I’m a Dabbler (according to the rules: more than one genre), & I’m aiming at the Miles challenge level (read 6 & review 3 books by Australian women). It’s a kinda modest number, but the challenge contradicts an earlier rule I’d laid down to minimise expenses next year. And – weird, I know – that includes minimising book buying!

That is a very low goal indeed. And I have to say that though I am minimising my expenses, I am STILL, somehow, buying books.

So far this year I’ve reviewed 3 books out of the four I’ve read:

• The Spare Room, Helen Garner
• Cliffs of Fall: And Other Stories, Shirley Hazzard
• Liar, Justine Larbalestier (can’t review friends’ books, sorry!)
• The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard

I have to read 2 more books in order to meet my goal. Which really is a sad goal indeed, I’m kinda embarrassed by it now. And I’ve bought another oh, half dozen books by Australian women writers. So there’ll be plenty more reading & reviewing in 2012!

Onward.

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But THE TRANSIT OF VENUS is a marvellous book, a literary love story which ponders beauty and time, and is written with Hazzard’s trademarked sharp, searing prose. Hazzard offers up deceptively tiny moments which come to define her characters and stories later on, and reward careful reading and re-reading (and I will likely re-read this book, despite having re-read about 3 books in my life). Later in the novel you will often find yourself struck dumb by her foresight, having mistaken her verisimilitude for reality, but a more beautiful and meaningful reality than you yourself had so far had access to. There is something painfully sensitive about Shirley Hazzard’s writing, and I love it.

Take for example, the defining piece of writing about Ted Tice, which occurs on page 16 of a 335-page novel.

““His story has such nobility you can scarcely call it unsuccessful.” Ted Tice was honouring the faith, not the failure.”

You will not understand, when you first read this, that the same can be said about Ted. Not until the final pages. And then you’ll be tempted to call him a failure anyhow, for holding something as old-fashioned as faith. But you won’t be able to. Because over 300 pages ago, Hazzard corrected you. And in the end, briefly, Ted Tice’s faith is indeed honoured. Just a little. Just enough to make you admire him and feel sad for him, and wish he’d let the world corrupt him as the world so often does.

Also (more grimly) enjoyable are Hazzard’s sly asides about Australia, a place whose “history soon terminated in its unsuccess” (page 32), a place perhaps unable to offer up “the full prestige of green” (page 26). A place, you end up thinking, that feels like the past for Hazzard, that lacks the future-promise of America where her protagonist winds up.

As to the bad: as someone forty years younger than Hazzard, I admit some of her ‘olde worldeness’ made me uncomfortable. Her description, for example, of “the men with their assertions great and small, the women all submission or dominion” (age 84, yes I really did bookmark all these precise, efficient pieces of prose). And it’s true that Hazzard’s men are often cold and full of bluster, and her women are such passive little things you want to wring their slender necks. When heroine, Caroline Bell, asserts that her true capability may be ‘to love’ (I didn’t bookmark the page: it annoyed me too much), I wondered what she meant. I would have thought her true capability, from the evidence of her behaviour, was to do pretty close to nothing, and let the world act on her, and then feel sort of melancholic about it.

But then you have these wonderful moments, such as this, when a woman confronts a man. “In a long pause he was made to feel her superior strength, and the fact that she had been withholding it for years out of charity” (page 193). And you find yourself, after you finish the book, missing that marvellous, eye-opening and surprising prose with its intelligent humour, its fierce wit.

Because this is where we get to the real ‘bad’ of Transit of Venus, and I’m afraid it’s Caroline Bell, that milksop of a heroine who takes up far too much of the book even though at the beginning it holds out hope of being some kind of ensemble piece (it’s not; it’s mainly about Caroline Bell). I keep calling her Caroline Bell, of course, but in the book she’s more often called Caro, a discordant abbreviation that left me seething. Was it some kind of mistaken ‘Australianism’, a play on the idea we all shorten our names? Because no one calls a Caroline ‘Caro’ instead of ‘Carol’. Just saying.

But no. My frustration drove me to Googling, and I found that Caro is latin for ‘flesh’. (Or ‘meat’ or ‘meat eater’, both of which suit her better.) By this reasoning, then, Caro is flesh while her far more likeable sister Grace is spirit. By extension, Caro is the sister ‘of the body’, the sensual sister, the woman in the text who signifies flesh and the act of love, and of loving.

