Thus Far and No Further

This was a treat for myself and to plug a gap in my Rumer Godden collection. It was first published in 1946v as Rungli-Rungliot, then reissued in this edition under the title Thus Far and No Further in 1961. This is another book adapted from a diary. Godden and her two young daughters (plus various staff and servants, some who travelled with them and some who were acquired on the spot) spent only a few months in this isolated house on a tea plantation in Kashmir, but though their stay was brief, it made an indelible impression.

The events of their time in Kashmir also formed the basis for Godden's later novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire, but there is no whisper of that drama in these pages (one of their servants apparently tried to poison the family with ground glass). Instead, the focus is on the utter physical beauty of the mountains, the quiet serenity of their lives there, Godden's gradual calming after a turbulent period in her life. It's a very meditative book, short passages, sometimes no more than a sentence or two, or a brief snatch of dialogue. Godden reflected that this time was valuable in truly getting to know her children, and 'Rafael' and 'Sabrina' emerge as vibrant characters.

Godden returned again and again to this precious, brief time in her writing; it was obviously both a golden period of joy and beauty, and a harrowing crisis. Though she doesn't talk about the bad side, that emotional intensity colours Thus Far and No Further.
 

What The Dog Saw

Picked up from a local street library, What the Dog Saw is a collection of articles and essays published in 2009. For a few years I've been a fan of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History, and the pieces in this volume are very similar in style -- I can hear Gladwell's voice in my inner ear while I'm reading.

Gladwell says he wants to provoke and challenge his readers (and now his listeners, presumably) to think about aspects of the world in a new way, and something from this broad range of topics will surely needle any given reader. The pieces here discuss everything from the seemingly trivial (why is it so hard to market different kinds of ketchup while many different styles of mustard flourish?) to the socially important (if it's actually easier, and cheaper, to solve the problem of homelessness by giving homeless people somewhere to live, why don't we do that?). I was slightly appalled to read Gladwell's efficient demolition of FBI crime profiling (nooo, Malcolm, don't tell me that Mindhunter is garbage!) and fascinated by his account of the way the contraceptive pill was developed to seem more 'natural' (to get the approval of the Catholic Church) when in fact it's not 'natural' at all to expect a modern woman to endure hundreds of periods over her lifetime.

The difference between panicking and choking; the evolution in strategies for selling hair dye to women (especially interesting if you happen to be re-watching Mad Men at the moment); the secrets of dog training; the flaws of the job interview system -- there is something here to amuse, puzzle and yes, challenge, every reader.

Life Below Stairs

Regular readers of this blog will already know that I am fascinated by servants, probably because in another life I almost certainly would have been one. So how could I resist Alison Maloney's Life Below Stairs: True Lives of Edwardian Servants?

When it arrived, Life Below Stairs proved to be a slim little volume, under 200 pages, and doubtless published to cash in on the popularity of Downton Abbey (Julian Fellowes, its creator, is even quoted a few times). It is, however, a really solid informative little source book for useful information about the exact hierarchy of roles and duties inside a house, wages and uniforms, etiquette and rules of behaviour. If I were writing a novel set in an Edwardian grand house, this would not be a bad place to start. For one thing, it would have cleared up Anna's confusion about whether or not she was a 'tweeny' in Countess Below Stairs.

To my amusement, I found quotes from other books about domestic service that I've already read, but I did find out some information I didn't know before -- like the fact that young girls hoping to secure a job as a maid had first to work and save up (maybe for a couple of years) to afford to buy the dresses and aprons they'd be expected to wear on the job! However, footmen, despite being paid more, had thier uniforms supplied. And did you know that a 'servant's bed' measured only 2 foot 6 across, compared with a standard single bed, which was 3 feet in width? (I was chuffed to see an advertisement for such furniture from Heal's, where Dodie Smith worked.)

I was really hoping for more in the way of personal stories and experiences, but I'm sure I'll find those elsewhere.
 

Metal Fish, Falling Snow

As you can see from the huge number of award stickers on the cover above, Metal Fish, Falling Snow gleaned a long list of prizes and shortlistings for debut author Cath Moore when it was published in 2020. Fourteen year old Dylan sees the world aslant, and when her beloved mother dies in an accident, she is forced to make a long road trip with her mum's boyfriend to reconnect with the only family she has left. The metal fish and the snow globe of the title refer to the only tangible mementos Dylan possesses from her parents.

