The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales

The story behind The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales is a sad one. The first Virago Book of Fairy Tales, edited by Angela Carter, was received with such acclaim that a second volume was commissioned. Tragically, Angela Carter died before this book was finished, though her notes on many of the stories are published here, and she chose each tale for the compilation.

This is an eclectic collection of folk tales, some evidently quite ancient, some so recent they are hardly more than single page jokes. There are stories from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas featured here and almost the only thing they have in common is that they all centre women. There are cunning witches, resourceful maidens, downtrodden and vengeful wives.

I'm not sure if I enjoy fairy tales and myths as much as I think I should. Perhaps it's the distillation of story down to almost pure plot -- characters are barely sketched, and if they have any distinguishing personality traits, they are boiled down to a single adjective: 'clever,' 'kind' or 'jealous.' I'm not sorry to have read this collection but I don't think I'll be hunting down volume 1.
 

The Durrells of Corfu

I was looking for a light read and The Durrells of Corfu hit the spot. As a teen I adored all Gerald Durrell's memoirs about his childhood on Corfu, My Family and Other Animals and its sequels, I found the family anecdotes hilarious and the nature writing vivid and delightful. It's now clear that those memoirs were quite heavily fictionalised -- different stories were exaggerated, some people erased and events shifted around to suit the narrative. I have no problem with any of that but it was interesting to find out what the actual facts were. For example, big brother Larry was presented as a temperamental, aspiring author, while in fact he'd already had two novels published and was an established member of the London literary scene. Moreover, his wife Nancy came with him to Corfu, and mostly the couple lived apart from the rest of the family -- but poor Nancy doesn't appear at all in Gerald's books! (Another literary wife deleted, a la Wifedom??)

There are lots of photographs included in Michael Haag's book and he does a great job of filling in the family background as well as the historical context. The Durrell idyll only lasted a few years, ending of course in the outbreak of war, and it seems that the antics of the bohemian clan were not universally approved by the island's other inhabitants, who took a dim view of nude sea-bathing and what they saw as a patronising attitude. At this distance, who knows the truth? But I think I will still hang onto the golden memories of Gerry's perfect childhood and the eccentric characters that surrounded him, including his siblings.

The Borrowers Aloft and Avenged

 I thoroughly enjoyed these last two adventures of the Borrowers, which see them in genuine peril, especially in The Borrowers Aloft, where they are abducted from the model village in Fordham and imprisoned by the villainous Platters, who plan to put them on permanent display as an attraction in their own rival model village. The horror of being gawked at by humans all day is very real. I remember visiting the model village at Bourton-on-the-Water in England as a child and being enchanted by it -- surely this was the inspiration for the creations of Mr Pott and Miss Menzies (the goodies) and the unpleasant Platter pair?

 

(By the way, with 26 letters to choose from, was it really necessary for Norton to name her small cast of characters Pod, Peagreen, Pott, Platter, Pomfret and Parkinson? But I digress...)

The Borrowers Aloft begins with a long dull set up involving the Platters' financial woes -- I don't love the framing of the borrowers' adventures with human activities, I just want to get into the borrowers' world immediately -- but once the borrowers have been kidnapped, the story really gathers pace, culminating in a daring escape by balloon (not really a spoiler since you can see the scene on the cover). The Borrowers Avenged sees a new borrower introduced, the gentle Peagreen Overmantel, and I wonder if he will one day become a rival to Spiller for Arrietty's affections? However we leave the borrowers in their new home (complete with ghosts) long before this becomes an issue, and there is only one fleeting reference to the First World War to shadow the otherwise tranquil ending (the stories are set in 1911).the

For a lovely nostalgic journey, The Complete Borrowers was the best $2 I've spent for a long time.

A Letter of Mary

I genuinely have no idea whether I've read this book before or not! I suspect I might have, I know when I first discovered Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice at the local library, I immediately read all the books in the series that they held -- whether A Letter of Mary, the third in the series, was one of them, I don't know. I hunted through my reading diary and couldn't find it, so at any rate I haven't read it since 2011; but I've mislaid the pre-2011 reading diary, so perhaps I read it before then?

ANYWAY once you get past the ick factor of having Sherlock Holmes in the 1920s married to Mary Russell, who at 23 must be at least forty years younger than he is, these books are a lot of fun. Mary is a worthy partner, with her own independent academic interests, and she narrates the stories with verve and wit. I did spot one slip -- I think it was a slip: usually Russell refers to Watson as the chronicler of Holmes' adventures, but at one point she notices a copy of The Strand magazine "with Conan Doyle's stories inside"???

I particularly enjoyed the character of Dorothy Ruskin, who could have stepped straight from the pages of Square Haunting -- a no-nonsense woman archaeologist, expert in her field, who wears trousers and is impatient with men (of course excepting Sherlock). Even if I have read A Letter of Mary before, I enjoyed it just as much as if I hadn't.

Holiday Reading

 Choosing the books to take on holiday is where having a really tall to-be-read pile comes into its own. I would never take library books away with me, particularly when I'm planning to read beside a pool -- anything could happen!

So I picked six books from my stack and stowed them in my suitcase -- believe me, they took up way more room than the clothes I brought with me. I chose mostly secondhand volumes so I could take risks with them, and indeed, I left a couple of them behind in the house bookcase for others to enjoy.

The first book to be finished (almost finished on the flight to Cairns, in fact) was Monica Edwards' The White Riders. This was a fun, horsey adventure where Tamzin and her friends pretend to be ghosts, or demons, or something scary anyway, to frighten away developers who are building a holiday camp on the marshes. As a child I adored the second volume of Edwards' Romney Marsh series, which features only Tamzin and Rissa, and I remember my indignation when I came across a later book which included BOYS. However, I've now grown used to Meryon (hot, dashing, descendant of a pirate, clearly going to be Tamzin's romantic interest when they get a bit older) and Roger (Rissa's cousin, nice enough, but just making up the numbers). I enjoyed The White Riders but I don't think the idea of dashing around dressed in white sheets has aged particularly well...

Next up was Ramona Koval's By the Book, part memoir of her own childhood and adult reading, and part rumination on books and reading in general. As someone who for many years hosted the ABC's Book Show, she had lots to share about the joys of reading and some fascinating stories to tell, such as the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah (which I think is the basis of Geraldine Brooks' novel, The People of the Book? Haven't read that one). This was a perfect holiday read, interesting but light.