Which drives me mad. Because it seems to me that any sensual woman ‘of the flesh’ would not be so numbingly placid as Caro (gah! Caro!) Bell. That any woman capable of love – romantic love – would also, surely, enjoy sex. She might even experience orgasm. And this is where it comes crashing down, for me, because I cannot imagine our wan little Caro Bell, in her bloody blue dresses, orgasming. Even though she has sex throughout the book, I’m sure she is capable only of a sigh and a melancholic turning away, and then some ridiculous assertion that her ‘capability is to love’. Not ‘to come’.

But perhaps Hazzard didn’t mean ‘flesh’. Caro can also mean ‘dear’ or ‘darling’, which might make better sense, since Caro is obviously dear to Shirley Hazzard (not so much to me, though). And when Caro is dropped into the world’s most miserable relationship with one of the world’s most miserable men, you can’t help but feel Hazzard’s sympathy for her dear Carol. Sorry, Caro. You can’t help feeling it, and marvelling at Hazzard’s authorial cruelty to have put Caro there in the first place. And when poor, old Caro is surprised by her lover on an evening walk, and reacts with something like fear, and Hazzard steps in to curse the fates that pulled these two, agonised lovers together yet again – when that happened I, of course, more astutely cursed Shirley Hazzard.

But I still bought three more of her books. Because I know a Maestro when I read one.

This review is part of the AWWC2012 challenge & is cross posted on Goodreads.com.

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Radio’s a great format for short stories, & it seems to me that in this ‘modern age’, I’d expect short stories to be on the ascent, & novellas to take over from novels. But I’ve been wrong before.

Click above for more of the story and a petition.

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(Obviously they’ve never heard about Bookcrossing. Shhh!)

Which goes against a lot of the authorial commentary on Creative Commons & the value of the ‘first one free’ approach. And hasn’t Cory Doctorow discovered that his sales went up after ‘giving away’ his books? I remember trying to read SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN, SOMEONE LEAVES TOWN electronically (back in the day, we had to read html directly from our desktop computers! That’s right, kiddies, and we couldn’t scroll without clicking!) & giving up, buying the damn book instead. That might have been exacerbated by the fact it’s such a weird book & even years later I can’t work out if I really liked it or hated it entirely. And, perhaps ironically, I occasionally buy other Doctorow books just to *work out* whether I actually liked that first one. But then I panic whenever I start to read one. Some kinda vicious circle.

It’s a complicated psychology, the ‘free book reaction’. I wonder if World Book Night will just end up bumping the psychosis rates across the UK & Ireland. Might be safer to watch TV that night instead.

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‘Why haven’t we seen this?’
‘Ah, yes. This is CRACKER. It’s very dark. I mean, it’s excellent but … too dark.’
‘What, darker than WALLANDER?’
‘Oh, hell, yes.’
‘… Wow.’

So we didn’t watch CRACKER, because not enough years have passed to take THAT particular journey again. It did remind, me, though, that I’ve been meaning to update you on Neil Cross.

I came across Cross (er, that was awkward) on a panel at the Sydney Writers’ Festival back in May. Cross is a British author based in NZ. He also happens to be head writer for brit cop comedy-drama (yeah, I’m calling it) SPOOKS. Just in case you were wondering how I was about to link Cross back to my opening sentence.

Cross was on a panel with Lenny Bartulin, Australian author, talking about crime writing & the importance of the sense of place. To go off on a tangent for a second, their conclusion was that elaborate description — even in something as location-oriented as crime writing — isn’t needed.

‘A man and a dog walk into a bar,’ said Lenny. ‘The audience sees the bar, the man and the dog. You don’t need to describe it.’

Bartulin also said a phrase like ‘it reminded him of his father’ draws out connotations for the audience that may be different for each person, but will still end up informing their vision of the character in ways that suit the story. Neat, huh?

Anyhooo, I’m eventually getting around to Cross. Apparently he started life as a ‘literary’ writer who was told his stuff would never sell outside Britain, being — as it was — “TOO literary”.

