside for criticism and discussion. Fanny told a friend that “Later on, if he works and lives he will get both fame and money, I am sure.” That took some faith: much of Treasure Island was written when Louis was in bed, trying to avert haemorrhaging.

Louis had already demonstrated his commitment by following Fanny back to San Francisco — at some cost to his health. Years before he had told his mother “I shall be a nomad, more or less, until my days are done.” That turned out to be the case. Its first fruit was the two-part book The Amateur Emigrant, in which he described first his journey to New York and then the sequel across America to California. (There he noted the “stoic” response of the Indians, as they watched new settlers pour off the train.) The shipboard section brought him trouble; Stevenson wrote of steerage as he found it, but the publisher objected to the blurring of class boundaries. So the account was bowdlerised, for respectables.

Stevenson was a man very broad in his sympathies, if rather vague about them. He got on to the contemporaneity and importance of American literature quite early. While retaining little of his early socialism, he remained radical by inclination. He described women’s social conduct as “the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured barbarians.” Stevenson also saw British rule in Ireland as being without moral authority, but while he opposed Fenian terrorism he could not quite bring himself to endorse home rule. It was the essence of Ireland he cared about.

Stevenson’s apogee was reached in the mid-1880s, when he published three novels which had phenomenal success. First was Treasure Island (1883) — still popular, if more on screen than from being read. It’s the classic adventure story for boys. But as Peri points out, for young readers it contains an important lesson: “Learn to think for yourself. Don’t accept what adults tell you as the truth.” Kidnapped (1886), an adventure story for teenagers, traces the journey of a man and a boy across Scotland after the 1745 rebellion, as the English move in to occupy the Highlands. The main character, David Balfour, is shown to be learning to develop courage and independence. One of the book’s admirers was Hilary Mantel, who as an eight-year old girl was drawn to it for that very reason. She also admired its style, its velocity, and found herself re-reading it every few years.

The third novel from this period was Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The existence of dissociation identity disorder (split personality) is now well-known. But in those pre-Freudian times a good many readers would have got halfway through the novella before realising respectable Jekyll and criminal Hyde were one and same person. It caused a sensation, and a stage version soon appeared. Scarcely had the run started when the Jack the Ripper killings began: the play was soon withdrawn.

Meanwhile the Stevensons moved about, living in England, France, and then on to America, where Louis was feted to an extraordinary degree. But despite spells in sanitoriums, his illness persisted. Fanny suggested they hire a yacht and go on a cruise to the South Seas. It was to be the first of three. Louis’s health improved immediately — he even took to swimming. On their second cruise they decided they would settle in Samoa.

At Vailima, while never completely well, Stevenson became a kind of patriarch. “I am chief and father” to twelve Samoans, he told an English friend; “my cook comes and asks permission to marry…” Their house (the only double-storeyed one in Samoa) also became a social hub — Louis’s celebrity attracted passing sea captains as well as local dignitaries, white and indigenous. Gradually other members of his family — including drifters and ne’er-do-wells — came and joined Fanny and Louis. There was increasing collaboration with her, this time in publication, and also with other family members, in particular his step-son Lloyd Osbourne.

Louis himself saw the South Seas as a crucible of imperialism, its veritable frontier. Wanting to understand it better, he embarked on a massive two-volume work (of a kind that existed on a number of British colonies) embracing political, cultural, historical and anthropological elements. But he had to abandon it: the project was too far removed from his existing talents. Nevertheless, the basic concern remained: the “extinction” of Pacific Island culture by Western civilisation.

The Germans in particular had penetrated Samoa by establishing plantations, and although the islands remained nominally independent, the three predatory powers — the United States, Britain and Germany — were vying for influence and manipulated different factions. Civil war did break out (rather reluctantly); Stevenson tried to act as a conciliatory influence, to little effect. Letters to the Times on the subject and a short book also occasioned little interest. Samoa — and Stevenson — were so far away, particularly to literary friends. The general feeling was that he had marginalised himself.

Meanwhile Stevenson dabbled in fanciful tales, wrote an undistinguished novel set in the South Seas and also a well-regarded short story set there. But it was Scotland that moved back to occupy pride of place in his imagination. He described how once, as he stood on the veranda at Vailima watching the rain falling down, he suddenly staggered as memories crowded in of Highland huts and peat smoke, wet clothes and whisky. The essence of Scotland — and again he was drawn to the eighteenth century, the period when England tightened her screws on the country. Stevenson wrote a sequel to Kidnapped, Catriona, which lacked the drive of the earlier novel, and contains dull expository passages about Scottish nationalism and English oppression. Samoa had sharpened his vision: the exploitation of the indigenous and the rapacity of newcomers were now all around him.

Death overtook the writing of Stevenson’s last novel Weir of Hermiston (another Scottish one). He was only forty-four. The torso, when published, drew considerable praise, although more in America than in England. Some say that, had it been completed, it would have been his masterpiece. It was only at the end, Graham Greene would write, that Stevenson’s “dandified talent began to shed its disguising graces, the granite to show through.”

What is plain is that the decline in Stevenson’s reputation — something he feared — began very soon after. While he had always enjoyed the approval and warm friendship of Henry James, writers such as H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad — whose Heart of Darkness followed the path signposted by Stevenson’s Ebb Tide — were dismissive.

One of the virtues of A Wider Shore is that Peri shows the compensating influence Stevenson has had in popular culture. There have been no less than sixty screen adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde (excluding porn). And Kidnapped, says Peri, helped establish the genre of the “epic buddy road trip,” extending to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. John Lennon said Kidnapped “opened my whole being.”

Written in a highly readable style, A Wilder Shore is backed by solid research. Camille Peri’s is an engrossing account of the Stevensons, psychologically acute, and one that does much to counter the dismissive “writer’s wife” stereotype imposed upon Fanny. •

A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson
By Camille Peri | Viking | $69.99 | 464 pages

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The central character is Campbell Flynn, a fine arts scholar who (to the chagrin of most of his department) has ventured successfully into high journalism, and even into the world of fashion. Socially he is well-connected; his wife’s sister is married to a duke. But he is a high spender, neither financially competent nor prudent. To make money, he decides to write a potboiler, Why Men Weep in Their Cars. As a study of the postulated male identity crisis, it brings complications, even though Campbell writes it anonymously and hires an actor to do the interviews.

Campbell is drifting into a malaise when the novel opens. He has made all sorts of adjustments as a good liberal, but feels something in his life is “off.” “Sometimes we need a holiday from ourselves,” he muses. He decides to take one.

At hand is Milo, a computer whiz who has taken Campbell’s course out of general interest. Campbell is struck by the young man’s self-possession, and — aware he is crossing a line, although not operating from a sexual imperative — suggests they have a drink together. This sets in motion a sequence of events that will destroy him.

For his part Milo — the son of an Irish father and an Ethiopian mother — conceals a great anger. He’s out to topple Campbell, whom he sees as fussing over Vermeer when the whole world is changing. “This is a white court. White officers, white barristers, white jury,” he shouts out when a friend is put on trial. He knows his friends have been bothered by the police all their lives, stopped, searched, called anti-social. “Then Travis [who is being tried] does something stupid and justice must be served. It hurt to think about it.” Correctly seeing the internet as the central nervous system of the world, Milo plans to use his skills to pole vault himself away to a safe place.

In the meantime, there is the professor. Gradually Milo comes to influence him more and more, to the point where he determines the tone of an important lecture Campbell is giving at the British Museum. The place is a “Fagin’s Lair” of stolen treasures, the professor declares; in this beautiful room “we populate and celebrate our nation’s criminality, at a ruinous cost to our modernity.”

Milo shows the professor the dark web, introduces him to Bitcoin, and then starts to crack open Campbell’s connections, with devastating results — for him and others.

The point O’Hagan constantly makes is that England itself is in a churn. You could say — as one of the characters does — that the whole country is on life support. Meanwhile the old insouciance of the upper classes is gone, often replaced by lapsed standards of personal behaviour. The ideal of “effortless superiority,” vaunted a century ago, was premised on empire — all gone. Or rather, it’s now among them, for these days almost 40 per cent of Londoners are foreign-born. The royals themselves are on the way out, despite their talent for always behaving in public “as if enjoying a glorious privacy.” O’Hagan also enjoys himself by slipping in the names of families once well-known, now less so: Eardley, Hicks Beach, Wemyss. Or using Dickens’s early penname “Boz” as the nickname for a migration racketeer and inverting E.M. Forster to create the maxim, “Only disconnect.” At the same time, he uses a fine performance of the Purcell song “Fairest Isle” to make the culture it represents seem isolated and irrelevant.

Campbell’s sister Moira is a Labour member of parliament. But there too there is disillusionment. (Presumably a little less so right now.) Labour, she reflects, used to be about working people, decency and fairness. But what now? What if the people stop voting for that? she asks. As another character observes, people will vote Trump-like against their own interests, simply because they hate the caring “elites” — “Islington garden-square hypocrites,” they are dubbed here — elites who like to tell them what is good for them. It might be that people “don’t mind being exploited so long as they can choose it themselves.”

The word “disruption” scarcely appears in the text, but discontinuities are everywhere. A young woman notes of her party-giving university contemporaries that “each existed at variance with his father.” There are many parties in the book, where gender fluidity is taken for granted. Some of the biggest are centred on gallery openings. The artworld is now populated with ex-bankers, who hold that authenticity is over-valued. (If people like a thing, they like it.) The whole shallow scene is marked by conspicuous consumption: Campbell’s flashy son insists on giving his father a big birthday party in Reykjavik — since the curry served in a restaurant there is the best in the world.

The past is ignored: it’s Milo who says, “Fuck Henry James. We’re on the Net,” but the sentiment is general. Everything’s ironic, or speedy. Some friends settle down to watch Netflix, but can’t agree on what to watch, so settle for two minutes of everything. And yet while O’Hagan takes pot shots at the trendiness of climate change — the trendiness, not the issue — there’s a younger character who puts a frivolous past behind him to become a highly effective activist for the cause. He also points to the integrity of the young journalist Tara Hastings.

The novel is particularly good in exploring the influence of the Russians in “Londongrad,” as it has been termed. We’re made aware of the “London laundromat” involving dirty Russian money, much of it processed by mainline British banks and then siphoned away into various companies. As one of the oligarchs quietly boasts, “I can asset-strip in fifteen languages.” Little of all this has been exposed, at least effectively: even a parliamentary committee plasters it over. The Russians, the novelist maintains, are in too deep — excluded people have been reinstated and given sinecures in the universities, a cohort have been active in arts patronage, and a few have been given seats in the House of Lords. Hefty Russian loans have compromised major businessmen and other leading figures.

One of them, it transpires, is Campbell’s wife’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Kendal. Campbell doesn’t particularly like him, since he’s a twitterer: a man “obsessed with social relations but clueless about social ease.” It turns out he’s doubly disgraced, by right-wing remarks that have gone viral but also by his being caught up in Russian financial schemes. “This country might be overrun by the wrong sort,” he’s heard to reflect, “but these people were men of business.” And, despite his difficulties, he comes through: they were just an embarrassment. A pillar of the establishment, with tradition, estates (and lawyers) plus royal cousins, he is (you might say) too grand to fail.

But the picture on the ground is not pretty. O’Hagan introduces us to people-smuggling, in which the Harrow-educated son of one of the oligarchs is deeply implicated. It is linked with the growing drug trade, the people transported often finding themselves enslaved on cannabis farms. Among other things the novel follows some Irish drivers, with their hopes and thoughts, and also a young Polish gay couple intent on making the journey. (Their story entails a snapshot of Bialystok). But we’re also given some of the nitty-gritty of the journey: drivers knock on the containers once they’ve pulled up, alerting the people inside to move to the centre so as to beat the heat scanners down at the port.

Caledonian Road is a fine novel, carefully plotted and with an ominous tone quietly surfacing from time to time. In part Campbell functions as an analogue for the decline of English liberal culture; his adversary the elderly Mrs Voyles, scratchy, bohemian and poor, for the England that’s been left behind. The characterisation generally is compelling — particularly in the case of Campbell’s wife, the immensely sane Elizabeth, who happens to be a therapist. Her mother, a wry aristocrat, is a delight; but O’Hagan is just as good and revealing about the assumptions of dunderheads like the Duke. His one caricature is of an Australian sculptor, a Dame; she, fortunately, occupies less than a page. Generally the novel is so sharply written that parts of it are just a notch or two away from satire. It abounds with neat phrases, such as Campbell’s “capable smile.”

A lot of Andrew O’Hagan has gone into this novel — in one sense Campbell, who also started as a Scots working class boy, provides a shadow scenario of what he could have become, and avoided. A Caledonian road then, in more ways than one.

More importantly, O’Hagan exemplifies V.S. Naipaul’s precept that “The novel is a form of social inquiry.” This is a Condition-of-England novel, an established nineteenth-century genre. Indeed, had it not been pre-empted by Trollope, its title could well have been The Way We Live Now. •

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Offering another perspective, Ann-Marie Priest’s recent biography of Gwen Harwood presented the case of a woman writer fighting to be published and recognised despite her husband’s obstruction and the daily grind of domestic life. Charmian Clift is a third example of wifedom: a writer married to a writer who was acclaimed for a novel, My Brother Jack, that he admitted could not have been written without her help.

The lives of Clift and George Johnston retain a certain glamour because they were spent partly on the Greek island of Hydra, mixing with Leonard Cohen, Sidney Nolan and other artists, during the 1950s. Interest has been renewed in recent years with the release of Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s study of their role in the Hydra artistic community, Half the Perfect World (2018), Sue Smith’s play Hydra (produced in Brisbane and Adelaide in 2019) and a documentary film, Charmian Clift: Life Burns High, will screen soon on Foxtel. Nadia Wheatley, who has long been the leading expert on Clift, published an excellent biography, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, in 2001 and edited a selection of her essays published in a new edition as Sneaky Little Revolutions in 2022.

Now comes The End of the Morning, the first section of an autobiographical novel Clift never completed but Wheatley believes can be read independently as a novella. Readers of Wheatley’s biography will recognise it as a significant source for her account of Clift’s childhood and adolescence in the quarry community near Bombo Beach, north of the NSW coastal town of Kiama.

The novella presents a vivid and charming picture of a childhood spent amid the freedom of the beach and bushland, Clift’s parents managing their poverty with creative resourcefulness and a commitment to literature as a reliable means of access to a wider imaginative world. Some recognisable tropes of autobiographical fiction appear — the rebellious tomboy narrator in rivalry with a more conventionally feminine sister for her parents’ attention; the narrator’s delight in learning — but this is not the conventional story of workers beaten down by the Depression. The father has chosen to live beyond the grind of English city life, among workers in Australia, so that he can enjoy a life with plenty of fishing.

Wheatley explains Clift’s struggle to meet the deadlines of the Commonwealth Literary Fund grant she’d been given for the novel, and gently outlines the anxieties that led to her suicide (which she refers to indirectly as “a cry for help that went unheard”). She speculates about the direction the novel might have taken without suggesting that Clift would have dealt with the sexual experiences that worried her so much at the time of her death.

Many readers will know that as a teenager Clift had a child who was adopted at birth. (She could not know that the child would become the artist and writer Suzanne Chick, herself the mother of Gina Chick who has gained fame in the reality television series, Alone.) But Clift’s concern at the time of her death was the imminent publication of George Johnston’s novel Clean Straw For Nothing, which depicted some of their sexual liaisons on Hydra.

As a kind of scaffolding for the unfinished novel, the rest of The End of the Morning is made up of a selection of thirty essays from the 225 columns that Clift wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald between 1964 and her death in 1969, chosen for their references to family life and childhood. Where the unfinished novel may frustrate the reader looking for a completed story, these short essays show Clift in total command of her form.

These 1000- to 1500-word pieces are full of thoughtful observations about her life and the social world around her. Sometimes she mentions the artistic community on Hydra, sometimes aspects of Sydney life, including renovations to her home in Mosman and the building of the Opera House. Often, she makes literary allusions to John Donne or Laurence Sterne or the most popular Romantic poets, but she never puts on airs — she has met many contemporary English poets and was struck by “over-reverence” before realising “that poets can be just as vain ordinary, peevish, arrogant, timid or plain dull as other people.” The essays assume that her readers also admit literature into their lives.

In this selection Clift makes no mention of her husband’s debilitating illness or the difficulties of her private life. The closest she comes to a political statement is when she contrasts the goals of younger and older women — helping women return to work in one case, engaging them in handicrafts and theatre parties in the other — at the inaugural meeting of a new women’s organisation. There is a lightness of touch and a clear sense of an audience that is made up, by implication, of other intelligent suburban women.

The same close observation enlivens the essays and the novel. Clift delivers wonderful lists of things: “On a Cluttered Mantelpiece” is made up mainly of descriptions of various objects found on her mantelpieces and their histories. “An Old Address Book” does a similar thing with places and people. Here are the county English:

men wearing either tweeds and caps and driving farm utilities or dinner jackets and driving Bentleys, mucking in with the pigs or serving champagne by candlelight and ladies who alternated between maintaining an Amazonian posture on perfectly frightening horses (and that horn so plangent over the Cotswold hills) and rising with that twitch of the trailing skirt that summoned all females at the table to retire and leave the gentlemen to their port.

Reading this you feel there is a novel waiting to happen.

Clift’s writing conveys a nostalgia for a lost Australia, not only for present-day readers but within the essays themselves, as she often remembers Sydney’s past and her own youth on the south coast. The End of the Morning also looks back fondly at the lost world of childhood, giving some clue to Clift’s role in the success of My Brother Jack. The novel is alive with a sense of what it was like to live in suburban Melbourne in the 1930s that Johnston couldn’t match in the Hydra of Clean Straw for Nothing or the Sydney of A Cartload of Clay. Clearly this detailed observation was Clift’s particular talent, just as her adaptation of My Brother Jack (1967) for television showed her gift for dramatic concision.

Clift’s newspaper columns remind me of Helen Garner’s articles for the Age, collected in True Stories and later books, and her comment that feature writing saved her from the loneliness of fiction and the need to “make things up.” Clift also admits to being gregarious, and it may be that she too found personal journalism suited her personality. But the literary world always rates the novel more highly than this kind of ephemeral writing and she struggled to finish her most ambitious work.

As well as her fears about the revelations in her husband’s next novel, perhaps the attitudes of the 1960s made it impossible for her to write about her teenage pregnancy, let alone sex outside marriage. We can speculate and regret the loss of what might have been an important addition to Australian fiction. At least we have these entertaining essays to enjoy. •

The End of the Morning
By Charmian Clift | Edited by Nadia Wheatley | NewSouth | $34.99 | 240 pages

The post A fragment of a life appeared first on Inside Story.

In the latter case, probably not. Yet it is in so many ways both the most intriguing first choice — who, after all, would expect the creator of James Bond to allude to the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Charles Secretan? — and the most portentous revision. The decision to eschew the clumsy homage and instead appropriate the dull name of an American ornithologist underscores Fleming’s ruthless pruning of anything that might unnecessarily adorn the instrument he created in 1952.

That creation, and the long story of its making, is at the heart of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an immense biography by Nicholas Shakespeare. Building on earlier efforts by John Pearson (1966) and Andrew Lycett (1995), the book was prompted by the Fleming estate’s willingness to give Shakespeare access to unreleased archival material that illuminates the real-life source material embedded in the Bond novels. That openness may also have been the estate attempt to adjust the dominant view of Fleming as a man who, where he is not defined by Bond, is derided as a misogynistic, alcoholic wastrel with a penchant for whipping who showboated during the second world war and spent postwar summers in Jamaica fantasising about British grit, foreign villains and sexual conquest in exotic locales.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man has plenty of whipping and wantonness, but it adds nuance to a life whose early years seem to have been spent in guileless and unknowing preparation for important wartime work — work for which he turns out to have been unusually gifted. In fact, it is the observation of one journalist — that Fleming, in this moment, with all his gifts and talents finally in use, was a “complete man” — that gave Shakespeare his title.

But what freight it brings to the book: an intimation of comprehensiveness underscored by its bulk and the vivid cultural history woven through it; an implied claim to being definitive bedevilled by the persistent haze of uncertainty around Fleming’s war record. Then there is the dramatic portent — that Fleming, even as he created the character that secured his fame, was somehow lesser or incomplete in those postwar years.

But perhaps that was merely a reversion to form. Fleming’s early life was monied but grim. His miserly Scottish grandfather was a banker who had survived considerable bereavement (three siblings had been buried before he was born, and three more, plus his mother, would follow by the time he turned fifteen) to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Robert Fleming’s greatest stroke of luck, however, was to be a constituent of a young Winston Churchill, who called on him for donations and provided in his friendship a glow of respectability for Robert’s sons, Val and Philip, whom Churchill nicknamed the “Fleming-oes.”

Val, elected a Conservative MP in 1910, fathered four sons — Peter (1907), Ian (1908), Richard (1911) and Michael (1913) — with socialite Evelyn Sainte Croix Rose, whom he had married in 1906. But his influence as a father was defined by his absence. After war broke out, he joined Churchill’s regiment, trained alongside the future prime minister, and was killed while serving on the Somme in 1917.

Robert Fleming is said to have bellowed in grief at the news, Evelyn painted every room in the house black, and Churchill wrote an obituary for the Times, a copy of which, framed and hung above Ian’s bed, gave the eight-year-old a nightly reminder of the greatness that he could never hope to match.

Val’s estate, meanwhile, gave Evelyn enormous wealth, but in terms that invited her to endure a lifetime of dutiful widowhood: should she ever remarry, the money would be immediately transferred to her children. She responded by elevating her dead husband “from an absent, pipe-smoking, deer-stalker to an iconic figure in the clouds with whom she alone enjoyed privileged communication,” writes Shakespeare, in one of many deft summations.

Controlling, insecure and extravagant, she played her boys off against one another, guilt-tripping them and blackmailing them with threats of disinheritance, pulling out all the stops to ensure they might never suffer the consequences of taking responsibility for their actions.

For Ian, this manifested most acutely in endless reprieves from failure and ignominy, and repeated diversions from paths that might well have led him away from Evelyn. He was pulled out of Eton ahead of trouble over a relationship with a girl and sent to Sandhurst with hopes of joining the Black Watch infantry battalion. Out less than a year later after contracting gonorrhoea in a London brothel, he was dispatched to the Tennerhof, a private school in the Austrian town of Kitzbühel, with freshly adjusted plans that he would pursue a diplomatic career.

Distance from Evelyn allowed promise to flower: linguistic versatility, some artistic ambitions, an engagement to a Swiss woman. But on his return his mother stomped on all these green shoots. After his failure to find a position in the Foreign Office she intervened to get him a job at Reuters, where he made a decent fist of covering a famous Soviet show trial of six engineers employed by a British machinery manufacturer. Then he was off again, moving at Evelyn’s insistence to join a firm of merchant bankers in the City.

Fleming had little to no interest in commerce and even less in maths: “I could never work out what a sixty-fourth of a point was,” he wrote. Yet he flourished to the point of becoming a partner at another firm only eighteen months later. The succession of environments into which he had been dropped had given him a charming veneer that allowed him to adapt and conform while keeping people at a safe distance. Even the jaded journalists he tried to scoop in Moscow had been disarmed to the point that they were willing to help him with his boss: one vouched that Fleming was “a pukha chap.”

The elite education and time spent among the privileged had also knitted Fleming into every club and network that was worth knowing about, giving him vast contacts and points of reference that he wielded readily. The “stockbroker” Fleming would talk to clients about investment strategy, wine and dine them at an appropriate club or hotel, and then turn them over to the pointy heads and bean counters in the office who could make the money flow. On the surface (and, to some, that was all there was), all this made Fleming a Wodehouse character: paid too much to do too little, all charm and glamour and self-obsession.

And yet, Shakespeare suggests, Fleming had by this time planted “miscellaneous seeds.” He could speak several languages, had solid journalistic experience, and was friendly with several notably crotchety press barons. He had contacts and networks across the financial, commercial and intelligence worlds. He even had literary credentials, via the reflected glow of elder brother Peter, who had become a successful travel writer, and his own efforts as a collector of first editions of books that had “signalised a right-angle in the thought on that particular subject.”

The book collecting might not have seemed helpful when war broke out in 1939, but the miscellaneous seeds sprouted once Fleming was recruited to the Department of Naval Intelligence as a personal assistant to its director, rear-admiral John Godfrey. His ability to deal with the press and with people — not least his irascible boss — made him indispensable. His myriad contacts became invaluable. His knowledge of distant worlds and their connections made him insightful. But perhaps most surprising of all was his creativity.

In this vein he was much like Churchill, whom Fleming grew to resemble with his polka-dot bowties and “daily prayer” memos (“Pray, could you find out…”). Under Godfrey, Fleming brainstormed all sorts of schemes, many impractical and far-fetched, to gain an advantage over the enemy. For every hare-brained idea — to have a fake U-boat captain send messages in glass bottles railing against the Third Reich, to create a fake treasure ship packed with crack commandoes (which sounds suspiciously like the Trojan horse) — there was something promising. Perhaps most notable was what Fleming took from a little-known novel, The Milliner Hat Mystery: the germ of what became Operation Mincemeat, a successful tactical deception of the Axis powers.

Placed at the near-centre of British intelligence efforts, Fleming had a wide ambit of activity that Shakespeare believes to have extended to a role in the creation of America’s foreign intelligence service. He was hardly the “chocolate sailor” some contemporaries called him. Godfrey certainly thought highly of his assistant. He called Fleming a war “winner” who was owed a debt that could never be repaid, and Shakespeare adds to this the findings of other historians: “It has taken time to realise how central Ian Fleming is,” says one. “What he was doing touched on so much of the war,” says another.

But ascertaining exactly what Fleming touched, and how lightly or heavily, is difficult. Even the claim to Operation Mincemeat is made via inference, analysis of stylistic tics and coincident timetabling. Secrecy is the issue. With friends and colleagues, Fleming was generally reticent about his wartime service; bar the blurred fantasies of the Bond books, he left few hints of his activities. Shakespeare adds to this the need for confidentiality during the war and, later, during the cold war, when archives were both weeded and closed to access. Then there is the material simply lost to time — damaged, forgotten, burned — and the records that are exaggerated or simply mistaken.

None of this is unusual, yet at other times Shakespeare strains to explain Fleming’s absences from records, or even to gainsay what exists and inveigle Fleming’s way in. “Simply because Ian is not listed in the minutes of a high-level meeting,” he writes at one point, “does not mean he was not there in the room.”

Enough well-documented rooms exist to make arguments like this unnecessary. The array of material Shakespeare proffers is enough to convince this reader, at any rate, that Fleming was an active, engaged, important and unconventional wartime player. While Shakespeare labours the point, it also serves to establish a key fact about Fleming’s literary efforts: while James Bond was depicted in a cold war world, with its dubious moralities and shifting principles, he was fundamentally a creature of the second world war and its starker divides between allies and enemies, good and bad.

The oft-made comparison with John le Carré has never been to Fleming’s advantage, but Shakespeare draws out so many connections, echoes and resemblances between Bond and the second world war that any comparison between Bond and George Smiley or between Fleming and le Carré seems like a category error. In fact, given Shakespeare’s attention to literary antecedents, the better comparison is between Bond and characters such as Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond, Richard Hannay and perhaps even Sherlock Holmes — Britons who, with vigour, smarts and a willingness to do violence, save the world.

Shakespeare is a restless writer. As though to jolt the reader awake, lengthy passages of third-person past-tense narration suddenly crystallise into the first-person present as he tracks down a long-lost colleague of Fleming’s or a vague acquaintance or — in more self-indulgent moments — the descendent of some vague acquaintance. These moments fold into the story of Fleming’s life the story of the stories — of the Pearson and Lycett biographies of Fleming, and of Shakespeare’s biography.

Shakespeare quotes people crowing about their efforts to mislead his predecessors or their determination to shut up shop: “Poor Pearson,” Godfrey writes, of Fleming’s first biographer, “is like a famished man gazing, his mouth watering, into the butcher’s and confectionary shop windows and having to be content with a stale turnip (or swede) from the greengrocer.”

Shakespeare doesn’t conceal his similarities with Pearson, noting his own eager anticipation of new discoveries. But he adds in the dynamics of his interviews, poignant notes about the contingency of historical research, and observations about the dark material at the heart of the Bond novels.

In one scene he arrives in the rain outside a bungalow at Milton Keynes to interview the last surviving member of 30AU, a wartime intelligence gathering unit set up under Fleming’s influence and operating, effectively, under his command. Bill Marshall is ninety-four years old and feels a decade older. He tells Shakespeare he is a week early but beckons him inside anyway. “Later, I am glad I got the date wrong,” Shakespeare adds. “Bill Marshall will be hospitalised five days after our conversation. Had I come at the right time, I would never have heard what he tells me.”

Inside, Shakespeare listens as Marshall — who only days before has received the Légion d’Honneur and a letter from Emanual Macron praising him as a hero — confesses to murder:

On 26 June, Bill watched as German snipers fired through the windows of a hotel, killing one medical orderly and shooting another through the knee as they attended wounded American soldiers in the street. It was raining when the German riflemen surrendered. Another witness told Nicholas Rankin how not long afterwards he had seen their blood flowing in the rainwater.

Bill grows quiet, withdrawn. “I shot four Germans in cold blood.”

“What did you feel?’

“Nothing. How do you feel seeing two men trying to attend being shot?”

What happened next, whether he was reprimanded or Returned to Unit, he does not say. He has said enough. I think of another character who inherited Bill’s licence to kill. This was the compost out of which James Bond emerged.

Much as he had come into his own, Fleming was in an invidious position by the end of the war. Bound by secrecy, he could not dispel or rebut jibes about him being the “Sailor of the Strand.” He was carrying considerable emotional turmoil: his brother Michael had died in 1940 as a prisoner of the Germans; a serious romantic relationship with Muriel Wright, begun in 1935 in Austria, had come to an end with her death in a German bombing raid in 1944. He could too easily see a future in which the skills and talents he had wielded so well went to waste. He was hardly alone in this plight: in the United States, Allen Dulles described his return to the legal profession as an “appalling thing” after heading a spy network. “Most of my time,” he wrote, “is spent reliving those exciting days.”

Where Dulles went to the CIA, Fleming returned to journalism. In 1945, he took a position in the Kemsley newspaper group, handling a network of foreign correspondents. A journalist Shakespeare interviews recounts how Fleming sat in front of a canary yellow map of the world equipped with tiny flashing light bulbs — one for each man.

Shakespeare cautiously ventures that this might have been cover for continuing intelligence work, but the whole portrait has the tragic comedy of a Graham Greene novel: Fleming’s use of naval intelligence lingo with his journalists, his retention of a code and cipher book in his office, the derisive whispers of younger colleagues that his vaunted contacts were nothing but old duffers. Then, of course, there are the corporate machinations: Fleming took the position with Kemsley, which also owned the Sunday Times, on the intimation that he might become the paper’s editor and the hope that he might even get a seat on the company’s board. He also fantasised that the foreign news service he was managing might one day become a rival to Reuters — at which point Fleming would be a press proprietor in his own right.

If true, it was only ever to be a sideline, for alongside a salary of £225,000 in today’s pounds Fleming negotiated an iron-clad policy of two months of paid holiday each year. He would spend those months in Jamaica, at the rather uncomfortable bungalow he had built and initially named “Shamelady Hall” before choosing a name that harked back to a wartime operation — Goldeneye. Here, in daily bursts of 2000 words, he wrote Bond.

In Shakespeare’s telling, the novels came shortly after a burst of disappointments and disillusionments. Fleming’s hopes of advancement at Kemsley had vanished; his long-term paramour, Anne Charteris, had been divorced from her husband and fallen pregnant (again) to Fleming, necessitating a hasty marriage that neither of them much wanted. With fatherhood imminent, wedlock complete, he was looking back to a life he once had and could still have had — in intelligence, on one hand, but also in literature.

Signs of Fleming’s desire for this life recur in the book, especially during Fleming’s time attending the Tennerhof. There, according to Shakespeare, the youthful Fleming was steeped in European history and literature and imbued with ambitions to write a serious novel in the vein of James Joyce or Thomas Mann. He made attempts to act on those ambitions, planning but then aborting a co-authored translation of Paracelsus and, in 1928, self-publishing a volume of poetry titled The Black Daffodil only to become deeply embarrassed by it. “He took every copy that had been printed and consigned the whole edition pitilessly to the flames,” wrote one of Fleming’s friends.

A factor in Fleming’s constant withdrawals, Shakespeare argues, was his elder brother’s success at writing. “Of course, my brother Peter’s rather brilliant as a writer,” Fleming would say, “but I wouldn’t know how you set about writing a book myself.” In the postwar years, however, his attitude changed. One prompt was his belief that he could better his brother’s effort at an adventure novel; another was his sense that he would not be trespassing on his brother’s turf if he did so. Then there was a sense of resentment, aggravated by his failed hopes at Kemsley, as friends, acquaintances and other writers churned out thrillers and spy novels that, in many cases, claimed experiences and actions Fleming saw as his own to write about — the gag of secrecy notwithstanding.

Perhaps too there was a sense of how he might slip that gag: Shakespeare posits that Graham Greene’s difficulties with the intelligence services — it was felt he drew too closely on his first-hand knowledge — may have influenced Fleming to increase the fantastical elements of the Bond stories even as he drew on the real-life material of his wartime experiences and insights. “I think he wrote the books primarily because he had a great deal of knowledge of things like this within him, and he had to get it out,” says one acquaintance.

It is a conflux of influences that Shakespeare presents with considerable verve. He plays with the book’s internal clock, changes style and tone, moves into scenes and back out of them, and in doing so creates vivid juxtapositions and drama. The chapter on Bond’s first appearance on the page follows immediately on Fleming’s decision to marry to create the convincing argument that Bond was an escape for Fleming as much as for an exhausted postwar Britain:

Suddenly, as he floated over the reef [at Goldeneye], above barracuda he had named after battleships, Ian saw an exhilarating path back to bachelorhood — by creating a contemporary naval hero in the tradition of Drake, Morgan and Nelson, loyal to the Crown, who would reaffirm England as a world power, wipe out the shame of the Burgess–Maclean defection, and re-establish SIS as “the most dangerous” Secret Service in Russian eyes. And he would be a bachelor. “If he were to marry and settle down he would be of little value to the Secret Service.”

A chapter later, Shakespeare is looking ahead again, foreshadowing how Bond would consume Fleming. It was not only that Bond’s fame quickly came to define his author’s public persona; it was also that Fleming became reliant on Bond. Advised that it was no good to write just one book, that he had to “hit the nail again and again with the same hammer until it’s driven into the head of your potential public,” Fleming became a factory working on a one-year schedule, the brunt of the work to be done during a spell at Goldeneye.

Fleming went into this routine clear-eyed, seeing it as wholly compatible with his working life as well as a path out of financial difficulties caused by a spendthrift Anne. As he wrote to his publisher Jonathan Cape during negotiations over Casino Royale, “I am only actuated by the motives of a) making as much money for myself and my publishers as possible out of the book, and b) getting as much fun as I personally can out of the project.”

But the fun, in Shakespeare’s telling, dwindled as the money poured in. Lawsuits over film and television rights, accusations of plagiarism, negative reviews and laughter from friends all corroded this late-life literary success. Then there was Fleming’s knowledge that, at some point, he would run out of material. Philip Larkin famously detected in the posthumously published Octopussy (1966) an allegory for how Fleming had used his war experiences as treasure off which to secure his heart’s desires — Bentleys, caviar, Henry Cotton golf clubs. It was acute insight that Shakespeare agrees with. “This was the draining exchange,” he writes. “Once Ian gave birth to Bond, he relied heavily on the hard-earned secret capital of the war. Each book was a different slice of stolen gold until the material ran out.”

The poor quality of Octopussy and The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), also published after Fleming’s death, suggests Shakespeare’s assessment is right. But at play in the preceding Bond books too is a sense of Fleming butting up against the limits imposed on a writer tilling in a single genre. For Your Eyes Only (1960) abandons the novel form in favour of the short story, one of which — the horribly titled “Quantum of Solace” — eschews gunfights and villains in favour of a parable about marital compassion delivered after a disappointing dinner party in a manner reminiscent of Somerset Maugham. The response to this deviation was lukewarm at best.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), meanwhile, is unique among the Bond novels for being framed by a meta-fictive introduction from Fleming, for adopting the first-person perspective of a woman, and for its brutally sleazy and violent story. The book contains the most rounded and complex of Fleming’s female characters, but its reception was so virulently hostile that Fleming, taken aback, suppressed a paperback edition, refused to allow anything but the title to be used in the film adaptations, and went back to his safe patch with the Bond that followed, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963).

One might wonder whether Fleming still yearned to write something that his younger, more highbrow self would have been proud of, and whether he had come to believe that, thanks to Bond, he could not. If so, it is all the more tragic for being a knowing compromise signalled by the early change he had made to the draft of Casino Royale.

A homage to a nineteenth-century philosopher was never going to fit into that work, into that world, and Fleming saw it quickly. He slashed a blue line through Secretan and above it wrote a new name. His protagonist would introduce himself bluntly, almost monosyllabically: “Bond. James Bond.” •

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
By Nicholas Shakespeare | Harvill Secker | $42.99 | 830 pages

The post Grand days appeared first on Inside Story.

Well-known to Lindsay enthusiasts, Cranny-Francis has written articles and organised conferences about his life and work, maintains a website, arranged the publication of his “political autobiography” The Fullness of Life and edited a volume of selected poems. In this first book-length single-author study of Lindsay’s life and work she has hit on an elegant solution to the problem of the hyperactively full life of her subject. He was someone whose works demand attention to his ideas, and whose ideas demand attention to his life. Jack Lindsay is structured around a core of six chapters, each dedicated to Lindsay’s book-length studies of English authors: John Bunyan (1937), Charles Dickens (1950), George Meredith (1956), William Morris (1974) and two on William Blake (1927 and 1978). This frame is filled in with chapters that provide biographical and intellectual context and discuss his other relevant works, helping the reader to understand, without being overwhelmed, how Lindsay’s approach to writing was influenced by his experiences and ideas.

This structure works well to illuminate Lindsay’s eclectic, self-fashioned life-philosophy, with its associated preoccupations, values and imagery: the struggle for unity, culture as expressive work, the archetype of death and renewal. The system evolved over time, but many elements were present from the first.

Inevitably Cranny-Francis omits or barely glances at much of Lindsay’s output. She makes barely a mention of his forty-three novels and seven biographies of artists. It would be hard to guess from it that Lindsay’s most cited study is about alchemy in Roman Egypt, or that the one most discussed by academics is a historical novel set in the British civil war.

Depending on what counts as a book, Lindsay published about 160 in his lifetime, as well as hundreds of articles, stories and poems. About a half of his writing was historical and biographical, a quarter fiction, and the remainder criticism, social theory, translations, polemics and poetry. Most of his publications were concerned with the past, usually the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Lindsay’s classical training is apparent in the eclectic character of works in which history, mythology, philology, archaeology, anthropology, aesthetics and philosophy are seamlessly blended.

All of Lindsay’s mature writing was underwritten by a self-fashioned philosophy or credo. Its most fundamental principle was what Cranny-Francis describes as the “embodied connectedness” of things. He often called it “vital unity,” “wholeness,” “Life” or “the fullness of life.”

In Lindsay’s thought the concept of vital unity assumes as many guises as energy does in physics. One of his symbols for it was Dionysus, the mysterious deity of wine and rebirth, leader of a disorganised band of enthralled creatures — satyrs, maenads, nymphs, centaurs, Pan the god of shepherds — who found no place on Mount Olympus. Another symbol was the figure of “the people,” which he sometimes called “the folk,” and occasionally “the masses,” each term with its particular political inflection. Human unity implied solidarity, equality, ethical responsiveness and mutual aid.

As Cranny-Francis observes, Lindsay extends the idea of unity to all spheres of human activity, including the natural world. John Bellamy Foster, noting Lindsay’s evocations of a “patient earth… ‘eternally reborn’ through labour and ritual practice,” identifies him as a forerunner of Marxist ecology.

Lindsay found the origins of the idea of unity in Plato, or even further back in Parmenides and Pythagoras, but a slightly less distant inspiration was the sixteenth-century excommunicated priest Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who melded Renaissance humanism with materialism. Lindsay was stirred when he encountered Bruno in the early 1930s, subsequently writing a novel about him (Adam of a New World, 1936), and translating De la causa, principio e uno (Cause, Principle, Unity, 1962). Later he would claim that reading Bruno led him directly to Marxism.

Lindsay’s intense awareness of the interconnectedness of the living world had implications for his everyday life. Cranny-Francis quotes from an episode in The Fullness of Life during his years with the poet Elza de Locre in the early 1930s, when he lived in desperate poverty.

A local farmer had gifted a couple of rabbits to them as a neighbourly gesture. Confronted with the reality of having to skin and disembowel the animals before cooking, Lindsay found himself unable to proceed. He contemplates the economy of death on which a meat-eating society is based, particularly when social organisation has reached a point where meat protein is no longer essential to the diet: “One’s symbiosis with the earth is therefore in terms of unceasing violence and murder; and one knows, deep in one’s being, that one lives only by a system of blood-victims.”

“A communist society which is not vegetarian,” he concluded, “seems to me a hopeless contradiction.”

The young Lindsay called the absence of unity abstraction or dissociation; later, under the influence of Hegel and Marx, he favoured the word alienation. He argued that alienation has always been present in human life and has always provoked resistance. Throughout history that resistance has taken many forms — initiation rituals, shamanic flights, alchemy, art and poetry, and political revolt. The struggle against alienation shapes people’s relationships with one another and the world, motivates the protests of the wretched and exploited, and underlies attitudes to nature. Great thinkers and creative artists throw light upon its diverse manifestations.

Blake’s prophetic books explore the “world of false consciousness, of alienation,” according to Lindsay, and he praised Dickens for “the discovery of dissociation and the alienation of man from his fellows and his own essence, the stages of struggle against the dissociative forces, and the intuition (uttered in symbolic forms) of the resolving unity.”

Lindsay regarded religion as both a product of alienation and a form of protest against it. His vision of the world was also infused with hope for a fulfilment somehow always just out of reach. In a letter to Edith Sitwell on her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1955 he confessed to having been at times “very close to the catholic creed… indistinguishable perhaps from ekklesia of the faithful — the people who are Christ.”

Affinities between his system and Christianity are not difficult to uncover: sin as alienation, humanity crucified, Life the Eucharist, Paradise a vision of love and freedom. He was familiar with such syncretisms in the Ancient World: in a book about Roman Egypt he references a tomb in the Roman catacombs of Pretextatys on which Dionysus is identified with the Lord Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, and burials in the Vatican Necropolis of Christians who also worshipped Isis and Bacchus.

Alienation has become all-pervasive in the modern world, chiefly because of money and science. Following Thomas Carlyle, Lindsay often referred to the institutions and customs associated with money as the “cash-nexus.” From all the possible elements of human relationship associated with the exchange of goods, money abstracts a single factor, that of utility, and makes the remainder redundant. The dehumanisation implicit in the use of money reaches its apogee with capitalism, which turns life itself into a commodity. In his study of William Morris he declares that “a genuinely new society can be born only when commodity-production ends, and with it division of labour, money, market-systems, and alienation in all its many shapes and forms — above all alienation from labour.”

The other powerful alienating factor of modernity is the scientific method stemming from Galileo and Descartes, which Lindsay consistently attacked as “mechanical,” “divisive” and “quantitative.” Cranny-Francis notes that “Lindsay returns repeatedly… to Blake’s criticisms of science and the post-Enlightenment rationalism on which it is based.” Lindsay was not at all opposed to scientific inquiry, nor wholly dismissive of the achievements of post Enlightenment science. But in Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949) and a later trilogy on alchemy, astrology and physics in Greco-Roman Egypt he refused to separate knowledge of “nature” from other kinds of knowledge. There is a single interconnected world, and all ways of knowing it are likewise interconnected. The “sciences” discussed in Marxism and Contemporary Science are not physics, astronomy or chemistry, but biology, anthropology, art criticism, psychology and history.

For Lindsay, decisive proof that contemporary science has taken a wrong turning was the atomic bomb, the culmination of alienation’s will to self-destruction. Today he would no doubt make the same criticism of the digital revolution and genetics.

But there is a nagging problem with alienation, though Lindsay, more of a poet than a philosopher, seems never to have addressed it, and neither does Cranny-Francis. It parallels the problem of evil in religions that postulate a benign creator. Where does alienation come from? How can the world be a vital unity and at the same time a site of struggle against division?

Some cosmologies have an explanation. An idealist can say that the world of the senses is a flawed copy of a perfect and eternal world that is glimpsed only in thought. The unity is “above,” the struggle “below.” But Lindsay was trenchantly opposed both to idealism and to hierarchy. For him mental and spiritual phenomena are autonomous, but in the final analysis dependent on matter. Cranny-Francis mentions his debt to the Sydney-born philosopher Samuel Alexander. Alexander was an early twentieth-century advocate of emergence, the theory that complex systems produce attributes and activities that do not belong to their parts. Could emergence explain the origin of alienation? It isn’t clear how.

At a psychological level, though, Lindsay’s biography provides a paradigm case of a conflict between longed-for unity and actual division. Lindsay’s father was the writer and artist Norman Lindsay, one of Australia’s best-known humourists and artists in the first half of the twentieth century, notorious for his sexual libertarianism and hostility to Christianity. Cranny-Francis dwells sensitively on Jack’s difficult relationship with Norman. “The story of father-son relationships threads through all of Lindsay’s writing, fiction and non-fiction,” she writes. When Jack was nine years old, Norman left his wife and three sons. The fatherless family moved to Brisbane, where young Jack lived in a state of genteel but disorganised impoverishment, loved but neglected by his vague and increasingly alcoholic mother until her sister’s family finally took charge and sent him to school. Unsurprisingly, the theme of a lost birthright appears often in Lindsay’s novels and histories.

Norman renewed contact with his son only after his academic achievements had earned him scholarships to Brisbane’s elite Grammar School and the University of Queensland. Lindsay, ecstatic to be restored to his famous father’s attention, was Norman’s devoted acolyte for the next decade. Then they fell out bitterly.

Norman’s entire life was a fierce act of will to sustain the exhilarating freedom of his adolescence, when he had followed his older brother out of a shabby mined-out gold town to marvellous Melbourne and lived in careless poverty, pursuing a self-directed course in drawing, reading, flaneuring and witty companionship until Jack’s conception brought that delightful life to a sudden end. For the rest of his life Norman acted out his ambivalence, alternately praising and denouncing his son. In 1967 he wrote to him, “I can’t help but laugh when I think of what our biographers are going to make of the break and reunion of our relations. They will have to do the best they can with its human dramatics for it is quite impossible for them to realise the compulsions behind them.”

Jack Lindsay did not have children until his late fifties. He was an anxious, self-critical parent, and never ceased to yearn for his father’s distracted attention.

Turn for a moment I say
Turn from your obdurate place
In that clarity of stone,
That terrible folly of light,
Turn for a moment this way
Your abstracted face.

Lindsay understood the importance of this personal history for his literary career, confessing to a close friend that “if my parents hadn’t parted I doubt if I should have become a writer at all.” Cranny-Francis suggests that his description of William Morris also applies to himself:

From one aspect there never was a more impetuously frank man than Morris; he lives restlessly in the open and follows his convictions out without concern for the consequences to himself or anyone else. From another aspect he appears a hidden figure, moved by a passion of which the multiple effects are plain but the central impulse obscured. I suggest that along the lines I have sketched we can bring the man and the artist into a single focus, and see the way in which his personal dilemma was transformed into a dynamic of acceptance and revolt, of deepening insight into the nature of his world and into the ways in which the terrible wounds of alienation can be healed.

A succession of recent British scholars has sought to recover Lindsay as a forerunner of practitioners of cultural studies, an influential field of interdisciplinary research instigated by British theorists — among them Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams — in the 1970s. Although they didn’t reference Lindsay, the founders of cultural studies were almost certainly familiar with some of his work, and there are strong points of similarity in their ideas. In particular, they all affirmed the political significance of culture.

Marx had suggested a base–superstructure model of social formation, according to which economic relationships ultimately determine the organisation of politics, law, religion and creative expression. The implication was that economic interests always trump cultural factors. The practical effect was to concentrate efforts to build socialism in workplaces, which in effect meant and trade unions. This left little place for cultural creators. Like cultural studies, Lindsay steadfastly rejected that model.

Another tenet of cultural studies that Lindsay anticipated was the idea that significant cultural change comes from “below.” Lindsay believed that plebeian practices and values, and their fraught and contradictory clashes with the practices and values of ruling elites, are the major source of cultural innovation. He made the point forcefully in a letter to his friend and fellow critic Alick West:

The concept is that culture is created by the expropriators, fundamentally expresses their position and needs, and has no close relation to the concrete labour-processes and the producing masses. I should like to suggest that something like the reverse is the truth. The people are the producers and reproducers of life, and in that role are also the begetters of culture in all its shapes and forms — though in a class-divided society the ruling class expropriates culture.

Lindsay’s view stemmed from the conviction — shared with Ruskin and Morris — that work and aesthetic production had once “been harmoniously united, and that they still ought to be, despite the general movement towards degradation and mechanisation.” Before commodity production alienated workers from the products of their labour — in this historical sketch uncommodified slavery is conveniently forgotten — work was done in order to create both necessary means of living and pleasing or profound emotions. Each was a joyful undertaking. Once, communal work had always been accompanied by singing and chanting. Understanding this had motivated William Morris to take on, in Lindsay’s dated language, “the full political and social struggle which alone could have as its aim the achievement of brotherhood and the ending of commodity-production.”

In A Short History of Culture Lindsay traced the essential identity of art and work back to the movement of bodies in space. From the classicist Jane Harrison he took the observation that the repetitive, rhythmic behaviours that create the necessities of life — poundings, liftings, plantings, weavings, cuttings, stalkings, throwings — are shared with dancing. Like her, he considered dance to be the primal kind of cultural creativity. Citing another book of Lindsay’s criticism, After the Thirties, Cranny-Francis writes:

Lindsay identifies in dance the rhythmical control of movement that characterises human activity and being. It bodily enacts the purposive behaviours that enable the group to maintain social coherence, engaging them through the rhythm of the breath: ‘Body and mind are thus keyed together in new adventurous and interfused ways.’ The dance becomes an exploration of the embodied being required to achieve a specific purpose, such as a hunt. It lifts the dancer (and observer) into the realm of ‘pure potentiality’ where ‘desire and act are one’; where the bodily disposition required to engage successfully in a particular activity is achieved and communicated. In this process, Lindsay argued, human beings imaginatively engage aspects of everyday life and rehearse the modes of being, thinking and acting that enable them to achieve their needs and desires. For Lindsay this is the role of culture in the formation of being and consciousness, whether it be the ritual art of early societies or contemporary literature, visual art, theatre and dance.

If communism means opposition to capitalism and desire for a future free of oppression and exploitation, Lindsay was certainly a communist. No one seems to know exactly when he joined or if he ever left the British Communist Party, but he was actively affiliated with it from the late 1930s until at least the 1970s. MI5 put him under surveillance. He stayed in the party when it demanded he recant his ideas, and again after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s brutality in 1956. There is no doubt about the strength of his allegiance. But was Lindsay a Marxist communist? He certainly called himself one. Cranny-Francis, along with just about everyone else who has written about him, takes it for granted.

Yet there are grounds for wondering about Lindsay’s Marxism. What kind of Marxist converts on account of a Renaissance philosopher? Marxism profoundly shaped his thinking but it was not Lindsay’s foundational postulate. He came to it as a plausible derivation from a more fundamental constellation of ideas about culture and history that he had already arrived at. Some of his creed was shared with Marxism, some was dissonant with it. If, in the manner of a party apparatchik, one were called on to prepare a list of his heresies, it would be an easy brief: he largely discounts or ignores economic forces, flirts with idealism, sees revolutionary potential in “the people” rather than “the working class,” and has a Romantic, even reactionary, understanding of Communist aims.

Late in life, Lindsay began to concede the point. The Crisis in Marxism (1981) is highly critical of most prominent twentieth-century Marxist theorists, particularly Adorno and Althusser. In one of his last essays he declared that he was “diametrically opposed to all closed systems,” including Lenin’s. “I have found all Marxists, orthodox or not, to be hostile.” Among an eclectic list of influences ranging from Keats to Harrison to Dostoyevsky, only two Marxists appear: Lukacs, and Marx himself.

In a sense, of course, debating whether Lindsay was “really” Marxist is as futile as debating whether Mormons are Christian or Alevis Muslim. In another sense, though, it matters. As long as Lindsay is seen as first and foremost a Marxist, his ideas remain submerged beneath the complexity and weight of a hundred and fifty years of Marxist theorising. To perceive what is most original in his thought, it needs to be disentangled from what has become a distracting integument.

