Susan Green

I woke early this morning – just before 5 – and couldn’t get back to sleep. So after a while I got up, made myself a cup of tea and went back to bed, where I sat up and read a cookbook. Very soothing. After about an hour of that, I got up and meditated for 10 minutes (my plan is to work up to 20 or even 30, but I’m stuck on 10 for now) and then I watered the garden in the cool early quiet. The cockies and parrots who’ve been so noisy and destructive were either not up yet or busy elsewhere; the cheeping and peeping and occasional song from the small birds was a gentle accompaniment. Next I tidied the dining table which had been heaped with junk and washed last night’s dishes. I’ve just finished breakfast. Everything around me is now calm and neat and orderly. Breathe, Susan, I tell myself. Breathe.

Because for the rest of the day I know I will barely catch my breath. It’s the maddest, busiest day of the year in the bookshop. For hours at a stretch, I will be a machine – gift wrapping, scanning and using the point-of-sale computer or Eftpos machine, issuing book vouchers, searching for books. It’s exhausting but great fun, and absolutely wonderful to see all those books flying out the door.

Lost in the Christmas rush was a nice little statistic. Our shop sold its 500th copy of The Truth About Verity Sparks on 17th December. Next year I will bake a Verity cake and celebrate. But right now I am preparing for a day of happy retail madness.

Merry Christmas! Happy Reading! And all the best for 2015.

The site of an old gold mine near the main road into town. Mining equipment turned into rusty old junk turned into oddly beautiful objects.  The closer you look, the more you see (isn’t that the way of things?).

All the noise and activity of the mine finished long ago, and what’s left of the machinery is mouldering away in the sun and rain. With the passing years, trees and grass and weeds have softened the harsh red soil that was ripped up and washed down and dug and sieved and sluiced.

You hear crows and the melancholy repetitive call of a bronzewing. You look across the valley to the Chewton hills, covered in scrubby bush now but once bare and swarming with miners. Just up the road is Pennyweight Flat cemetery where many of the graves are small, child-sized. Children on the goldfields had a tough time surviving. Only a few of the graves have names and dates; mostly they’re marked by rough edgings of made of rocks. Gone and forgotten.

But the gold is still somewhere in the world.

Perhaps it’s in my wedding ring.

It’s the time of year for reptiles of all kinds to be out and about, and so I’m being very mindful that the creature rustling in the bushes may be a harmless lizard – or a brown snake. So far they’ve been lizards only. Skinks galore, and a few bluetongues. You can’t really tell, but this fine fellow was huge. I wondered if it was an old one, for I spotted another, much smaller, whose scales were really glossy and shiny and new-looking. We also have geckos – again, one large and one small – who come out at night and cling to the flywire screen at the kitchen window. They’re lying in wait for the moths that come fluttering to the light.
There’s something very endearing about geckos. They have such dear little hands, for a start, and their soft pinkiness seems less coldly reptilian than scalier creatures. Their bodies curve into a variety of graceful gecko poses and their quick dispatch of their prey means there’s no hindquarters and tail half-in and half-out and a sinister bulge as there is with snakes (I speak from experience – my husband used to keep pythons.)

After I finished Little Women, I read one of the many YA new releases that are stacked in piles in our bookshop. There’s a lot of dystopia around, but since I’m feeling fairly depressed at the state of the world as it is (I must stop reading the papers!) I chose Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar.

I was sent here because of a boy. His name was Reeve Maxfield, and I loved him and then he died, and almost a year passed and no one knew what to do with me. Finally it was decided to send me here.

Jam (short for Jamaica), traumatised by her boyfriend’s death, has been sent to The Wooden Barn, a boarding school for ’emotionally fragile, highly intelligent teenagers’.

She finds that she’s been enrolled for a course called Special Topics in English. Jam’s room-mate, DJ – who’d love to do the course – describes it as a ‘legendary’ class. The elderly teacher, Mrs Quenell, only teaches it when she wants to. It’s one semester long. You read only one writer. There are only five or six students. “It’s the smallest, most elite class in the entire school.”

When Jam begins the class, she finds that the set text is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. And that it’s a course requirement that, twice a week, the students write in the journals that Mrs Quenell hands to them. They’re red, leather-bound, very old – and magical. Jam finds that when she writes in her journal, she’s transported to another world, a world where Reeve is waiting for her. They talk, they laugh, they lie together on the grass and kiss. And then it’s over. She’s back in her room.

