Susan Green

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.

I’d hate to be misunderstood: I’m looking for a man but without the least romantic interest. It’s long over. These days, more than a year since we parted, I think of him as a specimen. Today I’m on a field trip to study his habitat. But I’m jittery; I do not want to encounter this creature. Once, in his smiling eyes I saw good and gentle things. I held him tight and hoped for so much. Now I know that the smile was a simulation, the eyes black holes. I know to keep my distance.

Fake was a riveting read, almost like a crime novel. When renowned, successful journalist and writer Stephanie Wood is played by a narcissistic con man, she falls to pieces – and then pieces herself together again, bit by bit.

Part of her recovery was to use her journalistic training to turn detective and track down the truth about ‘Joe’, the man she meets online. A retired architect turned grazier, raising rare-breed sheep in country NSW, he’s unassuming – driving a beaten-up old car even though he’s filthy rich – and caring, intelligent and honest. Their connection is deep. As far as Wood is concerned, it’s love. She starts to believe they have a future together.

But not long after she starts her relationship with Joe, cracks start to appear in the love story. He makes last minute changes and cancellations. He’s elusive for days at a time. The excuses escalate. Reading how Wood was brought to an extreme and disabling state of anxiety and self-doubt and low self-esteem, it’s easy to see how it can happen. You don’t have to be stupid. Like Wood, most of us want to trust; we want to believe people are good and honest and mean what they say. Most of us are not expecting to meet with deception, lies and manipulation. As Wood digs into Joe’s life she finds he had no country acres, no rustic shack, no sheep. His Sydney house belonged to his ex-wife. He drove an old car because he was bankrupt and in debt. And as a final sting, he was often unavailable because he was in a relationship with another woman at the same time. She exposes him as a narcissist, a fantasist. A fake.

It must have taken real courage for Wood to expose her intimate story in this way but there’s ultimately a hopeful message. To get past the shame, the self-doubt, the anxiety and distress, Wood concentrated on healing –  and experienced what psychologists call ‘post-traumatic growth’. Life became good again. Different – with no happy ending with a handsome prince, or even a middle-aged grazier – but good.

Forget the life you wanted or expected, grab the life you have, she writes. Stop belting yourself up… Look for joy everywhere

Like many autistic people, I knew I was ‘different’ from a young age – and I knew that different was not a good thing – so I constantly tried to be more like people wanted me to be…

In an unpublished (unpublishable?) novel from 2020 I wrote some chapters from the point of view of a female doctor who happened to be autistic. I’d done some superficial reading on the autism spectrum, so I included clunky details like an obsession with graphs and statistics and an aversion to hugs. I had her deal awkwardly with her patients, preferring to stare at her screen while they talked instead of meeting their eyes; I made her the unwitting villain of the piece because of her lack of empathy. I realise now that a lot of the information I accessed was based on the more familiar male ‘Aspy’ tropes of train-spotting and jotting down number plates and Big Bang Theory stereotypes.

More and more books are now being published that deal explicitly with the female presentation of autism, which can be very different to that of males. Females on the spectrum can be highly skilled at masking their differences; they can be more socially adept; their ‘obsessions’ (My Little Pony, pop stars, clothes, crafts) can be socially acceptable). They can be creative, articulate and actually even BAD AT MATHS. No wonder so many young girls have missed diagnoses.

Sandra Thom-Jones was a respected professional with a family, a career, friends and a nagging sense that something is not quite right in her life.  And with two sons diagnosed with autism, she comes to a realisation that the struggles and difficulties could have an explanation. The sense of overwhelm and exhaustion, of ‘not fitting in’, of failing to meet the life challenges that other folks sail through… Could she be autistic too?

Growing Into Autism is her account of her experience of late diagnosed autism, with some useful but more general information tacked on. Thom-Jones structures her account around the DSM-5 (Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition) criteria, such as ‘restricted, repetitive behaviour patterns’ and ‘deficits in social communication and interaction’. She explains that she uses these categories ‘not to medicalise autism (or myself) but rather to give an understanding of what those very formal scientific phrases mean in the lived experience of an autistic person’.

So, for example, under ‘restricted, repetitive patterns’ she talks about her extreme and painful sensory hypersensitivity and how it leads to a self-protective shield of habits and routines, to perfectionism, overwhelm and burnout. She talks too about her ‘stimming’ – self-stimulatory behaviours.  I remember the intellectually disabled people I worked with in the mid 1970’s; I didn’t realise that the head-banging, hand-flapping, rocking and spinning were all coping strategies to help deal with negative emotions like anxiety or frustration. After her diagnosis, Thom-Jones embraced a whole repertoire of activities she can call on to self-soothe. Some of them are socially acceptable, like fidgeting or knitting, but when she’s at home, she can sing, dance, twirl, repeat random phrases and play with soft toys or her collection of dolls or other comfort objects. The more she lets herself behave naturally as her autistic self, the happier she is.

