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 film rumoured to be in production. 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.

Clift understood that her column needed to be upbeat and inoffensive, so she 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

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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

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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 he 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

The post Neverending story appeared first on Inside Story.

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 (or in this case, a detached arm), but doesn’t quite follow the trajectory we might expect.

A river bargeman makes the gruesome find, hooking it up from the sludge at the bottom of the Canal-Saint-Martin. “It was a human arm, intact from the shoulder to the hand. 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 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 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 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. •

The post A town not quite like Alice appeared first on Inside Story.

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. •

The post Writers over America appeared first on Inside Story.

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. ●

The post Hell or high waters appeared first on Inside Story.

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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The clearing of the forests for wheat was a concerted effort of destruction, subsidised by governments that enticed working people onto the land to cut down bush and burn it to ashes. Aspiring farmers willingly joined the rampage, fuelled by the promise of land and a profitable business. In practice, they found that they could earn more from clearing the land than growing crops on it, so the rural cycle turned from the hard graft of knocking over the bushland to the celebration of mighty fires, rather than the traditional round of sowing and reaping. When one area was cleared, they moved on to the next.

These days, the WA wheatbelt produces grain for export and looks like a profitable concern, but its history is a terrible story of the industrialisation of agriculture at the expense of the land, the people who lived there before settlement, the animals, birds and trees, and, ultimately, the people who cleared it.

Such a story might be told in a conventional geographical history, surveying changes to the landscape and the politics of settlement, but Hughes-d’Aeth is a literary critic, aware that the process had a series of literary witnesses. He traces the century-long history of the wheatbelt through the work of well-known writers including Albert Facey, Jack Davis, Dorothy Hewett, Elizabeth Jolley and John Kinsella – and some lesser-known, such as Cyril E. Goode, James Pollard and Barbara York Main. A few others – J.K. Ewers, Peter Cowan and Tom Flood – may be familiar to easterners interested in Australian literature but are hardly household names outside Western Australia.

Hughes-d’Aeth uses Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life, not published until 1981, to provide an overview of this history. Facey’s family saw the wheatbelt clearing as an opportunity to rise from poverty to the ownership of land – that European dream. Like others from the eastern states, they were attracted west by the promise of the goldfields but found themselves working as labourers and suffering immense privation. As an eight-year-old, Facey walked 220 kilometres barefoot to get to his uncle’s holding, at what would become Wickepin. He tells a story of child slavery and neglect, but also gives an account of a general phenomenon – the movement of people in search of a fresh start on the land. His later experiences of the first world war, life as a soldier-settler, and ruin during the Great Depression are representative of life in the wheatbelt.

The enterprise of clearing the land had a moral dimension, Hughes-D’Aeth comments, a belief that the people as well as the land would be improved by this massive, grinding effort of labour. Of course, a literary tradition of pioneering and pastoral life already existed in the eastern states, where squatters rode their horses among rolling hills, growing wealthy from their sheep and cattle. It was romanticised – as writers such as Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy and Barbara Baynton attested – but it adapted a longstanding notion that Australian rural life could be “pastoral” in the literary sense, lived in harmony with the natural world. This notion couldn’t stand a chance in the wheatbelt; Hughes d’Aeth thinks Steele Rudd’s stories of hopeless family labour on a selection are the closest equivalent to the experience there. As James Pollard presents it, farming the wheat was “a numbing and endless cycle of tasks, and not a moving and redemptive expression of life.”

In a range of poems and stories, Goode, Pollard and Ewers tried to reconcile pioneering and pastoral mythology with the lives of the “wheat men.” But their experiences led them to sometimes bitter reflections on the impossibility of the task. Goode’s poem “The Power Farmer’s Soliloquy” makes the contrast clear, with its images of roaring engines and grinding gears – a wheat farm was more like a mechanised factory than a place of communion with nature. He wrote his collection of poetry, The Grower of Golden Grain, in the decade before the Depression drove him from the land; he published it himself and sold it door to door on the streets of Melbourne.

These aspiring literary writers also turned to natural history as consolation. Pollard wrote a weekly nature column for the West Australian in the 1920s that elicited a response from readers wanting to learn about the birds, insects and plants they found in the remnant parcels of bush around them. Ewers, a school teacher, sought him out to share their mutual interests in nature and literature – with Ewers publishing two novels about the wheatbelt experience. It was clear to them that “nature” was not the farm.

Hughes-d’Aeth reads literary writing and history in a novel way, and provides new insights into both. Peter Cowan’s reticence can seem like a wilful refusal to let the reader near the essence of his novels and short stories, but Hughes-d’Aeth reads this “understated prose” as an expression of Cowan’s experience of the “amazingly barren open spaces” and the isolation of his years as an itinerant labourer among the wheat. Cowan was young enough not to know the land before it was cleared, and educated enough to recognise the modernity of the agricultural world in which he lived. “Nature” has no romantic resonance for him, and his work presents an alienated modernist view, appropriate to the monotonous land and work in the wheat.

Dorothy Hewett was also a child of the wheat country, in her case from one of the families who prospered there. Hughes-d’Aeth sees her story “The Wire Fences of Jarrabin” (first published in the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1957 as “My Mother Said, I Never Should”) as the first literary recognition of the social divisions and the segregation of Aboriginal people there, while her poem “Legend of the Green Country” finds a mythic dimension through her own family history. He regards her musical drama The Man from Mukinupin as the high point of her career because of the way it counterpoints the layers of myth with the realities of wheatbelt life, and introduces a sense of “tragic time.”

Yet it took Jack Davis, publishing after 1970, to speak for the notable absence from wheatbelt literature – the original inhabitants of the land. Davis was not a wheatbelt local – his people came from the Pilbara – but his nine months at the Moore River Native Settlement made him a crucial witness to the treatment of the Aboriginal children and teenagers who were removed to there (mainly from the north) in the 1920s. Moore River, now infamous for its appearance in the film Rabbit-Proof Fence, was also in wheat country, and Davis’s play No Sugar put its racist and mercenary principles on the public record. In some respects, his plays responded to Hewett’s Mukinupin by asserting that there were other invisible mythologies and other realities operating in wheatbelt society.

These connections between writers, including the importance of Judith Wright to Hewett and Kinsella, and of Oodgeroo Noonuccal to Davis, suggest an ongoing line of literary engagement with the Australian environment. The work of Randolph Stow, Henry Thoreau and William Wordsworth are also frequent touchstones through the book. Tom Flood, of course, is Hewett’s son, and her influence is clear in his novel Oceana Fine, while his work shares a generational shift towards postmodernist ambiguity with John Kinsella. In 2000, Kinsella and Hewett collaborated to produce Wheatlands, a collection of their poetry about the wheat country, with accompanying photographs.

It is Kinsella who offers a kind of conclusion to this literary witnessing of the damage of twentieth-century history. Growing up partly on a wheat farm with his father, partly in the city with his mother, Kinsella was always aware of the dual inheritance of the wheatbelt. He was the boy who cheerfully shot rabbits and trapped birds, and he acknowledges his own participation in the crime of destruction. As an adult, he finds some satisfaction in the emergence of the salt from beneath the surface of the land, as a sign of a return of a still powerful, if infertile, nature. In 2009, he moved back to live in Toodyay with his family, choosing to confront the dilemmas of the guilty human attempting reparation. This is symptomatic of the situation of all Australians who feel responsible for their environment, recognising that “the undisputed monarch of feral animals is the European human,” as Hughes-D’Aeth puts it. “In Kinsella’s poetry we have the wheatbelt functioning as an allegory for post-humanist despair.”

This is an expansive, monumental book – as lengthy as most literary histories of Australia, let alone a region. Hughes-d’Aeth gives a brief biography of each of his authors and reads their selected work closely and sympathetically. Though he can see the shortcomings of some of their writing, he gives such importance to their life experience and their testimony to a real world that these seem minor. He also takes into account the shifts in literary ideas and genre over time, moving from nature studies and memoir to stories, novels and poetry. It is a generous book in every sense, and a remarkable example of what literary criticism can do when it is not bound by narrow theories or tastes.

Of course, a conventional history could cover some of this ground – Hughes-D’Aeth refers to Geoffrey Bolton’s A Fine Country to Starve in,among others – but this literary evidence lets us see personal and emotional engagements with history. This kind of literary criticism amplifies the writing by putting it into a meaningful context. It demonstrates the centrality of literary writing to our understanding of ourselves.

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It was Vera Brittain’s magisterial memoir of the first world war and its aftermath, Testament of Youth, published in 1933 and read by me just eighty years later, that brought Holtby to my attention. The two women met after they clashed at a debating society meeting at Oxford on the relative merits of travel and a university education, Holtby claiming that Brittain was asserting a kind of superiority derived from her wartime experiences in Europe. Yet, as Brittain later wrote, “The friendship into which, from such ironically inauspicious beginnings, I had drifted with Winifred Holtby began an association that in thirteen years has never been broken and never spoilt.” Brittain would come to recognise in Holtby a mind as acute as it was compassionate, and the friendship would endure until Holtby’s tragically early death, aged thirty-seven, in 1935 – and would be warmly chronicled in Brittain’s Testament of Friendship (1940).

After graduating, the pair shared a flat in London (a blue plaque now records their residence). Both women embarked on literary careers as well as becoming involved in countless other activities, some of them relating to feminist issues and some to the more broadly social/political thinking of the day, notably the work of the League of Nations. The two were in much demand as public speakers and commentators. Holtby published her first novel, Anderby Wold, in 1923; this was followed by five other novels, two volumes of short stories, two volumes of poetry, a study of Virginia Woolf and another of the postwar position of women, Women and a Changing Civilisation (1934). She also wrote numerous essays and articles for journals such as Time and Tide, which is described by Alison Light, in Forever England, “as a child of the suffrage movement, aiming to keep up the momentum of feminist campaigns after the war.” Her life was short, but wildly prolific.

Holtby’s best-known novel, South Riding, was published in February 1936, the year after her death. It was seen into print by Brittain as a tribute to their friendship and to Holtby’s authorial gifts, even if (according to Marion Shaw, writing in 1998) there was “some opposition from Holtby’s mother, who thought the book was both libellous and vulgar.” Within five days of publication, 16,000 copies had been sold; and in the decade after its appearance it went through nineteen “impressions,” the second and third published in the same month as the first. Awarded the James Tait Black prize, Britain’s oldest literary award, South Riding’s place in the collective memory was prolonged by the film version (1938) and two television adaptations (1974 and 2011).

The novel’s subtitle is “An English Landscape,” which may seem misleading if taken narrowly to refer to rural scenes, as the film version was apt to do with its long shots of pastoral activities. But if landscape is understood more broadly to include whatever constitutes the ambience of a place, then the subtitle is a true indicator of the novel’s substance. It may then be seen in the tradition of such notable nineteenth-century English studies of provincial life as George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, in which the authors so adroitly meld matters of personal and communal significance. When Shaw, in her otherwise astute account of South Riding, writes of it as “a quintessentially middle-brow novel,” the characterisation seems to me to undervalue its achievement.

Having come late to reading South Riding, I was greatly struck by how skilfully the aspirations – admirable or otherwise – of individuals are woven into the fabric of this fictional Yorkshire region, which is centred on the town of Kiplington. Holtby offers an engrossing account of how this community operates, both informally and, through the vital work of local government, formally. As Tom Crewe writes in a fine article published recently in the London Review of Books, “The Strange Death of Municipal England,” in the later decades of the nineteenth century these councils “acting on their own initiative, pioneered welfare provision,” and yet, a century later, would witness “the gradual but inexorable encroachment of central government on [their] autonomy.”

Writing in the 1930s, Holtby was still well aware of the potential power for good that local government might exert, though equally alert to how human failings might undermine its best intentions. She prefaced South Riding with a letter to her mother, the first woman alderman in Yorkshire, writing:

I admit that it was through listening to your descriptions of your work that the drama of English local government first captured my imagination. What fascinated me was the discovery that apparently academic and impersonal resolutions passed in a county council were daily revolutionising the lives of those men and women whom they affected. The complex tangle of motives prompting public decisions, the unforeseen consequences of their enactment on private lives appeared to me as part of the unseen pattern of the English landscape.

Whatever Mrs Holtby’s later reservations about the book, it is clear that her daughter drew on the insights she had imbibed from her mother’s work, seeing local government as “the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies – poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment.” In South Riding, all those “enemies” are at work in the novel’s community, but the novel never lapses into didacticism in describing the council’s work and its results.

The book opens with young journalist Lovell Brown’s first appearance in the press gallery of the South Riding County Hall, and Holtby uses him as the reader’s eyes and ears as several of her key characters are introduced. These include Alderman Mrs Beddows, whose “clothes were a compromise between her spiritual and chronological ages,” and gentleman farmer Robert Carne, who another reporter wrongly considers will be elected to fill a gap in the council. Brown’s predecessor on the Kingsport Chronicle has come along to the meeting to fill him in on the political workings of the council, in which matters of education and Mental Hospital business are raised. “Lovell had come expectant of drama, indignation, combat, amusement, shock. He found boredom and monotony. Disillusion chastened him.”

Holtby is not out to make melodrama from the business and potential conflicts of local government. She establishes it firmly as a source – perhaps the key source – of the community’s chance to improve the lives of its people. South Riding is divided into eight “books,” each of which has a heading that reflects this theme: for instance, Book I is titled “Education,” Book II is “Highways and Bridges,” and the last, Book VIII, is “Housing and Town Planning.” Despite Brown’s disillusion, Holtby makes absorbing reading of all these matters of municipal concern, and her great strength is her integration of the personal lives of her characters with the procedures, and sometimes machinations, of those who wield the power in local government.

As South Riding is a novel, not an economic or political tract, those headings are essentially indicators of the parameters in which individual lives are conducted, and this is a very densely populated work of fiction. A list of 168 characters is given at the outset and, though some appear only briefly, they contrive to create a sense of community as well as identifying individuals. Holtby is concerned with how far her protagonists work for their own ends, virtuous or otherwise, and how far for the greater good of South Riding. She will sometimes query the relative efficacy of personal gestures of generosity, on the one hand, and the broader prospects of council or school board administrations, on the other.

At the centre of this is Sarah Burton, whom the school board appoints as headmistress of Kiplington Girls’ High School. From a modest Yorkshire background, she has, after a career in a mission school in South Africa (a location Holtby was familiar with) and a London secondary school, chosen to return to her roots. She is a fervent believer in the power of education to shape lives for the better and, in her relations with fellow teachers and her pupils, she epitomises the novel’s preoccupation with how personal attitudes and aspirations can work in tandem with institutions.

Sarah may be attracted to the conservative Robert Carne even as she stands largely opposed to the centuries-old traditions of class and privilege he represents. But in keeping with the way she avoids simplistic oppositions, Holtby also allows Sarah to find herself sometimes at odds with left-leaning councillor Joe Astell. Is it a coincidence that both of these men are suffering from physical ailments that threaten their involvement in concerns important to them? Being interviewed for the headship, Sarah asserts unlimited belief in the power of human intelligence, and the novel allows us to see her ideas and character in action in the community she has chosen to return to.

Two of her pupils will tax her resources: Lydia Holly, who lives in the semi-squalor of the Shacks, a congeries of housing structures derived from old railway carriages, and Midge Carne, the wilful, troublesome daughter of Carne and his demented wife. In Lydia, Sarah sees prospects of real intellectual development, which will be poignantly constrained when the girl’s mother dies giving birth to yet another baby, leaving her to housekeep for the large family left behind. In Midge, Sarah sees a wayward snobbery that grows from being Carne’s daughter (he’d have sent her to a private school if he could have afforded it) and from the genetic inheritance of her institutionalised mother.

There isn’t space to pursue here the lines of development for each of the main characters as Holtby interweaves their personal aspirations with their relationships to the wider community. Suffice to say, South Riding remains an admirable study in the interaction of character, idea and place, an undoubtedly sound recipe for the enduring value of a novel.

A large-screen adaptation and two TV miniseries versions of South Riding are surely evidence that Holtby was on to something of more lasting significance than could be limited to the time and place of its conception and execution.

Film producer Alexander Korda of the prestigious London Films company approved a purchase of the film rights within a month of publication, and so Victor Saville’s 1938 film appeared just two years after the novel’s publication. It proved both commercially and critically popular, and it is said that Holtby’s mother was much more pleased with this efficient but somewhat sentimentalised version of her daughter’s work than she had been by the book. Ian Dalrymple and Donald Bull’s screenplay not merely (though necessarily) reduces the scope and large cast of the original, but also cannot resist reducing the complexity of the issues explored.

Saville’s film ends on a day of national celebration (George VI’s coronation), with the unlikely image of Lydia Holly and Midge Carne holding hands; the prospect of love’s finding a way for Carne (Ralph Richardson), very much alive as he wasn’t at the end of the novel, and Sarah (Edna Best); the new housing scheme opened; and the band playing “Land of Hope and Glory.” It couldn’t be more uplifting – or more at odds with Holtby’s apparent intentions. Still, film audiences in 1938, when the prospect of war was looming, no doubt responded to this upbeat resolution.

In other ways too, notably in its dealings with sexual desire and relations, the film is more reticent than the novel, and this was also attributable to what was deemed acceptable to the screen’s much larger audience. The film’s handshake between traditionalist Carne and socialist Astell (John Clements) perhaps also reflected a contemporary urge to solidarity in public affairs. It is an attractive film, if not the one Holtby would have had in mind.

The two television versions adhere more closely to her thematic and narrative interests. Both are written by men of whom much proficiency might have been expected; both place Sarah Burton firmly at their centre and both are fortunate in the actresses chosen to interpret this crucial role.

The 1974 thirteen-episode series was written by Yorkshire-born Stan Barstow, author of A Kind of Loving. (The film version of that novel was one of the high spots of the British cinema’s “new wave” of the late 1950s and early 60s.) He later adapted A Kind of Loving and its two successors, The Watchers on the Shore and The Right True End, into a successful ten-episode television series. He had experience, then, in the challenging venture of translating the life of regional novels into the visual medium, and it shows in his screenplay for South Riding.

Barstow opens the series on the council chamber, with tweed-clad Carne (Nigel Davenport) rushing in late, rebuked by his friend Mrs Beddows (a great performance from Hermione Baddeley) for being “always in a hurry.” A secret ballot concerning a new alderman is conducted, and socialist Astell (Norman Jones) defeats conservative Carne. There is important and characteristic cutting between the personal (an insert shows Carne’s lonely daughter Midge weeping angrily) and the council’s business, thus setting the pattern for the series and maintaining Holtby’s clear agenda.

The next formal meeting, after various individual lives and problems have been set in motion, is that of the school board, whose current function is to select a new headmistress. This brings Sarah (a luminous Dorothy Tutin) into play. Her strongly feminist views on what education might do for girls and her “unlimited faith in the power of human intelligence” win her the appointment, with Carne alone not voting in her favour. Both this and the 2011 miniseries follow this scene with Sarah’s breasting the waves enthusiastically at the nearby beach, as if in celebration of the opportunity that has been opened to her. From the start, this version maintains the dualities germane to Holtby’s vision – and, indeed, preserves a great many of those private lives, across a wide social range, that impinge upon, and are impinged upon by, the operations of their community.

Andrew Davies, author of the screenplay for the 2011 version, may well be the most highly regarded adapter of literary fictions to TV, his lengthy filmography listing his dealings with Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy and many others, as well as screenplays for two Bridget Jones films. He knows better than most how to take a complex series of events and a large cast of characters and render them persuasive in a medium that may offer more temporal scope than a feature film but makes different demands in coming to terms with discrete episodes. Nevertheless, it could be said that in streamlining South Riding, he has sometimes over-simplified important issues.

He opens with a series of vistas of sea, road and rail, followed by images of Sarah (Anna Maxwell Martin) arriving for her interview with the school board, establishing at the outset how central she will be to all that follows. As in the earlier version, Carne arrives late, and Mrs Beddows (Penelope Wilton) again warns Sarah about what to expect in Kiplington, to which Sarah replies, echoing Holtby’s feminist sentiments, that she doesn’t believe that “wife and mother” are necessarily woman’s “highest calling.” Skilled adapter though Davies is, in his screenplay and Martin’s performance she is a less complex and commanding figure than in either novel or preceding television series.

But this latest version of the novel, lighter in tone than Barstow’s, still reinforces Holtby’s vision of what idealistic expectations might achieve and how instrumentalities of local government might enable their realisation. Whatever the strengths of the three screen adaptations, it is the power and insight of the original that provide the mainspring for their action – and which suggest that Holtby has remained a name to reckon with eighty years after her untimely death. •

The post The adaptable Winifred Holtby appeared first on Inside Story.

If you have family around you and need something to appeal to a mix of generations, Dickensian might just do the trick. This twenty-part series was premiered with considerable fanfare on the BBC last Christmas, but snuck unheralded into the international market (on Apple TV) many months later. It deserves its fanfares.

