Lincoln in the Bardo

I was scared to read Lincoln in the Bardo, even though I'd relished George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Mind you, that book was a very different beast, a lively and insightful discussion of short stories by Russian masters. I'd heard that Lincoln was difficult, weird, experimental, incomprehensible. Google produced links like, are you intimidated to read Lincoln in the Bardo? what is the point of Lincoln in the Bardo? George Saunders explains how to read Lincoln in the Bardo... No wonder I was wary!

So actually reading Lincoln in the Bardo was a wonderful surprise. It's hugely readable, not that long, absorbing, thrilling, startling and moving -- not what I was expecting at all! It's composed of a chorus of voices, mostly of the dead, the remaining unsatisfied spirits of corpses sharing a graveyard where Lincoln's young son has been recently interred, including Lincoln's son himself. It's based on an apparently true incident where Abraham Lincoln visited the body of his son after his interment, which is terribly sad, and the book is sad, but it's also hilarious, jarring and joyful as we enter the consciousness of these ghosts and commune with them. They all, as ghosts do, have unfinished business, which is expressed physically in their distorted appearance -- perhaps floating and revolving like a compass needle, or growing extra eyes and hands, or discomfited by an enormous penis.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an extraordinary novel and I'm so glad I finally summoned up the courage to tackle it.  It was exciting to read, and I don't often get that feeling from novels anymore.

The Mushroom Tapes

Like a lot of people, I was mesmerised (somewhat against my will) by the Erin Patterson case, in which Patterson poisoned her in-laws and her estranged husband's aunt and uncle with death cap mushrooms in a Beef Wellington. Something about the bizarre horror of the crime combined the intimate, domestic, relatable setting of a lunch party with relatives was irresistibly fascinating. Plus friends of mine lived for several years in Korumburra, where the victims all came from, so I have a feel for the geography.

Marry the subject matter with three of my favourite Australian non-fiction writers in Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, and you'll understand why I was so impatient for The Mushroom Tapes. It's a pretty loose format: the three writers discuss the court case, often in the car on the long drive to and from Morwell, or over a bakery lunch during breaks in the proceedings. They have all written about crime, they are all interested in what they call 'the rent in the social fabric' that murder creates, they are all curious about why Patterson did what she did, and in the character and demeanour of the witnesses -- not just Ian Wilkinson, the sole survivor of the lunch, or Simon, Erin's ex-husband, who was also invited (and, as we learned after the trial, had been the victim of poisoning attempts by Erin previously), but by the police and doctors and forensic experts who give service to the justice system by giving evidence.

All three women fret about their own motives, as well as speculating about Patterson's. Are they really superior to the gleeful gawkers who fill the courtroom day after day, the jostling photographers, the media scrum that fills the motels of the town? They talk about 'bearing witness,' but perhaps at the end of the day they really are no more honourable than someone like me who dashed out to buy this book to find out if they had any insights that I hadn't come up with myself, to chew over the banal grudges and passionate resentments that might lead someone to kill, to wonder if I could ever act that way. What separates Patterson from the rest of us? This is the fundamental question that Garner, Krasnostein and Hooper come back to again and again, and while it's fascinating and intriguing to see what they make of it, in the end they can't answer that question any more than I can.
 

Wish for a Pony and The Summer of the Great Secret

 

Total comfort reading here: Monica Edwards' first two books in the Romney Marsh series, Wish for a Pony and The Summer of the Great Secret, from 1947 and 1948 respectively. I can't tell you why, but I was absolutely in love with these books as an eight or nine or ten year old growing up in the Highlands of PNG. I know now that the Romney Marsh books are widely beloved by ladies of, ahem, a certain age, as attested by the fact that Girls Gone By have reprinted several of the titles, which I have duly sought out and bought -- but it's these two first stories that captured my heart (there were later books in the Mt Hagen library, but I wasn't impressed when boys came into it).

 

Perhaps it was the rock solid friendship between Tamzin and Rissa that appealed to me -- I used to put myself to sleep at night imagining I was their friend, too, and that we all had adventures together. Perhaps it was the pony content; of course I wanted a pony, but not in any realistic way. Perhaps it was the very staid English village setting; perhaps it was the glamour of film-making in the second book, which tied in with the Noel Streatfeild books I was also addicted to. In fact, there is a lot going on in the second book, which was the one I loved most -- smuggling, making a film, pony stuff, and the intertwined story of Lesley, the original owner of Tamzin's pony Cascade, who can no longer walk after a riding accident (don't worry, there's a happy ending).

 

I used to know The Summer of the Great Secret so well that when I borrowed it from the library I wouldn't even need to read it; I'd stash it under my pillow as a talisman and never even open it. By the time I got to it, it had lost its cover, so I never knew it looking as it does above, just with a plain blue hardcover from the Seagull Library, which is the same copy that I have since acquired. I can't put my finger on why these books bewitched me so thoroughly, but they will always have a special place in my heart. 

