The Bastables

I loved E. Nesbit's books as a child, I borrowed them over and over again from the Mt Hagen library, and while my favourites were the magical Five Children stories, I also read the Bastable novels multiple times. However, I'm pretty sure I didn't know that New Treasure Seekers existed until very recently, and I broke my 2024 No Buying More Books resolution to instantly purchase a copy.

The covers of these three volumes make an interesting comparison. The Treasure Seekers is the first Puffin edition, from 1958; The Wouldbegoods is a 1981 TV series tie-in; and New Treasure Seekers is a brand new (2021) reprint complete with blurb by Neil Gaiman. While it's heartening to see that a hundred and twenty year old children's book is still in print, I must take issue with the cover illustration, which bears NO relationship to the contents within -- there is no skating, there seem to be four girls and two boys on the cover while any Bastable aficionado knows that family consists of two girls and four boys...grr. 

The books were originally published in 1899, 1901 and 1904 and yet in many ways they seem as fresh as if they were written yesterday. Obviously the details of the daily lives of these Victorian children are fascinatingly different from our own, and were even when I first read them decades ago, and distressingly there are some words and attitudes that have not aged well (the chapter in New Treasure Seekers where they search for their lost dog in a Chinese quarter of London is... not good). And yet the Bastables are wonderful company -- striving to be and to do good, but constantly getting themselves into trouble.

There are quite a few references to soldiers and war (the Boer War) in these books and Oswald's dearest dream is to die heroically on the battlefield. It's sobering to realise that he is exactly the right age to do precisely that. (I note that Michael Moorcock uses the name Oswald Bastable for the protagonist of his 1970s early steampunk novels.)

The conceit of having one of the children recount their adventures, but not specifying which one, adds a delicious flavour to the narrative (I remember how proud young Kate was at figuring out that our story teller was Oswald). I wish I'd thought to read these books aloud to my own children, perhaps I didn't have them at the right time? With some judicious pruning, they would make wonderful stories to share and discuss. I'll have to save them for the grandchildren!
 

My Life in France

I went through a bit of a Julia Child moment a few months ago, which was when I picked up My Life in France from Brotherhood Books. I'd watched the first season of Julia with Sarah Lancashire, and I must have seen something else too, because I became quite intrigued by this tall, practical woman with the love of French cooking (and don't tell me that Bonnie Garmus' Lessons in Chemistry doesn't owe something to Julia Childs' story).

I finally got around to starting My Life in France while I was on holiday in Cairns, and due to many interruptions I've only just finished it now. I have absolutely zero interest in French cooking, but I am very interested in life in Europe in the post-war years, the gusto for life's pleasures displayed by Julia and her husband Paul, and Julia's unlikely television and publishing stardom. My Life in France was a late-life book, a collaboration between Julia and her great-nephew Alex Prud'homme, who wrote down her memories and anecdotes and shaped them into a book. It's episodic and meandering, but often very charming, punctuated with evocative photos by Paul (an accomplished photographer and visual display producer, despite being blind in one eye) and Julia's idiosyncratic exclamations -- 'Whoops! Merde alors! Ouf!'

It's Julia's appetite for life and her determination to wring every ounce of enjoyment from her experiences that makes her such an appealing character. Her classic cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was a labour of love over many years, and she was convinced (rightly) that American housewives weren't just content to produce over-processed, quick and easy gloop. I'm sure it's no accident that there was a bit of a Julia Child rediscovery during pandemic lockdowns, when we were all trapped inside our own kitchens and with time on our hands to learn how to make bread properly. And now I want to catch up with all the other Julia content I haven't seen yet -- season 2 of the Lancashire show, the film Julie and Julia (tied in with this edition of My Life in France, as the cover attests) and a documentary, also called Julia, on SBS. Bon appetit!