Lead scriptwriter Tony Jordan, whose track record includes Hustle and Life on Mars, came up with the idea of using the characters from half a dozen Dickens novels to create a collaged prequel to those stories. The atmosphere of A Christmas Carol is conjured up in the snow-bound streets of Camden, where Scrooge has his counting house. Although the whole series is filmed in a studio set, no trouble was spared in the building of Michael Ralph’s Dickensian world, with its cobbled streets, gaslit shopfronts and ornate Victorian signage.

It’s a scenic prototype in which most Dickens characters seem to belong. Fagin and his boys from Oliver Twist pick the pockets of shoppers and sell their loot at the Old Curiosity Shop, where a childhood romance is developing between little Nell and the oldest son of Scrooge’s luckless assistant, Bob Cratchit. The upwardly mobile Mr and Mrs Bumble, yet to be given authority over the workhouse where Oliver Twist makes his legendary request for more gruel, exchange greetings in the street with Mrs Gamp, the gin-soaked home nurse from Martin Chuzzlewit.

Dickens, perhaps more than any other novelist, invites dramatisation. He was himself a talented actor, and travelled the country giving readings in which he “did the voices” of all the characters, infusing climactic scenes with a histrionic sense of immediacy. The theatricality that is such an obvious lure to actors and dramatists, though, can easily become overblown on the small screen. A good television actor is one who understands that the camera does half the work, and that over-accentuated expressions destroy the subtle collaboration.

Jordan and the directorial team responsible for Dickensian, led by Harry Bradbeer, seem to have formed a judicious consensus on keeping the theatrics toned down. The pitch is set by Stephen Rea, who plays the ubiquitous Inspector Bucket with deadpan intensity, pursuing his enquiries in a voice that never rises above an undertone.

The strategy of avoiding caricature also works well in other roles traditionally associated with the great British tradition of “character acting.” Anton Lesser, one of the best television supporting actors in the business (his credits during the past couple of years include Wolf Hall, Game of Thrones and The Hollow Crown) plays Fagin with subtlety and charm, making the villainous edge seem all the sharper when it gleams.

Pauline Collins as Mrs Gamp goes for an approach that won’t raise distracting comparisons with the consummate Dickensian caricaturist Miriam Margolyes, in whose one-woman show this character is the most exuberant presence. Collins plays down the grotesqueries in which Margolyes revels, offering instead a winsome figure, almost fading away in her gin-soaked aura. Instead of the florid coercive monologues, we have the talk of someone pissed as the proverbial newt, whose words slip-slide on the tongue and disappear into nothingness. It works a treat.

Since any single Dickens novel is a squirming tangle of plotlines, one of the challenges for Jordan and his writing team is to provide narrative arcs. One of these follows the fortunes of Miss Havisham, exploring the sequence of events leading up to her fateful wedding day, amid the ruins of which she will spend the rest of her life. Tuppence Middleton portrays her as a vibrant young woman who has recently inherited the family business and is keen to try her strengths as its new manager. Her confidence is in stark contrast to the incipient degeneracy of her younger brother, embittered that she has taken precedence over him in his father’s will and bent on revenge through the agency of his unscrupulous friend, Meriwether Compeyson.

For those who know the novel Great Expectations, Compeyson is a name that sends a chill up the spine. We never meet him on the page, but see the effects of his work. He has a catalytic impact on the lives of those with whom he becomes involved, ruining them so profoundly that no psychological recovery is possible. He’s the ultimate conman – charming, stylish and with a deft line in faux candour. Tom Weston-Jones captures all this, and is equally convincing in showing the brutality that readily emerges behind closed doors.

Arthur Havisham, played by Joseph Quinn, sees both sides of the Compeyson personality but is too immature and too far gone in addiction to stand up to him. The rapport between the two actors gives real dramatic force to their scenes together. Quinn, plucked out of drama school, brings a sophisticated emotional intelligence to his debut role. His striking resemblance to the boy poet Chatterton is exploited in tableaux that evoke the portraits of Chatterton on his death bed, stretched out on a disordered couch beneath the window, his face paler than his linen shirt.

Inspector Bucket weaves his way between the various groups of characters, intent on discovering who killed Scrooge’s partner, Jacob Marley. “Mr Marley was a bad man,” he confides to one witness. “His killer may well be a good one.” The law plays a strangely ambiguous role in all Dickens novels, and Bucket, as its agent, wears the ambiguity with a quiet fatalism. It is he who will later play a part in the undoing of Bleak House’s Lady Dedlock, in a case in which lives depend on the burial of secrets.

In Dickensian, we meet Honoria Dedlock as a young woman, passionate and ingenuous, who falls for a good-looking soldier without the means to support her. Her sister, meanwhile, schemes to save the wreckage of the family finances by marrying Honoria off to an ageing aristocrat. This is not going to end well, but those who want to see how it does end can follow Dickensian with a further binge-watchers’ indulgence in the BBC’s 2005 Bleak House, far and away the best of all televised Dickens series, featuring Gillian Anderson as the pathologically bored and psychologically paralysed Lady Dedlock. It’s worth treating yourself to the boxed set.

Sadly, though, there will be no sequel to Dickensian. For reasons that are hard to fathom, the BBC has decided not to continue the series.

If it was one of the earliest detective novels, Bleak House is no generic crime thriller, and presents a welcome break from the endless stir-fry of recycled ingredients in television crime dramas. So does The Secret Agent, a three-part BBC series based on Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel. Here we have another story set in the densely populated streets of Victorian London, in which an unobtrusive police inspector weaves his way through a strange blend of incidents and motivations.

Conrad’s novel is based on actual events in 1886, when the Victorian era was past its prime and a new kind of consciousness was taking hold. As the title signals, it’s a story of espionage, and in some respects it is a precursor to the spy thriller, though it doesn’t conform to the expectations of the genre.

The story, as Conrad wrote it, is a study in psychological modernism, focusing on characters who struggle to survive in a society in which the stabilising elements of Victorian England – the home, local business and national identity – are being eaten way. Adolf Verloc, the secret agent of the title, manages a shop that deals in slightly shady merchandise, mainly pornography, and attracts a group of regular male customers. But this is a cover for interests of a darker shade: those who visit the shop are in fact a cabal of anarchists, and Verloc, in the pay of a government embassy, is informing on them.

We learn all this within the first twenty pages of the book. The act of terrorism around which the plot revolves occurs less than a third of the way through, and is the consequence not of brilliant scheming but of human error and converging circumstances. A confused youth, Verloc’s brother-in-law, is its only and unintended victim. In Conrad’s own interpretation, it was a banal manifestation of providence in which there was “not much to see.” Anyone planning a television adaptation is faced with some obvious challenges. If there is little or nothing to find out, where does the suspense come from?

The BBC team, led by scriptwriter Tony Marchant, took its cue from Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil,” convinced that the story has a new resonance in an age in which apparently random acts of terror are an increasingly familiar fact of life in major cities. So this is not a spy thriller, but a story of cultural dissonance and psychological breakdown that reaches its climax as a domestic melodrama. It is made to work through impeccable casting, focusing with growing intensity on the trio of Verloc, his wife Winnie, and his intellectually disabled brother-in-law Stevie.

Charlie Hamblett plays the impulsive Stevie with unwavering behavioural accuracy, and injects an element of lightness into an otherwise relentlessly sombre emotional landscape. Toby Jones gives a finely judged performance as Verloc, a man trying to hang on not so much to his reason as to his reasonableness after he has unwittingly committed the most appalling act of homicide. Vicky McClure as Winnie doesn’t have the option of taking refuge in subtlety, as the storyline takes her into the risky terrain of melodrama.

Verloc’s determination to hold to what is reasonable, in himself and his life, is precisely what drives her over the edge, in a spiral of grief and outrage that culminates in the anarchy of complete psychological breakdown. Leaning across her kitchen table and staring into the face of the camera, she takes in the news of her brother’s death in a long unedited shot. There is a sense of reactions beyond control or definition forming wordlessly, an explosion waiting to happen. McClure established a distinctive capacity to ride the psychological undercurrents of the drama in the crime series Line of Duty. Here, she rises to the challenge as they surface and break. It’s a tour de force.

The Secret Agent may not be to everyone’s taste. It may disappoint viewers who are lured by the title into expecting something like a historical John le Carré. But television drama easily becomes trapped in generic frameworks. Having tried to plough my way through Trapped and Midnight Sun, the two Nordic noir series currently on offer from SBS, I got to a point where Candy Crush Saga on the iPad seemed to promise better entertainment. Well-acted and scripted as they are, every scene seems to be a replay of something you’ve seen before, in Fortitude, The Killing or The Bridge. Even murder can get boring, and the more it is dressed up in ritual and sadism, the less it has to offer in terms of genuine narrative suspense.

Crimes and misdemeanours take much more various forms in the literary tradition, and it’s worth taking some risks with the ratings to bring those into the repertoire of television drama. •

The post Crimes and misdemeanours appeared first on Inside Story.

Today, this glorious temple to cinema hosts music, ballet, stand-up comedians and the annual Sydney Film Festival. But on a wet winter’s night back in 1966, a film that would help reactivate Australia’s moribund motion picture industry had its premiere there. Amid flashing bulbs, a procession of local celebrities and dignitaries tramped up a sodden red carpet. Foreign glamour arrived in the shape of the movie’s star, the Italian actor and comedian Walter Chiari. In spite of the weather, They’re a Weird Mob was being launched onto the world stage in some style.

Based on the bestselling novel by a former pharmacist called John O’Grady (writing under the pseudonym Nino Culotta), They’re a Weird Mob tells the – ever so slightly satirical – story of an Italian journalist’s encounter with the strange manners, language and rituals of postwar Australia. It’s a benign portrait of the migrant experience in Australia, and gently mocks the nation’s dominant Anglo-Saxon suburbanite culture. Published in 1957, it sold in its millions.

Besides its humour, the book probably found favour with Australian readers because it portrayed them in such a flattering light. Nino never encounters prejudice; he is accepted easily into Australian society because he accepts so easily its habits of speech and thought. Reading the book today, you have to remind yourself that it, and the film, were released at a time when Italian migrants would have been referred to in polite circles as “New Australians” but in the nation’s public bars as “wogs,” “dagoes” and “eyeties.”

Standing nervously backstage that night, “freshly made up with big hair and lots of eye make-up” and wearing a pair of fashionable culottes bought specially for the occasion, was a teenaged Jeanie Drynan. Fresh out of NIDA, she played Betty, the newlywed wife of Nino’s friend, Jimmy. Today, after a long and illustrious acting career, she is best remembered for her roles in classic Australian films like Don’s Party and Muriel’s Wedding.

“It was a big deal, a very big deal. There was lots of excitement about this film,” she told me recently by phone from her home in Los Angeles. After the film was shown that night fifty years ago, Drynan joined her older, more experienced cast mates up on stage: Chiari, Chips Rafferty, Ed Devereaux and Slim de Grey. A little bit of Hollywood hoopla had come to Market Street.

Also in the audience that night was a budding film-maker in his twenties called Anthony Buckley. He was working for the newsreel company Cinesound, helping to capture for posterity the damp celebrities on the red carpet. Buckley doesn’t rate the film highly, but he remembers it fondly. “We were starved for seeing something of ourselves,” he tells me, “even if it was a bit ocker.” Now retired from film-making, he went on to become the award-winning producer of films like Caddie and Bliss.

Though it wasn’t the best film ever to grace the screen at the State, They’re a Weird Mob contributed significantly to the idea that an Australian film industry revival was neither a fanciful idea nor a national folly. What we would call today a “co-pro” – partly funded with money from overseas – it was one of the very few Australian feature films that actually got made in the 1960s. It showed that Australia had actors and technicians talented enough to make films. Just as importantly, its financial success revealed that Australian audiences would pay to watch local films – if given the chance.

They’re a Weird Mob played to sellout audiences at the State for six months, and made over $2 million at the Australian box office nationally. (Perhaps not surprisingly, it bombed overseas. Maybe you had to live here to get the jokes.)

Skills and ideas: Michael Powell (left) and Walter Chiari on the set. British Film Institute

“They’re a Weird Mob woke the politicians up,” says Buckley, particularly the Liberals’ John Gorton and Labor’s Gough Whitlam. “Gorton led the push for film schools and film funds to be established, which was later followed up by Gough. And you can thank films like it for setting up Australia’s film renaissance in the 1970s.”

Like that other pioneering work that helped reawaken Australia’s slumbering film industry – Wake in Fright, directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff – They’re a Weird Mob was also the work of an outsider. In fact, the man who made it was a very English Englishman.

In 1960 the veteran British film-maker Michael Powell released a masterpiece that pretty much destroyed his career.

Peeping Tom is a Hitchcockian thriller featuring a serial killer who likes to film his victims in their death throes. It’s as much about the voyeurism of cinema as it is about the act of murder. Contemporary critics hated the film with a rare vehemence. It was widely dismissed as evil pornography. Maybe the critics objected to seeing their profession explained away as a brigade of psychopaths sitting in the dark. The film was even banned in Finland.

Today Peeping Tom is widely considered to be one of the most important films of the twentieth century, but at the time it seemed as if Powell had sabotaged his ability to get films financed – which had been considerable.

With his partner, the screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, Powell had established a production company they called The Archers, which became a byword in British film-making achievement. The Archers produced many of its best films for the Rank Organisation, including the Oscar-winning films The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. Martin Scorsese has called this body of work “the longest period of subversive film-making in a major studio, ever.”

But that was in the past. By his own estimation, Powell spent the two years after Peeping Tom “floundering about.” The only project he had on the boil was a musical about an island paradise transformed into a nuclear power station, called E=mc². It sounds like box office radiation poison – and probably would have been.

Around this time, a friend gave Powell a copy of They’re a Weird Mob. He read it on a flight from London to the south of France, where he owned a famously unprofitable hotel called La Voile d’Or. He later recounted that he laughed all the way to the French Riviera and fell in love with O’Grady’s steatopygous hero. (Nino Culotta, loosely translated, means “Johnny Big-Bum.”) He was particularly taken by the language of O’Grady’s “Sinnyites,” which he described affectionately as “a highly spiced mixture of cockney and Liverpool Irish.”

By the time his plane touched down in Nice, Powell had decided that a film of the book had to be made. But when he rang the author’s agent in London, Powell was bemused to discover that the film option had already been taken by an unlikely party: the Oscar-winning actor Gregory Peck.

“This was too easy,” Powell writes in his (digressive and somewhat unreliable) memoir, Million Dollar Movie. “Greg was staying in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat with his family, about a hundred and fifty yards up the road from the hotel. I caught him at home.”

When Peck had been in Australia filming On the Beach for Stanley Kramer, his co-star Fred Astaire had lent him a copy of O’Grady’s novel. Peck thought the book was a hoot. “It was so wonderful reading it in Australia, and having all the people around us just like they are in the book,” Powell reports Peck telling him. His plans had stalled, though, and so Powell eventually acquired the rights and took up the long battle to put They’re a Weird Mob on the screen.

As any honest auteur will tell you, the greatest of all film-making arts is the art of finding the cash. The energetic Michael Powell had the soul of an artist but the spirit of a carnival spruiker; and like the proverbial shark he was always on the move, sniffing out deals.

“What showman wants to be financially independent?” he once pronounced. “Half the fun is coaxing money out of other people’s pockets into your own.”

Within weeks of reading the book, he was winging his way to a country he had never visited and knew little about. But he had the whiff of a movie in his nostrils, and nothing else mattered. Years later, after the film was finished, a critic asked Powell what possessed him to make it. “Oh, because I had never been to Australia before, and I liked the book,” he replied airily.

In November 1962 Australia was still in the grip of the tyranny of distance. On his first marathon trip to Sydney, Powell flew from Rome via Teheran, New Delhi, Bangkok, Singapore and Perth. At the end of this slog through the skies, Powell arrived at Mascot Airport stupefied by jet lag, but optimistic and ready for action. Australians were flattered by the interest shown in their culture by this world-renowned director. For his part, Powell found his hosts to be pleasingly similar to O’Grady’s portrait of them.

During his stay, Powell took a crash course in the mores of Australia. One evening, O’Grady escorted Powell to Sydney’s famous Marble Bar.

The unlamented six o’clock swill was approaching its apogee when Powell was accosted by a local:

A very drunk man said to me, “Excuse me, sir, but you are impeccably dressed.”

I said, “Thank you.”

He said, “You are the most impeccably dressed man that I have ever seen.”

I began to feel self-conscious, and drank some beer.

He said, “That tweed, I’ll bet it’s made from the best tweed in Scotland.”

I said, “From Donegal.”

“That’s what I said.”

Following up on a tip from Peter Finch, Powell had already found his Nino – Chiari, a man of great charm who also spoke perfect English. Powell renewed an old acquaintance with the actor John McCallum, who fortuitously was now working for J.C. Williamson, Australia’s foremost showbiz empire. The two men were kindred spirits: McCallum wanted to kickstart a broken-down Australian film industry; Powell wanted to make a film – anywhere, even in Australia.

But now he needed a script. So he wrote one. It was no good. O’Grady wrote another. It would have run four hours, according to Powell.

Powell then approached his old partner in crime, Emeric Pressburger. According to Powell’s account, Pressburger quickly identified the problem.

“There is no story, Michael.”

“Isn’t there?”

“Oh, Michael, Michael… How many times have I told you that a film is not words. It is thoughts, and feelings, surprises, suspense, accident.”

“When could you start?”

Ten days later, Powell got a new script – 114 handwritten quarto pages – and there was now a story. Right at the very start, in Pressburger’s version, Nino meets an Australian beauty called Kay (played by Claire Dunne), whom he courts throughout the film. In the novel, Kay doesn’t arrive until the last quarter of the book.

So an Australian comic classic was now being directed for the screen by a Pom from a script by a Hungarian-born Jew (mysteriously credited as “Richard Imrie”) who had never been in the Southern Hemisphere, let alone to Australia.

It took three more years – and three more marathon plane trips by Powell – but in November 1965 the indefatigable director was back at the Marble Bar, surrounded by real-life extras drinking real-life schooners, filming Chiari (as Nino) being introduced to the rituals of beer drinking in 1960s Australia.

The critics have never really warmed to They’re a Weird Mob. Writing in Nation, Sylvia Lawson offered a typical contemporary view, calling the film “tenth-rate,” “slap-dash” and “very scrappy-looking.”

But the acerbic Lawson also pointed out that Powell’s movie is “a frustrating glimpse of what it would be like to have our own film industry, of how it might be to have your city given back to you on the screen.”

In this glimpse a lot of dreams were born. A critical mass was developing in Australian film culture. Within a decade of the premiere of They’re a Weird Mob, the Australian film industry had produced Sunday Too Far Away, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and The Devil’s Playground.

It could also be argued that the commercially successful Barry McKenzie films made by Bruce Beresford in the early 1970s owe a debt to Powell’s early stab at the “ocker comedy.” Later comedies like Muriel’s Wedding and Strictly Ballroom are also in a direct lineage.

Powell’s sojourn in Australia is usually ignored when his life story is written up in the media. The traditional narrative assumes his film-making career disappeared into a deep hiatus in the wake of Peeping Tom until he popped up again as a mentor and friend to Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola in the 1970s.

In fact, Powell worked again in Australia. He directed the feature Age of Consent, based on a Norman Lindsay book, starring James Mason as an ageing artist and a very young – and occasionally naked – Helen Mirren as the muse who gets him back to the paintbrushes. A still young Anthony Buckley worked as the film’s editor on Dunk Island in Queensland, where it was shot.

The film marked the beginning of Buckley’s long friendship with Powell. Buckley visited him many times at his home in England, and received numerous postcards from Powell in the remaining years of the director’s life. Powell even visited the set of Caddie, which Buckley made with the director Donald Crombie in 1975.

Buckley remembers him as a highly skilled and disciplined director. “If he didn’t need it, he wouldn’t shoot it,” he told me. “There are not many directors who are that sure of themselves, but he was so economical. He was a true artisan.”

It’s an aspect of Powell’s legacy in Australia that is rarely commented on: his mentoring of young Australian film-makers. He brought skills and ideas to our local industry at a time when it needed them.

Like most film-makers, Powell abandoned more films than he managed to make. In the years after They’re a Weird Mob, he had wanted to make another film in Australia called The Coastwatchers, set during the second world war. He wanted to make a film called Taj Mahal with Rudolf Nureyev. He wanted to make a film in Russia about the ballerina Anna Pavlova. But he made none of them. Many more projects were cast aside for want of finance or studio interest.

Powell made his last movie in 1972. The Boy Who Turned Yellow, a short film for children, was his final collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, who wrote the script. Michael Powell died in 1990 at the age of eighty-five. That’s nearly twenty years without making a movie. It must have driven him crazy.

