Madame Bovary's Haberdashery

The title alone of Maurilia Meehan’s fifth novel – Madame Bovary’s Haberdashery – gives a flavour of this book. For one thing, it’s very pleasurable to say out loud. For another, it suggests the witty subversiveness of this playful novel. This is a novel that knits together – knitting being the operative word –  the unlikely. Gustav Flaubert and Agatha Christie. Eroticism and crochet. 

It’s really hard to know where to begin with this slyly knitted work of fiction. It’s an often hilarious satire on the battle of the sexes, which portrays sexism as a series of delusions, willed or otherwise, on the part of both sexes. Given that prejudice requires the careful editing out of frame any facts that challenge the idea that particular classes of human being are inferior to others, this is a fair thesis. It’s also one of the traditional bases of comedy, which has always relied on the gap between how people perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others. Maurilia Meehan exploits this freely with her absurd and unlikely gallery of characters.

But first of all, this is a book about two friends, Cicely and Odette. We see them first through the eyes of Zac, one of several feckless men who feature in this novel, who briefly becomes the lover of both of them. Odette is a ceramicist who has adopted the free-wheeling sexual lifestyle traditionally reserved for men, “flitting to lover to lover, fitting them around her ceramic creations”. She is blonde, sculpted and quicksilver. Cicely, a writer and knitter, is presented as her “dark matter counterpart” – underneath her shawl of crocheted granny squares, she has the silhouette of the “perfect Venus of Willendorf”. While Cicely is always, although often confusedly, herself, Odette changes with each lover, taking on all their tastes and inclinations. When she meets Zac, this has unfortunate results.

Zac himself is a writer and wannabe circus knife thrower. But unlike Cicely, who writes her own stories and has even been published, Zac’s pretensions are, like his lifestyle, vampiric: he is making what he believes is a brilliant, definitive translation of Madame Bovary. Its authenticity is underlined by the fact that he s handwriting it with a quill in purple ink. Zac isn’t letting the fact that he can’t speak French get in the way of this: he has seven English translations which he cheerfully appropriates, as he evolves his definitive theory on Flaubert’s novel. The first half of Zac’s theory is the obligatory pseudo-Marxist gloss, in which Madame Bovary “foreshadowed the rise of consumer culture and the role of the international banker”. But more importantly, “The novel showed, more than anything else he had ever read, the truth about women. And the irony was that none of the women Zac had lived with, discussed the novel with, realised it. The first truth… was this: No matter what you did for women, they were never satisfied. The second truth: Women bled men dry, if given the chance.”

Cicely’s novel (which Zac, of course, considers to be a terrible example of feminine literature) heavy alludes to Madame Bovary, Zac’s own obsession. So it’s only a matter of time before Zac, wounded by his rejection by a publisher, begins to resent Cicely, and finally hate her, for plagiarising his work, even though her work preceded his by several years. The scene where his translation is rejected by Claw Publishing, after the editors discover that he actually hasn’t read Flaubert in French, is worth the price of admission alone.

Inconvenient facts that Zac ignores include his own plagiarism of the work of other writers, and indeed his material exploitation of the women in his life, who have supported him in his Great Work. Anyway, after Zac’s brief ménage a trois with Cicely and Odette disintegrates, he vengefully sets out to destroy their friendship. He succeeds: Odette moves out to live exclusively with Zac, and she and Cicely lose contact.

This, however, is merely the novel’s set-up. Like Cicely’s freestyle crochet creations, which have “their own mysterious way, pulling her along behind it”, Madame Bovary’s Haberdashery is an organically knitted structure that takes on its own life and invents its own form. It includes excerpts from Cicely’s writings, including a short story deleted by the film producer Dragan Greid from the film script he plans to make of her novel, emails from an internet dating site, letters, memories and dreams. There are narrative divagations that blossom into comedies of their own: the foisting of the ghastly invalid Uncle Bill onto Cicely, for example, who moves into her house and takes over her life, or the fanatical eye surgeon who corrects Cicely’s cataracts.

The spine that holds this together is Cicely’s search for Odette, who has mysteriously disappeared after moving in with Zac. This investigation – presided over by the spirit of Miss Marple – is in fact Cicely’s struggle to see more clearly, to transform herself from a passive recipient of the responsibilities of others, to an agent of her own life. That this transformation is less than perfect, and that her investigation turns out to be of a rather different crime than she initially imagined, is all part of life’s rich tapestry.

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, the writer I thought of most often in this book so intricately woven with writing and writers was Barbara Pym, one of the great (and criminally underrated) writers of mid-20th century Britain. Maurilia shares Pym’s mordantly ironic vision and her gift for sly satire, even if she eschews the conventions of the realist novel. But I think it runs deeper than that: there’s a gift for detail, an observational accuracy, that infuses even the least likeable and most absurd of these characters with a sympathetic life. I’m tempted to call it compassion. You’ll have to read this wonderful book and discover it for yourself. You won’t regret it.

With her fifth novel, Maurilia Meehan has carved out a subversive niche of chick-lit mystery. Madame Bovary’s Haberdashery is an amusing romp for the thinking woman, with references to Flaubert, Milan Kundera, and Agatha Christie. The decidedly feminist viewpoint is tempered by a mordant use of irony and satire.
Carol Middleton, Australian Book Review April 2013

Maurilia Meehan deftly pays homage to Agatha Christie and Gustave Flaubert, while creating her own delightful tale sure to satisfy lovers of noir, passion, and a great mystery. When the reclusive knitter and erotic novelist Celia leaves the room, she leaves behind her “a trail of unraveling wool”. What she doesn’t anticipate is becoming part of a brief ménage à trois with best friend Odette, and their new housemate Zac (an amateur translator of Flaubert), a liaison that suddenly becomes far more complicated. When Odette disappears from her new apartment, Celia, an Agatha Christie devotee, finds herself playing her previously imagined role of detective, charged with unraveling a murder mystery as entwined and colourful as her “increasingly bizarre crochet work”. Following a trail of tarot cards variously connected to Odette’s multifarious love interests, Celia not only questions her own objectivity in pursuing the case; she encounters the delightful Miss Ball (a character fictionalised in her own novel as Flaubert’s Emma Bovary) and her haberdashery. Meehan delightfully subverts the ending of Flaubert’s classic tale, and elegantly integrates it into the developing mystery. Unable to confine her enquiry to five suspects, Celia must draw upon Miss Marple’s skill in abstract logic, the answer revealing itself when she knits together the much-needed resolution.
Fiona O’Brien, Melbourne Review March 2013

The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy

The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy will appeal to those who've enjoyed John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener and Mission Song and similar books that mix thriller politics with moral issues. Tim Coronel, Bookseller + Publisher

After Love

Jaireth is a poet and autobiographer whose debut novel is about an unusual clash of cultures. Vasu is Indian, studying in Moscow in the 1960s. He falls in love with Anna, a Russian cellist. He is idealistic; life under Communism has made her realistic. The barriers against their love are great. They try to compromise by his not returning to India, but in Venice, she deserts him. Years later, they meet again. Subtle and affecting.

Lucy Sussex, Melbourne Age, The Examiner, Goulburn Post, Newcastle Herald, The Guardian, South Coast Register, Central Western Daily, Yass Tribune  November 2012

‘I am very pleased to be back at the Paperchain Bookshop to launch Subhash Jaireth’s new novel, After Love, published by Transit Lounge. Subhash has written a number of books of poetry and has also written numerous essays and short stories and, recently, a book of three monologues entitled To Silence—some of you might have seen a performance based on this work at the Street Theatre.

The novel, After Love draws on Subhash’s experiences as someone born in Punjab in India who, as a student studied geology in Moscow for nine years and who, after returning to India for a period to teach at a university there, subsequently came to Australia to work (where, I am pleased to say, he remains as part of our vibrant ACT literary scene). As a result, this is in some ways an unusual book in the Australian context because of its settings and the cultural backgrounds of most of its characters. In another sense, it is a book that will be familiar to everybody in its focus on human intimacy and love.

This is an engrossing novel that does a variety of things at once and takes the reader on a number of different journeys. The primary journey is into the love relationship between the book’s main protagonist, Vasu, a somewhat reticent Indian student of architecture in Moscow—who, among other things, is fascinated by the histories, structures and shapes of different cities—and Anna, a Russian cellist and archaeologist with German ancestry. The novel charts the relationship between these two characters as it develops from first encounters to love and cohabitation. I don’t wish to say too much about the novel’s plot because I don’t want to spoil your own reading experience, but the title of the book will give you a general idea of how things end up between them. Subhash does a brave thing in this book. He tells it in the first person voices of the main characters—mostly the voices of Vasu and Anna—and, in doing so, establishes from the start a kind of counterpoint between their respective points of view; and a fugal structure for the novel as a whole.

Everyone would know Bach as a major composer of fugues, along with earlier composers such as Pachelbel, and although the fugue eventually gave way to the sonata form, it remained influential—not only in the music of major 18th and 19th century composers such as Mozart and Beethoven, but also in the hands of the great 20th-century Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. Perhaps this is one of the Russian connections in the novel (Shostakovich is certainly mentioned in it). In any case, like this novel, fugues often contain an exposition, development and recapitulation and in them two or more voices build on a musical subject that is introduced early and which recurs throughout. In this novel the main themes are unfolded contrapuntally—that is, through the movement of two voices—like two melodic lines—that reference each other in ways which in musical parlance would be called contrary motion, similar motion, parallel motion and oblique motion. So the unfolding of this book’s narrative is one of its fascinations, as the voices of the key characters separate, entwine, run together and diverge.

The word ‘fugue’ derives from Latin and is linked to ‘fugere’, to flee, and ‘fugare’ to chase. Such concepts summarise key aspects of this work, as it documents a love affair where chasing and fleeing are central features. This is not the usual story of early passion and strong embrace that dwindles over time after familiarity has become a habit. Instead it is a story about how two unusual and distinct people come together almost by accident and attempt to negotiate their individuality, cultural differences and relative isolation into a workable partnership. As this negotiation takes place, the reader is taken into both of their families, which are revealed to have very different (and yet not always so different) expectations and dynamics. Some of the most compelling intimations about human intimacy in this work are rendered through these depictions of family life, and in the way families are shown to evolve and change. There is poignancy at the end of the novel as various family stories are brought up to date and are seen to play out, or to have played out, in unexpected ways. Subhash is a fine observer of people and sketches their lives with subtlety and nuance—in ways that are almost understated at times but always persuasive. By the end of the novel I thought that many of these characters could have been people I had met in the flesh.

This novel also takes us to various cities in various countries—Moscow, Sydney and Venice, among others. It is a novel about how people in our time move around and make connections that cross international and cultural boundaries; about the fluidity of relationships and the mobility of love. It is about how some older traditions can no longer capture or contain the intimate relationships that people have, and how different expectations between lovers—always tricky to some extent, even when people share similar backgrounds—are difficult to negotiate across cultural boundaries and international borders. In addition, this book is a celebration of culture. It includes small dissertations about cities and their planning, music, art, and other subjects—all of them unfailingly interesting and all of them tied closely to the depiction of one or other of the characters. It fascinated me how much in this book functions both literally and symbolically—how connections or failures of connection between various characters were articulated through their musical or cultural activities.

And the theme of archaeology, subtly laced throughout this work and most overtly addressed through Anna’s studies in the subject, emphasises this novel’s preoccupation with knowing and finding the past; and with scrutinising memory. Some of this scrutiny focuses on family history and on the often untold stories that are implicit in many photographs. As the novel explores these issues, the reader is shown the limitations and frustrations of such activity as well as some of its intriguing satisfactions. So the title, After Love, is not simply about the characters Anna and Vasu; it is also about what happens after love and close human connection more generally, in all sorts of circumstances. It explores how one character, Vasu, learns about himself through his experience of love, not so much allowing him to change—although that is part of the story—but allowing him to understand the world and his place in it. At times this novel emphasises reflection and contemplation as much as action—although plenty does happen in the book—and that, too, is one of its pleasures

You will find a fascinating series of journeys in this novel. I thoroughly recommend it to you for the fineness of its perceptions, and for its artful, often beguiling writing and construction—in short, for the various and varied riches you’ll find within its pages. And, on that note, I declare After Love launched.’

Launch of After Love by Subhash Jaireth By Paul  Hetherington , Paperchain Bookshop , Canberra. 11 October 2012

Languid and sad, this story of fated lovers slowly and inexorably gets under your skin.
Diane Dempsey, The Age, Canberra Times, Sydney Morning Herald  December 22, 2012
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It is a very rich and intricate novel, deceptively measured on the surface, but harbouring immense emotional tension and passion. I hope that this beautiful book is made available to readers outside of Australia, because it adds a unique voice and style to contemporary South Asian writing.
Elen Turner, South Asia Book Blog 17 December 2012

The theme of love, the challenges that it represents, with the binding of two people’s needs, desires and beliefs, is written within the pages of this novel. After Love captures the disappointment and discontent that can sometimes affect relationships after the glow of new love fades. It is about what you can discover about yourself and the world once love dissipates.  Leanne Weymans, M/C Reviews  3 February 2013
www.media-culture.org.au

Adventures of a Compulsive Traveller

This is a collection of travel stories from Australia and the world, told in a fresh, witty and intelligent voice.
Qantas News, October 2012

Dominic Dunne has been everywhere and he wants you to know it. From a visit to North Korea ("the heart of darkness") to more than 60 other countries including the US, Britain and even tiny Panama, Dunne has certainly been there, done that.

The Examiner, 13 October 2012

A wild and humorous ride in search of the famous and the infamous in the world's strangest locations.

Think Australian, Bookseller+Publisher, Australia, 2012

‘I must admit to not having read a great deal of travel writing, having been restricted to the odd P.J. O’Rourke and Bill Bryson. However, I think Adventures of a Compulsive Traveller by Dominic Dunne could sit well in their company.

Dunne grew up in Queensland in the 1970s. His early employment was as a cadet journalist for Brisbane’s Courier Mail, and he later worked as assistant to the CEO of Qantas, as well as a communications consultant for the Australian Embassy in Washington (all of which obviously helped him amass a few thousand air miles). Now, he has put together these experiences and encounters into an extremely amusing and intelligent collection of travel stories.

The gift of a good travel writer is to be self-deprecating while at the same time giving the reader a little bit of history about the subject. On Dunne’s many travels, we get to hear of his hobnobbing with Hilary Clinton and his inability to converse with Yoko Ono (she renders him frozen with fear), as well as a hilarious trip to Graceland and his preference for Japanese baths. On many occasions we observe how insular Americans can be.

When Dunne talks about standing on the very balcony in Hawaii where the opening sequence to the original 70s TV show Hawaii Five-O was filmed, you get this tinkling of nostalgia.

Some of Dunne’s stories are so outlandish – like his encounters with singer Nana Mouskouri or a certain liquorice incident with Gene Pitney – that you’ll chuckle to yourself, amazed that these things actually happened. The most touching part of the collection is the author’s 20-year friendship with his namesake: former Hollywood producer, novelist and Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne.’

Michael Awosoga-Samuel, Readings Monthly, November 2012  

Las Vegas for Vegans

There’s something unsettling about the cover of A.S. Patrić’s second collection of stories. It’s a Denise Scott Brown photograph of the Las Vegas Strip in the 1960s. A man in a black suit stares obliquely towards the casino development, the sky a stark and brilliant blue, the pale valley beyond. In many ways, this image is emblematic of Melbourne-based Patric’s characters in Las Vegas for Vegans: men and women caught in a trance-like trajectory towards differing annihilation.

In Becket & Son, Devon, a young man who is “probably gay”, witnesses his father having a fatal heart attack, then heads off to work. With iPod earphones jammed in his ears, Devon immerses himself in Joy Division and Mogwai, disassociating himself from the events of the morning and everyone around him. Cleverly, Patrić sets up an unexpected twist at the end of the story.

Boys is a strong tale of children’s friendship, set in Serbia. Sava and Milan leave Uncle Stefan’s mansion to play by an abattoir. They had been best friends for three years and sometimes didn’t need to talk for hours. Both felt stronger, braver and brighter simply being in each other’s company.” Unfortunately, the abattoir supervisor finds them loitering and pulls a gun. What transpires tests the foundations of the boys’ friendship, with Sava pointedly wondering: “How could a man transformed into anything other than what he already was?”

Guns N’ Coffee is an absurd anecdote about a man drawing a gun in a crowded café when he’s not served coffee quickly enough. “It’s a modest gun. I’m not a closet Dirty Harry wanting someone to make my day. I just want someone to make my coffee.” There is a flourish of this kind of zany energy in a few stories…. Patrić’s best stories are the longer ones driven by character, with more carefully developed narratives and settings. Murmur is a brilliant tale comprised entirely of Carveresque dialogue. Intelligent and funny, it’s a unique account of the first tremor of love.

The Eternal City is another excellent story. Veronica flies in to Rome to meet up with her boyfriend, Evan, who has been holidaying in Italy. Veronica is ill by the time she arrives at the hotel, but Evan stumbles in hours later, drunk. What follows is a brief portrait of a relationship going nowhere and the occasions of submission that verge into humiliation.

The titular story is the most compelling and memorable. Las Vegas for Vegans is a slick account of a desolate man’s final holiday to Las Vegas, with a thrilling conclusion that does what most short fiction fails to: shock.

Rebecca Starford, The Weekend Australian , December 1-2

To read Las Vegas for Vegans is to know that things are never as they seem, but I say this without reservation: A.S. Patrić is a writer on the up.
Will Heyward, Readings Monthly

A.S. Patrić is the sort of Aussie writer who need only rest his pen against a page and someone will throw an award his way. He's bagged both the Ned Kelly and the Booranga and been published in pretty much every reputable lit mag in the country. It's little surprise then that Las Vegas For Vegans, his second collection of short stories, is brimming with skilfully crafted nuggets of imagination and panache.

Bram Presser, Bait for Bookworms

So, does Patric succeed with the risks he takes? Indeed yes.
Lisa Hill, ANZ Lit Lovers

This is the second collection of short stories from Melbourne writer (and bookseller) A S Patrić, following last year’s The Rattler and Other Stories. In Las Vegas for Vegans, Patrić displays an extraordinary emotional range, moving from comic and sexy to wistful and despairing—often within a single story.

Jennifer Peterson-Ward,  Bookseller + Publisher

Patrić proves himself to be in control of a wide range of story-telling styles. His tone and voice are consistent and authoritative, inspiring confidence in the reader. There is an undertone of sadness or bewilderment in many of them, with people trying to make sense of the life they find themselves in. There is darkness but there is also wit. The most critical recommendation however, is that these stories are page-turners … not only to get to the end of each story, but to see where you will be taken next.

Alicia Thompson, News Write, NSW Writers' Centre

He  can write. His little vignettes draw you into an uncomfortable place somewhere between  the humdrum and the mystical. Odd things happen in a decpetively ordinary way. And vice versa.

Herald Sun  

Interview with A.S. Patric by Ryan O’Neill at: Readings

The Darkest Little Room

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

‘Patrick Holland will be one of Australia’s greatest writers of the future. I can’t say you heard it here first because everyone is saying it. The Darkest Little Room is his first novel since The Mary Smokes Boys. A crime novel with a literary heart. Set in Vietnam and surrounds, it is about the disturbing world of sex slave trading, about sexual obsession, racial misunderstandings, violence, religion and the potential for love. If you find yourself hooked after reading this crime thriller, check out The Mary Smokes Boys and the travel memoir, Riding the Trains in Japan.