Next I finished Mary Stewart's Touch Not the Cat, passed onto me from a street library by my friend Sian. This novel rang bells with me, the cover proclaimed it as a Number 1 International Bestseller. I thought I might have read it as a child when my mother borrowed it from the Mt Hagen library, but the publication date of 1976 makes that unlikely. Now I think I might have read part of a serialised version in the Women's Weekly or New Idea. I definitely remember being intrigued by the title. Anyway, Touch Not the Cat is quite the melodramatic tale, involving telepathic lovers, a maze, a neglected mansion, coded messages in antique poetry, and a pair of sinister twins. Also perfect holiday reading! (This is exactly what my copy looked like, too, by the way...)

Another old favourite author was next, also rescued from a street library: Mary Wesley's A Dubious Legacy. However, this was not my favourite Wesley title. There was the usual knotted plot, psychological surprises, eccentricities and refreshing sexual frankness, and even the reappearance of some characters from previous stories, but A Dubious Legacy was irreparably marred for me by an instance of animal cruelty played for laughs, and also a factual inaccuracy -- she has children watching Dr Who in the summer of 1990, when any serious follower of the Doctor knows that the show went on extended hiatus from 1989 till 1996. Sloppy research, Mary!

Last, but definitely not least, was White Night by Ellie Marney. A rare stand alone novel, White Night is set in the country town milieu that Marney knows well, and -- I was going to write, there's no violent crime in this book, but that's not exactly true! However, White Night is at its heart a story about love, the ties between people, and friendship. It's narrated by Bo, a sixteen year old boy becoming a man, who falls for Rory, the 'feral' girl from the mysterious community on the town's fringes. I loved the way that Marney lets us, the readers, fall in love with the Eden community just as Bo does, before its flaws become obvious to us all. Thoroughly recommended (as usual).

Ten Steps To Nanette

Dear readers, I have been on holiday. I enjoyed a lovely relaxing week with some friends in Cairns, bobbing in the pool in the sunshine, eating delicious food, chatting, playing games, and of course, reading (more on that later). But before I left for my week in the tropical sun, I had a task to complete. I had borrowed Hannah Gadsby's sort-of autobiography, Ten Steps To Nanette, from the Athenaeum Library (are you sick of me talking about that yet??) and it was due back the day after my return from FNQ. So I had to finish it before I left, didn't I?

It was no chore to race through this book, though it is harrowing reading at times. Gadsby is an absolute professional at playing their audience like a fiddle, something they talk about in some detail while describing how they wrote their award-winning, brilliant show Nanette. Gadsby uses some of the same techniques in constructing this narrative, easing us into comfort with some laughs and then, wham, punching us in the solar plexus with horrific memories or a piece of shocking information. Gadsby has wrestled with shame and fear, sexual assault, depression, self-harm, neuro-diversity, and gender identity, as well as poverty, employment issues and then, almost most disorienting of all, global celebrity with the violent success of Nanette, self-described as 'a comedy show that isn't funny.' (If you haven't seen it yet, please, in the time-honoured phrase, do yourself a favour.)

I particularly enjoyed Gadsby's discovery of the history of art and subsequent obsession with the topic as a way of understanding the world. They are obviously extremely intelligent and it's an indictment on our education system that they were allowed to fall through the cracks at school -- more evidence that we need to pay more attention to autism and ADHD in children. I really wanted to reach back in time and give little Hannah a big hug.
 

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens

I've been on the waiting list to read Shankari Chandran's Chai Time At Cinnamon Gardens for so long, it's probably time for the new winner of the Miles Franklin Award to be announced. There was even a reserve list at the Athenaeum! But my turn eventually arrived at good old Preston Library.

Despite waiting for so many months I'd lost count, I did not take advantage of this time to find out anything at all about the novel. I think I'd assumed from the title that it would be something like The Thursday Murder Club or those books set in nursing homes -- sorry, aged care facilities -- where people climb out of the windows (extremely unlikely in the aged care homes that I'm familiar with). The cover also led me to believe that this might be a gentle, whimsical story with quirky characters and a heart-warming ending.

Well, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens was sort of like that -- but also not like that at all. To begin with, much of the story centred on the civil war in Sri Lanka, a period of history I'm ashamed to say I knew absolutely nothing about. This brutal and bloody background colours the experience of several characters, and reminds us how many refugees and migrants to this country have come from such horrific situations. Towards the end, the novel becomes quite polemical in sketching an all-too-plausible white reaction to the Sri Lankan facility in their midst -- I'd like to be able to say it seems a little over the top, but alas, it's probably not extreme enough.

Chai Time was a much darker novel than I anticipated, including domestic violence and racist attacks as well as scenes of torture and slaughter, though there are indeed uplifting relationships and quirky characters. It's definitely a story of modern Australia and a worthy winner, a book that deserves many readers. With reserve lists this long, it's defiitely finding them.
 

Some Shall Break

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a HUGE fan of Ellie Marney, and I gobbled up her previous FBI novel, None Shall Sleep, with ravenous glee. Inspired by Mindhunter (which I also loved) and set in the 1980s, these books feature earnest Travis Bell, trainee FBI agent; damaged but resilient Emma Lewis, who escaped from a serial killer; psycho but charismatic monster, Simon Gutmunsson, and his oddly charming twin, Kristin. Some Shall Break sees our team on the track of a copycat, and ends on a beautiful loose end which I'm sure will be the subject of book three (thanks to social media, I know that Ellie is working on book three right now!)

The Shall novels hit a particular sweet spot for me, in that they deal with horrific crimes (rape, murder, abduction, torture) so the stakes are always very high; but they are not so graphic that I get disturbing images seared into my brain. I don't enjoy reading about real world pain and suffering, and I don't enjoy reading about imagined pain and suffering either. But perhaps because these novels are YA, they skirt the margins of the worst crimes, leaving the details mostly to our own imaginations (or not, if preferred; which I do).

I cannot wait for book three. Crack on, Marney!

Yellowface

I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but I was able to pluck Rebecca Kuang's viral satire, Yellowface, off the shelf at the Athenaeum library; there are 87 people in the queue to borrow it from my local.

