Category Archives: authors

A new twist from Colum McCann

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In May, at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I was in the audience at the Athenaeum Theatre to see the novelist Colum McCann – possibly my favourite contemporary novelist – in conversation with ABC broadcaster Kate Evans. Here to promote his seventh novel Twist, he charmed the packed house with his humour and his appreciation of Evans’ intelligent questions, and of Australia itself, the friendliness of its people, and the Welcome to Country at the start of each of his public conversations.

McCann made it clear in this interview that he has no interest in writing memoir, or of putting himself in the story, but turns his curious eye on the other, seeking out or inventing infinitely complex or extraordinary characters. He immerses himself in a true story that has caught his imagination, one that reverberates with current global issues, researches it intimately, and then brings in his storytelling skills and verbal mastery.

For Twist, McCann’s investigative research involved joining a cable repair boat on the west coast of Africa, while it scoured the sea floor for the broken cables that need to be fixed if we are to keep on paying for our cup of coffee, booking our hotel room, or exchanging meaningful (or -less) texts with lovers or strangers. Almost all our digital data is transported to its destination through the optic cables that slide across the ocean floors.

Twist opens quietly, with a slightly jaded narrator, but slowly hauls you in, focussing your attention on the pivotal character, John Conway, aboard the cable-repair vessel the Georges Lecointe. The enigmatic Conway leads his team of divers and engineers on a mission to repair the underwater cables. The task is to reconnect the people of Africa and ultimately the world who have been disconnected from their mobile phones and the Internet.

Continents shift. Worlds collide. Races mingle. The repair boat trudges on up the west coast of Africa. Eye on the target. Fix the break. A whiff of the sea air and we are back with Moby Dick and the whale, a captain fixated on revenge. Or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which is also set off the coast of Africa, on a journey up the Congo River. In Twist, the Congo is flooding, shifting the sea floor and breaking the optic cables apart.

We are taken down by divers, the relentless Conway in particular, who ‘freedive’ (or breath-hold dive) to reach the ocean floor and haul up the cable to be fixed on deck. I first read an account of freediving in Australian Book Review, the Calibre Prize winning essay by Michael Adams ‘Salt Blood’ (ABR June-July 2017). Prior to that, Tim Winton’s Breath. It seems the extraordinary feat of using one breath to stay underwater for, say, ten minutes is apparently not so extraordinary. It is simply reverting to how babies survive in the womb and is practised in coastal communities around the world. And yet, outside the womb, it is a near-death experience.

The stakes are high. When darkness looms, even the most revered characters are suspect. And we are all guilty, addicted to our technology. The earth, and the oceans, are at risk. ‘It’s a story about connection,’ says the author. Yes, and so much more.

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Fairy tale bonanza

Fairy tales are not my first choice of reading matter, although I’m sure they were a huge influence on my mind as a child. So when I was sent a copy of South of the sun: Australian fairy tales for the 21st century, I didn’t suspect that I would soon be riveted by this magical book.

I am now halfway through the volume and still reading! Here, some of our best storytellers and illustrators engage with this genre in ways that are entertaining, funny, and relevant to our times. These are stories for adults and are about a lot more than fairies. Myths, legends and allegories are reimagined with a 21st-century spin and strong female characters, set in Australia. The stories unfold in the bush, between the dark towers of Docklands, or at the Botanical Gardens.

Favourite authors Carmel Bird and Cate Kennedy give an assured start to the book and lesser known ones take up the baton. Delightful tales by K.Z. Barton and Gabi Brown, involving a homeless man and a Melbourne tram, lead on to a hilarious new take on ‘Jack and the beanstalk’ by Lindy Mitchell-Nilsson, with sparkling dialogue and enough bureaucratic red tape to stand in the way of any good Aussie giant-killer.

Other stories hark back to ancient myths and cultures. Louisa John-Krol’s ‘Pomelina the Pomegranate Fairy’ is a luscious, lyrical tale, originating on the Silk Road in Persia and transferred to Bendigo. It is one of several tales here that took root at the Australian Fairy Tale Society, who published this anthology. The book itself is silky to the touch, edited with care, and illustrated magnificently.

