Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy and the challenge to moral thinking; or Towards a Systems’ Theory view of Subjectivity.

Every now and then a book comes along that you know will change your life. You may not know how, exactly, but the reading of it touches you in a way so profound, resonates so deeply inside you, that you recognize at once it will become part of your “soul”, for want of a better word, part of your being.

Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy is such a book for me.

For those who haven’t heard of what’s it’s about, I’ll state it briefly. It’s about a boy from an impoverished background in a dystopian contemporary state in Eastern Europe – identified later as Moscow – who is abandoned and finds himself taken in and nurtured by a pack of city-living feral dogs. It was inspired by real-life stories of a dog-nurtured boy and how he was found and “rescued” back into society. Romochka is the name Hornung gives the boy in this book.

I read Dog Boy some weeks ago for part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge and was so rocked by it I wondered how I would begin to review it; I began to think the subject was too big. It was only the prompting yesterday by Sue T from Whispering Gums that made me decide at last to tackle it. Though tackle isn’t the right word. Engage with it. Engage, celebrate, ponder, muse, discuss, extend, subject myself once again to its magic, its tragedy, the challenge it presents to me to think on, feel and embody what it means to be human, what it means to have been touched by – and to love – a species that is not my own.

So this is more than just a review, if it is one at all. I’m still uncertain which blog it belongs to: this “review blog” or my personal one. Because, rather than discuss elements of the story – although they are intrinsic to what I have to say – I have allowed myself the freedom to weave in and around what this story means to me, the way it writes me, the way it helps me to interpret aspects of my own history. If the personal impact of a story isn’t what interests you and you’re looking for a more traditional review, I suggest you skip this and check out what notable Australian bookbloggers Whispering Gums (positive) and AnzLitLovers (not convinced) have written about Dog Boy.

If you’re still here, please bear with me as I grope my way along and try to articulate why this book so touched me.

Anyone who has loved and been loved by a dog will not fail to be deeply moved by Dog Boy. My own history with dogs is fraught. At the age of eighteen months, I witnessed the horrific mauling of my older brother, a three-year-old toddler, by a German Shepherd. My brother’s face was savaged; his cheek required 24 stitches. I don’t remember the event; I remember the emotional aftermath and the stories told and retold to explain the jagged pink scar on my brother’s face. My father got into a fight with the owner of the dog and was charged with assault. At the time, my mother was pregnant with her ninth child, the eldest only just turned eleven. For most of my childhood, I feared dogs, big dogs especially, associating them with a visceral fear of violence.

So when our family finally got a dog – a sprightly terrier named Injun – I didn’t warm to it. I knew other kids loved their dogs and thought I should, too, but I was frightened, even though it was small. It nipped and scratched and yapped and tore my skirt. By then our family was disintegrating and, after some initial excitement, the dog was neglected. Over the years, Injun suffered from mange, grew manic and pined for lack of attention. Its official owner, the brother who had been mauled, left home, abandoning it. My mother, who had grown up on a farm, believed dogs belonged outside, so Injun never became part of the family; it was fed, but given little love. A woman who occasionally cleaned for us eventually took pity and rescued it, taking it to a good home.

That should have been enough. But another dog made its way into our mad family – mad because my father, his behaviour increasingly erratic, had been drinking heavily for years, overwhelmed by the stress of trying to provide for a brood of children that had swollen to twelve, and increasingly disturbed by the mental illness he had never openly acknowledged, though his mood swings, paranoia and violent outbursts certainly made us kids question his sanity. It was a difficult period generally. His own mother was ageing and demented, my mother in and out of hospital with bouts of pneumonia, her own elderly, half-blind, mostly deaf mother an intermittent resident in our household. The new dog’s name was Mutto; she was a stubby-legged cattle-dog, a brick with fur, whose pathological fear of storms amused my father. She came from up north where another older brother had migrated in the seventies along with a generation of hippies.

I did warm to Mutto eventually, but only distantly. She was my dad’s dog and I was glad when he focused his attention on her instead of on us kids who remained at home. His cruelty toward her disturbed me, the way he’d swing her round by her front paws, but I didn’t think to protect her. My father was a big man, and when I finally stood up to him in my own defence, the result was traumatic. I don’t remember how or when Mutto died; just her quivering, shivering, shaking body, the mad scramble of claws on the wooden veranda and her bullish determination to butt through the swing door well before any of us could smell or hear the coming storm.

Fast-forward to adulthood – past the terrible years where my father’s illness erupted into full blown psychosis and tore our family apart – to the time when Dad was finally diagnosed and medicated. For his rehabilitation, my eldest sister bought him another dog, a pretty Border Collie-Kelpie cross with shaggy black fur and rust-tinged ears. Our beloved Peppy.

If it’s true the mental health of an animal reflects the mental health of the family it belongs to, then Peppy’s steadiness and warmth is a sure sign of the healing that occurred within my family once my father was under psychiatric care. But Peppy’s life wasn’t easy. She was my dad’s nurse and companion in many more ways than us adult kids could be. She put up with his occasional cruelty, the way he’d take her paws and make her dance on her hind legs, showing a patience and gentleness that half-convinced me she understood how important it was for him to experience unjudging companionship, loyalty and devotion from another sentient being.

As my father withdrew into himself, distrusting everyone who had sought to protect ourselves against the worst of his illness, it was only Peppy to whom he showed affection. After having been estranged from my dad for years, I finally felt safe to visit, and Peppy would greet me at the gate, her whole body wagging with her tail, pink tongue lolling, lips drawn back in a smile. Slowly under her mute tutelage, I rebuilt the fractured relationship with my father, her unstinting patience teaching me how best to be with him: silent, getting on with the business of helping my mother tend to his and my centenarian grandmother’s needs. In the years I helped nurse him, Dad rarely spoke to me directly – never once used my name. But, just before he died, he responded to my morning greeting with a “G’day, Peppy.”

