In writing this blog, I’ve never hidden my politics, but mostly kept them at least in the background, not that we don’t all quite often discuss problems of race, gender and to a lesser extent, equity.
However, on an ANZAC Day 2024, while our ‘Labor’ government is supporting Israel and the US in their racist genocide in Occupied Palestine, to not be “political” is itself a political position. In just six months the IDF has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza – I think 40,000 dead including 15,000 children is the current official figure – and herded almost the entire 2 million population into one city, Rafa, which it continues to bomb.
Meanwhile, and mostly out of sight of the press, Israeli settlers with the support of the IDF continue to murder and kidnap Palestinians in the West Bank and to steal their homes and land.
Like Australia, Israel is a settler-colonialist outpost of western imperialism built on genocide, ethnic cleansing and theft, now operating in a way that is inseparable from the US war machine, and inseparable from the West’s ongoing empire building in the Middle East
Caitlin Johnstone, 10 April 2024
I was going to write a post describing the ‘new’ empire which rose in the twentieth century to replace the quickly fading British Empire; “the military industrial complex” US President Eisenhower christened it in 1961; which retains hegemony over the Middle East to this day, supporting dictators and overthrowing popular governments; using Israel to counter-balance Iran.
… and drawing a straight line from Britain’s takeover of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, with the participation of Australian Light Horse units, straight after the failure of Gallipoli; through the 1917 (British PM) Balfour Declaration of Palestine – then with a largely Arab population – as a “national home for the Jewish people”; Jewish terrorism until they were granted statehood in 1948 (not that it ever ended); the first genocide of Palestinians by Israelis, the Nakba of 1948 which saw 750,000 Palestinians evicted from their homes; the constant violence of Israeli settlers taking over the West Bank bit by bit; Israel’s apartheid regime in Occupied Palestine; through to the genocide taking place before us now in Gaza – today’s news is that the bodies of children are being dug up in the ruins of hospitals, murdered with their hands tied behind their backs – all in the name of preserving a Western enclave in Arab heartland.
… and drawing a line too from Labor-traitor WWI Prime Minister Billy Hughes to Prime Minister Albanese today, handing billions to US and British arms manufacturers for no noticeable benefit to anyone here (except ministers planning to retire into military-industrial directorships).
But that is as much as I have time to write, before I return to work.
It is often asked how the Germans could support Hitler during the Holocaust. That is a question we must now ask ourselves.
I collected PC Wrens in my teens and twenties, old, heavy papered, clothbound editions from John Murray’s “Imperial Library” mostly, though Dad found me a Beau Geste with a dustjacket for one of my birthdays, and have carted them around with me ever since. Now they live on a bottom shelf with my Maigrets, Saints (Simon Templar), and William books.
Last year I reread Beau Ideal, my favourite, for another project, so I was pleased when I decided to take part in the 1937 Club to find that Worth Wile qualified. Though, as I got going, I discovered that the story I thought I remembered belonged to another book altogether.
I was expecting a story about an engaged couple in Pakistan who ‘jump the gun’. The man dies and the woman is left to bring up their son unmarried and alone. Instead, Worth Wile is the story of officers in the British Army stationed in the ‘North West Frontier’ – the mountain country where present day Pakistan borders Afghanistan.
“The two main gateways on the North West Frontier are the Khyber and Bolan Passes. Since ancient times, the Indian subcontinent has been repeatedly invaded through these northwestern routes. With the expansion of the Russian Empire into Central Asia in the twentieth century, stability of the Frontier and control of Afghanistan became cornerstones of defensive strategy for British India.” (wiki)
There is also a love story, of sorts. I’ve said before that Wren isn’t very good at woman stuff.
The first character we meet is John Vere-Vaughan, a flying officer who gets shot down while on a bombing raid over Afghanistan – the shock on rereading Wren is how familiar his 1920s stories sound in the 2020s – is captured and held for ransom.
Glancing around, Vere-Vaughan noted with approval that female suffrage had evidently not reached this part of the Afghan Border; for the ladies who had spat upon him, flung mud and stones at him, and endeavoured to get at him with knife or talon, remained at the compound gate, whence they watched the proceedings with savage eyes
Two of his captors are apparently British officers in disguise living as Afghan tribal fighters. After 100 pages we lose track of Vere-Vaughan for a while.
Part II begins with Richard Wendover, the son and grandson of Generals who have spent their whole careers fighting in India, dreaming of the same for himself; and with his neighbour, Sybil Ffoulkes, “A good kid. Pity she wasn’t a boy”, daughter of another General in India, now retired. Sybil, then 11 or 12, has already proposed marriage to Wendover once (unsuccessfully), and despite their being mostly apart for the next couple of decades, continues in that determination throughout the book.
“Years later ..” a third significant character is introduced. Young Prince Nikolas Bailitzin, nephew of the Russian Ambassador to the Court of St James, proposes to Sybil and is refused. When we meet him again more years later (and on the other side of the Russian Revolution) in Afghanistan he has remade himself as an agent of the Soviet Secret Service.
I can see I am leading myself into just telling you the story, which as you’re unlikely to read it for yourself, is not entirely a bad thing, but I’ll be brief.
