The Mary Smokes Boys

‘I have just finished reading The Mary Smokes Boys by Patrick Holland, which impressed me no end. This is only Holland’s second novel but I am prepared to bet he will become one of our most significant writers over the next decade.

His style is arresting and original; it reminds me most of Cormac McCarthy, but is distinctly Australian. It’s literary but plot-driven. It’s slow and understated yet powerful. His use of landscape - not just the lyrical description but the deep embedding in plot and character -  brought a tear to my eye in the first few pages:

“Without the cemetery was rolling yellow grassland where felled and windthrown timber was scattered amidst spare, ringbarked trees” (19).
Grey’s mother dies in childbirth, and his father is mostly lost to drink, or working the fences somewhere far away. Grey has his little sister, Irene. They have each other.

The small town of Mary Smokes is in the Brisbane Valley, between the D’Agular Range and Brisbane. It’s beautiful but harsh country, and on the decline. The Mary Smokes boys wander wild across the landscape late at night, particularly along Mary Smokes Creek. Grey becomes one of them and, inevitably, they get up to mischief.

As grown men, not much has changed, though the town is changing about them. Irene is grown, too, and beautiful. Grey’s father makes a foolish choice, one that forces Grey on to bigger risks. A chain of events begins which, although at first unseen, will have terrible consequences.
The creek dries up, development spreads, and the Mary Smokes boys start to look more lost than wild. Irene is the wildest of all, and her connection to the fragile landscape palpable:

“She claimed she could see paths lit for her in the deepest corners of the woods. It was true she seemed to have a map and compass always in her mind, even of country she had not seen. She never became lost or frightened, no matter how far she walked, no matter how late. She knew how to follow the creeks and she knew by the shape of the country where they would lie, like one who had spent years there. She knew the stairways of granite and exposed tree roots in the mountains; the lie of lost and forgotten cemeteries; the wild mulberry bushes and wild orange trees where she harvested fruit in its season” (65).
 
Irene walks at night, too, and Grey’s fierce protectiveness of her, as she moves into adulthood, threatens his friendship with best mate, Eccleston. Something between them seems off-kilter, but is it?

The relationships between Grey, Irene and Eccleston, are beautifully rendered and compelling. I really enjoyed this haunting, Gothic take on the Australian rural novel, particularly its depiction of a community on the decline and young, masculine friendships. The landscape is an amphitheatre for it all, the drama playing out across its vast spaces.

Holland’s first novel, The Long Night of the Junkmailer (UQP) won the 2006 QLD Premier’s Award for best unpublished manuscript, and was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize.  The Mary Smokes Boys is published by Transit Lounge. There’s another book on the way in 2011, Riding the Trains in Japan: Travels in Supermodernity, and a collection of short stories later this year: The Source of the Sound. He is a writer to watch, no doubt.’

Inga Simpson Notes from Olvar Wood www.ingasimpson.com.au

‘Patrick Holland's beautiful, beautiful second novel, The Mary Smokes Boys, is a tale that transports you through its realisation of place and its genuinely affecting story of love (for brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers). And yes, for a language as pure and magical as I have read in a long time. Grey North is aged just ten when his mother dies in childbirth. Her baby daughter survives the tragic event and is given her mothers name in tribute: Irene. The bond between Grey and Irene is inseparable, and with a journeyman father (who is an alcoholic to boot), the siblings have by no means an easy childhood. They also inhabit a community which the wider society all but ignores; it's just a pitstop on Southern Queensland's Western Highway: blink and you miss it. Through one of the North's neighbours, Eccleston, Grey soon joins the rough 'n' ready 'Mary Smokes Boys'. Their adventures – normal adolescent larking-about as well as those of a darker, riskier hue – form the backbone of this novel. There are echoes of Jon Bauer (featured in this issue) here in Holland's ability to inhabit these wonderfully realised young characters, and I also thought of Chris Womersley's The Low Road in that a sense of foreboding is never far away. But Holland is out on his own when it comes to his descriptions of the flora and fauna of the region's natural world – this surely stands as some of the best nature writing this country has produced. Finally, a larger theme Holland addresses isan existential one; namely what is the status of faith and hope in the vanishing world of country Australia, as our metropolises expand ever outwards, and small towns stay only barely viable? A major work from a writer I had not known of before,
but cannot help but think has a substantial career ahead of him!’

Martin Shaw Readings Newsletter, August 2010.

‘Grey North lives in the small town of Mary Smokes, outside of Brisbane. Grey’s mother dies giving birth to his little sister, Irene, and from this traumatic event the novel, and Grey’s character, emerges. On the night his mother dies, there is a cruel juxtaposition – fireworks and the delighted squeals of children on show rides, while Grey has just found his mother bleeding on the floorboards. His relationship with his sister begins as one of resentment, later turning to protection and attachment, as she begins to more resemble the mother he has lost.

Grey becomes involved with the boys he used to watch at night, the ones his mother called the ‘Wild Boys’, as he imagines the ‘nights of the wild boys charged with secret meaning’. He becomes close to the half-Aboriginal boy Eccleston. Grey’s father is a drunk and a failure, and Grey has no concept of the ‘heritage’ his grandmother speaks about. The past, for him, is just his mother.

Patrick Holland’s sentences are tight yet lyrical – swift, like the passing of time in this novel. Soon Grey is in his twenties and a severe kind of attachment has formed between him and his sister, Irene. This is a novel about a very small group of isolated people who have gone through trauma, change and loss, and so cling to each other – seeming casual, carefree about it at times; and at other times openly intense – desperate to hold on. The depth of their attachment is often uncomfortable for the reader, but this is because Holland never tells you too much. He gives space for the reader to interrogate the characters’ motives.

Though the novel is set in contemporary times, it feels old-fashioned, in the best possible way, and this is suitable to the themes of change, and loss. The town of Mary Smokes transforms - bulldozers, roads, shopping malls. But there is a continuance of quiet and space – an old drive-in theatre, a meteor shower, a desolate service station late at night, a paddock full of horses, the river. It also feels more like the American West, than the outback, at times – but beautifully so, in the tradition of American Gothic – in the vein of literature and film of insular, struggling, dramatically-charged lonely towns and people.

For some of the book, you are galloping along with the characters, but their issues keep resolving themselves, and you wonder, where is it all going? But you’ve forgotten about a few little plot points Holland has thrown out, and they all come together in a devastating climax. Along the way, there are incidents of theft, gambling, longing, fights, sickness, survival, narrow escapes, protection, and standing up for someone. The conflict is quick and constant, almost episodic, and if I had any qualm it would just be that I would have benefited from more clues, earlier on, that bigger struggles, and changes, were afoot – but the writing and characters were certainly enough to keep me glued. The ending is unexpected, but you do feel that Grey, who as a child was ‘moved swiftly to tears and violence’, and his story, could not have resolved any other way.
I think about a book like Philipp Meyer’s American Rust, in terms of some of the setting and themes – friendship, violence, isolation and most definitely changes over time, and transience; combined with the insular, things-only-getting-worse, narrative of something like the Coen Brothers’ film A Serious Man; but with selective and beautifully rendered features of Australianness, like in Matthew Condon’s The Trout Opera - features which are contemporary, but, as said before, the novel as a whole feels old-fashioned. The closest thing I’ve read recently, out in September, is Chris Womersley’s Bereft, which would make a nice companion. Together, they seem to point to a sort of new Australian Gothic – moody, contained Australia-set novels.

This is Holland’s second novel, after The Long Road of the Junkmailer (UQP), which was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, South East Asia Region, and won other awards. Holland grew up in outback Queensland and, as evident in the skilled descriptions of the horses and their handling in the novel, worked as a horseman in the Maranoa district and a ringer in the top end. He has traveled, studied and been published widely. I look forward to reading more from him.’

Angela Meyer Byron Bay Echo

The Well in the Shadow

‘Pick of the Week'
‘CHESTER Eagle, whose works include Mapping the Paddocks, does not claim to be a professional literary critic. What he offers is the writer’s view, a writer onfellow writers. His selection runs from Henry Handel Richardson to Alexis Wright (a major thread being indigenous writing's response to colonisation), incorporat­ing Patrick White, Judith Wright, Hal Porter — as well as lesser-known figures such as Barnard Eldershaw. The tone is conversational, the language accessible, the observations astute. His essay, based on two interviews with George Johnston's brother Jack, who didn't think much of My Brother Jack, looks at the disjunction between actuality and invention. Another theme, the writer and society, of writers responding to what is important  to them and “recording the inner life of their society”, is pertinent to a sales-driven world.’

Steven Carroll The Age, Saturday June 19

‘That old Sydney-Melboume divide! Eagle, a writer hardly known in Sydney, was a joint-winner of The Age Book of the Year award for nonfiction back in 1985 for a work of autobiography. Who today remembers Mapping the Paddocks? Anyway, this is a writer writing about other writers.

It is not high-contemporary literary criticism but rather a chatty, high-end "Book Club discussion" kind of book.

The author acutely aware of the problems of creative writing, looks across a broad spectrum of Australian literature (from Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony through Patrick White's Voss and A Fringe of Leaves to Murray Bail's Eucalyptus and Helen Garner's Monkey Grip and, writing in a breezy, conversational manner, offers astute
observations and insights.’

Bruce Elder Sydney Morning Herald, 17-18 July 2010

Iran My Grandfather

‘IF, LIKE me, you are new to or utterly ignorant of the history of Iran, then you will find Ali Alizadeh's Iran: My Grandfather an enthralling survey of this proud and puzzling nation's past hundred years. If you enjoy a readable story about one man's life in a faraway time and place, then this book will satisfy. And if you want an eye-opening account of human endurance in generations of one family through times of polit­ical tumult then Alizadeh provides it in this heartbreaking, elegant work.

Recent turmoil in Iran has captivated and horrified the world, but many of us are ignorant of much that has preceded it, including the several revolutions that convulsed the country in the 20th century. Iranian-born, now Australian but mourning his "homelessness", poet and novelist Alizadeh tells the story of his grandfather, Salman Fuladvand.

He was a police officer and intellectual who, through his lifetime, had to deal with not only the practical exigencies of life through a succession of regimes, but who was at one point caught in the political machinations, personally escorting the hero-turned despot “King of Kings” Reza Shah into custody upon his final disgrace, and shortly afterward, the Shah’s son Mohammad to his coronation ceremony.
Through a dramatisation of this man's life, we watch as political idealism turns to doctrinaire ideology and democratic protest becomes a Trojan horse for enabling oppression of the people themselves. It is an astonishing and cautionary tale.

The author portrays his grandfather in a series of vivid vignettes. As these include scenes of argument with his wife, post-coital argument with his mistress and seditious
argument with his best friend, it's clear that the grandson has taken imaginative yet unsentimental liber­ties with this avatar. However, issues of authenticity are side-lined by the vigour of the writing, which includes some deft "info-dumps" presented as dialogue, and the immense commotion of the political background. Interspersed between Fuladvand's own stories are cogent historical accounts that fill in the caesuras of the narrative.

Deadpan and yet clenched with outrage, these brief essays recount how Iran, the proud inheritor of Persian culture, overturns its feudal monarchy in 1905 with the Constitutional Revolution and sets itself upon a hundred years of transformation. A new era is set to begin in which women's rights are championed and democracy will flourish. It doesn't happen; thus, in 1921, brigade general Reza Khan mounts a coup and installs himself as leader of a more secular, enlightened government. In time, Khan himself grows corrupt and vindictive; assassinations are common and the young Fuladavand finds himself fighting for the force of good as police lieutenant in what seems a wicked administration. Khan, Shah, is deposed during WWII as the Germans and British tussle over oil-rich and strategic Iran; his son's installation heralds another hopeful beginning – one in which Fuladvand soon suffers in a demonstration of the new ruler's zeal for justice.

Fuladvand, disillusioned, eventually retires from public life. His country, however, continues on its  fantastical spiral through ironies: overt support from the United States for a corrupt administration; the overturning through CIA machinations of a democratic, liberal government; the Shah who believes his own legend as beloved saviour of the nation even as the people starve; the country careening between the plots of shady international forces and the malign clergy, who come to represent "the voice of the people" and whose power culminates in the appalling regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Alizadeh’s icy accounting of this man's outrages against his country is the most powerful part of the book as he tells of absolute theo­cracy and the hideous hubris of the Iran-Iraq war in which a million people were killed.

One of the more thought-provoking and timely themes of the book is the wearing of the burqa, banned by various governments as an instrument of women's liberation; enforced by others as a symbol of the people's will.

As Salman Fuladvand's mistress Zahra notes savagely, "There's always a bunch of arrogant men sit­ting in a palace or a mosque scheming about what women should or shouldn't wear. It all sounds so stupid to me."