So what have these memories to do with Eva Hornung’s book Dog Boy and systems’ theory?

In Dog Boy Hornung poses the question: what is it that separates us from the brute? Traditional religion would have us believe it’s free will, the ability to discern good and evil, to reflect on our own choices, to shape our own characters, and to know how – and be willing – to choose the good. Hornung suggests that where we fall on that spectrum of awareness may depend on how “brutishly” we ourselves have been treated. In the story of Romochka, human beings are, by turns, complex and flawed; cruel and compassionate; well-meaning and misguided.  Ultimately, however, Romochka’s treatment by dogs seems far more “human” than the treatment he suffers from members of his own species. So how does Hornung mean for us to understand what elevates humans above the animal?

It is a question that systems’ theory helps to enlighten.

Current thinking on systems’ theory is too broad, complex and subtle a subject for me to attempt to address in an intelligent way here. But it’s a measure of the remarkable nature of our universe, which so often throws up seemingly inexplicable synchronicities – in a quantum manner, perhaps – that just this morning as I woke up in the early hours, pondering how I might discuss this subject in relation to Dog Boy, I switched on the radio and heard a repeat of last night’s broadcast on Big Ideas of the Rollie Busch lecture by Nancey Murphy. Her subject: systems’ theory and the nature of subjectivity; her words found instant resonance with me.

Murphy is a physicist (and Christian) who rejects traditional Christianity’s Platonic dualism between the mind and body. Rather, she sees the “mind” or brain as comprising processes and relationships, with each part influencing and being influenced by the whole in a continuous feedback loop. Human behaviour isn’t pre-determined by our biology, our neurochemistry or genetic make-up, she asserts, nor by our environment. Rather, these elements both influence and are influenced by the behaviour of the system as a whole. While Murphy’s emphasis is on the brain as a complex system, the same thinking can apply to complex systems at all levels, to organs, the body, the family, the community, the state, the nation and the globe. Each can be construed as a system of relationships and processes which create organisms of increasing complexity, where component parts influence and are influenced by the whole.

Significantly, according to Murphy, what distinguishes the human from the animal in a systems’ theory approach is the acquisition of symbolic language which allows humans to learn from and reflect on their behaviour over time. By being able to reflect and choose our response to changes within the complex system of processes and relationships, we gain agency, which in turn creates moral responsibility. And it is this ability to learn, this entry into moral agency which Hornung so graphically and movingly depicts in Romochka’s story.

[Vague spoilers ahead]

By inserting Romochka into a non-human world, Hornung offers us a view of subjectivity that differs from both the dualistic notions of neo-Platonic Christianity, where mind is separated from body, and of Western individualism. In Romochka’s dog-world, each individual is connected to the whole, helping to create a self-supporting, self-regulating organism, the “pack”, which collectively has the intelligence necessary for survival. In Romochka’s identification with and entry into the pack, adoption of its “language”, mores and values, Hornung illustrates a flaw in individualistic notions of subjectivity: without the group, we perish; if we work as a team, nurture the young and vulnerable, individuals may at times be sacrificed, but collectively we survive.

The climax of Dog Boy occurs at the point when Romochka must choose either to abandon the idea of being a dog, one who belongs to a pack that no longer exists, or “go back” into human society. According to Murphy’s thesis, the moral choice he makes in the story is moral, not brutish, because it shows him having learned from the past, from Mamochka’s actions during a lean winter. The decision he makes regarding his pup “brothers” results in an action which, by then, given our empathy with the dog-world, appears to be an act of brutality; yet such is Hornung’s skill in creating this moral dilemma, the act also strikes the reader as a tragic sacrifice, as Romochka recognises that he cannot nurture himself as a dog, nor is he willing to raise the next generation if they cannot be considered his equals, his “pack”, his tribe.

The bigger picture here – and the reason I think Hornung chose to write this story – is the question it poses to humanity. Our world is threatened. Millions of people are dying of hunger, disease, poverty and malnutrition; others are locked up and chained, languishing in prison for their religious and political beliefs. Women are subject to untold violence. Habitats are being cleared; non-human species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate. Billions of plastic bags are manufactured daily, used once and discarded, left to choke our waterways and strangle our marine life. Catastrophic climate change is growing ever more likely. Our traditional ways of seeing our relationship to animals and nature, one of separation, dominion over and exploitation is killing us. Yet we have not been sufficiently educated to realise that we are component parts of a giant, creative, living, intelligent system, and that without those larger systems in balance we place at risk the very things that give us life and sustain us, our food, our water, the air we breathe, let alone the loving relationships among other sentients that makes our souls sing. “It’s all alive,” as the Bioneers say. “It’s all intelligent. It’s all relatives.”

So where is our sense of moral agency and responsibility? If faced with catastrophic conditions that threaten not just our individual survival, but also that of our communities, our species and Earth’s living systems, will we have the emotional intelligence and courage to make sacrifices, to choose tough moral decisions? Or are we so blinded by out-dated notions of what makes us human that we will continue to act like brutes, unable to reflect on our own behaviour, to learn and adapt, respond and change?

