AWW2017 – Reading Matters

Last year I participated in the 2016 Australian Women Writers’ Challenge and enjoyed it so much that I signed up to do it again this year.

I set myself a target of 10 books by Australian women writers and am happy to report that I achieved that last week.

As well as reading all the titles on the 2017 Stella Prize shortlist (apart from one), I read a couple of newly released books and several old ones from my TBR.

Here is a list of all the books I read. They have been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s name (click the title to see my full review):

Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain (2016)
Domestic novel about family secrets, grief, betrayal and strained relations set in Sydney on one rainy day.

The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke (2016)
Searing memoir of what it is like to grow up black in white middle-class Australia.

The Devil’s Staircase by Helen FitzGerald (2012)
Over-the-top psychological thriller about an Australian teenage girl on the run in London who gets caught up in events beyond her control.

Force of Nature by Jane Harper (2017)
Page-turner about a whistleblower who goes missing on a corporate team-building weekend in the rugged Australian bush.

Down in the City by Elizabeth Harrower (1957)
Disturbing story of an unlikely marriage between two people from opposite ends of the social spectrum.

The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower (1958)
Meaty postwar novel about a lonely girl who develops a scandalous but platonic friendship with an older man.

An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire (2016)
Crime thriller meets literary fiction in a narrative that explores the outfall of a murder on the victim’s family and local community.

Wasted: A story of alcohol, grief and a death in Brisbane by Elspeth Muir (2016)
Investigation into Australia’s drinking culture framed around the death of the author’s brother.

The Woolgrower’s Companion by Joy Rhodes (2017)
Sweeping saga about a woman’s struggle to save the family farm in the outback during the Second World War.

The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose (2017)
This year’s Stella Prize winner asks what is art and what is its purpose, framing the story around a real-life performance art exhibition staged in New York by artist Marina Abramović.

Have you read any of these books? Or care to share a great read by an Australian woman writer? Or any woman writer, regardless of nationality?

I plan on signing up for the 2018 Australian Womens’ Writers Challenge in the New Year. If you want to participate, you can sign up via the official website.

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‘Force of Nature’ by Jane Harper

December 26, 2017May 23, 2023 kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Pan Macmillan Australia; 400 pages; 2017.

Many of you will be familiar with Jane Harper’s debut novel, The Dry, which I read in 2016, long before it started to win every literature prize going, including the 2017 CWA Gold Dagger, the 2017 Australian Book Industry Award for Fiction Book of the Year and The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Year 2017.

I loved The Dry so much — the claustrophobic portrait of small-town Australia, the depiction of the landscape and the drought, the wonderful characterisation and the believability of the crime — that I couldn’t wait for the UK publication of her follow-up, Force of Nature, so I ordered it on import at exorbitant cost from Australia. The price, I think, was worth it.

A gripping page-turner

Force of Nature (to be published in the UK on 8 February 2018) is yet another page-turner set in the Australian bush starring Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk.

This time around it’s winter, the drought has broken and a group of people on a corporate team-building exercise in rugged terrain have got themselves into trouble: one of their party has gone missing.

Falk has a special interest in the search-and-rescue mission because the missing bushwalker, Alice Russell, is the whistleblower in a fraud case he is working on with his colleague, Carmen Cooper. Is her disappearance linked to their investigation? Has she met with foul play or done a runner? Or is it purely a coincidence?

Mounting sense of tension

The book is nicely structured, swinging between two main narrative threads: what happens between the corporate team members on the weekend-long hike in the (fictional) Giralang Ranges; and the ensuing investigation by Falk and Cooper.

From the outset, we know things are not going to go well on the hike. There are two groups — one comprising solely men, one comprising solely women — who go off in different directions, but the women never make their rendezvous point on the second night. Instead, fraught, frazzled and beset by petty squabbles, they get lost and cannot agree on the best course of action to take: set up camp and wait for daylight, or keep moving.

Meanwhile, Falk’s narrative thread highlights the pressure he is under from on high to solve the fraud case and at the same time we get to see the more human side of him: we learn about his fraught relationship with his late father and come to understand the loneliness of his life and his (unrecognised) need for human companionship.

Brilliantly clever characterisation

What makes this book work is the characterisation. Harper provides intriguing backstories for each character, particularly the women in the corporate group, giving each of them a plausible motivating factor for wanting nasty, short-tempered Alice to “disappear”.