Promised a scholarship to Oxford after he graduated from the University of Queensland but told that he would have to wait a year, Lindsay refused to enrol. For most of his life the lack of a higher degree and his oppositional politics would have made it difficult if not impossible to work as an academic. He gave no sign of wanting to. Even his most esoteric books were not aimed primarily at academics, nor did they please many of them. Ironically, today it is chiefly they who keep his memory alive. Anne Cranny-Francis’s book is no exception, but it deserves a broader readership. We need not agree with Lindsay’s controversial opinions to hope that this remarkable thinker will become better known. •

Jack Lindsay: Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary
By Anne Cranny-Francis | Palgrave Macmillan | €119.99 | 416 pages

The post A dynamic of acceptance and revolt appeared first on Inside Story.

While Lumby was working on her book Matthew Lamb was embarked on something different and quite unusual: a two-volume cultural history of Moorhouse. Lamb’s project is also a biography, but the extra length allows him room to explore in more detail the writer’s intellectual development and his role in challenging the restrictions on Australian publishing in the years he was active. Lamb’s first volume, Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths, has just been published.

Both biographers spent time talking to Moorhouse before his death in 2022 and both combed through his extensive archives, so their books raise questions about the role of writers in creating their own lives. In recent years, we’ve seen Ann-Marie Priest’s detailed biography of Gwen Harwood, written after the poet’s archives were opened after many years of restricted access, Brigitta Olubas’s meticulous study of Shirley Hazzard, written with the approval of Hazzard and her friends, and Bernadette Brennan’s sympathetic account of the novelist Gillian Mears, so closely based on the writer’s archive that it reads almost as if Mears had written it. All these subjects clearly wanted a biography to be written, even when, like Harwood, they played off the various aspirants to the role of biographer.

Moorhouse certainly wanted his life examined, and he had a keen understanding of his own role in Australian social and cultural change. But the relationship between a writer’s life and their fiction can present difficulties for a biographer who wishes to secure the facts but can’t afford to ignore the parallels. While a biographer is bound by the records, the subject’s memories so often prove unreliable when they’re compared with the documentary record or the memories of their friends and colleagues.

Lamb has written elsewhere about the peculiar difficulties of recording the life of an author whose stories were often based on real events. As Moorhouse told a friend, a fiction, once written, obliterated the real memory on which it was based. And sometimes Moorhouse was not the only writer using the material: Lamb offers examples of Michael Wilding writing counter-stories to those of his then friend.

One of the effects of this fictional use of real life has been an underestimation of the art in Moorhouse’s stories, to the point that he felt the need to constantly insist on it.

Lamb set out to read all Moorhouse’s work, including the short stories he wrote in high school, his journalism and his essays for the Workers’ Educational Association, and place them in the context of the author’s life. He also tries to encompass Moorhouse’s own reading and the influence of his various mentors to build a narrative of his intellectual development. And he keeps an eye on the shifts in Australian cultural life and the legal restrictions it faced.

Strange Paths is as much about changes in Australian print culture and sexual attitudes as it is about Moorhouse’s life. It is this contextual material that justifies this second, extended biography.

Beginning with a short account of governments’ restrictive controls over local publishing from the very beginning of European settlement, Lamb traces the evolution of censorship and copyright laws in parallel with the lives of Moorhouse’s forebears in the colonies — in his father’s case in New Zealand. Young Frank was born into a society in which publishing was tightly restricted and writers were forced to accept low royalties from a British-controlled book trade.

Lamb makes Henry Lawson’s and Joseph Furphy’s difficulties relevant to Moorhouse’s later struggles for authors’ rights. Despite his popularity, Lawson battled financial difficulties; Furphy’s novels satirise the impossibility of recording Australian speech under the prohibitions on obscenity. The book’s treatment of the two men signals Moorhouse’s position in a tradition of Australian writing and sets up his later challenges to censorship and his part in the campaign for author royalties.

Moorhouse’s education in country public schools might appear limited, but Lamb reveals that encouraging teachers gave him access to magazines like Southerly and Meanjin. At home, he could read his firmly anti-communist father’s copies of Free Spirit, the forerunner of Quadrant, and discuss cold war politics. Though he was expected to follow his two older brothers into the family’s agricultural machinery business in Nowra, his parents were ready to accommodate his aspirations to be a writer. His mother even consulted the poet Rosemary Dobson when she visited Nowra for a talk.

Though Moorhouse later became known as a sexual adventurer he was as ignorant about sex as any other school student growing up in Australia at the time. Like so many Australians of his generation, he and his girlfriend Wendy gathered what information they could from biology textbooks and “hygiene” instruction books that often relied on euphemism. He might have appeared more liberated than the rest of us, but he negotiated the same conventional upbringing, churchgoing and smalltown values that dominated Australian life in the 1950s and 1960s. An exceptional high school student, he learnt the importance of self-education and self-discipline early, writing stories that Lamb reads as evidence of his teenage preoccupations.

The influence of his parents’ devotion to self-help, the philosophies of Rotary and the guidance of the scouting movement was obvious in Moorhouse’s fascination with theories of living. As a young man he was distinguished by an eagerness to learn and a curiosity about people and their behaviour. He read the available books on psychology and sexuality by Hans Eysenck, Alfred Kinsey and Sigmund Freud, and was committed to the “spirit of enquiry” advocated by his journalist mentor, John Penfold, though a long-term homosexual relationship undermined the “Frankness and Sincerity Theory” he advanced as the basis of his relationship with Wendy, now his wife.

He also understood that fiction offers a way for a writer to describe and speculate about human behaviour, including intimate desires evaded in journalism and academic writing. His experiences as a journalist in Sydney, Lockhart and Wagga Wagga gave him the chance to make stories from small events (jellyfish on the beaches of Sydney in one case) but also convinced him that he needed to break free from the cynical, heavy-drinking culture of journalism.

A position with the Workers’ Educational Association in Sydney gave him the chance to explore his ideas about changing print media, sociology, film and folk music. Explore he did, at one point participating not only in the WEA but also in the Film Study Group, the Sydney Left Club, the Libertarian Society and the Push, though he resisted the libertarian view that literature was only an illustration of a philosophy or directed at some didactic goal.

According to Lamb, he regarded the literary imagination as “a form of inquiry in its own right,” a means of exploring reason and its limitations. In practice he also embraced it as a means of examining social taboos and the sexual lives hidden behind prevailing social and censorship conventions.

Strange Paths provides details of Moorhouse’s several encounters with the law. In 1967 his quite unerotic story about a young man’s disappointing visit to a prostitute, “A Barmaid, a Prostitute, a Landlady,” led to a Melbourne bookstall being charged for selling obscene material. In 1969, when the banning of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint brought the censorship controversy to a head, Moorhouse was part of the Tharunka editorial team that challenged the obscenity laws. In 1973 he was convicted for distributing The Little Red Schoolbook and assaulting the police who had found copies in his car.

Also that year Moorhouse and his publisher agreed to take up the cause of authors’ copyright, successfully suing the University of New South Wales for breaching his copyright by allowing staff and students to photocopy his story “The Machine Gun.” This, too, was an important breakthrough for Australian writers’ freedom to publish and support themselves.

Two things stand out in this account of Moorhouse’s life. One is how his study of popular culture, sociology and the media developed ahead of any interest in such subjects among academics. His time as a university student had been curtailed by his commitment to writing, as a journalist and as a writer of fiction, but he immersed himself in the range of areas that interested him.

Like so many other brilliant Australian writers who didn’t finish university — Hazzard, Harwood, David Ireland, Peter Carey and many others — writing was itself a form of self-education. But the outreach elements of university campuses — the libraries, the magazines, the clubs and visiting lecturers — have provided essential support for the intellectual life of these outsiders; as universities increasingly adopt utilitarian practices they may need to be reminded of their duty to artists and other intellectuals beyond their boundaries.

The second element is Moorhouse’s commitment to fiction writing as an intellectual pursuit free from the demands of political ideologies or moralities. When fiction so often appears to be either mere entertainment or didactic instruction from those who know better than the rest of us, Moorhouse understood that art offers the freedom to explore ideas and areas of life that challenge prevailing conventions. Of course, his work provokes arguments about feminism, sexuality and personal behaviour. That, too, is a role of fiction. Lamb’s book is not a work of literary criticism but his care in placing Moorhouse’s writing in a detailed historical context is revelatory. It places literary writing at the centre of social change.

This first volume takes us to the end of 1974, with the publication of The Electrical Experience and the release of Between Wars, the film Moorhouse wrote for director Michael Thornhill when he was thirty-six. So Lamb’s project has quite a distance to go. Impatient readers will choose to read Lumby’s more concise account, but historians of the recent past will find plenty to absorb their interest here. I may be the ideal reader for this version as I try to make sense of A.D. Hope’s negotiation of Australian censorship at an earlier time. Lamb’s book shows one way that a writer can be placed in an extensive cultural context. •

Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths
By Matthew Lamb | Knopf Australia | $45 | 480 pages

The post Writing life appeared first on Inside Story.

Apart from its isolation, Tasmania encapsulates extremities. First there is the primeval environment, containing the second-largest rainforest of its kind in the world, now besieged. In the past there has been the near extermination of the Indigenous people, while the simultaneous convict experience was more pervasive and shaping than elsewhere in the country. There remain persisting poverty and lower levels of education among the non-Indigenous than almost anywhere else. All these elements give the island state a particular importance in understanding the nature of settler Australia.

“Change came slowly,” Flanagan writes of the Tasmania he grew up in, and until recently “it was possible to conceive the nineteenth century as a time not unlike now.” The past receded more quickly, “people died younger and memory struggled to see over the great embankments of history — the war, the depression, the Great War.” Yet it projected forward in unrecognised continuities: everyday speech was still peppered with convict terms; labourers on the big sheep properties still received the old convict rations, supplemented by meagre wages. Occasionally a cruel convict man trap, designed to ensnare escapees, might be found in the bush.

Rural Tasmania, while cluttered with ancient gossip, was in denial about convict ancestry and the persistent Aboriginal presence. Except on rare, electrifying occasions — as when the limousine of the visiting governor was stolen by some miners who drove it about with an Aboriginal local character in the governor’s seat, waving to the locals. “A bitter joke which cut every way,” writes Flanagan.

The author is highly appreciative of his parents: of his schoolmaster father, solid and decent, a survivor of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, who — perhaps partly because of that — believed in the power of small acts of kindness. And his mother, impetuous, boisterous, funny, crimped by the codes of her time and place but for all that fiercely loving. “My parents were frugal,” Flanagan writes, “not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason in making life about money.” They faced the world with dignity, looking at fate squarely in the eye.

The full contrast came some time after. Flanagan left school, worked as a labourer, and had a near-death experience on the Franklin River (grippingly narrated here). He then decided to go to university, and on graduating won a coveted Rhodes scholarship. But he came to see Oxford, with its superior airs, as a citadel of conceit. He ended up rejecting it — and academic history as well. “In Tasmania,” he came to write, “history was not a story of progress… nothing ever quite went forward and everything finally returned. There was no straight line… only a circle.”

To this Flanagan would eventually bring a necessary double-sightedness — on the one hand understanding what impels the agents of destruction but, at the same time, “be on the side that loses everything.” Readers of The Narrow Road to the Deep North will be familiar with this approach, evident in the empathetic depiction of Japanese officers on the Burma–Thailand railway.

Question 7’s hybridity comes to the fore with two great arcs that run through the book. To round them out, fictional techniques are used — very tellingly in the case of the romance between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. But Flanagan’s primary purpose is to link Wells’s famous novel The War of the Worlds to Tasmania. This is easier done than might be imagined, for there is a passing reference to the eradication of the Tasmanians in the text, while it seems the germinating idea for that novel had been Wells’s discussion of the Tasmanians’ fate with his brother, as they went for a walk in the English countryside. In a daring leap, Flanagan calls the invading British settlers Martians, and — in retrospective revenge — decides the denizens of Oxford are best tagged that way too.

The second arc is no less daring. A second Wells novel (of 1914) is cited as the first to deal with atomic war. Flanagan traces the development of the idea of the atom bomb, again resorting at times to fictional techniques. His purpose is singular. The opening section tells of his journey to the site of the prison camp where his father was a slave labourer, but finds even the memory of it scarcely remains. At the same time, he knows that had there been an American invasion of Japan instead of the Bomb, his father would have been killed along with all the other Allied prisoners. Richard Flanagan cancelled; instead, a child of the A-bomb. The fortuity of his birth, the fortuity of his later survival. Contingency and fate, and the arbitrariness of destiny, loom large in this book. It poses many fundamental questions.

As Peter Carey recently remarked in the Age, “Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last hundred years.” He may very well be right. •

Question 7
By Richard Flanagan | Knopf | $35 | 280 pages

The post Double-sighted in the deep south appeared first on Inside Story.

How rare it is then to read a collection like Alex Miller’s A Kind of Confession: The Writer’s Private World, a rich blend of letters and notebook extracts by one of Australia’s most loved novelists who is still here and still writing. We may mourn the loss of the paper trail since the advent of the internet, but one thing this book demonstrates is that emails can be crafted as carefully and thoughtfully as letters written by hand on the finest notepaper.

Stephanie Miller, who skilfully and sensitively selected and arranged the pieces, notes in her introduction that this book can be read as a complementary volume to her earlier edited collection of her husband’s stories, excerpts and commentary, The Simplest Words, the two books forming, in her words, a kind of autobiography. A Kind of Confession may be seen as a form of life writing as it delves into the inspirations, joys, struggles and frustrations of the storyteller behind Miller’s thirteen (to date) novels and one biography.

In this different kind of confession from most memoirs, Miller’s friends and fellow letter writers share his private world and play a crucial role in it. Most of the words are Miller’s — only occasionally are his friends’ responses included — but the warmth and inclusiveness of his letters create the illusion of multiple voices. Stephanie Miller has also included succinct notes introducing each of the correspondents.

Organised chronologically from the early 1960s to 2023, the letters and notes are diverse and engrossing. As they are written in the perpetual present, time becomes both immediate and retrospective for readers — who may be familiar with many of Miller’s novels — as they observe his ideas developing and dive deep into his life, his beliefs about the writing process, the background to the production of his books, and his reactions to their reception. The journey is absorbing, touching, at times funny and always enlightening.

The correspondents are too many to do justice to in a review, but among them are familiar names, such as writer and philosopher Raimond Gaita, biographer Hazel Rowley, historian Tom Griffiths and artists Rick Amor and John Wolseley. Miller also corresponds with friends he gathers during the writing of his novels and biography. Some appear briefly, others recur.

One with whom Miller discusses literature, politics, his writing highs and lows, and life in general is Ron Sharp, an English professor at Vassar College in New York State, whom Miller met at the Mildura Writers’ Festival in 2004 and with whom he and Stephanie have become close friends. “Ronaldo” is the first to hear about Miller’s tentative plans to research the life of his long-term friend and mentor Max Blatt, as well as his reservations about writing the book that would eventually become the acclaimed biography, Max.

An academic but also a confidant, Sharp is a friend to whom Miller can confess the “zones of emptiness” he is sometimes plunged into or the vulnerability he experiences, familiar to many writers who work outside the academy: “that tightening of the gut every time I see an academic looking sideways at me, as they do.” Another academic correspondent with whom Miller has a warm relationship is Robert Dixon, an Australian literature specialist from the University of Sydney, who organised a 2011 symposium on Miller’s work and later produced an edited collection from it, The Novels of Alex Miller: An Introduction, to which several of the correspondents in this volume contributed essays.

Another regular correspondence is between Miller and his long-time publisher, Annette Barlow, who share such a trusted relationship that he can respond to her suggestions about revisions to The Passage of Love with a pleasant but firm “I hope you won’t be too upset, but I’ve decided not to delete the first twenty or so pages of the book.” Her reply shows a respect and engagement with her author’s work that any writer would envy: “And the ending, Alex! ‘She is one of my present dead. There are a number of them’… evocative, meaningful and stunning.”

A different side of Miller’s personality is shown in an exchange with artist John Wolseley, who lives in the Whipstick Forest in central Victoria, not far from the Millers in Castlemaine, as the two friends enjoy discussing books and jokingly reminiscing about Somerset life and language. “Dearest Alecko the old Gecko,” writes Wolseley, “Begorrah that were a wonderful and nourishing email wot you sent.” A response of Miller’s begins: “Maister, I be delighted to ear from ee! It do my hart much goode. I see that even as a boy, when you painted this lovely picture, you had the soul of colour in your eye already.”

If there is one slight disappointment it is that only one of Miller’s letters to Hazel Rowley is included. Their close friendship was conducted mainly by email between Australia and the United States. Sadly, she died suddenly not long before they were due to meet up in 2011 for a conversation about her joint biography Franklin and Eleanor at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre. Miller shares his sadness at the silencing of her voice in a letter to Ron Sharp, who had sent him her New York Times obituary.

Alex and Stephanie Miller’s family form a delightful personal thread through A Kind of Confession. He encourages their Berlin-based daughter Kate in her creative ventures and chats about her brother Ross and his family, who live near Castlemaine. “Steph” is a steady undercurrent through the book (we even catch a glimpse of her in one letter, sitting at the breakfast table in her green dressing-gown, the cat on her knees). In an email following a discussion at their local cafe about material from The Passage of Love that Miller is working on, he offers this heartfelt tribute to his wife and true collaborator:

I feel very encouraged from what you said this morning at Apples to begin reworking the ms [manuscript] as Lena in the third person — the standard story-telling voice…

What would I do without you! I think I’m writing a certain story and you read it and see not the story I thought I was failing to write but the story I’m actually writing despite myself.

What can I say? Alxxx

Stephanie literally became Miller’s life support a few years ago when he suffered a serious but puzzling decline in his health. For eighteen months she persevered doggedly in hunting for a neurosurgeon who could diagnose the problem. Eventually they met with a specialist about to retire — “the first one who had observed his patient rather than his screen” — who was able to diagnose the issue. He contacted his son, also a neurosurgeon in Melbourne, who performed the necessary brain surgery successfully.

James Baldwin’s observation that “all art is a kind of confession” is an apt epigraph for this book. Miller emerges as a kind and compassionate man, a humanitarian, whose determination to write underpins his notebooks and correspondence. He notes despairingly in 1971: “I’ve been committed to writing since I was twenty-one, thirteen years. Quite a stretch considering I’ve yet to publish. Still, the seed is eternal.” Publication did not come until 1988, when he was over fifty.

He is a novelist who looks beyond himself to research widely, in books and in person. He even borrowed money to take his wife and young son to China when he was seeking insight into the suicide of his friend Allan O’Hoy, the inspiration for The Ancestor Game. He is a keen and intelligent observer too — of people, of landscape, of the world around him — drawing on the lives of his friends for his characters. Friendships with both white and Aboriginal people form the basis of memorable characters in Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell, novels that are even more relevant today, since the failure of the Voice referendum, than when they were written.

Miller is also an introspective writer, searching deep within himself to find the elements to create his characters with truth and honesty. “I live alone in a world of my imagination,” he writes, “contemplating the motives of my characters (who are, I dare say, no more substantial than shadows of myself) that become apparent to them only in the deep interior of their most intimate thoughts and actions.”

Thus, the characters in Miller’s novels have a complex genesis, created from various external sources and from his own profound questioning of himself until they are transformed imaginatively into fictional beings. He warns readers against making too-literal connections, of equating Autumn Laing with Sunday Reed, for instance, writing that “Autumn Laing is the story of an examined life. Autumn’s examined life.” Writer Brenda Walker suggests in her essay in Robert Dixon’s edited collection that “Alex Miller may be Australia’s greatest living novelist,” a claim about which readers of A Kind of Confession can make their own judgements.

Miller’s generosity in reaching out to people leads me to a confession of my own. I am privileged to have a few letters to me included in this book. He contacted me a few years ago after finding inspiration for a character in the novel he was writing in a blurry portrait of Aileen Palmer, glimpsed behind a photo of her better-known parents, Vance and Nettie Palmer, in my biography, Ink in Her Veins. The novel was published as A Brief Affair in 2022. I have only met Alex and Steph a couple of times at book launches, but an epistolary friendship has developed between us that has enriched my life and my writing, for which they have my heartfelt thanks. •

A Kind of Confession: The Writer’s Private World
By Alex Miller | Allen & Unwin | $39.99 | 360 pages

The post A kind of autobiography appeared first on Inside Story.

That comic song charts how a whiskey-loving hod carrier, Tim Finnegan, falls to his death while hungover, only to revive miraculously at his own wake when a bucket of whiskey thrown in a fight splashes the liquor on his head. Up Tim rises, berating those around him, crying “t’underin’ Jaysus, do you think I was dead?” Joyce knowingly deploys the song’s title, but by eliminating the apostrophe gives himself freedom to explore questions of life and death, dream and reality, myth, religion, philosophy, history, language and much more beyond the scope of the song.

At the most superficial level, for example, “Finnegan” suggests endings (from the French word fin) and repetition (“egans” hints at “again,” the plural “s” implying more than one “again”) while “Wake” advertises the act of “waking” that each of us repeats endlessly, until we don’t, after which we enter (to quote Raymond Chandler) “The Big Sleep,” which, for atheists at least, is endless. But at least for the Irish, as the song reminds us, a subsequent ceremony or “wake” celebrates the dead person’s life. We must die to deserve a wake, and eventually and inevitably the people who attend the wakes of others become the guests of honour at their own.

This sense of potentially infinite beginnings and endings is built into the first word we read in Finnegans Wake — “riverrun” — which pulses with visual and vocal potency. Joyce’s games are afoot before we know it, though, with the absence of a capital “R” at the beginning of “riverrun” indicating that we are not so much at the start of the novel as already somewhere within its insistent stream.

The reader new to Finnegans Wake (spoiler alert) must wait 628 pages in the Penguin edition to read the beginning of that sentence, which loops back to “riverrun.” In a sense this novel never ends. Many potential readers never get that far. Or, if they know this fun fact about Finnegans Wake, they flip to the end, read the start of that sentence, nod their head in recognition and place the book back on the shelf. In a career teaching literature at university, this reviewer has only ever met three people who have read the book from cover to cover.

Note that I did not say three other people. For while I think that Joyce’s Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses are among the great literary achievements of the twentieth century, I admit to never having finished Finnegans Wake, nor in fact got anywhere close, wandering several times around its foothills before turning back, mystified.

Gabrielle Carey’s slim new book, James Joyce: A Life, is written for me and for people like me, including those who have (as yet) not read a word of Joyce. Indeed, the dust jacket of the book advertises that “If you know nothing about James Joyce but would like to — without the bother of reading him,” or “If you know a little about James Joyce and would like to know more but not too much,” or “If you are a die-hard Joycean who has spent a lifetime puzzling over his work but know nothing about his life,” then “this is the book for you.”

Of the three groups the third is the least likely to have many members, if only because Joyce’s life, and the Dublin he inhabited and left as a young man in order to become a writer, is so intertwined with his own work. It is hard to think that someone might have puzzled over his writing for a lifetime and not know anything about this writer’s life. But the other two groups should have enthusiastic members, and Carey’s posthumously published account (she died earlier this year at the age of sixty-four) is serious enough to encourage new readers by presenting engaging and meaty matter, while being light-hearted enough to entertain.

Carey has read Finnegans Wake, although she was honest enough to admit several years ago that the task took her and her reading group from 2004 to 2021. Her book is a much less time-consuming affair, being written to make converts, not just for Finnegans Wake but for Joyce generally. As she notes in an Apologia: “I offer this incomplete story of the life of James Joyce as a loving in memoriam.”

Joyce, like Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein and other great Modernist figures, is often treated with a numbing or crushing solemnity, as a figure we feel we should like or at least grudgingly admire in order to be, or to feel, sophisticated. Carey does away with this solemnity, her short (130-page) book offering a quirky, always lively take on Joyce’s life threaded with details and anecdotes about his work. For many people a further attraction is that it is not burdened with footnotes and other scholarly apparatus.

Broken into eighty-four bite-sized pieces (with a short Coda to take us beyond Joyce’s own life) Carey’s book is enthusiastic and intelligent, her portrait of the artist rendering Joyce as brilliant and incessantly driven to write, but also as a flawed and exasperating figure, selfish, self-pitying, smutty and fickle. As Carey tells it, he is someone you would find fascinating to meet — perhaps until, like Tim Finnegan, the drink kicked in.

Unlike Finnegans Wake, Carey begins at the beginning: “James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February: Candlemas Day.” Given Joyce’s Jesuit schooling, so acutely captured in A Portrait of the Artist, Carey might have focused on the Catholic resonances of his middle names Augustine and Aloysius. Instead, she introduces a traditional English rhyme on Candlemas, and mentions that Candlemas is also Groundhog Day and that Joyce arranged to have Ulysses published on his fortieth birthday.

Her approach throughout foregrounds associations and connections, what she calls “a bower bird approach,” rather than historical sequence. So, section 1 (barely longer than a page) starts with Joyce’s birth and ends with a reference to Finnegans Wake. There are positives and negatives to this tactic, one negative being that (to use another metaphor) the book has at times a slightly scattergun feel, while one positive is that readers are entertained by a life rich in amusing and intriguing associations. Given that its central character himself gloried in finding, creating, embellishing and mocking associations across all aspects of life, this seems entirely appropriate.

An early example helps to explain how this approach works. Joyce suffered from astraphobia, a fear of thunder and lightning. In section 2, Carey connects this biographical detail to meteorology and to language and literature, noting how Finnegans Wake has ten “thunderwords” in it. These, she explains, are “100-letter words, incorporating words from other languages and with multiple meanings,” one of which appears on the first page of Finnegans Wake: “bababadalgharaghtakaminninarronnkonnbronntonnerronn-tuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!” Thankfully she adds that “while it looks like nonsense, it is actually made up of the word thunder in various languages” including Hindi and Japanese, and that it embodies a linguistic representation “of one of Joyce’s favourite themes: the thunderous sound of the fall of man.”

It is probably worth mentioning at this stage to “those who know nothing about James Joyce but would like to” that by comparison with Finnegans Wake, his Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist and (the majority of) Ulysses are a doddle. Carey plays the role of the genial and comforting guide throughout; the book benefits immensely.

Which is not to say that it cannot be faulted. At times the “bower bird” approach creates the possibility of confusion, particularly for a section of its potential audience, those new to Joyce. So, when Carey writes that W.B. Yeats never finished Ulysses but was right to think that in that novel what “Joyce was trying to do was replicate the rambling mind. His intention was nothing less than to document the experiential nature of consciousness,” it might be more accurate to say that this is true of sections of Ulysses rather than of the book in its totality.

Someone fresh to Ulysses and expecting to plunge headfirst into the stream of consciousness will be disappointed. That novel is better understood as an “encyclopedia of styles,” Joyce fashioning a new style for every chapter.

Readers from beyond these shores might be nonplussed by the occasional Australian references, as when reviews of Ulysses are quoted from the Brisbane Telegraph, or, as in section 74, when we hear in greater length than the section on Joyce’s birth a tale of an Australian couple who meet Joyce in Paris in 1935. When Joyce suggests that as they had come so far “I couldn’t very well refuse you,” we are told that the couple were embarrassed because they had “been living in London for several years.” It is not quite clear why even Australian readers of the book need to know this.

For the most part, though, Carey sets out valuable information and insights into Joyce’s life and his fiction, explaining for example what a Martello tower is, noting that the one that appears in Ulysses is now the James Joyce Tower and Museum, and adding encouragingly that admission is free. And she tells those new, or relatively new, to Joyce about his fixation not only with the dates on which his works might be published but also with their appearance. So, he insisted that for Ulysses, “the colours of the binding (chosen by me) will be white letters on a blue field — the Greek flag though really of Bavarian origin and imported with the dynasty.” This phrase beautifully captures how Joyce is both arch-aesthete and arch-pedant.

Perhaps appropriately then, the dust jacket of Carey’s book performs a strange disappearing act. On the back are the enticements to the book’s different potential readers mentioned above. Clearly, like all dust jackets, it is meant to persuade readers in a bookshop to buy the book. But the front of the dust jacket configures the book’s title in clumps of three letters with alternating colours for each word, placing Carey’s name beneath, like so:

One perhaps unplanned-for effect of this artful design is that, at least initially, “James Joyce” is less visible than “Gabrielle Carey,” which clearly is not what Carey aims for, nor what the book itself strives to achieve.

The stark truth is that books in some sense “outlive” their authors. This is the case for both fiction and non-fiction, including (as here) a book that is non-fiction both about another person’s fiction and about the life of that person. Both the life and the work allow for continual, sometimes interactive interpretation, posthumously and post-publication.

While literary criticism and biography necessarily trail the work and the life, they can illuminate both for those who come after. Carey necessarily plays the roles of interpreter, instructor and encourager here, but any descent into po-faced scholarship would have sapped this book of its vigour and perhaps of its purpose, undermining her own obvious joy in reading, thinking about and discussing Joyce’s life and his work.

The fact that Carey hosted a reading group on Finnegans Wake for seventeen years underscores the commitment built into A Life, which gives it a very personally engaged quality. This intermingling of biographer and writer is ironic, in that Carey herself came to national fame as a writer through a fictionalised account of her own teenage life, the modern classic Puberty Blues, co-authored with Kathy Lette.

Lette would go on to a highly successful career as a novelist and columnist, whereas Carey concentrated, as the dust jacket of A Life tells us, on “acclaimed books of biography, autobiography and memoir.” Unless there are unpublished works by Carey to appear posthumously, James Joyce: A Life might seem to complete the narrative of her life as a writer. But, as we read her book, that narrative begins again. •

James Joyce: A Life
By Gabrielle Carey | Arden | $39.95 | 140 pages

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She is best known for her startling, sprawling novels, especially Carpentaria (2007), which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Since then, each of her new works has been a major literary event. There have been two further dizzying novels — The Swan Book (2013) and Praiseworthy (2023) — as well as the Stella Prize–winning Tracker (2017), a complex choral biography of Aboriginal activist Tracker Tilmouth.

Wright enjoys a significant reputation overseas, and her work has been translated into French, Italian, Polish and Chinese. The Chinese language translation of Carpentaria (2006) was launched by the Nobel Prize–winning author Mo Yan. In France, Carpentaria is the first Indigenous novel to be set for the Agrégation, the national civil service exam, and the first Australian novel since Patrick White’s Voss (1957) to have that honour.

It is difficult to encapsulate the full significance of Wright’s works because it is so far-reaching — cutting across boundaries of time, space and culture — and because it is still emerging. More than anything, her writing introduces into Australian letters a completely new form of thought and speech. In the linguistic universe opened up by Wright’s writing, the reader is made aware of ways of being in the world that are completely distinct from those of capitalist modernity. The achievement of her writing is that this does not come over as either a lost world or a forbidden enclave, but as an open challenge and invitation.

The mesmeric Prelude to her novel The Swan Book begins by asking its reader (listener) to entertain an image…

Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kind of cut-snake virus in its doll’s house. Little starts shining over the moonscape garden twinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out the window for intruders. It ignores all of the eviction notices stacked on the door. The virus thinks it is the only pure full-blood virus left in the land. Everything else is just half-caste. Worth nothing! Not even a property owner. Hell yes! It thinks, worse than the swarms of rednecks hanging around the neighbourhood. Hard to believe a brain could get sucked into vomiting bad history over the beautiful sunburnt plains.

What are we to make of this? The virus that lives in the doll’s house of this speaker’s mind is an intriguing revision of the angel in the house. This virus is the demand for an impossible purity, for an ideal purity that only exists to cast all real things into abject impurity.

This ideal, which is said to be far worse than the outward disparagement of “rednecks,” ignores all notices of eviction. It is not the emblem of any living value but the insidious product of “bad history.” It is at the same time something residing in the innermost recesses, and spewed forth in all directions across the plains. These “beautiful sunburnt plains” steal a wry glance at Dorothea Mackellar’s ubiquitous poem, but decide that, nevertheless, they are still beautiful sunburnt plains.

This kind of teasing circularity is the basic metier of Wright’s prose. She never lets you hold onto a metaphor too long before she gives it another twist and sends it in a new direction. She never lets her conceits become conceited. For this reason, her writing presents its difficulties. But it achieves its central aim when it forces you to stop and listen. If you try to skim ahead in Wright’s novels you lose the plot, even though in many cases the novels seem not to have one. But when you lose the idea that there is a plot, that means you have stopped listening, and it is time to slow down and bend an ear.

Reading an Alexis Wright novel is like being placed under a spell. When I teach Alexis Wright to my students at the University of Western Australia, I tell them not to read but listen. Her writing pulses with the unmistakeably cadences of the spoken word. The rhythm of this speech, even though it takes place in English, draws on an entirely different social world and cosmology. The voice in Wright’s work gains a substance and life that convert her writing into speech.

Wright’s adult life was forged in the rough and tumble world of central Australian Indigenous politics of the 1980s and 90s. Her writing, for all its wild wonder, is also intensely and intimately political. The politics is overt in her nonfiction works Grog War (1997), Take Power (1998) and Tracker, but is never far from the surface of her novels either.

Wright’s novels are often classified as magical realist. Certainly, a novel like Carpentaria is indebted to the tradition of writing that became globally influential with Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the late 1960s. But it is important to not lose sight of the “realism” in magical realism. What the concept of realism captures, on the one hand, is that Wright’s works deal with real-world problems — colonialism, climate change, family breakdown, sexual abuse, addiction. But more than these problems, Wright’s realism institutes a relationship with the real conditions of human life. Here there is a sharp break from Western secularism, because these real conditions are nothing other than the determinations of Country. In this respect, the real is exactly what we might, from a secular point of view, call magic.

Carpentaria begins with a cosmic joke about the fictional town of Desperance, where much of the novel is set. The town had been built at a river mouth to serve as a port for the surrounding region. Then, after a big wet, the river shifted course and decided to join the sea somewhere else. The town became pointless. A river port without a river. The real joke, though, is the town was always pointless and the river was simply drawing attention to this fact.

What becomes clear in Wright’s work is that Country has its moods, and if you have ever tried to reason yourself out of a mood, you will quickly meet the limits of reason. But though reason founders, knowledge continues, albeit a particular kind of knowledge.

It takes a particular kind of knowledge to go with the river, whatever its mood. It is about there being no difference between you and the movement of water as it seasonally shifts its tracks according to its mood. A river spurns human endeavour in one dramatic gesture, jilting a lover who has never really been known, as it did to the frontier town built on its banks in the hectic heyday of colonial vigour.

In Wright’s work, the living bridge of signification between day-to-day life and the insistence of Country is the basis of meaningful voice. The flawed father in Carpentaria, Norm Phantom, has many failings, but he possesses the gift of voice:

Norm had a hypnotic voice, his eyes cast spells, he distilled memory like the flooding river emptying into the sea. He made people wish they were there when it really happened. He made them feel that it was better to have been alive in the time of the real people, his ancestors.

It is one of the striking things in Wright’s work that someone who lives in a shanty at the edge of a country town in the middle of nowhere is endowed with this singular power. The power, that is, of carrying the world inside their voice. The power of connecting people to the ground of their being.

Wright’s work teaches us about the close relationship between voice and listening. For Wright, listening is the direct complement of voice. Everyone might think they listen, but more and more we seem to be entering an age of listening deficit disorder. Indeed, the refusal to listen has almost become a virtue, since it means you are no one’s fool, that nobody will take you for a ride. This points to the close correspondence of trust to listening. The refusal to listen is the triumph of non-trust. But Wright shows us that trusting what is good is the foundation for ethical life.

She seems to be saying that being taken for a ride is not the worst thing in the world. There is a soft spot in her writing for those who are prepared to take on the work of narrating the universe, from Norm Phantom in Carpentaria to Cause Man Steel in Praiseworthy.

The charisma of these rough-hewn men who speak without fear is something that Wright found fascinating in Tracker Tilmouth. She knows they are flawed and full of themselves, but she can also see the crucial thing that they offer their people, which is to remain uncowed. In Wright’s world you are stupid if you take these people too seriously, but you are even more stupid if you fail to take them seriously enough.

Having known Tracker for much of his political life, and having worked closely with him in a range of campaigns, it fell to Wright to find an adequate way to express the life of this extraordinary person. She knew instinctively that conventional biography was not the answer. What emerged instead was a sprawling oral history — an oral history of a man who was also an event.

This does not get rendered in the genteel distance of the “life and times” biography. Instead, it transpires in the real time of the spoken word. The book is written in a tumble of intersecting chapters by those who knew Tracker. Her informants include Tracker himself, who is able to maintain a sly detachment from his larger-than-life persona. The cast of authors spend time — they are in no hurry — recalling, reminiscing, castigating and fuming about Tracker and his exploits. Half the time, even in moments of great seriousness and the gravest importance, they just shake their heads and laugh.

One can sense a certain element of Tracker in many of the more memorable characters in Wright’s novels. One can also see something of the author herself. Her admiration for Tracker expresses qualities that are also the hallmark of Wright:

An extraordinary reader of the times, he spared no one from hearing his verdict on them, be it those from his own communities, politicians, business people or professional academics, whether they wanted to hear exactly what he thought of them or not.

Wright herself learned to write by listening, as she made clear in a lecture given at the Sydney Opera House in 2001 (published as an essay in Southerly magazine in 2002). She recalls a childhood spent listening to her grandmother:

[My grandmother] had stories to explain everything — who we are, who each of us were, and the place on our traditional country that was very deep and special to her. She was our memory. She was what not forgetting was all about. It was through her that I learnt to imagine.

Here Wright makes clear that her grandmother’s voice was not something that belonged simply to the woman who was speaking. Her grandmother’s voice was speaking the Country. Or more to the point, the Country was speaking through her. In Ambelin Kwaymullina’s lyrical treatise on Indigenous sovereignty, Living on Stolen Land (2020), she writes that “Life doesn’t move through time / Time moves through life.”

The voice of Wright’s grandmother instantiates this movement of time through the self. This voice held everything — memory, significance, relationships, rules, rights. It also provided the very ground of imagination. This fundamental precept of Indigenous cosmology — we don’t move through Country, Country moves through us — continually works its way through Wright’s work. This moving through is experienced as a voice. This is what makes listening so important in Wright’s world because in the act of listening, Country is given the opportunity to move through its human subjects.

The visionary characters in Wright’s novels, whether black or white, are marked by the fact that their voices are not their own. In Carpentaria, Elias Smith washes up miraculously one day on the mudflats near the town, where he is nursed back to health by Norm Phantom. His ocean ordeal has rendered Elias fully in the service of this deeper voice, in a way that clearly recalls Wright’s description of her grandmother.

Although Elias never remembered his origins, he was able to acquire other people’s memory. They gave him their imagination. Through adopting their childhood memories as his own, he was able to close the gap on the past he could not remember… He told his story so persuasively he was able to convince people just about anything.

In The Swan Book, set in a climate-devastated near future, we follow the life of an abandoned Aboriginal girl, Oblivia Ethylene, who finds herself catapulted into national life. While the book opens with an interior monologue in Oblivia’s voice, she never speaks in the main part of the novel. Instead, she is forever spoken for.

In this respect the novel offers Oblivia as the sine qua non of Australian Indigenous policy, in which the Indigene is a silent object whom everyone is trying to co-opt for a different purpose. At every point when Indigenous voice threatens to emerge — that is to say, in a politically meaningful way, rather than as multicultural ornamentation — the Australian polity reacts in a way to silence it. Or, to put it more accurately, to speak over the top of it.

But at the same time the muteness of Oblivia is also the face of genuine traumatic speechlessness. Wright’s novels are loquacious. The mainly Indigenous people constantly argue with each other over almost everything. Sometimes this is given in direct dialogue, but often we get it paraphrased by Wright’s narrator in their distinctive dry irony. But even so, this bubbling speech is occasionally punctuated by moments of sudden overwhelming traumatic stillness. Points at which speech stops.

Oblivia’s muteness is also an expression of this moment when speech, even the capacious, multitudinous vocality of Wright’s speakers, reaches its traumatic limit. Oblivia’s own people were brought to silence by the loss she embodied:

They were too speechless to talk about a loss that was so great, it made them feel unhinged from their own bodies, unmoored, vulnerable, separated from eternity. They had been cut off.

This kind of speechlessness was memorably dramatised in the harrowing scene in Warwick Thornton’s frontier film Sweet Country (2017) where the Aboriginal woman Lizzie is unable to provide testimony of her own rape, even though this testimony will likely save her husband who is on trial for killing the perpetrator.

In The Swan Book, we thus have this strange experience of a silent protagonist. But one who constantly attracts the speech of the other. Her subjectivity is not so much removed as collapsed, like a dying star into a darker denser orb. Is Oblivia a victim? Is she a figure of picaresque pathos? Is her silence really an oblivion? A mute silhouette in the space of subjectivity? She is, in the end, not quite any of these things because she is never really abandoned, for the simple reason that she is sustained by the narrative voice itself.

But how can we tell the difference between a voice that speaks for and over the top of Oblivia and one that holds her firmly in its metaphysical hands? The main difference is that the narrative voice, which is the characteristic voice we find in all of Wright’s novels from Plains of Promise (1997) to Praiseworthy, does not especially care for Oblivia.

It may seem a little paradoxical to assert that the voices that care most for Oblivia are the ones that suck the life out of her, and the voice that does not is the one that upholds her right to exist. Yet, this is the situation that Indigenous people have had to contend with insofar as their colonisation has been heavily mediated through the discourse of humanitarianism.

This aspect of what might be called tough love is something that we see throughout Wright’s writing. One of the attractions of her work is the rigorous way in which it denies certain convenient pieties. For example, while the white people in her novels are often mercilessly caricatured for their hypocrisy and venality, the Indigenous people are far from saints.

Her novels have little time for what is considered nice. They begin from the position that niceties never prevented, and will never prevent, the destitution of Indigenous people nor the continuing extraction of material wealth from their lands. Her novels do not depict Indigenous people as a deserving poor or make a case for charitable redress. Thus, her Indigenous characters, for all their flaws — and in a certain sense, because of their flaws — retain their sovereignty.

There is a strange double movement in Wright’s writing. On the one hand her novels activate the critical faculties, making you question things, weigh contending positions, see bitter ironies, appreciate the most profound dilemmas. But on the other hand, one is also compelled to surrender to the voice. As Australia votes on whether it is fitting to amend the Constitution to guarantee an Indigenous Voice to parliament and government, Wright’s work offers a sense of what this means and why it is important.

Indeed, Wright’s works are a living enactment of Indigenous voice, a subject that Australians have been asked to form a view on. Because it was immediately and brazenly converted into a culture war, this historic opportunity to listen might become yet another act of silencing. By rejecting the voice, Australia will not only reject a constitutionally recognised Voice but deprive itself of a mechanism to learn what it is to live in a world where voice is truly meaningful. •

The post The voice of Alexis Wright appeared first on Inside Story.

It is a difficult thing to write a biography of a writer who drew on his own life so fully for his fictions and journalism, and with many friends and lovers very much alive. In Frank Moorhouse: A Life Catharine Lumby allows her subject to take the lead, interviewing him, tracing his experiences through his substantial personal archive and talking to his friends.

Lumby decided not to write a literary biography but to concentrate on placing Moorhouse within his milieu, drawing out some of the contradictions in his personality and adding new information about his background that make his work even more intriguing. She adds to our understanding of Moorhouse’s writing without grappling too seriously with its ongoing significance as literature.

The biography follows a loose chronology, beginning with his parents’ origins and his family life in Nowra and then describing his escape to Balmain and embrace of the writing life. It deals with his idiosyncratic “rules for living,” his fight against censorship, his ambitious commitment to a trilogy of historical novels about a woman working for the League of Nations, and his frequent returns to the Bush. If you are a Moorhouse reader you will enjoy it immensely; if you are part of the generation who grew to adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s you will recognise Moorhouse’s role in helping break down the moral constrictions on ordinary middle class Australians.

Moorhouse’s parents, Frank and Purthanry Moorhouse, were not merely upstanding citizens of Nowra but exceptional people in their own right. Readers may have guessed that Frank senior was the model for the smalltown soft drink manufacturer, T. George McDowell, who first appeared in The Americans, Baby and returned in later fictions right up to Grand Days. Moorhouse gave his father’s commitment to community and his belief in self-discipline to McDowell but not his creativity; Frank senior invented a machine to preserve milk that changed the lives of dairy farmers in Australia. His agricultural machinery business prospered so well that he expected all three of his sons to join it. Frank went his own way, but his rigorous daily work routine was a clear legacy of his father.

Purthanry was an equally impressive person, president of the local Country Women’s Association, a girl guide leader and a homemaker concerned with living well. Moorhouse acknowledged that his mother’s concern for aesthetics and social protocol gave him one model for Edith Campbell Berry in his historical trilogy, but he came late to an awareness of the more complex lives of his own parents.

In his last years he realised that his mother had befriended a local Aboriginal woman, Belle McCleod, who helped in the house. Together they set up a CWA branch in the Aboriginal community at Worrigee on the edge of Nowra. He had missed the story of the Indigenous people living close to him.

The entire Moorhouse family were committed to the scouting movement, with Frank senior a scout leader, Purthanry a leading girl guide and all three sons boy scouts. It isn’t difficult to see Moorhouse’s concerns for correct behaviour and good preparation, and his need for regular forays into the bush, as an inheritance from the scouts. Lumby notes the creative tension between Moorhouse’s resistance to convention and his fascination with the protocols that make social and working life run smoothly.

Moorhouse made the journey from a country town to inner-city Sydney and beyond it to Europe. Driven by curiosity about people and their social world he discovered art and fine living at the same time as he was exploring various forms of sexuality. He never completed a university degree but his desire to learn led him to pursue matters often regarded as trivial or beyond acceptability.

Lumby tells us of significant moments in his life, such as his first experience of a camembert cheese, his relish in eating oysters from the shell and, of course, his fastidiousness about martinis. While these subjects may seem frivolous, in his fiction Moorhouse often undermined his obsessions with irony: his oft-quoted advice to anyone lost in the bush was to mix a martini and wait for someone to turn up to correct your method.

After an early marriage Moorhouse realised that he couldn’t remain monogamous, let alone exclusively heterosexual, and set about living a life outside the “bourgeois” confines of conventional suburbia. From his mid-twenties he determined to own neither a car nor a house, and sometimes juggled credit cards to ensure he could eat out for every meal. At times, he relied on the generosity of friends to keep him housed and fed. Women often took the role of provider of financial as well as domestic support, though they sometimes found his rules for living rather self-serving.

Lumby nevertheless renders bohemian life in Balmain as youthful and glamorous, the members of the libertarian Sydney Push meeting for philosophy discussions before seducing each other in pubs. Despite his unfaithfulness and exasperating fastidiousness about domestic life, Moorhouse’s lovers remember him as generous and, of course, he was funny.

In his fiction and journalism Moorhouse reported on his exploits in the sophisticated, cosmopolitan world that many suburban Australians dreamt about. His “discontinuous narratives” resisted the plotting of the traditional novel, observing the lives of characters making their different ways in a shared society. In stories as much reportage as fiction, Moorhouse showed us his version of Sydney’s bohemianism.

Lumby draws on other critics to respond to Moorhouse’s fictions and, apart from the occasional charges of sexism in his early work, they are all positive about his achievements. I am not a member of the Edith Campbell Berry fan club — the club Annabel Crabb imagines to be full of mainly women enthusiasts for Frank Moorhouse’s League of Nations heroine who ask themselves in a crisis: “What would Edith do?”

Edith strikes me as insufferably self-important, a kind of Barbie doll that Moorhouse dresses up in different clothes (cowboy suits, silk lingerie, capes) and tries out in careers impossible for most women of her generation. I was dismayed to see the wonderfully perceptive and funny observer of the foibles of real people in the contemporary world had moved off to a dreamland of historical fiction, where a Miles Franklin award might be (and eventually was) acquired.

In his grand trilogy, unlike his earlier fictions, Moorhouse was not writing about a world he had experienced — except, perhaps, in the sex scenes. After I read the celebratory appendix on file registries in Grand Days, I felt the need to tell him personally that these were familiar to anyone who had worked in a government department. By the time I read Cold Light, I wished that I had also explained to him that married women could not become permanent employees in the public service until 1966. Once he had married Edith off, she could never be promoted. If he had known, he might have kept her single so she would not be relegated to an outer office in Canberra rearranging the pencils on her desk and watering the pot plant.

Of course, that is judging fiction against historical reality and the novels may best be read as documents of Moorhouse’s own imagination and obsessions. Some realities, such as the actual restrictions on women’s lives, could only limit his fantasies.

On the back of Lumby’s book the publishers express astonishment that this is the first biography of Moorhouse, suggesting that they, too, imagine a fantastically cosmopolitan world where authors are given their due. In Australia, literary biographies are usually reserved for the long dead, and they can seem to mark the end of interest in a writer (studies of both Patrick White and Elizabeth Jolley, coincidentally, declined after their biographies appeared).

For readers of my generation, Moorhouse takes his place alongside Helen Garner as the recorder of the 1970s and explorer of possibilities for contemporary life. His work will always be significant to us. Pace Annabel Crabb, what reader in their thirties and forties knows of it? The work may yet fade away, like so many other writers who were significant in their moment.

Perhaps the difficulty is in the public preference for the monumental novel over the evanescent observations and speculations that Moorhouse wrote so well. Moorhouse, the performer, may matter more than Moorhouse the writer of a trilogy. This is why this biography matters: it tries to appreciate the performance of a life, not simply its residue of work.

While I will continue to resist the Edith fan club, I am now fully signed up to the Frank Moorhouse club. Frank, forgive me. I wish this book had been published before you died so that you could enjoy more of the acclaim you longed for. •

Frank Moorhouse: A Life
By Catharine Lumby | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 304 pages

The post Grand days appeared first on Inside Story.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror —
The wide brown land for me!

My memory of the poem is inseparable from the sound of more than a hundred young voices reciting it in unison — as a dirge, with no inflection or rhythmic variation — in the school assembly hall.

It was not until I read Deborah FitzGerald’s Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar that I discovered these well-known lines are not the first stanza of “My Country” but the second. The poem was inspired, at least partly, by a friend’s reference to England as “home,” common among descendants of white colonial immigrants, and the first verse evokes the “green and shaded lanes,” the “grey-blue distance” and “soft, dim skies” of England. Not only that: another four verses follow the one I am familiar with. Read as a whole, Mackellar’s vivid use of colour, a salient feature of her work, is evident.

Having toyed with the idea for several years, Mackellar composed “My Country” in the first months of 1908 at the drought-gripped family property of Kurrumbede, near Gunnedah in inland New South Wales. The property was her refuge and she was always inspired to write there. Away from the constraints of city life, she could indulge her desire for freedom, roaming the paddocks, riding her horse or lying in the grass on the banks of the Namoi River.

First published in the London Spectator as “Core of My Heart” (a title Mackellar preferred), the poem was reprinted in a number of Australian publications as “Core of My Heart — My Country” and eventually became known under the shorter title. The poet was twenty-two at the time of its first publication and the poem, hailed as a patriotic anthem, would become both “a triumph and a burden,” overshadowing her subsequent work.

Dorothea Mackellar was born in Sydney in 1885, the daughter of prominent surgeon and politician Charles Mackellar (later Sir Charles) and his wife Marion, also a member of a distinguished colonial family. Dorothea and her three brothers grew up at Dunara, a mansion in the exclusive harbourside precinct of Point Piper.

Dorothea’s parents were loving and generous but their benevolence did not stretch to allowing a university education for their precociously intelligent daughter. She did eventually manage to sit in on some university lectures, although not formally enrolled, and became proficient enough in four languages to travel with her father to conferences in Europe as his translator.

Tragedy befell the family when their oldest son and Dorothea’s beloved brother Keith was killed in 1900 during the Boer war. He was not quite twenty years old and his sister’s profound grief at his death lingered for the rest of her life. At around that time she wrote “When It Comes,” a moving tribute that shows a maturity beyond her fifteen years. It concludes:

So should I like to die, but where?
On the open plain, in the open air,
Where the red blood soaks in the thirsty grass,
And the wild things tread my grave as they pass,
There would I die.

A few years later she would begin to experience insomnia, dizziness and heart palpitations, symptoms of an illness that would become chronic yet never diagnosed at a time when women’s mysterious illnesses were often attributed to “nerves.” She also experienced episodes of what we would now call clinical depression.