The over-arching theme of this book is the relief that her diagnosis provided. Thom-Jones is released to evolve as a someone with a different brain, successful in her own terms instead of being a failed, faulty neurotypical. (Though I do actually wonder if there is any such thing as a typical person! Every one of us seems to have some challenge or other…)

Just a note: the horrible (in my eyes) cover is explained by her love of the colour pink. In an author pic I saw, she has pink hair and pink clothes.

And a further note: how I would love to have access to Thom-Jones’s stash. Knitting, she says, has been a life-saver and she has collected hundreds of balls of wool, more than she can ever knit with in her lifetime. Just because she loves loves loves yarn. Divine. Sigh.

Having played to her heart’s content, Chibi would come inside and rest for a while. When she began to sleep on the sofa – like a talisman curled gently in the shape of a comma and dug up from a prehistoric archaeological site – a deep sense of happiness arrived, as if the house itself had dreamed this scene.

The narrator – a writer and editor – and his wife both work from home in a rented cottage on a larger estate. He observes the comings and goings in the little zig-zag lane (‘Lightning Alley’) that runs by their home. There’s another a family – man, woman, child – nearby. They adopt a cat.

Over time, the narrator and his wife begin to observe the cat’s comings and goings, too. She begins to visit their garden, and then starts to check them out. Slowly, she begins to investigate the interior of the house. She plays, takes naps, allows herself to be fed.  The couple provide a bed and easy access through a window; dishes and her favourite foods; a bed; toys. They give her a name; Chibi, which means ‘little one’. Her idiosyncrasies and mercurial feline ways are a constant source of interest and delight for them. Chibi becomes part of their lives.
But she’s not theirs.

Apparently The Guest Cat, written by Japanese poet Takashi Hiraide and first published in English in 2014, was a bestseller in the US and France. Which is slightly surprising because it’s a such a gentle, quiet and thoughtful book. It has a cat in it, but it’s by no means a cute kitty love-fest. I’m a fast and often headlong reader, and I had to slow right down so that I could actually savour the small joys and observations; the cat getting plum blossom petals on her fur and smelling lizards in the garden, the narrator watching two mating dragonflies form the shape of a heart, the pink feet of birds landing on an area of glass roof.

There’s more to the book than the narrator and the cat – set in the 1980s, in Tokyo, there’s a financial contraction, difficulties buying and renting real estate, work issues, gallery openings, book launches, the illness and death of a colleague, social gatherings with friends. The narrator takes care  of the old lady who owns their cottage and lives in the big house on the estate after her husband goes into a home. And after she moves, he keeps an eye on the empty house and the neglected garden.
Nothing much happens, except towards the very end, but all the elements come together to meditate on change, transience, connection, attention, care. Not that the author beats you over the head with any of these themes; it’s all as subtle and light as one of those petals on Chibi’s fur.

I found I had this postcard; it’s called ‘The Tailor’s Cat’ (1927) and it’s by an artist called Tsugouharu Leonard Foujita (1886-1968). I recognised the cat’s eyes on the cover.

I’m not just an observer any more. I’m realising that I care about the team.

A very different book about teenage boys.
Yesterday evening, I loaned my library copy (yes, I know; bad) to a trusted and fast-reading friend, and she texted me her thoughts the next morning: ‘Total unashamed grandma doting with football as the side dish”. I couldn’t have said it better.

It’s Melbourne in autumn and winter, footy season, when a collective madness takes over a large portion of the population. While her youngest grandson trains and plays with his under-16 team, Garner sets herself the task of observing. With her  trademark sharp, shrewd and tender gaze she takes in the coach, the boys, their families, passers-by, joggers and dog walkers, the weather, the sky, her mood, the traffic to and from the ground. By the end of the season, she’s not just a watcher; she’s all in.