As Buckley says, “He was all the time going somewhere to do a deal to get a picture up and he died doing that. He didn’t stop dreaming.” •

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The place must have changed since the 1960s; it gleams in the sunlight as if fresh-painted, and the cafes and taverns along the seafront are set up to match tourist dreams of the easy life. But Brian, an Australian who came to live here in the 1970s, tells me that most houses still have no sewerage beyond septic tanks, and water is scarce. Tourists seem to confine themselves to the few blocks near the water’s edge, happy just to eat the delicious Greek food and look up at the stony hills in the distance.

We’ve come to honour the writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who lived in Hydra from 1955 until 1964 at the centre of an assorted collection of artists and writers, Australian, English, Canadian, American, German, Scandinavian and Greek. Paul Genoni from Curtin University and Tanya Dalziell from the University of Western Australia have organised a conference here, so we’ve gathered at the Bratsera Hotel to talk about the significance of Clift’s and Johnston’s work and friendships.

It seems like the greatest excuse ever for an escape to an idyllic resort – and as it happens, people commonly assumed that Johnston and Clift were escaping, too, in their case from the tough realities of postwar Australia. They both complained about uninvited visits from passing Australians who wanted to take a stickybeak at their lives – a charge that may rebound on us as we poke around among their old haunts, though the writers themselves can no longer complain.

The current owner of the house in which Johnston and Clift lived has generously allowed us to hold a reception in his courtyard and wander through the now rather stylish house. The old well where the local women gathered water is still there outside the walled garden. It all looks so beautiful it is easy to forget the poverty and hard work, the difficulties of bringing up children in such sparse conditions, and the ominous evidence of Johnston’s incipient tuberculosis.

We view a visual tribute to Charmian Clift by Yianni and Micky Papapetros, based on the ABC radio documentary Persona: The Parallel Lives of Charmian Clift, which reminds us of her brilliance and beauty and her sad end back in Australia. Some of the conference papers are accompanied by vivid black-and-white photographs of the famous or forgotten figures who visited – American poet Allen Ginsberg, the New Zealand journalist Redmond “Bim” Wallis, a youthful Mungo MacCallum carrying a baby in a basket. Diana Thomas’s paper on the novelist Pat Flower is accompanied by a photograph of Flower in Provence with a youthful Margaret Olley, who appears to be wearing pedal pushers.

The best-known of these photographs include James Burke’s Life magazine pictures of Leonard Cohen playing guitar with Clift and others under the olive tree at Douskos Taverna. As a child, Rosemary Burke accompanied her father on his visit to Hydra, and she has come back to help us understand her father’s photographs; she also takes the opportunity to re-enact their ride over the Hydra ridges on horseback.

We have enough celebrity fandom to have our photos taken under the same tree at Douskos’s (the waiter insists that we pose under the olive tree of the Burke photos, though some of us also want to sit under the pine tree of Cohen’s poem about it). Yet the whole enterprise has a bittersweet quality. We’ve read enough of the books and essays to know how much the couple struggled to survive through their writing. Hydra’s chief attraction was that it was a cheap place to live and Clift, in particular, bore the brunt of its lack of domestic amenity.

Of course, most of the photographs show them at leisure, hanging around the harbourfront cafes with friends, drinking and singing in the tavernas, shopping in the markets, sailing around the Aegean on the yachts of their richer friends. Apart from George, they are all young and beautiful, laughing for the camera. In every photograph the tubercular George has a cigarette in his hand. The hard graft of writing and selling books is easy to forget.

Like Bim Wallis and some of the unidentified figures in the photographs (“Who was that?” “Just a German who wanted to write”), Johnston and Clift might have been forgotten if My Brother Jack had not stirred such a response of recognition among Australian readers. It won the Miles Franklin award in 1964, providing enough money for George to return home; Charmian and their three children had to follow by ship as £10 migrants.

The novel is, of course, set far from Hydra in a Melbourne where war had been followed by the Great Depression, which led to shifts in aspirations as Australia entered another international conflict. Like James Joyce writing about Dublin from Paris, Johnston, with Clift’s help, had to conjure up all his memories of the places and language of his past. Brigid Rooney produced a photograph of the model for the hated suburban house in “Beverley Grove,” now in a comfortable tree-lined street in desirable Brighton.

Clean Straw for Nothing, the sequel to My Brother Jack, is the novel of their Hydra lives. It also won a Miles Franklin award, but its account of the struggle by Johnston’s fictional counterpart, David Meredith, to make a living, his physical decline and his obsession with his wife’s infidelity makes for painful reading. Some characters seem to correspond with members of the Hydra crowd – the artist Sidney Nolan and the actor Peter Finch, among others. It may be accurate in its account of the activities and intrigues of the expatriate community, but it couldn’t draw sympathy from Australian readers in the way of My Brother Jack, which seems to say necessary things about the aftermath of the first world war and its damage to returned soldiers and their families, and the prospects for a newly revived postwar Australia.

Johnston may have been expressing his own dissatisfaction with the limits of suburban Australian life in My Brother Jack, but Australian readers, even those of subsequent generations, recognise the novel’s aptness to the raw suburbs of their own experience. Several conference-goers commented that Johnston’s version of Beverley Grove in the 1930s corresponded to their feelings about the new suburbs of Western Sydney in the 1960s or of Canberra in the 1970s.

In retrospect, it seems that Sydney was a more congenial place than Greece for Johnston’s and Clift’s writing careers. While the novels they churned out on Hydra have mostly been forgotten, the first two novels of Johnston’s David Meredith trilogy were acclaimed and Clift won a devoted following for her informed and perceptive columns for the Sydney Morning Herald. Reading these columns today, they appear to monitor the changes in Australian attitudes – towards the Vietnam war, music and dress, relations with Aboriginal people, and occasionally even the current crises in Greek politics. It seems that their decade in Greece gave both writers a sharper insight into the desire among many Australians to throw off our ignorance about the world, the energetic cultural rebellion of the young, and the mix of kindness and prejudice in the old generation.

Beate Josephi drew attention to Johnston’s war novel The Far Road, published immediately before My Brother Jack; and there was discussion of the brilliance of earlier journalistic works, including Journey to Tomorrow (1947), and the importance of his experience of China and Tibet as a journalist at the end of the war – including his journey with James Burke to Tibet. Clearly he is a writer whose work beyond My Brother Jack deserves rereading.

The posthumously published A Cartload of Clay, the third of the David Meredith novels, now strikes me as an extraordinary portrayal of changes in Australian life. Like one of Patrick White’s novels of postwar Sydney, it observes suburban life, including the coarse vulgarity of an Australian “ocker” and the bright materialism of the young women, as its protagonist wanders the streets of Mosman thinking about his career and the death of his wife.

Now, of course, that novel can’t be read without awareness of Clift’s suicide in 1969 and Johnston’s death a year later. Clift’s last column, published after her death on the eve of the release of Clean Straw for Nothing, referred to her own claims on the material in Johnston’s novel and her desire to tell her own version of the story. So the relationship between their lives and their fiction can never be unravelled. Inevitably, what we think we know about their lives and their difficult marriage – based on their own writings – eclipses the writing itself.

Early death from tuberculosis, barbiturates and alcohol is far from glamorous. Yet the photographs, the food and the simplicity of Greek life, which Clift described so vividly in Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, give an inerasable air of glamour to the couple. Online there is even a clip of George and Charmian and their children as extras in a Tony Randall movie set on Hydra, called Island of Love. They were stars, of a kind, and their early deaths leave a sense of potential unrealised.

One of the paradoxes of the period when Johnston and Clift lived on Hydra is that it marked the beginning of the greatest migration of Greeks to Australia. While the writers sought peace on a Greek island, thousands of Greeks were leaving their country in despair. As we visit, the Greek people are again suffering from a declining economy and coping with tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Syria. Many of the shops in Athens are boarded up, and the refugees are noticeable around the Port of Piraeus and in the outer suburbs, though they are kept away from the tourist havens. On Hydra, we appear to be in a dream, apart from political realities, Greek or Australian, and the locals treat us with hospitality and kindness. The disjunctions between the Australian dream of island simplicity and the realities of Greek life remain. •

The post Dreams of Hydra appeared first on Inside Story.

From the first time we see Lady Henrietta in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1949 filmic adaptation of Helen Simpson’s novel Under Capricorn (1937), we know something isn’t quite right. The film is set in Sydney in 1831, a kind of costume-drama-meets-historical-romance, and the scene in question is a dinner party attended by male guests only: their wives have sent their apologies. The camera moves down the length of the table and rests on Samson Flusky, Lady Henrietta’s husband, played by Joseph Cotten. Out of his line of sight, but obvious to all present, Lady Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman) appears in the dining room and the cut to her signals the conclusion of a long take that lasts many minutes of screen time.

In practical terms, the take has involved an enormous Technicolour camera supported by a crane attached to a massive dolly tracking and panning with great agility the set constructed at Elstree, careening up and down staircases and hallways as crew and actors alike dodged to keep out of its way. Yet, unlike the guests who would be able to witness Lady Hattie in her dishevelled entirety, presumably, the audience is permitted only a fetishised vision of this woman. We are first afforded a glimpse of bare feet peeping out from a dress hem: this is not what one would expect of a lady in the company of gentlemen in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Then we are given a close-up of Flusky; he is looking ill-at-ease and the shot emphasises the placement of a woman’s hands on his shoulders, a wedding-band catching the light. (Under Capricorn was Hitchcock’s second film in colour.) Whether this gesture is one of imprisonment or affection is unclear. Either way, this is our abrupt cinematic introduction to Lady Henrietta, one that both is reasonably faithful to Simpson’s rendition of her as drunk and looking like “a goddess careless of human clothing, or some heroine of antiquity run nobly mad,” and establishes her as fashioned not only through male fantasies but also by means of Jack Cardiff’s remarkable cinematography.

With hindsight, Lady Hattie is an obvious subject for Hitchcock. If Vertigo (1958), arguably now one of his most famous films, has as its creepy centrepiece the reconstruction of a woman in the image of the male protagonist’s desire, then both film and book versions of Under Capricorn set Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), an impecunious relative of the recently arrived governor of New South Wales, the task of restoring Henrietta to her past glory, good name and public standing. As it turns out, Adare is successful: in the book, he is seen peering through a “peephole” at Lady Hattie as she is reacquainted with the society that has previously shunned her, enticing the reader to “Look at her, look at her, my lovely creature that I made out of a drinky slattern, a boozy frowsy poor slut with no friend but her bottle of gin... Finished, the work of art.” In the film, this marvellous resurrection, inspired by unrequited love, prompts the climactic revelation that Henrietta has murdered in the past, a crime for which her husband has done the time.

Flusky, an Irishman, continues to carry the transported convict taint, at least in the eyes of the new governor and those agents of empire he represents, even as, or perhaps because, he has become a wealthy man on his emancipation. In the book, the climax turns more around the exposure of the tub-thumping Christian housekeeper, Milly (Margaret Leighton), who has been plying Lady Hattie with alcohol all along in the hope that her employer’s affections will settle upon her rather than her mistress. And reconciliation of class and English–Irish tensions in the colonies is marked both by Adare who, having been sent on a fruitless search for gold, is united with his true love, Susan Quaife, the daughter of the colony’s former hangman turned barber, and the cheerful decision taken to bury the trophy-head of an Indigenous man that has been stowed away in the liquor cabinet to dissuade Lady Hattie from drinking. By contrast, the film ends with Adare setting sail with a broken heart and a gun wound (Flusky had shot him in a jealous rage) in the knowledge that Flusky and Lady Henrietta are firmly together once again.

Less obvious a topic for Hitchcock is the colonial past of Australia, and the cinematic story he tells goes well beyond both the bustles and cravats showcased in the promotional stills published in the Australian Women’s Weekly in February 1950 and the headline abridgment of the film as it appeared in the magazine, Woman, in August 1949: “Bergman’s London-made film has Australian setting.” The plot summary, stepped out into eight acts by the Weekly for ease of explanation and in line with some accusations that the film was nothing more than a stagy melodrama – “1. Freed 2. Broken 3. Visiting 4. Inflamed 5. Struggle 6. Confession 7. Poison 8. Reunited” – skirts around the significance of the Australian setting to which Woman gives a passing nod. But the film expressly announces itself as a story rooted in particular versions of Australian colonial history. In a stylistic manner that would be familiar to viewers of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008), the opening credits roll out over a framed and neatly creased map of Australia: a similar map appears on the publicity posters, along with the useful caution “Not Suitable For Children.” The initial shots establish Australia, or more precisely Sydney, as a sequence of filmic visuals while an authoritative voice-over skips across selected details of British colonisation: these include Captain Cook’s discovery of the continent to the establishment of penal settlements and the appointment of a new governor to New South Wales in 1831. The voiceover culminates in the commanding determination: “And now our story begins.”

It is an abbreviated, linear, matter-of-fact origin story of sorts, one that wilfully masks breaches of violence against Aboriginal people. Yet, these acts nevertheless re-emerge uncannily, not least when a seller of shrunken Indigenous heads approaches a rattled Flusky in the streets of Sydney. It seems that Flusky is intuitively identified as a potential buyer of the head because of his convict past, his Irish heritage and his current wealth; he is singled out in this manner because he represents a fault-line around which anxieties concerning unstable class hierarchies and English–Irish relations in the colonies are played out in the film. That he violently rebuffs the approach speaks volumes to the claims to civility and modernity he is endeavouring to make in the colony as imagined tabula rasa.

In other words, Australia does not simply serve as the film’s inconsequential backdrop as Woman’s banner might suggest; the film, as with the book, necessarily registers formally and thematically an uneasy acknowledgement of Indigenous presence and colonial dispossession. It does this at the same time that it upholds the purported potential to present oneself (or certain selves) afresh in the so-called New World, a caprice perhaps all the more urgent, and appealing, during the postwar period in which Hitchcock was planning for and filming Under Capricorn.

Under Capricorn was the second of two films Hitchcock directed as part of the production company Transatlantic Pictures he established with Sidney Bernstein in the mid 1940s, with Warner Bros. as the studio partner. The time seemed right for such a step: Hitchcock was increasingly annoyed with interference in his films by producer David O. Selznick and a change in the British tax laws in 1947 meant, as David Sterritt has detailed, that Transatlantic Pictures was well-placed to function as a “potential tax-free conduit for money made by US companies in their strongest overseas market.” As it happens, the film was a financial disaster. Transatlantic Pictures was liquidated soon after the film’s release and the film itself was repossessed by Bankers Trust Company, which had financed it, with the result that it was not shown for a number of years.

But Hitchcock was a film-maker and not a futurologist. He originally intended Under Capricorn rather than Rope (1948) to be the first film made within this new arrangement, but Bergman was unavailable at the time and James Bridie, who ended up writing the screenplay for Under Capricorn based on Hume Cronyn’s adaptation of the novel, rejected the initial invitation. Nevertheless, Under Capricorn was kept on the books, and Hitchcock persisted in engaging the select writers (those who had worked on Rope, although the scriptwriter Arthur Laurents declined to participate) and actors, particularly Bergman, “the biggest star of the day,” he wanted for the project.

Hitchcock’s choice of Bergman generated inches of column space in Australian newspapers, which noted with much excitement and anticipation her appearance in a film set in Australia. And as a less-than-impressed Lydia Carra (née Lo Schiavo) would later recall (and as Marilla North has documented), Bergman actually had the choice of working at this time on one of two filmic adaptation of Australian novels. With Dymphna Cusack’s encouragement Carra, Cusack’s friend and Hollywood gossip-columnist, had sold to 20th Century Fox in 1947 the option to the manuscript of Come In Spinner (1951), which Cusack co-wrote with Florence James and which was a bestselling novel set in wartime Sydney. When Carra went to sign the deal, Bergman was in the office and informed her that she had not read Come In Spinner but had read Under Capricorn, with the latter proving to be her preference. As a result, “I had the satisfaction of seeing Under Capricorn bomb,” Carra writes.

Despite Carra’s obvious pleasure, Hitchcock would lament to the French New Wave director François Truffaut that, “With all the enthusiasm we invested in that picture, it was a shame that it didn’t amount to anything.” It was a sentiment many critics shared at the time of the film’s release. True, the Melbourne Age waxed lyrical (and somewhat inaccurately) not about the film’s aesthetics but rather its earning potential, stating in September 1949 that “a British film about Australian life in 1831… is proving to be a dollar earner… and already more than 1,8000,000 dol. accruing from it have been paid into the Bank of England.”

Yet most reviewers at best agreed that the film was B-grade Hitchcock, with those working with the director wondering aloud what had attracted him to the novel in the first instance and what had possessed him to run with the idea of adapting it for the screen. (The option was rumoured to have been dirt cheap.) After all, and as Hitchcock recognised, by 1949 he had carved out for himself the position as a specialist of the thriller and suspense genre, and Under Capricorn did not try to come close to fulfilling the expectations this form carried. So audiences and critics alike were flummoxed at Hitchcock directing a historical romance, one set in colonial Australia at that, and didn’t think much of the effort. The notable exception was the French director Alexandre Astruc. Astruc championed the film in the French monthly cinema magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma, and in 1958 the publication voted Under Capricorn not only Hitchcock’s best film but also one of the ten greatest films to date. Today Under Capricorn suffers from serious critical neglect by comparison to the attention now lavished upon well-known Hitchcock-directed films.

The fate of Simpson’s novel is similar to that of the film, although on its release in 1937 the book was well-received. A reviewer in the London Times declared that Under Capricorn “is a professional novel in the sense that the reader is not required to put up with dullness,” and commended the writing for being “smooth, exact and fluent” and never having “to pause for a picture, a lively sketch of character or a turn of phrase.” A contemporaneous review in Desiderata, an Australian literary journal published during the 1930s, gave higher praise to Under Capricorn and its apparent realist outlook on the basis of its role in the production of an identifiable Australian literature. “Helen Simpson offers this book as a contribution to her country, and a worthy one it is,” wrote Desiderata’s reviewer. “She has recaptured the atmosphere of those early years and woven an admirable story of the incongruous lives of her characters. From the point of view of construction this may be judged her best novel.” There is not a hint here, or in Under Capricorn, of Simpson’s abiding (and transnational) passion for detective fiction and demonology.

Judges of Simpson’s first book on Australia, Boomerang (1932), thought that book her best, awarding it the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, Britain’s oldest and most prestigious literary award, despite, or perhaps because, it features, among other characters, a visiting female author to late nineteenth-century Sydney charged with the crime of “white slaving… hand in glove with low Chinese.” Simpson was herself a visiting writer to Australia on occasion, having moved from Sydney to France, and then England, as a young woman to live with her divorced mother and to study at Oxford. What prompted her return to Australia were not the mythical opium dens on which the racist fantasy of Boomerang rested but rather family ties and invitations issued by the Australian Broadcasting Commission to participate in on-air shows.

By 1937, when Simpson returned to Australia to lecture, to publicise Under Capricorn and to undertake research for a new epic novel she had in mind, she enjoyed a literary reputation, and this accolade was not misplaced. She wrote prolifically and widely, from a biography of Mary Kingsley titled A Woman Among Wild Men (1938) to Mumbudget (1928), a collection of fairy tales; The Happy Housewife (1934) a book on the domestic arts, and The Woman on the Beast (1933), a curious novel, the third part of which features a future Australia. Here gambling on horse races and tourism are the main attractions; Federation is only a memory preserved in an old song that, in turn, is “long since transformed after the way of politics dead, into a children’s game;” and two religious faiths, Orange and Green, preside.

Simpson may well have been what we would now call an expatriate writer. But, if she is quoted correctly in conclusion to the Desiderata article on Under Capricorn – “Faith in a great future; hope in work; a wise charity. These are the gifts of Australia to those who serve her, now as then” – she entertained a specific attachment to an idea of Australia, one which might be said to underpin the novel Under Capricorn itself (or, it might have been that she was astute when speaking to Australian media and knew when to push the right patriotic buttons).

Under Capricorn was not the first time Simpson’s writing had been adapted for the big screen; her novel Saraband for Dead Lovers (1935) was made into a film, a costume drama set in the eighteenth century and the first colour film to come out of Ealing Studios in 1948. With Clemence Dane, Simpson had written the novel Enter Sir John (1928), on which Hitchcock based the film thriller Murder! (1930), and she also earned a writing credit on Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936), based on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). Yet, Simpson died in 1940, before Hitchcock began his film adaptation of her novel and Ealing Studios produced Saraband for Dead Lovers; and she didn’t get to hear the 1948 serialisation of Under Capricorn on ABC radio, which Colin Roderick adapted for the medium.

