The Little White Horse

The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge was one of the formative books of my childhood, and it was a such a joy to revisit it for the first time in many years, though I regret that my current copy doesn't have the delightful illustrations that were included in the edition I used to borrow over and over again from the Mt Hagen library.

One scene unfolds after another, each one a vignette of pleasure. Maria Merryweather, a thirteen year old orphan, her governess, Miss Heliotrope, and her self-satisfied spaniel, Wiggins, rattle through the night to their new home. Maria's bedroom in a tower of the manor house has a tiny door, just big enough for her, and has stars on the ceiling (I see from reviews that I was far from the only child reader who sighed for that perfect little bedroom).  Maria goes riding and rescues a hare, Serena, from the clutches of the Wicked Men of the pine forest. In due course, the Wicked Men are steered from their evil ways, pairs of lovers are reunited, and after some hair-raising adventures, peace and happiness are restored to the valley.

Early in the book, the author remarks that there are three kinds of person: those who receive consolation from clothes, those who receive it through food, and those who seek it in the written word. There is ample satisfaction for all three in The Little White Horse. Clothes are lovingly described, from Maria's trim riding habit to Loveday's white satin wedding dress to Sir Benjamin's embroidered flowery waistcoast. There is plenty of delicious food for humans and animals alike (the book was published just after the Second World War, when everyone was thinking longingly about food). And the story, though simple, is deeply satisfying, filled with complementary characters and images. 

We meet a dog, Wrolf, who is really a lion, and the little white horse that Maria glimpses from the carriage in the first pages proves to be a unicorn. There are pairs of hearty, energetic 'sun' Merryweathers, and pale, proud 'moon' Merryweathers. Everything fits together neatly in the end, and the harmony in the valley and the village of Silverydew gave me, as a child reader, a picture of Paradise on earth. Perfect comfort reading.
 

The Season

 

Our Christmas was kiboshed by Covid. Half our presents still sit under the tree, waiting until we're all clear to see family members -- my sister, my daughter, my dad. Thank heavens that Helen Garner's new book, The Season, was being given to me by my other daughter, who also tested positive, because I couldn't have waited any longer. Once I cracked it open, I tried to spin it out as long as I could, but I finished it within a day.

It's so kind when your favourite living author writes a book especially for you: in this instance, a Melbourne book, about footy and families and getting older, about masculinity and violence and war, about stories and heroes and, like Tabitha Carvan's book, about being into something, whether or not you understand it 'properly,' but just because it gives you joy. Extra points because Garner's team is the same as mine, the Western Bulldogs, and little vignettes about players I know and love pepper these pages.

Garner's style looks effortless, but oh, the craft, the blood, that has gone into creating these apparently simple snatches of dialogue, these glimpses of scenes. A news report, a memory, little shards artfully arranged to resonate and glitter off each other, but made to look as if they've just been scattered carelessly and fallen haphazard. Forgive me, I'm not coherent, I'm blaming Covid, but I absolutely relished this book. The writing is so beautiful, and Garner loves footy the way I do (I feel vindicated), she tells people this is 'a nana's book about football.' She's in it for the stories, for the moments of ecstasy and despair, for the sweep of the narrative, the heroic battles and the noble characters, just like I am.

That Bont. His quiet, faithful brilliance. Where does such a man come from? Cody Weightman kicks six goals and executes a magnificent screamer: he romps up the back of North's Griffin Logue in great strides, like a man bounding up a staircase.

But really the book is not about football as much as it's about Garner and her grandson, Amby, fifteeen and growing into a man before her eyes, and her finding a way to accompany him for a little way on the journey, to find a language they can speak together.

Steps

Steps, the debut novel from Australian author Sam A.D., was a Christmas present from a friend (he went to the book launch and I suspect I'm the only person he knows who reads novels). 

Steps is a darkly absurdist parable with a killer premise, protected by copyright separately from the text itself (I didn't know you could even do that): every person has a lifetime allocation of 60 000 000 steps. Once you've used them all, you drop dead instantly. People become obsessed with their step trackers and go to great lengths to minimise their step usage. Cars have been outlawed, so people use wheelchairs or pogo sticks, roll along the ground or stalk on stilts. The very rich pay to be carried everywhere; some selfish types bounce around in those inflatable plastic bubbles. Sex has disappeared, and people go dancing at the Forever27 club when they've had enough of life and want to go out with a bang.

Steps tracks a frenetic 24 hours in Sunshine City, the day of the annual lottery when some lucky souls will win extra steps, or the chance for sex, and everyone has their trackers paused so they can enjoy an hour's free dancing. Agnes and Aksel are new friends; teens Elio and Sarita are freshly in love; gross Derek can steal others' steps; the conniving mayor, Turquoise, has her own sinister agenda.

