Susan Green

Numbers are my friends, and they are always around me. Each one is unique and has its own personality. The number 11 is friendly and 5 is loud, whereas 4 is both shy and quiet – it’s my favourite number, perhaps because it reminds me of myself. Some are big – 23, 667, 1, 179 – while others are small: 6, 13, 581. Some are beautiful, like 333 and some are ugly, like 289. To me, every number is special.

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant, which means very, very, very clever. He can calculate, memorize and manipulate numbers in utterly amazing ways, and because he has synesthesia –  which he describes as a ‘rare neurological mixing of the senses’ –  neurological ‘crossed wires’ – he experiences them as colours, shapes, textures, contours, motions and moods. For instance, 1 is ‘a brilliant and bright white, like someone shining a flashlight into my eyes’. 37 is like porridge. 89 is falling snow.

Books on autism and neurodivergence are ‘in’ at present, and since imprints don’t publish what they can’t sell, this indicates an appetite among readers for updated information and more first-person accounts which talk of difference rather than disability. I had wanted to read Tammet’s Nine Minds, which came out last year to good reviews, but the library hasn’t got it (yet?). But I was surprised to find an earlier book, Born on a Blue Day, in the catalogue. It was published in 2006 when he was 27, and went on to become a best-seller and prize-winner. When I looked him up on the net, I discovered that he’s famous, subject of a couple of documentaries, a TED talker and has written lots of other books. There’s so much I don’t know about…well, everything!

Born on a Blue Day is written in clear and straightforward prose, very readable except when he gets onto numbers. I’m not like Tammet; numbers are not my friends. Instead, they’re old enemies. They inflicted horrible mental strain and confusion and despair in school. Even now, just looking at a Sudoku makes my brain scramble – but when the numbers are attached to something tangible, like a bank balance or tax or a budget, I can happily sit down with a calculator.

Tammet describes his childhood and adolescence as a time of not fitting in, out of step with his peers, struggling and at times suffering. One of the most poignant and moving episodes was Daniel’s first experience of falling in love. He had figured out that he was gay – he became attracted to another young man – he tried to ‘court’ him by doing his schoolwork for him – and finally wrote him a letter telling him how he felt. I think my heart rate must have gone sky-high at this point, because I was expecting a hideous exposure and subsequent outing/humiliation/ostracism/bullying…but the young man wrote back sensitively, telling Daniel that he couldn’t be the person he wanted him to be. So he was let down gently, thank goodness.

Tammet comes across as likeable and genuine; a good, kind man who happens to be born with a profoundly different brain to most of us. He’s used his superpowers for good – making himself available to scientists as a subject, communicating about autism in his books, even at one point reciting the number pi to the 22,514th digit to raise money for an epilepsy charity. It was heartwarming to discover that he was, at the time of writing Born on a Blue Day, in a long-term relationship and had found in Christian faith a sustaining force in his life.

She…quite liked to talk to her mother, but somehow her mother was always about to go out, or into another room, and by the time Maria had got to the point of the conversation, she had gone. Her father when she talked to him would listen with distant kindness, but not as though what she said was of any great importance. Which, of course, it might not be. Except, she thought, to me. And so, for real conversations, Maria considered, things were infinitely preferable. Animals, frequently. Trees and plants, from time to time. What they said was consoling, and sometimes it was uncomfortable, but at least you were having a conversation.

During one of my ill-advised purges, I got rid of all my Penelope Lively children’s books. Now, I am gradually gathering them again. I found A Stitch in Time at the library book sale, and it is one that I never had in the first place, so what a win!

