Reading Notes: Where the Trees Were (Inga Simpson)

This review is my third from the Miles Franklin longlist. For earlier reviews, please see here:
The Easy Way Out
Hold

This is, in some ways, the most difficult book yet of the Miles Franklin bunch for me to review, because I am torn between wanting to praise it for its considerable virtues, and my unceasing irritation at one central stylistic device that kept pulling me out of the story over and over.

The book, like The Easy Way Out, tackles an issue that is of great interest to me and of great relevance to contemporary Australia (hence, one suspects, its landing on the MF list, which is supposed to prioritise books that speak to the Australian experience in some substantial way). While The Easy Way Out tackles assisted dying, Where the Trees Were takes on cultural appropriation within museology, and the argument for repatriation of cultural artefacts that belong to indigenous people.

It also uses this as a lens to talk to some extent about Australia's dismal history, and indeed contemporary situation, of mistreatment of indigenous people and culture, but strangely, given the scope, the book is much less about that than it could've been. Primarily, this is a story about growing up in the country in the same Australia, era-wise, as when I was doing my growing up in the city; about the losses that shape and mould an ordinary life; and about how the truths we learn in childhood are both powerful across our whole lives, and dreadfully unreliable in the wider world.

The central protagonist is Jayne - farmer's daughter; part of a crew of close-knit friends from surrounding properties and one from the town; and, later, museum curator in Canberra. The story is unusually rich in well-developed secondary characters - child/teen Jayne's friends, Kieran, Ian and Josh; adult-Jayne's partner, semi-spy Sarah; and Jayne's farmer parents, are all fully realised, complex people. The interplay between Jayne and her supporting cast is written beautifully and with a surety of touch that makes all the relationships feel authentic. I felt like I actually knew all these people by the novel's close, in a way that rarely occurs for books that have a single key protagonist.

There are many minor details in the book that feel unforced but are so resonant (to me, as an Australian who grew up in the same time period, albeit a different place). It is a book embedded in Australia - in chocolate bullets and illegal fireworks, in cycling in Canberra, in the Brindabella bushfires, even in the school texts under study (Jayne, like me, studied Z for Zachariah as her year 7 English text, a traumatising selection that I am still bemused by, as a generation of kids were introduced to the Coming Nuclear Apocalypse at the ripe old age of 12). I enjoyed this aspect of the book immensely - it's one of relatively few I have read that has related the period of my own adolescence in such seemingly casual but beautifully artful detail.

The plot itself concerns the existence on Jayne's family farm of a series of arboglyphs - tree carvings made by the Wiradjuri people to mark the gravesite of a fallen member. The arboglyphs' impact eddies throughout the book, affecting families and relationships, shaping Jayne's career choices, and, indirectly, leading to the most crushing of the traumas of the group's early teen years. It would not be untrue to say that Jayne becomes who she is because of the glyphs.

The pacing in the story works well on the whole, but the way in which it is accomplished brings me to my chief criticism (indeed, only significant one, but it's a biggie) of this novel - IT CHANGES POINT OF VIEW WITH THE ONE PROTAGONIST. By this I mean - Jayne remains the central subject throughout, but the book cuts between the storyline that occurs from the end of her primary schooling up until she leaves high school, which is told in the first person, and adult Jayne's storyline in Canberra, which circles around to meet up with the junior story and is told in the intimate third person. So when we're with 14-year-old Jayne, it's all "I did this and I saw that", then in the next chapter we're rocketed into "Jayne saw the door close behind the security guard" etc.

I am going to slightly belabour this point, because I think it matters. It seemed to me that Simpson is breaking one of the most basic rules of fiction writing (yeah, yeah, rules are made to be broken, but...) in not "agreeing in person", and unlike some other examples of rule-breaking I can think of, she doesn't get away with it.  I have read many a novel that head-hops and shares the POV successfully between multiple characters; I have even seen a person-POV change between different protagonists work, although less commonly (one example is Penni Russon's beautiful Only Ever Always, which has two mirror-protagonists who are usefully separated by the change from third to second person as we move between them.)

But not maintaining agreement in person for the same central protagonist is a serious irritant, as a reader. It drags you out of the story. It doesn't serve to emphasise the time gap between the two halves of the story (I assume that was the intention) - it just serves to create a sense of muddlement in the novel as a whole around what Jayne is trying to do and why, and indeed what the book is trying to do and why.