Krissy Kneen, Sunday Mail, 9 September 2012

‘When Joseph, an Australian journalist living in Saigon, is confronted with the body of a dead prostitute, he is not optimistic about the local constabulary’s commitment to finding her killer. But a tale of torture, accompanied by a photograph of a beautiful, bloodied naked woman, compels the journalist to investigate the flesh trade in Indochina, where he discovers victims as young as eight are trafficked into the sex industry with terrifying ease. Honicke, a European whose own culpability may be guessed at, tells Joseph of a dark room where violence is enacted on the bodies of disobedient sex workers for “special” clients. What follows is a page-turner as Joseph, who discovers he has a personal stake in the story, pursues the slave traders across several countries in landscapes made dangerous by desperate poverty and frighteningly ruthless criminals.

The real terror of the tale lies in the mundaneness of its settings: children at play snatched from outside their homes; traders who appear to be benign old men picking up their ‘daughters’ – drugged and desensitised by rape and other abuse – outside busy railway stations. Joseph concludes that sex slavery is aided and abetted by globalism. He says: “This is the dream our politicians have been having for a century. The free trade in unrestricted currency of everything we most desire in the darkest chambers of our hearts.” ’

VERDICT: AN ATMOSPHERIC THRILLER FOR THINKERS. Cheryl Jorgensen, Courier Mail, October 2012

‘INDEPENDENT Melbourne publisher Transit Lounge has made a significant mark on the Australian publishing scene in the past two years by combining a winning roster of eclectic travel writers (Inez Baranay, Felicity Castagna, Aaron Smith, Amy Choi) and top-notch dark and original fiction from Peter Barry, Ouyang Yu and Patrick Holland, among others. The latter has done especially well for it, bridging both categories via his travel book, Riding the Trains in Japan: Travels in the Sacred and Supermodern East, and highly regarded second novel, The Mary Smokes Boys, which was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year award last year.

Holland's third novel - his first was The Long Road of the Junkmailer in 2006 - is his most commercial offering to date but retains his distinctive gothic style. The Darkest Little Room is set entirely in a Vietnam that is almost unrecognisable - a grim, rain-drenched place of perpetual night in which expat Australian journalist Joseph plies his often seedy trade of extorting public figures by photographing them in compromising positions with prostitutes. Joseph writes the occasional travel piece for the Australian press (The Age gets a delicious, dubious nod) but earns his keep mostly by risking his life in a dimly lit netherworld of backstreet bars and brothels, alongside his hard-boiled partner in crime, Minh Quy.

Joseph is plagued by the memory of a woman he once loved, so stumbles into the dangerous world of slave trading when he is approached by a German asking him to investigate a brothel known as ''the darkest little room''. The photographs the man shows him of the terrible wounds inflicted upon women in this hellhole remind him of the woman he is searching for, and he plunges himself into an ill-advised investigation. The trail leads Joseph to Club 49 and he becomes obsessed with a heroin-addicted young prostitute who appears to have been tortured, although he is baffled by the fact her wounds disappear so quickly. He takes it upon himself to rescue her from her captors and forge a new life for her in Australia as his wife but, as with any classic crime mystery, all is not as it seems.

That Holland should choose to pen a ''literary thriller'' makes good sense. The pregnant atmosphere he captured in The Mary Smokes Boys with his rich, measured prose is in evidence once more here and is underpinned by a sense of urgency that renders the book extremely compelling. Despite the contemporary setting, Holland's characters are a throwback to the tough days of expat noir - Joseph has stepped straight out of the pages of Graham Greene or Ernest Hemingway. He has the brutal determination of a man driven to get what he wants, irrespective of the cost. His occasional bad temper and readiness to use a revolver are reminiscent of Raymond Chandler's detectives, which makes him fun to read but perhaps a little incongruous. If the story had been set in the 1930s, it would have been equally effective. Some scenes are pure film noir and a moody movie version can easily be imagined.

In these tumultuous times for publishing, the focus is often on extremely well-established authors or new ones, so it is gratifying to see a select few Australian fiction writers maturing through their second, third and fourth novels. Holland is one of these, and The Darkest Little Room might prove to be a watershed moment in his career. The short 38 chapters are well weighted and cinematic, lending the narrative a relentless pace. The dialogue is tough and curt, the descriptions often achingly beautiful. There are elements of mystery and otherworldliness woven throughout this exciting story but also a sense of gravitas, that what Holland is examining here is important - the appalling treatment of women as sex slaves in Asia and the Western man's complicity in this sordid business.

In many ways, The Darkest Little Room is the perfect 21st-century Australian novel, exposing the cruel underbelly of life in the Asia-Pacific region while also managing to be a cracking read.’ Chris Flynn, The Age and  Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 27 October

Holland evokes a suitably seedy, nightmarish world. This is a world of  of drug-addled bodies and duplicity; dimly lit nightclubs and dangerous criminals . The characters are believable  and the novel crackles with a relentelss tension … the novel is a compelling read.’
Jay Daniel Thompson, Australian Book Review, December 2012

Playing House

‘HOOK:  A heartfelt and funny memoir about relationships, travel and love.

‘HIGHLIGHTS: On the surface, the concept of reading a memoir from a twenty- or thirty- something jars. Barring child stars, sports people and those who have experienced life or death situations, how much could there be to say? Yet Amy Choi’s memoir is a delight. The young Asian-Australian takes readers through the three different phases of her life, starting with her years combining work and travel around Europe, then her move to the inner suburbs of Melbourne where she cared for a troubled teenager, then finally the biggest journey of all, becoming a parent. Woven through it all are her most important relationships - with her Aussie partner and with her family, back in Hong Kong.

SUITS: Anyone after a gentle, feel good true story.

VERDICT: A real surprise package. Beautifully written, with lots of laughs and insights about cultures, values and lessons learnt. It’s a heart-warming read about appreciating what we have and being grateful for our blessings.’ 

TAKE 5 Magazine

Exile: The Lives and Hopes of Werner Pelz

‘WERNER Pelz, the son of a Jewish entertainment entrepreneur in Berlin impoverished by the Depression and Nazism, travelled twice to Australia. In 1940, aged 18, he was one of 2500 or so enemy aliens, most of them Jewish refugees, transported from Liverpool on the infamous Dunera. He returned to England in 1942.

In 1973, after living in England and Wales for 30 years, he sailed out in comfort to take up a lectureship at La Trobe University, where he taught for 13 years. He died in Melbourne in 2006, aged 84. From Pelz's voluminous writings, from the testimony of family, friends and colleagues, and from his own memories as pupil and close friend, Roger Averill has composed a loving but warts-and-all account of his professional and spiritual odyssey. In each chapter he interweaves the stories of Pelz's life, his relationship with the author, and his dying.

In the all-male world of camps at Hay and Tatura, Pelz had sexual experiences that he wrote about later with a candour unusual among the internees. Also in the camps he began a conversion to Christianity that was completed after he learnt his parents had been murdered in Auschwitz.

Back in England, married to a Viennese, Lotte Hensl, he became a Church of England clergyman - the only German Jew to do so? - and was appointed curate successively to two Lancashire parishes, resigning after conflicts over his commitment to anti-nuclear activism. In the 1960s, he and Lotte co-wrote books contributing to a surge of interest in radical theology, most notably God Is No More, and Werner contributed to The Guardian a regular column of autobiographical reflections and gave radio talks on religious subjects. From these pulpits, he signalled accumulating doubts about Christianity and increasing commitment to a world view in which Jesus was a latter-day Jewish prophet.

Lotte suffered severe neurosis, never fully recovering from the shock of bearing a son, Peter, whose arrival in 1945 had put an end to both parents' utopian hope of serving in the vanguard of a movement to transform postwar Europe. The marriage fell apart slowly, surviving only as an intellectual partnership until Werner and Lotte separated. Werner lived from 1970 with Mary Zobel, the English-born widow of a German Jew and owner of a cottage in Wales occupied by the Pelzes.

Averill writes that Pelz, at the age of 48, ''set about reinventing himself as a sociologist'', enrolling at the University of Bristol to write a PhD thesis revised and published as The Scope of Understanding in Sociology.

Mary and her three children accompanied him to Melbourne when La Trobe appointed him to a lectureship. She was unsettled in Australia, and would eventually be engulfed by depression, while Werner engaged in prolonged conflict with his youngest stepchild, Justin.

He did not talk much about his time as a Dunera boy, but he made a point of visiting Tatura and Hay. The desert-like landscape of Hay evoked, he wrote, powerful memories, which had left their mark on the subconscious.

In his last years, as Averill tenderly records them, he endured professional disappointment and personal anguish. Unable to find a publisher for what he regarded as his magnum opus, The Curse of Abstraction, he wrote hundreds of haiku on the themes of life and death, such as:

''Age was to bring peace, wisdom, respect. Instead it brought terminal doubt.''

La Trobe, though, brought profound satisfaction. His colleagues in the sociology department he found ''open, cosmopolitan, tolerant''; his course on reason and emotion in society attracted huge numbers, and in and out of class he stirred many students to think for themselves. Averill writes eloquently about his Socratic capacity as a teacher. He is a sure-footed guide to the intricacies of Pelz's thought and to its connections with his protean life.’

Ken Inglis, The Age, Saturday 18 August 2012

‘This thoughtful book tells the story of Werner Pelz, a young Jewish man who fled Nazi Germany as war broke out, was interned in England for being German, then was shipped to Australia and spent two years in internment here.

On returning to England after the war, Pelz became an Anglican priest, an unlikely choice considering the brutal deaths of his parents in Hitler’s death camps. But, as Roger Averill points out in this book, Pelz was in constant search of the existential meaning of life, of truth, of who we are and why we are born. His journey was a long, often tortured one and Averill illuminates it beautifully. Because Pelz and the author met as lecturer and student in the sociology department at La Trobe University, Averill had to overcome feelings of awe about his mentor before he could do justice to the complexity of the man. His struggle shows and gives the book its heft. He does not flinch from revealing Pelz’s emotional blockages which were not helpful in his relationships with his wives and children. Averill discovers that a whole chunk of Pelz’s psychological being had been deeply traumatised by what happened in 1939 Berlin.

At the end, we know this man who lived trying to wrest meaning from every moment, who pursued a truth unbound by orthodoxy, who slipped and fell innumerable times. We can also marvel at the friendship and love between author and subject.’

Mary Phillip, The Courier Mail, August 18-19, 2012

‘WERNER Pelz, the son of a Jewish entertainment entrepreneur in Berlin impoverished by the Depression and Nazism, travelled twice to Australia. In 1940, aged 18, he was one of 2500 or so enemy aliens, most of them Jewish refugees, transported from Liverpool on the infamous Dunera. He returned to England in 1942.

In 1973, after living in England and Wales for 30 years, he sailed out in comfort to take up a lectureship at La Trobe University, where he taught for 13 years. He died in Melbourne in 2006, aged 84. From Pelz's voluminous writings, from the testimony of family, friends and colleagues, and from his own memories as pupil and close friend, Roger Averill has composed a loving but warts-and-all account of his professional and spiritual odyssey. In each chapter he interweaves the stories of Pelz's life, his relationship with the author, and his dying.

In the all-male world of camps at Hay and Tatura, Pelz had sexual experiences that he wrote about later with a candour unusual among the internees. Also in the camps he began a conversion to Christianity that was completed after he learnt his parents had been murdered in Auschwitz.

Back in England, married to a Viennese, Lotte Hensl, he became a Church of England clergyman - the only German Jew to do so? - and was appointed curate successively to two Lancashire parishes, resigning after conflicts over his commitment to anti-nuclear activism. In the 1960s, he and Lotte co-wrote books contributing to a surge of interest in radical theology, most notably God Is No More, and Werner contributed to The Guardian a regular column of autobiographical reflections and gave radio talks on religious subjects. From these pulpits, he signalled accumulating doubts about Christianity and increasing commitment to a world view in which Jesus was a latter-day Jewish prophet.

Lotte suffered severe neurosis, never fully recovering from the shock of bearing a son, Peter, whose arrival in 1945 had put an end to both parents' utopian hope of serving in the vanguard of a movement to transform postwar Europe. The marriage fell apart slowly, surviving only as an intellectual partnership until Werner and Lotte separated. Werner lived from 1970 with Mary Zobel, the English-born widow of a German Jew and owner of a cottage in Wales occupied by the Pelzes.

Averill writes that Pelz, at the age of 48, ''set about reinventing himself as a sociologist'', enrolling at the University of Bristol to write a PhD thesis revised and published as The Scope of Understanding in Sociology.

Mary and her three children accompanied him to Melbourne when La Trobe appointed him to a lectureship. She was unsettled in Australia, and would eventually be engulfed by depression, while Werner engaged in prolonged conflict with his youngest stepchild, Justin.

He did not talk much about his time as a Dunera boy, but he made a point of visiting Tatura and Hay. The desert-like landscape of Hay evoked, he wrote, powerful memories, which had left their mark on the subconscious.

In his last years, as Averill tenderly records them, he endured professional disappointment and personal anguish. Unable to find a publisher for what he regarded as his magnum opus, The Curse of Abstraction, he wrote hundreds of haiku on the themes of life and death, such as:

''Age was to bring peace, wisdom, respect. Instead it brought terminal doubt.''

La Trobe, though, brought profound satisfaction. His colleagues in the sociology department he found ''open, cosmopolitan, tolerant''; his course on reason and emotion in society attracted huge numbers, and in and out of class he stirred many students to think for themselves. Averill writes eloquently about his Socratic capacity as a teacher. He is a sure-footed guide to the intricacies of Pelz's thought and to its connections with his protean life. Like his subject, Averill is a truly creative writer.

Ken Inglis, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, 18 August

‘Restless journey of perpetual outsider. Werner Pelz.

IN the mid-1980s, last century, Werner Pelz's lectures in sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne may have been mild in delivery but their message, writes Roger Averill, carried "a sense of danger and whimsy more usually associated with Old Testament prophets".

Averill was Pelz's student. The two got talking - books, poetry, philosophy and life - and, in not much time, they stopped being a teacher and student and turned into friends. Forty-three years between them didn't matter a fig.

When Pelz died in 2006, aged 84, Averill, having rushed to his nursing-home bed, kissed his forehead, stroked his hair.

Christopher Hitchens once insisted a good biography should "cause us to wish we had known its subject in person". Readers of this book who had never before heard of Pelz might wish, like I do, that they had.

At 17 he left his native Germany for England, thanks to the devotion of his parents, and also their foresight: it was a month (to the day) before World War II. From that moment on he would be a perpetual outsider, even among other outsiders. He was a German Jew who after the war became an Anglican vicar, albeit one filled to overflowing with questions and non-conformist misgivings. "As a priest," Averill writes, "Werner encouraged his parishioners to abandon religiosity ... As a sociologist he was encouraging his students to abandon social science."

He wrote for The Guardian, broadcast on the BBC, wrote and staged plays for his parishioners. Well before we all turned to fiction to make sense of the facts, Pelz and his first wife, Lotte, co-wrote I am Adolf Hitler, a mock autobiography of the Fuhrer. He was, in other words, a true original.
When young, he worshipped Zarathustra, smuggling his cherished copy of Nietzsche's book aboard the HMS Dunera, bound for Australia, and for two years' internment in camps at Hay and Tatura as an enemy alien. In later life he preferred Don Quixote: a man who doggedly, heroically, refuses to be disenchanted with the world.

There was something of both Quixote and Zarathustra in Pelz. Brilliant, questing, a lifelong thinker-for-himself; and - in the same breath - haunted, self-sabotaging, self-deluding, prey to hubris and doubt.

He left Australia at 21; he sailed back, to take up the La Trobe lectureship, at 52. He was a teacher not merely audacious but also, it seems, unfailingly generous. His life, despite its riches and blessings, reads like tragedy. In many ways it is a story of what the Holocaust did to those, like Pelz, who had escaped it but could not escape it.

Averill doesn't quite say it like this. But to me Pelz's soul seems afflicted by what Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich called the "inability to mourn" (in their 1967 book of that title). They were talking about fellow Germans complicit in Nazism, not about German Jews such as Werner. And yet ... Werner never said proper goodbyes to his parents: in 1939, leaving for England, all he could muster was a "wooden hug" for his mother and an embarrassed look away from his father's first-ever display of tears. When his parents' last-ever letter reached him in 1943 - the letter in which Ludwig and Regina Pelz said their goodbyes, now certain of the fate that awaited them - Werner pushed it into a pocket, then lost it. Too much.

The Holocaust, for a while there, tipped Pelz towards the Christian God. He did not deny his Jewishness; later, he re-embraced it unconditionally. But he never quite faced the story of his family and, so, the story of himself.

Averill's deep love for his subject does not stop him telling us of the coward and the obstinate oaf in Pelz. His disengagement from his younger sister Jutti, who survived Auschwitz, unlike their parents, is shocking. After the war she asked him for help. He did nothing. Pelz's failings as a father and stepfather are also unsettling, especially in the light of his parents' all-abiding love for him.

I wish Averill didn't strain to fill the inevitable gaps in his expansive research by inserting "one imagines". The story as it stands is gripping, no narrative flourishes required. I wish, too, that the account of Pelz's dying was not tacked on to the end of each chapter, in the form of Averill's diary entries, and thus stretched out across the book, a slowing-down of farewell and a poignant counterpoint to his dear friend's aversion to farewells. But it feels like a misjudgment.

Averill digs deep, scours wide. We trust him - trust his integrity in chronicling Pelz's life, trust his not playing haywire with the facts and with us. I think Pelz would have liked the book. And he would have thought the right man got to write it.’

Maria Tumarkin , The Australian, 15 September

Averill is a constant but discreet presence throughout the book, as he meets and gets to know Pelz’s friends and family, visits his old home in Berlin, and tries to work out what his discoveries are telling him if anything, about Werner, and where the boundaries of biographical decency lie. The prose is a s clear as Orwell’s pane of glass, though he knows how to use a good anecdote, and the book flows evenly, deeply through Werner’s life. …Averill’s quest for the truth about Werner Pelz begins with questions: Can you really understand someone without knowing much of their past? What happens when you do know more? ‘Might I know more, yet understand less?’ He asks and in the spirit of his beloved teacher and friend he has no answer, except perhaps the one that Werner gave in a radio interview not long before he died: the most important thing is simply to go on thinking.

Peter Kenneally, Australian Book Review, April 2013

Averill truly loved Pelz, but he is nonetheless a skilled biographer not blind to the man’s flaw s … Averill writes about Pelz’s last days with great feeling and compassion. I was reminded about my teacher and about all those who survived the monstrosity of the mid-twentieth century. The book’s poignancy
stayed with me for long after I put it down.

Grazyna Zajdow, Arena Magazine, May 2013

The Edge of Bali

‘First published 20 years ago, it’s a testament to the timeless nature of Inez Baranay’s stories that this novel isn’t particularly dated. The Indonesian island remains a popular holiday destination and it’s the tourist perspective that Baranay’s interested in exploring. The narrative, which follows three Westerners, skates on the edge of Bali without venturing into the local mindset.’

The Sunday Age, July 22

‘At an area bright with awnings, banners and rows of hulking tourist buses, camera-laden tourists were being shepherded to the entrance of a theatre, where, the billboards proclaimed, the famous trance dance of Bali was enacted at ten am each day.