Garner has described The Season as ‘a nanna’s book about football’, and her grandmotherliness extends to all the boys. She glories in their strong young bodies growing fitter, musclier, manlier as the season progresses. She admires their grace and grit, their comradeship and competitiveness. She sympathises with their disappointments and stuff-ups. There are some down times – illness, tiredness, self-doubt, foul weather – but she sticks it out and as the team nears the finals, her involvement (does this count as a spoiler?) starts to build…

And it took me back to nine seasons of soccer. Late afternoon training sessions and early morning games in freezing Central Victorian winter. Over the years my car-load of boys got bigger and hairier and stronger and louder and more skilful each season. Their conversations were hilarious; the smell of them – feet! muddy uniforms! sweat mixed with Lynx deodorant! – intense. I used to buy a bag of hot donuts for the ride home, and that smell, too, is linked with those times.

I was a mama, not a nanna, and perhaps my doting was not quite as absolute as Garner’s, but I just loved those boys. This is a joy of a book.

Dying is the secret wish of the survivor. I don’t just mean by suicide, although that had become the most attractive exit strategy. I’m talking about the need for danger. The impulse to shipwreck the miracle of being alive.

I was more familiar with Lech Blaine’s political writing, and I had actually completely forgotten that I’d given my son Car Crash when it came out in 2021 until he loaned it to me last month.

Oh. My. God. This is the kind of book that gives a mother of a teenage son the chills.

Boys, booze and cars. Or just cars, no booze required, and a pack of teenage males. My worst nightmare. My secret fear.  As a mother, you need to let your son go but you also dread that knock at the door in the night. You can’t talk/nag/force a sense of self-preservation into them; they are going to take risks anyway, because that’s just what they do. Car Crash is a devastating read.

One night in 2009 in the Queensland town of Toowoomba, seven teenage boys hop in a car together and by the next morning, three of them are dead and two are in intensive care. Lech Blaine, seventeen at the time, walked away from the crash physically unharmed but damaged in so many ways by the tragedy. His attempts to cope with his grief and guilt are heartbreaking; he performs stoicism and ‘doing so well’ for social media and his school community while dying inside.  The section on Blaine’s schoolies week had me crying.

Blaine’s beautifully written, tragic (and occasionally very funny) memoir lives and breathes the world of boys who are finding their way into being men but have the usual concerns of school, sport, friendships, love and sex displaced and derailed by grief and guilt.  And despite the sensational nature of the accident, the rumors, the speculations around drugs, speed and booze, it isn’t some harsh expose of Australian ‘toxic masculinity’. It is – as a couple of reviewers pointed out – essentially a tender story. There’s damage and also healing; Car Crash is heartbreaking as well as ultimately hopeful as it struggles towards greater understanding.

I want to look through the eyes of a bird. Would its world be the same colours as my world? Would everything bend and ripple like a crazy mirror at the fair? Most birds have eyes that face sideways, so they can see predators coming. I must look like a predator to them, with my forward-facing eyes, like a big, featherless owl. I flap my arms, imagining how big my wings would have to be to lift me off the ground. It seems impossible, which it is, because my bones are dense and heavy while birds’ bones are intricate, hollow chambers filled with air. Eagles can telescope their vision to catch prey, which makes them superheroes, better even than Wonder Woman, my favourite. I want an invisible aeroplane, and silver bracelets that can deflect bullets. I want a whip that makes people tell the truth. I’d take it to school and lasso all the girls who bully me and ask them why. Maybe I could lasso the whole universe and make it tell me everything.

I was keen to read We Are the Stars because in 2023, Gina Chick was the winner of Alone Australia. If you haven’t watched any of the series of Alone, it’s a reality show, first shown in 2015. Ten participants are dropped at isolated campsites in remote parts of the world. It’s autumn turning to winter; they arrive equipped with a limited number of tools, no food and a camera set-up to film themselves. The aim is to stay in the wild as long as possible, using bushcraft, hunting and survival skills. The other ‘skill’ is the ability to be alone; more than anything else, it seems to be a mind game.  There are usually some scary predators, like bears and wolves.

In Tasmania, Gina Chick didn’t have to cope with big carnivores, just the unceasing search for calories, the miserable weather, the dispiriting locale, the dearth of things to kill or forage – and solitude. And she was just the woman for the job. As I discovered from her book, she’s done numerous extremely hard-core (or just hard) courses in survival; she’s strong, fit, not vegetarian, not squeamish and mentally tough. She is a lover of life, in all its forms and manifestations, not seeking to vanquish or dominate nature, but to be part of it. Solitude was not a torment for her, as it is for so many people. I was so pleased that she won; not just because she was a woman, and women – with less body mass and muscle than men – have a harder time with the challenge (only two women have won so far). It was also because she just bloody deserved to win. She was was magnificent.