Iran: My Grandfather is a compelling voyage into the personality of a country of paradoxes. Alizadeh offers poignant lens on the desire for dignity, and the awful means by which a nation yearns for betterment even as it sacrifices its own.’

Kate Holden The Age, Saturday July 3

 ‘THE West may have glimpsed hope for change in the protests and horrifying turmoil that followed last year's disputed presidential election in Iran.For Iranian-born Australian poet and novelist Ali Alizadeh, it was an emotionally exhausting time. But Alizadeh, a boy during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, told me then that the protesters didn't seem to want an end to the regime, only a less rabid version of it.

``I can't imagine any possibility for real change, let alone a revolution, for as long as religion remains to be the defining factor in contemporary Iranian identity, and for as long as identity remains so central to political thinking. It would be interesting if the focus changed to, say, rights, or justice,'' he said.

Alizadeh, whose semi-autobiographical novel The New Angel told of a boy torn from his homeland as it was being torn apart, has now written a powerful ``creative nonfictional'' account of Iran's collapse into tyranny over 100 years.

As he mourns his ``homelessness'' in a new land, Alizadeh's only image of Iran is a tattered photo of his maternal grandfather Salman Fuladvand in his World War II uniform. Salman's life will be his ``compass for sailing through the storms of the world, and an abacus for measuring the pros and cons of being human''.

The son of a provincial governor and feminist, the proud Persian intellectual's story echoes that of 20th century Iran from its drive for modernity, democracy and secularism to a dramatic fall and seclusion. For Iran, there is also the story of Western interference to control its oil and strategic East-West corridor, its corrupt shahs' cruel regimes and its descent into religious fanaticism and the mullahs' reign of terror.

Alizadeh places Salman on the sidelines of history, firstly as an enthusiastic champion of Shah Reza Khan's reforms. As a police chief, he wins honour battling extremist tribes in the mountains. But ordered in Tehran to hunt down and force women to remove their veils seen by progressives as a device of sexism and superstition imposed by mediaeval Arab invaders he receives a prophetic warning. ``One day the people of Islam shall have their revenge,'' cries one woman in her shame.

Salman's story unfolds alongside concise historical accounts. Reza Khan is deposed during World War II when ``he intends to take Iran to war on the side of that despicable travesty of a cannibal, Adolf Hitler'' and his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi claims the Peacock Throne. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh is overthrown in a CIA-orchestrated coup for daring to suggest that Iranian oil should benefit Iranians rather than the West. And, with an increasingly shaky hold on power, the erratic ``King of Kings'' Mohammad Reza Shah unleashes his sadistic secret police on ordinary Iranians until he is overthrown by Ayatollah Khoemini in 1979.

Meanwhile, Salman, who had comforted the young shah on the way to his coronation, is thrown into prison, ``to bring the wrongdoers of his father's regime to justice''. He finds refuge in the poetry and simple, accepting life of a Sufi and on his release retires from public life.
On his deathbed, he implores his daughter Suri to raise her future family in a land where there is no God.
``I thought we had saved Iran,'' he tells her. ``But we only made things worse . . . We turned our enemies into monsters. And the monsters are coming back now. They'll burn Iran.''’

Carlene Ellwood Sunday Tasmanian, July 5 2010


‘This fascinating and beautifully written book Iran: My Grandfather by Ali Alizadeh tells the history of Iran from the perspective of the author's grandfather. The author has woven a poetic tale encompassing his grandfather's story told as a novel gleaned from information he has learned about him, interspersed with the country's factual history. Ali tells the tragic story of a nation which see-sawed between "westernism" and "Islamic fundamentalism" as well as the consequences of "outside" influences resulting in the country as it is today. The reader can wonder "what might have been" with the different changes along the way. Ali migrated to Australia with his family when he was about 14 in the 1990s. We will likely be reading more from this writer.’ http://wine-giggles.blogspot.com/2010/07/iran-my-grandfather.html

‘Another enjoyable read is Ali Alizadeh’s Iran, My Grandfather, which blends the genres of memoir, fiction and historical account as it reconstructs the story of Alizadeh’s grandfather, Salman Fuladvand, a police chief, provincial governer and emancipist under one of the late Shahs. Through Salman’s perspective the complexities of Iran’s history of revolution, fundamentalism, modernity, war and tyranny are realised. The book is striking also for it’s intrepid description of the writer being cast adrift in the cultural wasteland of homogenised white Australia. I can very much relate to Ali, when he writes of not-belonging.’

Michelle Cahill http://michellecahill.com

New and Rediscovered

‘Viidikas is an Australian author of Estonian extraction who lived from 1948-1998. This volume is a chronological compilation of her poems, stories, nonfiction fragments and illustrations. Her writing is distinctively localized in its frequent references to Balmain and Darlinghurst. However, she is also preoccupied with foreign countries, particularly India, which she portrays as exotic and alluring yet intrinsically ‘other’ – a place she admires but does not belong in. Several other themes recur in her work, among them the role of the female artist, sex as a transaction rather than a form of intimacy, and drug-use. Many of her stories take place in grimy inner-city  apartments populated by aspiring writers who subsist on cigarettes, cheap wine and drugs. Viidikas is concerned with those who exist on the fringes: addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals and abusive men afraid to probe too deeply within themselves. She is profoundly non-judgemental, however, frankly exposing the foibles of her characters with wry understanding. The seediness of Viidikas’s subject matter is part of her appeal. However, in her poetry one sees a different side to her as a writer – the poems are crisp and pellucid with imagery that exposes the beauty of nature. This book is recommended for those with an interest in Australian urban literature. **** An excellent book.’

Leonie Jordan, Bookseller and Publisher May 2010

‘For Vicki Viidikas, life and writing were inextricable. She spun her writing out of the life she lived. She wrote and travelled endlessly, up and down the coast of Australia from Melbourne to Mullumbimby, through Thailand, India, Israel, England, France and Greece. In part it was the hippy trail, an ongoing search for experience, excess and enlightenment. She empathized with the varieties of religious experience she encountered, while remaining detached. She did a lot of drugs. She followed the path of the wandering troubadour. It is an honorable tradition. Arguably, it is the true tradition.

