Dalton admits that before her relationship with the hare, she paid little attention to the natural world. The hare opens her eyes to the rhythms of the seasons, the activities of the birds and animals, the effect of intensive farming practices on the loss of wild spaces like hedges and woods. Raising Hare is not a long book, but it's a beautiful and profound reading experience based on close observation of small and undramatic events, like James Rebanks' The Place of Tides.
To me, the Himalaya region always evokes the books of Rumer Godden, who has written so magically about her year of living in Kashmir in a simple mountain house with her two young daughters after her marriage fell apart in the early 1940s. Even though her family's time there ended in a nightmarish fashion when one of her servants tried to poison them, her deep delight in the beauties of the landscape, house and people glows through her prose. Sixty years later, Michael Palin journeyed through what was in some ways an utterly altered world, but in some ways still very much the same.
Palin and his team travelled through more than half a dozen countries as they made their way through the mountains, but despite differences in politics, forms of government, and degrees of military presence, the solid fact of the mountains themselves is always present: the sublime beauty, the hardship, and the tough, hospitable people. I don't think I'd be up to a hundred and twenty five days of butter tea and oxygen deprivation, not matter how gorgeous the landscape; lucky for me Palin was willing to do it for me.
Atwood's life makes for an interesting story in itself. Famously her naturalist father carted the family into the wilderness for half of every year, which left Atwood with a legacy of environmental awareness and a love of birds in particular. She writes enjoyably about the beginnings of the Canadian literature scene, which I imagine has a lot of parallels to the Australian situation -- it was difficult to persuade publishers to risk printing local stories, and aspiring writers were advised to try their luck in the UK or USA (sadly, I fear that 'global' appeal is again becoming a requirement for publishers to risk their money).
The latter part of Book of Lives is overshadowed by the decline and death of Atwood's second husband, Graeme; another story of grief and mourning. It's remarkable to think that Atwood is now in her late eighties, and yet she is as sharp or sharper than she ever was, making films during Covid and still experimenting. I suppose we might not have her for much longer, but what a blessing to have this chunky, rich and funny memoir from a real literary legend before she leaves us.
I was amazed at the speed and compassion (mostly) of the health workers who rolled swiftly into action, delivering a hospital bed, nursing care, morphine, special sheets to David's home with a minimum of fuss. I have no idea if similar systems are in place here; I guess I might find out one day. It might not have been the best time for me to read this book, as I'm currently caring for my ninety-year old mother who was recently in hospital with an infection and is taking a while to recover. But I was also able to recognise myself as one of that long line of carers who find themselves able to deal with incontinence, dirty sheets, coaxing tiny spoonfuls of ice cream into a reluctant mouth, organising medication and all the rest of the work of caring.
The very last image of the book was so incredibly beautiful, it made me cry.
Sometimes I stand at an upstairs window after dark when the city is getting ready for bed, and watch the lights go out one by one in rooms where strangers live. And if I stand there long enough I find, in compensation for the gathering dark, other lights arriving out of nothing -- the passage of a car turning for home, lamps switched on in bathrooms and bedrooms on the outskirts of town, streetlights marking roads I know quite well. Then I imagine I've walked out of the city and up what passes in Norfolk for a hill, and that I can see spread all around me this same pattern going on over and over: lights, everywhere, coming on where there was no light, then shining for a moment or an hour before fading slowly to an ember, or being suddenly extinguished. On and on it goes, far ahead and behind me, over borders, horizons, seas, summoned up and going out in their own time -- illuminating barely half an inch or fully half a mile, and each light particular, never to be repeated or replaced: all those other lights. All those other towns.
Bad Behaviour reads like a novel, with memories of events at Silver Creek intercut with reflections of Rebecca's later life, especially her relationships, which were clearly affected by patterns that were set up in that fateful year. I have to say that Silver Creek sounds awful, Starford's experience of it at least. Her dormitory house was ruled by a bully and her clique, who egged on Bec and others to escalating feats of cruel and stupid rule-breaking. It takes a long time for Bec to realise she'd be better off with different friends, and it's hard to comprehend the appeal of the mean girls (I am a steadfast goody-goody, so the glamour of bad behaviour is lost on me).
Starford writes with compelling immediacy about the ebbs and flows of teen friendship and the weird power that charismatic individuals can wield, though I was less invested in the later relationship dramas of her twenties. Mostly Bad Behaviour made me thankful that I'm not fourteen anymore, and I'd be interested to find out how teenagers would respond to it.
He is not exactly an autobiography. It's composed of fragments of memory and reflection, some floating free of context, all couched in the safely distancing third person point of view. He does mention his first and second wives (Garner was number two), without naming them, and expresses admiration for Garner's writing without disclosing their relationship! In her diaries, Garner often bemoans V's refusal to admit to feeling or expressing emotion, and it would be hard to imagine a more clinical piece of autobiographical writing, in which the word 'I' never appears!
