Susan Green

Our prolonged Indian Summer is over at last. It’s six o’clock; I’ve just come in from taking the dog for a walk around the block and my nose feels like it has frozen and may well snap off as it thaws. I was in Montreal in early spring many years ago; it was so cold that I did promise myself not to complain about our winters ever again. Well, I’m not complaining – I’m just noticing. At least we have a warm house. At least we have a house.

There’s something about wintry weather that makes me long for a good cosy, so that’s what I’ve been reading this past week. You may or may not know that the cosy is a sub-genre of crime fiction. If you think of Miss Marple, you’ll get the idea. Amateur sleuth, usually a woman, and the setting that works best is a small town or village or community. There are no mean streets, no jaded PI’s or alcoholic detectives, minimal sex and usually no graphic violence, there is still plenty of death.

I’ve just been reading the Sarah Kelling mysteries by Charlotte McLeod. A quick stock-take of modus operandi gives us toxic mushrooms, poisoned cocktails, paint stripper, the deliberate withholding of heart medication, bludgeoning with blunt instrument (in one, it was a built-up shoe) or a sharp instrument ( an axe), car brakes that have been tampered with, a quick shove in the back which lands the victim under a train or over a balcony…
Motives are the usual – sex and money and reputation. None of which is very cosy at all, really.

The other point of difference with a cosy is that it can be humourous. Even laugh- out- loud funny.

The Sarah Kelling books are stuffed with gorgeously eccentric characters. Absurd Boston blue-bloods abound. Some of them are dotty and delightful – like Uncle Jem, an elderly reprobate who belongs to the Order of the Convivial Codfish. And some of them are snobbish and murderous, like Sarah’s blind and deaf mother-in-law.

You can have a spot of romance, too, and it doesn’t have to be tragic. Handsome art expert and investigator Max Bittersohn falls for the widowed Sarah and assists her to solve various thefts and murders; it’s not all smooth sailing, however – in The Bilbao Looking Glass, the anti-Semitism of the yacht club crowd comes to an ugly head as they decide she can’t possibly marry a Jew. Elderly cousins and uncles also find love; my favourite courtship is that of twitcher Cousin Brooks and the statuesque sixty-ish beauty Mrs Theonia Sorpende.

Charlotte Macleod also wrote as Ailsa Craig.

I am a member of a Council of Adult Education book group, which means that we get  boxed sets of books – with reading notes and list of suggested questions – delivered, therefore none of us have to scamper around bookshops and libraries and friends’ bookshelves. If all goes according to plan, we have a whole month in which to read our books; at the meeting we turn in the old (if we want to keep it a bit longer we can) and collect the new. It’s well organised, and it’s easy, and many of us still don’t get our books read on time. That includes me.

I am feeling a bit smug this month because for the first time I am on track. With two full days to spare. However I still left it until the Saturday before the Tuesday meeting to get started. And I am really wondering why. Why didn’t I get stuck in straight away? This was a short book; I could have knocked it off in a couple of nights by the fire. I put it off, and put it off, and read detective novels and watched Midsomer Murders and even (I was tired and emotional) The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills… Knowing that the clock was ticking, I made myself take it with me on a train trip to Melbourne. As it turned out, I loved the book – it was the first of the book group titles I’ve wholeheartedly enjoyed – but still… Is it because reading a book for book group is too much like homework? Not freely chosen? Not chiming in with mood or interests or head-space or free time?

Last minute book panics are not the exception, they’re the rule. People – and I probably should say women, for it seems as if book groups are mostly female – come into the Bookroom all the time, wanting a novel right now, for a meeting the next night or the night after. Today, a customer today said, no, thank-you, I won’t order it, I have to have read it tomorrow evening. She added, further, that there were 10 reserves on that particular title at the library. We were out of stock, no doubt because her fellow readers had fallen upon our new-release table like ravening wolves.

Our book of the month is Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany. It’s one I would never have read off my own bat. The cover doesn’t appeal for some reason- I think it’s the colour – that dull, cool red and grey  – and the girl’s down-turned mouth. The title, too…  Because of my involvement in the second-hand books trade I’d seen heaps of copies of the 1922 book of bird notes with the same title by naturalist Alec Chisholm. It’s a deeply daggy title.

And the characters in this novel are deeply daggy too. In a good way. It’s 1950 in rural Victoria. Lonely hard-working farmer Harry watches birds, yearns for his neighbour Betty and cherishes her children Michael and Little Hazel.