Too literary. Man, I hate that damning with faint praise thing.

I figured Cross for a brother-at-arms & picked up one of his novels. I read CAPTURED right before I read Le Carre’s THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. Just for something completely different.

Because CAPTURED is different. It features Kenny: a man who’s just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the kind that kills within weeks. And so he’s taken stock. He’s determined how to spend the rest of his shortened life and he’s come up with an idea that starts off kinda tragic & becomes horrific. He looks up a woman he knew when he was a kid: Callie Barton. Trouble is, Callie disappeared years ago and though the reason or purpose behind her disappearance was never determined, Kenny decides to hunt down Callie’s husband, Jonathan. And I mean, really, hunt.

I may be doing the decision an injustice, I admit, because I never really was sure how he reached that conclusion. But he did, & so the next steps become darker and darker as Kenny’s hunt turns more dangerous. Which, I guess, is what happens when someone with nothing to lose falls in love with a violent idea based on some kind of inaccurate nostalgia. To give you the 25-words-or-less synopsis.

It’s a depressing, energetic book about some awful people and some victims who are only innocent to relative degrees, and it reads very much like a miniseries, complete with ‘hooks’ right before the ad breaks. (Okay, in this case the ad breaks are chapter endings, but it amounts to the same thing).

Like Le Carre’s book, much of Cross’ novel features two guys sitting opposite each other and the violence, when it happens, is messy and inaccurately aimed. Unlike Le Carre’s book, there’s more action than talking, more repulsive consequence than impolite conclusion. Cross has an impressive ability to wrench up the drama & take human need to its logical conclusions.

What I’ll remember most, however, is how damn DEPRESSING this book was. Selfishness and laziness and corruption get their just deserts, but so do other less-deserving traits.

Try to avoid liking anyone in the book. There are few happy endings.

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– John le Carre, December 1989, introduction to THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, Sceptre, 2009

There’s more. le Carre talks about writing the novel in a rush over 5 weeks, he talks about watching the Berlin wall go up. And he says — and at this point I bought the book — “I had been poor too long, I was drinking a lot, I was beginning to doubt, in the deepest of ways, the wisdom of my choice of job.”

I had been poor too long. I was drinking a lot. I was beginning to doubt…

Well, if that’s part of the formula for success, then raise a cheer, my friends, I swear I’m part way there!

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Anyhoo, I’ve been thinking about this book and you know? It really shouldn’t work. I mean, really. It’s a spy drama but the most action that’s happened so far is that one guy was riding a bike. Riding a bike while being shot at, sure, but still what it boils down to is a dude on a bike. Oh, and then there was one guy who got punched in the face, but really that’s **it**!!

Apart from that it’s all men in cars, men in rooms, men back in their cars on their ways to other rooms. Men talking. Mostly men, but my point isn’t about gender. It’s about activity. There isn’t much of it. It’s a book about talking. Talking about spying, sure. But mostly, it’s just a book with men sitting across the room from one another, talking. And I picture all of them in neat brown suits and narrow ties, perched on chairs in British drawing rooms, talking like Hugh Laurie used to talk back when he was British.

So, all this talking about spying and this driving around and the drawing rooms and the ‘I say, old chap!’ (this from the German guy) AND THEN there’s a couple of paragraphs telling the reader — not showing the reader — how difficult it is to be a spy, living a lie and trying to keep the lie straight in your head, oh how terribly wretched, fie! And so on.

See? This damn book breaks all the rules.

It shouldn’t work.

So why am I enjoying it so much?

Next post I will contrast this book with a recent Neil Cross novel I read. THEN we’ll talk about action.

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I always figured if there was a day in honour of Douglas Adams, it’d be a Thursday. Never could get the hang of Thursdays.

