Song For a Dark Queen

I read quite a lot of Rosemary Sutcliff in high school, and I vividly remember the 1977 TV series of The Eagle of the Ninth. Sutcliff's books usually portray Roman Britain from the Roman point of view, but Song for a Dark Queen for once shows events from the other side. Song For a Dark Queen is told by Cadwan, who is Boudicca's Harper and therefore close by her side throughout.

This is a slim novel (I found it in a street library), less than 200 pages long, but it's grim, poetic and intense. Sutcliff adopts the theory that the Iceni tribe was matrilineal, the Queen and her daughters sacred to the Mother Goddess, and her consort the King chosen as a warrior. Of course this would have been completely foreign to the patriarchal Romans, who decreed that after Boudicca's husband was killed, leaving no son behind, that was the end of the royal line, and the lands of the Iceni could be absorbed into Roman governorship.

The horrors of the treatment of Boudicca and her daughters is not explicitly dwelt upon, but it's not shied away from either. Song for a Dark Queen contains rape, slaughter, ritual execution and descriptions of hand to hand battle. I don't know if I'd recommend it to children, though it was chosen as a Children's Book of the Year in 1978! These days it would definitely fall into the YA category, but even for YA, it's pretty dark, and there is no happy ending here.
 

Indigenous Australia for Dummies

This is the book I could have used when I was starting to write Crow Country almost fifteen years ago. Beginning from a base of near-total ignorance, I scrounged around my local libraries for any text I could find that touched on the history and culture of Australia's First Nations. It was a pretty mixed bag, ranging from picture books of Dreaming stories to scholarly texts in anthropology, and it took a long period of study before I was able to piece together anything like a coherent picture.

In the years since then, there has been an explosion of fiction and non-fiction both by and about First Nations people, and I'm still learning. But Professor Larissa Behrendt's Indigenous Australia for Dummies is the excellent, comprehensive primer that would have set me on the right path.

I particularly enjoyed the early sections on culture and history, but I must admit my eyes began to glaze over during the portions on legal precedents (this is why I wasn't a very good law student). The sections on the struggle for civil and land rights were disheartening to read. The later sections on contemporary contributions to art, theatre, literature, music and sport were also very interesting, and I was glad to see that Behrendt didn't ignore her own achievements. (I'm a big fan of her novel After Story from a few years ago.)

This is a fat reference book that I will keep on the shelf and check when needed. This copy is the second edition and I'm sure it will be updated again as necessary.

There Are Rivers in the Sky

I borrowed this from a book club friend and I've taken my time meandering through it (did you know the word 'meander' derives from the name of a river?) Written by acclaimed Turkish-British author Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky weaves together a complex collection of themes: ancient Ninevah; the Yazidi people, persecuted as 'devil worshippers'; the translation of cuneiform text in the nineteenth century; heartbreak in contemporary London; the study of water; floods and drought; climate change; poetry.

There Are Rivers in the Sky is constructed like a beautifully made mosaic, each piece precisely placed and designed to highlight or contrast with the rest. It definitely made me think of water in a different way, and it felt very timely to be reading a book set partly in the Middle East, during the events in Syria and Lebanon. It's a part of the world that I'm shamefully ignorant and confused about, but both this book and Rory Stewart's The Places Between have begun to place images in my mind that might help to anchor the geography and history in my brain.

There are three main strands to the narrative, two set in the 2010s and one in the mid-nineteenth century, but all three end up twining together in a sad but satisfying way. It was difficult to read about the treatment of the Yazidi under ISIS, and a story I knew nothing about, and it's heart breaking to reflect that we humans still seem incapable of living together in peace.

Health: Spirit, Country and Culture

The latest volume in the First Knowledges series, Health, is co-written by Shawana Andrews, Sandra Eades and Fiona Stanley, two First Nations and one white woman, all vastly experienced in the field. It begins from the premise that traditional life on Country was an intrinsically healthy one -- there is no separate word for 'health' in Aboriginal languages, and indeed it's hard to argue that an active, interesting life, culturally rich and embedded in the natural world, could be anything but healthy. In one study, eight diabetic First Nations men were taken out to live on Country for several weeks, actively searching for food and living a close to traditional lifestyle; their health improved even in this short period of time.

Colonisation was ruinous for First Nations peoples' health. Not only were they ravaged by alien diseases and forced away from their traditional balanced way of life, but bush tucker was replaced with flour and sugar, alcohol and tobacco, not to mention the mental health consequences of loss of culture and families being wrenched apart.