‘Pseudo places,’ said Marla. ‘Pseudo events. I’ve been reading about it.’ At Warung Ibu Suci she had met someone who was doing a degree in Leisure Studies, majoring in Tourism. ‘Pseudo places define the tourist world, and finally eliminate places entirely and then the true like the real begins to be reproduced in the image of the pseudo, which begins to become the true.’ (p148)

It feels surreal to read this reissued tale of three travellers to Bali. When The Edge of Bali was first published by Collins in 1992, the novel was groundbreaking because it explored the culture of tourism, tested the relationship between East and West and interrogated the notion of exotic. But now, in the aftermath of the Bali Bombings, I couldn’t help but read Part One through a different lens, one with an expectation of approaching doom. Try as I might to remember the book’s original publication date, the timelessness of Balinese life takes over, and the story feels as if it’s taking place today. As Nelson strolls down the Kuta pathways to the bar, her head filled with romantic dreams of the Balinese boyfriend she has come to reclaim, I kept expecting the author to have placed a terrorist’s bomb to destroy the idyll.

The Edge of Bali is a book that could not have been written in the same way since the bombings. The carefree atmosphere that beguiles the tourists in Baranay’s novel is not as it was, so the sense of nostalgia is inescapable. But the issue of responsible tourism is the same, only more so…

Baranay has a light touch with these issues that bedevil tourism in developing countries – she avoids sitting in judgement with a setting so seductive that as the pages turn the reader feels transported to the same kind of relaxed contentment as the characters. A novel with these themes could easily have been tempted into polemics but it avoids that with deft characterisation and dialogue. An omniscient observer narrates the thoughts of the main protagonists:

1. Nelson, a 20 year-old whose reunion with her Balinese boyfriend leads her into unexpected peril
2. Marla,who’s intensely aware of the contradictions of tourism but finds herself seduced by Bali’s charm all the same, and
3. Tyler, seeking a lost friend, is sucked into intrigue.

Each of these three has hopes and dreams, and each gets a reality check along with unanswered questions about themselves. Seduced by the smiles, their delusions of a Balinese destiny and the ‘pretty promises of a new and meaningful life’ (p169) are shaken into clarity by time. They don’t ‘belong’ in the culture and their privileged origins mean that they never can belong. If you stay in any holiday destination long enough, you discover that for yourself.
The Edge of Bali is a classic example of a book that should never have gone out of print. Congratulations to Transit Lounge for reissuing it!’

Lisa Hill, ANZ Lit Lovers, September 2012  

Vicky Swanky is a Beauty

‘Often less than a page long, Diane Williams’ stories resemble overheard anecdotes with vital parts gouged out. They’re anything but straightforward, full of cryptic gestures and sphinx-like dialogue. Such brevity edges Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty closer to a collection of poetry than to standard fiction. Williams deliberately positions her pieces to be awkward and off-balance, down to the last detail. While her eccentric style will prove a hindrance to many readers, it also frees her hands. She collapses years of abandonment into a handful of strokes in the stand-out piece, ‘Chicken Winchell’, and many other stories explode and recast reality in this way. Williams also proves handy with dry, incidental comedy and never takes her eagle eye off the human experience. She renders the mundane profound. For all her hairpin turns and sometimes mocking tone, these pieces are oddly moving once readers attune themselves to Williams’ peculiar wavelength. Not a book to be rushed through, this should be pored over and re read up close, scanned for meaning in the vast spaces between words.’

Doug Wallen, The Big Issue, 17-30 July 2012.

We all Fall Down

‘‘Are Australian storytellers perennially obsessed with the middle class? Recently, we've seen middle-class suburbia carefully picked apart; in Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, in films Lantana and Three Dollars and countless more, in the perfunctory story arcs of Home and Away or Packed to the Rafters, we seem fascinated by the tightrope of normalised middle-income living, of testing the safety net against an ever widening array of threats, real and imagined, to our status quo. Perhaps we lack the outside pressures of our intercontinental neighbours, but the middle class - how we enter it, how we maintain it, and how we lose our place in it - is, for mine, the pre-eminent dramatic fuel of modern Australian narrative.

We All Fall Down mobilises these anxieties to terrific effect, even if it was written by a Brit (now living in Melbourne). Author Peter Barry's second novel explores the hidden world of Sydney's advertising agencies, depicting a corporate structure that suppresses creativity, rewards insouciance, and is ethically vacant. And Barry should know, having worked as a copywriter in Sydney and Melbourne for more than 20 years. Like advertising creative director Peter Carey before him, he's managed to shed the vocational lexicon and produce a novel of surprising rhetorical power, which argues a basic incompatibility between 60-hour corporate weeks and having a family.

Hugh Drysdale is senior operations manager at Alpha Agency, and handles the Bauer (think Porsche) account, even if his superiors give him virtually no credit for it. Early on, we witness Hugh's friend and office confidante, Fiona, being abruptly fired from Alpha, to be replaced by a hotshot creative director from London. The looming changes in managerial direction don't bode well for Hugh, whose traditional, cautionary approach to selling products is increasingly out of step with testosterone-driven contemporaries.

He's not in high regard at home either, having moved wife Kate and young child Tim from their North Shore address to a regional McMansion in Stanwell, outer Sydney. There, she becomes increasingly embittered in her domestic relegation, viewing Hugh's increasing workload and hours with contempt, resentment and suspicion. The combined pressures of a larger mortgage and job insecurity compel Hugh to work harder. When he jettisons an Easter family camping trip for more time in the office, his relationship with Kate begins to unravel.

Neither finds empathy in each other's circumstances; Hugh regards his wife's amateur artistic ambitions and notions of responsibility as laissez-faire, Kate cannot appreciate her husband's financial stewarding. The implications are inevitable and unsettling; each must sacrifice juvenile preambles of romance for either loveless marriage, or divorce.

Barry's story is dressed as a jittery kitchensink drama, the same style of dirty (read turgid) realism that characterised Australian fiction in the mid-90s. But underneath is a powerful rhetorical story about success and inequality in corporate Australia, one that challenges embedded notions of dog-eat-dog hyper-capitalism. Hugh's fall from occupational and familial grace is delivered gradually and plausibly; we're given valuable exposition into his past that render his ruminations (and subsequent humiliations) on marriage, parenting, advertising and ethics as stoically believable. Late in the piece, our protagonist is offered salvation in the form of a job in the booming bottled-water industry, but rejects it on the grounds that selling water - a public resource - is exploitative. It's a frustrating, revelatory moment; a metaphor for martyrdom against unstoppable corporate greed.

In We All Fall Down, Peter Barry ends up lobbying a brand of socialism that questions the necessity for companies, and for people, to make money at the expense of all things. The Alpha Agency is punished for transgressing corporate ethics and loses a valuable account, Hugh is punished for believing in the values of the corporate patriarch over the family home. The final sequence is symbolic and oratorical, as Hugh's lamentations on his past - the fool he was, and the shadow he has become, carve out a similar argumentative space to Camus's wretched judge-penitent in The Fall; that man cannot stake his happiness on wealth, success, sex or the the esteem of others, that lifestyles can become commodities perpetuated by the ego.

And, happily, Barry manages to land a few cheap shots on his former employers too.’

Sascha Kenny, Canberra Times 2 June 2012

‘Hugh and Kate are living the great Australian dream. They have a gorgeous son, a beautiful home in the leafy outer suburbs and Hugh has a glamorous job in advertising. Unfortunately, they are living in the danger period just as the GFC is about to hit and one wrong move will see them unable to afford their next mortgage payment. And all is not well behind closed doors, with Kate refusing to get a job and a cold war going on over whether to have another child.

Hugh begins to feel cornered and scared as he deals with the fickle world of advertising and the politics of his marriage. Is his boss out to get him? Should he steal his biggest client and go it alone: Why is it that his idea of suburban heaven is making his wife so miserable?

Hugh is a man trying to find meaning and to live his life with integrity, but he finds it increasingly impossible to cope with the uncertainty of his daily life.
People are being made redundant, the ad agency he works for is losing business and Hugh doesn’t have the stomach for it any more.

You can almost smell the fear and paranoia in this elegantly crafted depiction of modern life, love and career. Peter Barry has lived up to and exceeded the promise of his darkly comic first novel, I Hate Martin Amis et al.’
Must Read. Verdict: ****

Danielle Roller, Sunday Herald Sun 20 May 2012.

‘In his brilliant debut, I Hate Martin Amis et al., Peter Barry challenged the literati and questioned what makes fiction literary. In his latest novel, We All Fall Down, he takes on modern society and the family unit, constructing a powerful family drama that questions the very fabric of contemporary Australia. Hugh Drysdale and his wife, Kate, are living the Australian dream. They have bought their own beautiful home and have an adorable infant son to keep them busy. Hugh works for a successful advertising agency and Kate looks after their young son. But when one of Hugh’s colleagues and closest friends is made redundant, Hugh fears for his own job security and the cracks begin to appear in his perfect life. The Drysdales are, in fact, up to the eyeballs. They’re a typical middle-class family living week to week, trying to make mortgage and credit card payments they simply cannot afford in order to sustain a standard of living to which they believe they are entitled. This is a grim but powerful read from a major emerging voice in Australian literature.’

Angela E Andrewes, The Big Issue 19 June - 2 July 2012.

‘Peter Barry splashed onto the scene with his eviscerating look at the literary industry, I Hate Martin Amis et al. Now he turns his eye to the fickle world of advertising. The result, while narratively more conventional than his debut, is nonetheless equally devastating. When we first meet Hugh Drydale, he’s at the top of his game. He’s going places, he murmurs to himself, and not just to the 19th floor of the Alpha Agency where he works as an advertising executive in Sydney’s CBD. Hugh has the requisite accessories to complement his success; a wife with artistic pretensions and a toddler son tucked away in a seaside mansion.

But of course, his work-life balance is seriously skewed as his office commitment ensures that he sees his family only at the fag-end of days. The dearth of time together is already causing irreparable frays in his marriage. And then there are seismic changes at the agency: multiple redundancies and a brash new creative director. Hugh finds himself trying to hang onto his job in considerable meaner, leaner times.

Not since Elliot Perlman’s Three Dollars have the effects of economic rationalism been so comprehensively tracked. For a protagonist whose self-worth and identity are linked to his high-paying job. Hugh’s emotional fallout is particularly acute. His downward spiral is explored in Barry’s precise, measured prose that’s littered with evocative metaphors. (He describes a face as ‘broken up and obscure as an impressionist painting’) Anyone who has ever been beholden to a recalcitrant boss and bank manager will sympathise with this increasingly overwrought salaryman.’

Thuy On, The Saturday Age 19 May 2012

‘If it only seems like yesterday that a Peter Barry book found its way onto bookshelves, then that’s because it was just last year that his debut novel, I Hate Martin Amis Et Al, was released. Which is why it’s so surprising to see that he has already released a second book. Not only is it good, but it’s also better that his first. In many ways more assured, Barry’s latest work is set in Sydney and centres on a couple, Kate and Hugh Drysdale. They are battling the financial burden of buying their first house and attempting to stay afloat in a workforce that is becoming increasingly cutthroat and vicious. Hugh, the breadwinner, gets even more on his plate when a new creative director from the UK joins the advertising agency where he works. The newcomer adds even more uncertainty to a company that has made some of its best staff redundant.

Where I Hate Martin Amis Et Al covered a huge range of topics, We All Fall Down succeeds in its narrower focus, giving Barry the full scope to explore both his characters and the times we are living in. I can’t wait to see what he writes next.’****

Mitchell Jordan, Good Reading, July 2012

In Search of the Blue Tiger

‘I live in a house of adults who never tell the truth.’ Says 11 year old Oscar Flowers, beginning an account of his life. In Search of the Blue Tiger traces his search for clues, truth and redemption as he observes his parents’ cruelty and entrapment and looks for other ways of living. His mother and father, distanced by the use of definite articles (“the Mother” and “the Father”) trade insults - she calls him a pig: he calls her “a cow and a bitch”. This leads him to explore the connection between the human and animal worlds, his only confidant an invisible best friend, Blue Monkey. He imagines a blue tiger, capable of saving his family, and sets out to find it.

Some writers’ attempts to capture a child’s perspective involve a kind of primitivism, imagining the child’s world as a place of innocence and simplicity. Others show the vulnerability of such a state to experience. Virginia Woolf, for instance, begins her essay “A Sketch of the Past” depicting the absorbency of the child’s mind as she remembers the textures and sounds of the Cornwall family holiday house, the sea breeze pushing the acorn on the end of the blind back and forth across the bedroom floor.

But Woolf soon queries the possibility of such innocence (and the remembering that goes with it). Her piece darkens as memory is burdened with violence exceeding the child’s language and concept of self. Similarly, Robert Power’s striking debut novel works less with the idea of childhood innocence, than with its burdening and fracturing by violence. Among its chapters’ epigraphs are words from Woolf, as well as an array of literary luminaries.

Oscar’s narrative contains both the child’s view and language and slivers of the encroaching adult world. “The bitch and the pig and the cow” he thinks, sounds a bit like “the spoon and the dish and the cow jumping over the moon”. Yoking what he witnesses to the language of his childish experience creates a liminal world, where the whimsy of his observations are spiked by the violence of his home, which he calls the House of the Doomed and Damned. This name is just one of the splinters in his thoughts, something beyond the scope of a secure, nurtured child. Threads of an uncanny maturity are woven with the naïve to create an extraordinary voice, neither fully that of a child or adult. Part of this is Oscar’s age, poised as he is on the cusp of puberty. Oscar is aware of you, the reader, directly inviting us, for instance, to “take a walk to my house”. This self-consciousness gives the narrative a quality of performance, which feels slightly odd.

Oscar’s disconnection from parents too absorbed by their own lives and misery to care for him gives his perspective an odd whimsy. He sees those around him almost as mythological figures, and he names them to reflect this. Mrs Teachwell, Mrs. Butcherhook and Miss Spinster are among the characters who move across his field of vision, but at first Oscar is connected with none of them. At school he observes the Fishcutter twins, Perch and Carp, also cut off from the other children by the loss of their mother, by their family’s religious beliefs and by the enclosure of their own relationship.

Oscar’s search for the blue tiger takes him to the library, where he meets Mrs April, who helps him find his way through the shelves and towards the possibility of a gentler world. More precious, though is that she sees him. Oscar’s relationships with Mrs April and the Fishcutter Twins develop as his search continues. Power creates a sense of two paths unfolding before Oscar, though given the context of the small town where they live, these paths soon cross.

Around these paths move ideas of belief and doubt. For some characters Oscar observes, loss brings a deepening of religious ritual. His disapproving great-aunt Margaret has lost a child and burrows into a cold Catholicism, clicking her tongue and her rosary beads. The Fishcutters are Jehovah’s Witnesses and the twins invite Oscar into a sinister expression of their faith. In each case, the shell of ritual and words covers a lack. Late in the novel, events propel Oscar into a world where various religious leaders offer him guidance. This section is perhaps a little protracted.

The publisher’s blurb insists on comparisons with Yan Martel’s Life of Pi. Tigers not withstanding, this comparison suggests a greater degree of fantasy in Power’s novel than is the case. While Oscar hopes and searches for the tiger, the centre of the novel is the humanity he tries to understand. While his experiences circle around violence, his focus is on hope, largely embodied by Mrs April. Psychologically astute, original and whimsical, the novel creates a memorable protagonist and sees him set sail, eventually, powered by dreams and resilience. Fantasy and a quest for alternative worlds are symptomatic of trauma, but also, ultimately, the means of Oscar’s self-made redemption.’

Felicity Plunkett, Canberra Times 17 March 2012

‘Robert Power’s debut novel In Search of the Blue Tiger was shortlisted for the unpublished manuscript category of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in 2008. Early promise has germinated into a significant work which perhaps falls between Life of Pi, Under Milk Wood and Gus Kuiijer’s disturbing children’s novel, The Book of Everything.

Oscar Flower’s childhood is distorted by his parents’ violent fights. He believes that they are animals in human form, were-animals, and finds consolation in his literal and metaphorical search for the blue tiger, which will enable him to become fearless and powerful. His quest leads him to the library where a special friendship develops with the sympathetic Mrs April. He also becomes the focus of insular twins, Perch and Carp

Fishcutter, who embroil in him in their Jehovah’s Witness cult of Armageddon and sacrifice. Other surreal experiences seem to be inspired by theosophy or mysticism. The narrative belies recent criticisms of literary fiction as being plotless. Oscar is swept into a compelling journey, relayed in part by his scrapbook of tiger legends and facts. The writing is subtle, connotative and composed. Its craftsmanship embraces and extends this audacious depiction of an escape from childhood.’

Joy Lawn, Bookseller and Publisher, Summer 2011/12

‘THIS dark and beautiful tale, told with a light touch, stayed in my mind long after I'd finished.
Oscar, an 11-year-old boy who lives in the seaside village of Tidetown, is struggling to make sense of his parents' fraught relationship.

Often left to his own devices, he finds solace in books and a vivid imagination that leads him to the local library.

There he meets a sympathetic librarian who helps him research his special interest in tigers. When the two meet accidentally one day by the lake, there blossoms a unique bond between them that will shape their destiny in profound and tragic ways.

This is also a story about the dangers of religious obsession, emotionally damaged children, jealousy and love.
There are some transcendent moments of joy in the connection between Oscar and the librarian but there is also horror and despair as the narrative unfolds.
The prose is lucid, poetic and is, itself, one of the story's pleasures. The ending is both unpredictable and provocative, and strikes an ambiguous note between tragedy and redemption.’

Claire Kennedy, Herald Sun 12 March 2012

‘Oscar, a young boy, lives with his mother, father and great aunt in a house he refers to as the “House of the Doomed and the Damned”. Blue Monkey, Oscar’s imaginary guardian, protects him through the long nights of domestic violence he witnesses between his father and mother. Power’s skill as a writer is to allow us insight into Oscar’s hopeful magic-realist view of the world, even while we are travelling through this dark terrain of trauma. In Oscar’s imagined world, men can become tigers, and it is Oscar’s dream to grow up to become a tiger so he can protect his mother. Power’s highly imaginative and confident debut novel is a parable that draws on a number of biblical and mythical tales. His writing is full of lyrical imagery and language. Tidetown, the place Oscar lives, is full of characters with literal but elemental names. The fishmonger’s name is Mr. Fishcutter, the butcher is Mr. Butcherhook, the grave-digger, Ebenezer Squarentrue. Despite his fear, Oscar is always on the lookout for good things to happen and, eventually, they do.’

Pip Newling, The Big Issue No. 402, 13-26 March 2012

‘Alone and lonely, young Oscar Flowers lives in the seaside village of Tidetown with the Mother, the Father and the Great Aunt in The House of the Doomed and Damned.
With parental blood spilt above him in constant bouts of violence and a heavy moroseness poisoning the air, Oscar retreats to the cellar with his books and his imagination.
Though his guardian angel, Blue Monkey, is forever looking out for him, what Oscar really wants is to be a Blue Tiger or, failing that, to find one in order to harness its power and beauty. To the 11-year-old, the beast is a talisman of hope whose discovery would somehow soothe all his anxieties. What Oscar finds instead are a widowed librarian, the sympathetic Mrs April, and the compelling but less-lovely twins, Perch and Carp Fishcutter.

Robert Power’s novel is an intriguing blend of myth and reality rolled together with religious fanaticism.
Oscar is obsessed with animal-human hybrids and an anthropomorphic strain runs through the book.

As a witness to domestic violence, adultery and even murder, Oscar’s impressionistic image of the world is tainted at such a tender age but Power leavens the darkness of his novel by at times adopting a fabulist, almost cartoonish tone. For instance, he has a bit of fun with the names of the towns-people; the neighbourhood includes Miss Shorthand, Mrs Teachwell, Judge Omega, Father Saviour and Mrs Butcherhook. Written from the perspective of a child, In Search of the Blue Tiger is a strange, whimsical book about a boy desperate to make sense of a world where adults habitually lie.’