It’s soon clear that each of the students have been to this other place – which they eventually name Belzhar (a play on Plath’s title Bell Jar ) –  and they’re as troubled by it as Jam. Eventually the comforting fantasies and dreams, the wishes and might-have-beens collide with reality. We get to know each student’s story – the shocking events that landed them at The Wooden Barn – but Jam holds out. She only tells us what happened at the very end of the book and I’d better not spoil anything except to reassure you that, though drawing on Plath’s poetry, prose and biography, Belzhar doesn’t end in suicide but in a satisfying resolution and a surprise.

Here’s a little list of the themes touches upon – abduction, adultery, alcoholism, depression, divorce, drug use, eating disorders, obsession, porn, sexual identity… A world away from Little Women –  and nearly 150 years. I was talking to my editor about the two books and she suggested that books for young adults in Alcott’s era were often concerned with transforming yourself (for example, by conquering your faults), while most modern YA authors have a very different message.  The hero’s or heroine’s journey is to authenticity and self-acceptance. I wonder what Louisa Alcott would think.

PS I’m assuming this is the US cover. Different, eh?

More reading about reading. Last week I finished How to be  a Heroine;(Or, What I’ve Learned from Reading Too Much) by Samantha Ellis and it got me thinking about the heroines of my childhood. A reader, a bookworm, living much of the time in word worlds, I naturally pictured myself as the heroine of my own story. Doesn’t everyone?

No, apparently. Years ago I made some horrible vain remark to the effect that I was glad I had my ankles are slim, for no heroine ever had thick ankles.
“What on earth are you talking about?” said my friend. She thought I was weird. “Heroines are in books. They’re not real.”

My reading project is still to read something old and something new, but some of the old ones will come from my childhood reading because I’m interested in those heroines that helped form me. This week I re-read Little Women.

First published in 1868, it’s an antique. So is my copy – pictured to the left, with cover and many lovely illustrations by Shirley Hughes. It’s the one I first read when I was around 10 or 11. I wondered if I’d find it unreadable, but I just gobbled it up, finishing the whole thing in two or three sittings. I found the language easy and readable, the characters engaging – especially Jo, of course.  It’s sometimes funny, sometimes touching, and a wee bit sentimental. I shed a little tear when Beth defrosted old Mr Laurence next door and when she caught scarlet fever. The baby died in her arms! And of course Jo, with her intelligence, ambition and wild, coltish energy, is a living, breathing delight. But…

Yes, there’s a but. According to Ellis, it’s ‘unbelievably preachy.’ She reckons that every page ‘is rammed with endless, intrusive moralising’, and writes that ‘I never realised before that in Little Women, each March sister is tamed, one by one, part from Beth, who doesn’t need taming because she is a personality-free doormat. Which apparently is the ideal.’

Not quite. The ideal, stated by Mr March when he comes back from the war, is ‘a strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman.’ But I agree with Ellis that there IS lots of very explicit moralising. The Pilgrim’s Progress is mentioned over and over as the model for life’s journey.

Alcott has chapters that deal with Meg’s (pretty harmless, actually) vanity, Jo’s willfulness and temper and Amy’s selfishness. Beth, who is pathologically shy and at 14 still plays with dolls, is quiet, sweet and helpful, but even she gets a harsh lesson when Marmee decides to teach them that all play and no work is no fun either. No one feeds Beth’s canary, and she finds it ‘dead in the cage, with his little claws pathetically extended, as if imploring the food for want of which he had died.’ A bit harsh, Marmee!

What makes Little Women (and many other 19th and early- to mid- 20th century children’s books different to most published today is that Christian morality is front and centre.

But then, I read somewhere that Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series was really one long Mormon tract on sexual abstinence.

Who would have thought there were so many books about reading? It’s a whole genre. Reading a particular author – you could probably have a sizeable shelf devoted to reading the works of Jane Austen. Or reading just one book, like The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, which was about reading – well, Middlemarch. I remembered reading it when I was in my 20’s. It seemed like a wonderful, huge, whole world of a novel, one you could live an entire life in, and I loved it. Lots of characters, lots of storylines, happy endings and tragic endings and paragraphs. Phrases that have stuck in my mind for 30 years. Like the one about the squirrel’s heart.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Now, read that again. Isn’t it amazing?