For me, the first-person POV is markedly more successful, and I think it would've translated extremely well into adult-Jayne's storyline (it's intimate third person as it is - we are never inside anyone else's head, just Jayne's). I feel this would've been a much more coherent, powerful novel without the POV flips, and first person would've been the best choice for the whole thing.

Overall? A good book; an interesting story, well-told, with a notable strong suit in character development, but let down from being the excellent book it could've been by its weird choice with POV. I give it 7/10.

Reading Notes: Hold (Kirsten Tranter)

This review is my second from the Miles Franklin Prize Longlist 2017. For my first review, of Steven Amsterdam's The Easy Way Out, see here.

I was interested in Kirsten Tranter's novel as soon as I read the precis, for one important reason: this book features a hidden / secret room device.

One of my most recurring dream tropes is that of the "found room". This is not an uncommon dream archetype, and has a range of possible meanings, but it's something that has permeated my dreaming life for many years.

In my dreams, I am usually in my own current house, or occasionally in the house I was brought up in. I discover a door in the wall of a familiar room - a door I have never noticed before. I go through and find an unexpected new room - sometimes it's tiny, airless and claustrophic, like a little boxroom, whereas sometimes it's a long low narrow room, like an enclosed sun-porch.

My reaction to finding the room varies, presumably depending on what Jungian symbolism my psyche is using to convey meaning at the time. These dreams are, however, always extremely vivid, and feel significant - they are less a jumble of sense impressions and more an assertion of truths absorbed subconsciously, trying to work their way up to the surface.

Although the hidden / found room in Tranter's novel is not a dream, it has a definite dreamlike quality to it, and its function in the story is both Jungian and (depending on your interpretation) Freudian. Hold is, at its heart, a story of life after loss, and coming to terms with grief; the found room occupies a central symbolic role in the journey of the protagonist to make some sense of, and begin to transition through, the past in which she is mired.

Hold is an intelligent, sensitive and only occasionally over-egged novel. The disparate elements are woven together skillfully to reinforce the overall affect, which is a combination of yearning, melancholy and detachment from life. That said, while Shelley, the book illustrator / designer protagonist, is detached, it is in a completely different way to The Easy Way Out's Evan. Shelley's emotional flatness is a response to, and is fuelled by, the opening event of the novel, which is the drowning death at Bronte Beach of her boyfriend Conrad.

The novel is slow to start - for me, it began to get really interesting only when Shelley and her new partner, the oily David (did NOT like him), have moved into their shared terrace house and Shelley has discovered a hidden room, accessible through a stiff door hidden in the wardrobe of the master bedroom, and started to connect the small, secret space with her own emotions. Three years after Conrad's death, Shelley is not over him, or her loss - Tranter does a very subtle and effective job of showing this, rather than telling - and the room becomes the locus of the part of her that is not past this experience and is holding on to Conrad, holding tightly and painfully, despite repartnering.

Where this book is most effective - and to be clear, I think it is, on the whole, very effective - is in the way it delicately connects the small, brooding room with Shelley's fixations around Conrad. The introduction of the character Kieran, with his striking physical resemblance to Conrad, could have felt contrived, but it's a testament to Tranter's skill that it doesn't - rather, it evokes a strangeness and lucid-dream quality that serves the novel's overall trajectory well. The weaving of the fracturing relationship with David, the almost other-wordly interactions with Kieran and the oddball artist neighbours Rob and Alicia, the subplots with stepdaughter Janie and old friend Tess, is done in sepia tones that adds enormously to the effect.

There are a few moments where Tranter does strain the friendship a little - the loop-closing with Tess is a bit forced, and the resolution to the neighbour plot sits a bit too pat for my taste. But the power of the closed room as a central device never wavers throughout the whole unfolding of the story. Quiet, dim, imbued with a breathing, waiting presence of its own, the room is a character in the story in its own right, and in many ways, the most important character of all to Shelley's eventual resolution.

The ending of the novel (this is not a spoiler, all the surprises are revealed long before this) has Shelley swimming in an ocean pool at a Sydney beach, the salt of it on her skin and in her eyes, and finally, her heart shaken free from the frozen limbo she's existed in since Conrad's death. It is a good ending, satisfying, fitting to the story. And it is a good novel; a very good novel, in fact. It well deserves to be on the Miles Franklin list, and I'd like to see it shortlist.

