I think the Miles Franklin Award long-list looks interesting this year. Absent are the mega names that turn up year after year. No Peter Carey, no David Malouf, no Alex Miller, no Helen Garner, Louis Nowra, Kate Grenville, Tim Winton etc. With the dinosaurs away, the small, furry mammals can peep out of their burrows. Okay, Kim Scott won the Miles Franklin back in 2000 with Benang but he’s hardly a household name and Roger McDonald won if for The Ballad of Desmond Kale a few years ago but, on the whole, the list is of newish or low-key writers.
John Bauer and Kirsten Tranter are debut authors and the nominations for Chris Womersley, Honey Brown and Patrick Holland are for their second books. It’s surprising to see Melina Marchetta there – not because she’s not a good writer, she’s a great writer – but because she’s known as a YA author (The Piper’s Son is short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Award under YA).
The long-list
Rocks in the Belly, Jon Bauer, Scribe Publications
The Good Daughter, Honey Brown, Viking (Penguin)
The Mary Smokes Boys, Patrick Holland, Transit Lounge Publishing
The Piper’s Son, Melina Marchetta, Viking (Penguin)
When Colts Ran, Roger McDonald, Vintage (Random House)
Ada Cambridge is an Australian author of the late 19th century. She was born in Norfolk in 1844 but came to Australia after marrying a clergyman at the age of 26. She lived in many rural towns in Victoria before settling in Melbourne. Like many 19th century women writers she wrote to supplement the family income. Ada was a very popular novelist in her day (she wrote 18 novels and this one The Three Miss Kings was published by Heinemann in the UK in 1891 after being serialised in the Australiasian in 1883) but like many 19th century Australian women writers such as Rosa Praed and “Tasma”, Jessie Couvreur, she is virtually unknown today.
This is a pity because The Three Miss Kings is not only an enjoyable read it also provides a portrait of colonial Melbourne and paints a picture of the mores of daily life at that time. While the novel is essentially a romance, like writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Ada also deals with social themes such as philanthropy, religious belief, the role of women, and class – but with a light touch.
The three Miss Kings are: the maternal Elizabeth, the eldest; Patty, outspoken and artistic; and the youngest, the more susceptible, Eleanor. At the outset of the novel they are in their twenties and recently orphaned living in a remote cottage “overlooking a wide bay of the Southern Ocean”. Their parents lived in obscurity but brought up their daughters in a romantic way, steeped in music, foreign languages and the natural world. After their father’s death the sisters determine to make their way in Melbourne on the small amount of money made on the sale of the cottage. Landing in Melbourne by steamer they are initially taken under the wing of Paul Brion, a journalist and the son of the sisters’ solicitor.
Of course it’s “improper” for an unrelated male to involve himself with the women alone so he introduces them to a society matron, Mrs Aarons. Paul is mistaken in his opinion of Mrs Aarons who snobbishly slights the unsophisticated sisters. However at one of Mrs Aarons’ soirees Patty plays the piano and impresses a German maestro. It is here we begin to see there is more to the sisters’ past than meets the eye. Paul also falls for Patty partly through her music – he listens to her playing from the balcony of his rooms which are next door to the modest house where the sisters live.
Also at the soiree is the kind-hearted but overbearing Mrs Duff-Scott. She sees the innate refinement of the sisters and hopes they will becomes the daughters she never had, showering them with fine clothes and introducing them to society.
Historical events of the day provide backdrops to two crucial scenes in the novel. At the procession for the International Exhibition in Melbourne in 1880, Elizabeth becomes separated from her sisters and finds herself crushed by the press of spectators on the Treasury steps only to be saved by the strong arms of Kingscote Yelverton. And at that Australian institution, the Melbourne Cup, the sisters experience a social triumph. Shown to advantage in their special outfits they are universally admired as society beauties, but the Cup is also the scene of a misunderstanding between Patty and Paul that sends their budding romance onto the rocks of despair.
A turning point in the novel occurs when the sisters retreat from the tensions of their obligations to Mrs Duff-Scott and the choices to be made regarding suitors and return to their old home (conveniently bought by Paul’s father – the solicitor). Here a sightseeing trip to the local caves helps Elizabeth make up her mind about Yelverton and a chance discovery in the house leads to an unravelling of threads from the past.
Ada Cambridge sets up an intriguing dichotomy between “natural” worth – innate qualities such as artistic sensibility, sympathy to others, self-awareness – against social values such as wealth, position, custom, and I had hoped this would be developed more fully. However, as Audrey Tate states in her perceptive introduction, “in the earliest chapters the novel appears to be on the verge of developing an exciting feminist theme … but the pressures of society of one’s time are not easily disregarded”.