You might say it’s a long stretch from Dog Boy to systems’ theory, let alone to a revolutionary project of changing the very basis of how we live. Perhaps it is. Perhaps Hornung’s story is a fable, nothing more. You might suggest that Mamochka’s and Romochka’s decisions are driven by instinct and imitation, not considered reasoning. We, on the other hand, are human, we’re civilised; we’ll know what to do when the crunch comes. Maybe. I hope so. But books like Dog Boy bring these questions alive for me in a way few others have managed – without pessimism, and with such beauty.

And Peppy?

Peppy died when Mum and I spent a week in St Petersburg a few years ago. It was my second visit. I’d been there as a student in the days before Perestroika and I was staggered to find that the Communist propaganda symbols which had once dominated every venue had been swept aside in favour of the gilded iconography of the Russian Tsars. We visited in February with its long dark nights, snow turning to slush in the streets and grey, icy river. We stayed in one of the best hotels on Nevsky Prospekt and were chauffeured around the city by a fur-coated guide and a driver in a limousine. Outside a Russian Orthodox church, where priests chanted the service and men and women queued to kiss an icon of the black virgin, we saw old men begging, communist war veterans with amputated legs, scarfed matrons crouched on blankets offering for sale a meagre bunch of carrots and straggling bunches of herbs; we saw beautiful young women in high heels and glossy leather coats striding by, oblivious to the red-faced survivors of an older generation who had given decades of their lives to a corrupt regime and been left with nothing. We saw stray dogs scrounging for food down darkened allies…

And came home to news of Peppy.

Back then, Dog Boy had already been published. I can’t help thinking that its stark, beautiful prose might have helped me through my grief – the loss of a dog, a friend, a beautiful soul, one last painful link to my father – if only such brilliant books by Australian women were better known.

Dog Boy, Text Publishing 2009

• winner, Fiction category, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, 2010
• shortlisted, Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 2009
• shortlisted, ASL Gold Medal, 2010
• shortlisted, Literary Fiction Book of the Year, ABIA, 2010

A note on Australian ebook pricing craziness:

Dog Boy can be bought as an ebook from Aussie e-platforms: ReadCloud and Booki.sh stores, including:

• Megalong Books ebookstore: $23.95 (my local bookshop in Leura).
• Pages&Pages ebookstore has 2 editions, one for $23.95, another for $32.95.
• Avid Reader ebookstore advertises one edition on their website for $14.95 but notes: “We’re sorry, this book isn’t for sale in your country.”
• Avid Reader has another edition, the same one available from Megalong Books and Pages&Pages, but on sale for $15.80.

(Pages&Pages and Avid Reader bookshops have staff signed up for the AWW2012 challenge and have a AWW challenge tab on their ebookstore webpages.)


Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy and the challenge to moral thinking; or Towards a Systems’ Theory view of Subjectivity. by Elizabeth Lhuede is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at elizabethlhuede.wordpress.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.elizabethlhuede.com.

What’s all the fuss about? Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing.

Recently, I went to my local bookshop, Megalong Books, in Leura, to meet up with author Claire Corbett. I’d met Claire on Twitter and, discovering she was local, gladly accepted her kind offer to sign a copy of her debut novel When We Have Wings for a visitor from Sweden. While waiting, holding a copy of Claire’s novel in my hand, I struck up a conversation with another customer who turned out to be Peter from East Avenue Books, a second-hand bookshop in Adelaide, who was holidaying in the Blue Mountains with his wife Joan.

I asked Peter which books by Australian women were most popular. Without hesitation he said, “Anything by Geraldine Brooks.” Another Australian female author I’d never read.

A few days later I was holidaying at my mum’s and found the book I’d chosen to bring with me was one I’d already read, Tara Moss’s Fetish. As usual, I hadn’t read the back cover blurb, so wasn’t alerted to the mistake by the story summary: I’d picked up a copy from the library solely for the kangaroo on the spine and the “F” in the title. (It was to be my February read in the “Aussie Authors With A Twist” challenge promoted on GoodReads: the “twist” is to match the first letter of the month with a letter in either the author or title: “F: February, Fetish”.)

Not hopeful, I hunted around to see if Mum had any other books by Australian women I could read, and there on the coffee table was Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing,* loaned to her by a friend. For anyone who hasn’t paid attention to the literary scene, Brooks is a one-time foreign correspondent who has settled in the USA on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts. She has won numerous literary prizes for her work, including a Pulitzer Prize for her book March. She’s in that category of authors that I’ve formerly been reluctant to read: an author who gained her reputation overseas and, seemingly as a result of that, earned credibility in the eyes of Australian reviewers and readers, even though her subject matter – in this case, the first Indigenous graduate of Harvard College – is often intensely American in setting, theme and tone.

Or is it? And why should this be important?

One of the complaints about the Miles Franklin Award has been its “Australian” emphasis. The terms of Miles Franklin’s bequest, that the Award be granted to a book of high literary merit that depicts “Australian life in any of its phases”, have often been narrowly construed as demanding an Australian “setting” and strong sense of “place”. The idea that a book might speak of the lives and concerns of Australians and be set entirely in another country – or universe, for that matter – seems anathema to those who interpret those criteria, criteria which, I guess, were originally selected as part of an effort to champion Australian writing, to free it from inherited notions that anything Australian must be second-rate, that quality writing could only come from England.

See the contradictions?

First, it seems we look to non-Australian literary prizes to tell us what to read and value. Second, we demand our own literary prize contenders make their work overtly “Australian”. Where does this leave Australian writers whose work doesn’t fit into an overtly “Australian” category?