A Very Peculiar Practice: The New Frontier

I've just seen this book listed on Amazon for over $200! Suffice to say, I picked it up from Brotherhood Books for considerably less than that...

A Very Peculiar Practice was a BBC drama/comedy/satire that I was addicted to in the 1980s, principally because my darling Peter Davison starred in it, following his stints in All Creatures Great and Small and of course Dr Who. AVPP was written by Andrew Davies, who also adapted Pride and Prejudice as well as many other TV series (Middlemarch, War & Peace). I think AVPP was his only original series. It only lasted two seasons, and this is the novelisation of the second one.

It was a weird show, with eccentric characters and a touch of surrealism, like the unexplained presence of two nuns flapping mysteriously around the campus. Davison starred as thoroughly nice Dr Stephen Daker, working in the medical centre of Lowlands University, alongside truculent Bob Buzzard, gloomy Jock McCannon, and smoothly terrifying feminist Rose Marie. Some of their catchphrases still echo in my brain, forty years on -- the pissant swamp, as a woman, rude nasty girl. 

Alas, evil Vice-Chancellor Jack Daniels' plan to eviscerate the university and convert it to a weapons development facility, which used to seem like wild satire, is now closer to business as usual for higher education. And I'm not sure how I feel abut Davies' going all meta, with his character of Ron Rust, who wanders the campus writing a TV series about a university for the BBC...

A Very Peculiar Practice was a trip down memory lane. I still have illegal videotapes of the show somewhere -- but sadly, no machine to watch them on!
 

Fire Country

Fire Country by Victor Steffensen was a birthday present from one of my daughters. I was aware of Steffensen's name and I might have even heard him speak on the radio about Indigenous fire management, and I suspect this 2020 book was the thing that brought him onto the national radar. 

Fire Country was the third book I've read in a row that argues for paying close attention to the land, this time our own country of Australia. Steffensen tells a wonderful story of how he was educated by two elders, who passed on their knowledge to him, and how he himself now shares that traditional knowledge in fire workshops, lectures and demonstrations. He makes a powerful argument for nuanced and careful management of Country; different kinds of vegetation demand different times for burning, and need to be judged individually, according to when the land and the plants hold the right amount of moisture to allow cool, limited burning. It makes a nonsense of holding 'controlled' fuel reduction burns on a set date of the year, or trying to burn off a huge area. 

It's clear that regular, cool, closely supervised burning was the traditional way that First Peoples kept Country healthy, and that we have allowed that careful management to lapse. It just makes so much sense to reintroduce traditional wisdom to what Steffensen describes, heart-breakingly, as 'sick' country -- scarred by the inferno of bushfire, overrun by weeds, choked by dead vegetation. And it's also heart-breaking to read about the pushback from white bureaucracy that Steffensen has had to battle along the way.

Fire Country, like Wild Hares & Hummingbirds and English Pastoral, asks us to reconnect with the land on which we live, to watch it closely and treat it with respect -- not leave it to its own devices, but help it achieve and maintain health, diversity and all kinds of flourishing life.
 

The Making of Martha Mayfield

Jo Dabrowski's second middle grade novel, The Making of Martha Mayfield, has done the rounds of my book group and been universally loved. Coming from a group of children's authors and librarians, this is praise worth having! I've now joined the chorus of acclaim for this lovely, funny, sweet story. As fellwo author Kirsty Murray remarked, it's not easy to write this kind of everyday, realist book for kids and make it thoroughly engaging as well as compassionate and thoughtful.

Martha is shy and introverted; she is also creative and observant. She makes paper models of people and 'sets' in shoe boxes (my daughter used to make rooms in shoe boxes, too) and practices awkward situations in her bedroom; but when it comes to real life,  the conversations rarely go as planned. Elections for school captain are coming up and Martha has a perverse desire to show everyone that school captains don't always have to be the same kind of outgoing, confident people who usually win these contests. There are setbacks and inspirations, and Martha's family are facing their own challenges.

This is a beautiful, layered book about identity and courage and creativity -- not just making things, but also thinking in original ways. I really hope The Making of Martha Mayfield gets the recognition it deserves in the CBCA awards next year.
 

A Gentleman in Moscow

The ABC Radio National book countdown reminded me about Amor Towles' 2016 A Gentleman in Moscow, which had been on my radar for a while. It was very popular at my libraries, but I've finally got hold of it. The premise is a cute one: in the early years of the Russian Revolution, Count Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in the Hotel Metropol (a real place), and spends the next thirty-odd years within the confines of the building, maintaining his aristocratic cheerfulness, making friends with the staff (and eventually becoming head waiter) and even adopting a daughter.