He is, however, a beautiful work, filled with evocative images and remembrance, though the meaning of each fragment and their connection to each other is left for the reader to put together. I did feel I had a bit of an advantage in understanding Bail's character after seeing him through Garner's eyes -- at first intrigued, then in love, then increasingly frustrated, and finally devastated. Reading He was an interesting exercise, and a window into a certain kind of man's perception of the world. But I'm not sure I want to spend too much time inside his head.
The other piece that made me cry was about the death of Patchett's father after a long and debilitating struggle with pain and increasing disability:
I felt sad about my father all the time. When I closed my eyes at night I saw him lashed to a raft in a storm-tossed sea: dark rain, dark waves, my father crashing down again and again as he waited to drown.
When her father, after years of this, eventually dies, she doesn't feel 'terrible.' What she feels is joy.
This essay struck particularly close for me, though my father is still aboard his own storm-battered raft. I don't know yet how I'll feel when he goes under, but Patchett has given me a glimpse of a few possibilities.
There are many interesting, heart wrenching observations: Irvin is shocked that he's besieged with obsessive thoughts of sex after Marilyn's death; he knows perfectly well intellectually that she is dead, but he can't help taking photos and storing up anecdotes to tell her (apparently this reflects different functions of the memory in the brain); he acknowledges for the first time that he has never really known loss before, and that his therapy clients who accused him of being smug and insulated in his own happiness were quite correct.
Marilyn quotes a beautiful poem that I hadn't come across before, by Jane Kenyon, who herself died tragically young.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside. Let evening come. To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop in the oats, to air in the lung let evening come. Let it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.
The essays about applying to join the Los Angeles Police Force in the wake of the Rodney King riots, and the long history of her relationship to her now-husband were hugely engaging; each was a complicated story. Patchett's father was an LAPD police officer, and while she did want to explore what kinds of people applied to join, she also wanted to acknowledge the difficulties of the work and honour her father (he was really keen for her to actually join, not just write about it). The marriage story is actually largely about divorce, but it has a gorgeously happy ending. The final story, about her friendship with an elderly nun who used to be her primary school teacher, was beautiful and moving.
I did find the essays about caring for her elderly grandmother and the death of her beloved dog were a bit close to the bone for me at the moment, which is another way of recognising their power and truth. The only essay I didn't particularly enjoy was the one about writing. Patchett's advice is blunt and robust, basically just get on with it -- which I know is true -- I just don't much feel like hearing it!
In many ways, and he admits this himself, Yalom has had a blessed life. He married his soul mate, Marilyn, early, they have four healthy children, he has taught and written and seen clients for many decades, he has travelled all over the world and spoken to huge and adoring audiences, and espeically in latter years, he has enjoyed enormous acclaim and popularity. At the time of writing Becoming Myself, he was 86; he's now 94 and still with us.
Yalom is cheerfully candid about his own luck and his failings and regrets -- he allowed Marilyn to shoulder the bulk of child rearing, though she's had a demanding academic career of her own; he made mistakes in handling some patients; he wishes he'd had more empathy toward his difficult mother. He freely discusses taking marijuana, opium, LSD and ecstasy, which didn't shock but did surprise me. He is such an engaging writer and so open about his experiences, Becoming Myself was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Next I'm going to read A Matter of Death and Life, written a few years later by Irvin and Marilyn together, after Marilyn's diagnosis of terminal cancer. Yalom is frank about his fear of losing Marilyn, and I wonder how they handled it together.
Paul Jennings didn't start writing for children until he was forty years old. Before then, he had an extraordinary career as a teacher and education lecturer, often taking on students with physical or mental difficulties, and teaching youth offenders at what was then called Turana. With his quirky, hilarious short stories and particularly after the huge success of the ABC kids' show, Round the Twist, Jennings found himself rich and famous, and able to indulge himself by buying lots of vintage cars and fairytale cottages in the mountains. However, he is equally frank about his own struggles with mental health and the toll that his ups and downs took on his relationships.
Untwisted is compulsively readable. Jennings is a master craftsman of the art of the plot twist, foreshadowing and the clever set-up, and this makes the story of his own life a real page-turner. I must admit that his stories never had a lot of appeal for me, but my kids loved them, and Round the Twist is of course a classic. I now have a fresh respect and admiration for this national treasure of Australian children's literature.
During the moments when Junger was hovering on the border between life and death, he saw something totally unexpected: his dead father, who was a rational, logical scientist and if anything even more hard-nosed than his son. Junger's blow-by-blow account of his medical experience is utterly gripping, and takes up the first half of the book. The second half is devoted to his struggle to understand why he might have seen his father, and takes him into the arcane reaches of quantum theory, the definition of consciousness, and others' accounts of their own near-death experiences, to conclude that perhaps consciousness is woven into the very fabric of the universe, and that we really do rejoin something larger than ourselves when we die. It's a controversial, but (to me) very appealing proposition. I'm certain there is more to reality than our puny brains can comprehend, and it's always seemed the height of arrogance to assume that we could.
Weirdly, just after reading In My Time of Dying, I read Paul Jennings' life story, Untwisted, in which he recounts his own near-death experience, when he saw a cavern filled with people eating and laughing and enjoying themselves, and was drawn to a tunnel that exuded feelings of bliss and tranquillity. He says he hopes when his time does come, that tunnel is still there. Jennings' mother also saw a vision of her sister at the moment of her death, half a world away. Junger argues that there might be biological reasons for many near-death phenomena, but the one that is most difficult to explain is these visions of the dead. I do wonder what is going on; maybe one day I'll find out.
I like crosswords, I do one every day and two on Saturdays. But cryptics have always been beyond my comprehension. I was in awe of a fellow student at college who once tried patiently to explain to me how they worked -- and English wasn't even her first language. So in Puzzled I saw my chance for a crash course in the mysteries of cryptics once and for all.
Alas, after bravely wrestling with the whole book, I can only conclude that I don't have the right kind of brain for cryptic crosswords. Astle starts gently enough with anagrams and double meanings, but soon we're swimming in 'hybrids', 'manipulations' and '&lits' (or perhaps drowning!) Even with Astle holding my hand, I couldn't figure out most of these clues. Fortunately, the course in crossword solving is also interleaved with autobiographical episodes from David Astle's life, which are both entertaining and interesting and which helped me through the difficult patches. Puzzled is a beautifully constructed piece of work, but alas, I'm not much closer to mastering the mysteries than I was before -- my fault, not David Astle's!
Wild Hares made a perfect companion read to James Rebanks' more serious English Pastoral. Because I'd already read the latter, observations about the extinction of local birds and wildlife hit home harder. I knew what Moss was talking about when he outlined the consequences of silage replacing hay for cattle feed. Moss is careful to avoid an overtly political stance, but the shadow of climate change falls darkly even over this 2011 book. There are floods in the village, birds and insects respond too early to the change of seasons and find themselves without the proper food, certain butterflies arrive at the wrong time. Not every species is a loser in this shakeup of the natural world, but there are more losers than winners.
But mostly Wild Hares is a celebration of close observation and involvement in the natural world, delighting in the small events in Moss's backyard or familiar lanes and fields. This is a lovely book. Let's hope it's not completely irrelevant in another twenty years.
Rebanks is, famously, a farmer. English Pastoral is divided into three sections. In the first, he recalls growing up on his grandfather's and father's farms, with his grandfather introducing him to the hard work of farming but also the small delights of live on the land -- the birds, the insects, the cycle of life and death, the hedgerows, the wildflowers, the mysteries of the animals. In the second section, James is grown up, his grandfather is dead, and James takes his part beside his father in trying to wring a living from the land. Rebanks sets out in savage detail the modern economic pressures that have rendered this almost impossible. As agriculture has become relentlessly more 'efficient,' with the aid of pesticides, economies of scale, monocultures and artificial fertilisers, the price of food has steadily fallen and the crucial connection between farmer and nature has been whittled away. Farms are now just food factories, run on an industrial scale, with no room for emotion or luxuries like harbouring wildlife.
In the final section of the book, Rebanks describes his attempt to return to some of the old ways of farming and caring for the land. He argues that food has become too cheap; we no longer value it truly. The only way he and his family can stay farming in this way is to bring in income from outside -- partly, I guess, by writing books like this. But it's inspiring to read about the way that Rebanks has made room on his land for things like reinstating hedges, returning river flow to its natural state to soak up floodwater, using animal manure as fertiliser, and welcoming back birds and insects. Not surprisingly, he thanks Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell from Knepp, as documented in Wilding, which I read last year. I've read some critiques of English Pastoral as being too 'all over the place,' but while the style is fragmented, I didn't find it choppy. One thought or observation flows into the next to build a rich and moving mosaic, always engaging and persuasive.
Anna was a 'duck woman,' a dying breed, who travel to the remote islands where eider ducks nest. They build safe nesting places for them, protect them from predators, and watch over them until the eggs hatch and the ducklings are taken out to sea. Rebanks, Anna and Ingrid, a younger friend of Anna's, spent ten weeks on this island, working hard to tend to the nests, observing the ducks, waiting and watching and quietly spending time together. At first Rebanks felt restless, until he eventually settled into the rhythm of the life and recognised that yes, this was exactly what he needed. But to his surprise, though he'd thought it was solitary time that he was craving, he came to realise that in fact Anna was deeply enmeshed in community, and it was the time spent with Anna and Ingrid that achieved the real healing.