Wendover’s promising career is brought to a crashing halt when he is found drunk and asleep in charge of a fort he is meant to be defending. He is summarily court martialled and disappears; much later turning up as an Afghan tribal fighter. Much, much later his friends work out he was drugged by a ‘Eurasian’ – ie. a fellow officer who was NOT WHITE.
Sybil spends years trying to find out what happened; is eventually told Wendover has been seen on the British side of the border in his role as an Afghan; and wrangles an invitation to stay with yet another general, the North West Frontier is teeming with generals, who has a daughter her age.
Wendover gets a job in Afghanistan teaching Indian culture to Russian spies; is recognised, imprisoned and tortured by Bailitzin, but of course escapes the night before he is to be executed.
Veere-Vaughan makes his way back into the narrative; is rescued by Wendover. Wendover’s court martial is shown to have been illegal. Then just when he has been accepted back into the army, and – pretty unwillingly – into the arms of Sybil, he disappears again back into Afghanistan. There’s more, but the reviewers’ code forbids me to discuss endings.
Wren, it must be said, is in favour of British (and French) colonialism, and consequently his books must be read through the twin prisms of Boys Own heroism and the white man’s burden. How much of that rubbed off on teenage/twentyish me? A bit probably, it was after all the culture I was brought up in, in the 1950s and 60s, and that my father and his father were brought up in and wholeheartedly endorsed.
On the other hand, by 1971 I was a draft resister and my father and I were not speaking. And yet I still collected and read these books. It probably took me ten or maybe even twenty years to begin questioning both the sexism and the white man’s burden. And it is one thing to be aware of them theoretically and quite another to root them out.
Wren was employed in the Indian Education Service from 1903 to 1917 (and may have spent up to a year at the beginning of WWI in an Indian regiment). His first posting was in Karachi – ie. at the opposite end of present day Pakistan from the NW Frontier – but I can’t see where he spent subsequent years.
In any case he appears to have been a close and not always unsympathetic observer of Muslim culture. In this book, as in his North African French Foreign Legion books, his Muslim men can be both heroes and very villainous villains. Let me end with a quote from the one page I remembered to bookmark:
“It’s a sacred and solemn duty of one of these Pathans to kill a man who flirts with his wife as it is to say his prayers. It’s as much his duty to kill the man who has done that, or has killed his father or brother in the blood feud, or has blackened his face in some other way, as it is our duty to feed and clothe and educate our children. How should we like it, if an alien race, who were in a position to do so, hanged us every time we committed the offence of of feeding and clothing and educating our children?”
How should we like it indeed? Still not something we consider enough as we continue to colonise, rather than live alongside, Aboriginal Australians.
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PC Wren, Worth Wile, John Murray, London, 1937. 420pp (Pictured: First Canadian edition, 1937, with dustjacket)
Ric Throssell (1922-1999) was the only child of Katherine Susannah Prichard and Hugo Throssell. He was a soldier in New Guinea in WWII, then a diplomat, which he remained until 1983 despite his career being held back, especially early on, by his mother (and some of his friends) being Communists. As a writer, he produced 30 or so plays; two works, one about each parent; and, from 1991-1998, four novels.
In a Wilderness of Mirrors (1992) is the story of a man my age, so a good generation younger than Throssell, Selwyn Joynton, starting with a flowery chapter describing him flying back to Melbourne, diagonally across Australia, as you do coming from Europe via SE Asia.
Below, through 35,000 feet of empty air, the Timor Sea stole probing fingers into the estuaries of Kings Sound and lost itself among the chasms of the Fitzroy River. The stain of summer smoke dulled the colours of the Kimberley to one worn ochre, blurring the sharp lines of tumbled barriers of rock and gorges carved by the millennial tides of time in the land.
He makes his way to his home, an old house in an overgrown apple orchard, in the outer eastern suburbs, at the foot of the Dandenongs. His son is long gone. His daughter, moved out while he’s away, comes back to welcome him home, cook him dinner. He thinks back to his student days, in the anti-Vietnam War movement, marrying their mother 8 months pregnant.
We proceed in fits and starts through the 1970s. Using his job as a reporter for ‘British News’, Joynton does jobs for the Foreign Office in Uganda (post Idi Amin), Vietnam (the withdrawal of Australian forces), Grenada (the overthrow of a socialist revolution). At home, his long absences and sexual inadequacy cause his marriage to fall apart. We are in Joynton’s head of course, but also the heads of random strangers overseas, his daughter, his wife, his Italian mother in law. It’s all very bitsy and the language overblown.
Flying in to the Seychelles (for the 1977 coup) –
The islands had been the legendary Limuria once. A drift of rock in the vast solitude of the Indian Ocean, as if the Titan fist of a banished god had broken from the sea to challenge the complacent deities of the land and sky. For aeons undiscovered by searching man, they had been left to age to quiet fulfilment, islands of peace and beauty, until the French discoverers …
It’s chapter and chapter about, home and away; home where his daughter loves him, his son loathes him and his wife doesn’t care; away, meddling ineffectually, errand boy for bureaucrats with dreams of empire.
He’s called home from London, from tidying up his mother’s affairs, to see to his wife who is ill, and the story peters out, with a brief Epilogue beginning: “It is time to clear the glass; to wipe away concealing mists of make-believe; fold back the wings of the mirror that make man many men.” He protests, as so many do, that even though this is fiction, that the events in it are true, he was there, or there soon after. Except Vietnam, though “I suppose it might have seemed like that to some of the soldiers coming home.” And except the anti-war movement, where I was and he wasn’t, which for a brief moment I thought he might expand upon, but which here at the end he says he wrote with the assistance of his daughter and her friend, Biff Ward.