I’ve never re-read Middlemarch, but after reading about reading it – Rebecca Mead’s book was beautiful, moving and thoughtful –  I decided I would. And I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t. I couldn’t say exactly why. Perhaps you can’t go back again. But the thing is, and I’m almost ashamed to admit it – I really enjoyed reading about reading it.

Which led me on to Howard’s End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading at Home by Susan Hill. Hill, author of The Woman in Black amongst 37 published books, decided that for a year she would read only the books that were already on her shelves. Books she’d read once and forgotten; old favourites; books she’d never read at all.

I wanted to repossess my books, she writes, to explore what I had accumulated over a lifetime of reading and to map this house of many volumes… A book which is left on the shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object  packed with the potential to burst into new life.

I’d actually read Middlemarch, but many of the books Hill wrote about were known to me only by the titles. She compiled a list of 40 books, the ‘Final Forty’ she called it. Ignoramus that I am, I’ve only read 8 of those books. I’ve read 22 of the authors, but still…! A self-improvement project looms – or does it? Because there are always so many new books to read, too. New novels, new authors.

This is the time of year in a bookshop for new releases – as publishers hope that everyone wants to give and get books for Christmas. At the bookshop where I work, boxes of them keep arriving day after day so that the whole place is stuffed full of newness. I fear the publishing industry is like a dying tree, producing reckless amounts of blossom and fruit, one last fling at survival.

I don’t have a house of many volumes like Susan Hill, but I do have a floor to ceiling bookshelf in my study that’s stuffed to overflowing. There are old favourites, yes – but would do they bear re-reading? And there are many, many that I’ve never read. Will I ever read the collected poetry of Robert Browning? Or The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith, or Lavengro by George Borrow? I still have so many books that  belonged to my mother. Classics, mostly. Plays and poetry. She read them, every one. Perhaps, next year, I might give Susan Hill’s project a try. A modified try. Say, two a month from the shelves. One I’ve never read, and one I want to re-read. That doesn’t sound too daunting, does it?

I’ve spent all morning in the garden. Perhaps I’ve done a bit too much for someone with a dodgy back, but I’ve had a wonderful play with rocks, dirt and plants. I’ve wheel-barrowed and planted; I’ve lugged pots and loads of gravel; I’ve neatened a garden bed and it’s imposed instant order and calm, rather like making the bed in a messy bedroom.

It’s a beautiful time of year to be doing these things. I’ve missed spring so far, because I’ve been chained to my desk  with the third Verity Sparks book to finish. But as of last night at 11pm, when I pressed ‘SEND’, I’m (temporarily) released. My morning’s play was unhurried and guilt-free.

The painting is called ‘In a Shoreham Garden’, and it’s by an English artist called Samuel Palmer. I’ve known it since I was little, because there was a reproduction in a book of my mother’s. It was an anthology of words and pictures called A Book of Delights. I couldn’t read but I could look, and I kept turning the pages back to this. The tree exploding with frothy blossom is spring. It’s release and joy and delight. There’s nothing like blossom. Except, perhaps, that burst of golden wattle at the end of winter.

It’s all over so quickly. A couple of weeks ago, the last of the plum blossom blew off in the wind and lay in drifts like snow all over the back courtyard. Now there are teeny little red plums among green leaves on the tree. Soon the birds will be ripping and shredding the leaves to get to the fruit.

But today there is still apple blossom on the tree in the back yard. And roses beginning to bud and bloom, and some opium poppies slyly splitting their pale green pods. All in a Castlemaine Garden.

As you can see from the pictures, Stonemans Bookroom in Castlemaine – the place where I work – is not your standard bookshop. That’s what customers seem to love about it. Almost every time I work, a visitor says how unique/amazing/untidy we are. Locals seem to feel we are a treasure or at least worth supporting. Last week a visitor from the UK asked if she could take photographs.
“Why?” I asked. “Surely you’ve got shops like this at home.” (In my imagination, the UK is full of delightfully cluttered, eccentric, old-fashioned bookstores)
She shook her head and snapped away, saying, “I’ve never seen anything like it!”

Today I helped author Deryn Mansell launch her first novel, Tiger Stone. It was a warm and happy occasion, held in the foyer of the Castlemaine Library, with a large contingent of Deryn’s family and friends there to help celebrate. Here’s the talk I gave.

