Susan Green

Freezing winter weather, just right for curling up with a good murder mystery. And lucky me, I have friends and family who pass theirs on, so I have a stack of books on my shelf and I have just finished one of the recent crop of Australian rural crime novels.
I’ve read one book by this writer before, and it was good.

This one? It had enough suspense, a good couple of twists and a major red herrings. Some of the characters strained belief, and the motivation for the crime was a bit tired but these are not in themselves deal-breakers. But broken the deal certainly was.  Because of the setting. It just felt bogus. And in this genre – you can think of Jane Harper’s The Dry – the location, the  place, the setting is vital. It’s a major character, one of the elements we read this stuff for. Hell, this book was even named for the place. It’s where the backstory is, the past that underpins the present;  it’s where the locals were born and bred and old division fester, and where the newcomers collide.

This? A tick-a box  – or maybe pick’n’mix? – of wildlife and landscape.  A small country town that didn’t ring true – not its characters, its street or business names, or its local politics. The sloppy naming of localities and geographical features made me so grumpy!

Grumpy, grumpiest… Am I asking too much of commercial fiction? This was the  same feeling I get when there’s an Australian character in an American film, and the accent’s wrong. Or the Aussie-ness is bullshit and outdated. “Get it right!” I mutter to myself.
Was this book Australian commercial fiction with an eye to overseas  – US? – consumption? Where they wouldn’t have a clue?

Recently I finished Candleshine (I do hope that’s the title, because I like it so much), my first children’s book in five years. Hooray! It’s sitting pretty for a couple of weeks before I do that final read-through and (hopefully) final polish. It jumped the queue; I had the first draft of an adult novel sitting there also, but I’ve not been able to return to it after the first lockdown in 2020. Too grim.
The genre could have been nudged towards either literary fiction or crime. Place was key…it’s set in a small town surrounded by bush and state forest, which looks lovely but conceals poverty, disadvantage, violence against women and children, sexual abuse. There’s a crime, a cover-up. Reading the disappointing crime novel – not going to name it! – made me consider my choices in the abandoned manuscript. Was I guilty of bogus-ness, too? Were my place names believable? Did my farmer’s land use reflect reality? and would my pub in fact not exist due to the changing patterns of rural lifestyles? As a fiction writer, you imagine things. You make them up. Is it actually really, really hard – harder than I think –  to get it right?

Coincidentally, I found part of an article I’d clipped more than five years ago. It was about Alice Munro. If there is a spirit of time and place, she is its high priestess.

In spite of herself, the writer has remained loyal. She is loyal to place and the past, faithfully and  perpetually reconstructing it, so that no-one, having read her, would ever again say, “What’s so interesting about small-town rural Canada?” She is loyal to the truth, getting the detail precisely right in every phrase and world, so that people, habits, objects, scenes and places that are lost and gone in the real world remain alive on her pages. (“It was more concern she felt, it was horror , to think of the way things could be lost…”) She is loyal, also, to her chosen form, masterfully working and reworking it all her life, so that no-one in the world would say, “Why didn’t Alice Munro ever write a novel?” or “Why would a short-story writer win the Nobel Prize for Literature?”
from
Alice Munro’s Magic Hermione Lee
New York Review of Books, Feb 5-18 2015

In my case, it’s The Writer Laid Low!

You all know the great divide.
Supposedly, on one side, there are the plotters, who use whatever it takes – writing tools like Scrivener, index cards or charts or corkboards – to create a structures, goals, timelines. This way, they can write calmly from A to Z. They never let unruly plotlines tangle, or recalcitrant characters deviate from the plan.
On the other, there are the creative, free-spirited ‘pantsers’. (From ‘seat of the pants’. I seem to have read this first from American writers, and I don’t like the term –  maybe I’m a perv, but it sends my mind straight to underwear. Perhaps wingers, from ‘winging it’ is better). These pantsers apparently write and write, starting at the beginning and finishing where they type THE END, believing in the flow of their creativity and expecting all the while that it will all work out.
I’m not sure that it’s quite so neat. I certainly lean more towards the winging it side of things, but I always know my ending. I have key scenes in mind. I may not do the explicit and systematic planning but I do fill notebooks with – well, notes.