This makes it sound too abstract. Vicki’s writing was always vivid and precise, focusing on the telling detail, on the sharp-eyed observation. From the control-freak cocaine dealer in his waterside apartment to the menacing yet alluring Indian monkey-man, she could summon up situations of extraordinary power and subtlety.
Like the great jazz singers she so admired, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, Vicki’s voice is always recognizable, always effortless. There is nothing that sounds rehearsed or over-produced. She aimed for spontaneity. ‘Trying to catch the voice’ she calls one piece. To call her a stylist is misleading – or so she would no doubt have thought. Her whole project was to be free of affectation, of manner, of precedent. But her clarity, her directness, her visionary evocations and surreal connections have the characteristic note of an assured, spare, vividly colorful modernism. You do not achieve spontaneity like Vicki’s without years of commitment.

Vicki emerged as a writer in the mid nineteen-sixties. She chronicles the era of what seemed at the time like liberation, one of the first to record the sexual and drug revolution. She eagerly seized the opportunity to record what had rarely been written about explicitly before, a world of gays, lesbians, prostitutes, rapists and their victims, drug-dealers and their junky clients. These are sketches from the life, not narratives manufactured for commercial gain or propagandist agenda. Vicki presented no agenda: other than the agenda of the clear-eyed writer, the Isherwood ‘I am a camera.’ There were precedents, of course: Rimbaud, Anna Kavan, Leroi Jones, and she knew their work. Like every serious writer, she read widely and intensely.

She follows on from D. H. Lawrence in her portrayal of the crackling tensions of  male-female relationships. She vividly portrays a remorseless parade of unsatisfactory men, like the awful Austrian dope-freak in India, concerned only with procuring the best hash, the young village boy in Crete whose possessiveness turns to violence, and the casual pick-ups after a party in Sydney or a carnival in Paris.

Thirty-five years after they were written, her searing attacks on male self-involvement and overall unsatisfactoriness still make me flinch. No doubt they should, since a couple were written at me. Not written for me, or to me, but confrontationally at me. Writing was part of an on-going dialogue with the world for Vicki and other writers of the 1970s. Pre-dating blogs and the web, it was a direct and instant medium of exchange, inviting rapid response. We used to respond to each other’s stories and poems with stories and poems in reply. It was not a matter of manufacturing a product and marketing it. Of course, some were doing that and have been most successful. But that was a world for which Vicki had nothing but scorn.

New and Rediscovered is a marvellous selection from her stories, sketches, and poems, together with an extract from her still unpublished novel, Kali and the Dung Beetle. It is a compelling experience. The poems, sharp, fluent and accessible, can be read like sketches. And the sketches build up a memorable portfolio of the Bohemian underbelly of the twentieth century. Arranged pretty well chronologically, the selection has its inexorable narrative development, the drugs getting harder, the sexual partners getting younger, the writer getting older. Though not that old. She was just 50 when she died in 1998.

Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives has achieved cult status with its portrayal of young Latin-American writers in their pursuit of sex, drugs and literature in the 1970s. With this  selection from the work of Vicki Viidikas, the publisher of Transit Lounge, Barry Scott, has assembled the materials for a cult native to our own culture. Vicki would have been wryly amused. But with that puckered smile of satisfaction. It was worth it, after all, despite the cost. But it was at a cost, and she paid the price.’

Michael Wilding, Sydney Morning Herald  15 May 2010

‘Publisher and editor Barry Scott has arranged Vicki Viidikas's work in chronological fashion so we are able to follow the trajectory of her troubled life. The poems and short stories, both published and unpublished, of this anthology reflect an omnivorous spirit who lived a peripatetic existence for many years. In The Snowman in the Dutch Masterpiece, a beautiful woman lives with a wealthy drug dealer who tells her she is mad to write because there is no bread in it. She considers the cockroaches and rejection slips, but simply cant abide the alternative life of conformity. The same character, in a variety of guises, greedy for life, for love, for words, wanders in and out of Viidikas's work. In Greasy Copper and the Adventure, Viidikas makes a joke of her crazy, dangerous night in Bangkok looking for drugs. But you fear for her. Many poems go beyond the corporeal, the sex and the drugs, and reach out for the unreachable, but in A View of the Map we are told "there is no compass". Viidikas is usually identified as one of the Sydney-based generation of 1968 poets. She was certainly one of our best. She died too soon, in 1998, aged 50. But perhaps that is the way it was always going to be for our very own Jack Kerouac, our sad and blighted poet.’

Dianne Dempsey The Age, Saturday May 29 2010

‘For Vicki Viidikas, life and writing were inextricable. She spun her writing out of the life she lived. She wrote and travelled endlessly, up and down the coast of Australia from Melbourne to Mullumbimby, through Thailand, India, Israel, England, France and Greece. In part it was the hippy trail, an ongoing search for experience, excess and enlightenment. She empathized with the varieties of religious experience she encountered, while remaining detached. She did a lot of drugs. She followed the path of the wandering troubadour. It is an honorable tradition. Arguably, it is the true tradition.

This makes it sound too abstract. Vicki’s writing was always vivid and precise, focusing on the telling detail, on the sharp-eyed observation. From the control-freak cocaine dealer in his waterside apartment to the menacing yet alluring Indian monkey-man, she could summon up situations of extraordinary power and subtlety.
Like the great jazz singers she so admired, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, Vicki’s voice is always recognizable, always effortless. There is nothing that sounds rehearsed or over-produced. She aimed for spontaneity. ‘Trying to catch the voice’ she calls one piece. To call her a stylist is misleading – or so she would no doubt have thought. Her whole project was to be free of affectation, of manner, of precedent. But her clarity, her directness, her visionary evocations and surreal connections have the characteristic note of an assured, spare, vividly colorful modernism. You do not achieve spontaneity like Vicki’s without years of commitment.

Vicki emerged as a writer in the mid nineteen-sixties. She chronicles the era of what seemed at the time like liberation, one of the first to record the sexual and drug revolution. She eagerly seized the opportunity to record what had rarely been written about explicitly before, a world of gays, lesbians, prostitutes, rapists and their victims, drug-dealers and their junky clients. These are sketches from the life, not narratives manufactured for commercial gain or propagandist agenda. Vicki presented no agenda: other than the agenda of the clear-eyed writer, the Isherwood ‘I am a camera.’ There were precedents, of course: Rimbaud, Anna Kavan, Leroi Jones, and she knew their work. Like every serious writer, she read widely and intensely.