And she does a terrific job of creating not only mounting tension — showing slowly-but-surely how and why Alice goes missing — but also a sense of foreboding through the clever use of a news story familiar to the women: that of a serial killer, who butchered and buried a number of victims in the Giralang Ranges (loosely based, I suspect, on the real-life backpacker murders of the 1990s).

Force of Nature is not so much a crime novel, but a suspense one — and it’s so vividly drawn and so brimming with atmosphere it will probably deter swathes of readers from ever setting foot on a muddy bush track. (Companies offering corporate team-building exercises might rightly sue for damage, too.)

If I was to criticise any aspect of the book it would be that we never quite find out what happens to Falk’s fraud investigation. But in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter: Force of Nature is a satisfying read, one that will delight fans of The Dry and perhaps attract a new audience to Harper’s work. Call me greedy, but I honestly can’t help but be impatient for the next novel in this intriguing crime series.

This is my 10th book for #AWW2017 which means I have now completed this challenge for the year. Expect a wrap-up post in a few days.

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‘The Long Prospect’ by Elizabeth Harrower

August 21, 2017 kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Text Classics; 292 pages; 2013.

First published in 1958, The Long Prospect was Elizabeth Harrower’s second novel. It is a powerful example of Australian postwar literature, the kind of meaty novel that thrusts you into the messy lives of fascinating characters (some of them unkind), and then leaves an indelible impression.

Life in a boarding house

In it we meet 12-year-old Emily Lawrence, a lonely and unpopular girl living in a boarding house run by her maternal grandmother, Lilian, in the industrial northern town of Ballowra (said to be a thinly veiled version of Newcastle in NSW). Her parents, Harry and Paula, are estranged and live separate lives in Sydney.

Lilian is a domineering personality and she has few kind words to say to her granddaughter, whom she largely ignores, preferring to focus on her other interests instead — namely horse racing, gossiping with her friends and bossing around her new lover, Rosen, who also happens to be one of her boarders.

It’s only when a new boarder arrives, the fiercely intelligent scientist, Max, who works in the steelworks, that things begin to look up for Emily, for Max is a kind-hearted man and recognises Emily’s need for friendship and adult attention. He talks to her about great literature and science, treating her as an equal and encouraging her to pursue her studies and to dream big. But Lilian is not keen on their friendship and the novel’s storyline pivots on a dramatic confrontation with far-reaching consequences.

An immersive, slow burning story

Admittedly, it took me a long time to get into this story. It’s a slow burner, perhaps because the text is so dense and Harrower takes her time to build up a picture of the inner lives of this small dysfunctional family and its bitter, often cruel, self-absorbed members.

Long before we are ever introduced to Max, we come to know Emily quite intimately. We understand her love-starved existence — the crush she had on a former boarder and career woman, Thea; the other crush she developed on a teacher, who failed to truly notice her; the disintegration of a valued friendship with a girl when she realised Emily was from a poorer, less socially acceptable class; her distant relationship with her father, Harry, whom she regards as a stranger; the lack of bond she feels with her mother, who was packed off to Sydney to earn a living when her marriage began to fail — and wish we could teach her to see beyond her troubled life.

That’s where Max comes in, for when he arrives the narrative begins to pick up speed, as he teaches Emily to try new things, to overcome her shyness, to learn about the world beyond the four walls of her bedroom.

“About people—it’s still true, Emmy. Don’t spend your nights being afraid of murderers and your days being shy, but at the same time, remember—”
He hardly knew how to voice a warning without frightening her, her reaction to his least word was apt to be disproportionate. He said, “Learn from people, but don’t be dispersed by them. And remember that the bad times have compensations. Unhappiness is not all loss. Not by any means. […]”

The Long Prospect fully immerses the reader in the domestic realm of an unconventional household. The characters are flawed, authentic, original. Harrower’s uncanny eye for detail and her descriptions of the heat and the industrial landscape make Ballowra a character in its own right, too.

But she’s also incredibly perceptive about the psychology of people and what makes various “types” tick (especially prepubescent girls, in this case), and her dialogue, complete with barbed comments and little cruelties, is brilliantly believable.

This deftly written story about family ties, cruelty, heartache, friendship and coming of age only confirms my opinion that Elizabeth Harrower is one of Australia’s most important writers. I can’t wait to read the rest of her back catalogue.