To write the official biography of Dorothea Mackellar, FitzGerald was allowed access to previously unseen parts of her diaries, some of them written in a code that had been cracked by the editor of other published sections. Unfortunately they lack the wit and verve of the coded diaries of her contemporary, Miles Franklin, which have provided useful information to many literary scholars. Much of the Mackellar diaries is devoted to somewhat repetitive descriptions of rejected suitors. At times her biographer’s engaging prose shifts towards the style of a romance novel:

Dorothea… was delighted to find Captain Hugh Scarlett — the Governor’s aide-de-camp — waiting for her when the train pulled into the railway station. She could not help but notice his handsome face and warm smile as she was ushered into a luxurious Mercedes with red leather interior, and her bags were retrieved from the train. She smiled back at him, holding his gaze a little longer than necessary, and thought this might be an even more enjoyable trip than she had anticipated.

Curiously, Miles Franklin receives no mention in Her Sunburnt Country, although her novel My Brilliant Career, published in 1901 when she was nineteen, also haunted her throughout her career. The two women both published novels with the English publisher Mills & Boon in the 1910s, Franklin’s under a pseudonym.

The other major strand of Mackellar’s hitherto unseen diaries concerns her “unorthodox friendship” with writer Ruth Bedford. After they meet as young adults and share holidays, swimming, lying on the beach and sleeping in a hammock, the tone of Mackellar’s diary is quite different. The young women “play-act” together, creating and fleshing out characters who would later provide the material for two published novels they wrote together.

FitzGerald attempts to grapple with the importance of this relationship in the context of the times, though not entirely convincingly. The extensive work of American scholar Martha Vicinus in the area is reduced to a sentence on how a romantic friendship with another woman was seen at the time as a normal prelude to marriage. The statement by the biographer that “friendships between women that interfered with relationships with men by assuming too much importance were viewed as abnormal” is referenced (to my surprise) by an article of my own, written almost thirty years ago and rendered meaningless without contextualisation.

Mackellar’s relationship with Bedford becomes the steadying raft on the turbulent sea of her emotional life and is also the basis of much of her literary life. Together, they were involved with the Zonta Club and the Sydney chapter of PEN in the 1930s, and that love of “play-acting” led them to the Community Playhouse in Darlinghurst.

Neither woman married. Mackellar published four volumes of verse, but her involvement with writing and the literary scene waned in her fifties and she spent the last ten years of her life in a nursing home. Although Mackellar published no more work, Bedford remained a supportive presence in her life.

Her Sunburnt Country is a curious mix of a biography. Based on a doctoral thesis in which one might expect some rigorous analysis of Mackellar’s literary and personal life, it is clearly aimed at a general readership and packaged as such, with its Barbie-pink dustjacket announcing that it is “the official biography.” Its hyperbolic subtitle is undercut by minimal endnotes, no list of published works and no bibliography or index.

The book is written in the life-and-times mould of biography, but world events often appear primarily as background to Mackellar’s travels and travails, and connections between her life and her times are occasionally strained, as in an awkward segue linking Mackellar’s drinking habit to the effects of the Great Depression. A young Patrick White’s description of her as “pissed” when he meets her on board ship is countered by their exchange of bookplates showing “mutual respect” in later years.

The image of Mackellar’s bookplate is shown in the illustrations section with no explanation or attribution, while White’s is simply described in the text. In fact, both feature wood engravings by the well-known flower painter and bookplate artist Adrian Feint. His bookplate for Mackellar is one of his most enigmatic designs, the central figure depicted as a centaur from Greek mythology — half human and half horse — symbolising duality and paradox.

The androgynous human half with its outstretched arms is a far cry from the tawny-eyed beauty of the biography — a contrast FitzGerald might fruitfully have explored in this charmingly written book that accurately describes its subject’s restless spirit, contradictory nature and longing for freedom. •

Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar
By Deborah FitzGerald | Simon & Schuster | $55 | 336 pages

The post A triumph and a burden appeared first on Inside Story.

There is no dearth of biographies of George Eliot. From markedly unpromising beginnings, the woman who was born Mary Anne Evans became one of the nineteenth century’s most successful authors. Carlisle lists more than half a dozen full-length lives in her endnotes, in addition to the published journals and letters — much of them digitised in the enormous George Eliot Archive — and the books about George Henry Lewes, her spouse of twenty-five years, and by their many associates, all of whom took part in the century’s intellectual ferment.

But although scholarly interest keeps growing, as far as I can tell no other philosopher has been moved to write a book about Eliot. Here, in her preface, Carlisle tells us why:

When I studied philosophy at university, most of the authors I read were unmarried men: Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. Did they regard marriage as a hindrance to the serious work of philosophy, rather than a spur to thought? My friends and I were constantly analysing relationships — our own and other people’s…

Beneath its conventional surface, marriage simmers with tensions between self and other, body and soul, passion and restraint, the poetry of romantic love and the prose of domestic routine… For better or worse, the answers we find to our marriage questions — whether to marry, how to live in a marriage, whether to remain married — are often close to the heart of our life’s meaning. Over centuries these questions have shaped religious, political and social histories.

We could ask why Carlisle chose to embed her discourse in a study of the life and works of the author we have come to know as George Eliot, and not, say, Jane Austen, whose specialty was dissecting unhappy unions with wit and style and guiding her heroines towards happier ones. Eliot read Austen and couldn’t have failed to have been influenced by her. Yet when she did turn her hand to fiction her approach was darker and broader.

Like Charlotte Brontë, whose work impressed her deeply, Eliot was less concerned with finding the right husbands for her protagonists than with what came after the nuptial knots were tied. And it was the complexity and contradictions in Eliot’s own life and work that Carlisle found particularly useful for exploring the enigma of marriage itself.

George Eliot — variously, Mary Anne Evans, Mary Ann Evans, Marianne Evans, Marian Evans, Marian Lewes, Mary Ann Evans Lewes and finally Mary Ann Cross — was born on 22 November 1819 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the third child of Robert Evans, an estate manager. Her father saw that she was formally educated until she was sixteen, when he lost his wife and the children their mother.

At that point, as Mary Ann, she became her father’s housekeeper. She still had access to the library at Albury Hall, where he worked, and quickly plunged into a course of self-education, principally in the classics. After the family moved to Coventry she was introduced by a wealthy couple, Charles and Cara Bray, to England’s radical intelligentsia. Then, after her father’s death, she went to Geneva, boarding with an artist and his wife, and after that to London, where her talents expanded and her circle of connections grew.

It’s hard to imagine a better instance of landing in the right place at the right time. It was as though fate had taken her by the hand and led her to milieus where her intellect could thrive. It also, admittedly, reflected her own determination, her lifelong need to define her identity and, not the least of it, her longing for intimacy. Carlisle, like other biographers, traces her failed relationships (the philosopher Herbert Spencer was one) before she found love and the stability she needed with the journalist-cum-philosopher George Henry Lewes.

The Marriage Question opens with the couple eloping in July 1854. She was thirty-four and had established herself in literary circles by her editorial work, now signing herself Marian Evans, at the prestigious Westminster Review and by her own essays, criticism and translation. But she was not a marriage prospect; her age and prodigious intelligence put off duller men than Lewes, and throughout her life people felt free to comment on what were perceived to be her physical deficits. An overlarge chin was the chief problem, if compensated by a surprisingly beautiful voice.

Nor was Lewes — “slight, short,” his face scarred by smallpox — an oil painting; one contemporary uncharitably remarked on his “immense ugliness,” though photographs show him in a better light. Whatever his physical drawbacks, though, they were more than overcome by a lively, gregarious personality combined with the seriousness of his pursuits.

A perfect match? Not entirely, and more on that later. For now it’s important to note that Lewes also came with baggage — namely, a wife and four children, so Marian Evans was taking a huge risk running off with him. But by the time they boarded the train to Weimar, they were passing themselves off as man and wife, and from that moment she discarded the Evans for Lewes. Throughout their twenty-five years together her husband who was not her husband referred to her affectionately as Polly.

The dash to Weimar was a momentary escape from the scandal that would dog her in Victorian England, but also served to widen her horizons further. Lewes and she were following the path “trodden by other intellectual pilgrims — Romantic radicals who worshipped… the miracle of Genius.” The genius in question was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Frankfurt-born polymath poet, novelist and scientist who had settled in Weimar as a young man and remained there until his death in 1832. The couple had learned of him by reading Madame de Staël, who had taken the pilgrimage when Goethe was still alive.

With a letter of introduction from Thomas Carlyle, they attended the salon of Goethe’s daughter-in-law, befriending the composer Franz Liszt and other members of Weimar’s creative society. Lewes was halfway through his Life of Goethe, but Marian, Carlisle writes, was particularly ripe for inspiration. Moving among free-thinking artists and intellectuals in Weimar led her to wonder if she could match them.

Into the biography Carlisle weaves many influences of the time. Chief among these was the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose writings were gaining serious attention some hundred and fifty years after his death. Marian began translating his Ethics into English in 1855. The translation languished for a publisher as Spinoza’s works had, and like his only appeared well after its creator’s death. (Carlisle has edited the 2020 edition.) But the undertaking was a clear indication of the strength of Marian’s ambition and the depth of her intellectual capacity.

It was also a measure of Lewes’s support. Knowing what we do of many couples in which the woman’s aspirations take a back seat, the extent of his interest was rare. Aside from the demands of his own work, he was both her critic and agent, assuming control of her business transactions, eventually  leaving her free to concentrate on her writing. It turned out to be a wise investment. With the success of her first novel, Adam Bede, she was making more than he did, and she turned it all over to him in accordance with the rules of marriage at the time.

More importantly perhaps, she found that, more than poetry or essays, fiction was her true metier. Here she would combine her prodigious capacity for thought with the heightened emotional sensitivity that was equally part of her nature. Like the Brontës before her, and for the same reasons, she adopted a male pseudonym (George being Lewes’s given name, Eliot the most English surname she could think of) for her collection of stories, Scenes of Clerical Life, but with Adam Bede the author’s identity became an open secret.

Then, in 1859, while researching for what would become The Mill on the Floss, she produced “The Lifted Veil,” a short story along the lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s science fictions. The clairvoyant protagonist describes his gift as a form of “double consciousness” — a term, Carlisle tells us, that Eliot used to describe “her own self-doubting, self-critical inner voice.”

It’s telling how often the phrases “lifted veil” or “lifting a veil” recur in this biography, acting as a key to other kinds of double consciousness, and how suited the words are for interrogating the questions about marriage that Carlisle has chosen as her theme. Almost to a woman, Eliot’s heroines, unlike Austen’s, make poor choices and suffer terribly for them before they find happiness, if they ever do. Domestic violence, sometimes in the extreme, is a constant in Eliot’s fiction, and Carlisle’s examination of her partnership with Lewes does raise questions about what today we might call coercive control.

Yet that didn’t seem to put Eliot off marrying. Fifteen months after Lewes died Eliot wed John Cross, a man twenty years younger than she was, as devoted to her as Lewes had been, and who authored the first of her posthumous biographies. She also changed her name to Mary Ann Cross, which appears on the headstone of the grave where she was buried, near Lewes, in Hampstead. It’s not too farfetched to take this as yet more evidence of her deep need for the stability and companionship marriage can offer and how much she must have missed the one she had with Lewes, however irregular and scandalous for the times it was.

I make no claim to Eliot scholarship. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda are the only two works of hers I remember having read. But if one of the aims of literary biography is to rekindle interest in an author’s work, Carlisle has certainly succeeded with me. Everything Eliot wrote is examined in the round as the life and thought that nurtured them unfold — an approach I found as illuminating as it is thorough.

As for myself, I’ll be reading whatever of George Eliot’s I can lay my hands on, and rereading what I have read with renewed understanding and attention — how the gambling scene that opens Daniel Deronda, for example, is not just a clue to Gwendolen Harleth’s character but can also be read as a metaphor for marriage itself and the risks it inevitably entails.

Did I pick that up on my first reading? Possibly unconsciously, but probably not, because my interest in the book began with Eliot’s philosemitism and that’s largely where it stayed. But The Marriage Question chronicles Eliot’s wide, encompassing vision, her impeccable research, the complexity of her fiction and, as a sidelight, her exasperation that the reviews of her books were generally restricted to commenting on the development of character and plot.

Carlisle, a philosopher, has shown literature to be much more than that. A lot has changed in the world and in the world of letters since Marian Lewes starting writing fiction, but how surprising it is to learn that on the whole reviewing hasn’t changed much at all. That said, I hope I’ve given you in the space I’ve had some idea of the level of Carlisle’s achievement. •

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life
By Clare Carlisle | Allen Lane | $45 | 367 pages

The post Sense and sensibility appeared first on Inside Story.

John Carey called Morrison’s study “astute and revealing,” and it made the shortlist for the James Tait Black Prize, Britain’s longest-running biography award. As it happened, Carey’s own William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies won that year. Revealingly, Carey incorporated Golding’s classic debut novel into his title, suggesting that without overt semaphoring even informed readers might struggle to recall the 1983 Nobel Prize winner.

Morrison once told me his publisher had admitted that only four writers in English could be guaranteed a readership sizeable enough to make a biography an attractive business proposition: Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. Which in part explains why D.J. Taylor’s new biography of Orwell does not come subtitled The Man Who Wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell needs no prompt. But the subtitle of Taylor’s Orwell: The New Life is revealing, for his own Orwell: The Life was published in 2003. And that raises the question: how is Taylor’s new life of Orwell “new”?

Orwell hoped no biography of him would be written, but the renown of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the enduring appeal of Animal Farm made that unlikely. He died in 1950 at the age of forty-six, but nearly three-quarters of a century on he is regularly quoted (and sometimes misquoted) by journalists and politicians, and taught in schools, a writer whose impact on language and the public imagination extends to people who have never read him.

His early death meant he never truly experienced that celebrity. Homage to Catalonia, for example, now understood as a classic account of the Spanish civil war, sold fewer than 700 copies in his lifetime. And while he came to be acknowledged as a great essayist, most of his short works first appeared in obscure journals with paltry readerships.

In many ways, though, he is a biographer’s dream, a quirky figure with a sharp intelligence and sharper opinions who lived a brief, eventful life in troubled times. The years between 1903 and 1950 witnessed two world wars, the British Empire’s decline, the rise (and sometimes fall) of left- and right-wing totalitarian regimes, a global depression, the Spanish civil war in which he fought, and the cold war, which he is credited with naming in his 1945 essay “You and the Atom Bomb.” Even better for the biographer trying to construct the narrative arc of his life, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published barely six months before his death. To add to the pathos, he died alone at night in hospital, haemorrhaging from the effects of the tuberculosis that haunted his life.

Born Eric Blair in India to parents who were minor figures in the Anglo-Indian community administering that part of the Empire, he was educated at an English prep school he later eviscerated in “Such, Such Were the Joys,” a memoir so libellous it was not published in his lifetime. He then seemed to consciously squander the prestigious and highly competitive King’s Scholarship he had won to Eton, rejecting the route to Oxbridge taken by contemporaries such as Cyril Connolly and Steven Runciman, later a renowned classicist.

Instead, he worked for five years in Burma with the Imperial Police before returning to England, then spent the next half-decade trying unsuccessfully to write novels in Paris. (He managed only a few articles in Parisian newspapers — in French.) He worked there as a kitchen hand and in England as a teacher, living for brief periods among tramps and itinerant rural workers and mooching off his bemused parents, by now in retirement in the staid English town of Southwold.

He used much of this experience in articles and essays, novels and documentaries. In some sense he was his own biographer, although critics and actual biographers sometimes struggle to distinguish fact from fiction. Did he witness “a hanging” — the title of his first great essay — in Burma? Or, given its undertones of Somerset Maugham, is that work actually a short story? Or some hybrid? Is another essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” an eyewitness account or a crafted “sketch” (the term Orwell used for it) using a first-person narrator for dramatic effect?

Taylor thinks treating both as “straightforward pieces of autobiography” is “a mistake.” “A Hanging” was published in 1933 under the name Eric Blair, while “Shooting an Elephant” appeared in 1936 as the work of “George Orwell,” a pen name that first appears in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Biographers suggest that Blair adopted it to avoid his parents being publicly embarrassed by the book’s squalid details. “George Orwell” was only one of four names he suggested to his agent, two others being the uninspired “Kenneth Miles” and the laughable “H. Lewis Always.” The published title was also a late choice. Potentially, Eric Blair’s first book might have been published as The Lady Poverty, by H. Lewis Always. Thankfully, Down and Out in Paris and London and George Orwell prevailed.

Writing by Eric Blair continued into 1935, and the BBC hired Orwell under his real name during the second world war, but critics often see the adoption of the pseudonym as part of an ongoing psychological and political evolution. In this reading, Blair sheds many of the trappings of middle-class life, though the accent honed at Eton never leaves him and he might dress formally for dinner. He adopts the somewhat ascetic, combative and consciously quirky persona of Orwell, dressing with a provocative déclassé dowdiness and rather clumsily adopting working-class mannerisms such as hand-rolling cigarettes and drinking tea from a saucer.

All this suggests some level of inauthenticity, and Taylor repeatedly points to Orwell consciously fashioning a persona: “as well as being a biography,” he writes, “what follows is, ultimately, a study of Orwell’s personal myth, what might be called the difference between the kind of person he was and the kind of person he imagined himself to be.”

We might read this as less duplicitous than aspirational, but the undoubted tensions between middle-class and working-class perspectives finds literary form in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). This bifurcated study begins with Orwell’s report of conditions in working-class sections of northern England, a section meant to shock and educate middle-class socialists in southern England likely to read it. The book’s second half presents Orwell’s account of his upbringing and political development, a precursor to his idiosyncratic argument for an English socialism, shorn of Soviet affectations, in which the middle class merges in solidarity with the working class.

Homage to Catalonia road-tests Orwell’s developing socialist views in extreme circumstances, while Coming Up for Air (1939) tracks with wry affection the journey of a nostalgic Everyman who yearns for a past now long gone but senses impending war. The transformation from 1933’s Eric Blair to 1939’s George Orwell is dramatic, but had he written nothing after 1939 he would have at best been a literary footnote. Instead, he writes Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), two of literature’s greatest political fictions.

Without these late works, Orwell would hardly warrant one biography, let alone the half a dozen that have appeared from Bernard Crick’s 1980 study to Taylor’s latest life. But that simple sequence conceals a fraught narrative. Orwell’s second wife Sonia knee-capped Peter Stansky and William Abrahams’s early biographically based studies, The Unknown Orwell and Orwell: The Transformation, denying them the right to quote from Orwell’s work. She also floated the idea that Orwell’s friend Malcolm Muggeridge would write the first authorised biography, possibly to put off other potential candidates. Then, after selecting Crick, a political scientist, she disavowed his study as too dull, trying unsuccessfully to break the book contract. Sonia Orwell died before Crick’s account of Orwell was published to general acclaim — Orwell’s friend, the writer Julian Symons, called it the “definitive biography.”

When a study authorised by the Orwell Estate eventually did appear, Michael Shelden’s Orwell: The Authorised Biography (1991) took pains to dismiss Crick’s biography as a collection of facts that failed to illuminate Orwell’s character and motivations. (Crick returned fire in the 1995 reprint of his work.) Shelden’s study reflects his training as a literary scholar interested in character and motivation, while Crick adopts a more objective social science approach.

Jeffrey Meyers’s Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (2000) seeks to portray Orwell as a more problematic individual, a man with “a noble character, but [who] was also violent, capable of cruelty, tormented by guilt, masochistically self-punishing, sometimes suicidal.” Neither Crick nor Shelden paint Orwell as saintly, but Meyers strives to present him as a dark figure, without fundamentally changing the narrative outline of his life.

Biographers from Meyers on have enjoyed access to The Complete Works of George Orwell (1998), a twenty-volume set brilliantly edited by Peter Davison that presented not only Orwell’s published work but also masses of previously unpublished letters and documents. This and other material made available in the ever-expanding Orwell Archive at University College London afford and sometimes demand more recent reappraisals.

The centenary of his birth in 2003 prompted two more biographies, Gordon Bowker’s George Orwell and Taylor’s Orwell: The Life, proof that publishers saw an audience large enough to justify concurrent studies. Bowker continued the desanctification of Orwell, accepting him as a “writer of great power and imagination” but making much of what he saw as his subject’s deceptive character, infidelities and chauvinism. He declares that the “main thrust” of his book is to “reach down as far as possible to the roots” of Orwell’s emotional life,” to get “as close as possible to the dark sources mirrored in his work.”

Taylor’s biography is less lurid, but he too exposes Orwell’s less-appealing qualities. And he intersperses the chronological biographical narrative with short essays on topics such as “Orwell and the Jews,” examining Orwell’s problematically complex attitudes, or “Orwell’s paranoia,” about “malign exterior forces that he suspected of interfering in his and other people’s lives.”

Like Bowker, Taylor understands Orwell as a great writer — both come to praise Orwell rather than to bury him — but he too acknowledges substantial personal flaws. Taylor even includes a short “case against” Orwell, written in the persona of a Marxist critic who claims that “as a novelist, Orwell scarcely begins to exist” and declares him a “hopelessly naïve” political thinker. Taylor himself is far more positive.

Unusually, both of Orwell’s wives have merited biographies. The title of Hilary Spurling’s The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell (2002) overtly connects Sonia Orwell with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Julia, while Sylvia Topp’s Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020) argues for the influence of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, on his life and writing. Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, published this month (and reviewed for Inside Story by Patrick Mullins), advances that general case, presenting a complex mix of critique and life writing that faults Orwell himself for largely “erasing” Eileen from his writing and accuses previous Orwell biographers (all male) of failing to pay due respect to Eileen’s intellect and emotional support, as well as to the “free labour” that allowed Orwell to pursue his life as a writer at the expense of her own considerable abilities and ambitions.

Funder’s fictionalised vignettes, based on known facts and exchanges of letters with Eileen’s female friends, reposition her centrestage. All this takes place within a larger investigation of “wifedom,” the general condition Funder maintains continues to require wives (including herself) to operate within patriarchal power arrangements detrimental to their own flourishing. Provocative, fluent and energetic, Wifedom will activate lively debate among Orwell scholars and the general readers interested in Orwell and his milieu.

Which brings us to Taylor’s New Life. As with Funder, Taylor has access to new information unknown to earlier biographers, including Eileen’s often deeply personal letters to her friend Norah Myles, made public in 2005, which detail her life with Orwell from 1938 to 1941. Recently uncovered caches of letters also illuminate Orwell’s already known relationships with two women he pursued romantically before and after his marriage to Eileen.

Revelations have also emerged about Eric Blair’s problematic last meeting with his teenage love, Jacintha Buddicom, an event that might count as sexual assault. And Taylor assigns much greater importance to Orwell’s “ever-supportive Aunt Nellie,” who proved a key benefactor. Nellie’s living in Paris offered him literary and political connections in that city; her friends Francis and Myfanwy Westrope ran the bookshop where Orwell worked in the early 1930s; Nellie secured the spartan cottage Orwell and Eileen lived in through much of the late 1930s.

Women play a far more significant role in The New Life than in Taylor’s earlier book, so that Norah Myles, who does not appear at all in The Life, is referenced more than twenty times in the recent work, part of a more extensive and nuanced account of Eileen’s life and friends. Taylor also accepts Robert Colls’s criticism in George Orwell: English Rebel (2013) that Orwell’s depiction of the working class in The Road to Wigan Pier effaces the vitality of working-class life. Integrating these and other pieces of information and scholarship adds colour and shade to the image Taylor previously depicted, without changing the outline.

Taylor also deals with the relative paucity of primary information about key sections of Orwell’s early life, particularly at Eton and in Burma. All biographies are complex weaves of available evidence and interpretation, but how to proceed if little evidence exists? Michael Shelden, for example, took Orwell’s essay about prep school, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” almost as documentary, even though it was written when Orwell was in his forties and many of his contemporaries thought it exaggerated.

If Shelden accepted the essay too easily as fact, at least it was written by Orwell himself. Taylor at times adopts an odder tactic, at one point deploying the novel Decent Fellows by a rough contemporary of Orwell’s at Eton, John Heygate, to convey a sense of the school a decade earlier. Taylor’s claim that “all this sheds a fascinating light on Orwell’s time at Eton” seems a stretch. And on the question of whether Orwell saw a man hanged in Burma, Taylor connects Orwell’s essay to Thackeray’s 1840 “Going to See a Man Hanged” claiming that the later narrative “could not have been written in quite the same way without the ghostly presence” of Thackeray’s account. This claim, simultaneously large and odd, is somewhat undermined by the fact that The Complete Works of George Orwell makes no mention of Thackeray’s piece.

Even the best real detectives (as opposed to the fictional ones) must deal with the reality that sometimes there is no evidence to be found, and Taylor is honest enough to admit more than once that we simply do not or cannot know. At other times, though, he uses questions to generate potential answers, so that in a late “Interlude” titled “Orwell and his World,” he asks: “Some basic behavioural questions: What was Orwell like? How did he seem? If you were in a room with him, how might he conduct himself and what would you talk about?”

This is a little too close to “showing your workings,” an unnecessary act given the impressive amount of detail Taylor fashions into a coherent and insightful character study. He also retains from his earlier biography the two- or three-page essays on topics he deems worth individual attention. Some are only cursorily rewritten, while new ones are added: “Orwell and the Working Classes” or “Orwell and the ‘Nancy Boys.’” The latter begins with the terrible line “Orwell’s dislike of homosexuals follows him through his work like the clang of a medieval leper bell.” While the topic itself is significant, the dislocation of the narrative that this and similar pieces effect is heightened by its coming immediately after a chapter ending with Eileen’s death during an operation for uterine tumours; the juxtaposition is jarring.

For all this, Taylor assembles a wealth of information, some of it new, much of it intelligently reinterpreted, into what can justifiably be claimed as a “new” biography based on decades of close attention to Orwell’s life and mythology. The occasional medieval leper bell apart, he writes with a fluency that injects the narrative with vitality and significance. The New Life is a knowing biography, incorporating changes and advances in our knowledge and assessment of Orwell without being modish or attempting to defend the indefensible (or at least reprehensible) aspects of his life.

Almost alone among his contemporaries Orwell can still attract a sizeable new audience. W.H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh are still lauded, but they seem figures from a past that is recognisable as the past. As proof of Orwell’s status as a still-relevant writer, at least five books about him have appeared or will appear in 2023: Taylor’s biography; Peter Stansky’s The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War; Glenn Burgess’s Orwell’s Perverse Humanity; Masha Karp’s George Orwell and Russia; and Peter Barry’s forthcoming George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality. To which we might add Anna Funder’s Orwell-adjacent Wifedom.

Have we hit peak Orwell? Perhaps. But just as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 rocketed Nineteen Eighty-Four back to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, so the prospect of a second Trump presidency suggests that Orwell might again speak to a new set of readers. To this we can add the menace of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and their abominable clones. The man whose writing spawned the adjective “Orwellian” seems unlikely to go out of fashion. •

Orwell: A New Life
By D.J. Taylor | Little, Brown | $34.99 | 496 pages

The post The self-fashioning of George Orwell appeared first on Inside Story.

While Keiron Pim says nothing further about Schapiro in his biography of Roth, Endless Flight, we know that the essential part of the teacher’s prophecy came true: Roth went on to achieve international fame as a journalist and a novelist. His career took him from Brody to university studies in Lviv, to Vienna, to the Habsburg army during the Great War, to long periods of residence in Berlin and Paris, and on extensive travels throughout Europe, including as an exile from Nazism in the 1930s.

As all these journeyings perhaps suggest, any attempt to assign Roth a distinct religious, ethnic or political identity on the basis of his own actions or words would fail. He was born into a Jewish family and Jewish traditions, but was known to attend the Catholic Mass. He moved from Lviv to Vienna because — as he told a Polish-speaking uncle — he “could not be unfaithful to the German language” but rhapsodised over Paris the first time he went there, writing to his editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung that: “I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world… Whoever has not been here is only half a human, and no sort of European.” He was pacifist and a socialist in his younger days, but joined the Habsburg army in 1916 and later advocated a restoration of the Habsburg monarchy, believing it preferable to the other forms of conservative and nationalist rule that threatened to overtake — and of course eventually did overtake — Austria in the 1930s.

Pim sees Roth’s shifting self-concept, and his experience of and fascination with the Austro-Hungarian empire, as two important factors that attract twenty-first century readers to his works — those readers who “recognise his crisis of identity; and, not least, are primed for a nostalgic pull towards the aesthetics and perceived values of his Mitteleuropa as its last inhabitants fade from view.”

It is clear from Pim’s pages that the intriguing contradictions he identifies in Roth’s personality and mentality do not mean that Roth was always an admirable man, or an easy man to deal with. He lied repeatedly about his service in the Great War, claiming experiences of combat, capture and escape that never occurred. His complex relationship to his Jewish heritage included abuse of his employers at the Frankfurter Zeitung, with whom he had various contractual disputes, as “scheming Jews.” While he adopted the habitus of a Habsburg gentleman from the mid 1920s onwards — wearing narrow-cut trousers like an army officer’s, carrying a walking stick, indulging in chivalrous flourishes such as kissing women’s hands and sending them yellow roses — he was anything but gentlemanly in other ways, writing while at university in Vienna that female students were “no more women than streetwalkers” were, engaging in affairs throughout his marriage to Friedl Reichler, and — during his relationship with the German author Irmgard Keun in exile in the mid 1930s — sleeping with one fist grasping Keun’s hair from sheer possessiveness.

He was also a heavy drinker for about half of his life, and an alcoholic in his last years; Keun left behind a harrowing description of how he retched for extended periods every morning before vomiting blood and bile. And Roth’s hopes of restoring the monarchy to Austria eventually moved from wishful thinking to black farce; I doubt that I have ever read anything more ridiculous than Pim’s account of how, in 1938, Roth and others planned to smuggle the exiled Otto von Habsburg to Vienna in a coffin purporting to contain the body of an Austrian commoner who had died abroad, whereupon Otto would be proclaimed Emperor. (“With the monarchy thus restored, Roth believed that the British monarchy would ally with their Austrian peers and France to present a strong front against an expansionist Germany.”)

Given that Pim identifies various qualities in Roth’s writing as attractive to twenty-first century readers, I found his attitude to Roth’s fiction surprisingly mixed. He describes Roth’s most famous work, The Radetzky March, which chronicles the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as “one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.” (I would prefer to say that it is one of the greatest German-language novels of the twentieth century.) Beyond this, though, he often qualifies his praise of one work or another, if he praises it at all.

Thus, Zipper and his Father is “a wonderful novel,” but also the first to contain a “thoroughly realised, deeply imagined, three-dimensional character,” which of course says little for its predecessors. Similarly, while The Antichrist is “of biographical interest,” it is “a dissatisfying work to read.” Moreover, Tarabas is “not among [Roth’s] best works” and Confession of a Murderer is “weak.” As  for the short story “The Triumph of Beauty,” it is misogynistic, and “an ugly blemish on [Roth’s] œuvre.”

Pim’s remarks about Roth’s journalism are more positive. This is the work that first made Roth famous, and in which he claimed (in a letter to one of his editors in 1926) to be doing nothing less than “paint[ing] the portrait of the age.” Pim positions Roth’s journalism adroitly within the sometimes arid literary debates of the 1920s (and after) about “New Objectivity.” He praises Roth’s accounts of a journey in eastern Europe in 1924 for showing “how beautifully he wrote about phenomena others perceived as ugly,” and singles out his sketches of cities and lives in southern France in 1925 for particular attention as “the peak of what we could call Roth’s ‘lyric journalism’.”

Pim also notes numerous incidental but striking facts about Roth’s newspaper work: for example that in the year 1927 he travelled to nine different countries in search of material; that the Frankfurter Zeitung deleted criticisms of Mussolini in his despatches from Italy in 1928 without consulting him; and that the same newspaper paid Roth one mark per printed line (with a guaranteed minimum of one thousand marks per month), which prompted him to handwrite his copy in such a way that one line in manuscript corresponded to one line in newsprint.

Pim’s accounts of Roth’s work more generally also contain a number of fascinating details. His novel The Spider’s Web, which was published as a newspaper serial in 1923, was the first novel to mention Hitler. (I am not sure how this could be proved absolutely, but it seems highly credible given the date.) When a newspaper interviewer asked Marlene Dietrich in 1936 about her favourite book, she nominated Roth’s novel Job. And — more chillingly than these passing references — the manuscripts and other papers Roth left behind when he emigrated in 1933 were fortunate to survive a Gestapo raid on his German publisher. Similarly, the papers from exile that survived after Roth’s death in France in May 1939 were preserved by a redoubtable elderly Parisienne who told one of Roth’s cousins in 1946 that she had hidden them under the concierge’s bed.

Alhough I read Endless Flight with interest, I sometimes felt that Pim was unnecessarily eager to provide comprehensive information. For example, I could probably have done without the half-page description, plus photographs, of how the street and the building in Lviv where Roth lived in 1913–14 look today: “The chipped wooden handrail is supported by an art nouveau balustrade, and as you tread the wide, worn steps they croak like marshland frogs.” And I could definitely have done without the footnote explaining that Pim’s grandmother lived in the same street as Friedl Reichler’s family in post–Great War Vienna and speculating rather bathetically: “Perhaps my ancestors were even acquainted with Roth owing to his regular visits to the apartment across the street. There is no way of knowing, as they are all long gone.”

As the quotation about the steps that “croak like marshland frogs” suggests, Pim sometimes attempts a colourful or evocative style. Though other readers may disagree, I found some of these attempts rather pretentious or clichéd. Thus the passage about the steps is followed by some rather breathless remarks about Lviv: “In the twenty-first century this palimpsestic city has a strange mystique… The present here is a membrane pressed upon by a heavy past: you feel its weight without knowing its details,” and so on. And Pim’s evocation of the view from the hotel where Roth stayed in Paris in 1925 put me in mind of a travel brochure:

The windows of the Hôtel de la Place de l’Odéon look out from between blue shutters over an eighteenth-century Parisian plain dominated by the eponymous neoclassical theatre, before which roads spear out like compass points, tempting the visitor to pursue every angle into the Left Bank. To the hotel’s right runs the Rue de l’Odéon, which was home in the early twentieth century to a community of Anglophone authors and the Shakespeare and Company bookshop; in 1922 its owner, Sylvia Beach, published Ulysses by James Joyce, who dubbed the area “Stratford-on-Odéon.” The gorgeously sombre twin-towered church of Saint-Sulpice stands 200 yards to the west.

Pim sometimes also uses this portentous style to prop up political and literary judgements for which he offers very limited evidence. His description of Roth’s first foray to Berlin, in 1920, prompts him to declare that the Weimar Republic was “a curious mixture of postwar chaos and compromise dressed in unattainably high ideals that lent it a haunting capacity for failure” — a pronouncement that sounds more like wisdom after the event than informed intellectual analysis, notwithstanding Pim’s brief references to such phenomena as the proportional voting system (which of course has operated successfully in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949).

I was also puzzled by Pim’s opinion of Stefan Zweig, a literary colleague who lent Roth considerable support during their exile:

Zweig is less remarkable for his own artistry than for what he connotes, namely the bohemian Viennese coffee-house culture… from the fin-de-siècle to the entre-deux-guerres period. Judging by his work alone it is hard to gauge how he gained such prominence…

His memoir The World of Yesterday is a detailed and valuable exposition of that era… His prose is often engaging, but never irresistible. It is competent and smooth, but too smooth, too dispassionate, written with pathological reserve… Where Roth is a double espresso, Zweig is a half-decent mocha, served lukewarm.

Pim’s grounds for this lofty dismissal of Zweig are unclear, beyond a few passing observations, including the remark that some of Zweig’s fellow authors “mocked his grasp of grammar.” Moreover, if I have interpreted correctly a paragraph in Pim’s acknowledgements about his familiarity with German literature and language, he has not read Zweig in the original.

Endless Flight is well produced and well edited. There are many intriguing  photographs, though a few (like that of the present-day railway station in Brody) seem rather superfluous, and most of the photos are annoyingly small. I found no misprints, and only one error of fact — when Pim says that the Frankfurter Zeitung paid Roth in “deutschmarks” rather than reichsmarks; the deutschmark did not exist until 1948. In noting the latter point, I send a prayer — assuming there is a deity that protects literary reviewers — that I have not made any errors myself here. •

Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth
By Keiron Pim | Granta | $49.99 | 544 pages

The post Portraying the age appeared first on Inside Story.

These images come to us in atmospheric monochrome, street after Parisian or provincial street, defeated office workers dozing on park benches, women of the night, sad and trapped, bourgeois burghers, struggling to keep up a pretence of prosperity and contentment. It is a world beyond depressing and yet it draws us in until we want nothing so much as to be there, observing the lives of the world-weary, the frustrated and the disappointed, and luxuriating in it all.

Although Simenon was clearly influenced in his novels by the newer arts of cinema and photography — he was for a time a keen and talented photographer — he was not unduly bound by their already well-developed conventions. One of the best and most psychologically penetrating of the Maigret novels, Maigret and the Headless Corpse, begins with a standard opening scene, the discovery of a body, but doesn’t quite follow the trajectory we might expect. “It was a human arm, intact from the shoulder to the hand,” Simenon writes. “In the water, it had taken on a pallid colour and the texture of a dead fish.” Contrary to what we might expect, there is no cinematic reaction shot. We are given no clue as to what the bargeman who made the gruesome find might be thinking.

How to respond, and to imagine the horror of the scene, is left entirely to the reader. It is one of many small instances where Simenon establishes and maintains a direct connection between narrator and reader and helps to create that sense that we are part of his world.

Immersed in this world, we might join Maigret for a bistro lunch and a bottle of wine, typically shared with a colleague, while taking note of the habits and quirks of strangers. We can then head back to the Quai des Orfèvres in a regulation black Citroën, complete with suicide doors, perhaps for a restorative snooze before returning to the case. Or instead follow Maigret home for lunch, for something substantial prepared by Mme Maigret in their cocoon-like flat, finishing with a fruity digestif, a rustic prunelle perhaps.

These images come not only from Simenon’s novels but also from the countless film and television adaptations of the Maigret novels, and of some of the one-off romans durs, the hard novels, of which there are hundreds. (No one seems to know how many.) Some of the most recognised directorial names in French cinema — Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Claude Chabrol, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Bertrand Tavernier — have responded to the source material to considerable effect, while Maigret has been brought to life by some formidable actors — Michel Simon, Harry Baur and Jean Gabin among them.

Many other actors, some with the status of icons, some lesser known, have also had a go. What is perhaps surprising is how many of them are good in the role, suggesting something about the character of Maigret that brings out the best. Choosing the “winner” has become a bit of a game among Maigret fans. Some favour Harry Baur’s early incarnation (too old for the part, was Simenon’s comment, which seems a bit harsh as Baur was fifty-three at the time) or Jean Gabin, whom he acknowledged got the language right.

Overall, Simenon is reported to have favoured the performance of the less stellar but entirely convincing Rupert Davies, in the BBC television series of the early sixties, so well received that it ran for four seasons and fifty-four episodes, and recently cheered fans old and new when the entire run was released on DVD.

Georges Simenon (second from right) in 1966 with three actors who played Maigret: British actor Rupert Davies (left), Dutch actor Jan Teuling and Italian actor Gino Cervi. Mondadori Portfolio/AAP

As adaptations moved from black and white to colour, something was lost. Black and white just seems truer to Maigret and his world. It speaks directly to images we as readers already have in our heads. Two of the most recent adaptations, the television series with Rowan Atkinson and the 2022 film Maigret, directed by Patrice Leconte and based on Maigret and the Dead Girl, with the great Gérard Depardieu in the title role, are among the least satisfactory.

Disappointed viewers have tended to focus on what are seen as their one-note performances — Atkinson too distractingly deliberate and lugubrious, Depardieu too glacially cerebral. But this is deflection. The real culprit is colour, that and the deadening accuracy of sophisticated twenty-first-century set and costume design.

The novels rely on a bedrock of realism, but the overwhelming impression is atmospheric, a quality that in general is more successfully rendered in monochrome. When the plot of a Maigret novel doesn’t quite make sense, as occasionally it doesn’t, it seems like a trivial criticism compared with the power of the atmosphere that remains with the reader. It is a remarkable achievement, to create a world that resonates so strongly, by means of “simple” prose and what Simenon himself described as deliberately restricted vocabulary.

Among the seventy-five novels that make up Penguin’s recent republication project is one that is not quite a novel at all. Maigret’s Memoirs, in a new translation by Howard Curtis, directly addresses the elision that formed quite early in the public mind between Maigret and his creator. Maigret recalls how his acquaintance with Simenon began, and how it evolved over the years into a wary friendship. He tries hard to provide instances in which his personality, appearance and policing methods have been manipulated and even falsified by Simenon in the interests of creating a character who purports to be him.

Yet for all his questioning of Simenon’s methods, Maigret is repeatedly if reluctantly obliged to acknowledge the point of Simenon’s creative alterations. “The concern for objectivity falsifies the truth,” the creator explains patiently to the literal-minded creation, adding that “the first quality of the truth is to be simple.”

Simenon freely acknowledges the discrepancies between fiction and “real life.” He is fully aware, he assures Maigret, “that a chief inspector… doesn’t run around the streets in person questioning concierges and bar owners.” His objective, he says again, is to simplify in the interests of truth, and Maigret must admit to himself that this is logical. Simenon’s hero is given his own direct voice in the Memoirs, but this merely serves to confirm that it is not a relationship of equals, but one of leader and subordinate.

For someone with a reputation for being unknowable, Simenon talked and wrote a lot about himself. When I Was Old is an absorbing account of his life in the years between 1960 — when he realised that at the age of fifty-nine he was now undeniably old — and 1963, when he achieved some sort of accommodation with this uncomfortable fact and the journal abruptly stops.

Here, his advocacy of simplicity becomes something of a mantra, couched in almost comically simple terms. “I don’t like big words,” he says, justifying his approach by his confidence that reality is “less falsified in the simple.” Yet Simenon is also playing with the reader. He knows that there is a disingenuousness to this apparent forthrightness. He is fully aware that his version of reality “trembles on the brink of unreality.” To put it another way, it’s all about the atmosphere.

Along with the novels, Penguin has also turned its attention to the short stories in which the inspector appears. Many of them, the exact number of which is again difficult to quantify, have not appeared in English before, including three of the five that are included in the recently published collection Death Threats and Other Stories, translated by Ros Schwartz. In the story that gives the collection its title, the plot hinges on a distinction that appears frequently in Simenon, the unbridgeable gap between the young and the old. The young are “healthy, muscular, lively,” they are “normal” and “carefree.” At some point, though, they become old, sometimes disconcertingly early, and in doing so they ruin “beautiful materials, a beautiful life, infinite possibilities.” It is both a highly romantic notion and a gloomy prospect.

This distinction between youth and age underpins much of Simenon’s work, both in the Maigret novels and the non-Maigret. One of the best of those available in English is The Strangers in the House — a novel with a detective of sorts at its centre, albeit very much a reluctant one — published in 2022 in a translation by the indefatigable Howard Curtis.

Hector Loursat is a disappointed man. His career as an attorney barely sputters along, his wife has left him long since and he is virtually estranged from his daughter, even though they live under the same roof. As so often in Simenon, the course of his life is dramatically altered by a sudden, disruptive event. A murder is committed, on the top floor, a part of his house which may as well be in another world, one where he never ventures.

Slowly and painfully Loursat drags himself out of his customary torpor and devotes himself to finding the truth, at the same time saving his daughter’s reputation and the life of the young man accused of the crime. In the process, Loursat recaptures, at least for a time, something of the optimism and energy of youth. The young had adventures, he laments, while their parents “pretended to be alive.”

The key to this reinvention and to solving the mystery is the rediscovery of simplicity, of clearing away the debris and getting to the essence. When the examining magistrate waffles on and on, circling round the point, Loursat interrupts him midstream by blowing his nose, “loudly, cynically, just to get it over with.” In pursuing the mystery, he finds that “it was indispensable to translate every sentence into plain language,” to discover what people are really saying.

The murder that takes place under his own roof offers the prospect of adventure, of the opportunity to play detective. In his dogged quest to get to the truth, Loursat “had the impression he was descending into life.” At the end of the novel, after he has succeeded in more or less resolving the case, we are left uncertain as to whether he will remain in life or once more withdraw. We last see him seated “all alone, still dignified, in a bistro, over a glass of red wine,” leaving the question of what happens next entirely open.

Numerous attempts have been made to capture what it is about Simenon that makes him so sheerly readable, that makes it difficult to read just one or two novels, get the flavour, and stop. The prolific commentator on crime fiction and noir, Barry Forshaw, has recently taken on the task in his Simenon: The Man, the Books, the Films, with rather mixed results.

A large proportion of this book, more than half, is devoted to a varyingly annotated bibliography, which goes as far as can reasonably be expected towards the unattainable goal of comprehensiveness. It includes all the works in which Maigret appears, a generous sampling of the non-Maigret novels, and a particularly useful itemising of the film and television adaptations of both categories of novels, stretching from 1931 (sometimes listed elsewhere as 1932) with Jean Renoir’s Night at the Crossroads, to 2022 and Jean Becker’s The Heart of a Man, based on the hard novel Les Volets Verts and starring the ubiquitous Gérard Depardieu. Patrice Leconte’s Maigret, however, arrived too late to make the list.

Among the more obscure and hard-to-obtain film versions, Forshaw makes an intriguing reference to a Franco-Australian co-production of 1958, The Stowaway, set in Tahiti and featuring a range of well-known Australian and European actors including, improbably, the incomparable French icon Arletty.

More rewarding are the companion chapters on aspects of Simenon and his world, including one on Maigret’s Paris, another on his influence on other writers and, most interesting of all, a chapter on translation that makes extensive use of Forshaw’s interviews with three of the distinguished translators assembled by Penguin to see through its Maigret project. Ros Schwartz, who has by her own count translated sixteen Simenon titles, points to the need for the translator to also be something of a detective in accurately representing the period detail. “In one description of a woman sleeping with ‘épingles’ in her hair at night, I eventually found the exact bobby pins advertised on eBay.”

Schwartz also refers to the real difficulties in replicating Simenon’s “extraordinarily economical” language. The other two translators make this same point. Howard Curtis scotches any thought that Simenon is an easy author to translate. “Time and again,” he says, “you come across beautifully turned phrases that sum up a character, a setting, a mood in the minimum of words, and it’s often a struggle, for a translator, to find equivalents in English.” Siân Reynolds phrases it with appropriate simplicity: “they are hard to translate because they are written simply.” These comments go to the heart of Simenon’s continuing and wide-ranging appeal — his unmatched ability to convey complexity, nuance and, above all, atmosphere in the seductive guise of simplicity. •

Maigret and the Headless Corpse
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Howard Curtis | Penguin | $19.99 | 192 pages

Maigret’s Memoirs
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Howard Curtis | Penguin | $22.99 | 149 pages

When I Was Old
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Helen Eustis | Penguin | $22.99 | 452 pages

Death Threats and Other Stories
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Ros Schwartz | Penguin | $22.99 | 181 pages

The Strangers in the House 
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Howard Curtis | Penguin | $22.99 | 217 pages

Simenon: The Man, the Books, the Films
By Barry Forshaw | Oldcastle | $29.99 | 256 pages

The post The simplicity of Simenon appeared first on Inside Story.

The novel starts quietly, with three chapters on Thomas’s early years, his early, hesitant homosexual feelings and his first novel Buddenbrooks, which traces the decline of a nineteenth-century mercantile dynasty in the northern German city of Lübeck. Then, in chapter four, it bursts into life.

Here we enter the twentieth century, the lively, bustling city of Munich and the lavish world of the Pringsheim family, whose daughter Katia’s wealth, wit, style and social standing attract Thomas. In a series of salon scenes and loaded dialogues Tóibín shows the couple coming together and recognising their need for each other. Katia is the only woman who will ever attract Thomas, and he offers her release from her family into adulthood and the opportunity to disentangle from her relationship with her twin brother, the incestuous elements of which are thematised in Thomas’s short story The Blood of the Walsungs. (Look no further for evidence of a clunky translation than this interpretation of the one-word original, Wälsungenblut.)

Thomas and Katia’s wedding night is told in a sensuous paragraph; by the chapter’s end, four of the couple’s six children have been born and we are off and running.

Tóibín’s commanding knowledge of Mann and his work would be sufficient for a straight biography, but the novel form provides him with two advantages. The first is the opportunity to imagine scenes for which no biographical evidence exists, such as the couple’s wedding night, and to work with images, episodes and dialogue to convey social and domestic scenes and moods. Tóibín also adds colour with cameo figures drawn from the Manns’ circle of family and friends, injected at just the right time to move the narrative on.

In chapter four, the cameo is Katia’s father, Alfred Pringsheim, who rails at Thomas for violating the family’s privacy in The Blood of the Walsungs (which extended to references to Alfred’s own extramarital affairs) and causes the work to be pulled from print for twenty years. Then, as if to assert an overarching control, he insists on furnishing every room of the couple’s new flat, including Thomas’s refuge, his study.

The second advantage of the novel form is that it allows Tóibín to compose scenes by combining factual accounts with Mann’s fictional work. This is true to Mann’s own approach; he openly acknowledged that he not only appropriated material from other authors’ works but also drew on people he knew, including himself. As Katia’s mother, Hedwig Pringsheim, once acutely observed, “Thomas Mann, his family and surrounds — living material for the work of the novelist.”

Chapter four concludes with an account of Thomas’s sister’s suicide and his mother’s decline towards dementia and death. These are part of the real-life drama of 1910, but Mann also used them thirty-seven years later in the climax of his late masterpiece Doctor Faustus. There, amid death and decay, the composer Adrian Leverkühn suffers a collapse into unconsciousness, brought on by syphilis.

Thus, over 500 pages that are neither overlong nor dense, Tóibín’s account faithfully follows Mann’s life to its end. The Magician rattles along with the family through the upheavals of the twentieth century.

The rise of the Nazis caused the Mann family to leave Germany, first for neighbouring countries, and then to America, where their older children, surviving several misadventures, joined them one by one. Thomas was highly influential in both America and Germany as an opponent of the Hitler regime, and the three oldest children, Erika, Klaus and Golo, worked in the English-language press and the American army and intelligence service.

After the war the family’s patriotism was called into question by American anti-communist ideologues. Their existence was made so uncomfortable that in 1952 Thomas and Katia moved back to Switzerland, where they had first found refuge outside Germany nineteen years earlier. Thomas died there, aged eighty, in 1955. Katia lived to be almost ninety-seven, and in her nineties recounted her Unwritten Memories to her youngest son, Michael, and the writer Elisabeth Plessen.

Tóibín manages a large cast of characters, using the cameos to great effect. The six children, in particular, pop in and of the account, and Tóibín touchingly relates one of Thomas’s finest hours as a parent when he banishes Klaus’s terror of ghosts through magic tricks and is dubbed “the Magician” by Erika. It is a nickname that the whole family, not least Thomas himself, finds fitting.

Others who make entertaining appearances include W.H. Auden, whom Erika marries to obtain an English passport and whose smirking presence unsettles Thomas; Alma Mahler, who swirls across several scenes invoking her famous deceased husbands; and the composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose ideas about music Thomas borrowed so liberally for his composer Adrian Leverkühn that Schoenberg felt compelled to publicly deny that he, like Leverkühn, suffered from syphilis.

Thomas and Katia’s marriage is the crimson thread through the narrative, their love holding firm for fifty years of marriage. Their children were not all so steady, though, and Erika’s and Klaus’s adventures with sex, drugs, song and dance spanned Europe and America. Erika’s affairs included an old family friend of her father’s age, the conductor Bruno Walter, whom she dubbed, in opposition to her father, “the Demon.” But Erika also remained the most closely attached to her parents. She followed them to Switzerland after the war and together with Katia fiercely guarded her father’s posthumous fame.

Tóibín uses a straightforward narrative style. Although this is a novel about a novelist he eschews any postmodernist self-consciousness or double-coding techniques. The closest he comes is the intermingling of biographical and fictional elements.

Occasionally Tóibín’s intermingling is overly obvious. In chapter five, for example, Tóibín draws attention to the fact that Thomas’s visit to Katia in a Davos sanatorium was pivotal to the writing of The Magic Mountain. Removed from her normal routine Katia had lost her sense of time, and Thomas too feels the unreal atmosphere. But Tóibín labours the point when he has Thomas feeling that he had been drawn there by “magic” and had fallen victim to “sorcery,” while the “bewitched” Katia has to be roused from her slumber and woken to reality. This almost descends into bathos when Thomas seeks “to break the spell” by talking about building a new house in Munich.

Fortunately Tóibín rescues this episode with a beautiful scene in which Katia returns home while Thomas is still turning the sanatorium experiences into a book:

He did not know whether to tell the children immediately or let her homecoming be a surprise for them. As he waited, he understood that it would not be long before Katia would fill their lives as though she had never been away. He, on the other hand, would, in his imagination, inhabit the life of the very place she was leaving.