Deryn wrote Tiger Stone while studying Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT. She told me when we talked last week, that on freezing cold Central Goldfields mornings, catching the early train to Melbourne, she would go in her imagination to the steamy Javanese jungle of her story. Quite a feat of the imagination if you think of those frosts. Deryn knows Indonesia and Java in particular, very well. She’s been visiting there for over 25 years as a student and a teacher. She went to university in Jogjakarta, and has worked as a teacher of Indonesian in schools for many years. She now works with the Asia Education Foundation, furthering the role of Asian languages and cultures in Australian schools.

Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know that Deryn and I lived in the same town. We’d both attended the same Walker/Black Dog Books conference in Sydney, but there were a lot of authors and illustrators present, and we didn’t meet on that day. However when Deryn walked into the Bookroom where I work, she recognised me – and asked if I would help launch Tiger Stone. Launching a first novel is a special and exciting experience, and I was flattered be asked.
I hadn’t known anything much about Tiger Stone. I’d seen the cover at the conference, and I knew the book was set in Indonesia in the 14^th century. A place and time I knew almost nothing about. Then Tiger Stone arrived in the mail, and when I began to read it, I didn’t want to stop.  It wasn’t just that it was a good, tricky mystery with two very engaging main characters. The pages were opening onto a time and place I knew nothing about…and that was exciting.

You know that feeling when you go somewhere you’ve heard about but never been before? Say, a small town whose name you’ve seen on a map or a signpost. Well, you get there and lo and behold, there are people going about their lives, there are houses and buildings and landmarks and rocks and trees and a whole small world just going about its complex intertwined life… And now you know it exists and your world is enlarged.
Reading can do the same sort of thing. I told Deryn this when we talked last week. I said that I thought reading Tiger Stone enlarged my world, and that it’s a great thing. It’s a gift.

Growing up, I only learned about European history. Kings and Queens of England, the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Waterloo, that kind of thing. Even though I’m an Australian, we didn’t do a lot of Australian history. A smattering of explorers was about it. The children’s novels I read were English or (a minority) Australian. The parts of the world geographically nearest me – South East Asia – were not even on my radar. I did learn Indonesian in high school, but our teacher was a Scot (I can still hear the accent) and we learned little or nothing about Indonesian history and culture. I wish I’d had a teacher like Deryn! I think that this book can be not only generally just a good read for children in years 5,6 and 7, but also a good addition to any Indonesian language or cultural studies. Having a sense of a long, rich, eventful, colourful vivid history stretching back in time would have made me a more enthusiastic Indonesian student, I’m sure.

Deryn’s made Java in the time of Tiger Stone as full of drama as anything happening in Europe. Only no heavy velvet and fur, no suits of armour. The Battle of Bubat – in which the fictional Kancil’s father was killed – was a real event. Two Royal families – the Majapahit and the Sunda – were supposed to be united by marriage, but on their way to the wedding, the Sunda royal family were ambushed and killed. A bit like Game of Thrones? That violent past forms the background to Kancil’s story…and I’m not going to give too much more of the plot away, except to say that it’s a cracking mystery.

Along the way, I learned so much about Kancil’s world. I commented to Deryn that reading Tiger Stone, I could feel the heat, hear the monkeys in the trees, smell the hot cooking oil in the kitchen and the jungle dampness. I particularly noted the smells. I got to learn about social hierarchies in the village, the different ways language can be used, the brewing of medicinal herbs, the traditions around weddings…

As I said before, I’ve learned about a new world. Apart from anything else, that’s fun. But there’s another, more serious, aspect to it. I often find myself defending my trade – fiction writer – to people who say things like “Truth is stranger than fiction” or “Why bother reading made-up stories when the truth is much more interesting?”
The great thing about fiction, I argue, is that you can enter, imaginatively, right inside someone else’s world. Their thoughts, feelings, memories, observations. Through Deryn’s heroine Kancil I could hear and see and smell an existence I’d never even bothered to think about before. 14^th century Java. A refugee, hiding her true identity because of hostility and mistrust. A lowly kitchen girl, a poor relation, living on charity in a rich uncle’s house in a village. Scorned and mistreated by the other servants. Lonely and isolated. Trying to care for her grieving and sick mother. Learning who to trust; making friends with a surprising ally.
Reading Kancil’s tale, I got to exercise those muscles of imagination and sympathy. Essential muscles, I think. Without them we can think that ours is the only reality.