This is my my 9th book for #AWW2017 and my 8th book for #20booksofsummer. I bought it at the start of the year when I decided to purchase all of Harrower’s back catalogue and read them in the order in which they were written. I read Down in the City, her debut novel first published in 1957, in January and absolutely loved it.

20 books of summer (2017), Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2017, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Helen FitzGerald, London, Polygon, Publisher, Setting

‘The Devil’s Staircase’ by Helen FitzGerald

August 13, 2017January 10, 2021 kimbofo

Fiction – Kindle edition; Polygon; 224 pages; 2012.

First things first. The Devil’s Staircase by Helen FitzGerald is completely ludicrous. But it’s also entertaining — provided, of course, you suspend belief, try not to analyse the holes in the plot or the rationality (or otherwise) of the characters and don’t mind your fiction being dark and edgy.

Backpacking life in London

It tells the story of Bronny, a likeable but naive 18-year-old Australian, who’s just had a blood test to determine whether she has inherited the genetic disorder that killed her mother. She’s too scared to find out the result, so runs away to London without telling her father or elder sister.

She’s spent most of her teenage years frightened of being diagnosed with Huntington’s disease and has lived her life cautiously:

There was darkness, seeping into me.
I missed out on a lot in those four years:
I never went on the Scenic Railway at Luna Park.
I never kissed a boy in case I began to love him.
I never applied for university.
I never lost my virginity.
I was already dead.

In London she falls in with a group of backpackers and moves into a squat (an abandoned town house off the Bayswater Road) next door to a hostel, finds herself a meaningless job handing out towels in a gym and goes on an unabashed mission to lose her virginity. She makes new friends, goes sight-seeing, starts taking drugs and generally learns to loosen up a little. It’s all very far removed from her life in rural Australia living at home with her nice dad and her high achieving sister.

But there’s a dark element to the storyline, which comes as a bit of a shock when it’s revealed more than a third of the way through: there’s a woman hidden away in the basement of the squat. She’s gagged and bound to a chair. She’s been kidnapped by a depraved young man, who uses her for sexual gratification, and there doesn’t seem to be any way out of her predicament.

FitzGerald interleaves these two narrative threads — Bronny’s new hedonistic life in London (told in the first person) with the terrified woman in the basement (told in the third person) — to build up a sense of mounting tension: when will Bronny realise there’s someone stuck in the cellar below her room and do something about it?

Fast-paced read

The story is, of course, bonkers and far-fetched. It’s fast-paced though and I ripped through it in about three sittings. But it does make for uncomfortable reading, because in typical FitzGerald style she never shies away from writing about the questionable morality of ordinary people and doesn’t seem to mind if her fiction is exploitative. (She’s worked for the Scottish probation and parole service for more than a decade, so I suspect she’s seen it all.)

While it’s essentially a psychological thriller with a dark, noirish bent, The Devil’s Staircase does throw up some pertinent issues. For instance, is it ethical to be tested for a genetic disorder when you’re a teenager and how do you live with the results when they are disclosed? Does living your life mean doing things that may risk it? What can we do to stop depravity in seemingly ordinary people? How does losing a parent at a young age affect the rest your life?

This is a genuinely dark and edgy read, with great characterisation and superb pacing, but I question the exploitative nature of some of the basement scenes. Still, as a form of escapism, it’s difficult to beat and makes me relieved that my early days as a backpacker in London were nothing like this!

This is my 8th book for #AWW2017 and my 5th book for #20booksofsummer. I bought it online in August 2015 for the princely sum of 99p. I’ve read several of Fitzgerald’s novels, so knew it would be an entertaining read.

Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2017, Book review, Chatto & Windus, Fiction, general, historical fiction, Joy Rhoades, Publisher, Setting

‘The Woolgrower’s Companion’ by Joy Rhoades

June 10, 2017June 22, 2017 kimbofo

Fiction – hardcover; Chatto & Windus; 416 pages; 2017. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Joy Rhodes’ The Woolgrower’s Companion is a sweeping saga set in the Australian outback during the Second World War. The story is best described as one woman’s struggle to save the family farm against the odds. Admittedly, this is not my normal cup of tea, but this is the kind of romantic story you can lose yourself in, especially if you’re looking for something easy and enjoyable to read on holiday.