I raced through this novel, though parts of it were hard to read -- not because they were badly written, but because their forensic dissection of white guilt, overt and unconscious racism, and self-righteous self-justification were so painfully accurate and shameful. Don't get me wrong -- Yellowface is very funny as well as excruciating, not just about racism but also about the world of publishing (fortunately, as a children's author I have been spared the worst excesses of the publicity machine and the cycle of the Hot New Thing). I think I read almost this entire novel with a wince on my face.

Kuang's protagonist, June Hayward (known as Juniper Song after she steals her dead friend's manuscript and passes it off as her own), is monstrous, but she's also pitiful in her longing for admiration, validation and praise. I'm sure I'm not the only author to read this book and catch a glimpse of painful self-recognition in the character of June.

London: The Biography

I feel as if I've been reading this book FOREVER, so it was with some relief that I turned the last page. Don't get me wrong; London: The Biography is a fascinating, exhaustive, endlessly interesting exploration of the history and geography of this ancient and still vibrant city, but at 800-odd pages, it is a marathon, not a sprint, and I had to pace myself, with many breaks in between.

London: The Biography doesn't follow a strict chronological plan; instead, Ackroyd chooses one facet of the city's life and traces that through time. London's rivers, its crowds, pollution, theatre, children, the poor, plagues, fires, railways, all receive their own section. He has obviously pulled together a vast amount of research.

As it happened, while I was making my way through London: The Biography, I watched Ripper St, set in Victorian Whitechapel; read Square Haunting, about one Bloomsbury square; and remembered Ghost Theatre, set largely in Elizabethan London, south of the river. London: The Biography helped me to imagine all these areas more clearly, even though I have only made fleeting visits to the city and never had much of a clue about its geography. I do remember on my first visit diving into the Underground to travel a few stops, without realising that it would have been much quicker to walk through the streets on the surface!

Ackroyd (who had previously written another volume devoted to the Thames) seems quite enchanted by the city, resorting to almost mystical terms to describe its immensity, variety and unquenchable vitality and resilience. This book was published before the upheavals of Brexit and the Covid pandemic, but I am sure Ackroyd would point out that London has survived many such crises in its history, and these turbulent times will also pass.

A House With Four Rooms

Another treasure from the Melbourne Athenaeum Library -- I didn't even know that this book existed. And isn't this first edition pretty! The title is explained at the very end of the book:

Like everyone else I am a house with four rooms. As a child the physical room was barred to me, I had to fight my way to get into it. The room of the mind has always been mine. In the emotional, I have been marvellously lucky; with the spiritual, it was a long time before I would do more than peer in; now it is where I like best to be alone.

All of us tend to inhabit one room more than another but I have tried to go most days into them all -- each has its riches.

My house is, of course, slightly worn now but I still hope to go on quietly living in all of it, finding treasures, old and new until the time comes when I shall have, finally, to shut its door.

Isn't that absolutely beautiful? What a wonderful way to imagine the balance of life. Rumer Godden lived a full and rich and long life (she died in 1998), somehow managing to write dozens of books in between growing up in India, a failed marriage that led to a spartan life in a hut in the Himalayas, raising two daughters, numerous house moves, illness and tragedy (one house burned down and they lost almost everything), speaking tours of the US, several of her novels being turned into films, and other adventures...

Some of the personages she mentions in A House With Four Rooms are not known to me, others I have heard of. I looked up Stanbrook Abbey, the inspiration for perhaps my favourite Godden novel, In This House of Brede, and saw that it's become a hotel -- due to declining numbers, the abbey's sisters relocated to Yorkshire. It sounds (according to Wikipedia) as if the move was painful; three sisters left the abbey and set up their own establishment. It would have made a perfect, agonising plot for another novel.

The Borrowers Afield and Afloat

 My copies of The Borrowers Afield and The Borrowers Afloat are of course contained inside the omnibus volume I bought at the op shop, so I've picked my two favourite covers to share with you instead. Afield picks up exactly where the first story left off, with the three borrowers racing for their lives from the big house towards the dubious sanctuary of the badger's sett where they think their relatives might be living. 

Most of Afield sees the borrowers camping outside, sleeping in an abandoned boot, gathering berries and hiding from owls as well as humans. This book sees the arrival of the enigmatic Spiller, almost a wild borrower, infinitely resourceful and fortunately willing to help Pod, Homily and Arrietty. Afield ends with the reunion between the Clock family and their relatives -- no longer living in the badger's sett but safely in a cottage.

Alas, the happiness is short-lived, as we discover in Afloat -- the cottage, with only two human inhabitants, can't support all these borrowers, and anyway, as Arrietty learns, even those two are leaving. So our family decamp, with the aid of Spiller, for a thrilling adventure down a drain and along a stream, where they are almost caught again by a human from the previous book, but escape in the nick of time.

I'm so torn about these books, because the adventures are exciting and the whole concept of tiny people, living alongside us and repurposing our discards, is wonderful. But, sadly, some elements of these books are, shall we say, of their time (though I think they could be altered with no harm done) -- Mild Eye, the human who tries to capture them, is a gypsy, with all the squalor and 'foreignness' that implies in children's books of this era. Homily protests that she doesn't want to work 'like a black slave' and a head covering is described as having a 'Klu Klux Klan (sic)' appearance. If I was reading this aloud to a child of today, I would have some explaining to do.

And yet the borrowers themselves are so courageous, inventive and resilient, they are great role models for small people who also feel themselves helpless and vulnerable in a large, unfriendly world.

Blood on the Wattle

I can't believe it's taken me this long to read Blood on the Wattle, Bruce Elder's book about Aboriginal massacres and mistreatment which was first published as far back as 1988. There really is no excuse for saying 'we didn't know;' Elder collects together previously published material into one numbingly awful litany of slaughter.

Bruce Elder is not an academic, but a journalist, and he suggests that this might be the reason why he and this book were largely spared the attacks that the so-called 'black armband' historians received in the 1990s. There is a chapter included in this edition where Elder explains why the objections of the anti-black armband crew don't stand up; it beggars belief that all these stories, passed down through oral history in First Nations communities, should be invented or exaggerated, especially when there is plenty of other proof to be found, as David Marr's Killing For Country demonstrates.