Score: 8/10
Would recommend for all adult readers

Online Book Club Reading Notes: The Easy Way Out (Steven Amsterdam)

The brand spanking new Online Book Club that I'm a part of convened for the very first time last night, with six out of the seven members able to make the chat.

It was a fantastic experience for me, and I hope for them. I love nothing better than a good dissection of a book, preferably with intelligent people who've read it, but physical book clubs have proven prohibitively challenging for me in the last 15 years, due to child-rearing / health / distance constraints.

Being able to participate in a wide-ranging and complex discussion *at my own desk* while my kids slept / prepared for bed was exactly what I needed, and I'm just annoyed that I didn't think of it years ago.

As a group, we've decided to use the Miles Franklin longlist as our guide, at least initially; we were all keen to read new Australian fiction and this seemed like a good place to find some. For our inaugural session, we settled on Steven Amsterdam's The Easy Way Out, a novel about assisted dying - partly because two of our members are nurses, and we thought the subject matter of the book could make for some interesting discussions.

The Easy Way Out is the story of Evan, a nurse who, as the book opens, has just commenced employment in a pilot program at Generically Named Made Up Hospital as a "dying assistant". The book's premise is that assisted dying has been legalised within strictly controlled circumstances, and that the hospital is rolling out one of the first such programs.

Evan is, as protagonists go, remarkably flat in his affect, and not particularly likeable at any time. (Some of our group members warmed up to him by the very end of the book, but the majority of us didn't). He has trouble with, ironically, both boundaries and attachment; his difficulty observing the hospital's protocols around the assisted deaths is counterpointed to his drifting, emotionally distant interactions with people in his private life. In particular, we were all at least annoyed, if not repulsed, by his apparent disinterest in the effect his actions have on his long-suffering partners, Lon and Simon - at least two of us (me being one!) were firmly of the view that Lon and Simon were much too good for Evan. The fact that they keep loving him and wanting him despite his apparent inability to really reciprocate is both a tender note in the book and a frustration.

The book provides ample explanation for why he is as he is - Evan suffered an extravagantly damaging childhood with his feckless, although very amusing and likeable, mother Viv. His father committed (unackowledged) suicide when Evan was 10, leading to a dislocated, always-moving, fractured youth for him. Indeed, the "damaging-childhood-inadequate-adulthood" motif is so strongly emphasised, it becomes one of several areas in which the book over-eggs itself. This heavy-handedness does not help the flow of the story, although it is easy to see how (and why) the author made the narrative choices he did. Evan's remarkable emotional flatness is hard to understand otherwise, and his actions almost inexplicable.

The narrative of the book weaves Evan's experiences working in the hospital program, and later, working with the illegal covert Jaspers group who assist at deaths that don't qualify for the hospital program's stringent conditions, with his personal crises. Viv, Evan's vibrant, selfish, but affectionate mother, has Parkinson's Disease, and is declining at a rate of knots - at the book's opening, she has not long relocated to a nursing home, and is chafing against it. Evan's relationship with Viv seems oddly muted for much of the book, but on the basis that actions speak louder than words, it's evident that Viv is the one person for whom he does feel something profound, and accepts his interconnectedness with her. He never abandons his responsibility to Viv, even at the end (no spoilers, but the end is either a let-down or a transformation, depending on who you ask).

On the whole, we felt as a group that the treatment of assisted dying as an issue was handled very clinically and not very completely. One of our group has worked as a palliative care nurse, and felt that there were many nuances and dimensions that the book missed or chose not to deal with (we did wonder if this was intentional though - was Amsterdam, himself a palliative care nurse, trying to make a point about how legalised assisted dying could change the way palliative care is delivered?)

The hospital program, and its manager Nettie, seemed distasteful in a way that we found hard to pin down, but when Evan moves on to working illegally with the Jaspers, our repugnance was much stronger - the unregulated deaths seemed, to all of us, like suicides with someone there to watch, and at least two of those who died would have been ineligible for "controlled" assisted dying for sound reasons. We also struggled with the issue of payment - the Jaspers are given "donations" by their clients, but there is a smell of mercenariness to the way this was handled that sat very uneasily with us.

Overall, we ended up giving the book 6-7/10 - averaging, it'd be 6.5. We thought it had some interesting ideas and posed some good ethical questions, but didn't really stick the landing in terms of exploring the full gamut of its own plot.