When last I posted on this blog, I’d just finished my new children’s book, Candleshine. I was polishing before sending it off to my editor – and feeling pretty damn good about the whole thing. Oh, there were a few issues. Little niggles. Things that didn’t quite make sense. I’m aware of the shortcomings of my more lax approach and I’m the first to admit that I have a history of creating insanely complicated plots. But it hung together. The characters were adorable. The ending was just on the right side of tear-jerking… The editor loved it. Which was so encouraging. We agreed: I just had to fix the niggles and resolve the issues.

A couple of weeks later and I’m dealing with something (knitting analogy ahead) that feels like this:

Each time I repair a dropped stitch (a plot hole,  an out-of-character action, something that doesn’t make sense, utter drivel), my fix just creates another problem. I’m torn between unravelling the whole thing and re-knitting, or just chucking it in the bin. How has it come to this? I’ve written ten novels. More, if you add the disgraced manuscripts forever on the naughty seat.  Perhaps what I need to do is find some way of combining the two approaches. I need a more reliable way to plan and structure – that’s bleeding obvious. But it will have to be a way that works for me. Which means that  – as with my notoriously free-from knitting – I will just have to learn from my mistakes, learn from those who’ve been there before me –  and figure it out for myself.

It’s obviously too late now… but I have a renewed interest in books on writing for writers.My son asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I said ‘books’. I gave him a few suggestions –  all books on books and writing – and he gave me the lot.
I wanted Graeme Simsion’s  The Novel Project after a good review from Kate Constable, who wrote that she was finding it useful. The blurb promised that if I follow his structured approach, I will be able to “start each writing day with clarity and purpose”. I will find myself “progressing steadily toward the best book…(I’m)…capable of.” Which sounds wonderful. But it’s too late for my current tangled web. I started to read Simsion’s excellent advice…and despaired.
So I have laid it aside to read AFTER I’ve wrangled this book into shape.

Instead, I read Lee Kofman’s The Writer Laid Bare: Mastering Emotional Honesty in a Writer’s Art, Craft and Life. It’s an honest, wild, sometimes funny and sometimes painful examination of Kofman’s own life and practice. Big, generous, passionate – I wolfed it down like I was eating something hearty and full-flavoured (moussaka, a beef casserole with red wine and garlic). Some of what she writes about living while writing and writing while living is so familiar. It almost made me cry. There’s a relief in knowing I’m not alone in my struggle.

I loved the way Kofman melds memoir and instruction or advice. For me, this is the best way to learn; to start with the  personal  – the emotional and mental and physical lived experience – and then go on the intellectual.
Kofman insists on the personal.  Just look at the words in the subtitle, ‘Emotional Honesty’. In chapter called The Writer’s Body, she describes an unsatisfactory morning at her desk.
It is about the rain in Melbourne when I begin writing: the sky has been deceptively cloudy since the early morning. I say ‘deceptively’ because the sun is still finding its way through the fluffy celestial bedding, smudging this summer day with a sandy haze. The heat in the air reminds me how much of Australia is on fire right now….

Kofman continues to describe her anguish about the fires. And how it’s mixed with domestic concerns – a botched electrical job, dinner, packing for a holiday. She can’t get to the inner stillness she needs in order to write. She perseveres. She tries her strategies. She reads from Helen Garner’s diaries for inspiration. She copies quotes from a book she’s just read into her writing journal… In the end, she gives up and goes for a swim.

…a serenity descends. Words begin forming in my mind of their own accord… The words come and come, fleshy, exerting insistent and pleasurable pressure on me, just like the water as I move through it. Eventually, the pressure grows so powerful I bolt out, dry myself impatiently, sloppily and race back home, to my laptop.