If authors, like Brooks, win major international literary prizes, no problem. But what of other, hugely popular Australian writers, such as Anna Campbell, who writes historical romance, or Anna Jacobs, who sets her “clogs and shawl” books in 19^th-century England, or prize-winning romantic-comedy author Kandy Shepherd, published in the US, who swapped her settings from Blue Mountains NSW for rural Northern California? Or successful Speculative Fiction authors such as Kate Forsyth? To name a few.

Are these authors’ books, because of their settings, less “Australian” than ones set in Broome, Alice Springs, Port Douglas, Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide? Judging by the criteria set for the Love2Read “Our Story” selection, an initiative of the National Year of Reading, it would seem so. And guess what? The “Our Story” selection is dominated by books by men. Is this emphasis on “Australianness” helping to marginalize work by talented women?

The Stella Prize panellist, Jo Case, has written on the implications of this “blokey” construction of Australian identity in relation to women’s writing and the Miles Franklin Award, so I’ll leave that for now. I’m meant to be reviewing Caleb’s Crossing, a book which consistently appeared in lists of “top 5” selling books of online Australian bookshops at the end of 2011. Reviewing it seems more important than ever now that I’ve seen some Twitter responses to the novel – one reader couldn’t get into it and set it aside; another, a librarian, persisted, but found it didn’t get any better. How do these responses tally with all the hype and mega sales?

So two questions hovered when I picked up Caleb’s Crossing, the book’s popularity – deserved or not – and whether Brooks’ story, just as much as all those shortlisted on the “Our Story” selection, might reflect what it means to be Australian in the 21^st century.

Yet another refrain singing through my mind was the first of Brooks’ Boyer Lectures on the idea of “home” that I’d recently heard on Radio National. In that, she discussed growing up – literally – in “Bland Street” in Sydney. Listening to her half-Australian, half-American drawl, I sensed that, growing up, this author – like many of our generation – had held an insidious belief that “real life” happened somewhere other than where we found ourselves. And why wouldn’t we – being educated by reading dominated by stories set in other places and other times?

Youth of our generation left adolescence with wealth, leisure, fearlessness and great expectation – we happily flew off to Europe or Asia before the term “Gap Year” was invented. We engaged in a rite-of-passage during which self-deception ruled: we weren’t “tourists”, we were “travellers”, even if we banded together with other Aussies or Kiwis on Top Deck and Contiki buses, or on mattresses in a friend-of-a-friend’s flat in Earls Court. Many, like Brooks and the character Mandy – another foreign correspondent – in Charlotte Woods’ The Children, became true travellers, citizens of the world, never fully making it back “home”.

Is it surprising to me that Brooks married an American and settled in Martha’s Vineyard? No. Does this make her writing any less “Australian”? Perhaps. But how does one judge such things?

Another refrain teasing me as I read Caleb’s Crossing was the fate of Bennelong, the Aboriginal man whose name was endowed to the site of the Sydney Opera House. Bennelong lived in the earliest days of settlement in Sydney in the late 18^th-century, learned to speak English, dressed in European garb and travelled to London where he was feted as a curiosity of the Empire.

The song of Bennelong’s life formed a sad counterpoint to the one I heard of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, Brooks’ eponymous character. The European worlds which these two indigenous men encountered were vastly different: the values of the Puritan evangelists who founded the New World had little in common with those who settled the East Coast of New Holland more than a century later, English military masters and their impoverished, often drunken, convict charges. But this difference in the nature of the colonial-indigenous encounter provoked for me a number of questions: what if the Puritans had travelled further west and set out across the Pacific? Or what if La Perouse had beaten Cook to Botany Bay? If the Chinese had settled here during their fifteenth-century explorations, or the Dutch later? What if we were now to be invaded, not by a horde of desperate refugees, but by a race convinced of their own moral or technological superiority, such as true alien invasion? Or, closer to reality, if our world were transformed in less than a few generations irreparably for the worse, because of the values of those who claimed the land and means of production, whose attitude to resources is one of exploitation, who unthinkingly introduce foreign species or technologies and non-sustainable land-use practices? What would we lose? What would we gain and at what cost? Would our accommodation of these alien values destroy our “essence”? What “essence”, if any, do we Australians have to destroy?

For me, it didn’t take much for Brooks’ story of 17th-century America to appear vitally relevant to what it means to live in Australia in the 21^st century. Read this way, Caleb’s Crossing creates space to consider the most pressing issues that face us, both as Australians and as citizens of the world, as we enter an uncertain future. How can such considerations be anything, if not Australian?

Clearly, however, such a reading is far removed from the events and characters depicted in Brooks’ story. So to the question, why all the fuss over Caleb’s Crossing? And why the temptation for some readers to put it down and not pick it up again?

I enjoyed this novel, but it isn’t without its shortcomings. In my view, these stem from a paucity of characterization and a confusion of genre. Brooks falls into a classic trap: she romanticises Caleb – not his fate, certainly, based as it is on fact; but the construction of a sense of his “essence” as an Indian prince robbed of his rightful heritage, his songs and ceremonies, his physical fitness and the island land of his ancestors. Caleb never became real to me as a person, remained only the repressed object of desire for narrator Bethia May – daughter of an Evangelist minister, or “Storm Eyes” as the boy Caleb dubs her – and later as an exemplum of an early “Uncle Tom” figure, whose conversion to the ways of the Europeans leads to his downfall. This idealization of Caleb’s character wouldn’t matter if readers were invited to believe that Bethia herself remained distant from him, treating him as an object in her imagination, or if there were some grounds given for her construction of him as a “noble savage” more than a century before Rousseau. But Bethia is portrayed as having known Caleb intimately, perhaps more than a brother, from a very young age, including – improbably – learning his language.