Dylan's story is told in an idiosyncratic, very original voice, alive with word play and metaphor, and I can understand why the judges of literary prizes would have sat up when they opened these pages. It's beautifully written, often droll, sometimes very sad. Dylan seems sometimes much wiser than a typical fourteen year old, and sometimes much younger. For me, Metal Fish, Falling Snow falls into the category of books for adults who like YA or kidlit, which is a perfectly respectable category with plenty of readers and one I aspire to write for myself (as well as reading it :-)
 

The Sentence

Louise Erdrich has become one of my favourite authors. The Sentence, published at the end of 2021, is partly a pandemic novel, partly about Black Lives Matter, partly about ghosts, and mostly about reckoning with the past.

Links with Erdrich's life seem clear -- Tookie, our narrator, works in a bookshop owned by an author called Louise which focuses on Native American and marginalised voices, just like Erdrich's own Birchbark Bookshop (Trump will probably try to shut it down soon). Tookie spent a decade in jail and she was first arrested by the man who is now her beloved husband. Her life is now safe and comfortable, but there are elements of her past that she has never come to terms with, signified by the fact that she is being haunted by the ghost of a former bookshop customer.

The Sentence covers a tumultuous year in Minneapolis as Covid sweeps the country and then the murder of George Floyd sparks protests, riots and brutality in the streets. Erdrich expertly weaves national and even global trauma with the deeply personal story of Tookie and her family. She must have written it so fast! As always, I'm struck with admiration for the way Erdrich combines the spiritual, the political and the domestic. The Sentence is a powerful and moving novel.
 

We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord

I enjoyed this book a lot. Garth Nix has mined his own Canberra childhood, his history as a teenage D&D Dungeonmaster and put a John Wyndham-esque sci-fi twist on it all to produce an action-packed middle grade novel.

Kim (Chimera) and his younger sister Elia (Elieithyia) live with their eccentrically hippie parents on the outskirts of 1970s Canberra, spending most of their time hanging out with their friends Bennie and Madir, but everything changes one day when they fish a mysterious golden globe out of the lake. This incident is based on a true story from Nix's childhood, when he thought he saw a severed head in the murky waters one day (I think it turned out to be a motorbike helmet). Before long, child prodigy Elia is in communication with the strange sphere, which becomes progressively more and more threatening and dangerous.

We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord reminded me of John Wyndham's classic Chocky, which scared the suitcase out of me as a child, and also fascinated me. Things never get too terrifying here, though there is certainly plenty of danger and lots of action. I raced through it and I hope plenty of young readers do the same. My only quibble is that I was never quite sure how to pronounce Elia.
 

Madly, Deeply

I first came across Alan Rickman as the superbly smarmy Obadiah Slope in The Barchester Chronicles (a performance that JK Rowling has said inspired the character of Severus Snape, so how appropriate that Rickman ended up playing him). But I fell in love with him in Truly, Madly, Deeply when he played the ghost of Juliet Stevenson's husband, and even more as Captain Brandon in Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility. For most people of a certain generation, he will always be Professor Snape; for an older demographic, he is the villain in Die Hard (never seen it). What always set him apart was his divine, languid voice -- the result of being born with a tight jaw, apparently.

These diaries run from 1993-2015. Unlike, say, Michael Palin's diaries, which always seem to have written with at least one eye firmly on eventual publication, Rickman's diaries sit in an uneasy space between being shorthand enough to seem purely personal, but elliptical enough to be frequently opaque to future readers.

It's weird to read about the actual process of film-making from the actor's perspective. I think somewhere in the back of my mind I've assumed that if the action covers a year, then they've spent a year making it... whereas of course the actor might be on set for only a few days. One gathers that Rickman wasn't always easy to work with -- he's exacting, critical (including self-critical) and he can always see how things could be better. As an actor, he chafed against directors; as a director, he demanded a lot from his actors. But his prickliness was never in service of ego, always in service of the work.

But he was a wonderful, generous friend; he was always politically engaged, and he stayed with his partner from 1977 until he died in 2015. It's worth remembering that most people only write in their diaries when they're unhappy -- I know I certainly did -- and if Rickman comes across as a bit of a grump, that's probably one reason why. He also illustrated his diaries with gorgeous coloured drawings, only a handful of which are reproduced here -- I would have loved to see them all.

A Countess Below Stairs

Eva Ibbotson's A Countess Below Stairs has also been published as a YA novel under the title The Secret Countess, and to me it perfectly straddles the ground between light adult historical romance and young adult fun -- it's a fairy tale, and utterly satisfying in a fairy tale way.