Occasionally, too, Tóibín overdoes cultural references. For example, he has Thomas ruminating on Oscar Wilde’s fate when he fears the exposure of his own erotic fantasies. This helps makes the point for English readers — and the reference has been singled out for praise by the New York Times’s critic — but Wilde would barely have been on Mann’s cultural radar. And while there is a connection between the composer Gustav Mahler and the protagonist in Mann’s Death in Venice, Gustav Aschenbach, Tóibín overstates the point when he makes the composer the inspiration for the novella. This strikes a chord with the celebrated film of Death in Venice, made sixty years later, in which Mahler’s music plays a starring role, but the inspiration for the novella was Mann’s private drama and the real model for Aschenbach was none other than Mann himself.

I mention these minor blemishes because they show Tóibín’s determination to make Mann accessible to his readership, using references that have resonance for us. This helps to highlight Tóibín’s singular achievement in The Magician, which is to make Thomas Mann more accessible to an English-language readership than ever before. The great critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki called him “the most German of all the German writers of our century,” and that characteristic has been an impediment to an appreciation of Mann and his work in English. Mann’s works are all available in translation but are no longer widely read and risk being regarded as artefacts from the German past.

Mann cut a formal, even crusty figure in America, and the sheer length of some of his works added to the view that they were longwinded and tedious. The New Yorker played on this view when, following the English publication of his thousand-page Joseph epic, it quipped that “Thomas Mann threatens to become one of the greatest living bores.” Mann’s work has not benefited from fresh interpretations or influential editions in English, except for the superbly filmed Death in Venice, which has recently attracted a revived interest because it takes place in a pandemic.

By contrast, his reputation has remained vibrant in Germany. Since the 1970s the publication of his and his family’s diaries and letters have excited public interest by revealing the seemingly endless series of affairs, scandals and tragedies experienced by the children and the family’s associates. New versions and reworkings of Mann’s work continue to be published, and most recently his rip-roaring picaresque novel Confessions of the Confidence Trickster Felix Krull has been filmed for a third time with a screenplay by Germany’s new literary superstar, Daniel Kehlmann.

Colm Tóibín has bridged this cultural gap and given the English-speaking world a great portrait of Mann and his family, bringing them alive with a fast-moving narrative, dramatic scenes, snappy dialogue and a dash of poetic licence. •

The post The Magician’s many guises appeared first on Inside Story.

But the typewriter’s appeal for children isn’t surprising. The journey from fingers to printed text is direct, the type appearing on paper before your eyes as you compose. When it works smoothly, the writer can feel in full control, from idea to tangible text. There’s no waiting for a printer to finish the task.

In his new book, The Typewriter Century, Sydney historian Martyn Lyons reckons that this machine shaped how we write from the 1880s up to the mid 1980s, when the word processor established its superior claims. He marks this neat century with photographs of a Remington No. 1, the model bought by Mark Twain out of curiosity in 1875, and of Len Deighton in his London flat, hemmed in by a massive IBM word processor, in 1968. Twain “wrote” Life on the Mississippi by dictating to a typist, and Deighton called in the services of an operator for the IBM.

Lyons begins with a fascinating overview of the typewriter’s development, detailing many of the technical difficulties overcome along the way. Of the various people with claims to be its inventor, he gives most credit to Christopher Sholes, whose ideas were incorporated into that Remington No. 1, which came encased in a wooden cabinet with a foot treadle for returning the carriage.

Lyons soon moves from the typewriter’s technical development to its role in changing how fiction, especially popular fiction, was created in the early twentieth century. While literary writers like Twain and Henry James quickly adopted the typewriter as a way of easing the process to publication — dictating to stenographers who transformed their work into legible copy for publishers — the typewriter also made possible a commercialised form of writing, with a new generation of writers learning to type as part of their work in offices or newspapers. Some successful popular writers even replicated the office hierarchy, with several “typewriter girls” at hand to process their work. The task quickly became gendered.

Along with a rising mass literacy, the typewriter made possible the “pulp fiction” phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s, when writers like Georges Simenon, Erle Stanley Gardner and the Australian Gordon Bleeck could bash out a new novel in less than a week, selling them for a few pence on the railway stands. Some, like Simenon, were so prolific that they wrote under several pseudonyms to avoid flooding their own markets. Gardner referred to himself as the Fiction Factory. These writers made money by the sheer quantity of what they produced, not its quality, though both Simenon and Gardner longed for some literary recognition. André Gide thought Simenon a “great novelist” but his literary reputation was largely posthumous.

When he examines individual relationships with the typewriter, Lyons finds a range of responses. Some authors were worried by the “distancing” effect they felt when composing by machine. Rather than the intimate, physical experience of pen on paper, the typewriter transformed thought into impersonal, standardised print. Some authors who dictated their words were surprised by the impassive responses of stenographers trained to concentrate on the words rather than their meaning. James, for example, was disappointed when his most frightening passages in the Turn of the Screw made no impression on the demeanour of his typist. Others felt that the presence of the typist disrupted the privacy of composition, making them self-conscious about their creativity and alienated from their own work.

Many, of course, quickly went back to handwriting their first draft, creating a further distancing by handing copy to a typist. John le Carré replicated the elaborate office procedure of the civil service, where he had trained, by writing each draft in different coloured ink before passing it to his wife to type on different coloured papers. He then revised the typed text by hand in the appropriate coloured pen before handing it back to his wife for a further complete draft.

This process could continue for thirteen drafts, as for The Tailor of Panama, and must have slowed the process down rather than hastening it. Le Carré may have resisted acquiring a word processor, but his wife no doubt appreciated its arrival.

Writers trained in typewriter skills appear to have been more likely to develop what Lyons calls a “romantic” relationship to the typewriter, seeing it as an extension of their bodies and even a source of inspiration. The film cliché of the writer ripping paper from the typewriter, scrunching it up and throwing it on the floor appears to have no place in real life. Jack Kerouac, of course, is the archetypal romantic typist, but others, including Enid Blyton, felt freed by the responsive movement of the typewriter.

The Typewriter Century, with its amusing stories about the practices of many writers, is based on wide archival research. But it can hardly be exhaustive given the writing multitudes who have typed their way through the century. As the book progresses Lyons concentrates in detail on the typewriting careers of a handful of popular writers who could not have been so prolific without the machine: Simenon, Gardner, Agatha Christie, Richmal Crompton and Enid Blyton. This allows him to give some sense of the processes and self-mythologies of the writers. Simenon promoted himself as a speed typist, and Gardner became successful enough to supervise banks of female typists to produce his work. Christie, Crompton and Blyton professed to fit their writing around domestic routines — Christie is photographed sitting in a dining chair while she types on a drop-sided dining table.

All of these writers knew they were addressing distinct markets and the typewriter was the essential tool for them to meet their readers’ appetites for more of the same. The effect of the machine on literary writers raises more complex considerations. Lyons speculates that Ernest Hemingway’s newspaper experience, including the necessary typewriter, influenced his notoriously succinct and direct writing style. Yet there are examples of typewriter prolixity — perhaps those long and exuberant novels by Christina Stead and Miles Franklin were encouraged by their familiarity with the typewriter as office workers. The shift to dictation, too, must surely have influenced the writing style of James’s masterly later novels, or Twain’s later books. As Lyons concludes, “There is no single answer to the question, what was the impact of the typewriter?”

The book does invite readers to consider how their own favourite writers adapted to the typewriter. An obvious Australian example would be Joseph Furphy, the foundry worker who bought a typewriter in 1897 and revised the manuscript of Such Is Life himself. Scholars are often excited by handwritten manuscripts, as if they offer immediate contact with a revered writer; despite its visual anonymity, though, the typescript may be just as direct a product of a writer’s thoughts.

Readers of The Typewriter Century are likely to reflect on their own writing practices, too. The computer turned writing into a rather mechanical function called “word processing,” but its advantages as an editing tool were obvious and quickly embraced. It may be that it has encouraged different kinds of creative thinking and Lyons cites several writers, such as Cormac McCarthy, who resist it. The typewriter still has its uses, even if it is simply to avoid the distraction of the internet, as Zadie Smith says.

My ten-year-old granddaughter wrote her first film script on the second-hand Olivetti she was given for Christmas, but in the long run she found the keys too hard to press and the ribbon change too difficult. The laptop looks like winning out. •

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Writing The Second Sex (1949), one of the most influential feminist texts of the twentieth century, would have been enough to ensure her place in history, but Beauvoir was also a prize-winning novelist, a superb memoirist and a brilliant philosopher (though she stopped short of calling herself one). The life she led — almost satirically French bohemian, for better and for worse — has inspired a plethora of biographies and trips to Paris. And, since her death in 1986, interest in her life and work has eclipsed the attention received by her long-time partner, philosopher Jean Paul-Sartre.

Evidence of Beauvoir’s influence is everywhere, including in the life-writing of Deborah Levy, who provides the sparkling introduction to the English edition of The Inseparables, and in Lauren Elkin’s skilful translation and illuminating translator’s note. They provide enticing preludes, but it’s best to read them afterwards and instead dive right in. Beauvoir completists will already be familiar with the friendship that inspired the novella, while readers with no pre-existing knowledge will lose nothing if they catch up on the real-life details afterwards.

For the purposes of this review, some basics will suffice. Beauvoir and Elisabeth Lacoin, affectionately known as Zaza, met as precocious Parisian schoolgirls. From their first encounter until Zaza’s tragically premature death in 1929 to a sudden illness, just as she was about to turn twenty-two, they shared a deeply felt but lopsided friendship, with Beauvoir the most devoted of the pair. The Inseparables is not her first or only attempt to capture this formative connection — most memorably in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958) — but it is her most distilled, vivid and elegiac.

All of Beauvoir’s fiction, like her philosophy, was inspired by life, and so it is here. In this radiant novella, anticipating so-called “auto-fiction” by decades, she fuses the craft of fiction with the force of lived experience and an abiding existential commitment to freedom.

Divided into two parts, The Inseparables traces the friendship between Sylvie (Beauvoir) and Andrée (Lacoin) from their years of Catholic schooling through to their time at the Sorbonne, where Andrée chooses to study literature and Sylvie philosophy. It’s Sylvie’s perspective and world that readers are inducted into, but swiftly it is Andrée, a confident new arrival with an intense gaze and an arresting explanation for her diminutive stature (“I got burned alive”), who becomes the main story.

Or rather, it is the story of Sylvie in relation to Andrée. In meeting Andrée, Sylvie’s young life properly begins, a realisation that hits her first with force — “Life without her would be death” — then very soon after with the bittersweet sense that Andrée does not, or cannot, reciprocate in kind. For all her evident singularity, and no matter their status at school as “the inseparables,” Andrée is too deeply ensconced in her large upper-class Catholic family, and especially devoted to her formidable mother Madame Gallard.

This inaugurating imbalance is never quite overcome, but it is also part of the making of Sylvie. “No, our friendship was not as important to Andrée as it was to me, but I admired her too much to suffer from it.”

Sylvie grows into her resolution, but with her desire to know and be known by Andrée, some suffering is inevitable. At midpoint in the novella and in their friendship, Sylvie is stricken to hear Andrée declare that a summer boyfriend “was the only person in the world who loved me exactly as I was, and because I was myself.” “What about me?” she asks. Emboldened by alcohol, Sylvie declares her devotion, “the kinds of things you say only in books.”

Through Andrée’s bemused reaction we learn more about Sylvie, as well as the mysteries that sit at the heart of intimate human relationships. And yes, there’s an erotic undertow, but it remains inchoate. Sylvie is not so much jealous of Andrée’s “non-platonic kisses” with others as struck by what they give Andrée access to. “Well informed” about sex, Sylvie professes that her body “had dreamed its dreams,” but there was a “passageway between the heart and the body that remained a mystery” to her.

Sylvie’s maturity is marked in other ways. She comes to understand her family’s downward mobility as a kind of liberation — “I was obliged to go out and work; the problems that tormented Andrée didn’t concern me.” Early on, Sylvie abandons God, though it’s her continuing respect for “Christian morality” that draws her to her first university friend, the brilliant Pascal Blondel (based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who would go on to become the leading philosopher of phenomenology). Blondel is affectionately depicted by Beauvoir as a serious-minded, but intensely loving and lovable young man, and when Andrée and Pascal fall in love, Sylvie is “not jealous” and instead marvels at how her friends ripen into better versions of themselves.

The joys and tragedies of the second half of The Inseparables orbit around the love affair of Andrée and Pascal, but while the plot resembles melodrama, its execution is an exquisite meditation on the costs of societal constraints on human freedom — especially that of young women. That Andrée was raised to make a good marriage on her family’s terms is presented as her doom, but there is deep loss for Sylvie too. When she sees Andrée cry for the first time, Sylvie wants “to take her hand, make some gesture, but I was imprisoned by our strict upbringing and I didn’t make a move.”

Apparently not published in her lifetime because Beauvoir felt the book too “intimate,” The Inseparables is far more than an abandoned curiosity. The novella firmly belongs in the precious canon of fiction about female friendship, most recently perfected by Elena Ferrante. Above all, in The Inseparables Beauvoir honours her first impressions of her first true love: “Secretly I thought to myself that Andrée was one of those prodigies about whom, later on, books would be written.” •

The Inseparables
By Simone de Beauvoir | Translated by Lauren Elkin | Vintage Classics | $24.99 | 176 pages

The post Self and Other appeared first on Inside Story.

The Clarence River ran behind the ferryman’s house where the Mears family lived, and as a child Gillian had wanted it to flood like the photos in the museum, with kangaroos sitting on the roof of the pub. Extremity, wildness, she wanted it all. And also a sanctuary from which to watch. She was a shy girl, watchful, taking everything in — and vulnerable as the dark pressed in on her.

Which it did. Nothing was easy with Yvonne, with love and submission, admiration and rivalry entangled from the start. And her mother was disappointed that she chose to ride when she had other talents — the flute for instance, couldn’t she give her time to that? The sisters’ “messiness and horsiness” saddened her, Gillian would later say, and the sanctuary of the mother evaporated, or seemed to, as Sheila Mears “retreated” from her daughters.

Hanging over everything Gillian went on to write would be the shadow of sibling jealousy and of the disappointed, troubled mother who would die of cancer, at fifty-five, in 1991. Gillian Mears was twenty-seven by then, and had already published two collections of short stories and a novel. Ride a Cock Horse (1988) had won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book (Southeast Asia and South Pacific Region). Sheila Mears lived to see her horsy daughter’s success as a writer, but not to see her stricken — as her own father had been — by the multiple sclerosis that made its dark appearance during Gillian’s thirties.

Death, the perils and fragility of life, its fleeting quality, had been with Gillian from an early age. Her childhood had ended a decade earlier, she would say, when her river-riding friend Sandra Watkins and her brother were shot in 1980 by their mother. A murder-suicide, another haunting that Gillian would write about obsessively in her diary and in her early stories. The dread that existed alongside exhilaration. How was she to live without succumbing to one and losing the other?

In her final year of school she determined on a path that would be subversive, embracing life in all its aspects, refusing society’s norms and rules. She would be herself, “ME myself… completely.” She then began an affair with her much older high school English teacher, and four years later would marry him. For a young woman determined against “lamb-chopdom,” the short-term sanctuary of marriage proved a long-term stifling as she found herself up against the conundrum of what that ME might be. That wild, mercurial self; those many selves wrapped up in the person of Gillian Mears. “One of the most important Australian female writers of the last forty years,” Bernadette Brennan calls her.

And there she is on the cover of Brennan’s excellent new biography, Leaping into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears. That wide smile that drew so many people to her, the open face, the loose hair, the eyes partly closed against the light.

The metaphor of the title’s waterfall comes from Gillian Mears, of course. She loved the rush of water, the temptation to leap, and it was a terrible day when the MS made even a dip impossible. When she dreamed of waterfalls, the allure of the water, she’d be woken by the terror of going over into the “maelstrom of change,” knowing that the longing to leap, leaving “the safety of the little upper river shallows” could ultimately mean “courting death.”

I first encountered Gillian Mears when she arrived as a student at the University of Technology Sydney in 1983. I was on the creative writing staff, and that year saw a remarkable intake of talent that none of us will easily forget. (Nor will we forget the sense of alarm as we tried to figure out how to engage them and keep their interest, how to stretch ourselves to keep abreast, and possibly also teach them something.)

Even among that talent, she stood out. She rarely spoke in class, and yet hers was a dominant presence. How many nineteen-year-olds (when pressed) tell you the writers they intend to equal are Randolph Stow and Carson McCullers? And afterwards, after she had graduated and I had left, I worked as an editor on her novel The Grass Sister; we became friends and would spend time together when in the same city. I was in Paris briefly when she was at the Australia Council’s Keesing Studio, and according to Brennan’s biography, she remembered me showing her “how to see Cézanne.” My memory is of seeing some early Kandinsky semi-abstract Impressions with her, those blue leaping horses, and understanding (at last) the exhilaration of the rider as a metaphor for the artist: that surge of energy, its rhythm and its timing.

All this by way of declaring an interest. I get a few mentions in the book, which might have eliminated me from writing this essay, but I am glad it did not. If anything, it has made the task harder. I thought I knew Gillian Mears well, if intermittently, but reading Leaping into Waterfalls I realise how little I really knew. How little she let herself be known. Enigmatic, yes, and also shapeshifting. She was selective in the selves she allowed to be known, and she was convincing in their fullness. I knew one or two of those selves, or maybe three or four, and such was her power that I took them to be more. The little I knew her, and all that I did not know — or knew only in a tidied-up version (that wasn’t that tidy) — has made me all the more aware of the challenge Bernadette Brennan faced — and her achievement.

Leaping into Waterfalls is Brennan’s second biography of a writer. A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work was published in 2017. While Garner, like Mears, is a writer whose personal and fictional worlds meld, Brennan’s book about her — as is clear from the title — stays largely within the bounds of “literary biography,” with the emphasis on a critical reading of the work. It was deservedly well received. While her “primary intention” with this next biography is to celebrate Mears’s work, and her critical eye is beautifully evident, Leaping into Waterfalls is a leap into the rocky waters of biography — into the life narrative of a brilliant, complicated writer within, through and beyond the work.

Gillian Mears left a large archive of diaries and letters, which went in batches to the State Library of New South Wales when she needed money (which was often). After the diagnosis of MS, she annotated the archive — a “careful archaeology” — with notes addressed to her biographer. She didn’t know who it would be — she only met Bernadette Brennan once — but she knew there’d be one. She put a lot of effort, Brennan writes, into “steering curious eyes, emphasising some pathways, and obscuring others.” Pages have been removed from the diaries that had accompanied her since the death of her friend Sandra Watkins. Her “need to understand herself was one of the central forces of her imaginative life,” Brennan writes, and she knew her diaries would be a prime source. Could the diaries be trusted, she asks rhetorically. Yes, she writes, as diaries. As one lens among many through which to view the enigmatic Gillian Mears.

Mears was also a prodigious letter writer; “a form of flirtation” she called it. Very few could resist her, and it was a joy to see her handwriting on an envelope in the mailbox back in the days when such pleasures existed. (She took to email, of course, but it was never the same, and she kept up the letters until very near the end.) She initiated many of these correspondences with “paper friends” who came to include Gerald Murnane, Helen Garner, Kate Grenville and David Malouf, as well as Bruce Pascoe (who published her first short stories) and Ivor Indyk (who published her brilliant late essay-story, “Alive in Ant and Bee”). Elizabeth Jolley was one of the few established writers who resisted her overtures, but even she eventually succumbed. We were, I think, a small corner of those upper river shallows where she could go for safety (or at least endorsement as a writer).

And then there were the letters, so many of them, that she wrote to her lovers, her family and the friends of her generation. Letters of love, letters of jealousy, letters written in conflict and crisis when a sister or friend felt betrayed by something in her fiction, or as a love affair crashed into the water. After the short-lived marriage to her English teacher, Gillian’s passions became as wild and wayward as the rest of her life. Her “sensuality and sexuality,” Brennan writes, “were at the core of her identity and her exploration of each informs all her writing. She could strip herself bare, both metaphorically and in a later essay accompanied by a Vincent Long photo, literally.” (The photo of her painfully thin, lying naked with her walking stick, is among the many included in the book.)

Writing was, for Gillian, an arena of both risk and sanctuary. It was a reckoning, a necessary process of understanding — and transformation. But in stripping herself, she could also strip others, and when she did, to those who knew, she could appear — and be — indifferent, harsh, even cruel.

Pity the lovers and siblings of writers. Nabokov’s “great deceivers,” Janet Malcolm’s “burglars,” writers are by nature, Gillian would say, spies and eavesdroppers. Those who knew and loved her, ­or had loved her,­ had reason to feel the sting of exposure. And from their perspective it didn’t help that she spoke of her fiction as her own “peculiar” form of autobiography. Brennan amends this to “heavily autobiographical while simultaneously standing apart from her life story.” It was the standing apart, that mysterious process of fictional transformation, that made Mears the writer she was. The challenge for her biographer — as with the biographers of all (or most) writers — is how to weave a narrative through those complex entanglements to comprehend the life in all its messy contingencies — and its transformation in that “apartness” of the fiction.

It was a task made harder because, while Gillian died in 2016 at the age of fifty-one, most of those whose stories intersect with hers are well alive. When Bernadette Brennan approached her once-lovers, there’d be admissions of “heightened anxiety, even sleeplessness,” before meeting her. More stories, more versions, more justifications, more obfuscations. She takes her task as biographer to be one of listening; not judging or pleading but understanding the case of Gillian Mears.

And as biographer, Brennan makes few, if any, overt comments — even about some of the most dreadful moments. When the MS has Gillian (often literally) on her knees, she falls in with an ex-junkie, macrobiotic “healer” — a lover who is certain the “malady” is one of unresolved spiritual conflict. At his isolated farm, she deteriorates, dragging herself across the floor and through the mud, and still the healer-lover misses the heart inflammation that would have killed her if he hadn’t got her to hospital literally at the last moment. She was flown to Sydney, and I was one of those who visited her in the Prince of Wales hospital after the open-heart surgery.

It wasn’t the only degradation Gillian put herself through rather than succumb to the diagnosis and treatments offered by medical orthodoxy. Another “miracle cure” was conducted at the top of a mountain (in Venezuela) that she had to crawl up. And still Brennan resists interjecting, letting the narrative do its work, gathering rhythm and pace, holding steady the varied lenses, to bring us to a place of powerful (and sometimes painful) understanding.

In a deft move, Leaping into Waterfalls repositions Gillian Mears’s distrust of medical authority as part of the radical uncertainties she gave voice to in her fiction — as a migrant, a bisexual, an erotic adventurer and — in yet another paradox — a cosmopolitan who preferred to dwell close to the soil. Tents, caravans and huts from which she could see the sun rise meant more to her than even a Paris studio. And as with so much else in her life, her hope, her belief in other ways of being, linked her own bodily ailment to the psychic and spiritual disorder of the society, the culture, the polity in which she lived.

When she finally accepted the “fate,” the reality of MS, she turned to herself, to the repository of courage that had always been there, and to solitude as another form of sanctuary. While it was still, just, possible, she took off alone in an old, converted ambulance — Ant and Bee — set up so that she could live out in the bush for two weeks at a time, writing, feeling the earth beneath her feet, letting herself down into that realm of imagination that could “thrash around in the mud” (as she put it) and remake itself in fiction. Life in Ant and Bee was a last adventure into the (semi) wild before she would be confined to a wheelchair and bed. The waterfall exchanged, in Brennan’s luminous telling, for “the River god of imagination,” the horse for the pen.

Gillian Mears took her last step during the editing of Foal’s Bread (2011), in which she tells the story of a horseracing family whose daughter “leaps into history” when she wins a major jumping competition, only to realise she has alienated her jealous and disappointed mother, unleashing sorrows she was born from. Set before Mears was born, and paying homage to a “now-fading Australian vernacular,” it might seem her least autobiographical novel. And yet, Brennan writes, “the narrative gathers together many of her most precious and abiding concerns” — of a family both riven and bound together, the repetitions of histories, small and large, that can cut across the boldest of individual choices. It is a novel, written long after Gillian had last been helped onto the back of a (pliant and retired) horse, about the power of riding, that connection to the horse and to “something bigger” at that moment when the horse makes the leap, “climbing up and up,”  a jump unlike any other.

Writing of this last novel in words that match Mears’s own, Bernadette Brennan draws together  the paradoxical threads of Mears’s power as a writer, and the brutal loss of bodily capacity. The metaphor of the rider as the artist, that Kandinsky-like surge of energy, is rendered most powerful at a time when that dramatic moment of leap can no longer be lived.

Foal’s Bread won the 2012 Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and among the photos included in the biography is a gorgeous one of Gillian in her wheelchair receiving the award from Julia Gillard. There’s also one of her at the age of thirteen, leaning forward as her horse leaps over a fence of old tyres.

The harsh reality of MS meant that “Mears’s long obsession with death was coupled with her consciousness of what her life might mean,” Brennan writes. Not for her the denial that allows most of us to live as if the inevitable can be endlessly postponed. Death came to Mears step by relentless step as the paralysis that first took her legs continued its march through her body. By 2016 she could barely hold a pen, or swallow. She was facing the full paralysis of quadriplegia with all its tubes and catheters. As an advocate for voluntary euthanasia, and in possession of a vial of Nembutal, she had long decided to take control of her dying. Yet it’s one thing to have the vial, another to find the courage to drink it.

In those last years in her wheelchair, while the top half of her body was still mobile, she learned to dance, most beautifully, as she did at her fiftieth birthday in 2014, a large gathering at Grafton’s Barn, with everyone dancing in celebration of her life. “I want to touch life like the green twig touches the river,” she wrote near the end. While she had “given up on the idea of miracles,” Brennan writes, “she was not quite finished with blessings.”

It wasn’t, of course, quite that easy. But it’s not untrue to say that she did go dancing into that dark night “surrounded by love,” and at a time of her own choosing. In the early hours of the morning of 16 May 2016, she wrote her final goodbyes and then drank the Nembutal, mixed with Bailey’s Irish Cream to temper its ugly taste.

In a final project Gillian asked friends and family and fellow writers to send her fabrics that had meaning, or to sew panels of embroidery, which she made into a quilt that was there on the wall of the Barn at her fiftieth birthday. Her last metaphor, maybe, for the life she’d lived and danced and written. Quilts, waterfalls and safe shallows, horses and their riders. Bernadette Brennan’s gift to Gillian Mears — and to us her readers — is to bring us to that last, inevitable act in life, her death, with luminous clarity. And through it all, the revealed and the concealed, the courage and the abjection, the joyous and the appalling, we end up, with Brennan, liking and respecting — as well as understanding — the enigmatic Gillian Mears.

With Leaping into Waterfalls, Bernadette Brennan is confirmed as one of our finest biographers, to be celebrated not only for this vivid portrayal of a writing life, but for her facility with the art of biography in this complex, contemporary present. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Ricciardi’s study is a curious act of faith, for it assumes we know who Ferrante really is. The Italian investigative journalist Claudio Gatti notoriously identified her as literary translator Anita Raja, and Ricciardi seeks to confirm that view by describing how the Neapolitan saga is an encounter between German and Italian traditions, and reflects Raja’s work as a translator of German literature into Italian.

But whether Ferrante has actually been “found” remains a matter of keen and sometimes bitter controversy. In email interviews, the person who writes under that name has insisted that the novels stand by themselves — that the absence of the author from the public sphere “makes the writing absolutely central.”

Ferrante’s statements about her identity are fraught with anomalies and paradoxes. This very refusal to be identified has become absolutely central to public interest in the novels, and has generated one of the most compelling literary detective stories of our times.

The obsession with finding Ferrante intensified with the publication of the quartet known as the Neapolitan novels (2012–15), the first two of which have been adapted for television as My Brilliant Friend. There is a provocative irony in Ferrante’s creation of a fictional alter ego who is both the narrator and central figure in the chronicle: Elena Greco tells us everything about every aspect of her own life.

In a narrative driven by what she has called a “mania for reality,” Ferrante evokes the fraught social world of the arid outer suburb of Naples in which Elena and her friend Lila spend their childhood, then moves through locations around the city, where a burgeoning intellectual culture provides wider opportunities. The reality-effect of these literary evocations is so powerful it has generated a tourist trade catering to those who want to see and experience the places for themselves.

In a sense, Elena Ferrante is Elena Greco, or vice versa. Lofty authorial statements about trusting the writing are all very well, but the crucial question is one of trust in the story. Does the author belong to these places in the way that Greco does? Has she experienced for herself the murky social and familial tensions that explode with such inevitability? Does the mania for reality hold true if she has not, and if she does not know the constraints of a life lived on the edge of poverty in an environment from which education is a sole and desperate escape route.

These questions burned along the trails of detection as they converged on a well-established Italian literary couple, novelist Domenico Starnone and his wife Anita Raja as likely suspects in the case. Starnone came into focus first, when a team of specialists in “stylometrics,” a form of linguistic fingerprinting, began to observe a strong correlation between his works and those published under the name of Ferrante.

Then, in October 2016, Claudio Gatti claimed his scoop. It was a case of “follow the money,” he said: sudden and otherwise unaccountable increases in Raja’s wealth, including real estate acquisitions, corresponded with the commissioning and release times of the Ferrante novels. Raja works as a translator for Ferrante’s publisher, so the transfer of income streams could be easily managed.

Gatti’s approach was aggressive and prosecutory. He claimed that Raja should be exposed precisely because her own biographical profile, as the daughter of middle-class parents and brought up in Rome, was so different from that of Greco. If there was a “real” story in Raja’s life, he asserted, it was that of her mother, a Polish Jew whose family fled to Italy during the Holocaust.

The exposé, published for anglophone readers in the New York Review, generated outrage among Ferrante devotees who saw it as not only an invasion of Raja’s privacy, but also a gross intrusion into their own intimate relationship with the works.

Raja’s role has been neither acknowledged nor effectively contested. But Ricciardi’s book is an attempt to resolve the question in a different way, bypassing the technicalities of linguistic fingerprinting to delve into the common thematic and literary preoccupations of Ferrante and Raja.

For Ricciardi, the choice of a quotation from Goethe’s Faust as an epigraph for the first novel in the quartet is of the essence, not least because Ferrante makes her own translation of the lines, in which the Lord pronounces on the relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles. Faust is one of those “bold, denying Spirits” whose rebellious energies soon burn themselves out; his counterpart Mephistopheles, who “works, excites, and must create, as Devil,” is the real adversary of divine order.

Taking these two figures to correspond with those of Elena and her “brilliant friend,” the endlessly disruptive Lila, Ferrante’s novels can be seen as a portrayal of feminist rebellion with mythic dimensions. Since Goethe is an important presence in the novels of Christa Wolf, all of which Raja has translated, Ricciardi suggests that this can be taken as a vital indicator.

“Like a cat burglar who cannot refrain from leaving clues at the crime scene,” she writes, Ferrante leaves “a signature that artfully encodes her likely identity as Anita Raja.” To the general reader, that’s a bit of a stretch. Academic enquiry has its own seductions, and it’s easy to overvalue evidence that is gleaned from extended trawls through dense material.

Nevertheless, this bold punt on the authorship question does create the pretext for an account of the Ferrante novels as literary fiction with themes that have been missed because of their addictive qualities as mass-market fiction.

Ricciardi finds complex and unorthodox aspects to the relationship between Elena and Lila. Though both of them experience violence and abuse, Ferrante doesn’t use the vocabulary of trauma or assault. Rather, she seems to take a psychoanalytic perspective by portraying Lila’s episode of breakdown as smarginatura, or “dissolving boundaries.”

Without the boundaries of a self there can be no identity, which is the fundamental challenge of the feminist politics to which Elena becomes committed. Her path as an academic and author enables her to form an identity from elements of masculine heritage, but it leaves her feeling she has been “invented by men” and is still imprisoned by traditions of female subordination.

An anarchic counterpoint to Elena, Lila steers her own working life through rollercoaster transitions. Never afraid to invoke the worst consequences, she nevertheless has a way of changing her own fate, often through the most ruthless of stratagems. In a phase of what seems like wilful self-destruction, she takes employment at the local salami factory, where the work involves standing for hours waist-deep in the mortadella brine. Bearing witness to these conditions in an impromptu address to a gathering of communist protesters, she demonstrates a capacity to transform into a political firebrand but then sidesteps the opportunity.

Ricciardi tracks the storylines against their historical background as both women get caught up in the shifting tides of postwar Italian politics. Here too she finds a strong trail of association with Raja and Christa Wolf, who hold a “similar pessimism” about the fate of Eastern and Western European nations. Raja supplies the critical link between two bodies of fiction in which the struggle of an emergent feminism may inevitably be crushed by ancient forms of patriarchy.

In her determination to see these works as “fiercely intellectual,” Ricciardi sidelines the very qualities that make them compelling for a vast readership. The warmth of the writing, the headlong rush of the prose, the intensely personal tone — none of these seems to belong to a vision that is consciously literary. These are not historical novels, but fictions born of lived history, with all its randomness and confusion.

Here, though, is the paradox at the heart of the novels. Elena Greco lives the life of an intellectual. For all the brutality of the social milieu in which she grew up, she creates an identity for herself through her work as a scholar and writer. Yet her outpourings as a narrator resemble the unmediated confessional of a diary.

There is a duality about Ferrante, whoever she is. Is the writer who responds to interview questions with scattergun references across the canon of literature, from Dante to Proust, Jane Austen to Walter Benjamin, who admits to a deep interest in Freud and a love of innovative cinema, really the same person as the author of the sprawling chronicles of Neapolitan life?

One school of thought is that “she” is indeed two people, and that the novels are a collaboration between Raja and Starnone. Starnone barely rates a mention from Ricciardi, but he is the one with claims to first-hand knowledge of the social turmoil of postwar Naples, and who has form as a virtuoso of the narrative voice. My money is on the two of them. •

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As for me, I haven’t been much of a traveller since lobbing into Australia at the age of nineteen. So I’ve never been to the country at the centre of Leïla Slimani’s latest novel, though I did paint a picture once that, pressed to give it a name, I called “Morocco.” For me the country conjured up everything exotic and romantic in our world, with the movie Casablanca playing no small part.

Imagine, then, what it was like for Slimani’s central character. The Nazis were pushing across Europe, France fell, and at the age of nineteen, Mathilde, a village girl from Alsace, was swept off her feet by a handsome Moroccan corporal in France’s colonial army. And, in a rush of passion, they married before the Germans captured and imprisoned him. Reunited after the war, the couple went to live in his native country. Amine was twenty-eight, his bride just twenty. Now home in Morocco, he grew disenchanted, realising that “what had charmed him while they were still in Europe” was cause for much annoyance. Unlike his mother, Mathilde was frivolous and fiery — given to tears at the slightest provocation. In short, what began for Mathilde as a wildly romantic adventure had turned into what her dour older sister Irène might well have predicted.

Thus the story in The Country of Others is essentially that of a war bride, an all too common tale. For all that, there’s nothing stale or clichéd here. Mathilde and Amine are far from stock characters and, despite their differences and exasperations, Slimani makes us believe that at bottom they’ve never stop loving each other. The author brings unflinching honesty and vitality to her story. All the people we meet are complex, their lives churned on the accelerating waves of Moroccan nationalism in what was then a French colony.

If you wanted to pigeonhole the novel, you could say it’s a book about miscegenation — these days an old-fashioned and creepy word, but incendiary at the time. And there’s more to it than might first meet the reader’s eye. For this is a remarkable book by a writer who is the product of mixed parentage herself and, at the age of thirty-nine, has secured a special place for herself in French arts and letters.

Slimani won the Prix Goncourt in 2016 for her novel Lullaby (Chanson douce in French) based on the case of a Manhattan nanny convicted of killing her charges. Her first novel Adèle (Dans le jardin de l’ogre), inspired by the rape charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn that scotched his ambition for the French presidency, is about a woman whose sex addiction plays havoc with her life. For this novel she has drawn on her own French-Moroccan family, with The Country of Others (Le pays des autres), the first volume of a trilogy, centred on the life of her maternal grandmother, Anne Dhob, the woman we come to know as Mathilde. The second volume will deal with her mother, whom we meet as the girl Aïcha in this one, while the third will be autobiographical.

Before devoting herself to fiction, Slimani worked as an actor and a journalist. She has, in addition, published two books of non-fiction — Sex and Lies (Sexe et mensonges: La vie sexuelle au Maroc) was compiled from interviews with Moroccan women; another, La baie de Dakhla, examines the transition to modernity in Morocco’s Dakhla region — and a graphic novel, Paroles d’honneur, which appeared in 2017. To cap it all, president Emmanuel Macron offered her the ministry of culture, which she refused, believing — quite plausibly — that it would take her away from her writing. Macron has instead appointed her his personal representative to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.

Coming as it does with glowing recommendations from Claire Messud and Salman Rushdie, The Country of Others lives up to expectations. We have the incongruous match between the tall, fair, green-eyed, lustful Alsatian woman and her dark Moroccan lover, a full head shorter. We follow Amine’s struggle to wrest a living and establish a modern farm from the patch of stony land bequeathed to him by his long-dead father. We have Mathilde’s difficult adjustments as a foreigner, ignorant of her husband’s language and culture, a puzzle to his family, and a pariah in the eyes of the French community. Seven months pregnant with Aïcha and happening on the French quarter in nearby Meknes, she is subjected to the casual humiliation characteristically deployed by bigoted colonials.

“Just then, two young women pushed past her,” Slimani writes. “The dark-haired one started laughing: ‘Look at her. She’s pregnant by an Arab!’ Mathilde turned around and grabbed the woman’s sleeve, but she yanked it free. If it hadn’t been for her big belly and the oppressive heat, Mathilde would have gone after her. She would have stuffed those words back down her throat.”

In letters to her sister Mathilde glosses over her outcast state, along with everything else she is enduring. Too proud to own up to her misery, not to mention the shame, she ramps up the country’s exoticism instead. In any case, Slimani writes, “She would have needed new words, a whole vocabulary, freed of the past” to express the deep ambivalence of her feelings.

Despite such unpromising beginnings, Mathilde finds her place in Morocco. But her story forms only a thread of a larger story, peopled with a cast of humanely drawn characters. All along the novel’s accumulating plot they are rushed towards Morocco’s independence in 1956. Slimani handles this with consummate skill, carrying the reader into the struggle with neither didacticism nor strain. In a powerful but nuanced way The Country of Others, as the title subtly suggests, is a plea for humanity, whatever colour it comes in, and heralds a future when rigid and outdated twentieth-century notions about race and ethnicity are finally dismantled, though Slimani is clear-eyed about the concomitant pain.

One last word, about the prose. This Faber edition of The Country of Others is of course a work in translation. Still, reading it in English has its own rewards, and for that, much credit is due to Sam Taylor. Taylor, a novelist himself, also translated Slimani’s Adèle and Lullaby. •

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Many people have been reminded of that novel — or the film version starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner — in the depths of the pandemic lockdowns. Despite the quip that Melbourne was “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world,” falsely attributed to Gardner, the British-born Shute showed great affection for the city, and indeed for Australia as whole.

This bestselling British author had upped sticks and moved to Australia in 1950, and would spend the last decade of his life on a property southeast of Melbourne. Starting that year with A Town Like Alice, his immensely popular books portrayed Australia as a sunny land of opportunity — and plentiful steak and eggs — contrasted with a tightly rationed Britain in the grip of complacent civil servants and envy-ridden politicians. They helped fuel the surge of “ten-pound Poms” taking up the Australian government’s offer of assisted migration. When Shute died in 1960, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran an editorial declaring that “this country has lost one of its greatest friends and propagandists.”

And so, when a reporting trip recently took me to Queensland, I decided to look at the unlikely place where this infatuation began: the country on the southern shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria. From November 1948 until January the following year, Shute and his friend James Riddell toured this region in a light aircraft they’d flown out from Britain. In those days, cut off during the three-month “wet” and baked dry for the rest of the year, the region’s human population counted in the hundreds.

At Normanton, not far inland, Shute and Riddell met pastoralist Jim Edwards, who had been a prisoner of war working on the Burma railway. For filching food from the Japanese, he’d been tied with wire to a tree for three days and bashed with rifle butts. He became the model for A Town Like Alice’s Joe Harman, the archetypal Australian bushman, laconic and true, played by Peter Finch in the 1956 film of the book and by Bryan Brown in the 1981 miniseries.

Immensely popular: Nevil Shute in London in 1953. Picture Post/Getty Images

Shute had also come across the story of a group of Dutch women and children who had been shunted around Sumatra for three years by the Japanese. He made them the novel’s English families, marched around Malaya by perplexed guards, with a Malay-speaking planter’s daughter, Jean Paget, assuming leadership. Barefoot, sarong-clad and, like all of Shute’s heroines, wise beyond her years, she was played by Virginia McKenna in the film and Helen Morse in the miniseries.

Shute joined his storylines in occupied Malaya, when Joe Harman, driving a truck for the Japanese, steals his commandant’s chickens to feed Paget’s group. He is caught, nailed through the hands to a post and left to die. Although he is rescued, he only learns much later that Paget and her group survived — and, moreover, that she was Miss Paget, not Mrs as he’d assumed.

Back running a cattle lease in the Gulf, Joe scores a modest lottery win and sets off to London to track her down. Meanwhile, Jean, now a secretary in a London leather-goods firm, has come into an inheritance (another favourite Shute plot device) and goes back to Malaya to repay the villagers who sheltered her group. Having learned that Joe had survived, she travels on to Australia to find him, first to Alice Springs and then to “Willstown,” where he now works.

After many crossed wires the pair meet in Cairns. Joe is somewhat awed by the smart English lady Jean has become, but the ice is finally broken on Green Island in the Great Barrier Reef when Jean dresses in her old sarong. Though the gates of passion open, they agree to wait until they are married.

Shute’s love affairs were always chaste until marriage. He boycotted the premiere of On the Beach because its director, Stanley Kramer, had the US nuclear submarine commander, played by Peck, consummate his relationship with his Australian friend, played by Gardner, instead of staying loyal to his wife, presumed dead in America.

Leaving Cairns and Green Island, Joe and Jean return to “Willstown,” where Jean sets out to revive the old mining town and make it “a town like Alice.” Her scheme is to set up a shoe-making factory using the handy local supply of crocodile skins and employing girls who would otherwise head for the big cities. With a supply of young white women enticed further by a new ice-cream parlour, open-air cinema and hair salon, young white men also throng to Willstown. Soon new houses are going up on abandoned lots and the footpaths are full of prams.

To get to the original of that fictionalised place, I take the Trans North bus from Cairns to Normanton, then rent a four-wheel drive with a strong bull bar for a 230-kilometre journey along Australia’s national Highway 1, hereabouts called the Savannah Way. If you follow for the next 13,000 kilometres, as a lot of grey nomads do, it will take you around the edge of Australia and bring you back to the same place.

Highway 1 is sealed by the Queensland state government from Cairns to Normanton. But from there to the Northern Territory border, about 700 kilometres, it is left to the two local shires to maintain, a task clearly beyond the means of their few hundred ratepayers. Strips of bitumen alternate with gravel and dried mud, though most of the frequent wet-season floodways have concrete paving. The trees are stunted except along creek beds, ant hills are ranked like tombstones, a wedge-tailed eagle gorges on the carcass of one of the wallabies lying dead by the road.

Before reaching the river named after the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, who traversed this country in the 1840s, I turn onto a dirt track and come to a lonely monument marking the northernmost camp of Burke and Wills in their hubristic attempt to make the first south–north crossing of Australia. Across the Leichhardt, I come to a strip of sealed road that leads into Burketown, the none-too-hidden model for Willstown.

Even after seventy years, it hasn’t become a town anything like Alice. The population is just 176, with 152 more in the surrounding 40,000 square kilometres of Burke Shire — not counting the temporary residents of its Century nickel mine, the dry-season tourists, or the 1200 or so people of the Aboriginal shire of Doomadgee, to the west.

Still, it’s a great improvement on the town Shute would have seen. For one thing it has trees, thanks to a permanent water supply from a spring-fed river up-country, and a central grassy park with sprinklers pumping away. The Commonwealth Hotel, where Shute would have stayed, burnt down in 1954; in its place is the Savannah Lodge, with cabins set among thick greenery around a Southeast Asian–style open-sided lounge.

When I phone him the next morning, Burketown’s mayor, Ernie Camp, is out on his horse somewhere on his cattle spread. He tells me that when he was a small boy in the 1960s conditions were still primitive. “If you wanted a power supply you had to generate your own, or use carbide or kerosene lamps.” No roads were sealed, he says, and there was a single telephone line. “You could wait up to three days to get a telephone call out.”

As in most towns across Australia with significant Indigenous populations, the local Aboriginal people lived in shanty settlements out of sight. “I can remember coming into Burketown as a kid and seeing a complex of buildings just outside town,” Camp says. “Most people referred to it as a compound.” The only Aboriginal people in Shute’s novel are out on the cattle stations, as stockmen or as domestic servants in the homesteads, speaking broken English, subservient, and bearing offensive joke names like Bournville and Palmolive.

“People here were pretty much enslaved out on stations,” community leader Murrandoo Yanner tells me later that day at the offices of the Carpentaria Aboriginal Land Council. “They used to pay the mob in opium. Then they switched to paying us in tobacco, flour, sugar and tea, and one uniform a year. You got a pair of boots, a hat, and pastoral clothes.”

Murrandoo Yanner, who assumed community leadership after the death of his father Philip in 1991. Anna Rogers/Newspix

“We were all out on the fringes, on reserves on the edge of town,” recalls Yanner, whose first name means “whirlwind” or “waterspout” and replaces the “Jayson” he was first given.

His great-grandmother brought her children into Burketown after a massacre of Aborigines, including her husband, by police and pastoralists early last century. This was not the last clash: only five years before Shute’s visit, on Bentinck Island some forty kilometres from Burketown, spear-wielding Aborigines confronted a launch carrying Australian air force radar technicians from Mornington Island. They thought that the men, who had stopped for water on their way to Burketown, were about to abuse their women like a previous army survey team had done. One Aboriginal man was shot dead.

“It was worse than Soweto,” Yanner says of the fringe camp. “No water, no sewerage, you had to walk kilometres to get your water in buckets. Pit toilets, housing just tin shacks. People used to live off the land basically, aside from the rations they used to drop off. People controlling the rations would often rort that, keep half of it and sell it on the sly in the black market to their white mates.”

Shute didn’t show us this side of his Willstown, though he has entrepreneurial Jean Paget set up a separate space for Aboriginal customers in her ice-cream parlour, with an Aboriginal girl serving. Throughout A Town Like Alice, he used pejorative white Australian terms — “boongs” or “Abos” — while showing surprising understanding and respect for Malays and even putting some of the Japanese guards in a sympathetic light. The Aboriginal locals were just part of the background.

Shute was not outstandingly racist for his times. In an earlier novel, The Chequer Board (1947), he explored two examples of interracial marriage, a Black GI to an English girl, an English airman to a Burmese woman. In another of his Australian novels, Beyond the Black Stump (1956), he lampoons an American family for their appalled reaction when his Australian heroine mentions that her pastoralist father had fathered several children with an Aboriginal woman before her white mother arrived on the scene.

In a second novel derived from his time in the Gulf country, the weird and largely forgotten In the Wet (1953), he has a baby born to a Scottish stockman and his “half-caste” wife rising to become squadron leader David Anderson in the Royal Australian Air Force three decades later.

In the Wet’s picture of Britain in the imagined 1983 is grim, with rationing continuing under a miserable Labour government and pasty-faced people shuffling in bus queues. The white “dominions” are forging ahead, meanwhile, with the populations of Australia and Canada growing to near parity with Britain. Their dynamism is thanks to a modification of democracy, started in Australia, whereby one person, one vote is augmented by extra votes for having a university degree, overseas experience, raising two children to fourteen without getting a divorce, earning more than £5000 a year, being active in church, or being rewarded by royal decree.

As British prime minister Iorwerth Jones tightens the purse strings on the royal family, the Australian and Canadian governments, royalist to their bootstraps, each chip in a fully crewed jet airliner of the latest design (somehow this miserable Britain is still making advanced aircraft) for the Queen’s Flight regiment. When Anderson is tapped to fly the RAAF’s royal airliner, he asks if his race might be a problem. After all, he is a “quadroon” and commonly known as “Nigger” Anderson among his mates. Not at all, you just look a bit tanned, says Group Captain Cox, the Queen’s Flight commander. “We aren’t asking you to marry into the Royal Family.”

The dominions’ gesture only makes things worse for the royals. They secretly leave Britain aboard the two aircraft, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip travelling to Canberra in a jet piloted by Anderson and installing themselves at the vice-regal residence, while Prince Charles and Princess Anne disperse to Canada and Kenya. Her Majesty then appoints a tough army general, risen from the ranks, as governor-general of Britain.

Anderson meanwhile marries a Buckingham Palace secretary (another example of Shute’s stock heroine, a wise but intrepid young woman) who travels out with the Queen. She has checked out the possibility of a “throwback” baby, and been assured this could only happen if she too had non-European ancestry. On the flight out to Australia, it is Anderson who discovers a bomb in the cargo bay. “He was one quarter Aboriginal,” writes Shute, “not wholly of European stock, and in some directions his perceptions and his sensibilities were stronger than in ordinary men.” A 1970s movie version would have had a didgeridoo playing at this point.

In the Wet is the most bitter expression of Shute’s hatred of Clement Atlee’s Labour government and the welfare state bureaucracy he left behind. His autobiography, Slide Rule (1954), about his earlier career as an aircraft engineer, helps explain that hostility. During 1924–30 Shute had helped build a prototype airship, the British answer to Germany’s zeppelins, which made a successful flight to Canada. The rival public sector project, lavished with funding, crashed on its maiden voyage to India, with great loss of life.

Shute then founded his own aircraft company, Airspeed, and much of the book is about his struggle to raise capital. Government and banks were hopeless, he found, and the best source of funds was people with inherited wealth — the class found on the hunting field, the Cresta Run, the horse races and the yachting events. But they, he believed, were being taxed out of existence.

Tax was hitting Shute hard too. Having sold his shares in Airspeed for £3 million, and with his novels selling more than 100,000 copies in their first print runs and film deals starting to come in, he was a very wealthy man when he turned to full-time writing after spending the war thinking up fanciful weapons for the Royal Navy. By 1950, when he departed Britain, the top marginal tax rate was nineteen shillings and sixpence in the pound, or 97.5 per cent. Australia’s top rate was a less confiscatory 67 per cent.

He and his family settled on a small farm at Langwarrin, on the eastern side of Port Philip Bay, where he turned out more novels about Australia featuring lonely men and women finding each other in times of war or natural disaster, sprinkled with jibes at Atlee’s government and the miseries of postwar Britain.

Alice revisited: Bryan Brown and Helen Morse in Seven’s 1981 version.

While the British public lapped it up — A Town Like Alice sold 1.5 million copies — Shute’s infatuation with his new home country came to irk critics back in London. In Australia, though, there is little evidence that Shute’s portrayal was too cloying. It fed into self-laudatory stereotypes for decades, fuelling the huge popularity of the Seven Network’s 1981 miniseries of A Town Like Alice.

By then, of course, the country had changed in ways Shute couldn’t have envisaged. The exercise of Crown reserve powers in 1975, though not as drastic as the events in In the Wet, made us much more equivocal about the monarchy. The European migrants who figure in The Far Country (1952) had been augmented with Turks, Vietnamese and Lebanese. If he had existed, Squadron Leader (Retired) Anderson might have been joining a claim for his mother’s traditional lands. And Britain, far from being socialist, was getting tough conservative medicine from Margaret Thatcher.

Another forty years later, it’s not just the extra trees that make Burketown different. The 1967 referendum started profound social change, reinforced in economic terms by the 1992 Mabo judgement, for the Gangalidda, Garawa and Waanyi peoples of the region. “It wasn’t always pleasant to upset the status quo,” Yanner tells me. “They were very violent in the upheaval that had to occur — the agitation of the soil to bring new growth.”

I query the use of that word, violent. “The miners, the pastoralists, were applying great levels of violence,” he says. “The police would come and arrest us if we were trying to defend ourselves. We drew a line in the sand and said, ‘What more can you do to us?’ We took it on the chin, went to jail but we stood up for ourselves. Till they realised we wouldn’t take any more pushing and they started to respect us. We were just defending ourselves and our rights, we weren’t attacking them.”

Aged only nineteen, Yanner assumed community leadership after the death of his father Philip in 1991. He was harassed by the Queensland police during agitation for compensation from the big Century open-cut mine southwest of Burketown, then owned by Conzinc Riotinto — events recounted in The Gulf Country, a book by University of Queensland anthropologist Richard Martin, commissioned by Burke Shire.

