Susan Green

I’m going through a very frustrating phase in my reading life. It’s very unsettling; I can’t seem to find the ‘Goldilocks’ book, the one that’s just right. My library bag is full of returns that I’ve glanced into and skimmed and rejected. I always have a book on the go, and often two or three, so is this a sign that I really should be doing something else? But what? There’s nothing like a sinking into a good book. I just have to find the right one. Or persevere with the ones I’ve started.

Well, I’m making myself trudge through a ‘creative memoir’ at present, and the more I persevere, the pickier I get. The prose seems clumsier, the structure clunkier, the whole thing obvious and trite and unbearably serious with every page. It was well-reviewed and highly recommended by a writer I particularly like (I even subscribe, for ACTUAL MONEY, to her Substack) so wanted to read it. And I waited for ages for my reserve to make it to #1 in the library queue. Sigh. But I don’t like to write about books I don’t enjoy, so I won’t.

Instead, I’ll tell you about Death at the Sign of the Rook. It was the last novel I truly devoured; a new Jackson Brodie novel. I was a tiny bit book-shy, because the last one I read was quite shattering (from memory, child sexual abuse by highly connected Tories, or was it media types?).
There was no need to worry, and I should have known from the title. This is Atkinson having loads of fun with the genre.

Brodie is slowing down, and so is business. He’s hired by an elderly brother and sister to find a Renaissance portrait that’s gone missing from their mother’s house. Has the care worker stolen it? It just so happens that a Turner has disappeared from a nearby stately home, in similar circumstances. The coincidence is too much for Brodie, so he reaches out to Reggie Chase (who featured in When Will There Be Good News?) who’s on the case. The novel then takes a turn into classic golden era British crime with a snowstorm, an axe murderer, a mute vicar, a one-legged Major and a cast of nasty aristocrats and tourists at a farcical Murder Mystery weekend. Actually, the whole thing descends into farce. I laughed out loud. Which is alarming, when you consider that people were getting violently killed and maimed.

It was clever and funny and, in the desert of reading matter I have stumbled into, a delightful drink of sherry in the library. On a silver tray. With little cheese biscuits.
I’ve read better mysteries, but with much less enjoyment.

Second time around for The Weekend; I first read it when it was released in 2019. I hated it.

Because I loved Adele, Jude, Wendy and Finn the dog as if they were real people – my friends –  and Charlotte Wood was being mean to them by exposing their ageing bodies and their many frailties to the world. It was, I thought, a very cruel book.
(Silly, yes, I know, since Charlotte Wood invented Adele, Jude, Wendy and the poor, old, befuddled and dying Finn but it shows how passionately engaged I was and, though I didn’t realise this at the time, what a good writer Wood is).

The Weekend was this month’s book group novel and – guess what? – this time I loved it.  No reservations, I really did. What a turnaround. A pity, therefore, that out of nine members, only two of us did. One thoughtfully appreciated it. The rest thought it was boring, frustrating, pointless or just not their cup of tea. Which just shows, once again, the variety of responses a group of keen and intelligent readers will bring to the same book.

The story, or rather the set-up, is simple. A group of old friends meet at a beach house somewhere on the NSW coast. They’re in their 70’s. Elegant Jude, once a successful restauranteur, long term mistress of a wealthy married man. A control freak. Wendy, a famous writer and academic and owner of Finn. Widowed. Scattered, exasperating, brilliantly original. And Adele, once famous as well, an actress now unable to find work. Her lover has just kicked her out, she’s on the pension and fears poverty and homelessness. But she’s still a dramatic, passionate, sensual presence. Their friend, Sylvie, owner of the beach house, was the linch-pin of the group. Now she’s gone and they are clearing out the place where they gathered so many times in the past.

