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The pleasure of essays

 

I’m pretty much a fiction reader, although I have read non-fiction over the years, mostly biography and history. I remember reading a book on the early Christian saint, Columba. I was much taken with it but I have never been able to find that book again. I also read a biography of Isadora Duncan that started an infatuation of free-wheeling arty women of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, leading on to Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

Lately, however, I’ve found myself gravitating to more non-fiction and admiring it for its writerly qualities. A book that opened my eyes was Cheryl Strayed ‘Wild’. On the face of it this was a relatively simple story about a trek along the Pacific Crest Trail in North America but Strayed made it into a riveting narrative that was tense, insightful, introspective and a wonderful invocation of place and exploration of embodiment. I couldn’t quite work out how she’d pulled it off.

After Strayed, I was dumbstruck by a book that I had dismissed because it was a bestseller (and Oprah and everyone loved it) – ‘Wild Swans’ by Jung Chang. What a staggering book this is – beautifully written and structured covering an incredible period in history (late imperial China through to post-Mao) with the unique insight of the author’s parents who were early party members (not even their loyalty or rank could protect them from the ravages of Maoism).

After recovering from this, I stumbled on to Helen Garner’s collection of essays, ‘Everywhere I Look’. Taught, acutely observed, these essays made me realise that the pleasure of language, used with art and precision, could apply equally to non-fiction as fiction, and an essay can yield all the punch and meaning of a short story.

I found this also in Maggie O’Farrell’s book ‘I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death’. While some of these brushes with death are more serious and dramatic than others, each essay is a master class in constructing a narrative. O’Farrell brings all her fiction writing skill to bear on instilling meaning, reflection, emotion, horror and humour in these gems of stories. The first one in the collection, which deals with her encounter with a man on a lonely path by a lake who turns out to be a rapist and murderer is like a novel in miniature – what wonderful economy of style to achieve this. O’Farrell recalls all these events from the present time and so can move back and forward in time weaving around them threads of meaning. She also creates resonances between the pieces so, for example, we find out in a later essay why Maggie was sickly and bullied in school in an earlier piece. She is unsentimental about her younger self, and the reader is sometimes frustrated at her actions, but after ‘Cerebellum’ I had to reassess my reactions.

I also thoroughly enjoyed Penelope Lively’s ‘Dancing Fish and Ammonites’ (bizarrely also published as ‘Ammonites and Leaping Fish’). Now eighty years old, Lively writes wonderfully on the trials, indignities, frustrations but also freedoms of old age. Again, a fiction writer whose prose is muscular, studied and a joy to read. She reminded me of why I love George Orwell’s essays so much (‘A Nice Cup of Tea’, for example) ­– wry, humorous and just so beautifully written. Lively also touches on her childhood (she wrote a wonderful autobiography around this time in Eqypt in ‘Jacaranda, Oleander’) and the essay here conveys what it was like coming back to cold and grey post-war Britain). Other sections of the book deal with her reading and writing life, and an extended essay on memory where she over-philosophises somewhat (the least interesting section for me) but, still, a writer at the top of her powers.

 

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The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey

In a time of taut, fast-paced, violent and unrelenting thrillers, this mystery set in Bombay in the 1920s is a welcomed antidote. Massey seems to be as interested in evoking the feel of the time, it’s mores and details, as setting up the puzzle of her mystery. She spends time, too, in establishing her characters, especially her heroine Perveen Mistry – one of the first female lawyers in India. Perveen is not tough and brash but quietly intelligent and determined. Of course, no detective heroine is going to escape a complication on her past (or present) and Perveen’s is a bad marriage that she just manages to escape (some peculiarity of Parsi law – the Mistry’s belong to this sect – is utilised here). In fact marriage la

w, in this case, that involving Muslim women living in Purdah, features in the murder that has Perveen perplexed. She is well-placed to investigate as she is able to interview the secluded women.

There is mention in ‘The Widows of Malabar Hill’ about Perveen’s time studying law in Oxford, and I would have liked to have followed this thread. Here we get a flashback to Perveen studying at an Indian college, where the female students are supposed to hide themselves away in a female common room when not attending lectures. There are only a few of them and Perveen is the only one studying law where she is subjected to the petty cruelties of the male students. Perhaps Perveen’s time at Oxford will be included in a later book, as it appears, this novel is the first in a series. However, if you can’t wait that long, Massey has written a novella called ‘Outnumbered at Oxford’ that introduces Perveen. This is included in a boxed set of four novellas called ‘India Gray’.

I hadn’t heard of Massey before but she has written quite a number of novels, most notably a series of mysteries set in Japan where her heroine, Rei Shimura, is an antiques dealer. The first of these is ‘The Salaryman’s Wife’ published in 1997 and the most recent ‘The Kizuna Coast’ (2014).