Thuy On, The Saturday Age, March 31

‘This debut novel was shortlisted for the manuscript section of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Oscar lives in a town with his drunk, violent parents, and escapes into his imagination. A librarian helps him find books and he develops a crush on her. In this novel, parents sow what they reap from their children, with play-acting turning real, and murderous. Blue Tiger is dreamy, rich with observation and fine writing.’

Lucy Sussex, The Sunday Age, April 22

Shanti Bloody Shanti

‘Shanti bloody shanti is one of those rip-roaring rollicking good time Boys’ Own Adventure kind of tales, told with a distinctly Aussie voice and a delightfully devious sense of humour.

Aaron Smith’s Indian odyssey is filled with imagery so vivid that, by the end of the third chapter, I began to feel like a seasoned visitor to Mother India, despite the fact that I’ve never set foot on her shores.

Of the Victoria Monument, Smith writes:

This was a marble palace from the height of the British Raj, fronted by a grumpy, pigeonshit-encrusted bronze Queen Victoria and surrounded by acres of English gardens wilting under the Indian sun. (12)

Mumbai from the back seat of a taxi:

…we passed through blocks of slums, destitute shantytowns built from pieces of plastic, scraps of metal and whatever refuse could be salvaged from the streets. Overhead, masses of tangled powerlines were illegally tapped from the city grid. (25)

To say there is an interesting array of characters on this journey is an understatement: from bargain-hunter Frankie who once scored ‘a classic vintage 70s hang glider’ (24) to the Japanese hippy chick who introduces herself as ‘Suz the Nip’ and just about every eccentric character of every hue imaginable in between.

However, a couple of warnings:-

Smith might have given us just a bit too much information when it comes to vomit and shit and nostril gunk. I’m not sure I needed to know that a case of food poisoning resulted in ‘what feels like liquefied internal organs’ falling out of his ass (17) or that staring into a bucket of his vomit he spies sweetcorn, despite not having eaten corn for months. I know, I know…this would definitely be a big part of any back-packing, hostel-haunting, Indian safari but I occasionally cringed. Boys being boys though, the guys will get a real hoot out of this kind of stuff.

The second warning relates to the substantial amount of drug use. I am assuming this must be de rigueur for the twenty to thirty-somethings that would be inclined to embark on such an odyssey and I suppose it is a reflection of some affluent young Westerners (but I don’t believe it necessarily represents the majority, even in that age category).

Most people, at one time or another, have probably turned up to a party only to discover acquaintances shrouded in a Hiroshima-like haze or nasal deep in white powder but the acid tripping seemed more reminiscent of the seventies flower-power era than early twenty-first century. Smith even hints at the strangeness of it himself I think, when he and his friends are tripping while listening to The Doors as someone rolls a joint – ‘it’s all so trite.’ (180).

I recognize that, as a fifty-something female, I am not the targeted demographic for such a book and yet I enjoyed it. Despite not being a cricket fan, I had a good chuckle over the constant Ricky Ponting references and I enjoyed the Aussie colloquialisms (true blue, the sketchy bail and built like a brick shithouse), most of which were explained (with an eye on an international audience, I assume).

I can’t help but wonder how many young men, after reading of Smith’s odyssey, will be testing ‘handfuls of zinc tablets’ (28) as sex-marathon-assisters. Will readers trawl through the internet to clarify the official scientific line on déjà vu?

shanti bloody shanti is not all beer and skittles. The unfortunate incident of Dahlia and the ‘stairway to heaven’ signals impending doom and what follows is a series of strange events and eerie coincidences that seem to straddle the fence of reality.

I learnt much about Hindu spirituality, the mighty Ganges, Nepalese politics and even the animal spirits of the Yorta Yorta people back home. But Smith manages to impart with educational gems with the lightest of touches, eschewing any hint of the didactic. There is certainly nothing high-brow about shanti bloody shanti but Aaron Smith knows his audience and I suspect those readers will lap up this entertaining memoir.’

Karenlee Thompson

‘Man with shady past travels to India to find himself and to avoid being bumped off by a jealous drug dealer after sleeping with his girlfriend. Once there, among flea-ridden dives, political upheaval faux new-age mysticism and odd-ball characters, a succession of encounters and the death of a friend lead to a little wisdom and redemption. In style and tone, Smith’s book is somewhere between Shantaram and Sarah MacDonald’s Holy Cow, books that populate the shelves of the traveller’s cafes and budget hotels that form much of the backdrop to his story. And while one suspects truth is at times sacrificed on the altar of compelling narrative it’s a funny and enjoyable romp packed with traveller’s tales that ring true.’

Julian Swallow, The Advertiser , Dec 2011

‘If your’re afflicted by middle-aged blues or just plain broken-hearted and suspect travel and drugs could provide a cure, this soul-searching romp through India is for you. Old Indian hands will recognise the artful descriptions of places such as Sudder St and Rishikesh, or the crappy hotels and the often incomprehensible ways of the locals. Smith enlivens these scenes using Vedic legends as background to the chaos of a modern India, infused by merry bands of wobbly-headed Westerners on their spiritual quests. Verdict: amusing Gen-X read.’

Stuart Pridham, Herald Sun, Nov 19 2011

‘Fleeing a hitman, Smith escapes to India where he stumbles upon a murder mystery, evades a terrorist attack and meets eccentric characters while soaking up the chaotic charm of the country.’

Travel 3 Sixty. Air Asia Inflight Magazine, December 2011

‘Away from the glorified accounts of ‘finding oneself’ in India seen in Eat Pray Love and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, lie tales of a more sinister Mother India, whose unrelenting grasp is both mystifying and ruthless. Shanti bloody shanti is one of them. Aaron Smith, a former Blue Heelers policeman, delivers a staggering off-the-record memoir of what could be considered something between a stag tour and a hippie trail experience of India.

The self-described “ex-punk rocker, ex-drug addict, failed actor, divorced truck driver from Australia” embarks on a journey of self-discovery spawned not by an inherent desire to achieve spiritual enlightenment, but because his mistress’ boyfriend had a contract out on him. His tales cover not just the pure modes of enlightenment, but the whole gamut of Indian experiences; yoga, Reiki, ashrams, drugs, murder, poker, Dehli belly, love, loss, and desperation.

Smith mixes interesting and well-researched anecdotes of Indian (and Aboriginal) history and culture with stunning imagery of his surrounds. His intricate descriptions of the charismatic motley crew of travellers he meets on the way is all too familiar – we all know a fat balding friend in the IT industry, a friend terrible at poker but excellent at ‘the sketchy bail’, and a seedy Mediterranean womaniser claiming to be God’s gift to women.

Despite the fact he was a misogynist, tactless, a bit of a bully and had nothing in common with me, Chris had a certain quality that was comforting in a roundabout sort of way. I wouldn’t go as far as to say he had a charm, not by a long shot, but he had a brawny, beery, no bullshit boy’s own adventurousness about him that may have been just what I needed to blow away my dark clouds.

Unfortunately the evocative imagery continues to his bowel movements, which are continually touched on throughout the book.
“Sitting on the porcelain throne, expelling vile fluids from both ends, I have time to reflect. I suspect my current condition is not only due to yesterday’s drugs but also to do with yesterday’s consumption of so-called pizza in a small establishment called the Super Bar.”

“Sitting here now on the YMCA toilet, I stare into the bucket. I see pieces of what looks like sweetcorn, but I haven’t eaten corn for months.”
I’ll spare you the rest.

Smith’s use of colloquial ‘ocker’ language makes the book familiar to readers and enjoyable to read, but it also comes across a little too casual and almost comparable to the banter of a boys’ school classroom. His range and depth of expression reflects his suburban roots and feels more like you’re listening to an old friend tell stories than reading a novel. It’s impressive how poetic Smith can make his account of his friend’s soiled pants with the “stench of shit, almost saccharine sweat”. It’s almost beautiful.

While sex, poo, and drugs make up most of the jokes, no humour is left to describe the ‘real’ India most authors tend to discount. A murder mystery, death of a friend, and stories of foul play and poverty show the stark reality of Mother India. Like the author, it is both a thing of exoticness and wonder but also hides an evil dark side. To his credit, Smith does effectively convey some weirdly accurate spiritual encounters with level-headed sensibility.
Smith is an exquisite storyteller whose dynamic tales create a narrator who is a friend, a teacher, and a travelling companion. Shanti bloody shanti is humid with colloquial density and reveals the magic, mystery, and sadness of one man’s Indian experience. Though it is no Booker prize winner, this book is an interesting and poignant tale with a sharp with that will keep you chuckling for days.
Read this book if you love The Hangover movies.’

Kate Fitzpatrick, www.talesfromoz.com.au

Riding the Trains in Japan

‘WHAT would you do if you found yourself in Kyoto and had nowhere to stay?

Kyoto is a city where you can buy bowls of day-to-day food so beautiful that you hesitate to disturb the design with chopsticks, a city where geisha appear in the streets. Yet without a room to sleep in, the charm quickly fades.

Australian writer Patrick Holland does not often pre-book hotels and he arrived in Kyoto during O-Bon, a Buddhist festival for the return of the spirits of the dead. There was no accommodation for him.

This was a new experience for Holland, who has spent 10 years travelling in China, Vietnam and Japan, far from his Brisbane home. In Holland's position, stranded alone at the train station in Kyoto, I'd sit for a long time with my head in my hands. But he was far more sensible.

At first he decided to bunk down on a bench and sleep. This isn't impossible. The train station in Kyoto is the virtuoso achievement of architect Hiroshi Hara. It has vast curved and folding overhead structures and the longest escalators I've seen, leading not to retail paradise but to a roof garden. The retail spaces are far below and they are expensive. It isn't a place where you sprawl unconscious, using your backpack for a pillow.

So, Holland decided to store his luggage and use Japanese trains as makeshift hotel rooms, sleeping upright and journeying to and from Kyoto, where he finally saw a geisha, cool and immaculate on a street where everyone else was streaming with sweat. This Kyoto story opens Holland's new book, a collection of autobiographical essays on travel in Asia, reflections on places many of us will never see and reflections, too, on the practical and spiritual experience of travel.

Riding the Trains in Japan will take its place on my shelves alongside Donald Richie's The Inland Sea, a classic tale of thoughtful wandering in Japan. Holland's essays are personal, but they are also about the general subjects of travel, time, love, human exploitation and outlandish Western fantasies of the East. The book takes us to Japan, China and Vietnam. Holland writes about the sad and isolated children of wealthy Chinese manufacturers and about a vision of the Madonna that is central to an ethnic resistance movement in Vietnam.

He describes a Japanese cemetery of wood, water and stone containing a candle-lit lantern that honours the offerings of an impoverished woman who lived more than 1000 years ago. He describes a bridge across a river in Saigon that is a gathering place for young prostitutes.

Armchair tourism appears in the form of a chance meeting with Michael Palin, who is filming in a traditional matriarchal culture. This story also depicts a grotesque sex-tourist, clumsily hunting young Asian women. A piece on the Gobi desert considers the way politics and architecture are at best a temporary defence against the forces of wind and sand.

This makes Holland sound earnest, but he can be self-deprecating. He writes: "A fool in a bar in Brisbane is the same fool on a mountain in Tibet, I often said to my few and diminishing friends back home who claimed to envy my travels."

Holland, who was long-listed for this year's Miles Franklin Award for his most recent novel, The Mary Smokes Boys, is the opposite of foolish and his observations on travel are surprising and enjoyable.

For example, he uses a description of watching the reflection of his face in the window of a train to make a point about the position of the contemporary traveller: "Due to the darkness outside and the light within the carriage, your image is spread across the landscape like a deity, yet this is only possible because the landscape is rendered a depthless black plane, there is no expanse to spread across at all, you see little and understand nothing of it . . . in time . . . you hardly recognise the apparition as yourself. A weird premonition of the fate of the modern and supermodern traveller: to be everywhere and nowhere at once, and, at last, to lose himself."

Riding the Trains in Japan succeeds in the difficult task of offering the reader a fresh vision of places and histories, of catching the impression of distant voices and also of offering the kind of insight only acquired through travelling.

The book isn't perfect. Holland can be over-polemical and it's more inclusive to write of "humanity" than "mankind" as he does, especially in a book concerned about the exploitation of women.

However, Holland's thoughts on time, on faith and politics and the natural world, grounded in the observation of Asian cultures, are a genuinely interesting addition to the literary tradition of travelling, and writing, in solitude.

Brenda Walker, The Australian, October 22 2011

‘Few things read worse than bad travel writing. Fortunately, Patrick Holland largely dismisses the traditional travel narrative as “at best a kind of nostalgic fantasy, at worst a lie” on the fifth page of this collection detailing his time in China, Japan and Vietnam. Holland is more concerned with the spaces between Big Travel Experiences and the hooks these offer for a parallel, scattershot brand of philosophising, such as how dark water plays on human fears. Holland’s stories, for they are stories, are carefully constructed with a writer’s eye for recursive events, laden with detail and sting-in-the tail endings, and featuring an authenticity of place lacking in many contemporary short stories. The best resonate deliberately while maintaining this solidity; the worst fall back on anecdotal hijinks-yet even the worst are decent. For readers interested in the intersection of event, idea and place, this collection is a treat.’

Rhys Tate, The Big Issue, 6-25 Dec 2011

‘The speed of 21st-century transport and the uniformity of airports and modern cities make the traditional travel narrative a “nostalgic fantasy”, Patrick Holland says. The fate of contemporary traveller is to be “everywhere and nowhere at once”. It’s not surprising Holland should feel this so acutely. Unable to find accommodation in Kyoto, he decides to travel aimlessly by train for days on end and thus embrace what he calls this “supermodern” condition. Appropriately, these travel stories through Asia largely dispense with the contrivances of narrative tension or plot, being driven more by intellectual curiosity, philosophical reflection and an openness to uncertainty. In China, Holland explores the often bleak reality behind the “economic miracle”, such as spreading deserts and ghost cities of concrete. Free of the attitude and self-absorption common to the genre, this travel writing of a more existential kind.’

Fiona Capp, The Age, October 2011

‘This collection of travel essays is Patrick Holland’s first non-fiction work. His second novel The Mary Smokes Boys was long-listed for the 2011 Miles Franklin, shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year (Fiction) and highly recommended by Readings’ Martin Shaw. A devotee of minimalism, Holland’s prose is sparse yet evocative and very beautiful; his writing leaves space for the reader to fill in their own imagining of a scene or a place.

Holland’s ten years experience travelling and studying in the East inform his essays and he takes us through Japan, Vietnam and China, as well as many metaphysical places in-between. The first essay (which takes its name from the title of the collection) sees Patrick in a predicament: he’s arrived in Kyoto at the start of a three-day Buddhist festival which honours the spirits of one’s ancestors and thus there is no room at any inn in town. Unperturbed, he checks his luggage into a coin locker, buys a ticket for the shinkansen (300 km/h bullet train) and travels the near 400km distance to and fro between Kyoto and Tokyo through the nights and days for the duration of the religious holiday.

Patrick’s intrepid spirit makes for some marvellous travel tales, which are also humble reflections on how to live and what place there is for faith in the modern world. The fascinating rendering of the traditional juxtaposed with the modern in the first story continues throughout the collection.
The fact that it is non-fiction and travel writing might discourage, but Riding the Trains in Japan is far more remarkable than either of these genres might suggest – and it is not just for Japanophiles like myself. Reading Riding the Trains in Japan is a meditative experience, and I found much more to contemplate once I put the book down.’

Ingrid Josephine, Readings Monthly December 2011- January 2012

‘ … a patient, observant book, and also a joyful, knowledgeable one.’

William Heyward, Australian Book Review, March 2012

Waiting for a Wild Horse Sky

‘An engrossing story about the author’s experiences in South Korea. It is a book which deals with opposites and one which makes compelling reading.’

Gayle Sligar, The Echo, September 2011

‘Australian teacher Elaine Kennedy travelled to Korea to work in a bizarrely regimented, government-sponsored teaching program. Along with antique temples and exquisitely proportioned gardens, she discovers a netherworld of abuse and neglect of third-world guest workers. It is difficult to like the Korea depicted in Waiting for a Wide Horse Sky, and the author’s own conscience troubles the reader in turn. The parallels between her own bullied and overly controlled existence as a foreign worker and the overt exploitation of the Filipina women she encounters there are interestingly drawn, and I was left deeply troubled by the globalised word of labour that Kennedy describes.

This glimpse into the life of the English teacher abroad is frequently fascinating, as is the rich life of tormented friendships and intrigue that the author seemed to attract. The book also serves to detract from some of the supposed glamour of the expatriate life. The people who have chosen to start a new life in a country where they don’t know the language, history or customs are frequently difficult, escaping messy lives at home or being otherwise unemployable. Even more complex are the relationships with the Koreans themselves, as Kennedy attempts to navigate paths of friendship in minefields of mutual incomprehension.’ *** A good read.

Walter Mason, Good Reading Magazine, November 2011

‘Elaine Kennedy's memoir of her time living and working in Korea in the late 1990s touches the heart.  Embroiled in a situation that was by turns exasperating, annoying and funny, Kennedy and her new friends made helping others a priority - sometimes at their own personal risk.  The plight of the migrant factory workers is real, the conditions in which they live and work are outrageous, and their need for help is compelling.  As Kennedy and her friends stepped in to help where they could, and provided some support to these workers and those campaigning on their behalf, they discovered the potential for new beginnings - not just for the workers but for themselves and others around them.    
 
Kennedy and her new friends came from different countries to help prepare Korean teachers to integrate the teaching of English language into their schools.  Each had a different reason for being there, and as their stories unfold their willingness to tolerate the sometimes difficult living conditions in Korea becomes clearer.  Each of them goes through a profound personal journey, which is mirrored by the locals they meet.  There are many beautiful stories here, intertwined and yet individual in very important ways.  Myong-Ai's transformation from Kennedy's nosey land-lady to a happy and successful woman is one of the most beautiful journeys in this kaleidoscope of humanity.
 
I have never wanted to visit South Korea, and this book has not changed my mind.  But then it is not a travel memoir.  South Korea is a character as much as any of the human ones, and its life is just as important as theirs.  I sense that perhaps Kennedy's experience didn't really change the essence of who she is - that she always had the resilience and compassion to make a difference in the lives of others.  Perhaps it only required a particular set of circumstances to bring her strength forward to take a more conspicuous place in her life.   
 
Told with the pace of an adventure story, with emotional honesty and self-reflection, and with no less than three love stories unfolding under difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances, this book is a very satisfying read.’
 
Kate Matthew, Newsbite, Newsletter of New South Wales Writers’ Centre, December 2011

Small Indiscretions: Stories of Travel in Asia

‘Felicity Castagna’s book is something of a tour de force: it consists of 20 stories, set in most of the Asian countries ranging from Mongolia to Laos, always with Australians or other non-Asians as the protagonists.
It’s a series of delicate sketches and the encounters are small-scale and undramatic: Pearl and her daughter Dom fall out on a trip to Dalat, in the Vietnamese highlands; an English teacher in Shanghai gets one of her students to start a diary about her daily life; two Australian women on an Indonesian island compare lovers; a woman from Sydney works as a dancer in a Macau casino; a middle-aged Anglo man returns to the house his father owned in Singapore, the walls covered in sketches of the men his father knew in Changi.

The variations on the theme are fresh more often than not and can be surprising and although the book is very quiet in tone it does create a form of suspense, because you find youself wondering whether Castagna can keep up the poise, intelligence and alertness and avoid falling into travellers’ tales cliché. (You certainly envy her the stamps she must have in her passport.)

With this kind of writing there must be a temptation to show too obviously one’s political bonafides but even when Castagna deals in material that could lend itself very easily to moralising such as in the story about a a group of male uni students on an adventure holiday, she avoids making her points too crudely. The humanism of this book is everywhere implicit and nowhere harped on.’