The activities of the weekend – inspecting, sorting and disposing of the house contents, cleaning, preparing food, eating out, inviting theatrical acquaintances for drinks, going to the beach – provide the canvas for a rich exploration of their long friendship, the trajectories their lives have taken, the choices and the consequences. The challenges of ageing are front and centre, yes, but this time I am 5 years older and what I thought of as cruelty now seems like clear-eyed observation and even a kind of compassion. The women are flawed, yes. They’ve got old bodies and (almost) full biographies, but they’ve got some miles in them yet. They may still surprise themselves.

I also loved Wood’s most recent book, Stone Yard Devotional, and I have my fingers crossed for her success in the Booker Prize.

All around me now there are open acres, acres of ruined and desolate land, where the bombs fell. Over there the square tower of a gutted church survives as the only landmark, till the harmonious walls of the cathedral rise exposed in the background. It’s quiet here, and beautiful, for into this wilderness the wild things have returned. Grass grows here, covering, healing, and russet sorrel in tall spikes, and goldenrod, swaying beside broken walls, full of butterflies, and purple loose-strife, and one plant, willow herb, that some people call fireweed, grows wild in this stony place as plentifully as grass, though it used to be rare enough to be searched out, and collected. It is a strange plant; it has its own rugged sort of loveliness, and it grows only on the scars of ruin and flame.
I suppose they will build on this again, some day: but I like it best like this; grown over; healed.

I found Fireweed at the Op Shop a while ago, but spurred on by Kate Constable’s recommendation, I finished it in a rush this week. I had to rush, or I would have stalled. It’s a vivid, harrowing story set during the Blitz in London; two teenage runaways face death and destruction and daily life in wartime. Almost too poignant. I kept thinking about young people in Ukraine, or in Russia for that matter. In Gaza and Israel and Lebanon. Anywhere bombs are falling and the life they might have had is swept irrevocably away in smoke and dust, turned to rubble. I nearly stopped reading many times, asking myself, Do I really need to read something so sad?

But I ploughed on. It was the detail the hooked me, the feel of the place and time. Though the author was only 3 at the time of the Blitz, most of the adults around her as she grew up had experienced life in wartime and so she was able to draw upon their memories and  no doubt that’s what makes it feel so authentic and startlingly realistic.

The narrator is 15-year old Bill, who has run away from the Welsh farm where he was evacuated to safety. He returns to London to wait for his soldier father where he encounters another fugitive, the naive and sheltered Julie. A bond develops, as if they’re family, or even something closer; they become a pair, sheltering in the Underground during night raids, earning money working at the market during the day, drifting around the city together. However it can’t last…

No spoilers, but the ending is not what I predicted. Perhaps it’s even more tragic (is that a spoiler?). I have Goldengrove on the shelf; when I’ve recovered from this book I’ll read it. It might take a while.

There can be a perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish.

I got a lot of joy out of Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life by Sharon Blackie. So much to like. Fairy tales and folk tales of the British Isles. Myths and Jungian archetypes, psychology and magic. Gorgeous descriptions of the natural world. Just enough of the personal to make sense of the writer’s energy and courage, but not so much that it was all about her (though I am keen to get hold of her other, more autobiographical book If Women Rose Rooted). Inspiring images of elder-women as wise, passionate, nurturing, angry, fierce and/or bloody scary. Now that I am properly old, I feel an inner hag looking out through my eyes more and more often. Makes me wonder what are the possibilities for my remaining twenty-odd years.

I felt uneasy.
I lay in bed watching the wooden doll watching me.
I knew that she was just a doll, of course. She was only three or four inches high, rounded, like a small milk bottle, with her chubby arms…or what was left of them…gathered across her chest. She had weathered badly. All the sharp bits of her, like her ears and nose, were worn almost smooth, and there was a bad crack across her back, but she was still a doll.
The thing is, she kept looking at me…
I touched her, ran my finger down the stump of her nose, and then I had one of the worst shocks of my whole life.
When I drew my finger back from her face, it was damp.
The wooden doll had been crying.