Queen Bees and Wannabes

I can't remember where I picked up Rosalind Wiseman's classic 2002 book about teenage girls, Queen Bees and Wannabes, which informed the making of the equally classic movie Mean Girls. It might have been around the time that I was writing novels for the Girlfriend Fiction series; I'm pretty sure that my own daughters were not teenagers yet, and I wanted all the information I could lay my hands on.

Re-reading Queen Bees and Wannabes at least a decade later, my children have passed through the teen years (well, almost -- the younger one is still technically a teen for a few more weeks) and I can appreciate how much influence this book had, not just on my writing, but on my parenting. Even though it was written before the tsunami of social media crashed over us all, before the strains of lockdown life, and before new awareness of neurodiversity and gender fluidity, there is so much wisdom in these pages. The key messages -- like keeping lines of communication open, no matter what -- are just as helpful now as they ever were.

Much of the focus of Queen Bees is on helping your child to navigate the social hierarchy of high school, and some of it does have a particularly American slant. In this edition at least (I believe there is a revised version available now) there are some glaring gaps like the ones mentioned above, but the heart of the book hasn't changed much. Wiseman insists that the most important priorities are to build and maintain trust, establish boundaries, model the behaviour you want to see. She is realistic about the issues that teenage girls face and the limits of what parents can control. Better to equip your child to solve her own problems rather than march in and to fix everything for her.

It was a relief to put this book down and realise that, despite often stormy waters, maybe we didn't do such a bad job after all.

Black Duck

When I was a baby writer, and Bruce Pascoe edited Australian Short Stories, I sent him a few of my attempts. He rejected them all, but sometimes he'd write a kind note on the rejection slip which was almost as good as an acceptance. In latter years I have become a big fan of his, for his revelatory work on Dark Emu and for his dignity and patience in dealing with the sometimes vicious and deeply personal criticism that the book has attracted.

Black Duck is a very different book from Dark Emu. It's subtitled A Year at Yumburra, Pascoe's Gippsland farm where he is putting some of the discoveries from Dark Emu into practice, growing and harvesting native grains and making delicious flour from them. I love the loose diary format of this book, divided into seasons, and I marvel at the amount of labour that Pascoe undertakes at a time of life when most of us would be planning rest and retirement. It's not just the heavy work of farming and managing a rural property (fencing, clearing, cool burning, chopping wood, mending, building, caring for animals), but the endless demands on his time from the media and from interested visitors. Some are just breezing through, some are more deeply committed, but Pascoe takes the time to show them around and explain his work. He's also deeply involved in the local First Nations community; though he doesn't go into details, there was clearly some conflict to sort out during this particular year, which also takes up time and energy.

What I loved most about this reflective, generous book was the model Pascoe presents on how to live in harmony with Country -- grateful for its bounty, tending it with care, sensitive to the presence of birds and animals and vegetation, always aware of its stories. It's a glimpse of an approach to life which holds the possibility of so much richness and nourishment for us all, just as the native grains might teach us to appreciate the flavours of our own place instead of food imported from the colonisers. The shadow of death, infirmity, the disastrous Mallacoota fires, and petty back-biting falls over Black Duck, but at its heart this is a joyous and celebratory book.
 

Golden Afternoon

As a teenager, I had a very romantic view of the British Raj. In my mind, it was all potted palms and linen suited chaps sipping gin and tonics on shaded verandahs; the miniseries of Paul Scott's Staying On and The Jewel in the Crown, which led me to Scott's Raj Quartet novels, as well as the film of A Passage to India, created a misty, glamorous image of the exotic East and the melancholy of lost glory. I had no idea of the cold economic reality, oppression and violence that underpinned these romantic images.

I started reading M.M. Kaye's memoir of her 1930s youth in the light of this nostalgic glow. Oddly I have never seen or read The Far Pavilions, Kaye's novel which propelled her to bestseller status and was certainly a contributor to the rosy-hued view of the Raj which was floating around in the 1980s. I have read and loved Rumer Godden's memoirs and novels of her Raj childhood (like The River and Two Under the Indian Sun), also tinged with romantic nostalgia, but also informed with at least some political awareness. Perhaps I'm drawn to memoirs of colonial childhoods because I grew up in a colonial milieu myself, though expat PNG was a long way less romantic than British India. In any case, I suppose I was expecting another wistful, elegiac remembrance of a vanished world.