She follows on from D. H. Lawrence in her portrayal of the crackling tensions of  male-female relationships. She vividly portrays a remorseless parade of unsatisfactory men, like the awful Austrian dope-freak in India, concerned only with procuring the best hash, the young village boy in Crete whose possessiveness turns to violence, and the casual pick-ups after a party in Sydney or a carnival in Paris.
Thirty-five years after they were written, her searing attacks on male self-involvement and overall unsatisfactoriness still make me flinch. No doubt they should, since a couple were written at me. Not written for me, or to me, but confrontationally at me. Writing was part of an on-going dialogue with the world for Vicki and other writers of the 1970s. Pre-dating blogs and the web, it was a direct and instant medium of exchange, inviting rapid response. We used to respond to each other’s stories and poems with stories and poems in reply. It was not a matter of manufacturing a product and marketing it. Of course, some were doing that and have been most successful. But that was a world for which Vicki had nothing but scorn.

New and Rediscovered is a marvellous selection from her stories, sketches, and poems, together with an extract from her still unpublished novel, Kali and the Dung Beetle. It is a compelling experience. The poems, sharp, fluent and accessible, can be read like sketches. And the sketches build up a memorable portfolio of the Bohemian underbelly of the twentieth century. Arranged pretty well chronologically, the selection has its inexorable narrative development, the drugs getting harder, the sexual partners getting younger, the writer getting older. Though not that old. She was just 50 when she died in 1998.

Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives has achieved cult status with its portrayal of young Latin-American writers in their pursuit of sex, drugs and literature in the 1970s. With this  selection from the work of Vicki Viidikas, the publisher of Transit Lounge, Barry Scott, has assembled the materials for a cult native to our own culture. Vicki would have been wryly amused. But with that puckered smile of satisfaction. It was worth it, after all, despite the cost. But it was at a cost, and she paid the price.’

Michael Wilding Sydney Morning Herald, 15 May 2010

In-Human

‘In Tasmania’s Oatlands, teenager Sally Hunter is becoming painfully aware of her new body and blossoming sexuality. But this is not an everyday tale of adolescence: Sally’s form and world is stretched and changed by her transformation into a werewolf, something unexpected, beautiful and bloody. The antithesis of Twilight’s sparkles and whimsy, Anna Dusk’s visceral writing style captures the reader like no other, with all the gore and brutality of death and murder coming to light as Sally unleashes her new self on the town.

Both poetic and gritty, the characters’ laconic speech and the way time and reality are twisted with Sally’s new outlook come together and bring you immediately into her life. In her dysfunctional family, her mother is drinking herself blind to Sally’s changes. Her friends are saturated with desire, and some are possibly hiding secrets of their own. Dusk’s talent for immediacy vividly portrays Sally’s initial confusion and sickness, and later, the eventual acceptance and love she has for her new form. Visually striking and undeniably confronting, In-human is an incredible read.’

Fiona Hardy Readings Newsletter April 2010

‘Welcome to Oatlands, Tasmania, home of the femme-werewolf apocalypse. Sixteen-year-old Sally Hunter is seriously pissed off and she’s turning into a powerful ‘monster dog’, a werewolf with one hell of an appetite for flesh — human or animal and a growing se*ual appetite to match. A lot of people are disappearing, gruesomely murdered or eaten but who is responsible for all the carnage?

In what frequently reads like prose poetry, Dusk imagines herself right through every aspect of the anguish of ‘transformation’ and beyond, tackling a number of taboos as she goes — menstruation, sexually violent women, cannibalism, nihilism — to name a few. Her paintings, featured in the book’s cover artwork, also depict a disturbing, confronting story of the awakening of what lies within. She’s been inside the guts and psyche of ‘the beast’ and portrays its heightened sensory perceptions, its lust for the kill, its pain, its joys, its dreams.

There are moments of distilled beauty and home truths here but this is no simplistic, pretty coming of age story. Horror fans accustomed to dark humour and unrelenting rampages of gore should enjoy but the squeamish, those offended by details of bodily functions, graphic violence, sex or obscenities probably won’t. *** (three stars – a good book as per Bookseller+Publisher ratings system)’

Paula Grunseit 2010  This review from Bookseller+Publisher magazine (March 2010, Vol 89, No 6) was first published by Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © 2010, Thorpe-Bowker.

Evil with an Honest Edge
‘The dust jacket’s promotion of In-human as ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer meets Catcher in The Rye’ certainly appealed to this Gen-X-reader, who was further intrigued to discover that this was a text about a teenage werewolf, set in Oatlands, written by an enfant terrible of the Australian literary scene.

Her expectations of a subversive and literary answer to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series were put on hold within the first few pages, however when she was met with a disconcertingly surreal first-person narration littered with all the signs of a grunge novel …While this style was undoubtedly a ploy used deliberately by author Anna Dusk to present the protagonist’s physical and moral descent while becoming a werewolf, the effect is at times disorienting and even (deliberately) nauseating. This descent took so long to occur that this reader was left feeling a little woozy. When the action finally hotted up and the young werewolf began her trail of devastation, she took a while to catch up.

At the risk of sounding like I missed the point, I’ll happily admit to finding it hard to like the characters … I could, however, appreciate the dark humour in the characterisation and give the author kudos for playing with some brave and interesting ideas. Even though the novel is written in the first person, Dusk avoids sanitising or sentimentalising her monster in the manner we are accustomed to because of the slew of ‘kind vampire and ‘misunderstood monster’ texts that saturate the market. There is that in her depiction of evil that is brutally honest and very important given the nature of the crimes that are constantly reported in our daily newspapers.

The gothic artwork on the cover, also produced by talented debutante Dusk, is noteworthy for its raw and powerful nature (although perhaps needs to come with a warning about its graphic nature).

Despite the content, there is some poetry to be found in the writing style and there are some lingering and intriguing questions that remain unanswered at the end of this text – presumably to be explored in the sequel.’