Whenever I’m in the Op Shop and see British junior fiction with a slightly supernatural bent, I snap it up. Emer’s Ghost (1981) is my latest find. It’s a tight (as in short, with only 137 well-spaced, larger print pages) but wholly satisfying book. Emer finds a little doll buried in a ditch, and begins to see a ghostly child, a little ragged girl. What does she want Emer to do? Against the background of school, family life and the minor dramas of a small Northern Irish village, Emer and her sister Breige solve the mystery.
I was impressed with the way the author weaves Irish religion, politics and history into a children’s novel in such a compelling and (a phrase I don’t like, but it works here) age-appropriate way. In the story, Emer’s village houses the ruins of a church burned to the ground by Cromwell’s soldiers; this is based on the real-life Massacre of Drogheda in 1649, where St Peter’s church was deliberately set alight, killing all those inside. On the more cheery side of things, Emer and her siblings, their tired and overworked mother, the nuns, the local eccentric, the egg-smuggling shopkeeper and other local characters are believable and fresh, and the historical tragedy does not weight the story towards gloom and nightmares.

Reading is such a pleasure when you’re in the hands of a good writer!

About the author: Martin Waddell has written over a hundred children’s books. And he’s winner of the Hans Christian Andersen medal. I must have personally sold hundreds of copies of Owl Babies over the years I worked as a bookseller. But I didn’t know that he is also Catherine Sefton! I’ll be looking out for more.

Our most recent library book group novel.

I went along to the meeting quite unsure about Lola in the Mirror. I said to the group, ‘I don’t know what to think about this one. Maybe you can tell me.’
I still really don’t know what I think, but the group members were – for a change – almost all positive.

It’s sort of ‘modern-day Dickens in Brisbane’. The heroine-narrator, a spirited, intelligent young girl, is part of an underworld community that lives in abandoned vehicles in an old car yard. A lifetime on the run with her mother, and our heroine doesn’t know her real name, her true identity. That’s to keep her safe, Mum says. The story is, that she killed the girl’s father, her husband, before he could kill her. And then she ran, and kept running.

The narrator  and her mother struggle, scavenge, work cash in hand for a dodgy fishmonger. She attends a local homeless centre.  They make a life. Then, in a twist of fate, our nameless heroine is abruptly orphaned when her mother saves a child from drowning. Adrift in a brutal world, she consoles herself with her art (her dream is that one day she will have an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art) and her friendships with other homeless people. But she’s got to support herself somehow. So she turns to the sinister fishmonger, Lady Flo.

I’ll stop there, because I don’t know how to go on without spoilers. There’s violence, coincidence, dark and darker secrets with attendant revelations, true love, tragedy, art, kindness and cruelty to power the plot along. The group thought that the writer gave homeless people dignity, treated them with respect and care. Compassion. Even love. That it showed a side of life we tend to turn away from but need to see. That it dealt with important themes of family violence, maternal love, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness.

Mmm. It was a very spirited discussion. But I can’t say I was convinced. I found something slightly off about the book. It was sentimental and about as subtle as a brick, but that doesn’t usually mean I can’t like something. And it’s not as if Dalton was giving his bougie readers a titillating tour of down-and-out existence; from what I’ve read, he’s a sincere person. And I did enjoy his non-fiction Love Stories very much. Lola just seemed…superficial, somehow.
But it could be that my extreme dislike of the illustrations placed throughout the book coloured the whole thing. Which must mean I am… superficial.

I’ve just returned from a week up in Far North Queensland to gale-force winds, rain and grey skies. And it’s Spring! In like a lion, out like a lamb is the old saying. In between tottering out for swims, beach walks, coffees and gelato, I lounged about and read.
My holiday reading was not very diverse. Murder seems to go with relaxation, somehow.