Life on a farm

It’s the 1940s and Kate Dowd co-owns a large sheep station with her father, a returned soldier from the First World War. Her mother died a couple of years ago, so Kate runs the household (cooking, cleaning, gardening), managing Daisy, the young Aboriginal maid, and helping Harry, the 10 year old nephew of Mr Grimes, the farm manager.

She’s married, but her husband Jack is in the Army and is stuck in Sydney training soldiers. They never see each other.

When her father begins behaving oddly — losing his memory, not wanting to get out of bed, losing his temper — it’s up to Kate to keep things together: to make sure the men who live and work on the farm are paid, including two Italian prisoners of war (POW) who have been employed for their horsemanship; that routine maintenance is being carried out; that the sheep are being looked after properly; and that things keep ticking over despite the fact the region is plagued by drought and water is in short supply.

This new level of involvement in the management of the farm makes Kate realise there’s something not quite right: her father owes a massive amount of money to the bank and if the bills aren’t paid soon there’s a chance the property and all the livestock will be repossessed.

Multiple plot lines

Most of the plot revolves around Kate’s attempts to fend off the bank. But there are subsidiary plots revolving around the POWs (will she or won’t she become romantically involved with Luca, who helps in the garden, for instance), an ongoing hunt for a yellow sapphire that Kate’s father bought then hid in a place so secret he can no longer remember where he put it, and a dilemma over what to do when the help falls pregnant.

The book explores the strict social codes of the time as well as the racism, which makes it socially unacceptable for Kate to not only work on the farm but to form a friendship with a young aboriginal person. It examines the legacy of the First World War on those who fought on the battlefields of Europe and tells the little known story of how Italian POWs were shipped from British POW camps in India and sent to work on Australian farms (to replace those farmers who were fighting abroad). And it’s a fascinating portrait of life on the land in the harsh Australian outback.

It’s an evocative tale from another era, written in simple, often lyrical prose, where the landscape is as much a part of the story as the well drawn characters that inhabit it. This subtle and perceptive story largely draws on the experiences of the author’s paternal grandmother, a fifth generation sheep farmer from northern NSW, which lends it a ring of authenticity.

For me The Woolgrower’s Companion sometimes felt a bit slow going and the storyline slightly cliched, but it’s a good historical novel and will appeal to a broad audience.

Earlier this week Joy Rhoades took part in Triple Choice Tuesday. To see which three books she recommends, please visit this post.

This is my seventh book for #AWW2017.

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‘An Isolated Incident’ by Emily Maguire

April 17, 2017December 26, 2020 kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Picador; 343 pages; 2016.

An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire is one of those novels that refuses to be boxed into a single category. It dances a fine line between crime thriller and literary fiction. Its focus is not on finding out who committed a horrendous murder in a small town but on the outfall on the victim’s family and local community. It’s this level of social commentary — think Norwegian crime queen Karin Fossum — that lends the novel a literary quality.

Murder in a small town

The story is set in the fictional country town of Strathdee, in the NSW Riverina, on the road between Sydney and Melbourne.

In this typical close-knit, largely working class community, 25-year-old Bella Michaels disappears one April afternoon after finishing her shift at the local nursing home. Her body is later found at a roadside picnic spot.

Her much older half-sister, Chris Rogers, is called to identify the body, and from there the story splits into two interleaved narratives: the slow unravelling of Chris’s mental state as she seeks answers for Bella’s murder, and the journalistic investigation by May Norman, a young crime reporter from Sydney intent on breaking a career-defining story.

Chris, who is a barmaid and occasionally brings people back to her home for paid sex, tells her side of the story in the first person. Her voice is immediate, unflinchingly honest and distinctly working class:

You know, I’ve often been told I’m too trusting, too generous, too open. I used to think these were compliments, but recently I’ve come to realise that they are not. They say ‘trusting’ and mean ‘stupid’, ‘generous’ and mean ‘easy’, ‘open’ and mean ‘shameless’. All of those things are true and not true. It depends on who you ask, doesn’t it? Ask old Bert at the pub if I’m easy or generous or any of that and he’ll say no. He’ll say, ‘The little bitch slaps my hand if it so much as brushes against her’. Ask my ex, Nate. He’ll tell you a different side.
Look, what I’m saying is that sometimes I am trusting and generous and open and stupid and easy and shameless. What I’m saying is, who isn’t?