It’s about love and lust and desire, with a romance between Betty and Harry that’s weirdly sweet, given all the sweaty physicality going on. It’s also about family –  procreation, parenthood, protection, guidance and care – care for the young and also the old, be they human and animals… for around the human family are the family of animals – the dairy herd, the resident kookaburras and the birds at Hazel’s schoo , the sensitive, trembling dog, the one-eyed cat and the crippled heifer, all with their personalities and needs, their moods and emotions. Indeed, from Tiffany’s close, tender, often humourous observation, I finished the book with a sense that animals are people and people are animals. Of course!

It’s an earthy book with lots of sex, death and bodily fluids –  and some disturbing scenes of bestiality and exhibitionism thanks to the creepy neighbour Mues – but I often found myself laughing out loud. Harry’s sex education letters to Michael are sad and funny at the same time.

The writing is clear, unfussed and often beautiful. And the excerpts from Harry’s bird notes through the book are sheer poetry. I chose this at random:

The tink tink of the bellbirds
is a constant backdrop
to the day.
The kookaburras assemble and call
as the sun slips from the trees.
Then all is quiet for a while.
It’s only later
that an owl announces itself
out of the dark.

As Carrie Tiffany says, “Art starts with noticing.”

Late in life  – we, her children, don’t quite know when – my mother wrote several mysterious, beautiful poems. This one was about her mother, Phoebe.

I too sharpen
More and more each year
To my mother’s likeness
I see her
From the corner of my eye
As I pass the mirror
See her reflected
In the glass of pictures
In the brass of trays.

Passivity
You accepted for yourself
But rejected for your child.

From the acceptance
And that rejection
I moved freely
Safely
Happily
You did not break your way through walls of others’ making
But held the torch
And showed the way
And held aside the strangling vine
To let through the lovely light of the sun.

I’ve been reading nothing but crime novels all April.
It’s no coincidence that this crime wave is happening alongside an intense period of work on my new children’s novel. It’s not a Verity Sparks mystery and I’m loving making the acquaintance of my new heroine. At this stage, her name is Alexandra – or Alex – and she is a very different character to Verity.  But there’s an insanely complicated plot (the way I like ’em) with mystery and magic, danger and deception, twists and turns and any number of other alliterations to make it – I sincerely hope –  a rollicking good read.

While I’m writing like this, I find it hard to commit to a heavy or serious book, but I read for relaxation so the genre of choice is crime. Isn’t it strange? Crime – most often murder – isn’t heavy or serious…it’s relaxing! I don’t think I can even begin to puzzle that out. One explanation I have read is that in crime fiction, the killer is caught, justice is done, the bad are punished, thus giving us an orderly universe unlike messy reality.

I first read the Sue Grafton Alphabet mysteries when they came out, in the 1980s. I stopped somewhere around I or J…I’d got sick of Grafton’s PI Kinsey Milhone, with her prickly independence, junk food addiction, sketchy personal grooming habits and obsession with work. I may have even said something stupid and pretentious like “But she’s not growing.”
Oh, phooey. Re-reading – the library can’t get them to me fast enough – I am enjoying these books much much more than the first time around. I’ve been taking pleasure not just in the plot-puzzle, but the character herself. I ‘get’ Kinsey now, and with each book understand more and more about why she is a junk-food addicted workaholic searcher for truth and justice.

An interesting little factoid… The Alphabet series are set in a Californian city called Santa Theresa. What with the street names, neighbourhoods, topography, geography, I just assumed it was a real place, but no – Grafton set Kinsey there as a homage to the great crime writer Ross MacDonald.It was the fictional territory of his PI Lew Archer.
Long ago, I read a lot of MacDonald. He’s the inheritor of Chandler; Lew Archer is, like Philip Marlowe, a knight in tarnished armour but updated to the 1950s and early 60s. I always especially loved the ambience, the small Californian city – on the surface, all palms and beaches and sunshine – but with a dark, dark underside.

I’ve just borrowed The Chill from 1963.
It starts like this:

The heavy red-figured drapes over the courtroom windows were incompletely closed again the sun. Yellow day light leaked in and dimmed the electric bulbs in the high ceiling. It picked out random details in the room: the glass water cooler standing against the pannelled wall opposite the jury box. The court reporter’s carmine-tipped fingers playing over her stereotype machine, Mrs Perrine’s experienced eyes watching me across the defense table.