This is a very short review, for an unsatisfactory book, surprisingly short given that I was home and writing it up as I read, a process which usually results in too many words rather than too few. I respect that Throssell wanted to provide a left wing perspective to events to which he had been a witness; but it seems being the son of a famous author was a burden he was unable in the end to support.
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Ric Throssell, In a Wilderness of Mirrors, Left Book Club Co-Operative, Sydney, 1992. 196pp
That ‘Again!’ is a bit unfair, this should be the last one. Our daughter has come up with a really great opportunity for Milly to buy and build on an empty block in (WA seaside resort town) Denmark, just a couple of hundred yards from the shops, with trees on three sides and its own tree lined stream. We went down last week to check it out, and now it’s all systems go.
Gee lives 15 kms out, so I can see Milly doing after school grandmother duty more often than not, for years into the future. And yes we checked – she’s 15m above sea level, in fact there’s a little waterfall between her and the town centre – so she’s safe from that aspect of global warming, anyway, and in one of the coolest spots in WA.
And the bonus is, Milly has a free hand to design herself a house, which might be her favourite thing in the world, so we might get our family back verandah back.
Denmark River (BibbulmunTrack.org)
The ocean beach makes for spectacular photos, but the town is actually set back a few kms, on the inland side of the inlet that the river runs into.
When I told mum, her first reaction was ‘you’re going to be lonely’, probably a reflection of how she feels as the last of the family still living in Melbourne. Will I? I’m not sure. The problem is that neither Milly nor Gee likes my flat, too many stairs, so they’re unlikely to stay with me. I could get somewhere easier, but I like my flat and I like living on the river, close to the city. I’ll think about it over the next couple of years as I edge closer to retirement.
Onto other matters. I have been trying to catch up on the work I didn’t do, revenue I didn’t earn while my gearbox was rebuilt, so not much home time; well not until I got Easter off, which gave me time to write up We Need New Names; read for and prepare a couple of upcoming posts on CH Spence for AustralianWomenWriters dot com; catch up on blog reading; and do last year’s tax and all my filing. My desk looks a lot neater!
Last night I finished Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction. I have no idea what to say about it. Salinger seems to have invented a family, brothers and sisters and parents, just in order to write about himself as a writer. It’s brilliant, but beyond my ability to explain.
Driving down to Denmark and back, five hours each way, I played Jack Heath, Kill Your Husbands, an Australian murder mystery set in the mountains near Wagga. Milly was really into it, so when we got home I had to set up her computer so she could hear the end (which I still haven’t).
On one of my trips, and I did six, each around 3,000 km, in five weeks, I listened to a US crime thriller written by American Ghanaian woman, Yasmin Angoe. The thing is, it was so plain vanilla American compared with, say, We Need New Names, but with a Ghana backstory which felt tacked on, as though Angoe was exploring her roots – which of course she should, but so many other authors do it better. And why is it that assassins are so often romanticized? Her protagonist is female, wealthy, good looking and a murderer. I much prefer Stephanie Plum who is broke and can never find her gun when she needs it.
I just spoke to Milly and she’s feeling nervous about all the selling and buying ahead of her; the packing and moving; the one year gap where she’ll have to rent while she builds. She said she’s tried drawing house plans, but it’s not working.
This month’s Black Africa novel will be The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Ethiopia)
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Recent audiobooks
Dolly Alderton (F, Eng), Good Material (2023) “Comedy” Lin Anderson (F, Scot), Easy Kill (2008) Crime Yasmin Angoe (F, USA/Ghana), Her Name is Knight (2021) Crime NoViolet Bulawayo (F, Zimbabwe), We Need New Names (2013) Jack Heath (M, Aust/ACT), Kill Your Husbands (2023) Crime Greig Beck (M, Aust/NSW), Mysterious Island: Here be Dragons (2023) SF Fantasy
Currently Reading
JD Salinger (M, USA), Franny and Zooey (1961) JD Salinger (M, USA), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction (1963) Catherine Helen Spence & Jeanne Young (F, Aust/SA), An Autobiography (1937)
NoViolet Bulawayo (1981- ) was born in and lives in Zimbabwe. She went to the USA for her tertiary education, commencing with a community college in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Zimbabwe was colonised by the British in 1890, and was known as Southern Rhodesia from 1923 to 1965 and then Rhodesia when the minority white government of Ian Smith declared independence. After extended fighting, the majority Black – mostly Shona – population finally (re)gained control of their own country in 1980 with Robert Mugabe as Prime Minister and, from 1987, President.
Mugabe’s rule was or became authoritarian and the economy went downhill. The implication is mismanagement, but the withdrawal of capital for development is always a major problem for governments rejecting colonial/Western rule.
We Need New Names (2013) is both fictional memoir – of a girl growing up in a shanty town – and quietly but determinedly political. At the beginning the girl, Darling, is 10, and the shanty town, Paradise, is a suburb of a city in an unnamed African country. NVB writes only “our country” and “the leader of our country”, and throughout refers to the collapse of the economy with variations of the phrase ‘things fall apart’, which of course is the title of Nigerian, Chinua Achebe’s first novel.