Meanwhile, May’s narrative thread is told in the third person and includes all the stories she files for an online news site, giving the novel an authentic, too-close-to-the-bone feel, almost as if Bella’s murder was lifted from real headlines.

What results is a fascinating portrait of two troubled women — Chris is still grappling with the break-up of her marriage to a man with a criminal past; May is reeling from her married lover calling off their affair and falls into her past bulimic behaviour — in a town caught up by the media’s fear mongering and perplexed by the murder of an innocent woman who deserved better.

Violence against women

What makes this book so effective is the spotlight Maguire shines on misogyny and every day violence against women without being too prescriptive or obvious. Bella’s murder might be the isolated incident of the title, but the thoughtful reader will soon understand that her death is just one in millions of similar incidents across Australia (and, indeed, the world) in which women are victims at the hands of men, many of whom they know personally.

Maguire’s examination of the media’s obsession with pretty young women who suffer violent deaths and the sometimes morally dubious practises of crime reporters is also deftly handed. Maguire even raises an interesting issue about the ethics of well-meaning groups and activists who use murder cases to promote their own causes without seeking permission from the victim’s family first.

But from my own experience as a journalist, I found May’s news stories false, in need of some strong sub-editing and there was at least one that raised my libel hackles. Don’t let that put you off, though; poorly written journalistic stories in fiction are a pet bugbear of mine. I suspect many readers won’t even notice these minor failings.

The ending, too, is weak; not because it doesn’t tie up all the loose threads, but because it feels slightly rushed and not altogether believable. But on the whole, this is an excellent, deeply unsettling read that explores sex, marriage, prostitution, masculinity, criminality and violence. The strong undercurrent of a troubled society, in which innocent men fail to call out their mate’s misogynistic behaviour, seems timely, calling to mind last year’s Stella Prize winner, Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things. It deserves a wide audience.

Longlisted for the 2017 Indie Book Awards, commended for Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction 2017 and shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize, An Isolated Incident is currently only available in Australia. I ordered mine from Readings.com.au, which charges a flat — and affordable — rate for shipping to the UK.

For other reviews of this book, please see Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers and Kate’s at booksaremyfavouriteand best.

The winner of the 2017 Stella Prize will be announced tomorrow (Tuesday 18 April). I’ve read all but one of the books; you can see my reviews here.

This is my sixth book for #AWW2017.

2017 Stella Prize, Allen & Unwin, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2017, Book review, Fiction, Heather Rose, literary fiction, Literary prizes, New York, Publisher, Setting

‘The Museum of Modern Love’ by Heather Rose

April 15, 2017May 23, 2023 kimbofo

Fiction – Kindle edition; Allen & Unwin; 296 pages; 2016.

What is art, and what is its purpose? These are the questions posed in The Museum of Modern Love, a fascinating book that blends fact with fiction, by Heather Rose.

In this highly original novel, Rose takes a real-life event and peoples it with interesting fictional characters who interact with a particular work of art, are changed by it and come away from it having learned something of themselves and of others.

New York art world

The story is largely set in Manhattan in 2010. Arky is a composer who is lost, lonely and struggling to write his next film score. He has a strained relationship with his 22-year-old daughter, Alice, while his wife, with whom he is separated, is languishing in a health facility thanks to a devastating condition known as Thrombotic thrombocytopenia purpura.

My wife is in a nursing home, he imagined saying. She’s been in a coma but now she’s not. She’ll never walk again. Or talk again. She was the most energetic person when she was well. We knew it was coming. It’s genetic. No, I don’t see her regularly. I don’t see her at all. She wants it that way. She took out a court order. We were happily married. I think so.

But when he visits the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) to see Marina Abramović in The Artist is Present, his life takes a more interesting turn. In the queue to see the performance he meets a varied cast of characters who take him out of himself, teach him the importance of “connection” and the beauty of art to sustain us through good times and bad.

Art as therapy

The Artist is Present was a real-life performance art exhibition staged at MOMA in 2010. It involved the artist Marina Abramović, who sat immobile in MOMA’s atrium while spectators queued up to take turns sitting opposite her. They could sit opposite her for as little or as long as they liked, but they had to make eye contact. The performance lasted 75 days, between March and May, and more than 1,500 people took part. (You can read about it on Wikipedia.)

This performance art is not merely a backdrop to The Museum of Modern Love; it forms a central element of the story.

