Ambivalent Ambos

The wonderful world of books! You learn new things and visit new places, not accessible in any other way. How grateful you feel.

In this case, for instance, who would have thought that those Blitz ambulances were manned by gay women, and that their private lives & loves would be so vividly documented by the liquid prose of Miss Waters, who has mined the lesbian seam (as it were) so effectively in recent years.

She does write exceptionally well, but this is a long book, over 500 pages, and the last 100 or so pages are quite an effort, the more so as chronologically speaking they are actually the first 100 pages. One was tempted to go back to the beginning and see how it all fits in... as it were.

But this reader proved rather better at resisting temptation than Helen, Julia, Kay, Vivian and the rest.

Carry On Ireland

Maria Joan Hyland was born in London of Irish parents, but her Arts/Law degree from the University of Melbourne surely qualifies her as an Aussie author, particularly if she wins the Booker. Or so the Australia Council must have thought when awarding her the scholarship which supports her to live in Rome these days.

But she won't, not for this one. The 2006 Booker seems to be specialising in odd authorial voices, in this case that of a gangly 11 year Irish child who only gets about 30% of whats going on around him. That trick worked a treat for Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day but here one rapidly tires of the child's obtuseness and obsessions.

Short Black List

Well, the Booker short list was out last week - an event noted rather belatedly on this site due to a quick disconnected flip to Brisbane for the writers festival of which perhaps more later.

Kiran Desai. The Inheritance of Loss - Hamish Hamilton
Kate Grenville. The Secret River - Canongate
MJ Hyland. Carry Me Down - Canongate
Hisham Matar. In the Country of Men - Viking
Edward St Aubyn. Mother’s Milk - Picador
Sarah Waters. The Night Watch - Virago

Hmm. Nice to see Carey omitted, but rather a surprise that Gordimer was overlooked. Aussie firm Text Publishing - one of the very few Australian companies to take literary fiction seriously - can celebrate contributing two authors (Grenville and Hyland) to the list. So two Aussies, two coffee colonials, a Lebanese, the usual liquorice allsorts. Only one member of the traditional British literary aristocracy, St Aubyn (Westminster, Oxford) and even he has had the odd encounter with the dark side.

Suppose there's no escaping finishing the Grenville now, abandoned after the first 60 pages due to its intensely irritating authorial perspective. To be struggled through somehow. But Booker completism will be something of a challenge with the Matar and the St Aubyn not due for publication in Australia until well after the winner is announced

Got it, thanks

Now this is more like it. Give this one the Booker now and save eyestrain.

Gordimer is well known of course, but still something of a discovery. This is her 32nd book, 14th novel. Nobel Prize for literature 1991. The voice is distinctive, but also has echoes of Coetzee – is it a South African cadence, this laconic, incisive, ironic note?

Get a Life is brief – just 187 large font double spaced pages. At around 270 words per page that’s slightly more than 50,000 words. You, dear reader, writing at 1000 words a day, could create something similar in less than 2 months.

Well, perhaps not similar. The same length. For this is writing of the highest quality, elliptical, amusing, insightful and compelling. It’s the tale of an affluent South African professional family – the father a businessman, the mother a lawyer, a son who is an ecology campaigner, married to an advertising executive. They fall in and out of love, acquire children, advance their careers. Just human.

Two plot devices overlay the domestic: in the first, the son develops thyroid cancer in his thirties, requires surgery and then the ingestion of radioactive iodine to ablate the remaining tumour cells. This works. The enforced retreat - while he is ‘hot’ - to his childhood home provides a caesura for reflection, and the inevitable intimations of mortality.

The second revolves around a campaign to save certain ecologically sensitive parts of South Africa from development. This, frankly, doesn’t work as well: it’s dull and repetitive, the issue is presented monochromatically, and one tends to skip forward. It may be possible to write grippingly about the environment, but it doesn’t happen here.

What makes this novel successful, as so often, is the writing. The epigraph is from Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror –

O what authority gives
Existence its surprise?

An unanswerable question, of course, but an engrossing one. Good things and bad things happen to these folk, as good and bad things happen to us all. The soft-shelled carapace of language Gordimer constructs as their ordinary story unfolds creates beauty of its own accord, makes the particular universal, and not only leaves the reader noting, as Donald Rumsfeld did, that stuff happens, but also, as Donald didn’t, wondering why.