A colleague at work
asked me a while ago how many books I’d read in a year. I replied that it was
‘a lot,’ and that I’d never really counted properly before. So, these
bi-monthly entries are that attempt, a record of the books I’ve read this year
with commentary and thoughts on the patterns, the images, the styles that I
come across.
Perhaps the first
truly noteworthy piece I read in this instalment was This Year’s Ashes, a play produced by Griffin Theatre Company in November
2011, written by Jane Bodie. It had received good reviews and I wanted to see
it, but as with many things, time conspired against me and it closed before I
could get a chance to find an evening to go. There’s something about reading
plays that I find wonderful: on one level, I see them playing out as if in real
life, like a film I spose, with the scenes being cut together without the
blackout or change in lighting state and or costume that you get in theatre. On
another level, I see them as they might have been performed in the theatre (if
I didn’t see them performed, that is), and I try to imagine how they would’ve
been staged, how it would’ve all worked. And on another level, I look at how
the scenes are ordered, how the characters are written, how the play is
written, how it all works, trying to work out what makes it tick.
With This Year’s Ashes, Bodie takes the genre of the romantic comedy and infuses it with aSydney
vibe, love, loss, grief and cricket. In a decision that had the potential to spin
off in an entirely different direction, she drew a parallel between the five
stages of grieving (see Kübler-Ross’s On
Death and Dying, 1969) and the five tests in a cricket series, particularly
the titular Ashes. Yet on another level, the level pertaining to the grief and
loss, it is a touching story of a young-ish woman losing her father and how she
copes with it (or perhaps doesn’t). The end result is a beautifully
bitter-sweet play which hits the romantic comedy genre for six and, in doing
so, produces a piece which is imbued with a warmth and lived-ness, a sense of
experience and disillusionment and yet a heartfelt tenderness and a desire to
rise, phoenix-like, from the hardship and grow again, get back on the road to
good.
With This Year’s Ashes, Bodie takes the genre of the romantic comedy and infuses it with a
Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies is perhaps my favourite of
his (Brideshead is too long and boring
– and the television series and or film doesn’t help it at all, and it’s been a
while since I read Scoop), and I’m
not sure why. I first read it three years ago when I discovered Stephen Fry had
directed a film of it (the brilliant Bright
Young Things), and I loved it. It’s a bit like Kerouac’s On The Road in its relentless energy and
frivolity, its succession of parties and events which its Bright Young Things,
the up-and-coming cream of society, rapidly lap up. Adam and Nina’s off-again
on-again engagement forms part of the book’s plot, as do the many entertaining
predicaments the Bright Young Tings find themselves in. The film, perhaps more
so than the book, captures this care-free energy perfectly, and its colours and
style leap off the screen, dripping with the decadence and pulse of the 1930s.
(Perhaps daringly, Fry’s adaptation makes the book better, adds a coda onto the
end of Waugh’s novel that not only gives Nina and Adam their ending, but it
also gives us one of my favourite moments in cinema…) It’s so awfully
fun-making and enjoyable that you cannot help but fall into its hypnotic rhythm
of language, parties and the orbit of those bright young things.
I’ve also been reading
a lot of Helen Garner’s fiction as well. Since I read The Children’s Bach (which blew me away completely), I’ve pretty
much devoured the rest of her fiction writing, enjoying most of Cosmo Cosmolino
(rereleased this month) and ‘Honour,’ one half of Honour & Other People’s Children. I think part of the reason I
like her stuff is its honesty and rawness: there’s no bullshit, no waxing
lyrical (like Tim Winton seems to get caught up), no pretention like a lot of
the writing out there; it just is what it is and if you don’t like that then so
be it. Last time, I talked about The
Children’s Bach and its rhapsodic musical nature, its gentle rhythm of
life, the relationships between characters and families, old friends and former
lovers. After a while, you begin to see and make connections from book to book,
between characters and their names and or traits (both Garner and Kerryn
Goldsworthy talk about the characters named ‘Philip’ in the Oxford Australian
Writers book on Garner’s oeuvre,) and I suppose this was compounded, made
apparent and intriguingly explicit in Alex Jones’ dense and somewhat
deceptively engaging Helen Garner and the
meaning of everything. It is perhaps this glut of Garner that has inspired
a project I’m working on at the moment, a story about relationships and
friends, old lovers and share-houses, long summer days and the intimacy of
thought. (I’d actually love to see a stage play of The Children’s Bach; there’s something in it, something so small
and intimate and human and engaging about it that I think would work
beautifully on stage; just a kitchen, a table, a piano and a view of a backyard
outside the window…)
I said
in the beginning of the first instalment of these that I would avoid books that
have made the awards shortlists and or have won the ‘Big’ awards, like the
Miles Franklin and the Booker, for the simple reason that I think the
pretention that surrounds them is astronomical, that the Names of the authors
often cloud true judgement (how many times has Tim Winton won the Miles
Franklin and his books been lackluster?) and that the books are generally
disappointing reading. Foal’s Bread
by Gillian Mears was one such recent book. I read the reviews of it (which were
ecstatic), and read most of the first chapter in Dymocks and fell in love with
it (these pages can be found here, at Allen&Unwin’s website). But as I read the rest
of it, plodding my way through the book’s three hundred odd pages, I felt like
I was losing an uphill battle – the writing was hard to get, syntax was
awkward, and while I understand it could have been an attempt to evoke time and
place, the speech patterns of mid-twentieth century rural New South Wales
seemed at times to be another language.
On the
converse side, the book awards I do trust and the ones that by and large get it
‘right,’ are The Australian/Vogel Award and the Sydney Morning Herald Best
Young Australian Novelists Award, announced each May, the latter as part of the
Sydney Writers’ Festival. These books – some of which have won the Vogel one
year, and the SMH award the next – are often beautifully written, haunting in
their deceptive simplicity and just good literature. Each year, I try to read
the four books (not always with a one-hundred-percent – or even a fifty percent
– success rate, but I try), and I think that besides being a good indicator of
interesting and creative writing, the awards actually signpost some of the best
literature that comes out of this country’s ‘younger’ writers. This year, the
Vogel winner was Eleven Seasons by
Paul D. Carter, about a football-mad boy growing up in Melbourne
One of
these days I’ll get around to reading Anna
Karenina.
What I’ve read this year,
part three
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
The Pirates! In An Adventure With Whaling, Daniel Defoe
This Year’s Ashes (play), Jane Bodie
Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby
Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh
The Rime of the Modern Marnier, Nick Hayes
The feel of steel, Helen Garner
The Children’s Bach, Helen Garner (again)
Helen Garner and the meaning of everything, Alex Jones
Cosmo Cosmolino, Helen Garner
The Lost Dog, Michelle de Kretser
Foal’s Bread, Gillian Mears
Lovesong, Alex Miller
Eleven Seasons, Paul D. Carter
Simultaneously posted by me at http://thespellofwakinghours.tumblr.com/post/23597317734
No comments:
Post a Comment