I borrowed this battered and well-read omnibus from the ‘crime room’ at the Maldon Athenaeum.
Dorothy Simpson is a new writer to me. Her detective, Inspector Thanet, works in a small English city and is – for a change – happily married with no drug or alcohol problems. Almost boringly well balanced. The 3 books I read were Midsomer without the bizarre elements; classic English village and small town characters, and the crimes all satisfyingly rooted in the past. The sensitive Thanet and his more stolid sergeant Mike Lineham snuffle like hounds through the lives of victims and suspects. What fun. Simpson wrote 15 Thanet novels in the 1980’s so I can work my way happily through all of them as the need arises.

My other crime spree was with a Brother Cadfael omnibus, this time on Kindle.

They’re set in and around the city of Shrewsbury in Shropshire at the time, in the 12th century, when a civil war, known as ‘the Anarchy’ was raging between supporters of the two claimants to the throne, King Stephen and the Empress Maud. Brother Cadfael is a Welsh Benedictine monk, a herbalist, healer and very excellent detective. Ellis Peters wrote 21 Brother Cadfael mysteries (I’ll bet there are plenty at the Athenaeum) and there was also a TV series starring Derek Jacobi.

Cadfael is an older man, kindly, wise, experienced and well-travelled (once a crusader) but now happily tending his herb garden and making up medicines in the Abbey in between crimes. The mysteries are middling but the historical background is fascinating. ‘The Anarchy’. Empress Maud. Who knew? Not me.

When I think about it, much of my knowledge of history comes from novels. I first fell in love with historical fiction when as a 14-year-old I read a big fat novel called Katherine by Anya Seton, and soon I was working my way through the Plantagenets and Tudors and Stuarts in fiction and in fact. I think this is where my interest in the history of fashion comes from, too. When I read about characters wearing kirtles and wimples and parti-coloured hose, I just had to look them up. Now, I’m wondering if Katherine is at the Athenaeum. I hope it has the 1970’s cover, which is the one I remember.

When faced with an overload of distressing, worrying and just plain awful events swirling around in the friendship and family circle, not to mention in the wider world, sometimes I just need comfort reading. Lately comfort has come through gardening books. But when talking about the need for distraction to my brother, he dug out a book he thought might be just the ticket. He’d read the whole series to my niece when she was 8, and she’d loved them. Would I like to give it a try? My inner 8-year-old said, yes please.

Hermux Tantamoq is a quiet and rather shy fellow who repairs watches for a living. Just how he does this is, I can’t imagine because he is a mouse. Actually, all of the characters in the book are small mammals and some would say vermin (especially my friend whose upcoming odyssey to the outback has been postponed because mice ate out the wiring on her new motor-home). But it’s fiction, and Hermux is a sweetheart of a mouse who would never eat electrical wiring; he likes soup and chocolate donuts. He lives by routine, going to his shop, people-watching during breaks at his favourite café, and returning to his apartment in the evening to spend time with his pet ladybug.

But his quiet life is turned upside down when the fascinating aviatrix Linka Perflinger strides into his shop, requiring urgent repairs to her watch. She’s insistent, and so he agrees – therefore when she fails to pick it up, he’s annoyed. Then a sinister rat comes into the shop demanding he hand over Linka’s watch. Hermux refuses, and worried, decides to play detective.

The twisty plot takes in a sharp satire on the art world, a swipe at wellness culture, industrial espionage, opera and a cast of eccentric rodents. There’s a nail-biting finale, and I’ve already been around to my brother’s to borrow a couple more in the series. Fast-moving, fun and absorbing, the book did the trick of both cheering and distracting.

I read Wilding by Isabella Tree at breakneck speed and now I wish there was a sequel. So I could see if more peregrine falcons, nightingales and Purple Emperor butterflies arrived, and find out what happened with the pigs, and did they successfully introduce beavers into the river? What an uplifting and exciting book! It’s English (nightingales is a clue) but has so many parallels to Australian farming practices and preconceptions about our forests and wider landscape. I am sure if I dig a little, I will find a book or maybe an ABC doco about Australian wilding  or as it’s often called, rewilding.