Is this a failure of the novel? Possibly, but I understand why Brooks has constructed Caleb’s character in this way. It enables her to get away with a narrative transition that, to a romance reader, would be otherwise unthinkable: she swaps from one hero to another mid-novel. This brings me to the book’s second glaring shortcoming: its confusion of genre.

In Caleb’s Crossing, Brooks initially harnesses the power of romance. Avid romance readers would have no trouble reading the cues: Caleb is portrayed initially as a handsome, “exotic” warrior figure whose love is forbidden, given the mores of Bethia’s time. The narrative choice of creating a fictional memoir, penned at different intervals during Bethia’s life, allows Brooks to hint at the possibility of illicit union between the two, teasing the reader with a sense that Bethia may succumb to temptation and transgress the moral code of her time, that “Solace” is Bethia’s child. This sense is derived from carefully crafted hints about what Bethia desires but won’t admit to herself, her older brother Makepeace’s warnings of self-deception, the constant references to the possibility of damnation, the temptations Bethia herself chastises herself for – not limited to her literal drinking from the forbidden cup belonging to Caleb’s uncle, the indigenous “pawaaw” or medicine man. Brooks creates an underlying sexual tension between Caleb and Bethia which, for a romance reader, doesn’t entirely disappear when Bethia’s new love-interest, Samuel, appears.

The story achieves this shift from one “hero” to the other, but only because the characterization of Caleb is so slight, so emblematic. The reader never becomes fully invested in regarding Caleb as Bethia’s mate; in fact, we get the sense that we know little more about him mid-way through and at the end than we did at the beginning. This transition from Caleb as love-interest to the equally little-known male character of Samuel creates confusion: is this a love story, with the desired object so repressed that the reader is invited to feel the grief of the loss even when the character herself is unaware? For some readers, perhaps. But why should consistency in genre be important? For me, it has to do with the emotional pay-off (or lack of it) of the novel. Had Brooks consciously opted for a clever double-blinding of the first-person narrator to her own illicit desires, the book would have held far more emotional power for me. As it stands, the distance I felt from Caleb meant that I didn’t care as much as I should have about his fate: the novel’s emotional climax failed to touch me in the way it would had this been a romance-gone-wrong or love story, or indeed a romance with a happy ending. That’s the price Brooks pays for this confusion of genre: a lack of emotional power in the narrative.

Could Brooks have written the relationship of Caleb and Bethia in some other way? Certainly, but not without risking adding a further charge of falsifying history. Stories of sexual transgression are nothing new in American Literature – consider Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter – but a story of love between a Christian gentlewoman and “a salvage” at that time: how likely was it? The book ends as it ostensibly begins, not as a romance nor a love-story, but as a fragmented memoir. This device suggests it was written over a series of years and this arguably explains its disjointedness.

Perhaps, some might argue, the gaps in the narrative and characterisation represent shifts in time and the changing perspective of the narrator herself as time colours the way she views the past and stretches the limits of her self-honesty. Perhaps there is greater depth in such a construction than I’ve given credit for here… Or perhaps the book just isn’t that well written.

For the novel’s strengths, I look to Bethia herself, the portrayal of early settlement life in America, the previously unknown (to me) story of the first indigenous scholar of Harvard University, the tensions between Bethia’s book-loving character and her role as a woman growing up under a religious patriarchy, as well as Brooks’ depiction of the devastation brought European settlement to the Wopanaak tribe of Noepe (now Martha’s Vineyard). For me, in terms of my enjoyment of the story, these strengths fairly weigh against the book’s weaknesses.

In Caleb’s Crossing, Brooks makes narrative choices which serve both to detract and to enhance the reading experience: she chooses romance over character, and plausibility over romance. For me personally, the book was interesting and enjoyable: I loved Brooks’ use of language, I’m interested in the subject matter, and I had enough going on in my own mind about whether the story might conceivably be regarded as “Australian” to keep me reading late into the night. But, in consideration of the book’s popularity, I have to say: I’ve read other books by Australian women in the lead up to the Australian Women Writers 2012 Challenge which I’ve found more gripping (Kirsten Tranter’s The Legacy, Jaye Ford’s Beyond Fear), more politically provocative (Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game, Caroline Overington’s Matilda is Missing), more emotionally engaging (Charlotte Wood’s The Children, Heather Rose’s The Butterfly Man), equally as evocative of a past time and place (Christine Stinson’s It Takes A Village and PM Newton’s The Old School), and as beautifully written (Gail Jones’ Dreams of Speaking).

Based on Caleb’s Crossing, does Geraldine Brooks deserve her place as the top-selling Australian woman writer for 2011? Not judging by what I’ve seen. And I’ve only just begun to read.

*This review forms a part of my contribution to a number of challenges, including the Australian Women Writers 2012 Reading and Reviewing Challenge, the Booklover Book Reviews blog’s Aussie Authors 2012 Challenge, the GoodReads Aussie Readers’ group’s Aussie Authors with a Twist, and Bookdout blog’s Eclectic Reading Challenge.

What’s all the fuss about? Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing by Elizabeth Lhuede is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at elizabethlhuede.wordpress.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.elizabethlhuede.com.

Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones

Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a book that, for me, started slowly and gained momentum as I read. To be honest, I only picked it because it had a “J” in the title. I’m combining the Australian Women Writers 2012 Reading & Reviewing Challenge with the Aussie Readers “Challenge with a Twist” on GoodReads: each month you have to read a book whose title or author starts with the same letter as that month. “Jones” = “January”. I’d initially chosen Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice for January, only to find it’s a collection of short stories. (Lanagan’s first prize-winning story, “Singing the Sister Down” is outstanding, by the way.)