I can't remember how I heard about it, but I found it at the Ath (of course) and it was perfect, delightful comfort reading. Our heroine, Anna, is a dispossessed Russian noblewoman, forced into exile in England after the 1917 Revolution. She's a sweet, unspoiled, enthusiastic young woman who takes a job as a housemaid at a grand country house -- can you see why I couldn't resist it? Of course, her fellow servants can see at once that she's cut from different cloth, but they all fall in love with her anyway. And naturally, there is an eligible heir to the estate, survivor of the War, unfortunately engaged to a beautiful but deeply unpleasant fiancèe...

Everything plays out as it should, complete with high comedy vignettes, tearful misunderstandings and a dog called Baskerville. It's pure froth, but such deftly handled, pleasurable froth. I've never read any of Eva Ibbotson's work before, but I have a feeling she might become a favourite.

Stories

It's almost hilarious to contrast how skinny this volume of Helen Garner's collected short fiction is, compared with the companion volume of True Stories, which is about four times as fat. Lots of blank pages and huge margins in Stories, too.

Some of the pieces in Stories don't read much like fiction; as always, the border between fiction and non-fiction in Garner's work is porous to say the least. There were only a couple of these stories where I couldn't trace some kind of connection to Garner's own life, and perhaps even in those cases I just couldn't see the connection because I don't know her well enough. Does it really matter what's true and what's invented, or shaped, or curated, or edited, or enhanced? Every writer uses the clay of real life to some degree; just because Garner is more honest about her material doesn't make the final result any the less art.

I think all these pieces were new to me, so I was very happy to have read them. The final story, What We Say, was especially devastating, in that understated, elliptical way Garner has. What a superb writer she is.

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth and Me

 

This is a book that I think I probably acquired thorough the Scholastic Book Sale while we were living in PNG; my edition is from 1974, so I would have been eight or nine. The book sale was just for books (revolutionary, I know) and it was essentially the only way I could access books apart from the library -- there were no bookshops in Mt Hagen. And of course all the books were American... though this is the UK edition, the original US version had the title, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth. I have to agree with the UK publishers re the (slightly) snappier title.

I've hung onto this book all these years, but I don't think I've actually read it since we left PNG. As a child, I loved Jennifer, Hecate, but there was plenty in it to mystify me -- Pilgrim costumes for Halloween, apartments with elevators, quarts of water, New Math, snow and school at Christmas time and the fact that watermelon at New Year was strange. I was intrigued by witches, too, and I also experimented with magic potions, so I found that very relatable. I can't remember what I thought about the fact that Jennifer was Black and Elizabeth was white, though I was also living in a highly segregated community at the time.

Reading some more recent reviews, I found that some reviewers looked askance at this book because they took the view that Jennifer was 'bullying' Elizabeth by putting her through her 'witch apprenticeship.' Give me a break! Elizabeth has to eat strange foods (a raw egg every day, raw onions). But Elizabeth is well able to stand up for herself, and she undertakes her witch 'trials' willingly -- she adds the egg to milkshakes, and she loves onion sandwiches anyway. Elizabeth is just as sarcastic and feisty as Jennifer is cool and sardonic -- they are a great pair, a fact I only appreciated properly this time around.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Published in 2007, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian has become something of a modern classic. It's the semi-autobiographical story of Arnold Spirit (almost the same initials as Sherman Alexie) who makes the difficult decision to leave his school on the reservation and attend the mostly white high school in Reardan, 22 miles away. His community see him as a traitor, his new school mates see him as a misfit, but gradually, mostly with the traditional mechanisms of fisticuffs and sport, he becomes accepted.

There are plentiful illustrations, Diary of a Wimpy Kid style (ooh, apparently they were published the same year! interesting...) but the content is much darker. There are deaths on the reservation, none from natural causes, Arnold's parents are alcoholics, and they are so poor that often they can't afford to pay for petrol to drive him to school. The toughness of the material is made bearable by Arnold's ironic, self-deprecating style, the humour of the drawings, and the loose, readable printing -- short chapters, lots of space on the page. No wonder it's a hit with reluctant readers.

It was disappointing to discover that Alexie is yet another author whose personal behaviour has come back to bite him, though at least he seems to have been willing to apologise and try to make amends. I really don't want to have to cancel this one!

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia

Black Inc has a whole series of these Growing Up in Australia books: Growing Up Asian, Growing Up Queer, Growing Up Disabled and more, only some of which I've read. 