Writer Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell own Knepp Castle and its farm in Surrey. Years of intensive farming had brought them to their knees, financially. But instead of following conventional wisdom by putting even more land under the plough, using more pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers, increasing the size of their dairy herd and expanding their markets, they chose to do something very different. They didn’t do more; they chose to do less, much less, by returning 3500 acres to nature. Wilding is the story of that journey, and it’s heartening to think that sometimes, doing nothing can have such amazing results.

The speed with which the degraded pastureland changed and regenerated astonished Tree and Burrell. It took nerve, at times, not to intervene. When thistles took over a large area, they knew the surrounding landowners would soon be up in arms, demanding action. But that year, a migratory butterfly species called the Painted Lady descended on the farm and ate all the thistle leaves. The animals stomped all over the what was left, and the ants took care of the debris. The thistles were all gone, without Roundup.

Not that all of the property was left to fix itself up. The owners did a great deal of fencing, introduced animals like deer, pigs and cattle into selected areas to coppice woodland, add manure and break up the soil to regenerate vegetation. They did remediation work to the river that flowed through the farm, removing the canal and returning it to its floodplain because wetlands are not only home to wildlife, but assist with flood prevention by soaking up excess water. (They also filter run-off from farming).

Though all the work at Knepp was informed by of sound environmental science and research, as well as similar wilding projects in other countries (notably the Netherlands), the surrounding landowners took a lot of convincing. As did various government departments and funding bodies. They wanted to see what was going to happen before it did, and the couple were not equipped with crystal balls. Outdated studies on British woodland, which wrongly decreed that many species required a closed canopy to thrive, hampered their progress. I was reminded of the struggle to have Indigenous cultural burning practices accepted as part of normal forest management.

Burrell and Tree were brave souls in going against the accepted picture of an ideal English pastoral landscape because the wilded landscape is messy and ungroomed, unpredictable and surprising. Wilding, with its mix of memoir, science, history and practical environmental activism, was a feel-good and hopeful book to read in dark times.

William Mayne is one of the cohort of writers who formed the ‘second golden age’ of British children’s books. From the late 1950’s to the 1970s, writers like Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner, Phillipa Pearce, L M Boston and Joan Aiken produced future classics. They were the books that I read avidly. Yet I can’t think of any of Mayne’s more than 100 books that I actually read when I was a kid.

Now I’ve finished Earthfasts, I think I know why. It’s his style. It’s hard to describe, but the best I can do is ‘spiky’. You think you’ve got a grip on it, and then you get snagged on a sentence or even a single word.

Darkness began to lie more heavily now. In a gap in the cloud overhead a star looked out, then drew the curtains on itself and went back to its empyrean concerns. The drummer boy was still solidly there, but he was less easy to see. Keith looked at David, and David was less easy to see as well, so that the drummer boy was not unnaturally fading as he had unnaturally come…

It’s not easy to read; Mayne makes you work. It’s challenging. There is a lot of description.
‘Empyrean concerns’?  I had to look it up. And I don’t understand the last sentence. Which is OK, and as an adult reader I can cope – however reluctantly, because I’m a lazy reader –  with challenge. So I persevered.

Keith and David, who seem to be around 13 or 14, are both unusual boys, serious, intense and intelligent.  It’s a midsummer evening, and they’re on the outskirts of their rural Yorkshire town when they hear what sounds like drumming coming from under the ground. They see a mound of grass move and change shape – and out of the hill comes a boy from another time. He’s a drummer boy called Nellie Jack John who went into an underground tunnel 200 years ago to find King Arthur’s treasure. I won’t give any spoilers, but there are giants, an heirloom boggart, wild pigs, and a candle with a mysterious, addictive, un-extinguishable flame. The two boys, both science-minded,  try to make logical sense of events. Detective work brings them a number of clues from the past. There are episodes of fast moving adventure and even some humour. However a nightmare-prone child might be advised not to read it until they’re older; by the last of the four parts, the story has turned dark, scary and sometimes disturbing.

