Thoughts on books and writing
Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America came and went here in Australia not making much of a splash. (Much to Carey’s disgust – I think he complained about small sales in the Antipodes). Never fear he has made it to the Man Booker shortlist, along with:
Emma Donoghue – Room
Damon Galgut – In a Strange Room
Howard Jacobson – The Finkler Question
Andrea Levy – The Long Song
Tom McCarthy – C
The lucky winner hears on 12 October.
The 6th Sleepers Almanac was launched at the Trades Hall Bar in Melbourne last Thursday night by John Bauer. Sleepers Publishing was formed six or seven years ago by Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn to provide an avenue for publishing new Australian writing. Outlets for the short story and poetry, in particular, are few and far between in this country and the Almanac soon made a name for itself in publishing exciting writers. Zoe and Louise then launched out into publishing longer form writing and have published SOLD by Brendan Gullifer, Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009 Age Book of the Year), Kalinda Ashden’s Danger Game, and more recently David Musgrave’s Glissando, all to critical acclaim.
This year, for the first time, Sleepers released the Almanac as an iPhone App (including previous issues). They hope this will bring the writing to a new and wider audience but it remains to be seen if this will happen. They are also thinking of bringing the Almanac out as an e-pub. All the same, I’m sure I speak for all writers, when I say there’s nothing like seeing the ink on paper, smelling it, touching it and thumbing it. You can get your copy of the Almanac at sleeperspublishing or Readings online or read John Bauer’s launch speech at here.
You can also read Emmett Stinson’s review of the Almanac here and Kate Goldsworthy’s for Readings here. A further review in the SMH and The Age is here.
Craig Silvey’s novel Jasper Jones was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award this year. Most commentators thought it a surprise inclusion, along with Sonya Hartnett’s Butterfly. It was unusual, the argument went, for YA books to be considered. However, surprisingly, Jasper Jones was not published as YA but as adult literary fiction. And that raises the question, what makes JJ fit in this category?
The novel has a thirteen year old narrator, Charlie Bucktin, and the story follows Charlie through a hot summer in a small town in WA as he grapples with his involvement of the cover up of the death of a girl, Laura Wishart, in an attempt to help the eponymous Jasper Jones who fears he will be accused of her murder. Along the way we follow the vicissitudes of Charlie’s ever cheerful Vietnamese friend Jeffrey Lu, problems at home with Charlie’s unhappy mother, and the beginnings of a relationship with Eliza, the dead girl’s sister. The novel is written in an energetic, almost breathless style that is accessible to young readers. It is also full of wonderful imagery and original turns of phrase.
But does this all add up to adult literary fiction? Could it be that Silvey’s references to Harper Lee and Mark Twain throughout the novel have led critics to elevate JJ to the exulted firmament where these texts reside? There is indeed a Boo Radley figure in the feared Mad Jack Lionel, where the town boys’ rite of passage is to steal a peach from the tree near Mad Jack’s house, and there are also instances of racism against a Vietnamese family and the town’s normative acceptance of this. As narrator, Charlie Bucktin explicitly likens his mild-mannered father to Atticus Finch, unfavourably. In the case of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the comparison is less clear. Charlie, though a self-deprecating narrator with a flair for words, is much more straightforward than Huck. Silvey may be referencing the verbal gymnastics of Twain’s dialogue in Charlie’s sparring with his friend Jeffrey Lu, and the use of vernacular in the speech of the half-Aboriginal Jasper Jones (the first less successful than the second) but, however Silvey references these texts, which were obviously starting points for his approach to writing this novel, I think, JJ falls short of what should be expected of a top literary award.
That is not to say Jasper Jones is not an enjoyable book that successfully portrays a boy’s struggle to maturity and the banalities and cruelties of small town life; and it’s not surprising that it has sold well and been generally loved by those who’ve read it. But does it in any way say something new, is it challenging to the reader, does it raise issues in a sophisticated way, is its language compelling and elevating? The answer has to be no. It shouldn’t have been on the Miles Franklin shortlist. On the other hand Jasper Jones did win the Australian Book Industry Book of the Year and the Booksellers Choice Award, and deservedly so.