Maria, the 11-year-old heroine, is a quiet and imaginative girl, small for her age, hesitant and introverted. As the book begins, she is arriving at a holiday cottage in Lyme with her parents. They are quiet people, too – though not imaginative enough to relate to their daughter. They don’t seem to know what to do with a child, so Maria bottles up her spark and intelligence, and holds long conversations with inanimate objects. She wanders about in the house and garden, poking around, talking to the resident cat (a critical, rather ill-natured creature), discovering a fossil collection and an irrestistible-to-climb ilex tree with a view into the hotel next door…

So, all set for the kind of book I love. It’s beautifully written, very descriptive and in comparison to current kid’s lit, slow. The old house is full of its original furniture, books, objects and family memorabilia. The elderly landlady, Mrs Shand, lives just over the road. There’s a possible tragic mystery involving a young girl, one of Mrs Shand’s aunts, who sewed a sampler but didn’t finish it. And the sounds of an invisible swing and barking dog… Lively’s familiar themes are time, memory and the sense that past events can leave an imprint on the places where they happened.

But as well, there is present-day growth and change for Maria. A large family – aunts and uncles and cousins – is staying in the hotel, and gradually Maria is drawn to the liveliness of the children. She makes friends with 11-year-old Martin. He’s very different to her – outgoing and confident, expert at wrangling younger children and managing adults. But like her, he has serious thoughts and an inquiring mind. They bond over a shared fascination with fossils, and soon Maria finds herself joining Martin in noisy, shambolic family outings. Maria’s self-contained, reserved parents are taken aback by her new friends – I found the section where they are nudged into taking the kids for a rainy day in their cottage quietly hilarious.

The ‘mystery’ is not exactly a ghost story – more a fleeting suggestion of the past leaking into the present – and not quite the tragedy that Maria had imagined. The subtle time-slips are beautifully realised; the ending is gentle. Penelope Lively won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award in 1976 for A Stitch in Time.

While twelve readings of Pride and Prejudice give you twelve periods of pleasure repeated, as many readings of Emma give you that pleasure, not repeated only, but squared and squared again with each perusal, till at every fresh reading you feel anew that you never understood anything like the widening sum of its delights.
Reginald Farrer

I found the sentence above in an essay by Lionel Trilling, included in A Truth Universally Acknowledged edited by Susannah Carson, which I’d had on my shelf for years, and forgotten about until my recent Jane Austen binge. And I thought, yes! Though in my latest Japanese reading of P&P, I found more detail, more complexity, it was essentially the same book, only more so. But Emma seemed like a different novel altogether.

So I’ve also been reading books like Susannah Carson’s, and typing things like ‘Jane Austen’s Moral Vision’ into a search engine. Discovering what critics and academics and writers have to say – even watching filmed lectures! –  is so very interesting and enlightening.

I’m no critic, however, so I’ll just note the things that struck me this time around.

1. Emma is stuck with Mr Woodhouse.
Poor Emma! Gentle and sweet-natured he may be, but Mr Woodhouse is also selfish, demanding and irrational. It’s the tyranny of the weak. I had thought he was a comic figure, but no. He’s a man whose concerns have narrowed to fire-screens and gruel, and Emma, as his carer, has to baby him, placate him, coddle and coax and calm him. Though to all intents and purposes she is the self-satisfied mistress of Hartfield, she is trapped. No wonder she is so sad when her governess, Miss Taylor, marries. No wonder she pounces in Harriet Smith! Just to have a third person there with her, and not be always left alone with him.

2. Highbury is an ecosystem.
And how complex it is. Everybody, all together, no matter what their place is in the class system, makes it tick. The characters are constantly passing along news, gossip, favours, kindnesses, patronage, advice, opinions. The action ebbs and flows around the streets of the village to the vicarage, the school, Ford’s haberdashery, the Crown Inn, Donwell Abbey, Randalls, Hartfield and the Cole’s nouveau riche establishment.

3. Society is in transition
Emma’s snobbishness is challenged and overcome in some instances, and justified in others. Sometimes she works it out for herself; the social climbing of kind, neighbourly Mr Coles is acceptable, but that of pretentious Mrs Elton is not. But Mr Knightley has to help her to understand that the prosperous, sensible Martin family are worthy of her attention, too.

