Why Are We Like This?

Another recommendation via the Radio National book countdown -- Robin Williams, the long time host of The Science Show, which I've been listening to on a Saturday morning for as long as I can remember, suggested Why Are We Like This? by Zoe Kean, who has worked as a science journalist with the ABC, so there might be a touch of nepotism here! I do enjoy a spot of popular science, and Kean writes in a clear, lively style that meant that I understood almost all the science she was explaining.

Why Are We Like This? poses some big questions about human behaviour and genetic heritage: why do we have sex? Why do we sleep? Why do we age? and more, and takes an evolutionary approach to nutting out the answers. Not all these questions are solved, and Kean does a great job of setting out the various scientific debates, as well as honestly letting us know her own opinion. It shows science as an area of energetic but respectful conflict, motivated by curiosity and the advance of knowledge, which is something unspeakably valuable in these times where science is being ruthlessly devalued and misunderstood. We need many more books like these and many more writers like Zoe Kean who can help dumdums like me grope towards a rough comprehension of what science does, as well as its hard-won conclusions.
 

Bel Canto

Ann Patchett's 2001 Bel Canto came onto my radar through the Radio National Top 100 Books of the 21st century; it ended up at number 64, but the description of the story made it sound a lot more interesting and quite different from what I'd expected. 

This is a juicy, layered, rewarding novel. In an unnamed South American country, guerilla fighters storm an event at the Vice Presidential mansion and take hostage all the party guests -- most of the women and all the staff are then released, apart from the famous American opera singer Roxane Coss. Because the guests are from a variety of countries, everyone relies heavily on the Japanese translator, Gen. It turns out that the guerilla soldiers are mostly teenagers, with a couple of girls among them, including the very beautiful Carmen. Inevitably, as days of captivity turn into months, bonds start to form across the divide between the guerillas and their prisoners, and Roxane's music binds them together into a kind of dreamy trance-world. Of course the ending, when it comes, is shattering.

I don't think I've read any of Ann Patchett's novels before, but now I understand why she is such a popular and respected writer. At least in Bel Canto, she treads the line between literary and popular fiction perfectly.
 

Charlotte Sometimes

I was so riled up by Ian McEwan's dismissal of children's books as not proper literature that I pulled out an old favourite to see if it would stand up to scrutiny. Penelope Farmer's 1969 masterpiece, Charlotte Sometimes, is less than 200 pages long, and yet it packs a punch more powerful than some novels twice the length. Every time I read it, it seems darker: the dank November weather, the austere boarding school corridors, the grieving Chisel Brown family in their cold dark house, in mourning for their soldier son, the neglected Japanese garden -- it all adds up to an eerie, haunting story, quite apart from the creepiness and gnawing anxiety of Charlotte's helpless swap with Clare from 1918.

Charlotte Sometimes is an evocative exploration of identity, fragmentation and fate. In some ways, it's a very small story -- at first, only Charlotte and Clare are aware of what's happened to them as they mysteriously swap places, though later Clare's sister Emily and Charlotte's friend Elizabeth also learn the secret. The sinking horror when Charlotte realises that she is trapped in the past, because of adult whims, and her utter helplessness to change the fact, is genuinely terrifying. Not much happens: Charlotte and Emily try unsuccessfully to get Charlotte into the magical bed one night, they gatecrash the Chisel Brown's seance, they are caught up in street celebrations at the end of the war -- but none of these events directly change the narrative. By denying agency to the protagonist, Charlotte Sometimes seems to break every rule of writing for children; perhaps this is what makes it stand out as genuine literature!

One of the absolute classics of the time-slip tradition, Charlotte Sometimes remains as vivid and disturbing as ever.
 

The Daydreamer

 

Take a look at this cover. What kind of book do you think this is? A horror novel? Some kind of weird erotic adult furry fantasy? No, it's a children's book. I'm pleased to note that later editions dial back the weird and have much more appealing, kid-friendly covers, so someone eventually realised this one was doing them no favours, with the intended readers at least, though I could see Ian McEwan's adult fans picking it up.