A. Forward, Sunday Tasmanian April 11 2010

Toby Says:
‘For another look at female werewolves, Anna Dusk’s In-human is mindblowing. Great gutsy female heroine, but also a lyrical style and all set in Tasmania.’

http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2010/01/02/books-like-liar/

Keeping Faith

 ‘Roger Averill's Keeping Faith is a gripping debut novel which explores faith: how it can function against all odds in one person, and falter irrevocably in another. Josh and Gracie are siblings who lead very different lives, believing very different things. Keeping Faith tracks their lives between 1975 and 1994, highlighting the influence of their Father, a lay preacher, and their Mother, who at times struggles with her own faith.
Josh is a labour ward attendant, and life holds few mysteries for him. Indeed, the parts of Keeping Faith which revolve around his work are quite demystifying—so if you happen to have a romantic view of labour, and want to keep it that way, be wary. Having said that, the frank way in which Averill explores life and death, and what it does to people's faith, is what makes this novel so powerful. For Josh, life and death is a reality that does not change the fact that he has no faith in the existence of God: Over time I just lost the need to call all the good things in life 'God'. There were lots of things I was sorry about, things I had done to others which needed to be forgiven, but the thing was, I didn't feel sorry to God for them; couldn't ask Him to forgive me for being human, for not being an angel. (192)

But Keeping Faith isn't just about faith in God, it’s about having faith in each other. Josh wants a relationship with his Dad, however Josh's lack of belief makes his Dad lose his faith in him—he is, though, always proud of his daughter Gracie, who has faith even in the most dire circumstances.
Gracie works as a nurse on a remote mission station in Papua New Guinea. Life and death is an everyday reality for her too. But, the point of difference between her and Josh is that she personally comes face to face with disillusioning brutality, and during these troubled times, God is a consolation, a comfort: Even here now I know that God is present. I don't understand why He has let all this happen, but I know that in the end He will prevail. This is my consolation, my conviction. I couldn't escape it even if I wanted to, nothing can alter it – I'm a prisoner of faith. (152)

 Averill is the author of a critically acclaimed memoir Boy he Cry: An Island Odyssey, which explores the year he spent with his wife in a remote Papuan island, Nuakata. During this time he developed an understanding of the islanders, and their culture.  The sections of Keeping Faith which are set in Papua New Guinea also show an in depth understanding of the country, and its cultural tensions. There is no doubt that he is a talented author, who peels back the outer layer of his subject, and shows it for what it is, good, bad or otherwise.’

Gemma Collett  M/C Reviews   http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/

Under The Huang Jiao Tree: Two Journeys in China

‘A light, fresh memoir of a Westerner teaching in China, with insightful observations that lead to a journey of self-discovery. After throwing herself into the chaotic, ever-foggy city of Chongqing to teach middle school for a whole year, Jane Carswell grapples with culture and technology, builds relationships among isolation, and sees the beauty and poverty of the world around her. She contrasts life in Chonqing to her home in New Zealand and begins to long for the country she left behind. Through a deconstruction of self, Carswell reveals her passions and anxieties, and explores her identity and place in the world. Patience and tolerance for China reward her with relationships and cultural insight. This book reminds me of Brian Johnston’s Boxing with Shadows, but is less dramatic travel writing and more a self reflection. As a person who has also lived in China for one year, I feel that I already know her story quite well, but feel that she is showing me something new about China. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who feels the urge to travel overseas.’

Andrew Wrathall, Bookseller and Publisher October 2009

‘The Westerner’s spiritual journey to the East has become such a cliché that any author writing on the subject must tread carefully. Jane Carswell treads not only carefully, but thoughtfully and originally.

About a decade ago, New Zealander Carswell spent a year teaching English in a school in Chongqing, China. Most of the book describes that year, as she struggles with the challenges of living in a foreign land: from the practical such as unfamiliar toilets and cuisine, to loneliness and homesickness, to the extremes of cultural difference. Yet Carswell often found common ground with her Chinese students and colleagues, and was open to the different ways she encountered. This genuine openness is one of the qualities that sets Carswell’s book apart.

The word ‘journey’ to describe any experience has been much abused by reality TV participants. Here, the word has real resonance. She talks of the two interrelated journeys she made: the outer and the inner. She explores her changing understanding of her identity with a light touch, never self-indulgent or didactic.
On her return to New Zealand, a period that she describes only briefly, she became a Benedictine oblate. After her year away, Carswell discovered that she was a writer as well as a teacher; Under the Huang Jiao Tree is proof of that.’

Lorien Kaye, The Age, Saturday December  26 2009

‘Carswell was a music teacher in New Zealand, settled into middle age, but restless. She was selected by a Christian school to teach English in China, despite being no evangelical. She took one Bible, for her own use. What she found in China was hard work, culture shock and a spiritual sea change.  In the midst of an atheist, alien land, she turned away from the material, finding the space to write and reflect. The cult of the individual became less important. There are many travellers’ tales published, and equally stories of self-discovery. This book combines both in a very different way. It is unselfish, interesting even to non-believers.’

Lucy Sussex, The Sunday Age, October 11 2009

‘At 56, Jane Carswell abandoned husband and family in New Zealand to spend a year teaching in China, inspired, she says, to find the secret path of an old man she once saw cycling in Beijing. She writes neat, sparse prose telling of her cultural adventure, of the impediments of Chinese bureaucracy and of the zeal, charm and discipline of the Chinese people. There is no high drama; Instead, it is pleasant observational minutiae – until the end when Carswell reveals that what she and the old man have in common was meditation and that being in China brought her home to Catholicism.’

Samela Harris. SA Weekend, Adelaide Advertiser, November 21 2009

‘When we travel, says Jane Carswell, not only do we make the physical journey, we also make an interior one: our minds, our lives are changed. A teacher of music, she was encouraged by her husband to visit China. After a brief and beguiling visit to Beijing, opportunity later arose to do a year’s teaching of English in a foreign language school in Chongqing, a city in the south-west of the country. The book is an account of that year.

While a music teacher in Christchurch, Jane had a number of Chinese children among her students, and she found herself treasuring ‘the bright red patches on my teaching timetable’. Something about the Chinese spirit drew her, and this was at the heart of her inner journey. Living away from family and friends exposed an inner unease and longing. The simplicity amidst poverty of so much of living in China had an unsettling appeal.’

Madonna Magazine Jan-Feb 2010

‘A memoir by a 56-year-old Kiwi music teacher about 10 months of teaching English in China would not voluntarily make it into the teetering tower of to-be-read books on my bedside table. So, it’s a good thing I’m a reviewer or I would have missed this unexpected pleasure.

Jane Carswell’s observations and insights are interesting, astute and amusing. In Chongqing she is confronted with cultural and personal contrasts and conflicts: she is seduced by the simplicity of life there, but knows she’d be unable eschew privilege; despite always being a private person, she now revels in the sense of community and connection; and although she’s embarked on an external adventure, it’s the internal spiritual journey that finally gives her ease.

In beautiful harmony with the world she describes, Carswell’s understated writing has a rare clarity and honesty, making this a gentle, graceful read.’