Thirty-five years later, in 1983, a television mini-series based on the novel, made with the financial backing of the South Australian Film Corporation, was released. Tony Morphett, one of the most well-known writers for Australian television, restored to the series the romance between Charles Adare and Susan Quaife that Hitchcock had excised, and the stage sets of Elstree were swapped for South Australian locations and studios. The effusive publicity surrounding the mini-series and its DVD incarnation describes the small screen version as “scorching” and in the style of Gone with the Wind (1936) (perhaps because both feature large houses and flouncy dresses). But Simpson’s own modest, contradictory description of the original novel – “a highly coloured, improbable and simple story” – might be a better, if not so sexy, appreciation of a narrative centred on early nineteenth-century Sydney that has found itself transformed across twentieth-century media. •

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It was Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that introduced me to the idea of realism in fiction (and left me largely indifferent to fantasy) at a quite early age. Reading the novel as a youngish teenager, having been led to it by a benevolent teacher, I was struck by how, though nothing much seemed to happen, I kept turning the pages of the shabby red Everyman copy, and by how real it all seemed. If it wasn’t exactly like my own home life, it seemed real enough to be someone else’s.

On the whole, film has treated Austen pretty well, having worked its way, on screens large and small, through all six of the major novels. But until now no one has got round to filming any of the minor works. One of these is called Love and Freindship (the title was misspelt in the original) but it’s another minor work, the novella Lady Susan (written when Austen was eighteen), that provides the basis for Stillman’s film.

I hadn’t actually read Lady Susan till about a month ago, and it made me glad that, as she entered maturity, Austen would abandon the epistolary mode of storytelling, which was the established practice of the preceding century. As it traces the machinations of its eponymous heroine, Lady Susan offers some very sharp perceptions, but it is a long way behind the six masterworks.

My enjoyment of Stillman’s films goes back not quite so far, to Metropolitan (1990), a supremely witty, insightful, affectionate and wry satire of Manhattan yuppies being very serious about life, or at least about the very select bits of it that swim by them. I still remember lines from it, such as “Playing strip poker with an exhibitionist somehow takes the challenge out of it,” or how the leader of the pack, Nick, has been banished upstate to “a stepmother of untrammelled malevolence.”

Metropolitan was followed by such other sophisticated pleasures as The Last Days of Disco(1998), which returned Stillman to the wonderfully knowing, stylistically cool and verbally acute exploration of the lives of young people of the early 1980s taking themselves and the disco phenomenon very seriously. Barcelona and Damsels in Distress were only slightly less beguiling, creating their ambiences with evocative precision as well as focusing sharply on individual lives. These lives are mostly young, but the films are made with adults in mind: it’s the film-maker’s perception that matters.

As in all these films, so in Love and Friendship – again, Stillman has written the screenplay, and if the term “auteur” still means anything in film critical circles, he is undoubtedly one of them.

The film of the book

It is possible while reading Lady Susan to lose a grip on the dozen or so main characters as they execute the steps of the dance of relationships that make up the novella’s plot. This may partly reflect the epistolary format, which doesn’t do much to situate them in physically recognisable settings. Stillman’s adaptation seems to be aware of this problem, and from the outset – that is, in the credits – we are introduced to each of the characters, their function in the plot, and the actor who is playing each of them.

Even so, the viewer unfamiliar with Austen’s tale may feel challenged. Not to worry, though: the action will sort them out as and when necessary, and when the scene moves between London and various provincial mansions, a title will be provided for each residence. The most important of these is Churchill, which will be Lady Susan’s chief base for directing operations.

The plot, like those of many of Austen’s novels, is basically concerned with the idea of marriage, with the pursuit of likely contenders, and with consideration of the vital qualifications of a suitable partner. Love and friendship are all very well in their way, but there are more crucial matters, such as class position and a substantial income, that need to be given priority – or certainly as its protagonist sees things.

Lady Susan, a widow (though her life seems scarcely clouded by grief), is after two marriage partners: one for herself and one for her daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark). Frederica has proved a bit of a handful at the school to which her mother has consigned her while she, Susan, goes off to stay with her late husband’s brother and sister-in-law, Charles and Catherine Vernon, at their stately home, Churchill. Once there, her manoeuvrings set the rest of the film moving. Susan, described as a “diabolical genius,” takes a fancy to her sister-in-law’s younger brother, Reginald DeCourcy (Australian actor Xavier Samuel), and this is a cause of concern to his sister and his father (James Fleet), who tries to warn his son against this notorious woman. More complications ensue when, to the dismay of Catherine, Charles brings Frederica to Churchill and Susan does her best to arrange for her daughter to marry the foolish Sir James Martin. And so on.

If all this sounds a bit complicated – and there’s a good deal more, involving the hysterical wife of a man Susan has been flirting with, the Johnson household (he’s played by Stephen Fry and his American wife by Chloё Sevigny) and the DeCourcy parents – don’t let that worry you. The pleasure of the film is in the effortlessly elegant way Stillman goes about rendering all the plots and ploys, especially Susan’s devious attempts to ensure everything goes entirely her way, without, curiously, alienating us from any of the characters – even the moronic Sir James (in a very funny study of crass stupidity from Tom Bennett) and especially not the manipulative Susan. The film plays like a complicated period dance to which only she really knows the steps, and Kate Beckinsale’s dazzling incarnation of the role keeps our attention fixed on her and the often doomed efforts of the other dancers to keep up with her.

Remember, too, that Beckinsale once played another Austen-based manipulator, the title role in the 1996 version of Emma.She is wholly convincing in devising and carrying out Susan’s schemes – and in suggesting a not easily slaked lust. She wears her flamboyant period garments as to the manor/manner born and comports herself with a regality of bearing that does full justice to them.

As her occasional confidante, Chloë Sevigny provides a nicely muted contrast. Watching these two together again, nearly twenty years later and each with an imposing string of credits behind her, one recalls how well they complemented each other in The Last Days of Disco, in which Beckinsale’s character memorably told Sevigny’s: “You’re a good conversationalist, but there’s something of the kindergarten teacher about you.”

Beckinsale and Sevigny have both weathered the intervening years with brilliant composure – a composure that is here revealed as utterly appropriate to the roles of Lady Susan and her American friend Mrs Alicia Johnson, who exhibits her own share of devious behaviour. In fact, it’s a pity Sevigny wasn’t given more to do: as it is, she serves mainly as the recipient of Susan’s confidences about how her plans are proceeding – and of Susan’s brilliantly dismissive remark about Alicia’s middle-aged husband (Fry): “He’s too old to be governable and too young to die.” The film is replete with this kind of verbal stoushing, of course, and one of Stillman’s skills is his capacity to accommodate the idiom of the film’s era with the cadences of today without a failure of authenticity or tonal coherence.

Stillman’s perception of these convoluted lives allows him to discriminate without any loss of urbane good humour. But, however conniving and self-absorbed Susan may be – and her carefully calculated charm of manner doesn’t fool us as it does some of the other characters – Beckinsale contrives to make her the object not only of our most intense interest, but also of something almost like sympathy. In the world she moves in, she alone is the one who has her wits about her, self-knowingly playing the social games that constitute this milieu and determined not to let its tiresomely restrictive rules dominate her life.

The side plots in which she, of course, has a finger – or, rather, a hand – include Frederica’s falling for Catherine’s brother Reginald rather than the idiotic Sir James, and the distraught wife of her own (possibly) former lover, Lord Manwaring, becoming aware of her husband’s infidelity and raging on to the scene.

This is all part of the ambience of tangled relations in which Stillman is such a skilled practitioner, but it’s mildly surprising to see how firmly based in Austen’s novella are the sexual hijinks attributed to Lady Susan. She’s had a fling with Lord Manwaring (was this before or after her entry to stylish widowhood?) and makes an unmistakable play for young DeCourcy: Stillman of course takes these on board, but they were there to be so taken.

The current cinema needs Stillman as an antidote to all those franchises with a colon in their titles, and I hope he won’t wait another five years for his next film. The fact that this latest is an Irish/Dutch/French/British/US co-production perhaps suggests it wasn’t an easy project to get off the ground. We should be grateful that he managed it.

The book of the film of the book

Cinema has been voracious in its adaptation of literary works, especially novels, into films, as some of the best and most famous movies testify. The opposite process has a much shorter and not very distinguished history. Now, since filming Love and Friendship,Stillman has written a book of the same name, which is really the book of the film of the book. Offhand, I can’t recall any other film-maker who has ventured into this territory of double-barrelled adaptation. And not many film-makers would dare to take on Jane Austen, let alone have the capacity in some ways to improve on her.

I’m aware that this remark will have all those Janeites baying for my blood, but let me explain. Stillman’s book version of his film version of Austen’s Lady Susan releases her novella from the wearying constraints of the epistolary mode. Instead of leaving us to plough through over a hundred pages of (forty-one) letters, trying to keep track of who was writing to whom and about whom, Stillman has adapted his film into a series of meetings and conversations in which the people involved take on an immediacy not often the case in the novella. Arguably, one of Austen’s great achievements was to release the English novel from this highly artificial mode of storytelling – and I write as an ardent fan of the woman who set the novel on its wonderful career in the nineteenth century.

The other distinctive aspect of Stillman’s novel, and one that renders it almost an adaptation of his film, is anticipated in his subtitle: “In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Verdon Is Entirely Vindicated.” This “vindication” is effected by Stillman’s giving the authorial voice to one R. Martin-Colonna de Cesari-Rocca, who, on the opening page, solicits the attention of the Prince of Wales on the matter of his “late loyal subjects libeled [sic] and defamed by the same Spinster Authoress,” the term he uses throughout to refer to Austen.

Stillman’s controlling wit ensures that we never really confuse this “voice” with his own sentiments about Austen, and it is almost clumsy of me to say this, but it does also lead us to consider how Stillman really did view his “diabolical” protagonist. Perhaps he actually values the creative energy she expends on ordering circumstances and events to her own ends and satisfaction. Does anyone else in Austen, or in Whitman’s film or book, approach Susan for perception and determination? No.

It’s the pseudo-authorial voice that accounts for a lot of the pleasure of Stillman’s novel. Martin-Colonna is the nephew of the “rattle” Sir James Martin, whom Susan, rather than see him and his fortune go to waste, has married when Frederica turns him down because she thinks he’s “silly.” Martin-Colonna describes James as “my mother’s beloved elder brother… a man who… brought only joy and good feeling into the world” and condemns “the negative, nasty pleasure others found in mocking and ridiculing a man who would not conform to their icy mores.” And because Lady Susan is now his wife, she is given a good bill of moral health, unlike all those captious critics who’ve been set up by the “spinster authoress” to assume always the moral high ground. In doing so, Martin-Colonna shows himself a true heir to his uncle’s good nature – and his idiocy.

An authorship comprising Jane Austen, Whit Stillman and Sir James’s nephew could hardly fail – and it doesn’t. It’s a good idea to take them in that order, then possibly go back for another look at the film. •

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The characters in George R.R. Martin’s saga soon learn that trying to guess what has happened or is going to happen is a fool’s game, and here at Castle Black, under the great wall that shuts off the wilder reaches of the North, the play of natural and supernatural powers is at its most unpredictable. Humans, diminished by the scale of their own fortifications, move warily and exchange few words, focused only on the task at hand. A lesser dramatic imagination would have them react to the identity of the body, call for lights, indulge in emotional outbursts. There are certainly plenty of emotional outbursts in Game of Thrones, but they too are unpredictable: reactions suppressed in a moment of crisis may surface many episodes later, stored up in narrative lines that keep the tensions throbbing across a vast canvas of events.

In the show’s sixth season, it seems at times that the vastness has got out of hand. Just how many armies can you track across how many different kinds of terrain? We have an armada, the dragon-led shock troops of liberating Queen Daenerys, an army of supernatural “white walkers,” a state-of-the-art militia backed by ranks of archers under the command of evil Ramsay Bolton at the fortress of Winterfell, and Jon Snow with his ragtag assemblage of fighting men and women assisted by a giant.

As for the tally of paybacks and thwarted rightful claims, most of us long ago lost count. What matters is the immediacy of each encounter as it unfolds, and the conviction with which it is staged. Formal dialogues in courts and palaces are balanced against scenes of travellers crossing tracts of empty terrain on journeys between one seat of power and another. Digitised scenes of massed crowds or panoramic shots, with fantastic towers surmounting the cliffs, are offset by fine naturalistic detail in more closely shot sequences.

Game of Thrones is a hybrid of television and cinema, maximising the visual range of television with a commitment to massive scenic effects and complex locations. Filming for this latest season took place in Northern Ireland, Spain, Croatia, Iceland and Canada. No expense has been spared (the budget is over $10 million per episode), with two and sometimes three filming units working concurrently to allow more time for each strand of the story. The costumes (April Ferry), detailed with elaborate symbolic designs and accessories, are a work of art in themselves.

As I re-watch particular episodes, I’m also struck by the subtle artistry of sound that draws the viewer into a scene. As a lone figure looks out across the bay, a distant bell sounds. Travellers moving through the forest are all ears for the sound of horses’ hooves or the jingle of a bridle that may signal the approach of assailants. When the attack occurs, the sound mix becomes a chaos of drawn steel, whinnying horses, grunts, roars and the spray of blood landing on snow. You always hear the blood.

Over the course of six seasons, viewing figures worldwide for GoT have grown from just over two million to nearly nine million. It’s the combination of theatrical and cinematic qualities, I’d suggest, that has held the audience. Most of the leading cast members have extensive stage acting experience. They have the kind of presence that makes them convincing as power players in a medieval world, and they bring the necessary gravitas for the more formal scenes. They understand how formality may be used as a weapon, how there is no remark without subtext, as the relationship between meaning and statement is twisted to give every dialogue a running edge of tension.

And they can deliver a speech with aplomb. I’m a late convert to the series, having avoided the first two seasons on the assumption that there was just way too much violence, and nasty violence at that. Which, of course, there is, but there are other things, as I discovered when I walked in on an episode in the middle of season three, and ended up sitting down to watch the rest of it with other members of the family.

In this episode, two Machiavellian characters – Littlefinger, alias Lord Petyr Baelish (Aidan Gillen) and Lord Varys (Conleth Hill) – are talking in the empty throne room, contemplating the legendary throne of a thousand blades. “There aren’t a thousand blades,” says Littlefinger. “There aren’t even two hundred. I’ve counted… Do you know what the realm is? It’s the thousand blades of Aegon’s enemies, a story we agree to tell each other over and over, until we forget that it’s a lie.”

Now that’s good scripting (the episode was written by showrunners and overall masterminds of the series, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss). The Machiavel is not an easy character to write. Nuance is required: a sophistication of tone and perspective that can’t be faked. And Littlefinger has more to say here, in a speech about chaos that is one of the thematic keynotes for GoT.

In theatrical terms, good scripting involves a sense of dramatic structure and level. That’s what enables a writer to take risks and bring off a scene that might descend into absurdity under less skilled management. Take, for example, the scene in which Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) decides to front up to the dragons in their dungeon and try to talk them round, so he can get close enough to unclasp their halters. Tyrion, as the despised dwarf in the ruling family, has learned to talk his way into or out of anything, which means the writers are on notice to give him convincing material, but they are careful not to overplay their hand here.

It’s a very quiet scene, beginning with Tyrion descending the staircase carrying a torch. We watch him go all the way down, hearing only the sounds of his footsteps, and the torch flaring. So much of the art of theatre is the art of restraint, and so much television drama is ruined by being over-pitched, going for too many reaction shots, with the camera closing in on the actors’ faces in search of emotional intensity.

Season six climaxes with the “Battle of the Bastards,” directed by Miguel Sapochnik. It is the ultimate score-settling encounter, a spectacular tour de force of large-scale effects and choreographic originality lasting some thirty minutes. One chaotic mélange of men and horses succeeds another, each onslaught more brutal than the last, until, in a stunningturning point, the hero Jon Snow arises from the midst of a churning mass of living bodies, his mud- and blood-spattered face expressionless, the staring eyes of a berserker still trained on the enemy. It’s a genuinely stirring and thrilling moment.

High points like this are earned by the overall orchestration of the battle, which is based on Hannibal’s strategic manoeuvres against the Romans at the Battle of Cannae. Occasional panorama shots show the scale of the encounter and the disposition of forces, but much of the camera work happens inside the fray, so the visual field spins, swerves, closes in and sometimes blacks out as if from the point of view of a fighter going down.

The chaos of a pitched battle is unimaginable. Over 40,000 Romans and some 3000 horses were slaughtered at the Battle of Cannae. Hour by hour, those still up and swinging had to make their way through piles of corpses. Even most hardcore horror fans would not be up for thirty minutes of that on television. What makes it work dramatically is the structural artistry surrounding the maelstrom and, in particular, the sustained quietness of its opening sequence, in which Ramsay Bolton rides slowly to the front of the ranks and out into the open ground between the two armies.

Bolton has a prisoner tethered to him by a rope. A boy. From the other side of the field, a kilometre or so away, Jon Snow recognises this figure as his young brother. Bolton, played with impish charm by Iwan Rheon, dismounts, cuts the rope, and whispers to the boy. “Do you like games little man? Let’s play a game. Run to your brother. The sooner you make it to him, the sooner you get to see him again. That’s it, that’s the game. Easy. Ready?” As the boy starts to run, arrows are fired at him intermittently, most just missing him, until the fatal moment as he is about to be swept up onto his brother’s horse. One figure, one destiny, takes up five minutes of screen time before the massed forces engage.

Going back to the great classical works of theatre, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles or the epics of Homer, the art of it was all about binding chaos and structure into a narrative that offered no easy resolutions. There are some truly classic and epic qualities to Game of Thrones. Homer Simpson may outrank Homer the epic poet on Google searches, but there are times when the empire strikes back and the classics speak through popular culture with a new dynamism. •

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Wood’s book had a lot going for it in the opera stakes. In an enclosed setting, a small cast of well-drawn characters communicate with each other in simple words (it’s a myth that operas demand florid language); there’s a bushland setting and some exhilarating changes of narrative pace, both of which cry out for musical elaboration; above all, there is tension, foreboding, drama and a clear plot with well-delineated strands of good and evil, laced with enough ambiguity and nuance to provide moments of hope among the horror. As you can probably tell, I was quite taken with the novel. But it won’t make an opera, not by me, and the problem is to do with the nature of music.

“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful,” Benjamin Britten wrote to a friend in a letter in 1937. “It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.” Britten had been listening to Das Lied von der Erde, and marvelling at Mahler’s use of harmony and orchestration, especially the final minutes of the “Abschied.” “The same harmonic progression that Wagner used to colour his essentially morbid love scenes… are used here to paint a serenity literally supernatural,” he enthused.

Britten didn’t spell it out, and perhaps he didn’t intend it, but I have always thought that behind his words lay another, more regretful meaning: that music’s beauty was not just its great glory, but also its drawback.

There are some things that music is no good at, and inhumanity is one of them. Writing can manage it, so can painting and theatre and film, and this is because you can write and paint and act about inhumanity. “It’s only acting,” we tell small children on the verge of trauma from something on the telly that’s been a bit too exciting.

The Natural Way of Things makes uncomfortable reading because of the events it describes, but the writing itself is admirably vivid and often beautiful. The author is our intermediary, and a painter or film-maker would be the same, though it would be a particularly unflinching director who pulled off a film adaptation of Wood’s book. But a composer is not an intermediary, and music doesn’t tell or show, it embodies. Music is the thing itself.

I suppose a composer could aim to create music that was searingly ugly (Karlheinz Stockhausen once speculated that it might be possible to create music that would kill people), but the notion of music that sounds revolting is self-defeating, for no one would willingly listen to it. The mental and physical cruelty described in The Natural Way of Things would only be ameliorated by the addition of music.

Film-makers have always known this. We can watch the violence in A Clockwork Orange – feel detached from it, indeed – because at the same time as someone is being savagely beaten before our eyes we’re hearing Rossini’s overture to The Thieving Magpie. And when a director wants us to feel the full effect of violence, there will be no music at all. Hitchcock dropped Bernard Herrmann’s cue (along with the rest of his score) from the scene in Torn Curtain where the Stasi agent Gromek is murdered, because, he said, he hoped to demonstrate how difficult it would be to kill someone. Music would have made it look easy.

This issue came into especially sharp focus for me one morning in 2008 as I listened to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra rehearse the first performance of Kalkadungu, the orchestral piece that William Barton composed with Matthew Hindson. The piece employed a large and typically colourful Hindson orchestra, and featured Barton as singer, didgeridoo player and electric guitarist. It set out to tell some of the history of Barton’s people, the Kalkadunga from the area around what is now Mount Isa. A warrior tribe, the Kalkadunga resisted white settlement of their region for fifteen years. But when a pastoralist and five troopers were killed, the revenge was terrible. In 1884, Queensland police massacred around 200 tribe members. The event is central to Barton and Hindson’s Kalkadungu.

But how do you compose a massacre? What music could you imagine that would adequately convey the horror? Barton and Hindson’s music was intense, driven, loud and exciting. It was also, as I confessed to the composers after the rehearsal, my favourite part of their piece. Did that mean they had failed? Clearly not. The music was very powerful, the audience cheered and four years later the orchestra repeated the piece as part of its eightieth-birthday celebrations.