Initially I had my doubts. Any book that has a writer as the central character makes me wary. I’ve spent too many hours of my life reading “literary” books that seem far removed from life, but I persisted with Dreams of Speaking and was well rewarded. By the end, I was in love with Jones’ characters, their different ways of seeing the world and the author’s language.

An aspect I particularly loved was Jones’ way of interspersing the narrative with “facts”. I write “facts” in inverted commas because these sections purport to be facts, but come via one of the book’s key characters, Mr Sakamoto, retired Japanese gentleman traveller with a passion for Alexander Graham Bell, who befriends the main character, Alice, the young Australian writer from Perth whom he meets after she has taken up a literary scholarship to live in a studio in Paris.

From a narrative point of view, these interspersed sections of “fact” do a number of things. They provide evidence of the basis of this unlikely friendship, a shared fascination with invention and technology. The “fact” sections also a counterpoint with the shocking drama that underlies these characters’ lonely obsessions: the trauma Mr Sakamoto has suffered in surviving the atomic bomb blast of Nagasaki, and the fractured relationship Alice has with her sister Nora, and her former lover Stephen. Gradually, the reader has the impression that these characters’ fascination with human invention is both a retreat from a painful world, and a way of reaching out tentatively to others. This dance between distance and connection, intimacy and isolation creates a powerful tension throughout the book and leads to an ending which, for me, was one of the most moving I’ve read in years.

Who would like this book? People who love language, who love the idea of Australians as global people, equally at home – or at a loss – in Perth, Paris or Japan. Also anyone whose interested in Japanese character and culture, especially the post-nineteenth-century influence of the Meiji restoration with its love of European elegance and sophistication, as well as its embrace of modern technologies. People who are interested in the traumatic aftermath of WWII will find aspect of the book interesting, too – but this subject is treated in an oblique way, which, for me, has a lot more emotional power than something direct.

They say that if a book and its characters are memorable, it’s the sign of a good book: the story and characters remain vivid in the imagination long after you put the book down. This was certainly the case for me with Charlotte Wood’s The Children and Heather Rose’s The Butterfly Man among the books I read in 2011. It’s too soon after reading to judge whether Dreams of Speaking will have this quality for me. But I can say this: when I got to the end, I felt at war with the author: not because I felt the story failed, but because I cared so strongly about her characters and their fate. I didn’t like the ending Jones chose, but I respected it: it seemed true to the characters and the messiness of life generally. Instead of being a diversion and an escape like so many of the page-turning books I’ve read in recent years, this story made me feel as if it had added hours to my life, expanding my heart and my mind in unexpected ways.

I’ll certainly read more by this author.

After first posting this review in GoodReads, I discovered that Dreams of Speaking was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2007, as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and longlisted for the Orange Prize.

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Leah Giarratano, Black Ice

Black Ice by Leah Giarratano

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Leah Giarratano’s Black Ice is a crime novel that portrays a clash between the glitz-and-glamour of the Eastern suburbs and the underworld of Sydney’s west. It follows the exploits of undercover detective Jill Jackson (“Krystal”), her super-model-good-looking party-girl sister Cassie and single mother Seren, a woman with a heart of gold who got mixed up with the wrong people and ended up doing a jail sentence while her ten-year-old son Marco was farmed out to DoCs. Together and apart these women face the threats posed by hot-shot lawyer Christian, thug drug-dealer Nader and their hangers-on.

Sounds unlikely? It is. But Giarratano is an experienced forensic psychologist whose work has given her an entree into the seedy side of Sydney’s life, so at one level we have to trust that her characters and plot scenario are authentically portrayed. Yet there was little here I recognised here about the city I grew up in. Much of the language, characterisation, plot and setting came across to me as if they could easily translate into a Hollywood movie.

Maybe to critique Giarratano’s book for its lack of distinctive “Australianness” is unfair. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that when the author did go for local colour – like her description of the underground food court off Dixon Street – it brought the narrative to life.

There were flashes, too, of edgy, lyrical writing: “Right now, just eleven o’clock in the morning, thrumming beneath the city was Saturday night, waiting to be released. It pulsed and throbbed, biding time, emitting sub-threshold vibrations that caused apprentices to focus for once, to hurry to finish their morning shifts. Fifteen-year-old schoolgirls drilled each other on the elaborate fairytales they’d created for their parents, about who was sleeping at whose house, and what to do if the oldies actually checked. The beautiful people sipped coffees in cafes, waking slowly, apparently languidly, but Saturday night waited beneath them and the beat started an itch they knew would not be scratched until the dark came…” (p207)

While not exactly a page-turner, the novel didn’t drag. Part of my problem with it might be because Giarratano’s main character, the detective Jill Jackson, is a character regular readers will have met before. That crucial set-up, where a reader is introduced to a character and a bond of empathy is formed, was missing for me. I didn’t know enough about Jill and her background to really care what happened to her – until some of her backstory was revealed halfway through. Even then, though, her conflict with her sister and its denouement which could have been – should have bee, an emotionally moving scene – coincided with the plot climax in a way that both seemed unlikely and an odd choice by the writer. (Who has an epiphany – and *talks* about it! – at a crime scene?)

The one character I did feel empathy for from the start was single-mum Seren. But I found myself resisting this empathy because I felt the author’s manipulation: Seren’s character, the naive ex-con, didn’t ring true to me. The scenes of her pre-release from prison, however, were among the books most vivid, frightening and memorable. Here Giarratano’s background really gives us an insight into a world most of us – thankfully – will never have to know firsthand.