She writes: Sometimes when the mind is recalcitrant, nothing but the body can save us.

(I don’t swim; I walk. When I used to give talks for children, I always showed a picture of our dog, Gus – and introduced him as my best ever writing aid. Walking daily is my unstructured thinking time. Often after a walk, a knotty problem would simply dissolve. It seemed magical. Sleep can be the same.
Over the past six months, a combination of health issues slowed me down. My daily 50 minutes around the gardens shrank to half that, a couple of times a week. Maybe the lack of walking time is showing up in my manuscript. Maybe now that I’m walk-fit again, the niggles and issues will unkink…)

The Writer Laid Bare is full of insights, humour, good advice and honesty. It’s a writer generously showing how she writes, not from some Olympian height but warts (electrician, dinner, climate change, children) and all. Great to devour and then dip back in to. Plus a marvellous selection of quotes from writers scattered through the text – and reading lists at the end.

Lee Kofman The Writer Laid Bare: Mastering Emotional Honesty in a Writer’s Art, Life and Craft Ventura: RRP $32.99

Lee Kofman is a writer. teacher and mentor based in Melbourne.

I have just finished my book. Yay! Well, ‘finished’ with finger quotes would be more accurate. I’m at the finicky polishing stage, which makes me feel cross-eyed (and cross) at the end of the day. It’s word by word reading with a red pen. Off to my editor next Wednesday.

I didn’t have as long between finishing the final draft and starting the polishing as I like – I find it’s useful to put the whole thing away for a couple of weeks, not think about it, and do a spot of house painting or some major garden works – but in the couple of days I allowed myself, I read this little book. It was an Op Shop score, and now I’m on the prowl for more Helen Cresswell. I should be able to find some – she wrote more than 100 children’s books, and was best known for comedy… and the supernatural. So sheer serendipity… like my book, Moondial features ghostly visitors and strange happenings in a big old house.

Minty (Araminta) goes to stay with her Aunt Mary, who lives opposite a historic property, Belton House.

Even before she came to Belton, Minty Cane knew she was a witch, or something very like it. She had known since she was tiny, for instance, about the pocket of cold air on the landing of the back stairs. (Though she could not have known that a man had hanged himself there). She knew, too, that she shared her bedroom. She had woken at night to see shadowy presences gliding across the floor. She had never spoken to them, merely watched, sensing that  they were on some silent business of their own…

(Note: spoilers ahead!)

And when she first sees the elaborate sundial in the garden at Belton House, she knows it’s the key to a haunting mystery. Sundial? Moondial… Two children from the past need her help to escape from endless torment. With Tom, the 19th century kitchen boy, she defeats the forces of evil (the horribly creepy time-traveller Miss Raven) to rescue Sarah, a child from an even earlier era.

This is a beautifully written time-slip mystery, with a couple of marvellous set-pieces (the masked village children taunting poor little Sarah in the moonlight was almost too much). Dual timelines – there’s a pressing real-world, present-day situation for Minty as well – are threaded through the story to end up full circle in a satisfying but not quite neatly tied-up finale.

After Plant Dreaming Deep was published in 1968, Sarton – in her late middle age – found herself not only a best-selling writer, but a kind of model or mentor for many women. Probably white, middle-class and well-educated American women, but nevertheless, what inspired her readers was the unabashed emphasis on her own life. As – primarily – a creator. As a poet and novelist (that work was always bubbling away in the background); as a woman living alone and making her own life to suit herself. I imagine a chorus of wistful sighs from women readers with husbands and children; I wish, I wish, I wish….