There is no real central thesis or narrative here, it is a painful list of events which do start to almost blur together. Blood on the Wattle is not as beautifully written as Killing For Country, and Elder makes no attempt to pretend he is being 'objective' -- he is sickened and ashamed, and rightly so. Blood on the Wattle has been used as a school text for decades, and yet it does seem that the average white Australian is still ignorant of this basic history, or worse, knows about it and doesn't care.

Feeling depressed.

The Scent of Water

Inspired by the reluctant dragon I borrowed this first edition of The Scent of Water from the Athenaeum. It has a delicious scent itself, the smell of old books, a scent that takes me back to the small dark Mt Hagen library of my childhood. These days, of course, most old books are weeded from the shelves of modern libraries, so they never have the chance to develop this nostalgic fragrance.

I'm sure I've read The Scent of Water before. It has so many ingredients of a classic Elizabeth Goudge novel -- it may even be the ur-Goudge of which all the others are mere shadows. There are the delightful children, one sensitive and at least one slightly comic and ernest; a seeker (Mary Lindsay, a middle aged single woman who comes to live in the village); someone bitter (Valerie, who sees herself as a martyred wife to her blind husband); a gifted artist (Valerie's writer husband Paul). There is the refuge of the church, a forgotten history of saintly monks, the wonders of the natural world.

The Scent of Water features several varieties of what we would now recognise as mental illness. Mary's older relative, also called Mary Lindsay, suffered from episodes of 'madness' -- perhaps bi-polar disorder. The Vicar's sister, Jean, struggles with acute anxiety. Valerie is probably depressed (luckily, it only takes some masterful behaviour from her husband to snap her out of it). The no-good son of the heroic old couple would probably today be diagnosed with PTSD; in 1963, when the novel was published, he has no support or sympathy at all after his traumatic war experiences, except from his indulgent parents.

But while Goudge can be judgemental, she is also compassionate, and she strives to understand why each of these flawed characters has ended up the way they are. Indeed, the explicit message of The Scent of Water is that love alone is not enough, without understanding.

The miniature treasures featured in this novel (the 'little things') would make perfect gifts for Borrowers; both books also include a cat named Tiger!

Killers of the Flower Moon

I managed to struggle through the film version of Killers of the Flower Moon -- at three and a half hours, it was too long to watch in one sitting. I did appreciate the elaborate, expensive scene setting and the cultural details, but the action moved at treacle pace, and Leonardo di Caprio gives me the irrits (sorry, Leo). However, it's such a horrifying and intriguing story that I wanted to know more.

David Grann wrote the book on which the film was based, and unbelievably, the facts turn out to be even more shocking than the movie version. When the Osage tribe were forced onto what seemed to be worthless land in Oklahoma, no one dreamed that they were sitting on a fortune in oil fields. Before long, the Osage were sharing immense wealth from 'headrights' -- unalienable rights to the minerals beneath the land. However, the white townsmen found ways to grab themselves some of that wealth -- by grossly inflating the prices of goods sold to Indians, by having themselves appointed as 'guardians' to control Osage spending (no full blood Osage was deemed to be 'competent' to manage their own finances) and, most horrifically, by marrying into an Osage family and then conspiring to murder them so they would inherit their fortune.

The film focused on one family -- Mollie Burkhart and her sisters, Mollie's white husband Ernest, and Ernest's conniving uncle Bill Hale, a powerful local figure who was eventually convicted of plotting the murders of several Osage. However, Grann's work shows that there was a wide conspiracy to plan, carry out and cover up Osage killings, and that probably the victims numbered in the hundreds rather than the dozens. It's a truly chilling tale and while Ernest Burkhart and Hale ended up in jail, it's likely that many more men escaped justice entirely.

What's most distressing is the utter cold-blooded racism behind the murders, and the deep, scarring paranoia and fear that this history has left behind for Osage descendants.
 

The Borrowers

I'm trying not to buy new books this year -- I have the most enormous backlog to work through:

Plus, now I have a whole new library to explore... But when I found this Borrowers omnibus in the op shop for $2, I just couldn't resist. I loved the original Borrowers book as a child, and I managed to acquire The Borrowers Afloat from a library book sale years ago, but some of these six titles I have never even read before. It would have been churlish to walk away -- right?

Anyway I have now reread The Borrowers and I remember why I was so enchanted. There is something magical about a world in miniature and I remember that what captivated me most as a child was the way that Pod, Homily and Arriety repurposed human possessions for their own uses -- a cotton reel as a table, postage stamps for art, sliced chestnuts toasted like bread, a ring worn as a tiara. It's a very simple story, bookended by the device of Mrs May telling the Borrowers' tale to young Kate. I had completely forgotten Kate and Mrs May, which is surprising as I tended to latch on to any character sharing my name.

Funnily enough I am also reading Elizabeth Goudge's The Scent of Water, which features a collection of 'little things' -- tiny precious treasures which cast a spell over several generations of little girls. And my daughter, though not a little girl anymore, has just been putting together a miniature scene in a tin, which also clearly caters to this thirst for the tiny and detailed. I wonder where this fascination comes from and what purpose it might serve, and whether it is truly universal?

May Norton said that she began thinking of the Borrowers as a story during the years of World War II; perhaps the experience of feeling very small and vulnerable beneath falling bombs triggered a fellow feeling for these very small and vulnerable, though resilient and inventive, people?

Square Haunting

A loan from my dear friend Chris McCombe which I have enjoyed making my leisurely way through. Francesca Wade's Square Haunting is right up my alley of interest -- a study of five women who all lived in a single Bloomsbury square in the first half of the twentieth century. HD (Hilda Doolittle) was a modernist poet; Dorothy L Sayers, an mystery author and scholar; Jane Harrison, a classicist who first suggested the possibility of matriarchal and goddess-worshipping societies pre-dating the familiar male-dominated pantheon; Eileen Power, an economic and medieval historian who pioneered educational broadcasting (and probably ending up spawning a gazillion podcasts); and last but not least, the ground-breaking novelist and feminist, Virginia Woolf.

Using Mecklenburgh Square as a common element in all these women's lives is inspired -- some of them knew each other, some even lived in the same house. As free-thinking, unconventional women, they were all drawn to the area of London where bohemians gathered. In my uni days I was inspired by Virginia Woolf; I've loved Dorothy L Sayers since high school; and at uni I became slightly obsessed with HD and the modernists and the women who congregated on Paris's Left Bank (I wonder what happened to that book...). But I had never heard of Eileen Power or Jane Harrison and I'm dismayed that they disappeared from view so rapidly given the important work they did.