Well, after reading her book, I still think she’s magnificent. A wild, misfit kid, she grew into an outrageous, sensation-seeking young woman but with an innate need for spiritual meaning and authenticity, over the years she became the woman who weathered 67 days in the bleak Tasmanian wilderness. She’s a free spirit, passionate, creative and more than a little woo woo. I can cope with a bit of woo woo. In fact, I loved Chick’s paeans to nature and the oneness of all beings. And I admired the openness with which she writes about love, vulnerability, illness, pain, death and grief.

Now a vast wave has washed away that sandcastle, swept it into a ceaseless ocean, and all that is left is a smooth beach as far as I can see, wide and white, unmarred by wind or waves; no footprints, no paths, just possibilities. The sea reflects sunlight into showers of brilliant  discs. No cloud tears the blue. Silence howls in my blood. I can walk in any direction, but nothing calls me yet. So I pause, like a heron, head cocked; and listen, and wait. That space, that structureless plane of possibility, feels necessary. I know life will call me into action at some point, but for now it feels important to be very, very still and listen to that silence.

My only complaint is that she didn’t touch on Alone. Maybe she has a two-book deal…

“Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.”
The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Sorrowful and the Glorious Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and then, would chime some unlikely word; love, virginity, death; and during that hum the whole aspect of the rococo drawing-room seemed to change; even the parrots spreading iridescent wings over the silken walls appeared abashed; even the Magdalen between the two windows looked a penitent and not just a handsome blonde lost in some dubious daydream as she usually was.

I first read The Leopard in 1975 (a half century ago! a whole world away!) when it was a set text for HSC English Literature. From the very first paragraph (above), I was in love.
With everything. With the Prince and his family, who we see first at prayer in their frescoed room surrounded by painted Roman gods and goddesses – ‘thunderous Jove and frowning Mars and languid Venus’ and a mob of minor deities. With Sicily, which is a protagonist in its own right; the heat, the langour, the lavish beauty and cruelty, the history of invasion and colonisation, the decay. And most of all with the writing; its rhythm, its parade of semi-colons (which my own editors have always wanted to remove), its complex, flowing, allusive and beautiful sentences and paragraphs that weave an instant time-travelling spell. I am there, in May 1860, at the Villa Salina near Palermo.

Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, is the ‘Leopard’ of the title, around whom the novel revolves.

…(the Prince) had risen to his feet; the sudden movement of his huge frame made the floor tremble, and a glint of pride flashed in his light-blue eyes at this fleeting confirmation of his lordship over both humans and their works.

He is a conundrum of a man. Half-German, half-Sicilian, tall, huge and fair among his slighter, dark-haired kin, see-sawing between sensuality and intellect. He can be irascible, sentimental, intellectual, cynical, philosophical, melancholic, inattentive to practical matters and also ruthlessly pragmatic. He rules his family like  Zeus over Olympus – he loves them, they fear him –  but with the end of the Bourbon regime, the influence of his class is about to wane. The novel follows the Prince as he negotiates, with melancholy realism, the new reality ushered in by the unification of Italy. His class, he knows, must fade into irrelevance as the middle class supplants them.

I only just found out that there’s a 6-part Netflix series out soon. I’ve seen the 1963 Visconti film a few times, including once with the ball scene restored to its full 50-minutes.  American actor Burt Lancaster played the Prince, with Frenchman Alain Delon as his nephew Tancredi and Italian Claudia Cardinale his nouveau riche fiancee Angelica. It seemed perfectly cast. Can I bear to watch the new version?

I can certainly re-read The Leopard and know my expectations will be met. After fifty years and a lot of other reading, it remains in my mind a near perfect novel. And I could say perfect, but won’t for fear of provoking those gods of di Lampedusa’s.

I found a couple of Kathleen Norris collections on Kindle, each containing a half dozen or so novels, and very cheap.

Which is good, because after reading The Heart of Rachael and The Beloved Woman I’ve really gone off this writer.
Though she was an admirable trailblazer in many ways – a best-selling female author, socially and politically aware, a pacifist, supporting votes for women, committed to assisting families living in poverty –  she was also a devout Catholic. Which meant she was passionately opposed to divorce and to birth control, and used her books to promote her conservative views. One of her early books, Mother, even captured the attention of the President, Theodore Roosevelt, for its pro-family (large families, that is) message. The Heart of Rachael contains several full-on rants which seem to blame women for what Norris sees as the moral decline of the age. The Beloved Woman, while not quite as blatant, contrasts the pure, happy, wholesome working-class family with a miserable lot of decadent rich folks. There’s a pretty sickening denouement where the heroine, after having her head turned by a caddish married man, stages a dramatic last-minute reconciliation with her frankly cloddish husband. She renounces a massive inheritance, accompanies him West for work and vows to be a dear little housewife and helper in future.

