Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius – Bold and Compelling

By Tracy

“That night, as the moon rose, the Natives demonstrated their Native dance and song. Grark noted to himself, not yet trusting his mouth, that all their culture was considered worthless, except those parts that his people found beautiful. After the dance they sang a haunting lullaby from his own people...
... When he went to bed, after being introduced to the children, that sound, that singing was still playing in his ears.”
(Terra Nullius, pp. 232-233)

Claire G. Coleman’s novel Terra Nullius (Hachette 2017), the outcome of a black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship and described as “dystopian” and “speculative”, is a work of defamiliarisation. Narratives you may know, or think you know, will not feel or look the same way again because of this book. For this reason, telling too much about the contents will diminish the first-time experience – but that does not mean there’s nothing to say about the book.

It’s a compelling story of imaginative power – of multiple protagonists and multiple journeys, criss-crossing and converging, characters under pressure to move or trying (in the antagonists’ case, wanting to keep a grip on power) to hold still despite the desire to “go home”. “Home” itself as an idea has been radically destabilised – invasion, dispossession, and cruelty mean that for the colonised, survival has come to entail constant motion and dispersal.

It’s interesting that Coleman wrote the book “while travelling around Australia in a caravan”, because it echoes that onward thrust, the urgency of movement, that pervade the narrative. This is not accidental – as noted in the Guardian: “Her own peripatetic lifestyle flowed into her writing”, or as Coleman herself explained the mode:

“The feeling of travel, of not knowing where you are, of landscapes constantly changing. I think that disoriented sense of time and place was important, because a lot of Aboriginal people have felt very displaced and disjointed, and have a history of feeling like refugees in their own country.”

Coleman, who identifies with the South Coast Noongar people, has referenced Tolkien and Mary Shelley in an online feature as inspirations (an author’s note at the end of the novel itself also acknowledges influence from Aboriginal writers such as Sally Morgan, Kim Scott and Doris Pilkington Garimara). The hubris that drove Victor Frankenstein is here in the hubris of the colonial “experiment” on all scales – as John Rieder points out, Frankenstein has “a certain amount of explicit colonial content” but the Creature’s “progression” also structures a polemics – there’s an allegorical level to it.

In Coleman’s novel, allegory folds in upon itself in an uncanny mode – the narrative is both familiar and strange in a way that breaks open at a certain point and then rides tandem or side-car, or runs parallel, inviting readers to adjust their understanding. It is this-place and not-this-place; our-history and not-our-history at the same time: in the gaps are the what-ifs, the possibilities, the imaginative potential.

If “Australia” refuses to acknowledge fully, and to redress, its historic and contemporary treatment of Indigenous peoples, this novel will re-envisage the trauma and the resistance, the ongoing survival and hope, so as to make them visible again and again, which is why I began with the word “defamiliarisation”. It’s a timely book to make you think and re-think – a bold, energetic and provocative novel for a general audience, but also well-suited, in my opinion, for study in secondary schools.

Angela Carter's poems

By Tracy

The Observer this week announced that Radio 4 in the UK would be broadcasting some unpublished poetry by the late Angela Carter. Their article gives a short extract from one of the poems at the end. It's hard to tell from this extract what the poems might really be like, though it seems there are not many of them ("more than a dozen", the article tells us). Apparently Carter had serious thoughts of being a poet in the 1960s, before her first novel was published. She was a strikingly powerful writer of fiction -- it would be interesting to see the rest of the poems.

New novelist

By Tracy

I've just finished reading Saraswati Park by debut novelist Anjali Joseph (born 1978).

This was a birthday gift, nothing to do with my studies, except of course that it's a novel -- so I read it for pleasure.

It's a quiet novel whose atmosphere certainly drew me in, though I was disappointed that the back-cover blurb tells practically the whole plot (such plot as there is -- this is a mood-driven and character-driven book).

Middle-aged Mohan, a letter-writer, lives in reasonable comfort and calm with his wife Lakshmi in Bombay/Mumbai. They are at that stage where children have left home and an uneasy distance has crept up between husband and wife, though it takes a while for Mohan to realise this.

Their nephew Ashish comes to live with them because though his parents have moved away on account of work, Ashish must repeat his final year of college because of under-attendance.

Ashish has his own emotional (and sexual) life unknown to his uncle and aunt; the novel moves between his story and that of his uncle's marriage and daily life.

The writing is poised and observant, the characters credible -- and for a first novel, it's quite subtle and sophisticated in approach.

If you don't like very slow-paced or middle-class-style fiction, it won't be your thing. Ignore the back cover if you want to make the most of its developments...

The UK's Telegraph listed Anjali Joseph as one of their "20 best novelists under 40", for what that kind of list is worth.

Trying something new

By Tracy

Last week I heard novelist and musician Willy Vlautin talking on the radio from the Sydney Writers' Festival, and decided to try one of his books.

I wanted to partly because I get tired of novels limited to privileged or middle-class characters, and he's more interested in what reviewers keep calling "the dispossessed".

