Reading Matters

'The Shiralee' by D'Arcy Niland

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 257 pages; 2009.

D'Arcy Niland was an Australian author who wrote six novels, several short story collections, some poetry, radio and television plays, and an autobiography between 1955 and his untimely death in 1969. He was married to New Zealand writer Ruth Park of The Harp in the South trilogy fame.

He was best known for his first novel, The Shiralee, first published in 1955, which went on to become an international bestseller. It was turned into a film, starring Peter Finch, in 1957. But I largely knew it as a TV mini-series, produced in 1987, starring Bryan Brown. I didn't watch the series, because I remember the promotional adverts made it look like mawkish sentimental claptrap, and sadly that put me off ever wanting to read the book.

Turns out that was my loss, because The Shiralee, recently re-issued as a Penguin Modern Classic, is an absolute gem, one of those delicious reads that transports you to another time and place, and makes you hungry to read more of the same thing.

The story is set during the Great Depression (I think -- it's hard to be 100 per cent sure). Macauley is a swagman, an Australian term for an itinerant labourer who travels between jobs largely on foot, carrying a traditional swag (a bed that you roll up) and a tuckerbag (a bag to store food). He even stores his money in "a travelling branch of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company -- an empty golden syrup tin".

As he crosses the byways and highways of rural NSW, Macauley is accompanied by his four-year-old daughter, Buster, whom he initially regards as his "shiralee", a slang word for burden. Six months earlier he "kidnapped" Buster from her city-based mother, when Macauley discovered his wife in bed with another man. Taking Buster was supposed to be a form of punishment, but it seems to have backfired, and his quiet, frugal lifestyle has now become tempered by a little girl who talks too much and slows him down.

And yet, while it's slowly dawning on him that Buster's mother doesn't want her daughter back, Macauley is getting used to the company -- even if he may not want to admit it.

They had walked for two hours, and Macauley couldn't help but observe, as he had been observing, the growing endurance of the little girl. It dragged from him some slight sense of gratification. He wasn't paying out tribute to the child: he was merely feeling the small but positive diminution of responsibility. But it wouldn't be long now. At the end of the third hour and a steadily maintained pace, Buster's feet were scuffling, and she was whinging to be carried.
'Don't kid me,' Macauley said. 'You can go on a bit yet.'
'I can't. I can't,' the kid whimpered desperately.
'Come on.'
Macauley took her hand, and kept going. He felt the tugging weight. It got heavier and heavier. It was not brutality, but purposeful tactics. He stopped them short of the verge of exhaustion. When the child was swaying, leaning back from the mooring of his hand, the legs wobbling, the voice dreeing mournfully while the tears flowed unattended down the crumpled face -- that was when Macauley picked her up.
She was asleep in five minutes, her head on his shoulder.
Pity crept like a little flame into the smoulder of his resentment, but the resentment was too strong for it and it was smothered. Macauley told himself this could not go on. He was vehement.
Yet when he saw emus he had a wish that she could see them; when he saw the wild pigs had been rooting up ground he had an inclination to point it out; and when he came upon a goanna disgorging at his approach a kitten rabbit he had an instinct to wake her up and show her the sight.

The story covers Macauley's and Buster's adventures on the road. To write much more would spoil the enjoyment for others, but it's safe to say there's a few brawls, a run-in with the police and a lot of miserable weather. In fact, you're never quite sure what's going to happen next, and I was surprised, on more than one occasion, at the turn of events. (Note, there are no chapter breaks, so it's almost impossible to put this book down, because there never seems to be a natural point to stop reading.)

It's interesting to get a glimpse of a bygone way of life, particularly given that allowing a child to live such a rough and ready lifestyle today would be tantamount to child abuse. 

There's a wonderful sense of friendship and camaraderie in this book, too, not only between father and daughter, but between the many old friends Macauley meets along the way, as well as the new people he bumps into who think nothing of sharing their food and their shelter. It's certainly a less suspicious era, where people are trusted at face value, and no one thinks twice about picking up strangers wandering along the roadside.

Obviously, The Shiralee is a product of its time, and there's a very light smattering of racist terminology throughout.

But the book has a big heart. It's funny in places and sad in others. It's occasionally tender, occasionally brutal. It's humble, knowing and wise. Sometimes it makes you feel ashamed to be human, at other times it makes you feel proud. And, above all, it makes you wish every book was written like this: forthright, absorbing and genuinely moving. It is never mawkish, never sentimental.

I wanted the book to go on forever because I so enjoyed being in the company of these wonderfully smart and good-hearted people, but when it didn't, I felt like having a good, long howl: it's got a cracker of an emotional ending.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography says the book is about the "responsibility of fatherhood" but I like this description best, because it sums it up perfectly: "Niland's writing reveals a man who was profoundly aware of the paradoxical burdens and vitality of the shiralees which all human beings must carry."