4. There are lessons on how to be good that are relevant today.
Be kind. Be accepting. Don’t interfere, or make mischief, or lie and deceive. People are not playthings.
And as far as you possibly can, know yourself.

“O God! that I had never seen her!”
The rest of the day, the following night, were hardly enough for her thoughts. She was bewildered by all that had rushed on her within the last few hours. Every moment had brought a fresh surprise; and every surprise must be a matter of humiliation to her. How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under! The blunders, the blindness of her own head, and heart! She sat still, she walked about, she tried her own room, she tried the shrubbery – in every place, every posture, she perceived that she had acted most weakly; that she had been imposed on by others to a most mortifying degree; that she had been imposing upon herself in a degree yet more mortifying; that she was wretched, and should probably find this day but the beginning of wretchedness.
To understand, thoroughly understand her own heart, was the first endeavour.  

A couple of days ago I was with a group of friends, all constant readers, talking about re-reading books. Some of us – never. Having read a book once, there was no need to read it again. Or, there are so many new books to read, why would you? Only two of us were constant re-readers. This friend not only buys new novels each month but regularly re-reads her way through her old favourites. Which include the works of Charles Dickens, the Harry Potter series, Noel Streitfield’s ballet stories. She talked about the pleasure of visiting these fictional worlds and people again and again, becoming lost in their lives, knowing they are always there.

I am a re-reader as well. My re-reading falls into a few different categories.  I read very fast, often skip-reading, so that sometimes I get to the end and have to go back over a text. If I stop myself in time, and slow right down, I can get so much more from a book.

Then there is re-reading for self-soothing. Literary valium! Books I know so well, I can almost recite along with the text. There are no real  ‘surprises’ other than the little bursts of pleasure that come when I encounter the familiar characters and plots, the crises and resolutions and even well-loved phrases or descriptions.  Turning the pages, I know that all is safe, I am in good hands, all will end well. I can feel lulled, almost hypnotised, into calm and serenity.

And finally, there is re-reading that (sometimes unexpectedly) makes me wonder what book did I read in the first place? How could I have failed to see this, and this, and this? When I get over myself, and stop feeling inadequate, it’s the kind of re-reading that enlarges my understanding. I know the plot and the people, I’m not caught up in suspense or story, the ending is happy (or not)…but there is so much more.

When I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in Japan, I thought I had been nudged out of complacency. How much I’d missed! But I don’t think I learned my lesson. Not really. I noted a few posts ago that I’d re-read three Austen novels and listed them as ‘comforting old favourites.’

Having just given Emma another whirl, I realised that it was not comforting at all.  I was actually shocked by how superficial my previous readings have been. It’s an uncomfortable novel. It (ugh! horror!) makes you think. With the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth this year, it is probably time to work my way through the five precious novels again. Slowly. With pauses for reflection and admiration. And love and gratitude for these gifts that keep 0n – abundantly, surprisingly – giving.

This book is a Wine and Cheese Book Group choice, and when I picked it up, the coordinator lamented that it was a bit of a dud, and predicted that nobody would enjoy it.

Well, always one to be different, I did. Writing, publishing and bookselling is my old trade; 20th century British social and literary history is an enduring interest; and I’d read another memoir by this writer which was startlingly frank.  She was a partner and editor at the prestigious imprint Andre Deutsch from 1952 to 1993 from its humble post-war beginnings, an editor at the top of her game and, as it turned out, a sucessful memoirist as well.

Athill adored her work, and her ‘eye’ was legendary. While some books were essentially well-written and needed mere suggestions and tweaks, occasionally there was major re-writing involved. But even that was a joy; ‘like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained’. The personal lengths to which she would go for her authors were also legendary. For instance, Jean Rhys (author of Wide Sargasso Sea, a re-imagining of Jane Eyre from the point of view of Mr Rochester’s mad wife), was an impeccable artist but an utterly incompetent (Athill’s word) adult human. The many interventions to try to ‘save’ Jean from herself make tragic reading. And what she put up with from V S Naipaul, one of Andre Deutsch’s prized authors! What an entitled, sexist, nasty shit! I’ve never read any of his books and now I never will.