He's published three novels -- Planet Books only had two of them. I wasn't that interested in the new one, Lean on Pete, because of the horse-racing motif, so instead I chose his second, Northline (Faber and Faber, 2008).

It's a fast read. At first I found it quite annoying -- too much dialogue, phrasing too staccato for me, and the sense that the so-called "low-life" aspect is self-consciously on display for the reader. I couldn't tell if it was simply over-edited, stylistically, or if it was running on the assumption that people can only read very, very pared-back flat language. Some great writers of course have used a simple approach to style, but here it's frequently clunky, stilted.

Yet I kept reading, and it grew on me a little: there's a strong sense of compassion in the novel, and although it veers into being too sentimental (the Paul Newman fantasy-sequences, for one), it does leave you with a distinct feeling of atmosphere and some memorable characters.

Not the protagonist, however -- Allison -- who seems, perhaps intentionally, little more than an outline. It's the people who befriend her on her desperate downer -- like Penny, who trains her in phone sales, and Dan, a trauma survivor -- that seem vivid and durable creations.

The story is set in Las Vegas and Reno, among the drinkers, gamblers and workers of those places (Vlautin comes from Reno, according to the radio interview, though he now lives in Oregon).

He's singer-songwriter with the band Richmond-Fontaine, and there's a soundtrack for the book too.

All in all a bit disappointing -- certainly not the new Steinbeck or Carver that publicity led me to expect -- but still not a bad read.

Lionel's latest

By Tracy

Now onto Lionel Shriver's newest novel, So Much For That.

I was offered to choose a book as a gift the other day, and couldn't help myself. This one is for leisure, not for study, so it will have to be a slower read. (Leisure?)

It's essentially a book about the US healthcare system, and if I hadn't had first-hand experience of that, it might have lost me already, because it's rather reliant on long mouthpiece speeches.

And though I've appreciated most of the other Shriver novels I've read, I would class my most recent experience of her work, an early book called Game Control, as one of the worst novels I've ever read.

In this latest, there are the usual wonderful moments of clarity and perception of human foibles; unfortunately these turn all too quickly into harping on human foibles -- there's a bleak hard edge in her writing that's sometimes hard to bear.

There's also a kind of "book-club" topicality that I find irritating (certain subjects are just always going to get an airing with the book-buying public).

That's not a hit at book clubs, just an observation that you can sometimes feel how writers cynically aim at a niche.

However, in this case Shriver is also writing from experience of a friend's terminal illness, and it's not just a "topic" for her.

Why do I keep reading her, when she keeps making me so uncomfortable? I don't want merely to feel comfortable when I read -- and she steers clear of the sentimental. But she can also steer right into the grotesque... as when one of her male characters goes in for a botched "enlargement" operation. (Well, she is dealing with the medical system in this novel...) 

Two views from the Shriver universe...

By Tracy

Lionel Shriver's Game Control was a birthday present for me this year. It's a distressing and difficult novel to read -- not difficult in language or plot, more because she treads (as always) fine lines in what she depicts -- the reader continually winces.

This is (according to her afterword) the book that lost Shriver her American publisher. (It was subsequently taken up in Britain and then saw US publication after the big success of Kevin.)

I can see why. I'm very ambivalent toward her work -- but then Shriver is a master (mistress doesn't sound quite right!) of ambivalence herself. No novel more built from dialogue, in terms of competing voices and viewpoints, and here frustratingly so, because so polarised. You want to scream at the book that ways of seeing don't have to come in those specific, watertight packages (to mix metaphors somewhat).

It's a book I'm forcing myself to continue reading, rather than one I'm drawn into.

As always, Shriver writes with such pervasive irony that you will rarely if ever pin any particular character's view on the author. But I thought this pair of quotes quite telling. It's a "talky" novel, rather than a "happening" one, which gets annoying after a while...

From the character Threadgill, to another character, Piper:

"...for some reason everything we have and everything we make is gradually taken away from us. Your life is a leaky vessel; no matter how much you pour, your cup will never overflow, because there is a hole in it. The universe has a hole in it.  Your lovers die or betray you; your professional successes are diluted by failure or by simply being past; the summer homes where you spent the idyllic holidays of your childhood are bought by strangers and painted a garish green. So you can never stop making; maybe that's the reason for the hole. I don't know where these things go; I don't believe they vanish. I wonder if there isn't a magnificent junkheap in the next dimension of favourite train sets before they were broken and golden afternoons before the last terrible thing was said that parted two friends for ever. Whyever, the hole is there. It will suck from you everything you love." (pp. 168-9)

And a few pages later, from the viewpoint of Eleanor, if not in her direct speech:

"Cynics are spoiled romantics. They are always the ones who had the highest expectations at the start. They were once so naive themselves that they despise naivety more than any other quality. Alchemists, they turn grief to gold. They take quinine in their tonic, Campari with their soda -- bitterness is an acquired taste. Cynics have learned to drink poison and like it. They are resourceful people, though the sad thing is, they know what's happened to them. They remember what they wanted to be when they grew up, and not a single one of them dreamt of becoming a cynic." (pp. 172-3)

Food for thought, if a little trite -- but it's the constant clash of these (among other) viewpoints -- especially those of the two main characters, whom Shriver calls "vengeful misanthrope Calvin Piper and... guilty do-gooder Eleanor Merritt" that drives the novel.