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Lately I’ve been working full-time, alas, but one of the silver linings of full-time work (apart from cold hard cash) is commuting. But only because commuting grants reading time. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading:

Identity, Milan Kundera: heartbreaking. The story of a couple who go away for the weekend. I know, doesn’t sound heartbreaking. But the gentle exploration of self & other, about isolation in the midst of togetherness, was haunting. So much so that I immediately ordered The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I’m too scared to read it right now, though. There’s only so much loneliness I can bear in my prose. From here I moved onto:

Carmen Dog, Carol Emshwiller. Is this the perfect, funny, sweet, accepting, feminist book ever written? I think it might be. ‘Difference with equality’ *can* be done, that’s what this book showed me. Randomly, then, I moved from this book to:

The Clocks, Agatha Christie. Christie really is a master of the finely-observed character study. This is a wonderful book, though I admit I find Hercule Poirot oddly overblown compared to the subtle reality of the other characters. I suspect he was always this discordant & I just never noticed it when I was reading my way through all the Christies as a teenager. It was such a satisfying read I took a gamble & picked up a book I bought at City Lights in San Francisco last year:

Beauty Salon, Mario Bellatin. I didn’t love this. Actually, I didn’t even get this. But on the plus side: it’s short. I needed a much more narrative-driven book after this one, so I turned to:

The Straw Men, Michael Marshall. A great romp with a disturbing serial killer and weird, spooky clues on video tapes. Modern, energetic & creepy. Just the way I like ‘em. Almost as good as:

Bad Things, Michael Marshall. Now *this* was brilliant. I thought this was an almost-perfect book. The friend I pressed it upon didn’t quite agree & he instead made me read:

Last Man Standing, David Baldacci. Very well-plotted book from the author of Absolute Power. Occasionally a bit obvious, occasionally surprising, & very thick. Not as thick, though, as:

A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin. OK, THIS was thick. I was told in no uncertain terms I had to read it. *Obviously* I was never going to enjoy it. The book’s about 800 pages long & it has a dragon on the cover. The bf asked me once how I was going reading such a thick book & I said, ‘The dwarf-type character has just mentioned that dragons don’t exist anymore. Which, of course, means this book is going to have dragons in it.’ The bf looked at me. “Well, that & the fact it has a DRAGON on the COVER.” Thereafter he would occasionally recite, “It has a DRAGON on the COVER” whenever he caught me reading it.

This is a bloody good book. GRRM is such a master of character and plot and event that I rushed through this book, surrendering entire weekends to it. And then I bought the second one. Which is only 600 pages long, but printed in a font so tiny as to be illegal in some countries.

Next time I’m off sick, I’ll go check the bookshelves & let you know what ELSE I’ve been reading.

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Today is typically Sydney: both overcast AND muggy.

To compensate I am watching In Treatment Season 2, which is frikking awesome. Maybe more awesome than Season 1, I’m not sure. Only 1 ‘week’ in. Also there’ll be novel revision & roast chicken later today.

I am getting really good at this ‘time off’ thing.

And I have bought my very first moleskin notebook. I couldn’t resist — they now come in pink. Sriously, r they as good as the fans claim they are? I need to know. Two pink notebooks cost me twenty-five bucks!

Hmmm, now what shall I write in them?

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Man. I only just got through setting those goals.

In other news, I went into Dymocks today to spend some of my Xmas book voucher on CM Priest’s BONESHAKER, & they were sold out. They were sold out in most of the Dymocks stores in Sydney, I was told. So then I tried to find some Michael Marshall. They were also sold out of Marshall’s books.

If this keeps up, I’m gonna have to read that Atwood book I bought — right before I instantly began regretting buying another Atwood book. It better be good, people-who-told-me-to-read-it. It soooooo better be good.

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There were some highlights, of course. Apparently my name is now on the cover of a book (that really happened, right?) & I did get a new job (well, 2 new jobs, but the second one actually looks pretty good) & I did make a bunch of excellent new friends from all the workplace-alterations I undertook. And the house is now painted. Yay! I waited 12 years for that, I kid you not. Sometimes the issue was money, sometimes the issue was my poor choice of living partner (something else I’ve rectified in recent years). Also 2009 marked the return of healthiness post-gallbladder. Yes, the gallbladder thing took longer than expected — & longer than it should’ve, I’m sure. Slowed down as it was by other committments & general chaos. And apart from a lingering inability to drink anywhere near the way I used to be able to (actually, I never WAS able to drink the way I used to be able to), it seems to be working out fine.