The Place of Tides was only published last year, and I discovered it by accident on Brotherhood Books. It fits perfectly into a category of books my friend Chris calls people and animals -- books like H is for Hawk, or The Company of Wolves. It's nature writing, but it's also a meditation on life, connection and spirituality. The Place of Tides is an absolutely beautiful book, simple but profound, and it took me into another world.
Question 7 took my breath away. What an extraordinary, profound, elegant, supple, brilliant and moving book. Part autobiography, part history, part fictionalised history, it is a book that defies categorisation. Broken into short, easily digestible chunks, it weaves together Flanagan's family history (his father, who spent time in the Japanese death camps; his mother, who raised six children in hardship; his shrewd, demanding grandmother) together with the development of the atomic bomb, via HG Wells' affair with Rebecca West, Leo Szilard's campaign for peace, the horrific attempted Tasmanian genocide and Flanagan's own near-death experience of drowning in river rapids at twenty-one.
This is superb writing. I must confess, I have found Richard Flanagan's fiction too strong meat for me -- I didn't even attempt The Narrow Road to the Deep North, though I'm sure it's incredible -- but Question 7 is the best book I've read this year. If I was voting in the Top 100 again, it would be in my list without question (no pun intended).
Searching for Charmian is a highly emotional book, buzzing with questions and unresolved feelings. Suzanne had vaguely heard of Clift, but knew little about her eventful life; the book traces her eager research, connecting with Nadia Wheatley, Clift's biographer (they agreed to cease contact when Suzanne decided to writer her own book) and with friends of Clift and her husband, writer George Johnston, who mined their marriage for material. Famously, the Johnstons lived for years on the Greek island of Hydra and became the nucleus of an artistic and literary community there (young Leonard Cohen was a friend). Tragically, Clift took her own life in 1969, so Suzanne was never able to reunite with her in person. Suzanne presents her own history in parallel with her mother's, showing where each of them was in certain years; amazingly, they almost overlapped at times and could have walked past each other in the street.
Suzanne Chick seems to have inherited her biological mother's gift with words, though she spent her life as an art teacher. Searching for Charmian takes us on a poignant, very readable journey, questioning motherhood, adoption, the demands of creativity, love and loyalty, addiction and grief, beauty and confidence, aging and family. It was fascinating to read that young Gina took comfort from learning of her ancestry, having felt that perhaps her own personality was 'too wild' and over the top (though she seems to have learned to lean into that side of herself in later years). This is an engaging chronicle of an extraordinary family story.
Almost without intending to, Edwards successfully bid for the property at auction and then had to face the reality of herself and her husband Bill becoming farmers. After the war (I'm not sure if this is still the case), it was not legal to own arable land without actually farming it, so they gradually built up to owning a Jersey herd and sowing crops, as well as improving the ancient farmhouse. Bill seems to have worked miracles, uncovering inglenook fireplaces, creating bathrooms out of thin air, punching windows into dark rooms, demolishing dangerous chimneys and more. Edwards writes about their trials and tribulations, especially the activities of their many animals (including four Siamese cats), with her trademark warmth and understated humour.
The Unsought Farm is a lovely book. The Edwards stayed at the farm until 1968, when they retired to a nearby cottage, and Punch Bowl Farm was still an active farm well into the 1990s. It's a glimpse into a way of agricultural small-holding life that has become vanishing rare, so its triumphs are tinged with melancholy for a modern reader. In its own way, it's as much of a fantasy story now as any of Edwards' beloved novels.
As any viewer of Alone will already know, living in the bush invariably becomes as much an inner quest as a physical adventure. At first Dunn struggles with the basics of building a shelter and especially wrestles with trying to make fire without matches (hence the title), to the point where she had blood blisters on both palms from rubbing futilely at the hand drill. She's also driven by mental demons, a constant fear of not 'doing it properly,' self-doubt and existential angst. It's these more spiritual struggles that dominate toward the end of the book, when Dunn has relaxed into the company of insects and snakes, not washing her hair, and sleeping on the ground. More problematic are her fluctuating relationships with the other participants on the course.
My Year Without Matches is a highly readable, relatable account of a spiritual quest that ultimately comes to rest in a realisation that simply being is enough. Fittingly, Dunn now runs nature reconnection retreats of her own. I love the idea of living so close to nature (Dunn vows to only eat meat she's caught and killed herself, and sticks to it) but I know the reality would defeat me, probably on the first night. The next best thing is reading about it.