Some of my very favourite things are here – time slips, supernatural events, myths and legends that seep into everyday life, ancient rural landscapes, the peculiar, stratified social world of post-war Britain – and I certainly kept turning the pages. I recognised the quality and originality, the beauty of some of the writing, the intensity Mayne brought to the characters of Keith and David and above all the genuinely weird character of the events  unleashed when the drummer walked out of the hillside. Really, there was a lot to like about Earthfasts… but I didn’t love it. And I’m not sure what a child reader would make of it today. According to some of the articles I read, Mayne’s books were never widely popular among children. In fact, they were more popular with adults.

However, I still thought I’d like to find some more Mayne to read.

But maybe I will have trouble finding more books. They were apparently quietly removed from many British library collections in 2004 after he was convicted of 11 counts of indecent assault against little girls. He spent a couple of years in prison and was placed on the sex offenders register for life. (He died in 2010.)  It would be difficult to reissue the books of a convicted pedophile, even if he is a neglected master.

I recently found out about the famous Canadian writer and Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro. Munro stayed with her second husband after he not only pleaded guilty to sexually abusing her  daughter, but described the 9-year-old  girl as a seductress and home-wrecker.  She downplayed the nature of the offences, used her fame and reputation to quash publicity, and effectively chose her husband over her child.

I feel so sad! Munro’s Lives and Girls and Women is one of the touchstone books of my early adulthood. I learned not to feel inferior because my literary aspirations weren’t heroic. I learned that short stories about seemingly ordinary and quiet lives – female lives, interior lives –  can outshine the Big Male Novel. I read and re-read her books, buying each new one when they came out. I learned so much, not just about writing and language, but about womanhood.  I don’t want to lose any of that, but…

It’s a whole other big question, isn’t it? What to do, how to think, about writers like Mayne and Munro, whose private lives reveal such flaws? I’m afraid I don’t have any answers.

Here, sweet peas are in full bloom. I have rigged up a set of wire coathangers on chicken netting and old poles to make a fence for them.  I found a set of wire shelves which I brought home and leaned among the wires so that the sweet peas could cling to them. And now they do.

Entangled in one of life’s more brilliant snares, which do not concern us here, the garden is a miracle of consolation. Even such a little thing as transplanting beetroot sown in the seed box months ago…is almost mystical in the way it soothes me.

Gardens are my obsession at present. Because the garden soothes, consoles and delights me, I suppose, and the wet, cold weather makes my dirt play sessions few and far between. So, books.

Currently on loan I have books on propagation, re-wilding, the genus eremophila or emu-bush, dry-climate gardening and Kate Llewellyn’s A Fig at the Gate. It’s a long time since I read her previous garden diaries, The Waterlily (Blue Mountains) and Playing with Water (north of Wollongong). This one, published in 2014, is a four year record of establishing her latest (last?) garden in Adelaide, only a kilometre from the sea.

I must be reading for contrast. Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time was set in an English village, the writer/gardener had plenty of water, fertile soil, the bones of a beautiful garden and importantly, lots of money for rare and special plants, hard landscaping and labour. Olivia Laing’s book is a complex, structured hybrid of gardening memoir, history and biography. Heavy going at times (slavery, madness, civil war).
Poet Kate Llewellyn’s is a meandering diary of creating on a shoestring on a flat suburban block, planting and watering and harvesting, learning how to keep chooks, prowling the streets to scavenge or salvage plants and building materials (and carry them back home on her pushbike!) and buying plants at her local Bunnings. And friendship, ageing, joy, stray thoughts and observations –  and poetry. Parsnips!

Earth’s long ivory tooth
is a  buried smile
which becomes
winter’s snarl…

All of which is much more my style at present.

Today I felt as old as Methuselah. And I understood, as I have for some time, that I would not be young again, which seems blazingly obvious, but it is a surprise, as I said, to find how slow one is to comprehend such a rational thing. For instance, when I serve afternoon tea to the children working in the garden, I feel I am pretending to be an old woman; just going through the motions, as if in a play. I am very convincing.