It's so frustrating to read of so many wonderfully effective programs, developed in trust and collaboration with Aboriginal communities, which have then been dismantled or destroyed for lack of funding. I can only imagine how furious and disappointed those actually working in the field must feel. In contrast, politically motivated, quick fix 'solutions' like the Northern Territory Intervention or the criminalisation of children, can be rapidly put in place and are always disastrous in effect. It makes you want to tear your hair out. But it's great to read about the successes and to know that there are such dedicated, intelligent people working on the problems.
 

Ballet Shoes

I've owned this copy of Ballet Shoes for so long that I don't remember if it ever had a paper cover; this reprint dates from 1968, but I think I received it while we were living in New Guinea, in the early 1970s. This hardback cost $1.50! I know I was immediately enchanted with it and read it dozens of times, though during this re-reading (the first for many years), I was struck by how little plot there is. The story is very episodic. The three babies arrive and grow up, money runs out, the rooms in the vast house in Cromwell Rd are let out to a number of extremely useful lodgers who can tutor the children for nothing, drive them here and there, teach them dancing and lend them money (the only one who is a bit useless is Mrs Simpson, no wonder they wrote her out of the BBC adaptation). The girls take part in various stage productions and in the end, Great Uncle Matthew comes home and they are all going to scatter to live out their dreams (more or less).

But I remember what I particularly loved was the granular detail of the lives of Pauline, Petrova and Posy. I loved the reproductions of Pauline's licence application, the script extract from The Blue Bird, and the charming illustrations by Streatfeild's sister, Ruth Gervis.

I was surprised when my daughters (not knowing I was re-reading the book) started discussing the TV adaptation. The younger one was apparently quite traumatised by the depiction of Madame's death (she doesn't die in the book), and the older one went off on a segue about being traumatised by Little Women, which I honestly couldn't remember even reading to her. Did I really read the fake newspaper parts? Oh well. At least these books are now part of my children's DNA, just as they are part of mine, for good or ill.

Look Back With Astonishment

This third volume of Dodie Smith's autobiography, Look Back With Astonishment, picks up exactly where volume two left off, with Smith walking through the doors of Heal's furniture store (still going strong today) to take up a position as a shop girl, running the Little Gallery (toys and pictures), a job she would keep for the next decade after giving up on her acting career. She did not, however, give up on the theatre, because this book also covers her years as a tremendously successful playwright.

Anyone who has worked a day job while simultaneously pursuing a creative life will bristle at the headlines Smith attracted with her first successful script: 'Shop Girl Writes Play' -- as if she were a monkey playing with a typewriter! Gradually Smith's hours at Heal's taper off as she devotes more time to writing. She is very coy about her affair with 'Oliver,' who the attentive reader will immediately guess was in fact Ambrose Heal, her boss, but this affair seems to taper off in similar fashion as she grows more attached to Alec Beesley, her eventual husband. I had no idea that Smith had such a stellar playwriting career, extremely commercially successful and fortunately for her, extremely lucrative.

Look Back With Astonishment ends as war is about to break out, with Smith and Beesley embarking for America, ostensibly to help cast one of her plays in New York, but with an eye to the safety of Beesley, an avowed pacifist (in fact, as a conscientious objector, he probably would have been fine).

The Athenaeum Library doesn't have the fourth volume, Look Back With Gratitude -- to judge from the state of the other three books, it probably fell apart -- but I have ordered it for myself for Christmas. A fifth volume was apparently planned, but never finished, which is a shame. LBWG I think will cover their seven years in the US and the writing of I Capture the Castle, so I'm looking forward to that.

Green Dot

 

I heard about Madeleine Gray's debut novel, Green Dot, on Radio National's The Book Shelf, and found it -- guess where? -- at the Athenaeum Library. This is an up-to-the-minute take on a classically tragic situation, the one described by Princess Diana as 'three people in this marriage.' Green Dot is told from the point of view of Hera, a twenty four year old who has emerged from university with a fistful of degrees and a big blank where her life's passion should be. She settles for a menial job (comments moderator for a major newspaper) and proceeds to fall in love with an older man. The catch is, though technically she doesn't discover this until it's too late, he is married.

From the vast wisdom of late middle age, this reader sometimes wanted to give Hera a shake, or at least roll their eyes at her -- of course he's married! Of course he's lying to you! Of course he's not going to tell her! To be fair, Hera's own friends do plenty of this, and she is self-aware enough to see how bad her situation looks. But Hera wants to feel something, experience something, anything rather than the numbing void of deep depression that she's skirting the edges of, and god knows she's not the only one guilty of pouring away her best years on someone who doesn't want her enough.

