Susan Green

I’ve just finished Karen Joy Fowler’s Booker short-listed We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and from the outset I knew. It was right there on the cover. “One of the best twists in years.”
So what is this twist? I kept thinking as I read. The narrator Rosemary tells us that she’s lost contact with her brother Lowell. Sister Fern has disappeared, too –  so it’s likely the twist is something to do with the mystery of the missing sibs. What will it be? Is this a clue? Is that? Interrogating the page for hints and portents isn’t the best way to read, and when the twist came – and here I suppose I am obligated to write SPOILER ALERT! DON’T READ ON IF YOUR ENJOYMENT DEPENDS ON SURPRISE! – I wasn’t actually surprised, because I’d been watching for it. A friend told me she’d almost almost worked it out anyway; I was nearly there too. It comes early, around page 77, and thank goodness for that. Sister Fern is a chimpanzee. With that fact out in the open, the waiting was over and done with and my real enjoyment of the book began.

And it is such a very good book. Intelligent, funny, complex, deeply moving and asking some profound moral questions, it had me thinking hard about what it is to be human. Or a ‘human animal’, as Fowler’s character Rosemary says. I’ve decided to give the phrase ‘human animal’ a whirl myself, for that extra word does change your thinking.

Rosemary’s father is a psychologist; raising a chimp as part of his family is a long-term experiment. Fern and Rosemary grow up together as sisters (one who talks and one who doesn’t) but when Fern begins to show her chimpanzee nature – by biting, hurting, killing a kitten, becoming ‘uncontrollable’ – it’s revealed that she’s property. A thing. She belongs to the university. Though she’s been part of Rosemary’s family for five years, when the experiment has to end, they have no say over what happens to her. She is sold to another university, to be part of other experiments, kept in a cage, artificially inseminated, bred from. The sorts of things we do to animals. Because, well, they’re animals.
“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of the endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one who made them look.”

A companion piece to Fowler’s novel is the amazing Me, Cheeta. It was also on the Booker list (long- rather than short). My copy doesn’t even credit the author, James Lever; it has an index and a few pages of photographs; it’s a very convincing and clever spoof of the celebrity autobiography –  hilarious, gossipy, possibly libellous, and a wonderful portrait of the so-called golden years of Hollywood. It begins:

Dearest humans,
So it’s a perfect day in Palm Springs, California and here I am – actor, artist, African, American, ape and now author – flat out on the lounger by the pool, looking back over this autobiography of mine…

Cheeta, in case you didn’t know, is the chimpanzee who co-starred with Johnny Wiesmuller in the early Tarzan movies. At the end, when Cheeta is reunited with the aged, dying Johnny by his pool in Mexico, what has seemed like a comic turn becomes  – improbably –  tragic and deeply moving. My copy is (genuinely) tear-stained at that point.

A final word, taken from an interview with Karen Joy Fowler…

The world is a complicated, surprising, often horrible and often beautiful place. I just hope we can keep it. We’re not the only ones who live here.

I’M READING:
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
John Minton:Dance Till the Stars Come Down by Frances Spalding

I was recently asked to help judge a fiction prize at the junior campus of my local high school. Sixteen students from years 7, 8 and 9 submitted pieces ranging from half to eleven pages. The winner and runner-up were easy enough to choose; the first was well-written and the second was a cracking yarn. The third place went to a piece of comic writing, and there were a couple of ‘special mentions’ for an intriguing piece of micro-fiction and for experimentation in a variety of genres. Reading and then talking about the stories with my fellow judge was a real pleasure. Well, mostly.

What was not pleasurable was reading nearly all of these stories printed out in sans serif fonts. Serifs are the little bits at the tops and bottoms of these letters here… Or better put by the Oxford dictionary, ‘a slight projection finishing off a stroke of a letter.’

Now, you might say, ‘Font? What’s the big deal?’ The deal is, that I found the ones printed using a sans serif font hard to read. I’m no expert on the history of typefaces, but I think that the reason fonts with serifs are almost always used in books is because they are easier on the eye when you’re faced with large blocks of text. And another reason is maybe I’m just used to reading pages with a particular range of fonts. (And I am getting to My Name is Mina – don’t worry. Here we are…) After loving David Almond’s A Song for Ella Grey, I thought I’d like to read some more of his books, so I borrowed My Name is Mina from the library. I was more than a wee bit peeved to find this when I opened the book at the first page….

‘Grrr! One of my pet hates,’* I thought.  ‘So I am going to hate this book.’
I managed the student’s stories because they were relatively short. Here was a whole book, not just in this handwriting abomination, but also in a number of different styles of hand-lettering and type.
I made myself start reading. I made myself keep reading, for a few pages.
And you know what happened? Then I just read on. And on. I loved Mina.