The novel may end as a conventional romance but Ada’s humour and irony shine through. Like Austen before her she employs a knowing omniscient narrator. When Elizabeth flings her arms around Yelverton’s neck, the narrator comments:
“It is not, I own, what a heroine should have done, whose duty it was to carry a difficulty of this sort through half a volume at least, but I am nevertheless convinced that my real Elizabeth did it, though I was not there to see—standing as she did, within a few inches of her lover, and with nothing to prevent them coming to a reasonable understanding.” p.249
Rachel at Book Snob and Carolyn from A Few of my Favourite Books blog have arranged a Virago Reading Week this week – from 24 Jan to 31 Jan. The idea is to celebrate Virago Modern Classics. Virago was bought up by Little, Brown but still publishes under the Virago imprint. The original company, though, was set up in the seventies to reissue forgotten women writers and publish new ones. The modern classics mostly covers late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century writers but a lot of the distinctive dark green-covered “refound” works are now also out of print. The reading week encourages us to scour our bookshelves and search out secondhand book shops to find these books and read them again.
I’m reading The Three Miss Kings by Australian author Ada Cambridge. The novel is set in Victoria in the 1880s and follows three recently orphaned sisters as they leave their beloved farm overlooking the southern ocean and relocate to Melbourne, and who knows, perhaps the world. I suspect they are going to learn a few life lessons in the face of their other-worldly ways and, of course, experience first love and romance. What better way to spend Australia Day than in the company of Ada?
Last year I decided to dedicate myself to reading a short story a week for a year. That may not seem like much but, although I write short stories myself, they’re not my preferred reading matter and I felt guilty about it – how can I expect other people to read my stories when I don’t read theirs? – so I forced myself into a regime of at least a story a week (see the list of stories I read in 2010 under “Weekly Bread” link at right). After completing the year these are my reflections.
Short stories are hard to find
I had to go out of my way to find short stories to read – I wanted to read both classics and contemporary. I had some collections I’d already purchased such as UTS student anthologies and Best of Australian Stories. I also had the odd collection of short stories on my book shelves (and mostly I hadn’t read these). However, on the whole, I had to search out stories from other sources. I did buy a few collections, mostly anthologies, that I thought had a variety of stories of which I was bound to like some: Jeffrey Eugenides’ My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead and A S Byatt’s Oxford Book of English Short Stories, were two. The local library was also another obvious place but, as I discovered, short story collections make up a miniscule portion of the fiction holdings, plus they are hard to find being shelved in with the novels. In the end I also scoured the secondhand bookstores for collections to buy.
Contemporary short stories are published in the literary journals but I find these too expensive to buy to read one or two stories. There are hardly any stories published in cheaper sources such as women’s magazines (remember the old days when Woman’s Day and Women’s Weekly regularly ran short stories?). The Big Issue is a notable exception with its regular annual fiction special.
Genre stories are even rarer
Literary stories have outlets in literary journals and the annual short story anthologies, however genre stories don’t appear to have a home. Surely there is as wide a readership for crime/speculative/thriller stories as there is for novels in these genres but this market isn’t catered for as far as I can see. When they do publish stories, genre writers publish them in their own collections – Joanne Harris’ Jigs and Reels, for instance. There is the odd big anthology in the library like the very enjoyable and high quality Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women and Nightshade: 20th Century Ghost Stories, but there are not as many around as I would have expected.
Beware the editors of collections
I thought I’d purchase couple of anthologies and that would give me a head start in having a large number of stories to read. It hadn’t occurred to me before to scrutinise the editors of anthologies – I’d just look at the table of contents and if there was a couple of writers I liked, I might buy the book – but I learnt my lesson when I bought the Oxford Book of Short Stories edited by A S Byatt. Like a lot of people I loved Possession but I’d forgotten how dry and intellectual I found Byatt’s other novels. After sampling a few of the stories in the Oxford book I realised I didn’t see eye to eye with Byatt – I just don’t like the pieces she selected. To compound matters, I experienced the same thing with Jeffrey Eugenides’ collection. It’s supposed to be a collection of love stories but it’s as though Eugenides thought he’d have the last laugh on any sap who bought the book on the strength of the subtitle “great love stories from Chekhov to Munro”. I’d say these are stories that have a relationship at their centre and that’s about all. It’s also American-centric. However it does include an Alice Munro story I’ve wanted to read for some time, the great “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”.
The best of the crop
Reading a lot of short stories from a wide variety of sources concentrated my thoughts on what I actually like about a short story. Unlike a novel I don’t invest so much in a short story so I can afford to read something I might otherwise not read, which is a good thing. On the other hand, lack of investment means it’s easier to give up on one story and move on to another.
On the whole I like a story that is a story, ie has a story arc and enough substance to sink my teeth into. For this reason I thoroughly enjoyed many of the fantasy stories in The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women especially “The Lake of the Gone Forever” by Leigh Brackett and “The Ship who Sang” by Anne McCaffrey.