I’m hooked…

I Seeing these toadstools bursting out of the ground along the side of our neighbour’s fence, I remembered this poem by Margaret Atwood. Very sinister!  (This is only part of it.)

MUSHROOMS

i

In this moist season
mist on the lake and thunder
afternoons in the distance

they ooze up through the earth
during the night like bubbles, like
tiny bright red balloons
filling with water;
a sound below sound, the thumbs of rubber
gloves turned softly inside out.

In the morning, there is the leafmould
starred with nipples,
with cool white fishgills,
leathery purple brains,
fist-sized suns dulled to the colour of embers
poisonous moons, pale yellow.

ii

Where do they come from?

For each thunderstorm that travels
overhead there’s another storm
that moves parallel in the ground.
Struck lightning is where they meet.

from True Stories by Margaret Atwood Jonathan Cape 1982

We’ve just had three nights away  – at a little cottage in Dean’s Marsh, in the Otways.

There was really nothing to do, which was wonderful. I read detective novels, drank tea in the daytime and wine at night, watched DVDs and had the odd little totter of a walk.
I have a book to finish by late November, which seems like a lot of time, but isn’t. So it was my Autumn Break. Now, time to get serious…

A few weeks ago, I helped a friend called Michael Uniacke to launch his book, Deafness Down. Here’s the short speech I gave.

Many years ago, I had a phone call from a total stranger called Michael Uniacke. He’d heard that I was a writer and writing teacher, and he wondered if I’d like to meet up with him and talk about the possibility of editing a book he was writing.

I must have asked him what kind of book: he must have told me it was an autobiography – and I’m pretty sure I told him that I was absolutely and utterly a fiction writer. Nevertheless, we did meet, at a cafe, and we sat talking for a long time. The upshot of the conversation was that, though I was a fiction writer, I agreed to have a go at being an editor as well. I am not an editor’s toenail, but it was with an unskilled but enthusiastic can-do spirit I entered into the project. And with great shame that I remember the many pages scribbled with red marks and the subtle-as-a brick comments. But Michael bore with it all very patiently; he wanted to learn; he wanted to communicate, and he wanted to tell his own unique story.

There – I’ve used the word – ‘story’. We humans love a story. Story is how our brains work, it’s how we understand our lives, it’s how we understand others and ourselves. Michael’s story centred his experience of deafness, and to me that subject was fascinating and utterly new. Not only did it do what good fiction and biography and memoir can do – which is to open a window into another person’s inner life – but it was genuinely educative. Like most people not personally touched by deafness, I’d never come across the concept of ‘deaf culture’. Michael talked to me about the 1880 Congress of Milan, where educators of deaf people made a decision that signing was to be more or less banned. I encouraged him in his interest and exploration, and he came back with the most extraordinary stand-alone piece of writing. It was so dramatic, so imaginative that I was astonished. Who would have thought that this kind of story-teller was sitting there inside?

My work on the project ceased – I had a baby. Now, that baby has just started University! – So this was all a long time ago. However, there’s nothing wrong with a long period of gestation for a work such as this. Autobiography is about life seen and understood backwards – how can it be anything else? And the long view brings a greater perspective.

Which brings me to the original title of the book. It was ‘The Dragonfly’. This last week, in the very hot weather, I spent many hours in my neighbour’s pool. I rescued quite a few drowning bees, and watched the dragonflies skimming the surface. As I understood it, back then, the dragonfly symbol related to deafness in this way – the dragonfly, with its 360 degree vision aligned to its hovering, skimming flight, is able to sensitively and almost invisibly extract from the air what it needs to survive. The metaphor is the superbly attuned senses; the toughness; the survival. I wondered what else the dragonfly might symbolise, so of course I Googled.

And found that to the Japanese, it represents power, agility and victory. To the Chinese, prosperity, harmony and good luck. That’s very nice, I thought. But it was the Native Americans, to me, who said it all. They believe that, because it can fly in all directions – that means up and down and backwards as well – looking though those amazing eyes , it can represent a being who sees the world through many perspectives. And seeing the world like that, is emotional maturity. And that is a very lovely and very appropriate meaning for Michael’s story.

So that is the story of my involvement, over 20 years ago, with that part of Michael’s writing career. His passion to communicate hasn’t abated.I’m happy and honoured that he’s asked me to help celebrate.

