Susan Green

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. 

How good to find a new author! I bought The Sea in the Op Shop last year and put it on my ‘to read’ shelf where it’s sat for months. This is the first of Banville’s novels I’ve read and I will be going back for more. Luckily, there are lots more; this, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2005, was his 18th.With a long train trip ahead of me – to visit a friend in Barwon Heads (by the sea!) I wanted a shortish novel…

Shortish it is, but intense, beautiful. I’ve since read Banville described as a great stylist, and I’ve had this idea that I don’t like writing with loads of ‘style’, but I think I’m quite wrong. (As I so often am, and which is a very good thing, actually – but that’s another story altogether). Perhaps I’ve read and not liked prose which draws attention to itself – there’s a particular kind of American writing that I have in mind – but this is something different altogether. Lewis Jones, in his review in the Telegraph, puts it better than I can:

And Banville’s prose is sublime. Several times on every page the reader is arrested by a line or sentence that demands to be read again. They are like hits of some delicious drug, these sentences. One has to stop for a while, and gaze smiling and unseeing into the middle distance, before returning to the page for one’s next fix. For a shortish book, it takes a long time to read.

Here’s a sample; I just opened the book at random.

At times the image of her would spring up in me unbidden, an interior succubus, and a surge of yearning would engorge the very root of my being. One greenish twilight after rain, with a wedge of wet sunlight in the window and an impossibly unseasonal thrush piping outside in the dripping lupins, I lay face down on my bed in such an intense suffusion of unassuageable desire – it hovered, this desire, like a nimbus about the head of my beloved, enfolding her everywhere and nowhere focused – that I broke into sobs, lavish, loud and thrillingly beyond all control. My mother heard me and came into the room, but said nothing, uncharacteristically – I might have expected a brusque interrogation, followed by a smack – only picked up the pillow that the thrashings of grief had pushed off my bed and, after the briefest of hesitations, went out again, shutting the door soundlessly behind her. What did she imagine I was weeping for, I wondered, and wonder again now. Had she somehow recognised my rapturously lovesick grief for what it was? I could not believe it.How could she, who was merely my mother, know anything of this storm of passion in which I was helplessly suspended, the frail wings of my emotions burned and blasted by love’s relentless flame? Oh, Ma, how little I understood you, thinking how little you understood.

I have just had a Pride and Prejudice blow-out. A customer ordered a remastered DVD of the 1980 BBC series, with David Rintoul and Elizabeth Garvie in Darcy and Elizabeth roles. So I ordered it as well, and binge-watched the whole series one hot day. David Rintoul did the rudeness, snobbery and arrogance so well that I wondered if there was  any way that my bad opinion of him could be reversed. But of course, it was.
This P&P was not perhaps as romantic as the later BBC version, but very true to the tone of the book. It ended with great restraint. Darcy and Elizabeth escape from Mrs Bennet’s endless loop of chatter to walk along a country lane together – they talk, Elizabeth thanks Mr Darcy for saving Lydia, he tells her he did it only for her… and we know how it ends. However, their delight in each other isn’t expressed in a kiss or an embrace; rather, they walk and talk, telling to each other the history of their regard, not even holding hands, and finally the camera pulls back, leaving them together under a tree. The canopy hides them, and in leafy privacy they may have kissed at last but it was not for us to see.

Well, then for comparison I had to watch the one we all think of as the classic, the 1995 Colin Firth-in-wet shirt-and-breeches one. Not on the same day, but all in one go, and well into the night.
There was much more emotion on display in this one – more romance – but here’s a funny little difference. In the earlier series, Lady Catherine’s daughter was played as a normal-looking but shy, young woman. As Elizabeth says goodbye to the Rosings menage, Miss de Bourgh steps forward and takes Elizabeth’s hands in hers, mutely expressing her liking for the other girl. It was a moving little scene, and made you think how hellish to be Lady Catherine’s daughter. In the 1995 version, Miss de Bourgh is played for laughs, not pathos, as a snotty, sickly caricature.