The novel consists of a series of episodes in Darling’s life, her escapades with her friends, and then later, living with her aunt and attending school in the USA, in Kalamazoo. But underneath is the terrible poverty of ordinary people in “our country”, the unemployment, the flight of qualified professionals to neighbouring countries where they might actually be paid, the collapse of schooling, the collapse of the currency (hyperinflation in Zimbabwe forced the introduction of hard currencies, Rand and US Dollars, for local transactions), the oppression of the people by government security forces.
The first episode is the children, all 10 or 11 – Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho, Stina – raiding the backyards of nearby prosperous suburb, Budapest, for guavas, which they eat all through the season, despite the stomach pains they cause, to offset their hunger.
Chipo is pregnant, to her grandfather it turns out, and in a later episode the other girls, Darling, Sbho, and a new friend, unsuccessfully – and knowing very little about what they are doing – attempt an abortion.
We learn Darling’s family had earlier lived an ordinary middle class life in a proper house, but her father’s loss of employment had seen them move to one shanty town, which was bulldozed, and then to Paradise. The father had gone to work in the mines in South Africa; the mother – like the mother in The Famished Road – sells bits and pieces in the market; and Darling is mostly cared for by her grandmother, Mother of Bones.
The father, skin and bones, returns home to die of the ‘sickness’, I guess AIDS.
In one episode the security forces kill a local rebel, BornFree, and the children climb a tree in the cemetery to observe the funeral; and in another, they are up a guava tree in a Budapest backyard when security forces or vigilantes seize the white occupants.
Then, quite suddenly, Darling is living in Detroit, and subsequently, Kalamazoo, Michigan with her aunt Fostalina, her cousin TK and the aunt’s partner, Kojo who is Ghanaian (and therefore can’t understand Darling and Fostalina if they speak the language of their country).
Darling does well at school; makes friends with two other girls, Marina, a Nigerian, and Kristal, African American; they watch porn, go to the mall, Darling gets jobs in a grocery store and cleaning. The family have an adventure driving from Kalamazoo to South Bend, getting lost in the cornfields after Kojo leaves the I94. But we never lose our focus on back home.
How They Lived
And when they asked us where we were from, we exchanged glances, and smiled with the shyness of child brides.
They said, Africa? We nodded yes.
What part of Africa? We smiled
Is it that part where vultures wait for famished children to die? We smiled
Where the life expectancy is 35 years? We smiled
Is it there where dissidents shove AK47s between women’s legs? We smiled
Where people run about naked? We smiled
That part where they massacred each other? We smiled
Is it where the old president rigged the election, and people were tortured and killed, and a whole bunch of them put in prison and all. There where they are dying of cholera? Oh my god, yes. We’ve seen your country, it’s been on the news.
And when these words tumbled from their lips like crushed bricks, we exchanged glances again and the water in our eyes broke, our smiles melted like dying shadows, and we wept, wept for our blessed country. We wept and wept and they pitied us and said it’s ok, you’re in America now.
Fostalina and Darling attend to an old man from their country, in an old people’s home, who has lost any English he might have had and who imagines himself back, leading his people.
Darling phones her mother but the phone is picked up by Chipo, who is angry that Darling has lost contact with her friends and tells her that she no longer belongs.
In the last chapter Kojo tells Darling Osama Bin Laden has been found and killed, reminding her of the game ‘searching for Bin Laden’ she had once invented and played back home, and incidentally dating the end of the novel at 2011, implying Darling was born in say 1993, making her a decade or so younger than the author.
We Need New Names is so much more than a coming of age – a great novel and a worthy Booker shorlistee.
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NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names, Little Brown, 2013. Audible version read by Robin Miles. 9 hours.
JD Salinger (1919-2010) has always been my favourite prose stylist. He didn’t write much, and of that, until a couple of years ago I finally caught up with The Catcher in the Rye (1951), I had only owned and read Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).
Salinger was born in Manhattan to a Lithuanian Jewish father and to a “German, Irish, Scottish” mother, who converted to Judaism. He had one sibling, a sister, 7 years older. He appears to have been raised in relatively affluent circumstances; he went to a private school, and had a couple of goes at starting college before being drafted in 1942 and serving in the US Infantry in Europe and post-war Germany.
His first ambition was probably to have been an actor, which his father opposed (sending him to Poland to experience the supply end of the meat importing business). He began writing while still at school, mostly short stories. He was first published in 1940 – so at age 21 – and the following year had the story “Slight Rebellion off Madison”, in which we first see Holden Caulfield, accepted by The New Yorker. Sadly, Pearl Harbour intervened, and it ended up not being published until 1946.
In 1947, Salinger became an “avid follower of Zen Buddhism” – this is all relevant to this review – and in 1948 The New Yorker published “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, the first of seven stories in which Salinger establishes the fictional Glass family, retired vaudeville performers, Bessie and Les, with seven children: Seymour, Buddy (who might be the author), Boo Boo (a matron with 3 children of her own by the 1950s), twins Walt and Waker, Zooey, and Franny (Frances); with birth dates spread over about 16 years, from 1917 to 1933; brought up in a family sized fifth floor apartment in Manhattan overlooking a girls school.