Deafness Down and its sequel, Deafness Gain, are available in print from online book retailers, at Stonemans Bookroom in Castlemaine and as an eBook from www.tuq.pub/book/deafness-gain/

I’ve been having a few sleepless nights lately. Change of season? Change of life? Who knows. It’s all right as long as I am lying comfortably, resting, but as soon as I start becoming cross (with myself, the world, or with my husband who is lying there, fast asleep and breathing) I get out of bed, make a cup of herbal tea and read for a bit.

Quite a bit of our latest book group novel – The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver – was read way, way after midnight. I got a third of the way through but didn’t finish it – and I’m not going to, or not anytime soon, even though I loved the writing, the voice, the language; I loved the narrator, too, and his story and the exotic setting in Mexico with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera…

I stopped when I got to the part where I could see the train wreck (the House Committee on Un-American Activities) ahead – and I knew it was just going to make me too, too sad. Especially given the news at present, with right wing hysterics chucking wobblies all over the political show, here and everywhere.

Anyway, enough of that. My prescription for sleepless nights is a paperback, not too long, and with a guaranteed happy ending.

A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer filled the bill beautifully. It was a very sleepless night indeed, and I didn’t nod off till 4 am but not because the book kept me up breathlessly turning pages. Though Heyer more or less invented the Regency Romance genre, this book is almost an anti-romance. Our hero, Adam, is an aristocratic soldier, come back to England from the Napoleonic wars on his father’s death.

He finds mountains of debt (naughty old rake of a Papa) and no inheritance save the family pile. What to do? Marry an heiress, that’s what.

Though he’s in love with the impulsive, emotional Julia (such a beautifully annoying character; you can see  the author’s sympathies lie with sense, not sensibility), he has not only the estate but his mother and sisters to think of. So he dutifully does the right thing, and weds plain, prosaic Jenny Chawleigh.
The ‘contract’ of the title is the marriage,  arranged by Jenny’s  father, a rich merchant who wants his daughter to ‘go up in the world’. Everyone has many lessons to learn; Adam in particular must learn to cope with his father-in-law’s overbearing but well-meant meddling: Jenny with her new status, her relatives – and her hidden but very real love for her husband. By the end of the book, Heyer’s shown that dreams of romance are all very well, but a real life marriage is a matter of adjustment to reality. Those unromantic daylight qualities of affection, shared interests, comfort and kindness go a long, long way – perhaps further than moonbeams and starshine.

(By the way, isn’t that a shocker of a cover? Georgette Heyer’s books went through numerous editions, and some have covers that are quite lovely. And some, not so much.)

And for something completely different, Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London – the first in the best-selling Peter Grant series – was a cracker of a book to get one through a long, dark night. Harry Potter meets police procedural. Funny and clever. Though I couldn’t say the ending was entirely happy, the killer was caught! I’ve reserved the next two from the library…

Hurry!

The other day I found this poem, on a scrap of paper, in a novel. It was my handwriting, but I can’t remember copying it out. I Googled for the poet – it is Ernest Dowson.

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter
Love and desire and hate
I think they will have no portion in us after
We pass the gate

They are not long, the days of wine and roses
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

I needed a novel for another train trip, so this time I picked something I’d read long ago. As is often the case, re-reading was even better.  And as Fifth Business is the first of a trilogy, I have a lot of reading ahead of me on this long weekend.

It begins on a winter’s day  in 1908 in the small town of Deptford in Ontario, Canada. Two schoolboys are coming home from sledding in the snow. They’ve had a quarrel, and one of them – Percy ‘Boy’ Staunton, the son of a wealthy family – throws a snowball with a small rock in the middle of it. It’s meant to hit Dunstable Ramsay – but he ducks, and what happens next reverberates through Ramsay’s entire life.

It’s a magical novel – wildly inventive, funny, rich, strange, complex –  taking in small town life and morals, business, politics, war, teaching, religion, myth, art, theatre, sex, magic, guilt, love, responsibility… Especially responsibility. Because the snowball – thrown in a typically childish moment of thoughtless cruelty – hits Mary Dempster, the pregnant wife of the town’s Baptist minister. Robertson said of the novel: “I began it because for many years I had been troubled by a question:to what extent is a man responsible for his actions, and how early in life does the responsibility begin?”

In his introduction to my Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Manticore (the second of the trilogy) M G Vassanji writes: We are all responsible for our actions, even as children, the book suggests: no, it proclaims. Our deeds bear consequences, trivial or profound, and we are accountable… But while we may not be judged by a higher court – parental, religious or state – we may judge ourselves. And that is what Ramsay does: he did not throw the stone, but he moved aside and it hit someone else who suffered instead.