Sartons’s next book about her house and life in Nelson is also comfort reading, but of a different kind. In Journal of a Solitude (1973), there is still the beauty, the garden and the landscape, the old house, the flowers, the friends. But there is more honesty, and it’s comforting because of that. This is no perfect Country Style, House and Garden life. It’s often unhappy and lonely and frustrating. Perfect days of creative work and contentment and contemplation of beauty are followed by wretched times of frustration and pain. Sarton feels deeply; she loves, she feels empathy and communion and joy in company with others but she also finds it hard to tamp down her irritations and anger and often blows up in rage. I would say May Sarton sometimes just finds it hard being May Sarton (and a quick look online at her biography tells me that other people found her hard, too).

I woke in tears this morning. I wonder whether it is possible at nearly sixty to change oneself radically. Can I learn to control resentment and hostility, the ambivalence, born somewhere far below the conscious level? If I cannot, I shall lose the person I love. There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour – put out birdseed, tidy the rooms , try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside me.

It seems strange, now in 2022, when the confessional, warts’n’all memoir is a flourishing genre – when writers at the top of their game like Helen Garner will publish such devastatingly honest accounts of their messy lives – to read that Sarton’s achievement in Journal of  a Solitude was a Big New Thing.
I quote from Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life. She writes that despite the great success of Plant Dreaming Deep, Sarton was eventually dismayed as she:

…came to realize that none of the anger, passionate struggle, or despair of her life was revealed in the book. She had not intentionally concealed her pain: she had written in the old genre of female autobiography, which tends to find beauty even in pain and to transform rage into spiritual acceptance. Later, reading her idealized life in the hopeful eyes of those who saw her as an exemplar, she realized that in ignoring the rage and pain, she had unintentionally been less than honest…In her next book, Journal of a Solitude, she deliberately set out to recount the pain of the years covered by Plant Dreaming Deep. Thus the publication of Journal of a Solitude in 1973 may be acknowledged as the watershed in women’s autobiography.

I call it the watershed not because honest autobiographies had not been written before that day, but because Sarton deliberately retold the record of her anger. And above all other prohibitions, what had been forbidden to women is anger, together with the open admission of the desire for power and control over their own lives.

And a final note; what a shocker of a cover.
It is so disturbing that I had to keep turning the book over so I wouldn’t have to look.  I’m going to have to buy myself another edition!

From Plant Dreaming Deep by Mary Sarton.
…gardening is one of the late joys, for youth is too impatient, too self-absorbed and  usually not rooted deeply enough to create a garden. Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

After a long and distinguished literary career as a novelist and poet, Belgian-American writer May Sarton (1912-1995) had, from her late middle age, a series of bestsellers with her memoirs and journals. The first of them, Plant Dreaming Deep, tells how she fell in love with a neglected 18th century house in the village of Nelson, in rural Maine. She knew she had to ‘dream the house alive’; imaginatively transform it into a home before (and along with) the work of repairing, restoring and rebuilding. She carefully and lovingly places her furniture – including cherished Belgian family heirlooms – and  rugs, her paintings, objects, books  and above all flowers around her. She creates a garden from pasture. Piece by piece a home, a setting for her personality and her art, is dreamed and loved and toiled (with a great deal of help from a large cast of skilled local artisans and handy neighbouring farmers) into existence.
Her life sounds idyllic, one of peace, beauty, and creativity. Productive solitude is punctuated by visits from friends, forays out into the wider world for speaking engagements and other work. She develops relationships with a choice few of the Nelson locals. There are the occasional flutters of drama – weather, wildlife, local tensions – but the tone is warm, wise, and wonderfully lyrical. Comforting and nourishing stuff in these incredible times.

But  – there’s always a ‘but’, and there’s always a serpent in Paradise.
In 1973, Sarton published her journal of this time. And we see her adventure in home-making and blissful creativity through different and not so rosy glasses.

To be continued…

Comfort reading. Better for you than comfort eating!
But maybe both, together, are called for at the present time. Ukraine, climate crisis, the Morrison LNP government, covid, my sore back…let’s stop there. You get the picture.
Elizabeth Goudge is one of my top comfort authors (the others are Jane Austen and Barbara Pym) – but I realised recently that though I read most of her books when I was a teenager, I’ve only consistently re-read the Damerhosehay trilogy and The Little White Horse. Perhaps it’s because those books so perfectly and absolutely hit the spot.