Square Haunting highlights the struggle of these early modern women to be taken seriously, and to live full lives with their personal integrity intact; but it also celebrates the value of the communities they belonged to and the strength they drew from one another. I absolutely love the detail with which the book ends: Virginia Woolf's former house has been replaced with a huge international college, but in the approximate space where her study used to sit, a room is made available each year for a woman scholar, complete with a copy of A Room of One's Own.

Cold Enough For Snow

Jessica Au's award winning novella, Cold Enough For Snow, was the other extra book I picked up from the Athenaeum Library last week -- at less than a hundred pages, it doesn't really count as a book, right? 

Wrong. Reading Cold Enough For Snow is like taking a leisurely swim in cool, still water -- bracing, but refreshing. It's a meditative little book, following a trip to Japan by a mother and grown up daughter. The daughter reports their small excursions, interspersed with memories of her childhood, working in a restaurant, travelling with her husband to his childhood home. There's no plot. We observe the weather, the path through the woods, the museum exhibitions; we see the daughter's attempts to please her mother, usually not guessing exactly right; the book seems to be about our essential inability to really know other people, the way they are sealed inside themselves, occasionally revealing glimpses of their inner, private lives, and perhaps our inability to know ourselves. (This theme echoes the similar preoccupations of Virginia Woolf, who I was reading about at the same time in Square Haunting.)

I admired Cold Enough For Snow and I can see why it's won so many accolades. It's unusual and pleasurable to experience a novel so different from so many contemporary novels with their emphasis on 'hooking' the reader from the first page, delivering non-stop action or plot twists. Au's book is a reminder that novels can also be small and quiet and beautiful and thoughtful. I think Cold Enough For Snow will stay with me when some novels are quickly forgotten.
 

Gender Queer

I went to the Athenaeum Library intending to restrict myself to borrowing two books. Needless to say I came away with four... Gender Queer was one of them. I was aware of Maia Kobabe's 2022 graphic memoir vaguely as one of the most banned books in America, and there are some elements of this book that might be a bit 'graphic' for younger readers, but honestly, most teens will see much more explicit content than this on the internet every day.

Gender Queer is a detailed, honest and moving account of Maia's journey through questioning eir gender identity and sexuality (Kobabe uses Spivak pronouns, e, em and eir, which I wasn't aware of before, but which I quite like). It was super easy to read -- I almost finished it on the tram on the way home -- funny, engaging and very relatable. It really makes plain that every person's experience is different and nuanced, and it underscores the ridiculously arbitrary nature of the boxes we put ourselves into. (As an old school eighties feminist, I probably incline more towards the ideal of removing the boxes, rather than creating more and more of them, but that seems to be the way society is moving.) Maia doesn't feel comfortable identifying as a woman, but also doesn't see emself as a man -- ey are looking for gender balance, are attracted to androgyny, and are delighted when people aren't sure if ey are male or female.

I really enjoyed Gender Queer. I don't think it's anything to be afraid of, and I certainly don't support it being banned anywhere. I found it a helpful, enlightening and fascinating story, clearly and simply told. More power to you, Maia.
 

The In-Between

Full disclosure: I used to be sort-of friends with Christos; we had mutual friends in our twenties. Though I haven't seen him for years, I follow his work with warm interest and admiration. I sometimes find Christos's novels confronting, and they certainly aren't comfort reading, but I know he would say that that's not what fiction should be.

However, The In-Between is much closer to 'my sort of novel' than some of his other work. It's essentially a love story, about two middle-aged men who connect later in life, with all the compromises and potential and baggage that entails. Two chapters are from Perry's point of view, and two from Ivan's, and the novel finishes with a section from the point of view of the daughter of Perry's former lover, a woman seeing the couple from the outside. The In-Between is mostly set in my Melbourne -- Preston, the city, the bayside suburbs where my husband's family live (though I'm having trouble exactly placing Perry's Preston apartment -- perhaps Christos... invented it???)

There is simply no better Australian writer on class, and the central section of the novel is the strongest and the most excruciating to read. There is a dinner party where all the shifting fault lines of Perry's milieu are laid bare -- between middle and working class, women and men, gay and straight, parents and non-parents. Conversations about politics become painfully personal, and accepted moral stances are paraded. Do we all have to think the same about everything?? There is raging against the timid conformity of Australia, our inability to face passion, life and death.

The In-Between is a visceral novel, packed with smells and sex, undercurrents of fear and loneliness and violence. But it's also a very tender, compassionate novel, shot through with everyday beauty and yes, love.

The Goblin Emperor

Katherine Addison's novel The Goblin Emperor was published almost ten years ago, but I hadn't come across it before. It was a recommendation from author Francis Spufford; I know we share very similar taste in books because I was captivated by his 2002 memoir, The Child That Books Built. So I was pretty sure I was onto a winner, and so I was.

The Goblin Emperor is high fantasy, set in a steampunk world of airships, pneumatic messages, elves (white skinned and blue eyed) and goblins (dark skinned and orange eyed). When Maia's father, the emperor, and his three older brothers are all killed in an airship explosion, this eighteen year old half-goblin finds himself unexpectedly ascending to the throne and having to negotiate the intricacies of court intrigues and competing political interests. As Spufford says, Maia succeeds by 'being nice to everyone,' and while it's not quite as simple as that, the story is all the more satisfying for having a solid moral heart of kindness.

The world building underpinning this novel is extraordinary -- trade, language, formal courtesies, food, technology, racism -- nothing is forgotten (there is an extensive glossary at the back of the book and some helpful notes, which I wish I'd read at the beginning). The Goblin Emperor is filed under adult fantasy in my local library, but it could easily be a young adult book (except there's not much sex or romance, which seems to be mandatory for YA books these days), or even a sophisticated older primary reader who would love to be immersed in this complete, complex world.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

Yes, I'm still Obsessed With Trieste. I was excited when I found Jan Morris's last book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, in the Athenaeum Library catalogue, but imagine my dismay when I searched the shelves and there it... wasn't. The helpful librarian couldn't find it either, but promised to reserve it for me and let me know if it turned up. It transpires that it had been pulled from shelves to be discarded, because it's been ten years since it was last borrowed -- I saved it just in time! (On the other hand, if it had been discarded, it might have been put on the For Sale trolley and I could have bought it for $2... Oh well.)