Still, as I sat in that concert hall, feeling guilty about enjoying this massacre so much, for thrilling to its pounding syncopation when perhaps I should have been recoiling in horror, I recalled Britten’s regret about the beauty of music.

Another quote I’m fond of is Walter Pater’s line about “all art” aspiring “to the condition of music,” the writer, painter and film-maker envying composers our necessary abstraction. I’ve talked to enough artists in other fields to know that it’s true. But it’s also true that, sometimes, we composers feel the limitations of our own art form. •

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Garner is not the first Australian to win a Windham Campbell award; the playwright Noelle Janaczewska was awarded a prize in 2014, its second year. Janaczewska may be little known outside Australian theatre circles, but she works across a range of genres, including what she calls “performance essays.” The award announcement mentions her play This Territory, written in response to the Cronulla riot of 2005, alongside a wide range of theatre works and collaborations. The acknowledgement of Garner mentions not only This House of Grief but also her remarkable ability to shift between fiction and nonfiction.

The prize’s interest in different genres reflects the fact that Donald Windham was a writer of short stories and essays, and his life partner, Sandy Campbell, was an actor and theatre reviewer. The awards are funded from their carefully managed legacy, and they seem directed by the interests of writers rather than the concerns of publishers or the desire for publicity.

Here in Australia we have more modest literary awards, some of them also funded from the legacies of writers and their families. Of these, the Miles Franklin, the Patrick White and the Barbara Jefferis awards are the best known. The Kibble and Dobbie awards for women writers are the legacy of a librarian, Nita Dobbie, who wished to honour her librarian aunt, Nita Kibble. As well as these named awards, literary societies, journals, publishing groups, libraries and communities offer a range of other rewards to writers each year.

With less reliability, we also have publicly funded awards, such as the Prime Minister’s and the Premiers’ prizes. Curiously, though they are funded from the public purse, these awards attract less public criticism than a private award such as the Miles Franklin. In fact, the Miles Franklin appears to be pre-eminent in terms of reputation and controversy. The Sydney Morning Herald’s recent obituary for Leonie Kramer gave more space to her role in the awarding of the Miles Franklin to Helen Darville (Demidenko) than to her years of teaching and supervising university students, let alone her decades of uncontroversial chairing of the award. Though the judges now get a small honorarium, in Kramer’s day they were lucky to get a free drink as recompense for the long hours spent poring over the entries.

As Ivor Indyk has commented, the Stella Prize “shadows” the Miles Franklin award. It was established as a response to the perceived failure of the Miles Franklin to acknowledge the writing of women. It looks for winners who are “excellent, original and engaging” and also runs a supporting program of book talks and events to promote the work of women writers. Three of its four winners have been novels, the fourth a history book.

Though it is too soon to know whether a “Stella” genre will emerge, this year’s winner, Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, certainly raises questions about misogynist culture in Australia, suggesting the prize may take a position close to the Jefferis award’s search for an excellent work of fiction that depicts women and girls in a positive way “or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society.” The Jefferis winner can be written by a man, though none has won the prize (just as no non-Australians have won the Miles Franklin, though they are not precluded). Whether or not the Stella has influenced the Miles Franklin judges, the Franklin has gone to a woman each year since the Stella’s inception.

This plethora of prizes may be overwhelming to readers, but for writers in Australia, an English-speaking country with access to the literary publishing of the rest of the world, they offer a little financial support and, sometimes, help in building a reputation and boosting sales. It remains difficult for a literary writer to make any kind of living from publishing in Australia. With an estimated mean annual income for writers of about $12,500 from creative work, a serious literary author may well be grateful for any award that brings annual income closer to the $50,000 of the average Australian worker.

The catch is in the process of staggered longlist and shortlist announcements that goes with most Australian literary awards. Writing begins to look like a competitive sport, with losers eliminated in each round. (In practice, judges often find the winner at a first or second meeting, so shortlists are sometimes announced after the final decision has been made.) The desire for a big announcement ceremony means that organisers may keep the winner secret so that the shortlisted “losers” won’t be discouraged from attending. If you’ve been present when a prize has been announced and noticed unchosen writers carefully composing their faces or slipping speech notes back into a pocket, you will understand their reluctance to attend. The decision by some awards to give consolation cheques to shortlisted authors at least recognises this difficulty.

Some award managers seem to want books, like paintings or singing recitals, to be a communal public experience subject to a voicing of popular opinion. I recently took the opportunity to vote in the People’s Choice category of the NSW Premier’s prize for a novel; I had read only three of the six shortlisted novels, but that’s probably two more than many other voters. Promoting readers’ participation in this way seems harmless but it shouldn’t be mistaken for promoting the interests of writers. It would be fairer to them to release a long and inclusive list of all the good books that have a chance of the award, then simply announce the lucky winner.

For the winner will, indeed, be as much lucky as deserving. Judging panels are not absolute in their taste, and often harbour deep disagreements about the final choice. One forceful personality on a judging panel can drive everyone else into submission. In my various experiences as a judge, complete agreement usually came only on two-person panels. Once three or more judges are involved, the winner is likely to be a compromise candidate, and a safe one. Award managers sometimes seem ignorant or careless about the reputations of the judges they choose: the divided Prime Minister’s award for fiction in 2014 revealed a dispute between members of the judging panel, though some innocents seemed to believe that the prime minister had intervened to reward his personal favourite. As it happened, the Man Booker Prize judges later agreed that Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North was a winner.

Perhaps commentators take it quietly when odd things happen with politicians’ awards because they know that these awards are regularly endangered by political change. The Queensland Premier’s awards, for instance, disappeared when Campbell Newman came to power. A range of wonderful artists benefited from Paul Keating’s Creative Fellowships in the early 1990s, but the fate of the scheme was sealed as soon as the prime minister’s name became attached to them. Arm’s-length arts funding through the Australia Council was set up for good reason.

Judges will always have subjective taste, whether because of their academic training, their own reading experience or their place in the market; and in Australia’s small literary world, outright prejudices occasionally attach to particular writers. Despite any declared political commitments, though, judges are likely to be individualists rather than ideologues, and Australian literary judges have never been shy about publicly resigning on principle or declaring their abstention from a judgement. (Carmen Callil took this to an international level when she resigned from the judging panel that awarded the Man Booker International prize to Philip Roth in 2011.)

This is one of the ways that such awards stay in the news and gain extra publicity for writing. But it also detracts from the purpose of supporting writers to do their work. In my view, the funds for the various politicians’ awards would be better added to the severely depleted coffers of the Australia Council or to the state arts funds as part of their regular grants to writers.

In his survey of the Miles Franklin award in Australian Book Review a few years ago, Patrick Allington called for the publication of complete lists of all entrants, and more openness about the decision-making process. To me, the tactful approach of the Windham Campbell prize is more appealing because I can’t see that the public has any right to know how a private award is decided. It is all very well to barrack for the different possible winners, but we can hardly call for “freedom of information” rights.

Why shouldn’t the prize go to an excellent novel about “Australian life in any of its phases,” for instance, if that is the kind of writing its benefactor wanted to promote? If there has been a Miles Franklin genre, it has been the kind of monumental historical novel that Franklin herself wrote in her middle years: winners from Patrick White’s Voss to Thomas Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes, to Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, to Roger McDonald’s The Ballad of Desmond Kale and Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance conform to this genre.

It does seem that this kind of novel is usually written by men. A glance down the list of past winners shows that the prize on occasions has gone to more eccentric writing by Thea Astley, David Ireland, David Foster and Elizabeth Jolley, and to domestic novels like Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra By the River and The Impersonators. But women have been less frequent winners, and first-novel winners are rare. (The controversial Darville was both a woman and a first-time novelist.) The striking thing is that so many Miles Franklin winners have been excellent novels. And this is the real test of a literary prize. The judges and their processes don’t really count. It is whether the novels stand up when read and reread over time.

By this standard, the Miles Franklin has picked more winners than losers over the years – which is not to say it hasn’t picked some weak novels from time to time. Occasionally there are years when there are several excellent novels in contention, and others when there are hardly any. Domestic novels have been rare winners, and comic novels rarer still. In fact, the absence of satire and humour has been a weakness across all Australia’s literary prizes. Andrew McGahan’s serious consideration of Australian history, The White Earth, won the Miles Franklin in 2006, but I doubt that his wonderfully funny 1988, published ten years earlier, was even entered. Fortunately, a farmer called Peter Wentworth Russell noticed this gap, and has left a legacy to fund a prize for an Australian work of humour, so far to be awarded every second year. (Bernard Cohen’s novel The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies won the inaugural prize last year.)

So, if you feel inclined to leave your estate to support literary writing in Australia, learn the lessons of these various awards. The admirable Patrick White award takes no submissions, with its judges quietly reviewing the body of work of living Australian writers before announcing the winner. There is no need to insult any other writers by shortlisting and elimination, as their chance may well come the next year. There is no need even for a recent book to promote, as the prize is based on a body of work.

If you want to promote a certain kind of writing by setting guidelines beyond excellence, then you will create difficulties. Changing attitudes change definitions: sixty years after Miles Franklin’s death, “Australian life in any of its phases” is not such a clearcut ideal; and one can debate at length what constitutes a positive image of women, or a contribution to their improved status. Even humorous writing is a subjective category. The biographical/biological qualification for writers may not present immediate difficulties – young writers, women writers, new writers, Indigenous writers – but the possibility for imposture lies forever in wait (remember Paul Radley and Wanda Koolmatrie?). Surely the only way to avoid difficulties is to concentrate firmly on the writing, not the writer.

The Windham Campbell prize offers another idea worth considering. For all the public celebrations of writing at literary festivals, there is a paucity of deep critical engagement with contemporary Australian writing. Our literary life would benefit immensely from some sustained critical discussion of the work of winning authors. This might not be possible for individual prizes where first books often win – but surely some enterprising literature department at an Australian university could organise a seminar for the serious study of the work of the winner of the Patrick White award each year, perhaps addressing the backlog of winners by considering three or four at a time. •

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By sheer coincidence, several texts relating to the lead-up to the first world war have come my way recently. There was Vera Brittain’s coruscatingly brilliant memoir, Testament of Youth (a reading prompted by James Kent’s filmed version); then Sarah Gavron’s film, Suffragette, which plunged us into the political turmoil of 1912; and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt, which chronicles Roger Casement’s downfall during the war. Perhaps we are still wondering what this conflict was really about, give or take the odd archducal assassination, and retain a sense of its pulling apart lives that had nothing to do with its primal causes, whatever these were.

Simonson’s setting is the small, peaceful Sussex town of Rye, in the eponymous summer, when glorious weather seemed almost to mock the possibility of the terrors of war. On the surface Rye looks idyllic, but on closer inspection it proves to have its share of the tensions that are apt to underlie a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business and doesn’t hesitate to pronounce on it. Simonson’s triumph is to have avoided the cliché potential of this setting, to have given the book substance as well as surface.

The range of characters embraces a broad social and cultural spectrum. There’s Aunt Agatha (the name alone seems to evoke the period), wife of senior Foreign Office official John, who is therefore in a better position than most to know what’s likely to happen in the wider world. She is a woman of real firmness of character and discrimination, and she sets a major strand of the novel’s plot in motion when she successfully campaigns for appointing a woman as the new Latin teacher at the local grammar school. Her chief opposition comes from Mrs Bettina Fothergill, the mayor’s silly, snooty, pretentious wife, and the mayoral couple make their pompous presences felt on all public occasions. There is a titled family, Lord and Lady Maberly, whose daughter has married a German, which will make for its own tensions; there are gypsies on the outskirts of the town; and soon there will be an influx of refugees from brave little Belgium.

None of these characters emerge as mere stereotypes belonging to a cosy image of pretty provincial England. Indeed, they are fleshed out in the sort of detail that enables us to know them and understand their place in relation to this community and a wider world that, whether they like it or not, is about to make itself felt. It is Agatha’s relations with her two nephews – Hugh Grange and Daniel Bookham – and with the assimilation of the new Latin teacher, Beatrice Nash, into the Rye community that occupy the book’s main threads of personal interest. There is nothing schematic about how Simonson’s cast gives rise to issues that go beyond the personal: these simply (or, rather, complexly) arise from the ways in which they react to each other and to elements of a prewar world whose idyllic quality is about to undergo upheaval.

Matters of class, gender and sexuality, as well as international relations are woven into the rich fabric of the novel’s narrative. Hugh, a doctor, seems to be headed for engagement to the daughter of his titled superior, but finds a more serious interest, and not merely a sexual one, in Beatrice. She, on the other hand, has set herself against the idea of marriage and, without being vociferous about it, is determined to make her own way as a woman independent of male support. Her much-loved father has died and she has been left obliged to work for her living, not a common situation for a middle-class young woman in 1914. Hugh’s cousin Daniel has a passionate but uncommitted and unrequited devotion to Craigmore, son of Lord North, who despises Daniel and no doubt urges his son into an engagement that devastates Daniel. Simonson deals with these issues with an intelligent discretion that evokes the period’s attitudes to feminism and homosexuality: we are made aware of their presence in ways that belong to 1914 rather than 2016 but without denying readers the perspective of a century later.

Rye, then, is a community that has its own inbuilt tensions beneath the luminous summer surface, and the imminent war will inevitably change the peaceful patina. So how does it deal with the shattering events that August 1914 sets in motion? Simonson, while keeping her focus essentially on how the town responds to the dangerous international situation, also manages to keep us aware of that situation’s wider implications. Uncle John at the Foreign Office is an obvious link to the development of European clashes and, to Aunt Agatha’s agonised fears, both nephews will join the armed forces. In Rye, there is almost an element of competition to see who can assume most prominence in, for instance, the managing of the refugees. The most clearly differentiated of the latter are a Belgian professor and his daughter.

The daughter, Céleste, pregnant to a German rapist, comes under the guidance of Beatrice, and becomes a major matter of concern; the professor is taken in by Rye’s resident novelist, Mr Tillingham. He, of course, is based on Henry James, long-time famous dweller in the coastal resort. Whereas Beatrice has wanted to publish a small book of her late father’s letters, the publishers have asked another writer to undertake the editorial project instead. In awe as she is of Tillingham, her admiration for him will be tempered when she learns that he is indeed “another writer.” She is led to ponder “how many other young writers and artists Mr Tillingham had seduced so easily with his fame and reputation.”

Elsewhere, with war clouds threatening, Lord North, never doubting that his aristocratic status ensures the importance of his views, claims to know the author’s name but then inveighs against writers at large: “Always writing instead of doing. And then they have the most extraordinary opinions.” Alongside his easy assumption of the superiority of his class is Mrs Fothergill’s dismissal of the annual rural festival of the last days of the hops-picking: “All kinds of rough types allowed. I never attend” – and, qualifying this somewhat, Uncle John’s reaction to the “pagan festival”: “[It] will do Lord North good to be reminded that this is England the ancient and that we fight for her as much as for the prim town and the glittering city.” And the war itself won’t necessarily do away with the class barriers. Hugh, the medico, will of course be an officer, and Snout, Beatrice’s gifted Latin pupil but from a background that mingles the lower orders with gypsies, will be lucky to be a batman.

Simonson contrives to offer a panoramic view of a society on the brink of – and into – war, while at the same time providing compelling close-ups of individual lives as they respond to its challenges. It would be over the top to call it a contemporary Middlemarch, but with its wit, its comprehensive sympathies and its awareness of the structures and prejudices of late Edwardian England, it makes for utterly absorbing reading. And being “a good read” is a real bonus, especially in so fat a volume that has more going for it than it is easy to do justice to in a review. •

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Given the unprecedented success of Andrew Davies’s 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, any enterprising television producer might be forgiven for speculating along these lines. And when you realise that there is just such a novel, well overdue for a new television adaptation, the road ahead must seem like a highway to even greater accolades. War and Peace has a heroine of irrepressible vitality who melts the heart of a poker-faced aristocrat. It has a ballroom scene in which they dance together, setting the paths of destiny swirling in new and unforeseen directions. But this time war intervenes, and the fate lines darken. All you need is Andrew Davies to write the script.

Before the first episode of War and Peace went to air in Britain in January, the promotions team were already working to create a secondary legend, the story of how it came to be. Once Davies was signed up, the sluice gates of major finance opened: Harvey Weinstein came on board, making international distribution assured. The casting directors assembled a dream team headed by James Norton as Prince Andrei, Lily James (from Downton Abbey, another headline success for the BBC) as Natasha, and up-and-coming American star Paul Dano as Pierre. Other stellar cast members include Gillian Anderson, Stephen Rea, Greta Scacchi and Jim Broadbent.

Previews were aired before a high-profile panel discussion held in Paris in September last year, featuring Davies, Weinstein and executive producer Faith Penhale. Events like these generate an aura of self-congratulation which, with enough chutzpah behind it, can carry right through into the reviews. When the series premiered in Britain in January this year, the critical reception was, by and large, what the producers were expecting, though the ratings on the BBC somewhat embarrassingly failed to pass those of the Antiques Roadshow. Viewers in Australia were able to watch the series on BBC First, but it is now more widely available, on Netflix, iTunes and DVD. Watching it in the aftermath of the hype, we may be in a better position to judge it on its merits.

Opportunistic as it may be, the move from Jane Austen’s novel to Tolstoy’s has a certain historical rationale. Pride and Prejudice was published early in 1813, after the momentous year in which Russian troops clashed with Napoleon’s army at the battle of Borodino, leaving massive casualties on both sides. The Russians failed to prevent the French advance on Moscow and a period of military occupation followed. Russia’s richest families, who had thought their privileged world unassailable, fled their ornately furnished mansions with nothing but what could be carried on a cart.

Much the same illusions prevailed in England at the time. In a talk she gave in 1940, Virginia Woolf highlighted the contrasts between her own situation as a writer in wartime and the circumstances faced by Jane Austen. In spite of Britain’s involvement in the escalating conflict just across the channel, Austen’s world remained neither disturbed nor changed. Suppose the dice had fallen otherwise, and the Bennet family had been forced out of house and home, along with the Bingleys and the Darcys… there would have been a story.

War and Peace, of course, is not that story. It is another story altogether, though this is an inconvenient truth the BBC is not entirely prepared to acknowledge. This is a very English rendition of Tolstoy’s novel, and the efforts to evoke the cultural ethos of imperial Russia serve, if anything, to make that more starkly evident. Composer Martin Phipps worked with the Latvian State Choir to introduce choral elements into the church ceremonies, but the deep bass harmonics seem to belong to a different kind of physicality from that of the actors who form the congregation. In a scene from episode four, Natasha visits a peasant family and begins to dance as they sing a traditional folk tune. Her companions look on in wonder. How does she know this kind of dancing, one asks. “It’s in her blood,” says the other. Quite patently, it is not. Lily James looks like a well-schooled ballet student from Surrey. There is not a shred of raw impulse about her.

The endless close-ups of Natasha’s face turned just slightly over one shoulder are more than enough to persuade anyone she should be on the cover of Vogue. Yes, she is exquisitely cute, but do we need to be made aware of that with such insistence? The improbably handsome James Norton has to work hard not to make Prince Andrei look like the head prefect at an English public school. Although he manages to achieve some gravitas in the battlefield scenes, the designer smudges on his face as he emerges from the fray would not look amiss on the catwalk. A touch of distressed ruggedness is all the rage among the leading fashion houses, and it is through this lens that contemporary viewers will inevitably see him. Paul Dano as Pierre is an oddly counterintuitive piece of casting. Tolstoy’s Pierre is big and ungainly, shortsighted, socially obtuse; Dano is fine-featured, wide-eyed and incessantly photogenic. The physical idealisation of the central trio turns the love triangle into a kind of narcissistic minuet.

Physiognomy and personality are fused in Tolstoy’s characters. Who they are is radically bound up with their material presence in the world. Perhaps the casting directors (Susie Figgis and Julie Harkin) felt it was bold and innovative to go against physical type, and in some instances it does work. Tom Burke, dark-haired and rough-hewn, is very effective as Dolokhov, the gambler, seducer and fighter who spells trouble for anyone who crosses his path. In the novel, he is described as a shapely figure, fair and with clear blue eyes. Tolstoy’s Prince Vassily is bald and his scalp shines – which, for a sycophant who bows all the time, is an unfortunate handicap. On the screen, with his long, curly hair, Stephen Rea is not so evidently marked out as a loser, but he captures the air of the diplomat manqué, reduced to negotiating the social destinies of his family.

The character most critical to any effective dramatisation of War and Peace is Pierre, and here the physical mismatch is a real issue, something that cannot be countered by dressing him in oversized coats and multiple waistcoats. Paul Dano has something ethereal about him. Lightness of presence is his special gift. He was in his element in Love and Mercy as the young Brian Wilson, picking out the notes of “God Only Knows.” And yet it’s Dano who really manages to tap into the core business of Tolstoy’s novel. There is, ultimately, a lightness about Pierre, too. He may blunder around at an elegant soiree or as an unarmed “helper” at the edges of the battlefield, but he is the one who is transparent to the changing realities of a world in turmoil. A chameleon of events, he is marched as a prisoner of war across the snowbound landscape, returns to his mansion in the looted city, then settles as a farmer on his country estate.