I must confess that I did not greet The Daydreamer in the right spirit. For a start, the first sixteen pages are printed twice -- okay, not McEwan's fault, but it's sloppy (I expect better from Vintage). But then, get this -- from the Preface:

We all love the idea of bedtime stories... But do adults really like children's literature? I've always thought the enthusiasm was a little overstated, even desperate... Do we really mean it, do we really still enjoy them, or are we speaking up for, and keeping the lines open to, our lost, nearly forgotten selves? ... What we like about children's books is our children's pleasure in them, and this is less to do with literature and more to do with love.  

Well, I respectfully disagree, Ian. And how is the gall of the man, to say this with such confident authority, in the preface of a book written for children? He may as well say, kids' book are crap, here's a crap book I've written, hope you like it. It all reinforces my view that this first edition at least, was pitched  squarely at adult readers of McEwan, not children themselves.

The Daydreamer is not bad. Peter has an active imagination and he finds himself caught up in all sorts of hypothetical situations. Three of the seven stories involve body swaps: with a cat, a baby and an adult. In other adventures, he makes his family disappear with vanishing cream, tricks a burglar and defeats a school bully (using cruelty rather than violence -- though he feels bad about it afterwards). Because this is Ian McEwan, there is a definite creepy undertone to some of the stories, especially the one where his sister's dolls come to life. But the final story, where Peter finds himself suddenly grown up and in love, doesn't seem aimed at children but at nostalgic adults, and I suspect the whole book was really written from this point of view.

 

Not Just a Witch and Dial a Ghost

I've now read almost all of Eva Ibbotson's novels for adults, but not so many of her books aimed for children. I found these two in one volume in a secondhand shop. Not Just a Witch was first published in 1989, Dial a Ghost in 1996, but they are both the kind of timeless, old-fashioned middle grade story that retain a lot of, as the kids say now, 'charm.'

There's a satisfying (but not too graphic) amount of gore and creepiness in both these novels, and child protagonists are firmly to the fore. Not Just a Witch centres on two witches, one who can turn people into animals, another who can turn people in to stone, and their child friends who foil a dastardly plot to take advantage of them both. Dial a Ghost features a friendly family of phantoms, an orphaned heir, a ghost and haunting matchmaking agency, and two pairs of obnoxious villains (one alive and one dead). Both novels would make great bedtime read-alouds for a child with a sense of humour and an appreciation of the macabre -- maybe not one who's susceptible to nightmares!

Foxspell

Foxspell by Gillian Rubinstein won the CBCA Book of the Year for older readers in 1994. It's a seamlessly accomplished mix of social/family drama, and eerie supernatural story, and I'm not surprised that it won. Tod and his mother and sisters have moved to the fringes of Adelaide to live with Tod's grandmother after his English father has returned to the UK for an indeterminate period of time. Tod has learning problems and isn't particularly invested in school; his older sisters are starting to be interested in boys, his mother wants to be a stand up comedian, his brisk grandmother is busy with her hens and her vegie garden. As Tod starts to explore the quarries and bush that surround Grandma's house, he becomes fascinated with the foxes that live there, and one fox in particular offers him a chance of a very different, wild, fierce kind of life.

Rubinstein is clever in her handling of the foxes, acknowledging that they were imported from far away, just like the white inhabitants, and don't belong in this landscape. I've just realised that the foxes in the book only hunt other imported species -- hens, rabbits, cats -- neatly sidestepping the issue of the damage they do to native animals. It's a narrow line to tread, recognising the attraction of these cunning, beautiful animals but also the fact that they should never have been brought here.

The book ends on a breathtaking climax, leaving the resolution to the reader's imagination. I think my copy might have belonged to a teacher who could have been reading it aloud to two separate classes -- there are pencil notes in the margins marking (I guess) where each class is up to. It would make a wonderful read-aloud, appealing to both those who like realism and those who love fantasy. For a thirty year old novel (gulp, I feel old!), Foxspell holds up incredibly well.
 

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

I first heard Becky Chambers recommended on one of the ABC radio book shows, and I think they said something about her writing 'hope-punk,' which sounded both intriguing and inviting. I found the first of her Wayfarer series, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, at the Athenaeum Library, and I'm happy to report that there are two more in the series.

I used to read quite a bit of science fiction as a teenager, culminating in Ursula Le Guin's philosophical novels, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, but as I got older, I grew out of the habit. I did love Star Trek (especially Voyager), and of course Doctor Who and the dystopian Blake's 7, but science fiction writing has largely slipped out of my life. 

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet recaptured all the things I loved about my adolescent favourites. There is a cheerful, multi-species crew of various sexual and gender persuasions; there are adventures and encounters both pleasurable and dangerous; there are political and ethical dilemmas, and just a sprinkling of techno-babble. All the characters talk like twenty-something college students (except the dignified captain, Ashby) and there is plenty of banter as well as heart-rending moments. I was slightly disappointed that the planet-let Cricket was named for giant insects rather than the game! But it was really delightful to spend time on the Wayfarer, and I approve of hope punk. I'm looking forward to more. This is technically an adult book, but in many ways it would make a perfect YA.
 

A Talent to Annoy

The Mitford sisters are one of my guilty pleasures. I was seduced as a teenager by Nancy's The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate (I think I must have come to them via the 1980 TV adaptation) and then gradually discovered the rest of that glittering, wicked, gifted family. 

A Talent to Annoy collects a selection of Nancy's articles and reviews, mostly from the 1950s and 60s, when she was living in France. Her writing sparkles, even when she's discussing contemporary French politicians and 18th century personalities that mean very little to me. These articles often contain 'teases,' because Nancy did love to provoke as well as to entertain. One tease which had a long afterlife was a piece about the English aristocracy, in which she discussed 'U' and 'non-U' speech, where U stands for upper-class. For example, it's U to say napkin, non-U to use the word serviette. Nancy was actually quoting the work of a linguistics professor from several years earlier, but the article set off an explosion of furious debate in Britain and is still cited today.

I think Nancy must have longed to live in the 18th century French court (pre-Revolution), surrounded by amusing, learned and fascinating (and rich!) people. Each of these pieces is headed by a quote from one of her letters, and her voluminous correspondence, especially to her sisters and to her great friend Evelyn Waugh, give a real flavour of her personality. She used to spend every morning sitting up in bed dashing off letters -- how heavenly, and much more useful for posterity than doom-scrolling.
 

Thunderhead

FINALLY I got to read Sophie Beer's Thunderhead, after the library found it, or restocked it -- the very last book on this year's CBCA Notables list. I must admit when I started reading it, I wasn't sure if this was going to be a book for me. Our narrator, Thunderhead, is writing a blog, but one they hope that no one ever sees, shouting their troubles into the void. Thunderhead adores music, but they have tumours growing on their auditory nerves which may one day make them completely deaf. As someone who is (gulp) let's say, music-indifferent for the most part, I told myself that I couldn't really relate... Sadly, years working in the music industry have left me jaded and cynical :(

But then, unexpectedly, when Thunderhead was given the bad news about their hearing, and realised that their dream of becoming a music journalist would never happen, I found myself blinking back tears. And from then on, I was all in. Thunderhead is not just grappling with serious illness and losing music, they also have Year 8 friendship woes to navigate. Their best friend, Moonflower, has changed schools and found a new friendship group, while Thunderhead is left with two impossible nerds as the next best option. 

I really loved the nuanced way that the Moonflower situation developed, with the friends drifting apart, but still caring about each other. And I had to laugh at the musical theatre and animal-loving nerd, who shares a name with my younger daughter, who is/was also obsessive about those things. (She said, who is this author and why were they spying on me as a 12 year old lol) Long story short, I ended up enjoying Thunderhead much more than I initially thought I would, and I loved the illustrations, too. There are also loads of playlists for various moods, should you feel inclined to explore Thunderhead's musical tastes more deeply. A great note to finish on (see what I did there).
 

An Unsuitable Attachment

There is a terrible story attached (ha!) to this novel -- terrible from an author's point of view. Barbara Pym submitted the manuscript of An Unsuitable Attachment to her publishers, who had published her previous six novels, which had been pretty successful though the last three were less well received than the first three). They rejected it. Pym was stunned and hurt. They didn't even ask for a rewrite, or fully explain their reasons, though they did say (with some justification) that in 1963, novels about clergymen and spinsters and glasses of sherry were 'old-fashioned' and becoming harder to sell. Pym retreated in mortification and didn't even try to sell another manuscript until the late 1970s when her career revived and she was even nominated for the Booker Prize.

It's true, An Unsuitable Attachment is not her best work, but not deserving of the harsh readers' reports it apparently received. (By the way, those reports were written by two men, and surely one can assume that most of Pym's readers were women?) The unsuitable attachment of the title refers to a younger man falling in love with an older woman; he is also of a slightly lower class than her, but to modern eyes it hardly seems unsuitable at all. More concerning is the obsessive love of Sophia, the vicar's wife, for her cat Faustina. (She says to her husband, 'She's all I've got.' !!) There are moments of droll, gentle humour, keen observation and poignant emotion, and though the stakes are very low, there is still much to enjoy. Boo to those readers who rejected it so hurtfully -- it's now available in several editions, so evidently people did want to read it after all.

Dreams and Wishes

I spotted Susan Cooper's Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children in a second hand bookshop. It's inscribed on the flyleaf: To Mary -- Write, write, write!!! -- but not signed. I'm wondering now if that inscription could possibly have been written by the author? And I wonder who Mary was?

This collection has been put together from various articles and speeches that Cooper gave in the 1980s and 90s. There are some interesting stories about how her famous series, The Dark is Rising, come to be; the first volume, Over Sea, Under Stone, started life as an entry in a competition for a family adventure book, and the magical elements only crept in during the writing. Cooper was also very concerned (some things never change) about a drop in children's reading for pleasure, and the fact that some children spent three or four hours a day watching television, passive in front of a screen. As I read this, I couldn't help thinking, oh boy, Susan, you don't have any idea what's coming down the line...

I hadn't realised that this seemingly most British of writers has actually spent almost her whole adult life in the US -- perhaps that's what gives her descriptions of Wales and Buckinghamshire their potency. She agrees with a thesis I have heard before, that the writers of the so-called Golden Age of children's literature in the UK were shaped by growing up during the Second World War, when the battle between Good and Evil was played out literally above their heads and all around them. It's a persuasive argument. Susan Cooper is still with us, she is ninety, almost exactly the same age as my mum, and I am the same age as her children. The Dark is Rising was a formative text for me, as I'm sure it was for many fantasy, and other, writers -- long live Susan Cooper.
 

A Desert in Bohemia

I am such a fan of Jill Paton Walsh, and I particularly loved her Lord Peter Wimsey novels, which seamlessly continued Peter and Harriet's story, so it was a thrill to realise that there was a whole novel of hers that I hadn't yet read. A Desert in Bohemia was published in 2000, and it follows from the perspective of various characters the impact of Communism on a small community in a fiction Czech country over fifty years.

I really enjoyed the interweaving stories from different points of view, and as usual with Walsh, there are philosophical dimensions to the narrative involving questions of guilt, free will, responsibility and forgiveness. The writing is, as always, beautiful and moving. Some readers have complained about the fact that the novel is set in a fictional country, Comenia, when there are so many real countries which went through a similar journey and whose stories could have been told instead. I'm not so sure about that. To me, A Desert in Bohemia is not intended to be historical fiction; it's more of a fable about human nature, suffering and hope. So possible historical implausibilities didn't bother me too much, though I can understand if you were connected to any of those real Communist countries, they would rankle.
 

Ghost Bird

Look at that impressive array of award stickers! Lisa Fuller's Ghost Bird is her debut YA novel, and it's jam packed with creepy atmosphere, Aboriginal lore and fully rounded family drama. It's kind of a horror story: Stacey's twin sister Laney goes missing after a night out with some local tearaways. Is she being held hostage by the neighbourhood racists? Has she simply run away? Or is there a supernatural explanation, linked to the mountain where the elders have forbidden them to go?

Fuller switches effortlessly between Aboriginal English for the dialogue and standard English for the narrative. Stacey is realistically scarred by her experiences by the end of the book; things aren't wrapped up easily. There's a lot of back and forth between Stacey and her peers while they search for Laney, or try to gather information, and it sometimes felt like the wheels were spinning slightly. But Ghost Bird is a gripping and accomplished YA supernatural thriller, and it thoroughly deserves all the award stickers it's amassed. I really enjoyed it.
 

A War of Nerves

A War of Nerves was an impulse buy about a year ago from Brotherhood Books, and it's taken me a long time to read it -- I'd read a chapter at a time in between my other non-fiction books, because it was pretty dense stuff, though fascinating. Ben Shephard traces the history of the military and the treatment of mental illness in soldiers, from the phenomenon of 'shakes' and shell shock in the First World War, all the way through to PTSD suffered by combatants in the Falklands War. He examines the influence of a handful of charismatic doctors and psychiatrists, who were able to promote their own favoured treatment method. Various theories and treatments swung in and out of fashion, from a brisk, robust talking-to by a senior officer, and encouragement not to let the other men down, all the way to elaborate, personalised therapy in a specialised setting, which in Shephard's view, made the soldiers see themselves as irreparably damaged.

Shephard seems quite averse to psychiatry in general, noting unfavourably the 'industry' that sprang up around Vietnam veterans and what he calls 'the culture of trauma,' where everyone who experienced combat was almost expected to be broken by it. Shephard prefers the matter-of-fact approach of earlier doctors, who pragmatically gave exhausted soldiers a chance to rest away from the front line, and then sent them back to the fray. He rightly points out the powerful effect of expectations on the way that soldiers cope with the horrors of battle, but it's telling that he ends the book with an anecdote where a boatload of sailors had to pick up a load of bodies and body parts and take them back to harbour, and they deal (apparently effectively) with this horrific experience by singing songs and having a stiff drink together. I'm not sure that I'm entirely convinced.
 

A Question of Age

I am a huge fan of Jacinta Parsons. Her afternoon radio show on ABC Melbourne got me through Covid lockdowns -- her warmth, humour, compassion and curiosity created an oasis of community in a weird and disorienting time. She warns that A Question of Age is no self-help book; rather, it's an extended meditation on womanhood.

Some readers have complained that there's not enough about ageing, and too much reflection on being young. Many have praised her beautiful, eloquent writing. Parsons is careful to point out her own privileged position as an educated, white, middle class woman in a rich country, although her own experience of debilitating illness has sharpened her awareness of fragility and discrimination.

Ultimately I found it quite hard to relate to A Question of Age. Although I'm well aware that there are fewer years ahead of me than behind, I haven't really experienced a sense of loss of youthful power or beauty. My own adolescence and youth was pretty miserable, at least as far as sex and relationships were concerned, so I have few regrets about leaving those years behind. I love being middle-aged, pleasing myself, sure of my own preferences, with a few good friends and a loving family. I've been very lucky and I know it, but it leaves me with little to lament about growing older. Long may it stay that way.