Reading Matters

'To The Islands' by Randolph Stow

Fiction - paperback; University of Queensland Press; 208 pages; 2002.

Randolph Stow was an Australian writer who achieved great literary success in his early years. When he was just 22 he won the the 1958 Miles Franklin Award for To The Islands and the ALS Gold Medal, for the same book, in 1959. In 1978 he won the Patrick White Award. But ask the average Australian who is, or better still ask them to name the title of one of his books, and you will probably be greeted with a blank face.

Perhaps it doesn't help that Stow only wrote a handful of novels and that he emigrated to the UK circa 1970, effectively turning his back on the Australian literary scene. But it seems such a shame that a man who could craft such amazing fiction, including his mesmirising The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (which I read twice last year I loved it so much) could fall into relative obscurity so quickly.

I read To The Islands not long after I heard that Stow had died of liver cancer, here in the UK, in late May. (The news story of his death, published in The Australian, is very touching, but the comments are particularly telling of how dearly he was held in the affection of so many.)

It's an astonishing read, not least because he was just 22 when he wrote it (and this, I have to point out, was not his first novel, but his third). It's not only ambitious in scope, but there's a wisdom to the story that belies his years. That the book is largely told through the eyes of an ageing Anglican missionary confronting his own inner demons seems a remarkable work of imagination and daring for one so young.

Stow's carefully studied observations about the relationships between white Europeans and Aboriginals are also particularly perceptive. That may not be too surprising given he did spend some time working as a storeman on an Anglican mission in the far north of Western Australia immediately after graduation, but even so, he has captured the fear, violence and misunderstanding between blacks and whites incredibly well, and he has not been afraid to cast a light on some of the darkest, most gruesome events, in Australian history.

The story, as you may have gathered, is set on a remote mission in the Western Australian outback in 1957. Here, the Church of England provides lodging, employment and medical care for aboriginals, a race which has few civil rights  ("Someday we all be citizens, eh, brother?" quips one aboriginal to one of the brothers in an early scene) and is forbidden to drink alcohol. (In the preface to my edition, Stow points out that alcohol did not become a problem until the 1970s.)

An ageing missionary, Stephen Heriot, has ruled the mission for decades. One of the younger missionaries, Helen, describes him as "stone and iron" and "impassive, accustomed through decades to deal with wooings, marriages, disputes".

But when Rex, a troublesome aboriginal, returns to the mission, Heriot is determined to have him banished. Younger members of the mission are less sure about sending him away ("It begins to look a bit like victimisation," Way warns him; "He not a bad man, Rex. You don't give him no chance," says a fellow aboriginal, Richard.)

But one wild night, in the middle of a storm, Heriot believes he may have killed Rex. Full of remorse, he flees the mission on horseback, taking a rifle and a box of cartridges with him. What follows is a kind of adventure story, in which Heriot, confronted by the enormity of the unexplored wilderness around him, begins to experience a spiritual awakening. Meanwhile, his fellow missionaries try to track him down, convinced that Heriot plans to kill himself...

There's no getting away from the fact that this is a quintessential Australian story. Stow's descriptions of the landscape are always beautiful and, for this expat Australian, homesick-inducing. But even if you have never been to Australia, Stow has a way of conjuring the beauty of the surroundings that will make you feel like you have walked the terrain, smelt the eucalyptus, swum in the creeks and billabongs, seen all the amazing wildlife around you.

From the water flagged with lily leaves, lilies flowering among them, birds rose in sudden stages with a clatter of wings. Ibis and white cranes climbed slowly, wild ducks wheeled, and returned, and flew off again. Geese trailed their long cry over the plain, a single black jabiru following.

Before they had gone the children were already in the water, floundering among the lilies, crying to one another of the coolness of it and of its richness in ducks and flowers. The small children danced naked in the shallows with shining skins. The others, in brief pants, some girls in their dresses, dolphined among the lily stems.

It's interesting, too, to see how prescient Stow's views are on race relations given he penned the novel more than 50 years ago. I particularly liked this exchange between Heriot and one of his fellow missionaries, Way:

"As they [the aboriginals] lose simplicity they lose direction. So, what are we going to do with them? Who's going to teach them trades, give them confidence in themselves? Drive them out of this inertia they fall into now their pride's grown enough to make them want above everything to have some sort of competence. I don't know the answers."
"We're promised a technical school, some day, somewhere within a hundred miles."
"I wish it well," said Heriot. "And you. Because you're coming to the most heartbreaking phase in the history of this problem."
"We'll do our best, I hope."
"I hope," echoed Heriot, and looked at Way, that capable middle-aged man, reflectively and approved him. "You've time, I think, to see enormous changes, perhaps the end of physical misery among them, as the old ones die out in the way we old ones do. But in the end you'll have something else to face - misery of the mind. And that will be the hardest, Way."

This is a fascinating novel, one that can easily be read in one sitting, although I think it probably requires at least two read-throughs to fully come to grips with all the ideas presented. Many literary critics have dubbed it a "masterpiece" and I can see why.