By the way, Arthur, the object of her passion, is a tool. All the way through the novel, you just know he is doing his damnedest to have his cake and eat it too, and he doesn't deserve either of these smart, funny, attractive women whose lives he's ruining.

Just like the character of Hera, Green Dot is ironic, funny, charming, but also in a strange way, deeply sad. I would put it in the category of 'New Adult' fiction, along with Nina Kenwood's books, if we're still doing that.

I Capture the Castle

 

I last read I Capture The Castle in 2020, when we were all in desperate need of comfort reading. This novel, though I came to it late in life, has cemented its place as one of my all time favourites -- perhaps THE favourite. Smith laboured over it for seven years and it is almost flawless.

There are so many delightful and poignant and agonising elements woven into this story -- the romance of the castle setting, the family's dire poverty, eccentric Topaz with her affected thrilling contralto and her practical good heart; the storybook romance with the painful twist; the absurd set-pieces, like when they all dye themselves green or when Rose is mistaken for a bear; the fully-formed side characters like the Vicar and Miss Marcy -- but what holds the whole thing together is Cassandra's narrative voice. In some ways she is a typical emotional, sensitive adolescent, in some ways a naive child, in some ways truly wise and thoughtful.

Someone dismissed this book as 'hardly high literature' but it's deceptive. There is actually a lot going on here, under the star-crossed lovers story -- about writing and creativity, about freedom and duty, about money and class, about England and romance.

I think I fall in love with I Capture the Castle a little more deeply each time I read it, and I'm sure that I will return to it again and again as the years pass.

Wandering With Intent

Wandering With Intent is the second book of Kim Mahood's that I've read, and I'd already come across a couple of these essays in the pages of The Monthly. Now the only one I have left is Craft For a Dry Lake, which was her award-winning first book. Mahood is an artist, writer and map maker who was born on a station in the Tanami Desert and grew up with First Nations people. Now she divides her year between living just outside Canberra and spending several months in a remote WA community.

Mahood has shrewd and compassionate things to say about white workers who land in these communities, filled with good intentions, and how they get worn down. She is subtle and insightful about working with elders to map Country, and the rich and wonderful things that can be achieved at the intersection between white and Aboriginal knowledges, when there is patience, respect and good will on both sides (it makes a nice change to read about some successes). She is also scathing about obstructive bureaucracy, and policies dreamed up in an office thousands of miles away. 

Mahood is about seventy, and she writes with wry good humour and perspective and anger and love about these people, her family. I can't wait to read her other book, and I only wish there were more.
 

The Dark Is Rising Revisited

 

These above are not my books. I do own three out of these five, with these covers, but I also have a single volume omnibus edition of the entire series, which I couldn't find an image of online. That omnibus was published in 1984, when I was eighteen, and you might have thought I would be growing out of middle grade fantasy, but my edition is soft and battered and very well-read, so I mustn't have been too old for it after all.

I re-read The Dark is Rising (volume two, as well as the name of the whole series) a few years ago, as part of a Twitter (RIP) Christmas Eve collective read-through, an enriching and delightful experience. But I haven't read the other titles in the series for years.

As a young teen, I absolutely adored these books, especially the mixture of the everyday and the high stakes magic that evolved once Will Stanton appeared, an eleven year old boy who is also the last of the powerful Old Ones. I loved the simple but potent symbolism of the Six Signs that Will is charged to collect, and the inchoate sea-power of the Greenwitch and its connection to Jane, the only real female protagonist. I loved the enigmatic figure of Merriman Lyon (Merlin), Will's mentor, and the solemn, serious battle between the Light and the Dark.

The last two books of the series, The Grey King and Silver on the Tree, always appealed to me the least, especially the final, climactic volume, where Will and Bran (King Arthur's heir) enter a strange magical city and perform various symbolic ordeals -- this was the point where, for me, the story lost its grounding in reality, and even though the children are left to carry on the fight against the forces of the Dark in our own world, the nature of that battle is left pretty vague (there's only one stand taken against racism, which I did appreciate, but it's mostly Will's brother who fights that battle, so any role the children might take is left largely undefined).

It did feel horribly apt to be reading The Dark is Rising while Trump was being re-elected in the US. It's pretty clear what the battles for us are going to be.