Did it perhaps start to go there at the end? Maybe it did. One of our members wrote, "I wonder if in the end, the author wanted to show that when death seems the logical option, it still may not be the most meaningful one", and I think that perhaps sums it up best of all.  Where the book succeeds, it succeeds on ethical philosophy grounds; where it fails, it fails because it vastly underplays the emotional content of human lives and deaths, and all that implies. At the end of the day, it's an interesting book, not a lovable one. I'd recommend it, with some reservations, but do I think it should win the Miles Franklin? No.

Reading Notes: Miles Franklin Longlist 2017

Well, it's been a very long time since I tried a prizelist reading challenge! I used to do them a lot, but then life was a thing that happened (see also: work; children; poetry).

I noticed today, however, that the Miles Franklin longlist for 2017 is out, so I had a look, and I have Thoughts about it. I'm not going to commit to doing a full longlist read, but as indicated below, I am going to have a stab at some of these at least. (I've put stars next to the ones I intend to try - 5 out of the 9).

It's a 9-book longlist this year, with several authors I know, which is always a nice surprise. There's 4 books by men and 5 by women, and it's a lily-white list, with no authors of colour represented. That this is a problem for the Miles Franklin as for other literary prizes, and has historically always been so, is fairly well noted, I think. There have been POC writers on the Miles Franklin list and it has been won by POC writers too - most recently by Michelle de Kretser in 2013 - but a simple list count shows the skew, and it's pretty profound.

I think it is intrinsically problematic, in a country like Australia, to have the biggest literary prize available being contested entirely by white writers in any given year. I know all the counter-arguments: that it's about quality, not identity; that there are more white than POC people in Australia and certainly way more white than POC writers etc etc etc. I still think those arguments are pretty patronising and disingenuous though. Who decides what's quality, and what lens do they bring to that? Who decides what styles are literary enough to deserve acclaim? What cultural biases do readers, even expert readers, bring to the table?

And, frankly, if it's the case that there are less books by POC writers available to select from - well, why is that? I don't buy the "nothing to do with me, it's a pipeline problem" approach often taken by employers with a diversity gap or prize committees. There is a feedback loop at play here. Recognising the power and worth of books by POC writers makes it more likely that future writers can get publishers interested in them; that they can get acclaim; that they can prise open the death grip of the literary elites on fictional work in this (and all Western) countries. It's the same argument as to why it's so vital that book reviewers in major publications expand their repertoire and make a point of boosting the signal for books by authors from under-represented groups (I very much include writers with a disability in here). Be the change you want to see in the world, people.

So, back to the actual list in front of us. Depending on your measure, it could be characterised as a thematically diverse-ish list, but there is a pretty strong thread of death / loss / end of life running through it - at least 5, and maybe as many as 7, of these titles are basically built around the meaning, consequences and emotions associated with the fate of all flesh.

The books are:

*1. Steve Amsterdam, The Easy Way Out: Which sounds interesting and is about the ethics of assisted suicide. The writer himself is a palliative care nurse.

*2. Emily McGuire, An Isolated Incident: On spec, this will be a tough one, being about a murdered woman. I have read McGuire's earlier books and liked them, so I'll try this one.

3. Mark O'Flynn, The Last Days of Ava Langdon: Apparently "The Last Days of Ava Langdon takes us into the mind of a true maverick", which means it's probably not for me.

*4. Ryan O'Neill, Their Brilliant Careers: This is a set of fictional biographies of made-up Australian writers and sounds like it could be deeply amusing. I'll bite.

5. Josephine Rowe, A Loving, Faithful Animal: This is the kind of aftermath-damage-of-war family novel that I usually don't like much, but YMMV of course.

6. Philip Salom,Waiting: A book about "two odd couples" this sounds like it might be quirky. I really don't tend to love quirky.

*7. Inga Simpson, Where the Trees Are: A kind of "you can never go back there again" book, from the sounds of it - memories of childhood bonds revisited in adulthood. These stories can be great, so I don't object to giving this one a whirl.

*8. Kirsten Tranter, Hold: Except for the pesky details part, this sounds a little bit like a more literary version of Ghost (albeit minus the pottery). But it does feature a found-rooom, which is one of my most recurring dream icons, so I am going to give it a try for that alone.

9. Josephine Wilson, Extinctions: A book about a retired professor who moves into a nursing home and finds new meaning in life. NO THANKS.