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, edited by Anita Heiss and published in 2018, was a sobering read. It includes dozens of firsthand stories, from people born in the forties right up to teenagers, and while the narratives of the older generations included some desperately sad accounts of stolen children and even passed-down memories of brutal massacres, the most recent life stories are also full of racism, low expectations and relatives lost to suicide and despair, as well as loving families, community support and individual achievements.

One common theme was the exasperation and anger at being constantly asked to justify their own Aboriginal identity, especially, but not only from fair-skinned people: being required to quantify what 'percentage' of heritage they possess. I must admit I thought this was something that had gone out with the census referendum and I was shocked at how often even the youngest writers complained about this sort of interrogation.

There are many different kinds of stories here. Some writers have a strong, joyous sense of culture and belonging; others feel adrift. There are accomplished authors here, including Tara June Winch, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Jared Thomas and Tony Birch; celebrities like Adam Goodes and Miranda Tapsell; political figures like Celeste Liddell, and many others. Some stories are warm and funny, some are angry and sad, but all are worth reading.

A Month in the Country

J.L. Carr's short novel (just over 100 pages) was first published in 1980, and I studied it for either English or English Lit a few years later. I remember loving it, and it was safe on my shelves, but I hadn't revisited it for forty years, until I was prompted to do so by a Facebook friend.

A Month in the Country is a beautiful, elegiac little book, set in an idyllic English summer in 1920. The narrator, Tom Birkin, is restoring a painting in the church; Charles Moon is excavating someone's lost ancestor in the grounds outside. Both are survivors of the War, and both are deeply scarred. Nothing much happens, but gradually some things shift and begin to heal; in fact, what happens is that Birkin begins to make connections in the village, and these connections continue to nurture him long after that magical summer is gone.

A couple of years after I studied the book in high school, and unbeknownst to me, they made a film out of it, starring Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh in very early roles. I'm very excited to see it (though apparently it's not as magical as the book). It's so weird what survives in the memory -- as I re-read it, I remembered reading about Alice Keach's father testing her on obscure types of apple, and the fig leaves pressing up against the windows of the vicarage like hands, and one character being found 'in bed with his batman,' and what that implied, and I remembered what was particular about the missing ancestor and how he featured in Birkin's altarpiece. But loads of more dramatic scenes and details had vanished from my mind completely. I found myself thinking, oh, that's where that came from.
 

Honour & Other People's Children

Honour & Other People's Children was Helen Garner's follow-up to her immensely successful Monkey Grip: the difficult second album. Apparently she originally intended to write something similar to her first novel (I guess that meant mining her diaries in the same way) but couldn't make it work, so the noven-in-progress was split into two separate novellas. (I always have trouble remembering that Honour is one story and Other People's Children is another.) 

Honour, the novella I prefer, centres around a separated couple and the challenge to their amicable, long-standing relationship when the man wants to marry his new partner. Other People's Children concerns friendship and share-house politics, the breakdown of a friendship between Ruth and Scotty, and a possible new relationship for Scotty with the unattractive Madigan. Unfortunately I found Madigan so unappealing that I had no interest in whether or not he and Scotty would get together.

The autobiographical elements are not difficult to discern, though it seems that Ruth and Scotty both contain elements of Garner herself. Scotty seems closer to Garner in personality, but Ruth is the one with children, to whom childless Scotty is deeply attached and is likely to lose if the household breaks down. There's less meat in these novellas than there is in Monkey Grip, and I don't think Other People's Children entirely succeeds, but even a flawed Helen Garner book is always worth reading.
 

Impossible Creatures

I'm late to the party as far as Katherine Rundell is concerned, but Impossible Creatures is pretty nearly a perfect middle grade fantasy novel and I would have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone. 

Impossible Creatures opens with a bestiary of gorgeous mythological beasts, both traditional and invented by Rundell, and then plunges immediately into a fast-paced adventure with characters relatable and colourful -- Christopher comes from our own world, and is the unwitting heir to a guardianship he knew nothing about, while Mal comes from the walled-off Archipelago, a hidden part of our world where the magical creatures live. Mal herself is another unwitting heir to a weighty legacy. Helping these two young people in their quest are an array of supporting cast, human and not human, but in the end, Christopher and Mal have to reach deep to stop the leaking of magic from the other realm.

This is a novel I wish I'd written myself -- vivid, moving, pacy and magical. It's wonderful stuff.