I can't praise The Shiralee enough and look forward to hunting out Niland's back catalogue, sadly all out of print, in the weeks to come.

'The Life of Hunger' by Amélie Nothomb

Fiction/memoir - hardcover; Faber and Faber; 160 pages; 2006. Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside.

When I read Amélie Nothomb's astonishingly profound Sulphuric Acid last September I was intrigued enough to seek out more work by this Belgian author. I managed to track down a slightly battered second-hand copy of The Life of Hunger and mistakenly thought it would be a straightforward account of the author's battle with anorexia (well, with a title like that you would, wouldn't you?). Instead it's a kind of weird hybrid between memoir and fiction (or, as the Faber & Faber website describes it, an "odd memoir-cum-novel") in which Nothomb tells her life story from the age of four to 21.

This isn't as boring as one might expect, because Nothomb lead a fascinating childhood. Her father was a Belgian diplomat, so she got to live in various exotic places around the world. Indeed, she was born in Kobe, Japan, and then went on to live in China, New York, Bangladesh and Laos.

But the one constant in her life -- aside from her elder sister to whom she feels especially close -- is her hunger which is at odds with her personal affluence:

As far back as my memories go, I have always been dying of hunger. [...] I might add that my hunger should be understood in the broadest sense of the word: had it only been hunger for food, it might not have been so serious. But is it possible only to be hungry for food? Is there a hunger of the belly that is not also a sign of a generalised hunger? By hunger, I mean that terrible lack within the whole being, the gnawing void, the aspiration not so much to a utopian plentitude as to simple reality: where there is nothing, I beg for there to be something.

Reading between the lines I suspect that Nothomb's fierce intelligence lead her to feel, think and experience things more deeply that other people. Indeed, by the time she's a teenager her hunger manifests itself in anorexia, which she welcomes because it "kept me in an ice age in which feelings ceased to grow." She adds: "It was a respite: I stopped hating myself."

(In quite a revealing article in The Independent, published in 2006, she's quoted as saying "I'm totally cured. I eat in a strange way, but I enjoy it. Everything became well when I finally understood that I enjoy being hungry. Normally, I only eat in the evening. It's wonderful. It's like an orgy!")

Unfortunately, any deeper exploration of the disease is absent, as Nothomb skips over her two-and-a-half year battle in just a handful of pages. In fact, much of the book is like this. An incident in the sea when she lived in Bangladesh seems so fleeting, so superficial, I'm not sure what to make of it: was she molested by four men, or was she not?

This floating, dream-like quality to the writing is a double-edged sword: beautiful to read but too vague to interpret factually.

There's also a slightly precocious tone to the writing, and I can imagine that probably reflects what Nothomb was like as a child. (There are, in fact, several references to her early intelligence in the book. But the one that stands out most is a teacher at the French Lycee in New York calling Nothomb's mother to say "Your daughter's brain is overdeveloped. Do you think she suffers?")

On the whole, this is a quirky, somewhat off-beat memoir, one that might mean more to those who have read all of Amélie Nothomb's back catalogue, rather than the single volume I have managed to enjoy. I guess that means I just need to read more of her work... and with at least 10 translated into English I won't be short of choices.

'Sulphuric Acid' by Amélie Nothomb

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 127 pages; 2008. Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside.

When it comes to satire and parody, reality television seems ripe for the picking. I'm not a fan of Ben Elton but I read his very funny and clever send-up of Big Brother, entitled Dead Famous, back in 2002 when the genre was rather new and exciting, if a little tasteless. But now, six years down the track, reality television is everywhere.

Although the popularity of Big Brother is on the wane (according to this year's viewing figures the ninth series of the British version of Big Brother was apparently the most unpopular series since it started), our TV screens are still filled with endless variations of this rubbish: I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Strictly Come Dancing, the X Factor, Wife Swap et cetera, et cetera.

How refreshing, then, to find a book that looks at reality television and poses the question, what if we created a show that was so utterly tasteless and so morally outrageous, would anyone watch it?

Belgian author Amélie Nothomb seems to think the answer is yes. In her intriguingly titled Sulphuric Acid, first published in 2005, she creates a reality television show like no other in which Parisians are rounded up on the street, thrown into cattle trucks and taken to a TV studio that has been set up to look like a concentration camp. Here, contestants are forced to live like prisoners, deprived of food and basic human necessities, under the watchful eye of the TV cameras. A select few are elevated to the position of kapo (guard) and are encouraged to be aggressive and mean to the prisoners under their "care".