I hadn't anticipated how much Towles' novel would remind me of Eva Ibbotson. Not just because of the Russian setting, but because of the gentle humour and whimsy which is such a hallmark of Ibbotson's writing. A Gentleman in Moscow is a fable; even the KGB operate off-screen, as it were. It's as if the hotel acts as a lovely bubble, protecting us, the readers, as well as Rostov, from the outside world. I assume Towles did his research, but I was surprised that the hotel managed to function with so little disruption during the tumultuous years of communist revolution, war, and Stalin's purges. Rostov glides through these pages, unruffled and courteous, charming and cogitating.

If you're looking for a gritty account of Russia's history, this is probably not the novel for you. But if you're yearning for a fun, sweet romp set in an international hotel, with a delightful protagonist, A Gentleman in Moscow will fit the bill. 

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds

I have to confess, I bought Stephen Moss's Wild Hares and Hummingbirds purely on the strength of this lovely cover art (by Hannah Firmin). It's subtitled The Natural History of an English Village, and it's a simple but pleasing concept: Moss recounts the comings and goings of seasonal birds, animals, insects (the 'hummingbirds' of the title are actually hummingbird moths) and plants within a small parish in Somerset. The book is divided into twelve chapters, one for each month, beginning and ending in deep winter.

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. 

English Pastoral

After reading James Rebanks' The Place of Tides, I remembered there was another book of his that I hadn't yet read: English Pastoral. I'm so glad that I hunted it down (thanks, Athenaeum) because it's one of the best books I've read this year.

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.

A Morbid Taste for Bones

I first remember seeing a Brother Cadfael book when an overnight guest left one in my share house bedroom in 1988, but I've never got around to reading one (there are twenty books in the series!). A Morbid Taste for Bones is the very first one, published in 1977. The wonderful thing about writing books set in the twelfth century is that they don't date at all, or at least, this volume of Ellis Peters' murder mysteries hasn't. There are strong female protagonists, there is sex, there are recognisably eccentric characters, but there is plenty of strangeness about the medieval world, too, including the overwhelming power of the church, a fairly rough system of justice, and the accepted rhythms of agricultural life.

Brother Cadfael is a very attractive character, and I was pleased to see that Derek Jacobi had a go at portraying him on TV -- he seems like perfect casting. Cadfael is a monk, but he has a rich secular past -- he's known women, he's fought in the Crusades and been exposed to other cultures, he is worldly and shrewd. The plot of A Morbid Taste for Bones was a lot of fun, focusing on in particular on the politically ambitious Prior Robert and the ecstatically holy Brother Columbanus, whose performative visions cause Cadfael to roll his eyes. The tussle over the bones of neglected Welsh saint Winifred leads to bloodshed, but luckily Cadfael is around to set all to rights.

I enjoyed this book a lot and the person who recommended Brother Cadfael to me as perfect comfort reading was right on the money.
 

Demystifying Therapy

As well as being a sucker for books of popular science, I am a sucker for books of pop psychology, so I pounced on this intriguing-looking volume when it appeared on Brotherhood Books. Alas, this was not what I was expecting -- Ernesto Spinelli's Demystifying Therapy is aimed at practitioners of therapy, not laypersons or prospective or past clients. Which is not to say that it was uninteresting -- at the very beginning of the book, Spinelli poses the question, what is therapy? It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. And why does it work?

Uncontroversially (to me, anyway) Spinelli concludes that the most important element of therapy is the relationship between therapist and client, not the school of therapy to which the therapist adheres or the method they use. Well, der! Spinelli writes entertainingly about his own reaction of outrage and even anger when a client comes to a moment of insight on their own, rather than prompted by him -- I found this particularly interesting because I think I had a similar experience with a shrink once upon a time.

Demystifying Therapy was written over thirty years ago, long before the appearance of online or AI therapy services, but I couldn't help wondering, if Spinelli is right, and the relationship is the crucial thing that makes therapy work, how can AI possibly replicate that? Mind you, these days people are falling in love with AI companions, so what do I know.
 

Why Are We Like This?

Another recommendation via the Radio National book countdown -- Robin Williams, the long time host of The Science Show, which I've been listening to on a Saturday morning for as long as I can remember, suggested Why Are We Like This? by Zoe Kean, who has worked as a science journalist with the ABC, so there might be a touch of nepotism here! I do enjoy a spot of popular science, and Kean writes in a clear, lively style that meant that I understood almost all the science she was explaining.

Why Are We Like This? poses some big questions about human behaviour and genetic heritage: why do we have sex? Why do we sleep? Why do we age? and more, and takes an evolutionary approach to nutting out the answers. Not all these questions are solved, and Kean does a great job of setting out the various scientific debates, as well as honestly letting us know her own opinion. It shows science as an area of energetic but respectful conflict, motivated by curiosity and the advance of knowledge, which is something unspeakably valuable in these times where science is being ruthlessly devalued and misunderstood. We need many more books like these and many more writers like Zoe Kean who can help dumdums like me grope towards a rough comprehension of what science does, as well as its hard-won conclusions.
 