Owen Richardson, The Age July 30 2011 p32

‘In this insightful collection Felicity Castagna shows why the short story is the perfect vehicle for the wide-eyed explorer celebrating the fleeting nature of their travel experience. Castagna’s fictional stories float through winding rivers in Laos, hike Malaysian hillsides and fritter away their time and money in the casinos of Macau. They convey the way travel is often tinged with melancholy; experiences are ephemeral, loves are lost, memories are forgotten. But Castagna’s tales also revel in their transience. Small Indiscretions is Castagna’s first collection of short stories, told through a kaleidoscope of ages, backgrounds and perspectives. Along the way, beauty is found, faith is questioned, risks are run and tastebuds are tested against a blooming Asian landscape. The dialogue is sensitive without being sentimental and the characters are a slice of humanity: wiry and uncertain. While this collection is perfect inspiration for those who have recently swapped suburbia for self-discovery, it will sit well with dreamers everywhere.’

**** (An excellent book) Kate Stephenson, Bookseller and Publisher July 2011

‘Must Read if you like Graham Greene’s short stories.

If books came with smells, this one would surely tickle the nostrils with exotic Asian odours every time you turned a page. Felicity Castagna is skilful writer with a knack of being able to take you somewhere colourfully foreign while delivering a good tale … the twenty yarns deftly explore the clash of cultures, clashes between modernism and tradition, loyalty and love, loss and betrayal. All the good stuff.
These are well written stories full of wit, surprise and wisdom.’ Four and a half stars.

Bryan Patterson, Sunday Herald Sun, 28 August, 2011

Single White Female in Hanoi

‘This is a thoughtful and intelligent book.’

Bruce Elder The Saturday Age and Sydney Morning Herald, 1 October 2011.

‘Carolyn spent a year teaching English whilst living in Hanoi. With an ear for language that only a musician can have she struggles with communication and gender politics in a culture very different from her own. Exceptionally fine writing and a wry self-awareness makes this travel memoir unforgettable.’

The Independent Bookseller’s Spring Reading Guide

The Comfort of Water

‘‘Melburnians have taken the Yarra for granted, as a murky, brown fixture. Environmentalist Maya Ward sees it differently. She has explored the Yarra extensively, and one day determined to walk to the source of the river. It took her and a group of friends three weeks, walking from docks to bushland. For much of this time the travellers were off the beaten track, their only path the river bank. Told as a diary, the narrative covers much ground: historical, ecological and what the future of the Yarra might hold. Once the river was an open sewer – more recent concern about water quality saw Ward and her friends shut out from catchment areas. The book opens eyes into the indigenous history of the river and the radical changes made since European arrival. This story of an eco-pilgrimage is luminous, informative and rather beautiful.’

Lucy Sussex, The Sunday Age June 5, 2011

‘… this is an important book simply because no one appears to have done this trip and written about it for more than 100 years. Ward’s description of the closure of the Yarra‘s headwaters is a reminder that the simple joy of following a river from the mouth to the source is no longer easy and is often a heartbreaking disappointment.’

Bruce Elder, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday June 25

YOU know that urge to holiday, to escape the city’s abrasive friction and head off-road or outback, beyond the rapacious sprawl of the urban fringe?
What you are actually seeking, Maya Ward suggests in The Comfort of Water, is the way home.

In this urbanised country, we endure a form of exile. “Home” might be a sterile box, serviced by a huge television and internet access, and infinitely extended by a car, but this is not the real thing. Home, Ward says, is about knowledge of place, a visceral sense of connection to the ground beneath your feet and the air you breathe. It is a whole-of-body experience.

This is the true story of an eccentric journey, on foot, from the mouth of the Yarra River in Port Phillip Bay to its source: a long walk and a hard slog. It is partly a quixotic manifesto for walking. More significantly, however, it belongs to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage. Ward’s journey is an act of penance, a spiritual education for our times. If you are throttled by grief at our bad habits, well, this is for you. It is an ecologically inspired divine comedy.
Starting out, the scenery is rubbish, literally. Birdsong is drowned in the roar of freeways. Ward passes docks, building sites and industrial estates. The river functions like the digestive tract of this massive urban organism. With sacrificial courage, she swims between a sewage “purification” plant, and a pumping point downstream (recycled drinking water is nothing new). Further upstream, there are atavistic, baptismal plunges into the river’s purifying depths.

Ward, who was born and has lived most of her life in Yarra River country, is a permaculture teacher and environmental educator, an acolyte of Melbourne’s Centre for Research and Education in Environmental Strategies community park and the Moora Moora co-operative. Her pilgrimage is neither religious nor a lecture on the rape of the earth and the dispossession of Aborigines. And yet, in the sweetest, humblest and most extravagantly poetic fashion, it is all of these.

Seeing past this nation’s perennial struggle with being waterless, or waterlogged, The Comfort of Water is about a yearning spirituality. Nature is held sacred. The Aboriginal name for the Yarra was Birrarung; it is an unimaginably ancient phenomenon.

Ward sees pilgrimage as “preserved from the wisdom of the hunter-gatherers, from people for whom the entire terrain was home”. Aboriginal people lived like pilgrims, tracking and singing Songlines, developing forms of wisdom many thousands of years old, all along our rivers. Despite the sullied landscape she moves through, Ward explores a vision of our proper place in this environment.

In order to approach the Yarra at all, she discovered that she would have to negotiate fences, and needed permission from property holders whose ownership extends to the middle of the river. The longest continuous culture on Earth lived without fences.

In a short, sharp, history lesson Ward traces the modern fate of the Yarra region back past industrialisation in Britain, to the acts of enclosure, explaining how settlers imported the violence of mapping, the mania of ownership, the degradation of the earth.

Her pilgrimage is difficult logistically, physically and emotionally. Food and shelter are offered by friends and riverside dwellers, a form of support associated through the ages with the spiritual gesture of pilgrimage. This invests her account with hope and optimism.
Now and then, her gentle traveller’s discourse is punctuated by vignettes of utmost poignancy. There is a brief account of how her father tried for a decade to re-vegetate the banks of Moonee Ponds Creek, only to see his efforts bulldozed in the widening of the Tullamarine freeway. He stood beside it with a placard saying “You killed my garden”, and left the country forever.

Her vision is not naively nostalgic, sentimental or idealistic. She has a great affection for Melbourne and its people and a strong sense of her place in a modern community.

This book belongs to a genre that runs back through Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau in America, and the peripatetic tradition of romantic poetry in Britain. It is seeing a revival, as Mark Tredinnick, author of The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir, suggests in his introduction to this book.
Nature writing, until recently, was associated with a dissenting politics, characterised as a subculture. Now, due to global warming, it seems increasingly mainstream, an ideological avant-garde in the endgame of Western industrial societies.

What does it take, Ward asks, to initiate our wrong-headed, blow-in culture into “living in balance and attaining sufficiency without excess?” Hoards of wilderness pilgrims may not be the answer; but it’s a very good question.’

Stella Clarke, Weekend Australian, Saturday 2 July

Stella Clarke has lectured on cultural and literary studies in Britain and Australia. She has a PhD in English literature from the University of Warwick.

‘Ward is often candid and self-revelatory in describing a journey which may not be epic in a physical sense … but in terms of the thoughts that it allows to percolate to the surface, The Comfort of Water could be ground breaking or even life-changing. This book will challenge or reaffirm you belief systems as it explores the impacts of human behaviour on the environment.’

John Cannon, The Sunday Tasmanian , 3 July 2011

Tales from the Cancer Ward

‘‘ONE morning in early 2009 Australian filmmaker Paul Cox woke to discover he was sick to the point of helplessness.
A man with a schedule of international festival appearances, a home in France and a family in The Netherlands was suddenly travelling to a cheerless destination: the local emergency department.

There he was told, wrongly, that he had small scars on his liver. If cancer was mentioned, in passing, he paid no attention. He postponed further tests to go to the Tehran film festival. His life was, it seemed, back to normal. Medical intervention, when he returned to Melbourne, was minimal and largely reassuring. Later he was given a conclusive diagnosis of liver cancer, a plan for chemotherapy treatment and an ultimate medical objective: a liver transplant.

At this point he decided to keep a diary, and Tales from the Cancer Ward is an account of a great shift in self-identification. He became a cancer patient as well as a thoughtful and exacting filmmaker, known for films such as Man of Flowers and Lonely Hearts. This was a public process since, to his dismay, a newspaper interview on his work and his views on film appeared under a sensational headline about cancer. He provided the journalist with information about his health; nevertheless, this public identification with cancer caused him pain and inconvenience.

Cancer treatment is like having a second job, with deadlines, unfamiliar routines, social connections with co-workers and a crushing fear of failure because if you fail to meet your medical obligations you risk letting down yourself and the people who care for you. Achieving tenure in the world of the living is a tough process.

Cox, as a public patient with no connection to an individual surgeon, had tremendous physical challenges, since chemotherapy is so punishing, as well as social adjustments when he met new and very significant medical people. He was surprised by the harshness of chemotherapy, which he calls a "prison". Yet in this confinement he discovered a different emotional register: a welcome capacity for intense feeling.

After chemotherapy he was left with a terrible prognosis: he had a few months to live. If he passed certain tests he would become a candidate for a liver transplant. At this point he was almost 70. The transplant was contingent on the availability of a donor liver. The surgery itself would take 10 hours. Convalescence from transplant surgery is often complicated. He took courage from many things: his conviction in the value of art, dreams, family and friends. His children, especially his daughter Kyra, are central to his life. He read Inga Clendinnen's book Tiger's Eye, about her own liver transplant. It clearly gave him much more than just medical information, although that was immensely helpful. At last, after one preparation for a transplant that didn't take place, Cox received a donor liver.

His work as a filmmaker is extraordinary. During his cancer treatment he successfully resumed photographic work, holding an exhibition of still photographs from the past and more recent times. He also paints. This memoir extends his art still further. As a memoir it has distinctive and wonderful characteristics. He can be funny. He describes a dream where a nurse uses gaffer tape instead of post-surgical dressings. He questions this -- gaffer tape is a crude substitute, strong and hard to remove -- but the nurse replies: "You're a filmmaker and we've found that these people are difficult to keep together."

In fact his work as a filmmaker may account for the smooth transitions between experience, dream and hallucination that appear in this book. His dreams are vibrant, visual and filmic. In one, Werner Herzog, the German filmmaker, and Cox assemble at a funeral, probably in Russia. The men hold hands. The funeral may be for either of them, or it may be for an unknown person. This dream, so obviously and touchingly about companionship beyond national borders, up to the point of death, allows Cox to disengage a little from an intensely personal concern with physical survival.

Tales from the Cancer Ward, named for Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel Cancer Ward, gives us insight into so much more than medical procedures. It documents fleeting moments of grace: a Vietnamese man tracking single raindrops on the outside of a hospital windowpane; a magpie that lands on Cox's shoulder. It also includes his lamentations. He is annoyed with alternative healers, war, celebrity culture and consumerism. He likes a good kvetch. And why not? His complaints are part of his energetic engagement with the outside world. As a man in a fragile body, he is observant, loving and appreciative of the great transformations of the difficult medical procedures that have given him life, and an added understanding of life.’
Brenda Walker The Australian, May 27, 2011

‘There are many reasons why keen bookworms should read Paul Cox’s memoir of his battle with liver cancer. But here are three quick ones: first, the foreword, written by distinguished US film critic and fellow cancer sufferer Roger Ebert, is a truly exquisite piece of writing; second, journalist and writer John Larkin’s introduction sets the scene with those same observational and literary skills he employed as a respected Age feature writer in the 1970s and ’80s; and the third reason is Cox’s own voice. As he faces his death sentence, and then a reprieve, thanks to a liver transplant, the film director takes us on an extraordinary journey of despair, pain, hope and love.’

The Weekly Review  May 13, 2011

I Hate Martin Amis et al.

Rejection slips trigger a killer reaction

‘WINNING a Victorian Premier's Literary Award in the unpublished manuscript category is usually cause for celebration and Melbourne advertising copywriter Peter Barry must have cracked a few bottles when the plaudits came his way in 2005.
Many former winners, and indeed shortlisted titles, have quickly been snapped up by big publishers, with Andrew Hutchinson's Rohypnol and Catherine Harris's Like Being a Wife notable recent examples.

Why then has it taken six years for Barry's idiosyncratically titled novel to find a home at admirable small press Transit Lounge? Where was the queue of agents and publishers vying for the rights? The answers to these questions may only be known to the author himself, but given the delicate and rather delicious subject matter of I Hate Martin Amis et al., speculation will be rife.

In a miserable mid-90s London, school janitor Milan Zorec spends every spare moment working on a series of novel manuscripts, all of which are summarily and brutally rejected by literary agency Mulqueeny & Holland: "The content is literary but the writing is not"; "Scarcely original. Feel I've read this before".

Convinced of his literary merit, such dismissive comments drive the frustrated Zorec into a new metier. With Serbian forces laying siege to Sarajevo, Zorec decides that to write a great novel he must put his boyhood sharpshooting skills to good use and so becomes a sniper.

His sole companions in his lonely eyries are a decoy head by the name of Mr Gilhooley and a copy of Martin Amis's novel The Information.
Incensed by the constant attention famous writers receive, Zorec imagines that his targets are employees of Mulqueeny & Holland, merrily blowing their heads off in a twisted revenge fantasy. This is perhaps the point at which that queue of agents and publishers began to thin out.

Which is a real shame, as I Hate Martin Amis et al. is an original, compelling and darkly funny meditation on the vagaries of war, publishing and thwarted ambition. The apocalyptic atmosphere of besieged Sarajevo is richly captured, with its crumbling, abandoned tenements and populace scampering for cover creating a surreal, cinematic landscape.

Zorec watches with disinterest from his lofty perch, targeting bookish types in his telescopic sight and casting the ultimate judgment. It is a sobering deconstruction of a creative industry that selects its heroes from a seething mass of also-rans who, but for a little more talent or luck, might be elevated to the pantheon themselves.

Mistakes are made in publishing. Prospective authors are passed over and legendary manuscripts are rejected. As Zorec reminds himself, Lord of the Flies, The Naked and the Dead and Watership Down each were turned down 20 times.

Zorec is hardly alone in the stubborn belief that he belongs among the great writers despite the expert opinion to the contrary. Anyone employed by a publishing house will recognise aspects of Zorec among their slush pile and be quaking in their loafers at the novel's conclusion.

Despite Barry's painful poke in publishers' ribs, I Hate Martin Amis et al. is finally seeing the light of day, marking the debut of the sort of whip-smart writer we need more of. Barry's experience in copywriting has stood him in good stead. He has an assured, confident voice and knows how to write a snappy sentence. Zorec is a monstrous creation but one that needs to be talked about in an industry that has far more frustrated would-be geniuses than Martin Amises. That Barry has also provided a terrifying glimpse of a Balkan conflict no one seemed to understand is a stunning bonus.

The ultimate irony is that this manuscript itself struggled to achieve publication, thankfully now remedied with everyone's heads intact.’

Chris Flynn, The Australian, 7 May  2011

‘Peter Barry’s I Hate Martin Amis et al., is an unusual debut novel that combines irreverent humour with brutal depictions of war and musings on literary history. The protagonist of the novel, Milan Zorec, is an Englishman born to Serbian parents. Although Zorec had trained to become a teacher, he has spent most of his life working as a school janitor and writing four novels in his spare time—all of which have been rejected by every publisher and literary agent he’s sent them to. Zorec’s life falls apart in England when his girlfriend leaves him and, after a brief stint in prison, he decides to head to Bosnia and join Serbian forces as a sniper (at the height of the Bosnian conflict in 1998)—but Zorec’s enlistment is instigated less by nationalist pride or filial piety than by the thought that his wartime experiences will provide the unique experiences needed to enable him to write a successful novel.
           
Much of the novel derives its interest from this disjuncture: while Zorec encounters untold horrors in Bosnia, he always considers these events with the detachment of someone who sees them as the raw materials for his future novel. And as the plot unfurls it becomes clear that Zorec—despite being in many regards a pathetic figure—is a deeply unlikeable figure who in most regards is completely responsible for his own fate. This fact becomes even clearer as Zorec slowly discovers that he’s actually a more than competent soldier who experiences little difficulty killing unarmed civilians in the service of a cause that he doesn’t even believe in.
           
Despite its dark subject matter, however, I Hate Martin Amis et al. is also a comic novel, and Barry shows a particular facility for absurd similes, such as when he writes, ‘The moon was looming over the horizon, huge, like one of those cheap paper lams with which students like to furnish their digs,’ or ‘Like a leaf in autumn, like a sunbaker on the beach, like a Rottweiler, like a worm, she turned.’ And Barry also successfully handles the transition of Zorec from a mildly unlikable schlub into a remorseless killer.
           
But I Hate Martin Amis et al. is also about the frustrations of a rejected author and finds considerable humour at the expense of publishers and literary agents. It also reflects on literary history, and contains many references to Martin Amis’s novel, The Information, which is a book about a literary feud (and a book that is also highly in the debt of another, much better book—Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire); by and large these references to Amis work well (although I must note in passing that The Information is, without a doubt, the worst book by an author—Amis—who consistently writes terrible books (presumably in the spare time he finds in between msking comments that many have deemed racist)).

All in all, I Hate Martin Amis et al. is an enjoyable, unusual and generally successful first novel.’

Emmett Stinson  www.emmettstinson.blogspot.com/

‘‘I shall start by writing about my first victim,’ begins the most interesting and engrossing book that I have read in well over a year. Set in the mid-nineties, I Hate Martin Amis et al.is the story of Milan Zorec, a much-rejected unpublished novelist, recently also rejected by his girlfriend, who’s determined to write a book that no publisher will be able to turn away from. Trading his dead-end job for the Yugoslavian war, Milan travels from England to Bosnia to volunteer for the Serb army and becomes a sniper in Sarajevo during the final months of the longest siege in history. Here he hopes to come face-to-face with the horrors of humanity so that he’ll be able to write a book that no publisher can dismiss with the words, ‘I feel like I’ve seen this before.’

An earlier draft of this book won the 2005 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Simply put, this book is brilliant. It’s written in such a way that it literally can’t be put down – I sat up until four in the morning reading it, even though I had a seven o’clock start the next day. It is dark and confronting, but at the same time every sentence is powered by a strange kind of humour. I found myself jumping from sentence to sentence and chapter to chapter, constantly wanting more. I didn’t want to stop reading.

I Hate Martin Amis et al. is like nothing you’ll have read before – and I’m sure that it’s set to be one of the must-reads of 2011. This book is so well constructed, so well-written and so interesting that it will appeal to anyone. If you’re after a great read – get this book. If you’re after a great gift – again, get this book.’

Nathan Reid, Readings Monthly June 2011

‘This startlingly black novel will strike deep at the heart of all wannabe writers. Pushed to the brink by unfeeling publishers and agents who reject his work time and again, Londoner Milan Zorec decides to create a story for himself that no one can dismiss with “I feel I’ve seen this before”.
Imagining his victims as the heartless publishers’ readers who destroyed his dreams, Milan becomes a sniper in Sarajevo, fighting for a cause he does not believe in.

This is the story of Milan’s descent into the twisted heart of human nature − a dark, perverse Catcher in the Rye for our time.
Cringe from the subject matter if you will, but the astonishing insight into human nature, stunningly spare prose and raw, black humour will take your breath away.’

Danielle Roller, Sunday Herald-Sun May 8, 2011

‘If there is any moral to Peter Barry’s debut, it is that you should not judge a book by its title.