At one point, the police prosecuted Yanner under an obscure fauna protection law when they found two small crocodiles in his freezer. After a magistrate dismissed the charge, the government of National Party premier Rob Borbidge, who called the High Court judges in the Mabo case “historical dills,” appealed the decision. It went to the High Court, which upheld Yanner’s traditional right to catch crocodiles.

A spate of arson attacks followed. One destroyed Yanner’s house, another the council building. In 2002, someone torched a Coolabah tree on the Albert River blazed by explorer William Landsborough in his 1862 search for Burke and Wills, setting off fears that Aboriginal activists were intent on erasing the legacy of white pioneers.

But by 2015, the 150th anniversary of Burketown’s founding, the Century case had been settled by a court-initiated consent order with the state government. Millions of dollars were already flowing from the mine and the state into Aboriginal welfare and development projects. Large parts of Burketown were transferred to native title, including the town square, residential sites and industrial land, and the town now has an alternative Indigenous name, Moungibi.

Outside town, six pastoral leases came under Aboriginal ownership, making the Gangalidda, Garawa and Waanyi the biggest landowners in the shire. Their commercial arm bought out many of the businesses in Burketown, including the pub, the garage, the airport, the tourism centre and the Savannah Lodge.

The Carpentaria Aboriginal Land Council, from where these holdings are administered, is a kind of alternative government to the Burke Shire Council across the street, and the police and other Queensland government agencies.

“Most of Australia’s going to shit but here’s a place you can leave your key in your car, your house unlocked,” says Yanner. “Zero crime rate, no kids on the street, no mischief. No one beating their missus up, no one causing trouble. If they do, we restrict them access to our services and things and kick them out, because basically there’s dozens of people from less functional communities lining up to get in for their kids’ sake to a good community. We don’t do that with any state or government intervention, and deprivation of people’s rights, we do it ourselves: communally, locally. It’s far better than anything the government’s tried elsewhere.”

Doomadgee, to the west, Borroloola further along Highway 1 in the Northern Territory, and Mornington Island out in the Gulf are larger Aboriginal-majority towns notorious for problems of crime, addiction and poor health — and ineffective government interventions to deal with them. “The government doesn’t listen to the people’s ideas, or try out their ideas,” says Yanner. “They’re all concentration camps from the early days.”

He snorts at the idea of getting Aboriginal recruits into the police. “No, we wouldn’t accept it. They’d be the Jacky-Jackies. They’d be a tracker for them. Just like the old days. The only time Aborigines have been with the police is when you need an Aborigine to catch an Aborigine.”

Two of the shire council’s five members are Aboriginal, and a third is of Philippine descent, and Yanner says relations with the council are now cooperative. Ernie Camp, the mayor, concurs and adds to the account of community self-policing. “Sometimes it might be claimed nobody’s doing their parenting, single-parent families, but on the other hand everybody’s doing the parenting,” he says. “Everybody’s keeping an eye out, and certainly not going backwards in giving a shout-out if a kid may or may not be doing the right thing. It becomes community parenting, I suppose.”

Mutual advantage: Burketown’s mayor, Ernie Camp. Hamish McDonald

It’s not a community without problems, though. Youth suicide is a worry, Camp says, with one recent case involving a twelve-year-old, and social media grips young people who might previously have found solace looking after pet animals. Improving year-round road access would help reduce the sense of isolation, he thinks, as well as having national defence, biosecurity and a host of other benefits.

It still gets a bit fraught when, as mayor, Camp has to make a speech on Australia Day. He likes to use the analogy of a vehicle, with both a rear-vision mirror and a windscreen to look forward. “That’s the way life is, you need to have good vision going forward,” he says. “But we need to reflect on the past, and not to do the things again. It should be part of education to look back on history with no restrictions, and tell all.”

With our interview drawing to a close, Camp mentions how, in the midst of the heated negotiations over native title in the late 1990s, he was deeply touched when his three-year-old daughter wandered off from the family homestead and got lost in the bush. Yanner called and offered to bring out all his people in the search. (The little girl was found unharmed after many hours.) Anthropologist Richard Martin tells me that both sides had come to realise they could make native title and reconciliation work to mutual advantage.

The town now follows an annual cycle of tourism and cattle-raising set by the seasons. The three-month wet season, when the town is cut off by floods much of the time, is a wonderful, peaceful interlude, says Camp. “If you want to walk around naked all day you could — nobody’s going to bother you. Not that I’ve ever done it.” Then comes the annual barramundi festival, around Easter, timed so anglers can drive in from outside with the receding of the wet, but not so late into the cooler months that the big fighting fish has gone into semi-hibernation. Skilled fishers can still coax it to strike at the lure.

As the land dries out, it’s time for mustering the cattle. In September comes the unusual long cylindrical cloud formation known as the “morning glory.” Glider pilots fly their high-tech machines up from all over Australia to use Burketown’s airstrip as a base to ride its thermals.

Meanwhile, says Yanner, the Aboriginal peoples of the region keep up their traditions. “We are the only community in Queensland that still runs full tribal initiations here,” he says, holding an imaginary penis in one hand and bringing the other down in a slicing motion. “No painkillers, antibiotics, all that rubbish, no doctors, just the old days and the whole thing proper.”

The young float between the two cultures — among them Yanner’s son Mangubadijarri (“the barramundi jumping out of the water”), who has been studying law and international relations at Bond University on the Gold Coast and is currently managing the Burketown Pub.

One evening towards the end of my visit I took a “sunset cruise” run by the Aboriginal corporation’s tourism office. At the town jetty, I boarded a large, new steel barge and watched crewman Paddy Kunsing haul in a fine fish. Then we set off along the Albert River, the reddening sky reflected in its still waters.

Fish jumped along the shallows. A small crocodile lay on the mud. The crew broke out bottles of wine and beer, and laid out crackers, cheeses, olives and dips. My fellow tourists were eight well-off retirees on a bespoke tour of the Gulf, Cape York and the Torres Strait. Their pilot came along too, and extolled the capabilities of his aircraft, a Pilatus-12 turboprop with luxury seating that could still land on small, remote airfields.

Nevil Shute would certainly have cheered this aviation bit of the Burketown story. Who knows what he would have thought of Tony Abbott and his knighthoods, but I doubt he’d object to the notion of young Brits coming out to work on Australian farms under the proposed free-trade deal with the United Kingdom. And maybe he’d approve of the reconciliation painfully won in a town smaller but more inclusive than the “town like Alice” he envisaged. •

POSTSCRIPT, MARCH 2026

It was through another contributor, the late Robert Milliken, that I came in contact with Inside Story. Decades ago, Robert and I started as cadets on the Sydney Morning Herald the same day, so we went back a long way. He wrote principally for foreign newspapers and magazines, but also pursued burning interests in Aboriginal affairs, migration and other domestic things, first through Australian Society and then Inside Story.

My burning interests were more in Australia’s relations with the world, and with the receptive editorship of Peter Browne I found a platform to explore them and portray the people involved. Sometimes the suggestions came from Peter. Sometimes the stories suggested themselves. The occasionally clumsy initiatives of our politicians in Papua New Guinea and the Solomons; the experiences of Pacific islanders doing seasonal work on Queensland farms; the personal stories driving foreign ministers Marise Payne and Penny Wong. The strings at work in policy-making, through officials like Andrew Shearer and hybrid institutions like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute; the nobbling of critics in the China Matters think-tank by Scott Morrison’s consiglieri; the shock to the Australian cult of the military delivered by Justice Brereton’s war crimes report. And, of course, the worship of the ANZUS alliance turning into the cargo cult of the AUKUS nuclear submarines, and the whistling in the dark about Donald Trump.

Peter directed important books my way to explore great issues in long reviews. He gave the only sustained media space — outside the SBS Serbo-Croat service — to coverage of a judicial inquiry that followed my long-running investigation into an old terrorism case, the Croatian Six. When I pursued a story that looked then and now at the locale of popular fiction that established a romantic mythology about Australians — Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice — Inside Story was there to run the long story about my journey to that place in the Gulf country. So that’s the one I chose to represent my work for Inside Story.

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I have always loved the Circular Quay Writers Walk. On trips to the city as a child, I would annoy whomever I was with by insisting we stop and read each inscription in turn. I am fascinated by the synergetic relationship between space and literature, by how places give rise to stories and are shaped in turn by the stories told about them. What would London be without Dickens, or Dickens without London? Numerous popular and academic books have been written about literary London, Paris, New York and Berlin, but when I searched for a similar study of Sydney’s representation in literature, I came up empty-handed. My new book, Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism, is an attempt to fill that gap.

I quickly realised that it would be impossible to include all of Sydney’s literary lives in one volume. As Australia’s first and most populous city, Sydney has featured in fiction for as long as settlers have been writing. In the end, I chose to focus on the years between the two world wars, a period of rapid change for both Sydney and Australian literature, when Sydney as a modern city and the modern Australian novel emerged together and influenced each other’s development.

From the early 1920s, demolition swept away much of the old colonial town. When the Harbour Bridge was opened in 1932 as the longest single-span bridge in the world, it was heralded as evidence that Sydney could hold its own alongside the great metropolises of Europe and America.

At the same time, it was becoming harder to ignore the fact that Sydney, like all big cities, was marked by violence and injustice. Political agitation and calls for urban reform grew during the Great Depression as the city’s forgotten poor suffered. In 1938, at the sesquicentenary of the invasion, Aboriginal people staged a protest at the Australian Hall in Elizabeth Street, designating 26 January as a “Day of Mourning.”

Amid this ferment, writers participated publicly and through their fiction in debates about the city’s identity, culture and values. Remarkably, the most active and accomplished of them were women, so it was an easy decision to focus on their work. Writers like Christina Stead, Dymphna Cusack, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw were excited by the opportunities provided by the modern city and the modern novel to challenge old norms of living and writing. They were also passionate supporters of social justice and urban reform; they believed Sydney could be better, and they wrote in part to imagine or agitate for that better city.

Why did I include the word “waterway” in the title of my book? As I was writing it, I made a habit of “walking” the fiction I read, marking up contemporaneous maps of the city with major narrative events. On these walks, I’d inevitably find myself back at the harbour. Every novel I read mapped Sydney by its watery and littoral places: the imposing Heads that mark the transition from city to wider world, the overseas terminal at Circular Quay with its influx of new people and new ideas, the then working docks of Woolloo-mooloo where men laboured under unfair conditions, secluded stretches of beach in undeveloped North Sydney where ships wrecked and lovers met.

These places allowed the writers to explore Sydney’s history as a colonial outpost and its future as a world metropolis, as a local environment and as a node in increasingly globalised socioeconomic networks. Water — life-giving but unpredictable, ultimately impervious to human intervention — provided writers with the means to grapple through metaphor with the new freedoms and dangers of the big city, to navigate in literature the wild tides of modern existence.

Despite having been written more than eighty years ago, Sydney fiction of the interwar period has proved remarkably prescient. Clever, earnest and searching, female writers asked questions we continue to struggle with today: do urban environments enforce divisions between rich and poor, or can they close the gap? How do sex and gender affect individuals’ ability to participate in the city? How do we mitigate the ecological cost of urban development?

With the climate emergency, pandemics and housing crises making life in cities increasingly complex, perhaps a journey on the waves of Sydney’s literary past can tell us something about our uncertain futures. •

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Disclosures made in the biography — of even more affairs, of Roth’s having made a pass at a friend of his one-time stepdaughter, of Roth’s comments about the God-sanctified perfection of a twenty-year age gap between romantic partners — only fuelled the speculation, to the point that Peter Carey, for one, was moved to declare that being “an arsehole” was of no consequence for Roth’s position in the literary firmament.

Roth himself was appalled by the thought that his life might be understood only as a litany of licentious affairs: “It wasn’t just fucked this one, fucked that one, fucked this one,” he said. Responding to #MeToo, he wrote that he had “nothing but sympathy” for the pain felt by women insulted and injured by male sexual desire. “But I am also made anxious,” he told a friend, “by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges.” He was “made anxious as a civil libertarian,” he went on, “because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.”

What Roth would have made of the response to allegations of rape and sexual harassment levelled at Blake Bailey, his chosen biographer and the author of Philip Roth: The Biography, is probably clear. Bailey, who has denied all, has certainly received punishment: his literary agent dropped him; his publisher, W.W. Norton (which faces questions over its handling of the allegations), pulled the book from sale and cut ties with him; and the tide of very positive publicity has decisively turned.

The allegations against Bailey and the controversy around Roth are certainly serious, but they shouldn’t prevent us from paying critical attention to Bailey’s book. It is, after all, an extended and serious study of a significant literary figure. Had it not been for the latest allegations, it would probably be fixed in the public mind as the definitive word on its subject.

The book is also informed by material that may not be available to any future biographer or Roth scholar. As well as marathon interviews with the now-deceased Roth, Bailey was given his subject’s imprimatur to interview more than a hundred classmates, friends, girlfriends, publishers and family members, all of whom appear to have made a considerable effort to help with a book they believed would be authoritative. (One example is the former neighbour of Roth’s who wrote Bailey a hundred-page “remembrance” of her years-long affair with the writer, and was the model for Drenka Balich in Sabbath’s Theater.)

Bailey also had untrammelled access to Roth’s archives at the Library of Congress, as well as papers not integrated into that collection. Among the latter is the infamous “Notes for My Biographer” manuscript that Roth wrote to rebut his former wife Claire Bloom’s memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, and “Notes on a Scandal-Monger,” an account of Roth’s dealings with Ross Miller, an English literature professor who was briefly commissioned to write his authorised biography. (As the title suggests, the arrangement didn’t go well.) The fate of these manuscripts is in the hands of the executors of Roth’s estate, Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier, and there is no guarantee that they will be added to the official archives, let alone survive.

This level of access and cooperation lies behind Bailey’s use of the definite article in the title of his biography; for readers and scholars interested in the dimensions of Roth’s work and his life, these sources mean that this is a book to be reckoned with. No less a figure than Roth himself — who invested considerable time and energy in the process, and who anticipated the book would be substantive, corrective and comprehensive — would have insisted on such a reckoning.

By 2012, Philip Roth had retired from the writing career that had otherwise occupied him full-time since the early 1960s. His journey from prodigal Jewish son to lionised favoured son was complete: he had his own holiday (Philip Roth Day, 23 October) and was acclaimed as one of America’s greatest writers. His books had won nearly every prize it was possible to win and had been anthologised in the Library of America; some of them — Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000) in particular — had become classics. His attention was now focused on his biography.

Bailey applied to write the book after the collapse of Roth’s arrangement with Miller. To Roth’s question about why a gentile from Oklahoma should presume to write about him, a Newark Jew, Bailey replied that he was not bisexual, an alcoholic, or possessed of a Puritan family heritage, but he had managed just fine with his well-regarded biographies of writers Richard Yates (2003) and John Cheever (2009). This might well have allayed Roth’s concerns, but what sealed the deal — and wasn’t mentioned in the eventual biography — was Bailey’s unabashed admiration of actress Ali MacGraw, who had starred in the film adaptation of Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus and whose attractions Bailey and Roth cooed over. “Just as important a literary qualification for a biographer as knowing where he fits into the literary continuum with Malamud and Bellow and so forth,” said Bailey later, “is not taking too prim or judgemental a view of a man who had this florid love life.”

Bailey certainly isn’t prim or judgemental. He narrates Roth’s life from promising young author and enfant terrible to titan of American letters in detail and with clarity. Few areas of Roth’s life seem off-limits. “Let the repellent in,” Roth was fond of saying, and Bailey follows that maxim by providing countless examples of Roth’s behaving poorly. Roth nursed grudges, cut people off or used them in his fiction with nary a sign of regret, and was both unconcerned and unrepentant when confronted by their outrage. He was cavalier with girlfriends, seemed impervious to the damage that his chronic infidelity might cause — “God, I’m fond of adultery,” Bailey quotes him saying — and, if anything, was a believer in its benefits: “Adultery makes numerous bad marriages bearable.”

Amid this, as portrayed by Bailey, he was generous and could also be caring. He lent money to friends for medical emergencies and tried to rehabilitate those of them with alcohol problems, he advocated for the provision of libraries, and he championed free expression, no ifs or buts about it.

Bailey constructs his book chronologically and marshals his material effectively. Telling quotes pepper the text, and Bailey willingly allows for conflicting perceptions. One fine example is his citation of Claire Bloom’s thought that Roth’s voice was “suffused with pain” when he “reluctantly” declared his love for her. The reader who has learned of the wounds Roth sustained and inflicted during his first marriage might see the basis of that pain and be more tolerant of Roth’s decision, in the same paragraph, to go ahead with a scheduled trip to the Caribbean, sans Bloom; but the same reader might also understand how Bloom could be disconcerted by the nature of this love and how it is expressed.

Later, Bailey juxtaposes the costs of Roth’s infidelity with the poignancy of his ageing body and his need to charm. While continuing to bed young women, the septuagenarian felt that he had to prepare them for the lurid scars on his body before disrobing. “When lovely Venus lies beside/ Her lord and master Mars/ They mutually profit/ By their scars,” he would sing. Later, he would laugh: “Isn’t it charming? And it gets them. It gets them.”

One of the most notable aspects of the life described by Bailey is the salutary influence Norman Mailer, William Styron and other writers had on Roth and his generation of writers. Having seen the effects of booze and fame, writers like Roth, John Updike and Don DeLillo cultivated a steadiness and discipline that allowed them to be far more productive. Roth was particularly avid on this point. Hurrying to his desk at nine o’clock each morning, he was prone to reprimand himself that the novelist Bernard Malamud would already have been at it for two hours.

Roth was also fond of quoting Flaubert’s maxim that a writer should be orderly and regular in life, like a bourgeois, in order to be wild and original in his or her work. Those habits helped produce twenty-six novels, one novella and a short story collection, a work of narrative non-fiction, an autobiography-cum-novel, and two collections of interviews and essays: a bookshelf and then some.

Bailey also makes the valuable point that Roth and his fellow “abstemious children” began their careers at a time when literature occupied a “sovereign place” in American culture. Today, it is impossible to imagine that a contemporary novel could generate the publicity, notoriety and sheer sales (4.1 million copies and counting) that Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) did — let alone have an immediate social effect, as Portnoy did in Australia. Today’s impecunious scriveners, meanwhile, will gasp to learn that Roth earned US$827,000 from his writing in 1968 alone (and they might faint when Bailey notes that this is equivalent to more than US$6 million today). And those who know the outlines of Roth’s career might well be stricken when they realise that those earnings preceded publication of Roth’s most famous and commercially successful book, Portnoy’s Complaint.

But such detail belies a profound and critical weakness in Philip Roth: The Biography. What should ostensibly draw readers — the work — receives comparatively little attention. Bailey is excellent on Roth’s early career: his faltering short stories, the forays into playwriting, the ignominious and forgotten film criticism, the networks Roth built among emerging critics and contemporary writers. He gives considerable time to the publication process, Roth’s hand in preparing copy (“The masterpiece of an American master,” he ghostwrote of American Pastoral), and the reviews he received (long-time New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani’s reviews are mentioned twenty-one times). But he is often disengaged when it comes to the books.

Unlike the pages of lively and thoughtful analysis that Hermione Lee offers on Tom Stoppard’s plays in her recent biography, Bailey shies away from the works. He is even less concerned about their drafting — a particularly peculiar decision given Roth’s monk-like devotion to writing, revising, and extensive rewriting in response to feedback from a select group of readers. New Yorker editor Veronica Geng became one of those trusted readers and Roth’s favourite editor after talking with him about The Ghost Writer (1979), but Bailey says little about her advice. Ross Miller was presented with a draft of The Counterlife (1986) and told Roth that there was “a good book in here somewhere”: they spent thirteen hours talking about where it might be found. But Bailey betrays no interest in uncovering the effect of this conversation on the published book. Instead, time and time again, he turns back to Roth’s personal life.

This is the point at which Bailey’s refusal to be “too prim or judgemental” counts against him. The sympathy he feels for his subject, necessary for a biographer, is almost certainly too tender, and turns him into an uncritical barracker.

An example of Bailey’s too-close alignment with Roth lies in the book’s treatment of the 1962 symposium at Yeshiva University at which Roth spoke on “the conflict of loyalties in minority writers of fiction.” In The Facts, his autobiography-cum-novel, Roth claims to have been pilloried for his depiction of flawed Jewish characters not only by the largely Jewish student audience but also by the moderator, who asked if he would write the same stories if he were living in Nazi Germany. Bailey cites contemporaneous correspondence largely echoing Roth’s account: by the end, in Bailey’s telling, Roth is “battered,” “dazed,” “overwhelmed” and “wan.” But more recent reportage, using recordings of the symposium, suggests the audience was largely on Roth’s side.

That event was almost certainly important to Roth’s development and career: it even prompted a short-lived declaration that he would never write about Jews again. But to what extent did Roth build it up in his correspondence and then mythologise it in The Facts? This is the question Bailey should have been asking.

More notable, given the controversy over Roth’s “florid love life” and the alleged misogyny of his fiction, is Bailey’s treatment of the women in Roth’s life. As though to prove that he can understand Jewish culture, Bailey dashes his book with Yiddish expressions — most notably shiksa, an often-pejorative term for a non-Jewish woman — and frequently introduces women via their looks before anything else.

Thus, Maggie Martinson — Roth’s first wife, with whom he had a tempestuous, damaging relationship — is both a shiksa and “a short, attractive blonde.” A divorced mother of two children who waited tables to get by, and who may have been molested by her father, Martinson is immediately set up as the opposite of Roth’s “golden child,” and not a page goes by without some aside about her flaws. A request from Martinson that Roth pick up half a pound of parmesan cheese is recalled by Roth and presented by Bailey as a deliberate attempt to distract the writer from his work rather than an everyday errand. Martinson’s threat to kill Roth if he ever slept with her daughter is presented as if it were half-deranged, even though mention has already been made of the clear affection Martinson’s daughter held for him: “Kiss me, Philip,” she once said, “the way you kiss Mother.” The division of the Roths’ assets during their divorce proceedings is presented as evidence of Martinson’s grasping nature, not merely the reality of a divorce.

When Bailey seeks confirmation from Roth for his portrayal of Martinson as forever overreacting, desperate and in some ways physically disfigured, Roth invokes the Brothers Grimm: “This was like some mythological nemesis.” So does this depiction of Martinson amount to a myth, as Roth seems to suggest? Bailey’s answer is no, but Roth would likely suggest otherwise. In The Facts he has his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, describe this portrayal as unrealistic: “I suspect Josie [Martinson] was both worse and better as a human being than what you’ve portrayed here.” Given his abrupt dismissal of Martinson’s diary — “a pretty insipid piece of writing” — Bailey appears to have had no such suspicions.

In focusing on Roth’s relations with women, Bailey’s sympathy with Roth becomes acute. He joins the fray as an uncritical advocate for his subject. Thus, his portrayal of Roth’s relationship with Claire Bloom works in neither man’s favour. Roth made a pass at a friend of Bloom’s daughter and was rebuffed; he admits to having called her desire to avoid him “pure sexual hysteria.” In response to her claim that he had deliberately goaded and insulted her — “What’s the point of having a pretty girl in the house if you don’t fuck her?” — Bailey makes limp excuses: “His impulse to mock a certain kind of bourgeois piety was among his pronounced traits, both as a writer and a man.” And he seems to make nothing of Roth’s fear, as the #MeToo movement erupted, that this young woman might have more to say about the incident.

What, then, remains of Roth? Notwithstanding its conspicuous weaknesses, what emerges from Philip Roth: The Biography is a striking figure: a man who felt himself compelled to be a writer, who pursued that vocation with unrelenting vigour and abstemiousness — to the point of buying a farmhouse in which he could devote all his waking hours to the page — and who was so diligent in his efforts that he amassed more than 200 boxes of archival material in the course of producing more than thirty books. If he is in need of rehabilitation, those books are likely to be where Roth is rehabilitated. It will not come from a biography. It will certainly not come from this one by Blake Bailey. •

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Not all readers will necessarily go along with the strictures laid down in the biographer’s introduction, but there is no denying that this book has been massively researched, starting with the days when young Graham was often bullied at school because his contemporaries suspected him of dobbing them in to his father, the headmaster. Russian Roulette recounts how this conflicted childhood gave way to an adulthood constantly torn this way and that by beliefs, relationships, and medical and financial challenges.

From this account, often drawing on the writer’s own correspondence as a key — if not always wholly reliable — source of information, it becomes clear that Greene was never a man who saw clear-cut answers to demanding problems, whether personal or political. He flirted with communism in his early days at Oxford University, mainly in the interest of his own travel plans, but the pull would recur intermittently through the rest of his life, as would his somewhat precarious hold on Catholicism.

The book is not called Russian Roulette for nothing. So much of Greene’s life involved chancy decisions, their precursor perhaps to be found when he “played a reckless game” with a revolver he discovered in the cupboard of the bedroom he shared with his brother Raymond. According to his own account, he “loaded a bullet into the gun and spun the chambers around.” His survival after missing “by one” — the next click would have been fatal — thrilled him, and he felt he had “passed the test of manhood… It was like a young man’s first successful experience of sex.”

Sex and risk would account for a good deal of his ensuing life, and recurring references to Russian roulette remind us of the dangers to which he subjected himself. As Richard Greene sums up one of his subject’s intrepid (or rash) ventures into unreliable territory: “He would have to spend a week in Algiers doing research, and that would be playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded.”

After the conflicts of his early life, Greene seems to have felt lured into dangerous places, or places at dangerous times in their histories. As his biographer records, his visit to Israel “put his life at risk, and over the years his travels to the dangerous places of the world caused enormous worry to his family and friends.” To visit Israel in the fourth month of the six-day war in 1967, the violence continuing long after the official ceasefire, looked like asking for trouble, but the possible outcomes of such a venture (he was writing about the aftermath of the war for a newspaper) never came between him and accepting the challenges.

Greene seemed specially drawn to the fractious politics of countries once under the firm grip of European or American imperial power. Although the grip had been unwillingly loosened in Haiti, Sierra Leone, Cuba, Panama and many other places, it had not led to peace and harmony among the local populations. There, he made numerous contacts, some of them leading to long friendships, others to decidedly tricky relationships.

Richard Greene’s research into political, religious and sometimes military manoeuvres in these diverse locations is extraordinarily thorough, involving innumerable brief character studies as well as a detailed recording of shifts in power. Impressive though these historical investigations are, at times we seem to lose sight of Graham Greene; times, for instance, when we appear to be given more than we actually need to know about the history of Catholicism in Vietnam or working with double agents in Portugal. It’s not that such material is uninteresting; it’s just that it seems to push Greene to one side for longer than is good for biographical material.

Of course, several of Greene’s most highly regarded novels undoubtedly drew on his experiences in these trouble spots. We couldn’t have had The Quiet American — at least as we know it — without his difficult time in Vietnam, or The Comedians if he hadn’t had some experience of the regime of “Papa Doc” in Haiti, or The Honorary Consul without the inspiration of a rebel priest during his time in Paraguay.

This list could go on, but what matters in Russian Roulette is how this courting of volatile territories — and his ongoing fascination with those responsible for the volatility — influenced his writing and his far from orderly personal life. His own political views, as insecurely leftist as his Catholicism was uncertainly committed, do emerge from the biographer’s research, though sometimes the exposition feels like too much of a good thing.

Greene’s longstanding but rickety marriage to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, born in Rhodesia, withstood a number of tangled affairs on his part, affairs that, in a curious way, also acquired their own idiosyncratic versions of fidelity and longevity. Even after break-ups, he seemed unwilling to relinquish the ties that had bound, and he maintained contact with his children by Vivien though he was often distantly apart from them.

Difficult as he often was, Greene acquired plenty of friends along the way, including film director Carol Reed and Evelyn Waugh, whom he’d met at Oxford, where they’d moved in different circles, and with whom he shared literary celebrity in the postwar years. In the later 1940s, Reed and Greene had a widely admired cinematic collaboration on The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, two of the key titles in British cinema’s “finest hour.”

As Richard Greene writes, “No place in Greeneland is truly safe or content.” This comment might equally be applied to the real-life zones of conflict he was so strongly drawn to, and to the emotional, religious and political areas he inhabited in his long and often troubled life. He did, however, achieve a great deal, and the other Greene, Richard, does it more than justice. •

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Garner began as a novelist of small observations, a recorder of how women try to live out feminist principles in love relationships and domestic life. As she says several times in her diaries, she will never win the Miles Franklin award, yet she has become a major literary figure of her generation. She works close to life, crafting her own responses to the world around her. At this stage of her career, it appears logical for her to throw off all pretence and offer readers her notebooks as well.

There is pretence of a kind at work here, too, of course. This material from manuscript notebooks has been selected carefully to provide us with entertaining and revealing glimpses of the writer’s life.

Yellow Notebook records Garner’s self-doubt and struggle to establish herself as a fiction writer while trying to maintain family life in Melbourne. It is full of the kind of observations that appear in her stories, alongside a growing understanding of the nature of her own art. Amid frequent reflections on her own failings are sharp insights into her approach to art. As far back as 1981 she wrote that “meaning is in the smallest event. It doesn’t have to be put there: only revealed.”

Admirers of The Children’s Bach and Postcards from Surfers will enjoy Yellow Notebook’s account of the creation of those stories and notice the many elements of Garner’s life that would contribute to the screenplay for The Last Days of Chez Nous. The French husband, the father, the daughter and the student boarder, even some of the most memorable dialogue, are on display as Garner’s second marriage falls apart and she leaves the rented house to her daughter and her friends.

For those anxious to know, Garner answers a question she is frequently asked — “Where do you get your ideas for fiction?” — as generously as possible. We see her developing a clear-eyed understanding of her own strengths and limitations as an artist. On the one hand, there is the constant pressure to “make things up”; on the other, the joy when the stories come “pouring out.”

One Day I’ll Remember This reveals a more confident writer, defiant in the face of the condescension that both critics and casual acquaintances frequently offer her. She retains her optimistic commitment to sexual love and begins a new relationship with V, a married novelist from Sydney deeply interested in the visual arts. Despite all her misgivings, this develops into her third marriage to Murray Bail (an identification obvious to any curious reader). The joys and struggles of their relationship give this book a narrative arc that makes it read like a novel.

Together, the two writers struggle to work and maintain their individual confidence in what they do. Garner’s sociability and domestic instincts conflict with V’s need for solitude and resistance to the routine demands of housework. V, a creature of Sydney and its art world, takes Garner to meet famous artists and their put-upon wives. She realises that she belongs in Melbourne, in her own house with a garden, mixing with her wide circle of friends. While Sydney supports the visual art elite that V admires, Melbourne offers a more open and communal music scene where even amateurs like Garner can dance and play instruments. V obligingly moves to Melbourne, but their different perspectives continue to drive the marriage towards its inevitable end.

This relationship produces some significant arguments about art as the two writers engage in an almost parodic acting out of the traditional positions of men and women artists. As the Australian literary world, influenced by poststructuralist theory, moves against realism in the 1980s, Garner acknowledges that her own talent is low on the hierarchy: “I need to devise a form that is flexible and open enough to contain all my details, all my small things. If only I could blow out realism while at the same time sinking deeply into what is most real.”

Bail’s interest in mythic and modernist form fits a more respected artistic mode, and he would go on to win the Miles Franklin in 1999 for Eucalyptus, a novel he began while living with Garner. In their various homes, the argument about artistic hierarchy is symbolised by ongoing disagreements about the placing of V’s cherished painting by the New Zealand modernist, Colin McCahon. In one hilarious scene, Garner cleans the bathroom while V stands at the door advising her to stop writing about that “bullshit” period, the 1970s, and she responds that the portrayal of relations between men and women in his work feels like the 1950s rather than the “no place” and “no time” he believes it to be.

This pattern of self-criticism and mutual criticism, with casual, gratuitous criticism from friends and acquaintances, makes published literary criticism seem superfluous. With friends like these, who needs reviewers?

The publication of Cosmo Cosmolino causes an estrangement from her old friends in Sydney, O and R. It is not the fact that real people can be identified in the story, “The Recording Angel,” that causes the breach but its analysis of Garner’s relationship with O. No one seems to regard the story as fiction. In her defence, Garner insists that it is a loving picture of the complexity of a long friendship, though she also sees that it is “brutal.” She is distressed to have caused her friends pain but finds “a hard nut of something in the centre of my heart,” a kind of ruthless honesty. Eventually, they forgive her.

Garner’s declining interest in fiction may have hastened her movement towards journalism and the subjective non-fiction that has become her forte. The diary reveals the background to many of the essays that were collected in True Stories (1996), including her Walkley award-winning “Killing Daniel.” We learn that Garner’s first experience of a murder trial was to support a friend whose daughter was a victim. She finds the trial of Daniel’s killer harrowing, as indeed is the essay she wrote about it. In keeping with her interest in domestic relations, Garner chooses to write about how the courts handle the intimate crimes of sexual and domestic abuse that are increasingly the concern of public feminism. It is salutary that she rejected the possibility of writing about Ivan Milat’s random murders of strangers.

Garner’s “hard nut” arms her against the critics of The First Stone, soon to lead to her alienation from a generation of feminists. She includes a fateful note about her initial response to the charges against the master of Ormond College: “I wrote the guy a letter. Hope I won’t regret it.” The various legal injunctions before publication draw out what V calls her street-fighting quality, making her more determined to see the book through.

When the storm breaks, Garner receives a mass of letters, many from young women declaring she has betrayed feminism and they will never read her work. She is reviled in cafes and praised in supermarkets. Is any other Australian writer so recognisable? In the course of these diaries, the woman in the post office and the man at the bank declare themselves as her readers, and on one occasion she gets her hot water connected early because the supervisor has read all her books. When The Last Days of Chez Nous appears, she is grateful for the anonymity of the screenwriter.

These diaries reveal the social nature of literary life in Australia, especially in the heyday of publishing in the 1980s and 1990s. In a small community, writers can’t help but meet each other and their critics. Patrick White, Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley and Tim Winton (thinly disguised as J) all make appearances. Garner also takes some cheeky swipes at the big names — Saul Bellow is a windbag; Australia’s mighty poet attacks her in his column then insists on walking home with her from a festival reading. Some characters are designated simply as the great reader or the biographer.

Life is so much more complex than any written form can possibly encompass. These cleverly selected fragments gesture towards the many things that happen contemporaneously in every life — family irritations, spiritualism, operations and dental work, motels on the Hume Highway, Sydney’s mighty thunderstorms, the ownership of country cabins and dogs. They can be read as an autofiction of domestic life, as the background to admired books and films, as an account of the life of art at a certain period in Australia, or as an apologia for Garner’s work and a demonstration of it in action. Garner declares that she can only do what she does, asserting the value of her own subjectivity. She insists that one can be an artist and still love ironing. •

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The release of the Anglo-French film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy late last year revived interest in John le Carré’s fifty-year career as a novelist. Based on the seventh of his twenty-two novels, Tinker Tailor evokes the bleak landscape of cold war espionage that le Carré has explored over the decades with such sharp-eyed precision. To capitalise on the film’s release, his publisher reissued Smiley Versus Karla, the epic trilogy of which Tinker Tailor was the first part. That trilogy crowned a body of work that has given him pre-eminence in the spy thriller genre.

There is a gritty realism in le Carré’s world of spooks that straddles the boundaries between documentary observation and literary imagination, posing hard questions about how people navigate the perilous shoals between trust and loyalty, deception and deceit, all the while struggling to find meaning and certainty in a sea of doubt and danger. It is fiction with a serious political undertow that draws the reader into a chilling contemplation of lives adrift on great tides of political ideology that are utterly indifferent to individual conscience.

Novelists and spies live by fiction. Whether they are telling stories to engage readers or using fictional identities to deceive their enemies, occasional spies like W. Somerset Maugham, part-timers like Graham Greene or professionals like David Cornwell (John le Carré’s real name) necessarily become masters in the art of verisimilitude. Their parallel professions demand analytical acuity and precise attention to detail, the emotional intelligence to sustain an empathetic imagination, a generous measure of mendacity and the guile to craft a plausible “legend.” In applying these to his own experience of the cold war, le Carré has done more than anyone else to lift spy fiction from the derring-do fantasies of Ian Fleming into the realm of serious literature.

While it is difficult to fathom the myriad public and private obsessions that animate novelists, in the case of David Cornwell there were at least two incidents that propelled his literary persona John le Carré to the forefront of his genre. As a cold warrior employed by the British intelligence services, he was, along with many colleagues, outed to the KGB by Kim Philby, compromising his work at the British embassy in Bonn. He explained the second incident in the afterword to a recent edition of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold:

It was the Berlin Wall that got me going… [W]e stared back at the weasel faces of the brainwashed little thugs who guarded the Kremlin’s latest battlement… [T]he Wall was perfect theatre as well as a perfect symbol of the monstrosity of ideology gone mad.

That same passion drove his subsequent novels until, as he had implicitly predicted in The Russia House (1989), written after a visit to Gorbachev’s thawing USSR, the Wall came down.

Although his first two books, Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) are engaging excursions into his shadowy world, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) established his reputation for sharply observed, gritty stories of deceit and betrayal. In short, finely etched chapters he draws the attentive reader into an evocative narrative of private desperation and professional duplicity driven by the hard-eyed political imperatives of co-dependent superpower brutality. The moral ambiguities embedded in his stories give le Carré’s books an overarching thematic coherence. How is the West to defend its liberties without resort to Soviet methods? How are George Smiley and his people at the Circus to recover from the depredations wrought by the mole Bill Haydon, at the behest of Karla in Moscow Centre? Are they, in that great battle of will and wits, to succumb to a debilitating slide into moral equivalence born of operational necessity?

Rather than resolve the ethical dilemmas in a self-righteous allegorical homily, le Carré poses sharply focused questions at the end of his novels. At the last chilling moment, Alec Leamas, so long isolated in his world of multiple deceits, finally decides to come in from the cold. As George Smiley’s people complete their quest for Karla, a pointedly discarded cigarette lighter symbolises the exquisite tangle of Smiley’s professional and private obsessions.

Le Carré concludes his most recent novel, Our Kind of Traitor (2010), with an incident that poses an upwardly inflected question to which we think we know the answer, but cannot be absolutely sure. It is a mark of respect for his readers that he only suggests answers to such questions, preferring to engage rather than instruct.

Le Carré draws readers into his world of intrigue through a distinctive narrative structure that casts us as privileged observers of small vignettes that slowly build a bigger picture. The novels typically begin with introductory sketches of the protagonists at significant moments in a journey towards their part in the larger narrative.

In The Russia House we follow the dog-eared, slightly dipso Barley Blair from his familiar routine at a Moscow book fair to the centre of an operation that promises to expose the Soviet Union’s crumbling military infrastructure and, by implication, its whole system. We meet The Honourable Schoolboy Jerry Westerby first as a reclusive, rather decrepit exile in an Italian village. From there we follow him into a labyrinthine saga that spans Hong Kong, South East Asia and Britain, ending when he is shot by a British agent as the CIA, aided by compliant bureaucrats in British Intelligence, capture a prized Chinese defector.

Much of the tension in the novels is sustained by the slow building of narrative momentum to a dramatic climax as le Carré’s lens steadily zooms back to a now complete picture of a landscape littered with the debris of scruffy idealism and perfidious ambition. There is a forensic precision in the lean, taut prose as he dissects meetings, interrogations and the private exchanges of his protagonists. Even his sex scenes are evocatively minimalist. Of Peter Guillam and Molly Meakin’s long-anticipated tryst he simply observes, “She surprised him with a refined and joyous carnality.” He has a finely tuned ear for simple but suggestive dialogue and resonant imaginings where readers can hear the harmonics for themselves. The novels are replete with scenes where apparently simple exchanges conjure up a subtext of byzantine motives, personal ambitions and bureaucratic chicanery.

Indeed, one of le Carré’s great strengths is his capacity to lay bare the venal banality of bureaucratic politics beneath the veneer of decorous patriotism. The sprawling saga of George Smiley’s dogged pursuit of redemption after the fall of the Circus is littered with passages that chronicle this very process. In quiet back rooms and closed committees shadowy civil service mandarins do battle in a confusion of pomposity and gravitas that mocks the sorry fate of many an active agent.

Few writers can scrutinise with such chilling clarity the wood-panelled killing fields of Whitehall sub-committees and working parties. It is in places like these, just as much as on the ground, that le Carré explores the ethical ambivalence and moral relativism of cold war espionage, where your own side can be as lethal as your ostensible adversary and it is often difficult to know which is which. Perhaps that is the point, that deceit is systemic not partisan. Lurking beneath that is the larger, unasked epistemological question of how it is possible to know anything to be true.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated it seemed that le Carré might have lost his raison d’être, but he disagreed. “If an era is dead, the genre faces a long and boisterous renaissance,” he wrote. “The spy writer can turn to almost any corner of the globe, knowing for a certainty that the spooks, arms dealers and phony humanitarians will be there before him.”

Even before the cold war ended he ventured into another long-running conflict in the Middle East. The story of The Little Drummer Girl (1983) centres on Charlie, a pro-Palestinian English actress who is seduced, emotionally and politically, by Joseph, a Mossad operative, into an elaborate plot to kill Khalil, a leading figure in the Palestinian resistance. Their plan eventually succeeds but Charlie’s deep ambivalence over the politics of it pushes her to a breakdown, and a conflicted but disillusioned Joseph comes to her aid. Personifying the terrible dilemmas inherent in that conflict, they walk away together into the unknown. In doing so they register a recurring theme in le Carré’s work; how personal relationships and common decencies can be disfigured by power politics and ossified ideology.

Although his settings have become more peripatetic in subsequent novels, he has stuck to his metier. In Our Game (1995) Cranmer pursues his larcenous ex-agent and friend Pettifer who has stolen both his mistress and millions from the Russian secret service to support the Ingush independence struggle in the Caucasus. Following a litany of heroic folly and hard-eyed bastardry the venture fails and it all ends badly for the idealist Pettifer whose fate, for le Carré, only serves to confirm the hollow hypocrisy of the West’s posturing about national self-determination in the post–Cold War world.

The Tailor of Panama (1996), an instructive satire on the veracity of “intelligence” written in homage to Graham Greene, has the dissembling tailor Harry Pendel trapped in a self-inflicted, escalating deception of British and American spy agencies who are impelled to the point of disaster by their anxiety over future control of the Canal. The Tailor is a rare example of le Carré’s exploring the dimensions of deceit through gently humorous satire.

As the bipolar certitudes of the Cold War adversaries dissolved, le Carré’s focus shifted to the clandestine alliances between mendacious governments, brutally acquisitive corporations and international criminal organisations. He has explored in forensic detail the shift from a tussle between liberty and tyranny to the anarchy of unrestrained, amoral power in a chaotic global capitalism. All the while, his heroically hapless protagonists are crushed by its inexorable machinations.

After his wife is murdered when she discovers recklessly injurious drug trials being conducted on Kenyan villagers, Justin Quayle – the “constant gardener” in le Carré’s 2001 novel of the same name – unravels a convoluted conspiracy involving a pharmaceutical company, a compliant aid organisation, a corrupt regulatory agency and compromised British bureaucrats. In full knowledge of the systemic evil that killed his wife Tessa, he returns to Kenya calmly determined to await his fate and join her in death.

In The Mission Song (2006) Salvo, a talented, illegitimate son of a Catholic missionary in the Congo becomes a much sought-after interpreter who is employed by the British Ministry of Defence to translate at a secret meeting between Western financiers and East Congolese warlords to engineer regime change supposedly towards a more liberal democracy. Having discovered that the syndicate of financiers is only interested in establishing a puppet government so it can exploit the region’s mineral resources, Salvo and his lover Hannah attempt to stop the process. Although the plot fails for other reasons, he is stripped of British citizenship and awaits deportation to the Congo to rejoin Hannah. As ever, those who would enter this morass of greed and brutality are isolated or destroyed as many of their lives chart a tragic course from passionate innocence to impotent worldliness.

Our Kind of Traitor is cut from the same political template as most of his post–Cold War novels. It begins in his customary way with the main characters presented in an apparently commonplace setting. Perry, an Oxford tutor and accomplished amateur tennis player, is on holidays at a resort in Antigua with his lawyer girlfriend Gail. He is challenged to a tennis match by another guest, Dima, a stocky, bullish Russian accompanied by his extended family and an entourage of ominous minders.

After some preliminary circumspection, it becomes clear that Dima is a senior Russian mafia operative involved in money laundering for the brotherhood. He has had a deadly falling out with his associates and wants to seek anonymous asylum for his family in exchange for information about the criminal networks that have enmeshed themselves in capital markets. The sums are so large that financial institutions, regulatory agencies and governments are secretly complicit in the laundering for fear that public exposure might imperil not only them but also an already fragile global financial system.

Dima wants Perry to broker the deal with British intelligence. Gail, meanwhile, begins to develop a trusting relationship with the family, especially the girls, who are traumatised by the family’s violent history.

Perry makes contact, initially with Luke, a junior diplomat sidelined for minor indiscretions who in turn introduces him to his “handler,” Hector, a crusty Cold Warrior clinging to his superannuated certitudes in the face of more contemporary realists now running the secret service. Hector’s problem in “telling truth to power” is that he doesn’t trust the powerful, or the relativist, post-modern world of murky political contingency that they occupy.

In deciding what to do about Dima’s offer, the debates between Hector and one of those superiors, Matlock, are the occasion for le Carré to present an instructive dialogue on the way that “intelligence” has been prostituted to sordid political purposes. In Hector’s view, speaking for le Carré, governments and their agencies no longer have a political centre of gravity, nor any interest in finding a moral compass. Indeed, they have become part of the problem, as have the intelligence services.

Despite doubts on all sides, a deal is struck. Le Carré leaves it to us, the privileged observers, to come to our own conclusions about what happens in the end, but we know that the nefarious network of criminal brotherhoods, money launderers, financial institutions, government officials and intelligence agencies was ultimately responsible.

Appearing as David Cornwell on the US television program Democracy Now on 11 October 2010, le Carré explained the political views that informed his most recent novels. The whole point of writing, he suggested, is to engage readers with an entertaining story that has a real world foundation. Of Our Kind of Traitor, he said, “So, money laundering is not some distant fantasy. It’s actually how you handle the profits of extortion, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy and huge quantities of drug money.” Once in the system it gets blended with the nefarious nest eggs of corrupt dictators and is circulated through leading financial institutions into mainstream money markets. Bankers, regulators, governments, even intelligence agencies are complicit in this.

Referring to The Constant Gardener, Cornwall deplored the way pharmaceutical companies ruthlessly manipulate the development, testing and marketing of their drugs. The Mission Song has a message about how rapacious multinationals can corrupt and devastate resource-rich countries like the Congo.

In his catalogue of crimes against civilised standards Cornwell has a special place for Tony Blair who, at the bidding of his US allies, went to war in Iraq and justified it by suborning legitimate intelligence. Blair made it all the worse by cloaking his mendacity in the garb of unctuous religiosity. All this was enough to drive Cornwell to join the millions of others on the streets to demonstrate against the war.

Although, on some matters, he has joined them in common cause, that does not mean he had shifted over to the left. “I’m not suggesting we make some sudden lurch into socialism; that isn’t the case at all. I think it’s more to do with the exercise of individual conscience.” This is the precise issue that has troubled so many of his novels’ leading characters. In many ways, it is a central theme in all his writing, the individual struggling against overweening powers.

As David Cornwell, and several of John le Carré’s characters, rail against a corrupt and corrosive global capitalism and its accomplices, we can hear distant echoes of an older voice. Some of the things that Cornwell and le Carré’s characters say are reminiscent of William Cobbett’s tirades against early capitalist relations displacing ancient reciprocities, “stockjobbers” corrupting markets in the City of London, and pusillanimous governments betraying the interests of decent common folk of good conscience.

After some fifty years of making a living exploring the multitude of ways in which good, courageous people can be disfigured or destroyed by the systemic corruption of civilised values, Cornwell has steadily shifted his position from Cold Warrior to Tory Radical. He told his Democracy Now interviewers that he is finished with public appearances and will return to his Cornwall cliff-top to write more novels. More power to his pen. •

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Paul Giles, an English expert on American literature who took up the Challis chair of English literature at the University of Sydney in 2010, comes to Australian literature from an international perspective. In his book Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature, published in 2013, he identified numerous correspondences between American and Australian literary writing and offered evidence for Australian incursions into the American imagination. In all his critical writing Giles avoids the conventional binaries of postcolonialism, with its privileging of the relationship between the empire’s centre and colony and the assumption that colonial writing is bound to be inferior to that of a “mother” culture. He also evades the nationalist focus of much Australian literary criticism.

Now, in Backgazing, Giles surveys a wide range of writing over a distinct period — the era of modernist literary art, in his reckoning from about 1900 to the middle years of the twentieth century. He argues that, rather than forming a separate, belated strand of the modernist project, Australian modernism participated in an international movement, sometimes in contact with its central ideas, sometimes expressing them in parallel. He considers Joseph Furphy’s writing against the work of Joseph Conrad and James Joyce. He reads the poetry of Kenneth Slessor and A.D. Hope alongside that of T.S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop. He places the fiction of Eleanor Dark with that of James T. Farrell, and Patrick White’s novels in the context of Samuel Beckett’s fiction. These conjunctions may seem surprising, but in Giles’s readings they reveal significant connections and responses to twentieth-century debates about modernism and its politics.

While modernism is most simply defined as a period, it more accurately reflects an artistic and philosophical perspective. For Giles, it can most clearly be seen in attitudes to time. In the classic nineteenth-century novels, which exemplify the notion of time as progress, characters move in an orderly sequence towards their futures. Modernist writing disrupts this notion of causality, seeking a more universal time, not measurable in terms of daily hours, in which the past changes according to the viewer’s perspective. This is the backgazing of the book’s title.

Modernism also has a spatial dimension, and Giles sees Australian art as having, at times, disrupted mainstream assumptions from the margins. As in Antipodean America, he finds numerous moments when Australia and its writing impinge on a central modernist canon as well as many physical connections between canonical writers and the southern hemisphere: Conrad’s many visits to Australia as a seaman, for example, Joyce’s correspondence with his sister, a nun in New Zealand, and a visit by H.G. Wells in 1939.

Giles is particularly interested in how modernism breaks the barriers between demotic and high culture and how comedy and burlesque intrude into serious works of modernist art. In Australia, the popular embrace of modernity during the 1920s is evident in Australian enthusiasm for jazz and the art deco architecture still apparent in cities like Sydney. This leads him to consider how Kenneth Slessor’s poetry plays with time and modernity and opens a way to putting Slessor’s work alongside that of not only A.D. Hope but also Eliot, Bishop and Wallace Stevens.

In a dense chapter that might have formed a book in itself, he considers the links between modernist art and fascism, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. He explores the influence of Heidegger’s philosophy of time on the “reactionary modernists” who supported National Socialism, quoting Thomas Mann on Nazism’s mix of timely and “efficient modernness on the one hand and dreams of the past on the other — in a word, highly technological Romanticism.”

While Mann and Theodor Adorno resisted this philosophy, Giles sees the 1930s novels of Thomas Wolfe (an American of German background) as influenced by the underlying philosophy of Nazism — an influence that was much more common in the 1930s, he believes, than is usually acknowledged. The second world war involved not only a physical battle between national powers but also a conflict over “conceptions of temporality” as “Western culture set itself on a more rationalist, progressive path, one that rejected mythological fatalism in favour of an emphasis on volition and contingency.” Giles examines the effects through the fiction of Jean-Paul Sartre, William Faulkner and Anthony Powell.

The tendency in Australia to see our culture as having been behind the times means that local arguments against modernist art in the 1930s and 1940s are sometimes dismissed as signs of ignorance rather than responses to an influential philosophical threat. Here Giles sets up a framework that invites revision of some critical attitudes, taking the largely forgotten R.D. FitzGerald as a starting place for his discussion of “reverse time” in Slessor’s and Hope’s work. Few contemporary Australians will be familiar with the novels of James T. Farrell, but he discusses them alongside Eleanor Dark’s novels as expressions of the new liberalism that dominated postwar literature. Farrell was the chair of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and visited Australia in 1956 as a guest of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom. Because the Australian organisation was better known for its vehement anticommunism than for its liberalism, the notion that the two writers have “imaginative affinities” might appear at odds with their seemingly contrasting political positions. In this way, Giles’s international view brings some local peculiarities into new focus.

Following on from the shifts in modernism in the 1950s, Giles looks at W.H. Auden’s move to Austria in the late 1950s and the poet’s collaborations with the German composer Hans Werner Henze and librettos for Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky. He touches on the burlesque and absurd elements in the work of Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes before considering Patrick White’s “late modernism” and the relationship of his writing to painting, particularly through his friendship with Sidney Nolan and Nolan’s relationship to the American poet, Robert Lowell. In this way, he traces chains of connection across music, painting and literature to find similar patterns of expression in the late modernist art of Australia, America and Britain.