Bel Canto

Ann Patchett's 2001 Bel Canto came onto my radar through the Radio National Top 100 Books of the 21st century; it ended up at number 64, but the description of the story made it sound a lot more interesting and quite different from what I'd expected. 

This is a juicy, layered, rewarding novel. In an unnamed South American country, guerilla fighters storm an event at the Vice Presidential mansion and take hostage all the party guests -- most of the women and all the staff are then released, apart from the famous American opera singer Roxane Coss. Because the guests are from a variety of countries, everyone relies heavily on the Japanese translator, Gen. It turns out that the guerilla soldiers are mostly teenagers, with a couple of girls among them, including the very beautiful Carmen. Inevitably, as days of captivity turn into months, bonds start to form across the divide between the guerillas and their prisoners, and Roxane's music binds them together into a kind of dreamy trance-world. Of course the ending, when it comes, is shattering.

I don't think I've read any of Ann Patchett's novels before, but now I understand why she is such a popular and respected writer. At least in Bel Canto, she treads the line between literary and popular fiction perfectly.
 

Charlotte Sometimes

I was so riled up by Ian McEwan's dismissal of children's books as not proper literature that I pulled out an old favourite to see if it would stand up to scrutiny. Penelope Farmer's 1969 masterpiece, Charlotte Sometimes, is less than 200 pages long, and yet it packs a punch more powerful than some novels twice the length. Every time I read it, it seems darker: the dank November weather, the austere boarding school corridors, the grieving Chisel Brown family in their cold dark house, in mourning for their soldier son, the neglected Japanese garden -- it all adds up to an eerie, haunting story, quite apart from the creepiness and gnawing anxiety of Charlotte's helpless swap with Clare from 1918.

Charlotte Sometimes is an evocative exploration of identity, fragmentation and fate. In some ways, it's a very small story -- at first, only Charlotte and Clare are aware of what's happened to them as they mysteriously swap places, though later Clare's sister Emily and Charlotte's friend Elizabeth also learn the secret. The sinking horror when Charlotte realises that she is trapped in the past, because of adult whims, and her utter helplessness to change the fact, is genuinely terrifying. Not much happens: Charlotte and Emily try unsuccessfully to get Charlotte into the magical bed one night, they gatecrash the Chisel Brown's seance, they are caught up in street celebrations at the end of the war -- but none of these events directly change the narrative. By denying agency to the protagonist, Charlotte Sometimes seems to break every rule of writing for children; perhaps this is what makes it stand out as genuine literature!

One of the absolute classics of the time-slip tradition, Charlotte Sometimes remains as vivid and disturbing as ever.
 

The Daydreamer

 

Take a look at this cover. What kind of book do you think this is? A horror novel? Some kind of weird erotic adult furry fantasy? No, it's a children's book. I'm pleased to note that later editions dial back the weird and have much more appealing, kid-friendly covers, so someone eventually realised this one was doing them no favours, with the intended readers at least, though I could see Ian McEwan's adult fans picking it up.

I must confess that I did not greet The Daydreamer in the right spirit. For a start, the first sixteen pages are printed twice -- okay, not McEwan's fault, but it's sloppy (I expect better from Vintage). But then, get this -- from the Preface:

We all love the idea of bedtime stories... But do adults really like children's literature? I've always thought the enthusiasm was a little overstated, even desperate... Do we really mean it, do we really still enjoy them, or are we speaking up for, and keeping the lines open to, our lost, nearly forgotten selves? ... What we like about children's books is our children's pleasure in them, and this is less to do with literature and more to do with love.  

Well, I respectfully disagree, Ian. And how is the gall of the man, to say this with such confident authority, in the preface of a book written for children? He may as well say, kids' book are crap, here's a crap book I've written, hope you like it. It all reinforces my view that this first edition at least, was pitched  squarely at adult readers of McEwan, not children themselves.

The Daydreamer is not bad. Peter has an active imagination and he finds himself caught up in all sorts of hypothetical situations. Three of the seven stories involve body swaps: with a cat, a baby and an adult. In other adventures, he makes his family disappear with vanishing cream, tricks a burglar and defeats a school bully (using cruelty rather than violence -- though he feels bad about it afterwards). Because this is Ian McEwan, there is a definite creepy undertone to some of the stories, especially the one where his sister's dolls come to life. But the final story, where Peter finds himself suddenly grown up and in love, doesn't seem aimed at children but at nostalgic adults, and I suspect the whole book was really written from this point of view.