Reading Jan Morris's wistful 2001 description of the city and its history has made me all the more determined to visit one day. Trieste is a city marooned by accidents of geography and history. At the top of the Adriatic, just opposite Venice, it once served as the major seaport for the Austro-Hungarian empire, and its architecture reflects this Germanic flavour -- majestic squares, grand orderly buildings. But when the empire broke up and Trieste was returned to Italy, it lost its purpose (though in the 21st century, it seems to have reinvented itself as a scientific hub). It was a meeting place for many cultures, the Slavic nations to the south and east, Italy to the west, and Austria to the north. Morris describes a city of 'true civility' and just general niceness (we'll gloss over the brief period of Fascist dominance), and really good coffee.

Trieste seems like a melancholy city, a haunted city, with that air of shabby grandeur that I find so irresistible. More than ever I'm longing to wander the waterfront, to inspect the ill-fated castle of Miramar, explore the medieval old town and fortress, take the funicular up to the harsh wilderness of the karst, stare out over the glassy sea, and shiver in the pitiless gusts of the bora. One day.

 

The Night Watchman

Louise Erdrich is a relatively new author to me. I read her 2012 novel, The Round House, last year, which I thought was amazing, and I've just finished The Night Watchman (which I didn't realise had won the Pulitzer Prize until I was searching for this cover image online -- congrats, Louise!) and which is even better.

I'm not sure which I find more compelling, Erdrich's rich story telling, or the Native American world of her novels. The Night Watchman is partly based on her own grandfather's life and his fight to halt the planned termination of Indian tribes in the 1950s, which was framed as an opportunity for Native Americans to fully assimilate with other Americans, but was really a grab for reservation land, and would have meant annihilation of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe. This actually happened to other tribes. But Erdrich beautifully and movingly weaves in aspects of Native American culture and belief through the political story -- there are ghosts and spirits here, plant medicine, cradle boards and dreams.

Not surprisingly, there are many parallels between the treatment of Native Americans and Australia's First Nations peoples -- a history of dispossession, attempts at assimilation (in America, often through boarding schools; in Australia, through the Stolen Generations), and of course intergenerational trauma, sometimes leading to alcoholism and domestic abuse. But what is most remarkable is the strength and determination of the survivors.

It's so thrilling to discover a 'new' impressive author, especially when they have a massive back catalogue to explore, and even better, when your new favourite library has them all lined up on the shelf.
 

La Vie de Château

My daughter recently returned from a trip to Europe, and one of the gifts she brought me was this slim children's book by Clémence Madeleine-Perdrillat, La Vie de Chateau. Never having studied French at school, I've been plugging away for a couple of years at an online language program, which has enabled me to at least pick out commonly used words from the subtitles of Call My Agent. La Vie de Chateau was just the right level for me, in that I could get the gist of the story pretty easily, while looking up two or three new words per page.

Briefly, eight year old Violette is orphaned and is sent to live with her uncle, who is a cleaner at the Palace of Versailles. At first Violette is miserable and silent, but she gradually warms up to her new home and her uncle -- but now the authorities have decided to send her away... (I think this book is based on a short animated film.)

It's been a long, long time -- so long I literally can't remember -- since I had to work to read a book. I took it one page at a time so I didn't feel overwhelmed. It was frustrating at times. Sometimes I got the translation wildly wrong, sometimes I deciphered it on the first attempt. I was relieved when a big illustration shortened a chunk of text; I gulped when I was confronted with a long slab of words. It's been a really good reminder of just how hard this reading caper can be. But the sense of triumph and satisfaction when I reached the end was absolutely wonderful.

The Narnian

Another gem from the shelves of the Athenaeum Library. I have read quite a lot about C. S. Lewis but I'd never come across The Narnian. It's not an exhaustive biography, because Alan Jacobs focuses above all on the development and expression of Lewis's inner life -- his ideas and imagination. As a Professor of English and university director of Faith and Learning, Jacobs is particularly interested in Lewis's Christianity, which was of course the central foundation of his work. 

I have to confess I've never read any of Lewis's apologetics or even his adult novels (though I have a dim memory of attempting The Screwtape Letters in high school), but Jacobs does a good job of outlining his arguments. I think Jacobs is right when he says that Lewis's great strength was not actually in debate or philosophy (even though 'no one could best him'), but in depiction -- he shows us a world where goodness and virtue become rich and delightful, and makes us want to live in that world. Could there be a better description of Narnia? Jacobs emphasises Lewis's 'willingness to be enchanted,' for which I am prepared to forgive his dated attitudes.

One aspect of Lewis's personal life which struck me particularly after reading Wifedom was his long devotion to Mrs Moore, his friend's mother, about which Lewis's brother Warnie was apoplectic with fury, seeing his busy, gifted brother running around filling hot water bottles, taking out the dog et etc instead of getting on with his work. For a start, it seems clear that Lewis and Mrs Moore at least at one time were sexual partners, and no one would bat an eyelid if the gender roles were reversed, and a younger wife were caring with equal tenderness to an older, demanding husband, no matter how creatively gifted she might be, and how much her work suffered in consequence -- not that that would be an ideal situation, either, but part of Warnie's horror surely stems from the perceived 'unnaturalness' of Lewis's position. Anyway, it doesn't seem that Lewis's work actually did suffer all that much, and as Jacobs points out, this experience probably taught him much about suffering, and patience, and love, and duty, which helped him toward greater depth of wisdom and compassion in the long run.
 

Everywhen

I pounced on this book from my new favourite place in the world, the Atheneaum Library, on the strength of the title alone: Everywhen: Australia and the language of deep history. When I give school talks on Crow Country, I try to convey something of the pre-invasion First Nations world view -- the deep interconnectedness of Country, the importance of secrecy and accuracy of knowledge in an oral culture, and their different attitude to time. In the simplest possible terms, while Western cultures tend to conceptualise time like an arrow, or a conveyor belt, moving inexorably from the past into the future, First Nations cultures have a much more cyclical experience of time, tied to the movement of seasons and stars, and a sense of the on-going events of the Dreaming as existing in a kind of living, eternal present, rather than in a distant, far removed past. My understanding is pretty shallow, but the authors of this collection bring a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to this idea.