Born in 1917, Athill lived and loved and worked in a world that was transformed – often radically –  within her lifetime. I liked her rationale for writing Stet:

Why am I going to write it? Not because I want to provide a history of British publishing in the  second half of the twentieth century, but because I shall not be alive for much longer, and when I am gone all the experiences stored in my head will be gone too – they will be deleted with one swipe of the great eraser, and something in me squeaks ‘Oh no – let at least some of it be rescued!’ It seems to be an instinctive twitch rather than a rational intention, but no less compelling for that. By a long-established printer’s convention, a copy-editor wanting to rescue a deletion put a rove of dots under it and writes ‘Stet’ (let it stand) in the margin. This book is an attempt to ‘Stet’ some part of my experience in its original form…

Reading Stet was like being at a long lunch with someone sparklingly intelligent but with no sense of self-importance or need to impress. I imagine myself sitting quietly, listening to the flow of literary shop-talk, gossip and beady-eyed observation, wishing it would never stop…

I could start where I was: myself and those family stories. I had the image of a tight little frame, and my family stories neatly enclosed within it, telling their narrow bit of truth, and then the frame expanding out and out and out. As the frame expanded it would take in the people who were here when my forbears came into their land. Not to tell their story. Not to ask them to tell it. And not to catalogue the horrors. Just to travel to the places where the family stories happened, and put the stories and those First People back into the same frame, on the same country, and see what unfolded.

There are many things I loved about Unsettled, starting with its clever title. There are beautiful and lyrical descriptions that show me a land I recognise and love, and precise and orderly accounts of how that land was stolen. Not just by force, but also via bogus legalities.

Then there’s the perfect structure; a journey – a pilgrimage –  which took Grenville down the family tree, from her great-great-great-grandfather to her mother, back through the generations from Wiseman’s Ferry on the Hawkesbury to Tamworth. She traveled through the NSW landscape, trying to locate farms and pastoral properties and houses, taking the roads her forbears did. And taking that wider view, widening the frame to the First Nations people who were there first. All the time knowing and feeling that her family were:

…part of a relentless flood of foreigners who eventually pushed into every corner of the continent. Over many years they did their best to push out the people who were there. Took their country, their livelihood, their children and often their lives. 

I’m a non-Indigenous, 6th generation Australian; I’ve just started researching my family history. After reading Unsettled, I want to do better. I want to start putting Aboriginal people in the same frame as my great-great-grandparents who worked on Western District pastoral properties before the goldrush. I want to think differently about the words that I use in thinking and writing about my people.

The book made me pay real attention to the almost benign language that was used in the past – certainly in my schooldays –  to describe colonisation. Take the word settled. It’s a nice word. Even cosy. But, if some people settled, then other people were unsettled.  Kate Grenville italicises words to nudge the reader into thinking about alternative meanings for words we have used to talk about the history of Australia. Heritage. Squatter and pastoralist. Crown land. Explore. Open up. Taking up land means taking land from the people who already lived there.

My generation were told stories of pioneers; heroic men on horseback, with bullock drays and flocks of sheep. When we ‘did’ Australian history in grades 4 and 5,  nine-and ten-year-old self didn’t find the stories heroic; they were scarcely even interesting. I feel quite differently after reading Unsettled. Who knows? I might be inspired to drive to Lake Bolac, to try to find the place where my great-great grandfather lived as a boy. It was a remote place, a sheep run. The family story is that the men defended themselves against an attack by the local Aboriginal people. I suspect if I interrogate the story, I’ll find it was a massacre.

I’ve been circling this book for years, but the subject seemed to difficult. It’s about the
questions that come from being a non-Indigenous person in Australia. What do we do with the  fact that we’re the beneficiaries of a violent past? If we acknowledge that we’re on land that was taken from other people, what do we do about that?

Unsettled is a quietly devastating, thoughtful and and necessary book.