The show, which is called Concentration, is obviously immoral but the ratings are sky high and viewers are hooked on the dynamic between one of the prisoners, the beautiful Pannonique -- otherwise known as CKZ 114 --  and her guard, the despised Zdena, who regularly beats her.

At times the book is almost too horrific to read. It exposes the ease with which people can turn against their fellow human beings, treating them with brutality and contempt as if their lives were totally worthless. But the book also shows the capacity for human suffering and it is perhaps this aspect I found so chilling.

Nothcomb uses this fable to have a pop at the media, too, but ultimately she reserves her most damning judgment for the viewing public.

Concentration won the total audience: one hundred per cent of the population. The programme was watched by everyone, literally. Blind people, deaf people, priests, nuns, anchorites, street poets, children, newlyweds, pets -- even the rival channels had interrupted their schedules so that their presenters could watch.

The politicians sat in front of their sets, shaking their heads with despair, saying: "It's terrible. We should have intervened." [...]

The height of hypocrisy was reached by those without televisions, who invited themselves round to their neighbours' houses to watch Concentration and wax indignant: "When I see that, I'm glad I haven't got a television!"

This is a blackly funny and provocative read, one that makes no bones about condemning our obsession with reality television and the celebrities it creates. It's ultimately very shocking, and some may find it too twisted, too dark, for their liking. Still, it's hard not to admire an author who, in just 127 pages, is capable of packing such a powerhouse punch using nothing more than elegant, bare-boned prose and a strong moral compass.

'Eros Unbound' by Anais Nin

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Classics; 112 pages; 2007.

Anais Nin (1903-1977) is mainly known as a diarist, publishing a series of personal journals spanning 60 years of her life. But she is also one of the world's most famous and finest writers of female erotica.

No surprise then that this book, part of the Penguin Great Loves series, depicts a ripe orange that resembles a woman's breast on the cover. It almost looks too naughty to read...

In fact, it could be argued that this is a very naughty book indeed. Featuring eight sexually-charged short stories, this wafer-thin collection makes for a wonderful introduction to the French-Cuban's work.

According to the blurb, Eros Unbound explores "the nature of sex and the awakening of desire" which is a fitting description for a series of stories that includes everything from an erotic encounter on the beach between two strangers to a naive model slowly discovering her sexuality (on a pommel horse, of all things).

I have to admit that many of the stories contained here were already familiar to me, having read a similar collection (now out of print) in the early 1990s, but re-reading them was like discovering something wicked, but beautiful, all over again. My only quibble is that Nin concentrates less on the story arc and plot development than she does on her sentence construction, so while the writing is sensual and languid the abrupt endings leave you feeling like you've been cut short -- or, to use a terrible sexual pun, as if you've climaxed too early.

Anais Nin is obviously not for everyone. The stories are sensual without being overly raunchy, but there's still frequent references to genitalia and sexual acts that might disturb some readers.

'The Time Traveler's Wife' by Audrey Niffenegger

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 529 pages; 2005.

This magical, extraordinary novel will stay with you long after you have read the final, heart-wrenching page. A book that defies genres (is it science fiction? romance? fantasy?), it's received wide critical acclaim and glowing reviews. And with good reason.

Henry is a librarian who suffers a rare genetic disorder in which his chronological clock periodically resets itself. This means he can travel backwards and forwards in time, without warning.

And so, during one of these "episodes", when he is 36, he meets six-year-old Claire, his future wife, in a field behind her family home. What ensues is a love story like no other.

When he is 30, Henry marries Claire, who is 22. But their marriage is constantly under strain because Henry's condition means that he can unexpectedly disappear for quite lengthy periods of time.  During these periods of enforced separation, the lovelorn Claire struggles to come to terms with the fact that her life will never be normal. What keeps her going through all Henry's abnormal absences is her love for him, a love-conquers-all kind of philosophy.

While this might sound like a sappy love story, it is far from that. Despite the unnatural situation in which they find themselves,  Henry and Claire's relationship is one of the more realistic portrayals I have ever read in modern fiction. Because both characters are flawed (especially Henry), they seem especially believable and authentic, which means you can identify with their predicament so much more easily.

This is Niffenegger's first novel. Her writing is accomplished and confident. She takes her readers on a rollercoaster ride through every fathomable human emotion. While the story constantly moves backwards and forwards in time, the transitions never confuse the reader. This is helped by the start of each chapter clearly stating the date and the ages of both characters at that particular moment in time; a simple but important detail that aids comprehension.

All in all, I loved this book. Having thoroughly enjoyed the journey it took me on, I was very sad when it came to an end.

Niffenegger is an enormous talent, and I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next.