Next, the 1940’s movie with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. I loved that film as a young teenager, but now I find it almost unwatchable. Both the leads are way too old and their performances are embarrassingly mannered, and Garson in particular overdoes the arch, playful charm. Moreover, the costume department for some reason decided to make the clothes early Victorian, with huge puffed sleeves, full skirts and massive bonnets instead of Georgian, and it’s all so wrong. So is the tone of the thing – soft-hearted and broadly comical, instead of ironic and rather cool. However, the supporting cast is a treat. The Mrs Bennett of Mary Boland is fabulously vulgar and garrulous, and the sisters are a fine gaggle of girls.

Finally, I read the book. My Penguin classic contains a couple of wonderful essays and now I feel quite enlightened and full of a new admiration for Austen’s writing. I’m ashamed to realise that in all these years of re-reading P&P, while delighting in the language, the irony, the sharp, clever perception, even the exploration of morals and manners and values in the characters’ journey of (what an out-of-place phrase this is!) personal growth, I’ve really read for the romance. And though I’m an ordinary reader and by no means a student of the  social, economic, political, philosophical and fictional contexts, I found it added to my pleasure in the novel to consider these things. I’ve ended by questioning my own perception, which is nearly half a century old, that Pride and Prejudice is a romance at all.

Here is a rather long but lovely quotation from the introductory essay by Tony Tanner for the 1972 Penguin Classics edition.

…Jane Austen was brought up on eighteenth-century thought and was fundamentally loyal to the respect for limits, definition and clear ideas that it inculcated… In the figure of Elizabeth Bennett, she shows us energy attempting to find a valid mode of existence within society…In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake writes: ‘Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is  eternal Delight.’ As I have said, I think that Jane Austen’s suspicion of energy increased in her later work. But in Pride and Prejudice she shows us energy and reason coming together, not so much as a reconciliation of opposites, but as a marriage of complementaries. She makes it seem as if it is possible for playfulness and regulation – energy and boundaries – to be united in fruitful harmony, without the one being sacrificed to the other. Since to stress one at the expense of the other can either way mean loss, both to the self and to society, the picture of achieved congruence between them offered in Pride and Prejudice is of unfading relevance. It is perhaps no wonder that it has also proved capable of giving eternal delight.

I’m just about to start something new – I’ve joined a Book Group. My one and only try at being in a book group was about 10 years ago and it wasn’t a success. Our first book was The Vagina Monologues and our second book was Geraldine Brook’s March and that was it. I was quite eager, what with my internet researches on  ‘how to run a book group’ (notes and questions and checklists and all) but it didn’t gel and was mainly about afternoon tea. Which was absolutely fine. My world runs on tea.
But this one is the real thing, administered by the CAE, with a box of books arriving monthly, and proper study notes in a little booklet. Our first book is one I’ve never heard of, Our Father Who Art in the Tree by Judy Pascoe. I’m excited!

My neuroscience reading jag continues. On Monday I bought a new release, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body by Jo Marchant. It’s very interesting, and a review in Saturday’s Age suggested that it could be a new The Brain That Changed Itself.

It’s interesting, yes –  but my goodness, how it suffers in comparison to Oliver Sacks. The depth, erudition, curiosity and above all, the compassion of the man just shine. You just can’t help loving him. And after having read his autobiography On the Move: A Life, I can see why. It’s because he really understands suffering and pain. And guilt, self-loathing,  excess, addiction, passion, speed, drugs, sex, work, obsession, failure, success… He is, also, a very fine writer. He understands ‘story’ as well, and each case history is a beautiful piece of writing. I have borrowed his final book, Gratitude, from the library but haven’t read it yet, even though it is very slim. Because I know I shall be in floods of tears.

Not a flood of tears, but I was definitely moist-eyed at the end of Bel Canto by Anne Patchett.
In an unnamed, poor, Latin American country, a group of amateurish terrorists break in to the Vice-President’s home. There are a lot of guests that evening – a grand party has been arranged to promote foreign trade – but the President, target of the attack, has stayed home to watch his favourite soap opera. The would-be kidnappers are trapped, along with their hostages…a beautiful American opera diva: her devoted fan, a Japanese CEO and his loyal translator: a French diplomat in love with his wife: a cast of young freedom fighters, the Generals who planned the whole fiasco, the Red Cross negotiator who’s seen it all before ….
As the blurb says, ‘…a horrific imprisonment is transformed into an unexpected heaven on earth’. Beautiful, funny, poignant, surreal, romantic, loopy and finally, heartbreakingly sad.