Post-net for John

By Tracy

Today I've switched the blog posting over to my own management, as John is stepping offline... (see earlier entry here.)

(He's still here in spirit, though -- and in person nearby, of course!)

In fact he has a new book out -- a novel or rather récit -- entitled Post-colonial, which you can read about (and buy, if you like) from Papertiger.

A perfectly good novel -- and yet...

By Tracy

I’ve been reading my third Lionel Shriver novel: A Perfectly Good Family. It’s an older one than We Need To Talk About Kevin or The Post-Birthday World, which was one of my Christmas presents, but has been republished after them, at least here in Australia. (Shriver had brought out a number of novels before she came to major prominence with Kevin.)

A Perfectly Good Family is highly readable and very compelling – it’s lured me temporarily away from my PhD reading – but then it is school holidays...

It’s the story of three adult siblings, white Southerners in the USA, who haven’t lived together for years, who come together again after their parents’ death because the family home has been willed to them all (plus one – see below!*).

The two wildly different brothers don’t get on at all – and the narrator Corlis, the “middle child”, who has spent her life negotiating between the two of them, must choose which way to cast what is more or less a deciding vote in the house’s fate.

(That house is a Reconstruction mansion in the US South... which must make it symbolic in more than the familial sense, for the characters – in the wider cultural and political sense, it’s not just any old mansion, but a piece of “historical” metonymy.)

The novel’s technically well-handled – apart from one scene that I think was overplayed, dragged out, when Corlis and others clear out the freezer in which her mother had stored years’ worth of leftovers. Every inch of the metaphor is examined, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be effective, except that I think it goes on too long.

The novel’s title is an echo of the late mother’s catchphrase about this or that food item being still “perfectly good”, in a kind of eternal unwillingness to face transience, corruption, deterioration. (I think here of Hodge & Mishra's description of white Australian culture as wilfully "hebephrenic" -- she'll be right, mate -- and their call for "paranoid" readings of the literature, that go to the truths of colonial violence -- in their book, The Dark Side of the Dream.)

Shriver is very good, too, on the agonies of mother-love, or mother-ambivalence, especially in a scene where Corlis goes through her late mother’s dressing table, pots and scents and jewellery, only to counter her own emotionalism straight after, with a cruel and bathetic act that undoes the moment.

On the whole, the story’s excruciating in the best Lionel Shriver manner – you wince as you recognise all-too accurate behaviour and evasions – Shriver seems to leave no stone unturned. It’s the sort of harshness I associate with Mary McCarthy in The Group, except that there’s some compassion here, and a recognition of the utterly mixed nature of human personality. Shriver’s not standing back to say “you people”, but “we people”.

She also shows us the ambiguities and imperfect mixtures in purportedly held political views (Kevin was like this too), so that ultimately, while you’ll find a lot of reference to the world outside the individual (bourgeois) family, it’s mostly as a means of constructing their psyches for the reader; there’s no absolute political stance, only a lively “dialogism” and a clear depiction of the way that contradictory attitudes can exist within individuals and indeed families.

When this is used for humour and irony, it sometimes treads a fine line between satire of unintentional racism and participation in it. Two of the siblings, not wanting their house to sell, wish to be rude to prospective buyers – but the first to turn up are a well-off African-American couple. Since the siblings were brought up by a father who spent his life fighting for civil rights causes and on behalf of African Americans, Corlis and her brother squirm now in a predictable white middle-class self-scrutinising fashion.

This is meant as satire on shallow white guilt, but it only gets there by deploying still another stereotype, one that’s meant to overturn the “poor black” stereotype, yet is just as glib in its way. It doesn’t satisfy as a piece of satire, and it got me thinking about why humour that treads this line often wobbles. (I have problems watching, say, Ricky Gervais, that I don’t quite have if I watch Chris Lilley, and maybe asking myself why that is would be material for another blog entry...). This is the juncture at which I have to state that as a privileged white in a racist, colonial country, I read Shriver from the demographic position that makes my own critique of her, as John points out, equally compromised.

To be fair, I haven’t got right to the end yet, so it will be crucially interesting to see what Shriver does at last with these issues. (*One of the plot engines, pressuring the sale of the house, is that a fourth share in the parents’ will was left to the ACLU; this is resented by the three siblings each in his or her own way, and yet it seems to me to be part of the book’s point – again ambivalently presented – the unaddressed social and political dimension of the family story, the fourth who is there alongside the three...)

But any book that drives you to write about it before you’ve finished (as if you just can’t let it end) must have some narrative and psychological power.