The author was granted permission by the artist to include her in the book. “I have drawn extensively from interviews and performances given in the years leading up to her 2010 performance at MoMA,” Rose writes in her Author’s Note. “This does not mean that the thoughts I have attributed to the character of Marina Abramović at any time in this book are a true reflection of any event in history, nor how the real Marina Abramović thinks or feels. That is the risk the novelist takes, bringing to life what we can only imagine.”

The purpose of art

When I first heard about this novel I must admit it sounded pretentious. But somehow, in Rose’s very capable hands, it works. It’s a brilliant examination of how we interact with art and what we get from it.

As well as telling the story from Arky’s point of view, we also hear about Abramović and her varied and intriguing past.

And there are subsidiary characters — an art teacher from the mid-West, an art critic for NPR, a PhD candidate from Amsterdam — that help bring the performance alive from different perspectives — educational, spiritual, academic — as they all try to interpret Abramović’s work.

It’s a hugely engaging novel, written in an effortless, free-flowing style. It’s filled with a seemingly never-ending amount of highly quotable sentences, such as those I’ve highlighted below:

‘Still, what is she trying to say?’ Jane asked again. ‘What she’s been saying since the start, I think. That everything is about connection. Until you understand what connects you, you have no freedom.’

***

‘She simply invites us to participate,’ Healayas said. ‘It may be therapeutic and spiritual, but it is also social and political. It is multi-layered. It reminds us why we love art, why we study art, why we invest ourselves in art.’

***

All the great art makes us feel something quite indescribable. Perhaps it’s not the best word—but there doesn’t seem to be a better one to capture how art can be . . . transformative. A kind of access to a universal wisdom.’ ‘I’m going to use that,’ said Brittika, tapping away. ‘I mean, she’s using the audience to create this effect, but the audience has also created this experience by how seriously everyone has taken it.’

Longlisted for the 2017 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize, The Museum of Modern Love is currently only available in eBook format in the UK and North America.

For other reviews, please see Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers and Kate’s at booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

This is my fifth book for #AWW2017.

UPDATE 18 April
Congratulations to Heather Rose — The Museum of Modern Love has won the 2017 Stella Prize!

2017 Stella Prize, Australia, Author, AWW2017, Book review, Fiction, Georgia Blain, literary fiction, Publisher, Scribe, Setting

‘Between a Wolf and a Dog’ by Georgia Blain

March 28, 2017March 28, 2017 kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Scribe UK; 272 pages; 2016. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

The late Georgia Blain’s last novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog, has been shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize. The author died in December 2016, just a few days before her mother, the broadcaster (and “Omo lady”) Anne Deveson, passed away.

A domestic novel set in Sydney on a single rainy day, it is undercut with a back story (told flashback style) set three years earlier.

It’s largely told from the viewpoint of Ester, a therapist, who is estranged from her older sister, April, a one-time pop star who has lost her mojo. Ester is also estranged from Lawrence, the father of her children — twin daughters Catherine and Laura — but is close to her mother, Hilary, a widowed film maker, who has decided not to tell her children she’s dying of a brain tumour.

This sounds melodramatic, right? It’s not. The emotion is restrained, almost aloof, in this novel; Blain is careful to keep things in check, yet it’s full of dramatic moments. Indeed, the story is a chronicle of grief and anxiety, betrayal and strained relations — and that’s just the troubled patients that Ester listens to day in, day out in her therapy room; her own family has its own problematic, complicated past, and her ex-husband is in crisis having twiddled the numbers in his lucrative job as a pollster.

Slow going

I admit that I struggled with this book. Mid-way through I began to wonder if it was ever going to end.

I’m not much a fan of domestic novels, though I do like explorations of the human heart — and this one does that superbly. Blain beautifully captures the stresses and strains between siblings, parents and children, and married couples.

But I was never able to fully lose myself in the story because the writing, which is too self conscious, too laboured, kept getting in the way. The prose style is showy and too heavily reliant on back story (for the smallest of details) and everything is over-explained. The endless references to rain also wears thin.

Outside, the rain continues unceasing; silver sheets sluicing down, the trees and shrubs soaking and bedraggled, the earth sodden, puddles overflowing, torrents coursing onwards, as the darkness slowly softens with the dawn.