Giarratano chose to distance her main character from the thick of the fray before the climax, a choice which surprised and disappointed me. But maybe that was because, by then, I was expecting her story to adhere to the narrative conventions of Hollywood: I wanted the main character to have something more at stake, something I could get worried about. The ending, while satisfying, didn’t deliver that extra bang that such stories usually contrive to create, either. But why should it? There were some neat twists.

Despite the shortcomings and reservations expressed here, I enjoyed this book. Maybe it was always going to be a tough call, reading and reviewing a simple crime novel after having just finished Charlotte Wood’s brilliant – though flawed in its own way, too – novel of small-town Australian life and family, The Children.

Read as part of the Aussie Author 2011 challenge, this review first appeared in GoodReads.

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Beyond Fear – edge of the seat thriller

Beyond Fear, by Australian author Jaye Ford, is a book that grabbed me from page 1 and never let me go. Although I’d read this story in manuscript, once I had the book in hand, out went the cooking and the housework. Luckily I had time off work. It was even more thrilling to read it in one go. Everyone I’ve spoken to who has read it has literally not been able to put it down.

According to the Jaye, the story was inspired by the real-life stabbing of a teenage girl who witnessed her best friend’s rape and murder before being left for dead. The story’s premise begins with the scenario – how would such a woman react years later when confronted by another potentially violent situation? Would she cave or cope?

Like Jaye, I’m a dedicated fan of psychological thrillers like those by writing duo Nicci French, so I loved the fast pace and all-too-human characters of this page-turning novel. An incredible debut for first-time author, Jaye Ford – hopefully it’s the beginnings of many great reads to come.

Jaye’s second book, Scared Yet?, is due out in March 2012.

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Marching Powder, Rusty Young – true crime review

I read Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America’s Strangest Jail over one wild, windy weekend, only getting up off the couch to eat, say hi to my long-suffering partner and sleep. Then I checked out some reviews.

Strange, but I agreed with both the 5-star and the 1-star comments. It’s a fascinating, page-turning story, told in a simple, easy-to-read style. It has touches of surreal comic brilliance, as it tells of the narrator Thomas’s survival through incredible hardships and injustices of his 4-year sentence for drug-trafficking in a Bolivian jail. The first-person narration allows Thomas to gloss over the enormity of his crimes, not only of the original trafficking offence, but his subsequent drug-use and drug-dealing inside the prison, his bribery of prison and court officials, and his bashing of other inmates (described by horrified visitors as torture).

Whereas some readers have seen Thomas’s crimes and apparent lack of remorse as a flaw in the story, I see it as a strength of the book’s real author, Rusty Young, who allows “Thomas” to speak for himself, to spin his yarns of prison life in a way that is engaging, but not totally believable – Thomas is the archetypal unreliable narrator and readers can judge him for themselves.

Although I missed some contextualising by the “Rusty” character at the end – some hint that we’re not meant to swallow Thomas’s story uncritically – it wasn’t hard to read between the lines. The overall impression I got is that Thomas the person shares the personality profile of many successful criminals: a sociopath – a narcissistic manipulator who charms people and gets them onside, but always manages to see to his own needs; someone who ultimately has very little moral sense of culpability of responsibility for the hideous crimes he’s perpetrated against others.

Far from being a weakness, I see this narrative choice as one of the story’s strengths. But because of Thomas’s unreliability, I’m not so sure the book should be characterised as “non-fiction” or “biography”.

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Christine Stinson, It Takes a Village – An Australian childhood

Australian author Christine Stinson’s first novel was the marvellously witty and engaging, Getting Even with Fran. That story celebrates the complexity of life-long friendships, centering around a thirty-year Catholic girl’s school reunion. After such a debut, Stinson’s second novel, It Takes a Village, comes as a surprise.

Told from the point of view of a young orphaned girl being brought up by her shell-shocked grandfather, It Takes a Village doesn’t have the biting humour of Getting Even with Fran. Rather, it weaves a gentle spell around the lives of the various characters who populate a poor suburb in Sydney in the 1950s and early 60s.

In this fictional memoir, Stinson deftly creates a portrait of an Australian way of life long gone. With strict morals and, at times, narrow-minded attitudes, this life also created a sense of  compassion and community that contemporary suburban life rarely offers. Having read the story in manuscript, as well as the finished novel, I kept hearing echoes of the sayings and expressions of people from my own Australian childhood, those ancient great-aunts and their companions who have long since passed away.

Although It Takes a Village touches on some serious social questions, including the aftermath of the deployment of United States army personnel in war-time Sydney, it doesn’t attempt to provide serious social commentary. Instead it achieves a moving as well as feel-good atmosphere which reminded me of the novels of Maeve Binchey.

Given that the second novel was such a contrast to the first, I’ve been fascinated to watch Stinson approach the writing of her third, yet to be published, novel Epiphany (working title). Set in the Blue Mountains, Epiphany revisits the “group of friends” theme, and again conveys the complexity of relationships among contemporary Australian women, this time with the added international flavour of having one of the main characters a leading conductor. The story builds on a deeply moving emotional dilemma which touches many Australian women in their late thirties-early forties juggling motherhood and career, and promises to be ranked among the best contemporary mainstream Australian women’s fiction when it appears.

(This review appeared in Amazon in July 2011 and has been revised)

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Love is a Four-Legged Word – A charming, mad cap read

Love is a Four-Legged Word, by Australian author, Kandy Shepherd, is a light, fun-filled read. Its quirky characters, an aspiring celebrity chef and an uptight lawyer, are brought together when the chef’s elderly neighbour dies, leaving her the guardian of an ugly pug who inherits a fortune.