The shortlist will be announced in June and the prize itself in August / September. I'm going to try to read my nominated 5 before shortlist, then pick up any on the shortlist that I haven't picked before the prize. You gotta have goals, right?

Miles Franklin longlist

I'm over at Global Comment today doing a survey of the Miles Franklin longlist. I'm interested in your thoughts if you want to share them over there!

Reading Notes: Mateship with Birds

This review is a triple outcome for me - it forms part of my Australian Women Writers Challenge, my Stella Prize Challenge and my almost certainly unsuccessful attempt to read the Miles Franklin longlist before shortist announcement.

Carrie Tiffany's Mateship with Birds is a very illustrious book at the moment. Shortlisted for the Stella Prize, it has also found a place on the Miles Franklin longlist. (One other book has achieved this double feat - Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel). For me, it is the fifth of the 6 books on the Stella shortlist to be read (I'll shortly finish and review the last one, The Sunlit Zone) and third of the 10 books on the Miles Franklin longlist.

So I suppose the first question that I brought to this text was a fairly simple one -is the book as good as all that? Does it deserve to be on two prize lists at once? Is it a game changer in Australian literature?

My answers, now that I've read it, are: Probably; Probably; and No. It *is* a good book, no question - engaging and beautifully written and to me quite gentle (not a quality I was expecting from its blurb, which I feel does the book a disservice, hinting at darkness and twistedness that I just did not find in this story at all).

It has the rare (for me) distinction of being a book set exclusively in farming / small town Australia in the postwar period that isn't tired, overly reliant on "great brown land" cliches, or romanticised. I generally do not cotton to farming-life books and novels set in the postwar period to 1970s are without doubt the hardest to pull off, in my mind - perhaps because the aesthetic and voice is tremblingly close to our modernity, but not really of it.

The story is, plot-wise, extremely simple - farmer befriends single mother and her two children living next door, minor crises ensue, all is resolved in the final chapter. Within the constraints of this small plot,Tiffany manages to fully realise not just Harry (the farmer), Betty, her son Michael and her daughter Little Hazel, but also the natural world in which they live, and to make some fairly decent points about life, love, sex and growing up along the way.

One of the central themes - the one that's hyped in the publicity, which makes it sound salacious - is Harry's decision to share his wisdom about male sexuality with the teenage Michael. It would be possible to read this as threatening and vaguely wrong, but one of the book's greatest achievements is in allowing Harry to be quite explicit in what he says and writes without ever coming off as skeevy. The quasi-paternal relationship between the man and boy is sketched in few sentences and scenes, but somehow it's enough - combined with Harry's essential decency, which is underlined constantly - to make these communications seem poignant and a little sad. Harry, unlike the neighbouring farmer Mues, is never perceived as malignant or a threat, rather, in many ways, protective, kind and stumbling. His bird family diary, his care for his small dairy herd, his carefully doled out memories of happiness, illuminate him more clearly than any amount of interpersonal interaction could have.

Whether it's a *great* book ... I'm less sure on that count. Tiffany does really interesting things with her characters (Harry, in particular) and her linking theme of the kooaburra family, from the old bird watching book the title references, works extremely well as an elegant metaphor to tie the plot together. She does a lovely job writing a seemingly small story with large themes, but whether there are any earth-shatteringly new observations in it ... I'm reserving judgement on that.

Overall, should this book win the Stella? No - Sea Hearts and Like a House on Fire are definitely better books, and The Burial and Questions of Travel, in different ways, are both more innovative than this one. However, it is nonetheless a very good book, one I'd recommend, and shows yet again the incredible strength of the Stella list (and of Australian women's writing in general).

Reading Notes: Questions of Travel and The Burial

These reviews form part of my commitment to complete the Australian Women Writers Challenge in 2013 and to read the longlist for the 2013 Stella Prize.

When the Stella longlist was announced, two titles that I found intriguing were Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel and Courtney Collins' The Burial.

Having read both, I think my instinct was justified, although it must be said, these are two very different books, with distinct strengths and weaknesses.