On the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club recently (3 August) Richard Flanagan had some interesting things to say about book culture, and in particular prize culture. The panellists were discussing Yann Martel’s next novel after Life of Pi. The consensus was that the book Beatrice and Virgil was something of a failure. Here’s what Richard Flanagan had to say:
“The problem with book culture now is writers aren’t allowed failure. It’s become like the movies – you have to proceed from success to success. Perhaps [Martel] needed to write this book to liberate himself from the terrible enslavement of that huge success of Life of Pi (ie the Booker prize and big sales) in order to go on and write some more great books…”
“The real problem is we have a prize culture and if you happen to have the serendipity of winning one of those your books sell hugely, and if you don’t they almost vanish… twenty or thirty years ago most books sold moderately and they were judged for what they were. [Martel] had great success and now he has global humiliation. That’s a terrible thing to have happen to a writer. Something has gone terribly wrong with the world of writing when it’s been perverted to that extent.
“There are a whole lot of other accessible books, beautiful books, not high-brow books, great books. Great books are those books that people like. Novels are the great democratic art form … but the little bit of public space allowed for discussion of them, promotion of them, the marketing of them, is becoming increasingly restricted to the prizes and we are losing a lot in that.”
I wholeheartedly agree with this. It also feeds into the tendency of publishers to gamble on the next big thing with book auctions netting ridiculous windfall advances for the select few. The publishers, having spent so much, have to protect thier investment so they spend big bucks on promotion and marketing, meaning the spotlight shines down relentlessly on only a handful of books. As Laura Miller noted recently in a piece in salon.com: “Bestselling authors continue to sell better and better, while everyone else does worse and worse”. I live in hope that the cost changes that ebooks will eventually bring to publishing may herald a new democratic age for writing similar to that Richard Flanagan harks back to.
I read and loved the YA novel A Brief History of Montmaray and a main motivation in buying the book was it’s lovely cover that captured something of a love of reading and the solitariness and yearning for freedom of teenagehood. Imagine my horror when I saw the sequel in my local bookshop – The FitzOsbornes in Exile. Okay I haven’t read this sequel yet but the cover looks like something for a non-fiction book. The post next to the girl looks like some sort of farm implement and her hunched-over pose suggests she’s exhausted (the book description says “Sophie’s dreams of making her debut in shimmering ballgowns …” hmm nothing about toiling on a farm!). The publishers have also rebadged the first book to have the same look. This effort is a bit better. At least it has our heroine looking out over the sea but it’s still not a patch on the original cover.
The same thing has happened to The Prophecy of the Sisters by Michelle Zinks. The first cover was evocative and caught my eye and luckily the tale was as spooky as the cover. Now they have rebadged this book to be in keeping with the sequel Guardian of the Gate. These later covers are just ghastly. I refuse to read anything with a cover like that which is a pity because I’d really like to read the sequel. I’m sure the publishers are attempting to position these books in the vampire/zombie/horror teen fiction market when Zinks’ books are much better than that and have cross-over potential.
The Gold Dagger is a UK crime writers’ award for made for the best crime novel originally written in English and published in the UK. Peter Temple won it in 2007 for The Broken Shore.
Interestingly Amanda Flood, writing in the Guardian, notes that this year two of the shortlisted books have 12 year-old protagonists – Belinda Bauer’s Blacklands, in which a boy writes to the serial killer suspected of murdering his uncle and S J Bolton’s Blood Harvest, which has 12 year-old Tom as a main character in the action.
It is also interesting to note that Australian Gabrielle Lord, a gritty crime writer, has now made the move to write young adult crime with a “Conspiracy 365” series (it’s going to be 12 books in 12 months – now that’s series fiction). Of course there’s a difference between writing for a YA readership and having a young protagonist in an adult novel.