Joanna Rix, Wellington Dominion Post, Thursday 12 November 2009

‘New Zealand music teacher Jane Carswell thinks she’s relaxed into her middle years until she begins yearning for something more – a personal longing that takes her to Chongqing in China. Hardly a religious person, Carswell finds herself teaching at a school and developing an interest in the writings of St Benedict. In China she begins her own monastic journey and strongly bonds to her new community. Writing as Western capitalism is questioning itself, Carswell’s meditative memoir suggests another way of living. She poignantly observes China during its own cultural shift away from tradition towards capitalism, and struggles with returning home after a life-changing time working and living abroad. Spiritual, powerful and thought-provoking.’

Readings Summer Reading Guide 2010

‘It’s a long way from New Zealand to China in more ways than one. The author makes this journey to teach English in a middle school in Sichuan Province for a year. Her reasons for doing this are not clear to herself, but as she teaches she learns and when she returns to New Zealand these lessons help her to find herself and a new inner peace. A fascinating account of day-to-day life in a different culture.’

Kay Brien. The Launceston Examiner, Saturday October 17. 2009

‘Over the past few weeks, China seems to have been to the fore whenever I pick up a paper, magazine or pick up on a conversation. The accounts of life there differed wildly.Among them were the Australian journalist who went to explore her family’s roots, and felt (in spite of her Chinese ancestry) like an alien, young friends who went there to work and were subjected to a welcoming ceremony accompanied by many alcoholic “toasts”. The object of which seemed aimed at their losing face, businessmen who couldn’t cope with the pollution they found, and recently published statistics regarding the immense gains made in the quality of life there for the majority.

Not surprisingly, these were widely differing accounts – it’s such a huge and diverse country. And most of them were mere snapshots in time, varying from days to weeks. This memoir by Jane Carswell of a year teaching English in a large Chongqing high school, living in the same compound as her fellow teachers and their families, one of only two European teachers in a city unused to white faces, gave me a more comprehensive perspective.
Relentlessly honest and well-written, the book recounts her experience of everyday life in Chongqing alongside self-exploration of personal goals. She is fond of metaphor and uses it to give you a feeling of being there with her, whether describing her first impressions of the landscape “ … beneath us the land boils into hills, blistered and bubbled, the terraced edges like a thousand eyebrows. Beside the imposing spread of the city, the airport looks startlingly small and somehow unsure of its function”, or her longing for “for scraps of the natural world … I’m used to living in a home wrapped by garden” ; so when she feels “..desiccated and sandpapered by the city” she looks over her balcony to where glimpses of “a little dusty green” and a few small animals and birds help to restore her equanimity.

With her eye for detail and willingness to make the best of most situations, she provided me with a realistic-sounding guide as to what it must be like to be away from home and family in a metropolitan area with 31 million people, much of the time surrounded by fog, ‘‘a grey metal-and-rock world” in a culture where privacy is rare, your motives can be misunderstood, your lavatory is a hole in the floor, and you’re contracted to stay for a year.
After a few months, she has “a strong disaffection for everything in the Chinese world around me” and is frightened by the sense of isolation she feels. Before long, however, she regains a balanced view. Bonuses are the insights she gets into a way of life where the sheer numbers of people demand a patience that is rare in New Zealand, and an overwhelming sense of community.

The author’s empathy with the people she meets, the fascinating insights into Chinese life she provides, her ability to take the reader with her on the personal and private journeys she makes, all contribute to a story well worth reading.

Patricia Thwaites, Otago Daily Times December 12 2009

‘I reviewed Under the Huang Jiao Tree: Two Journeys in China by Jane Carswell (Transit Lounge) on Radio NZ's Nine to Noon last Thursday. Winner of the 2010 Whitcoulls Travcom Travel Book of the Year Award, this book slayed me. 

It begins with a quote: 'There is a meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveller'  by Deitrich Bonhoeffer,  and it is this mystery in the book - Jane's not knowing entirely what the journey's about - along with the meshed journeys into both China and Jane herself, and the subtle, evocative way she writes, that makes this book so powerful.  Nay, more than that - unforgettable. 

Jane Carswell gives me an insight into a way of being that I had not properly considered or understood before, and I carry that with me now. Here are my notes from the review - tidied up a bit, but essentially notes. The radio review is linked at the start of the post if you want to hear it. 

Jane Carswell (her mother's maiden name) was a farmer's wife in rural Canterbury (NZ) who raised children and taught the piano. She always felt an outsider and was aware of an interior dissonance - she was complex, awkward, too analytical. At 56, Jane was offered a job teaching English at a foreign language school in China - the city of Chongqing (an industrial city in mountainous Sichuan, 7 million in metropolitan area, fog-bound for half the year). She felt an affinity for China and the Chinese, and thought vaguely this might give her an opportunity to write, something she'd always wanted to do. 

1. Arrives - a little terrified - 1200 students and a few hundred teachers live together - she has a basic apartment - no toaster, no phone etc -  'mysterious household equipment' - gadgets that don't work - a muddle and a baffling lack of logic to it e.g. a table but no chair, and finds this extends to the rest of her life in that city - and yet people seem sanguine - 'perhaps tomorrow' is the catch phrase.

The phone: finally gets one, it doesn't work, 'perhaps tomorrow' - gets a large number of 'wrong number' calls - explained by the fact that there are a large no. of 8s in her phone number - eight sounds like 'rich' so people can't help dialling it. 

Jane struggles with teaching and with coming to grips with living in China:  
- random changes to the timetable - few resources - unclear what expected of her - but the students are alight with the desire to learn and energy and curiosity
- people she meets have an openness - lack of coyness - politeness and generosity that is refreshing - but on the other hand, there are many enthusiastic invitations to visit that come to nothing
- a difference between the official and unofficial versions of things at all levels - and always the need to be patient, to wait...

2. The humour in cultural and language mistakes: a conference where the badges say 'extinguished guests', someone wishing her a ' have a very tight sleep' , a fellow teacher gives her an egg in a jam sandwich half way through the meal and calls it 'toast' 

3. Loves the simplicity of life in China. The simple interactions between people and between people and the environment - the acceptance of their lot in often cramped apartments (toilets a 500 metre walk for some) - believes they are more economical and sensible than wasteful unnecessarily complex western households 

- when the invitations to visit do materialise - people don't look in the pantry first - they just give what they have - a woman she doesn't know gives her a pear when she's out walking -

Jane longs to live this simplicity but: 
'I'm too soft, too complicated, the knowledge of how to live simply has been bred out of me. Education and affluence have left me unfit for what I long for. How would I get on without books, antibiotics, travel?' 