I am now converted to the fairy tale in its modern, adult incarnation. What an excellent, light-hearted way to capture the essence of Australian life, to depict our trees and plants and creatures, to celebrate and satirise our society! I must read on…

https://www.serenitypress.org/product-page/south-of-the-sun

Back in the day

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I’m sure she would hate it, but I call Irish author Anne Enright ‘Aunty Anne’ behind her back. An aunt I can snuggle under the covers with and share delicious secrets and laugh at what we did ‘back in the day’, as she would say. The phrase smacks of nostalgia: not just any old day, but the day when life was better, or at least more vivid, than today. My friend Sylvia in Galway uses it whenever we reminisce about the 1970s, messing about in MacGillycuddy’s Reeks.

Last week Readings Bookshop hosted a surprise event: our own Jane Sullivan was to interview Anne Enright on Zoom. A chance to catch up with Aunty and have a giggle. And for the author to promote her latest novel, Actress, as it lands on Australian bookshelves. No hard sell with her: she is closer to shooting herself in the foot, as she berates herself for writing the same book over again. I wouldn’t let that put you off.

Now I have a copy of Actress in my hand, I am delighted to find that same voice, the wry Dubliner with the rapier wit, on the page. I believe, after six acclaimed literary novels (The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize), she has loosened her literary stays and found a voice that is no less eloquent for all its cheeky familiarity.

In the interview with Jane Sullivan, she champions her fellow Irish authors Sally Rooney, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns, who have broken away from masculine tradition with a voice of their own. And yet, even-handedly and in spite of her fight against misogyny, she says ‘Irish masculinity can be a lyrical, poetic tradition, the nicest thing.’

Aunty Anne gives us the best of both worlds: the lyrical tradition of Irish literature and the outspoken female Irish voice of today. The key to her style is her love of language. For her, it is language that drives her, and leads her one way or the other in her storytelling. And there the magic lies.

1984 – are we there yet?

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I remember holding my breath for the whole year in 1984, wondering if George Orwell’s dire predictions would come true. I looked around me in December, relieved to find that, at least on my side of the world in England, life was still rosy. I’d read the dystopian novel in the sixties (it was published in 1949), and now I was living in Thatcher’s Britain – not an ideal world, but still innocent enough, with no thought police and no TV programs named after Orwell’s Big Brother.

What did emerge within a few years, though, was the manipulative concept of political correctness, which may have had worthy aims of smoothing out inequality between the privileged and the under-privileged, but which succeeded in mangling the English language and producing gobbledygook. We ended up with ‘political speak’ and ‘business speak’, reminiscent of Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’, designed to eliminate all nuance from language and diminish the power of thought.

When I went back to Orwell’s novel recently, I found it almost unbearable to read. The story is grim, the prose stark. But it is more than just depressing. Reading it thirty years on, in a different and more threatening world, the story fills me with dread.

The latest stage production of 1984 is playing at the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne until 10 June. Check out my review:

http://www.australianstage.com.au/201706038320/reviews/melbourne/1984.html

Listening to a Laureate

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Last night I saw Irish author Anne Enright speak about ‘Family and fiction’ at Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne. In conversation with Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review, she rolled up her sleeves and entertained us with her down-to-earth womanly wisdom, her reflections on writing and her wry humour.

She started by reading from her latest novel The Green Road ((2015) in her lilting Irish brogue, with an eyebrow cocked and great dramatic expression. Six whole minutes of being read to by Anne Enright – what a treat!

The only work I’ve read of hers is The Gathering (2007), which put her among my favourite Irish women writers, those friends I like to cuddle up with in bed. I am reminded of Edna O’Brien and Edith Pearlman, but Enright’s humour, bleak at times, sets her apart. That novel won her the Man Booker Prize. Now she is the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction.

After the talk, she signed my battered copy of The Gathering, while I complimented her on her dramatic reading.

‘Yes, I like to ham it up,’ she said, smiling with satisfaction.

If only more writers would take their cue from her.