“Franny” and “Zooey” originally appeared as separate stories in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957 respectively. In the former Franny goes on a date, gets ill and faints; and the latter begins a few days later with Zooey in the bath (behind a hastily pulled curtain) discussing a severely depressed Franny with his mother who is sitting beside the bath chain smoking. There is no reason not to consider them as one novella.
All of the Glass children had been, serially over a long period, child prodigies on a radio quiz programme. Zooey has gone on to be a seriously good looking TV actor; Franny, the other good looking, not to say beautiful, sibling, is still at college. One of the twins has died in an accident during the war; Seymour has committed suicide; and Buddy is somewhere uncontactable, still without a degree, but teaching creative writing.
Franny, on her date, was carrying with her a green clothbound book which she says she got from the library but which she has actually taken from (the late) Seymour’s desk, The Way of a Pilgrim. I looked it up, it’s a real book, “a 19th-century Russian work, recounting the narrator’s journey as a mendicant pilgrim while practicing the Jesus Prayer [a repetitive chant, like the Buddhist ‘Om’]” (wiki); and apparently made famous by its centrality to these stories.
I guess the underlying theme is that Seymour and Buddy took idiosyncratic charge of their younger siblings’ education, particularly their reading, and that now he is gone, Seymour is missed. I sadly suspect that the main theme is that the religious is in everything. As Zooey says to Franny in the final, optimistic scene –
“… if it’s the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you’re missing on every single goddam religious action that’s going on around this house. You don’t even have the sense to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup – which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this madhouse.”
“Franny” starts with her boyfriend Lane meeting the train bringing Franny from her residential college to spend a weekend away, attending the Yale football game. They start off well enough, but at dinner, Lane gets on Franny’s nerves, is too attentive, too loving; Franny starts picking at him, talks at length about the Way of a Pilgrim, won’t order, appears ill, and eventually faints, coming to in the manager’s office. My suspicion is that she’s pregnant.
Lane .. sat a trifle closer to her and bent down and kissed her, briefly… ‘You’re just going to rest this afternoon. That’s all you’re going to do.’ He stroked her arm for a moment. ‘Then maybe after a while, if you get any decent rest, I can get upstairs somehow. I think there’s a goddam back staircase. I can find out. Franny didn’t say anything. She looked at the ceiling. ‘You know how long it’s been?’ Lane said. ‘When was that Friday night? Way the hell early last month, wasn’t it?’ He shook his head. ‘That’s no good. Too goddam long between drinks. To put it crassly.’
Lane goes out. Franny begins praying. “Her lips began to move, forming soundless words.”
“Zooey”, which is much longer, is Zooey getting ready to go out, bathing and shaving while discussing Franny with Bessie; then making two attempts to talk Franny out of her depression (I’m clearly wrong about pregnancy), first in the lounge where she’s lying on the couch, then on the way out, ringing her, pretending to be Buddy. And that’s the whole novella. A tour de force of conversation and description.
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JD Salinger, Franny and Zooey, first pub. 1961. 157pp.
Omar Sakr is a thirty-ish, bi-sexual poet and writer “born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants” (website). The protagonist of Son of Sin (2022), Jamal, is a young queer Muslim man born in working class western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish migrant parents.
The obvious comparison of course is with (middle class Melbournian) Christos Tsiolkas. Son of Sin, apart from being a good book in its own right, sits somewhere between Loaded and Dead Europe. Without the drug culture, but navigating Jamal coming to accept his own homosexuality without being ‘out’ to his schoolfriends and family, in Sydney, and for a while, in Turkey.
That’s about as far as I got before a trip came up, up the coast then inland to Paraburdoo. Even before I unloaded Saturday, Dragan was on the phone wanting me home to do a job for him.
GGD’s got the book covered
Then Sunday, he was frantic. Trucks had broken down, trailers were sitting in the yard loaded. As I got nearer, I offered to drop my trailers home and run up to Geraldton where one road train had been abandoned, en route to Onslow. In the end he decided I should hook up two trailers Monday morning from the depot and take them up to Nullagine, so I got to spend Sun night at home.
Right now, it’s Tues afternoon and I’m in the (airconditioned) lounge at Capi (Capricorn Roadhouse, Newman), just short of the turn-off to Nullagine and Marble Bar. I’m due at a mine near Nullagine tomorrow morning, but what I haven’t said yet is that trucks don’t use the Newman – Marble Bar road, it is quite simply too rough. In the last few years it has been bitumened to Roy Hill – a famous cattle station, now an iron ore mine, 110 kms north, but the next 200 kms are barely driveable. Trucks coming up from Perth to Marble Bar and the mines beyond, out in the Great Sandy Desert: Telfer, Woodie Woodie, Nifty, go the long way, via Port Hedland, an extra 400 kms.
Dragan is paying me well, I just hope I can drive carefully enough, once it is light tomorrow morning, to make it worthwhile, without my newly repaired truck shaking to pieces.
In Paraburdoo waiting to be escorted in to unload, I was parked next to a very shiny truck. I hope I at least look like I’ve been through a truck wash recently (I had).
Last trip, I was happy to get done and invoiced – only the second for the year, which was why Dragan found me receptive – and the reconditioned gearbox sounds beautiful, completely silent. It’s amazing to realise how noisy it had got before it failed. I did have my problems. It’s very hot up north, constantly in the 40s, and I blew two tyres. Also, my CD player failed, mid-story (and the mouse has failed on my laptop – I hope it comes back).