I also appreciate beautiful, intricate writing in a short story, writing that might be too rich or tiresome in a longer form. In this category I loved “Bridge of Sighs” by Gail Jones, “The Kiss” by Angela Carter, Ted Hughes’ “The Rain Horse” and Annie Proulx’s quite magnificent “Testament of the Donkey” from her collection Fine Just the Way It Is.
Then there are the uncomfortable, sad themes I might baulk at in a novel such as Peter Goldsworthy’s “Shooting the Dog” and Eva Hornung’s “Life Sentence”.
Stories that hang in my mind and I’m not sure why are: Barbara Hanrahan’s “Tottie Tippet” set in 19th century South Australia and with an unforgettable narrator, the unlikely-named but moving “The Slovenian Giantess” by Penelope Lively, a completely unsettling story by Joyce Cary about a father and his daughters called “Growing Up” that I was amazed to find included in a 1964 anthology meant for schools, and a similarly unnerving story “The Fog Day” by Amy Patterson set in Papua New Guinea.
It was an enlightening experience to read so many stories, and one I’m going to repeat in 2011.
This book should have been right up my alley. It ticked all the boxes for a satisfying read. Narrator (antiquarian book dealer) stumbles into an old neglected garden and then feels a ghostly child’s hand take hold of his, a family secret, a possibility of madness, the ramping up of the haunting mixed with the searches for rare manuscripts and a remote monastery in France. Tick, tick, tick. It’s hardly original but handled well it can make for riveting reading, think Sarah Waters’ The Little Friend, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale or Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.
So why did I find Hill’s book so dissatisfying? First and foremost it fails in its primary purpose which is to be frightening. The Small Hand just isn’t scary. I’m not sure why this is. It’s not as though Susan Hill can’t write terrifying books – The Woman in Black is deservedly recognised as one of the most chilling ghost stories ever written. I wonder if part of the problem is that the reader doesn’t empathise with the main character, the narrator – he is a rather stuffy, self-satisfied type and perhaps his retrospective reflections on his feelings of apprehension and fear distance the reader. There are too many “I shouldn’t have done that”, “if I had known”, “that was my last moment of peace”, “it wasn’t a dream, it was real” etc.
Another problem may be the novella form. (The Small Hand is 130 pages or so long). Novellas have no sub-plots so they are of necessity a straight-forward telling, missing out on the complications a novel can provide. The Small Hand needed additional complexity to tease the reader more. As it is, the narrative is too obvious and the ending pretty lame. I also have a few quibbles with the standard of writing: repeated words, incorrect usages – a monk in the monastery in France says “for some months we are impassable” about being snowed-in in winter.
If you want an atmospheric ghost story, also in the novella form, Kate Mosse’s The Winter Ghosts is more satisfying, proving that what a novella sacrifices in terms of narrative possibility can be made up via evocative writing.
Kalinda Ashton, whose debut novel The Danger Game has caused a bit of a splash here and overseas (it’s longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC prize) made some useful remarks re writing in an interview with Stephen Romei in The Weekend AustralianReview (4-5 Dec 2010). Aspiring writers have heard if before but it is salutary to say it again, especially, as Kalinda does, in a nice pithy way:
If you want to be published for fame and fortune … choose another profession.
There are no short cuts, so be ready to experiment, fail, abandon, cut, reverse and shift point of view.
Get used to spending a lot of time alone, often frustrated or blocked, or approaching structural change with deep dread.
Find a reason to write apart from to get published or merely because you need to express yourself [such as] a genuine desire to do something, say something, question something in your work.
Persist, and finally
Do not think that being published changes everything, because it doesn’t.
The Danger Game is published by Sleepers Publishing and you can buy a copy from Readings here.
Congratulations to Australian writer Margo Lanagan for winning Best Novella at the World Fantasy Awards for “Sea-Hearts”. It was announced at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio.
“Sea-hearts” is a heart-rending fantasy loosely based around the selkie legend and was published in the anthology X6 which includes six novella-length speculative fiction works. It’s edited by Keith Stevenson and published by Sydney-based Coeur de Lion. More info here.
For some reason I read Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi when it came out in 1992, YA in a contemporary Australian setting not really being my thing, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Although the book, and the film that followed it, were very successful, it took Marchetta 11 years for her next book Saving Francesca to be published. This was followed by On the Jellicoe Road in 2006. I noticed this book because I was attracted to the cover. Something about it reminded me of country towns with big shady trees, gravel roads and empty school playgrounds. I spent two years of my senior schooling at Leeton in the Riverina and I have a nostalgic pang for the flat land, big skies and swimming in the Murrumbidgee. I hadn’t twigged until I finally got around to reading On the Jellicoe Road that the book is set in that area.