Put off by such a pretentious name (who declares such a public war on one of Britain’s best known modernists and their ilk, after all?) it was with much trepidation that I approached this novel, only to find myself under Barry’s spell within the first paragraph.
Set in 1995, the book is narrated by Milan Zorec, a wannabe writer who can’t get his book published and then travels from England To Bosnia, where he serves as a sniper.

During this time Milan continues his plans to write, determined to wow publishers with a story they have never before encountered. This book will resonate with anyone who has ever entertained the idea of writing a novel – or has braved the slush pile and generic rejection letters – and it will make even the most earnest of wordsmiths laugh along the way.

The scenes in Sarajevo are just as compelling, demonstrating Barry’s writing talent. It won’t appeal to all readers, of course, Barry’s turn of phrase is at times idiosyncratic, in a way similar to that of Jonathon Safran Foer; but for a first novel he has pulled off something that Milan would be proud of.’
Mitchell Jordan, Good Reading, June 2011

‘PETER Barry's first novel makes great use of an uncomfortable juxtaposition. The storyteller, Milan Zorec, has grown up in England, led an unremarkable life and aspires to be a writer. The most important thing in his existence is his unsold manuscript. Despite being qualified as a teacher, he takes a job as a janitor in a school so he has more time to work on the novel. He is obsessed by publishers who refuse to read his work and who return it to him with formulaic rejection letters.

Zorec's relationship with his girlfriend, Bridgette, who works in advertising, is subordinate to his great book. When she finally calls it quits with him, he complains that ''I don't feel she's provided me with quite as much novelistic material as I might have hoped''.

His life is so banal and self-absorbed, it is hard to account for his passionate literary vocation. He has a burning desire to write but it's hard to comprehend why. We never discover what his rejected book is all about. Bridgette sums him up pretty well when she says: ''You'll never be a writer because you can't empathise with people.''

The other side of the juxtaposition is a mirror image to the first. Zorec is the son of a Serbian father and, in the mid-1990s, heads off to Sarajevo to join the forces laying siege to the city.

Barry re-creates the Balkan war with spare and telling detail. Zorec's apparent motivation is to provide more material for his stalled writing. But just as he reacted with passion to a banal life in England, here he becomes callous and disengaged in a situation constantly balanced between life and death.
He becomes a sniper. Indeed, Zorec insists on a distinction between being a killer (which he is) and a murderer (which he isn't). It is never easy to get a handle on this character and it becomes impossible to like him.

Barry negotiates the darkest of dark humour skilfully. There are some fine moments of comedy. Zorec says of one of his fellow soldiers that ''if the eyes are the window to the soul, then his eyes had been placed in an empty house''. And he imagines funny rejection letters for the likes of Hamlet, War and Peace and Ulysses. There are many such wry moments.

But black comedy doesn't work by cueing laughs. It is more likely to hollow out an empty place inside the reader. Barry does this superbly and painfully.
There is a chilling and disturbing scene towards the end when Zorec kills a boy in cold blood in the street. He then wounds the mother but refuses to kill her so she can have the additional pain of being with her dead son.

He watches the woman beg for water as he contemplates the successful harvest of a story for his writing. His coldness is in stark contrast to a passionate tirade he earlier displayed in a publisher's office. Zorec says bleakly: ''Being a sniper is an excellent way to define myself as a published author.''
Zorec has never been easy company; he develops into something less than human.

Barry plumbs some vacant places of the spirit with razor-sharp prose. This is an impressive but hardly cheerful debut.’

Michael McGirr , The Age June 4, 2011

The English Class

‘This is an extraordinary glimpse of China in the late 1970s. Born in Huangzhou, Hubei, Ouyang Yu completed an MA in English and Australian Literature in Shanghai and worked as an interpreter, translator and lecturer in China.
He came to Australia in early 1991 and has since published 52 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary translation and criticism in English and Chinese languages. Since 1995 he has edited Australia’s only Chinese literary journal, Otherland.

While The English Class draws on autobiographical roots, this novel is far more. In its gentle questioning of our means of expression, it does not set out to provide us with definitive answers, but to immerse the reader in the process. The story of Jing and his quest to learn English unfolds like a scroll on which the landscape is a misty watercolour, half dreamed, half remembered, poetic and engaging. Right from the first page of The English Class there is also a challenge for the reader. Orientalist views of China obscure understanding and our collective ignorance is exposed. What is a reader to do when faced with the description of Jing as “a small man with a face shaped like the Chinese character for ‘nation’”?

One surprising element is the inclusion of passages from a critique of the process of writing the novel, “… for you can now stop this stupid pursuit. Already the bookshop is bursting with unsold copies of published books.” Or again: “Perhaps this novel writing is about the moment, the moment lived that will pass, the moment retrieved from memory or simply imagined.”

The English Class is more than a well-crafted novel; it is a work of art.’

Sandy McCutcheon, Courier Mail, September 2010

‘According to his publisher, expatriate Chinese author Ouyang Yu is the author of an astonishing 52 books. He has written fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism. He has translated a number of Australian classics into Chinese, among them Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

One of his more recent works is the telling and combatively titled and subtitled On the Smell of an Oily Rag: Speaking English, Thinking Chinese, Living Australian (2007). Here Ouyang Yu directly addresses his complex and self-willed fate. The condition that he describes is also at the core of his new and partly autobiographical novel, The English Class.

Its protagonist, Jing, attends university in Wuhan, before moving to live in Australia, as did Ouyang Yu. In the first part of the novel, “ The little Aristocrat”, Jing is introduced as 23, unmarried, “a small man, with a large square white face, shaped like the Chinese character for ‘nation;”, whose greatest achievement so far has been to survive the Great Proletarian Revolution.

While now he works as a truck driver, his ambition is to secure entrance to university. Ouyang Yu immerses us in the often hilarious misadventures of the White Sands Truck Depot: Driving ancient vehicles with faulty brakes, carting excrement, negotiating bribes for running down water buffalo and historic trees. Interleaving this material are pages about the writing of a novel (such as this one) and the difficulty of “transplanting a life lived in China.”

In “Living Under English’, the second part of The English Class, Jing has realised his aim of being accepted for university study, notwithstanding that he is “an outsider who had absolutely no support, moral or otherwise, no acquaintances or connections that were prerequisites for career advancement”. This explains the prickly, sometimes offensive determination with which Jing seeks to make his way.

Members of the English class introduce themselves: Tian Ma whose father is a professor of English; Hongjun, whose name means Red Army and who “may have come from a family of old revolutionaries”, Ganmei (Expelling the Americans), who was doubtless born during the Korean War; Dang, who “would prefer to be a useless person”. Because these young people are learning English, this is “the key class under the Party’s surveillance”.
In effect, they are relearning to read. Ouyang Yu, a perceptive translator, brilliantly depicts their struggle to move between and to think in two languages.

For Jing, the effort is strenuous, but the goal is simple. “All I care for is the words, the Chinese words and the English words” However, he adds, in rueful retrospect, “Many years later, he was to replace this crowded world with a sparsely populated one and would keenly miss this lost world”. It is the lost world of a postponed one and would keenly miss this lost world”. It is the lost world of a postponed youth.

The first two parts of The English Class, tracing successively Jing’s work as a truck driver, from which he escapes to university, is one of the most unusual and impressive of Australian bildungsroman” that is novels about the acquiring of an education. In these sections, the book’s tone varies between exuberance and melancholy, between hectic life in the present and disenchanted reflection.

The third part of the novel, “The Price of Freedom” tells a different story and in a markedly different way. It concerns what Scott Fitzgerald called “the crack-up”. In the case of Jing, now Gene, and living with Deidre (former partner of his English teacher in Wuhan) at the foot of the Dandenongs, this is the problem of translating his “headwriting” to the page.

Unreleased, these torrents of narrative torment him, and he reckons himself to be “a good-for-nothing, a stray dog wandering in the land of dead spirits, a weird visionary who claims to be hearing dead voices”. In particular, he hears the voice of his father, who worked as an interpreter for the Americans during the Second World War.

Gene’s cultural crisis, searingly yet sympathetically imagined by Ouyang Yu, is “to hate the China within me”; to have run away from China only to discover that “the language I ran into never accepts me”. Thus – true to its subject – the final part of The English Class is structurally and temporally discordant with what has gone before, yet Ouyang Yu takes that risk fearlessly, abrasively, eloquently.’

Peter Pierce, The Age, 25 September, 2010

Review also featured in the Sydney Morning Herald.

‘Having resisted colonial forays for millennia, China is ironically westernizing itself, a cultural revolution with arguably as much impact as that of the Great Proletarian Revolution.  Even the poorest Chinese peasant, willing to dismiss the intense beauty embodied in the Chinese language, may believe the English language has the power to transform their life. This belief in the transformative power of English is the driving ambition, and perhaps the flaw, in the heart of Jing, the hapless, truck-driver protagonist of Ouyang Yu’s  recent novel, The English Class.   

Although Jing’s aspiration leads to his downfall, his character provides an ingenious vehicle for Yu’s endless curiosity with both the Chinese and English languages.  Yu’s prolific output, to the order of an average of two books per year for the last twenty years, speaks of a man whose fascination with language acts like adrenalin in his blood.  In The English Class, as he explores the idiosyncrasies of language, Yu ploughs the cultural wealth hidden within the fields of the two languages, fertilizing, cross-pollinating and producing a delightful linguistic hybrid.

The effervescent energy of this novel, and the charm of its innocent protagonist, compel interest throughout the entire four hundred pages. Reminiscent of the picaresque hero Don Quixote, the hapless truck-driver, Jing, tilts at the windmill of the English language as he bounds around in the Unique, his rattling, truck-without- breaks. More aptly perhaps, Jing resembles Sun Wu Kong, the famous Monkey King, hero of the Chinese classic, Journey to the West, who lampoons the phantasmagorical world of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist belief.

Like Sun Wu Kong, Jing also takes a journey to the West, albeit a West that is now located south, in Australia, where he believes he can rise above the material world, if only he can master the English language. “I can read and speak some English, whereas they can only read and speak Chinese,” Jing thinks about his workmates at the truck depot.  “All I ever wanted to do is move away from people, from them, from a life bound by materialism into a life of metaphysics. Truck driving is all about moving goods from one place to another. I want to do something like thought driving, moving thoughts from one place to another.”  (115)

Yu brings the flavour of the truck depot to life in precisely rendered characters, such as the fastidious Canton, who “just sits there, his left leg thrown over his right while his right knee constantly jerks up and down as he makes a sucking noise through his big-holed nostrils.” (15)  The dialogue makes for effortless reading, humouring the reader as it seamlessly segues the two languages. Gu, the story-teller workmate, scoffs at the aloof Jing:  “You think people who go to universities are smart? Goupi! Dog fart nonsense. The xiao bailian, small white face, doesn’t even know how to change a tyre properly and he’s learning ying ge la xi, Englishit!”  Mundane English expressions permeate with new meanings and with comedy as Jing attempts to memorize one hundred English words every day at the wheel of his truck.  “He knew what egg stood for but what was egg on?  . . . he could hardly make any sense of it.” (22)

When he enters University in Wuhan, Jing obsessively unpicks phrases and expressions, as if at a sub-syllabic level, some kind of power will be released, like splitting the atom, which will finally provide the desired transcendence.  Investigating the many ways the ideas of yin and yang pervade the Chinese language, for instance, Jing notices that yin, female, is both more prolific than yang, and always bad:

. . . yin wind, yin shadows, yin cold, yin darkness, yin privacy, yin conspiracy, yin danger, yin soul, yin clouds, yin thief, yin world . . . Are there other cultures out there that are only concerned with the yang as opposed to the yin? Is English as bad? Jing could only remember an English word, history, which seemed to suggest that it was a man’s story, not a woman’s. His memory became blurred as sleep pervaded his senses. He thought he fell off a cliff into the pond behind the hill. (155)

Yu balances dark consequences, the barest foreshadowing of the blurring to come, with whimsical touches that keep the text light and delightful.

While Jing idolizes English, a realistic undercurrent flows through the text. This tension between the ideal and the real is the source of the humour that pervades the novel.  Yu satirizes Australian society, holding up a mirror that reflects an undeniable cultural poverty in the suburbs. The new English teacher at Wuhan University, the Australian Dr Wagner, muses to himself:

Already he was faced with a class of young people whose aspirations travelled far beyond the borders of China, whose motivation was like nothing he had ever seen in a comparatively dreary Australian suburb, and whose learning skills were amazingly intuitive, coupled with a respect for their teacher that few of his peers could experience in Australia. (240)

Yu’s prose is vibrant with his original and creative English, which he tints with the colours of Chinese literary tradition:

The falling sun would set the lake waters ablaze with fire throwing down a long wide shaft of myriad colours and hues. The air was scented with wild flowers mixed with the smell of raw fish, and memories of the recently dead . . . in the distance was the university hidden among dense foliage with the roofs of its buildings half visible, most conspicuously a column of black smoke twisting every other way above the old library at the top of Luojia Hill. It took Jing quite some time to work out that the smoke was formed by millions of mosquitoes flying together towards the sky. (159)

Here we see the classic antithesis that enlivens Chinese language and poetry, with its surprising juxtaposition of fish and flowers, smoke and mosquitoes. The writer’s prose style resonates at the same time, with alliterative English. Yu revives and rejuvenates language, with his use of archaic expressions, perhaps unearthed as a result of the Chinese government’s exclusive use of romantic era texts for its English curriculum: 
“A penny for your thoughts, E Jing, you are in a brown study again!”

“No,” Jing said. “I’m actually in a green study.”  He said this as his hand swept the air in an arc that included the tree-lined bank encircling the lake and greenish hills beyond. (236)

Even Yu’s use of words, such as ‘greenish’, maybe considered vague by a native English writer, provide subtlety and charm, while contextualising the received language of the protagonist and the narrator.

The third and final part of the text leaps forward twenty years to a suburban garden in Melbourne where Jing struggles to align his dreams with reality.  Here, the narrative also becomes blurred and sometimes hard to follow, as the voice changes between characters, locations and time frames.  Even so, Yu maintains humour in the bleakest of situations. As Jing becomes unhinged, he is diagnosed as suffering from:

. . . cultural disorientation and bilinguistic confusion  . . .  exhibiting such symptoms as a difficulty in switching back into a ‘foreign’ culture after living in his ‘mother’ culture for a brief time; a constant need to assert the superiority of his former culture over the present culture in public while unreasonably denouncing his former culture in private; and a perennial sense of  victimization that he did not enjoy full rights as his other fellow citizens did because of his ‘wrong’ skin colour, his wrong shape of eyes and his wrong gait. (365)

Crash landing in the wasteland of the West, the windmill is destroyed and Jing’s identity disintegrates under the impact.  Instead of the hoped for transcendence, Jing finds alienation in the face of cringing racism. Ultimately, however, there is a strange surrender to ockerism and the ordinary, which suggests Jing may yet revive himself.

While the Chinese and much of the Asian block scramble to learn English, Australia remains aloof, providing the merest tokens of Asian language education to their young, and failing to provide the means for a meaningful cultural exchange.  The English Class is a work that shows the rich cultural potential of language contained within Australia’s immigrant population, a potential for which our previous Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, aka Lù Kèwén or ???, was openly aware. Australia could embrace its place in the East, become better acquainted with its neighbours, and even learn from their ancient philosophies and languages. ‘Easternization’ is a foreign concept, and as yet, an uncoined word.  Ironically, spell-check corrects it to ‘westernization’.  Let the easternization of Australia begin!  Meanwhile, we can look forward to more from the writer of the adventures of Jing.

Sally Fitzpatrick, Mascara Literary Review, October 2010. www.mascarareview.com

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

‘I remember the first time as a bookseller when I experienced that flutter of excitement of knowing that I had just read a book that I could press into the hands of my customers confident that this was a special book and that they would be changed by it. It was Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I experienced the same buzz of excitement when I began to read The Mary Smokes Boys by Patrick Holland. This was one of those books, one of those straight-to-the-heart, life-changing books. At the recent Australian Booksellers Association conference at a panel on small presses, I held up my advance copy of the book and pointed and said “This Book! Keep your eye on this book.” A young bookseller tracked me down after the session. It was a fellow who worked at Readings in Melbourne. He was also clutching his advance reading copy of The Mary Smokes Boys and he had that same, excited glow in his eyes as he held his copy to his chest. “This book!” he said, “This book.”

The Mary Smokes Boys is fundamentally a story about the love between a brother and a sister. Grey and Irene are people who feel so real that they become like members of your own family while you are reading the book, but after the book is finished, they continue to live on feeling like pieces of yourself.

 I was trying to work out why Holland’s book filled me with ideas for my own work and after considerable thought I have come up with a theory. It is because of the respect that Holland affords a reader. This book does not contain all the answers. Holland draws a delicate picture, and then steps back, leaving space for the reader to think and to dream and to bring themselves to the work. It is a conversation between a reader and a very skilled writer. This is the best quality in a book, and it is ever-present in this one.’

Krissy Kneen at launch of The Mary Smokes Boys, Avid Reader Bookshop, Wednesday 11 August 2010

Pip Newling  http://pipseye.blogspot.com/  September 1, 2010

Interview.  Patrick Holland.

‘The murder of a schoolgirl in the outback sets the stage for a meditation on loss and the threat to small-town life, writes Linda Morris.
Twenty years ago nine-year-old school-girl Stacey Ann Tracey farewelled her friends at her primary school’s gate to walk home alone. She was never seen alive again.

Her killer, a family friend who betrayed his role of protector, was destined to die in prison for her murder. After burying Stacey-Ann, the girl’s family left Roma’s desecrated flatlands, bequeathing her memory to a guilt-ridden teenage boy who wondered what could have been done to spare the life of Stacey Ann, his sister’s friend.

Loss – its memory and legacy – pervades The Mary Smokes Boys, the anticipated second novel by Patrick Holland, a ‘‘work in progress’’ ever since search parties discovered Stacey Ann’s lifeless body in the shallow bed of the ephemeral Bungil Creek, marking the eastern boundary of his family's four hectare property.

‘‘You hear about people being murdered and you think, ‘‘I know this happens,’’ but it doesn’t become real until it’s a personal experience,’’ says Holland, 33. ‘‘It’s like the former is a fiction, it happens but it happens to other people and it certainly doesn’t happen to a friend of my sister.”
‘‘You think of the way it would have gone down and the horror, the absolute horror, that girl would have felt and no one can fail to be shaken by it. It is also a kind of crucible for  faith, it’s a cliche but why, you ask, would a benevolent God allow this to happen, and there are pat theological  answers to that, but it still hits you in the gut.’’

The metaphorical ghost of the lost girl is not the only detail from Holland’s life that inhabits the pages of the pages of The Mary Smokes Boys. There are composite characters from his acquaintance, the vividly described brooding, silent landscape of his childhood and his deep suspicion of modernity and its creeping threat to Australia’s small town life whose time has passed.

The novel follows Greywood North, left bereft by the death of his mother in childbirth and an absent father lost to drink. Grey has only his sister, Irene, as his one ‘‘consoling dream of the world broken’’, and finds a rare sense of belonging with the ‘‘wild boys’’ of the town Mary Smokes, a bunch of misfits led by a half caste aboriginal boy Eccleston. Like 17th century geographers bound by the edges of their parchment maps, the boys are trapped in time and place, having nowhere to go and no prospects.

The ensuing linear narrative is set in country, riven by Highway 54, a ribbon of asphalt that skirts the D’Aguilar Range and connects the furthest reaches of Brisbane city and its ‘‘patches of biscuit cutter houses’’ with the pastoral sweep of Queensland’s wheat and sorghum belt.