I switched to Audible and listened to Stasiland, which was just ok. I get that the surveillance state was extreme, but I would like to see more acknowledgement that the welfare state was appreciated and that if socialist nations weren’t so constantly under attack from the US they would probably work very well.
At home I put some stories onto a USB stick, and so far I have listened to The Turn of the Screw and the beginning of Larissa Behrendt’s After Story.
200 km corrugated dirt
That’s not much, I know. From Nullagine I’m going on to Port Hedland to load home, which I might reach next Saturday.
Sun. 3 Mar. I’m home. Got home Fri night to a surprise long weekend (and Milly’s flat full of multiple generations of children), so I’ll be unloading Tues, and going again Fri, touch wood. No problems on the Marble Bar road – if you don’t count the battery isolator temporarily closing down the lights and engine; and the grille falling off – the truck behind me blew a steer tyre; and I blew a trailer tyre on the highway home, hardly unexpected after constant 40 deg days and high 30 nights.
Recent audiobooks
Kathleen Alcott (F, USA), Infinite Home (2015) Inger Ashe Wolfe (F, Can), The Taken (2009) Amanda Bestor-Siegal (F, USA), The Caretakers (2022) Anna Funder (F, Aust/Vic), Stasiland (2002) Larissa Behrendt (F, Aust/NSW), After Story (2021)
Currently Reading
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (F, USA), The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) Louisa M Alcott (F, USA), Rose in Bloom (1876) PC Wren (M, Eng), Worth Wile (1937)
Ben Okri was born in 1959, in Minna, in central Nigeria. His parents, who were Urhobo and Igbo, took him to England when he was 2, for his father to study law, and returned, to Lagos, in 1966. Two years later, aged only 9 or 10, Ben began attending high school at Warri, not far from Biafra and the civil war (which went from 1967-70). In 1978, he left to study comparative literature at Essex University, and I think the UK has been his home ever since.
The protagonist of The Famished Road (1991) is a young boy, Azaro, the only living son of very poor parents, in an unnamed market town on the edge of a forest. The action, such as it is, takes place over the course of a year – from dry season, through wet – with, in the background, an electoral struggle building up between the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor.
I wasn’t clear what the period was, but then, near the end, Okri talks of “seizing power from the white people that ruled us”, and of “the Colonial Administration” (p. 408-9) which implies we are in the late 1950s, although whether the elections were for the Federal Parliament (in 1959), or for one of the three Regional parliaments, presumably the West (in 1957), is not said.
In any case, Okri is writing outside of his experience both of the times, and of the lives of the very poor. The person(s) who wrote his Wiki entry posits that Okri may have heard about children experiencing visitations from spirits, which Azaro does, from his schoolmates at Warri.
Which brings us to Okri’s literary environment. The Famished Road was his third novel. The Britannica site says of his earlier work: “His first novels, Flowers and Shadows (1980) and The Landscapes Within (1981), employ surrealistic images to depict the corruption and lunacy of a politically scarred country. The short-story collections Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988) portray the essential link in Nigerian culture between the physical world and the world of the spirits.”
That is, living and studying in England, he begins writing within the dominant postmodern paradigm, but is drawn towards ‘Magic Realism’, which in literature is generally held to have its beginnings in Latin America, with, in particular, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). Notable works featuring MR following Marquez, included Salman Rushdie with Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988); and Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984).
Of his African predecessors, Chinua Achebe’s fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), was “a powerful fusion of myth, legend and modern styles”; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s sixth, Matigari ma Njiruungi (1986) seems to be realist, but also about how legends take hold, as is his later Wizard of the Crow.
Of course I am aware that a name other than Magic Realism is needed to describe Indigenous worlds in which life ‘here’ is continuous with or includes the spirit world, but MR is the name the movement had at the time. Rushdie in particular was already incorporating the religious/spirit world into his fiction; and I think the young Ben Okri could see how that might work even more powerfully in an African context.
I have written previously that Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (2023) is one of the great works of abstract literature. I think we may say the same of The Famished Road which barely has a narrative structure at all, but consists of a stream of gloriously described sequences. Reading it is like standing before Picasso’s Guernica – many shapes are discernable within it; it is difficult to ascribe meaning to the overall work; and you are overcome with wonder. There is also some pleasing circularity in the idea that early C20th abstract artists in Europe were influenced by stylized sculptures from Africa (Picasso’s African Period).
How many times had I come and gone through the dreaded gateway? How many times had I been born and died young? And how often to the same parents? I had no idea. So much of the dust of living was in me. But this time, somewhere in the interspace between the spirit world and the Living, I chose to stay.
The voice of the novel is Azaro’s, as he tells firstly of his birth, his unwillingness to leave the spirit world, and then of his life, in a ‘compound’, in which each family has one room, shares a latrine and a bathhouse, and cooks outside in the yard. The other families, with whom he lives so closely, are never named or described, not even the children with whom he must sometimes play.
His parents are Mum and Dad; the old blind man in the house across the street is only ever the old blind man, and a photographer is only ever the photographer. Through the whole 500 pages, the only people named are the owner of the local bar, Madame Koto; and, well into the book, the boy, Ade, who becomes his friend; and Helen, the beautiful young woman leading a family of grossly disfigured beggars. Azaro is ostensibly a schoolboy, but although he mentions sometimes going to or returning from school, it plays no part in the story.