The other actor who may be credited with making this series into something more than Pride and Prejudice with war scenes is Brian Cox as General Kutuzov, a scarred old bear of a man who looks too damaged to be of use in a bar-room brawl, but whose military instincts are second to none. Kutuzov led the Russian army through a succession of defensive campaigns against Napoleon, culminating in the Battle of Borodino, and subsequently engineered an effective counterattack by allowing the Frenchman to take Moscow, knowing the invading troops would be starved out in the Russian winter. Cox captures the canniness and the sheer physical solidity of this man, in it for the long haul.

Tolstoy devotes some twenty chapters of War and Peace to Borodino, digressing into an essay on how the chaos of events ultimately makes nonsense of human strategy. When it came to the chaos of war, Tolstoy knew what he was on about. In his early twenties, he had fought in campaigns in the Caucasus and seen the aftermath of atrocities committed by his own side in the Chechen villages. Perhaps there are few people now who want to be bothered with a nineteenth-century thesis on war, but director Tom Harper does some justice to Tolstoy’s grasp of its ironies. A long shot establishes the layout of the battlefield on the eve of engagement, troops on horseback arraigned with the formal design of a grand tableau. Then there is the havoc, in close-up, with dismembered bodies strewn in all directions, and the voices of those still half alive wailing through the smoke.

Alongside my copy of War and Peace in the bookshelf is the slim volume of Hadji Murad, Tolstoy’s novella about the Chechen warrior of that name. It’s a stunning piece of work, written in one fully realised scene after another, as if foreshadowing the medium of television. Maybe if enterprising producers could step away from the lures of the most obvious masterpieces, they might see the potential in this. •

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It was not long, however, before deception, a recurring theme in Cornwell’s life and le Carré’s novels, arose. While he was prepared to discuss his early work for MI5 at Oxford – he posed as a left-wing student and reported on his comrades – Cornwell wouldn’t talk about his time with MI6 in Europe in anything but the most general terms. When his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a bestseller in 1963, the gritty verisimilitude of the story inspired direct questions, which he answered at the time with either lies or obfuscation. There, he quite plausibly took cover as a signatory to the Official Secrets Act. On other matters, large and small, Sisman often challenged Cornwell in interviews by insisting that the contemporary written record contradicted his present testimony. Here, the deception became much more interesting, both in how Sisman and Cornwell created their iteration of le Carré, and for biography more generally.

The discrepancies were not so much lies as stories – “legends,” in the language of “tradecraft” – that had been part of how Cornwell had rounded off the rough edges of experience and the imperfections of memory to fit narratives of his public and private lives. The interplay between biographer and subject in this case presents a fascinating study of the role of narrative in creating personal identity and the epistemological limits of biography.

If David Cornwell were to make his living, both as spy and novelist, by lying, he had an exemplar of the dark art of duplicity in his father, Ronnie Cornwell. Charming conman, Lothario, fraudster; he often involved his sons directly in his chicanery and embarrassed them with his repeated failure to pay school fees and the very public humiliation of his bankruptcy and imprisonment. David’s mother had left the family when he was five, consigning him and his brother to the erratic care of this ebulliently amoral parent, and in David’s case to “sixteen hugless years.” Although le Carré’s A Perfect Spy explored the later stages of this relationship in fictional form, Sisman has given us a chillingly detailed account of how all this compromised Cornwell’s capacity to find and express love well into his adult years. Right up until his death, Ronnie continued to impose on David, mostly at inopportune times.

Despite the deceit in Cornwell’s family and professional life, Sisman tells us very little about his actual work as a spy. Of course, there’s an abundance of detail about spying and associated tradecraft in le Carré’s novels, but Cornwell and some of his old colleagues say that it is fictionalised. We have to look elsewhere if we want to learn exactly how spying is done. What this biography offers is an engrossing account of how Cornwell’s experience, suitably filleted, and his rich imagination have been wrought into le Carré novels.

Sisman’s narrative of the interplay between private life, public persona and published work is made all the more engaging by the abundant detail he can give from the letters and other sources Cornwell made available. His exemplary skills take us into the intimate daily life of Cornwell and his family, friends and associates; there are many occasions where we feel that we are there as unseen observers. In some passages, indeed, it is possible to sense the emotional tension of the moment. All the light and shade, colour and movement that he gives to the narrative carry us along very willingly.

Sisman’s style is not unlike le Carré’s: clear and succinct but highly evocative in tone and rhythm, with a poetic sense of the work simple, well-chosen words can do. Qualities such as these are evident in his previous work, but his capacity for critical empathy, which he brings to this biography in such abundance, enlarges our sense of Cornwell, even though some corners of his world remain in the dark. The work achieves a delicate balance between deep engagement and critical detachment, a quality shared with other fine biographies.

A recurring theme is the process of making the novels – the distillation of ideas, the extensive on-site research, then a fiercely focused writing period. When Cornwell has a draft, he takes editorial advice from publishers and others, while constantly negotiating strategies to market and manage responses to the novel. Sisman tells us a good deal about Cornwell’s relations with his publishers, the book market and the film adaptation of the novels.

Sisman’s examination of the relationship between Cornwell and le Carré’s novels is adept. Seeing the Berlin Wall built fed directly into The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. His intimate relationship with Susan and James Kennaway informed The Naive and Sentimental Lover. His belief that Israel had squandered Jews’ moral capital in its treatment of the Palestinians was part of the inspiration for The Little Drummer Girl, just as his disgust at the behaviour of pharmaceutical companies drove him to write The Constant Gardener. More recently, anger at the cosy relationship between international financial institutions, criminal networks and compliant governments suffused the plot of Our Kind of Traitor. To some extent, all of the books are personal, and in that sense are part of the biography.

This is such a fine piece of work that it is difficult to imagine the need for another. Indeed, there’s a certain hubristic hint in the use of the definite article – the biography – in the title. But it never does to presume. Sisman recently told a BBC interviewer that Cornwell is working on his memoirs. It’s not clear whether as a right of reply or a companion volume. •

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My late Sunday arrival, a day after their departure, was bewildering. In the relief of finding the right house on an unfamiliar street, an ajar front door barely registered. Even the room off the corridor, a scene of utter disarray, didn’t do it. Noting two drawers wrenched off their runners, my absurd thought was of a frantic last-minute search for a passport. Only when a nervous walk upstairs led to a smashed door lock did reality bite.

I called the police. A young constable appeared almost instantly; in her wake, a neighbour from across the road. Both were solicitous. Forms were filled, help offered. I left a message with the couple’s daughter. Soon – all too soon – things were quiet again.

Although the damage and its cost would fall on my hosts, it left me unsettled. At last, the week’s work ended, Saturday morning brought a first chance to breathe, to “light out for the territory.” Nearby White City, the BBC’s west London HQ, was an early landmark, followed by the shopping hub of Shepherd’s Bush Green, though the streets were still quiet. A girl, around seventeen, perhaps of Indian origin, walking lightly by, with smiling self-possession, wearing jeans and a hooped blue-and-white sports shirt.

Why was that sight so uplifting, and so enduring in the memory? Decoding the shirt at least was easy. This corner of London is the heartland of the Queens Park Rangers; there must have been a home match at Loftus Road that day. A cousin of mine, brought up in this area, had followed the soccer club even when he was exiled in Birmingham, England’s “second city” in the west midlands, for most of his working life. One thing led to another, and my thoughts turned to an event that looms large in Birmingham’s modern history, the bombing of two pubs by the Irish Republican Army, or IRA, which killed twenty-one people in November 1974.

By coincidence, one of the characters in the new novel I had just finished reading, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club, had lost her fiancé in those very blasts. The author had been on a BBC radio program days earlier, and I recalled his acute observation that the 1970s were “the decade before irony,” when people had not yet learned to adopt a pose, to hold their beliefs as if from an ironic distance, and that this made the period imaginatively hard to grasp.

At some level I was aware of myself, meandering and musing, a free man in London with no appointment to keep, and had a vague sensation of bliss. But mostly I was just inside the moment, going with the flow of Coe’s absorbing idea.

Just past the Green I stopped at a pedestrian crossing and waited for the lights to change. A man was standing on the other side. I looked at him. It was Jonathan Coe.

At that moment I learned the meaning of “psychogeography.”

Jonathan Coe’s eleventh novel, Number 11, has an ex-librarian circuiting Birmingham on a number 11 bus in order to save on domestic heating bills, a Kazakh former model building a vast basement extension under a South Kensington mansion that reaches to an eleventh floor, a film historian dying under the collapsed junk of the number 11 cupboard in a Leipzig warehouse, a police detective linking murder victims by their presence at a party held in the chancellor’s official residence at 11 Downing Street, an enigmatic artist who… but you get the picture.

The book also features new members of the nefarious Winshaw family, whose earlier incarnations were killed off in What a Carve Up!, Coe’s bountiful satire of Thatcherism, published in 1994, four years after the lady’s own defenestration. Two more Winshaws, as well as several associates of the protean clan, are dispatched in the course of Number 11. And just as What a Carve Up! takes its title from a comedy-horror film of 1961, the climatic episode of Number 11 borrows its name from What a Whopper, a Loch Ness monster lark also made in 1961 (now garnished, for congruity’s sake, with a “!”). But look out! For before his fatal encounter the historian has jotted an article idea: “Sequels which are not really sequels. Sequels where the relationship to the original is oblique, slippery.”

There’s much else in this complaisant vein. Jonathan Coe leaves no dot unjoined, no conceit unlaboured. Its design-by-number suggests a book crafted for fans (including that sub-category, literary academics) as well as mere readers, if the distinction can be sustained. A moment’s check, for example, confirmed the depressing intuition that Leipzig just had to be Germany’s eleventh-largest city. Such are the joys in store for those who relish that sort of thing.

More troubling to those outside the closed circle (as another disappointing Coe sequel was called) is how far and awkwardly the authorial calculus obtrudes. A trial-by-tabloid target brings to life the vintage stereotype “black, one-legged lesbian on benefits.” The detective’s young sidekick uses a London Review of Books article by James Meek to decouple a “bedroom tax” mystery and draws on “the modish discipline of psychogeography (as pioneered by Guy Debord, and practised in the present day by the likes of Patrick Keiller, Iain Sinclair and Will Self)” to skewer a case of indecent exposure. His proposition that “to solve an English crime… one must contemplate the condition of England itself” leads colleagues to dub him “Nate of the Station.”

It would be easy to say that Coe’s playfulness risks seeing the novel evaporate in self-referential whimsy: the postmodernist’s catch-11. But the construction-puzzle road to Nathan Pilbeam’s nickname or Alison Doubleday’s humiliation hints at something more complicated: namely that the book’s various registers – modern gothic, social satire, political lament – fail to gel, because its aesthetic intentions are from the outset stuck in a web spun from baser materials.

Every review of Number 11 refers to it as a “state of the nation” work. In truth, “state of two nations” would be more accurate. The idea of “two nations” is associated with Benjamin Disraeli, who as a Tory politician in the 1840s used it as the subtitle of Sybil, the second of a trilogy of novels favouring social reform. Disraeli’s evocation of the vast gulf between England’s rich and poor, “as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were… inhabitants of different planets” has long become a reflex shorthand across the political spectrum, its frequency of citation a signal that inequality and poverty are lapping at the gates.

The damage being wrought by these forces to individual lives and shared interests propels Number 11. The calculus here is a moral one, as five self-contained but gradually associative sections track many characters across a landscape of social division and its everyday dramas of loss, greed, anomie and waste. The latter unfold against the excesses, hypocrisies and scandals of the current order (media bullying and neutered dissent, extreme wealth and punitive austerity, financial deceit and political corruption, the “monetisation of wonder”). As the narratives chime, and the eerie premonitions of the book’s early pages acquire new intensity, these dramas reveal themselves as the manifestation of a deeper force consuming the foundations of contemporary London.

Coe’s Tales That Witness Madness (the book’s subtitle – another horror film, from 1973) curve across middle England, from Beverley to Birmingham and Oxford, with brief forays to South Africa and Switzerland. But the topical edge lies in the capital. London is depicted as a playground of the megarich, their whims (travel, children’s tuition, dog walking, those basements) catered to by a transient service class of immigrants and native graduates, of whom Rachel, the book’s principal character, is one. (Coe says that the book began with walking along Chelsea’s Tregunter Road “and seeing what passes for doing your house up round there, which… involves bulldozers, cranes and closing off streets for months.”)

This polarised city, moreover, crystallises the destructive intent of the Conservative government: persecuting the poor, corroding the public realm, destroying the remnants of a shared moral order. Prominent instances are the spread of food banks and the closure of public libraries. The social gulf, however, is as much ethical-political as strictly material. Rachel is an Oxford graduate whose mother is a barrister (representing whistleblowers), tutor friend Laura a literary scholar, and boyfriend a PhD film student. “We are all in this together” – the brazen promise of George Osborne before he entered 11 Downing Street as chancellor in 2010, which frames the “What a Whopper!” chapter – is a lie. In reality, the governing elite is a malicious and zealotic force, glad agency of the sinister Winshaw power-mesh that envelops England.

It’s a powerful indictment, which also relies heavily on Tony Blair for dramatic effect. Blair’s quote above the opening tale (“In another part of our globe, there is shadow and darkness”) is from a Washington speech made on the same day, 17 July 2003, as the death in an Oxfordshire wood of the weapons scientist David Kelly, who had been drawn into political-media disputes over the Iraq war. Rachel carries the childhood memory of her grandparents’ reaction to Kelly’s demise (“Britain would be a different place from now on: unquiet, haunted”) and bonds over it with Laura. Here, the determinism always central to Coe’s use of recent political history is at its most overt. The filter of the Winshaw saga renders modern British governance a giant conspiracy, and the country a horror story. But if reality is also conspiracy and horror, what need for fiction of this kind? Or indeed for politics?

The book is wide but shallow. A self-contained yarn about the serial murder of political stand-ups that climaxes at a best-of-all-awards ceremony – “The Winshaw Prize / or, / Nathan Pilbeam’s Breakthrough Case / A ‘Nate of the Station’ Story” – is a showcase for Coe’s theorist policeman. It also permits Coe to recycle his offline interest in the frivolousness of “anti-establishment comedy,” sketch the profane cynicism of a famous right-wing newspaper editor, and recall the scandal of Birmingham’s new library.

The theme echoes Coe’s 2013 essay on British satire, which also examined public indulgence of London mayor Boris Johnson’s image as a “lovable, self-mocking buffoon.” That London Review of Books piece got stuck in a patronising binary: “If we are chuckling at [Johnson], we are not likely to be thinking too hard about his doggedly neoliberal and pro-City agenda, let alone doing anything to counter it.”

In Number 11, the fictive treatment goes no deeper. An angry blogger aims at “middle-class liberal-left comedians” because they squander radical energy; the editor-ogre seeks to “co-opt” a stand-up under imminent threat; PC Pilbeam, armed with “the history and theory of comedy,” solves the case. The cartoonishness fails to rise above its putative targets and thus to illuminate them. What the Observer’s Nick Cohen calls Coe’s “postmodern back-covering” works against his own purposes.

But what are these purposes? The heart of the problem is that the work’s aesthetics and politics are discordant. The result is didacticism, which seems to elicit responses from the same cloth. The outline of two arrived in my mind fully formed. From the attack-dog right: “Iraq – check. Reality TV – check. Social media – check. Inequality – check. Tax evasion – check. Health rationing– check. Educational apartheid – check. Arms profiteering – check. Housing crisis – check. Tabloid journalism – check. Immigrants – check. Tory scum – check. All the ingredients of political injustice and righteous anger are there. A pity the author forgot to turn his cooker on.”

From the hip-gunslinger left: “These moving tales of pinched lives and broken dreams, crushed in the inexorable maw of a system out of control, form a savage portrait of Britain’s bleak wasteland of neoliberal misery. The novel unravels the heart of an economically razed, socially cleaved, and ethically decayed country. The bloated chicanery of our real-life Winshaws is exposed more devastatingly than any mere polemic could achieve.”

The truth in such deadening formulae is that Jonathan Coe has reversed George Orwell’s self-injunction “to make political writing into an art.” The surrender of imagination is nowhere more apparent than in how closely, across these tales, personality and social-political outlook are aligned. The exception is Rachel’s kindly grandparents, Conservatives from another age whose role is to accentuate the pitilessness of this one. Which in its way proves the rule.

In a revealing interview with the Financial Times during a country walk near his Birmingham childhood home (where his mother has lived for fifty-nine years), Coe says, “I’m a very nostalgic person and I had a very happy childhood, so I’m very attached to this whole area… These hills represent family to me.” It’s arguable that the nostalgia extends to his own work. The epigraph to Number 11 is a passage from What a Carve Up! that contains the line “there comes a point, where greed and madness become practically indistinguishable.” Laura’s late husband Roger (he of the Leipzig accident) is clearly a surrogate for Coe, down to the birthdate, obsessiveness, cinephilia and conviction – in his widow’s words – “that life was better, simpler, easier in the past.”

A minor detail here is that Roger has died within the last five years, since the couple’s son is that age; that would make him forty-six at Harry’s birth (the relevant action takes place in 2012). Laura’s age goes unmentioned, though she appears to be an early career academic and feels little older than Rachel herself, who is nineteen that year. Alfred Hitchcock didn’t hang about when flitting across the screen of his own films. Roger and his blasted, beloved past weigh far too heavy for the novel’s good.

A paradoxical feature of British declinism, left and right versions alike, is that it forever needs fresh sources to tap. Incessant cultural cannibalisation of the past encourages the search. There is no event or period that can’t be turned to partisan appropriation, held up to show how far the country has fallen. The left, in part because of its greater experience of defeat, has long pulled well ahead in these stakes. With few exceptions, the outcome is tawdry stories and reductive artefacts, suffused by bad faith. Ken Loach’s film The Spirit of 1945 is the brass standard for chutzpah, but the examples are legion.

The animating spirit of Number 11 is angry nostalgia. This very emotion seized hold of the Labour Party leadership in September 2015 following a second election defeat. It is also the most retrograde force in British politics, a guarantee, inter alia, of Conservative governments forever. It’s little wonder that Jonathan Coe has offered “two cheers” for Jeremy Corbyn, one of many warm endorsements from the worlds of art and literature. The new psychopolitics is melodramatic. It loves the grand sweep and lurid image. But looking back, down and up, it forgets to look at.

The alliance between the angry nostalgics’ hard core and their fellow travellers is on a roll, and has some way to go. A novel should be read and judged on its own terms. But where politics is concerned one thing is clear. Britain will be reborn on the day the last Corbynite is knocked out with the last copy of Number 11. •

The post Jonathan Coe’s “Number 11”: art vs politics appeared first on Inside Story.

St Helena appears to have been a community of writers. Napoleon’s international fame rivalled that of celebrities today, so everyone in contact with him kept a record, some in the hope of making their fortunes. His doctors, his secretary, his valet, his aristocratic companions, his generals and their wives, and even the wives of the British officials all left accounts of his final years. They recorded not only what he said but what he ate, when he slept, his every movement and social contact.

One of his more entertaining friends was Betsy Balcombe, the daughter of an East India Company representative on the island. She was only thirteen when Napoleon moved into the pavilion behind her family’s country house and she was allowed freedoms with the “emperor” not granted to adults. By the end of 1816 she, too, had become famous after the London Times and French newspapers published the Marquis de Montchenu’s version of her dalliance with Napoleon. Later in life, almost destitute, she wrote her own account of this friendship.

For her new book Betsy and the Emperor Anne Whitehead scoured the archives, including the neglected French records of the years on St Helena, to provide an amazingly full account of Bonaparte’s daily life, and of Betsy Balcombe’s later life in Sydney and England. Her research reveals the way networks of patronage operated across the British Empire in the early nineteenth century, from London to St Helena, the Cape, India and Sydney. Her Betsy is a well-travelled representative of the smart middle-class girls of Jane Austen’s novels, allowed a degree of freedom in her youth but ultimately obliged to deal with faithless fortune-hunters and to follow her father to the ends of the earth.

Though it was the high point of Betsy’s life, Napoleon’s captivity was undoubtedly the dullest period of his. Thomas Keneally shrewdly chooses Betsy as his narrator for a novel about the Great Man’s last years (Betsy refers to him as OGF, Our Great Friend), adding a gloss of youthful excitement to his loss of power and physical decline. The novel begins with an account of Napoleon’s death delivered to the Balcombe family by Barry O’Meara, the Irish surgeon who tended him and fell foul of the British governor for his doubtful allegiances. After his expulsion from the island, O’Meara was forced to make his living as a dentist in London while he completed the book he hoped would restore his fortune. In Keneally’s hands, O’Meara – with Betsy reporting his account – spares no details for the ladies’ sensibilities, including the gruesome touch of a rat devouring the heart and ear of the corpse.