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Margaret River Short Story Competition

Congratulations to the winners of the Margaret River Press Short Story Competition 2018. I’m pleased to say my story ‘On Either Side’ was shortlisted and will appear in the anthology that comes out in June this year. Margaret River is a small press but has a good reputation for publishing interesting titles. Their yearly anthology of short stories is one of the few remaining ones that come out in book form (I can think of ‘Best Australian Stories’ and ‘Award Winning Australian Stories’ …). The complete list of shortlisters and winners is below.

MRP 2018 SHORT STORY SHORTLIST

  • Jessica ANDREATTA – Ring Pull Art
  • Judith BRIDGE – Foodies
  • Abigayle CARMODY – No Harm Done
  • Zoe DELEUIL – Setting Sail
  • Penny GIBSON – Small Fish
  • Ashley GOLDBERG – Soap
  • Cassie HAMER – Habitat  *Second Prize*
  • Tiffany HASTIE – The Chopping Block  *Southwest Prize*
  • Tee LINDEN – Bounds
  • Miranda LUBY – The Sea Dragon
  • Helen RICHARDSON – On Either Side  
  • Fiona ROBERTSON – Descent
  • Sue ROBERTSON – Le Micocoulier de Provence
  • Andrew ROFF – Pigface  *First Prize*
  • Kit SCRIVEN – The Fate of Angels
  • Warwick SPRAWSON – Cracked Head
  • David Thomas Henry WRIGHT – Living with Walruses
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Top Reads of 2017

Looking back over the books I read in 2017, I notice that I did read quite a bit of schlock. By shlock I generally mean genre books that are written to thrill, excite, divert, transport one to an exotic, unusual or just very different environment, all for entertainment. They are the sort of book you don’t like to admit to reading such as the romance thrillers of Mary Stewart (I read two of these – The Gabrielle Hounds set in Lebanon and the novella, Wind Off the Small Isles, set in the Canary Islands) or they are children’s/YA books like Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce mysteries (I gobbled down The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag).

Nevertheless, I did read some more worthy tomes, and was glad to see that out of the 37 books I read, eleven were literary, and one a classic (Middlemarch). I was surprised that I read only two crime books, six fantasy/speculative and also only two kids/YA (Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls and the Flavia de Luce).

What was not surprising is that I continue to overwhelmingly read female writers – 29 out of 37, and my top books for the year are all by women. Of the male writers, my favourite book was Hisham Matar’s gentle and atmospheric Anatomy of a Disappearance. In many ways this novel about an adolescent boy who has complex feelings towards his father’s new beautiful, young wife and the guilt he feels when his father goes missing, and he and his stepmother have to search for him, reminded me in tone of one of my favourite books of the year, Susanna Moore’s wonderful My Old Sweetheart. Here the adolescent is a girl, not a boy, trying to cope with an erratic, beautiful mother and distant father on their ravishingly-described estate in Hawaii (Matar’s beautifully-described setting is a 1950s Alexandria).

Top 3 books

Wild Swans by Jung Chang
This book taught me so much about Maoist China. It was told from the inside because Jung’s parents were fairly high-up Communists having joined the movement during WWII. Her parents were idealists and their lives are told with insight and poignancy. How Jung managed to put together this huge book from interviews with her family, and make it so utterly compelling, is a marvel – it goes from her grandmother’s experience the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century, through her parents’ time in the rise of Communism, and the true horror of Mao, onto Jung’s own experiences as a child and young woman, until she eventually gets a chance to escape to the West. It is an epic, it is beautifully written and constructed, and it is one of those rare books that takes you convincingly into an alien culture. Amazing.

My Old Sweetheart by Susanna Moore
One of those books that you click with. The main character, Lily, is the sensitive, conflicted adolescent that I, rather nostalgically, relate to. Everything is felt deeply, the mother is idolised, yet fatally flawed, and we know that Lily is going to be hurt. It’s a life of beauty, ennui, longing. It’s like a Katherine Mansfield short story, or the delicious, sad, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn
Better late than never to come to this wonderful fantasy novel set in a reimagined medieval Japan. The two main characters: Takeo and Kaede, both teenagers when it starts are wonderfully realised, and both constrained, one way or another, by the strictly codified society they live in. I fell in love with the world-weary but essentially good Lord Shigeru, as did Takeo when Shigeru rescued him from the warlord who had destroyed his village. Takeo has to learn to craft his powers, and control his impulses, while Kaede has to survive being a hostage in a rival clan’s castle. These books (Tales of Otori) are beautifully written, paced superbly, great plotting, exciting, sad, gory – just everything you want from fantasy/historical fiction.