I wondered whether it was wise to review them together, actually; it's not like they are in any sense narratively or stylistically linked. Where de Kretser's book sprawls, at over 500 pages, Collins' is tight and taut at just on 300.  Where de Kretser pulls off a magic trick with language and plot to engage the reader, almost against their will, with two characters of dubious likeability, Collins' protagonist is attractive enough that I was drawn into her story (and on her side) by page 10. Where Questions of Travel ambles, sometimes apparently without destination (although this, too, is a trick - there is always an endpoint in mind), The Burial charts a remarkably straight course from opening violence to concluding denouement. These are not the same kind of book, and so, in some ways, comparisons are invidious.

Nonetheless, having read them more or less on top of one another, some meta themes did jump out at me. Although boiling complex books down to simple statements is not really a good idea, I will go out on a limb at say that de Kretser's book asks, repeatedly, What is the point of living? What is an authentic life? while Collins' asks, even more reductively, Why do we struggle to live when living hurts so much? The characters, plots and devices that each writer chooses to explore their themes are fascinating, engaging, and in one case entirely successful, in the other mostly so.

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT
DO NOT READ PAST HERE IF YOU DO NOT WANT PLOT DETAILS

Questions of Travel is, it must be said, the absolute slowest starting book I have ever ended up liking. Normally, anything that has me saying "meh" at the quarter-way mark is going to end up consigned to the trash bin of literature for me. (To wit - Will Self's Umbrella. Ugh.) Using two characters as her lenses - Laura Fraser, an unattractive Australian child, then teen, then adult, and Ravi Mendes, a Sri Lankan boy who grows into an early nerd in the dawning of the Internet - de Kretser flipflops between the two in childhood, exposing unwantedness, discomforts and discoveries with a calm, measured, almost somnolent voice. There is no denying that de Kretser writes beautifully - her prose is luminous, it's pleasurable to read - but the lack of discernible plot, and my inability to care one iota about either Laura or Ravi, had me perilously close to giving up on this one at the 25% mark.

However, it started to come together for me once de Kretser (finally!) got Laura overseas and travelling. Her observations about the nature of travel - about what we do when we go places, what we're searching for - unfold slowly, but are all the richer for that. The interweaving of Ravi's story, with his discovery of the early Internet and his relationship to it, started to work very well for me. I particularly liked de Kretser's treatment of the online world and its relationship to meatspace - she manages to say something real without either reifying or decrying the changing ways in which people experience the world and travel.

The murder of Ravi's wife (a political activist) and young son explodes in the middle of this book like a bomb - despite some pretty heavy-handed flagging, I wasn't expecting it, and it shocked me into my first real emotional response to the book. The way in which de Kretser treats Ravi after that - his withdrawal, his asylum seeking time in Australia, his relationships to others - rang utterly and painfully true to me. His wife Malini's ghost, and that of his son, are always with Ravi and the book is unambiguous that they always will be. Some hurts don't heal.

Laura's (presumed) death at the end of the book, caught in the tsunami, affected me much less, because I still did not feel engaged with her as a character or as a person, even then. Much more than Ravi, I thought Laura was de Kretser's mouthpiece to say all the things she wanted to say. Her relationships with others - with her art professor / lover Charlie, her gay friend in London, her co-worker and friend Robyn at the travel publisher she ends up working at, her married lover Paul, her brother Cameron, her father, her landlord Carlo - are all Symbols of Something, in my mind. Each relationship, each travel experience, is used to underline the point: Laura's life is meaningless, but so is everyone's, so why do we bother? That sounds very grim, but actually de Kretser approaches it with real curiosity. Because clearly we *do* bother, and unpicking that is at the heart of her book.

The Burial is a much, much less crowded stage in terms of characters, even adjusted for length - it's basically the story of horse thief, abused wife and cattle rustler Jessie (based on a historical figure called Jessie Hickman), stockman Jack Brown (who is also Jessie's lover), police sergeant and dope addict Andrew Barlow, and, as a lesser but still present malevolent presence, Jessie's husband Fitz Henry, who she murders at the opening of the book.

The central narrative device of this book is one that utterly broke my heart but also connected me firmly to the story from the start. The text is narrated by Jessie's dead child, born prematurely after Jessie kills her husband and buried by her in a shallow grave because she thinks the little one cannot live. The child tells Jessie's story, and Jack Brown's, and Andrew Barlow's, but she tells more than that - she tells the story of the bones of the earth, of the tragedy of wanting to live even when life is pain, of the bush and the struggles it holds.