This is where Holland grew up, and his mastery of the grammar of the landscape comes from a visceral intimacy with this, ‘‘dull, flat country’’.
The son of a stock and station agent, Holland, like Grey, was a sensitive boy moved ‘‘swiftly to tears or violence’’.

‘‘I could stand up for myself.’’ At age 14 he got his first paid job tailing cattle on lonely stock routes and after leaving school at age 17 worked first as a horseman, then as a ringer, on Queensland’s north-western plains.

 Writing, Holland says is a vocation, not an occupation. He readied for a life on the land but then reluctantly ventured beyond the ranges to the bustling metropolis of Brisbane to study English literature at Griffith University and sate his passion for words.

A natural aptitude for languages won him a scholarship to Beijing Foreign Studies University and then four years later he studied Vietnamese at Ho Chi Minh Social Sciences University, both crushingly populated cities as far removed from the silence and solitude of the Australian outback as is possible.

‘‘It’s very flat, very dry in Roma but there are spells when there are massive storms and you can see them skitting across the sky,’’ Holland says. ‘‘The thing that draws me back to this world is the space and the silence, it’s immense, it’s a real presence, particularly at night when the sky is awash with stars. It is a creative place to which I go to write and to understand the world. When I’m stressed and worried, I feel something is being recomposed in myself there.’’

In Holland’s lyrical descriptions of wind shredded clouds, soughing eucalypts and countryside ‘‘tinged by morning light the colour of lemons’’, the novelist strove for a more authentic sense of landscape than the caricatures of ocker Australia, or the historic journalling of pioneers he had come to associate with Australian literature.

In his painstaking long hand - he doesn’t use a computer to write or edit- his fiction is also deliberately terse and taut, leaving unstated the nature of relationships between the three central protagonists and ambushing the reader with the book’s gripping climax.

‘‘I tried for a very minimalist style because I wanted to create a space between the writing and the reader and invite the reader to cross that space,’’ Holland says. ‘‘I say as little as I can, I am as silent as I can be and make the fewest marks on the page. Most of the events are based on real events, the people are drawn from real people and when things ring true I don’t feel as though I, as the author, have to offer a final understanding, or a final word on anything, just so long as I compose it correctly.’’

Holland’s fierce protectiveness of the integrity of his work contrasts with an ambivalence for the Long Road of the Junkmailer, his debut novel which he was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, for best first novel in the South East Asia/South Pacific Region and marked him as one of Australia’s emerging young novelists.

Whereas Holland could have continued revising The Mary Smokes Boys for ‘‘another 100 years’’, he judges the Junkmailer an ‘‘abberrant’’ work of comedic fantasy, begun when he found himself struggling to complete The Mary Smokes Boys during a jobs drought when the only paid work he could find was delivering flyers twice a week for a mere $70.

However, the two books share, however, Holland’s personal sense of alienation with the city and a deep resentment of ‘‘supermodernity’’. In The Mary Smokes Boys Highway 54, stands for all that is insidious about the city. It usurps the town of Mary Smokes, and by association towns he loves that become ‘‘mere text on signboards’’ Holland says he feels ambivalent about freeways, “I loathe them. They signify a different view of landscape, an ignoring of landscape, but at night they are beautiful, the way their light makes flecks in darkness and snakes around to form arabesque patterns and striking lines.’’

If there is a political message in The Mary Smokes Boys it is that the rusted on life of the rural town is under threat from the advance of urban living. It’s a theme that is to recur in Holland’s first non-fiction work, due out next year, a collection of stories based on his train travels in Japan A collection of short stories, The Source of the Sound will be published later this year, his title story returning to the characters of Mary Smokes 15 years later. It is, says Holland, his final word on what is the work of an ‘‘entire lifetime’’.

There’s no mistaking the thread of religiosity, that reflects Holland’s return to faith, of his own bid to make sense of a chaotic world. ‘‘I’m a person of absolutes and what first drew me back to [Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox] was a sense of personal guilt, and it was that classic stereotype that I owed something and wasn’t paying it back. It led me to Graham Green, Evelyn Waugh, Walter Miller and to the Bible. As The Mary Smokes Boys reaches its denouement Grey’s promises to protect Irene and stand by Eccleston are tested during an unexpected fateful moment, and here Holland creates his own version of heaven and hell.

Ultimately, Holland is pessimistic about the survival of the world he holds as ‘‘true’’,  a life he one day hopes to return to somewhere in the Brisbane Valley.

 ‘‘My natural temperament is towards looking at the dark side of things. I can’t see that we as a world are headed anywhere great. But a little good goes such a long way, it only takes a few people to be inspired to strike out against those things that are unjust.”’

Linda Morris, Sydney Morning Herald  August 21-22,  2010

‘The Mary Smokes Boys is the latest offering from Transit Lounge, a small, relatively new publishing house that is yet to fail to impress me with their thoroughly imaginative and evocative covers and clean, stylish layouts and typesetting, the latter of which are not continually reemployed but are rethought for each title. Check out the watermarks in Sing and Don’t Cry, for example, or Boy He Cry’s cover, or The New Angel’s typesetting (those gorgeous page numbers!).

The tradition of careful attention to production details is evident in The Mary Smokes Boys as well. All that is immediately visible about it had me intrigued from the outset: for example, the cover photograph and design pictured. The text, then, had a lot to live up to. Yet I wasn’t disappointed.
From the beginning Holland thrusts us into a lyrical, evocative world. Ten-year-old Grey watches the mechanical goings on of a fair through a hospital window:

A rocket was launched at the exhibition grounds. The rocket slithered high into the sky and burst in a brilliant gold spider’s web. Grey followed the falling embers to where a procession of cars’ red tail-lights meant the end of the night. (13)

The heightened, out-of-time glee of the carnivalesque is the perfect accompaniment for what we readers soon realise is the boy’s situation, making it even more raw and surreal: his mother has just died giving birth to his sister.

Grey lives with his frequently absent father and sister, Irene, in the town of Mary Smokes in the Brisbane Valley. Grey is devoted to Irene’s wellbeing as his father is not, and Irene adores Grey. She is wild, unkempt and friendless, and Grey worries for her. They are also painfully poor, and Irene’s thin frame and threadbare clothes are a reflection of this.

Grey falls in with ‘the wild boys of town, who could be found at any hour of night, for they had no careful guardians’, whose nights he imagines as being ‘charged with secret meaning’ (31). Principal of these is Eccleston, who at first seems an almost mythical figure: it is said that the reason his father abandoned him was because he staked his own life on the turn of a card, and that his Aboriginal mother’s people had tried to kill him at birth for the trouble he might cause them. These boys exist outside the rhythms of mainstream town life; their territory is the woodlands and they are most active when the world is theirs alone, at night time.

The first half of the book is heavy with melancholia. The boys are not listless but they are aware of their lack of options. All the young people go the city, but they do not include themselves among such young people. As the town of Mary Smokes slumps into a kind of stagnancy, aware of its unpromising future but unable to halt its movement towards it, the boys become more and more lost.

Yet they have a deep relationship with place, and Holland pays careful attention to the environment throughout the novel. Characters are shaped by the land they engage with and at all times there is a pointed awareness of the weather. Holland’s prose is also at its best when writing about place: for example, Without the cemetery was rolling yellow grassland where felled and windthrown timber was scattered amidst spare, ringbarked trees. (19)

or,

Grey watched the brilliant city dissolve into the industrial western outskirts. Neglected parks. Commuter tract wastelands. Concrete brothels bearing names of flowers in neon—Tiger Lily, Lotus, Sakura. Colossal empty shopping centres whose monotonous geometry invited vandalism. Wisps of juvenile gangs at the edges of shadows and inside dim culverts. A degraded passage through which Grey admitted the consoling dream of the world broken. (15)
The bush is never menacing, but just is; I, having grown up in the country, was thankful for this because so many writers seem to turn it into a sinister place. Yet people’s fear of the unknown is at times exemplified, as is humans’ lack of agency in the face nature, which contributes to the sense that these boys are in the firm clutch of fate.

In his writing about place, Holland’s observance skills, and his ability to put what he has observed into language, are exemplary. It is not only the description and naming of flora, but also such observations as the night sky being ‘winter bright’, or that the creek would soon be ‘winter-still’ after unseasonal rain to the west had made it rush with water. Upon coming across each of these phrases my attention was drawn to things I had known about the sky and rivers but had never seen put into words, or none so concise and eloquent, so the reading of this novel became an experience repeatedly punctured with wonder for me.

In fact, reading Holland’s prose I was reminded of Barry Lopez’s contention in About This Life(Mark Mordue has a great interview with Lopez here)that there are people all across the US who intimately know the small parts of the continent that they inhabit, that they know them and care about them and care for them. They might not be able to name all the plants, but they recognise them. Grey is one such character, which makes me wonder if Holland is not one such person. I also wondered at the time of reading what Mark Tredinnick would think of the novel; Holland seems to be doing in fiction, at least in part, what Tredinnick does in non-fiction.

Yet to over-emphasise this attention to place ignores the fact of The Mary Smokes Boys’s plot. Because its plot is suspenseful and a driving force; it unravels slowly but packs powerful punches when unravel it does.

All this is not to say that the novel is without fault. The character development that sees Grey change from protective to, at one stage, something more sinister, felt a little undercooked. I didn’t quite believe that Irene’s sudden lack of attention towards Grey could incite this, perhaps because her doing so was elucidated in only a few lines. Dialogue also seemed a little forced at times. For example, Eccleston’s ‘You know, North, it seems like someone has always been huntin me. Always.’ and Grey’s response, ‘I’ll stay with you, Ook.’ (55), or Grey’s whispered ‘You poor child. I’ll always look after you. I promise’ (95) didn’t quite ring true or reflect what I had already learnt about the characters, but instead felt a little staged to me.

Also, I found the apparent confusion between restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, and how to punctuate them, distracting. I’m not averse to writers pushing the boundaries of language, and often enjoy a certain playfulness, or even toying, with grammar. But I wondered why the editor didn’t advise against the repeated disregard of the difference between these clauses, or, if s/he did do so, what Holland’s justification for its use could have been. For example, on page 19, I reread the phrase ‘Grey looked into his father’s eyes that were dull and defeated’ until I realised that the narrator probably didn’t mean Grey’s father had at least two sets of eyes. And, on page 85, I also had to reread the following phrase (and mentally erase its errant comma): ‘She was a fourteen-year-old girl capable of genuine melancholy, that was not easily relieved once it came’.

Yet these few quibbles were superseded by all that is great about The Mary Smokes Boys, and, truly, there is much about it that is great. This is a deeply beautiful book, a wonderful achievement. I will be hunting down Holland’s first book, The Long Road of the Junkmailer.’ Has anyone read it? What did you think of it?

http://plumeofwords.wordpress.com    Plume of Words  17 August 2010

While we are at an inextinguishably critical juncture in which the function of reviewing contemporary literature demands a sincere reassessment within the aperture of the global media — do we readers succumb to engaging in a measured and industrious critique for the underlying purpose of endorsement, of publishing promotions, of exclusively contributing to the generation of future book sales, without an oblique investment in actually framing the literature in the context of its substance? — one must always be wary of the motivations of journalistic hyperbole. This is an arduous task for a reviewer to perform with any degree of insightful consistency, of self-reflexive discernment, but it’s especially the case in the context of reading a great book.

Patrick Holland's The Mary Smokes Boys is one of these. In fact, it’s easily one of my three favourite books this year (the others are Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom), and like those two triumphs of modern American fiction, Holland’s novel is a lyric testament to the power of a single writer capturing the world through the eye of his quill. Even in this age in which, at every fleeting moment, the economically-governed “progress” of global technology and commercial industry consumes an individual’s means to hypostatise the present — to capture an irrefutable vision of the place we hold in our millennial world with fire and eloquence and valour and violent intelligence before such a perspective is occluded entirely from view. Patrick Holland has proven himself robustly attuned to this task, and his second novel, The Mary Smokes Boys, swarms with the value of integrity and sensation in a way that works of fiction so rarely do, in our daily margins of profit and financial gain.

I can promise you that this will be the most significant new work of novel-length Australian fiction you will read in 2010 (I will not disparage nor diminish the vitality of other great and powerful works of original fiction, and from Alex Miller to Chris Womersley to Jon Bauer to Wayne Macauley to Emmett Stinson to Joel Deane to Daniel Ducrou to James Laidler ad infinitum, I know there are many), but Patrick Holland’s The Mary Smokes Boys vibrates beyond the realm of nepotistically-inclined marketplace comparisons, because the novel offers a reality so achingly wrought, so decisively rendered, so incendiary in its heartbroken hunt for human morality that the book, and its relevance, could only be tarnished by the limitations of analogy. So what about Holland’s narrative is so relevant to you or I?

First among many reasons is that he has crafted a story to chill the bones, one in which the haunting bildungsroman of Grey North — sole son to an emotionally-insensitive self-penitent Australian stockman given to vice, and an inexperienced but soulfully generous Gaelic mother devoted to Christianity whom we only come to know through retrospect — is transcribed to page with a trembling fidelity of purpose, and with an urgency and economy of phrase which intensifies the iconographic culture of Mary Smokes, foregrounds its symbolic heft as an almost apocryphal town to which all modern Australia has either originated from or retreated to: the locus of the heartland of our country.

Second among my rationale is that a story of these same dimensions, of a sharp-eyed boy growing up within a forsaken community to endure and transcend the emotional compromises of adolescence — which is to say, a premise almost originary in its vivid overuse within the context of Western literary fiction as to now be a mythology of our culture, a cipher of the way in which we look to writing to self-identify — supplants all prior constructs in the veracity of its articulation. Holland elevates the genre by exploiting the silences manifest within this project of adolescent growth: for example, Grey feels such an obligation of love for his younger sister, Irene, with such an unquestioned sacralising kinship as to channel an almost possessive pathology, as if Grey’s nondistinct (but always apparent) wounded reckoning to protect Irene was beyond the role of territorial older sibling and dancing on the cusp of desire (but this is of course the very point, for to bear human witness to something so beautiful is also to simultaneously engage in the conviction to attain that which is desired).

This isn’t a philosophical, psychological or psychosocial desire, either, but a physiological one; an embodied paean, engendered in a man’s breath and heart, to intervene on the behalf of that object of beauty, so that nothing can intrude to damage it. Irene is Grey North’s touchstone for the person he strives to become: a dependable protector, unlike his alcohol-crippled old man, an independent scholar of experience, like his best friend Ook, a wayfarer to the land of those same wild-prairie Queensland horse districts in which Holland himself enjoyed a boyhood, immersed for twenty-odd years in the music of a bluff of silent tussock, of a solitary fox padding away from the corona of the town’s menacing shadow, of the rumbustious meander of Mary Smokes Creek.

I could will myself here, as a discriminating reader, to broker a précis of the plot for Patrick Holland’s brilliant book — a small rural town, persecuted by bankruptcy, and simultaneously haunted by both the threat and deliverance of a new council-auspiced highway which will disrupt the sleepy isolation of Mary Smokes forever; the emergence of a love triangle which must by the consequence of its geometry only signify horrifying consequences for Grey, his blood brother, Ook, and his sister Irene; a rash attempt on Grey’s father’s behalf to salvage a family he himself unintentionally dismantled; a youthful ache to reconcile the difference in racial and political experience felt by oneself and one's friends, to spurn the ubiquitous scorn of conservative values in the Abaddon-like outpost that is Mary Smokes; the fragility of something, a place, a heritage, a people, a melody, a life more precious than all others, being beset upon by those who, from their own dimensions of heartbreak, are already sickened by loss; a world weakened by one’s familiarity with it, until what originally made it spectacular has become a normativity, so that its votive of flame ends up guttering — but such attempts would only reduce the complexity of Holland’s emotional landscape to a thumbnail impression.

It’s best to leave it to the following letter, which I wrote to Holland, myself, upon reading his novel, to express the fullness of my gratitude. This is not just a novel of breathtaking vision, but one which displays a humbling respect for his readers. He invites you into the folds of a personal memory, and asks that you respond in kind.

Patrick,
I’ve just finished reading The Mary Smokes Boys — literally ten minutes ago, and it just galvanised the tinder of my gut and heart and wrought me asunder: it is such a profound and powerful little novel, so towering with empathy and human compassion, for an authentic, undeviating, unprepossessed and always sincere affection & concern for your characters, and it bristles with pain; the pain we witness exchanged between Grey, Ook, Irene, Vanessa and the unfurnished desolation of what has coalesced over time and through a chasm of misdirected intention into the interior desolation of Bill North, and the exile & fidelity of the wild boys. But it also rings with a yawning, bloodbuzzed, free-throttle authorial pain which I can only discriminate, with the innermost transparency, to the sacrifice you had to make to write that lucid, staggering, awful, incendiary, most honest, vast and fire-breaking ending. I could never allow myself to channel that much hurt, for an ending like yours; it is testament to your certainty in the love for the people who populate this world that you dare to render such heartbreak, and stir the lost, wheeling embers inside the most fierce reader. I think this is actually an artefact of immense creation, Patrick, a vivid and living book, and that aching penultimate-chapter sacrifice feels corrosive in the best way; like you've crafted a subversive Australian pastoral tragedy which earns both its grief and its wonder. I wouldn't gnaw the inside of your cheek or give a prophetic fuck about any quivering, feeble criticism dispatched your way: you've written something I think amounts to one of the best works of fiction this year, and you can only be accused of defying comfort: you are a mad one, Patrick, a real furious exponent of the word, an important scribe and a heartfelt moralist. I'm fortunate to know you, and share in the passion you transfer to page. As for the convergence of ideological & theological expression in the novel, from the glimmer of reincarnation (both literal/embodied and allegorical); the skeptical urgency, yearning for and reluctant dispassion with religious faith; the four-antlered eros/phileo/agape/storge love felt, fundamental obsession and distorted loyalty between Grey and Irene deepening the conflict apparent in the themes of possessing that which is immediately lost; the seeming vacuity of domestic space; the racial condescension intentionally represented towards the likes of Ook and Pos; the violence of wanting something, perhaps sacred, so much that it seeds ruination — I'm sure this all culminated to will unsympathetic fools into convulsions of critical wariness. But such feelings are cruel, lacking in foundation and blind to beauty. If you’ve frustrated anyone, you’ve moved them. That’s how I’d choose to view it. But it would be compromising and counter-intuitive to take anything expressed in this vein in the unsweetened guise of truth. Your book is more than any of this. It is a song, and they have discerned more rousing pastimes than to hear it. This is their inefficiency; not yours, and certainly not that of The Mary Smokes Boys.’

****1/2 out of *****
www.fun-with–kites.livejournal.com

‘Patrick Holland’s second novel, The Mary Smokes Boys, is a seemingly straightforward tale. Grey North grows up in rural Queensland outside of Brisbane. When he is still an adolescent, his mother dies in childbirth, and, since neither his grandmother nor his alcoholic father have either the will or the ability to look after him, he and his newborn sister are effectively orphaned. Grey soon joins up with a roving pack of boys—all orphaned or neglected—who congregate at the Mary Smokes River every night.

In a sense, the boys of Mary Smokes are sort of like the Lost Boys from Peter Pan: a group of almost feral children who, despite having to fend for themselves in an adult manner, have retained a sort of otherworldly innocence. What the book does effectively is to unfurl the inevitability of their innocence intersecting with the corrupt world outside. Despite Grey’s best efforts to protect both his young sister and his friends, it becomes clear very early on that the fragile paradise he has constructed is ultimately untenable.