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The Good People – Hannah Kent

I finally ‘read’ Hannah Kent’s novel ‘Burial Rites’ in audio book form. I had avoided novel, really, because of all the hype around it: somehow it came across as a genre-type book because it was based on a gruesome murder, with domestic violence undertones. What Kent did, in fact, write was a wonderfully controlled novel about a particular closed and tight-knit society – 19th century Iceland – in which the ‘truth’ about the murder is slowly revealed as we get to know the thoughtful and sensitive heroine as she is housed with a family awaiting her execution. The novel was based on a real story that Kent came across in her research.

One of the most amazing things about ‘Burial Rites’ was Kent’s ability to absolutely recreate the everyday life of rural Iceland, capturing the small rhythms of the day and year, and the quiet, subtle interrelations of the characters.

The quite staggering thing about ‘The Good People’ is that Kent has done the exact same thing but this time set in Ireland in 1825. The novel is set in a rural valley, where except for going to the nearest market town to sell their butter and eggs, the people live out the grind on their small landholdings – but of course, they don’t own the land but rent it. It is a limited life in the extreme, but Kent takes us there, and it feels utterly convincing. She has the gift of recreating a tiny, closed-in world, in all the interest of its detail, that is as alien to us today, as if she’d set it on another planet.

Our main characters are Nora, who is widowed in the first chapter, Nance Roach who is the local ‘cunning woman’, someone who deals in cures and charms, and Mary, a fourteen year old who is hired out as a seasonal worker and who comes to help Nora with her severely disabled small grandson. This might be Ireland in 1825 but medieval superstition, especially belief in the Good People – the fairies – still exists. While the local, hard-nosed priest, preaches against the superstition, pretty much everyone in the valley believes in the Good People, avoids places where they might gather, like the Piper’s Grave, and go to Nance to get their ailments cured. It is Kent’s intent to get inside this society, and to let us see their lives and actions through their eyes.

The tragedy of the novel is centred on the grandson, Michael. His mother died when he was two and his father dumps him on Nora and leaves. While Nora’s husband, Martin, dies a few pages in (suspiciously clutching his chest, and at the cross roads), we get the feeling that if he had lived they could have cared for Michael together, but grieving after his death, the difficulty of the disability starts to crush Nora, and the child’s mannerisms and the change in his appearance, makes her happy to eventually accept the rumour that he is a changeling – a fairy child left in the place of her real grandson.

As in ‘Burial Rites’, Kent takes a baffling crime and creates a plausible story around it. Here, she has to convince us that the three women she has portrayed as essentially good, could do something, that, on the face of it, is fairly evil. I don’t know if she is entirely successful but, as with, ‘Burial Rites’, I empathised with the ‘criminals’. Nance Roach, in particular, is a finely-drawn character, but it was the details of life in early 19th century Ireland that fascinated me – the earth floor of the ‘cabins’, goats and chickens in the houses, bare feet, even in the snow, the ‘breakfast potato’, (in fact the diet seems to consist only of milk from their one cow, eggs from the chickens and potatoes from their potato bed). There is also mention of the itinerant poor who are accused of nicking the necks of people’s cows and drinking their blood for sustenance.

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I was so angry that I decided I’d better write an essay

(Excepts are from a Guardian piece by Jonathan Franzen)

A lot of people think Jonathan Franzen is a pompous git but I suspect he is vilified for speaking his mind and not being afraid to shake up the received wisdoms. I loved ‘The Corrections’ and enjoyed ‘Freedom’. This article is a mea culpa for an earlier essay he wrote critical of those who (in his opinion) mislead people by suggesting we, as a global community, still had time to avert devastating climate change. I thought he had some interesting things to say about writing that I’ve collected here.

Essays are like fiction writing

‘To me it was especially not evident that a think piece should follow the rules of drama. And yet: doesn’t a good argument begin by positing some difficult problem? And doesn’t it then propose an escape from the problem through some bold proposition, and set up obstacles in the form of objections and counterarguments, and finally, through a series of reversals, take us to an unforeseen but satisfying conclusion?’

‘Sometimes, in ordering the elements of a familiar story, you discover that it doesn’t mean what you thought it did. Sometimes, especially with an argument (“This follows from that”), a completely new narrative is called for. The discipline of fashioning a compelling story can crystallise thoughts and feelings you only dimly knew you had in you.’

Essays against the ‘silo’ effect

‘Trump and his alt-right supporters take pleasure in pushing the buttons of the politically correct, but it only works because the buttons are there to be pushed – students and activists claiming the right to not hear things that upset them, and to shout down ideas that offend them.’

‘And here is another way in which the essay differs from superficially similar kinds of subjective speech. The essay’s roots are in literature, and literature at its best – the work of Alice Munro, for example – invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.’

Apocalypse now

‘Every one of us is now in the position of the indigenous Americans when the Europeans arrived with guns and smallpox: our world is poised to change vastly, unpredictably, and mostly for the worse. I don’t have any hope that we can stop the change from coming.’

(Equally substitute indigenous Australians for indigenous Americans)