However, Golden Afternoon did NOT fulfil this brief, and my reading of it was interrupted, and complicated by, reading Empireland. I was expecting something of Rumer Godden's exquisite prose; I was not expecting a posh, breezy voice not unlike my English aunties (may they rest in peace), chattering about endless parties, high jinks on Kashmiri lakes, feasts with local princes, death-defying drives through flooded landscapes -- 400 pages of largely unreflective japes and frivolity in a gorgeous but politically neutered setting. The occasional remark is tossed out: 'No wonder they wanted to get rid of us!' but the existence of empire is accepted as merely a colourful background to a very personal story.

I had been reading Golden Afternoon (which is only the middle volume of a three volume autobiography, mind you) as a bit of a guilty pleasure, but after finishing Empireland, the pleasure largely drained away and only the guilt remained.
 

Empireland

I found Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland at the local library after hearing him speak on a podcast in the middle of the night -- it was probably Empire (funnily enough) with William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, which is reliably fascinating -- because he's spruiking his new book, Empireworld, which examines the ways in which the globe has been shaped by British imperialism.

Empireland has a more modest scope, focusing on the sometimes unexpected ways in which imperialism has created modern Britain. While the Brits often congratulate themselves on their part in abolishing slavery, they tend to skate over the part where it was a major part of their economy (and I was shocked/astonished to learn relatively recently that the British government has just finished paying abolition compensation -- not to the descendants of the enslaved people, mind you, but to the slave owners!)

Sanghera sees the roots of many contemporary British attitudes stretching back to the imperial era: for example, the exceptionalism that encouraged many to believe that Britain would be better off out of Europe than in it; the foundation of so many venerable British banks and companies; the distrust of 'cleverness' when what was needed to run empire was solid, unquestioning loyalty; the amnesia about the presence of people of colour all the way through Britain's history, right back to the Romans; and the unsurprising desire of the colonised to move to seat of empire. 'We're here because you were there,' as some activists have pointed out. And that's not even touching on the topic of loot (see another excellent podcast, Mark Fennell's Stuff the British Stole), including human remains. While of course Australia was part of the empire project, Sanghera focuses mostly on India.

This is quite a short book, only about 250 pages, but it's eminently engaging and readable, and it made me think a lot. Elements of Empireland have kept popping into my head while I'm reading other books, and I think I will need to read the follow up, too.

Green Valentine

I'm a big fan of Lili Wilkinson; she has got better and better with every book. From my observation, her career has gone through three phases -- the early quirky rom-coms, the serious 'issue' novels, and now she has embarked on a rich and colourful fantasy series (which, like Green Valentine, centres on plants).

Published in 2015, Green Valentine is, I think, the last of the quirky rom-coms, a genre which Wilkinson perfected with books like A Pocketful of Eyes, Pink and The Zigzag Effect. Though thoroughly enjoyable, it's perhaps not her strongest entry, and maybe it's significant that after this she turned to darker subject matter. Gardening has always been a passion of Wilkinson's and in the author's note she says she wanted to write a book about gardening that wasn't 'totally boring.' With guerilla gardening at midnight and a delicious romance, she certainly achieved that, and the message that solutions aren't found with a single silver bullet, but from hundreds of small ideas, is still extremely timely.

Green Valentine is an uplifting story about hope and making change and community, and it would be a great antidote for a young person who might be feeling despair about the future of our fragile world.
 

The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales

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

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

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

The Durrells of Corfu

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

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

The Borrowers Aloft and Avenged

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

 

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

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

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

A Letter of Mary

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

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

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

Holiday Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Steps To Nanette

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

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

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

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens

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

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

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

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

Some Shall Break

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

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

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