We spent the New Year bit of 2009-10 in the Blue Mountains, holed up all cosy & snug in the drizzling weather. I love rainstorms. I love the smell of rain & I love being away from the tropical Sydney heat. Man, I hate the heat. But 2010 is starting off kinda cool & wet in Sydney, which is my favourite kinda weather. So I can’t complain.

So, what will I remember of 2009? Heck, I’m not even sure I WILL remember 2009. But according to the Guardian, it was the year of the short story. Which is nice. And although it’s apparently not technically the end of a decade, it’s surely the end of the ‘noughties’ — which is leading a lot of people to make ‘best of’ lists not only for the year but also the last ten years.

Here in no particular order is my List of Top Five Lists (Inspired by December 2009). Lemme know of others you’ve enjoyed:

The Book Maven’s Top 20 Books of the Decade
NY Times’ Favourite Book Covers of 2009
PublishingPerspectives’ Best Publishers of 09
About.com’s Best Books of the 2000s
Flashlight Worthy’s Best Graphic Novels of 2009

And for entirely unrelated reasons, 100 Extraordinary Examples of Paper Art.

Excelsior!

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(I think I made it by going a little crazy for a while.)

Of course, a lot of those deadlines were for A BOOK OF ENDINGS (six new stories, yours now via Twelfth Planet Press!), but the timetable of 2009 work made it all the way into December. Now I’ve got to start thinking about my timetable for (*gulp*) 2010. Something a little calmer, I hope, though I maybe have just signed up for another Gilgamesh project. And there’s editing for the contemporary Ishtar story soon, most likely.

Anyhoooo, the essay. It’s in & it may or may not coherently argue that the battle of good (Sheriff Bell) and evil (Anton Chigurh) for the soul of one man (Llewellyn Moss), the elements of the supernatural, the voice of despair, the struggle to believe in a God who seems less involved in the world than Satan are all Gothic elements of this modern novel. There’s other stuff, too. I refer to Anne Radcliffe and Terminator in about equal measures, and naturally I mention MELMOTH THE WANDERER more than once.

But here’s the thing: I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about gothic literature. Turns out I’m not that knowledgeable at all. It impresses me how much trust esteemed editor Danel Olson has placed in his extensive contributor list (2 volumes!).

Plus, essays. Wow, I’d forgotten how hard they can be.

For now, though, the next steps are to return to the fun stuff. My stuff. The BROKEN novel. I’d left off with John Eiger about to — well, let’s just say he could be making a big mistake.

Man, I love when characters make big mistakes. I love sitting alongside them thinking, ‘oooooohhh, buddy, you’re in trouble now….’.

But tonight some rest and something new to read that *isn’t* NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. I’m thinking it’s time to return to some Michael Robotham.

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So, then.

If this is the future of storytelling, I don’t think I mind it at all.

Also, some reading for 2010. Could come in handy, particularly if you’re thinking of doing the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge like driftwoodyak. I’m really keen on this, but I don’t think I can both read more AND write more all in the same 52-week period.

I’ve just added New Model Army and Death of the Author to my (already too-long) list. Man, I’m sick of reading boring books.

But if all that reading’s too much, maybe just skip to the end.

Last but not — well, just last — I came across the National Library’s page for A Book of Endings. Kinda cool.

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Still, the article ends on a high note by suggesting Waterstones may end up killing *itself*. Selling eReaders will wipe out the need for bookshops of any kind, apparently. (Unless someone comes up with a Red Room for eBooks, I suppose.)

I found one of the Waterstone article comments interesting: a parent who tells their child, ‘we don’t care what you read, just read something!’ Much as I want to encourage reading, I’ve always found this idea of the mystically transformative powers of reading kinda … short-sighted. My neighbour’s kid took to reading at the age of about eight. He read & read. What he was reading was the Harry Potter books, over & over again. Not sure if he ever did take to reading anything else.

Quite apart from that, he was one weird little kid.

The point is read, sure, and read widely. But be aware when reading that you may still come across garbage. And reading garbage is just as bad as watching garbage, listening to garbage or, indeed, eating garbage. Strictly, y’know, in my opinion.

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Oh, all right, I admit I’ve laughed along with the best of ‘em at Dan Brown’s prose (the famous silhouette with the pink eyes is my favourite), but I do have to wonder: where in heck was the EDITOR in all of this? Could you GET another editing gig after that?