Unlike de Kretser's book, this one struck me as very Australian in its aesthetic, and not just because it's set in the bush (although that doesn't hurt, of course). Collins uses many turns of phrase, and patterns of speech, that mark the book as from here without being stiffly contrived about it. The plot is so simple - a dead run that goes Murder - Burial - Escape - Pursuit - Theft - More Pursuit - Capture - Escape? But it works and is very, very strong; a vision completely achieved, in my view.

So, bottom line, are they worth reading? YES, undoubtedly. I would recommend both to most readers, although I would caution people that Questions of Travel requires a commitment to pushing past a very, very slow start.

Shortlist verdict:

Yes for The Burial;
Maybe for Questions of Travel, depending on the strength of the rest of the list.

*UPDATE 27/3: Questions of Travel and The Burial were both shortlisted for the Stella, and Questions of Travel has also just been named on the longlist for the 2013 Miles Franklin Award. 

Reading Notes: Floundering

I had never heard of Romy Ash, or her debut novel, Floundering, before attending the Emerging Writers Festival last month and hearing her speak as part of the Writing About Difficult Issues panel. After the panel, I went downstairs and bought Floundering, along with the Festival's own publication, The Emerging Writer. If the EWF had given me nothing else (although it did - so, so much), the gift of being made aware of these two book would have been enough. Because The Emerging Writer, which I intend to review soon, is wonderful; and Floundering is still haunting me, two weeks after I swallowed it whole in one sleepless night.

I bought Floundering because, hearing Ash speak, it sounded like it might resonate with two of my key writing and reading interests - writing authentically in a child's voice, and writing trauma obliquely rather than explicitly. One of my absolute favourite books of the past 5 years is Emma Donoghue's Room, which takes on a myriad of social, cultural and abusive issues through the lens of a five-year-old boy who's lived his whole life inside a locked garden shed with his mother, herself imprisoned by her stranger-abductor. My own two completed novels, while not covering such significantly dark issues of trauma, are written in the voice of an 11 year old girl, Frankie. I wondered if Ash's 11-year-old protagonist, Tom, would be someone I could "hear" in the same way, and if his story would grip me tight, as Jack's did in Room.

I'm not going to do too much spoiling in this review, but the broad premise of the plot is the story of Tom, his 13-year-old brother Jordy, their mother, Loretta, their journey across Australia to end up at a remote caravan park by the beach, and what happened next. Tom is the only narrator; there is no shift in POV or voice, which is key, I think, to the successful winding up of the spell that this book casts.

I found Tom an intensely sympathetic and authentic character. Seeing events, people and crises through his eyes lent this ultimately quite sad story a sometimes unbearable layer of poignancy that I think may not have been there if an adult narrator was the voice. Because Tom is 11, there are things he relates without necessarily making the connection to meaning in the same way that an adult or a teen might; this adds a sense of menace, of impending danger just out of view, to the narrative. Tom's confusion, sweetness and half-despairing love for his deeply troubled mother give this tale of loss such a pathos, but also a kind of detached innocence that Loretta's voice, or even 13 year old Jordy's, wouldn't have.

There are many things I admire deeply in this book - its evocation of a certain very recognisable Australian aesthetic, its beautiful and never heavy-handed symbolism, its portrait of brokenness and survival and the terrible resilience of love, its stubborn presence even after seemingly unforgiveable betrayals. It is an achievement of no mean proportions that, despite sparing us nothing in her picture of Loretta as an unstable and ultimately neglectful mother, Ash doesn't allow the reader to quite hate her or demonise her; rather, for all her feckless damaging missteps, we feel for her, just as her sons do.

The anti-hero of the book is a character about whom I want to say very little, because I am so deeply conflicted about his role in the story. I realise that Ash wants us to see complexity and nuance in him also, and has deftly painted it there for us to see, but, possibly due to the lens I bring to this (and any) book involving children, I do not see him as less than monstrous. Human, yes, but a monster all the same, and my largest problem with Loretta was that her actions brought her sons into his orbit.

I found the final few chapters of the book, with Jordy and Tom's ultimately ill-fated effort to save the gummy shark (the unspoken stand-in for the marooned mother that they may never be able to save), to be absolutely tragic. The ending was inevitable, but still deeply, deeply sad, and I read the conclusion with tears in my eyes.

This is a powerful book, a beautiful book, a book that stays with you for a long time and simmers away. I highly recommend it, only not if you're feeling fragile; it will demand an emotional investment of you, and it will hurt your heart a little, in the way that true tragedies do.