Set on the west coast of the USA, this zany romance reminds me of an old Cary Grant movie – it has the same, light-hearted, feel-good factor. In this story’s world, nothing is too serious, despite seeming life-and-death stakes for the “millionaire mutt”. It’s impossible not to be charmed by the heroine, Maddy, with her bubbly personality and whacky way of seeing the world. Even uptight Tom, the lawyer hero, proves to be just as lovable by the end.

Some readers think the ugly mutt Brutus steals the show, but I disagree. It’s Kandy Shepherd’s delightful comic voice that makes this story. Editors often say that want a new “voice” and some aspiring writers think they have to manufacture that. It’s not true. Writers need to bring out those aspects of themselves that will appeal to the reader.  Kandy’s writing persona very much reflects her warmth and humour in real life – it shines through her stories.

I recently reread the novel after the sequel Home is Where the Bark Is, which tells the story of Maddy’s model friend Serena. The sequence doesn’t matter: each novel stands well on its own. I’m looking forward to the next Shepherd romantic comedy. Kandy’s Castaway Bride came out on ebook recently – and I’m not surprised to see it is topping the best-seller lists.

I’m looking forward to more. How about it, Kandy?

(This review first appeared on Amazon in July 2011 and has been slightly revised)

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The Danger Game: A great message, fairly rendered

Australian left-wing author Kalinda Ashton’s 2009 debut novel, The Danger Game, came to me indirectly. Recently I downloaded a collection of Aussie short stories on an iPad app from Sleepers, a small press based in Melbourne. Sticking out from among hundreds of stories was the bright shard of Ashton’s short fiction. Its sheer painful brilliance prompted me to hunt down her novel.

To claim The Danger Game is a “worthy” book seems miserly. But it’s true. It is worthy. It depicts suffering with compassion; doesn’t shy away from the complexities of poverty, drug use, sex, failure and loss; enacts the tensions of union politics, the under-funding of state schools and the shortcomings of the welfare system. It does all this with glimpses of that same lyrical grace that sang to me in Ashton’s short stories and had me wanting more.

What it didn’t do was grab me by the scruff of the neck and impel me through the narrative.

It interested me; and I persisted; but I can’t say I was riveted. Instead I found myself tempted to skip parts and I felt guilty.

Before writing this review, I checked out other reviews. Among those lauding the writing style and worthy politics were ones that found the story boring, including a reader who “wanted to know what happened at the end” and felt deflated because the ending wasn’t a surprise. The comments were depressing mostly because I’d felt twinges of the same. So, apparently, did one independent publisher who, according to Ashton,  saw an early draft and didn’t find it “compelling” enough.

Yet the structure is clearly intentional, as Ashton has stated: “I think what I’ve tried to do in the book is have a structure almost like an ‘anti-thriller’ where in fact all the information [the characters] find when they go on this quest is not in fact what is the catharsis or release but the journey back into their lives now, and finding something collective out of the experience.” (From an interview with Rebecca Starford in Readings.)

All this got me wondering. About Ashton. About what it means to want to write a value-rich work that is still page-turning, riveting, engaging enough to grab hold of that middle ground of readers who might be indifferent to the politics but who want that “quest” and catharsis; who, like me, want a great read. It got me thinking about the implications of my own desire to write such a book; the ambivalences of such a desire, as Ashton might say.

The questions I come away pondering are these. (Warning: some jargon ahead.) Are the dominant linear narrative forms of Hollywood exemplified, say, in the writers’ craft phenomenon Story by Robert McKee, inherently reactionary? By opting for such insistent, pervasive narrative structures is an author inevitably sustaining, supporting and upholding an existing system, one irretrievably implicated in injustices to do with gender, race/ethnicity and class? Is it only by abandoning such structures for more experimental forms that a truly political writing can be achieved?

If it’s true that the only way to be truly effective politically is to opt for experimental narrative structure, I can take a stab at why. The argument goes something like this. With the narrative drive to know “What happens next?”, readers identify with characters’ goals, and enjoy the tension-and-release produced as those goals appear successively attainable and farther away. But such a drive lulls the reader into a type of unconsciousness, where readers demand only the addictive “fix” of a narrative “pull”, punctuated by a satisfying cathartic denouement or (in the case of thrillers) surprise ending. By manipulating the reader into becoming such a future-seeker, the writer may make her book a page-turner, but in doing so she potentially takes attention away from the detail, the mundane and numinous, the insights into character, moments that a writer like Ashton evokes and celebrates with ease. Takes away, too, perhaps, the opportunity for thoughtfulness, for engagement, the mental space in which one’s preconceptions can be challenged and, possibly, transformed.

On the other hand…

If a lack of narrative drive tempts the reader to put the book down and not pick it up again, what has been achieved?

I’m not saying say that The Danger Game doesn’t have narrative drive: it does; but it’s subtle, weaves in and out of present and past, spreads itself over three characters’ stories told in three different narrative styles (first, second and third person). More importantly, the objects of desire – knowing the truth of what happened in the past and the whereabouts of a lost parent – are never felt to be imperative, let alone vital. They’re sought more as a bandaid is looked for when the gash requires stitches or, worse, when the life blood is seeping away. The real desires, love, wholeness, meaning and connection, seem so far beyond the likelihood of being achieved, the characters barely recognise them as needs. Thus when they stumble over them the achievement feels almost accidental.

Ashton’s narrative may not be especially gripping in terms of story, but it does keep faith with the experience of what it means to be human. Considering the result, I’m sure Ashton’s happy.

The Danger Game by Kalinda Ashton (Sleepers Publishing)

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