Holding on to these complex notions of time and space can be difficult as this book progresses, and few readers will be sufficiently familiar with the many authors under consideration to engage fully with Giles’s account of international modernism. This includes discussion of music (Wagner, Mahler, Berg) and film (Charles Chaplin, Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk — and another Australian, John Farrow) and ranges from Proust to Patrick White. Giles’s encyclopedic scope may begin to feel overwhelming as he brings together a crowd of writers, many of whom are part of the academic canon (Joyce, Conrad, Eliot, Faulkner) but others of whom (Nancy Cunard, Farrell) are unlikely to be studied and read by Australians. Sharing his wide knowledge, he turns some accepted notions of Australian literary history sideways and offers a new reading of some neglected writers.

Backgazing is full of brilliant ideas drawn from Giles’s considerable knowledge of early twentieth-century writing across the hemispheres. While few readers will be able to match his breadth of reading, many will find parts of the book illuminating and be persuaded by this new arrangement of twentieth-century world literature and Australian literature’s place within it. •

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White had already published The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957), but he’d now been joined in this critical response to contemporary Australia by a new generation of novelists. Christopher Koch (then twenty-six) published his first novel, The Boys in the Island, in 1958 and Thea Astley (thirty-three) her first novel, Girl with a Monkey. The twenty-three-year-old Randolph Stow won the Miles Franklin award for his second book of fiction, To the Islands, and Elizabeth Harrower, then thirty, published her stunning second novel, The Long Prospect.

Of these young novelists, Harrower, like White, was a chronicler of Sydney. She was living in Britain when she wrote her first two novels, Down in the City (1957) and The Long Prospect, recalling life in Sydney and Newcastle with the detachment of distance. Down in the City, which followed the attraction of a well-brought-up young woman to a vulgar man from the semi-criminal world, depicted the conjunction of rackety King’s Cross with the wealthy suburbs to its east; The Long Prospect focused on a girl growing up in the haphazard care of her grandmother in an outer suburb of an industrial town.

That second novel had obvious autobiographical elements. The suburb was clearly based on Mayfield in Newcastle, where Harrower spent the first ten years of her life. Her protagonist, Emily, is a prisoner of her family, kept from intellectual and cultural life by an energetic and sometimes malicious woman whose interests extend no further than dreary sexual affairs, the pub and the radio broadcast of Saturday’s horse races.

Back in Australia, Harrower wrote a novel set in London, The Catherine Wheel (1960), in which a lonely young woman falls hopelessly in love with a feckless young man and is caught in a cycle of emotional abuse. This pattern — young women under the influence of controlling people, denied access to the consolations of art and human sympathy — appeared again in The Watch Tower (1966), which many readers regard as Harrower’s masterpiece. In this novel, the elder of two sisters left to fend for themselves in Sydney decides to marry her boss to give them both a secure home. The husband is Bluebeard transformed into a North Shore businessman and the novel draws us into the psychological games and emotional abuse he inflicts on his two captives.

Harrower sets up situations that echo the beginnings of Victorian novels in which educationally deprived middle-class young women are left vulnerable to sexual and psychological danger. As James Wood has commented, Henry James shadows her novels, her women locked away — like The Portrait of a Lady’s Isabel Archer — in grotesque marriages. James’s What Maisie Knew clearly influenced the shifting points of view in The Long Prospect as the innocent Emily watches with resignation the sexual escapades of her grandmother and is drawn to the sympathetic kindness of an older man. It was a situation that Vladimir Nabokov explored to darker satirical effect in Lolita, published three years earlier — but in 1958 Australians had no access to Lolita.

Harrower’s fiction is firmly located in the Australian suburbs of the mid-twentieth century, and her voice intrudes occasionally with scathing satirical comments on suburban life. As Brigid Rooney notes in her recent book, Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity, Harrower’s fiction shares some of Betty Friedan’s understanding of the way suburbia trapped women. It also added a woman’s perspective to the satirisation of suburban values by writers like White, often conveyed through the derision of women.

As Rooney writes, “Keeping company with Friedan’s housewives — suffering from ‘a problem that has no name’ — [Harrower’s protagonists] find themselves alone in claustrophobic and hostile terrain, contending with what White termed the cultural desert of mid-century suburban Australia.” White became a great supporter of Harrower’s work, constantly urging her to write more in the decades that followed.

For a range of reasons, three of the acclaimed young novelists of 1958, Koch, Stow and Harrower, stopped publishing after 1967, with Koch and Stow re-emerging at the end of the 1970s. Harrower withdrew her next novel from publication in 1971, apparently because she had doubts about its quality. She published occasional short stories but no further novels until Michael Heyward and Penny Hueston of Text Publishing convinced her to let them publish In Certain Circles (2014), the 1971 manuscript they found in her archives. Text reprinted all her novels and collected her short stories in A Few Days in the Country (2015). The new books were reviewed enthusiastically, though they don’t match the force of The Long Prospect or The Watch Tower.

Harrower’s long silence was a matter of puzzlement to many who recognised in those early novels a major talent. In interviews, she made the distinction between writing and publishing, and talked about the need for an urgent subject to write about. Certainly, it would have been difficult to continue writing in the dark mode of The Watch Tower.

Social attitudes in Australia were changing rapidly after the 1960s and Harrower’s fiction focused on domestic life immediately before and after the second world war. It chimed with White’s satirical vision of suburbia in Riders in the Chariot (1961) or Robin Boyd’s in The Australian Ugliness (1960). Fortunately, conditions began to change in the 1970s with women’s growing access to education and work. By the 1980s many other female writers — Helen Garner, Jessica Anderson, Elizabeth Jolley, Olga Masters — were depicting women’s domestic experiences.

Harrower clearly enjoyed the renewed focus on her work, happily attending public readings and author events in the last decade of her life. Her novels give us an insight into how women and children fared in a narrow and philistine Australia in which their hunger for attention, kindness and some shared understanding of a wider world contended with a sometimes-malicious anti-intellectualism. They remind us how the powerful can psychologically oppress the vulnerable and how hard-won is the struggle against material ugliness and narrow-mindedness. And they do this with an engaging elegance of style. What more can we expect of a novelist? •

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Nevertheless, I was startled on hearing that Armando Iannucci was tackling Dickens. What could the creator of that lethally witty exposé of political machination, In the Loop (2009), and the brilliant satirical account of The Death of Stalin (2017) possibly have in common with the beloved Victorian novelist? Now, on viewing The Personal History of David Copperfield, I find that the answer is “everything” — well, almost. Both are capable of excess, of being outrageous in a good cause, and Iannucci seems to have found a visual and narrative style that can work with comparable vividness and fluency.

One of the innovative aspects of this version of the 1850 classic is the diverse casting, with rising actor Dev Patel as the adult David and several other key participants of African or Asian origin. This may well be Iannucci’s gesture to the changing ethnic demography of contemporary Britain, and it works spectacularly in setting up David Copperfield as a protagonist often at odds with a difficult world. In the wake of his 2008 feature debut in the much-Oscared Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Patel has become a major figure in such successful recent films as Lion (2017).

Here, Patel literally commands the stage when, in the opening sequence set in a large, noisy theatre, he appears to introduce his life story to the audience, echoing Dickens’s opening sentences with “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…” and “To begin my life with the beginning of my life…” He then joins his mother at the scene of his birth, which is followed by the arrival of Aunt Betsey Trotwood (Tilda Swinton), who loses interest and leaves when the baby proves to be a boy, and by a montage of his early life.

After this daring opening, the film never looks back, penetrating the heart of the novel while persistently offering its own take. At the same time, it seems in one sense utterly Dickensian in its procedures: Patel’s telling the story of his life is an incarnation of the novel’s first-person narrator who can’t have been expected to know everything he recalls. What matters is how his recollections and imaginative recreations have informed the story he is telling the theatre audience via an audiovisual style as wildly evocative as Dickens’s prose.

Adapting an 877-page novel with a huge list of characters to a two-hour movie obviously poses challenges. But though I hadn’t read the book for decades the film conjured up most of the key phases I recalled of David’s life and most of the often-bizarre characters. Iannucci, as both director and co-screenwriter, relies on his collaborators behind the camera as well as his cast to ensure we register David’s changing environments.

The happiness of his earliest years with widowed mother Clara (Morfydd Clark) and loyal housekeeper Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper), not to forget the holiday with Peggotty’s family in their home made of an upturned boat, is brutally interrupted when his mother marries the tyrannical Murdstone (Darren Boyd), who sends David off to a harsh boarding school and then to work in the squalor of his — Murdstone’s — bottle factory.

All this, and a great deal more, is rendered vividly by Cristina Casali’s superb production design and Zac Nicholson’s evocative cinematography. Clearly differentiated interiors suggest David’s changing circumstances, and the exterior vistas of panoramic beauty offer not mere pictorialism but suggestions of David’s response to what the world may offer. Glorious long shots of the Yarmouth coast, for example, contrast with its cluttered wharves, and the Houses of Parliament, shown from Westminster Bridge, contrast with the city’s crowded and often sleazy streets.

Perhaps a little more might have been made of David’s schooldays, but essentially the film keeps its mind on how he is interpreting what he sees as he moves towards adulthood. The use of what seem to be his handwritten titles (“If I am a gentleman” and so on) and of Patel’s intermittent voiceover means that we never lose the sense that we are indeed witnessing a “personal history.” And when, following news of his mother’s death, he runs away from London seeking out his only living relative, Betsey Trotwood, and his life takes new turns in new places, the film registers this not so much with realism as with the reality of what it all means to David’s growing awareness of the world’s challenges.

If you are going to film David Copperfield, or perhaps any novel of Dickens, you need a bevy of character actors to register the vivid eccentricities of its personnel without divesting them of a degree of credibility. In this matter Iannucci has been very fortunate. The Miss Murdstone imagined by Dickens and recalled by the narrating David is an awesome presence in Gwendoline Christie’s grim-visaged frigidity; Tilda Swinton is a surprisingly more complex Betsey Trotwood than expected; Hugh Laurie makes Mr Dick’s kite-flying and obsession with King Charles’s severed head both comic and oddly touching; Ben Whishaw breathes Uriah Heep to hypocritical life; and Iannucci’s star from In the Loop, Peter Capaldi, is a matchless incarnation of Mr Micawber’s wild optimism.

Among the younger players, Rosalind Eleazar is a feisty, compelling Agnes Wickfield, contrasting with Morfydd Clark’s gently touching Clara Copperfield, who finds an echo in her later role of Dora Spenlow. The fact that she plays both leads one to reflect on what each may have had in common in their influences on David’s life.

Seeing the film has led me to embark on rereading the novel (surely a positive response to a film adaptation?), and again and again I am struck by how this or that sentence resonates with its audiovisual counterpart in Iannucci’s film. Having admired David Lean’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist for decades, I can’t but feel that Dickens might have responded more enthusiastically to Iannucci’s Personal History of David Copperfield, his cinematic zest striking bells of recognition. •

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In Novel Politics, political scientists John Uhr and Shaun Crowe argue that literature can reveal much about how political ideas circulate in Australia. In defining political fiction, the subject of an undergraduate course they have taught at the Australian National University, they follow Irving Howe’s distinction between the “political” novel, which confronts readers with the consequences of political ideas, and the “social” novel, which takes “society for granted” — George Eliot’s social philosophy versus Jane Austen’s wry observation, in other words. Their interest is in novelists as public intellectuals rather than as observers and entertainers.

Because their broad definition of politics covers many more Australian novels than could be discussed in a book of this length, Uhr and Crowe use six case studies to demonstrate their ideas. Uhr examines three pre-Federation novels, by Catherine Helen Spence, Rosa Praed and Catherine Martin, while Crowe looks at a novel each by contemporary writers Tim Winton and Christos Tsiolkas, and two by Kim Scott.

Spence’s Clara Morison is an amusing novel, reflecting her devotion to Jane Austen in the period before she encountered George Eliot, but Uhr concentrates on how it deals with the nature of civic virtue in the new “free” colony of South Australia. Spence was the first woman to stand for public office in Australia, and it may be that Uhr and Crowe’s interest in her work partly reflects her increasingly active role in social and political reform.

Rosa Praed also had something of the insider’s perspective. She was the daughter of Thomas Murray-Prior, the Queensland postmaster-general during the period when the post became a political ministry, and for a time acted as social companion to her widowed father, learning about the machinations of colonial politics. In Policy and Passion she writes directly about political intrigue in the Australian colony, and Novel Politics focuses on her analysis of civic virtue and vice in a new society.

Uhr reads Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl not only as a “New Woman” novel concerned with the possibilities for women in the new society, but also as an exploration of the era’s philosophical debates. The heroine of this long novel is committed, in turn, to Newman’s notion of Catholicism, to Kant’s philosophy and then to social democracy. Like Spence and Praed, Martin was writing at a time when fiction was one of the few avenues for unenfranchised women to participate in debates about the future of the colonies.

By contrast, the three contemporary novelists are all tertiary-educated men in a position to claim some public attention outside their fiction. Crowe’s chapters cover the identity politics of recent decades and some of Australia’s most pressing challenges — environmental degradation, inequality, and the possibilities for reconciliation between settler and Indigenous communities.

All three of these novelists are political activists. Interestingly, only Tim Winton gained close attention in Brigid Rooney’s Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (2009), and only Kim Scott contributes a statement to Bernadette Brennan’s collection of writers on social commitment Just Words? Australian Authors Writing for Justice (2008). But it is the third of Crowe’s subjects, Christos Tsiolkas, who is the most traditionally political in his writing about class and the place of the sexual outsider.

Crowe finds the source of Winton’s environmentalism in his writing’s sensual response to nature, particularly in Dirt Music. He sees Winton’s determined identification with “redneck” attitudes to the environment as “prioritising earned wisdom over the mediated lessons of science.” Winton’s characters often earn their livelihood from nature, and don’t view it sentimentally, and Crowe makes the interesting point that Winton’s championing of Ningaloo Reef follows from his artistic engagement with the natural world rather than a more rational consideration of scientific evidence.

Tsiolkas is a more complicated case, with his self-consciousness about political theory and his allegiance to both gay liberation and the migrant experience. As this book suggests, his negotiation of the contradictions in these allegiances makes for some of the more interesting moments in his fiction. Personally, though, Dead Europe strikes me as more politically engaging (and disturbing) than the popular The Slap, which Crowe examines, with its tenuous narrative premise and selective sympathy for its characters.

For its part, Scott’s That Deadman Dance is astonishing in its disciplined account of early contact history and the brief possibility of a more equal and reconciled nation. At this point, Crowe is inclined to let the novelist make the political argument, limiting himself to a description of the novel’s content and context, including Scott’s more recent novel, Taboo.

Novel Politics opens up a debate about fiction’s role in circulating political ideas and its capacity to engage readers’ imaginations in unpredictable ways. Dirt Music and The Slap were both popular among readers who may have sympathised with their political positions, but they also stimulated wider discussions about current issues. That Deadman Dance, like Scott’s Benang, makes greater demands on its readers but also provides new insights into first-contact history. Of the nineteenth-century novels, Clara Morison has been the most widely read and appreciated, perhaps because its themes are carried along by its comedy, whereas the full version of An Australian Girl requires a considerable commitment of time and attention.

Uhr and Crowe offer distinctive readings of these novels. They anticipate that the people they call “traditional literary critics” may smile at their naivety in taking on such a broad topic, but they might have been more sensitive to the range of contemporary critical writing. Their recourse to important books of the 1970s — Tom Inglis Moore’s Social Patterns in Australian Literature, Brian Kiernan’s Images of Society and Nature and Geoffrey Serle’s From Deserts the Prophets Come — seems to imply that Australian literary studies have somehow ignored the political and social dimensions of fiction for the past forty years. David Marr’s reference on the cover to the need for Australian fiction to be rescued from a “deadening simplicity of patriotic tradition” overlooks a vast amount of feminist and postcolonial critique in recent decades.

Novel Politics will entice those who read Australian literature to propose their own list of political novels. As well as a range of feminist novels from the 1970s and 80s, mine would include Joseph Furphy’s Rigby’s Romance, Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Frank Hardy’s But the Dead Are Many, Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip and, most of all, given our current situation, Andrew McGahan’s Underground. The field is large, and the authors of Novel Politics suggest that the time has come for political scientists to embrace it. Perhaps we will see regular “Politics and Literature” conferences and a “Politics and Fiction” society to continue their work. •

Policy and Passion and the first edition of An Australian Girl can be downloaded for free as pdfs from the University of Sydney Library. Clara Morison is available commercially as an ebook.

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To start with what may seem a trivial matter. Some decades ago, when I was writing about the silent film version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a female colleague took issue with the underclothes the heroine was wearing, claiming women never wore pants in the period of the film’s setting. In the latest version of Emma, Austen’s protagonist (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) is seen standing in front of a fire and lifting her skirts to warm her bare bottom. A little earlier there had been a naked rear view of Mr Knightley (Johnny Flynn) as he was being dressed in every detail by a manservant.

The point I am making about Autumn de Wilde’s film, directed from Eleanor Catton’s screenplay, is that it is concerned to establish a sense of historical period through such seemingly small details: the absence of Emma’s item of lingerie clearly signifies a now-distant past, and the fact that Knightley requires such sartorial attention immediately illuminates the class lacunae at the heart of Austen’s world.

In such details, and in the titles that announce the changing seasons, the filmmakers have set out to make something new from the classic novel. The most interesting adaptations are those that shun a reverential approach to the text by offering a different slant on something we already knew. In this new film, other matters, such as an intermittently choral-sounding musical score or the crocodile line of red-cloaked schoolgirls making their way about the village and its surrounds, also subtly enrich the texture of this small world.

Having failed so far to answer my opening question, perhaps what I really mean is this: what is it about Austen’s novels that so persistently attracts filmmakers’ attention? Well, they are undeniably witty in tracing their characters’ path to marriage, and along the way they are perceptive about what makes people behave as they do and how matters such as wealth and class help to account for this.

Austen is very rigorous in her dealings with such matters; there is not an atom of sentimentality in her novels, and Emma may well be the most demanding of them. Some readers even find it the least likeable, with its heroine so sure she is always right in her interference in the lives of those around her. Only very near the end is she brought to realise that there is more to life than merely getting her own way.

How does de Wilde, whose previous career was largely in video shorts, deal with the fact that Austen’s original five-volume novel ran to nearly 500 pages? The film begins with the novel’s opening sentence — “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich…” — quoted over images of its heroine sleeping and then, choosing roses in the garden, imperiously directing the servant, “Not that one. The next.” Her way of dealing with her inferiors (and their name is legion, in her view) is quickly established, but it’s not all there is to her: the flowers are intended as a present to her governess, to whom she is devoted and who is about to make what Emma’s hypochondriac father names “an entirely unnecessary marriage.”

Having set Emma in place, physically and socially, the film preserves for the most part the novel’s central narrative trajectory, which is to bring her to a larger awareness of life. Along the way, de Wilde brings a necessary tough-mindedness to bear on Emma’s meddling, and she has been fortunate in Taylor-Joy’s subtle performance.

As is often the case with Austen, it is the arrival of newcomers that propels the plot. Emma takes under her wing Harriet Smith (very engagingly played by Mia Goth), “natural” daughter of someone unknown, which provides her with scope for her managerial talent — well, inclination anyway. Then there are the much talked-about Frank Churchill, who interests Emma, and Jane Fairfax, towards whom she has less than amiable feelings, and Reverend Elton’s new and absurdly uppity wife. There are also relationships with her dim and ageing father, the as-yet-unmarried vicar, and the incessantly gossiping Miss Bates.

The film has some difficulty in coping with the pairings and other connections that constitute this network of lives jostling for a place in the scene. Though both Callum Turner as Churchill and Amber Anderson as the musically gifted Jane Fairfax do attractively what is asked of them, there is really not enough for them to work with. The film might have been tightened if it had dispensed with them — their function in the plot is not made persuasive — and spent more time on the situation of Harriet and the young farmer Emma believes to be unworthy of her protégée.

But this is not a major quibble about a film that knows what it is up to in presenting a central figure who will be brought to more mature awareness. The camera adroitly picks out Emma’s response to a kind gesture on Knightley’s part when he invites the neglected Harriet to dance at a ball. And the Box Hill picnic at which Knightley makes Emma realise how much she has hurt Miss Bates is another step towards her emergence from her heedless girlhood.

If Taylor-Joy and Goth are the most interesting Emma and Harriet I can remember, there are at least two other wonderfully comic treats — from Bill Nighy as old Mr Woodhouse, repeatedly requiring screens to protect his knees from drafts, and from the towering Miranda Hart, whose Miss Bates also registers touchingly a brief moment of hurt. As well as the actors, other collaborators who make significant contributions to this latest foray into Austen are costume designer Alexandra Byrne and production designer Kave Quinn, both evoking time, place and character. As indeed does the film as a whole. •

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It’s the voice. Every writer needs one, and hers is a voice Australians are now familiar with — a certain kind of Jewish New Yorker’s voice, laced with irony and self-examination for all its community-mindedness. Yet biting, and far from self-indulgent. When I read her, echoes flood from my childhood — comforting, but at the same time confronting. It’s a judging voice, one she has questioned if never entirely relinquished.

But maybe she has with this book. Unfinished Business advertises itself as a book about books and reading. After all, books can be friends, and visiting old ones can delight but also surprise us; the things we remember often aren’t there on the page. Recently, seeking a quotation, I re-read a book that had a profound effect on me shortly after I came to Australia. Not only could I not find the quote, I was shocked to discover just how racist and sexist the book is.

As with life, so it is with books. You can’t go home again. Or if you do, you’re likely to meet with disappointment, or at least a disconnect. As Gornick says:

It has often been my experience that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly called into alarming question. It seems that I’ve misremembered quite a lot about this or that character or this or that plot turn — they met here in New York, I was so sure it was Rome; the time was 1870, I thought it was 1900; and the mother did what to the protagonist? Yet the world still drops away while I’m reading and I can’t help marvelling, If I got this wrong, and this and this wrong, how come the book still has me in its grip?

Most of the books Gornick examines here she’s re-read twice, at different stages of her life, each time changing her take on them. And this applies to all different kinds of books — her reading is not only wide but worthy itself of comment. The authors include writers as disparate as Marguerite Duras and Colette; Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz; A.B. Yehoshua and Natalia Ginzburg; D.H. Lawrence, Pat Barker and J.L. Carr.

Their differences notwithstanding, there’s no discounting the critical place of feminism in Gornick’s re-readings. Her opening piece traces her own development along a common political trajectory from socialist left to women’s liberation. She was writing for Village Voice when she came upon the pioneers of feminism’s second wave, citing the galvanising effect of meeting Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller and Shulamith Firestone, writers whose analyses of what we came to call sexism would hone her perspectives on love and sex for years to come.

But now, towards the end of her life, she finds their judgements, bold and perceptive as they were, to be missing something. She turns instead to an earlier feminist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the nineteenth-century suffragist and editor of the journal Revolution, for a seemingly deeper embrace of humanity.

If this seems perplexing, it’s because Unfinished Business isn’t really a book about reading at all. It is about emotional poverty; and what Stanton said about this in her final public speech was that an individual life, female or male, through a combination of nature and history, is fundamentally alone. “Who, I ask you,” Stanton therefore cried, can “dare to take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?”

Here, then, is the underlying theme that binds all Gornick’s authors together. She begins, after the chapter on her reading self, with D.H. Lawrence’s classic bildungsroman Sons and Lovers. I was introduced to this book shortly after arriving in Australia, and was dismayed to find out in my Sydney University English class that Gertrude Morel, with whom I identified completely, was the villain of the piece. Only after her son Paul (based on Lawrence himself) had broken away from her, we were told, was he on his way to adulthood. It was a purely Freudian interpretation.

When Gornick first read Sons and Lovers she identified with Miriam, Paul’s sweetheart, who is portrayed as being crippled by suppressed desire — the lot of many women in her day (and, I should say, in the 1950s). On Gornick’s second reading, though, at the crest of second-wave feminism, her sympathy lay with the free-loving bohemian artist Clara. Now, on her third reading, Gornick has come to perceive that Lawrence made far too much of sexual freedom. Over a century since Sons and Lovers was published and a half-century since her own feminist awakening, she has seen how we have asked too much of sex, how it can be a substitute for feeling, masking, for a variety of reasons, a near epidemic of emotional paralysis.

Page-wise, Unfinished Business is a small book. For all that, it packs a powerful punch. More, it sent me on a reading jag that included another of Gornick’s books, two of which are being reissued this year. And though I was familiar with many of the writers she discusses in this one, I had never read Elizabeth Bowen, and decided it was time I did. Beginning with The Death of the Heart, Bowen’s sixth novel, which many consider her finest, I moved on to Patricia Laurence’s biography of her and, having finished that, have started A World of Love, which came out in 1954. Bowen published ten novels and thirteen volumes of stories, as well as a family history and other nonfiction. Her own life, too, is as fascinating as anything she wrote.

Gornick is full of praise for Bowen, largely because society’s tamping down of genuine feeling is Bowen’s abiding subject. Orphaned young, she was parked among relatives for much of her adolescence. The Death of the Heart, a bildungsroman like Lawrence’s, springs from this experience, with Portia, its sixteen-year-old protagonist, bucking against the adult world of dissemblance and denial. It’s a powerful book, portraying Portia’s pain and resilience with more than enough hints of her creator’s. But then there is Eddie, the love interest. Most of us women, Gornick included, have had an Eddie in our lives, charming but faithless. “Although ostensibly an adult, he is actually a true Bowen child,” Gornick writes, a victim himself of “stunted empathy,” an avatar of “the human fallout” Bowen has made the theme of her novels.

So far, though I’m mesmerised by Bowen’s stories, and indeed her life’s story (Anglo-Irish, orphan, lover, spy), I can’t seem to wholly share Gornick’s admiration for Bowen’s prose. It’s too much of her time, too precious and wordy for me — so unlike Gornick’s own, in fact, with seven pages to Gornick’s single crackling line. It’s the New Yorker in me, I guess. So much depends on childhood, its echoes reverberating inside a reader’s brain, dictating a writer’s voice and, in the end, shaping our reading tastes. That said, how grateful I am for this latest book of Gornick’s, nudging me, prodding me, opening vistas for me, every step of the way. •

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McGahan was a phenomenon in the literary world, a young “dirty realist” of the 1990s with Praise, his Vogel prize-winning novel about a drug-fuelled love affair in seedy Brisbane. Its prequel, 1988, was a hilarious parody of Kerouac-style road-trip novels that had tough things to say about white Australian history. There was a play, too, called Bait, about the efforts of Gordon, the protagonist of Praise and 1988, to conform to a public service job, and also the screenplay for an engaging film version of Praise. McGahan’s novels were both entertaining and serious, and many readers waited with anticipation for what he would do once he had worked through this autobiographical material.

He admitted to baulking at the next step in a literary career, publicly wondering whether he had anything more to say. He tried his hand at crime fiction with Last Drinks, a novel about corruption in Queensland before the Fitzgerald inquiry. Then, in Underground, he imagined an alternative Australia led by an uncharismatic dictator working with international leaders to keep Canberra closed off from the rest of the nation. That novel expressed McGahan’s fury at the Howard government, but re-reading it in the time of Trump, as controls on immigrants and information become even tighter, gives it an even sharper edge. McGahan always understood that the ordinariness of Australia might hide nasty and dangerous possibilities, the pose of “nothing to see here” encouraging a laziness among us when we ought to be galvanised by outrage.

Those novels played with popular genres while insisting that corruption never ends, that politicians always need to be held to account, that secrecy is always dangerous. In The White Earth McGahan moved to the pastoral saga, dealing with Queensland’s brutal race history in the light of the Mabo decision. It won the Miles Franklin award in 2005, as well as several other major prizes, though in some ways it is the least engaging of his novels, without his customary satiric edge. For once, as the novel’s perspectives alternated between a boy trying to understand the hidden history of the Darling Downs and his conniving great-uncle clinging to his tenuous ownership in defiance of the Mabo decision, there was no central figure to express McGahan’s cynical, world-weary view of human folly.

In Wonders of a Godless World McGahan turned to yet another genre. The protagonist of this fantastic journey into a fabled world learns about the power of nature through a series of out-of-body experiences. Like the boy in The White Earth, the Orphan, a girl, is an innocent open to every impression, willing to follow the Foreigner, who shows her a series of natural catastrophes. He explains that these are not part of a cycle of regeneration but merely the result of physical systems: “Life doesn’t matter to the earth.” With magnificent descriptions of the physics of nature — volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, storms, floods, noxious gases and, finally, the looming destruction of life by a comet — the novel shows McGahan in philosophical mode, contemplating the insignificance of human life in the face of the physical forces around us. A work of both imaginative force and scientific logic, the novel won the Aurealis award for science fiction. During that period, McGahan had also taken up young adult fiction, publishing four novels in his Ship Kings fantasy seafaring series.

Some of the preoccupations evident in those earlier novels come together in McGahan’s final novel. The Rich Man’s House begins with a clever pastiche of historical writing, describing the early discovery of the Wheel, a mountain situated on an island a few hundred kilometres south of Tasmania. Almost three times the height of Everest, it becomes the site of a series of mostly fatal attempts on its summit. Only one man ever reaches its pinnacle, known as the Hand of God, and this is a fabulously wealthy American, Walter Richman, who has built a palace on a mountain on a nearby island so he can observe the Wheel in its changing moods.

The reader’s perspective comes through Rita Gausse, the estranged daughter of the palace’s recently deceased architect, who is enticed to join Richman and his entourage there. She is one of McGahan’s cynical and wayward but fundamentally decent observers, appalled by the extravagance of her father’s vision. She has witnessed nature’s revenge on some of her father’s other buildings and appears to have been invited out of superstition. With Rita we explore this extraordinary place, built in defiance of nature, a monument to human arrogance and the power of money. McGahan clearly enjoys inventing its luxurious rooms and tunnels, a kind of exaggerated version of the building projects on reality television by which rich people, driven by willpower and wealth, create homes filled with unnecessary luxury.

An earthquake wreaks havoc on this Tower of Babel, gradually cutting it off from contact with the world below. The novel follows the conventions of a thriller as Rita struggles to survive and comes to understand Richman’s motivations. Yet it also maintains a biblical dimension, with Richman confidently ensconced in his eyrie, in defiance if not of God then of the powerful natural world. The godless, uncaring world of McGahan’s earlier novel makes way here for the possibility that the Earth may actively seek revenge. He intercuts the narrative with newspaper reports and commentaries that give a background to events, and he vividly describes the geological fabric of the mountain and its meteorological effects. The almost playful conclusion presents reports on the 2075 anniversary climb and tells us more than we might need to know about Richman’s fate.

It is impossible to read The Rich Man’s House without an awareness of its author’s death. McGahan inserts an author’s note cheerfully advising the reader that the book might have been closer to perfect if he hadn’t been forced to rush publication in the face of his “abrupt decline in health.” In this light, the novel’s calm contemplation of death might be read as evidence of McGahan’s equanimity about his own demise and his willingness to face up to the insignificance of individual life. Its satiric elements, though, suggest that he managed to maintain a bemused anger at the way power and money dominate our society. Like all McGahan’s writing, while it is a call to recognise the folly of natural destruction, it resists pomposity.

We’ve lost a rare Australian voice — a talented writer with a strong ethical sense who never took himself too seriously. The Rich Man’s House is thoroughly entertaining, cleverly written and driven by an ethical conception. With Wonders of a Godless World it joins the many recent fictions that speculate about the future of a planet at the mercy of humans heedless of the consequences of their urge to conquer it. •

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In Bruny, Heather Rose has taken up the implied challenge, offering us a novel for an uncertain, unequal world in which ordinary fair-minded people are angry yet feel paralysed. Her setting is the Tasmania of the present, or the near future, in which the everyday includes globalisation, mass surveillance, climate change and unrest — in short, the everyday experiences of life in the Anthropocene. With a hypothetical, just-plausible scenario, Rose sets up a crisis that enables her to explore what might constitute progress in a world of accelerating change.

The novel can be read simply as a thriller. Its well-crafted plot tracks what happens when a big infrastructure project — a bridge connecting Bruny Island with Tasmania — proves to be a bridge too far, for some at least, and even a cause for terrorism. But this is a thriller with a serious underbelly, which the reader can dwell on and draw out — or not. It is well worth reading just for its noirish humour about the predicament of our increasingly monochrome times.

The novel’s ultimate optimism draws much from the creative arts. Rose uses her art to interweave her own reflections on how present injustices and environmental destruction have become everyday. Working contrapuntally, the internal musings of the protagonists tell a bigger story, and hold the suspense. It is a very local story, but the local is now the global.

Bruny Island (in real life) uses the slogan “An island off an island, off an island” to attract tourists, and the fictional Bruny riffs on this island-mindedness. Tasmania’s small-town scene is signalled in the curious coincidence that a single family is at the heart of all the politics. The chief protagonist is Astrid (“Ace”) Coleman, an international conflict-resolution specialist with the United Nations. Ace’s twin brother is the premier (J.C., conservative/Liberal) and her older sister is the leader of the opposition (Max, Labor). Ace spends time with her dying father (a former Labor politician), who despairs of what politics can do within and beyond his family and has withdrawn into quoting Shakespeare.

Ace, the studiously professional outsider, keeps her distance from Tasmanian politics. She is there to listen to the locals: the protesters, those in favour of the bridge and those bemused by its sudden imposition on their quiet corner. She understands Tasmania, but her outlook is global. She has been based in New York for decades: her children have grown up American. Her work has taken her to the most disadvantaged and war-torn parts of the world.

But this task is new and strange. While helping people in poverty and global strife is normal, Ace finds it acutely more difficult to deal with the possible destruction of this special place of peace, free of the cares of the world. She left Tasmania, she muses, “because you get really small out here on the perimeter of life, and life gets way too big picture.” Yet her sense of self depends on knowing that this place exists; she needs to retain the option of losing herself on the edge of the world.

At times the plot can appear too neat. Surely no government would call in an expensive international conflict-resolution specialist to sort a local dispute about a bridge? Yet, truth eerily echoes fiction, even as I was reading this novel. Senate estimates hearings in October revealed that the Morrison government had spent $190,000 on consultants Futureye as part of what it called a “social licence strategy” to help government deal with landowners along the controversial Melbourne–Brisbane inland rail line. Futureye’s role was to advise on empathy, to measure community sentiment and to provide advice on how to win over critics — exactly the role given to Ace in Bruny.

In the private reading place between writer and reader nurtured by a novel, fictional options emerge that are almost too subversive for real life, yet it is these that make Bruny ultimately satisfying. Rose seeks out readers like me, who feel flooded by the barrage of good causes we can’t take responsibility for. “There ought to be a name for the kind of overwhelm that happens when you realise there are too many things to fight,” she writes. Living in a globalising world is overpowering; it leaves you breathless and impotent. This novel is a solace, an enabling space, where the local is important and, maybe, just maybe, social licence can be “a powerful thing” in which communities who vote and pay taxes might “hold all the cards.”

The motif of tourists “getting present to themselves” at Bruny’s fictional Solitude resort echoes Rose’s earlier novel, The Museum of Modern Love, which celebrates artist Marina Abramović and her performance “Being Present.” Abramović stretches the present into a place for meditation, for “being with” the times rather than overtaken by them, by looking directly into the eyes of museum visitors. “Perhaps art was evolving into something to remind us of the power of reflection, even stillness,” Rose mused. In Bruny, she builds into the action spaces that are still, reflective and nourishing to the soul. She argues for the power vested in the arts: “Nobody with a strong culture looks like they can be bought.”

Central to the plot is the figure of Gilbert Farris, leader of the Bruny Friends Group, the protest group defending the island against the bridge. Rose positions Farris, whose international fame is based on a bestseller, The Homogenocene, as practically and theoretically concerned about loss of social and cultural diversity, even as he also defends his private right to his writing paradise. Farris is fictional, but the concept of a Homogenocene is not: it is one of the terms used to refer to the rupture that sees our world moving beyond the relatively stable epoch of the Holocene into a new era where the old rules no longer apply. The Anthropocene is another of these terms — its focus is on how humans have become geological forces, shaping the physical trajectory of Earth. The Homogenocene emphasises the loss of diversity, biodiversity and cultural diversity, and the homogenising “one size fits all” model of the market economy.

Both Anthropocene (coined in 2000) and Homogenocene (coined in 1999) appeared during the period of millennial anxiety, and have since gained traction. With markets amorally accelerating the growing gap between rich and poor, rapid ecological and psychological change have become increasingly interdependent. What should a responsible individual do in such times?

Not all literary critics accept “cli-fi” (climate fiction) as serious fiction: science fiction has traditionally been treated as a genre apart, though this is changing with rising scientific literacy and the sense that both the sciences and the arts are ways to make sense of the world. Climate change is inherently uncanny and unpredictable. It is beyond classic scientific methods, yet it is also intensely physical, as anyone bearing the brunt of the rising firestorms and sea levels knows. The artist, according to cognitive scientist and philosopher Jerome Bruner, must exploit “metaphor” rather than prediction: her role is to “join dissimilar experiences by finding the image or the symbol that writes them at some emotional level of meaning.” That depends on getting past the “literal mode of connecting” that is necessary to prediction. This is a particular task for cli-fi, where the predictive mode (the language of science) sometimes suggests connections too literal for metaphorical power.

Changed weather conditions, and the high-carbon lifestyles causing them, are becoming increasingly familiar. Yet their menace and uncertainty is not really everyday for a novelist, says Amitav Ghosh. The surprises and shocks are too great for the background, he says, yet they are a distraction in the foreground of the novel. Climate change is one of many background forces in Bruny, along with injustice, media concentration, mass surveillance, and distant authoritarian control by democratically elected governments. Rose grapples with the interactions between them — the Homogenocene effect — but her novel foregrounds personal responsibility in a creative space where she and her reader connect. In telling a breathless story of destruction and global power struggles, she offers a paradoxical intimacy that empowers and refreshes the reader. •

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The walk finished at 24 Russell Square, where the publisher Faber & Faber had its offices in Orwell’s time. Established in 1929, the firm was immediately notable for the fact that its founding director and editor was T.S. Eliot, whose 1922 poem The Waste Land came to be considered a founding work of literary modernism. The firm quickly became a leader, publishing emerging poets, playwrights and novelists like W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Siegfried Sassoon, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.

George Orwell, though, was never published by Faber. That was the reason we were at 24 Russell Square. “TSE” rejected Down and Out in Paris and London in 1932: “decidedly too short… and too loosely constructed.” Then, in July 1944, he turned down the manuscript for Animal Farm in one of publishing’s most famous rejection letters.

“We agree it is a distinguished piece of writing,” wrote Eliot. “The fable is very skilfully handled… the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane — and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver. On the other hand, we have no conviction… that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.”

This was just over a month after D-Day. There was a war to be won and Britain’s allies included the target of Orwell’s “fairy story,” the Soviet Union. Eliot was “very sorry, because whoever publishes this, will naturally have the opportunity of publishing your future work: and I have a regard for your work, because it is good writing of fundamental integrity.”

Animal Farm was eventually published by Secker & Warburg in Britain and Harcourt, Brace in the United States in 1946. By then the war was over but a new one had begun, a cold war, where the Soviet Union occupied the other side of an Iron Curtain. Orwell’s future work turned out to be 1984, published in 1949 shortly before he died from tuberculosis. TSE was right: Secker & Warburg and Harcourt, Brace got that one too.

Faber & Faber: The Untold Story is written by a grandson of Geoffrey Faber, the firm’s founder. Toby Faber, a former managing director of the firm and still a director, has curated and edited an archive of extracts from letters, internal memos, board minutes, diary entries, promotional materials, and newspaper and magazine articles, covering the period from the firm’s founding until 1990. He annotates many of the extracts to provide context and explain details. Chapters are organised chronologically and each is introduced with an overview of the main incidents and trends in the period. Together with an introduction and afterword, it adds up to an absorbing account of the creation, evolution, near death and survival of an important enterprise in what some would now call the “creative industries.”

At the heart of that enterprise are the authors who wrote the manuscripts, the staff who accepted some and rejected many, and the books Faber & Faber published. Readers looking for delicious publishing industry gossip will find a feast. Within a month of starting work as a junior editor in 1953, Charles Monteith pulled a few manuscripts off the slush pile to occupy a train journey to Oxford. He thought more of one titled Strangers from Within than the reader who had already annotated it with “Absurd and uninteresting fantasy… Rubbish and dull. Pointless. Reject.” The author, William Golding, submitted a revised version of this, his first novel, with a new title, A Cry of Children. Faber published it in 1954 as Lord of the Flies. About thirty years later, Golding won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Monteith was not so impressed by Ted Hughes’s first book of verse, The Hawk in the Rain, even though it had won a prize in the United States. “The quality seems to me very uneven… [H]e might perhaps have a letter of encouragement.” T.S. Eliot was more enthusiastic: “I’m inclined to think we ought to take this man now. Let’s discuss him.” Faber made an offer, Hughes accepted it, and they published him for the rest of his life. Artful correspondence followed about work from Hughes’s wife, Sylvia Plath: her early poems and initially pseudonymous novel The Bell Jar went to Heinemann; Faber published her posthumous collection Ariel and, later, a paperback edition of The Bell Jar, licensed from Heinemann.

The archives of a publisher whose authors won four Nobel prizes in the 1990s alone (Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Wislawa Szymborska, Günter Grass) and another four since (Harold Pinter, Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas Llosa, Kazuo Ishiguro) hold many such stories of wooing, signing, editing and sometimes rejecting or losing famous authors. The signings often express the power imbalance between awestruck young authors and a prestigious publishing house; the losses show creators pressing the value of their work, increasingly via the agents that unsettled the dominance of haughty publishers. Spencer Curtis Brown thought books by his author C.P. Snow should be selling 35,000–45,000 copies “and I am sure that you believe that too and that you will be full of exciting and enthusiastic ideas towards that end.” Snow moved to Macmillan.

Alongside the Nobel and Booker prize winners, Faber published a lot of books that did not have such high literary aspirations. Asked to spell out the kinds of books she liked and those she didn’t, the editor of the gardening and farming list, Eileen Brooksbank, wrote in 1976, “I can’t help remembering that on many an occasion when I have asked the travellers what is selling they simply reply ‘the usual things, bridge books, cookery and gardening.’ So we must try to keep them supplied.” Commenting on an internal memo criticising the humorous NOT 1982 calendar that sold massively, Toby Faber observes that “many Faber employees never quite understood that the firm could only publish great literature if it also made a profit.”

In different hands, the “untold story” of Faber & Faber might have given less space to the business side. As a former managing director and a member of the family that still controls half the publisher’s shares, Toby Faber reveals a great deal about the enduringly private Faber & Faber. He includes a table of sales, pre-tax profits and gross dividends paid each year, showing the big swings between struggle and fortune. He also shows sales revenues predicted by “Dr Morley’s Parabolic Prediction or Futurity Revealed,” a formula one of the early directors derived from the pattern of sales between 1926 and 1931. By the late 1930s it was wildly out, but the figures in the late 1980s were eerily close to Morley’s ancient model.

Like the founder of any start-up, Geoffrey Faber had to work out what his business would do, where it would get the money to do it, and who would do the work and where. Initially, it wasn’t even his business. He had published two volumes of poetry and had a little experience in publishing with Oxford University Press before the first world war, enough to encourage the inheritors of a business called the Scientific Press to appoint him chairman and managing director in 1924.

The new owners wanted to diversify away from medical titles. Someone suggested Faber talk to T.S. Eliot, who was working at Lloyds Bank and editing the literary magazine The Criterion as well as writing his own poetry. Eliot, of course, was not yet the Nobel Prize winner he would become in 1948, but The Waste Land was already famous and Faber was told he was “the best and most learned [critic] of his generation and is respected (and a little feared) by the young.”

Faber bought into the business through a complicated family transaction — a loan from the “relatively large” trust estate left by his father’s cousin — that needed both the widow’s and Faber’s mother’s approval. The partners in the business then fell out, separating their interests by selling the profitable Nursing Mirror for a sum that enabled Faber to pay back his loan from the estate and emerge as the sole owner of a new company that acquired the marginal books business. Choosing “Faber & Faber Limited” from four possible names, he inspired ageless speculation and jokes — the Russell Square twins, Fabber & Fabber, Fabberdum and Fabberdee — about the second Faber.

The business of becoming what Toby Faber calls “the literary publisher… for most of the period since it was founded” needed various forms of cross-subsidy from the start. For most of the three decades he was in charge, Geoffrey Faber also drew a salary as an “estates bursar” at All Souls College in Oxford. Among the college’s investments during this time was a country property in Sussex that was leased to Faber, who spent weekends there with his wife Enid.

Most spectacularly, Faber & Faber earned immense profits from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, which turned T.S. Eliot’s collection of children’s verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, into a blockbuster musical theatre show. In the financial year to March 1986, net revenue from Cats was just over £1 million while pre-tax profit for the company as a whole was £246,000, implying the rest of the business lost around £750,000.

In the especially difficult 1970s, a similar role was played by John Seymour’s The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency and its sequel. It sold over a million copies in different formats, “riding a wave generated by the TV sitcom The Good Life.” The money was real, but the book was “essentially conceived and produced by [book packager] Dorling Kindersley.” Faber & Faber was “very lucky” that Seymour insisted it should be the publisher.

On the other hand, once established, the books business could cross-subsidise new businesses. A music publishing arm was created in the 1960s, initially for Benjamin Britten’s works. He was delighted to bring his music to “such a splendid publisher,” and Geoffrey Faber’s wife Enid wrote that “frankly I would sooner lose my money over this, than over something duller.” It turned out to be a very handy business indeed, which T.S. Eliot’s widow Valerie (nee Fletcher) insisted should handle the music rights for Cats.

At several points, Toby Faber describes the sometimes excruciating male-ness of the enterprise and the industry — in evidence in the remarkable photo, reproduced above, of Louis MacNeice, Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender at a Faber party in 1960, which Sylvia Plath described in a letter to her mother: “Ted looked very much at home among the great.”

But huge roles at the company were played by women. Geoffrey’s wife Enid was deeply involved in the business: she “largely ran” the Faber stand at the first Sunday Times Book Exhibition in 1933, which later became a national book fair at Earl’s Court. Perhaps she was the other Faber? The cover blurb for Derek Llewellyn’s 1971 Faber bestseller Everywoman: A Gynaecological Guide for Life, calls it “the most compassionate, pleasing, authoritative and informative treatise on the business of being a woman that I have so far seen,” reproducing the verdict of Dr Donald Gould in the New Statesman. In 1989, as part of a restructure to preserve the company’s independence, it was Valerie Eliot who set up a trust to acquire the other half of Faber & Faber, alongside and equal to the Faber family interests.

Toby Faber identifies luck, a publishing philosophy “focused on excellence and the long term,” good editorial taste, regular editorial renewal, and the “crucial business decision” to publish both hardbacks and paperbacks as major factors that helped the business founded by his grandfather to survive not just to 1990, when this book ends, but to the present.

In July, Faber & Faber announced that it will publish twenty-seven-year-old Australian author Gabriel Bergmoser’s “full-blooded” debut. The title has not been settled — it will be Sunburnt Country or The Hunted — but it will be “a short, sharp shock of a novel” and the manuscript has been optioned for a movie by “a major film company in LA.” It feels some way from the mid 1930s, when the hot front-list competitors were The Faber Book of Modern Verse, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse edited by W.B. Yeats, and I.M. Parsons’s The Progress of Poetry.

Yet Toby Faber’s rich account of the history of “the literary publisher” also reminds us that talk of literature’s demise is always in fashion. In 1965, when Charles Monteith was unenthusiastic about a novel by Barbara Pym, Philip Larkin lamented:

Personally… I feel it is a great shame if ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane people doing ordinary sane things can’t find a publisher these days. This is the tradition of Jane Austen and Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today… I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field they command, but who can see, in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so-called “big” experiences of life are going to miss them. •

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My Brilliant Friend, the first of the four novels, has been dramatised as an eight-part series, with Ferrante’s involvement as a script consultant. US network giant HBO collaborated with European production company Rai Fiction to film the series in Campania, the region of which Naples is the capital, with a cast drawn from local schoolchildren and actors familiar with the regional dialect. It is HBO’s first foreign-language series, and comes with English subtitles.

“Authenticity” is often equated with scrupulous attention to detail, but here it has a more fundamental meaning. It is as if personalities and events are manifestations of the environment. Because any sense of an individual psychology or destiny must be wrested from the determining influence of the social milieu, it is this milieu, first and foremost, that must be realised on screen.

The story commences in a suburb on the outskirts of Naples. In the words of series director Saverio Costanzo, this is “a place with no meanings, no charm… built in the middle of nothing” in the late 1940s. Costanzo and his team constructed the exteriors of fourteen apartment buildings, with corresponding interior sets, a church and streetscapes with shopfronts and trading carts. The apartment blocks are typical postwar concrete constructions, their small, railed balconies fit only for hanging washing. There’s hardly a tree in sight, and the landscape around is flat and featureless. Vesuvius is a distant presence and the sea a remote prospect.

Ferrante draws her storylines from the interplay of households struggling to make a living or, in some cases, to break out of the poverty trap with more aggressive commercial ventures. Neighbours fight each other like crazed teenagers, harbouring resentments and pursuing long-term vendettas. Children are born into families in which the parents have hardly had the chance to become adults themselves and who have accepted that their own future is written in the past.

Yet two of these children will have a different future. For Elena and Lila, the girls at the centre of the story, opportunities are created by the changing conditions of a larger world and the new freedoms it affords as the war years recede. Their parents see no need for them to be educated, and reward any form of adventuring with a beating, but one of their schoolteachers is equally determined to help them realise their potential.

The two girls are brought together by different kinds of intelligence. Elena is diligent and intuitive. Lila — “brilliant,” according to the title of the novel — has an almost uncanny capacity to learn whatever skills may serve her as circumstances change. Geniale, the adjective in the novel’s Italian title, has connotations of genius or inspiration, but Lila’s genius has a dangerous edge. It is she, alone among the denizens of this wretched, insular suburb, who has the capacity to cheat what they perceive as inevitabilities.

Elisa del Genio and Ludovica Nasti, who play Elena and Lila as primary schoolchildren, were chosen from among thousands seen during the casting process. In accord with the descriptions in the novel, they are perfectly contrasted in physical type. Elena is pretty and well-proportioned, with pale skin and fair hair; Lila is smaller, darker and more angular — “skinny like a salted anchovy,” in Ferrante’s words. Though neither had prior acting experience, they inhabit the personalities of the duo with an assurance that allows the stronger dramatic currents between them to emerge.

More exacting demands are made of Margherita Mazzucco and Gaia Girace, who play the two girls as teenagers. They have to fill in the psychological and emotional dimensions that will play out in the longer term. Elena grows and develops, in a consistent narrative arc. Adolescence makes her awkward, a dumpy figure in shapeless clothes who finds the onset of menstruation humiliating, but she compensates by working hard and doing well at school. Lila is on an arc that twists contrarily. Forced to abandon her schooling, she finds herself given an unexpected beauty which she exploits to gain control of her situation.

All this comes across in the intricately wrought texture of the television adaptation, with some sparing use of narrative voiceover to underline the psychological underpinnings. “Lila acted within me like a demanding ghost,” Elena tells us at one point. The novels come close to suggesting that in their conjoined life course, Lila and Elena are two parts of one psyche, an idea not easily communicated on screen.

Through its unwavering fidelity to the nuances of the two girls’ exchanges, the series risks becoming ponderous at times, but the slow pacing pays off when it is counterpointed by eruptions of tension in the community. Predatory youths circle, developing their own hierarchies. Vicious fights break out and everyone in the street stops to watch.

With thirty-two episodes planned to cover the whole four-part cycle of the novels, this series promises many of the qualities of Un Village Français, perhaps the finest television saga we’ve seen in recent years. Both have that deeper sense of authenticity that comes with a committed engagement with the lives of a community. Sense of place and the material realities of everyday life are so fully evoked that the performances seem to grow out of them, and as viewers we read expressions and reactions as if we were present.

There is, though, a very significant difference. Un Village Français has a more broadly based dramaturgical structure, with different groups of characters involved in their own distinct storylines. Ferrante writes point-of-view novels, so we only connect with the lives and events of the community surrounding Elena and Lila through what is happening to them.

In a novel, this works as part of a complex thematic and psychological framework. It is the narrative voice itself that mesmerises. On television, the unilinear approach becomes a constraint. It’s hard to keep track of the various members of the nine families whose lives are entwined with those of the two girls. Although every character is perfectly cast, creating an ensemble of strikingly individual physiognomies, it’s too easy to just forget who most of them are. They remain part of the backdrop of the central drama.