Honestly, if I'd realised just how scholarly Everywhen was going to be, I might have thought twice about borrowing it, but I'm so glad I persevered. Some of the essays are deeply personal, like Jakelin Troy's account of standing between the snowy mountains of her ancestors and the sky, or Shannon Foster's reflections on being locked away from rock engravings around Sydney, on D'harawal land, in order to 'keep them safe.' There are pieces here that examine the role of music and song, that outline the way performance of ancient songs and stories helps to bring the deep past into the present moment, or the challenge for linguistics of trying to recover the languages lost since white settlement.

After the shock and despair of reading Killing For Country, it was heartening to explore these essays and to realise that there are so many people working so earnestly to preserve, to recover and to engage with the oldest living culture in the world, and hopefully to share a new perspective on what it means to live on and with our fragile planet.

Beyond the Vicarage

I enjoyed reading Away From the Vicarage so much that I pulled out my copy of Beyond the Vicarage and re-read it immediately. Away From the Vicarage had filled in a few crucial events, and the story picks up straight after the previous volume, with 'Vicky' on her way home from a theatrical tour in Australia after her father's sudden death.

As it deals with 'Vicky's' adult life and career as a writer, Beyond the Vicarage is less packed with amusing incident and anecdote than the earlier books, but the chapters dealing with Streatfield's experiences of WWII in London are filled with fascinating (and sometimes gory) detail. She volunteered at first as a fire warden and then running a mobile canteen, which went around during air raids supplying hot drinks and food to people in shelters -- it's incredible the amount of organisation which was mobilised to put such a service in place. I'm continually amazed at the way the British (and presumably other) governments were able to marshal their resources to plan and proceed with such complex programs (evacuating children, nutrition programs, fire patrols, etc etc), quite apart from the actual effort of fighting the war -- and all without the aid of computer technonlogy, all done with paper and typewriters! Unsurprisingly, it was often women who filled in the gaps. I'd forgotten Streatfeild's account of the 'Housewives' association, who came to the rescue with tea, sandwiches, clothing and counselling when other groups failed.

Noel Streatfeild died in 1986 at the age of 91, when I was at university. I wish I'd written her a fan letter when I had the chance. I never realised how many adult novels she'd written; she never intended to be a children's writer and yet she is one of the most gifted writers for children who ever lived.
 

Killing For Country

Killing For Country is a remarkable, scorching book. Journalist David Marr was digging through his family history at the behest of a relative when he stumbled across a photograph of his two-times great-grandfather dressed in the uniform of the Native Police, a notoriously brutal group who specialised in 'dispersing' (ie slaughtering) Aboriginal tribes in Queensland in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Marr forensically lays out the records, from official correspondence, newspaper reports, private diaries and letters, which bulge with proof of large-scale massacres and individual killings on the frontier -- a history we never learned or even suspected at school, a history that was silenced, covered up and ignored for far too long. There are no more excuses for ignorance. This land was brutally stolen, its inhabitants murdered.

David Marr says he doesn't feel guilt for the actions of his ancestor, but he does feel shame. And so should we all. The detail of this clear, intelligent account is incontrovertible. Many times while reading Killing For Country, I had to lay down the book to catch my breath in disbelief and horror. Anyone who still believes that the history of white settlement has suffered from a false 'black armband' view should be made to read Killing For Country.
 

Away From the Vicarage

A week ago, I did something very exciting -- I joined the Athenaeum Library! (Thank you Kirsty for putting the idea into my head.) I've long been aware that there was a library upstairs in the same building as the Athenaeum Theatre, but I'd never investigated it. It's the library of my dreams -- a perfect combination of second hand bookshop and a library, in that it's stocked with lots of the kinds of books I love to read -- including the middle volume of Noel Streatfeild's thinly-veiled autobiographical trilogy, Away From the Vicarage, which I've never been able to get my hands on. Huzzah!

I'm looking forward to exploring the collection; even on my flying visit to sign up and pay my subscription, I saw at least ten books that I want to borrow immediately.

Away From the Vicarage covers Streatfeild's twenties, which were also conicidentally, the 1920s, which she spent training and working as an actress, quite a scandalous career for a vicar's daughter in the years after WWI. As usual, Streatfeild's prose is conversational, easy and always engaging as she sweeps us through horrible theatrical lodgings, plays of varying quality, extended tours of South Africa and Australia, and always affairs at home, in the very different world of the vicarage. 

I've also been dipping into Francesca Ware's Square Haunting, which deals with the lives of five women who lived at Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, where Streatfeild lodged, and I realised that Dorothy L Sayers and Noel Streatfeild probably lived close to each other at the same time. I wonder if they ever met? Neither of them thought of themselves as writers at this time, and it's unlikely that their paths crossed then, but I wonder if they ever did?

A Question of Betrayal

I only borrowed A Question of Betrayal because it's set (partly) in Trieste, but I shouldn't really have bothered. Newbie MI6 agent Elena Standish is sent to the city in 1933 to rescue another agent, who broke her heart a few years ago, the charismatic Aiden Strother. There ensues pages of tortured conversation about treachery and back-stabbing, a convoluted plot about Nazi money-laundering through MI6 (really??), second-guessing about which side Aiden is really on, some historical detail about Dollfuss and the Austrian Fatherland Front, plotting to install Hitler as overlord. 

There is a small amount of description of Trieste's streets and canals, and the clothes sound gorgeous -- bronze-coloured evening dresses, grey silk and sequins, but I found it hard to summon up much interest in the story, despite the fascinating setting. A Question of Betrayal feels quite loosely edited; there were a few annoying inconsistencies in the plot, and a huge amount of yakking -- there was huge urgency to get Aiden out of the city as his cover was blown, and yet they spent days wandering about exchanging smouldering looks. 

A Question of Betrayal is book 2 in a five book series. Author Anne Perry died a year ago, but luckily completed this series before she left us. I'm sure there will be Elena Standish fans who are relieved about that, but I don't think I'll be seeking out the other volumes.

Astercote

Penelope Lively is an author who is interested in the intersections and echoes between the present and the past, whether it's through the presence of a very real ghost (Thomas Kempe) or a kind of mass possession channelling an ancient ritual (Hagworthy) or a straightforward time-slip story (Cross Stitch).