This year, I thought I’d manage at least a post a week, but no. I’ve been reading, reading, reading – as usual – but not writing about it. Especially lately. We’re 27 weeks into the year, but I’ve only posted 12 times. “Must do better!” I tell myself…but I have valid excuses. The magical trip to Japan. Then, then a bad bout of Covid, followed by a death in the family and an unexpected 2 weeks in a hotel in Adelaide.
I will get my groove back, but let’s be realistic; I have no hope of catching up in any way, shape or form. So here is a helpfully categorised list of my reading from the beginning of June. The Old Familiars are perhaps over-represented, but they’re on my Kindle. And what the hell, is it wrong to seek comfort in trying times?

Comforting Old Familiars
Sense and Sensibility
Persuasion
Emma
by Jane Austen

Jane and Prudence
Some Tame Gazelle
A Glass of Blessings
No Fond Return of Love
Excellent Women
by Barbara Pym

Intriguing (or do I mean just strange?) Japanese Fiction
The Kagawa Food Detectives by Hishashi Kashiwai
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Distressing Non-Fiction
Stasiland by Anna Funder
The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan
You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the History of War by Elizabeth Becker

and finally, a wonderful and deserving and…

Utterly Beautiful Booker Prize Winner
Orbital by Samantha Harvey

I’ve been to Japan. Ten days in the South, on the islands of Kyushu and Shikoku. Our guide, Yusuke, called these places ‘the last frontier’ of Japan, especially Shikoku which has around 3.8 million people (out of a total Japanese population of around 124 million) living on it, which makes it the most underpopulated of the four major islands. So we journeyed to quieter, more rural places, through forest, small towns and agricultural land and into smaller cities. Over-tourism in Japan is in the news, and there were tourists, certainly – but they were overwhelmingly Japanese and Korean. English was rarely spoken. Though illustrated menus were helpful, Google translate came in handy. However, the people in shops and restaurants were unfailingly patient, helpful and kind. With pointing, charades and smiles, we got got through.

Japan wasn’t a bucket-list destination of mine. It was not on my radar at all; actually, I’ve been dreaming of Sicily ever since I watched The Leopard as a teenager and I’m even learning Italian.
I decided to go when a friend confided that though she wanted to travel, she was hesitant. I said, on a whim, “I’ll go with you!” and we hit upon Japan. She, because her son recommended it as a good destination (safe, clean, amazingly different and beautiful).

And me? I had just watched the series Shogun. Thus are big – or biggish – decisions made.

Of course I took books. A fully-loaded Kindle. But instead of reading Murakami or one of the many Japanese books about cats, I read Pride and Prejudice again. And – is it so surprising? I find something new in Austen every time I read her novels –  it read very differently. I’m not going to pretend that I have any profound cross-cultural observations to make, but the varying codes of behaviour at Longbourn, Netherfield Park, Rosings and Pemberly seemed to find an echo. Because I’m so familiar with P&P, I think my perception of the strangeness of Regency customs and manners have usually been blunted. But being immersed in a society so foreign to me must have got me a little off-balance. The strait-jacket of manners and customs has never seemed so confining, nor financial security so precarious.

The story of Elizabeth and Darcy didn’t quite lose its fascination, but this time I seemed to take in the whole book as a web of social manouevres, debts, obligations and unequal relationships in a way that I hadn’t before.  It was pretty unromantic. Anti-romantic, even. And Lydia – ‘untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy and fearless’ – came out as one of the few characters who is uncalculating and authentic.

Reading Austen in Japan opened a big ol’ can of worms about Austen’s morality and world-view. Who knew? I look forward to travelling with her again.

This is a book about how the world opens up once you realise you’re never going to sort your life out. It’s about how marvellously productive you become once you give up the grim-faced quest to make yourself more and more productive; and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you’ll never get around to more than a handful of them (and that, strictly speaking, you don’t need to do any of them at all). It’s about how absorbing, even magical, life becomes when you accept how fleeting and unpredictable it is; how much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your flaws and failures from others; and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest difficulties in life might never be fully resolved.