While this emphasis on the horrors of bodily decline reminds us of his predilections in earlier novels, for the most part Keneally makes Betsy’s account plausibly that of a mature woman recalling herself as a lively girl. In order to provide us with necessary information, he has her eavesdropping at doorways, hiding in the basement to listen to the conversation of men, even bursting in on a sexual scene where the cross-dressing Napoleon is surrounded by his naked and half-naked friends – though this last seems a clumsy way to let us know that, with the help of his friends’ wives, he was not living like a monk.

In the early days of their acquaintance, when he lived in the pavilion at the Balcombes’ estate, the captive and his companions regularly came to dinner with the Balcombes, and Betsy took the opportunity to tease him, often causing concern among his protectors. Napoleon may be the character of most interest, but Keneally makes Betsy a sympathetic and perceptive foil. He turns a reported incident where Betsy plays with Napoleon’s sabre into a moment of psychological recognition between the two. An initial teasing moment builds into a drama of threat and possibility as Napoleon goads her on:

So, in frantic excitement I began to make slashes in the air either side of his body, and then, reaching the limits of my strength, swishes above his head, even while holding on in desperation so that the sword would not fall and harm him. A mere cut, as against a serious penetration, would reduce the scene to inanity. It wasn’t what he was looking for. He was looking for something ultimate, and that was marvellous.

As Betsy grows towards womanhood, her life on the island becomes a round of balls, dinners, visits to ships, and social calls on neighbours. Napoleon and his party are settled away from the Balcombes in a larger but less comfortable house, and Betsy’s visits to him become more restricted. She increasingly reports his activities from secondhand sources like Fanny Bertrand, the wife of General Bertrand, or from servants’ gossip. But Napoleon maintains his interest in her, even manipulating her for his own amusement. Banned from any social appearance himself, he manages to arrange for Betsy to ride his Arab horse in the ladies event at the island’s races; she wins easily, of course, much to the annoyance of the watching officials and other ladies.

In the last sections of the novel, Betsy becomes an open supporter of Napoleon in his ongoing struggle with Sir Hudson Lowe, the British governor of the island, whom she calls Name and Nature (as in “low in”). The British government has at last taken over the island from the East India Company, and Lowe takes his responsibilities seriously. For Betsy, Napoleon is generous and heroic, and Lowe is no more than his mean-spirited, officious jailer. We learn that her father has helped Bonaparte communicate with friends and banks in Europe, though such support must be close to treasonous, and the family is finally sent away.

Whitehead’s version of Lowe’s situation and the Balcombes’ fall from grace is necessarily more complicated. She takes Betsy’s story well beyond Napoleon’s life to describe her disastrous marriage to and abandonment by Edward Abell, and her father’s subsequent career in Sydney as the colonial treasurer. William Balcombe kept the colony’s revenue in his house in O’Connell Street and fell into disgrace when Governor Darling, another punctilious colonial administrator, was appointed to investigate the colony’s management. Whitehead’s description of Sydney social life – the turf club, the Masonic lodge, the balls – gives a lively sense of the ambition and greed behind life in 1820s New South Wales. William Balcombe may have been given to shady deals, but his behaviour appears symptomatic of the mixed private and public nature of colonial administration. And Whitehead’s account of the visit by a French naval expedition under the command of Hyacinthe de Bougainville, who engaged in flirtations with the ladies of Sydney, suggests material for at least another novel of Georgian misbehaviour.

In Napoleon’s Last Island, Keneally is content to focus on the character of Napoleon seen at close quarters, then from an admiring distance, by his teenage narrator. He clearly enjoys imagining his way into the mind and experiences of a flighty girl, with her schoolgirl understanding of the Napoleonic wars and tendency to hero worship. As a result, the novel’s allegiances are with the emperor (strangely for a republican author), and Napoleon emerges as a more kindly and less dangerous creature than the many other written accounts might attest. In his introductory note, Keneally describes Napoleon as “ruthlessly enchanting.”

Napoleon’s connections with Australia may seem tenuous at first, but these two books remind us that New South Wales shared the British obsession with him, and that Waterloo had direct effects on our society. Whether you prefer the rollicking story of a novel or the engaging narrative of a detailed history they are a fitting celebration of the 200 years since Napoleon’s surrender. •

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Who would dare? Xi’s speech has been likened to Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” of 1942, in which Mao demanded that art serve the Party and the people and help vanquish the enemy. Xi did the same, extolling the Stalinist idea that writers are engineers of human souls; but he also talked about market influences, popular culture and other contemporary phenomena. He called for Chinese artists to create “socialist culture and art” that is “artistically outstanding and morally inspiring,” and stressed that art must serve “correct” views of history, nationality and culture. It must feature, he said, “positive energy.”

At the forum, Xi praised two young bloggers – Zhou Xiaoping (over eleven million views) and Hua Qianfang (over 87,000 fans on Weibo) – for their “positive energy.” Among Zhou’s writings is a blog post from June 2013 called “Please Don’t Be Unworthy of This Age.” A paragraph towards the end of the piece gives some idea of what “positive energy” means:

I, Zhou Xiaoping, do not deny that China has corrupt officials, prison guards, bad people, bullies and crazy people. In the same way I wouldn’t deny that a beautiful woman has thickened skin on the soles of her feet, snot, bowel movements, bacteria or germs, inflammation of the mouth, swollen lymph glands, or pancreatic juices (what’s more, these things make up no small proportion). But when I see a beautiful woman I still feel delight in my heart and eyes, and I still hope that I can hold her in my arms. If at the moment, you are standing to one side nattering on, saying: “You’ve been brainwashed, this beautiful woman is made of the skin on her feet, snot, bowel movements, germs and viruses, inflammation of the mouth, pancreatic juices, intestines, organs and lymph, it’s extremely disgusting, hurry and wake up.” I honestly don’t know whether I’m blind or you’re mad. If you don’t do anything but natter, at most I’ll just smile. But if one day, someone makes a move to eliminate this “harmful beauty,” I will certainly not stand idly by. The reason is very simple: if I failed to act, would I be a man? A man’s greatest virtue is that of guarding and protecting.

Zhao Benshan was only one of a number of major state-supported artists, including the veteran painter Fan Zeng, who lavished praise on Xi’s speech – much as state-supported artists have done since 1942, whether out of genuine enthusiasm or simply because they are mindful of the price of opposition. (The writer Wang Shiwei, the first to pay the ultimate price for dissent, was expelled from the Party in 1942 and beheaded in 1947.)

Xi has expressed specific as well as general views on the arts. He has revealed, for instance, that he hates the “weird” architecture that has come to define China’s modernising cities. Weird architecture presumably includes the work of figures like Zaha Hadid and Ma Yansong (of MAD Architects) as well as numerous high-concept, low-value knockoffs and buildings designed to look like lotuses, teapots, coins and even a piano and violin. “No more,” said Xi. It’s uncertain what this diktat will mean in practice for projects already contracted or under way – or what the speech as a whole will mean for art, literature and film that is already out there but doesn’t sing along with what the Chinese media and propaganda arms have long promoted as “main melody” art.

After all, China has been home since the 1980s to a flourishing counterculture of independent visual artists, film-makers and writers who support themselves outside the state system or use it cannily to pursue their careers. Many other artists who work within the system (in the sense that they must pass the censors) have nonetheless managed to make boundary-pushing works. Take, for example, the directorial debut of rock star Cui Jian, whose songs have been banned and unbanned over nearly thirty years. Blue Sky Bones, which deals with the Cultural Revolution, sexuality (including homosexuality) and a corrupt media, screened nationally in Chinese theatres from October 2014.

Or take Chen Qiufan’s first novel, The Waste Tide, which describes a dystopian near-future where, on an island built with e-waste off the Chinese coast, migrant workers battle capitalist elites and powerful local forces for control. The novel won Best Novel at China’s Nebula Awards in October 2013 and the Huadi Best Work of Science Fiction Award, sponsored by Guangzhou’s Yangcheng Evening News, in March 2014. The Waste Tide “paints China as a conflicted nation,” according to the Women of China website, “powerful enough to convince other countries to accept its ideologies, but not strong enough to pull its population out of poverty.”

Chen, who was born in 1981, obliquely addressed the question of Shared Destiny when he wrote that his generation encompasses Foxconn factory workers, princelings “who treat luxury as their birthright,” entrepreneurs pursuing dreams of wealth, and college graduates who must “compete ruthlessly for a single clerical position.” Yet, Chen observes, the Party persists in speaking as though the “People” all share a monolithic Chinese Dream. “Between the feeling of individual failure and the conspicuous display of national prosperity,” Chen writes, “lies an unbridgeable chasm.”

How the party-state will address political heresy in the domestic cultural sphere – including among “globalised” artists and writers and in imported popular culture – will become clear in the coming year. In the Mao era, and through much of the Deng era, the authorities accused creative artists whose work offended them of “counter-revolution,” “spiritual pollution,” “bourgeois liberalism” and other ideological crimes. In more recent times, the party-state has preferred criminal to political charges. These have the potential to smear artists’ reputations, especially within China itself, punish them financially through fines and tie them up in legal cases they can’t win.

When authorities detained the artist-activist Ai Weiwei from 2011, for instance, they charged him with tax evasion and put him under continuing surveillance. After the Australian-Chinese artist Guo Jian created a diorama of Tiananmen Square smothered in rotting meat to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the violent suppression of the 1989 protest movement, the authorities detained and then deported him on charges of visa fraud.

The consequences are generally more severe for artists with less clout. In November 2014, for example, the independent film-maker Shen Yongping, who had produced an eight-episode internet documentary about China’s constitutional governance (posted in April or May 2014 through Weibo), faced trial. During the filming, police had warned him that if he went ahead he would go to prison. What they have charged him with, however, is engaging in “illegal business activity.” (This came during the last week of October, when state media was singing the praises of the Fourth Plenum under Xi Jinping, with its stated focus on rule of law and constitutionalism.)

There is also a third way: in October, police detained thirteen artists in the Beijing “artists’ village” of Songzhuang on charges of “creating trouble.” All had indicated support on social media for the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong or were planning to attend a poetry reading in solidarity with the protests. (Human rights monitors have reported the arrest of dozens of mainland citizens who have indicated support for the Hong Kong protesters.) Reports in the foreign press at the end of October indicated that police were swarming through the once-relaxed village and many artists had closed their studios to outsiders.

The artists, for their part, can accept the Party’s leadership and reflect Xi’s guidance in the kind of art they produce. Or they can make the sort of art they consider meaningful and risk the consequences. Or they can attempt to hit “graze-edge balls,” named for a play in ping-pong in which the ball grazes the edge of the table – technically still “in” or legal and yet almost impossible to counter.

Or, if they have the means, they can send their art overseas. Chen Qiufan published the essay from which the earlier quotation was taken, translated by his fellow science fiction writer Ken Liu, on the science fiction and fantasy website Tor.com in May 2014. Writers Murong Xuecun, Yu Hua and Yan Lianke (a finalist in the 2013 Man Booker International Prize and, the following year, the first Chinese writer to win the Franz Kafka Prize) are among those who have increasingly turned to websites, journals and newspapers including the New York Times to publish essays that can’t appear at home.

Working remotely, Ai Weiwei created a giant, site-specific installation for the infamous former island penitentiary of Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay. It includes a colourful dragon with Twitter-bird eyes, 175 Lego representations of prisoners of conscience from around the world and a dozen gleaming steel stools individually installed in one of the cells in Cell Block A. Into the cell are played songs and speeches of protest, including Martin Luther King’s 1967 anti–Vietnam War speech, music by the imprisoned Tibetan singer Lolo, and Hopi chants representing the Native Americans incarcerated in the nineteenth century for resisting assimilation.

Guo Jian, meanwhile, went to New York in the second half of 2014 to collaborate with the American artist and Iraq war veteran Marcus Eriksen on an anti-war multimedia installation called Surrender. They asked people all over the world, especially soldiers in uniform, to send photographs of themselves with their hands up in surrender. Like Ai Weiwei’s Alcatraz work, it was a rather different vision of Shared Destiny from that of Big Daddy Xi. •

This extract is from the China Story Yearbook 2014: Shared Destiny, which will be launched by Andrew Leigh MP at Parliament House, Canberra on 24 November, 6–7 pm.

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Despite the brevity of their stay in Australia, the Lawrences were no mere tourists. While at Thirroul, Lawrence managed to write all but the last chapter of a novel, Kangaroo, which has impressed and annoyed Australian readers ever since its publication in 1923. He depicted Australians as hollow, modern people, living in a society so democratic that it denied all superiority and depth of intellect and feeling. Australia’s very modernity exemplified the degenerate nature of industrial society.

These criticisms of Australians have become familiar, but the perceptiveness and idiosyncrasy of Lawrence’s analysis has made some readers all the more defensive. J.I.M. Stewart, professor of literature at Adelaide University, compounded the matter in 1940 when he famously declared that Kangaroo was the only work of Australian literature worth serious attention. This insult to our literary pride was hardly Lawrence’s fault, but it contributed to the residual hostility to his novel. It is, as David Game suggests in D.H. Lawrence’s Australia, one of Lawrence’s least-read works, rarely taught in Australian universities.

Part of the Australian resistance to the novel may lie in the perception that it is the work of a day tripper whose knowledge of Australia came from a few months at Thirroul reading the Bulletin. International readers of Lawrence’s fiction, on the other hand, may see Australia as little more than an odd detour. Game argues, on the contrary, that the Australian experience, and its emergence in Lawrence’s writing, was integral to the way the author understood the world. He suggests that Lawrence’s close friendships with the writers Katherine Mansfield and Eleanor Farjeon (whose father, Benjamin Farjeon, tried his luck on the Victorian goldfields and wrote several novels about it) stimulated his interest in the possibilities of Australia as a new and uncorrupted Britain.

Game traces every reference to Australia across the whole of Lawrence’s oeuvre, finding references as early as in his novels The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron’s Rod (1922). He goes so far as to propose an Australian period in Lawrence’s life and work, dating from March 1920, when he began The Lost Girl, to September 1924, when he finished St Mawr (1925). He lists Lawrence’s poem, “Kangaroo,” and the unfinished Mr Noon as part of this group of works. It is worth remembering that Lawrence died less than eight years after he left Australia, at forty-four years of age.

Lawrence prepared for his trip to Australia by reading a range of Australian writers, including fiction by Rolf Boldrewood, Barbara Baynton and E.L. Grant Watson. Indeed, Suzanne Falkiner’s biography of Grant Watson (The Imago: E.L. Grant Watson and Australia, 2011) complements Game’s account of British interest in Australian anthropology and the possibilities for Australian society in a post-Darwinian world. Lawrence read Watson’s novel Where Bonds Are Loosed (1914) and Game notes its influence on Lawrence’s rewriting of Mollie Skinner’s manuscript as The Boy in the Bush (1924).

In the years before his Australian experiment, Game explains, Lawrence was deeply immersed in the current literature of “degeneration.” He read a range of post-Darwinian arguments about the decline of the West and anthropological speculations by James Frazer and Herbert Spencer. He picked up bits of information about the Australian Aboriginal people that excited his interest. He rejected most of the Social Darwinist and eugenic theories of the time, pursuing his own sometimes contradictory theories.

But Lawrence’s experiences during the first world war – the basis for the nightmare chapter of Kangaroo – might have contributed more than his reading to this interest in the possibilities of a new world. Despairing for the future of Britain, he dreamt of a utopia he called Rananim and, it seems, briefly considered Australia as the place for it. But he was quickly disillusioned by the society he found in and around Sydney. When he revised Kangaroo in New Mexico, he added a new final chapter expressing his “deep disappointment.”

While the novels written before the trip to Australia consistently depict Australians in a favourable light, those published after Kangaroo reflect the disillusion Lawrence suffered as a result of his experience of the place. In The Lost Girl the character offering the prospect of renewed life is an Australian, possibly Aboriginal, doctor; in Aaron’s Rod the Australian character, Francis Dekker, represents “a new and vital version of English man.” But in St Mawr the expatriate Australian characters are obsessed with material possessions and modernity.

Game takes on many of the standard criticisms of Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush, arguing that it is Lawrence’s rejection of any political solution in Kangaroo that matters, not its accuracy as an account of Australian politics at the time. The concern about the models for the character “Kangaroo” and other activists are diversions from the novel’s real interest. The frequent criticisms of Lawrence’s depiction of women and his sense of racial superiority are countered by Game’s assertion that Lawrence did not subscribe to establishment attitudes to sex or race – rather, he was critical of them, and his fiction allowed him to grapple with the complexity of sexual and racial beliefs. Rather than asserting an ideological position, Lawrence used fiction to explore possibilities and their limits.

As Game argues, Lawrence is not only a philosophical novelist; he is also a writer of emotional honesty and sensitivity. The speed with which he wrote Kangaroo explains its wonderful sense of immediacy and its freedom from any deference to genre conventions, particularly Australian ones. It may indeed be the first truly modern novel written in Australia, in the sense that it addresses Australia’s industrial society in the years immediately after the first world war. Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) springs to mind as coming nearest to Lawrence’s close observation of the urban lives of Australians. Kangaroo’s great strength is its refusal to romanticise Australian life, especially that of the working man.

Lawrence’s generous correspondence with his friends, quoted here, reinforces the sense of the openness of his inquiries into Australian life, or the problems of marriage, or the possibilities of communal living. Though he may have been disappointed in Australian society, he continued to help and like Australians, maintaining contact with Mollie Skinner and trying to help her with later publication, and getting to know Australian-born writers P.R. Stephensen and Jack Lindsay in England. David Game’s book diligently musters every bit of evidence of Lawrence’s interest in Australia, and discusses his Australian books with sympathy and perception. He makes a convincing argument for rereading Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush in the light of Lawrence’s ideas about the degeneration of industrial society, and in the context of his whole life and work.

Perhaps it is time we forgave Lawrence for his criticisms of the Australian way and celebrated the extraordinary events that left us with his acute and still pertinent observations about our society. •

D.H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire
By David Game | Ashgate | £67.50

Also in Inside Story: Tom Fitzgerald visits Thirroul and the man who remembers D.H. Lawrence

The post D.H. Lawrence’s Australian experiment appeared first on Inside Story.

Few of the women characters hovering around the separated Jonathan Lott need the financial support of a man of good fortune. Some are heiresses, others professional women – even his ex-wife has inherited a fortune of her own. And the fifty-five-year-old Jonathan, father of two grown daughters, is perfectly capable of cooking a meal and has sufficient opportunities for sexual comfort; frankly, he would prefer to have his old wife back. Here we have one of the mysteries of contemporary social life, especially amid calls for marriage equality – why does anyone get married? An argument can be mounted for the religious, and for the young, sexually active and fertile. But for those of mature years, able to earn a decent living and look after themselves, there appears to be little material benefit.

The Landing concerns itself with the wealthy middle class – the present-day Australian equivalent of Austen’s county gentry. In the first few pages we learn that Jonathan is the senior partner in a law firm and a member of the Brisbane Club. He drives to his newly built, architect-designed holiday house on a lake beyond Noosa and most of the action of the novel occurs among his neighbours there. Divorce has disrupted the lives of several of them: Penny has reached the tolerance limit with her misery of a husband and now teaches art; her daughter Scarlett has run off with the elderly next-door neighbour, who has left his wife Rosanna to her new-age therapies. Gordie, an ageing roué and doctor, has been widowed and is visited by his daughter, Anna, trailing European titles and husbands like a femme fatale from a Henry James novel. Despite their separations, most of these characters are quite happy to share neighbourhood dinners with their ex-partners and their new loves.

They are people who are concerned about wine and food, aware of couture labels and informed about the lives of international celebrities. With a light touch, Johnson manages to make them both intelligent and silly. No important matters – and certainly no urgent survival needs – seem to concern them. Over the barbecue, they talk about the threat of Muslim terrorism with more concern about ideological appearances than any real confrontation. The local council’s plans to build a public footpath between the waterfront properties and the lake present a more immediate problem, but for most of the year the magnificent houses at the Landing are empty. Johnson quietly reminds us that the lake and its surrounds once belonged to Aboriginal people, so issues of public access have a clear irony.

Johnson undermines the comfort of her middle-class characters with the vulgar Sylv and Phil, who run the Landing’s one shop and spend their time wryly observing the activities of its wealthier residents. Then there is the waif, Giselle, neglected by her mother, who wanders among its houses looking for attention. No one helps Giselle, and she pops up as if to comment on the frivolity of the main characters.

Alongside this contemporary narrative of material comfort and failed love Johnson tells the story of Penny’s French-born mother, Marie. Fleeing the war, Marie found herself in Brisbane in the 1950s and was bullied into marriage to the heir to the local department store. By the time of the novel’s present, she is a widow in her eighties, still beautiful and domineering. Her experience of marriage reminds us of a possibly forgotten history of deprivation and struggle.