And yet the book teems with people. Neighbours, creditors, country relatives, strangers are forever crowding in to their one room, spilling out along the passage, across the concrete front verandah, and out into the street. As with both Mister Johnson and No Longer at Ease, whenever there is a little money then more is borrowed to supply whoever turns up, with food and drink.
And teems with spirits; working all the time to get Azaro to return; working through Madame Koto and the old blind man; pervading the forest, the road. There is always someone dying, being brought back from the dead. Here it is Azaro, being led home by a spirit
When I thought I could no longer bear the pain underfoot and the hunger, when the roadside became littered with dried corpses, skeletons of babies, skulls chattering rhymed verse, the road changed into a green stream … ‘Soon we will get to the great river,’ said the spirit. ‘Be grateful. When we cross the river there is no turning back. Your companions and the whole of the spirit world and the goddess of the spirit-rivers will have a wonderful banquet awaiting you, because you are their prodigal friend.’
What is the story? Dad works as a lumper, unloading lorries loaded with bagged cement and salt; Mum, makes a tiny living hawking in the street or at a stall in the market downtown. Madame Koto gets Azaro to sit in her bar for ‘good luck’ and feeds him peppersoup and palm wine.
Madame Koto associates with the Party of the Rich, and prospers, becoming the first in the area to have the electricity connected, to get a car. The thugs who drive around the streets canvassing for votes come to Madame Koto’s to drink and pick up prostitutes.
Mum who supports the Party of the Poor is constantly harassed and forced to move on by their opponents.
Dad dreams of being a boxer, the Black Tyger, begins training, constantly shadowboxing; unaware that Mum starves herself to feed him up. There is a fight, out in the street, which he almost loses and then wins; and another in which it is clear the old blind man is holding him back by wizardry. Dad dreams of becoming rich, of feeding the beggars and building them schools.
It sounds like very little and yet there is action on every page. An amazing work.
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Ben Okri, The Famished Road, Jonathon Cape, London, 1991. 500pp.
Brona has also published her review today – in fact, I meant to post this review next week, but today’s review is not yet ready, not even close – and anyway you might find it interesting to read them together.
Where I discussed Magic Realism you’ll see that Bron says “Okri developed a new writing style he called “trans-realism” or “a realism with many more dimensions” or being “inside and outside of realism”.”
I read Little Women for the first time just a few years ago, and then happened to see Rose in Bloom in a charity shop on the Murray Valley Hwy near Yarrawonga – I’d stopped to buy a pie or a cake at the bakery next door – bought it and stuck it out of the way, on my top shelf.
Where it stayed until I finished The Famished Road (review end of Feb.) and was looking for something a little easier, and here we are. I’ve mentioned Jo from Little Women a few times in the context of the ‘Independent Woman’, and thought this one might fit in as a late entry for Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week.
If you know your Alcott then you’ll be aware that Rose in Bloom (1876) is the sequel to Eight Cousins which I gather is about Rose, an orphan heiress, and her 7 boy cousins, a matriarch and a whole heap of uncles and aunts, all well off, all living within a few miles of each other (in New England? I’m not sure. And what is the major city nearby, L______?).
At the end of Eight Cousins, bachelor Uncle Alec takes Rose and her maid, Phebe, to Europe for a couple of years, where Phebe, also an orphan, takes singing lessons as a route to gaining her independence. Rose in Bloom begins with the four older boy cousins – Archie, ‘Prince’ Charlie, Mac and Steve – now in their twenties, waiting on the wharf for Rose’s ship to dock.
Although Phebe has gained a great deal of polish (and beauty) as Rose’s ‘friend’, a more accurate description would be companion as she is still expected, and paid, to serve. The oldest cousin, Archie, almost immediately falls in love with her, which the family find unacceptable, and Phebe goes off to L______ to find paid employment in a church choir.
Here is the paragraph that got my hopes up. Charlie has just told Rose that a woman doesn’t need plans, she must just break a dozen hearts, before she finds one to suit, “then marry and settle.”
“That may be the case with many, but not with us; for Phebe and I believe that it is as much a right and a duty for women to do something with their lives as for men; and we are not going to be satisfied with such frivolous parts as you give us,” cried Rose with kindling eyes. “I … won’t have anything to do with love till I prove that I am something beside a housekeeper and a baby-tender!”
“Heaven preserve us! here’s woman’s rights with a vengeance!’ cried Charlie …
They go on to discuss what profession she might choose, considering first medicine – “you know how well women have succeeded in this profession” – but she has decided on philanthropy. Two or three years ago I listened to a history of women doctors in the UK (university education began in 1881, but it’s complicated because at least one woman became a doctor before then by being ‘apprenticed’ to another doctor), but I have never got a handle on when women first became doctors in the US.
Rose does become a philanthropist (and Phebe a successful singer) but sadly, most of the rest of the book is about Rose falling in and out of love.
Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom, first pub. 1876. My edition (pictured above), Sampson Low, Marston & Co., London, hardback, undated (Sampson Low, Marston & Co were established in 1872. But the book looks to be maybe 1930s and is available in better condition than mine from Abe Books UK for just £4.64).