The moral of the tale is this –  serifs may rule on the printed page, but I can cope with whatever when I love the story.

*The other one is dialogue without talking marks.

Revising and editing at the present. I work at the Bookroom 2 days a week, and I’m aiming  to work on my novel 4 days a week – which leaves me one day off. Today was the day, and my husband took me for a Sunday drive in the pale, end of winter sunshine. We drove through rolling farmland and bush to Heathcote, stopped off for a pastie and a pie at an old-school bakery, stopped at Redesdale to have a cup of tea (from our trusty thermos flask) on the riverbank near the historic iron bridge, and then drove home a slightly different way, through more rolling farmland and bush. The wattle, in the sunlight, was luminous and golden and glorious and glowing; there was a lot of ‘ah’ and ‘oh’; many sighs of delight. After such a long and cold winter, it was a day of spring and beauty and warmth.
Amongst my revising and editing, I came up with a little continuity problem. A wattle problem, actually.
My father had told me that when he was in London in the early 1950s, he was so homesick he felt physically ill. Friends used to send gum-leaves, which he and his friends would burn for the nostalgic, campfire smell. And there was also, in early spring, in posh florist’s shops, wattle. Only they called it mimosa, and it came from the South of France.
In my novel, which is set in London in the early 1950s, my young heroine (I know it is old fashioned, and protagonist is the word to use, but she is my heroine, and I will call her that) is an Australian girl. I show her looking at wattle in the florist’s shop in Bond Street and feeling homesick.
But – wattle in London florist’s shops – was my dad steering me right?  I Googled for information, and found out that acacia from Australia had indeed been planted in the South of France. Rich people had been popping it into their gardens since the 1900’s. And yes, they called it mimosa, and it was in flower in March and April, and it was much sought after as a spring bloom.
However, for the purpose of my story, my homesick heroine has to be looking at wattle after the Festival of Britain, which ran from June till September 1951. It had to be autumn. The spring of the following year was too late.
It’s a bit sad, and I’m not obsessively fussy about accuracy, but you can’t play around with the flowering season. Wattle is spring, so no wattle in Bond Street.

I’VE BEEN READING
I have been reading The Forrests by Emily Perkins, and today I bought Six Bedrooms by Tegan Bennett Daylight. Both of these authors are new to me, and I’ve been encouraged to read them by their interviews with Charlotte Wood in her online magazine, The Writer’s Room Interviews. It’s fantastic, like listening in on the most nitty-gritty literary shop talk ever. Highly recommended!

I’m in love with this book and I haven’t finished it yet. I’m deliberately not finishing it because I love it so much. Does that make sense? Probably not!

I have only fifty pages to go. Perhaps tonight, instead of watching a DVD (I am obsessed by Inspector Morse, poor sad thing that I am) and knitting, I will read…

One of the problems is that I know how it ends. Not because I have read the ending – which is something I do; it’s horrible, I know and my son can’t believe that I do it but sometimes I just can’t help myself – but because David Almond has based this book on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice.  But really, knowing the story behind the story is neither here nor there; A Song for Ella Grey is a thing of its own. It’s a beautiful thing, dreamily poetic and oddly real.

In the early part of the book, narrator Claire tells how her group – North of England of teenagers wanting a getaway from exams and school and stress and winter – go on a camping trip to the beach.

SO this, we said. We’ll make our own Italy. We’ll make our own damn Greece. Where? In Northumberland, of course, We’ll go the first chance we get, in the Easter holidays, in Spring. There should at least be a bit of sun by then. If not, we’ll just pretend there is. We’ll go to the beach for a whole damn week. We’ll get the bus, or we’ll hitchhike there. We’ll take tents and sleeping bags and camp in the dunes. We’ll take guitars and flutes and tambourines and drums. We’ll take a couple of massive pans, a ton of pasta, gallons of pesto, a thousand tins of tomatoes We’ll take a binbag of frozen bread. We’ll save up and stock up on boxes of Lidl chianti and Aldi chardonnay…We’ll light bonfires and have beach parties every night… We’ll forget about anticipated grades and adjusted grades and passes and fails and averages and stars and all the stupid boring bliddy stuff that stops us from being us…

Claire’s best friend Ella, over-protected by her adoptive parents, isn’t allowed to be there. But when a young man called Orpheus arrives on the beach, and plays for them, Claire knows she must share the music with Ella. She calls her, holds up the phone to the air and Orpheus’s song plays for Ella.

‘Just listen,’ I whispered.
I held out the phone towards him.
‘Oh God,’ I gasped, as I saw the birds coming down from the sky to the beach, as I saw the seals lift their heads from the sea, as I saw from the corner of my eyes the adders slithering down the sand to us.
‘Ella,’ I breathed. ‘Even the snakes are listening.’

