Judith Armstrong

Belinda Alexandra’s first novel, The White Gardenia (2002), was a ‘word of mouth best seller’. It may not have been picked up by certain critics, but it was nevertheless favoured by the book-buying public. Its subject was exotic – the fortunes of the daughter of a White Russian refugee family in Harbin and Shanghai – but the Mills & Boon cover was a bit of a worry. Now Wild Lavender appears, the second instalment of Alexandra’s two-book contract.

Novel, autobiography, memoir? I imagine poet and editor Manfred Jurgensen dealing impatiently with the question – does categorisation matter? Aren’t books to be judged by intrinsic worth rather than labels? Up to a point, but in Book One especially (of two) there is enough equivocation to be annoying.

What’s a nice girl called Anastasia doing in the Whangpoa River? Maybe she’s the daughter of the last tsar who everyone thought was dead, or maybe it’s just a girl who looks like a Russian princess and happens to have the same name. If the proposition sounds familiar, be assured by Colin Falconer that Anastasia Romanovs were thick on the streets of Shanghai after the White Russian diaspora of 1917–18.

There is a wonderful sense of liberation in the title of this short novel: a sense of being able to gaze at a distant blue horizon and sniff salty sea air. It provides an exhilarating contrast with the atmosphere of claustrophobia suggested in Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky’s work of similar length and loosely comparable themes. But whereas the Underground Man rarely ventures into the street and never strays far from St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, the nameless protagonist of lgor Gelbach’s tale moves constantly between Leningrad, Moscow and Sukhumi. Sukhumi is a Georgian resort town on the Black Sea, where Rubin, a theatre director and friend of the dilettante narrator, owns a little-used apartment. Rubin prods our narrator to stay in it and enjoy the sun, the palm trees, the esplanade and the coffee, but also to write a novel about a certain theoretical physicist called Paul Ehrenfest. Ehrenfest was one of the circle surrounding Albert Einstein in the early years of the twentieth century when Einstein spent five years in St Petersburg. The narrator is not averse to the project, but even when he occupies the Sukhumi apartment, the muse remains elusive.

When I was about ten, I used to devour the books of an English children’s author named Noel Streatfield. The most famous was called Ballet Shoes, which took young antipodeans onto the stage and into the wings of another world, the London theatre scene. Galina Koslova, a Russian-born émigrée to South Australia and the heroine of The Snow Queen, gives Ballet Shoes to a step-granddaughter, correctly designating it a classic. I wondered whether Mardi McConnochie’s novel was designed to fill the gap left on adult bookshelves by long-abandoned copies of Ballet Shoes, even if our reading requirements have matured.

The Russian theorist Yuri Lotman said: ‘Plot is a way of understanding the world.’ On this basis, texts with plots – novels, for example – do more for us than texts without plots. The telephone book, for example, a plotless text par excellence, may promote aspects of communication, but adds little to our attempt to make sense of life. However, Igor Gelbach, a Georgian Russian now living in Melbourne, has challenged this concept with his thought-provoking but virtually plotless novel, Confessions of a Clay Man, which may be narrative in shape but is highly poetic in procedure. At first reading, it is rather mystifying, the story so fabulised that you tend to lose it and concentrate on the word-pictures, which manage to make a completely unknown place hauntingly evocative, as though you had once dreamed about it. Like Goethe’s ‘Land wo die Zitronen blühn’, we can’t know it, but we feel as though we do. Gelbach’s seaside town resonates with a similar, impossible familiarity.

Poisonous, profiteering physiotherapist Sue Mindberry is making a packet by charging seven gullible, fifty plus women $1000 per head for thirteen three-hour sessions of hydrotherapy. They are variously brain-damaged, hugely obese, psychically astray and arthritic. Sue Gough believes with Germaine that even such as these do not deserve the invisibility that age is supposed to confer. She gives them each a story – or rather, stories – invented by Beverley, a stroke victim, who hates her post-traumatic paralysis so much that she tries to disappear into the imagined lives of her fellow sufferers in the pool (its roof rolled back so that as they lie in the water supported by floaties each can identify with her own personal star or goddess).

The publication of this book has created somewhat of a storm in a teacup. Melbourne  researcher, Maja Sainisch-Plimer, demanded its recall, claiming the book misrepresented the findings of her research over the twenty years. The publisher, Graeme Ryan, placed a Notice to Bookshops in the book pages of The Age claiming unfair practice and advising bookshops ‘to confidently display and sell Anya: Countess of Adelaide’. Subsequently the book has been reclassified by the National Library from biography to fiction.

This book is full of sadly ironic observations, such as: Most adult sons have no memory of telling their mother to stop kissing them; decades later they are simply anguished and resentful that she has shown them no affection.

The trial of Lindy Chamberlain drew the fascinated attention of most Australians when it was reported day and night in every media outlet. It moved into a different but equally popular mode with the publication of John Bryson’s documentary novel Evil Angels and the screening of Fred Schepisi’s film of the same name. The novel not only won a clutch of awards but was translated into nine languages, a sufficient achievement to earn its author an enduring international reputation and to globalise what might otherwise have been a short-lived local curiosity. Bryson’s account picked up the dramatic intensity of the Central Australian setting and the human agonies of the players, as well as the universal issues, such as justice and prejudice, that towered over the Rock and the courtroom.