But to focus on the plot of this novel is to miss what actually makes it so incredibly effective; the main character of this story is ultimately Holland’s prose. Although Holland’s writing is hardly expansive, neither is it a minimalism. His sentences, though often simple, possess an unusual and engaging syntax, and at the moments where he jumps into high rhetoric, the result is incredibly moving:

‘And while the woods were burning he led her to the bank of Mary Smokes Creek and he brought her a drink of the water in his hands and they stayed there on the other side of the water, on the opposite bank from the world, on the wide and starry plain where the wind and the sound of rushing water were their only companions and they needed no others, for every speechless word she spoke was intended only for him and intended only for this night where there was no future.’

In moments like these (and, indeed, in the plot itself), The Mary Smokes Boys recalls aspects of William Faulkner’s writing and similarly is able to find a rare beauty in the cadences of common speech.

As the clear sense of foreboding throughout the novel suggests, this is ultimately a sad book, but its particular power exists in watching the destruction of these characters arrive as slowly and quietly as the Mary Smokes River itself. Much like the way that Grey observes the natural world with a careful but detached eye, the reader, too, feels simultaneously close to these characters and incredibly removed from them. Although this novel is ostensibly a realist work, it ultimately reveals itself as a sort of fantasy or romance (in the medieval sense), since the boys’ perspective on the world is inherently remote from reality, even outside of it.

It is this otherworldly quality, which makes The Mary Smokes Boys such an interesting and unusual novel; even when the looming disaster coiled within the book finally springs, it—thankfully—lacks a clear rationale or moral framework. These aren’t characters being punished for their sins, but rather powerless, marginal people being overrun by forces more powerful than they are; their particular ends are irrational in the way that all violence is. The Mary Smokes Boys is a beautifully written novel that appears to be much more simple than it is. It’s an incredibly engrossing book, and I can’t wait to read whatever Holland comes up with next.’

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

Eagle-eyed

‘The Well in the Shadow, whose title is drawn from Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo
(1929), is an unconventional book, shaped entirely by Chester Eagle’s idiosyncratic responses to certain writers and their work. Eagle’s engagement with, and enthusiasm for, the texts he considers are undeniable. So too is his close knowledge of the books and writers discussed. The range of subjects is broad and reasonably inclusive, but I did wonder, given the book’s subtitle, about the absence of well-known writers such as Peter Carey, Tim Winton, David Malouf and Christina Stead.
Nonetheless, the choice is diverse.

Another strength of this collection is Eagle’s readiness to pose trenchant questions that are usually left unasked. In the essay ‘Jack and George: Who Owns a Life?’, for example, Eagle reproves George Johnston for ‘cannibalising’ the lives of his brother Jack and his wife Pat in My Brother Jack (1964), and for mythologising them in ways they found humiliating. Drawing on interviews he conducted with Jack and Pat in 1980, Eagle is able to give voice to their sense of violation:

Jack and Pat I met in July 1980, when the book had been in circulation for sixteen years, and they were still uneasy with it, accusing it of being wrong, of not representing them as well as it should, taking issue with points of detail (as if the book was meant to be an accurate picture of them) while at the same time rejecting it because they felt their lives had been quite other from what George had shown.

By asking the question, ‘how can it be ethical to write about living people, especially those in one’s own family?’, Eagle focuses on a persistent dilemma for those engaged in life writing. As Janet Malcolm has so brilliantly pondered in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994), how ethical is any kind of biographical writing? Having raised this important question, Eagle does not sustain any serious analysis of it; nor, on the other hand, does he identify the need for a certain forensic ruthlessness on the part of the biographer, regardless of whether the subject is alive or not.

In another essay, ‘Most Theatrical When Most Personal’, Eagle is caustic in his disapproval of Hal Porter’s theatricality in his autobiographies Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony (1963), The Paper Chase (1966) and The Extra (1975), and for the unkind representation of Porter’s wife. Eagle applauds his skill as a writer but objects to his use of artifice and to the appropriation of the writerly persona as ‘actor’. Writing is necessarily a form of artifice, and the myth of the self sits at the heart of autobiography: why, then, object to Hal Porter’s self-myth?

 In the essay on Patrick White’s Voss (1957), entitled ‘A Desert Song, Or Is It?’ Eagle admonishes White for his ill-informed (or deliberately skewed?) representations of Aboriginality and,
in particular, for the way in which their traditional practices are misrepresented:

This may strike you as trivial, but the death of Voss is not. Jackie, at the be hest of men of whose tribe he is not a member, cuts the throat of Voss, then hacks his head off. Hacks the head off and throws it at the feet of those whose will – if that’s the word! – he is obeying.  The death of Voss is thus ritualised in a way more appropriate to Macbeth than to the customs of our Aborigines.
I cannot accept this dismemberment of the German. I think it happens because of an hysterical wish in the mind of Voss’s creator, who needed, required, something as shocking as this to happen.

Eagle’s challenge to the shibboleth that great art transcends the political is refreshing; he is ever willing to interrogate the ethics of ‘great books’.  …’

Extract from:  Christina Hill, Australian Book Review, September 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

‘Iran’s fascinating, in parts beautiful and in parts horrific history is worthy of account: the contextual conflict; religion versus progress; and all the complex in-betweens. So many good intentions, misinterpretations, capitulations, and fluctuations has this country endured. Its citizens have swayed with vicissitudes, standing up and being beaten down, feeling that one thing is right until it goes too far, feeling that the other thing is not right at all. And then big, shadowy players like England, Germany, and the US have entered with their devastating and oft confusing (for the citizens, for the reader) interferences.

Ali Alizadeh’s Iran: My Grandfather, is the history of Iran through the lens of the author’s grandfather Salman Fuladvand. From Salman’s birth in the democratic Iran of 1905, through to his death as a disenchanted man attempting to find peace as a Sufi poet in the ‘70s, Salman witnessed the rise and fall of revolution, injustice; and knew that terror, in the form of the reactionary rise of Islamic fundamentalism, would become worse after his death. Having never been a Muslim, by the time he died, Salman had stopped believing in progress.

Alizadeh begins the book with a moving but not entirely necessary explanation of his reasons for writing the book. All his points are valid: ‘I have read many accounts of what went wrong in Iran, the trouble with Islam, and the like, and yet I am left bored, unsatisfied and disembodied’ (p. 5), but the main, novelistic narrative of the book speaks for itself. The (albeit justified) forthright anger of this front section might alienate some readers – the kind of readers who, perhaps, should be reading this book, the better to understand Iran’s rich history and the bold, destructive interference of Western powers.
The end of this chapter explains why Alizadeh has chosen his grandfather as the lens, and it becomes more evident, throughout the book – as his grandfather’s life was absorbing, privileged and vital, spanning many eras. He writes: ‘His life is not a crystal ball but a mirror. I’d like to see myself, and also you, reader – you and humans like us, in the mirror’ (p. 7). The book is not just a history, it’s an exploration of belief and error, of passion and disappointment, of individual and collective fate – fate sometimes autonomous, and on many occasions forced into shape by some external force.
The main, effective body of the book is written as historical fiction – the author’s grandfather’s life-story is intertwined with the life of the country. The book is never dull or dreary, but passionate (without being as forceful as the prologue.) It’s absorbing and informative simultaneously.

When the Qajar monarch was deposed in 1925 and Reza Khan took over as Shah, Alizadeh’s grandfather, Salman, became a policeman and was required to undertake military training. His pregnant wife, Tahereh, disagreed with the new Shah’s plans for modernising Iran. On p. 35, they argue over baby names. Tahereh wants an Iranian Muslim name, but Salman says: ‘Stop being so melodramatic, sweetheart. I think we should choose original Persian names. Names that Iranians used before the damn Arabs and their Islam invaded us.’ This micro-conflict is representative of the simmering differences throughout the population through many tyrannical, or short-lived, well-meaning, rulers over the following decades. One of the Shah’s impositions in 1935 was the banning of the veil for women, which Salman agreed with – his mother was a feminist and he himself believed women should be emancipated. But an incident is depicted which is very strong in the way it portrays the confusion of the clash between forced ‘freedom’, and choice: A woman refuses to remove her veil and Salman, as is his duty, must remove it by force.

'He hears the woman whimper as he grimaces and, without looking directly at her, first tears off her face mask and then the long black fabric of her chador. She shrieks as though he were raping or stabbing her. Startled by her reaction, Salman lets go of her. She falls to her knees and starts beating herself over the head.’ (pp. 62–63).

Such a scene is frightening and difficult for the reader. Salman is our hero, and yet, we feel much empathy for the woman, who cannot contemplate Salman’s reasons for baring her – she cannot comprehend the law. This scene is also an emotional precursor, in microcosm, to later violent uprisings against secular laws and secular rule, or any kind of rule or aid that is not Islamic. But of course – there are reactions and then there are outrageous and terrible and fanatical reactions. And Alizadeh lets the reader make up their own mind, or allows them to contemplate the complexity of the chain (and loop) of actions and reactions in Iran’s history.

The ‘Great’ Reza Shah’s ideas and his hunger for power became larger, and as is always the case in these situations, opinion against power was quashed. Salman, in the 1940s back in his hometown as Police Chief, was certainly beginning to question the leader he once looked up to. A Prince being held in the jail of his district is killed without a trial, and Salman asks his Sergeant: ‘Do you think [Reza Shah] is steering the country in an ethically and politically viable direction ... Or do you think, as I do, that his modernism is giving way to totalitarianism?’ (p. 80). Indeed the Shah and Nazi Germany were in cahoots, and Salman lost an eye standing up to a German scholar whom he suspected of using construction funds to buy Iranian archaeological treasures for museums in Europe.

After the Shah finally stepped down and Iran was taken for the Allies, the new Shah proved his mettle by publicly doing justice to the ‘perpetrators’ of the last regime. In this, Salman was falsely accused of the murder of the Prince who had been in his custody. He was sent to Qasr Prison – where, over the ensuing chapters, he undergoes much change and resolves himself to accepting a kind of powerlessness, passing through madness, to a shaky kind of peace. The story follows the family’s destiny until Alizadeh himself left Iran with his family as a teenager. It describes the rich, first world Iran of the 1970s, the Islamic uprising, the US involvement in bringing the Ayatollah into power. It suggests why the Ayatollah was accepted as an alternative voice to the people – tired of their megalomaniac Shah and in the absence of leftist/intellectual voices, and it references the Iraq/Iran war, with its horrific death toll. When Salman’s voice has passed, Alizadeh himself becomes the ‘mirror’ for the reader.

The writing itself is absorbing and polished. The structure works, in particular the intertwining histories: the microcosm of a grandfather’s life and the macro narrative of the country. The narrative is also peppered with aptly cryptic translations of Sufi poetry – which is something Salman was comforted by in prison. The complexity, the abstraction – these are things Salman can understand, not reason nor faith. ‘The rose that does not assume the heart’s colour/Shall be mired in the mud of its quintessence’ (p. 165).

One comes away with a feeling of heaviness, sadness and a sense of hope – for the understanding of people, for a diminishing role of greed, for countries of such rich and scarred history to one day be ruled as independently and fairly as possible, and for more books like this to be published and widely read.’

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 1967 the British pop group The Beatles dressed up in embroidered mirror-cloth and tinted shades and set off on a spiritual quest for peace and love to an ashram in India. The US and Australia (whose military force consisted mainly of young conscripts) were engaged in an unpopular war against communism in Vietnam. In Sydney, a poem, ‘At East Balmain’, by former high school dropout Vicki Viidikas, marked her first publication in a moderate magazine, Poetry Australia.

‘At East Balmain’, set around Mort Bay, is about the timelessness of life on a working harbour. It introduced an exceptionally competent nineteen year old poet with an aptitude for sharp observation and description –

    This day will be submerged in a thousand other days,
    yet I know distinctly I felt the glance of a figure
    in a singlet, rolling cigarettes as his barge went
    upstream.

The 1970s in Sydney was a time of great social change driven by youth culture. It was an era, evolving from the protest movement against conscription and the Vietnam war, of long-haired pacifist hippies and the widespread use of marijuana and other ‘mind-expanding’ drugs that engendered a profusion of rebellious and high-spirited creativity. Counter cultural happenings like Jumping Sunday, a weekly celebratory afternoon in Centennial Park, Martin Sharp’s Yellow House, and PACT theatre flourished. There was the advent of underground printing presses, the UBU group’s experimental films, psychedelic music and light shows, of sexual freedom, and women’s liberation. Vicki Viidikas was publishing and reading her poems and becoming a well-known figure in the lively, male-dominated literary scene around Balmain. Just a few suburbs away in Glebe, in December 1969 Helen Jarvis had founded Sydney Women’s Liberation House, a hub for discussion and women’s activism that would thrive into the new decade.

Viidikas might have been a candidate for women’s lib, given that she wrote experientially of a darker side of female life –

    I should have been selfish
    not a woman, but learnt
    to violate myself too, so I could fit the boat,
    twentieth century and rock …
   ’White Poem’

Her poetry is almost always tinged with pain and her prose pieces are often about the extreme edge of relationship. ‘Punishments and cures’, a dark poem about being raped by an ex-prisoner with venereal disease, seeks, in a tentative, exploratory way, moral elucidation –

    Perhaps it’s true what he said,
    that all women are ugly …

    One feels that
    when you become a four-letter word,
    and afterwards, there’s some private festering
    not always cured by a doctor …

In her life, Viidikas took risks. Her friend the poet Kerry Leves says, in this book’s introduction, ‘…  she embraced experience, even flung herself into or out of experiences, …’.  She entered chance encounters or ‘pickups’, as she called them, and wrote about them. In ‘The Snowman in the Dutch Masterpiece’ an impoverished young woman writer drifts into a brief, whisky and cocaine drenched liaison with a cashed-up drug dealer who drives a flashy Mercedes Benz. Their few hedonistic days together are described with some detachment. Viidikas’s writing was a precursor to the coming eruption of confessional women writers but hers was an instinctive response to the condition of womanhood, not informed by a political consciousness. Many of Viidikas’s characters were ‘fucked up’. And many of them were in her second (and I’d say ‘best’) book, Wrappings (1974), a third of which is included here.
In 1975, in an interview with Hazel de Berg, Viidikas said about her writing:

 What I was writing was really confessional, it was just – I’d go out to a party  or something and if anything upset me or I was depressed, I’d go home and  scribble things down on bits of paper, really just what my inner feelings were  at the time.
Viidikas’s work is all about subjective experience. She records persistent unhappiness and trouble. The intensity of sadness builds incrementally in this collection, so that it’s a huge relief, about a third of the way in, to read the exuberantly sensuous ‘Mad Hats of Desire’ –

    OK romantic
    I wanted to wade your body …

    … I wanted to rip suck bite kick
    growl laugh nuzzle your self
    madness
    black mad hats
    put on put off

    Now I don’t know what to ask
    can’t promise
    log cabins apple pie
    raccoon boots for winter
And later, there is a surprisingly loving poem about her Estonian father.

Maybe for Viidikas it was more about ‘writing’ than about ‘what she was writing’. She worked from a compulsion to write things down. In 1977, in Australian Literary Studies she wrote ‘… I first started writing my problems on scraps of paper when I was 15 and living away from home, and later found these ‘problems’ were actually poems.’ Description was easy for her but she was rarely analytical. She delivered her stories and poems without investigating the process. She doesn’t seem to have laboured for long over technique or form. She wasn’t interested in showing off. These are straight up confessional or descriptive pieces. Vicki Viidikas was interested in telling.
Her poetry is more playful than the prose. Sometimes her deft, free verse reads like automatic writing. She said that she wrote poetry ‘off the top of my head, straight off, in one go. … My writing is done at any time of the day or night, it’s quite a spontaneous thing… .’ Emotions were what she was trying to express. Perhaps Viidikas found solace in the ritual of writing.
Viidikas’s work often tells us that she preferred India to Australia. (‘It was Calcutta not Canberra, that honeycomb of barren souls.’ ‘The Silk Trousers’). She lived in India for more than a decade. An early story is about an Indiaphile living amongst shrines and incense in a poky Darlinghurst flat. Her last book India Ink (1984), was immersed in Indian culture and Hinduism.

Having not visited India, nor studied its religions, I found the comprehensive glossary in India Ink invaluable. Ten of those poems are republished here without aid for readers who know little about India. However, as the writing is mostly descriptive, like all good poems about place, these do make a vivid, yet never too-sensational impression.

    You waited, black
    stone goddess
    in a scarlet sarong,
    Your shoulders packed
    with yellow powder,
    feet dusted with red,
    one hand in a blessing,
    palm upright, take it easy
   ‘Durga Devi’

Australian poetry presses supported Vicki Viidikas, publishing four of her books in a decade. Her last title appeared in 1984. She lived a further fourteen years without a new collection and with her writing appearing only scantily in a period when women’s writing was booming. Sadly, as Viidikas’s heroin addiction increasingly formed the basis of her modus operandi, she became marginalised and publishing and performing opportunities vanished.

In 1975 she had written ‘A View of the Map’; a speculative, time-shifting prose piece. It ended – ‘My Iceland is at the centre of this map. Knowing you have visited it and gone. That I am the only permanent resident.’ In 1988 she added a new final line, ‘There is no compass.’
Melbourne publisher Barry Scott has made a respectable selection to introduce Viidikas to contemporary readers. There is though an odd inclusion of eight childish drawings that add nothing to the project (signed, copyrighted and dated by Viidikas, possibly indicating that she took them seriously). The cover portraits show Viidikas with long blonde hair parted in the middle, kohl-lined eyes, appliqued peasant blouse, a cigarette – like an icon of the 1970s.

Vicki Viidikas New and Rediscovered offers a kind of restitution. There are around twenty uncollected pieces, an extract from an unpublished manuscript, Kali and the Dung-Beetle, and a few later poems, including ‘Lust’, written only two months before her death at fifty, in 1998.’

Pam Brown, www.thedeletions.blogspot.com

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/

‘Sally Hunter is not a hero here to save us all, In-human isn’t plastic American entertainment made to dull the masses’
Catch the full in-depth review by the people who know their horror writing at http://www.scaryminds.com/reviews/2010/book61.php

‘Sally Hunter is a young teenager growing up in a small country town in Tasmania where everyone knows everyone else's business. She is part of a dysfunctional family that is being raised by a single mother. Her father is dead, and she has 2 brothers. She seems to be at odds with everyone from the start, feeling physically and mentally different from others. This starts to manifest itself in feelings of illness and heightened sensual perception.
This is a rite of passage story with a big difference. Not only is she struggling with teenage angst, but also the growing awareness that she is turning into a werewolf.

The story, told through Sally's eyes, becomes increasingly disturbing as the beast within her emerges and she embraces her true nature. Written in a powerful style that ranges from exhilarating flights of the almost interdimensional joy she feels in her animal body, to confronting descriptions of her compulsion towards killing and eating, to the physical aftermath that has on the human part of her existence.
As people start being murdered in the town, the realistically observed characters that inhabit it collide head on with horror in the way of all good stories of this genre. This is a gore fest, with plenty of hot, teenage, animal sex going on to lure potential victims. Soon other questions are raised. Is Sally the only killer, or are there others like her? What will happen when her family confront what they already suspect?
This is not a story about evil, but about difference, and how we embrace our true nature, our faults and the beast within all of us. Sally and all her friends speak in the spare, expletive-based, Aussie teenage slang we are all familiar with, and it reinforces how savage teenagers can be to those around them, even when they are not turning into werewolves!

This is definitely a book for older teens and adults. There are a lot of sex, violence and drug references. It is, however, well written and very creatively crafted. A cracking good read that builds to an exciting climax, apparently there is a sequel coming up. I'll be looking out for that.’

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