I know how it ends, but I think I’d better get reading, now.

If you only know Morris Gleitzman’s for his funny books – like Blabber Mouth, Misery Guts, Toad Rage and so on – you will maybe be surprised by this series. Soon is the fifth book (the others are Once, Then, After and Now) but they don’t need to be read in order. This was the first of them that I’d actually read – but I am going to read them all now. Among the many things that impressed me about this novel is that it is told simply, without difficult language or structure, and yet it is complex. It’s moving, inspiring, violent, sad, hopeful, devastating – and even at times funny. Which is pretty amazing, when you consider the subject matter…how teenager Felix survives in the aftermath of WW2 in shattered, lawless Poland.

Soon, I hope, the world will be a safe and happy place.

This morning, it isn’t.

Over there, for instance. On the roof of the apartment building next door.

Two of them. Or is it three? I can’t see them because we’ve got sacks covering our windows, but I can hear their voices.

I try to keep my voice as quiet as I can.

‘Gabriek,’ I whisper urgently. ‘Wake up.’

Gabriek mumbles but stays asleep.

I wish I didn’t have to disturb him. When he hears what I’m hearing, his poor middle-aged heart valves might not make it through to breakfast.

My heart valves are hammering away like the engines on a plummeting Nazi fighter plane.

You know when a war ends and you give a big sigh because you’ve survived and things will be better and you start trying to live a normal daily life but things aren’t better because the city has been wrecked and people are hungry so you lay low on the second floor and pray that intruders won’t barge into your secret hideout and take it and kill you but now it looks like they’re going to?

That’s happening to me and Gabriek.

My sessions today at Text Marks the Spot, the Bendigo Writer’s Festival Schools event, were great fun. Here’s my list of recommended books – starting, of course, with my own!

Verity Sparks and the Scarlet Hand

Susan Green: Walker Books 2015 (Australia)

Withering-by-Sea

Judith Rossell ABC Books 2014 (Australia)

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place #5:The Unmapped Sea.

Mary Rose Wood: Harper Collins 2015 (USA)

Awful Auntie

David Walliams: Harper Collins 2014 (UK)

Soon

Morris Gleitzman: Viking 2015 (Australia)

The Honest Truth

Dan Gemeinhart: Chicken House 2105 (USA)

The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains

Neil Gaiman(UK) illustrated by Eddie Campbell (Australia): Headline 2014

Song for a Scarlet Runner

Julie Hunt : Allen&Unwin 2013 (Australia)

Brotherhood of Thieves: The Final Battle

Stuart Daly: Random 2015 (Australia)

The Letter for the King

Tonke Dragt: Pushkin 2015 (the Netherlands (Holland))

Every Move

Ellie Marney: Allen & Unwin 2015 (Australia)

Tiger Stone

Deryn Mansell: Black Dog Books 2015 (Australia)

A Song for Ella Grey

David Almond: Hodder 2015 (UK)

The Cut Out

Jack Heath : Allen & Unwin 2015 (Australia)

The Heart of Two Worlds

Anne Plichota Pushkin 2014 (France)

I am giving a couple of sessions at ‘Text Marks the Spot’, the Schools Day held by La Trobe University as part of the Bendigo Writer’s Festival next weekend. One is an author talk, and the other is called ‘Green’s Guide to Good Books’. For that, I’m wearing my bookseller hat and presenting a range of books that are on the shelves of the bookshop now (so nearly all of them have been published in 2014 or 2015).
I haven’t given my choice a whole lot of thought or else I’d get so tied up in knots I wouldn’t get anywhere. I’ve chosen them for no real reason other than they’re the ones that have taken my fancy. Which is as good a reason as any.

The topic, however, has got me thinking. What’s a good book? It’s not a trick question; there are many answers and here are just some.
A good book is well-written, challenging, inspiring.
Relevant. Readable. Un-put-downable.
Enjoyable, entertaining, easy-to-read.
It’s the book you are reading now.

A good book is all or any or a combination of the above. It all depends, doesn’t it? It depends on how you’re feeling, whether you want to flop onto the couch with an easy comforting read… or try a challenging, difficult one. Do you want to think or do you want to be entertained? One or the other or both at the same time? And so on.

For a bookseller, perhaps a good book is one that sells…in large numbers.

Children – especially really young ones –  often don’t buy their own books. Parents, grandparents and other friends and family and carers do. Teachers and librarians do. Often, they base their choices on prizes such as the CBCA awards. Those little gold, silver or bronze discs can make all the difference to sales. That’s why publishers stick them prominently on the covers. But the CBCA winners aren’t always the books that children love to read. When children nominate and vote, there are often very different shortlists and winners. And that’s just the way it is. Think of some recent adult bestsellers…like the Shades of Grey series. They were never going to win any prizes, but sold like hot cakes (whatever they are… donuts?).