The other reason I’ve gone off Kathleen Norris is because of her support for America First. We’re hearing that phrase these days on the lips of Donald Trump, but originally the America First Committee was a highly influential pressure group, active 1940-41, dedicated to keeping America out of WWII in Europe. One of its most famous members was the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was openly a Nazi sympathiser. To see a photo of Kathleen Norris on a stage in Madison Square Garden, next to Lindbergh, giving what appears to be a Nazi salute, is off-putting, that’s for sure.

In the last days of January I also read Crypt by Professor Alice Roberts. Subtitled Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond, it was not a comforting book. However, I learned a lot about ethnic cleansing in Anglo-Saxon Britain, the Black Death, leprosy, the establishment of  hospitals after the Norman invasion, the destruction of Becket’s shrine at Canterbury and the remarkably robust bones of the English archers who drowned when Henry VIII’s prized ship, the Mary Rose, sank. The facts that have stayed with me are few, sadly – can I blame the hot weather? – but I will always remember that I can only catch leprosy from other human beings and from banded armadillos, and that the Mary Rose had a brother ship, called the Peter Pomegranate.

Both these facts are now tucked away in the trivia department of my brain –  forever.

The Sicilian summer was bringing out the abs and pecs again. It would once more reduce all movements to the consistency of molasses while enervating people with the sirocco, plague the countryside with tiger mosqitoes and forest fires, and make people closet themselves behind their shutters more suspiciously than usual. But summer belongs to Sicily like mountains to Switzerland. It’s only during the long, hot months from May to October that the island is entirely at ease with itself, rediscovering its rhythm like a cat that has strayed and found its way home again. Summer would also bring mulberry granita, silken nights filled with promise and the scent of jasmine, and days bathed in the sand-coloured light of which you can never get enough. The coffee would again taste as it does nowhere else – in fact, everything would again taste like the very first time, for that is the Sicilian summer’s hypnotic trick; everything feels pristine, over and over again,

‘Auntie Poldi’ is Isolde Oberreiter, a 60ish Bavarian widow who retires to her late husband’s home town of Torre Archirafi in Sicily. She fully intends to to drink herself to death while taking in the glorious view. Fortunately, despite depression, sadness and excessive drinking, slowly but surely her formidable life force reasserts itself.  Instead she finds many, many reasons to stay this side of the grave. They include new friends, her husband’s family, the manly and attractive Commissario Vito Montana, plus wine, grappa, prosecco and solving crimes.

The plots are insanely complicated, as is Poldi herself. She’s lusty, bold, clever, crazy, annoying, changeable, ridiculous and adorable. She wears a huge black wig (and claims that Amy Winehouse borrowed her hairstyle), has a wardrobe full of incredible clothes and a thing for perving at traffic cops.

Sicily herself is quite a character as well. I loved the long, lush, lavish descriptions, the detours and digressions into Sicilian history, folklore,  food, crime (the mafia, of course), lifestyle and character.  Auntie Poldi’s adventures are narrated by her nephew, a stitched-up and timid would-be writer who travels from Munich each month to spend a week or two ‘keeping an eye’ on Poldi, working on his turgid family saga and inevitably getting caught up in Poldi’s schemes.

I’ve just read the first three  – Sicilian Lions, Fruits of the Lord and The Handsome Antonio –  in quick succession, and the bonkers plots have now amalgamated into a whirl of hair-raising sleuthing expeditons via Vespa involving mafiosi, real estate, pheromones, vineyards, decaying palazzo, ancient villages, psychics (a beautiful woman, an ugly man, a spooky child), a priest, a Finnish heavy metal band, a palm-tree growing magnate, corrupt practices in water supply, a quarry, several grisly murders, quite a lot of mature-aged sex and I can’t think what else but there’s LOTS.

Though I’ve got another one on the shelf, I need a little breather. One more book would be like having pasta al nero, spigole in agrodolce, pepata di cozze, lumache in salsa di pomodoro, calimaretti fritti, insalata di arance e finocchio selvatico, caponata siciliana, parmagiana alla Teresa, an expresso, half a dozen cannoli and a gelato al limone, all at the one sitting.

However (from the ridiculous to the sublime?) the Poldi books have given me a bit of a yen to re-read The Leopard by Guiseppe di Lampedusa…