Talking of humour, and drama, take a look at my review of Lally Katz’s latest comedy, now playing at the Arts Centre in Melbourne:

https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-arts/4094-minnie-liraz-melbourne-theatre-company

Revisiting the ’90s

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Better late than never! I’m reading Women Who Run With The Wolves, written by Jungian analyst, Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I dipped into it when it was first published in 1992, when my Wild Woman was in hiding, overtaken by full-time work. Now’s my time to enjoy this retelling of myths and fairytales, through which the author explores female creativity. It’s a passionate and erudite work.

I was never exposed to Jung’s work in my student years, so am now searching libraries and friends’ bookshelves, to complete my education. I need to know more about the terms that are so familiar: the archetypes, the collective unconscious, the shadow self. Written in the 1950s, Jung’s words about the ‘undiscovered self’ ring fresh and pertinent today, with the need to reclaim individual responsibility from those who abuse power.

At the beginning of the year I set up a new habit of writing for an hour before breakfast. Writer friends keep telling me how much their writing practice was influenced by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (1993). I have dug out a copy from the bookshelves, to see how I can refine my new pre-breakfast writing routine with her ‘morning pages’.

By the way, on the subject of women and power, I recently reviewed an MTC production of the 1946 comedy Born Yesterday. Very appropriate for our times. Check it out.

Hey, Mr Tambourine Man

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The New York Times calls him Mr Dylan; Obama calls him Bob; we know him as Dylan. For those of us who grew up in the sixties, he was the one who shook us from our roots and made us question everything about our lives. He has kept the faith, in his own unpredictable way, and now has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. What a turn-up for the books!

Oh to be a fly on the wall when the Academy discussed the pros and cons of giving this modern-day troubadour the award. Is Dylan following the oral tradition of the ancient Greeks, like Homer and Sappho, as Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said when making the award announcement?

I was first ‘turned on’ to his music in England in 1965. For a week in August, I lay in bed, suffering from a bout of tonsillitis, listening to the latest songs on the radio. The Byrds’ version of Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ was top of the charts, ahead of The Beatles, Lulu, The Animals and Joan Baez. Then they played Dylan’s original version. As soon as Highway 61 Revisited was released later that month, I hurried to the record shop and handed over the cash, slightly embarrassed by my boldness, as if I were crossing a line.

After two weeks of silence, Bob Dylan has accepted the award. There were murmurings that he was rude and ungrateful, but he emerged into the world again, gracious and humbled by the honour. Maybe he had to take time to adjust to being less, or more, than a rebel.

Most of us adjust to being less rebellious in later life, but it’s good to know Dylan is still shaking things up, and being acknowledged for it.

 

Dennis Potter binge

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Nothing brings out my inner Brit like Dennis Potter. I had already migrated to Australia in when I first saw his TV series Pennies from Heaven, The Singing Detective and Lipstick on Your Collar, which collectively blew my socks off. They almost made me turn again for ‘home’.
I discovered a copy of Seeing the Blossom (as in ‘smelling the roses’) at South Melbourne market the other day, which has the transcript of his final TV interview with Melvyn Bragg, Potter’s last will and testament. He smoked, drank champagne and swigged morphine (by necessity) throughout the interview, telling Bragg how he still managed to write ten pages a day, in spite of the pain, rising at 5am while his energy allowed. He was determined to complete his final two TV scripts (Karaoke and Cold Lazarus), which he did before he died two months later.
Today I told my librarian I was on a Dennis Potter binge, as she swiped my loan copy of Potter’s The Art of Invective. Here is an antidote for the mealy-mouthed writer. And if there’s anything to put some lead in the critic’s pencil, Potter is your man. Just read his opinion of Rupert Murdoch! And if you are tempted, as I am, to explode the highbrow/lowbrow myth, look to Potter for some ammunition to level the ground. For him, the most popular medium of the time, television (his ‘palace of varieties’) was the place to reach people. He certainly reached me. And the actors who played the leads in his plays performed for him at their peak. The characters played by Bob Hoskins, Michael Gambon, Ewan McGregor and Giles Thomas are still clearly imprinted on my memory. Time to revisit those TV series, I think!