Contrary to the old saying, you can and do choose a book by its cover. Or else the publishing companies wouldn’t spend all that money on cover art, would they? An intriguing title helps too. And an intriguing back-cover blurb. It needs to tell you enough, but not too much. One of the books I’ve read recently had a big giveaway – the kid has cancer – on the back cover, but that’s not revealed for quite a few pages. It’s not quite a spoiler, but almost…

I suggest that, when choosing a book, you read the first page. Then open the book at random and read another page. It’s a bit like entering into a conversation with someone – do you like their voice? Are you going to enjoy hours of listening to that voice?

Choosing is one thing – then sometimes there’s a dilemma… Having invested time in reading, should you keep going if you’re not really taken by the book? You don’t have to, you know. But if you give up too easily, you may miss out. I try to strike a balance between giving it a go and going on too long but if all else fails, and I’m about to pack it in, I always take a peek at the ending. (This horrifies some people). Every now and I end up reading backwards and forwards, and actually end up enjoying the book.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it. Samuel Johnson

Yesterday I beguiled a train trip to and from Melbourne – a bit less than 3 hours – with Withering -by-Sea: A Stella Montgomery Intrigue by Judith Rossell.

As you can see from the shiny circle on the cover, it’s one of the shortlisted titles for this year’s CBCA awards.

It’s what I’d call ‘a romp’ and I enjoyed it immensely. And the fact that it fits into Verity Sparks’s genre, the Victorian fantasy-adventure or ‘gas-lamp mystery’ made it all the more enjoyable for me.

Stella Montgomery lives with her three Aunts – Temperance, Deliverance and Condolence –   in the seaside resort of Withering-by-Sea. Their home is the Hotel Majestic, a retreat for elderly hypochondriacs. The aunts firmly believe that children should be seen and not heard, and so Stella’s life is dull and rather unhappy. The deadening atmosphere of the hotel and the boredom of life under the aunt’s regime is beautifully done. Here’s poor Stella studying French Conversation for Young Ladies under her aunt’s eagle eye.

Aunt Temperance was sitting, bony and upright, at the window, sewing a pattern of violets in immaculate stitches onto an antimacassar. As usual, while one of her watery eyes was fixed on her work, the other seemed to be roving here and there around the room in a disconcerting manner, like a marble rolling around in an eggcup. She seemed very alert. Stella sighed and put down her book…
The afternoon dragged on. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked, and sometimes a seagull cried as it sailed past the window.
Aunt Temperance said, ‘Don’t swing your legs like that, child’, and twenty minutes later, ‘Don’t slouch. Sit up straight.’

Stella’s only pleasure is to read her beloved – but forbidden –  Atlas. She is hiding in the conservatory looking at a map of the Amazon jungle (and imagining the aunts inside a giant boa constrictor) when a fellow guest, Mr Filbert, sneaks in and hides a package in a potted fern. And so begin Stella’s hair-raising adventures…
There’s lots of action and cliff-hanging suspense, with a truly wicked villain, evil henchmen, singing cats, a spell-bound orphan boy and a helpful acrobat. Not to mention the mystery of Stella’s parentage. Stella herself is a most satisfactory heroine (after reading this book I find I’m talking Victoriana!), being brave, sensible, clever and kind. Verity would approve.

This is a lively, imaginative, dashing book and I was tickled pink with the way author Judith Rossell has such fun with the period details. As I do myself.

On Sunday 12th July, Verity Sparks and the Scarlet Hand was launched at Buda Historic Home and Garden in Castlemaine. Claire Hutchison, the administrator, had very kindly offered Buda as a venue for the launch –  it was the perfect place – and she introduced the guest of honour, Carmel Bird. The author of novels, short story collections and books on writing fiction and memoir; editor, essayist and a strikingly original voice in Australian literature, Carmel launched Verity’s new adventure with style and wit.

I said very sincere thank-yous to:
friends, family and well-wishers for braving the weather and coming to Verity’s party
Claire Hutchison and the team at Buda.
the marvellous Carmel Bird.
my never-say-die agent, Sheila Drummond.
my publishers, Walker Books Australia and especially my amazing editor Mary Verney.
Dr Majorie Theobald, whose book The Wealth Beneath Their Feet was such an inspiration. Marjorie also read through the manuscript for me.
and of course my husband Howard and son Lachie, whose love, support and pride in me make such a difference.

…and then afternoon tea was served. One kind friend even brought along cucumber sandwiches; another made anchovy toast (a favourite of the Professor’s); there were biscuits and slices but no banana cake because the two I made the night before stayed in the oven till they were crispy and burned. Despite the wind, rain and cold, there were plenty of guests and the Buda Garden Room was loud with laughter and conversation.