In need of a comfort fix, I went to Kindle and – how lovely – found myself in Goudge territory again with Linnets and Valerians. It’s set in the early years of the 20th century, in the deepest Devon countryside, and her love of the natural world spills over in lush and lyrical description of the countryside, forest, moor and garden. Tapping into my other comfort genre (historic houses, and gardens), the old manor house with its overgrown garden – a kind of Sleeping Beauty house, left to go wild and decay – was also a delight.
Of course there are children and animals, too. Four children – bold Robert, sweet, introverted Nan, sensitive and intelligent Timothy and the robust baby of the family, Betsy –  are living with their strict grandmother while their soldier father is in Egypt. When they run away in a stolen pony cart – how marvellous!  – they end up at the home of their Uncle Ambrose, with his pet owl Hector and resident cat Andromache, in a neighbouring village.
He’s a stern but loving and very scholarly vicar and ex-schoolmaster; they are told they can stay with him, but they have to earn their keep with jobs and more importantly, dedication to their lessons. His housekeeper and cook, the one-legged Ezra, (who to some extent reprises the role of Marmaduke Scarlet in The Little White Horse) provides wonderful food, nurturing care, advice, stories and not too much supervision.
Complications and adventures and mysteries abound; there’s a sleeping-beauty house inhabited by a grieving old lady, her Black butler and monkey footman; a lost child; a sweet old lady who’s really a witch – and her terrifying witch’s cat; black magic; villainy among the villagers; and the magical protection of the bees.
Goudge’s novels always have a strong Christian spiritual element, but here’s she’s gone pantheist. The book (re-named The Runaways) apparently hit a snag with school libraries in the United States. Black and white magic, witchcraft, and above all, the appearance of the great god Pan proved difficult for them. After all, Uncle Ambrose tells Timothy that as a vicar, he can’t believe in the old Greek gods, but he – Timothy – has a choice…
And in the end, all mysteries are solved, the lost are found, the bad mend their ways. The children’s father returns to live in Devon and even brings with him the missing lord of the manor. Journeys end in lover’s meetings, as the old lyric says.
Not much realism here. And there are the usual racial, gender and class issues (Black servant Moses Glory Glory Hallelujah…) to be found in most older British children’s novels…

But what the hell, I say. I was comforted.

‘Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening,’ wrote George Orwell in 1940.

I will read anything by the American essayist Rebecca Solnit. Her writing is lucid and intelligent and playful; often travelling in unexpected directions to connect previously unseen dots; always political; fiercely intelligent and fiercely human. In examining Orwell’s legacy as a man, a gardener, a writer and an anti-fascist, Solnit meanders not simply into his biography, but into the history of coal, the tragic life of Mexican photographer Tina Modotti, Stalin’s obsession with lemons,  the exploitative rose industry in Colombia and the legacy of colonisation in Western names for Asian and South American flowers.

I knew George Orwell only through 1984 and Animal Farm. I knew he fought in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded; that he died of TB. In photographs, he looks gaunt and serious and high-minded. I didn’t know that he loved cups of tea, old British pubs, English puddings, cosy crime novels, watching toads and hedgehogs and other wildlife, fossicking in junk shops –  and gardening.

In his cottage garden in England and his farm in Scotland, he grew not only utilitarian fruit and vegetables but flowers. He planted roses; he wrote in an article for a left wing magazine about the joy of cheap roses from Woolworths, often wrongly labelled, so you didn’t know what was actually going to bloom and the flowers were a lovely surprise. An enraged lady correspondent complained; flowers were bourgeois. But Orwell thought that they were beautiful and life-affirming. As the song says, give us bread and give us roses.
Give us toads and hedgehogs and pudding.