The strong characterisation keeps the story afloat, however, even if no one appears to be terribly likeable or worthy of sympathy. These are artistic middle-class types, affluent, secure, complacent and a little bit annoying. Blain’s perceptive eye focuses on their every day sorrows and anxieties, and questions the role of forgiveness in easing heart-ache and pain. But for much of the time, I read this book wishing I could knock a few heads together. Get over yourselves, I wanted to yell, it’s not bloody worth it!

This is my fourth book for #AWW2017.

2017 Stella Prize, Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2017, Book review, Hachette Australia, Literary prizes, Maxine Beneba Clarke, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘The Hate Race’ by Maxine Beneba Clarke

March 19, 2017May 24, 2023 kimbofo

Non-fiction – paperback; Hachette Australia; 272 pages; 2016.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. Her memoir, The Hate Race, tells the story of what it is like to grow up black in white middle-class Australia. It has recently been shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize.

This unflinching account charts Clarke’s experiences at school, where she was routinely bullied for the colour of her skin and where teachers and other people in authority turned a blind eye. “It’s just a bit of teasing,” the school counsellor tells Clarke, who, by the time she was a teenager, had been subjected to endless “teasing” for almost a decade. The ongoing verbal abuse had manifested itself in a rather alarming physical way: Clarke would scratch her face in her sleep, a psychological attempt to claw her way out of her skin, a form of self-harm that would leave her with nasty facial bruises.

At five and a half, racism had already changed me.
After a while you start to breath it. Another kid’s parents stare over at your family on the first day of school with that look on their faces. You make a mental note to stay away from that kid. When you have to choose working partners in numbers, you discreetly shuffle over to the opposite side of the room. You tell a teacher someone is calling you names. Blackie. Monkey girl. Golliwog. The teacher stares at you, exasperated, as if to say: Do you really expect me to do something about it? The next time you have a grievance, you look for a different teacher. This is how it changes us. This is how we’re altered.

Clarke and her two siblings — an older sister and a younger brother — were born in Australia. Her dad was born in Jamaica but emigrated to the UK in the late 1950s, where he gained a PhD in mathematics. Her mother, from Guyana in the West Indies, was a stage actress living in London. The married couple emigrated to Australia after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech made them want to live somewhere more welcoming. They chose Australia on the basis Clarke’s dad had worked alongside a young Australian couple at Nottingham University who had recently returned home.

But from the get-go Clarke admits that her family were the only black people in the community and were regarded with a mixture of fascination and suspicion. It is only when Clarke goes to school and learns about Australian aboriginals that she realises the country has a long-established black community that has been usurped (and often massacred) by the whites.

Every day racism

A large part of the book documents Clarke’s experience of casual and not-so-casual racism, mainly in the classroom but also out in the real world, where less talented peers were often granted privileges for which she was overlooked.

In one instance, Clarke relates the story of how she missed out on winning a top award for a public speaking competition. The prize went to a less confident white girl whose father was greatly respected within the community. The father, to his credit, tells Clarke that she was the best speaker in the room — but he does nothing to change the outcome.

That’s one of the messages that runs throughout this story: that standing on the sidelines and saying nothing when wrong is being done makes you complicit in the act. This realisation comes early to Clarke, when her and her younger brother are confronted on their new bikes by a gang who call them names and start throwing stones at them. Clarke’s friends don’t help or defend them — they simply run away:

But the scene at the bike park just kept looping in my head. Her silence. The way they’d suddenly disappeared. I knew they were scared. I knew they were just kids. But so were we. My friend’s silence hurt more than the names we’d been called — more than seeing my brother’s bloody, grazed knee.

While The Hate Race is essentially a collection of anecdotes from Clarke’s childhood, all told in an entertaining and forthright style (and not without a smidgen of humour to lighten the despair), this catalogue of abuse makes for a damning indictment on Australian society in the 1980s and 1990s. Is it any better now, I wonder?

In her acknowledgements, Clarke states that she loves Australia but believes people could be kinder to one another:

I wrote this book because I believe stories like these need to be written into Australian letters. Stories like mine need to be heard, and seen, both by those outside of them and those with similar tales. I wanted to show the lasting impact of living in a brown body in Australia in the eighties and nineties on one child. I want to show the extreme toll that casual, overt and institutionalised racism can take: the way it erodes us all.

This is my third book for #AWW2017.

If you liked this, you might also like:

Talking to my Country by Stan Grant: a heartrending account of what it is like to be an Indigenous person in Australia.
Black and Proud: The Story of an Iconic AFL Photo by Matthew Klugman and Gary Osmond (not reviewed on this site, but I read it in 2014): an eye-opening read about racism in sport.

Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2017, Book review, Elizabeth Harrower, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Text Classics

‘Down in the City’ by Elizabeth Harrower

March 15, 2017April 2, 2017 kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Text Classics; 290 pages; 2014.

Elizabeth Harrower is an Australian writer who has recently been rediscovered thanks largely to the efforts of Text Classics, which has republished all of her novels from the late 1950s and 60s, including one she withdrew from publication in 1971.

Last year I read her newly published short story collection, A Few Days in the Country and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize. I was enamoured enough to want to explore more of her work, so I went right back to the start and purchased her debut novel, Down in the City, which was first published in 1957. I liked it so much, I promptly ordered the rest of her back catalogue. I think I might have discovered a new favourite author.

Domestic life in post-war Sydney

Down in the City is one of those moody, atmospheric novels that brims with menace and has a frisson of danger running just underneath the surface.

It’s set in Sydney one hot summer and tells the story of an unlikely marriage between two people from opposite ends of the social spectrum.

Esther Prescott is 33. She comes from a rich respectable family. She’s pretty, intelligent, calm and measured, but has led a fairly sheltered life, cosseted in a Rose Bay mansion with three brothers to protect her and a loving stepmother as her best friend.

One day Stan Peterson comes barging into her life. He’s flashy, loud, full of vim and vigour and quite unlike anyone she’s ever met before. Two weeks later she’s married him and moved into his King’s Cross flat.

Portrait of a marriage

The book charts their marriage as it morphs from an exciting new one to a troubled and obsessive one. It occasionally makes for uncomfortable reading, for it soon becomes clear that Esther’s domestic situation is an abusive one.

At first, keeping house is fun and she is eager to please her husband in whatever way she can. At all times she is kind and tolerant and thoughtful, prepared to befriend Stan’s neighbours (even though they are from a lower class than her) and to do whatever she can to make their living arrangements pleasant and comfortable.

But Stan is the type of man who is never pleased — and always selfish. He’s moody, evasive, cruel and sly. He is fond of the drink and likes to gamble. He’s never quite honest about how he makes a living and yet he’s always rolling in cash and has plenty to throw about. Women think he’s a boor and even his small circle of golfing buddies talk about him behind his back.

Stan was a man of grunts and nods and silences. If he could avoid an eye or a question, he did, his expression enigmatic. Nevertheless, after a few drinks at the club house he had given enough away — hints of grandiose schemes, not caring how his listeners interpreted them — to indicate that whatever his business might be, it was not legal.

It takes a little while for his true colours to come out, but when they do Esther is shocked and embarrassed and ashamed. She hides their domestic troubles from family and friends, and does a stirling job of keeping up appearances. But it’s heartbreaking to see her poise and grace and inner resolve begin to crumble.

A lightness of touch

Despite the rather heavy subject matter, Harrower writes such effortless, almost frothy, prose that the story moves along at a cracking pace without ever feeling oppressive. Yes, there’s a menacing undercurrent, a sense of creeping paranoia and a deep unease, but because the story is also told from Stan’s point of view, his actions are never that surprising. You know that he’s a manipulating, resentful, immature oaf; you just wish Esther knew it too.

It’s testament to Harrower’s skills that she can write such wonderful characters without turning them into caricatures or stereotypes. Esther’s naive and Stan’s a rogue, but their relationship is not entirely black and white: this is a delicately drawn and highly nuanced portrait of two people whose motivations, desires, hopes and dreams are simply not compatible. As the pair’s relationship changes over time and as Esther comes to realise her husband is not who — or what — she thinks he is, the reader comes to appreciate Harrower’s talents for emotionally acute observation.

Stan’s troubling behaviour, primarily his repeated, random and habitual use of intimidation to control Esther, is a textbook example of domestic abuse. Given it was written in the late 1950s, Down in the City seems decades ahead of its time. Back then, men went to work, women stayed at home, and what happened behind closed doors stayed there.

Its rather brilliant insights into psychological “warfare” on the home front makes this an important and compelling read. But its strong sense of time and place adds another level of interest, making it a truly rewarding read.

This is my second book for #AWW2017.

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Tag: AWW2017

10 books by women: completing the 2017 Australian Women Writers’ Challenge