In Astercote, though there are hints that this might be a time slip story at the beginning (the character of Goacher, who seems almost medieval at first meeting; the sound of the bells), the novel is more like Wild Hunt of Hagworthy in that historical patterns and fears begin to play out in the present day (albeit 1970, when the book was written). The village of Charlton Underwood is haunted by the lost village of Astercote, deserted after the Black Death, and when the chalice that is supposed to have protected the village is lost, people start to behave in irrational ways, barricading the village and fearing an outbreak of the plague.

It was weird to read this book so soon after the pandemic, when quarantine was a sensible response to danger and not a bizarre echo of a vanished past. These days it's irrational to disbelieve in the plague. There is more evidence of Lively's love for a good ruin, giving us not only the overgrown medieval village but also a collapsed manor house with trees growing out of it. There are many borderlines here -- between village and countryside, childhood and adulthood (intellectually disabled Goacher sits in the middle), new and old parts of the village divided by the road, as well as past and present (and is there a hint that young nurse Evadne, the children's ally, might be mixed race?)

Ultimately though, Astercote is a story of mass hysteria rather than magic, as as such, less appealing to me than Lively's other more supernatural stories.
 

The Whispering Knights

First published in 1971, The Whispering Knights has something in common with The Time of the Ghost; in both books, a group of children unintentionally summon up a malevolent, ancient feminine force (Morgan in The Whispering Knights, Monigan in Time of the Ghost) and have to deal with the consequences, though Time of the Ghost is a more sophisticated, young adult version, while The Whispering Knights is very much a children's story.

The Whispering Knights also reminded me of Alan Garner's early works, particularly The Moon of Gomrath, as one of the children is captured and imprisoned by Morgan in her big sinister house and needs to be rescued (she is called 'the Morrigan' in Garner's book). It's interesting to speculate about the possibility of these three wonderful writers reading each other's work and being influenced, or having ideas for stories sparked. In order of publication, it goes Garner, Lively, Wynne Jones, but I have no idea whether any of them saw the books of the others. Sometimes story ideas seem to float in the zeitgeist; it's not unusual for roughly contemporaneous novels to share similar plots or settings, or to draw on common source material, as seems to have happened here.

The Whispering Knights is the most straightforward of the three and the most easily resolved; the children have the help of the wonderful Miss Hepplewhite, an equally ancient force for good, and the Whispering Knights themselves, a stone circle which comes to life in the final climatic battle. A good introduction to some big mythological ideas.
 

A Dead Man in Trieste

Those who know me will know that I'm a sucker for shabby grandeur. Ruined mansions, abandoned towns, overgrown gardens, I love them all. I think it all started when I read The Leopard in high school, when Tancredi and Angelica wander through the shut-up rooms of the palace, which was intensely romantic. 

So imagine my delight when I discovered there is a whole city like this (thanks House Hunters International). Trieste was once the sole seaport of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a meeting place for the Balkans, Italy, German-speakers, a microcosm of Europe itself, a centre of trade and culture. But now it's part of Italy, neglected cousin of Venice, its Adriatic twin -- filled with grand buildings, but now sort of... irrelevant. (I've been amusing myself by shopping for apartments in Trieste online, and boy, you can get some real bargains.) In short, I've become slightly obsessed with Trieste.

So naturally I went hunting for books set there. My local library could only come up with two, one of which is A Dead Man In Trieste by Michael Pearce, the first of a whole series of Dead Man novels set before the outbreak of WWI and featuring polyglot English policeman Sandor Seymour. The back cover says that this novel is set in 1906, but it's actually 1909, and Trieste is a hotbed of intrigue and artistic ferment. The Futurists release their manifesto, even James Joyce ('James Juice' in the novel) makes an appearance.

A Dead Man in Trieste is a short novel, less than two hundred pages, and its mystery is not all that complicated, but I loved the setting (obviously) and this volatile corner of history and geography.

Cue For Treason

My friends know what I like! Thank you, Pam, for scooping up this one for me -- this Puffin edition dates from 1982, but Cue For Treason was first published in 1940. I have heard of Geoffrey Trease but never read any of his books for children, but having read this, I can see why he was so popular and why there are so many editions of his work.

Cue For Treason is a pacy, exciting, historical adventure, set in Elizabethan England. There is hardly time to breathe as thirteen year old Peter is harried from his home by our villain, Sir Philip Morton, falls in with a troupe of actors and another mysterious boy on the run (the reader realises much sooner than Peter that Kit is a girl in disguise), travels to London and of course meets Shakespeare, and soon becomes entangled in foiling a treasonous plot. We meet Shakespeare, Burbage and eventually the Queen herself. It's a wonder that William Shakespeare found time to write any of his plays, given all the extraneous adventures that various authors have inserted him into over the years -- has there ever been an Elizabethan novel that doesn't feature at least a cameo from the Bard?

Cue For Treason slotted in nicely with my (slow) reading of Peter Ackroyd's enormous volume, London: A Biography, which I've been crawling through in stages. But more of that book later.

Prima Facie

Prima Facie is based on the hugely successful one-woman play by Suzie Miller, which took London and other cities by storm; I've heard rave reviews from people who have seen the film of the performance, and there is also a separate film version being planned. This novel adaptation by the same author has also received overwhelmingly positive reviews. There was a long queue of readers waiting to check it out at the library and I've had to wait a long time to get my hands on it. 

So I know I am in the minority when I say that I was disappointed. I kept waiting for the story to take off and it never really did. Apparently the play is extraordinary, and the bones of the story are compelling -- a defence barrister finds herself on the other side of the legal process as a victim of rape -- and particularly at this moment in history, after the Bruce Lehrmann case and other high profile rape cases. But it never really translates successfully into a suspenseful or even particularly moving novel. The lead up to the rape consists of a lot of slightly plodding backstory, showing Tessa as a working class girl made good, but her shock at becoming the subject of court tactics that she has used herself just isn't very convincing. Perhaps I've paid more attention to these types of cases but I just wasn't shocked at the way victims are treated, or the horribly low conviction rates for sexual assault. One thing that I found irritating was the way Miller repeatedly skipped over court testimony -- 'I made a point and the jury reacted and I sat down in triumph' -- almost literally in those words! It almost read as if she couldn't be bothered making up actual dialogue in parts.

I'm pleased that the play and now the novel have drawn attention to the way that victims of sexual assault are traumatised all over again by the legal process, but it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, and Prima Facie didn't quite work for me.