Steps packs an incredible amount of violence and action into less than 150 pages, and it seems to have been written with an eye to screen adaptation. There are a few holes in the world-building (there are no children in the story, and I wonder how they're cared for) but I suspect we're not intended to examine the logic of the plot too closely. It's a rollicking, no holds barred thought experiment, with some unexpected consequences.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny

Well, this was a strange book. First published in 1972, reissued in 1985, The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny is a not very scholarly, highly anecdotal, frankly psychoanalytical account of the history of nannies and nannying. I have a fascination with the British servant class (I wouldn't be at all surprised if my ancestors were 'in service') so I couldn't resist this one.

Gathorne-Hardy writes very much from the perspective of the nannied, despite having interviewed dozens of nannies -- as he rightly points out, the last generation of Victorian and Edwardian nannies who raised whole generations of upper and middle class children. He is very interesting on the probable effects of this phenomenon of entire classes of children being raised by people who were not their parents: the split in affection and authority between the nanny and the parents; the resulting attitude to women (he argues that many nanny-raised men became sexually fixated with 'lower class' women like their nannies); the opportunities for cruelty and abuse; the idealised, distant mother; the sense of betrayal and insecurity when a nanny left the family, and much more. He traces the famous English emotional repression and stiff upper lip to the often 'over-strict' and 'depriving' regime of the Nanny, where any pleasure for its own sake was suspect. It's an interesting theory but in Gathorne-Hardy's account, entirely without actual evidence.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny is packed with intriguing stories, bizarre facts, wild speculation and peculiar digressions (there is a whole half chapter on the nanny-related murder which was the subject of Kate Summerscale's book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher). But one subject on which it's strangely silent is Mr Gathorne-Hardy's own personal experience of being brought up by a Nanny. We know he was, he mentions it in passing, but by the end of the book, I was dying to know how much of his sexual and psychological theories were informed by his own life.

My copy came with an inscription:

To my wife, Margaret,

Who, on balance, is a more pleasant person than the Nannies and Matrons of my experience.

Love from Peter

York, Christmas 1985

Questions upon questions!

Mansfield Revisited

Found at the Athenaeum: a sequel to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park by another JA, Joan Aiken. The first thing Aiken does is promptly remove happily married Fanny and Edmund from the action by sending them to the West Indies. Our heroine this time is Fanny's younger sister, Susan, a slightly more lively and opinionated character than her meek sister (though still virtuous and thoughtful). 

 

Mansfield Revisited is not exactly Jane Austen, but it's certainly in the same universe. Aiken does a superb job of replicating the dialogue and concerns of Austen's world, and as always, her ear for language is nuanced, playful and note-perfect. Aiken's Lady Bertram is a particular delight. The only moment that didn't ring Austen-true for me was when Susan has an internal reflection using the pronoun 'I.' I couldn't swear that Austen never does that, but somehow it didn't feel right.

Aiken brings back those attractive, selfish characters the Crawford siblings, and metes out suitable fates to them, and she does a good job of making them much more sympathetic, though still faithful to their more youthful selves. I enjoyed Mansfield Revisited a lot, though it doesn't contain quite the same depths as the original. I'm not usually a fan of other-authored sequels, but I'll make an exception for this, and also for Jill Paton Walsh's Wimsy novels.

 

The Hunter

I went through an absolute Tana French binge when I first discovered her a couple of years ago, and The Hunter is her latest. It's another book about American police officer, Cal Hooper, who has retired to a remote village in Ireland and becomes entangled in local secrets, and taciturn, stubborn teenager, Trey, for whom he gradually becomes a kind of unofficial guardian.

In The Searcher, the story centred on the mystery of what happened to Trey's older brother, Brendan. In The Hunter, it's Trey's no-good father Johnny who wreaks havoc on the community when he returns, with an associate and a scam up his sleeve. Soon the whole village is drawn into Johnny's schemes, but Trey has her own agenda for revenge.

It was very enjoyable to be back in the company of Cal, Trey, Lena and the rest of Ardnakelty, though there is so much unspoken and sinister swirling beneath the banter. Weirdly, the story is set in the midst of an unnaturally (climate change) baking summer, and as a good Australian, I couldn't approve of plot resolution by means of a deliberately lighted fire, however necessary for a dramatic climax. There is less of a supernatural flavour to this French volume, which is an element that I generally enjoy, but for this story, the strangeness of human beings was probably enough.

Song For a Dark Queen

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

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

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

Indigenous Australia for Dummies

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

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

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

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

There Are Rivers in the Sky

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

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

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

Health: Spirit, Country and Culture

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

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

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

Ballet Shoes

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

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

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

Look Back With Astonishment

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

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

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

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

Green Dot

 

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

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

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

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