Perhaps this will become less of a problem as the series progresses and the lives of the two young women open out. As teenagers they discover the city of Naples, with its awakening worlds of fashion in the Via dei Mille, its pizzerias and, of course, its great ocean vistas. And Fabio Cianchetti, one of Italy’s leading cinematographers, has a way of composing scenes that makes every still from the series a compelling statement in itself. Hold off on the visit to the travel agent. You’ll never see these places quite as they have been brought to life on screen. •

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Since The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), his first brush with cinema, McEwan has written the screenplays for several of the screen versions of his novels, and this is again the case with The Children Act, an absorbing adaptation of one of his toughest works. He is reunited here after twenty-five years with director Richard Eyre, who also directed The Ploughman’s Lunch. Eyre, in a sort of parallel with McEwan, has also won plaudits for achievements in two media: not only has he directed such memorable screen fare as the two Judi Dench starrers, Iris (2001) and Notes on a Scandal (2006), but he is also a formidable, award-winning stage director.

The third name that gets one excited about the new film is that of Emma Thompson, and I’ll come back to her shortly. Enough to say now that her performance holds together McEwan’s complexity of ideas and the subtleties of Eyre’s direction. It’s not all that common to find a film dealing in ideas, but in this matter The Children Act is wholly intended for grown-ups — or for very alert teenagers like the boy whose plight is at the centre of its drama and dialectic. McEwan obviously had to shrink his novel in the interests of the film’s running-time, but he has contrived to retain — and dramatise — the same sense of belief and actuality, and law and morality, pulling at each other.

Thompson plays Fiona Maye, a High Court judge we first glimpse typing away at night in the vast apartment block where she lives with her husband Jack (Stanley Tucci), who soon won’t be living there. Her obsession with her work in the family division has reached the point where it has undermined her marriage. The film makes quite clear how and why the sorts of cases on which she has to pronounce judgement might have led to this pass.

The drama of her life is in her handling of such demanding possibilities. She simply can’t respond to her husband’s suggestion of a night at the opera — nor to his bald statement, “I want an affair.” “When did we last have sex?” he asks, and she can’t remember. What is persuasive is the way the film manages to suggest that they may love each other but that their marriage is foundering because “the law can take over your life.” Jack, a decent but now sexually needy man, leaves.

Fiona’s most recent court experience has involved the proposed separation of conjoined twins: either she allows it to go ahead, in which case one will die because of key shared organs, or she does not, in which case both will die. Either outcome will bring grief to the parents, but she has to be guided by what the law allows or, indeed, requires. “This is a court of law, not of morals,” she says from the bench with impressive command and dignity.

This may well be the central issue of all Fiona’s decisions, but the film also suggests persuasively that she is partly the product of this requirement of her profession. Perhaps it stands in the way of any compromise in her domestic life.

The case at the film’s heart involves a boy of seventeen, Adam Henry (Fionn Whitehead), who will die of leukaemia without the blood transfusion that he and his Jehovah’s Witness parents are refusing. The film’s emotional charge is toughened, but never sentimentalised, by Fiona’s own childlessness, as well as by the marriage disintegration, but in her magisterial grasp of the sources of strain Thompson enjoins unfailing empathy in the viewer. Fiona is work-bound and has been barely aware of the marital aridity in which she and Jack have been living.

The case of Adam Henry unsettles her professional firmness. The media scrum outside the court contrasts with the rigour of the courtroom, where she presides over the hearing in which medical experts, counsels for and against the transfusion, and the father all put their cases. Andrew Dunn’s camera prowls the courtroom, focusing on each in turn, before moving very slowly to Fiona’s face as she ponders the various testimonies. She must weigh the prediction of an expert witness — that it will be “a horrible death” — against what the Henrys see as the ultimate test of their faith.

The turning point comes when Fiona realises that, after so much careful listening, she needs to speak to Adam himself. The film moves to the hospital, where a surprising and moving rapport is struck between the two: the highly intelligent seventeen-year-old boy and the fifty-nine-year-old judge. For those unfamiliar with the book and planning to see the film, I won’t give further details, except to say that, though touching and wholly convincing, their relationship is not what you might expect, and it is acted with superb control of nuance by Thompson and Whitehead.

I should add that the cast is full of striking character players — including Nicholas Jones as the steely expert witness and, in a witty three-minute cameo, Rupert Vansittart as a wildly sceptical colleague of Fiona’s — which enrich the texture of this fluently written and directed film with its equal respect for ideas and narrative power. •

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This year’s winner of the Man Booker prize, Anna Burns, will soon need ready answers to the kind of query posed in Craig Brown’s imaginary Q&A with Shakespeare following the first night of Hamlet. The Irish novelist’s life changed at 10pm on Tuesday when the ceremony in London’s lavish Guildhall concluded with the announcement that Milkman, her fourth work, was the judges’ choice over the favourites, Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black.

Within minutes of her stunned reaction and tremulous thanks to publishers and editors, the Belfast-born writer was pitched into a round of speed dates with deadline-pressed journalists. The first mention of Brexit can’t be far off. [Stop press, 03.00 GMT: Burns’s interview reference to her book as also being about “barriers, barricades, and the dreaded ‘other’” is seen as underscoring its relevance to Brexit.]

The award to Burns’s cryptic first-person illumination of a Catholic girl in a claustrophobic urban district during Northern Ireland’s 1970s heaviness is welcome if unexpected. The shortlist looked thinner when two kinetic works, Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight and Sally Rooney’s Normal People, failed to make the cut. Powers’s tree-centric embrace of deep time, Edugyan’s epic of a freed slave, Daisy Johnson’s rural English mythos, Rachel Kushner’s tale of a mother’s survival in a California prison, and Robin Robertson’s transatlantic verse-journey all had their champions, while Private Eye’s description of an “earnest and overly issue-driven shortlist” might be truer of several recent years. In the end Milkman, with its nameless characters, immersive fears, experimental diction, stream-of-consciousness portraits, and powerful sense of a collective subject, draws the reader into its genuinely imagined world.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the NYU philosopher who chaired the judging panel, had earlier offered a few portentous words about the “dizzying array of human imagination” on offer from the six finalists, which “speak to our moment,” while admitting that — in the Booker tradition of last-minute tussles — even he “didn’t know this morning” who would take the prize.

Everyone, in short, did their level best by what is still regarded as Britain’s most prestigious literary title, its £50,000 (A$92,000) value to the recipient not incidental. (“Pay off my debts,” was Burns’s sensible answer when BBC’s Rebecca Jones asked about her plans.) A big rise came in 2002 when the Man Group, an investment management firm, took over the sponsorship, wisely choosing to keep the older name, with its happy assonance, as part of a new branding.

The baton now is returned to the publishers, booksellers, publicists, agents, feature writers and re-reviewers, whose next busy weeks aim to put author and work into the heads and hands of as many readers as possible. At the max, the “Booker bounce” can deliver great benefits, shared by the other novels who have made the long- and shortlists.

Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, for example, catapulted from 13,000 to over 191,000 sales in 2016 (even excluding audio and ebooks), while George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, last year’s winner, jumped from 10,000 to 62,000: the smallest boost on record, yet still one to die for. The success of these sons of Los Angeles and Amarillo was made possible by the sponsor-led opening-up in 2014 to any novel published in English in the United Kingdom, regardless of the author’s home country, a departure from the Booker’s historical “confinement” to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth. The closing words of Appiah’s announcement, “we read all these authors without ever asking for their passports,” might be seen as a coded endorsement of that decision — or rebuke to the British government over its now colder house for immigrants?

In this respect, it will be interesting to track the latest iteration of what publishers yearningly call the Man Booker’s halo effect. Anna Burns’s award will surely also deflect persistent criticism of that international (read: American) outreach, made on the grounds that the prize’s distinct character will be eroded, as well as an overlapping unease over a sequence of four awards to male writers since Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries won in 2013.

The Booker race, famously landed with the term “posh bingo” by Julian Barnes, whose The Sense of an Ending won in 2011, ostensibly seeks to make readers of punters and gawpers. Yet the compulsive social thrills of such events — the odds and inside dope, the personas and backstories — seem ever to turn the literary pleasures into also-rans.

To see how BBC television and, marginally less so, radio treat the annual Man Booker is to encounter a willing collaborator possessed of bags of complaisant smiliness but no intellectual or moral rigour. That at least is the gravamen of its two pre-Booker programs, the first of which was a thirty-minute, Friday night edition of its Front Row Late arts series. In a live event at Birmingham’s literary festival, inevitably fronted by Mary Beard, a three-person panel discussed publicity, reviews and the boom in literary prizes and festivals.

In a recorded segment, industry figures agreeably shared trade customs: dispensing proofs to “influencers,” maximising the “personal element” of meet-the-author and signed copies. Fortuitously transformative notices were also given their due. Pru Rowlandson, publicity director at Granta, recalled Margaret Atwood’s review of Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, and James Daunt, managing director of the flagship Waterstone’s chain, cited Ian McEwan’s live BBC Radio encomium to John Williams’s Stoner, which propelled the neglected work to 130,000 sales.

There was little revelatory in any of this, though Beard — having read “1.5” of the Booker shortlist — expressed worry about the “packaging” and “language” just voiced. Kate Mosse, founding director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, explained her rationale (“prizes matter because they give a reason for works of quality to stay on the shelf”), while the journalist and Birmingham curator Sathnam Sanghera championed more local, diverse and soulful events against expensive ones “in fields and tents, for posh white people.”

Dreda Say Mitchell, a crime writer and digital evangelist, was already way beyond. She lamented both the hard copies on show (“In a world where books have gone digital, I would expect to see Kobo or Kindle”) and the “very narrow voices of corporate traditional publishing,” instead praising online commenters, crime readers’ clubs and “the power of digital to give writers a living.” She then took aim at Sanghera’s dismissal of many Amazon reviews as “rubbish,” citing a single star for Hamlet: “Why shouldn’t they give Shakespeare one star? At the end of the day I’m a writer. I want people to buy my books. The most powerful persons to me are the people who read my books. How do you define an expert? What is an expert?”

Mary signed off with the obligatory BBC plug: following the last “hugely successful adaptation” of John le Carré, here’s a “taster” of the next, “which starts on BBC1 later this month.” Then the credits, which listed twenty-two names complicit in this mess of pottage. Though to be fair, it was enlivened by Dreda’s sorted and fearless presence. And even if the Man Booker link had proved vestigial, the professionals’ insight into the machinery driving today’s “prose factory” (the title of D.J. Taylor’s rich history of England’s post-1918 literary life) was of real interest.

An absorbing current illustration, given the author’s established status, is the pre-marketing for Jonathan Coe’s forthcoming novel Middle England, published in early November but circulated well before then among key influencers. The bucolic heritage-style cover announces its inevitable choice as a BBC Radio 4 “book of the week,” while blurbs have long circulated framing the work as the landmark post-Brexit novel (notwithstanding the genre’s busy post-2016 output). Most remarkable of all in the months up to publication is Coe’s enticing drip-feed to his followers of lines from the novel.

These literary slivers slot into place alongside Coe’s one-track political commentary in what might be termed Tribal Coeland. “England felt like a calm and settled place tonight: a country at ease with itself.” “‘It’s a shop, Dad. It’s a Marks and Spencer. They don’t make cars here any more.’ ‘Where do they make the cars, then?’ That was a good question.” “‘Luckily, there are still a lot of loyal, sensible Conservatives who appreciate the benefits of EU membership. I believe you’re sleeping with one of them.’” And so on.

The book’s high-end endorsers include Ben Elton (“An astute, enlightened and enlightening journey into the heart of our current national identity crisis. Both moving and funny”); Nigella Lawson (“magisterial”); Sanghera, Coe’s fellow Brummie (“fantastic… the first great Brexit novel”); and India Knight (“This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics”). The Guardian’s John Crace even turns market pitcher to roll up the crowds: “Let me add to the chorus of praise for Jonathan Coe’s new book Middle England.”

Middle England’s buzz-building — a coalescing of author, publisher, festivals, friends, fans, and the politically like-minded — is a case study in literary manufacture, a topic raised, but no more, in Front Row Late. If such processes were brought fully into the light, and considered in an inquiring, eclectic spirit, not just the world of books but the common good might be well served. The chance of that being tried on the BBC is less than zero.

The second program, broadcast on BBC Four on the eve of the Man Booker ceremony, was a one-hour survey of the prize’s half-century, inevitably guided by the BBC panjandrum Kirsty Wark, with a title — Barneys, Books and Bust-Ups — sampling from the corporation’s millennial trademark: patronising populism.

Again, to be fair, the endless milling shots of big-night luminaries — filling for the lack of relevant visuals — were a bracing rapid-fire test, and insiders were again good value: the late publisher Tom Maschler, who took the idea from France’s Prix Goncourt (“I set it up because England is backward in terms of literary appreciation”); double recipient Peter Carey, on how the prize “brought new voices from beyond the metropole” before becoming a “literary juggernaut”; and the scholar Hermione Lee contextualising a clip of Penelope Fitzgerald, winner in 1979 with Offshore, being cut down on the BBC’s The Book Programme by disdainful host Robert Robinson and fellow guest Susan Hill soon after her sweet moment.

If the latter was excruciating, and a hapless TV presenter’s buttonholing of judges Angela Carter and Fay Weldon in 1983 equally so, Anthony Burgess’s reaction when beaten by William Golding in 1980 (“a small, parochial prize suitable for small, parochial novels”) was cowardly, and his feint to the Nobel, which Golding would also shortly receive, indicative of a cosmic humour at work.

Familiar rivalries and incidents were retold: Brian Aldiss and Malcolm Bradbury’s attempt to stop Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981 (it was also chosen as the “best of…” after the Booker’s twenty-fifth and fortieth years); John Berger handing his prize money (“as a revolutionary writer”) to the Black Panthers in 1972 on account of parent company Booker-McConnell’s historic links to Caribbean sugar plantations; Alan Taylor’s counter-coup in 1994, which installed James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late over Alan Hollinghurst or Jill Paton Walsh. Kirsty’s anecdotal heap vaguely prompted the old joke that to find England’s real bloodsport, the place to look is the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement. But there was plenty of mulch too — Beryl Bainbridge’s backache, Val McDermid ploughing through the longlist while cooking, P.H. Newby’s sister watching people bet on the outcome in 1969 when she secretly knew he had won, Anne Enright being denied a visit to the loo — before it perked up with Fay Weldon’s agent being punched.

There were omissions, such as Nicholas Mosley resigning as a judge in 1991 because he wanted a novel of “ideas” not of “style” to win. That decision was made to look sound after Ben Okri’s overblown The Famished Road was selected, a rival to Keri Hulme’s The Bone People in 1985 as the prize’s nadir. More immediately, there was a hint of recent controversies over the Booker’s expansion, but no mention of the various extractive spin-offs (such as the convoluted process that in 2018 ended by delivering a Golden Man Booker to Michael Ondaatje for his 1992 winner, The English Patient). The sponsors’ interests and priorities were tangibly out of bounds.

In editorial terms both these programs, as so often on the BBC, had no governing theme: no solidity or coherence, above all no guiding intelligence. In the end — and this can be intuited of a clear majority of BBC TV’s so-called factual output — all they aspire to do is, fundamentally, fill space. Typical here is the aural blancmange of Kirsty Wark’s script: the Booker’s “annual awards ceremony unfolds early in October in an opulent London venue,” it is “always a magnet for scandal, with backbiting and bitchiness ever present,” though “as well as amusing literary spats, [the prize] also uncovered some major new writers,” “from humble beginnings the annual award ceremony has cemented itself as the go-to literary event of the year.” And so, witlessly, on.

This week’s Bagehot column in the Economist draws a lesson from the veteran broadcaster Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time — an intelligent, long-running Radio 4 discussion program about pretty much everything under the sun. The lesson, hard as it would be to take forward, goes well beyond the BBC, but fits the limited ground examined here:

[In Our Time’s] success is testimony to the power of curiosity. Rather than being sick of experts, people are desperate to hear their reports from the frontiers of knowledge… There is nothing inegalitarian about catering to this curiosity, just as there is nothing egalitarian about doling out dumbed-down drivel… BBC producers churn out formulaic products aimed at the imaginary median viewer… Institutions like the BBC need to rediscover their cultural self-confidence.

Such words, clearly, are the beginning of an argument not its conclusion. In its large context, two forgettable BBC programs around the Man Booker prize scarcely matter. Yet the world exists in grains of sand, and (pace Walter Bagehot on the House of Lords) the cure for admiring the BBC is to look at it closely — then also look through it, to society and this moment’s needs. For the time being, Anna Burns’s narrator in Milkman nails those: “The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, to be present, be adult.” •

The post Anna Burns, a Booker with soul appeared first on Inside Story.

While the speech may have failed in its main goal — to prove that “China wants a different American president” — the consensus among China-watchers is that most of what Pence said was not fiction, or fake news, or even alternative facts. Bill Bishop, editor of the Sinocism newsletter, described it as “a useful articulation of the problems the US sees with China.”

In a recent episode of The Little Red Podcast, Louisa Lim and I tried to get a picture of modern Chinese espionage. We sat down with two political journalists — Adam Brookes, former China correspondent for the BBC, and Chris Uhlmann, chief political correspondent for Channel Nine — who have both turned their hand to China-focused spy novels.

Brookes’s account — in the form of the Philip Mangan trilogy — ranges from the back alleys of Beijing to the sleepy tax haven of Suriname, and from the bad lands of China’s drug-riddled southwest border to English university campuses where the children of Communist Party bosses get the best education offshore accounts can buy. The depth of Brookes’s knowledge of China is evident from the first page, and the novels are based partly on how his life might have panned out had he responded to a “dangle.” An elderly man — most likely from the Chinese security services — turned up at his office and offered him classified documents related to China’s missile program in exchange for introductions to the “right people” at the British embassy. After several weeks of intense pursuit, the man gave up.

Uhlmann’s novels, set in Canberra and penned with former News Corp journalist Steve Lewis, have become the basis for a surprise Foxtel hit, Secret City (Canberra dramas don’t usually rate). The novels, exploring the intersection between Chinese and US influence operations and Australian politics, were so close to the bone that the pair had to change no fewer than fourteen characters to skirt Australia’s absurd defamation laws.

Early in our discussion it was apparent that our two guests didn’t entirely agree about what forms Chinese espionage took. Uhlmann weighed in with the “thousand grains of sand” theory of Chinese espionage — the view that it is mostly driven by large volumes of information from a huge number of sources. Not quite President Trump’s “almost every student is a spy” worldview, but this has long been the mainstream view of Chinese spycraft, and is not without basis. The Xinhua news agency, Confucius Institutes and other institutions are known to act as data-collection agencies for the Chinese state. But it is worth remembering that the United Front Work Department and its shadowy proxies keep a close eye on Chinese students in Australia precisely because the Chinese state doesn’t trust them.

Brookes advanced a different theory. China’s methods have more in common with the Soviets, he believes, who provided the blueprints for Beijing’s peak spy agencies, the Ministry of State Security and the Second Department of General Staff Division of the People’s Liberation Army. Brookes raised the case of the unfortunate Glenn Shriver, which sufficiently alarmed US officials that the FBI made a cheesy cautionary video based on his story, with Shriver providing the afterword: “Espionage is a very big deal. You’re dealing with people’s lives.”

Shriver’s recruitment as an American student in Shanghai by “Amanda,” who initially encouraged him to apply for a job with the State Department (he failed the exams twice) and then to get on the recruitment track for the CIA (he panicked during a lie detector test and was later arrested for lying to the US government), confounded two prevalent narratives about Chinese spy recruitment. It targeted a non-Chinese American; and, rather than appealing to love of the motherland or anti-American feelings, it involved throwing large sums of cash at a penniless student. While it may seem comical, Shriver was surely not the only one targeted in this way. While other students reported being approached by a woman fitting Amanda’s description, Brookes says no one else who took up her offer was caught.

For his part, Uhlmann cites a source who claimed that Australian agencies “had tracked 120 groups, not individuals, but groups of foreign intelligence service officials crossing our borders in the last twelve months. And most of them came from China.” He argues that much of this activity blurs espionage, sharp power and influence operations to target Australian citizens and Chinese nationals who are deemed to threaten the party’s interests.

Attitudes have shifted — Deng’s doctrine of “hide your strength and bide your time” has been set aside in the South China Sea and elsewhere — and so too have resources. The Chinese state and Chinese companies now have the capacity to undertake operations that were once the sole privilege of Western powers.

Whereas in the past, commercial espionage verged on the comical — an account from the 1980s tells of a Chinese scientific delegation to a trade show in Paris dipping their ties in a photographic solution made by the German firm Agfa with the hope of analysing the solvent later — operations are now well resourced. The two-year FBI operation that led to the conviction of Mo Hailong for stealing genetically modified seedlings from a host of US agribusinesses found that a team of at least six had been digging around the Iowa cornfields. A link to the Chinese state was never proven, and the rest of Mo’s team had the smarts to escape.

Brookes makes the excellent point that we should consider the effect of full-scale electronic surveillance of China by US agencies on the Chinese leadership’s thinking. It certainly does nothing to reduce Beijing’s paranoia. And, as Pence admits, US tech firms have profited from the expansion of China’s domestic surveillance state. The vice-president also drew welcome attention to the plight of the Uighurs, but the Chinese state has used the West’s counter-extremist rhetoric since 11 September 2001 to frame Uighurs and other minorities, and worked closely with successive US administrations on counterterrorism.

In terms of espionage, from China and elsewhere, the rub for Australia and the United States is how to respond. The principles in Pence’s speech — “fairness, reciprocity and respect for sovereignty” — sound fine, but can readily lead to arguments for more domestic surveillance and restrictions on freedom of speech. Repression is unlikely to give pause to a regime that is veering towards totalitarianism. •

The post Stranger than fiction appeared first on Inside Story.

You’re more likely to have heard of Louis Becke, whose novels of South Sea adventure were compared by American reviewers to those of Joseph Conrad and R.L. Stevenson. With Rosa Praed, he flew the flag for Australian adventure and romance at the beginning of the twentieth century. And even more likely to recognise the name Arthur Upfield, who came relatively late to the American scene, emerging as a popular Doubleday Crime Club–backed novelist in the 1940s.

David Carter and Roger Osborne have traced the careers of the many “Australian” writers who penetrated the lucrative American marketplace during the decades in which a boom in literacy created a mania for romance, mystery, crime, adventure and other popular fiction genres. Some of them (E.W. Hornung, Fergus Hume, Nat Gould) are Australian only in the sense that they visited Australia and mined their experience to create exotic fictions about the colony; others (Guy Boothby, Carlton Dawe) left behind their Australian birth to become part of an international fiction market with little allegiance to location.

As Carter and Osborne stress, readers across the English-speaking world were reading the same popular fiction. It’s true that most Australian books were published in Britain, but before the US Copyright Act of 1891, which extended protection to foreign books in the US market, American publishers often pirated them. The six American editions of Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life published before 1900, for example, were all copied from Bentley’s British edition. Clarke was surprised to receive £15 from Harper publishers, commenting, “I suppose it represents something in dollars — Harper’s conscience, perhaps!”

Under the new regime American publishers claiming copyright needed to be the first to publish a novel, or to publish simultaneously with a British publisher. Cunning operators sometimes published an advance excerpt from a book in a magazine, thus claiming first publication and American copyright for the book. For Australian writers, the road to American publication was usually through a British publisher, though a few enterprising authors found ways to reach the American publishers directly, even to the extent of moving to the United States. The now-forgotten Dorothy Cottrell left her life in remote western Queensland after sending the manuscript for her The Singing Gold directly to an American publisher in 1927. Her popular success was such that she emigrated to America, partly to avoid what Cottrell regarded as the “iniquitous taxation” of alien earnings.

American readers were not as interested in Australia and the Australian experience as they were in escapist fantasies in a new location. Those anti-romantic writers Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy did not get a look-in. But in the 1930s Henry Handel Richardson had good reason to be grateful to American readers for ensuring her place in literary history. After poor sales of the first two novels in her The Fortunes of Richard Mahony trilogy, her husband had to guarantee the British publication of the third and, in many ways, most impressive novel, Ultima Thule. It was greeted so enthusiastically in Britain that the new American publisher W.W. Norton & Co. bought the rights to all Richardson’s novels.

American sales for Ultima Thule were astonishingly high, boosted by selection for the American Book of the Month Club, which had membership of more than 110,000 subscribers. This ensured sales for the first two novels in the trilogy, and for Richardson’s earlier novel, Maurice Guest, which had maintained a small following among American readers. Maurice Guest was later adapted as a Hollywood film, Rhapsody (1954), though it was unrecognisable apart from the name of the Elizabeth Taylor character, Louise, and her love for a musician.

Norton published Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo a year after Ultima Thule and went on to produce an American version of her Haxby’s Circus in 1931 as Fay’s Circus. This edition reinstated material that had been excised from the British edition by Jonathan Cape, and Prichard worked on it further to produce a version of the novel that pleased her more than any other. Strangely, that version has never been published in Australia, where the mangled British edition has always been reprinted. Australian publishers (Text? Sydney University Press?) please take note of this omission — an Australian edition of Fay’s Circus is long overdue.

Norman Lindsay also found the American market congenial and profitable. His Redheap, published in London in 1930, was famously banned from import by Australian customs, but was published in America as Every Mother’s Son and appreciated as a modern sex comedy, “shockingly alive and scandalously amusing,” according to one critic. Lindsay headed off to New York to promote the American publication of what became a total of six books in eight years. His The Cautious Amorist also had the distinction of being banned by Australian customs, apparently on the strength of American reviews that described it as “a delectable entertainment” that might be “extremely shocking” to some readers. Lindsay enjoyed his year in America, finding the kind of serious critical response that he would never receive in Australia.

Lindsay, Prichard and Richardson made money from their American editions, reaching much larger audiences than existed in Australia. And they found American critics more open to their work than were the British gatekeepers. The American historian and critic C. Hartley Grattan visited Australian in 1927 and again from 1936. On his return home he championed Australian literature among his network of publishing contacts. The growing American interest in their work did more to boost the incomes and reputations of significant Australian writers than was possible at home, or likely in Britain.

American publishers were also crucial to the careers of Christina Stead and Patrick White. Stead lived in the United States in the 1940s and five of her novels are set there (though Americans often dispute the authenticity of the setting of The Man Who Loved Children). She had supportive friends in the American publishing world, and the critics Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Hardwick played a vital role in the revival of interest in her work in the 1960s. White had the good fortune to win the commitment of Ben Huebsch, a publisher who never doubted the importance of the Australian’s work and ensured his American publication at times when British publishers rejected it. Some Americans understood that these two writers were worthy of interest precisely because they wrote outside the current lines of development of the literary novel.

This account of American publishing serves as a parallel literary history: of fiction that has become part of our literary canon, and of popular writing that has disappeared from memory. Carter and Osborne quote numerous published reviews and private comments by American publishers that reinforce a sense of the openness, sophistication and perceptiveness of these literary Americans. They place Australian writing in the context of the international development of the novel rather than the conventional local interest in Australianness. The Australian literary world of the same period, with its reliance on British approval and prohibitive customs laws, appears parochial by contrast.

Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s will serve mainly as a resource for historians interested in the way that the anglophone world shared its fantasies through popular fiction in the decades before radio, film and television overwhelmed the novel as popular entertainment. It provides detailed information on the many publishing houses in the booming American market and how Australian writers made money, and lost it to the US tax system. It doesn’t unearth much lost fiction that deserves to be remembered for its literary qualities, but it does acknowledge the brief roles of writers like Greig, Rosman and Cottrell in the history of Australian fiction. •

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Which just goes to show how wrong a man can be. Thirty-four books later and he’s still at it. And still as Sydney as ever. And they are different in Sydney, aren’t they?

It’s not just that “if you don’t live in Sydney, you’re camping out” hubris. Not just the logjam traffic and the surf and the Sleaze Ball. Not just the giant cockroaches and the bent coppers named “Chook,” and Jonesy and Lawsy and Nifty and the Mr Bigs and Mr Sins and the Carlottas and the NSW Right. Not just the weird convergences, the rampant poovery cheek-by-jowl with hose-downable hotels, the glint of water around every corner and the rugby thugs with their necks like Moreton Bay figs and the Lebbo homies and the old men with bare leathery chests walking fox terriers across the wet sand at dawn as the sun comes up over the Pacific like a flaming ball of kebab fat.

It’s all of that, of course, its soundtrack amplified by the swarming and pulsating of 4.5 million humidity-fevered, real-estate maddened, thonged and singletted human beings.

But from somewhere in all that din come the footfalls of a lone man staggering down a back lane in Glebe — a man with the sour taste of yesterday’s Tooheys in his mouth and the ring of deliberate lies in his ears. A man who has been bludgeoned and coshed and bashed and biffed and set up, who has been fucked with and fucked over and, when he manages to get lucky, sometimes just plain fucked.

And as he catches his breath against the ramshackle back fence of the only unrenovated knocking shop left in the old neighbourhood and tilts his head back and draws a deep lungful of the fetid, corruption-stinking air, we glimpse his beaten-up but not beaten-down features and we recognise them as surely as we would recognise the silhouette of the Opera House or the coathanger profile of the Harbour Bridge, for we know this man of old, this Cliff Hardy.

For some of us, remembering the 1985 film of The Empty Beach, the third of Peter Corris’s Cliff Hardy novels, the face of Cliff Hardy perforce belongs to Bryan Brown, yet another archetypical Sydneysider. That lean, tensile build, that face so craggy and, well, cliffy that it looks like it should have grappling hooks permanently embedded in it, that laconic tone of voice like Chips Rafferty sharing his last smoke with a cobber as he bleeds to death in some far-flung foxhole.

But to see Cliff Hardy as Bryan Brown is, I believe, to get things in the wrong order. To confuse cause with effect. For it is not Brown who embodies Hardy but Hardy who animates Brown so that whenever we see that face, in Two Hands, say, or Cactus, we feel he should be behind the wheel of Cliff Hardy’s everlasting Falcon, or blinking in the sudden sunlight as he comes out of the Darlinghurst cop shop, rubbing the back of his neck, his thirst poised for quenching.

Cliff Hardy has moved on since those days, of course. He is, after all, no spring chicken. He served in the army in the Malayan Emergency, which makes him somewhere in the neighbourhood of seventy. But he remains a hard bloke to kill. In his latest case, Deep Water, he has a coronary occlusion and a quadruple bypass, gets punched in the kidney and knocked unconscious, listens to a best of Cold Chisel album, drinks copious quantities of alcohol, has two bouts of vigorous sex and solves a brace of murders.

Stripped of his private detective licence and mourning the murder of his lover, he’s been in the United States helping a boxer mate prepare for a title fight. Felled by a heart attack in San Diego, he is approached by his nurse, an expat Australian, to help her solve the disappearance of her father, a geologist working for a secretive energy corporation. Back home, he works the case in an unofficial capacity, enlisting his daughter Megan and her PI boyfriend Hank the Yank. The missing man, he discovers, had found a way to tap into the Sydney aquifer. With massive potential for profit at stake, crime and corruption raise their ugly heads. New threats and old enemies conspire. But the chase, and the flame of romance with his client, puts the lead back in old Cliff’s pencil.

This is bedrock Hardy, familiar and solid. But it is that very familiarity that constitutes Corris’s great achievement, for it was he who got there first, who staked out the ground and laid the foundations on which all subsequent Australian crime fiction has been constructed. Before him, the closest thing we had to modern novels were the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am pastiches of Carter Brown, transplanted fantasies of an American urban jungle. Since Corris, anything has been possible.

Corris was an academic, a lecturer in Pacific history at Melbourne University. It was a career that he loathed with a vengeance. In the mid seventies, he bit the bullet, moved to Sydney and survived on freelance journalism and book reviews while working on his first novel. The Dying Trade was published in 1980 and Cliff Hardy was set loose upon the streets of Surry Hills.

But the mean streets, as Raymond Chandler famously called them, are also recognisable streets. In them, Hardy is at home. The urban and suburban milieu through which he travels on his dogged quest for the truth — and maybe even a little justice — is not the anonymous and atomised geography of some Big Nowhere. It is a well-savoured city, a place whose peculiarities and history are appreciated by our hero, even as he detests what is happening within it.

And so what Ian Rankin does for Edinburgh and Donna Leon does for Venice, Corris does with an on-the-money specificity for Sydney. Not just the topography but the social geography:

The street was a bit back from New South Head Road and elevated, so that the houses had a view of the water with the trees of the Royal Sydney golf course off to the south… The adjoining townhouses were quiet — professionals out earning enough to live there.

But place, while necessary, is not sufficient. In any series as enduring as this, it is the character of the protagonist that keeps the readers coming back.

Cliff Hardy is no anguished soul, no driven avenger, no flippant cynic or cool careerist. If anything, he’s a bit of a dinosaur. An old-school working-class male with a bred-in-the-bone detestation of the smooth operators and corner cutters from the big end of town. His most conspicuous quality is a capacity to absorb a constant diet of physical violence. His standard modus operandi is to ask a question, get clobbered, ask some more questions, get shot. Eventually the bad guys get sore fists or run out of bullets. The cops are unhelpful at best, often obstructive and sometimes corrupt. His clients are often well-heeled but the only kickbacks he ever gets are of the in-the-teeth variety. Poor Cliff has been poleaxed so many times that it’s a wonder he’s not taking his meals through a straw.

This fearlessness is driven by a sense of ethics rooted in a sense of the fair go, a bloody-minded unwillingness to let bastards rule the roost.

His job comes naturally to him. It is a calling, not a career. Even now, with his licence cancelled and his body beginning to fail him, he is grateful when given the opportunity to return to the fray.

I’d done it for more than twenty years. It was work I enjoyed, mostly, and which I’d done well, mostly. I hadn’t come up with any ideas on how to occupy myself for the rest of my life, which, according to the medicos, was a good stretch if I looked after myself.

He might be something of a throwback, but he does keep up. When he remarks that a building is laying down a fair carbon fingerprint, his young partner falls for it.

“Footprint, Cliff, footprint.”

Writing is a visceral process and Corris has never hidden the connection between his writing and his battles with alcohol and diabetes. Yet over a period of four decades he has generated a prodigious body of work. As well as the Cliff Hardy series, he has published historical and young adult fiction, eight novels set in the 1940s featuring private eye Richard Browning, the Ray “Creepy” Crawley espionage series, the three-book Luke Dunlop series, a biography of Fred Hollows, and books on golf and boxing. And while he is not in any immediate danger of winning the Nobel Prize for literature, he serves his readers well and never takes them for granted. Deep Water is assured and entertaining, doling out the customary ration of sex, violence and death, but leavening it with a deft and good-humoured portrait of a man refusing to grow old gracefully.

Chandler, writing of his archetypal hero, said: “If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.”

Sounds like Cliff Hardy to me. And Peter Corris, for that matter. •

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What has prompted these (not particularly profound) reflections is the release of two films derived from short, almost minimalist novels, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. These adaptations were first sighted in Australia at last year’s British Film Festival, where both enjoyed full houses, and both have gone on to commercial release — in art-house cinemas, not surprisingly, their subject matter and its treatment more or less precluding multiplex exhibition.

One of the challenges for a film-maker adapting novels like these is that so much of their tensile strength and attraction lies in the narrative voice. Behind the events that comprise their plots is that voice, subtly fixing events in time and place, gradually unfolding the protagonists’ dealings within the complexities of their lives. Re-reading both books, I kept recalling the opening line spoken by the narrator of the film of The Bookshop: “When we read a book we inhabit it.” And while we are inhabiting it, we can take time if we wish to reflect on how the lives of the characters are presented in interaction with their ambient cultures.

A longer novel might seem to confront the film-maker with the more serious challenge of dispensing with hunks of narrative or deciding which characters will have to go. I’m not proselytising here for the “faithful” adaptation, but I want to suggest that terser fictions throw down their own gauntlets to directors aiming for a fluent transfer into the medium. The two directors in question — Isabel Coixet (The Bookshop) and Dominic Cooke (On Chesil Beach) — seem to me to have pulled off the task of making something that honours the texts while making something new.

By the sea

Product of a curious background, partly intellectually (and socially) superior, partly deprived, even at times poverty-stricken, Penelope Fitzgerald was well versed in the daunting aspects of life, on which she several times drew after making her debut as a novelist in 1977, at age fifty-eight. In recent decades, and in the wake of several major awards, she has come to be seen as one of the most impressive novelists of the twentieth century. In The Bookshop (1978), as in all her novels, she writes with an unaffected precision, setting before the reader the lives of her protagonists, outsiders of one kind or other in worlds she seems to know from the inside.

Capturing the narrative voice of this novel on the screen is a complex matter. Director Isabel Coixet has revealed — at least in her English-speaking films, including Elegy and Learning to Drive — a distinct, low-key, quietly tenacious “voice” that knows what to make of idiosyncratic relationships. As she wrote the screenplay for The Bookshop, we should expect that voice to make itself felt. And it does, in the lucid, unemphatic way she goes about positioning her characters in relation to each other and to those aspects of the setting that reveal them. Coixet has also chosen to employ another narratorial presence — a voice that tells us, at the film’s outset, how we “inhabit” books and, at the end, how “the story keeps playing in your head” — though its identity will not be revealed until the film’s last moments. In this way, Coixet has departed radically from the novel’s procedures, and the final moments are moving in a way quite different from Fitzgerald’s poignant last sentence.

The Bookshop’s protagonist, Florence Green, is described in the novel as having “a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation,” and her film incarnation in Emily Mortimer’s subtly shaded performance bears this out. Following the death of her husband, she ventures to open a bookshop in the seaside town of Hardborough, in an empty building called The Old House. This is a daring enterprise, as banker Keble (Hunter Tremayne) points out when its financing is under discussion. Among the obstacles she will have to face, and will ultimately be defeated by, is the conniving of local “patroness” Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson, by now a Coixet regular), who wants the premises for an arts centre.

Along the way, Florence engages ten-year-old Christine (Honor Kneafsey) to help in the store after school hours, and business goes reasonably well until she decides to risk selling Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita. In this she has the backing of eccentric recluse Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy), who confronts the controlling Mrs Gamart.

This account of the film (or novel, for that matter) tends to suggest more conventional narrative procedures than we see (or read). What is crucial is the evolution of Florence as a woman with a passionate determination to carry on what she sees as a worthwhile enterprise, and an integrity that is not undermined by the devious motives of others. The film deals intelligently with these life-shaping influences, and reaches a poignant conclusion as Christine runs to farewell Florence as she leaves the town. The novel’s last sentence reads, “As the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop,” and the film ends no less touchingly with the narrator’s voice valuing the “courage and passion for books she bequeathed to me.”

Coixet has chosen not merely to reflect on the failure of the bookshop as a business venture but also to suggest that it has not been wholly a matter of loss if even one person has benefited from the shop and its owner. Adaptors are necessarily selective, and the most rewarding adaptations are less likely to be reverential in their dealings with the original and more likely to have something new to say about their source.

Also by the sea

In Dominic Cooke’s version of On Chesil Beach, the change in tone — while the film as a whole adheres closely to the novel’s narrative line, and in some ways to its structure — is as much the work of the novelist as of the film’s director. Ian McEwan has the sole credit for the screenplay, so it is reasonable to assume that he has had further thoughts about the outcome of the often-painful events the novel describes. Or perhaps he was motivated by what was felt to be a more commercially acceptable endnote than the novel’s austere wrapping-up.

On Chesil Beach is constructed around the wedding-night failure of a virginal couple, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, who love each other but fail to find sexual consummation. This failure is attributable partly to the prevailing rigours of the era in which the marriage has taken place (the early 1960s), partly to the kind of upbringing each has had, and partly to the inherent dispositions of the pair involved. Sex before marriage was still widely regarded as morally lax, which in this case has meant frustration for Edward and lack of sexual readiness in Florence’s love for him. Following his loss of sexual control, she is appalled and runs from their hotel room to the beach where, in the novel, they last see each other, after an anguished, quarrelsome exchange in which each hurls abuse at the other.

In terms of narrative structure, the book is divided into five major sections. The opening sentence of part one sets the impetus for what follows: “They were both young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual differences was plainly impossible.” This section is largely set in the hotel, with waiters bringing a room-service dinner, as the couple moves apprehensively towards the bedroom, with authorial inserts about aspects of their respective backgrounds. Part two takes us into the past, revealing their education and ambitions and how they first met at a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally in Oxford. Part three returns to the present and to the crisis of sexual failure and Florence’s fleeing to the beach; part four brings another return to the past, situating their courtship (and such a dated term is exactly right here) in the context of their very different family backgrounds; and the final section places them on the eponymous Chesil Beach.

Past and present are for the two of them intimately interwoven, as the novel’s structure enacts. The future is dealt with in a few final pages that record her musical success and his “inattentive, unambitious, unserious, childless, comfortable” life. It reads almost like a PS from an author who has realised, rightly, that the reader would like a few glimpses of what followed the honeymoon disaster.

So, how does the film deal with a small masterpiece so much dependent on the author’s tone, on his capacity to make minor details resonate more widely? The atmosphere of the period in which the couple (played by Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle) have grown to early adulthood is potently evoked in the precision with which the mise en scène recreates the somewhat stiff, upper-middle-class formalities of Florence’s home and the squalor of Edward’s messy domestic scene. Her mother, Violet Ponting (Emily Watson), is a chilly academic and her father, Geoffrey (Samuel West), an undemonstrative business tycoon. Edward’s mother (Anne-Marie Duff) has suffered brain damage after being knocked down on a railway platform and his father (Adrian Scarborough) is a quietly spoken primary school headmaster, who is allowed a moment of touching sensitivity with his son.

The film’s production design (led by Suzie Davies) and cinematography (Sean Bobbitt) render these contrasts in ways that further our understanding of the protagonists, doing some of the work of McEwan’s descriptive and reflective prose. Florence’s musical ambition, which will culminate in her leading a quartet at Wigmore Hall, has had to accommodate itself to her mother’s request that she stop her “screeching” so that Violet can get on with her academic duties in their more than ample house. Edward, on the other hand, has to share with his younger sisters a bare minimum of the domestic duties his mother can no longer cope with, picking his way through rooms of chaotic disorder. Place — whether the impersonality of the hotel, Oxford’s grand edifices and its idyllic surrounding landscape, or the two contrasting homes — is clearly important in creating our understanding of the lives at the film’s centre.

Whereas the novel leads to Chesil Beach and the parting of the two, never to meet again, Cooke and McEwan draw on its suggestions about their futures, and venture to locate the elderly Edward at Florence’s Wigmore Hall triumph. Some may see this as the screen’s softening of the novel’s austerity, but there is no denying the poignancy of the moment, and it stops short of what could have been a cloying reunion. It may have been more rigorous to end on the wonderful panoramic shot of the beach, with Edward at one end of the image and Florence vanishing from the other, but the film’s invention has its own emotional weight.

The film’s major strength is in the two performers — Ronan and Howle — who incarnate so much of McEwan’s thematic patterning, endowing their characters with aspects of their own physical and emotional selves, and vivifying in another medium what McEwan so unforgettably created in his.

As in the adaptation of The Bookshop, not a word is wasted. The cinema’s resources are marshalled to take us into the lives and times and places first created in the written word and give it a new lease of life. Each film may well send viewers back to the novels, and that would be a bonus reward. ●

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Deborah Levy is such a prolific and celebrated writer it’s fitting to begin with her. Nominated for the Man Booker prize for two of her novels, she has also written works of nonfiction and many plays. The Cost of Living follows on from an earlier book-length essay, Things I Don’t Want to Know, which dealt with writing, motherhood and a disintegrating marriage; this second essay records how Levy gained a new foothold after she took her two teenaged daughters to a tumbledown art deco building in a less-than-salubrious part of North London. In what is deemed to be the prime of life, it was all she could afford.

Levy is hooked, perhaps more than most writers, on the sheer mysteriousness of things, and particularly the wonder of storytelling. As anyone who has taken a writing course will tell you, there are rules, but the best writers, like Levy, give themselves permission to break them. This doesn’t mean that she is difficult to read; in fact, reading her is thrilling. But how to unpack this book? For all the ellipses in her narrative, it exhibits just the right mix of image, incident and analysis to sweep up her readers and carry them along. A lot of it is rhythm: Levy has said that she’s learned her pacing from years of playwriting, and it shows.

The Cost of Living opens with a scene in a Colombian bar: a “tanned, tattooed” forty-plus American man with muscly arms and long silver hair done up in a bun is talking to a young woman; by Levy’s estimate, she’s no more than nineteen. The man has interrupted her reading and hasn’t stopped talking, but after a time she breaks in with a story of her own. She tells him about having nearly drowned in a whirlpool off the Mexican coast, but he isn’t interested and puts her down for talking too much. Levy, the bystander, has witnessed what amounts to an epiphany. “It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was,” Levy writes, “that the world was her world too.”

If there is a theme running through all of Levy’s work it’s this need for a woman to interrupt, to find her voice and make it be heard — an imperative that’s with us still. Levy is more than twenty years younger than I am but this is precisely what women my age longed for and some of us ended up fighting for. I thought things had got better, and in many ways they have, but it’s still going on, that struggle to be heard. You’d have to be blind and deaf or on a desert island not to see why women have got bolshie again and why feminism is once again on the rise.

Levy reminds us that for all her achievements, the struggle has been hers as well. Drowning in a whirlpool, or nearly so — this is the image that propels her narrative. The business of reconstituting a life after divorce is one of the trickiest around, especially for an older woman, and for an artist of any kind it can be even more precarious. “Most urgently,” she writes, “I no longer had a study at the most professionally busy time in my life.” At the same time, she needed to take on every job offered and “winced when the bills flew through the letterbox.”

The sixth-floor flat she and her daughters had moved to was in a building inviting demolition. The lifts were unreliable; the corridor floors, awaiting new carpet, were covered in the meantime with industrial-strength plastic. She frequently had to deal with blocked pipes under her sink and other pressing repair work. Yet there was more than enough compensation. The windows gave onto a wide-shot view of London’s skies and the streets below. There was light and air. She was making a home for her daughters, and perhaps, though she doesn’t say, offering her freed self as a model. She became “physically strong at fifty,” charging up one of London’s highest hills on an e-bike with a backpack full of groceries. She learned to write through all manner of chaos. Eventually she did find a study in a friend’s backyard shed, but that, too, had its challenges. Like all the others, though, they merely formed part of the uber-challenge of what it took to make herself finally heard.

Now for Sheila Heti, a name not known to me until I read Motherhood, but at forty-one a rising star in North America, author of eight books, and on the surface at least someone who has been good at getting heard. Her oeuvre includes short stories, a novella, collaborative volumes and a children’s book. Though Motherhood is presented as a novel it seems like a memoir to me, more an autobiographical essay, but I’m not too fussed about this. Nothing makes me happier than seeing younger writers break out of the genre cages the publishing industry has attempted to confine us in over the past few decades.

Still, it’s a puzzling book. Motherhood is about Heti’s inner wrestling over whether to have a child. The other characters are her mother and father, her friends, and her partner Miles, the man with whom she would have the child if she did decide to have one. Apart from Miles and her mother, though, none of these people comes to life as they might in fiction. In an interview, Heti contends that the book is a novel because of its symbolic dimension, which she claims differentiates it from a memoir. I’m not sure I agree, but I won’t take up space arguing the toss about it now. The significant point is that Heti (or her narrator) reminds me of the nineteen-year-old in The Cost of Living’s opening scene. Whatever the putdown she endured in that seedy Colombian bar, she hasn’t faced the difficulties that Levy had, or women of my generation did.

I’m willing to admit that it’s probably me, but, novel or not, Motherhood is one of the most irritating books I’ve read. From the perspective of a woman about to turn eighty, veteran of 1970s feminism, Heti’s narrator exposes herself as one of the more egregiously self-absorbed examples of her generation. She overloads the will-I, won’t-I exploration of her dilemma with endless reflections on how, even as a girl, she never saw herself as a mother, and though the biological clock is ticking and her sex with Miles is wonderful and many of her friends have succumbed, she finds herself resisting. A baby would intrude on her writing, might intrude on her relationship, the planet is full of babies no one cares about, the planet is being ruined by babies. Yet Miles and she practise withdrawal, a risky birth-control method if there ever was one. She tries an IUD but then has it removed. She throws the I Ching, a central metaphor, as is the carving knife she keeps in front of her mirror. She drives Miles and her readers mad with the seesawing speculation and comes close to ruining her relationship with both.

And yet, for all my reaction to Heti’s hair-tearing, there are points of similarity between my story and hers. At forty-one, the same age as Heti is now (though the book covers her late thirties), and after a spate of consultation, professional and otherwise, I gave birth to my fifth child. The circumstances were precarious, the pregnancy an accident, and in wrestling with myself over whether to go ahead with it, I too, in desperation, had recourse to the I Ching. In the end, like Heti, I listened to myself. Yet tellingly, as both Heti’s and Levy’s mothers were, mine was a significant player in this. When I rang her in Los Angeles seeking her opinion, her answer was so typical of her. “Look,” she said, “you’re a grown woman now. If you want to have a baby, have a baby.”

And if you don’t, don’t. For First World women today, there are many paths — that much we’ve won. But whatever our choices, they will be influenced by the lives of our mothers. Neither Levy’s mother nor mine is alive now. Yet, as Heti has so circuitously demonstrated, motherhood is as much about our pasts as it is about our futures. Maybe even more. ●

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Three-quarters of a century later, Boschwitz’s novel Der Reisende (The Traveller) has been published to great acclaim in Germany. Rediscovered and re-edited, it is a work of great historical significance that deserves to be translated into other languages and read by a wider audience.

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was born into an affluent German-Jewish family in Berlin in 1915. His father, Sally, was a factory owner who died shortly before Ulrich was born. His mother, Martha, came from a leading Lübeck mercantile dynasty, the Wolgast and Plitt families. After Sally’s early death Martha, an amateur artist, took over the running of the business. Ulrich undertook a business apprenticeship after completing school and seemed destined to take over the business.

Hitler’s rise thwarted that plan. On 1 April 1933 the National Socialist regime declared a national boycott of Jewish businesses and life soon became extremely difficult for German-Jewish families. Ulrich’s elder sister, Clarissa, emigrated to Israel in 1933, and Martha and Ulrich left the country two years later. They had no choice but to leave the family fortune behind.

They went first to Sweden and then to Norway, where Ulrich wrote his first novel, Menschen neben dem Leben (People Next to Their Lives). Sweden was important for exiled German writers — Thomas Mann was among the authors whose work was published there — and Boschwitz’s first novel appeared there in Swedish 1937 as Människor utanför. He used the pen name John Grane rather than the very German Ulrich Boschwitz.

The novel was a success and Boschwitz was able to move to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. During the late 1930s he moved between France, Luxembourg and Belgium, completing The Traveller in 1938 while watching from Brussels as the persecution of Jews intensified after Kristallnacht. Like his first novel, The Traveller was published under his pen name and in translation, this time in English. It appeared in England in 1939 as The Man Who Took Trains and in 1940 in the United States as The Fugitive. A later French translation used the title Le fugitiv (1945).

The outbreak of the second world war destroyed any chance of the novel’s being a commercial success. It soon went out of print and copies are now only available in rare book collections.

By the time the war broke out Ulrich and Martha had made their way to England. There, on 28 June 1940, as fears of a German invasion reached fever pitch, they were interned as enemy aliens. Two weeks later Ulrich was deported to Australia on the transport ship the Dunera. Martha remained in internment on the Isle of Man.

The Dunera is notorious for the dreadful treatment of the passengers by the British troops. The troops rifled through the internees’ belongings and cast overboard anything they considered useless. Boschwitz’s manuscript of a new novel, Das grosse Fressen (The Big Feed), was lost in this pillaging.

Boschwitz spent two years in internment in Australia, first in Hay, in New South Wales, and later in the Victorian town of Tatura. Throughout, he wrote incessantly, working on another novel, Traumtage (Dream Days) and correcting The Traveller. He wrote to his mother that The Traveller was his best work and that the corrections would improve the new edition of the book, for which he had publishing contracts.

The boycott of Jewish businesses begins on 1 April 1933. Creative Commons Von Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-14468/Georg Pahl/CC-B

During Boschwitz’s two years in Australia official attitudes to the internees changed. The British government acknowledged that many of the internees were refugees and opponents of Nazism and that they had been shamefully maltreated on the Dunera. From 1941, a number of avenues for release became available to the Dunera internees. The next year Boschwitz left Australia for England.

He carried the manuscript of Traumtage with him. He told a friend that if the ship went down he would try to save the manuscript by tying it to himself under his clothes. When disaster did strike, though, neither Boschwitz nor the manuscript survived. His corrected version of The Traveller fared no better.