“Hi, I’m looking for a job, my previous experience was as editor of Dan Brown’s –” *click* “… hello?”

Yer have to hand it to Brown: he’s found something that millions of people can enjoy. More than one commenter over at this column even states it specifically: Brown gives good story (even if he doesn’t give good prose).

(Yes, yes, I know, story is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, what? Oh, well, I’ve not really read any … or, okay, I read one, but I skim-read it, & I don’t know if I really thought it was a good story. I’m just a Knights Templar-obsessive. It seemed to roll along, though. What’s that you say? Characters? Oh, well, I’m not sure there were any…)

Still and all, Brown would find a lot to laugh about with MY thwarted novel attempts. And I couldn’t blame him for that. Hats off to him for his runaway success, after all. Not many authors get that level of buzz around their next novel, that many people excited by & looking forward to their next work. Good on him, I say! And I actually mean that, though the flippant nature of the rest of this post is probably undermining my attempts to be sincere on that front. Good on him, so few of us break through, how can we begrudge the ones that do?

But if you ARE looking for a rollicking good story where the prose may not pain you so much, there’s an excellent-looking list here. Onto the wishlist with these!

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From the weekend surfing:

* Rebecca Solnit, “You know, a lot of my work has been based on the field of disaster sociology, which emerged after the World War II, when the US government decided it wanted to know how human beings would behave in the aftermath of an all-out nuclear war. The assumption, as it often is, is that we would become childlike and sheepish and panic and be helpless, or that we’d become sort of venal and savage and barbaric. And the disaster scholars started to look at this and eventually dismantled almost every stereotype we have and found that people are actually, as I’ve been saying, resourceful, altruistic, brave, innovative and often oddly joyful, because a lot of the alienation and isolation of everyday life is removed. [snip] What you also see is that because the authorities think that we’re monsters, they themselves panic and become the monsters in disaster.” Elite panic, it’s called. Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell, has gone into the shopping cart.

* How to Innovate Like Apple: this includes nurturing talent, flattening hierarchies, and ignoring market research.

* Relatedly, an article on why big business isn’t bothered about helping you find your stolen iPhone.

* Follow the Reader: a blog for readers

* The Short Review: a review site for short story collections (I so wish I’d known about this a year back when I was putting together my own short story collection — think of all the brilliant ideas I could’ve stolen learned from!

* And finally, via catsparx: if architects had to work like web designers (so. very. true.)

And the even better news is that the brain is working well enough again for me to be pushing forward on the writing schedule. Over the past few days I’m managed to get halfway through my Ishtar contemporary novella (currently being brought down from 23K to the requisite 20K) & I am having a blast with this project.

Ah, Ishtar. Putting the FUN! back into love & war.

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Of course, they publish only American authors, so my interest is purely academic. But what a great idea, book covers like rock albums! C’mon, let’s storm those parapets, eh?!

Head over to check out some charming objets de la littérature. You can even take a peek inside & read some of the text, if titles such as “Cast Your Eyes Like Riverstones Into the Exquisite Dark: A Book of Night Poems” (Danny Sherrard) take yer fancy.

In other news, I’m planning a Sydney launch for A Book of Endings. Will keep you posted. Plans so far sound kinda cool, if I do say so myself.

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We’ve heard TV types say that ‘each week we’re making the equivalent to a movie’ (but half an hour shorter). Now of course we’re hearing TV shows being compared to serialised novels. A natural equivalence, when you think about it. And explains why I couldn’t get into The Wire the first time I tried: I was trying with an episode part-way through Season 4, with no explanation as to who the hell the characters were that I was watching.

The second time I tried, by sitting down with 4 seasons of the DVDs & starting from the beginning, the show made perfect sense.

… It occurs to me I should be comparing TV, then, not to a serialised novel but to *a series* of serialised novels.

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I read this book while I was in late elementary school – probably fifth or sixth grade (around 1999). I found it in my mom’s room and don’t really know a publishing date for it, but I know that it wasn’t new then. The pages had wear and it just had that “old book feel.”

Doesn’t that just make you wish you’d found that same book in your mum’s room when you were a kid?

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