Not being a big gritty crime follower (I prefer those snootily referred to as “cosies”) I like the sound of The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge from those above concerning a suicide sect in France, with the writing having, by all accounts, a philosophical bent. The winner will be announced on 8 October.
The Australian equivalent of the Daggers is the Ned Kelly Awards. You can see the nomination list here. (It’s way too long to include here). The winners will be announced as part of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on 3 September.
Peter Temple graciously withdrew the nomination for Truth for the Ned Kellys to “clear some small space” for other writers. Temple has won 5 times before and, anyway, Truth took out the Miles Franklin in June.
There might be an election campaign on but it’s nice to know Julia has thought about books at this time. She did choose the shortlists didn’t she or was it Kevin back then on 19 July? Any way the shortlist for our most lucrative prize ($100,000) for fiction was announced then. As the year drags on, the same names are popping up on the award circuit so it’s good to see some titles here that haven’t appeared on other short lists. The list is:
Of Alison Wong’s book the judges call it a “haunting first novel … [that] draws on her Chinese family history in its account of New Zealand in the early years of last century”.
The Lake Woman by Alan Gould involves an Australian soldier parachuting down “the night before D Day” and landing “in a vast lake of flooded fields” where he encounters a “mysterious woman”. The judges call it a bold experiment “confidently and affectingly sustained from hectic beginning to peaceful end”.
I’m full of admiration for the ambition of Eva Hornung’s (she previously published as Eva Sallis) novel Dog Boy told from the point of view of a young boy adopted by stray dogs living on the streets of Moscow. The judges say: “To the ancient folkloric and literary traditions of children lost, then raised … in the animal world, Eva Hornung brings her own compassionate and contemporary outrage at the treatment of refugees and outcasts”.
There are also awards of $100,000 each for non-fiction, children’s and young adult books. You can view all the shortlists here.
The Behaviour of MothsOne of the thing guidebooks for writing like to emphasise is the compact with the reader. The writer has to play a fair game, no matter how tricksy, convoluted or abstruse they might be to get their story told. At the end of The Behaviour of Moths I had the distinct feeling that Poppy Adams had not kept her contract with me. I can’t accuse her of not laying the groundwork for her denouement because she does, quite carefully. We know from the beginning that her narrator, Ginny, is quirky and obsessive, but it is a fun quirkiness and an endearing obsessiveness (this obsessiveness is later channelled into her work as a lepidopterist, following her father into the field hence the “behaviour of moths”).
The novel starts with Ginny in old age waiting for the return to their family mansion of the sister she hasn’t seen for 47 years. The reason for the estrangement is spooled out in flashbacks over the space of several days. Adams has a facility with words and a wonderful ability to 
evoke scenes and people through the mordant prism of Ginny’s eyes. For the most part I was enthralled with this book (who would have thought descriptions of moth collecting, dissecting, preserving etc could be so engaging?) I loved the portrayal of the sisters’ relationship, the mother and the father and the house and countryside. So why did I feel betrayed by the ending?
Of course there has to be dark secrets and mysteries and, of course, the seeds for unravelling these have to be sewn throughout the narrative, and Adams does do this quite deftly. She does, for example, have a family doctor who takes an inordinate interest in Ginny, annoying her with his questions and attentions. She does have a terrible accident befall Ginny’s sister and Ginny overhearing her mother complaining that she (Ginny) shows little emotion over it.