We know of this missing work only from his last letter to his mother, written in English to pass the censors and available in the digital repository of the Leo Baeck Institute, an organisation devoted to the history of German-speaking Jews. Boschwitz told his mother that somebody travelling on another ship had undertaken to bring the first 109 corrected pages of The Traveller to her, and that she should “get the advice of some experienced literary chap” to finalise it. “In case you get this letter,” he wrote, “you probably know why. I took my chance and failed.” The corrected pages somehow went missing.

The fact that the novel Boschwitz considered his best has been now been published in revised edition owes much to a German publisher and editor, Peter Graf, who is renowned for rediscovering lost works. Ulrich’s niece, Reuella Shachaf, alerted Graf to the existence of a typescript of the original version, in German, of The Traveller. Aware that it fell short of Boschwitz’s revised version, Graf assumed the responsibility of being Boschwitz’s posthumous editor. He familiarised himself as much as possible with Boschwitz’s life and work and edited the manuscript as he believed Boschwitz would have wanted. This, at last, was the “experienced literary chap” Boschwitz had asked his mother to seek out.

Graf described his work as a mixture of humble reverence and audacity. “You approach a text like this with awe,” he told German radio, “and you need a bit of courage at this or that point to say, okay, the author would have approved of that. You also have to trust a bit what you learnt over all the years.”

The result is remarkable. The Traveller takes us right back into the time when it was written. Turning the pages, you feel as if history is hitting you in the face.

The novel centres on Otto Silbermann, a German-Jewish businessman with a Protestant wife, Elfriede, living in Berlin in the 1930s. They are wealthy and refined and hang modernist art in their well-appointed flat. Their son Eduard is living in Paris. Until 1938 Silbermann and Elfriede live comfortably in Berlin, insulated from the increasing anti-Semitism by their privileged position and the fact that Silbermann does not look like the stereotypical Jew of Nazi propaganda.

But by the time the action of the novel begins Silbermann and Elfriede have come to regret having stayed. Hostility is closing in and they are looking to leave. Silbermann is in the invidious position of negotiating the sale of their house to an old acquaintance who has realised that there is good profit to be made from the dispossession of Jews. The negotiations are interrupted by telephone calls that signal the reality they face: first, Eduard phones from Paris with the news that he has been unable to acquire travel permissions for the couple; then Silbermann’s sister calls, distraught that her husband has been arrested and her flat ransacked. After each interruption Silbermann lowers the price for the house in line with his growing desperation. Then the negotiations cease altogether when there is the sound of fists beating against the door and the demand, “Jew, open up!”

At Elfriede’s urging Silbermann flees through the back door. He manages to escape the house only to find himself in a city taken over by marauding Nazis. The reader realises that it is 9 November 1938 and Kristallnacht is under way. Silbermann creeps through the hostile streets feeling that he has become “a swear word on two legs.” Rapidly he comes to the realisation that the Nazi regime has robbed him of both his means to live — “Nowadays one is murdered by economics,” he reflects — and of the right to exist. “Life is forbidden to us,” he tells a fellow Jewish businessman. From this point on, he is “the traveller.”

Even before he was interned as an enemy alien, Boschwitz had plenty of experience of being displaced, and he portrays Silbermann’s predicament with great insight and flashes of dark humour. In creating a sense of alienation he was clearly influenced by Kafka, and incidents in The Traveller echo scenes from the Czech writer’s fiction. At one point, for instance, Silbermann reduces his surname to one syllable, “Silb,” just as Kafka’s characters often go without full surnames. Although this is intended to make his name sound less Jewish, it makes him seem absurd because it is very similar to the German word for syllable, Silbe.

The novel also extends beyond Silbermann’s perspective to gives us a revealing social portrait. He is robbed of business capital by his partner and former closest friend, now a Nazi party member, who coldly reasons that “every person exploits their advantages. Now you [Jews] have bad luck and we [Germans] are profiting. That’s totally fair.” Silbermann encounters locals who are sympathetic to him personally but also enthusiastically support Hitler; bureaucrats who believe they are just doing their duty when they persecute Jews; a young communist who helps Silbermann despite his dislike for bourgeois Jews; foreign businessmen oblivious to the persecution of the Jews; and even an alluring divorcee who tells Silbermann he should thrive on the excitement of a life lived in tumultuous times.

Through all of this, Boschwitz shows us the degradation of German culture under the Nazis. Indeed, at one point Silbermann finds himself sharing a train compartment with two Nazi propagandists trying to make up a new German term for culture because the existing term, Kultur, is too close to other languages. Silbermann is morbidly fascinated at what tortuous word they will invent but leaves the compartment before he finds out.

As the novel moves to its climax, a relentless rhythm comes to the fore. Silbermann cannot get the rattling of the train tracks out of his head and it seems to increase in volume. The noise builds to a resounding crescendo in the vivid final scene, which borrows techniques from film to achieve its effect.

The Traveller is a wonderful rediscovery. Ulrich Boschwitz didn’t live to learn of the full horror of the Holocaust but he saw and documented its early stages with great clarity, leaving a remarkable record of those days. It combines the qualities of powerful eyewitness accounts such as Victor Klemperer’s diaries I Will Bear Witness with the broad sweep of novels about the degradation of German culture written by authors in exile, most notably Thomas Mann’s epic Doctor Faustus.

The publication of The Traveller not only revives Boschwitz’s memory but reminds us how powerfully a novel can make history come alive. It’s a major piece of literary restoration. ●

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Frank Moorhouse’s The Drover’s Wife occupies similar territory. Its collection of stories, parodies and critical essays riffs in various ways on the Lawson short story. Some of the pieces are “genuine” items of literary criticism and journalism, some are fictions that do no more than reference elements of Lawson’s story, others shift into the double imaginary world of metafiction and parody. O’Neill is represented in this collection by an extract from his 2014 PhD thesis on experimental short fiction in Australia, one of the straight critical articles Moorhouse features. A 1980s atmosphere is present here, too, in the games the writers play with Lawson: the frolic documented here began back in 1975 with a story by Murray Bail.

Moorhouse begins with the thirteen-page 1896 version of Lawson’s story, which must then bear the weight of the accumulated speculations and fictions that follow it. He takes an editor’s privilege of writing five introductory pieces about the background to the story, its representation of women and “sexual tension,” Lawson’s “gender precariousness” and the changes to the original versions of the story, in particular its depiction of Aboriginal people. These culminate in Moorhouse’s own take on Lawson — that his intense friendship with his mate Jim Gordon may have been sexual.

Moorhouse argues for a gay Henry Lawson whose relationship with Gordon, recently examined in Gregory Bryan’s Mates: The Friendship that Sustained Lawson, represented an intimacy never broached directly in his writing. He imagines a kind of Brokeback Mountain relationship, giving a romantic gloss to mateship on the track. While their wives stay home with the children, the mates are imagined enjoying a consoling sexual intimacy. Moorhouse is open about his reasons for seeking this reading of Lawson: it speaks to his own experience of a sporadic sexual relationship with another man through their years of marriage to, or uncoupling from, women.

Another recent book on Lawson, Kerrie Davies’s A Wife’s Heart: The Untold Story of Bertha and Henry Lawson, reads the writer’s life from an opposite direction but with an equally personal perspective. Davies projects her own experience of a retreating husband and single motherhood onto Lawson and his wife, Bertha. She does sterling archival research to expose Lawson as a drunken wife-beater, incapable of supporting his children. Bertha comes out of this version of their story as a heroic survivor, rather than the widely accepted figure of the vengeful wife who put her husband into prison for his failure to provide maintenance.

It seems futile to protest that these readings are ahistorical: that the frequent comments during his lifetime on Lawson’s “effeminacy” do not imply homosexuality, or that Davies’s recent experience of single parenthood is a cakewalk compared to Bertha’s battles in the days when women’s access to work was restricted and social services virtually non-existent. Of course, it is possible that Lawson could have beaten and confined his wife, abandoned his children, run off with the maid, drunk himself to incompetence, and also had an enduring sexual relationship with his mate. How does this change how we read his stories? Reading emerges from these books as a various, individual experience in which a reader can select whatever he or she likes from a story. The pieces collected in Moorhouse’s book offer us a series of these readings, most of them ironic and skewed to a sexual interpretation of the story.

The story by Bail that set this metafictional game in train was inspired by Russell Drysdale’s 1945 painting, a painting that has nothing to do with Lawson’s story of a woman abandoned in an isolated bush hut with her children, apart from its name. Drysdale’s woman is on the track with the drover. There are no children in sight, and Bail writes in the voice of her abandoned city husband, who has been left to care for them. The story wipes away all Lawson’s concern for the isolated and endangered woman, turning it into a comedy of masculine indignation. In 1980, Moorhouse replied to Bail’s speculations with a “conference paper” by an Italian-Australian literature expert, Franco Casamaggiore, who had fallen for the sex-with-sheep jokes of visiting Australians. The poor Italian scholar elaborates on the links between the painting and the story and the identification of the wife with a sheep. Lawson’s fragile story sinks beneath the weight of this boyish mockery.

Women writers challenged these parodies, with Barbara Jefferis publishing her version later in 1980, and Anne Gambling writing a contemporary version in “The Drover’s De Facto” in 1986. That year, Damien Broderick joined in with the voice of the dog, who begins: “Call me Alligator.” Ten years later the game was taken up by Mandy Sayer and David Ireland, both writing about the painting, with another flurry of parodic stories dating from 2006 to the present. I fervently hope this hasn’t become a standard exercise in Australian creative writing courses.

Moorhouse brings together all these versions and variations, regardless of their merit or interest. Most of them are fun to read, with Louisa Lawson’s essay “The Australian Bush-Woman” standing out as more detailed and impassioned than her son’s famous story — though we know that he based it on his mother’s experiences in the bush. The longest piece in the collection, Madeleine Watts’s “Afraid of Waking It,” is also the strongest, though its story of the exploitation of a lonely young woman by a pair of old artists makes only tangential allusions to Lawson as it tracks its way around the inner west of Sydney.

As one might expect, Moorhouse emphasises sexual rather than political responses to Lawson and his writing. He takes little note of the reference to the drover’s being a failed squatter, a “careless” man like Middleton in Lawson’s poem “Middleton’s Rouseabout”: “Type of a careless nation/ Men who are soon played out/ Middleton was.” I would like to speculate that the drover’s wife followed Louisa Lawson’s example and headed for the city with her children, like so many others, as drought and economic depression took hold by the 1890s, but then I would simply be adding my own contribution to the thread.

Much more important is the postcolonial, Indigenous reading Leah Purcell brought to the story with her 2016 play of the same title. Moorhouse includes the notes by Purcell and the play’s director, Leticia Cáceres, from the recent Currency Press edition of the play. The play must have been produced just as Moorhouse was completing his book, and one can sympathise with his difficulty in trying to include some notice of it here.

These notes give only a sketchy idea of Purcell’s drama, which blows previous versions of the story out of the water. She imagines her drover’s wife armed with a gun, facing up to the swagmen and troopers who come her way and ready to protect the Aboriginal man who calls on her for help. She is both a more abused and a much more formidable figure than the women in the other stories, and the secret she is hiding is redolent with anger and violence. Her son’s declaration that he “won’t never go drovin’” amounts to a commitment to join her in outlawry.

Moorhouse struggles to come to terms with the racism evident in the changes Lawson made to his original story, which expanded the references to the midwife “Black Mary” sent by “King Jimmy,” and described the Aboriginal man who built the wood heap as “the last of his tribe and a King.” He calls these additions “coarsened music-hall caricatures” and is disappointed that Lawson seems to have approved them. He recalls that he accepted, as a child, the conventional wisdom that Aboriginal people were dying out, despite the presence of Aboriginal children in his primary school class, but he undermines his good intentions by adding, “Now it is the Anglo-Saxon tribe that is dying out,” with an unfortunate echo of the familiar white nationalist rhetoric.

This proliferation of writers writing on writers suggests that publishers have lost faith in the ability of academic critics — the people Moorhouse generously calls scholars — to offer interesting or helpful readings of Australian writing. Perhaps all the arguments about literary theory and identity politics have drawn them away from the task of clear explication of the fiction of their compatriots. Perhaps it is simply more exciting to publish a creative response to a work of literature rather than a close reading by a self-effacing critic. This is a matter of personal concern, as I edit a series of books intended to give academic scholars the chance to examine the work of Australian writers at length; it seems to be pushing against an overwhelming preference for personal responses from other fiction-makers.

With its series of essays by writers on writers, Black Inc. has joined this trend, beginning with Alice Pung on John Marsden and Erik Jensen on Kate Jennings. Each of them addresses the writer in question, making a sustained case for admiration of the work. At a time when some parents have criticised the gloominess of the texts set for high school students, Pung insists that it is important that teenagers are exposed to the darker side of life, especially when they are likely to be struggling with difficult personal circumstances.

Jensen wears his heart on his sleeve, declaring Jennings’s Snake to be “the great Australian novel.” His interviews with the writer suggest a friendship that extends to sympathetic reading of her fiction. His essay is clear, entertaining and full of interesting context that will send readers looking for Jennings’s work. “Snake failed to find an audience,” he tells us. “It never had a good cover, its subject was unfashionable. Several times it was described as a descendant of Henry Lawson’s short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’.” Of course, a section of Snake appears in Moorhouse’s book.

These essays appear to be a return to what was once called “literary appreciation,” criticism that engages with the writing and reads it sympathetically in context. They are a welcome addition to the array of responses to Australian writing, most of all because they are an invitation to go back to the original writing and read it for itself. ●

The post Writers writing about writers and writing appeared first on Inside Story.

His provenance, as the Nagasaki-born younger son of Japanese parents who arrived in Guildford, southwest of London, when he was five, gave him initial distinction in that world, as well as providing the themes of his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986). It seemed to matter at a time when the publishing industry was learning to market authors, and authors to become personalities, their points of social and cultural differentiation now a potential new lure.

Like Ian McEwan and Rose Tremain, Ishiguro enrolled as a student at the University of East Anglia’s soon-to-be-famous creative writing course, founded by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. His sparring over technique with Angela Carter bled into lasting comradeship. He featured in the Book Marketing Council’s list of best young British novelists in 1983. A flashy new generation of writers that included Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie solicited reams of copy about their biographies, politics, romances, feuds and — these were the early years of Thatcherism, after all — publishers’ advances.

They were also the years of proto-multiculturalism, albeit in a British, into-the-future-sideways mode that went with the metropolitan mood but against the dominant political grain. Ishiguro had a ready place available within the emerging circuits, which he was able to modify as well as occupy. By his mid twenties, living with his wife Lorna MacDougall, a social worker from Glasgow, playing guitar and composing songs as well as stories, the self-possessed English guy of Japanese origin began to make fertile use of his dual-yet-singular inheritance.

What was interesting about Ishiguro in this formative period is that he quietly declined the persistent invitations to self-exoticise. The Japan of those early novels drew on history’s sweep but was invented, not recollected or researched. (In a 1986 interview, he was “slightly dismayed” by reviewers who saw his books in documentary terms, as a “unique opportunity to get an insider’s view of Japan.”) He spoke its language only with his parents and first returned to the country at the age of thirty-five, eight years after becoming a British citizen. He frequently recalled the normality of his upbringing and the evenness of his transition to a new country.

The bubble years of the 1980s contributed to a Japan boom of sorts, and Ishiguro embodied the ties between the two nations. His background was a natural, if often trite, part of every review and profile. But with deft assurance he averted the enchantments that were by then moving from an accessory to a staple of literary marketing.

In every respect, his third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), was a breakthrough: for its use of the classically English setting of a country house to explore tensions between calling, heart and public morality; for its enduring success, a Booker prize win reinforced by an effective film adaptation; and for its reception as evidence of Ishiguro’s status as a major and, more subliminally, a British writer, no longer defined mainly with reference to his ancestry. Yet those fixated on otherness or orientalism found it impossible to let go: Ishiguro’s understated and elliptical register in conveying the butler Stevens’s self-deceptions could even be depicted in terms of an imported sensibility or a bridge across the two strands of Ishiguro’s identity.

The definite uplift in his reputation was also a vindication of Faber, his publishers, whose editor Robert McCrum (now literary editor at the Observer) had championed him from the first. And at this point, the resources Ishiguro had ingathered and the space he had established in those early years — including support from his long-term agent, Deborah Rogers — were deployed to striking effect. For his next novel, The Unconsoled (1995), was another kind of breakthrough: the hallucinatory interior narrative of a concert pianist, Ryder, whose imminent performance in a central European city is snared in unceasing small anxieties. The delicate social manners of the earlier works, so often their characters’ shield, were stripped back, exposing the abyss (as the Nobel committee would put it) that always lay beneath.

The 500-page book, twice the length of its predecessor, divided reviewers. Some, noting in its modernist discordance the traces of Robert Musil as well as Franz Kafka, recognised that it was far more a deepening than a departure. Anita Brookner, as astute a critic as a novelist, was one who ventured the word masterpiece. The more conventional narrative of When We Were Orphans (2000) soon accreted the same dreamlike quality. Christopher Banks, the London detective narrator, visiting Shanghai in the late 1930s to investigate his parents’ disappearance, is another who finds the reality around him, this time pervaded by Japan’s military occupation, elusive: “My memory of these moments is no longer very clear.” That is the Ishiguro sentiment, to be found in many variations.

A passage near the end of When We Were Orphans about a character’s “sense of mission and the futility of attempting to evade it,” seems to point forward to Never Let Me Go (2005), whose group portrait of children at an English boarding school melts into the gothic as awareness grows that these are cloned beings raised for the purpose of organ harvesting. Life is reduced to a brief, pitiless interlude. Yet within their cocooned world they inwardly ache towards the light.

Never Let Me Go’s Booker prize nomination and film version cemented its joint status with The Remains of the Day as the novelist’s most accomplished works. But Ishiguro seems immune from any audience expectation to stay in a groove, much like his lifelong hero Bob Dylan (also, to his great pleasure, the current laureate). Thus did The Buried Giant (2015), set in a ravaged Anglo-Saxon landscape where a traumatised couple are searching for their lost son, reconfirm both his imaginative daring and ability to perplex. A haunting theme is the creeping forgetfulness over even the couple’s own earlier lives, amid the larger unspecified calamity that has befallen the realm.

In Axl and Beatrice’s quest, the echoes multiply of the many Ishiguro characters whose private troubles secrete an era of public turmoil. The theme also comes up in his interview with a Nobel media representative after the announcement, where he says the “personal arena in which we have to try and find fulfilment and love… inevitably intersects with a larger world, where politics, or even dystopian universes, can prevail. We live in small worlds and big worlds at the same time and we can’t forget one or the other.”

Ishiguro has rarely spoken as a public intellectual. Of his generation, far more prominent in this respect have been the much missed Angela Carter, along with Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. “I always felt that for novelists, it’s better not to appear on television,” he told a documentary by Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, in 2010. “I want people to relate to my stories, not to me as a person.”

That makes the views Ishiguro does choose to express all the more telling. In the foreword to a 2016 edition of An Artist of the Floating World, for example, he said the novel was “very much shaped” by the divisive years of Margaret Thatcher’s rule in the early 1980s. Those years, he said, were characterised by “the pressures on people in every walk of life to take sides; the rigid certainties, shading into self-righteousness and sinister aggression, of ardent, often youthful factions; the agonising about the role of the artist in a time of political change. And for me personally: the nagging sense of how difficult it is to see clearly above the dogmatic fervours of one’s day; and the fear that time and history would show that for all one’s good intentions, one had backed a wrong, shameful, even evil cause, and wasted one’s best years and talents to it.”

These very topical reflections, written in January 2016, acquired even greater force with the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union in June. The edition was published on schedule a week later. That weekend he wrote in a Financial Times essay of his anger at the outcome, the dangers of a far-right revival, and the need to “unite a sharply divided, bewildered, anxious, leaderless nation around its essentially decent heart.”

By default, the Nobel award gives such interventions extra significance. Ishiguro clasped this in his early comments, referring to the great uncertainty today about values and leadership in the Western world, and to people feeling unsafe. How his voice, as much as his art, matches this new status will be fascinating to see. So will be the media and political response. At this stage, broadcast and print news coverage is perfunctory, though literary pages feature warm tributes. Ishiguro’s prize has no propulsion as a national-cultural story compared to those of the recent British laureates: V.S. Naipaul (2001), Harold Pinter (2005) and Doris Lessing (2007). No doubt the atomising, decentring impacts of cyber revolution, and the erosion of critical arts journalism, are (related) factors in this. But it also has to do with these one-time pioneers’ vast political hinterland, provoking opinions, and celebrated vendettas. Their local fame was too set, their careers too advanced (Naipaul, the youngest, was sixty-eight), and — pace Ishiguro — their dogmatic fervours too aggravating for the Nobel to make anything new.

This time is different. Ishiguro is way beyond stereotype. True, a man whose heart beats on the left can expect a Daily Mail treatment with meagre praise, as well as a Craig Brown parody in Private Eye following sublime ones of Naipaul and Pinter. But alongside his work and his personal qualities, Ishiguro’s eschewing of petty strife or political idiocy across four decades gives him a rare moral authority.

More widely, the decade following those three awards has shaken the UK’s body politic and its collective psyche. Similar tremors are erupting across the world. Dealing with them is not intrinsically a writer’s job. But by exercising genuine imaginative freedom, a writer can sometimes find the wellspring of a truth that everybody knows but, until that point, has not been able to feel. And that can make something new. At this moment, Kazuo Ishiguro is the best possible shot. ●

The post Kazuo Ishiguro: a sense of freedom appeared first on Inside Story.

I’ve been writing stories for as long as I can remember, but it was only in 2014 — after two decades of practice — that I finally finished my first novel, Greythorne, a Gothic mystery set in Victorian England. The writing process itself had been relatively short, just twelve months from the idea to a manuscript I was comfortable submitting to publishers. In November 2014 I took it to an Australian Society of Authors Literary Speed Dating event in Sydney, where I pitched to various agents and editors, and five months later one of those contacts bore fruit.

My contract was with a digital-first imprint of one of the Big Five (the five biggest book publishers in the United States: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Pan Macmillan and Simon & Schuster). Digital-first meant it would be available only in ebook and print-on-demand formats, so there’d be no big print runs or distribution to bookshops unless it happened to do very well. At the time I didn’t care; it was a foot in the door.

What followed was a stripping away of any illusions I might have had about the traditional publishing industry. I thought publishers were in the business of marketing books — because they presumably want them to sell. Once upon a time they were, but those days are long gone. These days, a new release has to fend for itself, and if it doesn’t strike paydirt within the first month, then it’s done its dash. But getting lucky is far more likely to happen in some genres than in others — romance and crime, for instance, have hugely dedicated readerships. It certainly doesn’t happen in Gothic mystery.

I baulked at the thought of going indie; deep down, it still felt like the easy way out, or second best to endorsement by a traditional publisher.

Of course, I was lucky to have been offered a contract at all. The market for my kind of book is relatively small, and Greythorne is short as novels go, at only 55,000 words, or a bit over 200 standard paperback pages (most publishers prefer them to be around the 80,000-word mark). The development of digital-first imprints — which several major publishers have started in an attempt to tap into the ebook market — means that publishers will sometimes take chances on books like mine, whereas they wouldn’t necessarily consider them for a traditional print run. But these imprints are also often tiny, run by a dedicated but small team of people within a very big company, without the resources to properly market their wares. Essentially, they’re often set up to fail, and this failure then reinforces everything the publishers think they know about the ebook market, namely that it’s impossible to make a go of. (It’s not — trade publishers just don’t do it very well — but more on that later.)

In mid 2016, the imprint I’d been contracted by closed down unexpectedly, or at least it was unexpected for those of us on the outside. A number of authors, me included, were left stranded. On the one hand, our contracts were with the parent company, so they were still valid as long as our books continued to be made available for sale. They were, but what little marketing support there’d been had disappeared. On the other hand, the publisher offered to give us back our rights, but then we’d have to decide what to do with them. I queried an agent about the possibility of pitching the book to another publisher and was basically told not to bother — it’s extremely difficult to resell an already published novel unless it’s a bestseller. I decided to leave Greythorne where it was for the time being, because at least people could still buy it. Then I started looking at options.

In the meantime, I’d begun working on another novel, The Iron Line. This was another Gothic mystery, this time set in Australia in the 1880s. The imprint’s collapse had taken away any temptation to take the path of least resistance by pitching it to them, but it also meant I was essentially back to square one in terms of finding a publisher and/or an agent. It was a demoralising thought.

Around the same time, an author friend introduced me to a Facebook group for “indie” authors. Indie, or independent, authors are what used to be known as self-publishers — people who produce and publish books themselves, in this case using ebook and print-on-demand technology. Indie publishing is very different from vanity publishing, where unscrupulous companies charge inexperienced authors to publish through them, often to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, for little or no meaningful return. Indie authors subcontract services like editing and design themselves, and retain full control of all their intellectual property.

The indie scene underwent a renaissance in the late 2000s, spurred on by Amazon’s release of Kindle Direct Publishing, which allows authors to publish directly to Amazon’s Kindle ebook platform rather than having to go through a third party. In the ten years or so since then, indie publishing has developed into a thriving industry, with an array of services blossoming out of nowhere to support it. Self-publishers are no longer stereotypical narcissists with thousands of badly printed books in their basement; these days they’re businesspeople, and often quite successful ones at that.

Discovering just how many options are available to the modern author — far beyond the “contract or bust” model of yesteryear — was a revelation. But at the same time I baulked at the thought of going indie; deep down, it still felt like the easy way out, or second best to endorsement by a traditional publisher. So I left Greythorne languishing there in limbo, but nevertheless decided to find out exactly what this indie publishing thing was all about.

Entering the indie publishing world is a little bit like entering a parallel universe. Up in the firmament are a whole host of superstars you’ve probably never heard of — Hugh Howey, Joanna Penn, David Gaughran, K.M. Weiland, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, James Scott Bell — many of whom are making five-, six- or occasionally seven-figure incomes from their writing. Further down are the mid-list — people who aren’t quite indie superstars but who are making perfectly respectable money through savvy marketing. Of course, there are still traces of the old self-publishing problem evident in those books that lack decent design and/or editing, but that’s what happens in a democratic marketplace. You could sit the best-quality indie books next to traditionally published books and most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

One characteristic of the most successful indie authors that I noticed early on is that they’re not just authors — they’re businesspeople. Many of them run mini-empires, built around not just their fiction work but also non-fiction, speaking gigs, workshops and other services. To succeed, indie books need to harness a whole marketing ecosystem — an email list, free giveaways, a spot in the coveted BookBub newsletter (which sends free or discounted deals to its subscribers every day and can add thousands to a book’s sales), and so on — and the most successful authors have learned how to make this work for them.

Hybrid strategy: Hugh Howey capitalised on his self-publishing success by striking print deals with major publishers but retaining lucrative ebook rights.

Strangely enough, though, techniques that would be a closely guarded secret in other industries are willingly shared in the indie world. Whether it’s through free sources such as Facebook groups and podcasts, or through non-fiction books, webinars and other media, indie authors are almost always ready to help each other out. In the indie Facebook group I’m part of, members regularly (and constructively) critique each other’s covers and blurbs, offer feedback on drafts, and answer questions about platforms and marketing strategies, even sharing the results of particular promotions they’ve launched and offering lessons learned. You might think that an industry in which members are competing to get their own work noticed would be incredibly vicious, but in fact indies across the board are really nice.

Even those who’ve had enormous success seem to see value in giving back to the community. Hugh Howey became famous as the first indie author to sign a print-only deal (retaining ebook rights because he’d done so well with them on his own) after his dystopian science-fiction trilogy, Silo, was picked up by Simon & Schuster for a six-figure sum. But he’s also known in the indie community as the brains behind the Author Earnings website, which is one of the few sources of sales statistics that don’t come from the major publishers (which don’t usually include ebooks or indie books). It aims to crunch the data across the entire marketplace and give a more accurate snapshot of exactly which types of books are selling and who’s producing them.

The traditional publishers hate this kind of thing because sales figures have always been a tightly held secret, but Author Earnings is in keeping with the openness of the indie community, which is all about sharing information to help authors make informed decisions. Likewise, one of the longest-running podcasts on indie publishing, The Creative Penn, run by British author Joanna Penn, regularly hosts guests from all over the world who share information on all aspects of indie publishing, from writing techniques to exploiting audio rights to getting the most out of Amazon ads. The amount of information available, often for free, is simply extraordinary.

All the same, indie publishing is a huge learning curve, and it’s not for everyone. Some writers just want to write, and that’s fine. As an indie author you have to do it all, and that means being comfortable with marketing. Once upon a time, highly introverted authors were able to hide behind their publisher’s marketing department, but not any more. Even in trade publishing, authors have to do the lion’s share of the work when it comes to getting their book out there, and in indie publishing this is magnified. If that’s not your thing, or if you’re not technologically savvy, you’re going to struggle as an indie author.

The other thing to bear in mind is that some types of books sell better than others. Romance readers, for example, are voracious and loyal, so romance is the perfect genre for indies because the market is huge. Likewise, crime tends to do well, especially “cosy crime” (think Agatha Christie) and thrillers. Speculative fiction — science fiction, fantasy, horror and all their various sub-genres — also has a pretty strong market, especially because the ebook retailers’ categories go into quite some detail, so readers can browse very specific varieties of the genre according to their taste. Steampunk, for example — a speculative fiction subset that has fantasy or sci-fi elements set in an alternative Victorian-era world — is a growing market, but not big enough for many traditional publishers to touch it.

On the other hand, middle-grade fiction (chapter books for children aged eight to twelve) is generally accepted as difficult to publish independently. Kids’ books in general are hard to sell this way because you have to market to the parents as well as the child, and these works tend not to be so popular in ebook form anyway. Likewise, if you write literary fiction then indie publishing is a bad idea, because it won’t sell — but then, literary fiction tends not to sell very well in any format, which is why traditional publishers use the earnings from genre fiction bestsellers to cross-subsidise it. Literary fiction authors also depend disproportionately on literary reviews and prizes, neither of which are particularly accepting of indie-published books. But for genre fiction authors like me, there are far more opportunities than ever before.

In early 2017, I decided to dip my toe in the indie publishing waters with a non-fiction book, Communications for Volunteers: Low-cost Strategies for Community Groups, which I’d written as an asset for my consultancy business (because, like most writers, I also have a day job). In this case, there was never any question of finding a traditional publisher; I deliberately decided to go indie because I wanted to retain full control over the intellectual property rights. I knew I’d be using material from the book in other aspects of my business, such as training courses, and I didn’t want to have to go running to a publisher for permission every time I wanted to do that. So indie it was.

As an entree to the industry I probably couldn’t have picked a more difficult book. It was full-colour with lots of lists and diagrams, so was a lot more complicated and expensive to format and print than a traditional black-and-white novel. Marketing non-fiction is also quite different from marketing fiction, and there are fewer resources available. But I got there in the end, and it made me realise just how much freedom and control you have over the entire process, from what you write, to design, release dates, sales and giveaways

I watched Greythorne’s sales ranking slide without being able to do anything about it. If you can’t control the price then you can’t run sales, give books away for free, or implement any of the marketing mechanisms that will actually help it to sell.

By this point I’d finished the first draft of The Iron Line and was getting started on rewriting. It had taken longer than Greythorne (it turns out that starting a new business and finishing a novel aren’t always compatible) but it was rapidly reaching the point where I needed to decide what to do with it. I’d been toying with the idea of indie publishing from early on in the process, but had come up against the stigma that still exists around self-publishing. A successful author friend epitomised this when she said, on hearing that I was thinking of going indie, “Oh no, don’t do that — your writing is far too good and it’d be a waste of your talent.”

So I continued to weigh up my options — agent, major publisher, small press — and in July this year I again went to a Literary Speed Dating event. I had some muted interest, but also “we can’t sell Gothic” and some concerns about the length of The Iron Line, which, although slightly longer than Greythorne, is still on the short side. Even the fact that I already had one book published (and so was slightly less of a risk than a debut author) seemed to make little difference.

In the meantime, I watched Greythorne’s sales ranking slide without being able to do anything about it. If you can’t control the price then you can’t run sales, give books away for free, or implement any of the marketing mechanisms that will actually help it to sell. I knew that the dismal sales figures weren’t because it was a bad book — it had got good reviews, and I’d actually made some pretty decent money, albeit by buying print-on-demand copies and on-selling them myself, which is ultimately an unsustainable way of doing things. Finally, I decided that I wasn’t getting anything from the publisher that I couldn’t get myself, so I got my rights back and have recently re-released Greythorne under my own imprint. Suddenly a whole world of possibility has opened up, and I’m cursing having waited so long to do it.

I started thinking about The Iron Line systematically. What could a traditional publisher give me that I couldn’t get for myself? These days, publishers tend to outsource design and editing to freelancers, so these can be obtained at the same quality you’d get if you went through the trade press. Indies obviously have to finance these themselves, but then the potential returns are also far higher.

The one thing traditional publishers can provide is print distribution into bookshops. But the reality is that most books only stay on the shelves for a month or two, unless they happen to take off. Certainly books in niche genres, like mine, won’t hang around for long. And in any case, bookshops (much as I love them as a reader) only give access to the Australian market, which in global terms is minuscule, whereas indies have access to the entire English-speaking world — and beyond just the usual Western suspects. Some of the places I’ve gained the most traction have, oddly enough, been India, Malaysia and South Africa, and one of my longer-term projects for Greythorne is a Hindi translation.

Another important consideration, and the main reason why the indie mid-list is thriving while it’s all but disappeared from the traditional industry, is royalty distribution. On Amazon, which is still far and away the biggest ebook retailer, any books priced between US$2.99 and US$9.99 yield a 70 per cent royalty (for books outside those parameters it’s 35 per cent). This means that for every US$4.99 copy of Greythorne sold, I make US$3.50. I can’t divulge the royalty rate from my original contract, but I can tell you it was a lot less than that. If you choose to publish exclusively with Amazon, you can also enrol in their subscription program, Kindle Unlimited, which gives readers access to an unlimited number of books in exchange for a monthly subscription, with authors paid by the number of pages read as well as for normal sales.

Other retailers, such as Kobo, give authors a 70 per cent royalty regardless of price. Plenty of research has shown the sweet spot for ebooks — the point where the author will move the most copies but still get a decent return — to be around the three-to-five-dollar mark, which is why indie authors who are savvy with their pricing and marketing are often able to make a decent living. In contrast, most trade publishers still use ebook pricing primarily to drive sales to paperbacks (which is where they make their money), ignoring the many reasons why readers might choose to read ebooks instead. This is why you often see ebooks from traditional publishers priced at anywhere between $10 and $25, which means, of course, that they don’t sell anywhere near as well as their more reasonably priced cousins.

Even though most indie authors still make the majority of their income from ebooks, developments in print-on-demand technology have made indie paperbacks a huge industry. Gone are the days when a minimum print run was 1000 books, which you then had to store until you could sell them. These days, you just upload a file and it gets printed as people order copies. Amazon has its own print production company, CreateSpace, while one of the world’s largest producers of traditionally published books, Ingram Content Group, also runs a print-on-demand arm, IngramSpark, designed for indie publishers. IngramSpark also markets indie books directly to retailers and libraries in the same way that Ingram sells its traditionally published books, meaning that it’s easier than ever for indies to get their work out there.

The other exciting area where indies are leading the way is audio. In the last five years, the audiobook market has taken off, driven in large part by the ubiquity of the smartphone and the resultant podcast revolution, which changed people’s listening habits. Most traditional publishers, realising just how valuable audio rights are, will now force authors to sign them over (whereas previously you could choose to retain these and nobody cared), even if they have no intention of exploiting them, which deprives authors of a valuable asset. In addition, unlike with print books, it’s not possible for authors to pitch directly to audiobook publishers such as Bolinda. They deal directly with print publishers, so even if you retain your audio rights, there’s no way you can get an independent deal with them.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon is leading the way in indie audiobook production, like it did with ebooks, through its own platform, Audiobook Creation Exchange. ACX pairs authors with narrators, through either a fee-for-service or royalty-sharing arrangement, and then publishes the audiobook to Amazon’s massive Audible platform, as well as to iTunes. Books published on Audible are also made available for sale on Amazon alongside the ebook and paperback versions, and it’s becoming increasingly common for customers to buy both the ebook and the audiobook, especially as they sync on a smartphone or tablet to allow seamless transitions between the two formats. (You can read up to a certain point in the ebook, and the audiobook will pick up where you left off, and vice versa.)

But ACX isn’t available everywhere — Australia, as you might expect, is one of the places yet to receive it — and other companies such as Findaway Voices are rapidly filling the gaps. The growth of in-home voice-activated services such as Google Home and Amazon Echo is also likely to bolster the audiobook market, and indies are in a prime position to take advantage of it.

Looking at it this way, in cold, unemotional business terms, it was clear to me what the best option was. But if this sounds like an easy decision, it wasn’t. Indie publishing is hard work. It also, strangely, felt a bit like admitting defeat. I hadn’t realised how deeply I’d internalised the idea that the only people who self-publish are those who can’t get a traditional contract.

Thankfully, this perception is gradually changing, especially as more and more well-known authors start choosing the hybrid model — some books published traditionally, some indie. In December 2016, bestselling Australian author John Birmingham (He Died with a Felafel in His Hand) announced that, although he still had some trade contracts, he was going to be indie publishing a lot of his work from now on, after a falling-out with his publisher. Such high-profile defections help give legitimacy to indie publishing, as does the fact that many publishing awards are now increasingly open to indies. In fact, the annual ACT Publishing Awards are open only to books published either independently or by small presses, in recognition of the fact that high-quality work exists outside the publishing mainstream.

For me, ultimately, it came down to freedom. I certainly don’t expect to make my fortune overnight — indie publishing is a long game — but I have control over my own destiny, and that’s hugely important to me. Indie publishing gives me freedom not just in the business sense of deciding release dates, pricing and when to run sales, but also creatively. The accepted wisdom in traditional publishing is that once you publish your first novel you need to keep writing more of the same in order not to confuse readers, but in indie publishing, you can write whatever you want. It’s true that deviating hugely from your normal genre may not be the best business decision, at least under the same name, but if I want to jump from Gothic mystery to steampunk, for instance, that’s not such a huge leap. Realising I have the freedom to experiment creatively and to take risks (some of which may not pay off, but some of which I’m hoping will) is incredibly liberating. And even if I lose the respect of many in the traditional publishing industry, I can connect directly with my readers, which is one of the things I love most about being an author.

For many writers, a traditional publishing contract will still be the pinnacle of success, and others just want to write without the pressure of running their career like a business. And I haven’t ruled it out entirely; if the right trade contract came along, I’d happily be a hybrid author. Considering that just a decade ago everyone seemed to be decrying the death of the book industry, it’s incredibly exciting to realise that it’s not just surviving but thriving. It may not look exactly like it used to, but as both an author and a reader I feel there’s great cause for optimism. •

The assistance of the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund in providing funding for this article is gratefully acknowledged.

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Backlit in radiant daylight, this figure will be recognisable to many viewers by the distinctive aura of tight curls around her head. It is Margaret Atwood, making a brief appearance as if to put her stamp of authentication on the new dramatisation of her novel. If there is a flaw in this poised and trenchant literary work, though, it is in the author’s inability to resist delivering that extra, gratuitous swipe.

In Volker Schlöndorff’s 1990 film version, starring Natasha Richardson and scripted by Harold Pinter, the scene is more naturalistic and restrained. The girls who form the accusing chorus are younger novices dressed in white, still not fully schooled in the reactions they are required to perform. It is a test for them, part of their gradual introduction to the roles they must play once they graduate from this bizarre academy.

In this television series, made by production company Hulu, showrunner Bruce Miller gives the drama a harder edge. Indoctrination, enforced with a cattle prod by the instructor, is immediate, and the students already wear the distinctive scarlet habits and white starched bonnets of the Handmaids. They know the lines they must speak and the expressions they must wear (and not wear) on their faces.

As fertile women in a society stricken with widespread infertility, their role is to bear children to the Commanders, men of rank whose wives are sterile. Many of the graduating Handmaids, including the penitent in the shaming scene, are familiar with the more extreme punishments for insubordination of any kind.

Perhaps it is unnecessary now to offer audiences any more gradual introduction to the horrors of Atwood’s world. Rape victims suffer atrocious punishments in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. On 6 July, the very day The Handmaid’s Tale was made available in Australia through SBS On Demand, a nineteen-year-old was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment in El Salvador for failing to prevent the stillbirth of the baby conceived when she was raped.

In published commentaries, Atwood is insistent that the gruesome lynching scene in the first episode has real-life precedents – she cites one from the French Revolution and another recorded by Zola in his 1885 novel Germinal, in which a mob of striking miners tear their employer to pieces with their bare hands. If you have the stomach for it, you can find reports of many more recent examples from Chechnya, the Central African Republic and India.

While it evokes the aesthetics and social codes of seventeenth-century puritan America, The Handmaid’s Tale now seems alarmingly plausible as a vision of the future United States. Instead of fighting for an ever more open society, “progressives” in Trump’s America find themselves engaged in a rearguard action as moves are made to put reproductive control into the hands of lawmakers. As Atwood herself commented in a recent essay for the New York Times: “In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades, and indeed the past centuries.”

The progressive illusion is the most powerful theme in her novel, and the flashback approach works especially well in television. How did things get to be like this? Hasn’t it all gone backwards? For those who thought liberation was a one-way trip, Atwood’s tale is a stern reminder that cultural climates are subject to radical turbulence. The world can turn both quickly and comprehensively, and television is the ideal medium for portraying the reversal.

The free and easy dialogue in the flashback scenes, the vivid and spontaneous play of human behaviour, is set against the muted and formal patterns of demeanour that belong to a society under total control. It’s a form of totalitarianism that is primarily social and cultural rather than political. “The personal is political” is a feminist rallying cry, but here the personal defines the political.

If Atwood sometimes overplays her hand in staking out the dramaturgy of victims and persecutors in the novel, this is less of a problem in the televised version once we have got past the more lurid scenes in the first episode. This is not a drama about violent events, but about codes of behaviour.

Ultimately, what is proscribed is human communication itself. The stringent choreographic requirements of “the ceremony,” in which the Commander attempts to impregnate the Handmaid, are of the essence. There will be no kissing, no embrace, no eye contact and no privacy. It is a contract that binds the powerful and the powerless alike. When the Commander, played by Joseph Fiennes, tries to break through the constraints, he does so by resorting to the lighter confines of a Scrabble game. Sitting across the table from his Handmaid, Offred, he can instigate an exchange of letters, then words, then glances and lastly, perhaps, some trust.

Time and again we see such tentative invitations to trust, but they are always misplaced. The Handmaids walk in pairs. “I spy on her; she spies on me,” Offred comments. With each of these partnerships, there are cautious explorations of the potential for breaking with protocol and forging an illicit alliance, but such explorations are always themselves double-edged. Are they tests? Lures to betrayal?

A spin-off from the period genre of the comedy of manners, The Handmaid’s Tale is a drama of manners in which the codes are so strictly enforced that every exchange is fraught with potentially dangerous tensions. In the household to which Offred is assigned, the enforcer-in-chief is the Commander’s wife, Serena Joy, played by Australian actress Yvonne Strahovski. This is a clever piece of casting. Strahovski, whose roles in action films have created a fan following, has an intimidating physical presence, but here she also displays some fine psychological acuity in navigating between formal demeanour, calculated menace and a genuinely human response.

The work of casting directors is not often acknowledged, but so often they are the making or breaking of television drama. Here, Russell Scott and Sherry Thomas (whose previous experience includes five years on Breaking Bad) do an impeccable job. It’s a cast of few principals and many extras, but the same quality of attention is given to the choice of every face that comes before the camera.

Fiennes makes the Commander a much more agile and unpredictable personality than he is in Atwood’s novel, where he is a stereotyped silver-haired patriarch. Ann Dowd as Aunt Lydia, the Handmaids’ chief instructress and controller, takes a character who is no more than a series of tedious rants on the page, and brings every statement alive with manipulative ingenuity.

Laurels in any review should go to Elisabeth Moss, as Offred, who appears in almost every scene. She has the face of an innocent, wide-eyed and classically symmetrical. Much of the time it is framed in the translucent cone of white linen that is the Handmaids’ distinguishing head-dress. The camera, and we who are watching what it sees, tracks this face in its every register: wearing the required expression when she is under observation, sometimes devoid of all expression, sometimes betraying the emotional turmoil that is always threatening to overwhelm her. Moss does fifty shades of fear, from apprehension to outright panic.

The stars of the show, though, are the production designers (Julie Berghoff and Andrew Stearn) and art directors (Evan Webber and Nicolas Lepage). Atwood is a highly visual writer. Her chapters start with the particulars of setting and decor for each scene, and these are realised with extraordinary imaginative discipline. Interior tableaux, with shafts of soft daylight filtering through squared windows and domestic figures in linen caps bending over their work, evoke the paintings of the Dutch masters. Handmaids walking in pairs in their sculpted red-and-white costumes are in every exterior shot, sometimes seen from a distance or from above.

Aerial shots reinforce the sense of formal design that imprisons the human inhabitants and determines their movements. Every sequence here is a classical composition of colour, light and form. This horrible world is mesmerisingly beautiful. •

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Since cinema’s earliest days, we’ve been used to seeing films based on literary works, most commonly novels and plays. The Sense of an Ending and Their Finest belong unequivocally to this category, derived as they are from novels by, respectively, Julian Barnes and Lissa Evans. Denial, with its screenplay by British playwright David Hare, draws on the American historian Deborah Lipstadt’s History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005). The fourth, Viceroy’s House, has its basis in significant historical events.

When the adaptation is from text to film, the idea of being “faithful” to the source is essentially unrewarding. Fidelity is great for relationships, but playing around is definitely to be preferred on the screen: it asks more of the film-maker, and of the audience. But when it comes to films that have their basis in actual events, do we require the film-makers to stick to the facts? Can they be allowed to play fast and loose with the historical evidence?

As an opening declaration, “Based on a true story” seems to me misleading in the sense that we expect a “story” to have a beginning, a middle and an end, the latter pulling together the interaction of character and event. Life tends to be a messier, much less organised business. A film whose name for the moment escapes me settled engagingly for “Some of this stuff really happened,” a locution that allows the film-maker scope for invention as well as re-creation.

Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House makes its drama from the partition of India in 1947, when Lord Louis Mountbatten was sent as Britain’s last viceroy to oversee the transfer of political control to the subcontinent and the creation of the separate state of Pakistan. Not having any specialist knowledge of this painful – for many, tragic – episode in Commonwealth history, I can’t vouch for how authentically it portrays Mountbatten, well-meaning but still running the country under British orders, going about his work. But most informed accounts of the film suggest that Chadha, whose grandparents fled oppression in Pakistan, has been essentially true to the historical facts, and the screenplay, by Chadha’s husband, Paul Mayeda Berges, certainly seems more interested in understanding the events than creating melodramatic excitements.

The film’s title refers to its chief setting, the palatial residence in which 500 servants carry out their appointed tasks and to which Gandhi, Nehru and others are invited to put their views forward. The Mountbattens (Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson) are depicted as benign in their dealings with the people and the processes of transition, but there is an implied critique of the way the British rulers have dared to maintain so luxurious a lifestyle and are now seeking to protect their interests by the strategic drawing of Pakistan’s borders and other means.

Bonneville, trailing clouds of Downton Abbey aristocracy, and the American Anderson, with an impeccably English accent and demeanour, create a wholly believable pair as the Mountbattens, without resort to stereotypes. As well as the factual events on which the film draws convincingly, a fictional romance depicts young lovers torn apart by the wider political divisions. Touchingly played by Manish Dayal and Huma Qureshi, these may perhaps be seen as a personalisation of the political reality.

So, does it seem appropriate for a film story inspired by actual events to include a narrative strand that is the invention of the screenplay? If it is handled in such a way as to underscore the larger issues at stake, then I’d say yes, it does.

With The Sense of an Ending, we are on ground more customarily associated with the idea of adaptation. As one who dissociates himself from the notion of the “faithful” adaptation, I was set a challenge by this utterly absorbing film version of Barnes’s novel. When I re-read the book just before seeing the film, I was reminded how idiosyncratic it is. Watching it on the screen, directed by Ritesh Batra from a screenplay by Nick Payne, gave me the strangest feeling of watching the translation of a narrative in one medium into another that just happened to be using a language system consisting of audio-visual moving images. This is no mere reverential plod through the precursor text, even though virtually everything of importance has been transferred – as has so much of Barnes’s razor-sharp prose, whether in conversation or reflective discourse.

The protagonist of novel and film is Tony Webster, a divorced man in late middle age who runs a camera shop, keeps in intermittent touch with his former wife, Margaret, and their daughter Susie, and generally seems to be making his way without excitement towards his ending. Things begin changing when he receives legal notification that Sarah Ford, the mother of an early girlfriend, Veronica, has bequeathed him £500 and the diary of a school friend of his, Adrian Finn. But that account makes the novel and the film sound much more conventionally structured than is the case. On returning to the book those several years later, I was struck by how much it is preoccupied by the processes of memory, of reflection, and of tentative philosophical steps (“the more you learn, the less you fear”) towards understanding what his life has meant to Tony, in whose words the whole thing is narrated.

Almost everything I’ve said about the novel finds not so much its parallel as its reincarnation in the film. Tony (Jim Broadbent) will sometimes have access to the voice-over, film’s nearest equivalent of first-person narration. But, while his recollections of, say, schooldays or his first romance invoke film’s capacity for dealing fluidly with time and space, we never lose the sense that it’s all about Tony. All about him in the sense of how the past impinges on his present: how he relates to those who have populated his life and how he has treated them. The past is sometimes rendered in a flashback to schooldays, when the articulate Adrian challenges the received wisdom of a history teacher or the headmaster tells the assembled school of the suicide of one of their fellows, but sometimes it will be no more than a flash of memory that just barely registers in the older mind. And sometimes it will call that memory to account.

Two women will make their contribution to the recalled annals of the past. One is Margaret (Harriet Walter), whose pragmatism can pull Tony back into the present. (In one salvo, she accuses him of a “total inability to see what’s going on right under your nose.”) In these scenes, director and actors offer a most persuasive sense of how two people who once loved each other can maintain a rapport long after the passion has gone.

The other woman of consequence is Veronica, first seen as a carefree – and careless – teenager (Freya Mavor) and then, forty years later, as a woman to whom life has offered some serious challenges but who has nevertheless arrived at the kind of self-knowledge that has eluded Tony. As the older Veronica, Charlotte Rampling arranges to meet Tony to offer information about her mother’s will and the death of Adrian, conveying with stunning veracity and compassion a lifetime of coming to terms with painful truths. She only appears in the film’s last twenty minutes or so, but it has been worth the wait. Broadbent’s Tony, bumbling between eras, and Walter’s crisply spoken Margaret (she refers to Veronica as “the fruitcake”) are no less riveting company.

Indeed, all the acting is of the highest order, and the younger versions of Tony, his school chums and Veronica convincingly suggest the sixty-year-olds they grow into. Or do I mean the other way round? But this is a film that plays with time in ways that suggest past and present are by no means discrete entities. What they were then may well determine what they have become now; what they are now is of course irrevocably knitted into their often feckless pasts.

Because I finished re-reading the book a few hours before seeing the film, I can’t be sure that coming to the film version without the anterior experience won’t lead to some passing confusions, but I can only urge filmgoers not to let that deter them from taking on the film. There is a brilliant moment – and I mean moment – when, in a semi-flashback, the elderly Tony suddenly replaces his earlier self in the back of a car in which Veronica’s dad is driving them both to the station. It epitomises the film’s daring fluidity in matters of time, and effortlessly makes its point about what the memory may be up to. And could there be any more evocative way of placing an event in the past than the image of people in a restaurant smoking between courses?

There isn’t space to deal in detail with those other films I mentioned at the outset. Suffice to say that both Denial and Their Finest offer absorbing entertainments, having drawn their inspiration from works in another medium. Their Finest also “adapts,” in the historical sense, the work of the Ministry of Information’s film division during the second world war. Not having read Lissa Evans’s novel, I can’t know how closely Lone Scherfig’s film reproduces its narrative contours, but the ministry’s film work was an important contribution to wartime propaganda and morale, and the film – with its muted colours and chirpy tone – may be seen as adapting what would once have been a well-known aspect of the life during a tense period.

But it is The Sense of an Ending that has challenged my views on cinematic adaptation. Unlike the transpositions I’ve most admired, it seems less concerned with offering a new intellectual, emotional and philosophical take on the original than with translating it into a new signifying system. Does that sound dull? It’s not. Ritesh Batra (of The Lunchbox fame) and Nick Payne set out to make Barnes’s prose account of a life – or phases of it – available in the distinctive language of cinema, and have done so with much success. •

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