1937
1937 Ford Club coupe
I haven’t previously participated in Kaggsy and Simon’s ‘year’ clubs, but 1937 seems so me that this time I will put up one or hopefully, two reviews in the week 15-21 Apr (I couldn’t resist the photo that searching on ‘1937 club’ brought up). Serendipitously I had already scheduled one 1937 book – Catherine Helen Spence’s autobiography as completed by her companion Jeanne Lewis – for my April contribution to the Australian Women Writers Challenge site.
A look around my shelves (and one quick purchase) reveal these other contenders:
Australia: KS Prichard, Intimate Strangers Martin Boyd, The Picnic Ernestine Hill, The Great Australian Loneliness (review) Ernestine Hill, Water into Gold Kenneth Mackenzie, The Young Desire It Arthur W. Upfield, Mr Jelly’s Business (review) Other: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (review) MJ Farrell (Molly Keane), The Rising Tide LM Montgomery, Jane of Lantern Hill (review) Leslie Charteris The Ace of Knaves (a ‘Saint’ adventure) PC Wren Worth Wile Georgette Heyer An Infamous Army
Of the authors I collect, I have a heap of William books, by Richmal Crompton, but not William the Showman (1937), and both Simenon and Evelyn Waugh wrote all around 1937 but not that year. There is another Heyer, which I don’t have though my daughter might, the crime novel They Found Him Dead. If you’re wondering, the nearest Miles Franklin is All that Swagger (1936).
Other 1937 Australians are: Eleanor Dark, Sun Across the Sky M Barnard Eldershaw, Plaque with Laurel Leonard Mann, A Murder in Sydney Vance Palmer, Legend for Sanderson Helen Simpson, Under Capricorn (Hist.Fic. – made into a Hitchcock film starring Ingrid Bergman)
I’m still off the road. I asked the mechanic what went wrong with my gearbox and he said “two million kilometres, mate”, which wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Milly wants to go down to our daughter’s, so that’s the weekend taken care of and I should be back in my truck by Tuesday. But will I have work? I bloody hope so!
If, like me before last week, you haven’t read Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper‘ (1892), then follow the link to Project Gutenberg, and go no further here until you have. I have the Penguin edition above, and made the mistake of reading Kate Bolick’s Introduction first, which took away all the tension.
So, this is the story, written in the first person present, of a woman suffering from a nervous condition, whose doctor husband takes her away to a rented house –
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house … but that would be asking too much of fate!
and then persuades her to take the large, sunny room on the top (third) floor, a former nursery, and maybe a gym when the house was for a while a school; rather than a smaller, more comfortable room on the ground floor.
All her husband, John’s, persuasions sound like orders. He is the physician. He has only her best interests at heart. He knows best about how to manage her foolish fears, and her doctor brother agrees.
So I take phosphate or phosphites – whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again… Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
The shabby wall-paper in her room, the wall-paper of the title, torn off in large patches by the schoolboys, is “repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow”, with one of “those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”
There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd unblinking eyes are everywhere.
The (unnamed) writer’s “work” is writing. We are reading a journal being kept in secret. Her husband does not want her to think about her illness; his sister, who is keeping house, believes it is writing which has made her sick.
Some weeks in to their three months long lease, we get the first hint of the problem developing:
I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.
She’s lonely in the house, her husband away all day and some nights doctoring; lonely and unoccupied, but he will not let her go on a visit to friends, she is not strong enough, and she breaks down in tears and does not make her case very well. He says “I must use my will and self control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.”
I know you have all read this, all feminists have, I’m sure, and it’s probably compulsory in American colleges; but I wanted to open up the detail in the order that Gilman does. Here we are on the ninth page of 16 with a text book case of depression, and she is being told to snap out of it. I am sorry that Psyche is not here to discuss it with me.
I am aware that ‘snap out of it’ was a common reaction till quite recently; and also that nineteenth century women were fearful, as the writer is, of being institutionalized. Jess White looked at this with Rosa Praed’s daughter in Hearing Maud. But I also seem to remember, in Australia’s early days, so, much earlier than this story, that the people around him were aware that John Macarthur’s mania and depression were an illness, and were treated as such.
As I say, we’re more than halfway along, when we see, “There’s one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.”
Bolick writes, Gilman’s “symbolic fictionalization of her own postpartum depression, shocked readers when it first appeared in 1892” and also led to the “forgotten masterpiece” being added, 80 years later, “to the then-nascent feminist canon” [which only adds to my belief that Australian women’s writing in the first half of the twentieth century was much more overtly feminist than US (or British) women’s].
The baby is only mentioned a couple of more times, and while that might be a clever device, leaving us to draw our own conclusions, there is in fact no evidence the depression began with the birth, or that Gilman herself understands – presumably without the terminology – she might be suffering postpartum depression.
The remainder of the story concerns the writer’s gradual descent into madness, brilliantly described, until in the last page or so she becomes her own worst nightmare, but, luckily for us, still writing.
.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings, Penguin, 2019. Introduction by Kate Bolick. The Yellow Wall-Paper first pub. 1892.
From the Penguin bio:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) married CW Stetson in 1884 and was almost immediately pregnant with a daughter. After the birth she “sank into a deep depression” which lasted several years. She spent some time in a sanatorium, taking a rest cure; got out; had a nervous breakdown; left her husband in 1888 and went to California “where her recovery was swift”. In the 1890s she began writing and lecturing. In 1894 she relinquished custody of her daughter to Stetson.
The Australian Legend 