Ginny, as the narrator, is able to explain most things away to the reader but we remain wary, as we should. It is the sign of a great (rewarding) writer that they hold these things in balance in a plot. The reader has to be drawn forward in the mystery, be taken down plausible roads and then be left there disoriented as something unexpected happens, only to be reassured and picked up again. Sarah Waters did this masterfully in The Little Stranger. That book, too, left me with the sense I’d been led up the garden path but when I looked back over the story I couldn’t pinpoint where I’d been misled so deftly was the thing knitted together. In the case of The Behaviour of Moths there was a place near the end where Adams used an unfair device to keep information from the reader. I won’t spoil the ending but it didn’t sit comfortably with me. Okay, an ending doesn’t have to be comfortable but it has to feel right. That said, as a debut novel, The Behaviour of Moths is accomplished, enjoyable and beautifully written.
A Pair of Ragged Claws blog referred to an article about well-known authors being asked to provide “blurbs” for book covers. Laura Miller on salon.com pointed out that “blurbs” aren’t actually the publishers description of the book found on the back cover (which she says is called the flap copy) but that “blurb” really only applies to “bylined endorsements by other authors or cultural figures”.
She has some pretty trenchant things to say about the reliability and (perhaps) honesty of these saying that authors are asked by their publishers to do the rounds begging endorsements from “name” mentors, colleagues, friends of friends etc: “So when publishing people look at the lineup of testimonials on the back of a new hardcover, they don’t see hints as to what the book they’re holding might be like. Instead, they see evidence of who the author knows, the influence of his or her agent, and which MFA program in creative writing he or she attended. In other words, blurbs are a product of all the stuff people claim to hate about publishing: its cliquishness and insularity.”
This is all the more problematic because research from Book Marketing Limited found that the blurb makes 62% of consumers buy a particular book. Laura Miller’s article is here.
A Flavia de Luce Mystery
Orion Books 2009
Recipe by Alan Bradley
The Sweetness:
Pie crust
Method:
Mature, Scottish (Zimbabwean-born), white, male Alexander McCall Smith created a believable and charming black, Botswanan, traditionally-sized female detective in The Full Cupboard of Life. Can mature, white, Canadian male Alan Bradley do the same with his overflowing cupboard of ingredients for his white, English, 11 year-old Flavia De Luce series, and this book in particular?
Let’s see what the reviews on my book cover said:
Yikes! Just goes to show that if crème caramel is nice and liquorice allsorts are nice, a caramel allsort pie is not necessarily going to work. By the way, I could not see anything remotely like Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle or 101 Dalmatians here. Nor the Addams family, thank goodness.
It is easy to be delighted by the precocious Flavia whose chemical and elemental asides are fascinating and often pertinent…(which describes what happens when the yellow prussiate of potash is heated with potassium to produce potassium cyanide). She is humorous and as omnivorously intelligent and educated as you wish we all could be. However, I think this sort of 11 year-old would be more appropriate in a child fantasy/mystery ( like Lemony Snicket stories for example). It becomes a bit of a stretch here in stock standard cosy land, with a first person narrator. The 1950s references are, I am sure, accurate, but seemed more like a banner strung across the stage than of the play itself. The mystery is delightfully tangled and necessitates so much bicycling by Flavia on her trusty steed Gladys (a Raleigh for those thousands of us who remember) that I felt for her 11 year-old legs.
With so much to like and a real desire on my part to unravel the mystery, why did I find this an unsatisfying read? Has Bradley just thrown too much delight and sweetness at a fairly slight theme? Flavia has her own website and lots of fans who have no trouble at all with a 1950s 11 year-old stuffed to the gills with feminism, chemistry, D’oyley Carte operettas, literature, art etc. I can see where her mischievous and humane sides are given a run in her relationship with her sisters but it’s all a bit strained and cursory.
The Ladies Detective Agency series has characters with real humanity and a moral viewpoint that informs them and forms part of the South African setting that McCall Smith obviously loves and understands, warts and beauty alike. Bradley needs to develop that kind of core for his heroine in her very English setting so her humour and intelligence can be grounded in the setting that gives rise to her mystery. It lacks heart and in the end is less a pie, perhaps, than a glorious jumble of trifle, needing more control to blend these delicious ingredients into a coherent dish.
Review by Tania