I worked in a bookshop for over 24 years, and over that time a mighty river of self-help titles flowed past me. The books ranged from the po-faced spiritual to the (arguably) scientific with a steady stream of faddish nonsense in between. I used to sample them, and it must have been primarily to torture myself. Because (though there were always a few useful ideas, even in the most idiotic), after reading them I always felt cross/grumpy/enraged/disbelieving. Rarely did they reflect life as I lived it. I have never possessed supernatural powers of concentration, self-discipline and willpower. Life, being unpredictable, predictably got in the way of the best plans for increased productivity, focus, personal growth, fitness and (yes, I’ll admit it) weight loss. All those charts, lists,  schedules and reminders ended up feeling both joyless and ultimately useless.

So Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking was a cheering entrant into the crowded field. I enjoyed his highly sceptical take on the whole project. His next book, 4,000 Weeks: Time and How To Use It clarified his central message. Which is that life is short, and we are never going to have the time to do all the things we think we must, should, need and want to do. Becoming more productive is a trap, because, for example, the more quickly we respond to emails, the more incoming emails come pinging into our inboxes. Checking off items on a long ‘to-do’ list only frees up time to make the list longer. Some of Burkeman’s ideas from that book I follow still. Embrace your limitations, and this includes the limitations of human life. It’s short. We can’t predict our futures. Anything can happen, at any time, to anyone. Abandon perfection. Rediscover the power of rest. And, very practically for a writer, write only 3 to 4 hours in a day.

Burkeman’s new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts is a distillation of what he’s learned over the years of his quest to make better use of his time. He suggests that we abandon not only perfectionism, but those fantasy visions of your best life, your best self, your ideal existence. Because it’s never going to happen. I’ve already tried some of his practical advice – like practising ‘scruffy hospitality’, where you don’t clean the house from top to bottom before guests arrive, and eat a gourmet meal off matched plates with ironed table napkins. And I enjoy the excursions into religion, philosophy and spirituality which underpin much of his writing.

I highly recommend this book to all anxious over-achievers like me.

We spent last weekend camping in a bend of the river at our friends’ farm, not far from where we live. It’s a sheep property; you have to open three gates as you navigate your way down the rutted track through the paddocks and then down to the river to the campsite. It’s right on the river, tucked in among massive old river red gums –  ‘widow-makers’; no-one pitches a tent under them – and young trees. It’s private but not truly isolated, though it feels like it is because it seems to take longer to get from the gate down to the river than it did to drive there.
Nine friends; we’ve been having these farm camps for years now, but this time, there was a newcomer. Was this the perfect cast and setting for a ‘bush noir’ crime novel?

Well, no. It was all very jolly, the new friend was lovely and we all drove home happily leaving no corpse behind. Blame my weekend reading, Jane Harper’s Exiles, for my over-active imagination.

Exiles is her third novel featuring investigator Aaron Falk, and it’s set in a South Australian wine-growing area. Since my husband’s family comes from SA, I can picture the Maralee Valley (the Barossa) as easily as I could the parched farmlands of The Dry and the Gariwerd/Grampians landscape of Force of Nature. For me, as a country dweller, her well-observed rural settings and landscapes are an especial pleasure and she rarely strikes a false note.

Falk is in town to attend the christening of his friends Greg (another police officer) and Rita Raco’s child. The ceremony was meant to happen the year before, but when a local woman went missing at the local Food and Wine Festival, all plans were upended and Falk joined the community in the search. The woman’s body was never found, but it is generally accepted that the new mother was suffering post-natal depression and took her own life by slipping into a nearby dam, leaving her baby at the Festival, all alone in her pram. It’s something doesn’t ring true to a number of people. There’s a renewed appeal for information… and the secrets and lies begin to emerge.

Harper does these stories so well. Small town, tight knit community, a crime rooted in the past. A perfect Aussie camping holiday read.