Month: December 2012

The tag line to Brenda Walker’s Reading by Moonlight is how books saved a life. I wonder why she chose to include this because it at once requires too much of books and also quite the wrong thing. Perhaps it is one way to flag to the reader that this is a book about the threat of mortality, not the romantic sweetness that ‘reading by moonlight’ suggests.

It is also not surprising that a literature academic would see her illness, in this case breast cancer, through the prism of fiction. For me, I picked up this book, to read an intelligent woman’s account of her brush with disease, and this disease in particular. One in four women will get breast cancer at some stage in her life, so a lot of us will have to face what Brenda Walker did.

There are, of course, descriptions of getting the diagnosis and her treatment of surgery and chemotherapy and radiotherapy. She is honest, and eloquent, about her fear of death. However the medical side is pushed to the background as if it is too painful to dwell there, or that readers would soon tire of too forensic a treatment. Instead Walker looks at literature and what she might find there to shine light on her experience, what might enrich our understanding of the vicissitudes of life.

All reading is a matter of taste and the works Walker includes to write about in detail are personal favourites of hers, or works that she can use to illustrate an idea. I did find the connection between many of the books to Walker’s experience of illness at times difficult to discern, or tenuous. They are hugely diverse – from Poe, to Tolstoy, Patrick White to Philip Roth. And there is a lot on Samuel Becket, a favourite of Walker’s. I found it hard to believe that anyone would choose Malone Dies as their book of choice for a hospital stay!

I did enjoy Walker’s discussion of The Tale of Genji and White’s Voss interesting, but others I found less enthralling.

That said, I enjoyed reading Moonlight. Walker’s style if crisp, studied, but also easy to read. The book reminded me, not that books can save a life, but the study of books within, or without, a tertiary institution certainly enhances your life. Walker, herself, explains what books mean to her:

When I tell myself that books can save a life, I don’t mean that books can postpone death. That is the job of medicine. I mean that certain books, by showing us the inner fullness of the individual life, can rescue us from a limited view of ourselves and others.

Reading reminds me that we are not so singular after all, that there are crowds, whole populations, in the stack of books at the end of my table. Some of these people will trouble me, some will appear in thoughts and dreams, and they will all still be here … when my own books are out of print, when my writing table is just another chipped piece of furniture at a clearing sale.

 

This is the final of my reviews for the Australian Women Writers Reading Challenge 2012. There will be another one next year – a great initiative to support women writers in this country. (See link in sidebar). 

Liese Campbell is on a working holiday in Australia at her uncle’s real estate firm: she shows clients around fancy apartments to rent. One day in a crazy-brave spur of the moment decision she seduces a client, wealthy farmer Alexander Colquhoun, in one of the empty apartments. Maybe because he acts surprised at this, but is also willing, after the act she asks him to pay.

This is the premise The Engagement is based on. If you’re prepared to go with it, as I was, then you’re in for a tense, psychological thriller. The novel is basically a two hander – between Liese and Alexander – as the power in the relationship shifts from one to the other and back again.

The reader is given the backstory of how the two met and Liese’s background in England, but the novel starts with Alexander driving Liese from the station to his remote property for their first weekend away together. Liese has misgivings from the beginning about moving their relationship out of the artificial fantasy of meeting in other people’s apartments, but she’s about to leave Australia and the money Alexander is paying her for the weekend is more than welcome.

But as the car moves through the landscape and finally pulls up in front of the crumbling pile that is Alexander’s inheritance things take a more and more gothic hue. The weekend becomes a psychological cat and mouse game between the two protagonists. The reader sees things through Liese’s focalisation so we are initially sympathetic to her, but things are not that simple. Is Alexander just lonely, mistaking sex for love? Is Liese emotionally damaged in some way, seeing threats where none exist?

As I read this novel I kept thinking of Daphne Du Maurier thrillers like Rebecca or Don’t Look Now where the reader is never sure who to believe, although I found Hooper’s work darker and more claustrophobic.

I loved the nuance of this book and the twists and turns; it’s the hallmark of an accomplished writer that she can convince the reader to believe one thing and then a few pages later almost its opposite. Couple this with some very effective writing and you have a potent thriller that builds to an almost hysteric, deeply disturbing conclusion.

Out the truck windows there was chaos on either side, the vegetation dense and scrappy. We rushed past bursts of brilliant yellow wattle, bushes with bristling pod-like extrusions, the bulbous pigmy trees erupting in countless long green spikes – plants all designed in a radical workshop. Nowhere in England would you move so fast from pastoral land into vast, wild disorder.

Terri Janke was an indigenous woman in her thirties when she published Butterfly Song in 2005. Like her heroine, Tarena, Janke also studied law in Sydney in the early 90s and is of mixed Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal heritage, so it’s probably safe to say many events in the novel follow Janke’s own life.

But what makes this novel different from a coming-of-age indigenous girl makes good story, is the device of telling the story around the fate of a pearl-shell brooch carved on Thursday Island and given to the carver’s lover, and which then turns up forty years later for sale in a Cairns antique shop.

Tarena has just finished her law degree when she’s asked by her mother, Lily, to run a case of misappropriation against the purported owner, and the shop. Lily has recognised the brooch as one owned by her late mother, Francesca and carved by her father, Kit, who died when Lily was a little girl.

Moving between TI, Cairns and Sydney and covering fifty years, or so, Janke introduces us to the love affair of Francesca and Kit, Lily and her brother Tally’s young life in Cairns, Tarena’s childhood and her life as a law student.

Some of these strands are more interesting than others. The scenes of pearl diving and life on TI in the 40s, and life in Queensland for indigenous people in the 50s, were interesting for me, but I found the scenes of student life in the 80s fairly bland.

Music, songs, frangipani trees and the ocean soften the reality of racism and the harshness of some aspects of the characters’ lives.

Throughout, Janke uses the brooch motif to weave all the threads together, and the courtroom scene where the ownership of the brooch is determined is suitable tense and moving.

Butterfly Song is an easy read and I appreciated getting an insight into the life of indigenous people in the Torres Strait and Queensland.

As a footnote, Janke was named NAIDOC person of the year in 2011: she’s now a well-known and successful lawyer specialising in indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights.