The Places In Between

I am a huge fan of Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell's podcast, The Rest is Politics, and though I naturally lean more toward Alistair's Labour perspective, I have come to love and respect Rory immensely. He is a man who likes tradition, a small-c conservative, and although he did serve as a Tory MP, he quit on a matter of principle (he wouldn't serve under Boris Johnson) and he is driven by a deep desire to make the world a better place, a stance which is usually associated with the progressive side of politics.

That's a very long-winded introduction to The Places In Between, which is a memoir of his 2001-2 walk across Afghanistan. He walked alone, a British man in a country where the British and American military were in occupation, from village to village through the mountains, grudgingly accepted overnight, fed most often on bread and tea, suffering from dysentery. He picked up a half-wild dog, Babur, who reluctantly accompanied him most of the way. His life was threatened periodically and he had to talk his way out of trouble. Everywhere he saw evidence of the devastation of war -- wounded fighters, burned villages, traumatised people. 

Rory recounts these events in a very matter-of-fact way, which only underscores his personal courage and determination. Also, he speaks eleven languages! And this Afghanistan walk was only part of a longer trek across India and Pakistan. Although the walk sounds absolutely grim, he says he fell in love with the country and the people, and later returned to set up a charity, Turquoise Mountain, in Kabul, to which he is still committed. There are whispers, as there were about Arthur Ransome, that he might have been a spy; if so, he reserves a discreet silence. He would certainly make a very good one.

Scar Town

Scar Town by Tristan Bancks was the this year's winner of the CBCA Book of the Year for younger readers, and it thoroughly deserved it. At first I thought the cover made this book seem more like a young adult title, but the three protagonists are all twelve or thirteen, which puts it firmly in the younger category. However, the themes and events of the story do lean into older territory, with the kids finding human bones and ill-gotten money in the first chapter.

The pace never slackens -- the action takes place over only a couple of days. The chapters are very short and punchy, perfect for reluctant readers, hauling you through the story with one cliff hanger after another. There are thrills and perils, bike chases, quite a bit of violence, family drama and buried secrets, as Will and his friends fight to solve a mystery and keep ahead of the bad guys.

I was interested to read in the author's note that Bancks first came up with this story idea back in 2009. The plot hinges on a body and some money hidden in a house which has been long-drowned at the bottom of a dam and only revealed as the water dries up during a drought. Meg McKinley used a similar device in her terrific book Surface Tension, and I also based part of Crow Country around a dried-up lake. There is something gripping about that image of the past, especially past wrongs, being covered up but eventually revealed -- irresistible to a writer's imagination! And I'm sure we all saw the same stories and images of revealed ruins during the millenial drought; but just look at the very different kinds of plots we came up with.

Dirrayawadha

Anita Heiss is a best selling, award winning Australian author. She also happens to be a Wiradyuri woman, and in Dirrayawadha (Rise Up) she explores the troubled, tragic history of colonisation around the Bathurst area, Wiradyuri country.

Dirrayawadha centres on a love story between a Wiradyuri woman, Miinaa, and an Irish convict, Dan O'Dwyer. But Dan and Miina work for a pair of white settlers, and Miinaa's brother is the famous warrior Windradyne, who led the First Nations resistance in the eighteenth century. Love, joy and loyalty are inextricably intertwined with brutality, loss and tragedy.

This is an important story, and we need more stories about colonised Australia that centre the First Nations point of view. Heiss also draws an interesting parallel between First Nations dispossession and  the history of Ireland, also violently colonised by the British. I'm not aware of any Irish political prisoners, like Dan, who could clearly see the comparison between the two, but it's a fascinating idea that gave me food for thought. Like Melissa Lukashenko's Edenglassie, this book also includes many First Nations words.

In some ways, Dirrayawadha adopts a modern sensibility, perhaps intentionally, which might help a wider readership more easily relate to the power dynamics of the historical situation. Expressions like hyped-up, maintaining autonomy, racism, culture, self-worth, and you don't get it might be anachronistic, but if they gain this novel more readers, I'll swallow it.

Look Back With Love

Good old Athenaeum comes up trumps again with this delightful memoir from Dodie Smith, author of I Capture the Castle and The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Born in 1896, Dodie (Dorothy) grew up in Manchester in a big house surrounded by aunts, uncles and grandparents -- the ultimate only child experience. Her father died in her infancy, but a plethora of uncles filled the gap.

Are antique author childhood memoirs my favourite kind of book? This one was sheer pleasure. The combination of social history, psychology, family dynamics and richly amusing writing made it impossible to resist. Smith wryly recounts her early acting experiences, casting herself as Sleeping Beauty (a mistake, because she lies unconscious for most of the story) and writing her own plays (terrible). It's interesting that adult Dodie clearly sees her later play-writing and acting as her chief legacy, where I had only the dimmest notion of her work in theatre and love her books above all.

The Athenaeum also holds the other two volumes of her autobiography, gorgeously titled Look Back With Astonishment and Look Back With Mixed Feelings. I can hardly wait.
 

Highway 13

One of my favourite kinds of novel (is it a novel?) consists of short story collections where the stories are linked -- by a single character, like Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, or by a theme or an historical event, as is the case here. The twelve stories in Highway 13 revolve around a series of murders in the Australian bush, which bear striking parallels to the so-called Backpacker Murders executed by Ivan Milat. In Highway 13, the murderer is Paul Biga, of Polish extraction (Milat's father was Croatian), but his crimes are very similar -- hitchhikers and tourists picked up by the side of the road, taken into the forest and brutally murdered. I should add that neither the murderer or his crimes ever appear directly in any of the stories, but their off stage presence looms ever more powerfully because of it.

Highway 13 reminds us that the effects of crimes like these ripples out far beyond the victims themselves. We meet a 'tourist,' ghoulishly obsessed with the murders; true crime podcasters; someone who knew Biga's sister-in-law; the brother of a missing woman; one of Biga's neighbours; someone who managed to get away; a police officer who worked on the case. The stories swoop across the years, before and after the crimes were committed, and across continents.

I absolutely loved this book. Each story is beautifully written, shining a different light on something very dark: moving, clever and compassionate. Superb.

Joan Aiken Wolves Chronicles

My signed copy of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is one of my prized possessions. The rest of the Wolves series I picked up at library book sales or in secondhand bookshops -- they are definitely not the covers I would have chosen, especially The Cuckoo Tree, which has one of the most mediocre cover illustrations I have ever seen and is ironically, probably my favourite to read.

I'm not sure if I've ever read the series back to back. I read them a lot in early high school, except for Black Hearts, which was the only one my school library didn't have, so I was never properly introduced to Dido Twite. She is a fabulous character -- smart, resourceful, brave and loyal, frank and decided -- and the series really takes off after her appearance.

There are so many things I love about these books. I adore the alternate history timeline, where the pesky Hanoverians are always conspiring to remove good king James Tudor-Stuart III from the throne and replace him with one of the Georges. I love the way Aiken writes about creature comforts, in what is quite a harsh world. Sylvia sleeping in a donkey-cart filled with geese and patchwork quilts remains a vivid image of warm, snuggly comfort. The food is evocative, too, whether it's clam chowder or huckle-my-buff (it's a real drink!), it always sounds super delicious and sustaining.

The plots are delightfully lively and inventive -- giant cannons to shoot from Nantucket to London, pink whales, wolves breaking into railways carriages, hot air balloons sailing over London, St Paul's Cathedral mounted on rollers to slide into the Thames during the coronation of King Richard IV.

But the real joy of these stories is the exuberant, intoxicating, rollicking play with language. Many of the words were unknown to me when I first read them, some of them are unknown to me even now, many of them no doubt originated in Aiken's own imagination, but nevertheless they always make perfect sense.

"This is a fubsy kind o' set-out,' Dido said to herself. "Still, no use bawling over botched butter -- have to make the best of it. I'd as soon not tangle overmuch wi' that old witch next door though. Only thing is, how are we going to get summat to eat? Oh well, maybe old Lady Tegleaze'll send some soup and jelly -- or cheese and apples -- no use fretting ahead. Queer old cuss she is, too -- all those rooms in that great workus of a place, and she has to send us to a ken that ain't much bigger than a chicken-coop."

There are other books featuring Dido and other members of her family whose existence I was previously unaware of, but I will definitely be keeping an eye out for them in future.

Inspector Thanet Omnibus 1

Recommended by Susan Green as a classic, undemanding murder mystery, Dorothy Simpson's Inspector Thanet proved to be exactly what was promised on the tin. My Athenaeum library has all five omnibuses, fifteen novels in all, and I must say, having raced through the first three, The Night She Died, Six Feet Under and Puppet for A Corpse, I am quite tempted to settle in with the next twelve and a cup of hot chocolate.

While I do enjoy the pure puzzle aspect of a murder mystery, though I'm not very good at figuring out whodunnit, perhaps the greatest pleasure for me lies in the snapshot of social mores that crime novels provide. This is why I love reading Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers so much -- there is nothing like a murder novel, with its high stakes, to spotlight social anxieties and pressures of the time.

The 1980s don't seem so long ago to me but these three novels, published between 1981 and 1983, were very much of their time. Luke Thanet's wife wants to go back to work now that their youngest child is starting school -- the fact that Thanet would even regard this decision as worth arguing about speaks volumes about how the world has changed in the last forty years. One story featured a deserter from the Second World War -- they are all long gone by now. The descriptions of clothes and furnishings are often hilarious. Most strikingly, the things that characters regard as utterly shameful secrets -- mental illness, male sterility, infidelity -- are much more accepted now and openly acknowledged (even if not exactly enjoyed). Even the reason why Dorothy Simpson gave up writing novels (RSI) seems quite dated!

I must note in passing that Thanet's small daughter Bridget is described as having sci-fi show Blake's 7 as 'one of her favourites.' I devoured Blake's 7 as a teen in the 80s but I can't approve of it as being suitable for an eight year old!

It is rather nice to have a detective who is so resolutely ordinary, rather than, I dunno, a poetry-writing aristocrat or a Belgian egg. Thanet's humdrum personal life allows the crimes to shine. I'm looking forward to his further adventures.
 

The Clearing

Scottish artist Samantha Clark's 2020 book, The Clearing: A Memoir of Art, Family and Mental Health was in a bundle of books lent to me by my good friend composer Chris McCombe. It's a slender but dense volume, an intensely personal story which I initially found quite tough going. At first I thought the 'clearing' of the title referred to an open space in the woods -- even if it was a metaphorical space -- but no. The book begins with Clark and her two brothers clearing out their family home in Glasgow, a process which eventually ends up taking them three years (!!)

It's immediately obvious that this was not a happy home -- not because Clark's parents weren't loving, but because her mother's severe mental illness made demands on her father and on the siblings which crushed all the joy from their lives. As the memoir unfolds, Clark reflects on her difficulties in connecting with either of her parents, her struggle to find freedom away from home and her feelings of guilt and shame, love and hurt, anger and grief. Though Clark is a visual artist, she expresses these feelings beautifully in words and metaphors -- the concept of ether, which both holds and separates; the light perceptible even within the deepest darkness, the darkness that enables us to discern the light; the dutiful acts of personal care (grocery shopping, nail cutting) performed unwillingly but conscientiously.

I must admit that about a third of the way through The Clearing I was thinking, this is the grimmest book I've ever read! and wondering why Chris had lent it to me. But as the house is gradually cleared, Clark finds her own emotions settling and also becoming clearer, and by the end of the book, she is finding peace and creativity in her artistic practice, moving away from her demanding academic job and swapping the chaos of the city for the wild weather of Orkney. I was thrilled to see that she recently won a major art prize, too. The Clearing is not an easy read, but it is a beautiful and rewarding one.

The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome

 

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, Swallows and Amazons and its many sequels are among my (sometimes problematic) faves; however I did not know very much about their author, Arthur Ransome, of whom the bald, jovial adventurer Uncle Jim Turner in the books is an obvious self-portrait.

So I was very interested to discover this autobiography, written piecemeal and late in life, though it only takes Ransome's story up to 1931 (the remaining thirty-odd years of his life are summarised in a postscript by his younger friend and colleague Rupert Hart-Davies). 

Perhaps Ransome's most intriguing years were those spent as a journalist and researcher of folklore in Russia, before and after the 1918 revolution. He was on intimate terms with many of the major players, including Lenin and Trotsky, and indeed, Trotsky's personal secretary became his second wife. Ransome claims that he was able to become so close to the Bolsheviks because he himself was completely 'unpolitical.' This contention has led to speculation that he was in fact acting as a spy during this period, though naturally there is no discussion of espionage in the autobiography. He and Evgenia made a hair-raising escape to safety into Estonia in the chaos of fighting between White and Red, with Ransome bluffing his way through the front lines and Evgenia riding on the back of a cart (according to other sources, with millions of roubles worth of diamonds smuggled in her petticoats). To be honest, the ins and outs of the revolutionary period, with its shifts in power and double-crosses, were quite hard for me to follow, but it was a good reminder that the narrative of history is difficult to discern at the time of the events -- everything is in chaos, and it's only after the dust has settled that the story becomes clear (and sometimes not even then). Who knows what the established story of our own times will be in a generation or two? The moments that seem crucial to us might end up being insignificant in the broad sweep of history, and perhaps the most important developments are the ones we are not even aware of.

Fire and Hemlock

When I was doing my recent Diana Wynne Jones binge, I remembered that I used to have a copy of Fire and Hemlock, which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared (I must have lent it to someone). Anyway, I bit the bullet and bought myself another copy and plunged in.

You would think that, having read it before, I would find the plot easier to understand. I did not. What did help immensely was finding a blog post from someone which explained the 'problematic' ending and the rest of the story while they were at it. This is an extremely clever, deeply layered, intelligent book which draws on several different legends, most obviously the ballads of Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin, in which the Fairy Queen takes a mortal as her king for ten years, after which he is supposed to be sacrificed, but is saved by the heroism of his mortal lover, Janet. In Fire and Hemlock, Thomas Lynn takes the part of Tam Lin while Polly is his saviour -- a female hero, loyal, brave and imaginative.

The actual mechanics of the deal that Mr Lynn strikes with the Fairy Queen and her minions, and the way Polly finally overcomes their bargain, are too complicated to explain (maybe I still don't fully grasp them :), but this doesn't at all get in the way of a deeply engaging, playful and original story which races along in a most satisfying way. 

This is not to say that the novel is without flaws. The growing friendship between Polly, aged ten at the start of the book, and adult Mr Lynn, is uncomfortable to read, especially as he really is, in a sense, grooming her. By the end of the story Polly is nineteen and Tom is, at the very youngest, twenty-nine -- still a big gap but not an impossible one -- but still... In fact, most of the relationships in the book are uncomfortable in one way or another, except for Polly's grandmother, who is fantastic.

Fire and Hemlock is not an easy read. It's about as sophisticated as young adult literature gets, considerably more sophisticated than the 'adult' murder mystery I was reading at the same time. And it's definitely a book I will reread in the future.

Fireweed and Lapsing

 

Jill Paton Walsh is an author I discovered relatively recently, and I am still actively collecting her novels. Quite coincidentally, I found two of her books within a week or so of each other. I found Fireweed in a small op shop in Euroa, with a tiny collection of YA books for sale (I gasped audibly when I saw it on the shelf). Lapsing turned up, appropriately enough, at a church book sale in the city among many books about theology and missionary travels, and it only cost me a dollar.

I loved Paton Walsh's Wimsy sequels, and I also relished her Imogen Quy mysteries, but of her standalone novels, I definitely liked these two best (so far). Fireweed is very short (even by Paton Walsh's standards) but it tells a vivid and moving story, of two teenagers from very different backgrounds camping out alone in London in the middle of the Blitz. The Blitz setting is breathtaking in its brutal detail; Paton Walsh thanks 'everyone I know who was old enough to remember 1940,' and the novel very much has the flavour of lived memory.

The same is true of Lapsed, though this is a very different kind of novel; it feels autobiographical in parts. It centres on Tessa, an Oxford undergraduate in the 1950s (like Paton Walsh herself), a staunch Catholic who finds herself being courted by several young men and who makes a choice that is consistent with her beliefs, but which will probably baffle a modern reader. Shot through as usual with philosophical and moral struggles, Lapsed feels unusually heartfelt (unlike A School for Lovers, which was much lighter, almost farcical in tone). Like Tessa, Paton Walsh was also a Catholic. She formed an attachment to another man while already married; she did eventually marry the second man, but only after the death of her first husband, who was also a devoted Catholic; so we can only guess how much of her own experience was poured into Lapsed.

The Last of the Marlows

 

The last four books of Antonia Forest's Marlow series are a mixed bag: two 'holiday' books and two set at Kingscote, two of my absolute favourites and two at the bottom of my 'liking list,' as Nicola would say.

The Ready-Made Family is a lovely read, introducing the Dodd children (bookish Rose, chirpy Chas and ponderous Fob) and their dismal father Edwin, who unexpectedly marries nineteen year old Karen, thus bringing her Oxford studies to an abrupt halt. It's always perplexed me that everyone just assumes that Karen has to give up her studies after marriage, but perhaps there was some kind of university rule about it? The theme of this book is 'nearly a nasty accident,' from the naughty boys throwing stones on the railway tracks in the opening chapter, all the way up to Rose and Nicola's terrifying near-miss encounter with a very nasty man in Oxford at the end. It could be argued that Karen and Edwin's marriage actually is a nasty accident; I'm less lenient toward him and his (not always suppressed) violent streak than Nicola is.

The Cricket Term ties with End of Term as my teenage favourites -- two perfect school stories. It's been pointed out that this novel feels like it could be the end of the series, neatly tying up Nicola's long-standing enmity with the dastardly Lois Sanger, a happy, summery atmosphere, and a cracking cricket match as its climax. Forest writes about cricket as well as anyone I know, so well that she's won converts to the game among American readers who otherwise wouldn't have a clue. And there's a fabulous plot twist involving my pet Lawrie, which delights and outrages me every time.

The Attic Term skips over the summer holidays and brings us back to school. This is my least favourite of the Kingscote stories, mostly because it revolves around Ginty, my second least favourite Marlow sibling, and her tedious romance with boy-next-door Patrick. And I could well do without Patrick's pontifications on the recent changes in the Catholic Church, which make him so unhappy at his own school that I honestly can't understand why his parents don't move him. This time the theme seems to be 'the coughing bear' -- a minor breach of rules/laws that results in terrible damage, most immediately Nicola's first illicit phone call from the school office which paves the way for Ginty's later wrongdoing. I think Forest is suggesting that the changes of Vatican II also opened the door for catastrophe to follow? I don't know enough church history to comment on that point of view!

Run Away Home is another patchy book, like The Thuggery Affair (though I prefer Thuggery). This one features my first least favourite Marlow, oldest brother Giles, who is sexist, pompous and insufferable, though clearly intended to be dashing, bold and tremendous good fun. I'm irritated by the plot of the runaway boy, in which the rights and wrongs are less obvious to me than they are to the Marlows. I'm furious on behalf of poor Ann, who is treated with utter contempt by everyone, teased, lied to and denigrated at every turn; I'm inclined to agree with her take on the Edward situation and I think her family treat her abominably. There's a half-formed problem with Nicola accepting the gift of Miranda's dress, which again, I find baffling -- who cares? Miranda would have thrown it away if Nick hadn't taken it! However, the final few chapters, with Giles and Peter in trouble at sea and Patrick holding vigil, are almost worth the annoyances at the start.

It was interesting to read all ten novels from beginning to end. It was much easier to follow little bits of continuity, like the endless pony swaps and Peter's splinter, as well as the presence of the Dodds, which I never understood as a young reader, having missed Ready-Made Family. Taken as a single work, they are certainly uneven, but there are far more moments of brilliance than there are moments when I grit my teeth. As Patrick says to sexy au pair Claudie, 'Might we do that again some time?'

Friends, Lovers and the Big, Terrible Thing

Matthew Perry's memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing was a birthday present. I've been wanting to read it ever since Perry's shock death in October last year. Insecure, witty Chandler Bing was my favourite Friends character; Chandler and Monica's romance unfolded in parallel with my own courtship with my husband, and I followed it avidly. I was dimly aware that Perry had suffered from a painkiller addiction during one season of Friends, (one season? Huh!) but I stupidly assumed that he had gone to rehab and got over it. How wrong I was.

Friends, Lovers is a painful read. Perry started drinking at eleven, moved on to opiates (though he always balked at heroin) and ketamine, and never broke free from addiction to one substance or another for longer than a year or so until the day he died. He tells how, as a colicky baby, a doctor prescribed phenobarbitol to stop him crying; was that when his brain chemistry was irretrievably altered? Or was his deep anxiety the source of the black hole inside he was never able to fill, not with gorgeous girlfriends, not with fame, not with money or artistic success? 

The tragedy of Matthew Perry is that he was never able to convince himself that he was enough. Plenty of people tried to help him; he made numerous attempts to help himself, and sometimes he would seem to succeed in shaking off his demons. But never for long. There was a particular anguish in reading the end of the book, where he declares that he's clean for good this time, knowing full well that he would be dead within a year. It's hard to escape the conclusion that his sad, premature ending was inevitable. Perhaps the saddest part is that he really was just as smart, funny and surrounded by love as Chandler; yet as Perry himself points out, Chandler was able to mature and achieve the goals that Matthew Perry the actor never could.
 

The Great Believers

I came of age in the AIDS era. In the late 80s and 90s, the spectre of the disease hung over me and my gay friends like the threat of nuclear war -- only much more personal and immediate. Safe sex messages were everywhere, posters of cute boys kissing, labelled with chirpy admonitions. I was terrified of something happening to one of my friends, I wished they would all stay celibate forever (no chance). But gradually treatments appeared, then really good treatments, and eventually HIV became a manageable chronic illness rather than a death sentence.

In The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai draws a deft comparison between the devastation of a generation in the First World War, and the similar catastrophe wreaked by AIDS on a whole community. Her story focuses on Yale, a young gay man, and Fiona, the straight sister of his friend Nico, and it's Fiona who acts as a witness, support, and advocate, and ultimately memory-keeper, for a whole friendship family. The novel alternates between Chicago in the late 80s and Paris in 2015 where Fiona is searching for her estranged daughter, and I found the Chicago sections more compelling. The plot also deals with an art legacy, acquired in Paris in the 1920s, and this theme beautifully highlights the duty of memory, story-keeping and the role of art (with this novel itself forming a part of that witnessing).

I absolutely loved The Great Believers, it's a sensational novel. I also thoroughly enjoyed Makkai's later novel, I Have Some Questions For You, but The Great Believers is, I think, more moving and substantial. Highly recommended.
 

First Knowledges: Innovation

I've enjoyed reading all the volumes in the First Knowledges series (this is the seventh title, and there are at least four more scheduled), but Innovation: Knowledge and Ingenuity, by the husband and wife team of Ian McNiven and Lynette Russell, is one of the best. It serves as a brief, digestible history of Australian First Nations peoples and the adaptations and inventions they have made over their long 65,000 year occupation of this continent.

There has long been a notion that First Nations people lived in a static, changeless world, stuck in a 'Stone Age' lifestyle. In fact, they were quick to adapt and change as their environment changed, willing to develop new methods of hunting and trapping (like the ancient, massive fish traps at Budj Bim), adopting some foreign inventions (like using Reckitt's Blue laundry powder for painting, or glass and ceramic for spearheads) and rejecting others. Even when missionaries attempted to introduce Christianity to First Nations communities, it was usually added to their existing spiritual beliefs, rather than replacing them.

It's impossible to read this book and not come away with a profound admiration for the resilience and ingenuity of First Nations people, both before and after colonisation.