The strength of the writing is the way the mystery is allowed to be and Jane's thoughts circle as she tries to understand the place, her journey, herself. She wonders, for example, if simplicity is really poverty 'pinched of hope' and is horrified by the poverty she sees.

4 Jane becomes homesick for the countryside, and when it's foggy - for light. She misses music at first  - her 'ears hungrier than eyes', she notices the sounds of mahjong, a man singing, music on loud speakers.

5. Politics rears its head - the bureaucracy, the feeling of always being watched - public property vs privacy of self, the need to say the 'right thing' publically, the way joining the communist party is the right thing to do to get ahead - whatever your beliefs, the community expectations - conformity, obedience, long ceremonies and mass exercise vs. those with different preoccupations (of the mind), who don't meet expectations, are more sensitive, or  suffer from mental disorders/depression  ...  what of them?

6. Jane becomes comfortable with her own interior dissonance - people have always told her she's cautious, easily pleased and patient - and she find this nature of hers fits well with the Chinese people  - she doesn't feel so 'ineffective' here - 

7. The illogicality of China outside the school e.g. the Dinosaur Lantern Festival which includes a 2-storey high dinosaur made from condoms. Jane realises she needs to respect the mystery of difference, because she can't understand everything. She's learning at a deeper level about herself  - feels the 'pieces moving inside'. 

8. Jane went to China - partly - as a Christian presence.... she thought she had to 'teach' to do that, but she realises that her presence was really as a disciple, she was there to learn. One day she sees a man standing under a Huang Jiao tree - his eyes shut, simply standing there at peace in the bustle of this crowded city - the images sears itself on her brain. 

9. Epilogue - Jane returns to NZ - sifts through her experience - feels enriched but is not sure the journey has given her more than that - but finally she comes to a point of understanding about herself which is that paradoxically rather than understanding herself,she needs to simply stand and wait like the man under the Huang Jiao tree. As an overly analytical person, this resonated with me, and continues to resonate. 


To receive gifts, she says, you need empty hands. I don't know how many times I've said this to people since I read it. It's so hard to do - to have those empty hands - but it transforms things. I've seen it.  


In the end, this knowledge she's brought back from China leads Jane back to God, and to twice-daily meditation as a Benedictine oblate. Two journeys, indeed.’ 

Mary McCallum
http://mary-mccallum.blogspot.com/2010/04/under-huang-jiao-tree.html

‘I am always delighted when I receive invitations to attend exhibitions or such like, to view the creative works by a Community member.  Apart from the privilege of being invited to share in someone else’s life and activities in this way, my pleasure also lies in ‘seeing’ most tangibly through the art or music, or in this case, the writing, the unfolding of being in the life of someone you know and deeply respect.  It is the playing out of John Main’s teaching that ‘through the practice of Christian Meditation we become more truly the person we were created to be’.   So when I learned of Jane Carswell’s newly published tale of her time teaching in a Foreign Language School in Chongqing, China about a decade ago, I went straight out to procure a copy.   In Under The Huang Jiao Tree, subtitled Two Journeys in China, Jane explores both the outer and inner journeys of her experience in China. 

The book’s publishers classify it under three headings – travel, spirituality and memoir.  Having known and cared for and been fascinated by, many Chinese students over the past fifteen years, I am very interested in her astute observations of these usually wonderful, hard working and resilient young people and their life.   But my greatest interest lies in her very honest and open observations of her inner encounter with a very different culture of great paradox, mystery and expectation and the questions it raises for her life and journey into self understanding.  Moments observed, such as the man under the Huang Jiao tree, from whom the book takes its name, are perceptively captured with an awareness of their possible multi-layered meanings and always with a deeply respectful openness and humility before more questions.

Jane is now a leading member of the New Zealand Christian Meditation Community.  Her journey on all levels in China prepared her to ‘hear’ the teaching on Christian Meditation when Laurence Freeman OSB visited Christchurch some time after her return to New Zealand.  Her insightful writing on the practice of Christian Meditation and its impact on her life and her allegiances to two Christian streams could well serve as a reflection piece for Christian Meditation gatherings and hopefully encourage others to write deeply about the practice in their lives.  But the book is worth reading for itself, it is very well written with a light touch, a gentle sense of irony and humour, but always with profound respect and compassion for others.  And as I always find when I have the privilege of hearing others ‘inner journeys’, it helps me with my own.  I recommend it to you.’

Ruth Fowler, Australian Christian Meditation Community Newsletter  March 2010

 ‘This book was named Whilcoulls' Travel Book of the Year for 2010 and it is one of the most wonderful books I have ever read.

Jane Carswell is a piano teacher and Benedictine oblate (person dedicated to God) from Christchurch. She declares in her prologue that "there was something about the Chinese spirit that drew me." Consequently, at the age of 56 she travelled to Chongqing in China to teach English for 10 months.

Interspersed with descriptions of actual outer journey events, Jane shares with us profound insights into the quality and significance of her inner spiritual journey during her time away, Theological and spiritual reflections are integrated seamlessly into the narrative, and these are more explicit in the epilogue.
   
As readers we are privileged to gain sacred insights into Jane's character and faith. During her time in China Jane encounters, befriends and works alongside teachers from other countries including Boris from Russia. She reaches and acknowledges the limits of cross-cultural understanding.

The complex and multifaceted realities of life in China are described in vivid detail, including less than luxurious accommodation and teaching facilities. Jane's courage and determination shine through as she triumphs over an unexpected attack of sinophohia.

A generous supply of letters from home helps her fight a frightening sense of isolation. She describes many vibrant and meaningful experiences of interacting with students and staff', some of whom invite her into their homes. There are some lovely humorous insights into 'the human condition.
Jane is an excellent judge of character. At one point she declares  “I do like these people  and their city.” A haunting question she raises is “What does it mean to be Christian presence in China?” All of the lessons Jane learns fit comfortably under what she refers to as the “ umbrella of love”.
By the end of the book I had a sense of knowing Jane quite well. She has retained contact with several of her former students and colleagues. Although it is not overly stated, I experienced this book as an invitation to share the contemplative spirituality which sustains the author,  a spirituality  of acceptance and insightful reflection on experience.
This book would make an excellent gift for the traveller, especially for someone who is going to teach  or has taught away from NZ.  All teachers will identify with Jane Carswell’s challenges, dilemmas and triumphs. This book would make an excellent addition to the library of anyone interested in cross-cultural studies, or for anyone at all who enjoys a good read. Highly recommended.’

Greg Hughson Touchstone magazine, July 2010