Nostalgia aside, I loved On the Jellicoe Road. The novel has a complex structure set around a mystery that resolves itself slowly through the eyes of our heroine, seventeen year old Taylor Markham. Marchetta’s brilliance is to make the reader totally accept Taylor’s viewpoint. It’s hard to describe the plot without giving away details that would make the unravelling of the mystery less satisfying. Suffice to say it deals with a modern day group of teenagers, some from a boarding school, some from the town and some from a group of cadets who camp there every year. The various groups are involved in a territory war every summer. Taylor is head of her ‘house’ at the school and she has to lead the school’s group against the townies and cadets. The enclosed nature of the ‘wars’ and the lack of adult interference is expertly handled by Marchetta but we soon find out the wars are a backdrop to Taylor discovering things about her past that for unknown reasons are being kept from her. The pleasure of the novel is all in the unfolding, and in the development of the relationship of the teenagers (or should I say young adults?), Marchetta’s forte. There are really two stories in one – what happens to five friends after a tragedy twenty years before and how this interweaves with the present day characters. I found this relationship cryptic to begin with – it was brave of Marchetta to just go with the story, confident her YA readers will follow Taylor and be patient enough to let the scenario play out at its own pace.
I was surprised, given the many awards Marchetta has garnered, that in Australia On the Jellicoe Road has only won a category of the 2008 WA young readers award. Last year she won the US Michael Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature, an award associated with the American Library Association. Why, I wonder, is Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones categorised as literary fiction, and short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, and On the Jellicoe Road relegated to YA? Could it be that Silvey’s book has a male protagonist and overtly references literary classics?
Apropos of the cover I loved so much, the B format cover makes the book look like a soft relationships novel for teenage girls and has none of the sense of place and intrigue of the first cover. As a point of contrast, on the cover for Marchetta’s latest book, The Piper’s Son, the publisher has gone 180 degrees the other way – a monochrome photo of a young man walking down a depressing looking inner-city street. It shouts ‘take me seriously’. I checked just in case the book was categorised as adult fiction. But no, despite the protagonist being in his late teens or early twenties, it’s still YA according to Penguin.
I stumbled across this novella as a “popular penguin” in a bookstore in the city and recalled that I had enjoyed a short story by Jackson called “The Summer People”, so I bought it and what a amazing book it is. Coincidentally the next day ABC Radio National’s Book Show had a piece on Jackson as she had just had a Library of America commemorative edition of her works published. You can listen to the broadcast here. Apparently Jackson is being “revived” now because her gothic works published in the 1940s and 50s were dismissed – at the time, and up until quite recently.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a brilliant piece of controlled narrative. The story is told in the first person by eighteen year old Merricat (a contraction of Mary Catherine) who lives in a crumbling mansion with her older sister Constance and her Uncle Julian, an invalid. Our sense of Merricat’s isolation and strange notions builds as we follow her on her weekly trip into the hated local village for supplies, but Merricat is so single minded, and so witty, that by the time the dark side of her nature is revealed, the reader is completely won over. Or, at least this reader was.
In an essay appended as an afterword (don’t read it first as there are spoilers in it) Joyce Carol Oates likens Merricat to those other famous young narrators of American fiction: Frankie in The Member of the Wedding, Scout in To Kill a Mocking Bird and Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. The striking thing about Merricat is that her logic is the logic of a wild animal and her will to survive on her own terms has all the poignancy of TheCall of the Wild or Auster’s Timbuktu or Sonya Hartnett’s Forest, for that matter. Jackson brilliantly pulls the reader into the book so that we are helplessly on Merricat’s side revelling in her crystal clear, darkly comic vision.
Scribe has just announced its New Australian Stories 2 anthology. In conjunction with Varuna, Scribe ran a national short story competition and the shortlisted winners of that were considered for NAS2, along with invited submissions from other writers.
Five writers from the competition made it into the anthology. Congratulations to: Claire Aman, Sonja Dechian, Anne Jenner, Jane McGown and Jennifer Mills. (All women – interesting)
This was a great chance for emerging writers to be published alongside more established writers such as Georgia Blain, Marion Halligan, Debra Adelaide, Cate Kennedy and Karen Hitchcock. (Where are the men? They are there – take a look at the complete list of authors at Scribe)
As I recall, to enter the Scribe/Varuna competition cost $40, although you could enter up to three stories (330 writers submitted/825 stories) so you’d have to say it’s stiffer competition for the emergers. The collection is out in December 2010.
I think the Miles Franklin Award long-list looks interesting this year. Absent are the mega names that turn up year after year. No Peter Carey, no David Malouf, no Alex Miller, no Helen Garner, Louis Nowra, Kate Grenville, Tim Winton etc. With the dinosaurs away, the small, furry mammals can peep out of their burrows. Okay, Kim Scott won the Miles Franklin back in 2000 with Benang but he’s hardly a household name and Roger McDonald won if for The Ballad of Desmond Kale a few years ago but, on the whole, the list is of newish or low-key writers.