As an aside, I read the "very slightly abridged" 1982 edition (which was republished by UQP in 2002) and not the original. Stow says he revised it because it contained "many faults, due partly to immaturity, but more to the fact that my technical competence was not equal to my ambition, which in retrospect makes me realise how horizons narrow in middle age". (The great Irish writer John McGahern did much the same with his 1974 novel The Leavetaking for similar reasons, so he's in good company. And, if I'm honest, there's much about Stow's work that reminds me of McGahern.)

Stow also claims to have cut out some of the Christian mission-station propaganda involving a "good deal of talk by the white characters about their difficulties and hopes, and even a very tepid love-interest, introduced not for its own sake but to suggest that at least two Europeans would remain committed to the Mission".

Sadly, To The Islands seems to have fallen out of print, although you might score a very cheap second-hand copy on Amazon Marketplace if you are lucky.

For another take on the same novel, please read Lisa Hill's review on ANZ LitLovers LitBlog.

'The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea' by Randolph Stow

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 408 pages; 2008.

I loved this book so much I read it twice. First, in March, then again last week. And on both occasions I found myself falling in love with the story and wishing it would never end. I'm sure I could read it a third time (a fourth time, a fifth time... you get the idea) and not grow sick of it. It's one of those beautiful stories that's easy-to-read but if you dig a little deeper you'll unravel layers of meaning.

Essentially the book, which was first written in 1965, is a coming-of-age story. It is set in Geraldton, Western Australia, where the author, who now lives in England, was born. Although my Penguin Modern Classics edition claims it is "not a self portrait" there's no mistaking The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea's semi-autobiographical roots. It has a truly authentic feel for the time and the place, and it's easy to find yourself entirely immersed in this world, smelling the eucalyptus wafting on the breeze and feeling the hot sand of the beach between your toes.

It's a beautiful, somewhat nostalgic look at what it was like to grow up in one of the most remote areas on the planet, sandwiched between the desert and the Indian ocean, at a time when the Second World War was raging in Europe, and the Japanese were getting closer and closer to invading Australian soil. When the story opens in 1941 the Japanese have yet to bomb Darwin (that happens in February 1942) but the threat feels very real.

Young Rob Coram is just six years old and his life revolves around school, playing at the beach and avoiding his younger sister, Nan. His father, a quiet, solitary man, is stationed at the local garrison and plays little part in his life, and even less so when the family is evacuated to the rural hinterlands. It is here that we are introduced to Rob's favourite cousin, Rick, who at 20 years old has given up his law studies to join the Army. Rob is devastated.

The book follows both their lives over the next eight years and is divided into two parts: "Rick Away 1941-1945" and "Rick Home 1945-1949".

It's the second part which is probably more moving of the two, because Rick's time as a prisoner of war in Mandalay has scarred him psychologically and he finds it difficult to readjust to normal life. When Rob hears someone describe his beloved cousin as "immature" he adds it to a catalogue of offences in which "everything was wrong with Rick" :

Rick was immature.
He was lazy.
He was a narcissist.
He used dirty language. [...]
He talked like Hitler about the Bomb.
He fainted.
He cried in his sleep, and when he had got drunk at Andarra on New Year's Eve.
He had stayed at the very bottom of the Amy.
He had given up his campaign ribbons, &c., to a kid in the street as soon as he got them.
He had not given his campaign ribbons, &c., to Rob.

The prose style is simple and perfectly encapsulates the mindset of the boy. It's incredibly poetic in places, not surprising given Stow's career (he's had much poetry published), and his beautiful descriptions of the landscape and the changing seasons, are reminiscent of Irish writer John McGahern:

The dark grey berry-bushes on the vacant land grew green and soft-looking, and put out small, mauve-tinged flowers. Then spring came, loud with bees, and the red berries formed, and in many yards were yellow flowering cassias. When the petals fell, the flowers turned into writhing green snakes full of seeds.
The peppertrees bloomed. At Sandalwood the olives drizzled continually, the little green-white flowers and unformed fruit whispering down.
In the early mornings the harbour was polished like a blue mirror.

The merry-go-round is a recurring motif, symbolising the unity of the family and the circle of life, two themes the book revolves around (yes, pun intended). Indeed, the beauty of the story is following Rob's transformation from the naive young boy who thinks the mast of a wrecked ship out at sea is a merry-go-round despite his mother's claims to the contrary. (It's only when he manages to swim out to the wreck with a friend as a teenage boy that you, the reader, realise he's grown up and the emotional impact of this, at least for me, cannot be underestimated.)

The story deals with other themes in varying degrees, including what it is to be Australian and whether it is possible to outgrow your country; the differences between a city and rural upbringing; isolation and belonging; boyhood and adulthood; family and loneliness; war and peace.

It's not a perfect novel (there are occasional clunky "bits" and some of the ideas and attitudes presented, especially towards aboriginals and the Japanese, are dated and offensive), but it's a highly readable, entertaining, often funny and incredibly moving story. I'm grateful to Penguin for bringing it back into print because this is the kind of book that deserves a wider audience. I can only hope that they might do the same to Stow's remaining back catalogue.