Marie represents a time when women had little choice about marriage – it was necessary for survival, though she certainly did more than survive. Anna, too, comes from a place where marriage provides the luxuries necessary for status – private boarding schools for the children, travel to Europe. Scarlett, with her two babies and ageing husband, is bound to have a struggle ahead (though the inheritance from the department store will no doubt help). Penny regrets Scarlett’s lost education and career, and the way the feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s have no meaning for her.

For these women, marriage retains something of its nineteenth-century purpose – to provide financial support and status. It is one of the paradoxes of our time that, for all women’s calls for equality, inheritance and marriage continue to provide more reliable financial support for women than careers that still pay less to women than men. None of Johnson’s women are engaged in workplace battles, and her novel is more interested in love than work. Yet those elements of the nineteenth-century novel – marriage and inheritance – still play their part in her narrative of contemporary Australia. Of course, the romantic decisions of her women characters have none of the moral dimension of those in a novel by Austen, George Eliot or even Henry James. There is not much vice here, but plenty of harmless folly.

With its ironic attitude to its characters, The Landing is a rare thing in Australian fiction – a comedy of manners. In the kind of scenario David Williamson regularly puts on stage for our entertainment, Johnson gathers her characters together at two social events and gives them witty dialogue. Like Williamson’s characters, they are a little too superficial and well-off to invite any strong sympathies, but Johnson likes them too much to mock them with fully fledged satire. Few Australian novelists can manage the consistently ironic tone that is Johnson’s strength in this and earlier novels, like My Hundred Lovers and Life in Seven Mistakes. She is writing to amuse us while raising a few unsettling questions about our understanding of love and our responsibilities to each other. •

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Nabokov readers can become obsessive, and his work has a habit of turning up in strange transformations – the Lolita girls of Japan, for instance – and even in pop songs (the Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”). I write as one who has walked the streets of Ithaca, New York, identifying every house the Nabokovs rented there, thrilled to find my flat in Highland Avenue was close to John Shade’s home in Pale Fire.

These effects can be magnified in the case of published fiction writers. Lorrie Moore’s latest collection of stories, Bark, includes her version of Nabokov’s story “Signs and Symbols,” and Gail Jones, in her new novel, takes her cue from a lesser-known story, “A Guide to Berlin,” first published in 1925 and not translated from Russian until 1975. Jones’s central character, a young Australian woman called Cass, finds herself drawn into a group of Nabokov fans after she is observed photographing the house in Nestorstrasse, Berlin, where the Nabokovs had an apartment from 1932 until they left the city in 1937. She joins two Italian men, an American college professor and two young Japanese who meet regularly in a series of Berlin apartments, not so much to talk as to tell stories inspired by Nabokov. Marco, one of the Italians, is a real estate agent with access to empty apartments suitable for their meetings.

They quickly develop a “Speak, Memory” game in which each of them, in turn, tells a story of past life, full of Nabokovian detail and allusion. Victor, the American, is the son of Polish Holocaust survivors who migrated to New York. He recounts their story of poverty and isolation in an alien culture, and announces his gratitude to Nabokov’s memoir “for this resurrection in formal prose, Russian-style. And for encountering a Europe my family might years ago have known. And for the novelty, above all, of unconventional seeing.” Later Victor and Cass visit the Berlin zoo and Victor stares into the eyes of an ancient tortoise in the aquarium, excited that it may be the same tortoise that looked at Nabokov in his 1925 story. It is an effort to retrieve lost time, the looking forwards and backwards at a given moment, that lies at the heart of Nabokov’s writing.

Other stories contribute some of the history of the world since Nabokov’s time in Berlin: the Japanese couple tell their love story, including the effect of the Sarin gas attack in Tokyo and the phenomenon of young men locking themselves away in their bedrooms for years; Gino, the other Italian, recounts how his father died as a result of a terrorist bomb explosion at Bologna central train station; Marco’s father has disappeared, while his Jewish grandparents died in Nazi camps. Butterflies, chess moves, forced exile, fathers mistakenly killed by terrorists – the Nabokovian patterns emerge. Cass, aware of her own less exotic history, suppresses the story of her loss of a brother in a cyclone, though she links it, privately, to the death of Nabokov’s brother Sergei in a concentration camp. Compared to the European stories, Australia is a kind of Zembla – the “distant northern land” in Pale Fire – a dream-world of reversals. All of the group are writers of one sort or another – academics, bloggers, essayists, aspiring novelists – and their stories are self-consciously eloquent. Cass’s trepidation before her turn to speak and her deliberate editing of her past indicate how fictional such confessional stories must be.

Between the story sessions, Cass explores the messy world of Berlin in winter, a place where signs of the past intrude on everyday life. She rides the U- and the S-bahns and visits Berlin’s many memorials, museums and cemeteries with her new friends. She listens to the difficult German of her apartment caretaker, from the old East, and Gino takes her to meet Afghan refugees camping in Oranienplatz. The present overlays the stories of the past with its own problems of displacement and injustice – but it also offers new discoveries to delight the New World tourist. As the members of the group get to know each other better, alliances and hostilities emerge. Eventually, Gino challenges the literariness of the group – and, indeed, of the novel we are reading – with an outburst about their blindness to the world they are living in: “Where is now rather than our own deeply intoxicating pasts?” He accuses them of literary snobbery, “smug, hidden from the fucked-up world,” and forces a violent intrusion on their story-making. It is, of course, only a fictional intrusion and the novel’s eloquence continues to hold experience at bay.

Jones is an elegant and marvellously controlled writer who knows her Nabokov (and her Italo Calvino) well. She manages to give each of her storytellers sufficient differences of accent and emphasis to be plausible, and somehow writes narratives that reference Nabokov just enough, without becoming programmatic or predictable. Even with English as a supposed second language, they speak lucidly – though it is interesting that there is no Russian, German or French speaker in the group. Jones may be claiming Nabokov for readers of English. (It was his son, Dmitri, not Vladimir himself who translated “A Guide to Berlin” into English.)

Cass may seem a little too passive in the face of these strangers in a strange city but she serves the novel’s need for an observant innocent abroad. In this respect, the novel has striking similarities to Sebastian Schipper’s recent film Victoria, in which a young foreign woman allows herself to be caught up with a group of charming Berlin petty criminals, with violent consequences. Through Cass, Jones observes the discordant details of Berlin – the Italian restaurants run by Sri Lankans, the discomfort of living in rundown grey buildings and the beauty of a snowy winter with the “delicious glassy crunch beneath her boots” of snow, the mix of people on the suburban trains, an old man playing “Nessun Dorma” on a saw in the underground. It is like touring winter Berlin in the hands of an articulate and hypersensitive guide – not Nabokov, but certainly in the spirit of his own Guide.

Indeed, Jones never pretends to be Nabokov. She has little of his playfulness and transgressive comic sense, but she is brilliant at encapsulating the small things that make his work so memorable, and this novel does honour to the master. She gives us the pleasures of beautiful writing while reminding us that all fictions, all writing, have a complicated relationship to reality. Nabokov declared that he despised politics in writing, yet his whole life was shaped by the major political events of the twentieth century. Jones, with her band of Nabokov scholars, places him back inside a small part of this history.

If you love Nabokov you are likely to enjoy this novel. If you’ve experienced the discomforts of contemporary Berlin – or anywhere in old Europe – in the off-season you may enjoy it more. Even without these credentials you are sure to delight in its exquisite writing. •

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Dixon’s descendants in the British tradition include George Gently, Inspector Morse and his successor Lewis, and Jack Frost. Curiously, the women of the comfort zone tend to be in the period genres: Miss Marple and her Australian cousin Miss Fisher are the most obvious prototypes. Since most of these figures have their origin in literary fiction, they also belong to a longer span of cultural history. As the cultural critic Raymond Williams observed, the detective story is a definitive example of middle-class modernism in which murder “is made to consort, very comfortably, with afternoon tea, residential villages, cricket and a classical education.” And, one might add, with feather boas and clip handbags.

But television also shook up the bland formulaic approach, taking the cops out onto the streets in fast-moving action scenes, and showing more of the social worlds in which crime has its origins and impact. The BBC’s Z Cars (1962–78) spawned a second tradition in which social realism, violence and psychological complexity were the core ingredients. For the viewer on the couch, the crime options are now sharply dichotomised. Lewis or Midsomer Murders might serve you well if your after-work indulgences run to tea and cake. If you’re more inclined to pour yourself a whisky, you’ll go for Happy Valley, The Fall or Line of Duty.

The second series of Line of Duty, currently playing on ABC on Friday nights, offers some interesting challenges to the Williams thesis. For one thing, it reflects a new social reality: the middle class is not a safe place to be any more. Widely perceived to be under threat of extinction from the ravages of extreme capitalism, the middle class is also assailed by more particular threats. For professionals of all kinds, there is danger at work. With performance management regimes, redundancy declarations, liabilities and lawsuits, a job can turn on you in so many ways.

Line of Duty focuses on the investigations of an anti-corruption unit within the police force, and as the story progesses, it becomes clear that there is a slippery slope between compromise and corruption. No one, it seems, is immune to compromise, including the hardcore incorruptibles on the team. Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) has money troubles and desperately needs the promotion his boss, deputy chief constable Mike Dryden (Mark Bonnar), has promised. So what happens when one of his team produces evidence that puts Dryden under investigation? And is Dryden’s overt support for Hastings a sign that’s he’s trying to pre-empt the scrutiny?

At the centre of the story is DI Lindsay Denton, played by Keeley Hawes as a sullen and rather isolated woman who is difficult for colleagues and viewers alike to assess. Hawes is almost unrecognisable as the actor who played Alex Drake in Ashes to Ashes, a series I found unwatchable for all the kooky posturing and mugging to camera in which she was encouraged to indulge. Here, there’s not a shred of vanity about her performance. Denton is a character who doesn’t do self-esteem. Apart from the job, to which she declares herself stoically dedicated, the components of her life are a failed love affair, a dying parent, a rowdy neighbour and a cat that ends up being rehoused. There’s a poignancy about her, brought out in moments when she’s alone, picking out melodies on the piano. The charmless manner and the sudden attacks of venom give way to moments of raw feeling as her ordeal gets rougher. Hawes sustains the ambiguity with an unfaltering instinct for the emotional truth of the character.

It’s largely due to her fine performance that the series has gained such popular and critical momentum, but good television acting does not occur in a vacuum. The level of dramatic subtlety and concentration is established by the cast as a whole. Many of the actors in Line of Duty are familiar to viewers from other recent series, but here they are doing their best work. Martin Compston (formerly Ewan Brodie in Monarch of the Glen) is a young officer recently recruited to the anti-corruption unit, who has won the unshakable confidence of Hastings, his boss. Compston plays the role with restraint and economy. He’s not the new hero on the block; he’s a good professional learning his own capacities. Adrian Dunbar as Hastings has the problem of being too recognisable. He’s been in Cracker, Inspector Morse, Ashes to Ashes, Silent Witness, A Touch of Frost. It’s got to the point where whenever a British crime series takes you into the police station, you expect to find him there. Line of Duty gives him a more developed role, and Dunbar knows exactly what he’s doing as the character charts his course through a moral labyrinth in which nuances of behaviour are clues by which the viewer is invited to second-guess the next turn.

There has been some controversy over the final episode of series two. Scriptwriter Jed Mercurio seems to have set too many hares running, and they had to be rather summarily rounded up for the denouement. But it’s in the resolution of the crime story that the call of the comfort zone can reassert itself. One of the most widely discussed theories about the popularity of crime fiction is that it caters to some deep human need to have the chaos of the world tidied up and the moral order restored. Mercurio doesn’t buy into that at all.

Line of Duty exhibits some interesting parallels with The Fall. Both mark a departure of the television crime series to a zone where there is ultimately no comfort from the law enforcement process or the courtroom. We are beginning to see detectives fail. Crimes are left unsolved, or cases are erroneously resolved, and the next series is triggered by the compulsion to return and try again. To fail again, to fail better.

Speculating about the ongoing cultural obsession with crime stories is almost as fascinating as the stories themselves. The TV Detective: Voices of Dissent in Contemporary Television, a new book about British television crime by Helen Piper, is an attempt to map the changing and ever-expanding field. Critical studies in this area too often become embroiled in genre theory, but Piper maintains a lucid perspective and keeps the focus on some key questions.

One of these is the imaginative connection between viewer and detective. A move towards “centred biography,” Piper says, followed the success of the Morse series. This involved deepening the psychological profile of the leading detective character by developing a personal life story, typically one in which family relationships are in tension with the demands of the role. Something we can never expect of the detective story is work–life balance; the dynamic is always driven by the all-engulfing demands of the case. Perhaps the viewer on the couch seeking some mental relief from his or her own working world finds this paradoxically gratifying. Someone else’s work can be more exhausting than your own, but also more urgent, frustrating and obsessive.

Some critics have associated the lonely detective with “a crisis of bourgeois individualism.” They often behave badly to those around them, make wrong calls at critical moments and probably drink too much. But, as Piper observes, the dramatic structure must be “designed to support and demonstrate the ‘truth’ of their moral viewpoint.” As we follow their progress, we slide between the frames of empathy, sympathy and antipathy.

Genre-think can have a very deadening effect, not just on criticism, but also on the dramas themselves, because generic seed stock keeps on producing the same kind of crop. Piper is good at explaining the determinants of genre and then digging around them to see where something new has been introduced. She doesn’t have a great deal to say about Line of Duty (the book probably went to press before series two was broadcast) but reading The TV Detective enhances the experience of watching it, and confirms my sense that this is a series running wide of some of the most stable parameters of the detective tradition. •

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Spirit of Progress put the lives of Vic, Rita and Michael on hold in order to explore a moment when high art encountered people on the fringes of Melbourne. Going back to the mid 1940s, the novel explored a Carroll family legend – of an eccentric aunt who became the subject of Sidney Nolan’s 1946 painting Woman and Tent. The novel provided an intriguing tangential view of Nolan’s circle, giving Carroll the chance to consider more self-consciously the relationship between art and small lives lived in relative poverty beyond the interest of history. This is, of course, one of the things Carroll himself is trying to achieve in his series of novels. He is exploring moments in the lives of ordinary suburban people, the kind of people who rarely attract the attention of artists and historians.

For all the references to speed and progress in the titles, Carroll prefers to stand still and contemplate the past. His novels take the time to examine the possibilities of each moment from within the internal consciousness of each character. We learn everything from memories triggered by an event in the narrative present. Michael, in particular, is always looking backwards, often with nostalgia for his rapidly receding childhood and youth. At the end of The Time We Have Taken one of his friends, an artist, paints a commemorative mural for the suburb’s supposed centenary, which depicts all its people looking back at their past rather than turning towards the future with pioneering energy. Technological progress appears in the novels – diesel engines replace steam, cars get faster, television arrives in every home – but the suburb remains a placid, almost silent, haven of domestic life. Curiously, Vic and Michael become obsessed by golf and cricket respectively – contemplative sports whose longueurs are punctuated by moments of excitement. Perhaps this is what suits them so well to Australian suburban life.

Inevitably, in Forever Young Michael has grown older and left the suburb for a wider world – Melbourne’s inner city and ultimately Europe. He is now in his early thirties, on the point of trading his electric guitar and his rock band for the life of a writer and a trip to France. It is late 1977 and Whitlam’s Labor Party is about to be defeated for a second time by Malcolm Fraser. Typically, Carroll avoids the most dramatic and memorable moments of Whitlam’s career – his victories of 1972 and 1974 or the dismissal of 1975 – to mark the forgotten election that sent him from politics. Michael has written an article depicting Fraser as a Macbeth figure, crippled by the guilt of his accession to power, and this leads to a brief brush with Canberra politics.

His old university housemate, Peter, has become a Liberal Party functionary, and he approaches Michael to write sympathetic pieces for his party. This brief encounter allows the novel to reflect on Peter’s mistreatment of his lover in The Time We Have Taken, and see a pattern in his manipulations of women. Michael, too, feels guilt towards the women in his life; he has ended a love affair insensitively and neglects his mother. Political guilt provides only a distant echo of the central guilt of men about their behaviour towards women. (Vic is long gone from Rita’s life.)

But the technique that served Carroll so well in the earlier novels is straining under the need to move to a broader setting and more mature problems. The constant use of the present tense, shifting between the thoughts and memories of different characters, becomes relentless. And new central characters – Peter, and Michael’s grieving girlfriend Mandy – appear without the kind of background that elicits interest and sympathy. The two women suffering from the thoughtless selfishness of men, Mandy and the seasoned journalist Beth, are surprisingly fragile in the face of adversity, but they are sketched figures, rather than full characters.

Whenever Rita gets her turn to think, the novel comes alive. Now that she has left the suburbs behind she becomes feisty and engaged with the world, and she leaves Melbourne to travel to Europe on a tourist bus tour. This allows the novel to loop back to the subject of Spirit of Progress, with a scene in Tuscany in which Rita encounters two expatriate Australians in a village coffee shop. She recognises one of them as Sam, the now-famous painter of the woman and the tent. After this awkward meeting, Rita begins an extended reflection on her life and the relationship between ordinary people, like her, and the art that claims to portray them:

Not people but types. The types that they make jokes about on television, or put in books or on the stage, the types that everybody laughs at. Or that become paintings put up on the walls of public galleries so that everyone can come along and gawk. And it’s not you; it’s the way they saw you. And that’s just it. Once they’ve pinned you to the wall and caught you the way they wanted you to be caught – once you’re there and helpless and pinned up on the wall the way they saw you – that is what you become. It’s a sort of theft.

The other artist in the cafe, Art, begins a corresponding meditation on the meeting:

For it is almost as though she has stepped out of one of his paintings, stepped out of one of those anonymous peak-hour crowds, either going to or coming from work, and entered his studio, offering the nagging observation, “No, no you haven’t got me right, have you?”

He goes on to consider the nature of nostalgia and the way art preserves “mythic memories.” The juxtaposition of the two meditations is brilliant; it is the finest writing in the novel.

Of course, Carroll is offering a self-conscious debate about his own practice. Like Art, he is creating “mythic memories” rather than recording a real world, but he wants to defend his subjects from mockery. The importance of nostalgia as a source of Carroll’s art may be the reason that Michael’s adult experiences are comparatively unsatisfying; they are simply too close to the author’s present. It is the life of his childhood that excites his imagination. Michael travels to France to become a writer, confirming the novel’s suggestion that distance in place (as well as time) may be necessary to give an artist perspective.

Like James Joyce re-creating Dublin from Paris, like Art in Tuscany, Michael will have to rely on his memories of the Melbourne suburbs for inspiration. We are told that Art’s father was a tramway mechanic and his mother a shop assistant. We know that Sidney Nolan’s father was a tram driver – and George Johnston’s David Meredith is also the son of a tram driver. Johnston’s novel of Melbourne suburban life, My Brother Jack, is cited several times in the course of Carroll’s Glenroy series. The novels invite us to compare them with other literary and visual depictions of suburbs and small towns – including the more satirical versions by Patrick White and Barry Humphries.

When a novel invokes relatively recent times it calls on a reader’s own memories. Carroll relies on a shared experience between author and reader to provide background to the moments he chooses to explore. The passions and drama of public events have little impact on the main characters. There is, for example, no delineation in these novels of the importance of Whitlam’s government to Michael’s generation – this is mentioned only in passing. He also avoids any of the repercussions of the Vietnam war. These absences from the novels almost force the reader to remember them.

Carroll has remarked that he is not interested in writing realism, and these novels only distil a few drops of what a man like Carroll – or Michael – might have experienced. Real life in the suburbs is likely to include a noisy crowd of siblings and other relatives, school classes full of other children, people on buses and trains, tradespeople and salespeople, church congregations, fellow workers. Carroll strips his characters back to Michael’s immediate circle – he has no siblings and few friends, just his parents, some neighbours and girls he likes. In the earlier novels, Vic and Rita go out to work – Vic to drive his engines, Rita to demonstrate new appliances in the country – but they bring home no anecdotes, no stories of encounters with the world. At home, they hardly speak to each other as they withdraw into thought.

This slow turning over of the suburban experience is an ambitious project in the style of some of the great literary projects, such as Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, or Anthony Powell’s more sociable A Dance to the Music of Time, or even Philip Roth’s steady creation of a history of postwar America on the basis of his own experience. It makes one think of Patrick White coming back from Europe after the war to fume at the ugliness of the outer suburbs of Sydney. Things may look rosier at a distance of fifty years – or half the world away. At the end of the novel Michael sits at his desk in the French countryside recalling his mother’s voice: “Tell them how it was, behind the flying ducks and the laughter; behind the quaint feature walls and shadow boxes and ornamental boomerangs; tell them how it really was, if they should ever ask.”

Carroll’s extended version of the suburbs is rich with nostalgia under a peach-coloured sky. But readers will have their own views on whether this is “how it really was.” •

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