These seem dark days. I sometimes feel guilty about how much I love living here in the country. My joy in watching wrens in the birdbath or the hare that comes lolloping through the bushes in the back yard. My pleasure in picking basil and making pesto for dinner. Bourgeois? Or a way of pushing back at the capitalist big brother who’s always urging us to be productive so we can consume? Both? There’s probably an essay in that.

Solnit ends the book with this summing up (I have put the last line in bold type):

Orwell’s signal achievement was to name and describe as no one else had the way that totalitarianism was a threat not just to liberty and human rights but to language and consciousness… that achievement is enriched and deepened by the commitments and idealism that fueled it, the things he valued and desired, and his valuation of desire itself, and pleasure and joy, and his recognition that these can be  forces of opposition to the authoritarian state and its soul-destroying intrusions.
The work he did is everyone’s job now. It always was.

I’m a fast reader, and when I get excited I’m probably way too fast. I finished Orwell’s Roses at greedy speed, all the while aware that I needed to slow down, to consider what I’d just read, to think and consider. To smell the roses? A nice little lesson right there; I’m going to read it again.

When I was a young teenager, I just couldn’t get enough Gothic. They were captivating, thrilling; a perfect package of romance, mystery, suspense. I loved Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Moonstone and when I ran out of literature I plunged in to the mass market. These paperbacks always had a young woman in a floaty dress fleeing a forbidding mansion on the cover. (I haven’t actually read Hand of the Impostor, but you see what I mean). Some had more sex than others but I mainly liked the mixture of old houses, lurking danger and vaguely supernatural threats. I even wrote one of my own for a school English project in form 3; it was called Burnt House and featured a good orphan and a wicked sexy heiress who got hers in the end.

Which brings me to Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale.

Sold as a mystery in the vein of Rebecca and Jane Eyre, it’s a story about stories.
The famous and best-selling author Vida Winter has spent her life inventing stories, but has kept her tragic past a secret. Old and sick, she contacts a younger woman, writer Margaret Lea, and asks her to be her biographer. Lea agrees. She travels to Vida Winter’s isolated old house…and together they untangle the horrid truth from invention. I remember  a deliciously complicated, literary and decadent modern take on Gothic and I loved it.
It came out in 2006. I seem to have missed her next novel, Bellman and Black – a ghost story – but when a friend offered to lend me Once Upon a River, published in 2018, I knew what to expect.

Which is a rambling way of saying that though it’s good to have expectations of an author –  their new book will be a bit like their previous one – the author may not oblige. Setterfield’s 2018 novel, Once Upon a River is more Dickens than du Maurier, and once I got over it, I was fine with that.

In a Thames-side inn sometime in the later nineteenth century, the locals are assembled on the night of the winter solstice, drinking and listening to stories in the snug warmth. The door opens. A badly injured stranger walks in with a dead girl in his arms. He’s patched up by nurse Rita; the little corpse is put into another room. Where, some time later, it comes to life.
Who is she? For it turns out there are three drowned girls; Amelia, the kidnapped child of a wealthy couple; Alice, the daughter of a local lad gone bad; and Ann, the little sister of the parson’s simple housekeeper.

From that dramatic start, the story meanders, branches, pools and floods, flowing around 500 pages to its end. There’s a large cast of characters and a number of strands to the story; there’s murder, prostitution, infanticide, kidnapping. There’s photography, medicine, Darwinian theories, folklore, early psychology. And there’s the river.
Once Upon a River is full of likeable, admirable characters with a few black-hearted villains, a bucolic chorus of locals, an ingenious, multi-layered plot and – is this a spoiler? – a happy ending. With the awful events unfolding in our world at present, Once Upon a River was a good weekend’s diversion.
And a note about those mass market Gothics. A few years ago I found one of my teenage favourites – Maulever Hall by Jane Aiken Hodge, and tried to re-read it. The book hadn’t changed, but I had and sadly (or not) the thrill had gone. I had thought I might re-read The Thirteenth Tale but perhaps it’s best to leave well alone.